L'amoroso messer Giusto da Valmontone: Un protagonista della lirica italiana del XV secolo (review)

This interesting and thoroughly researched monograph introduces a poorly-known protagonist of fifteenth-century Italian lyric poetry, Giusto de' Conti da Valmontone, whose influence in the Quattrocento and early Cinquecento has been compared to Pietro Bembo's. This coherent volume is made of a series of long essays already published or forthcoming in journals, collected volumes, and in the proceedings of conferences. The interest of Pantani's work is not merely archeological. Pantani does not limit himself to offering a detailed and convincing reconstruction of this poet's biography and a description of his poetic production. The Italian scholar aims to prove that Giusto de' Conti's canzoniere La bella mano, first published in 1440, plays a relevant role in the development of Italian Renaissance poetry, with a remarkable influence on Boiardo and Sannazaro. The unusual title La bella mano is not Conti's, although it is present since the editio princeps of the canzoniere (1472).

The first detailed chapter of Pantani's study addresses Giusto de' Conti's cultural formation, his biography, and his intellectual friendships. A graduate from the University of Padua, where he studied law, Conti was a modest Church official until he joined the court of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta in Rimini, where he spent the last two years of his life. He died in 1449. Leon Battista Alberti was one of the poet's most notable friends and exerted, according to Pantani, a detectable influence on Conti's poetics. The most interesting aspect of chapter 2, dedicated to Conti's early poetry, is the analysis of the structural differences between Petrarch's and Conti's poetic epistles. The original version of La bella mano (1440) contains only eight epistles out of 144 poems. The number goes up to ten in the subsequent extended edition made of 150 poems. Particularly relevant is that, unlike Petrarch's compositions, Conti's epistles never address powerful figures, which is, in Pantani's words, a "radical departure" from the Petrarchan canzoniere (51), although Petrarch's poetic letters to Senuccio are the essential model of Conti's compositions. Particularly interesting are Pantani's remarks on sonnet 53, which Conti directs at his unspecified friend Giorgio. In this poem Conti discusses the theme of jealousy, which plays a pivotal role within his canzoniere. The love experience narrated in La bella mano focuses on the poet's progressive and resentful detachment from his Isabetta, whose unjustified jealousy leads her to marry another man. Although some of Conti's sources are Boccaccio's Filostrato and the Latin lyric poets, Pantani sees a direct connection between Conti's bitter stance against his woman and the misogynist views of Leon Battista Alberti's Sofrona, De amore, and Deifira. In La bella mano the poet does not grant his beloved any "educative or salvific function" (102). More than the actual woman, the poet seems to direct his poetry to her "hand," seen as his primary muse (97). This central synecdoche emphasizes the lack of any real encounter between lover and beloved in Conti's canzoniere. Her hand has the paradoxical role of allowing the poet to expose his woman's rejection.

Pantani correctly perceives an intensification of Platonic motifs in the last six poems added in the second version of Conti's canzoniere, which reflects the significant growth of Platonic and Neoplatonic presence in the Italian contemporary philosophical debate. Pantani offers an engaging examination of the ternario 150, the conclusive poem of Conti's canzoniere. From the outset ("Se con l'ale amorose del pensero," 156) Conti underscores its strongly Neoplatonic character. Commenting on verse 18 ("mi scorse e spinse infin al terzo cielo"), the Italian scholar highlights the difference between the image of the beloved woman in the first canto of Dante's Paradiso and Conti's interpretation of his Isabetta. According to Pantani, the originality of Conti's...