Poetry and Painting

Table of Contents

The Garden of Poetry: Paintings, Sculpture, and Verses in the Collection of Scipione Borghese Before and After the Galeria

Francesca Cappelletti

Foreword

Lina Bolzoni

Cavalier Marino at the Galleria Borghese

Emilio Russo, Patrizia Tosini, Andrea Zezza

“The Loving Interpreter of an Unparalleled Season of Artistic Flowering”: The Origins of Marino’s Long and Fruitful Dialogue with Painting

Andrea Zezza

Marino’s Rome

Patrizia Tosini

Collecting Images, Works and Texts. Marino: Poet and Art Lover

Beatrice Tomei

The Prehistory and History of Giovan Battista Marino’s La Galeria

Carlo Caruso

Marino between Love and Death. The Adonis and the Strage de gl’Innocenti

Emilio Russo

“Amor fu mio maestro…”. Poussin Learns from Marino

Mickaël Szanto

Catalogue

I. Poetry and Painting in the Seventeenth Century.

Introduction to Giovan Battista Marino

II. The Galeria and Marino’s Dialogue with Artists: The Dream of a Collection

III. The Massacre of the Innocents

IV. The Adonis between Sacred and Profane

V. Farewell: The Apotheosis of Marino and the Discovery of Nicolas Poussin

VI. Works by Giovan Battista Marino in the Exhibition

Apparatus

Timeline of Giovan Battista Marino

Anthology of Texts by Giovan Battista Marino

Bibliography

Cavalier Marino at the Galleria Borghese

Emilio Russo, Patrizia Tosini, Andrea Zezza

Giovan Battista Marino (1569–1625) was made a knight of Saints Maurice and Lazarus in 1609 and has been known to one and all, in particular in Italian, as Cavalier Marino ever since. He was the greatest Italian poet of the seventeenth century, known above all for his great poem the Adonis (1623), a poetic monstrum of more than forty-thousand lines, and La Galeria (Gallery; 1619), a formidable collection of hundreds of short poems structured in relation to an equal number of – real or imaginary – works of art, in a dialogue between the sister arts (Poetry and Painting or Sculpture) that is at once both a play of reflections and a continuous expressive challenge.

Besides being the most influential writer of the century, a benchmark for friends and adversaries alike, Marino was also an extraordinary witness to some of the greatest art collections of his time, seen and admired across a life that took him around Italy and France, from Naples to Rome from Bologna to Genoa, Mantua and Turin, up to the Paris of Louis XIII and Marie de Médicis, before returning to Rome in 1623, at the apex of his literary fame. It was a return that quickly transformed from triumphant to dramatic, due to the accusations of heresy that led to the humiliation of a forced public abjuration, in 1623, and then his exile to Naples, where he died on 25 March 1625, almost exactly four hundred years ago. Across his historical and geographic arc, Marino directly or indirectly encountered all the leading figures of the art world of his time, developing close relationships with many of them and collecting their paintings and drawings. There is mention of a portrait of him by Caravaggio; his friendships with Cavalier d’Arpino, Bernardo Castello, Agostino Carracci and Ludovico Cigoli are documented; he was in contact with Palma the Younger; he studied the masterpieces of Guido Reni and Peter Paul Rubens from up close and he discovered, and became the mentor of, the young Nicolas Poussin.

The aim of this exhibition is thus to offer a detailed snapshot of this extraordinary arc and, most importantly, reread, through the lens provided by the poet himself, the relationship between literature and art in the early seventeenth century, at a time when the birth of Baroque literature, which culminated in none other than the Adonis, coincided with a period of intense experimentation in art.

