5 AmbraLorenzo

Lorenzo de' Medici's "Ambra": due poesie diverse?
Author(s): Corinna Salvadori Lonergan

Source: Hermathena, No. 121, Modern Language teaching in Trinity College, Dublin
1776—1976 (Winter 1976), pp. 159-168
Published by: Trinity College Dublin
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23040713
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Lorenzo de' Medici's
Ambra: due poesie diverse?
by C. Salvadori Lonergan
Editions of Lorenzo de' Medici's Ambra usually bear a comment

that calls into question the poem's unity: are the 48 octaves which
for nearly two centuries have borne the title of Ambra a coheren
poem, or are they two fragments, the first 22 octaves being a
description of winter and the remaining the independent story o
Ambra's metamorphosis? Is this work like Lorenzo himself, 'du
persone diverse, quasi con impossibile congiunzione congiunte'?1
There is no manuscript extant with the title the work now bears.
Two of the five available manuscripts are without title, the remain
ing three have Descriptio Hyemis or Deschritione del verno.2 The poem
was not included in the Poesie volgari, published by Aldus in Venice
in 1554, or in the relatively important 1763 Bergamo edition.3 It
first saw the light in a private edition of only 12 copies in 1791.4
The editor was William Roscoe, and in his dedicatory preface in
Italian to his fellow citizen whose name he italianizes to Guglielm
Clarke, he writes that he is completing a life of Lorenzo, to which
he will add the unpublished works by Lorenzo that Clarke, o
Roscoe's request, transcribed from manuscripts in the Mediceo
Laurentian Library. This well-documented biography of Lorenzo,
in which much prominence was given to his literary activity, first
appeared in 1795 and was eminently successful.5 By 1799 there
was a translation into Italian; one into French and one into
German followed promptly. By 1806 there were five editions in
English. To William Roscoe we owe not just Ambra, but also, inter
alia, the important Caccia col falcone and Amore di Venere e Marte.
Early editors accepted Roscoe's title and cast no doubt on
Ambra's homogeneity. For example, the editors of the 1825 Floren
tine edition of Lorenzo's work make no mention of Ambra in the in
troduction, which contains lengthy notes on codices and printed
editions of the texts.6 Not so recent editors who either dismiss a
159
C. Salvador! Lonergan
link between the two parts or, at best, hesitatingly concede a very
tenuous one.7 Uncertainty in this matter is apparent in the fact
that no editor has taken a firm decision not to follow Roscoe and
print the text as two separate poems. Basically all betray a vague
feeling that somehow Roscoe was right and that the poem does
hold together; more than that, they speak of it in laudatory terms.
Critics tend to take the same position. Mario Martelli, who in re
cent years has made the most important contributions to the study
of Lorenzo's literary work, considers Ambra to be 'una delle piu bel
le liriche laurenziane' yet adds that it is an 'autentico mistero' and
refuses to call it a 'poemetto, del quale non ha n£ vuole avere unita
di materia'; he blames Roscoe for imposing a title that ignores
both the first beautiful half of the poem and the title of'description
of winter' given by three manuscripts.8 If we examine Martelli's
comments they become a question of semantics: how can Ambra be
decisively not a poem, and yet one of Lorenzo's most beautiful
lyrics? It is consoling to see Roscoe's decision (or was it really
Clarke's) which the present writer believes to have been intuitive
ly correct, supported by the American scholar Sara Sturm,
although one regrets that it was possibly beyond the scope of her
book to look at this in detail. In a brief paragraph, she attributes
the poem's unity to a 'single effect—the isolation of living things at
the mercy of winter's harshness' and she finds in that'interpenetra
tion of life and landscape that characterises the poem from its
opening verse' the strand that draws together.'the various poetic
fragments of the work'.9 This is undoubtedly a feature of the
poem's unity but not, it will be shown, the fundamental one.
Let us take a brief look at the background to the poem. One of
Lorenzo's favourite country residences was his villa Ambra, the
creation of Giuliano da Sangallo, built on a property surrounded
by the river Ombrone at Poggio a Caiano, midway between
Florence and Pistoia, and acquired by Lorenzo in 1479. The villa
may have taken its name from some nearby rivulet that flowed into
the Ombrone. It was greatly damaged by flood in spite of
Lorenzo's persistent efforts to protect it from this likely event. The
poem—where the presence of Lorenzo himself is felt first in the
'lauro' of stanza 2 and later, more explicitly, in Lauro, the 'pastor
alpino', for whom Ambra nurtures a chaste love—may have been
an effort to immortalise the statesman's haven of peace that nature,
against his efforts, partially destroyed. The background to the
poem is the season of winter, enemy to man and beast and vegeta
160
