3. Giovanni Pontano (1426-1503), “When You Laugh.”

Portrait medallion by by Adriano Fiorentino

Giovanni Pontano was one of the nicest and most talented people of the Italian Renaissance. A manuscript of his forms the background to this page.

(The Wikipedia article is a bit lame: mostly just the old EB 11th ed.).

A bare sketch from The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance (link depends on your subscriptions):

Pontano, Giovanni, or (Latin) Giovanni Pontanus

(1426/9–1503),

Italian humanist, diplomat, and neo-Latin poet, born in Cerretto (Umbria) and educated in Perugia. In 1447 he entered the service of King Alfonso I of Naples, serving as tutor to the duke of Calabria; in 1486 he was appointed chancellor of the kingdom by Ferrante I, and in 1495 he negotiated the surrender of Naples to Charles VIII of France in the opening campaign of the Wars of Italy.

Pontano's writings included works on astrology (De rebus coelestibus), moral philosophy (De prudentia and De fortuna), political theory (De principe), and the history of the Neapolitan war in which he had played a part (De bello Neapolitano). He also wrote moral dialogues and Latin poetry, including lyrics and didactic verse. He was the most eminent member of the Neapolitan Academy, which later became known as the Accademia Pontaniana.

Bibliography

J. Bentley Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (1987).

From The Hermaphrodite: Antonio Beccadelli, trans. Holt N. Parker (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2010). I Tatti Renaissance Library:

Beccadelli’s other great accomplishment was founding the first of the Academies that would nurture intellectual life in the following centuries, the Academia Neapolitana. By 1447 Beccadelli was planning a formal recreation of the Academies of the ancient world. There had already been literary meetings in the royal library, to which Beccadelli made many contributions. The new venue, a setting which favored open and unstructured discussions, was the remains of the Roman arches in the Strada dell’Anticaglia near Beccedelli’s home, which came to be called the Porticus Antoniana. Towards the end of Beccadelli’s life, the running of the academy passed to Pontano, and it came to be called the Accademia Pontaniana. This fell into desuetude in 1542, was revived in 1808, was repressed by the fascists in 1934, again revived by Croce in 1944, and continues today.

When Barbara and I visited Naples, with clues from the description, we tracked down the location, and made a quasi-pilgrimage to the first modern Academy:

My own sketch of Pontano, from “Renaissance Latin Elegy,” in Blackwell Companion to Roman Love Elegy, ed. Barbara K. Gold. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 476-90:

Propertius and these poets in turn influenced Beccadelli’s friend Giovanni Pontano (1429-1503), who took over the direction of Beccadelli’s Academy, the first of the Renaissance. Pontano was in many ways the best and most appealing Latin poet of the Renaissance. In prose he ranged over astronomy, philosophy, satire, and vivid dialogues; he was no less prolific and admired in poetry.
His early Pruritus (“The Itch,” 1449) was directly inspired by Beccadelli’s Hermaphrodite, but suppressed (and reused) in the more lyrical Parthenopeus (or Amores) in a variety of meters with a central character of Fannia. His greatest work in elegy is the three books of De amore coniugali (1480-84), which begins with an address to Elegy herself and his own epithalamium (1.2) to the love of his life, Adriana Sassone (whom he addresses as Ariadna, not least because he is forced to abandon her so often for official duty). They end with epithalamia for his daughters. These poems show clearly not only how conventional forms were used to express new and personal sensibilities but also how new genres were created. For the first, a good example is 3.2 (“Natalem Domini sine me”), where he urges his wife to celebrate Christmas and New Year’s with all the old customs even though he must be away. For the second, Book II includes one of the most remarkable experiments in the history of Latin verse, in which the Neapolitan lullaby is recast into twelve Latin neniae (2.8-19), which freely draw on Catullan diminutives to weave hypnotic sound patterns. After Adriana’s death, she is present in all his poetry. In the Baiae, he even castigates her for leaving him so bereft (1.12, 1.13, 2.29). Yet he is human, and while he fills the countryside of Ferrara with gods, myths, and flowers in the Eridanus, he also confesses to an old man’s passion for the earthly Stella, and appeals to his wife’s spirit for understanding. The Tumuli (which turned Alexandrian epigram into the French tombeaux; Furno 2003, 172-76) include hers and his. The Eclogues (in hexameters) begin with the inset lament of Melisaeus (a name other poets then used for him) lamenting his lost wife. Even in the middle of De hortis Hesperidum (two books of georgics taking how to grow lemon and orange trees in Italy as his starting point), gathering fruit reminds him of similar times with Ariadna, whose premature death may have spared her much suffering (1.318-35). See Thurn, N. 2002. Drei neapolitanische Humanisten über die Liebe: Antonius Panormita - Hermaphroditus, Ioannes Pontanus - De amore coniugali, Michael Marullus - Hymni naturales. St. Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae.