Within the frame of the Galleria Borghese, the exhibition intertwines Marino’s ideal gallery and artistic predilections with the real one begun by his contemporary, Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577–1633), nephew of Pope Paul V (1605–1621), in the first decades of the seventeenth century: exemplary evidence of collecting reuniting past and present. Entering the Galleria from the splendid hall on the ground floor and looking up, visitors find themselves before a singular sculpture (fig. 1), installed above the entrance to the second hall. It portrays Marcus Curtius Throwing Himself into the Chasm, an episode drawn from the legend of a young Roman knight who sacrificed himself to save the city. The group is the result of the reuse of an ancient fragment, a rampant horse, that the sculptor Pietro Bernini (1562–1629) “restored” by adding the figure of the soldier and rotating the ancient figure ninety degrees downward to create a new work. The remains of a past world given new life and new meaning through the ingenious invention of the artist. As has been observed, the creative process of Bernini (father of Gian Lorenzo) was similar to the

Fig. 1 Pietro Bernini, Marcus Curtius Throwing Himself into the Chasm, 1616–17. Rome, Galleria Borghese.

Marino’s Rome

Patrizia Tosini

ROh, beautiful Rome, how I yearn for you!1

ome, Year of the Lord 1600: Marino visited the papal city for the great Jubilee of Pope Clement VIII, probably in the company of Matteo di Capua, prince of Conca.2 It was, perhaps, his first time in the city that would forever remain ‘under his skin’ and which he longed to return to until the end of his days.

In this essay, we will not be retracing Marino’s footsteps across his three documented trips to Rome, which have already been widely probed in the literature on the poet,3 but rather sketching out the reasons behind some of Marino’s visual loves – and some of his idiosyncrasies, or better, omissions – relative to certain artists at the expense of others, in an aesthetic geography that remains somewhat evasive, reflecting at the same time on the art and artists that the poet could have possibly encountered during his time in Rome.

The major artistic projects commissioned for the Aldobrandini pope’s Jubilee would have certainly left a strong impression on the poet, who would have been able to witness first-hand the success of some of the pope’s favourites, first and foremost Cavalier d’Arpino. Marino would have already seen Cesari’s work in the Certosa di San Martino in Naples (1595–1597) (fig. 1) but seeing it in the Roman context in which the artist achieved unparalleled success would have lent it an aura of sacredness in the eyes of the young man of letters, who was seeking patronage and opportune connections in the papal city.4

And so, although Cesari does not appear in Marino’s correspondence until the poet’s second sojourn in Rome, in 16035 (when he was the gentleman-in-waiting of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini),6 Arpino’s role in the projects for the Jubilee (as an inevitable prelude to the lay commissions he subsequently fulfilled for Aldobrandini, most importantly the frescoes in the Tuscolan villa celebrated in La Galeria7) would have impressed Marino, especially for the glory enjoyed by the painter, an impression expressed in the passage in the Galeria devoted to Cesari’s painting of Fame (“Suona, e rimbomba / Più chiaro il tuo Pennel, che la sua Tromba” / Your brush sounds and thunders more clearly than her trumpet).8

Among the projects for the Jubilee headed by Arpino, we should note the lavish fresco decoration of the Clementine transept in the Lateran (fig. 2), for which Cesari led a team of artists who became dear to Marino for various reasons: the painters Giovanni Baglione, Cristoforo Roncalli and Arpino himself as well as his brother and alter ego, Bernardino, and the sculptor Nicolas Cordier.9 During that same period, Arpino was preparing the cartoons for the mosaic decoration of the dome of St Peter’s, while Roncalli was decorating the same basilica’s Clementine Chapel.10

One might think that it was not one Cesari’s declaredly Neo-Renaissance taste that appealed to the poet (a highly appreciated mix of Raphaelesque sweetness, sheathed in brazenly Michelangelesque compositions, with a few masterfully Venetian touches) but the painter’s prominent position at the court of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, who described the artist as ‘my special servant’ as early as 1598. It was in this capacity that the pope sent him, first to Ferrara and then to Venice, with the specific task of “seeing not only the paintings on public view but also the most beautiful ones in private collections”.11 Marino’s admiration for Cesari thus seems to have been motivated primarily by his privileged position in the cardinal’s “fam-

Fig. 1 Cavalier d’Arpino, Stories of the Passion of Christ, 1595–97. Naples, Certosa di San Martino, sacristy.

