Giovan Battista Marino
Encyclopedia
Giambattista Marino (18 October 1569 — 25 March 1625) was an Italian
poet who was born in Naples
. He is most famous for his long epic
L'Adone.
The Cambridge History of Italian Literature thought him to be "one of the greatest Italian poets of all time". He is considered the founder of the school of Marinism
, later called Secentismo, characterised by its use of extravagant and excessive conceits. Marino's conception of poetry, which exaggerated the artificiality of Mannerism
, was based on an extensive use of antithesis
and a whole range of wordplay, on lavish descriptions and a sensuous musicality of the verse, and enjoyed immense success in his time, comparable to that of Petrarch
before him.
He was widely imitated in Italy, France
(where he was the idol of members of the précieux school, such as Georges Scudéry, and the so-called libertins such as Tristan l'Hermite
), Spain (where his greatest admirer was Lope de Vega
) and other Catholic countries, including Portugal
and Poland
, as well as Germany
, where his closest follower was Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau
. In England
he was admired by John Milton
and translated by Richard Crashaw
.
He remained the reference point for Baroque poetry as long as it was in vogue. In the 18th and 19th centuries, while being remembered for historical reasons, he was regarded as the source and exemplar of Baroque "bad taste". With the 20th century renaissance of interest in similar poetic procedures his work has been reevaluated: it was closely read by Benedetto Croce
and Carlo Calcaterra and has had numerous important interpreters including Giovanni Pozzi, Marziano Guglielminetti, Marzio Pieri and Alessandro Martini.
until 1600, leading a life of pleasure after breaking off relations with his father who wanted his son to follow a career in law. These formative years in Naples were very important for the development of his poetry, even though most of his career took place in the north of Italy and France. Regarding this subject, some critics (including Giovanni Pozzi) have stressed the great influence on him exerted by northern Italian cultural circles; others (such as Marzio Pieri) have emphasised the fact that the Naples of the time, though partly in decline and oppressed by Spanish rule, was far from having lost its eminent position among the capitals of Europe.
Marino's father was a highly cultured lawyer, from a family probably of Calabria
n origin, who frequented the coterie of Giambattista Della Porta
. It seems that both Marino and his father took part in private theatrical performances of their host's plays at the house of the Della Porta brothers.
But more importantly, these surroundings put Marino in direct contact with the natural philosophy of Della Porta and the philosophical systems of Giordano Bruno
and Tommaso Campanella
. While Campanella himself was to oppose "Marinism" (though not attacking it directly), this common speculative background should be borne in mind with its important pantheistic
(and thus neo-pagan and heterodox) implications, to which Marino would remain true all his life and exploit in his poetry, obtaining great success amongst some of the most conformist thinkers on the one hand while encountering continual difficulties because of the intellectual content of his work on the other.
Other figures who were particularly influential on the young Marino include Camillo Pellegrini, who had been a friend of Torquato Tasso
(Marino knew Tasso personally, if only briefly, at the house of Giovan Battista Manso and exchanged sonnets with him). Pellegrini was the author of Il Carrafa overo della epica poesia, a dialogue in honour of Tasso, in which the latter was rated above Ludovico Ariosto
. Marino himself is the protagonist of another of the prelate's dialogues, Del concetto poetico (1599).
Marino gave himself up to literary studies, love affairs and a life of pleasure so unbridled that he was arrested at least twice. In this as in many other ways, the path he took resembles that of another great poet of the same era with whom he was often compared:Gabriello Chiabrera
.
But an air of mystery surrounds Marino's life, especially the various times he spent in prison; one of the arrests was due to procuring an abortion for a certain Antonella Testa, daughter of the mayor of Naples, but whether she was pregnant by Marino or one of his friends is unknown; the second conviction (for which he risked a capital sentence) was due to the poet's forging episcopal bulls in order to save a friend who had been involved in a duel.
