«Deliberarno la lor passïone | cantando l’uno a l’altro far palese». I pastori innamorati nelle bucoliche ‘appassionate’ di Boiardo

Abstract

After Francesco De Sanctis’ slating in his History of the Italian Literature (chapter 12), for a long time bucolic poetry (in particular the Latin humanistic one) was considered as a literary product of pure imitation, which therefore had little to do with civil life as with the author's profound experience. The recent studies on the bucolic have instead re-evaluated this literary genre, highlighting the exciting contradictions on which the Three Crowns refounded it in the Fourteenth century. In particular, Matteo Maria Boiardo entrusts great political and sentimental responsibilities to his two bucolic collections, composed, at a distance of twenty years, on the double desk, first Latin (1463-64) and then vulgar (1482-83). From the political point of view, he uses the Pastoralia to take the side of the young Hercules of Este, while the Pastorale to invoke and then to thank Alfonso the Duke of Calabria for his providential intervention in the Salt War; from sentimental point of view, thanks to massive grafts taken from the elegiac lexicon, both the Pastoralia and the Pastorale are pervaded by the metaphorical field of fire provoked by love, in a way that does not seem to have precedents in the pastoral tradition.