Name Girolamo Graziani Role Poet | Books Il Cromuele | |
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Died September 12, 1675, Pergola, Italy | ||
Girolamo Graziani (1604 – 12 September 1675), was an Italian poet.
Girolamo Graziani () has been one of the most famous poet of 17th century. But his fame didn't survive him. During his life he was appreciated mainly for his epic poems La Cleopatra (1632) and il Conquisto di Granata (1650).
The latter has been the source for Giacomo Leopardi's Consalvo (1833). Actually the plot (Love in the imminence of death) and the names of the main characters (Consalvo and Elvira) of Leopardi's Consalvo seem to come from Graziani's poem.
Biography
Girolamo Graziani (1604–1675) was born in Pergola, near Urbino, but he spent most of his life in Modena.
His father was a law attendant in the Sacra Rota Romana. He took degree in Arts and Laws in Bologna's University.
Graziani spent most of his life at the Este court, as State Secretary. In 1673, during the governance of Laura Martinozzi, who was the nephew of Cardinal Mazarin, he managed, as Este's ambassador, the diplomatic aspect of the marriage between Laura Martinozzi's daughter, Maria Beatrice d'Este (1658–1718), and James Stuart (who will become King James II of England). The marriage had been sponsored by Louis XIV of France. In the same year, Graziani published his tragedy Il Cromuele, expressly unrespectful of Aristotle's rules. It deals with the theme of the dark cruel tyrant, (Oliver Cromwell) and the royalty prophanation (Charles I of England's martyrdom).
Graziani wrote epic poems, politic writings, panegyrics, epithalamus, laudatory and love sonnets, feasts and tourney relations.
According to some of his coeval biographers, he also made any effort in order to publish an “Historia” about the period between the end of Castro's War and the Treaty of the Pyrenees. But the "Historia" was not published, and there is no more trace about it.