I’ll put up some of these later on.

Now on to the poem. Baiae 1.15:

Ad Batillam

Cum rides, mihi basium negasti,

Cum ploras, mihi basium dedisti;

Una in tristitia libens benigna es,

Una in laetitia volens severa es.            

Nata est de lacrimis mihi voluptas,         5

De risu dolor. O miselli amantes,

Sperate simul omnia et timete.

Notes:

Meter: hendecasyllabic (one of Catullus’ favorite meters).

Batilla: the classical Bathylla.

1-2. That is, when she is happy, she has no need of him; when sad, she has cried on his shoulder. Not, I think, with Mathiesen: "When you laugh at me, you have denied me a kiss / When you cry for me, you have granted me a kiss."

negasti: nega(vi)sti, pf.

3-4. unā: adj. with laetitiā, etc. (‘only in happiness’).

4-5: libens  . . . volens: quasi adverbial with the adjective.

7: either indic. or impv.

This little poem illustrates many of the basic problems of reading humanist poetry. The words are all quite simple, but since the rules of classical poetic usage were not always known or followed, the exact syntax and sense can be elusive: what's the connection beween the present and past tenses ("It's as if you have denied")? Does mihi go with rides and ploras: "when you laugh at me"? Is una adverb ("you are simultaneously willing and nice" or adjective? Is sperate indicative (that's how lovers are) or imperative (that's how lovers ought to be)? Whose happiness and sadness?

Translation:

When you laugh, you have refused me a kiss.

When you weep, you have granted me a kiss.

Only in sadness you are willing and kind.

Only in happiness you are wanting and cruel.

I gain pleasure from tears,

and pain from a smile. O pathetic lovers,

you want and fear everything all at once.

I’ve chosen this trifling trifle as first out of Pontano’s work not only for the questions even a simple poem can raise, but also because it was set (as few humanist Latin poems were) as a frottola or madrigal. The best is by Orlando de Lassus (a list of his madrigals). The score (ed. Peter Bergquist, 2001) is HERE. There’s a lovely performance by the Chamber Choir of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, conducted by István Párkai, on an old Hungaroton record:

PLAY THE MUSIC.

Thomas J. Mathiesen gives a detailed analysis in Music and Ideas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 216-25. The music “punctuates” the clauses after mihi, but pays no attention to elision. There are other settings by Tromboncino, in Fioretti di Frottole (Naples, Caneto, RISM 1519⁴). There’s a recording of this, but only the instrumental version on Dulces exuviae (including settings of Virgil and Horace) and by the Canadian Brass. It was also set by Johannes Lheritier in Opera omnia / Johannis Lheritier, ed. Leeman L. Perkins. American Institute of Musicology, 1969.

On the frottola, the first form of the madrigal, the Grove Dictionary (requires subscription) notes:

The sporadic settings of Latin verse found in the frottola repertory are due in large part to humanistic impulses: Isabella d’Este, for example, indulged her love of Virgil by ordering music to his poetry. Such settings include Horatian odes (e.g. Integer vitae, book 1 no.47); portions of the Aeneid (e.g. Dissimulare etiam sperasti, composed by Filippo de Lurano, book 8 no.13); Tromboncino’s setting of Dido’s letter to Aeneas (Aspicias utinam quesit from Ovid’s Heroides, in Antico’s book 2 no.40), which, according to Einstein, is ‘the first love letter in music’; newly written humanistic odes (e.g. In hospitas per alpes, book 1 no.46); and an elegy by Propertius (Quicunque ille fuit set by Cara in Antico’s book 3 no.21). Some of them were composed schematically, as in the ‘Aer de versi latini’ of Caprioli that may be fitted to a distich in elegiac metre (book 4 no.62). Occasionally Latin was used for purposes of travesty (e.g. Rusticus ut asinum in F-Pn Rés.Vm.⁷676 no.64) or religious mockery: a frottola of Honophrius Patavinus (book 6 no.60) starts with ‘Sed libera nos de malo’ (from Pater noster) then switches to Italian (cf Josquin’s In te Domine speravi, book 1 no.56 and Tromboncino’s Vox clamantis in deserto, book 3 no.58). A pièce d’occasion was Lurano’s music to Quercus juncta columna est (book 9 no.1), composed for the wedding festivities of Marc’Antonio Colonna.

There’s a great archived Public Radio introduction to the frottola at:

http://indianapublicmedia.org/harmonia/frottola-renaissance-love/

or http://www.prx.org/pieces/57905-the-frottola-and-renaissance-love.

All of Pontano’s poems from Baiae have been translated by Rodney G. Dennis for Harvard’s I Tatti Library. Julia Haig Gaisser has just done the first volume of his Dialogues for the same series.

The hendecasyllabics are on Perseus.

The first printings of most of his works at CAMENA.