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| Portrait by Titian |
He invented Arcadia.
Last week we met Giovanni Pontano, This week we meet one of
his friends and pupils, Iacopo
Sannazaro, who attended the Accademia Pontaniana. In Latin he wrote the
epic De Partu Virginis (The Virgin Mary in Childbirth), gaining
him the depressing title of “The Christian Virgil” and a place on many pious
reading lists; the Eclogae piscatoriae
(substituting fishermen for Virgil’s shepherds); and twenty-four elegies in
three books tinged with the knowledge of the passage of time; death is a fixed
feature of the landscape.
Sannazaro, Jacopo (1457–1530), Italian poet, born into a noble family in Naples, where he lived for many years at the court. In 1501 he followed King Federico into exile in France, returning to Naples after the king's death in 1504. With the support of Pontano, Sannazaro became a member of the Neapolitan Academy (see academies).Sannazaro wrote in both Latin and Italian. His most important Latin poem was De partu Virginis (1526), an epic on the birth of Jesus. His principal work in Italian was L'Arcadia, a pastoral romance in which verse eclogues are linked by a prose narrative. L'Arcadia proved to be enormously popular, and established the shape of European pastoral for the next two centuries.
And from Nauert, Charles G. 2004. Historical Dictionary of the Renaissance (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow
Press):
SANNAZARO, JACOPO (1458–1530). Neapolitan humanist and poet. During his youth at Naples, he was a member of a circle of local humanists led by Giovanni Pontano. During the 1480s and 1490s he developed a reputation as a poet in both Italian and Latin. When his patron, King Frederick of Aragon, was dethroned and exiled to France, he shared the exile until the king’s death in 1504 and then returned home to his rural villa, where he spent the rest of his life, busy writing but removed from court life and politics. In Latin he wrote Virgilian-style Piscatorial Eclogues and a Christian epic on the birth of Christ, De partu Virginis (1526). His most important poetry, however, was his vernacular pastoral poetry, especially the lengthy Arcadia (1502 and 1504). This work, with its many allusions to classical poets and modern ones like Dante and Petrarch, describes an imaginary society of cultivated shepherd-poets and provides an allegorical account of his own romantic quest for the woman he loved. Arcadian pastoral poetry had great influence on later Renaissance literature, not only in Italy but also in England, in the work of Sir Philip Sidney; in Spain, in the romances of Jorge de Montemayor and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; and in France, in the pastoral poetry of Honore d’Urfé.
Notes
Text from Jacobi sive Actii Synceri Sannazarii poemata
ex antiquis editionibus accuratissime descripta, ed. Patavii : excudebat
Josephus Cominus, 1751. The Hathi Trust has an online copy , where
Sannazaro’s text is given the full scholarly treatment with notes by Pieter
Vlaming (1686-1733).
1. inclyta:
for ínclŭtus or ínclĭtus; medieval and early-modern texts vary greatly in the
spelling of i and u, especially from medial weakening, or
when a Greek etymology was suspected.
4. Apollo had a famous oracle at Cumae. Aeneas goes to visit
Cumae and the Sibyl in
Aeneid 6.
5-6. Aeneas sees the temple to Apollo dedicated by Daedalus
when he alighted there, after losing Icarus: Aen. 6.14-33.
22. A dove guided the first Greek colonists to Cumae:
Vellius Paterculus, Hist. 1.4.1.
22-23: Recalls Cic. Fam. 4.5 (see below).
22-23: Recalls Cic. Fam. 4.5 (see below).
30. The image is taken from Georgics 1.492-47. Here is Peter
Fallon’s lovely new translation (Virgil:
Georgics, Oxford World’s Classics, 2006):
Nothing surer than the time will come when, in those fields,
a farmer ploughing will unearth
rough and rusted javelins and hear his heavy hoe
echo on the sides of empty helmets and stare in open-eyed amazement
at the bones of heroes he’s just happened on.
Translation:
Here, where there once arose the fabled walls
of Cumae’s fame, the chief glory of the Tyrrhenian sea,
where often a stranger hastened from distant shores
to see your tripods, Great Apollo,
and the wandering sailor entered the ancient port, 5
seeking signs that witnessed Daedalus’ flight
—who could have believed it, while its fate remained
intact?—
there now a deep forest hides the wild animals of the
countryside.
And where the secrets of the soothsaying Sibyl once lay
hidden,
now a shepherd pens his fat and happy sheep at night. 10
The Senate house that once gathered the noble elders
has become a home for snakes and birds.
The entry halls filled to the brim with wax masks of noble
ancestors
lie collapsed at last under their own weight.
Thresholds once weighted down with sacred battle trophies
are trampled underfoot; and grass covers gods torn down. 15
So many beautiful things, the handiwork of artists, so many
famous tombs,
so many pious urns of ashes, a single ruin overwhelms them
all.
And now among the empty houses and tumbled columns
lying everywhere, a stranger spears the bristling boar. 20
Yet their own god did not prophesy this to the Greek ships,
nor did the dove that guided them sent from the deep sea.
And do we complain if the time allotted to our life flies
quickly?
Violent death snatches away cities.
O that my oracles might deceive me their poet-prophet, 25
and I am proved false by a far off future generations.
And yet, you will not exist forever, City who enfolds the
seven hills,
nor you, her rival who arises from the midst of the waves.
