How antiquity influenced the visual arts, as soon as the flood of
barbarism had subsided, is clearly shown in the Tuscan buildings of the
twelfth and in the sculptures of the thirteenth centuries. In poetry,
too, there will appear no want of similar analogies to those who hold
that the greatest Latin poet of the twelfth century, the writer who
struck the keynote of a whole class of Latin poems, was an Italian. We
mean the author of the best pieces in the so-called 'Carmina Burana.' A
frank enjoyment of life and its pleasures, as whose patrons the gods of
heathendom are invoked, while Catos and Scipios hold the place of the
saints and heroes of Christianity, flows in full current through the
rhymed verses. Reading them through at a stretch, we can scarcely help
coming to the conclusion that an Italian, probably a Lombard, is
speaking; in fact, there are positive grounds for thinking so. To a
certain degree these Latin poems of the 'Clerici vagantes' of the
twelfth century, with all their remarkable frivolity, are, doubtless, a
product in which the whole of Europe had a share; but the writer of the
song 'De Phyllide et Flora' and the 'Aestuans Interius' can have been a
northerner as little as the polished Epicurean observer to whom we owe
'Dum Diana vitrea sero lampas oritur.' Here, in truth, is a
reproduction of the whole ancient view of life, which is all the more
striking from the medieval form of the verse in which it is set forth.
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