Biography

Francesco Davoli is a scholar of Italian Renaissance Literature. He graduated from the University of Perugia (BA) and the University of Padua (MA) before obtaining his PhD at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in 2022 with a dissertation on Trissino’s “Rime” (1529). He has since worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Ca’ Foscari University on a project on the book of rhymes by Niccolò Lelio Cosmico. In 2022, he was a visiting researcher at the Fondation Barbier-Mueller in Geneva. His main research interests concern Trissino’s poetry, Renaissance translations of Virgil and Theocritus, and various aspects of vernacular metrics, including the presence of the terza rima form in 15th- and 16th-century collections of lyrical poems.

Project Summary

In the gatherings taking place in the Orti Oricellari, a revival of Greek models was proposed as a way to constitute modern literary forms and genres in vernacular. The publication of new editions of Greek texts was accompanied by new vernacular literature shaded with classicistic elements; particularly in the fields of lyric poetry with the revival of Greek choral lyric and the Anthologia Graeca, eclogues, and tragedies that followed the models offered by ancient Greek dramas. This project will examine the works of some of the central figures of the “second phase” of the Orti Oricellari meetings - in particular, Luigi Alamanni, Lorenzo Martelli, Alessandro Pazzi, Giovanni Rucellai, Giovan Giorgio Trissino, Benedetto Varchi - in order to cross examine their re-use of Greek texts for each genre they practiced and to better understand how Greek auctoritates were used as tools to create modern literature.