(Cf. Inferno xxi, 1-6,
Purgatorio xiii, 61-66.) The poets who followed rarely came near him in
this respect, and the novelists were forbidden by the first laws of
their literary style to linger over details. Their prefaces and
narratives might be as long as they pleased, but what we understand by
_genre _was outside their province. The taste for this class of
description was not fully awakened till the time of the revival of
antiquity.
And here we are again met by the man who had a heart for everything--
Aeneas Sylvius. Not only natural beauty, not only that which has an
antiquarian or a geographical interest, finds a place in his
descriptions, but any living scene of daily life. Among the numerous
passages in his memoirs in which scenes are described which hardly one
of his contemporaries would have thought worth a line of notice, we
will here only mention the boat-race on the Lake of Bolsena. We are not
able to detect from what old letter-writer or story-teller the impulse
was derived to which we owe such lifelike pictures. Indeed, the whole
spiritual communion between antiquity and the Renaissance is full of
delicacy and of mystery.
To this class belong those descriptive Latin poems of which we have
already spoken--hunting-scenes, journeys, ceremonies, and so forth. In
Italian we also find something of the same kind, as, for example, the
descriptions of the famous Medicean tournament by Politian and Luca
Pulci.
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