Lorenzo de' Medici's Ambra: due poesie diverse?
tion, with its destructive floods. One of the flooding rivers is the
Ombrone, that encircles, with its swollen waters, the small island
rock Ambra that was once, or so the poet's fancy imagines, a
beautiful chaste nymph who had come to bathe in its refreshing
waters. She had thus roused the passion of the river-god, who pur
sued her and sought the help of the river Arno, whose tributary he
was, when he feared that he was losing her. Seeing herself caught
between two enemies, Ambra prayed to Diana to preserve her from
them; the answer to her prayer was her gradual transformation
into rock. In his supplementary Illustrations to the life of Lorenzo de'
Medici, William Roscoe gives an engraving of a carving on an
amber fiaschetto that belonged to Lorenzo.10 It depicts the fable of
the nymph and the river god, but we do not know if the carving
suggested the story to Lorenzo or if, rather, he commissioned the
carving to illustrate his own poem. Poliziano also wrote a poem en
titled Ambra, in which he celebrates the Medici villa 'mei Laurentis
amor' (v. 518), but neither refers to Lorenzo's poem, nor gives
Lorenzo's version of the Ambra story. It is the third Sylva, read by
Poliziano at the beginning of the 1485-6 academic year. This,
together with his fourth Sylva, Nutricia, read at the beginning of the
following academic year, in which Poliziano praises the fruits of
Lorenzo's 'felix ingenio' (v. 773) and lists a number of poems but
not Ambra, forms the evidence used by scholars to give 1486 as the
date post quem for Ambra. It belongs, therefore, to Lorenzo's mature
work.
Let us now look directly at the problem of the poem's unity. The
extreme view, that the second part bears no relation to the first, is
impossible to support when winter with its desolation is the season
that forms the background to the poem, this atmosphere is
sustained throughout, and the metamorphosis of Ambra is in the
context of the flooding of the rivers Ombrone and Arno. Allegedly,
lack of coherence of tone is to be found between the first part,
typical of Lorenzo's keen observation of detail in nature, of his
highly realistic writing, and the second,a mythological fable, total
ly unreal. One careful reading of the text will suffice to show that
there is as much mythological personification in the first part as
there is realism in the second. The opening stanza bears the hall
mark of Lorenzo's poetry: minute detail that betrays sharp obser
vation of the outdoor scene—here the crackling of the fallen
dried leaves and branches under the tread of the animals of the
wood. But the second stanza, with its mention of the evergreen
161
C. Salvador! Lonergan
laurel and myrtle, draws us at once to classical mythology, which
becomes explicit in the reference to 'Ciprigna', Venus the goddess
of love, who dwells in the eternal spring of Cyprus. In the ensuing
stanzas we find a constant careful interplay of the two elements.
The third one gives us both that image so typical of the Tuscan
countryside—the olive groves changing from dark green to shim
mering white in the breeze—and a definite personification of the
migrating birds who show their young in voyage a sea full of
'nereidi, tritoni ed altri mostri'. In the fourth stanza, the shorten
ing of winter days is expressed in terms of a struggle between
Phoebus and Orion, and while the two next stanzas relate directly
to our experience of winter nights—with the very expressive line
describing the tedium of insomnia that makes night seem 'un secol
di cent'anni'—we are conscious of the ever recurring personifica
tion of the inanimate in the image of the dawn, Aurora in the arms
of her old husband. Even stanzas 9 and 10, so often taken as exam
ples of Lorenzo's careful depiction of the formation of birds in the
sky, end with a reference to Jupiter and Ganymede. The seasonal
change in winds is portrayed as Zephyr, seeking refuge in Cyprus
and dancing there with the flowers, ousted by Boreas, Aquilo and
Notus (stanza 11). Also personified, as an old white-haired man
with a frozen beard, is Monte Morello, the mountain that protects
Florence from the north-west wind, referred to here as the fierce
Caurus (stanza 13). The unconstrained swelling rivers find a new
freedom and pay homage to their father Ocean (stanza 15); the
fish in their waters rejoice at meeting old friends, and exchange
news of their place of provenance (stanza 16). While this is a rather
infelicitous stanza, it does reflect the extent to which the poet's
world is animate. Lorenzo's winter, the harsh season when the om
nipotent forces of nature are unleashed against powerless man, is a
drama with the elemental forces of the universe as personae. The jets
of hot vapours, a volcanic phenomenon that was a real threat to the
inhabitants of Volterra, are transformed in the poet's mind into the
weeping earth releasing its sadness on the world (stanza 18). On
the other hand, most realistically described by Lorenzo, and suc
cessfully interwoven into this highly mythological scene, are the
fear of countryfolk before the flooding rivers, their concern for their
