Adonis

Adonis

Adonis The Myth of the Dying God in the Italian Renaissance Carlo Caruso

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Contents List of illustrations vii Acknowledgements viii Abbreviations x Preface xi Introduction 1 1

An ancient myth revisited: Adonis as citrus tree 6 Pontano and the myth of Adonis 6 The solar myth in Pontano’s Urania 8 The Garden of the Hesperides 11 Competition with the ancients 12 The search for the Hesperides 14 Adonis as citrus tree 16 New myths out of ancient verse 18

2

Adonis and the Renaissance idyll 21 The legacy of Pontano 21 The pitfalls of inventiveness 24 Adonis and the vernacular idyll: the eclogue 28 Adonis and the vernacular idyll: the stanzaic poem 32 Ovid’s Adonis in translation 36

3

Adonis in sixteenth-century mythography 39 Early attempts at a new mythography 40 Lelio Gregorio Giraldi’s pagan gods 43 Natale Conti’s explanation of myths 45 The solar myth of Adonis in decorative cycles 47

4

Giovan Battista Marino’s Adone (i): From pastoral to epic poem 49 Marino’s life and works 51 An outline of the Adone 55 Origin and growth of the ‘grand poem’ 58 Transgressive pastorals 60 Jean Chapelain’s defence of the Adone 62

vi Contents The poem and the myth 65 From myth to contemporary chronicle 70 5

Giovan Battista Marino’s Adone (ii): The king’s poem 73 The poem and the court 74 Binet’s Adonis and Le Breton’s Adonis 77 ‘Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child’ 84 ‘The king never dies’ 86 Adonis as the born-again king 88 The king’s heart 91

6

The seventeenth-century aftermath 95 The legacy of Marino’s Adone 95 Marino’s Adone and the Index of Forbidden Books 97 Adonis and the theological debate 100 Return to the Hesperides – Epilogue 102

Notes 111 Bibliography 169 Index of manuscripts 195 Index of principal passages cited 197 Index of names 205

List of illustrations 1 G. B. Marino, L’Adone (Paris: Olivier de Varennes, 1623). Title page (Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal) 50

2 C. Binet, Merveilleuse rencontre… Adonis… Les Daufins (Paris: Fédéric Morel, 1575). Title page (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale) 78

3 G. Le Breton, Adonis. Tragedie françoyse (Rouen: Raphaël du Petit Val, 1611).

Title page (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale) 80

4 P. P. Rubens, ‘The Triumph of Time and Truth with Louis XIII and Maria de’ Medici’ (Paris, Louvre) 93

5 C. Bloemaert after Domenichino, ‘The Tale of Leonilla’, engraving, from G. B. Ferrari, Hesperides (1646) 105

6 ‘Fingered or multifarious citron’ (Malum citreum digitatum seu multiforme), etching and engraving, from G. B. Ferrari, Hesperides (1646) 106

7 ‘Childing citron-lemon’ (Limon citratus alterum includens), etching and engraving, from G. B. Ferrari, Hesperides (1646) 106

8 ‘Differently-shaped, multi-childing citron-lemon’ (Aliae formae citrati limonis alios includentis), etching and engraving, from G. B. Ferrari, Hesperides (1646) 107

9 ‘Foetus-bearing orange’ (Aurantium foetiferum), etching and engraving, from G. B. Ferrari, Hesperides (1646) 108

10 ‘Hermaphrodite or horned orange’ (Aurantium hermaphroditum seu corniculatum), etching and engraving, from G. B. Ferrari, Hesperides (1646) 109

11 ‘Misshapen orange’ (Aurantium distortum), etching and engraving, from G. B. Ferrari, Hesperides (1646) 109

Acknowledgements ‘To hurt no one and give everyone their due’ (Inst. 1.1.3) is a mandate that also applies to scholarship. But just as in the realm of the law, it is no easy mandate to fulfil.

Anyone spending years over one’s work is likely to receive an incalculable number of suggestions and stimuli, many of which become, virtually unnoticed, a constituent of one’s thoughts; and yet, these stimuli are often no less effective than those which are more readily acknowledged. My first and most general expression of thanks goes to all those from whom I received valuable feedback without my necessarily recognizing it as such.

The institutions I have worked in since I developed an interest in the early modern revival of the Adonis myth include the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, and the Universities of Zurich, Reading, St Andrews, Warwick, Siena and Durham, all of which have in various ways supported my enquiries. A grant from the former Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) and a Christopherson-Knott Fellowship of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University provided me with the necessary leisure to conduct a substantial part of my research. The School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Durham University backed the project both with research leave and financial help towards the editing of the volume.

Libraries remain the centre of scholarly life for any committed student of the Humanities. In grateful acknowledgement of the assistance I received at every visit, I would like to single out the Bodleian Library, the Taylor Institution and the Sackler Library, Oxford; the British Library and the library of the Warburg Institute, London; the National Library of Scotland and the University Library, Edinburgh; the Biblioteca Universitaria and the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, Siena; the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris; the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II, Rome; the Biblioteca Provinciale, Pescara; and Durham University Library. The great digital collections – Internet Archive, Gallica, the digital section of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Jstor, Persée, Digizeitschriften, Poeti d’Italia in lingua latina, Biblioteca Italiana, and the programmes of digitalization variously converging towards Google Books – have made life considerably easier for all scholars, especially (but not only) for those who cannot always rely on the proximity of well-stocked libraries.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the help of colleagues, editors and publishers who have allowed me to reproduce material for this book. I wish in particular to thank Stefano Carrai for authorizing the reuse of my chapter ‘Dalla pastorale al poema: l’Adone di Giovan Battista Marino’, originally published in La poesia pastorale nel Rinascimento, ed. by Stefano Carrai (Padua: Antenore, 1998), pp. 349–77, parts of which appear now in Chapter 4; likewise I thank Ingo Gildenhard and Andrew Zissos,

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together with the Managing Director of Legenda, Graham Nelson, for permission to reproduce the content of my chapter ‘Adonis as Citrus Tree: Humanist Transformations of an Ancient Myth’, in Transformative Change in Western Thought: A History of Metamorphosis from Homer to Hollywood, ed. by Ingo Gildenhard and Andrew Zissos (Oxford: Legenda, 2013), pp. 252–72, in the Introduction and in Chapters 1 and 2.

I am grateful to all those who have liberally devoted a significant portion of their time to discuss the subject of this book. These include Kathryn Banks, Federico Casari, Paola Ceccarelli, Andrew Laird, Joseph North, James Russell, Lorenzo Sacchini and Jonathan Usher. Among the many scholars and friends to whom my debt is acknowledged in the notes I wish to single out here Ottavio Besomi, Clizia Carminati and Emilio Russo. Special thanks go to Ingo Gildenhard for a number of considerable improvements to the text. The staff at Bloomsbury, and in particular Kim Storry of Fakenham Prepress Solutions, are to be thanked for their courtesy and forbearance.

Adriana Caruso and Fanny Lombardo have helped towards the compilation of the Indices. I owe a singular debt of gratitude to Fiona and Peter Macardle for their extensive expertise and kindness. To my wife and colleague Annalisa Cipollone, I acknowledge the most useful and helpful observations I received in the course of my research and to her I attribute some of the most incisive insights the reader may encounter in these pages.

Abbreviations Atallah, Adonis Atallah, W., Adonis dans la littérature et l’art grecs. Paris: Klinksieck, 1966.

Detienne, Les jardins d’Adonis Detienne, M., Les jardins d’Adonis. La mythologie des aromates en Grèce. Paris: Gallimard, 2001 (1st edn 1972).

DBI Dizionario biografico degli Italiani. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960-.

EI Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti. Milan-Rome: Treves Tumminelli Treccani-Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1929–39, 36 vols and Appendice I. Frazer, Adonis Attis Osiris James G. Frazer, Adonis Attis Osiris. Studies in the History of Oriental Religion. London: Macmillan, 1919, 2 vols.

RE Pauly (von), A. F. and Wissowa, G. (eds), Paulys Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1893–1980, 84 vols.

Ribichini, Adonis Ribichini, S., Adonis: aspetti orientali di un mito greco. Rome: Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche, 1981.

Roscher Roscher, W. H. (ed.), Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie.

Leipzig: Teubner, 1884–1921, 10 vols.

Tuzet, Mort et résurrection d’Adonis Tuzet, H., Mort et résurrection d’Adonis. Étude de l’évolution d’un mythe. Paris: Corti, 1987.

Preface ‘Why should one bother with Adonis?’ is the opening sentence of a book by Hélène Tuzet, published in 1987. The author’s admission that the story may at first glance look tenuous appears to concede the legitimacy of the doubt.1 The narrative core of the Adonis myth does look rather thin, after all – a supremely handsome youth born of incest, seduced by Venus, killed in his prime by a boar and finally turned into, and reborn as, an anemone flower. The figure of Adonis is admittedly ancillary, inseparable from that of his mistress, and does not rank highly in the hierarchy of ancient deities, nor can its standing be forced upwards without patently forcing the issue. The vulgate representation of him as a passive ‘toy boy’, unenthusiastically subservient to the goddess of Love, is suggestive of a handsome but overall shallow character.

Yet Adonis has been a popular figure among the poets of all ages. Sappho, Theocritus, Bion of Smyrna, ps.-Moschus and Ovid among the ancients, and in the modern age Pontano, Ronsard, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marino, La Fontaine, Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Leconte de Lisle, d’Annunzio, Cavafy (at least by way of allusion), Wilfred Owen and Ted Hughes have sung their fascination for young and fragile male beauty overshadowed by untimely death.

Scholars, too, have felt drawn to Adonis’ bland but strangely attractive figure. Since the Hellenistic Age, his simple story has evoked older and more arcane narrations of ephebic lovers and primeval ‘Mother Goddesses’, of irrepressible sensual love tragically intertwined with death, of feats of demise and regeneration connected with the life cycle and the cultivation of crops. Was Adonis the shadow of distant and more largely looming deities, such as the Sumerian Dumuzi, the Babylonian Tammuz or the Egyptian Osiris? Could his story provide an interpretative key to those otherwise unfathomable figures, which the peculiar turn of the Western mind had allowed to recede into some sort of prehistory of human thought once famously described as ‘before philosophy’?2 And what kind of relationship, if any, existed between the figure of Adonis and the partly analogous figure of Christ (notably with regard to the deathand-resurrection element)? The line of thought generated by such questions, which have been persistently asked from Late Antiquity to the present day, culminated in James G. Frazer’s felicitous characterization of Adonis as a ‘dying god’. Frazer’s comprehensive view embraced a spectacularly diverse array of divine or semi-divine characters, beliefs and rituals across the globe, and may be said to have crowned fifteen hundred years of scholarly interest in the myth of Adonis.3 Confidence in replying affirmatively to the questions highlighted above has diminished considerably over the past hundred years. A conviction has prevailed that such common traits as are shared by the myth of Adonis with its cognate Eastern forerunners are more likely to be the product of later conflation, generated by syncretistic thought, than of direct filiations, and that such relationships are, at any rate,

xii Preface much more complex and problematic than previously imagined.4 Scholars have thus tended to strip the Adonis myth bare of the accretions accumulated over the centuries and to review the evidence in a new light – Marcel Detienne’s rejection of the received notion of the fertility myth for its exact opposite is a classic case in point.5 The evercontentious issue of Adonis’ revival or ‘resurrection’ has seen some vehement attacks against such a prerogative, with modern theologians reigniting the disputes of the early Church Fathers.6 But Frazer’s category of ‘dying and rising gods’, and more generally the comparative approaches used, have also been vindicated as legitimate, after a reconsideration of the main framing questions.7 The literary evidence has been revisited with important results, and an Oxyrhynchus papyrus has permitted a fairly recent release of a new elegiac fragment where Adonis is mentioned.8 In any case, this book is not concerned with what the myth of Adonis may have been like in its pristine form. As the subtitle suggests, the emphasis is placed on its revival in the Italian Renaissance (which is here understood to include the early Baroque Age as well) over a period of one-and-a-half centuries. The ‘return’ of classical myths in the Italian Renaissance was characterized by a combination of erudite enquiries and literary appropriations, often leading to original reformulations and reinterpretations of the myths themselves. Analogies, rather than differences, guided the reappropriation of such myths. Many aspects that one regards today as mutually exclusive, often for cogent chronological reasons, used to coexist happily in the early modern age, and even influenced one another. On the other hand, only selected aspects, notably those which presented a marked literary appeal, may be said to have been genuinely ‘revived’. Therefore, this book aims not so much to peel back these reworkings in the search for the Adoniac myth’s inner core, but to assess the layers of meaning that early modern authors and mythographers deposited over the ‘original’ story, forging new narratives and new meanings for their readers.

The case of Adonis is, in many respects, exemplary. According to the myth, he was the lover of Venus and the most attractive of young males. As such, he remained a paragon of ephebic beauty and, because of his status as either a shepherd or a hunter, featured in Renaissance pastoral and mythological idylls – all in all, a decorative presence, which was occasionally used for instrumental purposes. Giovan Battista della Porta (1535–1615), advising in his Magia naturalis (Natural Magic) on ‘How women could bring forth beautiful children’, suggested – in the footsteps of the Elder Pliny – that ‘in the bed-chambers of great men ... the images of Cupid, Adonis, and Ganymede’ should be displayed in full view, so ‘that the wives, while lying with them, may turn their attention to and have their imagination strongly captured by those pictures, and continue to reflect on them daily while pregnant, so that the conceived child may eventually resemble them’.9 In other circumstances, however, when a gifted poet turned his attention to the theme, ambitions rose to greater heights. Two of the boldest innovators of Italian Renaissance poetry, Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503) and Giovan Battista Marino (1569–1625), dealt with the Adoniac myth at different points in time and with different aims. In their hands, the timid figure of the ephebe acquired the independent status of a protagonist and became associated with a wide range of unexpected topics: the cultivation of citrus trees, French dynastic propaganda, and Christian imagery.

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The myth’s reappearance in such uncommon guises fuelled debates on the uses of ancient sources and their translation into new literary works and genres; on the function and legitimacy of erotic imagery and allegory; and last but not least on the boundaries defining the degree and nature of the miscegenation of pagan myths and Christian doctrine in literary works. * In the following pages I shall assume knowledge of such common equivalences as Zeus/Jupiter, Aphrodite/Venus, Hera/Juno, Persephone/Proserpine, etc. I have used both forms, in relation primarily to context, rather than adhering systematically to one or the other.

In a number of cases I have consciously departed from the current English practice.

In referring to ‘Caterina de’ Medici’ and ‘Maria de’ Medici’, for example, I have preferred the Italian over the otherwise more common frenchified forms ‘Catherine de Médicis’ and ‘Marie de Médicis’, as the two Queens of France are here mentioned always in connection with their Italian provenance.

The early modern reception of a myth demands the student to attend to the actual circulation of texts. Thus the date of a first printed edition is often of crucial importance – even though the circulation of manuscripts may have remained buoyant for the entire period under consideration here. When the title of a work is followed in the text by the indication of a date between brackets, this must be understood as the date of the first edition for the work in question, unless otherwise stated.

I have adopted a mixed régime as regards quotations, since texts in different languages have been quoted from early printed books and manuscripts as well as more recent editions. In all such cases where I thought that slight (mostly minimal) adaptations would not detract, I have aimed to simplify matters by adopting modern orthographical conventions (such as, e.g. v for u, or et for &), and by providing more helpful punctuation where needed. Changes of greater consequence have been indicated in the notes.

When writing up this book, I quickly realized that classicists and early modernists represent two cohorts of potential readers which do not necessarily overlap. I therefore compromised as to the level of detail required when addressing the critical bibliography on my subject. On several occasions, the unfolding of the argument suggested further lines of enquiry which it seemed absurd not to mention, at least in passing: in all such cases I have tried to give rough indications that might help point the reader in the right direction. In other circumstances I have not mentioned standard works on the topics I was discussing, simply because they were tangential to my argument.

This is of course no justification for any important omission on account of ignorance or lack of discrimination, or both.

Introduction

Ancient mythology was perpetuated in the West by three different means: ‘through its presence in ancient literature and in all literature formed on that model, through the polemics of the Church Fathers, and through its assimilation in symbolic guise to Neoplatonic philosophy’.1 The myth of Adonis is no exception to this rule.

According to the best-known version of the myth, Adonis was the offspring of King Cinyras of Cyprus and his daughter Myrrha (alternatively, the offspring of King Theias of Assyria and his daughter Smyrna, or even of King Phoenix and Alphesiboea), who fell insanely in love with her father and lured him into sleeping with her, while taking care to conceal her identity during their night-time assignations. When her father discovered the plot, Myrrha barely escaped his wrath by requesting the intervention of the gods, who responded by turning her into a myrrh tree. The baby born of the incestuous relationship was extracted from the bark of the tree and raised by the forest nymphs. As a youth of unsurpassed beauty, Adonis attracted the attention of Venus.

He surrendered rather passively to her seductive arts, and indulged with her in an idle life of sensual pleasures until his decision to engage in boar hunting. The hunt resulted in the beast killing the inexperienced Adonis. After having lamented his untimely departure, Venus transformed him, or rather his blood, into an anemone flower.2 This, in essence, is the version that obtained universal and enduring success thanks to Ovid’s popular adaptation of the story (Met. 10.298–739), which readers have enjoyed uninterruptedly since its composition and publication.3 Ovid’s version does not however take account of Adonis’ infancy, which is prominent in the earliest reported testimonies of the story as given in Apollodorus’ Library (3.14.4). Rescued from the myrrh tree by order of Aphrodite/Venus and subsequently handed over to Persephone/Proserpine, Adonis became the object of a quarrel between the two goddesses as to whom he should be ultimately entrusted. An agreement was eventually reached that he should spend one third of the year with Proserpine and the rest with Venus.4 Apart from fleeting references in poems and the writings of mythographers and scholiasts, this aspect of the story does not seem to have inspired any surviving narrative of note.5 It must have been very well known, however, for it laid the foundation of the allegorical interpretation of the myth, according to which Adonis’ periodical disappearance and reappearance would represent, or at least be ideally linked to, the sun’s seasonal journey and the life-cycle of vegetation, and where time spent with Proserpine would broadly correspond to winter and that spent with Venus to spring and summer.

The other relevant texts for the diffusion of the Adonis story are by the Greek Bucolic poets: Theocritus’ fifteenth Idyll, Bion’s Lament for Adonis, ps.-Moschus’

2 Adonis Lament for Bion (which develops ‘Adoniac’ themes), and the short poem The Dead Adonis included in the Corpus Theocriteum.6 These texts refer to the Adoniac cult, the annual mourning ritual commemorating the youth’s premature death, in addition to despondent commentaries on the human condition as compared and contrasted with that of flowers and plants. Here, the element of mourning is dominant, even though revival was expected every spring. In these works Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorff perceived a poetic expression of universal grief for the loss of ‘youth and beauty’, Aphrodite being given the role of desolate lover and Great Mother alike. The ancient populations of the Eastern Mediterranean, Wilamowitz wrote, saw reflected in Adonis’ death the sudden and violent climate changes generated by the seasonal cycle in their geographical regions, whereby vegetation is periodically revived and destroyed by an excess of its very source of life: heat.

