1-08-1520

Otiose Joking

The letter responds to a previous one that Nerli had received from Lucca where M. was carrying out commercial negotiations for various Florentine companies (on the context and potential purposes of these missions see Black, Machiavelli, 223–225). Its sarcastic and amusing style of communication is typical of the letters exchanged between M. and his “compagnia” or “brigata” of friends with connections to the “garden academy” in the Orti Oricellari, a place of leisure and otium doctum that both correspondents visited regularly in this period. Ridolfi (Vita, 565-66) describes the language used by Nerli as “mordacità fiorentinesca” (‘Florentine caustic sarcasm’). It amounts to a sort of comic slang that, in some cases, today’s readers of the correspondence may find hard to understand (cf. also Niccolai, Nerli, 19). While traditional scholarship often stresses the fact that the Orti Oricellari were a place for erudite political, philosophical and literary discussions, in this letter a more burlesque character of the “garden academy” comes to the fore.

Nerli informs M. that Zanobi Buondelmonti’s son was born and embraces this opportunity to satirize M.’s military thinking: All newborn males should be rejoiced in, for they will help fight against the Turk (“tanti più provigionati arèno contro al Turco”). He proves to be very serious in this matter and exhorts M. to warn those “signori Lucchesi” to use diligence in sexual intercourse for the infantry and that it is not the trenches and fortresses that are the sinew (i.e. the core) of an army (as M. had emphasized in Principe XX and Discorsi II.24). Otiose joking is brought into a grotesque relationship with military thinking. It is not only the subject and potential effect of the letter, but it is also enacted by the very act of epistolary writing.

 

Reflections on Language

Furthermore, Nerli writes about the latest gatherings in the Orti Oricellari and the ongoing discussions on the questione della lingua (cf. Cummings, The Maecenas, 35f.). This lively exchange on the norms for vernacular writing is also at the center of the Dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua which is attributed to M., although the question of its authorship remains unresolved. The fact that this literary dialogue might have evolved in or from the conversations that took place in the Orti could provide further evidence for the hypothesis of M.’s authorship. Moreover, the constant reflections on language and the questione della lingua might point out that the letters in M.’s correspondence do not conceive language as a merely functional tool, but as an artistic and social practice: as a form of conscious literary networking which connects public and more private spaces, otium and negotium as well as different social groups and classes.

M.’s rivals in this circle had taken advantage of his absence and had proposed – as Nerli claims – to give the ex-secretary and future author of the Istorie fiorentine tuition in language and style after his return and, sarcastically, force him to read Gualtieri Panciatichi’s Epistola nella entrata di Papa Leone twice a day – which was obviously considered an example of a somewhat pompous and pretentious writing.

On Panciatichi’s Epistola, as one of the extant sources about the solemn entry of Leo X in his hometown performed on 30^th November 1515 and lasting seven hours cf. Shearman, “The Florentine Entrata of Leo X, 1515”; it was actually a text considered to be “tiresomely affected in literary style” (ibid., 136).