Giangiorgio Trissino

• Born: July 8, 1478
• Birthplace: Vicenza, Republic of Venice (now in Italy)
• Died: December 8, 1550
• Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)

Other Literary Forms

The most distinguished letterato of his generation, Giangiorgio Trissino was a grammarian, critic, poet, and diplomat as well as a dramatist. His most serious literary endeavor stemmed from his desire to break the romance tradition in Italian literature and to replace it with the epic. Scorning Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516, 1521, 1532; English translation, 1591), he worked for twenty years on his national epic, La Italia liberata da Gotthi (1547-1548; Italy liberated from the Goths), in twenty-seven books. He took his story from Procopius’s history of the war of Belisarius against the Goths in order to recapture Italy for the Byzantine Empire, and he strove to imitate Homer according to Aristotle’s De poetica (c. 334-323 b.c.e.; Poetics, 1705). The epic, written in the blank verse of a medieval chronical, encumbered by intricate subplots and fulsome passages of praise for noble Italian families, and full of Lombardisms, failed to interest the Italian public, whose enthusiasms were more religious than heroic and would await Torquato Tasso’s epic Gerusalemme liberata (1581; Jerusalem Delivered, 1600) some thirty years later. The fact that Trissino admitted pagan deities into the Christian hierarchy (such as the “Angel” Neptune) seemed to offend everyone. The topic lacked relevance for Italians: Italy delivered from the Goths was only Italy delivered to the Lombards, and Italians bore little or no hostility toward either of these invaders anyway. What Trissino had hoped would be a second Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1611) turned out to be a parody of the Iliad.

In addition to his epic, Trissino wrote many shorter Italian lyrics: three Pindaric odes, two eclogues, and the first Horatian ode in Italian, along with forty-seven sonnets and a variety of canzoni, ballate, madrigali, and sirventesi. One sonnet honors Trissino’s first wife and begs her pardon as the sonneteer guiltily yields to the charms of another woman. Two sonnets convey sincere praise for Pope Paul III and Pietro Bembo. The sonnet to Bembo was answered in kind by the poet-cardinal, but this exchange of poetry seems to represent a truce perhaps effected by an intermediary rather than a rapprochement of their many political and intellectual differences.

There are also a few epigraphs in Latin written by Trissino: on the death of Bembo, for the tomb of his teacher Demetrius Chalcondyles, for his dead son Francesco, and the especially beautiful lines on the death of his friend Giovanni Rucellai (“You asked me, o learned Giovanni/ What I would do without you”).

In 1529, Trissino published the first four divisions of his treatise La Poetica, which deal mainly with linguistic matters and Italian versification. The last two divisions, published posthumously in 1562, basically paraphrase Aristotle’s Poetics, discussing poetry in general and drama in particular and stressing drama as an adjunct to morality: Tragedy teaches by means of pity and fear, and comedy teaches by deriding things that are vile.

With his Epistola del Trissino de le lettere nuovamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana in 1524 and its sequel, Il Castellano (the chatelain), in 1529, Trissino entered the questione della lingua controversy and argued for the spelling reforms that he conscientiously put into practice in his works.

Achievements

Giangiorgio Trissino’s La Sofonisba, which was highly praised by his contemporaries, is considered by scholars to be the first tragedy of modern European literature and provided a model for many succeeding writers. The tragedy was imitated by Pierre Corneille and Voltaire in France, by Vittorio Alfieri in Italy, by Emanuel Geibel in Germany, and notably by Étienne Jodelle in Cléopâtre captive (1553). La Sofonisba was rendered into French prose in 1559 by Mellin de Saint-Gelais. Jean Mairet, whose Sophonisbe (1634; English translation, 1956) was the first tragedy written in French in accord with the neoclassical unities. This work followed more closely the rules of unity of time, place, and action than Trissino’s had and owed much to the inspiration of Trissino’s work. Trissino introduced the formal pattern of versification in Italian tragedy, and Giraldi Cinthio confirmed it in both practice and theory: unrhymed verse for the greater part of the dialogue and rhyme for the chorus and the most important passages of the dialogue. This Italian legacy of blank verse reached as far as England and became the primary medium of Elizabethan tragedy.

By attributing so much importance to the love affair of the character Sofonisba, Trissino helped establish the importance of women in Renaissance tragedy; Giraldi Cinthio’s emphasis on the cult of the feminine soul was an outgrowth of the example set in La Sofonisba.