In the lands of the south, nature dies in summer. The lush, burgeoning spring vegetation succumbs to the very heat that had awakened it to brief and luxuriant life. Even today this is felt – by anyone capable of feeling – to be violent and premature, the very death of youth and beauty.7

The very notion of ‘heat’ recalls the myth’s relationship with the rising of the Dog Star (Canicula), when both humans and animals, and especially beasts (like boars) are prone to indulge their lewd impulses, driven insane by unhealthy passions.8 The threnodies on the death of Adonis were institutionalized in the Adonia, the annual commemorations of the dead youth, which involved the ritual cultivation of the so-called ‘Gardens of Adonis’ – shallow pots, or rather shards of pottery, where fragile herbs were grown, only to wither rapidly under the unrelenting rays of sun in summer, recalling the young hero’s premature fate. Whether confined to the private sphere or expressed in sumptuous and crowded festivals, the cult of Adonis, which essentially concerned women, was subordinate to that of his mistress.9 From Sappho to Ammianus Marcellinus, references to the Adonia allude to female cults in Athens, Cyprus, Byblos, Alexandria and Antioch.10 The female nature of the cult, as well as its erotic appeal, was further accentuated by a number of pseudo-etymologies variously connected with the name of Adonis.

Apart from the traditional view that assumes a Semitic origin (from Hebr. ’ādōn ‘lord’, frequently mentioned yet far from validated),11 a much more evocative role was played, at different points in time, by derivations from hēdonē ‘pleasure’, or else hadus ‘sweet’ (incidentally the very first word – almost a keynote – of Theocritus’ idylls),12 often in combination with perfume and music. Hence Fulgentius could claim that ‘adon was Greek for sweetness [suavitas]’, while Remigius of Auxerre, in his commentary on Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury), was able to associate Adonis with Gr. adō ‘I sing’.13 Presumably because of the association with the world of women, the figure of Adonis became the target of a number of derogatory comments. Derisive observations about Adonis were already common in antiquity. The ‘Gardens of Adonis’ were, according to both Plato and Plutarch, a typical example of pointlessness; to Epictetus, of immaturity.14 ‘Sillier than Praxilla’s Adonis’ appears to have been the ancient equivalent of our ‘beauty without brains’.15 When in the Macedonian city of Dio, Hercules

Introduction

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saw people flooding out from a temple and was told that they had been worshipping Adonis; his dismissive comment was ‘Nothing sacred’.16 Moreover, since accounts of the Adonia were often linked, no matter how reliably, to sacred prostitution practised at shrines dedicated to Venus, Adonis’ already dubious reputation suffered greatly from such stories, especially in a world increasingly permeated, and regulated, by principles of Christian morality.17 The spread of the Christian faith engendered new occasions of cultural conflict.

Association with other Sun cults brought Adonis dangerously close to the figure of the Hebrew God, and his cyclic disappearances and reappearances – allegorically interpreted as death followed by resurrection – to that of Christ. This similarity drove the Church Fathers anxiously to denounce any such juxtaposition as fallacious and misleading.

The reaction of the Church authorities was prompted in particular by a crucial passage in Ezekiel, where one of the ‘major abominations’ of the morally decayed Jerusalem is identified with a group of women lamenting the death of Tammuz (Adonidem in the Vulgate). ‘Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord’s house which was toward the North; and behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz’ (Ez. 8.13–14).

This is followed by the sight of people ‘with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces towards the East’, worshipping ‘the sun towards the East’ (Ez. 8.16).18 The extreme response of the Church Fathers is evidence for Adonis’ change of status. Pagan authors such as Plutarch, Pausanias, Lucian, Athenaeus, Ammianus Marcellinus, Macrobius and Martianus Capella, among others, stressed similarities between the cult of Adonis and those of comparable Babylonian, Egyptian and Anatolian gods or demi-gods like Tammuz, Osiris and Attis. Regeneration through death and rebirth, connected with sacrificial rites of fertility and the cult of the Sun, appeared to be a common characteristic of these and other figures, who were progressively populating the new syncretistic pantheon.19 Plutarch proposed a substantial correlation between Adonis and Dionysus, as both appeared to be expressions of Nature’s regenerative power (Symp. 4.5.3, 671 B-C). The anonymous author of the Orphic Hymn To Adonis, Proclus, Ausonius, Macrobius, Iohannes Lydus and Martianus Capella insisted on the many interchangeable names and avatars as the product of one sole essence, commonly identified with the Sun (Hēlios).20 The relevant passage in Macrobius’ Saturnalia (1.21.1–6), arguably the most influential source for the allegorical interpretation of the Adonis myth in the early modern age, falls within the wider discussion of the Sun’s numerous manifestations (Sat. 1.17–23). Influential, yet somewhat confusing; for if, as Macrobius maintains, ‘Adonis … is the sun’ and the killer boar ‘represents winter’, then his interpretation must be considered at variance with that of Adonis as a victim of the sun’s excessive heat.21 The tendency in Late Antiquity towards syncretistic monotheism is, in all likelihood, at the root of the Macrobian allegory.22 The hymn to the Sun in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis is a further and most eloquent example of such a tendency.

Solem te Latium vocitat…

Te Serapin Nilus, Memphis veneratur Osirim, dissona sacra Mithram Ditemque ferumque Typhonem; Attis pulcher item, curvi et puer almus aratri,

4 Adonis Hammon et arentis Libyes ac Byblius Adon.

Sic vario cunctus te nomine convocat orbis. (2.188, 191–2) Latium calls you the Sun … the Nile adores you as Serapis, Memphis as Osiris; as Mithras, and Dis, and fierce Typhon in differing ceremonies; similarly [you are] handsome Attis, and the sacred child of the curved plough [i.e. Triptolemus], and Ammon of burning Libya, and Adonis of Byblos. Thus the whole world invokes you under different names.

The principle of analogy which drove this process of conflation operated like a centripetal force. It was said of Hellenistic and late-antique authors and mythographers that they, more easily than not, ‘surrendered to the obsession for conciliation and syncretism’, and left authors of later ages ‘working on some sort of concordance which results from the juxtaposition of fragments they themselves derived from previous concordances …’.23 This may perhaps be said of other ages as well, including our own. It is possible that this is simply the way in which the transmission of such materials works.

Subsequent to the decline of the period known as Late Antiquity, interest in Adonis seems to have diminished. If one makes an exception for the exegesis of the relevant passages in Martianus Capella and in Book Ten of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, nothing particularly significant appears to have emerged for a period of over eight centuries – although research in this field has admittedly been far from exhaustive.24 Adonis’ lack of status during this long period is conveniently summarized in Jerome’s periphrastic designation of him as a mere lover of Venus, Veneris amasius.25 On the other hand, the allegorical tradition of commentaries is in itself of some relevance, and may have produced new associations and new meanings, but whether by chance or by design it would be difficult to tell. John of Garland’s thirteenth-century Integumenta Ovidii, for instance, which was presumably written with the double intent of memorizing the poem’s content as well as highlighting its allegorical significance, offers the following abridged account of Ovid’s take on Myrrha (Met. 10.298–502), the apples of the Hesperides with Atalanta and Hippomenes turned into lions (Met. 10.560–707), and Adonis (Met. 10.503–59, 708–39).

Rem miram mirare novam Mirram per amorem In mirram verti quam dat amarus amor.

Ex auro poma tria sunt genitalia, fervens Cum leo luxuries, fertur uterque leo.

Nobilitas, species, sapientia sunt tria poma Aurea, que triplici pectora dote trahunt.

Flos breviter durans iuvenilis dicitur etas Que cito discedens ut levis umbra fugit.26 (413–20)

[rubr. ‘De Mirra’] [rubr. ‘De Ypomene et Athalanta’]

[rubr. ‘De Adoni’]

A wonderful thing, to watch the new Myrrha, turned because of love into myrrh, the product of bitter love. The three golden apples are genitals; [they stand for] burning lust when the [sun enters the sign of the] lion; both lions are said [to signify the same]. Nobility, beauty and wisdom are three golden apples which win the hearts with their triple dowry. The ephemeral flower means youth, which flees like a light shadow that departs rapidly.27

Introduction

5

When reading vernacular literatures, one finds that there, too, the exegetical tradition has more to offer than the lyric or narrative treatment of the subject. The Adonis inset episode in the Roman de la Rose, included in the later section by Jean de Meun (1268–78?), is nothing but a shortened version of the Ovidian story, focused on Venus’ anxious warnings about the dangers of chasing wild beasts (Roman de la Rose, 15687; cf. Ovid, Met. 10.542–52) and on Adonis’ failure to listen to her, with the bathetic conclusion that one ought to follow good advice.28 There is little more to be gleaned from the Adonis story of the Ovide moralisé (10.1960–3953), where, however, the key element is enhanced by the four explanations that follow the story. The second account aims to extract the story’s anagogical sense and is particularly striking. Myrrha’s passion for her father is interpreted there as the love of the Virgin Mary for God the Father, Adonis as the Saviour, the boar as the Jews responsible for Christ’s death, and Adonis’ metamorphosis into the flower as the Resurrection.29 A noticeable change occurred when ancient mythological lore was revived in new works of antiquarian erudition, among which Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogie deorum Gentilium (The Genealogies of the Ancient Gods, ca. 1355–70) stands out as a most authoritative example. Arranged like a long gallery of portraits following genealogical patterns, Boccaccio’s encyclopaedic repertoire was to establish itself as the standard work on classical mythology for almost two centuries.30 It was Boccaccio’s minute attention to detail, complemented with a euhemeristic approach of both pagan (mainly Ciceronian) and Christian inspiration, which secured unprecedented prestige for his work, despite its patent faults and extravagant misunderstandings.31 But apart from the content, it was the design of Boccaccio’s Genealogies that exercised a tangible influence on the perception of the Adonis myth – in fact, of all ancient myths – and inspired poets and writers of the early Italian Renaissance to new productions. By assigning to each character a section, however small, of their own, Boccaccio ensured they were all granted, at least potentially, equal or almost equal dignity. Minor mythical personages were thus offered a degree of autonomy they had never enjoyed in ancient literature. An immediate consequence was a flourishing production of ‘new’ myths in both Latin and vernacular poems, where characters from secondary episodes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or from such ‘minor’ works as Statius’ Silvae, the ps.-Ovidian Nux, the poems of Ausonius (or surrogates thereof), were deliberately placed at the centre of new narrations, usually of limited extent. In the second half of the fifteenth century, reputed scholars like Domizio Calderini and Angelo Poliziano went so far as to declare that such smaller formats became modern poets admirably, for they, unlike the ancients, would not be capable of successfully sustaining their inspiration over the span of longer and more ambitious poems.32 General persuasive arguments of this kind, with Boccaccio placing a renewed emphasis on Macrobius’ interpretation of the Adonis myth as an allegory for the sun’s seasonal cycle, provided the handsome youth with the essential requisites to attract the attention of the literary world once again.33 From that moment onwards, the somewhat colourless Veneris amasius went through an extraordinary transformation, which was to culminate with James G. Frazer’s interpretation of Adonis as one of the archetypical ‘dying gods’.

1

An ancient myth revisited: Adonis as citrus tree

At the end of the fifteenth century the story of Adonis caught the eye of a truly gifted poet in the person of Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503), who produced the first highly personalized revisitation of the Adoniac myth in the modern age.

Like many other fifteenth-century humanists, Pontano pursued a political career in the service of an Italian potentate. A native of Cerreto di Spoleto, a charming hilltop village in the Umbrian valley of the river Nera, Pontano moved to Naples in 1454, where he progressed through the ranks to the eminent position of secretary and minister of the Aragonese kings (1486). His political career came to an end in the aftermath of the French conquest (and subsequent loss) of Naples in 1494–5. Thus unburdened of the heavy duties of a busy court, Pontano was free to channel all his energies into literary activity. He would survive the demise of his office for only eight years; yet the quantity and quality of the work he produced during this period outclassed his previous and by no means insignificant production, and remained unequalled among the humanists of his time.1 Long after Pontano’s death his sometime pupil and friend Iacopo Sannazaro still remembered the old man bursting with daimonic energy while indignant at his younger colleagues’ apathy. ‘When dear old Pontano wanted to challenge us while he was producing verse after verse, he was wont to say: “You men of straw, what are you doing?”.’2

Pontano and the myth of Adonis Pontano’s prodigious activity, as witnessed by his contemporaries, receives further confirmation from the available manuscript evidence. Many works he had drafted in the 1460s were brought to maturity and saw the light of day no earlier than the following century, having undergone substantial changes and frequent restyling. The chronology of such revisions is not always known or clear; it is therefore difficult to ascertain the dating of any specific attention Pontano may have devoted to classical myths in general and to the myth of Adonis in particular.3 The presence of Adonis can be detected in the presumably ‘earlier’ sections of works like De amore coniugali (On Marital Love, 1467–84, revised 1490s) and Eridanus (1482–4, revised 1490s). Such appearances, however, look rather conventional: in them, Adonis tends to conform to his usual background role as Venus’ lover, even though Pontano’s inventive approach to ancient myths is already revealing itself.4 Conversely, some of the shorter poems

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collected under the titles of Tumuli (Tombs, viz. ‘Epitaphs’) and Iambici (Iambic poems), datable with reasonable accuracy to the last decade of the fifteenth century, suggest that by this time Pontano had come to explore a different aspect of the myth. The imagery dominating the Tumuli is one of pathetic contrast between the graves as symbols of the bleak coldness of death and the plants beside them as tokens of perpetually renewable life.5 In the Iambici the ephemeral life of flowers and herbs is compared with the longer and (only apparently) happier life of human beings, who are however denied the privilege of a new birth.6 Such moving variations on the ancient theme of death affecting the whole of the human race, yet sparing plants (no matter how humble) for they are bound to revive every spring, show Pontano as a keen reader of Hellenistic bucolic poetry, where such a theme is closely associated with the Adonis myth.

When observed in relation to these ancient sources, Pontano’s readings can perhaps be ascribed a somewhat firmer chronology. Eighteen idylls by Theocritus, including Idyll 15 on the Adoniazusae, were first published in Milan in 1480. Shortly afterwards Pontano spent a period of two years in Ferrara (1482–4), where, in the circle of Battista Guarino, Theocritean poetry had been fashionable for over twenty years.7 A further crucial moment for the growing popularity of the Greek Bucolics came in 1495, when the first printed edition of the Corpus Theocriteum appeared at the press of Aldo Manuzio in Venice with a dedication to Guarino, Manuzio’s old teacher. It included among others Theoc. 15, the Anacreontic poem The Dead Adonis on the guilty boar put on trial by Venus (often, though not by Manuzio, ascribed to Theocritus), Bion’s Lament for Adonis, and ps.-Moschus’ thematically related Lament for Bion (given as anonymous in the Aldine print).8 The following passage from the Lament for Bion in particular must have proved inspirational for Pontano: Alas, when in the garden wither the mallows, the green celery, and the luxuriant curled anise, they live again thereafter and spring up another year; but we men, we that are tall and strong, we that are wise, when once we die, unhearing sleep in the hollow earth, a long sleep without end or wakening. Lapped in silence therefore wilt thou lie beneath the ground … (98–105, tr. A. S. F. Gow).9

Clearly reminiscent of this old lament is Pontano’s dirge for the death of his son Lucius in 1498: Foliis quid heu, amarace, heu quid floribus Nudata squales maestula? Heu quid languida Arentibus comis et horrido sinu, lugubri amictu fles, misella amarace? …

Deest enim, te qui rigabat …

His tu viresces et novam indues comam, beata amarace, foliis novis, novo amictu; at ego senex subarescam miser umore vacuus …10 (Iambici, 5.18–21) Alas, why, amaracus, why, alas, are you languishing, sad and barren of your leaves and flowers? Why, alas, are you crying, your foliage withered, your bosom barren,

8 Adonis in such mournful fashion, sad little amaracus? … He who watered you is now gone … You will live again with a new crown, happy amaracus, with new leaves and a new attire; but I, poor old man, emptied of my vital sap, I shall wither …

The fragile and now neglected marjoram plant (amaracus), dried up by the heat after the death of the poet’s son had interrupted its watering, also bears a revealing likeness to the short-lived herbs of the Gardens of Adonis. 11

The solar myth in Pontano’s Urania At the turn of the new century it became clear that Pontano’s interest in the Adonis myth had increased over the years, as Adonis features in two of the three poems posthumously published by Aldo Manuzio in 1505, Urania and De hortis Hesperidum libri duo (Two Books on the Garden of the Hesperides).12 Conceived shortly after 1469 and progressively expanded, Urania was declared ready for the press more than thirty years later.13 The poem represents the culmination of an illustrious tradition initiated by Poggio’s rediscovery of Manilius’ Astronomica in 1417 and continued by one of Pontano’s mentors, Lorenzo Bonincontri.14 Bonincontri’s poem, Rerum naturalium et divinarum sive de rebus coelestibus libri tres (Three Books on Natural and Divine, or Celestial Matters), provided a much-admired model for the future author of Urania, and the editorial work done by Bonincontri for the 1484 Roman edition of Manilius proved of such quality as to win the praise of no less demanding a reader than A. E. Housman.15 Pontano for his part considered Urania his most challenging poetic enterprise, so much so that he came to be regularly associated with that poem in the mind of his admirers.16 Manuzio, while soliciting the privilege of being Pontano’s publisher, hailed the poem as ‘a divine piece’.17 Pontano’s long-time friend and posthumous editor Pietro Summonte, writing to Manuzio about his own editorial plans in Naples, promised to leave Urania for Manuzio to publish ‘as a work of paramount importance’, and in dedicating his edition of Pontano’s lyrics to Sannazaro openly declared that Urania stood at the pinnacle of his late friend’s production.18 Both Manilius’ Astronomica and Pontano’s Urania share an equal number of books as well as broadly similar subject matter, even though the latter poem never becomes quite as technical as the former.19 Urania deals with three main topics: the planets (Book 1), the fixed stars (Books 2–4), and the stars as patrons of the various regions and peoples of the Earth (Book 5). In Book 1 the author proceeds to describe the celestial bodies according to the traditional Ptolemaic sequence: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun. After a series of myths connected with the sun-god Apollo two short digressions follow, designed to highlight the relations of both Mercury and Venus with the Sun.20 The transition between the two episodes is secured by a thematic link of a kind that readers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses will recognize at once.

Following Macrobius, and indeed Ovid, Pontano claims that Argos is the sky and his hundred eyes the stars, which are destined to die out as soon as the rising sun-god Apollo vanquishes them with his radiant light (Ur. 1.471–3 ‘Phoebo exoriente … candenti lampade victa / emoriuntur’).21 The hint at an image of death evoked by the

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catch-word emoriuntur (‘they die out’), combined with the subsequent echoing of a line from Ovid (Ars am. 1.75 ‘Nec te praetereat Veneri ploratus Adonis’, ‘You mustn’t omit to remember Adonis, bewailed by Venus’), offers the prompting for the mournful story of the young hero.