land and beasts, their seeking refuge with their 'povera ricchezza',
less dear, however, than life itself (stanzas 20 and 21). Rightly
Vernon Lee hailed Lorenzo as a writer of 'outdoor poetry' rather
than of 'pastoral' that had held sway in Europe for too long, and
162
she read her Ambra carefully enough to spot that right through it
were several 'little things which affect us, mixed up as they are with
all manner of stiff classic allusions'.11 While 'stiff' is thoroughly the
wrong epithet, it is perfectly true that in Lorenzo's description of
winter we cannot dissociate his keen perception of the outdoor
world from his equally keen acceptance of the fabulous world of
classical mythology. This is also true in the story of the
metamorphosis.
The transition from the description of winter to the story of
Ambra is smooth: the victorious waters have seized space earlier
denied to them; the river Ombrone, proud lover, now embraces the
'piccola isoletta' Ambra (stanza 23). This, then, is the cue for
Lorenzo's telling of a love story as unreal as the existence of river
gods but realistic in its features and details, for he is a poet who ex
cels in giving concrete expression to the elemental emotions in
man, as deep and as strong as the uncontrolled forces of nature. A
fine equilibrium is maintained between the two: the increasing in
tensity of Ombrone's desire is comparable to the increasing
momentum gained by the flood; he burns with love as the earth
burns in its volcanic eruption. Ambra in her chastity is as cold as is
the ice of winter. Her fear is comparable to that of the
countryfolk; it develops into panic leading ultimately to the an
nihilation of her humanity. Cecilia Ady could not be further from
the truth when she writes that 'the adventures of Ambra and her
lovers are told charmingly enough, but they come as something of
an anti-climax to the realistic picture of the flood'.12 There is no
charm nor anti-climax in this story, culminating as it does in an
almost surrealist picture of a totally frozen lifeless scene.
As realistic as any feature of the earlier part are the three similes
related to Ambra. In stanza 28 she is compared to a fish that loses
some scales, as, with difficulty, it escapes through the fine meshes
of the imprisoning net. In stanza 38 she is like the terrified beast
that, believing it has avoided the jaws of the hounds, finds the net
before it, and releases its terror in a screech. The tense realism of
this stanza excels the Ovidian lines that may have suggested the
image to Lorenzo.13 The simile of the beast at bay returns in stanza
43. Here the animal swiftly and nimbly jumps the wall, leaving the
dog that has just missed its prey looking in total, blank disappoint
ment. The rhythm of the octave most successfully renders the con
trast between the movement to freedom in the nimble jump and
the static, shocked powerlessness. Bearing in mind, therefore, how
163
C. Salvadori Lonergan
the entire poem is set in winter and in the specific context of the
flood, how the intensity of the forces of nature in the early part is
matched by the intensity of the emotions in the second, how
realistically portrayed both of these are, how the animal world of
the first part appears in the similes of the second, how realism and
mythology are constantly counterpoised, it is difficult to argue for
lack of homogeneity in either tone or atmosphere. But we need to
go further.
Reflection on the poem's literary allusions will take us, in all in
stances, to poetry where there is no happy fulfilment of love, but
rather a denial of it. The very nature of the story brings to mind
Ovid's Metamorphoses, and in particular those of Daphne, Aglauros
and Arethusa: to each story there is a tragic ending and a
background of frustrated love. The Virgilian image in stanza 32
when Ambra is described as being so swift that she might skim
over the ears of corn without bending the blades recalls Camilla,
the loveless maiden warrior of the Aeneid.u When Lorenzo, like
Dante, mentions the cry of cranes and their formation in the sky
(stanza 9), we do, indeed, have an echo of great love poetry, but
tragic poetry, as the Dante image is from Inferno V (vv 46-7), the
canto of the ill-fated love of Paolo and Francesca. Ambra has several
images in common with Dante's canzone 'Io son venuto al punto
de la rota'—the hot wind coming from Ethiopia and quenching its
thirst in the Tyrrhenian Sea, the steamy release of gases from the
earth, the references to stone and marble—and what is most rele
vant is that Dante's poem is about the passionate ardour of love,
not in the usual setting of spring, season of joy and fulfilment when
it rains 'amore in terra da tutti li cieli' (v. 68), but in the depths of
winter, when love is frustrated. In each of the five stanzas Dante
describes aspects of winter—astronomical, meteorological,
zoological, botanical, geological—and ends with the reiteration of
the intensity of his passion, which is not satisfied. Again, when we
find in stanza 40 of Ambra an echo of the appeal to the winds from
