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The three principal words in the title of this book may seem clear, but each of them is problematic. ‘Italy’ in this period might be said to be both too small and too large a unit of study. On one side, traditional forms of play in Italy, from charivaris (scampanate) to Carnival, had parallels elsewhere in Europe, while some new forms invented in Italy, such as the comedy, were adopted and adapted in other countries. On the other side, Italy was not yet a nation but a number of regions, which varied in their cultures as well as in their economies and political systems. A written language based on Tuscan was helping to unify the peninsula at this time, but the majority of the population spoke regional dialects, and the elites often employed dialect as a playful form of language, as we shall see.

Readers will notice that the majority of the examples offered in the book come from northern and central Italy. This does not mean that play stopped south of Rome. Obvious examples to the contrary include the storyteller Masuccio Salernitano, from Salerno in southwest Italy; Pietro Antonio Caracciolo, an actor who wrote farces in his native Neapolitan; Fabrizio de Fornaris, another Neapolitan actor who was famous for his rendering of the boastful but cowardly ‘Captain Crocodile’; Giambattista della Porta, a polymath from Naples who is best known for his comedies; and Giordano Bruno, from Nola near Naples, the author of some lively and playful dialogues. The minor role played by the south in this essay is probably the result of a relative lack of evidence. The Sicilian puppet theatre, for instance, already existed at this time, but little is known about the performances before the nineteenth century.

The term ‘Renaissance’ is also problematic. The main problem is the contrast between two common usages. The term is often employed in the traditional manner to describe a period of European history – more or less, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nowadays, this period is more often described as ‘early modern’ and extended to the eighteenth century. In this essay, I shall be looking at Italy during a long Renaissance from 1350 to 1650.

The word ‘Renaissance’ is also used in a more precise and limited sense to refer to a movement, a collective attempt to recover and imitate the culture of classical antiquity (Greek and Roman). The focus of this essay will be on the movement, extended to include the work of the major artists and writers of the period, even when they were not inspired by the ancient world. The movement involved only a minority of the Italian population, but to place it in context it will be necessary to examine popular culture as well.

Do we have too serious a view of the Renaissance? It certainly had a playful side, and so did many – if not the majority – of the most famous individuals who contributed to the movement, whether they were artists or scholars (the so-called ‘humanists’).

Leading artists, including Leonardo (whose notebooks show that he also collected jokes), Raphael (whose playful cherubs have become iconic), Bronzino (whose comic poems show he was not as cold as his paintings may suggest), Giulio Romano (who made architectural jokes) and Arcimboldo (who invented visual puns), all produced images that were intended to provoke a laugh, or at least a smile. Even Michelangelo, often regarded as completely serious – either in agony or in ecstasy – had a sense of humour that was expressed in his poems (mocking himself at work on the Sistine ceiling) as well as in his art, and, according to legend, in practical jokes as well. He exchanged comic verses with the master of that genre at the time, Francesco Berni.¹

Leading humanists, including Petrarch, Poggio Bracciolini, Angelo Poliziano and Pietro Bembo, collected jests. Cosimo de’ Medici, the unofficial ruler of Florence, plays an active role in Poliziano’s jestbook. Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo de’ Medici wrote songs for Carnival as well as a comic poem, and Lorenzo’s second son, Giovanni – who became Pope Leo X – employed several fools to entertain himself and his court. Baldassare Castiglione discussed the nature of humour. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote comedies. Great ladies, notably Isabella d’Este, took part in games. The humanist Leonbattista Alberti presented mathematical puzzles as ‘jolly things’ (cose jocundissime). Philosophers from Marsilio Ficino to Giordano Bruno were attracted by the idea of ‘serious play’ (serio ludere or giocare serio), while Galileo included comic passages in his lively dialogue ‘Concerning the Two Main World Systems’ (1632).² Among the greatest Italian poets of the period, Ludovico Ariosto wrote comedies and a playful romance, Orlando furioso, while Torquato Tasso wrote dialogues about games.

Insofar as the Renaissance was a movement of cultural innovation – sometimes disguised as renovation – some observations by psychologists may be illuminating. It has been suggested that innovation is encouraged by playing with ideas, trying out alternative solutions to a given problem. Dialogue is one form of this play, and printed dialogues, as well as oral ones, flourished in Italy at this time.³

Writing about play in the Renaissance is not meant to imply that there was an absence of playfulness in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, play was a powerful presence at that time, obvious enough to anyone who reads about Francis of Assisi, for example, or looks at the margins of many medieval manuscripts, or at the gargoyles or the misericords in Gothic churches.⁴ There were important continuities in forms of play between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, notably in the case of Carnival, as well as forms that broke with tradition.