Nec deploratum Veneri linquamus Adonim, Venantem quem durus aper sub dente peredit.

Non illum fontes nec amici flumina Nili Infletum voluere. (Ur. 1.474–7) Let us not forget Adonis, bewailed by Venus, devoured while hunting by the cruel boar’s tusk. Neither did the springs nor the waters of the friendly Nile wish to leave him unlamented.

The lines that follow present a female figure that seems like an artful combination of Venus, Nature and Mother Earth, shedding tears on the untimely death of her paramour. For seven full days, the swollen river, urged by its irrepressible grief, joins her in mourning by flooding the neighbouring countryside and laying waste plants, animals and human beings alike. Trees and shrubs, too, lament Adonis’ lot; and the myrtle – on account of its being sacred to Venus and, because of a probable etymological wordplay with myrrh, also representative of Myrrha as well – strives in vain to follow the funeral procession by repeatedly and piteously stretching its branches.22 Ter myrtus conata sequi miserabile funus, Ter radice retenta sua est, ter brachia flexit, Ter frustra lentos conata est flectere ramos. (Ur. 1.485–7) Thrice did the myrtle attempt to follow the sad cortège, thrice was it held back by its roots; thrice did it stretch its arms, and thrice did it attempt to flex its pliant branches in vain.

This image, too, stems from Ovid: it harks back to the plants drawn away from their roots by Orpheus’ song in Met. 10.86–105.23 But the characteristic threefold iteration recalls further Ovidian and Virgilian passages, and the resulting effect is one of sophisticated mosaic-like design. The myrtle stretching its branches is an imitation of Medea stretching her arms to the stars (Met. 7.188–9 ‘sidera sola micant: ad quae sua bracchia tendens, / ter se convertit, ter …’). Also Ovidian is the construction ter conata followed by the bisyllabic infinitive of a deponent verb, sequi in Pontano, loqui in Ovid (Met. 11.419 ‘ter conata loqui, ter fletibus ora rigavit’; Her. 4.7–8 ‘Ter tecum conata loqui ter inutilis haesit / lingua …’). Virgilian, as well as Ovidian, are the three vain attempts to move, made especially memorable by two famous lines which occur twice in the Aeneid: ‘ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum’ and ‘ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago’ (Aen. 2.792–3 and 6.700–1) – both moreover referring to the shades of deceased persons, Creusa and Anchises, and therefore thematically appropriate in a funeral context.

Yet the main novelty resulting from Pontano’s combinatory technique resides in those stretched branches which, as is subsequently made clear, are but the shrub’s

10 Adonis longer shadows cast by the receding autumn sunlight. The death of Adonis is presented here as the progressive disappearance of the sun from the autumn and winter horizon, and in this respect Pontano’s narrative is an elegant rephrasing in smooth hexameters of the allegory expounded at length and at the characteristic slow pace in Macrobius’ Saturnalia. There Adonis stands allegorically for the sun, the boar that kills him for winter, and Venus for the earth’s boreal hemisphere ‘going into mourning when the sun, in the course of its yearly progress through the series of the twelve signs, proceeds to enter the sector of the lower hemisphere’.24 As already mentioned in the Introduction, Macrobius had interpreted the Adonis myth as an allegory for vegetal regeneration in harmony with the changing of the seasons, while suggesting a comparison between Adonis and the Egyptian god Osiris (as well as Attis), which is essentially what Pontano also does.25 Yet Macrobius was not a source Pontano would have been comfortably ready to acknowledge. Macrobian prose offended his finely tuned humanist ear; it combined a lack of linguistic and stylistic refinement with inappropriate sententious tones when dealing with Virgilian matters.

How did that barbarian, born under distant skies and unable to express himself in acceptable Latin, dare to pass judgement tanquam praetor, like a magistrate, on the greatest of all Roman poets?26 Moreover, because of his frequent use of Greek, Macrobius was likely to be implicitly relegated by Pontano – as he would be later by Erasmus – to the unflattering category of graeculi.27 Pontano was willing to improve on his source, and no one was better qualified than he to perform the job. The old Senecan ideal of allusive as well as elusive imitation, according to which references to one’s sources were to be made palatable yet not immediately recognizable even for a highly perceptive reader, had already, and very effectively, been adopted and promoted by Petrarch. Now it was being further refined by Pontano, who was genuinely believed by his contemporaries to embody the humanist ideal of the ‘Poet as Proteus’, Poëta Proteus alter, graced by an uncanny ability to adapt metamorphically, and even excel, his own models.28 The effectiveness of Pontano’s technique may be appreciated in his transformation of Macrobius’ account of Venus recovering from the sad winter months.

Sed cum sol emersit ab inferioribus partibus terrae, vernalisque aequinoctii transgreditur fines augendo diem: tunc est Venus laeta et pulchra, virent arva segetibus, prata herbis, arbores foliis. (Sat. 1.21.6) But when the sun has come forth from the lower parts of the earth and has crossed the boundary of the spring equinox, giving length to the day, then Venus is glad and fair to see, the fields are green with growing crops, the meadows with grass and the trees with leaves (tr. P. V. Davies).

Ac veluti virgo, absenti cum sola marito Suspirat sterilem lecto traducere vitam Illius expectans complexus anxia caros, Ergo, ubi sol imo victor convertit ab Austro, Tum gravidos aperitque sinus et caeca relaxat Spiramenta, novas veniat qua succus in haerbas, Et tandem complexa suum laetatur Adonim. (Ur. 1.500–6)

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But as a maiden waiting anxiously for the affectionate embrace of her absent spouse, all the while sighing and leading a lonely and sterile life on her bridal bed, then, as soon as the victorious sun rises above the southern horizon, she reveals her florid bosom, and unlocks her inner pores, and lets the sap of life flow into the tender blades, rejoicing at last in the arms of her Adonis.

The stock of Macrobius’ dreary prose is revived by Pontano’s grafting onto it the striking Virgilian image ‘et caeca relaxat / Spiramenta, novas veniat qua succus in haerbas’ (‘[the Earth] unlocks her inner pores, whereby the sap flows into the tender blades’), which is lifted verbatim from two lines of the Georgics (1.89–90), yet not without a twist. In Virgil the picture is one of rustic vividness, referring as it does to the soil releasing its stored-up moisture when stubble is burnt in the fields. In Urania those very words are skilfully made to convey a description of the Great Mother in Cytherean attire, her sensuous body being gradually resuscitated by the warmth of spring to give birth to a glorious celebration of Nature’s regenerative powers.29

The Garden of the Hesperides In one of his last great works written on the cusp of the new century, De hortis Hesperidum sive de cultu citriorum libri duo (The Garden of the Hesperides, or The Cultivation of Orange Trees, in Two Books), Pontano produced yet another reinterpretation of the Adonis myth, which was in due course to become extremely influential.

The subtitle of the work is misleading, as the poem in fact deals with the cultivation of three different varieties of citrus trees: oranges (the ‘sour’ variety, bot. Citrus aurantium), citrons (Citrus medica) and lemons (Citrus limonum).30 The title contains an allusion to the mythical garden situated in the African Atlas, where golden apples were grown under the surveillance of a dragon and three nymphs, the Hesperides.

The raiding of the Garden of the Hesperides had constituted the eleventh labour of Hercules, who after killing the dragon had carried off the precious fruits to Greece.31 With characteristic boldness, Pontano repudiated the classical myth and turned it into an aition intended to explain the presence of citrus trees on the Neapolitan shore.

He declared their extraordinary fruits to be the genuine issue of the mythical golden apples of the Hesperides, and their noblest variety, the orange, to be the plant into which Adonis had been transformed by Venus after succumbing to the fury of the boar.

The selection of the subject matter found its justification in a combination of literary and geo-political reasons. As for the latter: while first and foremost aimed at glorifying the citrus groves of Naples, Pontano’s Horti Hesperidum also evoked another celebrated citrus-studded Riviera, that of Lake Garda, by ways of a dedication to the ruler of its shores, the Marquis of Mantua Francesco Gonzaga.32 A letter sent to Gonzaga

by Pontano on 13 September 1500 reveals that by that date the poem was virtually complete, and only in need of revision. In the letter the poet asked, somewhat dryly, for further patience: ‘I have several things dedicated to your name, but the works of the intellect require frequent and lengthy labor limae. Let Your Excellency therefore be

12 Adonis patient. If polished they will both honour you and their author; if uncouth, the opposite would occur.’33 Gonzaga features in the poem as a war hero, with the introductory lines eulogizing him as the leader of the Italian coalition forces that fought the French at the battle of the Taro (1495), an indecisive event for which both sides had claimed victory.34 In honouring Gonzaga Pontano was accepting an invitation issued to him in 1499 by Giovan Battista Spagnoli, called ‘il Mantovano’ (Mantuanus), to participate in the celebration of the Mantuan warrior and ruler; Mantuanus himself had already sung the praises of Gonzaga in the five books of his poem Triumphus.35 It must have been an invitation difficult to resist. One cannot help wondering whether Pontano’s prompt acceptance was somehow influenced by the need to clear his own name of the accusations that had followed his final actions as minister of the Aragonese kings in 1495.

Since that fateful year when the French had occupied Naples, rumours had circulated of Pontano kow-towing to the conquerors with excessive zeal.36 Now however, in a changed, if volatile, political situation, Pontano showed himself ready to dedicate his Horti Hesperidum to the sometime enemy of the French, while explicitly lamenting the ‘violent rule of the Brigands’ and ‘the profanation of the Penates’ in Naples,37 and even wishing in the final peroration that Gonzaga might one day restore the Neapolitan kingdom to its independence.38 The two motifs of the war hero and the presence of citrus trees on Lake Garda were elegantly intertwined by suggesting that an interest in gardens and orchards was not irreconcilable with martial virtues, as Hercules’ successful attempt to release the Garden of the Hesperides from the dragon seemed to prove (Hort. Hesp. 1.46–55).

It is doubtful that Pontano’s effort to ingratiate himself with the ruler of Mantua was successful. Such a courteous invitation was presumably wasted on a recipient like Francesco Gonzaga – a professional soldier plagued by syphilis, made for and used to a lifestyle quite different from the one portrayed in Pontano’s elegant verse.39 But, again presumably, it was not wasted on Gonzaga’s wife, Isabella d’Este, that grande dame of the Italian Renaissance, who was so influential in everything pertaining to the realm of poetry and art in Mantua. In that very year of 1499, Isabella was soliciting Pontano’s revered opinion about a statue of Virgil that was to be erected in Mantua; she asked also for the text of an inscription to be carved on its basement.40 The Virgilian inspiration of the Horti Hesperidum, openly declared at the beginning of the poem (Hort.

Hesp. 1.9), is a clear token of allegiance to Mantua, Virgil’s birthplace, no less than to Naples, Pontano’s home and Virgil’s resting place. It would be no surprise should it one day be discovered that Isabella had an active role in the choice of the poem’s subject.

Competition with the ancients The Virgilian model features prominently in both the invention and execution of Pontano’s Hesperides. Citrus trees were the new matter Pontano poured into the ancient mould of a didactic poem on husbandry in emulation of Virgil’s Georgics.

Competition with the ancients was once again the main driving force behind his new accomplishment.41 More specifically, two passages from Virgil’s Georgics must have played a decisive role in motivating Pontano’s emulative approach. Virgil had

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famously declared that he was leaving orchards for others to sing (G. 4.144–8). In fulfilment of such auspices, Columella had already responded by producing Book Ten of his De re rustica in hexameters – where, however, citrus trees are not mentioned; nor are they recorded in the anonymous treatise De arboribus liber (On Trees), traditionally ascribed to Columella in the Renaissance and transmitted together with the De re rustica by manuscripts and early printed editions.42 Furthermore, Virgil’s invitation was presumably read by Pontano in the light of another passage from the Georgics, where the citron or Median tree – the only variety of citrus recorded in the ancient sources – is mentioned (G. 2.126–35). There, Virgil claims that the citron is worth being compared with the bay tree, for which it could easily be mistaken were it not for its scent.

This was an enticing but also problematic passage, as the ancient readers already knew. Servius thought the tree to which Virgil was referring was not a citron tree (in G. 2.131). Virgil’s comparison is in fact inaccurate, as it is based on a misunderstanding (presumably generated by a corrupt reading) of a passage from Theophrastus’ Historia plantarum (4.4.2), the work on which the Roman poet relied for most of his botanical information. Virgil may have never seen a citron tree after all – and Renaissance readers were quick to realize that.43 Whether Pontano also identified Virgil’s blunder remains a matter open to debate. He certainly was aware of what the Elder Pliny had stated, that even citron trees had only been familiar to the Romans as pot plants imported from Media (HN 12.7.14–16).44 Another source with which Pontano was undoubtedly familiar, Macrobius, had reported from Oppius’ lost work De silvestribus arboribus (On Woodland Trees) the distinction between a variety of citron tree (citrea malus) that grew in Italy and another, called ‘Persian [tree]’ (Persica [malus]), which grew in Media (Sat. 3.19.3–5) – unless the latter was merely a peach tree. At all events, the ancient sources seemed to confirm the ancients’ ignorance of the most valuable varieties of citrus trees, namely oranges and lemons, the existence of which appears to have come to the attention of the Europeans only after the arrival of the Arabs, who were almost certainly responsible for their introduction or reintroduction in the West.45 But in addition, there was the intriguing suggestion, made by no less an author than Virgil, that citrus trees could be compared with, and therefore be a match for, bay trees. There was adequate scope for Pontano to add an original chapter to the Virgilian topic of orchards, especially given the renewed preoccupation with the aesthetic qualities of country life that characterized the second half of the Italian Quattrocento, and inspired in its literature a vigorous revival of the georgic and bucolic genres.46 Like other poets such as Hesiod, Virgil, Columella, Walahfrid Strabo and Petrarch, Pontano was himself a passionate gardener and an accomplished horticulturalist, who enjoyed working in his orchard on the hill of Antignano overlooking the bay of Naples. It is therefore legitimate to ask of him the same question that R. A. B. Mynors once asked of Virgil: ‘How much about husbandry did he already know?’.47 The answer is easily provided. The Horti Hesperidum delivers not just first-rate Latin poetry but also detailed accounts of specific cultivation techniques, and even some little gems such as what appears to be one of the earliest allusions to ‘sweet oranges’ or portogalli, thus named after the Portuguese crew of Vasco da Gama that first came upon them (Hort. Hesp. 1.343–63).48 The ‘sweet orange’ (Citrus sinensis) is the tree, then still

14 Adonis unknown to the Western world, from which all the currently commercialized varieties of orange derive.49 News of its discovery was passed on in private letters by Italian members of Vasco da Gama’s crew on their return home in 1499.50 When one year later Pontano announced to the future dedicatee that his poem was finished and only in need of some polish, the passage on the sweet oranges may have already been there; at any rate it must have been inserted before Pontano’s death, which occurred on 17 September 1503.51 The Horti Hesperidum is among the earliest texts, almost certainly the first published text in verse, to report on the existence of the newly discovered variety of oranges.52 Had Pontano any direct predecessor in this unusual reformulation of the Adonis myth? A source might emerge one day showing him clearly indebted to a previous author; no such source, however, has yet been identified. Given Pontano’s fondness for literary ‘crossing’, one is tempted to surmise that he devised his topic independently through his usual blend of ancient and modern sources.

One thing is certain: Pontano did take pride in the originality of his own approach to the matter. In a passage of his dialogue Aegidius (last revised 1501 or later), the then still unpublished Horti Hesperidum is introduced as an object of admiration on the part of contemporary scholars, and in a fashion that casts considerable light on the nature of the poem itself.53 One of the characters in the dialogue, Hieronymus Carbo (Girolamo Carbone), is asking for the opinion of another interlocutor, Puccius (Francesco Pucci), about the topic of didactic poetry. Puccius obliges by citing Virgil, Columella and Lucretius, as well as expanding on the masterful Virgilian and Lucretian ‘art of beginning’.54 At this point Hieronymus incidentally mentions that he is looking forward to Pontano’s forthcoming poem ‘on the nature of oranges, on the rarity of such trees and on their cultivation, which no-one has [yet] put on record’ (a nemine tradito). The absolute novelty of the subject-matter is further confirmed by another interlocutor, Thamyras (Piero Tamira), as well as Puccius.55 The interesting element here is that both Thamyras and Puccius are purposedly called upon in their role as pupils of two great humanistic schools, Pomponio Leto’s in Rome and Politian’s in Florence respectively. Both of them attest to their teachers’ omission in dealing with oranges while commenting on the crucial Virgilian passage of G. 2.126–35.56 The statement can be easily validated through direct scrutiny of the texts in question.

Neither Leto’s commentary on the Georgics, elaborated in the years 1469–71 and published for the first time in an unauthorized edition at Brescia in 1490, nor Politian’s unpublished lecture notes for the course on the Georgics, which the humanist had delivered in the Florentine Studio in 1483–4, contain any reference to orange trees.57

The search for the Hesperides Pontano’s self-reference in Aegidius betrays the highly erudite nature of his endeavour, performed in competition not just with poets but also with scholars. The idea of amalgamating citrus trees, the Hesperides and the Adonis myth into one single narrative was undoubtedly a brilliant one; its originality and complexity, however, suggests that it must have dawned on Pontano only gradually.

