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Girolamo Preti
Girolamo Preti (1582 — 6 April 1626) was an Italian Baroque poet. He is considered one of the most accomplished of early 17th-century poets.[1] BiographyBorn in Bologna in 1582, he was destined for a legal career, but broke off his studies to devote himself to literature. He became a member of the Bolognese Accademia dei Gelati, founded in 1588 by Melchiorre Zoppio, and became friends with the poet Cesare Rinaldi.[2] In 1609, he was made member of the Accademia degli Umoristi.[2] He became friends with Girolamo Aleandro, Antonio Bruni, Alessandro Tassoni and other members of the Academy.[2] In 1611 Preti was charged by cardinal Federico Borromeo to purchase volumes for the newly founded Biblioteca Ambrosiana.[3] Later he put himself at the service of Cardinal Carlo Emanuele Pio di Savoia and then of Alessandro Ludovisi (the future Pope Gregory XV).[1] Preti was one of the few concettisti to find favour in the Rome of Pope Urban VIII; he served as secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, and was accompanying him on a Spanish embassy when he died suddenly in the spring of 1626.[2] WorksPreti was a very successful poet. His poems, which were first printed in Venice in 1614, were reprinted eight times during the first half of the 17th century (Venice 1624 and 1656; Bologna 1618, 1620, 1631 and 1644; Milan 1619; Rome 1625; Macerata 1646). His idyll La Salmace was translated into French, Spanish, English and Latin.[4] In 1647 a translation into English of Oronta di Cipro was made by Thomas Stanley as Oronta, the Cyprian Virgin.[5] It was published in several editions through 1651. He is best known for his idylls, a genre which he established with the mythological Salmace of 1609, inspired by a story in the fourth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and then extended to more straightforwardly amorous subjects.[4] His lyric Poesie (1614) is characterized by a cautious yet original adaptation of the models offered by Giambattista Marino, whom he knew from the early 1600s, when Marino was a frequent visitor to Bologna.[1] He makes moderate use of complex metaphors and acutezze, inclining to a gently sensuous style, which captures physical detail (his description of the nymph Salmacis bathing is exemplary), while avoiding the more intense and disturbing erotic charge to be found in Marino.[4] His ideas were similarly conservative: in his brief treatise Intorno all’onestà della poesia (1618) he reasserts the Renaissance Neoplatonist view of the moral functions of love poetry.[2] Like many other of Marino’s friends, he was perplexed by L’Adone.[2] Preti and MarinoPreti's sonnet, 'Penna immortal...', proclaims his poetic debt to Marino, and his description of the mechanism of a clock is a famous example of the Marinist liking for difficult and unconventional subjects. But despite some stylistic flamboyance, he deplored the voluptuous tone in Marino and cultivated instead a more sentimental strain. His tenuous spirituality has made him appear to some as a precursor of the Arcadian reaction against Baroque excesses. Notes
Bibliography
External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to Girolamo Preti.
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