The Prehistory and History of Giovan Battista Marino’s La Galeria

Carlo Caruso

At an unspecified date but after early September 1609, Giovan Battista Marino cautiously reopened his correspondence with his treacherous rival, Tommaso Stigliani, politely asking to borrow his portrait by Palma the Younger. He wanted to have a copy of it made for display in his study, “where”, he wrote, “I have been for some time collecting what almost amounts to a museum of images of all the illustrious and eminent men of our age” / “ho raccolto quasi un museo coll’immagini di tutti gli uomini illustri ed eminenti de’ nostri tempi”.1 Having explained that his intention was to return to Turin from Ravenna, from whence he was writing, and then move to Venice to oversee the publication of “eleven volumes of [his] works”, he announced among them “the collection of said portraits, each with its encomium [elogio], titled La Galeria” / “la raccolta dei detti ritratti, ciascheduno col suo elogio, intitolata La Galeria”, as evidence that, “despite his travels and the courts,” he had wasted neither his time nor his creative energies.2 This was the first mention of a work that would be published, in considerably different form and after numerous changes of mind and dropped plans, about ten years later, between 1619 and 1620, becoming the most ambitious poetic celebration of the visual arts in European literature. Tracing back over its genesis and succinctly illustrating its salient features will offer food for thought about the relationships between poetic genres, artistic production and collecting during the transition from the late Renaissance to the Baroque period.3

Of all the works to be included in the eleven volumes announced in the letter to Stigliani, La Galeria was the only one explicitly mentioned. Its precise description leaves no doubt as to the model that inspired it: Paolo Giovio’s Elogia and museum, two terms that almost functioned as antonomasia at the time, because elogio and “museum” automatically evoked the name of the famed humanist from Como.

The matter with “galeria” was, on the other hand, quite different. The term, which originated in France, had been in use in Italy since the early sixteenth century, and a hundred years on it had not yet lost its foreign air.4 In 1615, an authoritative contemporary of Marino, Vincenzo Scamozzi described, in a well-known passage of Idea dell’architettura universale, “a type of construction called a gallery, perhaps because it was first introduced in France or Gaul” and later, he added, Rome and Genoa. It was now spreading to Venice, “in the homes of many senators and gentlemen and virtuous people” fostering an ambition to create a “collection and study of ancient marbles, and bronze and medals, and other bas-reliefs, as well as paintings by the most famous and talented masters of our time”.5 “Virtuous”, in its old meaning, was the perfect term for describing Marino socially. Familiarity with art, previously a distinctive feature of the privileged few, was increasingly in the purview of private individuals who were distinguishing themselves for their abilities and thus legitimately eager, mutatis mutandis, to acquire the customs and practices of the aristocracy.

Marino between Love and Death. The Adonis and the Strage de gl’Innocenti

Emilio Russo

Over the course of his not particularly long literary career (it lasted about thirty years, although we know very little about his early period in Naples1), Marino consistently and skilfully used a specific strategy for the advance promotion of his work, announcing it, presenting it as near publication and describing its features in preview. In doing so, he created expectation among common readers, princes and, most importantly, fellow writers and he also laid claim to his own superiority in literary society in terms of innovation and success, condemning his rivals to be consumed with rage.2 Within this practice, two works that are actually at opposite poles, the one on Adonis and the one on the Massacre of the Innocents, run parallel and are often even paired in the poet’s announcements. The mere contiguousness of a sacred work and a profane one already says much about the ambiguous and unorthodox nature of the Marinian muse, which was not, for that matter, ascribable to any specific credo if not his unshakable belief in his own literary excellence.3

Moreover, the Adonis and the Strage were the two works that spent the longest time on Marino’s writing desk. He worked on the Strage for at least twenty years and it was not published until after he died, in a series of uncoordinated editions in the early 1630s.4 Whereas it took the poet nearly thirty years to complete the Adonis, which had already been announced in admiring tones at the end of the sixteenth century in a letter written by Camillo Pellegrino, when the poet was still an emerging figure in the court of Matteo di Capua in Naples:

I have heard wondrous things about the poem treating Adonis that Marino is working on, and amidst all that the world can so expect from his fertile brilliance, one can also expect the impossible things from which the credible marvel of the poets is born.5

A “poem about Adonis” that we can imagine was steeped in the late-sixteenth-century Neapolitan style and thus thick with concettism.6 This initial version of the Adonis remained among the poet’s works-in-progress and travelled with him to Rome during his adventurous move in 1600, the first of many escapes from the rigidity and threats of the political and religious authorities.7

The poem resurfaces a few years later, in 1605, but Marino was already in a new chapter of his career, by this point recognised as the leader of a movement, rewarded by the undisputed success of the Rime of 1602 and positioned at the top of the Roman hierarchies, at the court of the cardinal-nephew of Clement VIII, Pietro Aldobrandini.8 While many were awaiting the epic’s school-leaving exam, which had been announced publicly on many occasions and pri-

“Amor fu mio maestro…”. Poussin Learns from Marino

Mickaël Szanto

Poussin’s early biographers – Bellori, Passeri and Félibien – are unanimous: the close friendship forged by the French painter with Giovan Battista Marino in Paris in 1622 decided the poetic colouring of his art. Without the greatest of poets, Poussin may never have been the greatest of painters.

As Bellori reports with precision (1672), Marino, who by that time was established at the court of Marie de Médicis and had recently admired the ingenious compositions painted by Poussin at the Jesuit college, “wanted to meet him and invited him to his house to paint”, and “enjoyed seeing his own poems, and those about Adonis in particular, represented in drawing”.1 As pointed out by Bellori, among these graphic inventions guided by the poetic inspiration of the Italian master, a small collection of unusual drawings survived (kept at the time in Cardinal Carlo Camillo Massimo’s collection but now part of the British Royal Collection):

And it is clear from those drawings to what extent his mind was even then fertile and imprinted with the fine examples of Raphael and Giulio [Romano], and also the extent to which, through his familiarity with Marino, he had taken on the colours of poetry, which are completely consonant with the colours of painting, and which he retained ever after in his compositions, to very great acclaim.2

Among these poetic drawings, Bellori took care to describe those that seemed most evocative of Poussin’s links with Marino, The Birth of Adonis (fig. 1): “As he emerges from the belly of Myrrha, who is already changed into a tree, with her tresses and arms dissolved into foliage and her legs hardened into a trunk; a nymph is there helping to bring forth the baby, while others rush up with ewers and accoutrements, gazing at her new baby with wonder”.3

Thanks to their inventive originality, the so-called “Marino” drawings laid the foundations for the art of Poussin, a painter who was twenty-eight at the time and whose earlier works, Bellori tells us, were not worthy of remembering. Poussin needed to drink from the inspirational cup of the illustrious Neapolitan poet in order to bring out his creative genius. Poussin was again able to benefit from this fruitful friendship, forged over more than seven months – Marino left Paris for Italy in the spring of 1623 – when he arrived in Rome in April 1624, for a few weeks at least; Marino returned to Naples at the end of May. To convey the intensity of this rediscovered friendship, Passeri even reports that to the French painter “it seemed as if a thousand years had passed when he was able to see and enjoy his dear Cavalier Marino again with greater consolation”.4

Armed with these biographical details, a great many art historians have highlighted the close relationship between Marino’s poetry and Poussin’s artistic imagination. The painter drew on the poet’s work not only for subjects and motifs for his paintings (cat. IV.6, V.2–V.5), he also picked up a poetic definition of creation from Marino, a conception of artistic expression based on love, and an Ovidian imagination, in which the connection between metaphors and analogies feeds into the mysterious union of the sacred and profane.5

Giuseppe Cesari called Cavalier d’Arpino (Arpino, 1568–Rome, 1640)

Triumph of Galatea

c. 1630

black and red chalk; mm 241 × 196

Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Art, inv. 2012.58.5

Provenance: Christie’s, London, 7 April 1981, lot 52; Yvonne Tan Bunzl, London; Alfred Moir, Santa Barbara (1982–2010).

