Renaissance

This article investigates how the issue of violence is treated in Italian fifteenthcentury political literature, with specific attention to a particular strand of texts that deal with the topic of conspiracy and enjoyed widespread diffusion in the second half of the 1400s. These works belong to different literary genres and offer significant case studies that allow us to explore the multiple functions of the idea of violence in literature and politics in the Quattrocento. Violence emerges a crucial factor and plays a pivotal role as a thematic, stylistic and ideological element in these works. In particular, the ideological overtones that this multifaceted component acquires, as both a structural and stylistic element, contribute to revealing the common political ground on which all these pieces of literature lay.

This essay examines Filelfo’s Oratio de laudibus illustris Karoli Gonzagae, the speech he wrote in 1449 to celebrate the confirmation of Carlo Gonzaga’s appointment as Capitano del Popolo in Milan. Written in the intricate scenario of the Ambrosian Republic, this not very well known oration reveals Filelfo’s political commitment in the turbulent circumstances of the internal conflict within the city. The analysis of the text and the investigation of its connections with Filelfo’s Carmina, epistles, and other important speeches allow us to trace the evolution of the humanist’s political thought as informed by a burgeoning princely ideology, which was framed by pivotal classical models. The fertile interplay among the literary sphere of oratory, historiography, and poetry uncovers the crucial role played by the historia in Filelfo’s literary output and in the process of building up his political theory as based on the new humanist figure of the ideal princeps.

This article investigates the revitalization of the literary theme of Renaissance conspiracies in nineteenth-century Italian art. The topic of political plots enjoyed widespread diffusion in Italian Renaissance literature, especially in the second half of the 1400s, when it was chosen as the subject of several texts. It is significant that four centuries later this topic was resurrected and reframed in a number of artistic works, becoming a pivotal theme of both Romantic visual culture and the later artistic movement of the Macchiaioli. In this evolution, the issue of conspiracies acquired new overtones, placed within the context of a turbulent period of political transition. It becomes a vehicle for modern political ideologies and an artistic pattern able to convey a new cultural sensibility. Thus the fertile relationship between literature and art brings new life into the recovery of Renaissance history, enriching the early modern tradition and continuously reviving it.

This paper analyses one of the most significant examples of epic poetry in Italian Humanism: Orazio Romano’s ‘Porcaria’, a sophisticated literary transposition of the historical events of Stefano Porcari’s conspiracy against pope Nicholas V (1453). This poem reveals the humanist tension between classical tradition and literary innovation. It is shaped by some typical motifs that marked classical epic and is built through the extensive use of classical sources; nevertheless, it displays many innovative elements that place this work in the ‘experimental’ area of humanist literature. In particular, the ‘Porcaria’ shows distinctive features which can be traced back to the original choice of employing the epic genre to treat the topic of ‘conspiracy’. The interplay between political matters and poetic patterns results in an original literary work characterized by a totally imaginary setting, a classical underworld, where classical figures are recalled as either positive or negative exemplars. The conflation of historical and fantastic elements, along with the eclectic combination of manifold classical models, builds the poem’s ideological perspective and conveys the author’s political pro-papal standpoint in a subtle and effective manner.