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Even the association of citrus fruits with the fabulous golden apples of the Garden of the Hesperides was far from straightforward. Varro (Rust. 2.1.6–7), followed by many including Servius (in Aen. 4.84), had offered an allegorical interpretation of the ‘golden apples’ (aurea mala) of the Hesperides as ‘sheep’ by proposing the etymological reading of Lat. mala < Gr. mēla (‘sheep’).58 In the works of Lucretius, Virgil and Ovid, on the other hand, the aurea mala or aurea poma of the Hesperides were (and are) commonly understood to be not citrons but quinces.59 Pontano seems to have shared the same belief at first, for in De amore coniugali 2.4.14, aurea mala stands not for citrus fruits but for small apples called azariole.60 In the same poem Venus and Adonis are exposed as the cause of moral corruption among mankind after all the other gods have abandoned an Earth dominated by vice (2.4.63–70 – a transparent imitation of the Astraea episode in Ov. Met. 1.149–50). This piece is thus likely to represent a phase prior to Pontano’s interest in the Macrobian interpretation of Adonis, as well as the myth of the Hesperides.61 Citrus trees and the Garden of the Hesperides could be correlated on the assumed authority of several later Latin and Greek authors, like the Elder Pliny (HN 5.1.12; 13.29.91), Martial (13.37; 14.89), and Athenaeus (Deipn. 3.83 a-d)62 – an authority, however, riddled with uncertainties, as it split over the correct name of citrus trees and fruits and the actual geographical area from which they were supposed to have originated. There existed terminological confusion between Lat. citrus (‘citron’ and/ or ‘[Atlas] cedar’) and cedrus (‘cedar’, ‘juniper’), and between Gr. kitrion/kitreon (‘citron’), kedrion (‘juniper-berry’) and kedros (‘cedar tree’).63 Although denounced

by Athenaeus at Deipn. 3.84c-d, such confusion perpetuated itself throughout the Middle Ages. The alternation of variant readings like cetrus/cedrus/citrus in medieval manuscripts of ancient Latin works is revealing enough, and doubly confusing when it occurs in works to which people confidently turned to obtain reliable factual information, such as the Elder Pliny’s Natural History.64 Furthermore, ever since the Middle Ages one single term (cedro) has been used in the Italian vernacular to designate the citron tree and its fruit, as well as the cedar tree. As for the location of the wonderful trees and fruits, in Athenaeus’ dialogue the character maintaining that the Africans call ‘the apples of Hesperia … citrons’ is immediately silenced by his opponent who points to Theophrastus (Hist. plant. 4.4.2) as proof that citrons originated in the East, namely in Media or in Persia, not in the West.65 A further reference to the Western regions of Northern Africa may have reached Pontano via the GreekLatin glossaries and Hermeneumata, which in different versions circulated widely in fifteenth-century classrooms and provided young pupils with the earliest rudiments of Greek.66 Terms like citrium, citrum are there consistently translated as (h)esperis, (h)esperion or suchlike (< Gr. hesperos, Lat. vesper ‘evening’, ‘West’).67 This would have readily authorized etymological wordplay on Hesperides as well as on Hesperia, one of Italy’s traditional names in antiquity, and of course on Hesperus as ‘the evening star’, the planet Venus. In yet another source – Antonio Mancinelli’s commentary on Virgil’s Bucolics, read in the Roman Studio in 1486–7 and first published in 1490 – etymological wordplay seems to have been silently stretched to produce citereum, an apparent conflation of citreum (‘of the citron’) and cythereum (‘Cytherean’).68

16 Adonis Finally, and significantly, the assimilation of citrus fruits to the apples of the Hesperides often occurred in, or in reference to, geographical areas where the cultivation of citrus trees was a lucrative activity. The aurea mala mentioned in two Latin poems of 1480s by Francesco Patrizi, Bishop of Gaeta have been positively identified as oranges.69 Ugolino Verino’s Panegyricon for the conquest of Granada in 1492, addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, praises Spanish (orange) fruits as far tastier than those of the Hesperides, of Alcinous, of Gaeta and of Paestum.70 Pontano’s careful choice of dedicatee, as has been seen, is similarly suggestive of a twinning between the bay of Naples and the southern coast of Lake Garda, both of which were graced with the presence of the golden fruits. But perhaps the most significant text that can be mentioned in this context is one from another ‘citrus region’ – Tuscany – and one intriguingly similar to Pontano’s Horti Hesperidum, in that it deals with an ancient tale of metamorphosis into a fruit tree and deliberately expands on it. Coluccio Salutati’s aition on the origin of the almond tree, inspired by Serv. in Buc. 5.10 and the ps.-Ovidian Nux (Walnut Tree) and entitled Conquestio Phillidis (The Lament of Phyllis), topically lists plants evoking mythological reminiscences; and there the tree of Myrrha with ‘Adonis in her bosom’ closely follows the citrus trees of Gaeta.

Medica caiete scopuloso in litore poma crescant. Iudeus balsama rara colat.

Dactilus ex nudo procedat robore palme, ac humilem curvent grandia poma citrum.

Mura, nefas, pulcrum sub pectore servat Adona ac electra gemens det quasi parturiat.71 (147–52) Let the apples from Media grow on the rocky shores of Gaeta. Let the Jew tend rare balsams. Let the date proceed from the palm’s naked vigour [i.e. stripped trunk], and big apple fruits bend the humble citron [under their weight]. Let Myrrha, O horror! keep handsome Adonis in her bosom, and weepingly exude gallipot as if in labour.

Adonis as citrus tree These appear to be the only potentially inspirational passages for Pontano’s Horti Hesperidum which can be found. For a humanist such scattered elements were in themselves valuable pieces of rare and remote information. But a poet (as well as humanist) such as Pontano is likely to have cast his eye beyond their informative value, looking forward to their potential reuse in a literary context. Moving on from the lexical to the thematic and narrative level, one realizes that another hint might have come to him from a mere statement of fact – that a relationship between the Adonis myth and that of the Hesperides, at least by contiguity, already existed in ancient literature. As a keen admirer of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pontano could not have failed to notice that the Adonis episode includes as an inset digression the tale of Atalanta and Hippomenes (Met. 10.560–707). There the deployment of the apples of the Hesperides constitutes Hippomenes’ decisive stratagem for defeating Atalanta in the running race.

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A further association between the Hesperides and Adonis also existed insofar as their names had been mentioned together by Pliny in connection with the fabulous gardens of old – ‘the gardens of the Hesperides and of the kings Alcinous and Adonis, and also the hanging gardens, that is, of Semiramis’ (NH 19.19.49).72 The passage was key for anyone fostering an interest in garden cultivation, and was as a matter of fact utilized

by Pomponio Leto to introduce his popular commentary on Columella’s Book Ten.73 Apart from Venus’ well-known but generic association with the fruits of the Hesperides, one of which had been given to her as a victory token after the so-called Judgement of the Goddesses,74 further details of a more subtle and tantalizing nature may have spurred Pontano’s associative powers and appetite for literary competition.

It will be remembered that the final lines of the Ovidian episode allude to the Adonis flower, the anemone, as one liable to be dissipated by the wind (Gr. anemos). namque male haerentem et nimia levitate caducum excutiunt idem, qui praestant nomina, venti.75 (Met. 10.738–9) For the winds, which give the flower its name, shake it off as it clings precariously and is prone to fall off easily.

Conversely in the Georgics the leaves and flowers of the citron tree had been proclaimed by Virgil unshakable.

folia haud ullis labentia ventis, flos ad prima tenax. (G. 2.133–4) No wind can shake its foliage, and its flower clings as tenaciously.

Not only the poems of Virgil but also those liminary texts that traditionally complemented them in both manuscripts and early printed editions, such as the poet’s ancient biographies, may have been part and parcel of this allusive game. One need only recall the dream Virgil’s mother was supposed to have had the night before she gave birth to her prodigious son – how she picked a twig from a bay tree which, once planted in the soil, miraculously produced a different, luxuriant plant laden with fruit and blossom.76 Might not Pontano’s citrus trees look like an embodiment of that fabulous plant, as well as an appropriation of its symbology?

This last supposition may sound excessively bold. It would however chime with a further decisive detail, which made Pontano’s association of the Adonis myth with citrus trees not only persuasive but also compelling. The metamorphosis of Adonis as a symbol of life’s perpetual renewal appeared to him to be uniquely enshrined in a distinctive feature of such trees – that of being, in Pontano’s own words, ‘always graced with new fruits, blossoms and leaves’ throughout the whole year (Hort. Hesp. 1.571).77 It was a feature that Theophrastus, Pliny, Solinus, Servius, Palladius, Macrobius and Isidore of Seville had already noticed and recorded when illustrating citron trees.78 In the medieval and early modern age similar observations were extended to oranges and lemons as well, and occur – as one would expect – in the work of agriculturalists.79 But they also occur, for instance, in Boccaccio’s Decameron, where a garden is described as ‘surrounded by most green and luxuriant orange (aranci) and citron trees (cedri), which showed not only flowers but fruits both old and new’, and in several

18 Adonis other texts.80 Even more remarkable is the imagery conveyed by a text chronologically closer to the Horti Hesperidum, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). There a cloister is said to be adorned ‘with admirable citron, orange and lemon trees’, with oranges in particular sporting their ‘candid flower’ and their ‘fruits both ripe and unripened’, while in a further passage the same tree varieties fill a garden-grove sacred to Venus containing the sepulchre of Adonis.81 The awestruck tone of these descriptions shows wonder for a natural occurrence that seemed to make dreams of a fantasy world concrete. To the poets and scholars of the Italian Renaissance, citrus trees must have looked like the real-world observable equivalent of the extraordinary plants that populated Alcinous’ garden in Homer’s celebrated description, the ‘garden of gardens’ of the ancient world.82 But without the courtyard … is a great orchard of four acres … Therein grow trees, tall and luxuriant, pears and pomegranates and apple-trees with their bright fruit, and sweet figs, and luxuriant olives. Of these the fruit perishes not nor fails in winter or in summer, but lasts throughout the year; and ever does the west wind, as it blows, quicken to life some fruits, and ripen others; pear upon pear waxes ripe, apple upon apple, cluster upon cluster, and fig upon fig. There, too, is his fruitful vineyard planted, one part of which, a warm spot on level ground, is being dried in the sun, while other grapes men are gathering, and others, too, they are treading; but in front are unripe grapes that are shedding the blossom, and others that are turning purple … Such were the glorious gifts of the gods in the palace of Alcinous. (Od. 7.113–32, tr. A. T. Murray).

New myths out of ancient verse Just as in Urania, transformation of the ancient sources occurred in the Horti Hesperidum through ‘crossing’ at several levels. This is already evident in the organization of the poem’s introductory lines. According to the hierarchy of styles, the Horti Hesperidum was supposed to rank below Urania: hence the initial invocation of lesser local deities such as the water-nymphs (Naiads) and the nymphs of the forests (Napaeae), dwelling in the river Sebethus and on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius respectively. But this apparently humbler approach is rapidly subverted by what follows. The name of Virgil, whose tomb tradition located in nearby Posillipo, is evoked first (Hort.

Hesp. 1.9); then Urania is introduced as gracefully granting her benevolent patronage to the modern poet (1.26). At this point a sudden change of tone is felt, and the poet’s voice rises to a passionate prayer, distinctively Lucretian in style and energy, asking his beloved Muse to assist his enterprise – the celebration of the orange as the noblest among all citrus trees (citrigenum decus) and the glory of the Sebethian groves, just as the Phoebian bay tree is the pride of the Thessalian vale of Tempe (1.30–45).83 This declaration is the prelude to an even greater surprise. Orange trees are sacred to Venus, Pontano explains, for this is the plant into which dead Adonis was converted by the will of the goddess, its ever-present blossoms and fruits bearing ‘a perpetual, sad memento of Venus’ grief ’.84 No explicit reference to any previous

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mythological tradition is given, although the Ovidian subtext would have automatically come to mind. At a single stroke Pontano obliterated Ovid’s version of the myth and replaced it with a brand new aition – which he characteristically obtained by borrowing from Ovid himself, for he saw no impediment in drawing on the death of Adonis as narrated in Met. 10.708–39 and ‘improving’ upon his model.

If Ovid’s Venus had simply sprinkled nectar over Adonis’ blood, then Pontano’s Venus would indulge in a much longer rite, pouring ambrosia over the youth’s hair, washing his body, and murmuring unintelligible spells. And while Ovid had had Adonis’ blood turned into an anemone, Pontano preferred to have the whole body of Adonis turned into a tree, so that the story of the child born of a myrrh tree could come full circle.

Ambrosio mox rore comam diffundit et unda Idalia corpus lavit incompertaque verba Murmurat ore super supremaque et oscula iungit.

Ambrosium sensit rorem coma, sensit et undam Idaliam corpus divinaque verba loquentis; Haeserunt terrae crines riguitque capillus Protenta in radice et recto in stipite corpus, Lanugo in teneras abiit mollissima frondes, In florem candor, in ramos brachia et ille, Ille decor tota diffusus in arbore risit; Vulnificos spinae referunt in cortice dentes, Crescit et in patulas aphrodisia citrius umbras. (Hort. Hesp. 1.77–88) Then she showers his hair with ambrosia and washes his body with her Idalian ointment while murmuring incomprehensible words, and gives him a final kiss.

The hair sensed the ambrosian shower, the body sensed the Idalian ointment and the words uttered by the goddess; the hair clung to the soil, stretching rigidly into a root, and his body into an upright trunk; his soft body-hair dissolved into tender leaves, his white skin into blossoms, his arms into boughs, and that grace which Adonis had when alive pervaded the whole tree like a radiant smile. The thorns on the bark reproduce the wound-making teeth, and Venus’ orange tree grows, casting its broad shadow around.

For the actual description of Adonis’ metamorphosis Pontano did not hesitate to bring in Ovid’s most spectacular showpiece, the metamorphosis of Daphne (Met. 1.548–56), conveniently rearranged by reversing the original descriptive sequence.85 Further textual resemblances suggest that the Ovidian transformation of the Heliades (Met. 2.333–66) was also drawn upon, no doubt to offer the knowledgeable reader another ably disguised but eventually recognizable source. As for the language, Pontano left hardly a single Ovidian expression untouched, brilliantly and perilously bordering on, yet never actually crossing over into, parody. He also drew on the vernacular tradition – as most Neo-Latin poets of the Italian Quattrocento were wont to do.86 One passage in particular may help show this further aspect of his passion for the deliberate conflation of disparate sources. Once the metamorphosis of Adonis has reached its

20 Adonis conclusion, the newly born tree gratefully shakes its top in response to Venus’ woeful attentions, and lets its blossoms shower into the goddess’s lap: Illa velut dominae luctum solata recentes Excussit frondes, resupinaque vertice canos Diffudit florum nimbos, quis pectora divae Implevitque sinum et lacrimas sedavit euntes; Exin hesperiis arbor nitet aurea silvis. (Hort. Hesp. 1.97–101) As if to comfort its lady in mourning, [the tree] shook its new leaves, and bending its top poured white showers of blossoms into the goddess’ bosom and lap, and calmed her flowing tears. Thereafter the golden tree shines amidst the Hesperian groves.

Readers of Petrarch will not fail to recognize in this passage an allusion to a celebrated scene from his Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, where Laura is depicted under a shower of blossoms: Da’ be’ rami scendea (dolce ne la memoria) una pioggia di fior sovra ’l suo grembo … (Rer. vulg. frag. 126.40–2) A rain of flowers descended (sweet in the memory) from the beautiful branches into her lap …

At the sight of such ‘wonderful dexterity’ (prodigiosa maestria), an expert judge like Vladimiro Zabughin felt encouraged to declare Pontano’s consummate art comparable only to that of Dante’s.87 The examples that have been offered should help explain why, during his final years and in those immediately subsequent to his death, Pontano was perceived to be the only modern Latin poet who had genuinely challenged the otherwise undisputed supremacy of the ancients.88 Many of his contemporaries and followers saw in his reinterpretation of the Adonis myth the token of a new age of radiance for Latin poetry, and in the celebration of orange trees a powerful symbol that could stand up to classical poetry and its noblest symbol, the Phoebian bay tree – as indeed Pontano himself had wished (Hort. Hesp. 1.39–42). It is an episode of Renaissance literary history that has strangely gone unnoticed, or perhaps been misinterpreted as merely ornamental stock-verse and dismissed accordingly. The following chapter will show how the legacy of Pontano and his poetics came to influence, for good or for bad, the changing fortunes of the Adonis myth in the course of the sixteenth century.

2

Adonis and the Renaissance idyll

The keen new interest in ancient mythology that resulted from the revival of classical antiquity is a well-known phenomenon. Its progressively changing nature, however, may not yet have received adequate acknowledgment.1 In the heyday of fifteenth-century Italian Humanism, fascination for pagan myths was not necessarily or primarily engendered by mere antiquarian curiosity, nor by pride in the strict imitation of the classics.2 In fact, one of its most striking features was a fresh, uninhibited and emulation-driven approach to the ancient models, of which Pontano’s achievement, as highlighted in Chapter 1, is an eloquent example. Sixteenth-century authors, on the other hand, increasingly preoccupied with issues of decorum to the point of fastidiousness, would be inclined to condemn such an approach as ‘unregulated’ and therefore inappropriate.

This may help to explain why the model set by Pontano’s poetry, which continued to receive enthusiastic accolades for two or three decades after his death, rapidly lost its prestige when the new trend inspired by rigid classicizing principles became an established norm. Pontano’s marginalization is the result of a series of circumstances different in nature, yet all somehow working against the influence exercised by his legacy. One such circumstance was the shifting balance from Latin to the vernacular, which, in the early decades of the sixteenth century, came to affect ever wider and more influential sectors of Renaissance readership; Pontano’s all-Latin output could not but suffer from it. Another was the increasingly widespread perception of his achievement as unique and even, in many respects, idiosyncratic. A third obstacle was represented by the changing conception of imitation itself, which induced a much more rigid codification of literary genres. This last factor in particular proved to be a lethal blow to the prestige enjoyed by Pontano’s poetics.

The gradual distancing of Italian literary culture from Pontano’s achievement deserves to be examined at closer range, because it indirectly came to bear upon the perception of the Adonis myth in sixteenth-century literary culture.

The legacy of Pontano The early decades of the sixteenth century saw authors such as Iacopo Sannazaro, Pietro Bembo, Ludovico Ariosto, Niccolò Machiavelli and Baldassarre Castiglione

22 Adonis choose the vernacular for some of their most influential works. Anyone enjoying the benefit (or the mirage) of five hundred years’ hindsight might be tempted to consider that, by then, the traditional ascendancy of Latin had ended. While persuasive from afar, such a view reveals itself, on nearer scrutiny, as illusory and even misleading.

Carlo Dionisotti’s comments on this point still hold good – that in Italy the competition between Latin and the vernacular remained in the balance until at least as late as the mid–1520s.3 Not until the appearance of Pietro Bembo’s authoritative Prose della volgar lingua (1525) did the Italian vernacular gain a status comparable to that enjoyed by the two classical languages. According to Bembo, this unprecedented advance could only be made through the adoption of strict rules that would ensure orthographic and morphologic regularity and absolute control in matters pertaining to lexical selection and style. Rigorous imitative practices should be set up for the purpose and calibrated on only two main models, both diversely representative of the linguistic excellence of fourteenth-century Tuscan literature – for verse Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, and for prose Boccaccio’s Decameron (Prose della volgar lingua, 1.14–19, 2.3). In other words, Bembo was proclaiming Petrarch and Boccaccio the new vernacular classics, while excluding Dante, whom he considered unsuitable for imitation. In so doing he was repeating the delicate operation he had conducted a few years earlier, when he had uncompromisingly selected Virgil and Cicero as absolute models for an equally strict doctrine of imitation to be applied to Neo-Latin.4 As is well known, this is a question (the so-called questione della lingua) that has been debated at length over the past five centuries.5 Here I shall confine myself to highlighting one or two tangential points in relation to Pontano’s Nachleben and the associated perception of the Adonis myth.

