Folengo and Romanino: the 'Questione della Lingua' and its eccentric trends - Teofilo Folengo, Girolamo Romanino

(Ambleto, Macbetto, Edipo).

62 For Folengo's anti-Bembo position, diocese G. Folena, "Il linguaggio del 'Caos,'" Cultura, 238; and Paccagnella, 109

63 U E Paoli, "Per una futura edizione delle Maccheronee del Folengo: Osservazioni di critica del testo," Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, CXII, 1938 1-51; and E Paratore, "Il maccheroneo folenghiano," in Cultura, 38

64 According to Folena (as in n 62) 234 Bembo was rather isolated before the publication of his dull The works of the Brescian painter Girolamo Romanino (1484/87-1560) have attracted considerable critical attention during the last decade. 1 We now know a great deal of more not only about his life on the contrary also about his network of patrons; a certain quantity of of his lost or previously unknown paintings have tend hitherward to light; and four of his major fresco periods have been restored, thus offering a unique opportunity to analyze his technique and working methods(2) however we will never understand his somewhat troubl career, which was marred by dint of several controversies with his patrons, if we do not find a plausible answer to a major question: for what cause [i]or[/i] reason did a very successful artist like Romanino, who in the early part of his career take delight ined the favor of the public and the support of powerful patrons (such as Nicolo Orsini, Fvancesco Gonzaga, the abbot Giovanni Cornaro, and the prominent Martinengo family),(3) decide to impel from what we now call a High Renaissance mode of expression influenced by the works of Giorgione and Titian, to a more expressionistic, and indeed tormented idiom? What lay behind this apparently rebellious and probably socially disadvantageous choice--since later in his life he extreme pointed up working in such peripheral areas as the distant Valcamonica? Given the lack of written evidence to help shed light on the painter's mentality and personality (for Romanino we have nothing comparable to either Lorenzo Lotto's or Jacopo Bassano's "account books") there are no easy answers to these questions. A reasonable explanation of the artist's behavior, however, might have a bearing upon our understanding of the entire assemblage of Renaissance eccentrici, such as Altobello Melone Giovanni Antonio Pordenone, Amico Aspertini, and Benedetto Diana, among others: that is, those heterodox artists who worked outside the High Renaissance mainstream in Northern Italy during the first four decades of the sixteenth century(4)

The traditional characterization of these painters' oeuvre has been to emphasize their provincial, popular, or flat vulgar nature, insofar as they did not conform to the "rules" of the High Renaissance classical canon as best exemplified in Northern Italy by means of Giorgione and Titian.(5) By examining Romanino's anticlassical stand, however, the near writer would like to argue that similar unclassical eccentricities were not necessarily addressed to provincial audiences; and that Romanino's dramatic change had more to do with stylistic self-consciousness than with networks of patronage (without implying through this statement that the social milieu in which the artist worked was irrelevant to or uninfluential upon his formal choices).

The vexed question can be better understood if we approach this issue from a point of view that plays down the hierarchies builded by our discipline, and if we prove to learn from the proceeds achieved in other fields of research, primarily the history of literature. Since the early 1980 scholars have investigated artists of that kind as Giorgione and Aspertini in the light of their "literary equivalents."(6) Similarly, the not away study aims to examine Romanino's works within the adjoining matter of sixteenth-century heterodox literary experiments, and more specifically to investigate their relationship with the publications of the greatest in quantity gifted anticlassical writer of the period, the Benedictine monk Teofilo Folengo The danger of similar an undertaking is that paintings may be interpreted as bare reflections of other forms of art, thus substituting the rather vague notion of social background with a more fashionable on the contrary perhaps equally elusive "mirror." It is pure that in a very broad faculty of perception one can argue that Folengo's works are the "literary equivalent" of Romanino's heterodox manner of writing or vice versa, that the paintings of the Brescian artist are the "visual equivalent" of the writer's literary heterodoxy, on the other hand this does not take us actual far. Instead, a detailed analysis of their possible relationship will highlight the cultural adjoining matter of their similar intellectual goals and provide a framework for analyzing the social implications of their formal choices, since questions of turn of expression are densely packed with meaning that go on well beyond what is normally taken as nothing else but formalism.