PONA AND ANTI-PONA: "LA LUCERNA" BETWEEN ECLECTICISM, CENSORSHIP AND SELF-CENSORSHIP

Abstract

A man of letters and a doctor torn between the “ozio lecito della scrittura” –to take up the title of Stefania Buccini’s fundamental essay on the work of the Veronese author– and his vocation as a man of science, Francesco Pona is an author still little studied and often forgotten in the current panorama of Italian literature. An eclectic author, very close to the experimentalism of the Accademia degli Incogniti, Pona published in 1625, under the pseudonym of Eureta Misoscolo, La Lucerna, a work that, due to its load of transgression, its themes and contents and its evident typically Baroque avant-garde style, did not go unnoticed in the main literary and intellectual circles of his time, nor did it miss the control of the censorship of the Sacred Congregation of the Index that, from March 1626 to 1948, included the text in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The reasons for this condemnation seem almost discounted, and the author himself is aware –as can be inferred, for example, from the essential paratextual apparatus of La Lucerna– of dealing with themes and doctrines –that of the Pythagorean metempsychosis, in the first place– which move away greatly from the limits established by the censors of the counter-reformation. The outbreak of the plague in 1630 and the inclusion of La Lucerna in the Index marked a hiatus in the literary work of the author who, after abjuring his juvenile production in 1636, turned from the transgression of the earlier works towards a cautious conformism –paradigmatic, from this point of view, the title of a work of 1648, Antilucerna–.

The present study will focus on these elements, mainly stylistic, thematic and doctrinal, which made La Lucerna a widely read and controversial text, and, in addition, on the prohibition of the text both in Italy and in Spain, where it was prohibited from the Index of Zapata of 1632 to Ceballos's of 1790, not so much, as happened in Italy, because of its contents, but because of the publication of the text under a pseudonym.