“Risibilia” bandelliani: le novelle di motto

In the wide bibliography on Bandello’s Novelle (the first Three Parts published in 1554, the Fourth, posthumous, in 1573), studies on comico are just a minority and exclusively concern the beffa in literary relationship with the novella tradition from Boccaccio to the Cinquecento. His novellas di motto – not many, not amongst his best, and most of all not modelled on the Decameron – represent, instead, a narrative type disappeared since about a century from the collections of novellas and by now integrated into the specific collections of facetiae. Most of these are rewritings of literary witticisms, often told within the frame of a conversazione cortigiana, similar to the one in the dedicatory epistle. The epistle allows Bandello to provide a theoretical justification for telling a piacevole motto or a series of piacevoli motti, in accordance with the great modern models de ridiculis (Pontano and Castiglione); however, both the epistles and the tales reveal how deeply the rhetoric and ethics of facetudo have changed.