But some witnesses, who include both Marino's detractors (such as Tommaso Stigliani) and defenders (such as the printer and biographer Antonio Bulifoni in a life of the poet which appeared in 1699) have firmly asserted that Marino, much of whose love poetry is heavily ambiguous, had homosexual tendencies. Elsewhere, the reticence of the sources on this subject is obviously due to the persecutions to which "sodomitical practices" were particularly subject during the Counterreformation.
Marino then fled Naples and moved to Rome, first joining the service of Melchiore Crescenzio then that of Cardinal Aldobrandini. In 1608 he moved to the court of Duke Carlo Emanuele I in Turin
. This was not an easy time for the poet, in fact he was the victim of an assassination attempt by his rival Gaspare Murtola and he was then sentenced to a year in prison for malicious gossip he had written about the duke.
In 1615 he left Turin and moved to Paris
, where he remained until 1623, honoured by the court and admired by French literary circles.
He returned to Italy in triumph and died in Naples in 1625.
His new approach can be seen in the Rime of 1602, later expanded under the title La lira (The Lyre) in 1614, which is made up of erotic verse, encomiastic and sacred pieces, arranged either by theme (sea poems, rustic poems, love poems, funereal poems, religious poems) or by verse form (madrigal
, canzone
).
They often hark back to the Classical traditions of Latin and Greek literature, with a particular fondness for the love poems of Ovid
and the Dolce stil nuovo tradition of Italian verse, showing a strong experimental tension with anti-Petrachan tendencies.
In 1620 Marino published La Sampogna, a collection of poems divided into two parts: one consisting of pastoral idylls and another of "rustic" verse. Thus Marino distanced himself from love, heroic and sacred themes in favour of the mythological and bucolic.
), which was published in Paris in 1623 and dedicated to the French king Louis XIII, is a mythological poem written in ottava rima
divided into twenty cantos.
The poem deals with the love of the goddess Venus for Prince Adonis, who escapes from a sea storm to take refuge on the island of Cyprus
, the site of the goddess's palace. Cupid
uses his arrows to make his mother and Adonis fall in love with one another.
Adonis listens to Cupid and Mercury telling love stories and is then led to the Garden of Pleasure, which is divided into five parts, one for each of the senses, and to the fountain of Apollo
. Jealousy warns the god Mars
of Venus's new love and he heads for Cyprus. When Adonis finds out Mars is on his way, he flees and is transformed into a parrot for refusing the goddess's love. Having regained his human form thanks to Mercury, he is taken captive by a band of robbers.
Adonis returns to Cyprus where he wins a contest of beauty, is made ruler of the island and is reunited with Venus. But Mars has Adonis killed on a hunting expedition by a wild boar. He dies in the arms of Venus and his heart is transformed into a red flower, the anemone
. The poem ends with a long description of the funeral games in honour of the dead youth.
Into this flimsy framework Marino inserts the most famous stories from mythology, including the Judgement of Paris
, Cupid and Psyche
, Echo and Narcissus
, Hero and Leander
, Polyphemus
and numerous others. Thus the poem, which was originally intended to be only three cantos in length, was so enriched that it became one of the longest epics in Italian literature, made up of 5123 eight-line stanza
s (40,984 verses), an immense story with digressions from the main theme and descriptive pauses.
All this tends to characterise “L’Adone” as a labyrinth of entangled situations without any real structure. The lengthy Canto XX, which takes place after the protagonist's death, serves to undermine any pretence to narrative unity. But this very lack of unity constitutes Marino's narrative innovation. The poet composes his work using various levels and passes from one episode to the next without any apparent logical connection, basing the links solely on a language rich in hyperboles, antitheses and metaphors.
In Adone, Marino quotes and rewrites passages from Dante
's Divine Comedy, Ariosto, Tasso and the French literature of the day. The aim of these borrowings is not plagiarism but rather to introduce an erudite game with the reader who must recognise the sources and appreciate the results of the revision. Marino challenges the reader to pick up on the quotations and to enjoy the way in which the material has been reworked, as part of a conception of poetic creation in which everything in the world (including the literature of the past) can become the object of new poetry. In this way, Marino also turns Adone into a kind of poetic encyclopaedia, which collects and modernises all the previous productions of human genius.
