Reading of a Sonnet by Della Casa

Delivered at Ferrara’s Academy towards the end of the 1560s, Tasso’s lecture on the sonnet by Giovanni Della Casa is one of the most demanding theoretical works produced by Tasso beyond the area of epic. As well as providing a detailed analysis of the text of Questa vita mortal, it includes a broader discussion concerning the status of lyric poetry within the framework of genres and hierarchy of styles, and the current trends in poetry in relation to the Petrarchan model. The lofty topic of the sonnet (the precarious nature of the human condition, addressing divine authority) on the one hand forced Tasso to reconsider the metrical structures set out by Dante in his De vulgari eloquentia, and on the other hand encouraged him to take a step back from poetry that was too close to philosophy, so conceptually dense as to verge on the obscure (the examples mentioned are by Cavalcanti and from the Commedia). Della Casa offered a Petrarchan-school alternative, austere and lofty in style, and based on ideas and metaphors of high quality, devoid of the excessive use of oxymoron and rigid correspondences (Tasso called them “contraposti”) that were typical of the poetry of the day, which verged on fully-fledged mannerism. He provided a further and more developed discussion on the importance of this lyric model in Cavaletta overo de la poesia Toscana (Cavaletta, or on Tuscan poetry), a dialogue written in 1585 in which Della Casa’s sonnet Questa vita mortal was favourably compared with a text by Coppetta and used as a basis for further reflection on the current rules, especially metrical structures, of lyric poetry.