It was Pulci's object to parody his predecessors,
particularly the worst among them, and this he does by the invocations
of God, Christ, and the Madonna, with which each canto begins; and
still more clearly by the sudden conversions and baptisms, the utter
senselessness of which must have struck every reader or hearer. This
ridicule leads him further to the confession of his faith in the
relative goodness of all religions, which faith, notwithstanding his
profession of orthodoxy, rests on an essentially theistic basis. In
another point, too, he departs widely from mediaeval conceptions. The
alternatives in past centuries were: Christian, or else Pagan and
Mohammedan; orthodox believer or heretic. Pulci draws a picture of the
Giant Margutte who, disregarding each and every religion, jovially
confesses to every form of vice and sensuality, and only reserves to
himself the merit of having never broken faith. Perhaps the poet
intended to make something of this--in his way--honest monster,
possibly to have led him into virtuous paths by Morgante, but he soon
got tired of his own creation, and in the next canto brought him to a
comic end. Margutte has been brought forward as a proof of Pulci's
frivolity; but he is needed to complete the picture of the poetry of
the fifteenth century. It was natural that it should somewhere present
in grotesque proportions the figure of an untamed egotism, insensible
to all established rule, and yet with a remnant of honorable feeling
left.
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