The poem is also evidence of a new sensibility connected with the latest scientific discoveries (see for example the eulogy of Galileo in Canto X) and geographical findings (such as Canto VII with its praise of the passiflora, a plant recently imported into Europe from the Americas).
Thus Adone, in spite of its technical virtuosity, is a work rich in authentic poetry written in a style which often achieves perfection of rhythm.
s against Gaspare Murtola), the "capitolo" Lo stivale; Il Pupulo alla Pupula (burlesque letters) etc. Many works were announced but never written, including the long poem Le trasformazioni, inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, which was abandoned after Marino turned his attention to Adone.
in England and culteranismo
in Spain.
who set several of Marino's poems in his collections of madrigals, beginning with the Sixth Book published in 1614. In 1626, Domenico Mazzocchi
drew on Marino's epic for his opera La catena d'Adone
("The Chain of Adonis").
. It appeared in the collection El hacedor in 1960.
and the Copernican
". More recently, in 2002 Marie-France Tristan's essay La Scène de l'écriture appeared in France, stressing the philosophical element of Marino's poetry.
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
poet who was born in Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
. He is most famous for his long epic
Epic poetry
An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...
L'Adone.
The Cambridge History of Italian Literature thought him to be "one of the greatest Italian poets of all time". He is considered the founder of the school of Marinism
Marinism
Marinism is the name now given to an ornate, witty style of poetry and verse drama written in imitation of Giambattista Marino , following in particular La Lira and L'Adone.-Features:The critic James V...
, later called Secentismo, characterised by its use of extravagant and excessive conceits. Marino's conception of poetry, which exaggerated the artificiality of Mannerism
Mannerism
Mannerism is a period of European art that emerged from the later years of the Italian High Renaissance around 1520. It lasted until about 1580 in Italy, when a more Baroque style began to replace it, but Northern Mannerism continued into the early 17th century throughout much of Europe...
, was based on an extensive use of antithesis
Antithesis
Antithesis is a counter-proposition and denotes a direct contrast to the original proposition...
and a whole range of wordplay, on lavish descriptions and a sensuous musicality of the verse, and enjoyed immense success in his time, comparable to that of Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...
before him.
He was widely imitated in Italy, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
(where he was the idol of members of the précieux school, such as Georges Scudéry, and the so-called libertins such as Tristan l'Hermite
Tristan l'Hermite
See also François Tristan l'HermiteTristan l'Hermite was a French political and military figure of the late Middle Ages.He was provost of the marshals of the King's household under Louis XI of France, which gave him enormous power in the Intrigues and plots that characterized that king's 22-year...
), Spain (where his greatest admirer was Lope de Vega
Lope de Vega
Félix Arturo Lope de Vega y Carpio was a Spanish playwright and poet. He was one of the key figures in the Spanish Golden Century Baroque literature...
) and other Catholic countries, including Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
and Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
, as well as Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, where his closest follower was Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau
Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau
Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau was a German poet of the Baroque era.He was born and died in Breslau in Silesia. During his education in Danzig and Leiden, he befriended Martin Opitz and Andreas Gryphius, both leading figures in 17th century German poetry...
. In England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
he was admired by John Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
and translated by Richard Crashaw
Richard Crashaw
Richard Crashaw , English poet, styled "the divine," was part of the Seventeenth-century Metaphysical School of poets.-Life:...
.
He remained the reference point for Baroque poetry as long as it was in vogue. In the 18th and 19th centuries, while being remembered for historical reasons, he was regarded as the source and exemplar of Baroque "bad taste". With the 20th century renaissance of interest in similar poetic procedures his work has been reevaluated: it was closely read by Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce was an Italian idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, methodology of history writing and aesthetics, and was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade...
and Carlo Calcaterra and has had numerous important interpreters including Giovanni Pozzi, Marziano Guglielminetti, Marzio Pieri and Alessandro Martini.
