Le gesta belliche dell’eroe: biografia e storiografia nel primo Umanesimo tra Firenze e Napoli

The notable development of the genres of biography and historiography in the humanist period brought with it a complex, highly developed representation of the protagonists, which was partly a response to the genuine characteristics of the figures depicted, and partly modelled on the schemes and memories of classical biography and historiography. This latter aspect had an empowering effect, in that it could give the narrative the noble, solemn tone that the humanists regarded as necessary whenever they set about composing the literary equivalents of the monumental representations created by contemporary sculptors and painters.
If we turn specifically to the accounts of war deeds in the humanist period, the question to be clarified is the delicate balance between the Greek and Latin “sources” and the project of offering a picture that responded to the — contemporary — reality described. In other words, the “sources” do not seem to act as a deterrent or an obstacle for narrating the present, but rather as elements that add to its rhetorical value; on the other hand, the figures chosen are often identified with the representatives of power, further emphasizing the celebratory ends inherent in any court–based programme.
But the question also had a strictly linguistic side, regarding the permissibility of neologisms, which, in any case, could not be used in the vernacular, but had to be translated into Latin in a context that, depending on the various authors, aspired to the anti–purist eclecticism of a «docta varietas», or to a Ciceronian «latinae linguae reparatio», later to be endorsed at the end of the century by respectively Poliziano and Sabellico.
The two poles of enquiry in the essay are Florence towards the end of the Age of the Communes and in the Medici period, as we find it in the second book of Filippo Villani’s «De origine civitatis Florentie et de eiusdem famosis civibus» and Benedetto Accolti’s dialogue «De praestantia virorum sui aevi»; and Naples, affected by the arrival of the new Aragon dynasty and by such decidedly incompatible personalities as Valla, and Facio and Panormita, whose celebratory works and the controversies surrounding them are considered.