The Erbolato

Is a sort of monologue in prose, posthumously published in Venice, in 1545, by the Modenese Iacopo Coppa, at Nicolini da Sabio’s. It was probably written after 1524 or maybe even after 1530. in any case it is a work the poet wrote towards the end of his career. Perhaps it was conceived as an interlude to be recited during the intervals at the staging of plays. The text, again in prose after the ‘conversion’ to verse for the Negromante and Lena, is full of satirical allusions and parody but also contains more ‘serious’ considerations on the cruelty of Nature. After a lengthy initial discourse, full of praise for the virtues of medicine that apparently succour the  weak and defenceless, the ‘charlatan’ Antonio da Faenza goes on to deviously and fraudulently exalt a miraculous ‘electuary’. The figure of the ‘charlatan’ coincides with the truly existed doctor and philosopher from Faenza Antonio Cittadini, who practiced and taught in Ferrara and Pisa, and who died in Faenza in 1518. The character Antonio da Faenza also sings the praise of the doctor Niccolò da Lunigo, in Ferrara in that period, and the inventor of an ‘electuary’ capable of curing the body’s every ill and thus lengthening life beyond its physiological limits. The properties of this new ‘essence’ are vaunted by the ‘charlatan’ as being wonder-working and so marvellous as to have been tried by the brothers of Duke Ercole I d’Este, who thus managed to live beyond the age of eighty. Naturally this is a deceitful allocution directed at the public, a sort of grand publicity spot filled with  blatant lies, from which once more emerges the theme of how man is easily deceived, almost wanting to be beguiled through artifice. After a long period in which publishers, critics and readers lost interest in this work, the Erbolato started to attract interest again in the XVIII century.