Giulio Cesare Cortese (1570 in

Naples Naples (; it, Napoli ; nap, Napule ), from grc, Νεάπολις, Neápolis, lit=new city. is the regional capital of Campania and the third-largest city of Italy, after Rome and Milan, with a population of 909,048 within the city's adminis ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...

– 22 December 1622 in Naples) was an Italian

author An author is the writer of a book, article, play, mostly written work. A broader definition of the word "author" states: "''An author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility f ...

and

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or writte ...

Life

Born to a well-to-do family, nothing is known of Cortese's early life, though it is thought that he was a schoolmate of

Giambattista Basile Giambattista Basile (February 1566 – February 1632) was an Italian poet, courtier, and fairy tale collector. His collections include the oldest recorded forms of many well-known (and more obscure) European fairy tales. He is chiefly remembere ...

. Receiving a degree in law, he tried life as a

courtier A courtier () is a person who attends the royal court of a monarch or other royalty. The earliest historical examples of courtiers were part of the retinues of rulers. Historically the court was the centre of government as well as the official r ...

Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , i ...

and

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...

, without any great success. Cortese apparently had some success in the

Medici The House of Medici ( , ) was an Italian banking family and political dynasty that first began to gather prominence under Cosimo de' Medici, in the Republic of Florence during the first half of the 15th century. The family originated in the Muge ...

court as he was sent in 1599 to Spain as a member of a Medici delegation for the marriage of

Philip III of Spain Philip III ( es, Felipe III; 14 April 1578 – 31 March 1621) was King of Spain. As Philip II, he was also King of Portugal, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia and Duke of Milan from 1598 until his death in 1621. A member of the House of Habsburg, Phi ...

with

Margherita of Austria Margaret of Parma (; 5 July 1522 – 18 January 1586) was Governor of the Netherlands from 1559 to 1567 and from 1578 to 1582. She was the illegitimate daughter of the then 22-year-old Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Johanna Maria van der G ...

. In his "Tuscan" rhymes there is a fruitless attempt to catch the attention of the Counts of Lemos, the foremost representatives of the Spanish crown in Naples. He was a close friend of

Luigi Caponaro Luigi Caponaro (Salerno, 14 August 1567 – Gaeta, 1622) was a healer in Naples and Gaeta, Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Caponaro received a medical degree in Naples but never practiced medicine per se due to a reported av ...

, who he frequently cites in his work. Regardless of his commemoration by Basile in 1627, it is generally believed, due to several handwritten manuscripts, that Cortese lived at least until 1640 and it is consequently believed that he attended and perhaps participated in his own funeral. Cortese is very important for Baroque and dialectical literature, in that, with Basile, he laid the foundations for the artistic and literary dignity of the

Neapolitan language , altname = , states = Italy , region = Abruzzo, Apulia, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Lazio, Marche, Molise , ethnicity = ''Mezzogiorno'' Ethnic Italians , speakers = 5.7 million , date ...

as opposed to the

Tuscan dialect Tuscan ( it, dialetto toscano ; it, vernacolo, label=locally) is a set of Italo-Dalmatian varieties of Romance mainly spoken in Tuscany, Italy. Standard Italian is based on Tuscan, specifically on its Florentine dialect, and it became the lan ...

in which Cortese had also produced a number of largely laudatory works.

Works

The Vaiasseide

mock-heroic Mock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically satires or parodies that mock common Classical stereotypes of heroes and heroic literature. Typically, mock-heroic works either put a fool in the role of the hero or exaggerate the heroic ...

poem in five cantos, where the lyric meter and the heroic themes are lowered to the level of the protagonists: a group of ''vaiasse'', common Neapolitan women who express themselves in dialect. Its writing is comic and transgressive, where much importance is given to the participation of the plebeian choir in the mechanics of the action.
The reader is literally catapulted into the day-to-day life of the ''vaiasse'' where the main element is the investigation of the world through which Cortese makes into a world which is not his own and which he describes with irony and tragedy.

The Voyage in Parnassus

This work, in dialect, is a diagnosis of the condition of literature and of people of letters, with a variety of autobiographical allusions, filled with bitterness and pessimism.
The whole thing is situated in

Parnassus Mount Parnassus (; el, Παρνασσός, ''Parnassós'') is a mountain range of central Greece that is and historically has been especially valuable to the Greek nation and the earlier Greek city-states for many reasons. In peace, it offers ...

where

Apollo Apollo, grc, Ἀπόλλωνος, Apóllōnos, label=genitive , ; , grc-dor, Ἀπέλλων, Apéllōn, ; grc, Ἀπείλων, Apeílōn, label=Arcadocypriot Greek, ; grc-aeo, Ἄπλουν, Áploun, la, Apollō, la, Apollinis, label= ...

and his

Muses In ancient Greek religion and mythology, the Muses ( grc, Μοῦσαι, Moûsai, el, Μούσες, Múses) are the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge embodied in the p ...

reside and where the poet can set forth the sins of poetry, carried out in a degraded society, where the order of the day is the crime of plagiarism. The whole resolves itself with a fairytale ending and the bitter disillusionment of the poet who see all of his ambitions coming to naught.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Cortese, Giulio Cesare Neapolitan language Italian poets Italian male poets 1570 births 1640 deaths