Le varianti della poesia di Michelangelo: scrivere by Ida Campeggiani (review)

This book is the first monograph dedicated to the study of the variants of Michelangelo’s Rime. The topic has never before been addressed in such a comprehensive way—although Campeggiani obviously includes only selected examples in her work. Very few studies were available (for example C. Vecce’s “Petrarca, Vittoria, Michelangelo,” and chapter II.3 of Girardi’s Studi su Michelangelo scrittore), and Claudio Scarpati, in his 2003 article on Michelangelo’s canzoniere, still pointed out the lack of a systematic study on such an issue.¹

The author is well aware of the position of her work in the field of the critica delle varianti, from Contini onwards. While, she states, a variant was usually evaluated against a system, that is the alleged norm of a specific author’s writing, in the case of Michelangelo we have no such stable system, but an “universo estroso, fatto di parzialità che nascono l’una dall’altra” (135). We do not have the composition’s final stage, but an accumulation of possibilities that must all be considered within the analysis of a poem in order to illuminate its obscurity or that are all marked by a “continua pienezza di significato” (101). Campeggiani goes so far as to suggest the inadequacy of the term variante to describe such a complex textual situation (7–8) and criticizes Girardi’s choice in adopting a “criterio meccanico” to choose among the variants (9).

Thus, variante assumes a wide spectrum of meanings in this book. Campeggiani analyses not only variants in the strictest sense of the word (varianti indecise and multiple writings of a same text in chapter 1 and 2), but also texts constructed from fragments (chapter 1 and 3), composite forms comprising notes, letters, drawings, and postscripts that gravitate around a poem (chapter 4), texts that originate from the same moment of inspiration and that diverge later, forming a diptych of opposite poems (chapter 5), and finally variations on a theme based on the same source (chapter 7).

In chapter 1, Campeggiani examines the variants of poems 84, 231, and 197 in order to show how Michelangelo improved his poems through his corrections; the author also suggests that 37 and 38 are “appunti di un unico discorso poetico,” later employed in the genesis of 42. Her observations are certainly interesting, although, as she admits, they do not offer a solution to the problem of the editorial treatment of these poems. Likewise, at the end of the chapter, questions relevant to the status of Michelangelo’s poems with respect to the non finito and the ways in which we can “recepire la volontà dell’autore, cerebrale e compiaciuta, mentre stenta a scindere una forma dalla fase in cui tutto è ancora possibile” (41), remain unanswered. What might at first seem like a failing of the work however, is not only the natural outcome of the analysis of such unstable materials, but also a strength. Campeggiani does not try to force a specific conclusion, but rather offers deep insights into the complex textual situation of Michelangelo’s poems. In the same chapter we find an interesting analysis of the variants and the comments added to the poems that Luigi del Riccio asked Michelangelo to compose on the occasion of Cecchino dei Bracci’s death. Campeggiani interprets Michelangelo’s insertion of rather lowly and ironic comments, together with the request addressed to Luigi that he choose among the different variants, as strong evidence of Michelangelo’s self-irony, playfulness, and his awareness of his status as a poet: “in questa disinvoltura nel porsi sopra i propri versi … si può avvertire il forte interesse teorico che Michelangelo aveva per fare il letterato” (23).

In chapter 2, the author finds a Ficinian theme in 55. She argues that this theme reappears in the multiple drafts of the later sonnet 76, where the source is also in dialogue with a Dantean intertext. The same process is...