Bibliography: Master Drawings 2000, pp. 20-21, no. 5; Röttgen 2012–13, III, pp. 100–1, no. 466; Bolzoni M.S. 2013, p. 387, no. 280; Bolzoni 2023, p. 331, fig. 1.

The nereid Galatea, one of Nereus and Doris’s fifty sea nymph daughters, makes her first appearance in classical literature in the XVIII book of the Iliad, but it is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (XIII, vv. 738–897) that the girl, with Polyphemus and Acis, becomes the protagonist of one of the most famous love triangles of antiquity.

The myth of Galatea inspired Giovan Battista Marino, who to this nereid and her sad love story dedicated several sonnets of his Rime and the XIX canto of his Adonis (oct. 124–32). While the Adonis manuscript was yet to be printed, in 1619 Marino released another literary project of his, the Galeria, a collection of short poetic compositions dedicated to a series of mostly imaginary paintings. A good three sonnets in the Galeria are dedicated to the sea nymph: Aci con Galathea: di Pier Francesco Morazzoni, Galathea del Cavalier Giuseppe d’Arpino, Polifemo con Galathea d’Agostino Carracci, and it is in the second sonnet that the poet celebrates a painting by Cavalier d’Arpino whose sole protagonist is Galatea.

As of today no Galatea paintings by Cesari are known, but critics have identified a sheet preserved at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (see fig. 5 in Beatrice Tomei’s essay) to be the first, in chronological order, of the three drawings Arpino dedicated to the sea nymph in triumph among the waves and as being also the drawing that inspired Marino’s verses in his Galeria (Röttgen 2012–13, III, pp. 96–7, no. 464; Bolzoni M.S. 2013, p. 364, no. 249).

The compositional structure of the Parisian sheet seems to follow the blueprint of Raphael’s famous 1512 fresco at Villa della Farnesina commissioned by the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi. The École des Beaux-Arts drawing in fact portrays, just like in Sanzio’s painting, Galatea among the waves, triumphantly seated on a chariot drawn by two dolphins and surrounded by sea creatures, tritons and nereids, two of which are captured in a sensual embrace in the background.

In the sky two flying cupids are ready to fire their arrows of passion, an explicit allusion to Galatea’s love. This work draws heavily on Raphael’s famous painting, including specific motifs and iconographic solutions precisely referencing the Farnesina work, such as the marked contrapposto of the nereid’s body and the flowing quality of her hair set in a knot on her forehead and tousled by the same gust of wind swelling Galatea’s veil like a sail, or the muscular triton crowned with seaweed in the foreground whose solid Michelangelesque body frame suggests a clear perceptive contrast with the sweet and mellow shapes of the putto lying among the waves on the right.

On the back of the Parisian sheet runs an inscription that today is only partly readable. It is a dedication that Cavalier d’Arpino added to the drawing that was to be a gift to his friend Giovan Battista Ma-

rino. The two enjoyed a close friendship since the early 1600s when they both gravitated around the court of the powerful Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini.

The lack of documentation regarding Cesari’s paintings representing the Triumph of Galatea, may suggest that the invention expressed in the Parisian drawing may have been made specifically in view of Marini’s Galeria project, that the poet described in a letter he wrote in 1613, addressed to the Genoese painter Bernardo Castello, briefly describing its structure: “Each story [of the Galeria] is expressed in a drawing by a man of talent; and then based on each of these drawings I make brief praise of that master, followed by my quips and poetic antics about him” (Marino ed. 1966, no. 77).

Cesari’s invention, which according to Marino’s original project was supposed to be printed (“I want all [his drawings] engraved with exquisite application”; Marino ed. 1966), was actually never engraved; but perhaps due to the poet’s and art enthusiasts’ positive reception, the artist drew this subject at least two other times. The best replica in terms of quality of those known today is the one here exhibited, recently donated by Alfred Moir to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. To be dated a few years after the French prototype, the American Galatea drawing presents a specular layout. Compared to that of the École des Beaux-Arts however, the composition appears complete and not trimmed along the borders like the Parisian sheet, allowing us to admire the clever variation on the famous Raphaelesque motif in its entirety.