As far as vernacular poetry is concerned, the success of Bembo’s approach appeared to be sanctioned by 1530. In that year the lyric poems of the two most prominent poets of the previous decades and fathers of modern Petrarchism, the very same Bembo and Sannazaro, were edited in conformity with the new rules.6 Two years later Ariosto amended his Orlando furioso for a third and definitive edition, bringing his masterpiece into line with Bembo’s positions on language and style. In the realm of vernacular prose, too, Italian writers dutifully followed suit by acknowledging, by and large, the authority of the Boccaccian style.7 The battle for Latin prose, on the other hand, could be said to have been won by Bembo as early as 1513, when Pope Leo X had given Ciceronian style the greatest institutional endorsement by appointing the two masters of Ciceronianism, Bembo himself and Iacopo Sadoleto, Secretaries of Papal Briefs.

Latin poetry presented problems of a different kind. Up until the 1520s Latin verse had had an advantage over the younger language, still in the process of catching up. This explains why some of the foremost poets of Italy were intended to avail themselves of the Latin language for works that ought to represent their durable bequest to posterity. In light of the long gestation and ensuing belated publication dates, such works as Sannazaro’s De partu Virginis (On the Virgin Birth, 1526), Girolamo Fracastoro’s Syphilis (1530), Marco Girolamo Vida’s three books De arte poetica (On Poetry, 1527) and Christias (The Christiad, 1535) show an enduring faith and confidence in the power of the ancient language. Around the same time another

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prominent poet, Antonio Tebaldeo, went as far as to sorely regret ever having written vernacular verse.8 The role played by Pontano’s poetry in this process was crucial. A considerable number of testimonies confirm that such enduring faith and confidence in Latin as a living literary language had been inspired in no small part by Pontano’s own example.

Modern poets felt encouraged by his success to continue using the same medium the ancients had used, and as masters of their own trade accepted the challenge of producing something as ambitious and long-lasting – all things being equal – as their time-honoured models. The very symbol that Pontano had devised for his revisited Adonis myth, the orange tree, became for many the proudly acknowledged blazon of Neo-Latin poetry, in respectful but positive contrast with the bay tree of ancient verse.

The testimony of the Neapolitan Sannazaro deserves to be mentioned first. When following King Frederick of Aragon into exile in 1501, Sannazaro was said to have bidden goodbye to Naples and ‘its gardens and Hesperides’ in elegant Latin distichs while the boat was leaving the harbour, and the moving scene had been recorded in Pontano’s Aegidius.9 Sannazaro’s was no passing fantasy. As late as 1526, when he eventually published his eagerly awaited De partu Virginis, readers were informed by the final lines that the poet’s coveted prize for his most ambitious poetic enterprise was nothing other than a wreath of Neapolitan – and at this point, one could say Pontanian – orange leaves.10 Mergillina, novos fundunt ubi citria flores, citria Medorum sacros referentia lucos: et mihi non solita nectit de fronde coronam. (De part. Virg. 3.511–13) Mergellina – where orange orchards put forth ever new blossoms, orange orchards that evoke the sacred groves of the Medians – weaves me a crown from uncommon leaves.11

Naples was not alone in honouring the old vates in such a manner. While describing Agostino Chigi’s Roman residence (now Villa Farnesina) in 1512, Blosius Palladius sang the praises of Pontano’s Hesperides the moment he came across an orange tree in the villa’s garden.12 Another acknowledged master of verse, and one of the luminaries of the Roman court, Francesco Maria Molza, devoted one of his elegies to Pontano’s Hesperides and Adonis,13 while even for a contemporary French poet, the well-known secretary of Erasmus, Gilbert Cousin of Nozeroy (Gilbertus Cognatus Nucillanus), the orange had become quite simply ‘the tree of Adonis’.14 Pontano’s symbol appealed not only to Latin, but also to vernacular poets. Writing the first georgic poem in any European vernacular, Della coltivazione libri sei (Six Books on Farming, first published in 1546 but written over a period of almost twenty years), the Florentine Luigi Alamanni referred to the orange as the ‘plant … that originated from Heaven’, and commiserated with the ‘uncouth ancient world’ for having been ‘deprived of so noble a tree’.15 But more prominent than all others in his support of Pontano’s poetry was the Veronese physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro. In the introductory lines of his masterpiece, the aetiological poem Syphilis sive de morbo Gallico (Syphilis, or the French Disease, 1530), Fracastoro invoked the protection of Pontano’s Muse Urania

24 Adonis (1.24–52), and went on to honour Pontano himself as one of the marvels of his age (2.38–49), together with his ‘Cytherean tree’ (arbor cithereïa) cultivated by Venus in remembrance of her Adonis (2.220–2).16 Sannazaro’s fantasy about a garland woven from orange leaves had indeed become the ambition of many a fellow poet.

The pitfalls of inventiveness How, one wonders, could a legacy of such scope be dissipated and eventually lost?

As anticipated at the outset of this chapter, Pontano’s own prowess may paradoxically have played a counterproductive role in the process. Pontano’s poetic gifts were not easily matched; nor were his particular cast of mind and inventiveness, so unflinchingly committed to courting transgression. The comparison with Dante proposed by Zabughin, reported at the end of Chapter 1, reveals itself as fitting even in its less advantageous implications. At a time when Bembo’s doctrine of literary imitation was imposing itself with mounting authority, Pontano was increasingly perceived as a near-inimitable model – just like Dante. In circumstances like this, inimitability can prove an ambivalent quality.

The best appraisal of Pontano’s accomplishment in this new context was provided

by Lelio Gregorio Giraldi (1479–1552). His two dialogues De poetis nostrorum temporum (On Modern Poets) include an overview of the Latin poetry produced in Italy in the early decades of the sixteenth century. People and events mentioned in the text show that the first dialogue is set in Rome about 1515–16, during the glorious days of Leo X’s pontificate. The text itself was presumably begun shortly afterwards, with composition and revision extending into the 1520s, possibly the early 1530s. It was eventually published, after a final adjustment, in 1551, together with a second dialogue set in Ferrara in 1548 and written in 1548–9.17 The poetry of Pontano is eulogized in the first dialogue as follows: The works of Giovanni Pontano of Umbria – his Urania, Meteora, the Garden of the Hesperides, his eclogues, epigrams, and elegies, and all his other poetry as well as his many prose works – compel me to commemorate him in these portraits as one of the leading poets. In fact I would place him as just about equal to all the writers of antiquity, even if, as some think, he is not outstanding in everything he does (for sometimes he can be too salacious and digressive) and he clearly does not always abide by the conventions of the genres [‘nec plane ubique se legibus astringit’]. This will seem unsurprising to those who are aware that he was for a long time involved in the important affairs of kings and princes and that he handled terms and treaties pertaining to both war and peace as well as following Phoebus and the Muses. Yet who has written more than he? Who has written more learnedly or more eloquently? In short, who has composed with more perfection, succinctness or discrimination?18 (De poet. 1.37–8, tr. J. L. Grant, slightly adapted)

This accolade is splendid and well-deserved, as well as being genuine, for Giraldi did not omit those traits of Pontano’s poetic personality which might have seemed

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less acceptable in the eyes of the new reading public. One comment, which admittedly reports the judgement of others, may sound odd and perhaps unfair. It is the remark about Pontano not deserving to be compared to the ancients because he had failed to excel in everything he wrote. This was a questionable charge. The proverbial ‘sometimes even Homer nods’ (Hor. AP 359) should in all fairness have been extended to Pontano, and as a reminder of human fallibility even in the case of most gifted literary figures, rather than as a pretext for casting aspersions upon them. Yet the remark must have hit home because it stressed unevenness – something that those imbued with the new classicizing taste perceived as distinctively Pontanian. According to Giraldi, unevenness in Pontano’s œuvre was caused by a variety of factors: an occasional inclination to lasciviousness, a tendency to digress, and a somewhat detached neglect of rules. As Grant conveniently puts it in his translation, Pontano did not appear to abide by ‘the conventions of the genres’. A critique of this kind would have been possible, though readily dismissable, in Pontano’s own time, but it could amount to a serious charge in the 1510s or the 1520s, let alone the 1550s, when the debate on the hierarchy and legitimacy of literary genres had entered a heated new phase following the reappearance of Aristotle’s Poetics.19 Giraldi would not, however, let such reservations dominate as some of his contemporaries might have wished (‘And yet there are today some who do not give a fair assessment of his renown’). On the contrary, he would wait and see if ‘they themselves [could produce] better work or [adduce] superior work done by others’ (De poet. 1.39) – something he claimed had not yet happened to date.20 One of those unnamed critics can be positively identified. He was none other than Pietro Bembo – the dictator of the Italian literary scene of the 1520s. This leads to the third reason for Pontano’s neglect. Bembo and Pontano had almost certainly met in the spring of 1492, when the former visited Naples on his way to Sicily. This presumed encounter is customarily invoked to explain the dedication to Bembo of Book Seven of Pontano’s De rebus coelestibus (On Celestial Matters, posthumously published in 1512). In 1494, when Pontano is thought to have added that dedication to his stillunpublished work, such a token of respect was unusual and remarkable in itself, as it came from an aged, universally acclaimed politician and man of letters to a younger man, however talented and of patrician stock, who had not yet given any public proof of his gifts.21 But in the 1520s, when Pontano had been dead for over twenty years and Bembo was deeply engaged in a violent debate that threatened his position as the most influential man of letters in Italy, there was very little time left for pleasantries.

Just before the publication of his Prose della volgar lingua, Bembo once again tried his hand at Latin poetry by producing Benacus (Lake Garda, 1524), a poem of Virgilian inspiration.22 The piece met with lukewarm reactions – more was evidently expected of a man of Bembo’s calibre. The assessment offered by Giraldi is once again illuminating, and the particular flavour of his account, with its nuances and aftertastes, can be fully relished against the fictional setting as well as the prolonged gestation of his text, for there one can distinctively perceive the changing trends and moods that characterized the Italian humanist world of the 1510s and 1520s.

After the passage quoted above where Pontano’s uniqueness is extolled, Giraldithe-character acts as if struck by an afterthought, and concedes that at least one

26 Adonis other contemporary poet should be acknowledged as equally outstanding. He therefore turns to one of his interlocutors, Giulio Sadoleto, suggesting that three poems by his brother Iacopo may indeed deserve as much praise.23 To utter the name of Iacopo Sadoleto in the Roman context of 1516 would automatically evoke that of Pietro Bembo on account of their shared office at the papal court. A tribute to Bembo, or rather to his astounding mimetic ability, dutifully follows; but not without reservations.

He has wondrous skill in emulating the best of authors, both Latin and Italian. For the most part one seems to hear or read, not Bembo himself as he speaks, but the author whom he has chosen as his model.24 (De poet. 1.39)

No other comment illustrates with comparable elegance and efficacy the ambitions and achievements of the three masters of Latin verse: the late Pontano, naturally and unquestionably the greatest; Sadoleto, potentially his competitor, but only on a very limited scale, as his excellent but sporadic attempts at Latin poetry showed; and finally Bembo, of the three arguably the most motivated and eager to excel and undeniably skilled, but skilled in speaking through the voice of his models rather than his own voice. Giraldi may have fostered doubts about some of Pontano’s idiosyncracies, but he knew where true talent lay.

What of Bembo’s own perception of the situation? One year after the disillusion the half-hearted reception of his Benacus had caused him, he was entrusted with the power of reviewing Latin poetry in the making. In the autumn of 1525 Girolamo Fracastoro asked him to read a draft version of his Syphilis, the aetiological poem of Virgilian (as well as Pontanian) inspiration mentioned above, for he intended to make Bembo the poem’s dedicatee. Bembo obliged by offering copious suggestions for improvement. He also declared his appreciation of the author’s dexterity and grace in dealing with topics of natural philosophy in verse, and commended the perfectly pitched Virgilian tone of the whole and the novelty of the aition of the ‘sacred wood’ from the Antilles, the guaiacum, whose extracts were believed to offer an effective remedy for syphilis.25 From the list of suggestions, as well as from a second letter which also allows the reader to guess the content of Fracastoro’s lost intermediate missive, it emerges that Bembo had proposed the removal of a second ‘new’ aition (that is, not imitated from any ancient authority): the one concerning quicksilver, another supposedly successful therapy for those affected by the disease. In his lost letter, however, Fracastoro had made it clear that he intended to retain the quicksilver aition while expanding his work to the length of three books.26 Bembo hastened to voice his disapproval. To invent two such tales, new in all their parts and showing no dependence on the ancient models, was an exaggeration, he claimed, that would meet with general censure. He warmly recommended self-restraint, and rebutted as illusory Fracastoro’s persuasion that the insertions could be endorsed on the authority of such ancient poets as Virgil or Pindar.

For if you say that Virgil inserted digressions in his poems, I shall reply that you, too, have many of them in your two books, which is perfectly acceptable – although a digression is one thing, and an utterly new tale [favola del tutto

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nuova] quite another. Even Virgil, when he introduced the tale of Aristaeus [G. 4.315–558], did not devise it out of nothing but rather extracted and derived it from the ancient ones. Pindar cannot provide a good model for he is a poet of lyrics and dithyrambs …27

But the scathing comment was reserved for the only modern authority involved, which in his lost letter Fracastoro had evidently mentioned on a par with the two classical poets.

I won’t say a word about Pontano – for if I were to imitate anything [from his works], I would rather imitate his virtues, not his faults. That habit of his of inventing new tales [favole] is so despicable that one can hardly stomach the reading of any of his poems.28

Pontano’s didactic poems had by that time become the blueprint for all modern emulators of Virgil’s Georgics.29 Once again Giraldi’s words prove illuminating when he writes that in his poem Fracastoro was ‘aiming to match the ancient poets’ but ‘especially trying to emulate Pontano, whom he reveres so highly’ (De poet. 1.175).30 The point had been made clearly enough in the Syphilis, where enthusiastic references to Pontano and his new Adonis myth stand out as hardly less conspicuous than the eulogy of the poem’s dedicatee.31 The sequel of the story reveals that Fracastoro would not listen, that the poem would be published four years later in three books with the two aitia as planned, and that Bembo would acquiesce by graciously accepting the dedication with a polite but curt letter of thanks.32 The episode is suggestive of a changing approach to the authors, literary genres and topics of the ancient world. Rigorous and decorum-inspired imitation was now expected to be exercised, not merely linguistically and stylistically but narratively as well. Bembo had come to feel increasingly uneasy about imitative practices which elaborated on the ancient texts under the stimulus of unbridled mythographic inventiveness, with the result of provoking an undesirable sense of stylistic distortion. He, or someone close to his positions, even set himself the task of offering an eloquent example of what the idea of a ‘new favola’ was. The Latin poem Sarca (River Sarca) is today assumed to be Bembo’s, despite the fact that it was never included in his collected works and remained unpublished until the nineteenth century.33 Whoever wrote it, he must have written it after the double experience of Benacus (of which Sarca appears to be, if not a recasting, at least in part a palinode) and Bembo’s correspondence with Fracastoro discussed above.34 Justly considered a veritable little masterpiece by Jacob Burckhardt, Sarca is a mythological fantasy on the origin of Lake Garda.35 The River Sarca marries the nymph Garda after arranging the wedding ceremony with her father, the River Benacus. Both rivers are portrayed as tributaries of the lake into whose waters, according to Sarca’s proposal to Benacus, theirs are jointly to flow.36 A poem in praise of Virgil and Virgilian poetry and places, Sarca also expands into the singing of Lake Garda’s outflowing River Mincio on whose shores stands Mantua, Virgil’s birthplace. Although relatively open to the acknowledgment of other models – a dutiful tribute is paid to the other spirit of the place, Catullus, with

28 Adonis the epithalamic celebrations of Garda and Sarca following the arrangement of Catull.

64 – Sarca remains exemplary for its stylistic unity and homogeneity.

That this is what Sarca was meant to be in the eyes of its readers can also be gleaned from the glaring reticence that characterizes Pontano’s presence in the poem.

Citrus trees are mentioned as one of Lake Garda’s typical features, together with a brief allusion to the peculiar cultivation techniques in use in that area.37 A double topical reference to the Hesperides and the garden of Alcinous follows, extracted from ‘authorized’ ancient sources but without the slightest hint at Pontano (183–94). And when the prophetess Manto takes the stage for her final inspired speech (405–619), an eloquent tribute is indeed offered to Naples, not only as Virgil’s resting place, but also as the birthplace of those few poets who managed to keep the Virgilian flame alive: Statius, Pontano and Sannazaro (576–604). This indisputably powerful and moving passage is, however, far from being (as the most recent editor of the text would wish it to be) ‘Bembo’s final gift to Pontano and Sannazaro, who shared his life’s passion’.38 In fact, the praise is very selective. For while it was simple to characterize Pontano as ‘divine’ (579), as Bembo’s good friend Aldo Manuzio had done over twenty years before, that epithet is in fact restricted to the Meteororum liber (583–6) and Urania (587–9). There is no mention of the Horti Hesperidum, which together with the other two poems formed the celebrated Manutian edition of Pontano’s didactic verse (1505), and which by then had become the most frequently and enthusiastically imitated piece of the three. It is one of those instances where silence can be more eloquent than a thousand words.39 The principal aim of this long digression has been to explain Bembo’s rejection of Pontano’s Horti Hesperidum and the imitative practice the poem represented in the general perception of early sixteenth-century readers. Bembo’s rejection incidentally affected the perception of the Adonis myth in the literary culture of the later Italian Renaissance. Pontano’s manner of revisiting the Adonis myth appeared unacceptable to Bembo, because in his view the poetics underpinning it was unacceptable. But by the late 1520s Bembo may have had a further reason for opposing the success of Pontano’s mythographic invention so vehemently. By then he had turned his attention to the vernacular and become the champion of ‘classical’ or ‘regulated’ Petrarchism, the dominating trend of Italian lyric poetry that was about to spread to the rest of Europe and ensure the primacy of Petrarch as the new classic of the modern age. Petrarch, it will be remembered, had not merely revived but indeed reinvented the ancient symbol of poetic excellence, the laurel, by thematizing its pursuit as the equivalent of a love quest. It is hard to imagine Bembo accepting that Petrarch’s laurel wreath should ever be superseded by Pontanian garlands of orange leaves.40

Adonis and the vernacular idyll: the eclogue In the course of the sixteenth century the myth of Adonis was almost exclusively confined to the idyllic genre in both its narrative and performative varieties. It would certainly be an exaggeration to claim that this trend resulted solely from Bembo’s censure of Pontano’s habits in matters of genre hybridization. It is a fact, however, that

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nothing comparable to Pontano’s Horti Hesperidum is to be seen for over a hundred years – not just in Italy but in the entire Romance world and beyond.

