Renaissance in Italy, Volume 2 (of 7) / The Revival of Learning

by John Addington Symonds

The warnings addressed to his mistress in her country rambles, to beware of rustic gods, and the whole eclogue of 'Iolas,' are written in a rich and facile style, that makes us wonder whether some poet of the Græco-Roman period did not live again in Navagero.[468] Only here and there, as in the case of all this neo-Latin writing, an awkward word or a defective cadence breaks the spell, and reminds us that it was an artificial thing. A few lines forming the exordium to an unfinished poem on Italy may be inserted here for their intrinsic interest:—

Salve, cura Deûm, mundi felicior ora, Formosæ Veneris dulces salvete recessus: Ut vos post tantos animi mentisque labores Aspicio, lustroque libens! ut munere vestro Sollicitas toto depello e pectore curas![469]

Navagero, we are told, composed these verses on his return from a legation to Spain. Born in 1483, he spent his youth and early manhood in assiduous study. Excessive application undermined his health, and Giovio relates that he began to suffer from atra bilis, or the melancholy of scholars. The Venetian Senate had engaged him to compose the history of the Republic in Latin; this work was already begun when illness forced him to abandon it. He was afterwards employed in an unsuccessful mission to Charles V. and in diplomatic business at the Court of France. He died at Blois of fever, contracted in one of his hurried journeys. He was only forty-six when he perished, bequeathing to immediate posterity the fame of a poet at least equal to the ancients. In that age of affectation and effort the natural flow of Navagero's verse, sensuous without coarseness and highly coloured without abuse of epithets, raised a chorus of applause that may strike the modern student as excessive. The memorial poems written on his death praise the purity of sentiment and taste which made him burn a copy of Martial yearly to the chaste Muses.[470] One friend calls upon the Nereids to build his tomb by the silent waters of the lagoons, and bids the Faun of Italy lament with broken reeds.[471] Another prophesies that his golden poems will last as many years as there are flowers in spring, or grapes in autumn, or storms upon the sea, or stars in heaven, or kisses in Catullus, or atoms in the universe of Lucretius.[472]

A place very close to Navagero might be claimed for Francesco Maria Molsa, a nobleman of Modena, who enjoyed great fame at Rome for his Latin and Italian poetry. After a wild life of pleasure he died at the age of forty-one, worn out with love and smitten by the plague of the Renaissance. The sweetest of his elegies celebrate the charms of Faustina Mancini, his favourite mistress. In spite of what Italians would call their morbidezza, it is impossible not to feel some contempt for the polished fluency, the sensual relaxation, of these soulless verses. A poem addressed to his friends upon his sick bed, within sight of certain death, combines the author's melody of cadence with a certain sobriety of thought and tender dignity of feeling.[473] It is, perhaps, of all his compositions the worthiest to live. The following couplets describe the place which he would choose for his sepulchre:—

Non operosa peto titulos mihi marmora ponant, Nostra sed accipiat fictilis ossa cadus; Exceptet gremio quæ mox placidissima tellus, Immites possint ne nocuisse feræ. Rivulus hæc circum dissectus obambulet, unda Clivoso qualis tramite ducta sonat; Exiguis stet cæsa notis super ossa sepulta, Nomen et his servet parva tabella meum: Hic jacet ante annos crudeli tabe peremptus Molsa; ter injecto pulvere, pastor, abi. Forsitan in putrem longo post tempore glebam Vertar, et hæc flores induet urna novos; Populus aut potius abruptis artubus alba Formosâ exsurgam conspicienda comâ. Scilicet huc diti pecoris comitata magistro Conveniet festo pulchra puella die; Quæ molles ductet choreas, et veste recinctâ Ad certos nôrit membra movere modos.[474]

The Paganism of the Renaissance, exchanging Christian rites for old mythologies, and classic in the very tomb, has rarely found sweeter expression than in this death song. We trace in it besides a note of modern feeling, the romantic sense of community with nature in the immortality of trees and flowers.[475]

Castiglione cannot claim comparison with Navagero for sensuous charm and easy flow of verse. Nor has he those touches of genuine poetry which raise Molsa above the level of a fluent versifier. His Latin exercises, however, offer much that is interesting to a student of Renaissance literature; while the depth of feeling and the earnestness of thought in his clear and powerful hexameters surpass the best efforts of Bembo's artificial muse. When we read the idyll entitled 'Alcon,' a lamentation for the friend whom he had loved in youth—

Alcon deliciæ Musarum et Apollinis, Alcon Pars animæ, cordis pars Alcon maxima nostri—[476]

we are impelled to question how far Milton owed the form of 'Lycidas' to these Italian imitations of the Græco-Roman style. What seemed false in tone to Johnson, what still renders that elegy the stumbling-block of taste to immature and unsympathetic students, is the highly artificial form given to natural feeling. Grief clothes herself in metaphors, and, abstaining from the direct expression of poignant emotion, dwells on thoughts and images that have a beauty of their own for solace. Nor is it in this quality of art alone that 'Lycidas' reminds us of Renaissance Latin verse. The curious blending of allusions to Church and State with pastoral images is no less characteristic of the Italian manner. As in 'Lycidas,' so also in these lines from Castiglione's 'Alcon,' the truth of sorrow transpires through a thin veil of bucolic romance:—

Heu miserande puer, fatis surrepte malignis! Non ego te posthac, pastorum adstante coronâ, Victorem aspiciam volucri certare sagittâ; Aut jaculo, aut durâ socios superare palæstrâ. Non tecum posthac molli resupinus in umbrâ Effugiam longos æstivo tempore soles: Non tua vicinos mulcebit fistula montes, Docta nec umbrosæ resonabunt carmina valles: Non tua corticibus toties inscripta Lycoris, Atque ignis Galatea meus nos jam simul ambos Audierint ambæ nostros cantare furores. Nos etenim a teneris simul usque huc viximus annis, Frigora pertulimusque æstus noctesque diesque, Communique simul sunt parta armenta labore. Rura mea hæc tecum communia; viximus una: Te moriente igitur curnam mihi vita relicta est? Heu male me ira Deûm patriis abduxit ab oris, Ne manibus premerem morientia lumina amicis.[477]