17th-century literature

Poetry and prose

The popularity of satire was a reaction against prevailing conditions. Prominent in this genre was the Neapolitan Salvator Rosa, who attacked in seven satires the vices and shortcomings of the age. The Modenese Alessandro Tassoni acquired great fame with La secchia rapita (1622; The Rape of the Bucket), a mock-heroic poem that is both an epic and a personal satire. The most serious poet of the period was Tommaso Campanella, a Dominican friar, who spent most of his adult life in prison as a subversive. Campanella is perhaps less well known for his rough-hewn philosophical verse than for the Città del sole (1602; Campanella’s City of the Sun), a vision of political utopia, in which he advocated the uniting of humanity under a theocracy based on natural religion.

The most successful and representative poet during this period was Giambattista Marino, author of a large collection of lyric verse (La lira [1608–14; “The Lyre”] and La sampogna [1620; “The Syrinx”]) and a long mythological poem, Adone (1623), in which the Ovidian myth of the love of Venus and Adonis, told by Shakespeare in 200 stanzas, is inflated by Marino to more than 8,000. Marino derived inspiration from the poetry of the late 16th century, but his aim—typical of the age—was to excite wonder by novelty. His work is characterized by “conceits” of fantastic ingenuity, far-fetched metaphor, sensuality, extreme facility, and a superb technical skill. His imitators were innumerable, and most 17th-century Italian poets were influenced by his work.

Gabriello Chiabrera, soberer in style than Marino, was successful in imitating the metres of classical poetry (especially of the Greek Pindar) and excelled in the composition of musical canzonette (rhymed poems with short lines modeled on the French Pléiade’s adaptation of the Greek verse form known as the anacreontic). Toward the end of the century a patriotic sonneteer, Vincenzo da Filicaia, and Alessandro Guidi, who wrote exalted odes, were hailed as major poets and reformers of the excesses of the Baroque. Though they retained much of the earlier bombast, their consciousness of the need for rational reform led to the foundation of the Accademia dell’Arcadia.

Among prose writers of the period, the satirist Traiano Boccalini stood out with Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612–13; Advertisements from Parnassus) in the fight against Spanish domination. A history of the Council of Trent (which defined Catholic doctrines in reaction to the Reformation) was written by Paolo Sarpi, an advocate of the liberty of the Venetian state against papal interference, and a history of the rising of the Low Countries against Spain was written by Guido Bentivoglio. The Venetian novels of Girolamo Brusoni are still of interest, as are the travels of Pietro della Valle and the tales of the Neapolitan Giambattista Basile. All the restless energy of this period reached its climax in the work of Galileo, a scientist who laid the foundations of mathematical philosophy and earned a prominent place in the history of Italian literature through the vigour and clarity of his prose.

Music drama and the Accademia dell’Arcadia

With the rise of the music drama and the opera, Italian authors worked to an increasing extent with the lyric stage. Librettos written by poets such as Ottavio Rinuccini were planned with dramatic and musical artistry. During the 17th century a popular spirit entered the opera houses: intermezzi (short dramatic or musical light entertainments) were required between the acts, a practice that undermined the dramatic unity of the performance as a whole, and toward the end of the century every vestige of theatrical propriety was abandoned. The spread of Marino’s influence was felt by many to be an abuse. In 1690 the Accademia dell’Arcadia was founded in Rome for the express purpose of eradicating “bad taste.” The purpose of the academy was in tune with a genuinely felt need. Many of its members were rationalist followers of René Descartes with severe classical sympathies, but their reaction consisted mainly in imitating the simplicity of the nymphs and shepherds who were supposed to have lived in the Golden Age, and thus a new artifice replaced an old one. A typical exponent of the Arcadian lyric was Pietro Metastasio, the 18th-century reformer of the operatic libretto.