A tentative list of poems on Adonis produced in Italy and France in the course of the sixteenth century will help clarify this point. Luigi Alamanni’s eclogue ‘Adone’ (in Opere toscane, 1532–3), Amomo’s ‘Epitaphio di Adone’ (in Rime toscane, 1535),41 Girolamo Muzio’s eclogue ‘Venere’ (written in 1531, published in Egloghe, 1550), Ludovico Dolce’s Stanze nella favola d’Adone (1545), Giovanni Tarcagnota’s Adone (1545), Mellin de Saint-Gelais’ ‘Elegie ou chanson lamentable de Venus sur la mort du bel Adonis’ (1545, with Salmon Macrin’s Latin translation), Pernette Du Guillet’s ‘Conde claros de Adonis’ (1546), Giuseppe Leggiadro de’ Gallani’s lost Favola d’Adone,42 Jean-Antoine de Baïf ’s ‘Adon’ (written 1556?), Girolamo Parabosco’s Favola d’Adone (in Lettere amorose, 1558), Pierre de Ronsard’s Adonis (1564), Sebastiano Minturno’s ‘De Adoni ab apro interempto’ (‘On Adonis Killed by the Boar’, in his Epigrammata et elegiae, 1564),43 Jean Passerat’s Adonis, ou la chasse du sanglier (written before 1574?, and published in the posthumous Recueil des œuvres poétiques, 1606), Claude Binet’s Adonis (1575), and Honorat Laugier de Porchères’ ‘Venus affligée sur la mort d’Adonis’ (early seventeenth century?);44 all such texts are characterized by their belonging to the pastoral or idyllic genre. The same may be said to apply to Adoniac inserts in works on various subjects,45 or to Adonis-inspired pieces such as Muzio’s eclogue ‘La Napea’ (written 1533, published in Egloghe, 1550) and Rémy Belleau’s Chant pastoral sur la mort de Joachim du Bellay Angevin (1560). Even mildly humorous parodies such as those by François Habert and Vauquelin de la Fresnaye persist in retaining a traditional bucolic setting.46 An apparent trespassing of genre limitations like Gabriel Le Breton’s French tragedy Adonis (performed before 1574, published 1579?) is to be regarded as a deliberate exception proving the validity of the rule.47 The picture is not substantially altered when one moves to England or Spain. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’s Fábula de Adonis (1553), Juan de la Cueva de Garoza’s ‘Llanto de Venus en la muerte de Adonis’ (in Obras, 1582), William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), Edmund Spenser’s Astrophel (1595) for the death of Philip Sidney, and Lope de Vega’s comedy Adonis y Venus (1597–1603) all seem to confirm the trend. Besides, whereas the crossing of sources remains a common feature of these texts, in line with the classically inspired ideal of literary imitation, no significant overstepping of the boundaries of the selected genres is detectable. The only noteworthy ‘deviation’ is represented by the reformulation of the Adonis story in Book 3 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (3.1, 3.6).48 In this relatively homogenous situation a range of different solutions may still be noted. Adoniac pastoral idylls ordinarily present such traits as a bucolic situation and narration in the form of a shepherd’s song (often a dirge), with the occasional but deliberate adoption of a rustic mode. At the opposite end of the spectrum stand epyllia, with their typical ‘forest scene’ (scena boschereccia) and less stationary plots emphasizing in particular the two pivotal moments of the story, Adonis’ amorous encounter with Venus and the fatal hunt.49 A further distinction can be made between those poems displaying marked classical garb, such as blank verse in imitation of classical hexameters, and others which adhere more closely to the vernacular tradition in adopting narrative stanzas.

30 Adonis These not always clear-cut but perceptible differences may have originated from the late-antique mythological repertoires portraying Adonis as either a hunter or a shepherd.50 As is well known, this ambiguity has appealed to modern anthropologists of the ancient world. Some scholars have accordingly proposed an interpretation of the figure of Adonis as one uncomfortably situated between the vagaries of primitive hunting societies and the more settled activities of sheep-farming and cereal cultivation, unable to be convincingly pigeonholed in either occupation and therefore bound to be an ‘unhappy hunter’ as well as a ‘failed farmer’, with fatal consequences – not unlike those determining the lot of similarly failed heroes such as Actaeon, Hippolytus, Perdicca and Melanion/Hippomenes.51 While there is no evidence to suggest that the authors of Renaissance idylls ever approached this issue in a comparable manner, they were nevertheless sensitive to the twofold nature of their character, and ensured that the appropriate stylistic effect was achieved with regard to the desired profile.52 When Ronsard portrays his Adonis, for instance, as ‘a shepherd and a hunter alike’ (Adonis, 9 ‘Adonis et berger et chasseur tout ensemble’), he takes great care to characterize each role by adopting separate and palpably different registers, which rely in turn on distinct models and sources.53 The question concerning the ‘pastoral Adonis’ must be inscribed within the modern revival of the ancient eclogue. In post-classical times the Latin pastoral eclogue was revived by none other than Dante during his exile at Ravenna in 1319–20, and enjoyed a remarkable success in the subsequent two centuries, including among its practitioners some of the most prominent Latin and vernacular authors.54 In the sixteenth century the genre was reconstituted with new premises, and it is at this point that Adonis becomes, once again, a staple character of bucolic poetry. The Virgilian canon comprising the Eclogues and the poems of the (later to be named) Appendix Virgiliana had by then been complemented with the minor Roman bucolics Calpurnius and Nemesianus and the Corpus Theocriteum.55 The vogue spread rapidly from Italy to France and Spain and subsequently to England, influencing both Neo-Latin and vernacular poetry. The actual presence in France and Spain of famous writers of pastoral verse who were also diplomatic representatives of Italian potentates may have contributed to the success of the genre at those two eminent courts. Count Baldassarre Castiglione (1478–1529), one of the most accomplished gentlemen of Europe and author of well-known eclogues such as Alcon (in Latin) and Tirsi (in the vernacular), spent the last five years of his life in Spain as Pope Clement VII’s Apostolic Nuncio.56 The Venetian nobleman Andrea Navagero (1483–1529), the author of Lusus (mostly written in the first decade of the sixteenth century and published in 1530), resided in Madrid and Valladolid as ambassador of the Venetian Republic from 1526 to 1528, and died at Blois during a mission to the French court.57 A member of the Florentine ‘ottimati’, Luigi Alamanni (1495–1556) went into exile in May 1522 after the failure of a conspiracy against Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici and spent the best part of the following thirty-odd years in France as court poet of both François I and Henry II.58 At a considerably less prominent, yet by no means insignificant level, Girolamo Muzio (1496–1576), the author of the century’s most ambitious collection of pastoral eclogues (published 1550), was in 1530–1 at the French court in the retinue of Count Claudio Rangone from Modena and personally offered King François I his eclogue

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‘Venere’, a political allegory based on a reworking of the Adoniac episode.59 A final inclusion should be the ‘Epitaphio di Adone’ by the once-mysterious Amomo, now plausibly identified as the Bishop of Troyes, Antonio Caracciolo, whose collection of Rime toscane per Madama Charlotta d’Hisca was published in Paris in 1535 and again in Venice in 1538, with a preface by the well-known Italian émigré Gabriele Simeoni.60 Alamanni was without doubt the most influential bucolic author of his age. It is a curious coincidence that he, a Florentine like Dante, was, also like Dante, to spend most of his active life in exile – Virgil’s tender lines ‘I relinquished my land and pleasant fields, I left my home’ (Ecl. 1.3–4), must have resonated for them both with a distinctive sweet-sour tone. With his sixteen eclogues in Italian blank verse, the tenth of which is devoted to Adonis, Alamanni endorsed a programme of renovation of the vernacular eclogue by purposely aiming to reproduce the classical hexameter through unrhymed hendecasyllables.61 By avoiding ‘that certain affectation’, as he put it, produced by rhymed verse, he intended to express the ideal of natural speech as fitted to the simple talk of shepherds. He was expertly assisted in his attempt by Giangiorgio Trissino, who likewise supported a classicizing reform of vernacular verse.62 ‘Adone’ is an excellent example of Alamanni’s aspirations. The main body of the text is a free imitation of Bion’s Lament for Adonis rearranged as an amoebaean exchange between two shepherds, Daphni and Dameta, in the manner of Theocritus’ sixth Idyll. The frame within which Bion’s imitation is placed is provided by a brief prologue and an equally brief epilogue. Eight lines rapidly sketch a pastoral scene in a Florentine setting (‘Along the Arno…’), reminescent of Theoc. 6.1–5. In the epilogue Daphni, Alamanni’s own bucolic mask, invokes Theocritus as guide ‘should the course of my song extend beyond the banks of Arno’, which reads like a premonition of the poet’s own exile – a recurring theme in his eclogues. Daphni addresses the Greek poet thus: ‘You are my master, my guide and my leader’, which echoes Dante’s famous self-recommendation to Virgil at Inf. 2.140.63 Owing to Alamanni’s prolonged residence in France, it is only natural that his influence should be manifested mainly, although by no means exclusively, among French poets. His ‘Adone’ and his eclogues in general stand at the fountainhead of the diffusion of the Adonis myth and the bucolic genre in France during the reign of François I and beyond. However, the French approach to the bucolic genre shows features of considerable originality when compared to the parallel Italian tradition. The first noticeable characteristic is the environment in which the French bucolic poets operated and circulated their pieces – the royal court. From Mellin de Saint-Gelais to his rival Ronsard, all such poets appear in one way or another attached to the circles surrounding the sovereign or the members of his family.64 The elevation of the bucolic to a higher rank, so that it could be considered to be a genre truly fit for a king, was also promoted by other factors. The particular variety of the genre known as éclogue forestière must have depended in part on the prestige enjoyed by hunting, which was by then the traditional sport of French kings. Not even the potentially ominous ending of such stories as those of Adonis or Actaeon could dissuade the Queen Mother Caterina de’ Medici from preferring hunting over tournaments, one of which had claimed the life of her husband King Henry II.65 Nor should one underestimate the classicizing flair attached to hunting – especially boar hunting – as opposed to ‘medieval’ jousts.

32 Adonis Caterina’s son Charles, elected King of France at the age of nine, was a passionate hunter and fostered a special attachment to the figure of Adonis, with whom he apparently enjoyed being identified. When he, too, died prematurely in 1574, Claude Binet wrote a dirge in the manner of Bion, proclaiming that the great Charles, also known as Adonis, was dead.66 In the ‘Sonnet sur la tragedie d’Adonis, 1574’ prefixed to Gabriel Le Breton’s tragedy Adonis, the editor François d’Amboise invited the ‘hunting Oreads’ to announce that ‘Charles, your support, your Adonis, your favourite, is [now] dead’.67 In the dedicatory epistle to the Duchess of Beaupréau he referred to the work as ‘that Adonis which used to be the favourite of the late King Charles of happy memory’.68 In an elegy celebrating Charles IX as the author of a manual on hunting left unfinished at his death and published only years later under the title La chasse royale (1625), Ronsard lamented the king’s premature departure by comparing him to the ‘Adoniac Rose’: Ainsi par la tempeste à terre on voit flestrie La Rose Adonienne avant qu’estre fleurie.69 (39–40) Thus one sees the Adoniac Rose struck by the tempest lying withered on the ground before it could bloom.

Even Le Breton’s tragedy Adonis, previously singled out as an exception, can now be fitted easily into the picture. Apart from being expressly written and performed for the enjoyment of Charles IX, its title page exhibiting the genre label ‘tragedy’ in tall block capitals – even taller than the title proper ‘Adonis’ – revealed an aspiration to allow the dramatic idyll to ascend in the hierarchy of genres.70 The genre traditionally qualified as ‘tenuous’ (tenuis), ‘humble’ (humilis) or ‘jejune’ (gracilis) was gaining in prestige thanks to the pronouncement of authoritative scholars, among whom Julius Caesar Scaliger stands out on account of the authority his Poetics acquired in France in those very years.71 Once Scaliger had proclaimed amoebaean verse the ‘most ancient … poetic genre’ (vetustissimum … poematis genus) and as such the ancestor of both comedy and tragedy, the new status of pastoral poetry was assured.72

Adonis and the vernacular idyll: the stanzaic poem In Italy the situation differed. There the eclogue remained a very successful genre and continued to offer a uniquely wide range of inflections, without, however, attaining the prestigious position its French counterpart had acquired.73 The short forest idyll, or epyllion, appears in comparison to have enjoyed greater popularity – both in general and more specifically in the case of narratives with Adonis as the protagonist.

The three authors who tried their hand at the subject of Adonis – Ludovico Dolce (Stanze nella favola d’Adone, 1545), Giovanni Tarcagnota (Adone, 1545) and Girolamo Parabosco (Favola d’Adone, 1558) – were not courtiers but rather men of letters who used their pen to make a living in the thriving world of the Venetian publishing houses. It is not by chance they are far better known today as editors, anthologists, compilers and translators than as authors in their own right. All sufficiently skilled in their trade to cultivate a lucid sense of literary standards, they did not, like Alamanni,

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entertain reforming ambitions of any kind, but appeared rather to sit quite confortably within the precincts of the genre they had chosen for themselves – the narrative short and mid-sized poem in the well-tested stanzaic form of the ottava.74 The information one can gather from the texts’ dedicatory epistles, as well as from the texts themselves, conveys the picture of a world of private relationships occasionally covered by anonymity. Dolce appended his Stanze nella favola d’Adone to the edition of his play Il Capitano (1545) with a dedication to Paolo Crivello, an acquaintance of Aretino and probably close to Pier Paolo Vergerio and his Venetian circle of adherents to the Reformed Church.75 But in the first stanza an anonymous ‘beautiful and noble lady’ is adressed, and a passing reference to the ‘fine sands’ of the River Mincio ‘not far from Peschiera’ at stanza 12 may represent a covert allusion to her identity.76 The dedicatee of Tarcagnota’s Adone, Gioseppe Abocchino, is virtually unknown.77 As for Parabosco’s Favola d’Adone, it is dedicated to ‘My beautiful Lady L…’, who on reading the piece is expected to become less disdainful of Love’s flames and arrows.78 The restricted extent of these three poems and the semi-private nature of their dedications tell in each case a story of limited ambitions.

This is a far cry from those ritualized French pastorals where literary and social conventions appear to be united in mutual bond against the backdrop of a royal courtly scene. In the Italian poems, on the other hand, a less marked stylization is evident, which may account for greater freedom in speech, tone and imagery. Greater audacity in the use of erotic imagery is certainly one factor that distinguishes them from their French counterparts – an audacity possibly driven by seductive purposes of a practical nature, as some of the texts and dedications seem to suggest.79 A darker vein occasionally emerges from the manipulation of selected narrative features. In Dolce’s Favola d’Adone, for instance, Adonis is the victim of an intrigue of the jealous Juno, who demands and eventually obtains from Jupiter that the Parcae should cut Adonis’ thread of life as a punishment for his mother Myrrha’s incest and his scandalous relationship with Venus. At the centre of Dolce’s narration, therefore, are the machinations of Juno as the guarantor of marital love, engaged in her customary strife with Venus as the goddess of illicit passions.80 Yet because of Juno’s exceedingly vengeful and overtly hypocritical conduct, and although the poem ends on a sombre note, one does not feel the overall tone is one of moralizing. It is certainly not as moralizing – and deflating – as the final lines of Ronsard’s Adonis, which produce an interesting contrast when compared to the Italian idylls on the same subject. There the authorial voice comments on Venus’ fickleness in forgetting Adonis ‘for the love of an Anchises’, bathetically mixing melancholy and misogyny (‘Such is, and will [ever] be, the affection of ladies’), while comparing a lady’s affection to ‘an April flower that lives for just a day’.81 It may also be worth noting that no metamorphosis takes place at the end of Ronsard’s Adonis.

In the three Italian texts the context and the story tend to vary, however slightly. The season may be either spring (Dolce) or summer (Tarcagnota, Parabosco); the action may either commence with the two lovers already together (Dolce, Tarcagnota) or with a preamble dealing with their first encounter and mutual seduction (Parabosco); the hunting of the wild boar may result from Adonis’ independent decision in spite of Venus’ warnings (Tarcagnota, Parabosco) or – as we have seen – from an ambush

34 Adonis designed by Juno to take revenge on Adonis’ mother Myrrha and on Venus (Dolce).82 One should also consider the possibility of a calculated variatio implemented by both Tarcagnota and Parabosco against Dolce, and by Parabosco against the two other poets, in order to offer a sense of originality in their own treatment of the myth.

Of the three texts, Dolce’s Favola retains, or rather includes, features of rustic vividness, such as that of Venus pictured in the act of milking ‘with her celestial hands the impure udders of she-goats and she-lambs’ (17.5–6), or said to be happily busy in ‘all such tasks as become shepherds and young shepherdesses’ (22.7–8).83 For Dolce, as well as for Ronsard later on, the model for this rustic scene was Navagero’s eclogue ‘Damon’. There Venus is said to prefer ‘the love flames of her dear Adonis’, on which account she is ready to relinquish ‘the heavens and the shiny stars’ for her lover’s rustic abode and duties.

Fortunate puer! Tecum formosa Dione Una tondet oves, una ad mulctralia ducit, Atque immunda premit caelestibus ubera palmis.84 (Lusus, 20.75–7) Lucky youth! Beside you beautiful Venus now shears the sheep, now leads them to the milking pails, and her celestial hands press their impure udders.

Among the said texts mentioned above, Tarcagnota’s Adone is the most ambitious in terms of narrative ingenuity and exploitation of the stylistic medium. It shows a markedly mannerist development of the story by elaborating in particular on the ps.-Theocritean The Dead Adonis. It will be remembered that the morbid boar of the anonymous Hellenistic poet had already altogether lost its menacing outlook.85 In that little poem tragedy had been reduced to the dimension of an unwanted accident, and the culprit identified as a ‘humanized’ beast overcome by a fit of mad desire to kiss Adonis’ thigh – a simple mistake had thus led to the fatal wounding in the groin. The mildly absurd comicity of the episode is taken up and emphasized by Tarcagnota. In his poem the boar is made to circle around Adonis in ecstatic admiration of the youth’s beauty, and only when a gust of wind lifts Adonis’ vest does burning lust get the upper hand (L’Adone, 15–26). Tarcagnota also attempted to introduce further small variations on minor details of the myth, displaying a moderate aetiologic inventiveness and a propensity to variatio which seem to anticipate certain innovations of Late Renaissance and Baroque poetry. According to his own declaration in the dedication, he identified the flower of Adonis’ metamorphosis with the poppy (papavero), and he added the transformation of Venus’ torn hair into the lacy plant and yellow flowers of maidenhair (It. capelvenere, Lat. capillus Veneris).86 From these three rather ordinary texts a common feature seems to emerge: the clear definition of the story’s narrative foci. Following an arrangement that ultimately goes back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and excluding the premise – only hinted at through retrospective reference – of the Myrrha episode, the narration is dominated in all three cases by the love affair between the goddess and the youth on one hand, and the departure for the hunt and the death of the latter on the other.87 Irrespective of how luxuriant the rhetorically decorative parts may be, this structure remains in place for the vast majority of sixteenth-century poems on Adonis, both in Italy and

Adonis and the Renaissance idyll

35

elsewhere. This is also the case with Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, whose treatment of the Ovidian tale was long ago shown to be dependent on Italian mediation – though Shakespeare’s poem, apart of course from its author’s mastery in the treatment of the verse, has a special claim to originality for its more pronounced eroticism and for Adonis’ remarkable obstinacy in refusing to be an ‘easy lay’.88 As will be seen in Chapter 4, even Giovan Battista Marino’s grand poem Adone (1623), in spite of its magnitude, retains identical characteristics as far as the arrangement and narrative structure are concerned.