Life
Marino remained in his birthplace NaplesNaples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
until 1600, leading a life of pleasure after breaking off relations with his father who wanted his son to follow a career in law. These formative years in Naples were very important for the development of his poetry, even though most of his career took place in the north of Italy and France. Regarding this subject, some critics (including Giovanni Pozzi) have stressed the great influence on him exerted by northern Italian cultural circles; others (such as Marzio Pieri) have emphasised the fact that the Naples of the time, though partly in decline and oppressed by Spanish rule, was far from having lost its eminent position among the capitals of Europe.
Marino's father was a highly cultured lawyer, from a family probably of Calabria
Calabria
Calabria , in antiquity known as Bruttium, is a region in southern Italy, south of Naples, located at the "toe" of the Italian Peninsula. The capital city of Calabria is Catanzaro....
n origin, who frequented the coterie of Giambattista Della Porta
Giambattista della Porta
Giambattista della Porta , also known as Giovanni Battista Della Porta and John Baptist Porta, was an Italian scholar, polymath and playwright who lived in Naples at the time of the Scientific Revolution and Reformation....
. It seems that both Marino and his father took part in private theatrical performances of their host's plays at the house of the Della Porta brothers.
But more importantly, these surroundings put Marino in direct contact with the natural philosophy of Della Porta and the philosophical systems of Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno , born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited...
and Tommaso Campanella
Tommaso Campanella
Tommaso Campanella OP , baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella, was an Italian philosopher, theologian, astrologer, and poet.-Biography:...
. While Campanella himself was to oppose "Marinism" (though not attacking it directly), this common speculative background should be borne in mind with its important pantheistic
Pantheism
Pantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...
(and thus neo-pagan and heterodox) implications, to which Marino would remain true all his life and exploit in his poetry, obtaining great success amongst some of the most conformist thinkers on the one hand while encountering continual difficulties because of the intellectual content of his work on the other.
Other figures who were particularly influential on the young Marino include Camillo Pellegrini, who had been a friend of Torquato Tasso
Torquato Tasso
Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of the 16th century, best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata , in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the siege of Jerusalem...
(Marino knew Tasso personally, if only briefly, at the house of Giovan Battista Manso and exchanged sonnets with him). Pellegrini was the author of Il Carrafa overo della epica poesia, a dialogue in honour of Tasso, in which the latter was rated above Ludovico Ariosto
Ludovico Ariosto
Ludovico Ariosto was an Italian poet. He is best known as the author of the romance epic Orlando Furioso . The poem, a continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, describes the adventures of Charlemagne, Orlando, and the Franks as they battle against the Saracens with diversions...
. Marino himself is the protagonist of another of the prelate's dialogues, Del concetto poetico (1599).
Marino gave himself up to literary studies, love affairs and a life of pleasure so unbridled that he was arrested at least twice. In this as in many other ways, the path he took resembles that of another great poet of the same era with whom he was often compared:Gabriello Chiabrera
Gabriello Chiabrera
Gabriello Chiabrera was an Italian poet, sometimes called the Italian Pindar.-Biography:He was of patrician descent, and was born at Savona, a little town in the domain of the Genoese republic, twenty-eight years after the...
.
But an air of mystery surrounds Marino's life, especially the various times he spent in prison; one of the arrests was due to procuring an abortion for a certain Antonella Testa, daughter of the mayor of Naples, but whether she was pregnant by Marino or one of his friends is unknown; the second conviction (for which he risked a capital sentence) was due to the poet's forging episcopal bulls in order to save a friend who had been involved in a duel.
