Ricci, Roberta

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr
College
Italian Faculty Research and Scholarship Italian
2005
Review of Retorica della diffrazione: Bembo, Aretino,
Giulio Romano e Tasso: Letteratura e scena cortigiana,
by Fabio Finotti
Roberta Ricci
Bryn Mawr College, rricci@brynmawr.edu
Let us know how access to this document benefits you.
Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/italian_pubs
Part of the Italian Language and Literature Commons
This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/italian_pubs/2
For more information, please contact repository@brynmawr.edu.
Custom Citation
Ricci, Roberta. Review of Retorica della diffrazione: Bembo, Aretino, Giulio Romano e Tasso: Letteratura e scena cortigiana, by Fabio
Finotti. Renaissance Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2005): 1296-1298.
Fabio Finotti. Retorica della diffrazione: Bembo, Aretino, Giulio Romano e
Tasso: letteratura e scena cortigiana.
Biblioteca di “Lettere Italiane” Studi e Testi 63. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2004. 463 pp.
+ 20 b/w pls. index. append. illus. bibl. €46. ISBN: 88–222–5384–1.
Finotti divides this rich, erudite study into three large parts, each dedicated to
a different literary genre: Bembo’s lyrics, Aretino’s theater, and Tasso’s bucolic tale.
The volume has two valuable appendices that confirm Finotti’s innovative inter-
pretive work as well as fill a serious modern lacuna: the first publishes Bembo’s
poetic juvenalia in the original, and the second supplies the first Italian translation
(with notes). Ab initio we must highlight the important translations from Latin,
not only in these final pages, but also throughout the entire volume, where
numerous original citations are presented in Italian in the notes. The ample
bibliography includes Latin and Italian works, as well as critical works that un-
derscore the author’s interdisciplinary approach: the “retorica della diffrazione.”
To mark “the rhetoric of diffraction,” Finotti reconstructs the tradition in theater,
painting, sculpture, prints, engravings, and miniatures from which the satirical
fable in poetry proceeds, confirming how satirical and licentious taste became one
of the two most relevant driving forces of the Cinquecento and beyond.
In the first part, “La scena lirica: Pietro Bembo,” the “rhetoric of diffraction”
is clarified with an interpretation of the “hedonistic classicism” of De Aetna (1496)
and Asolani (1505). It addresses the tendency at the time toward both rhetoric and
a centrifugal polyphony that increased on a multilingual and multistylistic plane in
De Aetna and a multitonal plane in Asolani, a polyphony that ultimately guarantees
a solidified linguistic system. “Amo infatti la poesia non meno della retorica”
(translation from Latin, 7), Bembo wrote to Angelo Gabriele, intending to
substitute the poetry-philosophy pairing with poetry-rhetoric in response to the
negative conception that Pico elaborated in his well-known letter to Ermolao
Barbaro. The lack of a translation of Bembo’s poems, Finotti shows, has
skewed their interpretation toward Neoplatonism instead of the revival of the
Dionysian theme of the Renaissance in northern Italy. One of the most important
contributions of the volume is the differentiation of philosophical-literary paths
among different geographical locations. Bembo in De Aetna abandons certain
Quattrocento concepts: the rhetoric regarding negotium of Venetian civic human-
ism and the subordination of poetry to philosophy of Florentine philosophical
humanism. De Aetna praises otium, elegant conversation, pleasing with rhetoric,
licet (license), and the religion of letters.
RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY1296
For an accurate reconstruction of these two texts by Bembo, Finotti could
have paid more attention to the place of women in Cinquecento letters, as readers,
listeners, and authors of texts precisely in those cities with which Finotti is con-
cerned: Florence, Venice, Padua, Ferrara, and Mantua. The female public
contributed not only to the shift of letters as regards delectare, but also to that
polyphony of voices, multiplicity of points of view, and theoretical eclecticism that
defined, as Finotti shows well, the “diffrazione della verità” in the Cinquecento.
In the second part of the volume, entitled “Aretino e Castiglione: il Marescalco e
il Cortegiano,” Finotti discusses Aretino’s theatrical writings within, and not
against, the civility of the court for the “insistenti omaggi” (the paradigm of the
prank, the pun) in the Marescalco. The presence together of “convenienza” and
“disconvenienza” (not only natural but, above all, cultural), of model and anti-
model, of experimental and classical, or rather “dei diversi e dei contrari” (187)
places this theatrical text in the area of “the rhetoric of diffraction” so prevalent in
the culture of the Cinquecento. Such dissemination of tones guides the final part
of the volume, “La scena satiresca e l’Aminta del Tasso,” dedicated to the pastoral
tale. Like Aretino’s comedy, the satirical Arcadia is introduced in the Cinquecento
court not by avoiding but by reflecting the contradictions, the illusions, and the
dreams of the court, according to the final chorus of the first act of Aminta: “S’ei
piace, ei lice.” Here the “rhetoric of diffraction” is defined in the isotopy between
courtly honor — then classicist reputation — and formal and thematic licentious-
ness — then aesthetic and hedonistic lasciviousness — provoking that centrifugal
tendency with which Tasso takes account of the style of the “favola pastorale” and,
I might add, of the epic. For Finotti, the drunkenness of the bacchanal becomes
“internal” to the very culture of the Renaissance, thanks to the encounter between
the bucolic and the urban. The bucolic tale marks the lasciviousness and joy which
are indispensable elements of creativity and which sanction the birth of a new
literary genre between tragedy and comedy. The substitution of satyrs with shep-
herds does not privilege the unrestrained lust of the former but the erotic attraction
of the latter toward a particular nymph, lessening the sentimentalizing and hu-
manizing suitable for the central thematic core of the new literary genre. The
dialectic between honor and license — “la retorica della diffrazione” — assumes a
new connotation in how much Aminta gathers to himself the affect of the shep-
herds and the instinctiveness of the satyrs. Indicative of this new “diffracted”
dimension are Finotti’s reflections on the male gaze of the shepherd who looks at
Silvia tied to a tree, naked: “ignuda come nacque, ed a legarla fune era il suo crine:
il suo crine medesmo in mille nodi / a la pianta era avvolto” (3:1233–37). The
eroticism that animates the scene is immediately mitigated by the shame of the
nymph “disdegnosa e vergognosa,” who lowers her gaze and “‘l delicato seno,
quanto potea torcendosi, celava” (3:1268–71). The description is modeled on the
topos, abundant in literature, of male voyeurism and female simplicitas that
strengthens the desire to penetrate the character viewed.
The schizophrenia between duty and license, control and instinct, story and
literature, docere and delectare, perfectly condenses the “rhetoric of diffraction” that
REVIEWS 1297
Finotti’s book discusses: the consistent theme of Cinquecento civility that erupted
into different camps of learning and different literary genres, and acquired distinct
connotations in specific geographical areas — from the theme of the faun in
miniatures and sculpture to satirical fables in poetry, theater, painting, and sculp-
ture in the Padua-Veneto region, to that connection between duty and license that
arose from the old category of anti-Renaissance.
ROBERTA RICCI
Bryn Mawr College
Translation SHEILA J. RABIN
St. Peter’s College
RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY1298


Review of \u3ci\u3eRetorica della diffrazione: Bembo, Aretino, Giulio Romano e Tasso: Letteratura e scena cortigiana\u3c/i\u3e, by Fabio Finotti

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&amp;context=italian_pubs

Review of \u3ci\u3eRetorica della diffrazione: Bembo, Aretino, Giulio Romano e Tasso: Letteratura e scena cortigiana\u3c/i\u3e, by Fabio Finotti

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Scholarship; Research; and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College