On the one hand, they
replace abstract terms in poetry, and render allegorical figures
superfluous; and, on the other, they serve as free and independent
elements in art, as forms of beauty which can be turned to some account
in any and every poem. The example was boldly set by Boccaccio, with
his fanciful world of gods and shepherds who people the country round
Florence in his 'Ninfale d'Ameto' and 'Ninfale Fiesolano.' Both these
poems were written in Italian. But the masterpiece in this style was
the 'Sarca' of Pietro Bembo, which tells how the river-god of that name
wooed the nymph Garda; of the brilliant marriage feast in a cave of
Monte Baldo; of the prophecies of Manto, daughter of Tiresias; of the
birth of the child Mincius; of the founding of Mantua, and of the
future glory of Virgil, son of Mincius and of Magia, nymph of Andes.
This humanistic rococo is set forth by Bembo in verses of great beauty,
concluding with .an address to Virgil, which any poet might envy him.
Such works are often slighted as mere declamation. This is a matter of
taste on which we are all free to form our own opinion.
Further, we find long epic poems in hexameters on biblical or
ecclesiastical subjects. The authors were by no means always in search
of preferment or of papal favour. With the best of them, and even with
less gifted writers, like Battista Mantovano, the author of the
'Parthenice,' there was probably an honest desire to serve religion by
their Latin verses--a desire with which their half-pagan conception of
Catholicism harmonized well enough.
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