The Song of Songs in Sixteenth-century Italian lyric poetry

In recent years, European literary studies showed a renewed critical interest in the fortunes of the Song of Songs, which, as far as Italian studies are concerned, has known research mainly focused on individual authors and texts, or overall overviews extended to the entire chronological field of Italian literature, from Dante’s Vita Nova to contemporary poetry. This contribution aims instead to adopt - based on a study published in 2009 by Marina Vitullo, Il Cantico dei Cantici e la lirica amorosa medioevale – an approach focused on a precise period and genre, namely 16th century Italian lyric poetry. Focusing on some precise tòpoi (e.g. the floral and animal metaphors used to praise the beauty and purity of the beloved, or the ‘descending’ construction of the descriptio puellae) and on various Italian writers of the 16th century (Pietro Bembo, Baldassarre Castiglione, Giovanni Pollio Lappoli, Girolamo Malipiero, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Bernardo and Torquato Tasso, Giordano Bruno, Angelo Grillo), the research aims at determining the relevance of the Song of Songs within the Petrarchist code, as well as to highlight exemplary cases of intersections between lyric and religious poetry, especially frequent in the second half of the century and well attested in the production of Bernardo and Torquato Tasso