Luigi Pulci

Born Aug. 15, 1432, in Florence; died early November 1484, in Padua. Italian poet. Representative of the most democratic current in 15th-century humanism; materialist and skeptic. Declared a heretic by the church.

Pulci’s chief work is the epic poem Morgante. Its first edition, published between 1478 and 1480, contained 23 cantos; the second, with 28 cantos, is known as the Morgante Maggiore (1482). The work is based on a 14th-century folk narrative poem that recounts the adventures of the knight Orlando (Roland) and his squire, the good-natured giant Morgante. Comedy and buffoonery alternate with naive, impassioned folk elements. Morgante influenced the work of F. Rabelais, as well as the heroicomic narrative poems of the Renaissance.