Dialogo di Don Nicolo de gli Oddi padovano in difesa di Camillo Pellegrini, contra gli Academici della Crusca

8vo (148x100 mm). 111, [1 blank] pp. Collation: A-G⁸. Woodcut coat-of-arms of the dedicatee Giovanni Terzo from Ventimiglia on the title page. Contemporary limp vellum, inked title on spine and lower edge. Worm tracks, roughly restored, to quire A and E-F significantly affecting the text, otherwise a clean copy.

First edition of this dialogue that is part of the controversy between Tasso's supporters and the members of the Accademia della Crusca. The interlocutors in the dialogue, Filippo Paruta, Bartolo Sirilio and Giovanni Ventimiglia, take their cue from yet another work by the Accademia della Crusca in defense of the linguistic and stylistic purity of Ariosto's Furioso, and support the opposite theses that Camillo Pellegrini (1527-1603) had expressed first in his Carrafa ovvero della epica poesia (Florence, Sermartelli, 1584) - which had been followed in the same year by the Difesa dell'Orlando Furioso contra ‘l dialogo dell'epica poesia - and then in the Replica alla risposta (Vico Equense, Cacchi, 1585). Oddi, who also agrees with Pellegrini in downplaying the linguistic and literary contribution of Dante's Commedia, affirms in this dialogue the superiority of the epic genre (Tasso) over the chivalric one (Ariosto) because of its major adherence to the Aristotelian canons and to the spirit of the Counter-Reformation.

“He [Oddi] organizes his defense of Pellegrino (hence of Tasso) roughly along the lines of the Poetics when it treats the qualitative parts: plot, character, thought, diction […] Moreover, three general criteria are proposed for the excellence of the action. It must be verisimilar, marvelous, and necessary” (B. Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, Toronto-Chicago, 1961, II, p. 653).

Edit 16, CNCE37549; Weinberg, II, p. 1137.

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