La tragedia del Cinquecento come “specchio de’ Principi”: la virtù, il principe e il tiranno nella 'Canace' di Giovanni Falugi

This essay deals with a tragedy written in the first half of the sixteenth century, the little-known Canace by Giovanni Falugi (1529 ca.), dedicated to Ippolito de’ Medici on the occasion of his election as cardinal; this tragedy, bound to be totally eclipsed in less than fifteen years by the far more renowned Canace by Sperone Speroni (1542), took up the ancient myth of the incestuous sons of Aeolus, Canace and Macareus, which had already become the subject of the lost Aeolus by Euripides and of the eleventh epistle of Ovid’s Heroides. In his own re-writing of the story, Falugi took into account the Ovidian source and was also fascinated by the Senecan tragedy, whose themes and motifs he abundantly resumed. The author’s classicism is also evident in the recovery of other ancient writers (such as Horace and Virgil), which have been highlighted when relevant to the present discussion. Starting from the definition of Renaissance tragedy as a ‘political’ literary genre and a brief historical contextualization of Giovanni Falugi and his work, this paper will focus on three aspects of Canace which can be related to the sixteenth-century theoretical koinè as regards political matters: 1) the idealised depiction of prince Macareus; 2) the tyrannical portrait of Aeolus; 3) the moral of the tragedy, which reveals the courtly gift made by the author to the dedicatee as the proposal of a model of virtue.