"A most miraculous miracle" and "different kinds of beasts'": a contribution to critical pilgrimages through Mavro Vetranović's Piligrin

Čale, Morana. (2017). "A most miraculous miracle" and "different kinds of beasts'": a contribution to critical pilgrimages through Mavro Vetranović's Piligrin. Croatica: časopis za hrvatski jezik, književnost i kulturu, 41(61). pp. 75-108. ISSN 1849-1111

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Abstract

Drawing on several studies which Dunja Faliπevac has dedicated to the unfinished allegorical poem Piligrin (‘Pilgrim’), written by the Croatian 16th century poet Mavro Vetranović Čavčić, the paper examines the possibility to view the poem not only within the serious literary tradition of religious and Platonic allegory, but also from the hypothetical perspective of its double-coded disposition, focusing namely on the text’s simultaneous affiliation with the opposite, playful generic and thematic lineage, marked, above all, by the Renaissance renewal of Lucian’s and Apuleius’ legacy. Therefore, I argue that the range of the Italian models to which Croatian literary historians have so far related the Piligrin should be revised in the light of this alternative point of view. I propose to envisage the debt of the Croatian poem to the oeuvre of one of the authors who notably contributed to the flourishing of the Menippean satire and the so-called Lucianism in 15th century Italy, Leon Battista Alberti, an important forerunner of Ariosto’s and Machiavelli’s satirical developments. The hybridity and the mosaic technique which characterize Vetranović’s textual strategies, as well as the poem’s emphasis on the subjects of metamorphosis and travel into transcendent worlds, are here ascribed to the poet’s propensity for the Anti-Cicerionian humanists, to his interest in comic and satire, and partly to his friendship with the playwright Marin Držić. Since Lucianic themes and narrative modes are intertwined with the double Renaissance reception of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass), the Piligrin is compared to Apuleius’ novel and to one of its most original Italian heirs, Machiavelli’s short narrative poem L’Asino (The Ass, 1517). The outcomes of this analysis support the contention about the presence of previously unnoticed resonances of the latter two texts in Vetranović’s poem.

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