But some witnesses, who include both Marino's detractors (such as Tommaso Stigliani) and defenders (such as the printer and biographer Antonio Bulifoni in a life of the poet which appeared in 1699) have firmly asserted that Marino, much of whose love poetry is heavily ambiguous, had homosexual tendencies. Elsewhere, the reticence of the sources on this subject is obviously due to the persecutions to which "sodomitical practices" were particularly subject during the Counterreformation.
Marino then fled Naples and moved to Rome, first joining the service of Melchiore Crescenzio then that of Cardinal Aldobrandini. In 1608 he moved to the court of Duke Carlo Emanuele I in Turin
Turin
Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...
. This was not an easy time for the poet, in fact he was the victim of an assassination attempt by his rival Gaspare Murtola and he was then sentenced to a year in prison for malicious gossip he had written about the duke.
In 1615 he left Turin and moved to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, where he remained until 1623, honoured by the court and admired by French literary circles.
He returned to Italy in triumph and died in Naples in 1625.
Works
Marino wrote a large amount, both in prose and verse. His poetry remains the most admired and imitated part of his work.Le Rime (1602) and La lira (1614)
Marino originated a new, "soft, graceful and attractive" style for a new public, distancing himself from Torquato Tasso and Renaissance Petrarchism as well as any kind of Aristotelian rule.His new approach can be seen in the Rime of 1602, later expanded under the title La lira (The Lyre) in 1614, which is made up of erotic verse, encomiastic and sacred pieces, arranged either by theme (sea poems, rustic poems, love poems, funereal poems, religious poems) or by verse form (madrigal
Madrigal (music)
A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition, usually a partsong, of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six....
, canzone
Canzone
Literally "song" in Italian, a canzone is an Italian or Provençal song or ballad. It is also used to describe a type of lyric which resembles a madrigal...
).
They often hark back to the Classical traditions of Latin and Greek literature, with a particular fondness for the love poems of Ovid
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...
and the Dolce stil nuovo tradition of Italian verse, showing a strong experimental tension with anti-Petrachan tendencies.
In 1620 Marino published La Sampogna, a collection of poems divided into two parts: one consisting of pastoral idylls and another of "rustic" verse. Thus Marino distanced himself from love, heroic and sacred themes in favour of the mythological and bucolic.
L'Adone
L'Adone (AdonisAdonis
Adonis , in Greek mythology, the god of beauty and desire, is a figure with Northwest Semitic antecedents, where he is a central figure in various mystery religions. The Greek , Adōnis is a variation of the Semitic word Adonai, "lord", which is also one of the names used to refer to God in the Old...
), which was published in Paris in 1623 and dedicated to the French king Louis XIII, is a mythological poem written in ottava rima
Ottava rima
Ottava rima is a rhyming stanza form of Italian origin. Originally used for long poems on heroic themes, it later came to be popular in the writing of mock-heroic works. Its earliest known use is in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio....
divided into twenty cantos.
The plot
The poem deals with the love of the goddess Venus for Prince Adonis, who escapes from a sea storm to take refuge on the island of Cyprus
Cyprus
Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...
, the site of the goddess's palace. Cupid
Cupid
In Roman mythology, Cupid is the god of desire, affection and erotic love. He is the son of the goddess Venus and the god Mars. His Greek counterpart is Eros...
uses his arrows to make his mother and Adonis fall in love with one another.
Adonis listens to Cupid and Mercury telling love stories and is then led to the Garden of Pleasure, which is divided into five parts, one for each of the senses, and to the fountain of Apollo
Apollo
Apollo is one of the most important and complex of the Olympian deities in Greek and Roman mythology...
. Jealousy warns the god Mars
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
of Venus's new love and he heads for Cyprus. When Adonis finds out Mars is on his way, he flees and is transformed into a parrot for refusing the goddess's love. Having regained his human form thanks to Mercury, he is taken captive by a band of robbers.
Adonis returns to Cyprus where he wins a contest of beauty, is made ruler of the island and is reunited with Venus. But Mars has Adonis killed on a hunting expedition by a wild boar. He dies in the arms of Venus and his heart is transformed into a red flower, the anemone
Anemone
Anemone , is a genus of about 120 species of flowering plants in the buttercup family Ranunculaceae in the north and south temperate zones...
