Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Le insidie dell'allegoria: Ermolao Barbaro il Vecchio e la lezione degli antichi (review)

2001; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.2001.0021

1534-0708

Craig Kallendorf,

Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies

The Orationes contra poetas, composed in the late 1450's by the bishop of Verona, Ermolao Barbaro the Elder (1410-1471), are well known among historians of Renaissance humanism, who have generally taken them as the fulminations of a conservative cleric against the new learning in general and its focus on pagan poetry in particular. Based on a careful reading of the text and an extensive exploration of the cultural milieu in which it was produced, however, Frank's new study shows that this traditional reading of the Orationes is overly reductive to the point of being seriously misleading. To be sure, Barbaro has reservations about how Greek and Latin poetry should be used by the Christian readers of his own time, but many of the same reservations can also be found in the writings of the educational theorists of Italian humanism. In other words, Barbaro is writing from within the humanist camp, not outside it. Making this observation allows Frank to focus more precisely on what Barbaro is really opposed to: not ancient comedy per se, but its crude reappropriation by the popular theater and preaching of the Quattrocento; and not the poetry of the ancients, but the overly enthusiastic efforts of some Renaissance readers to elevate it, consciously or unconsciously, to the same ontological level as Sacred Scripture itself. That is to say, Barbaro's Orationes are in fact in accordance with the basic principles of humanist thought, in that their insistence on a clean separation between the sacred and the profane rests on an awareness of the historical circumstances that distinguish pagan culture from its Christian successor. This gives the literature of Greece and Rome its legitimate space in which to operate, as the finest expression of what the human spirit can achieve without the aid of grace.