And you (who will believe it?) the city that nursed me, a
harsh plowman
will turn you up, and say, “This too was a famous city.” 30
Fate sweeps humans away. At the insistence of fate, cities
and everything you see, time itself will bear away.
See also Marsh, David. 1988. “Sannazaro's Elegy on the Ruins of Cumae,”
Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance 50: 681-689.
The topos of reflection over the ruins of once noble city is an
ancient one. The first to come to Sannazaro’s mind might have been Isaiah
13:21-22:
But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. 22 And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged.
But Servius Sulpicius’ consolation to Cicero on the death of
Tullia was clearly in his mind (Fam.
4.5.4, 248 SB):
quae res mihi non mediocrem consolationem attulit, volo tibi commemorare, si forte eadem res tibi dolorem minuere possit.
ex Asia rediens cum ab Aegina Megaram versus navigarem coepi regiones circumcirca prospicere. post me erat Aegina, ante me Megara, dextra Piraeus, sinistra Corinthus, quae oppida quodam tempore florentissima fuerunt, nunc prostrata et diruta ante oculos iacent. coepi egomet mecum sic cogitare: 'hem! nos homunculi indignamur, si quis nostrum interiit aut occisus est, quorum vita brevior esse debet, cum uno loco tot oppidum cadavera proiecta iacent? visne tu te, Servi, cohibere et meminisse hominem te esse natum?' crede mihi cogitatione ea non mediocriter sum confirmatus.
I want to tell you about something that gave me a lot of comfort, on the chance that it might lessen your grief too.
On my way back from Asia Minor, I was sailing from Aegina to Megara, and I began to look at the landscape all around me. Aegina was behind me, Megara in front of me, Piraeus on the right, Corinth on the left, all of them flourishing towns once upon a time, now lying tumbled and in ruins before my eyes. I began to think to myself: “Ah, we little humans get upset if one of dies or gets killed, and our lives should be even shorter, when so many corpses of cities lie abandoned in one area. Can’t you restrain yourself, Servius, and remember that you were born a human?” Believe me, I was more that a little bucked up by that reflection.
St. Ambrose reflected on the passage (Letters 1.39):
Sed doles quod dudum florentissima repente occiderit. Verum hoc nobis commune non solum cum hominibus, sed etiam cum civitatibus terrisque ipsis est. Nempe de Bononiensi veniens urbe a tergo Claternam, ipsam Bononiam, Mutinam, Rhegium, derelinquebas, in dextera erat Brixellum, a fronte occurrebat Placentia, veterem nobilitatem ipso adhuc nomine sonans ; ad laevam Appennini inculta miseratus, et florentissimorum quondam populorura castella considerabas, atque affectu relegebas dolenti. Tot igitur semirutarum urbium cadavera, terrarumque sub eodem conspectu exposita funera non te admouent unius, sanctae licet et admirabilis feminae, decessionem consolabiliorem habendam; praesertim cum ilia in perpetuum prostrata ac diruta sint; haec autem ad tempus quidem erepta nobis, meliorem illic vitain exigat ?
Itaque non tarn deplorandam q uam prosequendam orationibus reor : new moestificandam lacrymis tuis sed magis oblationibus animam eius Domino commendandam arbitror.
The topos has a distinguished history. So a sampling (feel
free to add your own melancholy reflections on the mutability of fortune).
Horace Odes 3.3.40-44:
As long as herds of cows trample on the tomb
of Priam and Paris and wild animals without fear of reprisal
hide their cubs, let the Capitoline stand
glowing and let fierce Rome be able to give laws
to the conquered Medes.
Both Nisbet-Hubbard and Shorey on this passage cite, E.
Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam xviii:
They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep;
And Bahram, that great hunter—the Wild Ass
Stamps o’er his Head, but cannot break his Sleep.
And Byron recalls this passage:
Byron, Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage IV.44.389 ff.
XLIV
Wandering in youth, I traced the path of him,
The Roman friend of Rome's least-mortal mind,
The friend of Tully: as my bark did skim 390
The bright blue waters with a fanning wind,
Came Megara before me, and behind
Aegina lay, Piraeus on the right,
And Corinth on the left; I lay reclined
Along the prow, and saw all these unite
In ruin, even as he had seen the desolate sight;
XLV
For Time hath not rebuilt them, but uprear'd
Barbaric dwellings on their shatter'd site,
Which only make more mourn'd and more endear'd
The few last rays of their far-scatter'd light, 400
And the crush'd relics of their vanish'd might.
The Roman saw these tombs in his own age,
These sepulchres of cities, which excite
Sad wonder, and his yet surviving page
The moral lesson bears, drawn from such pilgrimage.
XLVI
That page is now before me, and on mine
His country's ruin added to the mass
Of perish'd states he mourn'd in their decline,
And I in desolation: all that was
Of then destruction is; and now, alas! 410
Rome -- Rome imperial, bows her to the storm,
In the same dust and blackness, and we pass
The skeleton of her Titanic form,
Wrecks of another world, whose ashes still are warm.
XLVII
Yet, Italy! through every other land
Thy wrongs should ring, and shall, from side to side;
Mother of Arts! as once of arms; they hand
Was then our guardian, and is still our guide;
Parent of our Religion! whom the wide
Nations have knelt to for the keys of heaven! 420
Europe, repentant of her parricide,
Shall yet redeem thee, and, all backward driven,
Roll the barbarian tide, and sue to be forgiven.
And Alphonse de Lamartine, (1790-1869), Le lézard.
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