La Poetica, in which Trissino reduced Horace and Aristotle to Italian prose and set down literary laws for poets and dramatists, had a lasting influence on his successors. Trissino formulated a more emphatic unity of time than had Aristotle; this he conceived as precisely the artistic principle that would help rescue the new dramatic poetry from the chaotic directions of medieval drama. Henceforth this unity was not only a dramatic law but also one whose observance could serve to distinguish the accomplished dramatic artist from the crude compiler of plays.

He maintained a friendly rivalry with Giovanni Rucellai, who dedicated his didactic poem “Le api” (“The Bees”) to his friend Trissino and who inserted a tribute to him within the poem itself. Following Trissino, Rucellai wrote parts of his own plays Rosmunda (1525) and Oreste (wr. 1515-1520, pb. 1723) in blank verse. The gothic subject matter of Rosmunda was doubtless influenced by Trissino’s interest in the role of the Goths in Italian history. When Rucellai died in 1525, he bequeathed the manuscript of “The Bees” to Trissino, and it was Trissino who had the poem published at Venice in 1539.

Trissino’s epic poem La Italia liberata da Gotthi, though dull and unread in modern times, exhibits a thorough knowledge of Roman tactics and topography. It was in the spirit of Trissino’s title that Tasso’s Il Goffredo was retitled (without the consent of Tasso) Gerusalemme liberata in 1581. Trissino’s short poems are imitative of Petrarch; yet, significantly in an age so slavishly devoted to the Petrarchan ideal, Trissino also did much to revive interest in Dante and to establish him as equal with Petrarch. His attempts to reform Italian spelling by the addition of certain Greek letters met with derision, but he is credited with establishing the “x” and “z” of the Italian alphabet and with distinguishing between “u” and “v.”

Trissino exerted a formative influence on the great architect Andrea Palladio, whom he discovered working as a mason on his villa at Cricoli outside Vicenza. He educated the young man in his academy, gave him the name Palladio in allusion to the Pallas Athena of Greek mythology and to a character in his own poem La Italia liberata da Gotthi, and took him on visits to Rome.

Trissino’s greatest achievement stems from his translation of Dante’s Latin treatise De vulgari eloquentia, which he discovered in the Biblioteca Trivulziana and which had an immediate impact. Dante’s essay, to which modern philology can add little, is an attempt to identify the volgare illustre, the ideal norm that contemporaray Italian writers strove to perfect as they came to realize that Latin was no longer adequate for communication in Italy. After systematically examining the principal Italian dialects and refusing to identify the volgare with any of them, including his own native Tuscan dialect, Dante concludes that no specific part of Italy can claim to have nurtured the Italian literary standard and that, like a panther’s scent, the volgare is present in every city but belongs to none.

By the first half of the sixteenth century, the question of how to identify the Italian literary standard came to absorb the energies of many Italian intellectuals. They divided into basically three camps: those who favored following the by then slightly archaic Florentine dialect used by Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Dante; those who favored an eclectic solution; and those who favored using the current speech of Florence and Tuscany as the logical successor of the language enshrined by the triad of great Tuscan writers.

During one of Trissino’s visits to Florence, probably in 1514, he discussed the contents of Dante’s treatise with a group of literati who met in the Orti Oricellari, and he continued to speak of this during his sojourns in Rome from 1514 to 1518, in 1524, and in 1526. His lively conversations on language at Florence, remembered long afterward, inspired Niccolò Machiavelli to write on the subject. In November, 1524, Trissino published his Epistola del Trissino de le lettere nuovamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana, in which he defended the new spelling he had introduced in La Sofonisba (employing the epsilon for open “e,” the omega for open “o,” and other substitutions to indicate phonemic distinctions not made in conventional spelling), which had been published in September of the same year. There, Trissino writes of an “Italian” language and develops a distinction between Tuscan/Florentine on one hand and what he calls the “courtly and common” language on the other. He claims to have used Tuscan dialect whenever feasible in La Sofonisba for the comprehension of his readers but admits using the courtly and common language when a Tuscan word would be unfamiliar to non-Tuscan readers. This essay created much controversy; much of the dissent came from Tuscans, such as Agnolo Firenzuola, who disliked Trissino’s spelling reforms. Lodovico Martelli argued that the language should be called Florentine instead of Italian, and he also questioned whether Dante was the actual author of De vulgari eloquentia. Trissino responded with Il Castellano, written in 1528 and published the following year, in which a resurrected Rucellai, appointed keeper of the Castel Sant’ Angelo in Rome by Pope Clement VII, upholds the theories of Arrigo Doria (Trissino). In this new dialogue, Trissino claims that Tuscan is in fact synonymous with Italian, but that the great authors have always absorbed words from the other dialects when a Florentine word was unsuitable. The linguistic legacy of Dante, as Trissino interprets the crucial Dantean word discretio (even today translated variously as either “amalgamation” of the best elements or “elimination” of the worst elements), is the ideal of mingling the choicest words from the different dialects to supplement and enhance the lexical base of Tuscan.

