Luigi Pulci - Renaissance poet

Luigi Pulci wrote his epic poem for
the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent

Luigi Pulci, a major Italian poet of the early Renaissance best known for his epic comic poem, Morgante, was born in Florence on this day in 1432.

Morgante, which featured a real-life Frankish military leader under Emperor Charlemagne who became legendary after dying heroically in battle, was significant in that it created the mock-heroic epic genre in Western literature.

Luigi was the youngest son among nine children of Jacopo di Francesco Pulci, an impoverished nobleman. After a difficult childhood caused by his family's poverty, he was introduced to the Medici family in 1461 and came under the patronage of Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici, otherwise known as Lorenzo the Magnificent. The de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic, Lorenzo became the most powerful supporter of Renaissance culture.

Despite his family’s straitened circumstances, Pulci received a full classical education, which equipped him to navigate the elite literary and political circles of 15th-century Tuscany.

He formed a close personal friendship with Lorenzo when the latter was still a teenager and who found Pulci’s wit and storytelling a welcome distraction from study.

Pulci became a favourite with Lorenzo’s wider circle due to his sharp wit, satirical humour, and talent for popular poetry. It was Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lorenzo’s mother, who actively encouraged Pulci to write a poem about Orlando.

The eighth-century paladin had entered popular culture in Italy thanks to The Song of Roland, an 11th-century French epic poem based on his heroic death fighting the Spanish at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass on behalf of Charlemagne in 778. It is the oldest surviving major work of French literature. 

Pulci’s version features a giant, called Morgante, who becomes Orlando's loyal follower after the knight stops him from attacking the monastery of Chiaromonte and converts him to Christianity. 

The front cover page of a 1574
edition of the popular Morgante

It differed from the serious courtly epics of tradition in that Pulci filled his work with slapstick humour, popular Tuscan slang, and theological parody. The poem features the gluttonous Margutte, a comic character who proudly boasts of his many sins and eventually dies in a fit of laughter.

Morgante himself is killed by a bite from a crab. The poem ends with an account of Orlando's defeat and death at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass.

At Tornabuoni’s request, the poem was read aloud in the Medici court as it progressed. The first edition containing 23 cantos appeared around 1478, and the final 28-canto version was published in 1483.

As a result of its success and popularity, Pulci’s chosen ottava rima rhyming stanza form became the standard for epic poems. Orlando featured in later epic Renaissance poems such as Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1495) and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516).

Pulci’s position in the Medici court eventually deteriorated. His irreverent attitude toward religion and his fascination with the occult drew sharp criticism from prominent court humanists, most notably Marsilio Ficino and Matteo Franco.

Pulci engaged in fierce, bitter poetic public feuds with Franco, a priest who accused him of dabbling in black magic. They traded insults in a series of sonnets.

Eventually, his coarse, popular style fell out of favour, and he grew increasingly isolated. Politically sidelined and in need of money - he had some business interests that saddled him with large debts - he left Florence some time around 1470 and entered the service of Robert Sanseverino, a powerful condottiero. 

A plaque remembering Luigi Pulci in
the area of Padua where he was buried

Pulci travelled extensively on missions for Sanseverino throughout northern Italy. During a journey to Venice, he became ill and died in Padua in November 1484. 

Before that, in 1478, following the assassination of Lorenzo's brother Giuliano during the Pazzi Conspiracy, amid a climate of anti-clericalism in Florence, Pulci wrote a poem in which he fulminated against the Rome of Pope Sixtus IV, dedicating it to Lucrezia Tornabuoni.

It reinforced the church’s view of Pulci as a heretic, as a result of which after his death in Padua, the local clergy refused to give him his last rites and denied him burial in consecrated ground. His body instead was buried in an unmarked grave just outside the churchyard wall of the Chiesa di San Tommaso Apostolo in Padua, which was demolished in the early 20th century. 

There is a plaque commemorating the life of Luigi Pulci on a wall in Via San Tomaso, close to where the church stood.

