Introducing Luigi Pulci
Adam's Notes for February 13, 2025
“Like a hare and more wretched animals, I was born to fall prey to everyone.”
Welcome to the launch of a new series here at Adam’s Notes, where we’ll be moving on from the chansons de geste to look at Luigi Pulci’s epic poem Morgante Maggiore, or the Greater Morgante. It’s a chivalric romance first published in 1483, about the knight Orlando and his buddy Morgante, a giant.
But before we look at the poem, let’s take a look at Pulci’s life.
Born on August 15, 1432 (incidentally, that’s the anniversary of Roland’s death at Roncevalles), Pulci was one of Iacopo Pulci and Brigida de’ Bardi’s nine children. Theirs was a noble family, so ancient that there was a story that their ancestors first came to Tuscany from France with Charlemagne, but they had fallen on hard times, losing their wealth and political influence. Iacopo was at one time appointed podesta, but he was barred from taking office because his name was on the list of those indebted to the city. When he died, the family had to sell off their farmland to cover his debts.
The three Pulci brothers—Luca, Luigi, and Bernardo—shared a love of poetry. Luca and Bernardo wrote love poetry and religious poetry, while Luigi is known for the Morgante, and a poem chronicling a jousting tournament, plus a number of scandalous polemics. Bernardo was possibly the first to translate Virgil’s Eclogues into the vernacular, and his wife, Antonia Pulci, was herself a poet as well as a playwright—she composed several miracle plays about the lives of saints, which would’ve been performed in churches. Luca worked in Rome as a not-very-successful banker, while Luigi was employed by Francesco Castellani, a wealthy Florentine who might have introduced Luigi to the Medici family, and almost certainly gave him what little education he had. The Pulci girls married, but this only worsened the family’s financial situation, as the three Pulci brothers had to go into debt to raise the agreed-upon dowries.
Luigi eventually wound up hanging around the Medici palace, and Lucrezia Tornabuoni (wife of Piero the Gouty) took a liking to him. Luigi states in the Morgante that he started working on the poem at her urging. It’s kind of funny because she was a pious woman and probably figured a story about Charlemagne would bring out the good Christian in Pulci. But that wasn’t Pulci’s style—he once wrote a letter complaining about unfair treatment, joking that he might return to the font to be unbaptized, “for it is certain that I was better fitted for the turban than the cowl.”
Money was always a problem. Luigi started a business as a cloth merchant and handed it over to Bernardo when it took off, but Bernardo ran it into the ground. Worse, Luca’s banking business collapsed and his creditors went after Luigi and Bernardo, even though they had nothing to do with the bank. All three of the brothers had to flee Florence for a time. Luckily, Tornabuoni’s son, Lorenzo de Medici aka Lorenzo the Magnificent, had always liked Luigi’s bizarre nature, and interceded to protect Luigi and Bernardo.
Luigi worked as a messenger/ambassador for Lorenzo to Italy’s other courts. Luca, however, died in 1470 after a year in debtors’ prison, and Luigi and Bernardo inherited the responsibility of looking after Luca's pregnant widow and three children.
Then, in 1474, Luigi entered a literary dispute with the priest Matteo Franco, which got a lot of attention on both sides and “soon degenerated into a heated exchange of obscene as well as defamatory sonnets.” Among other things, Matteo accused Pulci of an interest in black magic—and there was more than a little truth to this accusation. Pulci seems to have attended the magic rituals which were held at the home of the Neroni family, and he had an avid interest in the Kabbalah. As we’ll see, there’s definitely an element of this interest on display in the Morgante. He “abandoned the observance of religious practices to dedicate himself, for a period that lasted about twenty years, to the study of the occult sciences.” He was pretty open about this stuff, too. In some of his letters to Lorenzo he talks about “spirits, speaks of his growing familiarity with Salayé, and announces his imminent trip to Norcia in order to visit the cave of the Sibyl.” At one point he promised to send Lorenzo new verses “when he is in hell, by means of some spirit.”
At one point the Medici women urged him to go to mass and take communion—evidently an attempt to beat the accusations.
He entered into another dispute with the philosopher Marsilio Ficino of the Platonic Academy. The origins of the dispute remain unclear, but they’re also sort of irrelevant, because for Luigi Pulci it was always personal. He had no interest in any sort of intellectual debates, he just liked to attack people. But Pulci took this one too far: he wrote a sonnet mocking pilgrims going to Rome for the jubilee year, and another denying all the miracles in the Bible. At this point the humanist community and Florence’s priests called for his censure, and Ficino asked Lorenzo to stop Pulci’s “continuous barking.” Lorenzo stepped in and had a word. Pulci stopped attacking Ficino, and wrote a poem in which he repents to the Virgin Mary, and explains that he just happens to be endowed with a scurrilous, combative nature. Whether the poem is sincere or not is open to speculation, as his religious beliefs were all over the place.
Lorenzo and Pulci’s friendship cooled off, and Pulci started spending more time at the farm he’d acquired in Mugello, and at this point Roberto da Sanseverino became his employee and patron. Pulci died while in Padua for Sanseverino in the autumn of 1484. The priests there refused to give him a funeral, and he was buried in unconsecrated ground outside of a churchyard, near a well.
The first edition of the Morgante appeared in print in 1478. A second, expanded edition appeared in 1482, and the final version in 1483. It’s a strange poem, the product of an idiosyncratic mind. Byron called Pulci “the master of the half-serious rhyme.” It’s also a rifacimento—a rewriting—of an earlier poem, but while Francesco Berni would rewrite Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato to bring it into more elegant Tuscan, Pulci’s focus seems to be on bringing out his material’s weirdness and humour. The giant Morgante dominates the work, pushing Orlando out of his own poem, while the giant Margutte provides a sort of comic relief, and there are long, ironic dialogues conducted by the demon Astarotte (who predicts there must be some undiscovered land far beyond the Pillars of Hercules), and just when you think the poet refuses to take anything seriously, the poem ends with a retelling of Roland/Orlando’s last stand that switches to an epic and almost tragic register.
My plan is to read the poem one canto at a time, sort of like with my Pepys Show posts, but I also hope to include more context on Pulci’s life. In the next instalment, we’ll look at the first canto, in which Orlando goes errant and makes a friend.
Sources and further reading:
Morgante: The Epic Adventures of Orlando and His Giant Friend Morgante by Luigi Pulci, translated by Joseph Tusiani, with introduction by Edoardo A. Lebano
Luigi Pulci and the Morgante Maggiore by Lewis Einstein
Half-Serious Rhymes: The Narrative Poetry of Luigi Pulci by Mark Davie
Luigi Pulci in Renaissance Florence and Beyond: New Perspectives on his Poetry and Influence edited by James K. Coleman
Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 by Leigh Hunt (free at Project Gutenberg)
Luigi Pulci and Laurentian Florence: “Contra hypocritas tantum, pater, dissi” by Michael J. Maher
And here is the Adam’s Notes series on the chansons de geste, to be continued at some future point:
Introducing the chansons de geste (Yde et Olive, and Hugues Capet)
Getting drunk and stupid with the paladins of France: Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne
The Song of Blancheflor: was Charlemagne cuckolded by a dwarf?
Thanks for reading!
incredible coincidence — i just started reading this two days ago!
Yes, but also, more Pepys!