the song of Aristaeus in Poliziano's Orjeo (v. 80ff), we should bear
in mind that in his song the shepherd is lamenting the heart
lessness of the nymph who rejects his love and that Orjeo is a poem
that ends in the tragic loss of Eurydice to both Aristaeus and
Orpheus.
Equally relevant are the echoes in Ambra of Lorenzo's other
poetic works, as we find that they also are works where there is
never the happiness of love fulfilled. A. Schiavo Lena finds in
164
Stanza 11 of Ambra a link with Lorenzo's sonnet 'Dolci pensier, non
vi partite ancora' in which the poet, amid 'silenzi, ombre, terror,
venti e brinate', laments that his lady no longer loves him.15 The
echo that Emilio Bigi finds, in stanza 45, of the canzone 'Amor,
poich'io lasciai tuo gentil regno' is to a canzone in which the poet,
in a way similar to Ombrone's, mourns the loss of his love, as life
without love for him means death.16 The 'sacro sangue' shed by
Ambra as she flees over the brambles and stones (stanza 46) to me
recalls the sonnet 'Non de' verdi giardini ornati e colti' where the
legendary origin of the red colour of the roses is attributed to the
'divin sangue' shed by Venus running to aid, in vain, the wounded
Adonis. Here again is a story of unrequited love, ending in
tragedy. Finally I should like to draw attention to the rhyme of
stanza 35, which gives us fugge/strugge and which we find used by
Lorenzo in two canzoni: 'Donna, vano b il pensier che mai non
crede' and 'Chi tempo aspetta, assai tempo si strugge', the first of
which is one of the finest in the Italian language. Martelli gives us
enough evidence to accept that these canzoni were written by
Lorenzo for the carnival of 1490.17 They belong, therefore, to the
same period as the composition of Ambra, though we cannot date
precisely any of these works. What is certain, however, is that the
theme that is going through Lorenzo's mind, arid one that he
repeatedly expressed in these late poems in the most lyrical terms,
is
La bella gioventu giamai non torna,
ne '1 tempo perso giamai riede indrieto . . .18
It is the theme of both canzoni and they end with the exhortation
to love, to yield while there is youth and beauty—what Ambra fails
to do. Lorenzo's eclogue Corinto bears the same message. Corinto,
realising that he has wooed the beautiful but heartless Galatea in
vain, takes consolation in the fact that her beauty will not last
forever. He comments that 'vana cosa e il giovenil fiorire' (v. 180),
and love must be enjoyed during our all-too-brief youth, which is
like the flower of spring that turns into the ripe fruit of autumn,
and is then picked. This closing image of Corinto is the opening one
of Ambra:
Fuggita b la stagion, che avea conversi
i fiori in pomi gi& maturi e c61ti. . . (stanza 1)
This posits clearly the inter-relationship of the two poems. In
Corinto there is an appeal to love for it is fertile, and this is most
165
vividly conveyed in the ending verses (vv 184—191); in Ambra the
appeal to love goes unheeded, and sterility ensues. The nymph is
turned neither into a tree, as Daphne was, nor into a fountain, as
Arethusa was, but into rock around which waters freeze. Life in all
its aspects is negated.
The winter season—background to the entire poem against
which the drama is played—is a season without growth, unkind to
animals, birds and men. Its desolation becomes fury that is ap
peased in a chilling finale when the north wind,. 'Borea algente'
(stanza 48), is asked to turn water into ice and to harden the ice
around the rock that was once a living and beautiful nymph, and
to keep the sun—with its warmth, its light, therefore its life—far
away. Whereas the poem begins with some mention of earlier
seasons of flowers and fruit, now banished with love to Cyprus,
island of Venus, it ends with a wintry congealment—the last two
words are 'rigidi cristalli'—that is the objective correlative of the
frigidity of the nymph, of her avowed virginity, of her 'casto amor'
(stanzas 24 and 40), all of them desolate and sterile. By contrast
there is the love of-Ombrone, as furious and frenzied as the swollen
rivers that overflow in all their might, the burning fire of his pas
sion as strong as the volcanic phenomena of the earth itself. There
is a strong sensual, even sexual, element throughout the poem, as
sociated mainly with the rivers and their traditional sign, the horn,
symbol of their fertilizing power. Read, for example, stanza 25
when Ombrone, roused by the 'membra verginali' of the naked
Ambra before pursuing her 'prese il torto corno'. Six times does the
poet mention the nakedness of the nymph and of her lover in the
space of eight stanzas. But the wish of Ombrone—'nudo il nudo e
bel corpo tenere' (stanza 26)—is frustrated and ultimately fer
tilization yields to sterility, fire to ice, life to death.
The sympathy of the poet is not for the chaste Ambra (although
Lauro also loses his nymph, and perhaps here Lorenzo
adumbrated some personal love lost) but for Ombrone. There is
nothing in the final work of Lorenzo that advocates the denial of
love; rather he bids
gentil donna aver merzede