The last of the three known versions, part of a private collection, was drawn by Arpino using a bolder but less effective technique (a mixture of watercolours and black and red chalk). The clear stylistic fatigue that characterises this third drawing, suggests it might date to the final years of the painter’s production (Röttgen 2012–13, III, pp. 98–9, no. 465; Bolzoni M.S. 2013, p. 364, no. 249)

Marco Simone Bolzoni

Marino’s

The Galeria and Marino’s Dialogue with Artists - Favole

Cristofano Allori (Florence, 1577–1621)

Judith with the Head of Holofernes c. 1610–1612

oil on canvas; cm 139 × 116

Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina, inv. 1912, no. 96

Provenance: Florence, Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici, 1620–1626; Florence, Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici, 1626–1666; Florence, Palazzo Pitti, 1666–1799; Paris, Palais du Luxembourg 1799–1815; Florence, Palazzo Pitti, 1815–1940; Poggio a Caiano, Villa medicea, 14 June 1940–15 November 1940; Poppi, Castello di Poppi, 16 November 1940–16 June 1945; Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, Deposito, 17 June 1945–05 July 1945; Florence Palazzo Pitti, since 6 July 1945.

Bibliography: Baldinucci 1681-1728, ed. 1974-1975, III, pp. 726-728; Pizzorusso 1978, pp. 62, 65–7; Shearman 1979; Pizzorusso 1982, pp. 48–51, 128–29; M. Chappell, in Cristofano Allori 1984, pp. 78–81, no. 25; Cantelli 1985, pp. 80–3; C. Pizzorusso, in Il Seicento fiorentino 1986, i, pp. 189–91, no. 1.72; M. Chappell, in L’ombra del genio 2002, pp. 149–51, no. 5; M. Chiarini, in La Galleria Palatina 2003, II, pp. 32–3, no. 26; S. Bellesi, in Luce e ombra 2005, p. 140, no. 47; F. Baldassarri, in Artemisia Gentileschi 2016, pp. 126–27, no. 23; A. Cosmi, in Caravaggio e Artemisia 2021, pp. 160–61, no. IV.25; Terzaghi 2021, pp. 188–93; Pagliano 2023, pp. 213–19. Exhibitions: Paris 1935, no. 3; Florence 1984, no. 25; Rome 1997–98, no. 2; Florence-Chicago-Detroit 2002–3, no. 5; Rome 2016a, no. 23; Rome 2021–22, no. IV.25.

With a noble, proud air, the young widow of Bethulia looks out in front of her, holding the head of Holofernes in one hand and brandishing a sword in the other, having just committed her brutal crime. Abra, on the other hand, to Judith’s right, has a worried look, perhaps checking to see if an enemy is coming to stop their escape. The painting, which has always been considered one of Allori’s best, enjoyed immediate fame due to a series of happy circumstances. Being in the employ of the Guardaroba (Pizzorusso 1982, pp. 99–113), various aspects of his biography (Baldinucci 1681–1728, III, pp. 726–27) and the numerous copies he made of the work (M. Chappell, in Cristofano Allori 1984, pp. 78–9, identified four “types”) were determinant in this sense.

The current painting is understood to be the first version of the composition, ‘begun’ for Grand Duke Cosimo II on an unknown date sometime between 1610 and 1612, and delivered to the Guardaroba on 22 April 1620 (Pizzorusso 1978, pp. 65–7), along with one for the count of Villamediana, which has been recently identified as the painting at Hampton Court (inv. RCIN 404989; Terzaghi 2021) signed and dated 1613. As we know from letters exchanged by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger and Alessandro Orsini, the latter also commissioned a copy of the by-then famous painting, which the artist did not deliver until 1616 (Amendola 2013, pp. 59–61 has identified the Orsini painting is the one in the Lichtenstein Museum in Vienna, inv. GE 225). What is less clear is the fate of the final version, known through the sources, which was owned by Carlo Davanzati and a pendant to the David by Bilivert (Matteoli 1970, p. 329).

