La istoria della casta Susanna by Lucrezia Tornabuoni – a possible sourse of Zuzanna by Jan Kochanowski?

Abstract

Already in 1957, Jerzy Ziomek postulated the need for profound, multilingual comparative analysis of Zuzanna, a biblical epyllion by Jan Kochanowski. Nevertheless, in the last 60 years scholars have paid very little attention to early modern sources and contexts of the Polish biblical paraphrase, though as early as in the 1930s Julian Krzyżanowski noticed some analogies between Kochanowski’s Zuzanna and anonymous La Historia di Susanna moglie di Giouacchi identified by Ziomek as a printed variant of the 15th century poem La istoria di Susanne e Daniello. However, much more parallels to the Polish poem can be found in La istoria della casta Susanna by famous writer Lucrezia Tornabuoni (1427-1482), mother of Lorenzo de’ Medici (il Magnifico), which has been completely absent in studies focusing on Polish Renaissance poet. The aim of the paper is to compare composition and elocution of the texts by Tornabuoni and Kochanowski and to present La istoria della casta Susanna as an important context possibly one of sources of the Polish Zuzanna written c. 1562, especially since we treat the text by Kochanowski as a kind of aemulatio of the Italian poem.