ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Luigi Pulci's relationship, first with Angelo Poliziano, a leading representative of the new culture which supplanted Pulci's in Florence in the course of the 1470s. And second with Matteo Maria Boiardo, whose Orlando innamorato provides the earliest evidence of the presence of the Morgante in the narrative poetry of the Vaipadana. Luigi Pulci belonged to an earlier generation than that of'94. Pulci's poem leaves the reader in no doubt that the essential purpose of the whole spectacle was to celebrate Lorenzo's coming of age as the beginning of a new golden age in the Florence. Geography and chronology both rule out any such mutual influence between Pulci and Boiardo. Boiardo shows the same economy of effort in what is probably his most evident borrowing from Pulci, the figure of Brunello as a variation of Pulci's Margutte.