e non di sua bellezza essere altera. . . 19
or again,
Cogli la rosa, o ninfa, or che 6 il bel tempo.20

166
The thoughts of Lorenzo, man and poet, in these last years of his
life—although he was only in his late thirties—show an awareness
of death coming far too soon to snatch him from a life he so deeply
loved. The climax of Ambra is the superb lament of Ombrone, a
figure that has only the merest link with his mythological nature,
and that shows from the very beginning of his drama a wide and
deeply human range of feelings, his god-like attribute—immor
tality—serving only to increase the intensity of his sorrow that can
not hope for death. (A thought, this, that might lead us back to
Dante's lovers, whose plight is told in the context of eternity.)
Ombrone's sorrow springs not from his own personal loss,
Io non arei creduto, in dolor tanto,

che la propria piet&, vinta da quella
della mia ninfa, si fuggissi alquanto
per la maggior pieta d'Ambra mia bella . . . (stanza 45)
but from an awareness that life turned to death, that a living cor
poreal image of beauty has been lost forever. For the true theme of
Ambra is that in the negation of love there is the negation of life.
Notes
1. N. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, Book VIII, chapt. 36.

2. For details of the five MSS see Lorenzo de' Medici, Opere, edited by Attilio Simioni, 2
vols (Bari, 1913, 1914), II, p. 329 ff.
3. Poesie del Magnxfico Lorenzo de' Medici, edited by S. Muletti and P. A. Serassi (Bergamo,
, 1763).
4. Poesie del Magnifico Lorenzo de' Medici, tratte da testi a penna delta Libreria Medic
Laurenziana e finora inedite, edited by W. Roscoe (Liverpool, 1791).
5. W. Roscoe, The life of Lorenzo de' Medici, 2 vols (Liverpool, 1795).
6. Opere di Lorenzo de' Medici detto il Magnifico, edited by the Accademia della Crusc
(Florence, 1825).
7. See Lorenzo de' Medici, Scritti scelti, edited by E. Bigi (Turin, 1955), p. 477 where t
editor writes that between the two parts there is only a 'tenuissimo legame narrativo'. Lu
Cavalli, editor of Lorenzo de' Medici, Opere (Naples, 1970) states that the two parts 'paio
mal collegarsi' (see p. 501). Anthologies sometimes give only the description of winter; s
Quattrocento, edited by G. Ponte (Bologna, 1966), p. 646 ff.
8. M. Martelli, Studi laurenziani (Florence, 1965), pp 177-8. Martelli suggests t
perhaps Lorenzo intended to incorporate these fragments in the Selve. The problem of th
interdependence would, however, still arise.
9. Sara Sturm, Lorenzo de' Medici (New York, 1974), p. 109.
10. London, 1822. The illustration is appended at the end of the text.
167
11. Vernon Lee, 'The outdoor poetry Vin Euphonon (London, 1884), I, p. 163. Her pages
on Lorenzo's poetry merit reading not so much for the light they throw on the poetry but
because the latter inspires some truly poetic nineteenth-century eloquence.
12. C. Ady, Lorenzo de' Medici and Renaissance Italy (London, 1955), p. 141.
1 i. Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 533-38
14. Virgil, Aeneid, VII, 806ff.
15. A. Schiavo Lena, La poesia mitologica nei secoli XIV, XV e XVI (Caltagirone, 1907), p.
15. This critic was the first to draw attention to many of Ambra's literary allusions but
without, however, drawing any specific conclusions from them.
16. Op. cit. in note 7, p. 492.
17. Op. cit. in note 8, chapt. 2, 'Una vacanza letteraria di Lorenzo: il carnevale del
1490'.
18. 'Chi tempo aspetta, assai tempo si strugge'.

19. 'Donne, vano e il pensier che mai non crede.'
20. Corinto, v. 193.
168

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Lorenzo de' Medici's "Ambra": due poesie diverse?

Author(s): Corinna Salvadori Lonergan

Editions of Lorenzo de' Medici's Ambra usually bear a comment

gentil donna aver merzede

Cogli la rosa, o ninfa, or che 6 il bel tempo.20

Io non arei creduto, in dolor tanto,

1. N. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, Book VIII, chapt. 36.

18. 'Chi tempo aspetta, assai tempo si strugge'.

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