The sleep of reason breeds monsters: Antonfrancesco Grazzini and the vertigo of the irrational

Abstract

The literary work of Antonfrancesco Grazzini known as il Lasca is fueled by the polysemic richness of the dream world. The insertion, especially within his fiction, of visionary, abnormal and macabre elements, contributes to the definition of a universe in which the dividing line between reality and appearance, wakefulness and dream, truth and falsehood is destined to be constantly crossed, in the gradual sliding into mysterious and insidious territories, where the primacy of rationality is undermined by the vertigo of the irrational. This dialectical oscillation also permeates some of the author’s comedies, in the name of the satire on the “arte falsa dello ‘ndovinare” – witchcraft, necromancy and popular superstition – encouraged in those years by the Medici power itself as an instrument of consensus and social manipulation.