The first general language of Italy was the Latin, and so
strongly was the Italian mind dominated by the influence of
ancient Rome that her earliest writers sought to keep alive the
Roman tradition. This spirit of freedom led to the establishment
of the Italian Republics, and after the Lombard cities threw off
the yoke of Frederick Barbarossa they turned their chief
attention to education and literature. The spirit of chivalry and
chivalric poetry never took such root in Italy as it did in other
European countries. Nevertheless, Italy was not uninfluenced by
the Crusades, and the Arabs, establishing a celebrated school of
medicine at Salerno, gave a new impetus to the study of the
classics. In Bologna was opened a school of jurisprudence, where
Roman law was studied, and these schools, or universities soon
appeared in other parts of Italy.
The Italians devoted more time to the study of law and history,
and to making translations from the Greek philosophers, than to
the cultivation of chivalric poetry, although many of the Italian
poets wrote in Provencal and French; and Italian Troubadours made
journeys to the European Courts.
It has been said that the only poetry that has any real power
over a people is that which is written or composed in their own
language. This is especially true of Italy. Following this early
Latin period came Dante, the most glorious, and inventive of the
Italian poets, and indeed one of the greatest masters of verse in
the world. He perfected the Tuscan, or Florentine dialect, which
was gradually becoming the literary language of Italy. Petrarch,
who succeeded Dante, is greatest in his Italian poems, and it is
by these that he is best known, while his Latin works, which he
hoped would bring him fame, have been almost forgotten.
In the fifteenth century the use of the national language in
literature entirely died out, through the rise of the Humanists,
and the craze for Greek and Latin classics; but toward the end of
the fifteenth century, under Lorenzo de'Medici and Leo X,
interest in their own literature among the Italians began to
revive again. Ariosto and Tasso wrote their magnificent epics;
and once more Italian poetry was read and appreciated, and
reached the height of its renown. Again in the seventeenth
century it declined under the influence of the Marini school;
whose bad taste and labored and bombastic style, was
unfortunately imitated in both France and Spain. In the
eighteenth century, under the patronage of Benedict XIV, the
Arcadian poets of the Marini school were banished from
literature, and other and more brilliant writers arose, possessed
of the true national feeling. Under Pope Pius VI, by whom he was
liberally patronized, Quirico Visconti undertook his "Pio
Clementine Museum," and his "Greek and Roman Iconography," said
to be the two greatest archaeological works of all ages.
With the rise of Napoleon, Italy was flooded with French
writings, and French translations, not always of the best, and
even the French language was used instead of the Italian. The
Italian literature again suffered a decline, and it was not until
after the treaty of Vienna in 1815 that the foreign influence was
again shaken off. It will thus be seen that it was when Italian
poets wrote in their own language that their greatest and most
lasting success was attained. During the periods when a craze for
imitating foreign works existed, the national languages
deteriorated. In Germany, under the Emperor Maximilian, a crown
was publicly bestowed on any poet who achieved success in Latin
verse, while no reward or emolument was given to those who wrote
in German. The religion of Humanism in Italy went to such lengths
that many seemed to lose not only their belief but also their
good sense, as they considered it vulgar to talk of the Deity in
the language of the Bible. God was spoken of in the plural--gods.
The Father was Jupiter, the Son, Apollo; and the Devil, Pluto;
but these various errors had no lasting or far-reaching
influence. The Divine Comedy, the most powerful and lifelike
exponent of the thoughts and feelings of the age in which Dante
lived--an allegory, written in the form of a vision, at a time
when men believed that the things that are unseen are eternal--is
the most perfect and magnificent monument of earthly love,
refined and spiritualized, that has ever been written. It stands
alone; for no man of any country, coming after Dante, has been
able to write from the same motive, and in the same spirit, that
he did. Petrarch, the next greatest after Dante, is chiefly
celebrated for his lyrical poems, which were used as models by
all the most celebrated poets of the South of Europe. They are
written in two forms, the canzone taken from the Provencals, and
the sonnet, taken from the Sicilians. Petrarch kept up a wide
correspondence with the literary men of Europe; and through his
influence a sort of literary republic arose which joined together
the literati of many different countries. Boccaccio, next in rank
to Petrarch, evolved a poetry consisting of Norman wit and
Provencal love, joined to an elaborate setting of his own. He
took Livy and Cicero for his models, and tried to combine ancient
mythology with Christian history, the result being that his
writings were not so fine as they would have been had they
displayed a greater freedom a of style. His most celebrated work
is the Decameron, the idea of which is taken from an old Hindu
romance which was translated into Latin in the twelfth century.
Most of these tales have also been found in the ancient French
fabliaux, and while Boccaccio cannot be said to have really
invented them, he did clothe them anew, and his tales in their
turn have been translated into all the European languages.
It is due to Cosmo and Lorenzo de' Medici, and to Pope Leo X,
that there was such a glorious development of the fine arts in
the fifteenth century, an era whose benefits have been felt among
the cultivated nations for over three hundred years.
At the same time Poliziano created the pastoral tragedy, which
served to revive the study of Virgil. Other poets seizing on the
old romance of the Trouveres, added to them an element of
mockery, in place of the old religious belief. This new spirit
was adopted by Ariosto. From the East he borrowed the magic and
sorcery interwoven in the adventures of his knights and ladies,
giants and magicians. It remained for Torquato Tasso to revive
the heroic epic in his Jerusalem Delivered, in which he depicts
the struggle between the Christians and Saracens. Neither the
Siege of Troy, nor the Adventures of Aeneas could compare with
the splendid dramatic element in Tasso's immortal poem, which has
been said to combine the classic and the romantic style in a new
and unusual degree.
In the sixteenth century Strapparola, an Italian novelist, wrote
a number of fairy tales, which have been a treasure house for
later writers, and to which we are indebted for Puss in Boots,
Fortunio, and other stories which have now become familiar in the
nursery lore of most modern nations. Bandello, in the same
century, was a novelist from whom Shakespeare and other English
dramatists have borrowed much material.
One thing which is peculiar to Italy, and which has found its way
into nearly the whole civilized world, is Italian Opera or
melodrama. It was an outcome of the Pastoral drama, and first
took shape in 1594 under Rinuccini, a Florentine. But the true
father of Italian opera is Metastasio, who flourished in the
eighteenth century. He regarded opera as the national drama of
Italy, and raised it to a plane that it has ever since retained;
though of late years it has become more the fashion to cultivate
German opera.