In 1525, the Venetian Pietro Bembo published his Prose della volgar lingua, in which he claimed a tyrannical authority for the usage of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and—almost grudgingly—for Dante, whom he saw as a mingler of dialects and wielder of a coarse and imperfect medium. Ultimately the views of Bembo prevailed, and for many years the uniformity of Italian was achieved at the cost of repressing the natural interplay between the spoken and written language. As Jacob Burckhardt wrote in Die Kulter der Renaissance in Italien (1860; The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1878), “Literature and poetry probably lost more than they gained by the contentious purism which was long prevalent in Italy, and which marred the freshness and vigour of many an able writer.”

The resultant language was called Italian as Trissino had argued, and his pleas that the vernacular as the common property of the Italian people be cultivated with a discretionary concession to local diction were not without effect. The Florentine Accademia della Crusca was never as hostile to the use of alternative forms as were, for example, the French and Spanish academies, and in modern times, with television and increased communications, the standard language of Italy has become receptive to lexical enrichments from its many dialects by a process not so very different from the ideal envisioned by Trissino.

Biography

Giangiorgio Trissino was born to patrician parents, Gaspare Trissino and Cecilia Bevilacqua, in Vicenza. From his family, he inherited vast estates. His education did not begin in earnest until 1506, when, already a widower with two children, he settled in Milan, where he became a student of Chalcondyles. At the home of Chalcondyles, he met Ippolita Sforza Bentivoglio and the beautiful Cecilia Gallerana, both of whom figure prominently in his letters and poetry.

In 1509, Vicenza was allotted to the Holy Roman Empire, and when the city gave itself back to the Venetian Republic a month later, Trissino’s loyalty to Maximilian forced him into exile in Germany for some months and caused the temporary confiscation of his property. He returned to Italy the next year, settling in Ferrara, where he met Lucrezia Borgia. To escape the humidity of Ferrara, he moved on to Florence, where he frequented Machiavelli’s literary circle, and then to Rome, where he associated with Bembo and enjoyed the friendship of Rucellai. Trissino and Rucellai composed their plays La Sofonisba and Rosmunda concurrently, meeting from time to time to recite verses and compare notes. In Rome, Trissino established himself as a capable diplomat, serving Popes Leo X, Clement VII, and Paul III. Leo X sent him on a mission to Bavaria and on his return effected his pardon from the Venetian Republic and the restitution of his property. At the time of the coronation of Charles V, Trissino was made knight and count.

Trissino always lived in magnificent style. When he traveled, he was accompanied by an elaborate retinue. Between 1530 and 1538, he rebuilt his villa at Cricoli in the ancient Roman style with lavish Italian gardens to house his La Trissiniana academy, the pupils of which lived a semimonastic life, studying mathematics, music, philosophy, and classical literature. The architecture of the villa derives from Trissino’s interpretation of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, whom Andrea Palladio, himself a protégé of Trissino, would later credit as his greatest inspiration.

He spent the years from 1540 to 1545 on the island of Murano at another, more secluded villa, but despite his desire for solitude and his studious habits, the courtly life of the great cities never failed to reclaim his interest. While perfecting the last two sections of La Poetica, on a journey to Rome in 1550, he died in the arms of his student and friend Marco Thiene and was buried near John Lascaris in the church of Sant’Agata in Suburra.