The prominence of the two narrative moments – the love encounter and the fatal hunt – is confirmed by the sixteenth-century figurative tradition.89 Painters saw the double opportunity to explore the potential of the Adonis myth in both its erotic and tragic aspects. Virtually every great artist of the Renaissance engaged with the subject either personally or through their school. Giorgione, Baldassarre Peruzzi, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Sebastiano del Piombo, Correggio, Primaticcio, Rosso Fiorentino, Tintoretto, Titian, Niccolò dell’Abate, Vasari, Veronese, Luca Cambiaso, Taddeo Zuccari and Annibale Carracci, and in the following century Rubens, Cornelis Cornelisz, Hendrik Goltzius, Domenichino, van Dyck, Francesco Albani, Poussin and Guercino – to mention but the most prominent – tried their hand at the Adonis myth.90 The amorous scenes, and notably the adieus before the departure for the hunt, are among the subjects most frequently painted. The dead or mortally wounded Adonis is another favourite, with Venus either approaching the scene in haste or already next to him in tears, while winged cupids support Adonis’ failing body or are busy catching the guilty boar in the background (as in ps.-Theoc. The Dead Adonis, 7–16). In some of these compositions occasional but intriguing overlappings with the figurative tradition of the Deposition of Christ are clearly noticeable, as for instance in van Dyck’s drawing (London, British Museum) reproduced on the dust jacket of this volume.

Titian’s ‘Venus and Adonis’ (Madrid, Museo del Prado) is one of the artist’s most famous paintings on mythological subjects. Titian is credited with having stressed, or indeed invented, Adonis’ coy attitude towards Venus, and this was criticized by Raffaello Borghini for it appeared to contradict the literary sources.91 But this critique did not affect the already universal fame of the painting, which had received highsounding praises at its appearance. The pictorial representation of Adonis constituted in itself an alluring challenge for the painter, requiring as it did a perfect combination of masculine and feminine beauty. This is well illustrated in Lodovico Dolce’s famous letter written in explanation of Titian’s painting, which the artist himself called a ‘poesia’.

This ‘poem’ on Adonis was painted recently and sent by the divine Titian to the King of England. … One can see that this unique master tried to express in Adonis’ face a graceful handsomeness, which while partaking of the feminine does not however depart from the virile: whereby I mean that a woman might have a certain something male about her, and a man something beautifully female – a mixture difficult to achieve, agreeable, and one most highly valued by Apelles (if Pliny [HN 35.36.79] is to be believed).92

36 Adonis Further illustrations of the story may result from unusual pictorial solutions. A fairly uncommon pattern is offered, for instance, by the diptych displaying the birth and death of Adonis by Sebastiano del Piombo (La Spezia, Museo Civico). In other cases a series of paintings may derive from the reappearance and circulation in highly influential circles of relatively rare literary sources. Such is the case with Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata – not the most inspirational of texts at first sight, but one that happened to be ‘rediscovered’ in the circle of Politian and Lorenzo de’ Medici. In conjunction with the description of Adonis’ sepulchre in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the passage from the Progymnasmata stimulated the exploration of two non-Ovidian episodes connected with the idyllic tradition, the staining of the rose (Sebastiano del Piombo, ‘The Death of Adonis’, Florence, Museo degli Uffizi), and Mars chasing Adonis (Giulio Romano, Mantua, Palazzo del Te, ‘Sala di Psiche’).93

Ovid’s Adonis in translation The confinement to short- and mid-length poems was a lot shared by Adonis with other subsidiary mythological characters, who likewise struggled to release themselves from their marginal position. As we have seen, the dominant presence and authority of the Greek Bucolics and above all of Ovid’s Metamorphoses inhibited any substantial alteration of the Adonis myth. The unbroken popularity of Ovid’s poem in particular was strengthened and augmented by means of new and successful vernacular translations and adaptations.

As Bodo Guthmüller has shown, the old ‘medieval’ tradition of the ‘moralized’ and ‘allegorized’ Metamorphoses exercised its influence well into the earlier sixteenth century.94 This is evident in the vernacular prose translations, from the late fourteenth-century translation of Giovanni dei Buonsignori to the Ovidio Metamorphoseos vulgare of 1498, but also in translations in verse, be they versions or rather reworkings of single episodes like the Historia de Mirra nuovamente in octava rima traducta (The Story of Myrrha Translated for the First Time in ‘ottava rima’, before 1515? by an otherwise unknown Emilianus Carnarius), or complete translations such as Nicolò degli Agostini’s Ovidio Metamorphoseos in verso vulgar (1522). Both these works present a rather uncouth ‘cantare’ style, and Agostini’s version comprises prose ‘allegories’ for each canto.95 The publication dates show them to be contemporary with some of the most successful Italian chivalric poems, and Agostini himself is more commonly remembered for having produced a continuation to Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Inamoramento de Orlando several years before Ariosto came up with his own sequel, Orlando furioso (1516).96 According to Guthmüller, this new vogue for romanzi – as chivalric poems came to be known in Italy – marked a turning point in the reception of Ovid among readers of vernacular works. High demand soon affected the reception of the Metamorphoses as well, as readers craved to read it ‘in the guise of a romance’.97 When Lodovico Dolce’s complete version in ottava rima appeared in 1553, it instantly rendered the older versions obsolete. Dolce’s blank-verse translation of Book 1 (1539) and his Stanze nella favola d’Adone (1545) may be said to be trial samples of his major

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37

enterprise, which he had the impudence to publish under his own name as Le Trasformationi without a trace of the ancient author’s name on the title page.98 In Dolce’s thirty-canto version, the entire twenty-first canto is assigned to the story of Myrrha and Adonis – a minor but not irrelevant feature, potentially suggestive of narrative independence for anyone intending to develop the episode on a grander scale.99 The other noteworthy sixteenth-century version is that by Giovanni Andrea dell’Anguillara (1561), which superseded Dolce’s in its turn. It has recently been styled as ‘digressive, artificial, magniloquent’, and as such recognized as an important forerunner of the development of Baroque literary style.100 Anguillara also worked for some time in France in the Italian circles of Lyon, and his coup d’essai, the translation of the first three books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was published in Paris in 1554 with a dedication to King Henry II; the complete text, published in Venice in 1561, was dedicated to another King of France, Henry’s son Charles IX.101 This should be remembered when considering that over 60 years later Giovan Battista Marino was again able to offer an ‘Ovidian’ poem like his Adone (1623) to the King and the Queen Mother of the same country.102 From their second editions onwards both Dolce’s and Anguillara’s versions were equipped with a sizeable exegetical apparatus printed at the end of each canto. Dolce provided his own (1561), whereas Giuseppe Orologi’s was appended to Anguillara’s translation (1563).103 These observations bear the customary heading of ‘Allegories’ and are tendentially meant to allegorize Ovid’s text by applying to it an interpretative ‘coating’, as it were, the superimposed meaning of which is meant to overpower the literal sense. This was an old device, broadly comparable to the techniques of the medieval exegetes and adapted to the taste of the early modern reader. But the invitation to abandon the literal sense for the allegorical may have had in this case a further, undeclared intent. As stories involving pagan deities and moral standards incompatible with Christian ethics were increasingly being put under scrutiny, the preservation of textual integrity had become a burning issue. This was particularly true of vernacular texts, on which the attention of censors was primarily focused.104 Now Dolce’s and Orologi’s ‘Allegories’ appeared in print after the first Index of Forbidden Books promulgated by Pope Paul IV – the so-called Pauline Index (1559) – had been in existence for some years, and just before the Tridentine Index was introduced in 1564. How far ‘Allegories’ could be regarded as an effective solution for authors afflicted by the presence (or merely the thought) of censors can be observed in the case of Torquato Tasso’s revision work on his Gerusalemme liberata. Tasso’s revision was conducted in the years 1575–6 by ways of written correspondence with a group of ‘revisors’, which also included a Father Inquisitor. The discussions touched on a number of points, from general narrative solutions and the nature and function of episodes to questions concerning style, syntax and lexical choice, and were often characterized by a marked ideological and confessional edge. It was in the final phase of this self-imposed yet not always comfortable dialogue that Tasso came to acknowledge the potential usefulness of an ‘Allegory’ for his poem. By allowing a general transposition of meaning in relation to the poem’s main aims and ends, the application of allegorical interpretation offered a positive solution for all those features

38 Adonis which on the literal level appeared to conflict with the established narrative and moral conventions.105 The principle of allegorical interpretation was not simply a way of preserving texts from mutilations prior to and after their publication. It also allowed the treatment of mythological matter, which ecclesiastical censorship would at this stage be inclined to consider seriously problematic. The relevance of this point will emerge in relation to scholarship on ancient mythography (Chapter 3) and to the debate on the greatest poem ever devoted to the subject of Adonis, Giovan Battista Marinoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Adone (Chapters 4 and 5).

3

Adonis in sixteenth-century mythography

As observed in the previous chapter, an adherence to the tradition of the pastoralidyllic genre characterized virtually every sixteenth-century European literary text dealing with the myth of Adonis.

Pastoral and mythological idylls do not ordinarily aspire to address or include learned topics, although the very affectation of simplicity could in many cases be regarded as a subtle refinement of learning. In addition, limitations imposed by the classicizing doctrine of literary genres discouraged any significant attempt to absorb elements of a didactic or speculative nature within the idyllic genre. Consequently, the texts examined in Chapter 2 display a high degree of conventionality in the treatment of their subject, as well as exhibiting a dominant preoccupation with matters of register and style. It could be said that literary production and antiquarian research into ancient mythology – at least as far as the subject of Adonis is concerned – parted ways in the course of the sixteenth century, only to be reunited again in the seventeenth. By then, an interest in the figure of Adonis had been revived by the publication and circulation of novel or updated mythological treatises, by a renewed curiosity concerning unconventional aspects of the ancient myth, and by a resurgent interest in allegory as an interpretative tool.

Three works marked a turning point in the tradition of Renaissance mythography.

Two of them, Lelio Gregorio Giraldi’s De deis Gentium varia et multiplex historia (A Various and Manifold History of the Pagan Gods, 1548) and Natale Conti’s Mythologiae, sive Explicationum fabularum libri X (Ten Books on Mythology, or, The Myths Explained, 15681; 15812) are the most important manuals published in the course of the century; they are often considered together because of their overall common subject and intent.

The third work, Vincenzo Cartari’s Le imagini de i dei degli antiqui (The Images of the Ancient Gods, 1556), enjoyed great success among artists and their advisors for providing extensive iconographic information in the vernacular, with the additional support – from the second edition onwards – of a wide range of illustrations. Cartari’s work is, however, heavily indebted to Giraldi’s treatise, and patently inferior in terms of accuracy and thoroughness.1

40 Adonis

Early attempts at a new mythography In the early decades of the sixteenth century, an urgent need for updated mythological encyclopaedias and lexica was increasingly felt. Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Ancient Gods remained the standard reference work of the category; it had however been in existence for almost one-and-a-half centuries. While it continued to command respect for its all-embracing design and detailed content, by the early 1500s most of the information it provided was seriously inadequate. To use the words of Juan Luis Vives, Boccaccio had performed his task ‘more happily than could have been hoped for in his century’. Likewise Giraldi, while praising the fruit of Boccaccio’s scholarly application and talent, could not but add: ‘by the standards of his time’.2 The advances achieved by Italian and European Humanism in all fields of antiquarian knowledge demanded at the very least a thorough overhauling of Boccaccio’s work.

Replacing Boccaccio’s Genealogy did not prove easy. It is symptomatic that, before resorting to such a decision, steps were taken to preserve and reinforce the authority of his treatise. The Latin text, circulated widely in manuscript form, was printed no fewer than fifteen times between 1472 and 1552. The Basel edition of 1532, by Jacobus Micyllus, represents the most radical attempt to domesticate the text by neutralizing the grossest inaccuracies and adding new, more correct information.3 Translations into modern vernaculars served in part the same purpose. In France, a translation had already been published twice, in 1498 and 1531, and another would be produced

by Claude Wittard in 1578.4 In Italy, Giuseppe Betussi published his successful translation-adaptation in 1547, which was to be continuously reprinted right into the seventeenth century.5 Thus, in one shape or another, Boccaccio’s Genealogy continued to sit on the desks of scholars and literati. Renaissance mythographers may well have gradually shied away from openly acknowledging Boccaccio as one of their sources while showing an increasing tendency to quote from Hellenic authorities, but their information is all too often recognizable as of Boccaccian derivation, with references to Greek authors as but superficial name-dropping. Furthermore, certain sections of Boccaccio’s work which had been exposed by scholars as fanciful were unexpectedly given a renaissance in new literary texts, almost as though their obsolete status had turned them into something rich and strange. An excellent example is provided by Boccaccio’s fantastic Demogorgon. A character famously generated by a misreading of Gr. dēmiourgos, which (as Giraldi was the first to clarify) Boccaccio had found in a corrupt version of Lactantius Placidus’ in Stat. Theb. 4.516, Demogorgon was portrayed in the Genealogy as the father of all gods (Gen. 1.Pref.3.8 – seemingly on the basis of a pseudoetymology).6 The ‘Demogorgone’ of Boiardo’s Inamoramento de Orlando (2.13.29), of Folengo’s Baldus (18.312, 22.376 and 441, 23.338 and 400) and of Ariosto’s Cinque canti (1.4), the Demogorgons of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1.5.22, 4.2.47) and Milton’s Paradise Lost (2.965) – not to mention Shelley’s Demorgogon in Prometheus Unbound – are all descendants of Boccaccio’s, or rather his source’s, ‘slip of the pen’.7 The hesitation and reticence characterizing the new attitude towards Boccaccio and other compilers from non-classical periods is clearly attested in Mario Equicola’s Libro de natura de amore (A Book on the Nature of Love). Presumably begun in the

Adonis in sixteenth-century mythography

41

last decade of the fifteenth century, this work went through a draft version which still survives in manuscript form, datable to 1505–8, and bears signs of a further revision conducted in 1509–11. The work was eventually published in 1525.8 In the manuscript version, considered here, the passage summarizing mythographic knowledge concerning Adonis is included in Book 4 as part of Chapter 5 ‘On Venus’ (‘De Venere’) and of a wider discussion on the nature of sensual love.9 Poets said that [Venus] was in love with Adonis, who stands for the Sun according to what the Assyrians believed, followed by the Phoenicians [Macrob. Sat. 1.21.1; Bocc. Gen. 2.53.3]. The Earth is divided into two hemispheres. The superior hemisphere, inhabited by us, is said to be Venus’; the inferior, [situated] at the antipodes, is according to the ancients the home of Proserpine. Venus cries for six months, that is, for the time the Sun visits the other hemisphere (the boar which killed Adonis is understood to be winter) [Macrob. Sat. 1.21.4; Bocc. Gen. 2.53.2]. Others claim that Adonis was born of Myrrha, [and myrrh is a substance] agreeable to Venus, favouring coitus and (as Petronius has it) exciting lust [Fulg.

Myth. 3.8.124; Myth. Vat. III 11.17; Bocc. Gen. 2.52.4]. Adonis is killed – he stands for lust, which vanishes with old age and does not rise again. Adonis means sweetness [Ibid.]. We read about his gardens in Plato and Pliny [Pl. Phaedr. 276b; Plin. HN 21.60]. Pausanias the Grammarian claims that the gardens of Adonis are those where fennel and lettuce were grown and were kept in vases outside the window; that nothing but [short-lived] pleasure is in them. Hence the proverb aimed at men of little value, who care about things of slight consequence bearing little fruit [Paus. Gramm. Frag. α27 ed. Erbse]. Theocritus makes allusion to them [Theoc. 15.113–4], and sings of the tears that Venus shed upon the dead Adonis and were then changed into poppies, and of Adonis’ blood which stained the rose.

[Bion, Epitaph. Adon. 64–6]10

Plato, Pliny, Pausanias the Grammarian and Theocritus are the only authorities explicitly named in the cited passage, but Equicola’s stock information is in reality derived from Macrobius and Boccaccio, and presumably Fulgentius. The case of Macrobius is revealing. His name had been introduced at the beginning of the sentence where the division of the Earth into two hemispheres is referred to (‘According to Macrobius, the Earth…’), but was removed during the process of revision, as an erasure in the manuscript shows.11 The reference to the passage by Bion as Theocritean is justified insofar as Bion’s Lament for Adonis had been published by Aldo Manuzio as an anonymous item of the Corpus Theocriteum; only in 1530 would Bion’s name be proposed for the poem’s authorship by Joachim Camerarius.12 Yet Plato, Pliny and Pausanias occur together under the entry ‘Gardens of Adonis’ in the earlier version of Erasmus’ Adagia, first published in 1500 and continuously reprinted even after the appearance of the second expanded edition (1508). There is every possibility that Equicola derived part of his basic information from Erasmus’ popular collection, as the following Erasmian passage suggests.

Pausanias the Grammarian reports that the ‘Gardens of Adonis’, filled with lettuce and fennel, were dedicated to Venus, and seeds were planted in them as

42 Adonis one usually does in pots, and the feat became a proverb against futile and trifling people. On Adonis read Pliny, Book 21, Chapter 10 [HN 21.60]. The same gardens are also mentioned by Plato [Phaedr. 276b], whereby he means the collecting of those little flowers that are bound to die shortly.13

As has been argued, the new tendency to remove non-classical sources from the page was not particularly effective.14 No matter how many disparaging comments or embarrassed silences they may have met with, Boccaccio’s Genealogy, as well as other medieval or late-antique mythographic treatises, continued to be the port of call for all those readers in search of their first encounter with ancient mythology. With the addition of select ancient works, such treatises together formed a mythographic ‘vulgate’ that circulated widely. The mythological and astronomical works of Hyginus, Palaephatus, Fulgentius, Aratus and Proclus were published in one volume in Basel in 1535, and subsequent editions gradually came to include Annaeus Cornutus’ Theologiae Graecae compendium (at the time commonly known as Phornutus, or Phurnutus), the De deorum imaginibus libellus of Albricus’ (‘the Philosopher’), Apollodorus’ Library and Lelio Gregorio Giraldi’s De Musis Syntagma.15 Information about ancient myths could also be gleaned, in rather piecemeal fashion, from general encyclopaedias and dictionaries. From the Etymologicum magnum, readers familiarized themselves with the etymology of Adonis and cognate terms and read about the curious association, also made by Hesychius (Ēoiēs), of Adonis and Aōos in Cyprus (19.9–21; 117.33 ed. Gaisford; H652 ed. Latte). They also learned of Aphaca in Lebanon as the place where Venus and Adonis had met for the first (and last) time, and where Adonis’ body was believed to be buried (175.6–9).16 The Suda has an entry on the ‘Gardens of Adonis’ (A517 ed. Adler), and so has Hesychius (A1231 ed. Latte).17 Hercules’ disparaging comment on the cult of Adonis (‘nothing sacred’) was included and illustrated in Polydore Vergil’s and Erasmus’ proverb collections.18 Further information could also be gathered from thematically arranged literary encyclopaedias, primarily devised to offer support to authors engaged in composing literary works. Ravisius Textor’s Officina (Workshop), published for the first time in Basel in 1503 and frequently reprinted into the seventeenth century, included references to Adonis under such comprehensive headings as ‘Killed by boars’, ‘Handsome men and beautiful women’, ‘Lovers of the gods and of men’, and ‘Hunters’.19 Such an arrangement clearly owes a debt to the classification used in Hyginus’ Fabulae. Under ‘Learned women’, Textor reports the vulgate proverb ‘sillier than Praxilla’s Adonis’, with further reference to the second, expanded version of Erasmus’ Adagia (2.9.11).20 Also by Textor is the extremely popular Epithetorum opus (A Collection of Epithets, 1518) – ‘most useful as well as most complete’, according to the title page of one of its innumerable reprints – which inaugurated a tradition that continued until as late as Roscher’s Supplement.21 Under the entry ‘Adonis’, Textor assembles the epithets culled from ancient and modern Latin authors, and Pontano significantly heads the list with three entries: ‘ploratus Veneri’ (Ov. Ars am. 1.75), ‘aptus sylvis’ (Ibid. 1.510), ‘formosus’ (Verg. Buc. 10.18), ‘Cynareius’ (Auson. 13.53.7), ‘[murice] pictus’ (Auson.

