Maurice Scève
Scève, Maurice (c.1500-1560). Lyonnais poet and humanist, best known for his Délie, objet de plus haute vertu (1544), the first French canzoniere of love poems. It consists of 449 decasyllabic dizains and a prefatory huitain and is illustrated by 50 emblematic woodcuts, appearing regularly throughout the text; they bear some relation to the neighbouring poems and increase the aphoristic flavour of the writing. Scève published his poem a few years before the first work of the Pléiade (who praised him, but rather reluctantly); he was more firmly rooted in the native French tradition, and closer to Clément Marot and the Rhétoriqueurs than they were, but he shares or anticipates many of their aims and preoccupations, such as the creative reading of classical and Italian authors and the use of the vernacular in the renewal of poetry. He stands outside his own time and theirs, however, in the originality of his linguistic and syntactic innovation, the concentration of his thought and its expression, and his ability to unite abstract ideas and sensuous imagery.
Although Scève's poem starts with an innamoramento and proceeds through several absences and partings to a final separation, and in spite of certain anecdotal elements (such as boating in spring when the shad are coming up the river) and some clear historical pointers, this is not the narrative of a love-affair. Nor is the sequence significantly Petrarchan. Scève's first dizain does indeed contain a clear allusion to the first of Petrarch's sonnets, and his last poem refers to the Trionfi, thus placing Délie firmly in a Petrarchan frame, yet the final dizain emphasizes how far away from Petrarch he is since there is no question of repudiating his love for Délie on religious or spiritual grounds. Délie may well be a pseudonym for Pernette du Guillet with whom Scève has long been associated, but the name has many other resonances: it is just possible that its anagram ‘L'idée’ has links with the Platonic doctrine superficially present elsewhere in the poem; more certainly the name is the focus of numerous allusions to classical literature (e.g. Tibullus' Delia) and to classical mythology, especially in the person of Diana. The geographical setting of Lyon provides a recurrent symbol of the poet's love for Délie: the vigorous Rhône and the slow-moving Saône, images of the poet and his mistress, will sooner part, and the two hills of Fourvière and Croix-Rousse come together, than their love fail. The poet's physical jealousy is powerfully and dramatically conveyed.
Scève was also the author of a translation of La Déplorable Fin de Flammette (1535) by Juan de Flores (who based himself on Boccaccio), and he composed five blasons (Sourcil, Larme, Front, Gorge, Soupir). A more important work is his pastoral poem La Saulsaye, églogue de la vie solitaire (1547); this is a debate between two shepherds, Antire and Philerme, on the subject of town and country and also the court; Scève here shows the influence of Sannazaro and Marguerite de Navarre, but also much originality. Scève's versatility is evident in the work he did for the Royal Entry of Henri II and Catherine de Médicis into Lyon in September 1548; he was the overall artistic director of this enterprise, was responsible for the iconography and the written inscriptions, and was also the author of the printed account, La Magnificence de la superbe et triomphante entrée de la noble et antique cité de Lyon (1549). Finally, he published in 1562 another major work, Microcosme. This is a long cosmic, scientific poem about the creation of man, his fall, and his subsequent achievements, in which Adam (man) is the little world reflecting the whole universe. The book covers the period from the creation to the death of Abel, but man's progress up to the coming of Christ is foretold by means of a dream of Adam's. Scève is writing at the end of a long tradition of patristic and medieval thought, and his work constitutes an encyclopedia in the manner of Gregor Reisch's Margarita philosophica, stressing the discovery and development of the arts and sciences, and man's dignity and freedom, yet stopping short of the new Renaissance learning.
[Peter Sharratt]
Bibliography
- I. D. McFarlane (ed.), The ‘Délie’ of Maurice Scève (1966)
- D. G. Coleman, Maurice Scève, Poet of Love (1975)
- D. Fenoaltea, ‘Si haulte architecture’: The Design of Scève's ‘Délie’ (1982)