The last years of Trissino’s life were plagued by his bad relations with his son Giulio. After the death of his first wife, he married a cousin, Bianca Trissino, by whom he fathered another child, Ciro, whom he openly preferred to his older son, Giulio. Father and son fought, lawsuits were undertaken, and the courts of Vicenza and Venice made judgments against the father, whereupon Trissino penned a series of acrid sonnets against the two cities. Trissino’s revenge on his son was harsh. First he blackened his character under the name of Agrilupo in La Italia liberata da Gotthi, and then he disinherited him with a curse and accused him in his will of Lutheran heresy, for which Giulio was prosecuted, excommunicated, and thrown into prison, where he died a martyr to his Lutheranism in 1576.

Analysis

Giangiorgio Trissino was a man of great intellect, erudition, and enterprise, who did not always choose well the topics and trappings for his creativity. He wished to be remembered as an innovator, but the innovations that he proposed were not always appropriate for his age. His epic poem, though born of the noblest goals, was a failure. Nevertheless, what was worthy of imitation in Trissino’s work was recognized. La Sofonisba stands today as the first secular tragedy of modern European literature, and the pattern of versification that was thereby introduced was widely followed by subsequent dramatists.

La Sofonisba

Trissino completed his tragedy La Sofonisba in 1515. Galeotto Del Caretto had written a more traditional (that is, medieval) version of the story in rhyme in 1502, but Del Caretto’s play was not printed until 1546. Petrarch had even used the story in one of his poems. Trissino’s play, taken directly from Livy, proved more erudite than stageworthy. Although it was not staged until 1562, after the author’s death, when it was lavishly produced by the Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza, it was printed at least ten times in Italy between 1524 and 1620 and was highly praised. In his dedication to Pope Leo X, Trissino, like Dante more than two centuries before him, felt it necessary to justify his having written in Italian rather than in Latin or Greek: He wanted to reach the common people.

Although Trissino liked to say that La Sofonisba was written according to Aristotelian theory, he was not yet so familiar with the theory at the time of the play’s composition as he was to become. As Marvin T. Herrick observes, if Trissino had had a good understanding of the Poetics of Aristotle when he wrote La Sofonisba, he would not have chosen the story of Sofonisba in the first place, for Livy’s original account does not lend itself to arrangement in the complex plot employing discovery and reversal of fortune that Sophocles and Euripides used in their best plays and that Aristotle recommended. In his La Poetica, Trissino confessed that the plot of La Sofonisba was not like that of Sophocles’ tragedy Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 b.c.e.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715) or Euripides’ Iphigeneaē en Taurois (c. 414 b.c.e.; Iphigenia in Tauris, 1782), but rather like that of Sophocles’ Aias (c. 440 b.c.e.; Ajax, 1729), which Aristotle called a “tragedy of suffering.”

Trissino wrote La Sofonisba in reaction against the vogue for Senecan tragedy. Following Greek models and eschewing the precedent of Horace and Seneca for a five-act drama, he arranged his play in episodes and choral odes, although if the prologue, incorporated as an integral part of the play as in the Greek fashion, is counted as an act, it and the episodes actually meet the five-act requirement. Although his followers preferred to continue using the traditional segmentation into five acts, Trissino did set a precedent when he chose to write La Sofonisba, not in the terza rima of Dante or the ottava rima of Boccaccio and the writers of the heroic romances, but in blank verse, which he deemed more appropriate for the poetry of tragedy, especially for a tragedy with a military setting. He used the eleven-syllable line, which bears some resemblance to the iambic trimeter of Greek tragedy. In a play as dependent on argument as La Sofonisba, Trissino did not abandon Seneca’s penchant for sententiae (maxims such as Laelius’s rebuke of Masinissa for his marriage, “The physician who sees that the disease needs a knife is unwise to use charms”), although in this, he probably saw himself as following Euripides rather than Seneca.

Although Trissino adhered strictly to the unities of action and of time, there is no strict unity of place. The setting opens in Cirta in Numidia and shifts in the third episode to the Roman camp. The chorus, which remains on stage throughout, must be transferred from the palace to the camp and then back to the palace.

The Carthaginian Sophonisba, in the company of her confidante Erminia, sets the tone of suffering in the first lines of the prologue. To Erminia she declares her intention to “speak at great length and to begin with fulsome words.” This in fact she does, beginning with Dido and continuing through her own political marriage to Syphax, king of Numidia, when she was already betrothed to Masinissa. When, in the first episode, the page brings the queen bad tidings, Sophonisba exclaims “O harsh exordium,” a word that underscores Trissino’s concern for the rhetorical element in tragedy. When the page tells Sophonisba that her husband has been captured by the Romans, it becomes evident that the queen fears capture by the Romans more than she fears death. In anticipation of her suicide, the chorus argues against self-destruction, to which Sophonisba replies, “Our life is like a fine treasure, which ought not to be spent on base matter, nor should it shirk honorable enterprises, because a beautiful and glorious death makes our past life resplendent.”

