Luigi Pulci

Luigi Pulci was born in Florence on August 15, 1432, into an old family that had known better days. The Pulci had once ranked among the city's established houses, but by the time of Luigi's birth their fortunes had collapsed under debt, and his father Jacopo di Francesco Pulci left the family in straitened circumstances ^[1]. Money troubles followed Luigi for most of his life, and creditors appear repeatedly in his surviving letters.

He was one of three brothers who all wrote verse. Luca Pulci composed the Driadeo d'amore and a poem on the joust of Lorenzo de' Medici, while Bernardo Pulci translated Virgil's eclogues and wrote devotional poetry ^[2]. Growing up in this household gave Luigi an early education in the vernacular literary culture of Florence rather than the Latin humanism of the schools. He never acquired the polished classical training of the university men, a gap his rivals later used against him, but he absorbed the popular traditions of the city: the cantari sung in the piazza, the burlesque sonnet, and the tales of Charlemagne's paladins that itinerant performers recited to Florentine crowds ^[1].

Who was Luigi Pulci before fame found him? The documentary record shows a young man scrambling for work and patronage in a city where literary talent could open doors. By the late 1450s he had attached himself to the orbit of the Medici family, the connection that would define his career ^[3].

Pulci's entry into the Medici household came through Lucrezia Tornabuoni, the devout and cultivated mother of Lorenzo de' Medici. Around 1461 she took an interest in the struggling poet, and it was at her request that he began his great work, a retelling of the Carolingian legends in Florentine ottava rima ^[2]. The choice of patron mattered: Lucrezia wanted a poem on Charlemagne, the emperor whom Florentine legend credited with refounding the city, and Pulci turned that pious commission into something far stranger and funnier than she can have expected.

During the 1460s he became a fixture of the young Lorenzo's circle, a companion on country excursions and an entertainer at table. His comic poem La Beca da Dicomano, a parody of rustic love poetry written in answer to Lorenzo's own Nencia da Barberino, shows the teasing intimacy of that friendship ^[3]. He also commemorated Lorenzo's celebrated joust of 1469 in a poem titled La Giostra, one of the standard poetic records of that Medici spectacle ^[1].

The relationship was never merely literary. Lorenzo used Pulci on confidential business, sending him as an informal envoy to Naples, Rome, and other courts during the 1470s ^[3]. These missions gave the poet a livelihood of sorts, though his letters home mix diplomatic news with constant pleas about unpaid debts and complaints about rivals who were crowding him out of Lorenzo's favor.

Pulci's reputation rests on the Morgante, the sprawling mock epic he worked on for more than two decades. The poem follows Orlando, Rinaldo, and the other paladins of Charlemagne through battles, quests, and betrayals, but its title character is a pagan giant whom Orlando converts to Christianity and who fights thereafter with the clapper of a bell as his weapon ^[2]. A first version in twenty-three cantos circulated in print by 1478, and the definitive edition of twenty-eight cantos, sometimes called the Morgante maggiore, appeared in Florence in 1483 ^[1].

What set the poem apart was its tone. Pulci took the familiar chivalric material and ran it through the comic registers of Florentine popular speech: kitchen humor, thieves' slang, proverbs, and blasphemous jokes sit alongside genuine pathos and, in the final cantos, an ambitious account of Roncesvalles and the death of Orlando ^[4]. The episode of Margutte, a half-giant who recites a gluttonous anti-creed professing faith in roast capons and strong wine, became the most famous passage in the work and one of the boldest comic inventions of the century ^[2].

The later cantos introduce the devil Astarotte, who discourses on theology, free will, and the possibility of lands beyond the ocean, passages that scholars have read as evidence of Pulci's engagement with the speculative currents of Laurentian Florence ^[4]. Among the essential Luigi Pulci facts is the poem's afterlife: Rabelais drew on its giants for Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Byron translated the first canto into English, praising Pulci as the founder of the serio-comic style he himself used in Don Juan ^[5].

Pulci's sharp tongue made enemies. His most damaging feud was with Marsilio Ficino, the Platonist philosopher at the center of Lorenzo's intellectual court. In a series of sonnets from the mid 1470s Pulci mocked doctrines dear to the philosophers, including arguments for the immortality of the soul, and Ficino answered by denouncing him as an impious slanderer ^[4]. Another running battle of sonnets pitted him against Matteo Franco, a chaplain in the Medici household, and the two exchanged insults of memorable vulgarity that circulated widely in manuscript ^[3].

The cost was real. As Lorenzo matured and his court took on a more philosophical and devout coloring, the aging jester found himself pushed to the margins. Pulci publicly retracted his offending sonnets and inserted professions of orthodox faith into the final cantos of the Morgante, including a declaration that he believed as the great theologians taught, but suspicion clung to him for the rest of his life ^[4].

Any balanced Luigi Pulci biography has to weigh this question of belief. Some scholars read him as a genuine skeptic ahead of his time, others as a professional joker whose provocations were misread by humorless opponents. The surviving evidence, sonnets, letters, and the poem itself, supports no simple verdict, which is part of why he continues to attract scholarly attention ^[6].

With his position in Florence eroding, Pulci found a new protector in Roberto Sanseverino, a condottiere and one of the leading mercenary commanders in Italy. From about 1473 onward Pulci served him as an agent, secretary, and companion, traveling through northern Italy on the general's business ^[3]. The arrangement gave him income and standing, though his letters suggest he missed Florence and the old intimacy with Lorenzo.

He continued to write during these years. Besides finishing the expanded Morgante, he composed the Confessione, a penitential poem addressed to the Virgin, and left a body of letters to Lorenzo that historians prize as a candid record of Laurentian Florence, full of gossip, complaint, and flashes of the same verbal energy that animates his verse ^[6].

In the autumn of 1484 Pulci accompanied Sanseverino toward Venice. He fell ill on the road and died at Padua on November 11, 1484, at the age of fifty-two ^[1]. Because of his reputation for impiety he was denied burial in consecrated ground, an unusual and pointed posthumous punishment for a poet of his standing, and one that fixed the image of Pulci the heretic in later tradition ^[2].

Pulci's achievements look larger with distance. The Morgante was the first of the great Italian chivalric poems of the Renaissance, appearing before Boiardo's Orlando innamorato and a generation before Ariosto's Orlando furioso, and it established ottava rima narrative as the vehicle for the genre ^[2]. Where his successors refined the form toward courtly elegance, Pulci kept it rooted in the comic, plebeian voice of Florence, and that voice proved durably influential. Rabelais borrowed from him, Folengo learned from him, and in the nineteenth century Byron's translation of the first canto introduced English readers to what Byron called the parent of his own comic style ^[5].

Among Luigi Pulci achievements beyond the epic, critics count his contribution to the language itself. The Morgante is a storehouse of fifteenth-century Florentine idiom, slang, and proverb, and philologists have mined it ever since for evidence of how the city actually spoke ^[6]. His sonnet wars with Matteo Franco stand in the long Tuscan tradition of comic invective that runs from Rustico Filippi to Berni.

Modern scholarship has treated him generously. Full English translations, critical editions, and monographs by scholars such as Constance Jordan and Mark Davie have examined the poem's politics, theology, and humor, while the question of what Pulci really believed remains open and productive ^[4]. Five and a half centuries after his birth, the debt-ridden Florentine who turned a pious commission into a comedy of giants still repays reading.