Il Rinascimento in letteratura: introduzione facile e veloce!

From a historical-literary perspective, the period of the so-called "Italian Wars" (1494-1559) is known as the Renaissance. While it is true that any periodization, whether historical or literary, is problematic, the notion of "Renaissance" raises further questions from a critical perspective. This is because the sixteenth century, in reality, does not present such unifying characteristics, and especially in literature, very diverse and even opposing trends occurred throughout the sixteenth century. Generally, we can identify as part of the "Renaissance" many of the works written and conceived during the first half of the century, when – on an artistic-literary level – aesthetic canons were established that explicitly drew on the model of the "classics." The Renaissance, therefore, completed the process, already begun by Humanism, of reviving classical models and their imitation, even in vernacular literature. The term "Renaissance" refers not only to the extraordinary flourishing of literature and the arts that characterized the life of the noble courts of the time, but also to the belief that we were the heirs to a very high sum of values: those of Latinity, complemented by those of the Italian tradition, more recent but now consolidated; the idea that these values ​​needed to be revived and perfected was established. Thus, formal classicism, a sense of beauty understood as spiritual balance and intellectual order, a measure of proportion that was expressed above all in the figurative arts, are characteristic of the Renaissance period. These ideas, which initially appeared as common sentiment, soon transformed into codifications, giving rise to forms and models that harnessed art in all its manifestations, including literature (in the vernacular, the canons were identified by Bembo in Prose della volgar lingua, published in 1525). Against these artistic and literary conceptions, other trends developed, which—in summary—can be summarized, according to critic Giulio Ferroni, into three different "cultures": The culture of contradiction, which maintains many ties to humanistic "experimentalism" and which highlights the ambivalence of all behavior, revealing the limits of any unitary and absolute vision; among the authors of contradiction we can cite Machiavelli and Ariosto; Anti-classicism, or anti-Renaissance, or counter-Renaissance, that is, the culture that totally rejects the models of Renaissance classicism, drawing on lesser-known folkloristic traditions and marginal and heterogeneous dialects and languages; Mannerism, which adopted the characteristic features of the Renaissance, but exaggerated them, emphasizing its artificial nature, abandoning the serene notion of reality that had characterized the Renaissance and—indeed—bringing forth a new sense of existential uneasiness that would distort the initial models, descending into bizarreness and formal artifice, as in the works of Tasso, initiating a process that would culminate in the Baroque. Sources: Baldi Guido (et. al.) La Letteratura vol. III, Paravia, Turin, 2007. Ferroni Giulio, Storia della letteratura Italiana. Dal Cinquecento al Settecento, Mondadori, Segrate, 2012. In its current form and with a periodizing function, the term Renaissance entered Italian usage rather late (in the 16th century, "Rinascita" is encountered, if anything), and was modeled after the French Renaissance. Its meaning, indicating the cultural renewal that took place in Italy, can be considered enshrined in the famous Discours préliminaire de l’Encyclopédie, in which d’Alembert, synthesizing and systematizing concepts long developed and widely disseminated in the eighteenth century, imposed it on the world of culture, accompanying it with a series of connotations destined to persist for a long time: the origin of the Renaissance placed in the study of the ancients, especially the Greeks, and in connection with the fall of Byzantium. In Italy, the term R. spread not so much through the influence of the title of the well-known ninth volume of J. Michelet's Histoire de France, La Renaissance (1855), but through the translation of J. Burckhardt's work, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860; Italian translation by D. Valbusa, revised by the author, 1876). source: online entry of the Treccani encyclopedia. N.B. the illustrations by Pietro Bembo and Pietro l'Aretino were taken from "ilgazettino.it".