Rustico

Rustico Filippi, 'The Art of Insult'

Although he was a skilful author of courtly love lyrics, Rustico’s fame rests on another type of poetics altogether. At the time, he was credited with fathering a new branch of comic literature—insult. Of his 59 sonnets, 30 are insulting caricatures of fellow citizens, political figures, and Florentine women. Literary theorists had justified insult as a means to enforce public morality, but in the Italian tradition, no one had explored the artistic range of insulting literature before Rustico. After Rustico, insult was a central element of comic literature.

Il fils'ossia la veglia villereccia, scritta in dialetto rustico Bellunese. - Belluno, Deliberali 1837

Rustico Di Filippo and the Florentine Lyric Tradition

Rustico di Filippo, a Florentine poet of the generation before Dante, is known by and large as a poet of the jocose, or humorous, tradition. We tend not to know that Rustico was a major exponent of traditional love poetry. Unlike traditional literary history, this study relates Rustico to his contemporaries: Guittone d'Arezzo, Chiaro Davanzati, Monte Andrea and others. It also examines his influence on poets of the next generation: Dante Alighieri, Guido Cavalcanti and Cecco Angiolieri. By reading Rustico within the mainstream of the Italian lyric tradition, we begin to see him as a major poet.