Minturno, Antonio

Abstract

Poet, critic, and theorist, Minturno had a prominent role in his own times (and one that was certainly greater than that attributed to him in the last few centuries) in the birth and consolidation of poetic thought in the second half of the sixteenth century. His work is characterized by a particular interest in the vernacular tradition, posited in the direct line of descent from the Latin tradition; a highlight of the doctrinal dimension of poetic writing, constantly brought back to the philosophical and speculative field; a distancing from the chivalric genre (the romance), aimed at basing the structure of epic poetry on Aristotelian principles; and a constant recourse to historical perspective in literary inquiry, in particular to the entire trajectory of vernacular poetry from its origins, from the Provencal writers and the Sicilian school up to Dante. Such passages in M.’s reflections constitute a prefiguring of the poetic thought of Torquato Tasso, who most likely read and reflected on his most important treatise, the Arte poetica (Venice, 1564), during his formative period in Padua.