The tenzone between Matteo Franco and Luigi Pulci in the Context of Renaissance vituperium: Notes on Language and Intertextuality

Dealing with early Italian lyric, Marco Berisso has recently reminded us of the ‘clear specialization that immediately links the comic register to the metric form of the sonnet — one that would not undergo any significant changes until the Cinquecento, when terza rima would come close but never replace it’. This statement applies fully to the poetic exchanges tackled in this essay, in the general literary context of Renaissance comic poetry, and in the specific analysis of a few poems related to a relatively famous episode that occurred within the Laurentian poetic circle. This essay deals with a small corpus of sonnets that were exchanged — arguably between 1470 and 1473 — by a famous poet, Luigi Pulci, and a relatively unknown young priest, Matteo Franco (1447–94), whose rapidly growing literary reputation irritated an already affirmed Luigi and sparked a merciless competition between the two to secure Lorenzo de’ Medici’s appreciation and favour. The ritual exordium by Franco (Salve, se sè quel poeta, Luigi) helps situate our tenzone within the boundaries of the traditional 'quaestio' between lyric poets, originally tackling issues such as the definition of love or its development in the human body, but often resulting in a request of help and support for the writer’s anguish and despair.