Eroicomico e parodia letteraria in Pier Jacopo Martello

Known tragedian and brilliant playwright, Pier Jacopo Martello becomes, in his comedy for scholars, theorist of a ridiculous in the wake of classics but moderns too, such as Boileau, Riccoboni, Galluzzi. In his comedies for scholars he holds most of all on an original parodic intuition intended to hit not costumes but wits, in particular Arcadia’s nerveless and uncritical petrarchism, in the name of the high conception of both poetry and poet expressed in his ‘Satire’, ‘Sermoni della poetica’ and ‘Comentario’; so that, for instance, the comedy ‘Che bei pazzi’ differs Ariosto’s regular model – it anyway looks at – into an acute but not harmful satire that, drawing on aristotelian dictates and an Aristofane-based taste, reveals also the catholical training of the bolognese rationalist worried about preserving the “charity” towards the neighbour. From Messer Cecco and Sostrata until the autobiographical Mirtilo, this comedy, under the literary game of linguistic caricature – pointing up arcadian and marinistic manners –, therefore ties itself to the humanistic debate on imitation and implicitely identifies the imitator with an actual inventor, crossing the ridiculous in its most external meaning and proposing itself as a both complex and strongly experimentating parody; a kind of writing attended even in the inedited poem Carlo Magno, where the enlargement of the story-teller function, outlined inside the XVIIth century heroicomical codification, aims to break the impermeability of the traditional diegetic structure.