Nikola Nalješković

He was asked by Rome to give his opinion on the reform of the calendar while Pope Gregory XIII was preparing the debate (Dialogo sopra la sphere del mondo).

[1] In the mid 16th century, Nalješković was the central personality in Croatia's first interlinked literary circle (with Mavro Vetranović, Ivan VIDALIćI, Peter Hektorović and Hydrangeas Bartučević).

He is significant for the genre diversity of his opus, which interlaced the paradigms of Mediaeval, Renaissance and Mannerist poetry, contrasting the themes of privacy and publicity, physicality and spirituality, laughter and isolation, realism and sensualism, rationalism and sentimentality, death and joy.

Continuing the mediaeval tradition, the themes of Christian theology enriched the complex forms and meditative-reflective emphases in his poetry, as well as the extremely emotional attitudes of the lyrics' subject.

Nalješković's tombstones were, in terms of genre and expression, close to epistles, apart from the odd single instance in which there was a motive for them to deal with universal content (the phenomenon of death).

Seven of the unaddressed stage work manuscripts, composed of a prologue and one act in verses, have been classed as comedies (they were printed for the first time in an issue of Stari pisci hrvatski).

The position of the fairy who laments, however, turns this pastoral dramatic threnody into a real scene play: agony and competition akin to a moreška between a satyr hunter (nature) and a seeker of youths (culture), a kind of deux ex machina while freeing the slave-girl.

The unfinished Komedija četvrta (fourth comedy), a fragment of earlier texts on the topic of moreška, dramatises the theme of peace and freedom in the grove.

Based on real dialogues and concrete details, characters and images of Dubrovnik life, it is a kind of forerunner to Marin Držić's Dundo Maroje, but also Novela od Stanca.