. The poem ends with a long description of the funeral games in honour of the dead youth.
Narrative technique
Into this flimsy framework Marino inserts the most famous stories from mythology, including the Judgement of Paris
Judgement of Paris
thumb |right |460px |[[The Judgment of Paris |The Judgment of Paris]], [[Peter Paul Rubens]], ca 1636...
, Cupid and Psyche
Cupid and Psyche
Cupid and Psyche , is a legend that first appeared as a digressionary story told by an old woman in Lucius Apuleius' novel, The Golden Ass, written in the 2nd century CE. Apuleius likely used an earlier tale as the basis for his story, modifying it to suit the thematic needs of his novel.It has...
, Echo and Narcissus
Echo and Narcissus
Echo and Narcissus is an episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses, a Latin mythological epic from the Augustan period. The introduction of the myth of the mountain nymph Echo into the story of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who rejected sexuality and falls in love with his own reflection, appears to have...
, Hero and Leander
Hero and Leander
Hero and Leander is a Byzantine myth, relating the story of Hērō and like "hero" in English), a priestess of Aphrodite who dwelt in a tower in Sestos on the European side of the Dardanelles, and Leander , a young man from Abydos on the opposite side of the strait. Leander fell in love with Hero...
, Polyphemus
Polyphemus
Polyphemus is the gigantic one-eyed son of Poseidon and Thoosa in Greek mythology, one of the Cyclopes. His name means "much spoken of" or "famous". Polyphemus plays a pivotal role in Homer's Odyssey.-In Homer's Odyssey:...
and numerous others. Thus the poem, which was originally intended to be only three cantos in length, was so enriched that it became one of the longest epics in Italian literature, made up of 5123 eight-line stanza
Stanza
In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe; in popular vocal music, a stanza is typically referred to as a "verse"...
s (40,984 verses), an immense story with digressions from the main theme and descriptive pauses.
All this tends to characterise “L’Adone” as a labyrinth of entangled situations without any real structure. The lengthy Canto XX, which takes place after the protagonist's death, serves to undermine any pretence to narrative unity. But this very lack of unity constitutes Marino's narrative innovation. The poet composes his work using various levels and passes from one episode to the next without any apparent logical connection, basing the links solely on a language rich in hyperboles, antitheses and metaphors.
In Adone, Marino quotes and rewrites passages from Dante
DANTE
Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...
's Divine Comedy, Ariosto, Tasso and the French literature of the day. The aim of these borrowings is not plagiarism but rather to introduce an erudite game with the reader who must recognise the sources and appreciate the results of the revision. Marino challenges the reader to pick up on the quotations and to enjoy the way in which the material has been reworked, as part of a conception of poetic creation in which everything in the world (including the literature of the past) can become the object of new poetry. In this way, Marino also turns Adone into a kind of poetic encyclopaedia, which collects and modernises all the previous productions of human genius.
The poem is also evidence of a new sensibility connected with the latest scientific discoveries (see for example the eulogy of Galileo in Canto X) and geographical findings (such as Canto VII with its praise of the passiflora, a plant recently imported into Europe from the Americas).
Thus Adone, in spite of its technical virtuosity, is a work rich in authentic poetry written in a style which often achieves perfection of rhythm.
Other works in verse
Marino wrote other works in verse such as: I panegirici ("The Panegyrics"); La galleria ("The Gallery", descriptions of paintings and sculptures); the sacred poem in four cantos, La strage degli innocenti ("The Massacre of the Innocents"); the epic fragments Gerusalemme distrutta and Anversa liberata (still of uncertain attribution) inspired by Tasso; interesting and ingenious burlesque compositions such as La Murtoleide (81 satirical sonnetSonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
s against Gaspare Murtola), the "capitolo" Lo stivale; Il Pupulo alla Pupula (burlesque letters) etc. Many works were announced but never written, including the long poem Le trasformazioni, inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, which was abandoned after Marino turned his attention to Adone.
