An Assembly of Self and State: The Impossibile Congiunzione of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Poetry [thesis]

Description

This dissertation investigates the political aspects of Lorenzo de' Medici's poetry with a focus on Nencia da Barberino, the Raccolta Aragonese, and Comento de' miei sonetti. Lorenzo de' Medici demonstrated a propensity for appropriating poetic traditions and models and reshaping them in his own image. By doing so, he recast the trajectories of those traditions and models within a Medicean brand. Lorenzo employed his poetry to reinforce Florentine cultural prestige and, consequently, to bolster his own political influence; also, with great subtlety, he created a poetic image of himself as a private citizen, no more prominent than his peers in the governing of the city. I offer a new perspective on Niccolò Machiavelli’s 1526 characterization of Lorenzo de' Medici as an impossible congiunzione of poetic and political personas. I analyze discordant combinations in Lorenzo’s poetic production and argue that he utilized dissonance to construct his poetic authority. In Chapter One, I investigate a confluence of trends in literature, philosophy, language, and artistic patronage by which Lorenzo tied Florence's cultural preeminence to his own dynastic impulse. In Chapter Two, I explore Lorenzo's naturalistic portrayal of rustic life, which he combined with a parody of courtly love poetry in Nencia da Barberino (c. 1470). The poet invites his audience either to sympathize with an enamored shepherd or to scorn his lack of sophistication. The Nencia affirms Florentine cultural hegemony – the same authority on which Lorenzo capitalizes in the Raccolta Aragonese, which I discuss in Chapter Three. In this collection, Lorenzo de’ Medici offered a dynamic blend of Dantean and Petrarchan poetic paradigms within his Ficinian love poems. By inserting his own poems in the Raccolta Aragonese (1476-77), Lorenzo legitimized his own poetic endeavor within a cultural artifact that he exported beyond the boundaries of Tuscany. This study concludes (Chapter Four) with an analysis of Lorenzo’s integration of Petrarchan themes and forms with Dantean exegesis in his Comento de’ miei sonetti (1473-1490). In his sonnets and commentary, Lorenzo developed his own exegetical poetics. The leader of Renaissance Florence turned the poetry of personal experience and a hermeneutics of self into domestic politics.