On the feast of St. Cosmas and St. Damian,
the patrons of the House of Medici, he was first compelled, adorned
with laurel and purple, to amuse the papal guests with his recitations,
and at last, when all were ready to split with laughter, to mount a
gold- harnessed elephant in the court of the Vatican, sent as a present
to Rome by Emmanuel the Great of Portugal, while the Pope looked down
from above through his eye-glass. The brute, however, was so terrified
by the noise of the trumpets and kettledrums, and the cheers of the
crowd, that there was no getting him over the bridge of Sant' Angelo.
The parody of what is solemn or sublime, which here meets us in the
case of a procession, had already taken an important place in poetry.
It was naturally compelled to choose victims of another kind than those
of Aristophanes, who introduced the great tragedians into his plays.
But the same maturity of culture which at a certain period produced
parody among the Greeks, did the same in Italy. By the close of the
fourteenth century, the love-lorn wailings of Petrarch's sonnets and
others of the same kind were taken off by caricaturists; and the solemn
air of this form of verse was parodied in lines of mystic twaddle. A
constant invitation to parody was offered by the 'Divine Comedy,' and
Lorenzo il Magnifico wrote the most admirable travesty in the style of
the 'Inferno' (Simposio or I Beoni).
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