Prose works
Most notable are the Dicerie sacre (1614), a sort of oratorical handbook for priests, which was considered indispensable by generations of preachers; in its enormously long sermons, which in reality have little to do with religion, Marino takes his transcendent technique of continuous metaphor to an extreme; a feat imitated throughout the Baroque era. More interesting for the modern reader are the "Letters", an eloquent document of his artistic and personal experience. In them Marino rejects the accusation of sensuality levelled at his poetry, explaining that he was only living up to the expectations of the ruling class, as can be seen in a letter to Duke Carlo Emanuele I.Influence
Marino was famous in his time and acclaimed by his contemporaries as the successor and moderniser of Tasso. His influence on Italian and other literature in the 17th century was immense. In fact he was the representative of a Europe-wide movement which included préciosité in France, EuphuismEuphuism
Euphuism is a peculiar mannered style of English prose. It takes its name from a prose romance by John Lyly. It consists of a preciously ornate and sophisticated style, employing in deliberate excess a wide range of literary devices such as antitheses, alliterations, repetitions and rhetorical...
in England and culteranismo
Culteranismo
Culteranismo is a stylistic movement of the Baroque period of Spanish history that is also commonly referred to as Góngorismo...
in Spain.
Music
Marino's verse was very popular with contemporary Italian composers, including Claudio MonteverdiClaudio Monteverdi
Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi – 29 November 1643) was an Italian composer, gambist, and singer.Monteverdi's work, often regarded as revolutionary, marked the transition from the Renaissance style of music to that of the Baroque period. He developed two individual styles of composition – the...
who set several of Marino's poems in his collections of madrigals, beginning with the Sixth Book published in 1614. In 1626, Domenico Mazzocchi
Domenico Mazzocchi
Domenico Mazzocchi was an Italian baroque composer of the generation after Claudio Monteverdi. He was a composer of only vocal music, motets, oratorios and madrigals which have continuo, similar to the late Monteverdi's ones....
drew on Marino's epic for his opera La catena d'Adone
La catena d'Adone
La catena d'Adone is the only surviving opera by the Italian composer Domenico Mazzocchi. It was commissioned by Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini and first performed at the Palazzo Conti, Rome on February 12, 1626...
("The Chain of Adonis").
Later literature
Marino is the subject of the short prose fiction "Una rosa amarilla" ("A Yellow Rose") by Jorge Luis BorgesJorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
. It appeared in the collection El hacedor in 1960.
Criticism
For a long time critics, who had a negative assessment of Marino's work from the end of the 17th to the last decades of the 20th century, maintained that the poet's intention was to astound his readers through the elegance of the poem's details and his descriptions. But Adone, along with a great deal of Baroque literature, has been reevaluated, starting in the 1960s with Giovanni Getto, who was followed by the critic Marzio Pieri in 1975 and by Giovanni Pozzi in 1988, who, while denying the presence of a structure, recognised a highly refined form in the poem which he defined as "bilocal and elliptical", reflecting the "hesitation of 17th century man between two contradictory models of the universe, the PtolemaicGeocentric model
In astronomy, the geocentric model , is the superseded theory that the Earth is the center of the universe, and that all other objects orbit around it. This geocentric model served as the predominant cosmological system in many ancient civilizations such as ancient Greece...
and the Copernican
Copernican
Copernican means of or pertaining to the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus* For the Copernican system of astronomy, see heliocentrism* For the philosophical principle, see Copernican principle* For the lunar geological period, see Copernician...
". More recently, in 2002 Marie-France Tristan's essay La Scène de l'écriture appeared in France, stressing the philosophical element of Marino's poetry.
External links
- Letters of Marino
- Works by Marino, including the full text of L'Adone, at Italian Wikisource http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Autore:Giambattista_Marino