19.11), ‘pulcher’ (Nemes. 2.73), ‘tener’ (Pontano, Ur. 5.494), ‘dulcis’ (Pontano, Hort.

Hesp. 1.221), ‘mollis’ (Pontano, De am. coniug. 2.7.32), ‘miserandus’ (Urceo Codro,

Adonis in sixteenth-century mythography

43

‘De Ioanne Marsilio Oda’, 74), ‘Cithereius’ (Tito Vesp. Strozzi, Eroticon libri, 4.8.28), ‘purpureus’ (Giovanni Aurelio Augurelli, Carm. 1.11.14), ‘niveus’ (Prop. 2.13.53).22 Reach me some poet’s index that will show Imagines deorum, Booke of Epithets, Natalis Comes … (‘Satire II’, 26–8)

John Marston’s often-quoted verses show that a mixed régime of both obsolete and new mythographic sources continued to obtain in his own time – that is, well into the seventeenth century.23 Already on approaching the middle of the previous century, however, it had become clear that the material of ancient mythology demanded to be arranged in a more critical, as well as more rational, manner. A number of works having failed to accomplish the mandate, the publication of Giraldi’s De deis Gentium established new standards in mythographic scholarship.24

Lelio Gregorio Giraldi’s pagan gods All Giraldi’s works are characterized by formidable erudition and amazing intellectual breadth but, even by his own standards, the treatise De deis Gentium is an outstanding achievement. It appeared in Basel in 1548 and for at least a century remained the main reference tool of classical scholars in the domain of ancient mythology. Its writing is closely knit and packed with references not always accompanied by quotations, sources being often paraphrased or simply referred to. It frequently looks as if the material had been poured directly in from the author’s own notes, which would not be surprising given the dire conditions under which Giraldi brought his work to completion.25 The result is one of extraordinary richness, offering evidence on every page of the great advances made by humanist scholarship in the field of classical mythology.

The chapter devoted to Adonis is part of Syntagm 13, but Adonis is already mentioned in Syntagm 8 with reference to the two syncretistic epigrams by Ausonius proclaiming the equivalence of Dionysus with Adonis (Epigr. 32 and 33).26 The form ‘Adoneus’, noted as characteristic of those two epigrams and of Origenes’ Contra Celsum, 6.32 (where ‘Adoneus’ is given as the equivalent of Jah, Sabaoth, and Eloaeus), will be recognized in Syntagm 13 as Plautine (Men. 144).27 Syntagm 13 is dominated by the chapter on Venus, followed by those on Cupid, Adonis, Vulcan and the Graces. The chapter on Adonis offers an assessment of the origin of the myth, its rituals, cult, and allegorical meanings.

Giraldi was not in a position to free himself entirely of the continuing powerful influence exercised by late-antique and medieval repertoires, as has been persuasively argued by Allen.28 Traditional elements are thus derived not just from Ovid’s Metamorphoses but from Servius and Fulgentius as well. In general, however, a clear and genuine preference for Greek sources is evident. Phurnutus’ (i.e. Cornutus’) Theologiae Graecae Compendium, 54–5, and the Scholia Theocritea, 3.48, are now the authorities for the allegory of Adonis as wheat, with a further comment at the end of the chapter on Cornutus’ allegorical interpretation of the boar’s tusk as the plough’s tooth (Theol. Gr. Comp. 28).29

44 Adonis It is not easy, from Giraldi’s succinct notes, to extract or even to guess his personal interpretation (if he ever cared to have one) of the myth in question. The selection and arrangement of the sources suggest a syncretistic approach. When reporting on the multiplicity of Adonis’ names, Giraldi seems to accept a substantial equivalence between the Phoenicians’ Gingrēs (Athen. Deipn. 4.174f.), the Jews’ Thamuz/Thamus (Hier. In Ezech. 8.14), the Persians’ Abobas (Hesych. A234) and the Cypriots’ Gabanta (in fact Gauas, Lyc. Alex. 831) or Pugmaion (Hesych. Π4281).30 The problem of the supposed existence of two ‘Adones’, one venerated in Cyprus and the other in Byblos, is addressed by resorting to the authority of Stephanus of Byzantium (Ethn. A249 Amathous ed. Billerbeck), who had identified a common Egyptian origin for both in the cult of ‘Adonosiris’ in the Cyprian city of Amathus.31 The customary references for the lamentations on the death of Adonis are adduced (Hier. In Ezech. 8.14; Macrob. Sat. 1.21; Luc. Dea Syr. 28.30; Grat. Cyneg. 66–7; Hymn.

Orph. 56; Bion’s Lament for Adonis – cited as Theocritus, ‘Idyll 23’), as are those for the Adonia (Ar. Lys. 393–6; Plut. Alcib. 18.5, Nic. 13.7; Strab. 16.1.27; Amm. Marc.

22.9.15). Praxilla’s and Hercules’ proverbial comments are dutifully mentioned too.

On the Gardens of Adonis, over and above references to Plato and Pausanias the Grammarian, the name of Aristotle unexpectedly comes up – most likely a slip, or misprint, for Aristophanes.32 Giraldi also cites Eusebius (Prep. evang. 3.11.12) and Augustine (Civ. Dei 7.25) for their claim that the ancients understood Adonis to stand allegorically for ‘ripe fruits as well as short-lived flowers’.33 Several other points are made, but one in particular deserves attention: the discussion of the symbolic meaning of lettuce. As is well known, this once marginal or utterly disregarded aspect of the Adonis myth was revived by Marcel Detienne in his book on the Gardens of Adonis. According to that eminent French scholar, Adonis’ association with lettuce stressed his frigid and fruitless nature. Lettuce, as Detienne asserted, was indicative of ‘sexual impotence and lack of vital force’ in every type of Greek writing, from botany to comedy, ‘suffering from the same unfortunate reputation as does bromide among the soldiers of today’.34 Giraldi seems to have been the first of the modern mythographers to acknowledge this aspect of the myth, presumably (for in this case he does not mention his source) from reading the following passage in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists.

Nicander the Colophonian says that Adonis was running towards a plant of this kind [i.e. of lettuce] when he was slain by the boar … And Callimachus says that Venus hid Adonis under a lettuce, meaning allegorically that those who are addicted to lettuce are very little apt to pleasures of love … And Cratinus says that Venus when in love with Phaon hid him under the lettuce. (Athen. 2.80a, tr. C. D. Yonge)

Giraldi even produced a pointed epigram, ascribed by him to an undisclosed ‘learned man’ (‘docti viri carmen’) who turns out to be none other than Andrea Alciato, for the poem had appeared in the latest edition (1546) of his Emblemata.35 Inguina dente fero suffossum Cypris Adonim Lactucae foliis condidit exanimem.

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Hinc genitali arvo tantum lactuca resistit, Quantum eruca salax vix stimulare potest.

Pierced in the groin by the cruel tusk, the lifeless Adonis was hidden by Cypris [i.e. Venus] among the leaves of the lettuce. Hence lettuce is so strongly opposed to the female nature [cf. Verg. G. 3.136] that the arousing colewort can barely stimulate it.

While the former distich on Venus hiding Adonis’ corpse under the lettuce is clear in its meaning, the latter, on the herb’s ‘devitalizing’ properties and effects, may not be immediately intelligible. It does not seem to refer to Adonis’ traditional lack of stamina translating into short-lived pleasure; rather, the ‘chilling’ lettuce is understood here as a remedy against the excess of amorous passion in women, an anti-aphrodisiac capable of neutralizing the opposite, arousing effect of colewort.36 Alciato’s epigram may thus be said to be an erudite variation, riddled with an obscene innuendo, on the Terentian theme – by then a hackneyed proverb – ‘Without the aid of Ceres and Bacchus, Venus freezes’ (Eun. 372).

In his handling of the question of lettuce, Giraldi was also the first to observe the interchangeable role of Adonis and Phaon. The resemblance of the two figures, suggested by Cratinus’ excerpt quoted by Athenaeus, was in recent times vigorously stressed by C. M. Bowra and Detienne, who both concluded that Adonis and Phaon were, ‘in fact, one and the same mythical figure’.37 The question seems to be destined to remain unresolved for now;38 nonetheless, it is perhaps surprising to learn that it could impel a reputable scholar such as J. D. Beazley, while at work on two Etruscan vases showing respectively Adonis and Phaon as Aphrodite’s favourite, to volunteer the following impatient comment: Adonis has always seemed to me, though true to life, an uninteresting character, unworthy of being coupled, as he has been from this time – the late fifth century [bce] – down to our own, with the divine Helen: Describe Adonis and the counterfet Is poorely immitated after you; On Hellens cheke all art of beautie set, And you in Grecian tires are painted new.

I prefer Phaon, who did at least rise from the ranks.39

Giraldi merely remarked the resemblance between the two characters and referred the reader to his Historia poetarum, where he dealt with Sappho and Phaon with no further allusion to Adonis.40

Natale Conti’s explanation of myths Vincenzo Cartari’s Le imagini de i dei degli antiqui (1556) ought to be next in line in this rapid overview of the Italian Renaissance’s most influential mythographers and their contribution to a better knowledge of the Adonis myth. The derivative nature of

46 Adonis his work, which has already been noted, and the fact that Adonis is considered as an appendix to the treatment of the figure of Venus makes Cartari’s contribution of little consequence for our purpose.41 An entirely different approach is required, on the other hand, when considering Natale Conti’s Mythologia.

The life and personality of Natale Conti (1520–82), even more so than that of Giraldi, is almost exclusively portrayed in his works and in a very few external documents.42 When compared to Giraldi’s De deis Gentium, Conti’s Mythologia can be regarded as a step forward (but not always and necessarily an improvement), as well as a step sideways. For reasons that have not yet been clarified, Conti never mentions Giraldi; it is however clear that he is both building upon and, where necessary, amending the work of his predecessor. In Conti’s treatise the sources are more extensively quoted than in that of Giraldi; but the question of what advance he may have made on his rival, in terms of accurate knowledge of his subject, is more contentious. Limiting the case to Adonis, Giraldi’s information was undoubtedly a match to Conti’s: he had access to the rich mythographic material in John and Isaac Tzetzes’ scholia to Lycophron’s Alexandra, which appeared in print (1546) just in advance of the publication of his De deis Gentium; and although Apollodorus’ Library was still unpublished at the time, he was nonetheless able to list it among his sources.43 On the other hand, Conti appears to have a firmer grasp of Hellenic texts; besides, as recent research suggests, he never ceased to improve his work by gaining access to additional sources and by obtaining the help of fellow erudites between the publication of the first (1568) and second editions (1581).44 But such authoritative scholars as Joseph Justus Scaliger, Pierre Daniel Huet, and even Felix Jacoby cast serious doubts on his integrity, and Conti’s reputation became seriously tarnished.45 Rather than lingering on points of detail, it is perhaps more helpful to underline the new context in which Conti set his treatment of the figure of Adonis. As has been observed, Conti produced a more rational subdivision of the matter and a much improved general design compared with Giraldi’s effort. A constant feature of Conti’s work is his ambition to prove that ancient myths are condensed narratives replete with philosophical significance. The same observation is made several times in his book and, more pointedly than anywhere else, at the end of the chapter on Adonis. There Conti, having quoted Hymn. Orph. 56, proclaims the ancient myths as philosophically relevant as the theories of Platonists and Peripatetics, and only in need of being unpacked to merit full appreciation. ‘For if ’, he claims, ‘one excises all disputes from the works of Aristotle, which now occupy many volumes, only very brief sentences will remain’.46 This may sound like a snipe at professional (i.e. scholastic) philosophers, somewhat in the humanist tradition which began with Ficino and Pico and continued through successive stages to Francis Bacon.47 But one also notices in Conti’s treatise a clear allegorizing slant, whereby the ‘mysteriously meant’ element of Renaissance mythography is constantly emphasized. This allegorical tendency had its roots in medieval exegesis, and Conti appears to have been one of its staunchest supporters. In his tenth and final book, entitled ‘That all the dogmas of the philosophers were contained [and explained] in [the form of] mythical narratives’, Conti rapidly revisited all the myths discussed in the previous nine books and explicitly stressed their allegorical and moral meaning, often

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resorting to ‘medieval’ distinctions and classifications as historice, physice, ethice, and suchlike.48 The most remarkable change affecting the character of Adonis in Conti’s work is the position assigned to him. In Giraldi’s De deis Gentium, as has been noted, Adonis is treated, together with Cupid, Vulcan and the Graces, as a secondary character in the shadow of Venus’ dominating figure. In Conti’s Mythologia, Adonis finds himself in altogether different company. While Venus, Cupid and the Graces are dealt with in Book 4 and Vulcan in Book 2, Adonis is inserted in Book 5, preceded by Bacchus, Ceres and Priapus and followed by the Sun, Pales, Aristaeus, the Earth and Feronia.

This is clearly a group of ‘vitalistic’ deities, all somehow connected with the notion of natural cycles of death and revival. Even more than Giraldi’s Adonis, Conti’s is an independent character; he has been separated from Venus and allowed to stand on his own two feet, as it were. Moreover, like Giraldi before him and in line with a tendency that characterizes the sixteenth-century approach to the myth, Conti assigns minimal importance to the figure of Adonis’ mother, Myrrha. Myrrha played a prominent role in Ovid and in all the late-antique and medieval mythographers, including Boccaccio; in all these texts her pathetic story overshadows that of her son. In Giraldi’s and Conti’s treatises, as well as virtually all the other texts examined in Chapter 2, Myrrha’s story is reduced to a line or two – no more than a brief narrative premise.

The solar myth of Adonis in decorative cycles The Adonis myth enjoyed great popularity in sixteenth-century art. As has been mentioned in Chapter 2, it was primarily the erotic and pathetic aspects of the story that attracted the attention of art patrons and collectors and stimulated the fantasy of painters. Conversely, not much can be said about the influence exercised by the myth’s symbolic and allegorical interpretation. One famous painting that was traditionally believed to represent a ‘Death of Adonis’ within a notoriously complex iconographic context – a fresco by Rosso Fiorentino in the Galerie François I at Fontainebleau – is now understood to be a ‘Death of Attis’ instead.49 A cycle of paintings devoted to Adonis, destined for the frieze of one of the main rooms (now ‘Sala di Adone’) of the Palazzo Orsini at Monterotondo near Rome, was executed between 1554 and 1560 by Girolamo Siciolante of Sermoneta (1521–80). It includes scenes of Cinyras’ wrath, the birth of Adonis, Adonis and Venus, and the death of Adonis, all of which can be traced back to Ovid or his imitators.50 A series of small frescoes, painted in 1561–3 by Federico Zuccari on the vault of the loggia of the so-called Casino of Pius IV in the Vatican, is the only truly important pictorial cycle devoted to Adonis that was in part inspired by Renaissance mythography.51 The story unfolds over ten scenes, focusing in particular on Adonis’ hunt, Venus’ lamentations, the boar’s trial and punishment, and Venus departing in her chariot. In his book The Casino of Pius IV, Graham Smith justly declared it ‘an unusually rich cycle illustrating the passion of Adonis’.52 While overall the ten scenes appear inspired by Ovid and the ps.-Theocritean The Dead Adonis, their allegorical significance is enhanced through association with other pagan myths and biblical

48 Adonis stories that decorate the loggia and its adjacent spaces. The programme, devised by Pirro Ligorio, finds an exact correspondence in Ligorio’s copious manuscript notes on archaeological and mythological matters.53 The notes make it clear that the myth of Adonis was inserted as symbolizing the sun according to Macrobius’ allegory; most of the passages devoted to Adonis are, in fact, translations, with minimal adaptations, of Macrobian excerpts from Sat. 1.21.54 Raffaello Borghini was the first to notice that Zuccari had painted ‘in the loggia above the fish-pool little narrative scenes (historiette) of Adonis and Venus, and the birth of Bacchus, and other myths in a gracious manner’.55 The association with Bacchus is to be extended to further decorative elements, including Cybele, Pan and other deities representing the generative powers of nature. The emphasis on the solar myth is such that the Casino has been described as an ideal Regia Solis, and the elements of the often ‘bewilderingly complex’ decoration (Smith) as ‘a veritable Hymn to the Sun’.56 The syncretistic approach underpinning the rich pictorial and stucco decoration of the Casino is primarily aimed at the conciliation of pagan myths with Catholic orthodoxy. ‘The moralized pagan tale in Counter-Reformation Rome’ is the manner in which the outcome of Ligorio’s inventive eclecticism has recently been characterized.57 This was not merely a compromise dictated by the nature of the commission and the place where the Casino was erected – for in spite of the fact that the building, as its name implies, was primarily intended for leisure and had as its model Pope Pius III’s ‘secular’ Villa Giulia, it stood after all within the sacred precincts of the Leonine City.58 Ligorio’s spirited compromise intended to preserve the fascination of pagan tales by ways of ‘re-semantization’ within a Catholic context. In this respect, the issue of his decorative programme is not dissimilar from other contemporary issues, such as the delicate relationship between the vernacular translations of Ovid’s text and their exegetical framework discussed in Chapter 2, or the issue of Conti’s ‘moral’ mythology.

Ligorio’s solution is a prelude to the debate on the nature and purpose of art in a Christian society which followed soon afterwards, embracing all questions concerning the use of images in Counter-Reformation countries.59 The reception of the Adonis myth was necessarily affected by this process. The intersection of sensitive elements of the classical tradition with the new ideological stances of the Church of Rome could no longer be considered, at that point, a question of minor importance.