Lionardo Salviati
Salviati became consul of the Florentine Academy in 1566, and played a key role in the founding of the Accademia della Crusca, with its project of creating a dictionary, which was completed after his death.
He also wrote numerous polemical pamphlets against Torquato Tasso under different pseudonyms, mostly using the nickname he adopted on joining the Accademia della Crusca, 'Infarinato' ('covered in flour').
Particularly noteworthy are his speeches delivered at important events, in particular at the funerals of Benedetto Varchi,[4] Michelangelo Buonarroti,[5] Piero Vettori[6] and the Grand Duke Cosimo de 'Medici.
[8] He first came to public attention with the composition in 1583 of three memorial orations ('confortatorie') for Garzia de' Medici,[7]: 9 deceased son of Grand Duke Cosimo, which earned him the esteem of the grieving family.
Two days later, on 1 May 1564, he published a discourse on poetry dedicated to Francesco de' Medici, the oldest son of Grand Duke Cosimo, who had just assumed the regency for his ailing father.
In addition to performing the routine activities of this post and composing occasional works (such as the translation from Latin of Vettori's oration for the Grand Duchess Joanna of Austria), Salviati also began his project for a new edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron.
His devotion to the Academy and to the Medici earned him, in June 1569, the honour of knight chaplain of the Order of Saint Stephen which he was presumably awarded after spending an obligatory year of service at its headquarters in Pisa.
In the summer of 1576, as part of Salviati’s campaign to secure favour from the d’Estes, Orazio Capponi put him in contact with the court poet in Ferrara, Torquato Tasso, who was struggling to revise his Jerusalem Delivered.
[3] Salviati eventually entered the service of Giacomo Boncompagni - General of the Church, son of the reigning Pope Gregory XIII - whom he had met in September 1577 at the baptism of Filippo de' Medici.
[11] In the archive of the Accademia della Crusca there is a hand-written document by Piero de 'Bardi that provides the minutes (autumn 1582) of the memorable foundation meeting and the speech by Salviati.
Salviati helped to give the Academy a new linguistic direction, promoting the Florentine language according to the model of Pietro Bembo, who idealized the 14th-century Italian authors, especially Boccaccio and Petrarch.
[13] By then his energies were absorbed by a work of another tenor, the Remarks on the Language of the Decameron ; in March 1584 he went to Rome to give a copy of the first volume to its dedicatee Buoncompagni, from whose service he then took leave.
[8] Late 1584 saw the publication of Il Carrafa, or the truth of the epic poem by (it) Camillo Pellegrino, which discussed whether Ludovico Ariosto or Torquato Tasso had achieved primacy in epic poetry; it declared the winner was Tasso's Gerusaleme Liberata, because of its respect of the unity of action, the balance between history and fantasy and the morality of the Christian characters; Orlando Furioso in contrast, was criticised for lacking unity and verisimilitude, as well as for its licentious episodes.
[14][8] In February 1585 there appeared the Defence of the Furioso Orlando, signed collectively by the Academicians of the Crusca, but actually written by Salviati with the collaboration of Bastiano de' Rossi.
Preceded by a dedication to it:Orazio Ricasoli Rucellai and a preamble to the readers (written by de 'Rossi), the Defence was an attack on the language of Tasso's poem, whose Latinisms and 'impure' forms were considered detrimental to Tuscan 'purity'.
After a number of other writers intervened in the controversy, Salviati, using his Accademia Della Crusca name ‘Infarinato’, published a forceful and polemical response to Tasso's Apologia on 10 September 1585, dedicated to the Grand Duke.
At the same time Salviati reiterated criticism of both L’Amadigi and Gerusalemme Liberata, extolling the excellence of the poems of Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ariosto and, for the purity of its language, the Morgante of Luigi Pulci.
Then, through the good offices of Ercole Cortile and after intense negotiation which ended in December of that year, Salviati was invited into the service of Alfonso II d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, to write a new history of the d’Este dynasty.
[3] A second comedy, The Thorn (La Spina), written at an uncertain date, was printed posthumously in Ferrara in 1592, with a dedication to Giovanni Battista Laderchi, secretary of Alfonso II d'Este.
[3] Both plays followed the rules of classical poetics but were written in idiomatic Florentine, thus demonstrating how refined contemporary language could accommodate traditional forms.
[15] At a solemn meeting of the Florentine Academy, Salviati, then aged twenty-four, paid tribute to his own language with the stated aim of bringing about a drastic change of attitude among the academicians.
[3] Salviati began working on a commentary on Aristotle's Poetics in 1566 but it is possible that only the first of the four books was finished, one still kept at the National Central Library in Florence (Ms. II.II .11), for which the imprimatur was requested and granted only ten years later.
Salviati decided for the most part to follow the variations within the Mannelli Codex because of their phonetic authenticity "since it is likely that they are not merely different but arise from the same common form, and we cannot simply prefer one of them".
He was less conservative in other aspects of his editing; inserting punctuation, eliminating latinisms (choosing 'astratto' rather than 'abstracto' for 'abstract'), removing the letter 'h' within words ('allora' rather than 'allhora' for 'now'), preferring 'zi' to 'ti' ('notizia' instead of 'notitia') and standardising forms such as 'bacio' rather than 'bascio' (kiss) and 'camicia', not 'camiscia' (shirt).
The second volume, dedicated to Francesco Panigarola, deals with grammatical questions, in particular of nouns, adjectives, articles and prepositions, in more detail than he had set out in the Rules of Tuscan Speech.