The church's hostility toward Pulci did not end there. In 1497, a decade after his death, the radical friar Girolamo Savonarola, who led the infamous Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence, deemed Pulci’s comedic epic morally corrupt and dangerous.

Savonarola campaigned against what he considered to be the artistic and social excesses of the Renaissance, preaching with fanatical passion against any material possession that might tempt the owner towards sin. Copies of Morgante were seized and thrown into the public fires.

Nonetheless, Pulci’s legacy endured through his influence on the evolution of the European epic after his blending of high literary culture with low-brow street comedy broke rigid medieval traditions. By elevating the vernacular Tuscan dialect, he helped shape the future of Italian literature. 

Centuries later, Lord Byron, the British romantic poet and adventurer, translated portions of Morgante, cementing Pulci's reputation as a pioneer of the romantic-comic narrative style.

The beautiful Boboli Gardens were a Medici
addition to their newly-acquired Palazzo Pitti

Travel tip:

The Medici family’s dominance of Florence for approximately 300 years can be seen in numerous reference points across the city. The early years of their rule brought the construction, between 1444 and 1460, of the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, in present-day Via Camillo Cavour, which was the family’s original power base, commissioned by Cosimo il Vecchio and home to Lorenzo il Magnifico.  The same period saw Medici funding of improvements to the Basilica di San Lorenzo, to which Michelangelo’s New Sacristy was added from 1520, at the behest of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (later Pope Clement VII). The rulership of Cosimo I saw the construction of the Uffizi (1560–1581), originally an administrative complex designed by Giorgio Vasari, the addition of Medici apartments to the medieval Palazzo Vecchio, and the construction in 1565 of the Vasari Corridor, the 750m elevated corridor built to facilitate Cosimo I’s safe passage between the Palazzo Vecchio and the Palazzo Pitti, which had become the ceremonial residence of the Medici family and the seat of the Grand Duchy of Florence in around 1550. The Palazzo Pitti was purchased by Eleonora of Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I, in 1549, having previously been the home of Luca Pitti, a Florentine banker. The Boboli gardens were a Medici addition. 

Stay in Florence with Expedia

The Basilica di Sant'Antonio, one of Padua's
main attractions, was built in the 13th century

Travel tip:

Many of the major sights that attract visitors to Padua had already been built when Luigi Pulci died there in 1484. For example, the Palazzo della Ragione, which still dominates Piazza delle Erbe and Piazza della Frutta, was built in 1218 and enlarged between 1306 and 1309, while the Scrovegni Chapel, one of the best preserved medieval chapels in Italy and decorated with stunning frescoes by Giotto, was built between 1300–1303. The nearby Church of the Eremitani, built for the hermit friars of Saint Augustine and dedicated to the saints Philip and James, has stood since the 13th century, as has the Basilica di Sant’Antonio, with its eight domes. The Baptistery adjoining the Duomo would have been as it is today. The city’s walls, which existed in Pulci’s time, are not fully intact, although sections remain, along with the Porta Altinate and Porta Molino gates. The city already had a university, which was established in 1222 and is one of the oldest in the world, second in Italy only to the University of Bologna . The main university building, Palazzo del Bò in Via VIII Febbraio in the centre of Padua, used to house the medical faculty. The history of Padua itself goes back much further: it is believed to be one of the oldest cities in northern Italy, founded in about 1183 BC by the Trojan prince, Antenor. 

Find Padua hotels with Hotels.com

More reading:

Ludovico Ariosto, the poet credited with coining the term humanism and author of the epic poem, Orlando furioso

How Tuscan writer Francesco Berni’s satirical verses poked fun at two Popes

The bucket that inspired Alessandro Tassoni’s mock-heroic poem La secchia rapita

Also on this day:

1702: The birth of landscape painter Francesco Zuccarelli

1922: The birth of economic historian and writer Carlo Cipolla

1944: The birth of fashion designer Gianfranco Ferré

Ferragosto - Italy’s great summer escape

Home