Patrum erga filiam amor luctuosus. L’espressione funebre dell’amore familiare nella poesia di Giovanni Pontano e Jan Kochanowski. Paralleli e ispirazioni

Abstract

Patrum erga filiam amor luctuosus: Mournful Expression of Family Love in the Poetry of Giovanni Pontano and Jan Kochanowski. Parallels and Inspirations

The early modern tradition of poetry dedicated to family love was started by Giovanni Pontano. He used the tradition of Roman love elegy in order to write the collection De amore coniugali (On Conjugal Love). Some of the poems were addressed to Pontano’s wife, Ariadna, while others were elegies and lullabies (Naeneiae) addressed to his children and suffused with powerful emotions. The subject of family love reverberates also in his mournful poetry, for instance in the collection Tumuli consisting of mournful epigraphic elegies. There is significant evidence indicating that Jan Kochanowski had Pontano’s poetry in mind when he was writing one of the most original early modern funeral cycles, Treny. The cycle was devoted to his thirteen-month- ?old daughter Urszula. In Tren II he distinctly refers to the author of Naeniae and Tumuli, even though he does not mention his name. Moreover, the influence of the astrological poem Urania becomes noticeable in the mode of using mourning topoi and the plot of Treny. Characteristically, the final part of Urania was devoted to Pontano’s daughter Lucia, who had died at the age of thirteen. The elaborate humanistic discourse on the philosophical vision of the world, which is an ideologically significant part of Kochanowski’s oeuvre, had its precedent in Pontano’s poetry. The relationship sheds new light on the range of Kochanowski’s reading and the reception of Pontano’s work in Poland. The ending of both cycles reflects the influence of Petrarch’s Canzoniere on the poets: Pontano and Kochanowski refer to the sonnets from the cycle In morte di Madonna Laura, which involve metapoetical issues.