By now the Romans are approaching, and Masinissa, the Numidian ally of Rome, appears. When Sophonisba pleads with him, the chivalrous Masinissa promises to protect her. At this time, the chorus sings of the evils of war and invests its only hope in the compassion of Masinissa. In the second episode, the Roman general Laelius is informed that Masinissa has just married Sophonisba, and he later learns that the two had actually been betrothed before the marriage of Sophonisba to Syphax. The second episode ends with Laelius agreeing with Masinissa to consult Scipio about the propriety of their marriage, since Sophonisba herself may not be considered an enemy of Rome.

The chorus prays to God in His mercy to spare the queen and the people, a sentiment which, more Italian than pagan, reflects Trissino’s design to write an essentially modern tragedy. In the third episode, an unhappy Syphax is shown as a prisoner well treated in the Roman camp by Scipio. Scipio is, however, unsympathetic to the new marriage and decrees that Sophonisba belongs to Rome. Masinissa does not demur: “I will contend no longer.” The chorus intervenes, invoking the god of love for Sophonisba, betraying in this case Trissino’s Petrarchism.

The suicide of the queen comes in the fourth and final episode. Masinissa sends Sophonisba a vial of poison, and she drinks it. Erminia is with the queen as she dies, and although she wishes to accompany her mistress in death, she must continue to live in order to care for the queen’s two-year-old child, whom Erminia holds up for his mother to see in her dying moments. As the women of the chorus take charge of the body, Masinissa appears and promises an escort for the return of the funeral party to Carthage. The chorus closes with the philosophical lament, “The false hope of mortals, like a wave in a proud river, is seen one minute and then seems to be dissolved.”

Although there is some attempt to develop character in Laelius, Scipio, and Masinissa, they do not ring true, and there is little real dramatic action in the play. The tone is more that of a monotonous elegy. Sophonisba is an automaton, marrying Masinissa without remorse for Syphax and drinking her poison like an obedient child. Masinissa, who has sent her the poison in the first place, is shocked when she takes it. Trissino repeated the facts of a well-known story, but in his slavish attention to rules, he failed to endow his characters with credible motivation. On the other hand, the play has in its favor its unified and relatively uncomplicated structure, the soaring poetic heights reached by the chorus in certain spots, and Sophonisba’s farewell scene, which is not easily forgotten. La Sofonisba has been admired by critics as varied as Tasso (who annotated one of its editions), Alexander Pope, Voltaire, and Benedetto Croce, who called it a “moving tragedy entirely worthy of its pioneering position in the history of Italian tragedy.”

I simillimi

I simillimi, also known as I simillissimi, is Trissino’s attempt at comedy, but it lacks both the linear simplicity and the comic strength of Plautus, from whose Menaechmi (The Twin Menaechmi, 1595) Trissino borrowed his plot. Trissino, always wishing to be an innovator, modified the plot, added characters, changed the names, dispensed with the prologue, and added a choral role. Two centuries later, Carlo Goldoni used the same Plautine plot in his I due gemelli veneziani (1748; The Venetian Twins, 1968), but Trissino’s play was not an influence on this more successful work. The sad but unavoidable truth is that Trissino wrote a comedy that is neither stageworthy nor amusing.

Bibliography

Brand, Peter, and Lino Pertile, eds. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Rev. ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Covers Italian literature from early to modern times. Discusses the development of theater in Italy. Bibliography and index.

Di Maria, Salvatore. The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance: Cultural Realities and Theatrical Innovations. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Examines the early history of Italian theater. Bibliography and index.

Migliorini, Bruno. The Italian Language. Rev. ed. Boston: Faber, 1984. Migliorini examines the development of the Italian language, touching on Trissino’s part in its development. Bibliography and index.

Mulryne, J. R., and Margaret Shewring, eds. Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. This collection of essays from a seminar held at the University of Warwick in May, 1987, covers, among other subjects, the early Italian theater. Bibliography and index.

Wilkins, Ernest Hatch. A History of Italian Literature. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. Examines the history of Italian literature, including the early theater. Bibliography and index.