The artist’s meticulous preparation for the painting, attested by the large number of drawings and studies for the composition that have been found (G. Cantelli, in Disegni e bozzetti 1974, pp. 43–5 with additional material in M. Chappell, in Cristofano Allori 1984, p. 80) and the simultaneous presence of at least three examples of the

The Galeria and Marino’s Dialogue with Artists - Favole

same subject in the artist’s workshop positioned people close to the Medici court to appreciate the refinement of the masterpiece and celebrate it in poetry. As observed by Pizzorusso (1982, pp. 8–18), Allori’s role as court painter at Palazzo Pitti immediately placed him and his work at the centre of attention in the circle of sophisticated intellectuals, men of letters and artists, one of the most prominent members of which was Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger (Di Meo 2024, pp. 257–65). This was the context for Ottavio Rinuccini’s early poetic celebration of the “work sent to Rome” (written, therefore, in 1616, but published in 1622, p. 108) and the madrigal in the Galeria (1620a, ed. 1979, I, p. 49). While the famous Florentine librettist would have had the opportunity to see Allori’s fine painting with his own eyes, since he was well-inserted in the dynamics of Cosimo II’s court (Fantappié 2016), Marino’s poem would have been written presumably in the wake of the painting’s meteoric success, capturing his attention despite his preference for mythological subjects. Besides the numerous reproductions circulating in France and the persistent request for a copy to hang next to the “Susanna I have by Caravaggio”, a letter written by Marino to Paolino Berti in April 1620 (Marino ed. 1966, no. 148) seems to offer further insight. Reading this letter, it would seem that Marino (who had left Florence in 1602 and moved to Paris in 1615) knew of the “wonders of the original” solely from the numerous reproductions circulating north of the Alps and not from the versions in the painter’s workshop in Florence. The case of the Judith, triumphantly celebrated based on copies and for its immense success, is a good example of the poet’s orientations, guided not only by his refined personal taste but also by the inclinations of the intellectuals and dealers around him (Tomei 2024), including Juan de Tassis, count of Villamediana (Terzaghi 2021, pp. 197–98).

Gloria Antoni

The Adonis between Sacred and Profane

The story of Adonis accompanied the entirety of Marino’s career and over the course of the years became the centre of all his writing. The myth tells the story of the love of the goddess of beauty, Venus, for a handsome young man, Adonis: a love that began with a sweet period of falling in love, crowned by sexual union, and then ended in tragedy, with Adonis killed by a wild boar during a hunt as the result of a vendetta waged by Mars, Venus’s lover and mad with jealousy. In this opposition between Venus’s love for Adonis and the violence of Mars, god of war, the myth also offers a contrast between the sweetness of amorous passion and the violence caused by weapons and war. Across the sixteenth century, various authors (Luigi Alamanni, Lodovico Dolce, Giovanni Tarcagnota) wrote on the theme of Adonis, choosing the mythological subject as an alternative to the bellicose one traditional for epic poems, and some of the masterpieces by the painters Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto were also devoted to the myth of Adonis, steeped in sensual vitality.

Well aware of this literary tradition, and doubtless fascinated by the artistic precedents, Marino began composing his Adonis in his youth, while still in Naples. He then brought the work with him when he moved to Rome, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and then again when he went to Turin, between 1608 and 1609, without, however, ever deciding to publish it. Until 1614, the Adonis described by Marino in his letters to friends was modest in length (at first three, and then four cantos), but then it began to grow and literally exploded in 1615, becoming an astonishingly long poem. Indeed, starting from the account of the myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which is just over 300 lines, Marino created a work of more than 5,000 octets, more than 40,000 lines, the longest and richest poem in Italian literature. The initial myth of Venus and Adonis was joined by digressions, accounts of other myths (the Judgement of Paris, Cupid and Psyche, Echo and Narcissus, Actaeon, et cetera) and even episodes from contemporary history. The Adonis, finally published in Paris in 1623, thus became a work constructed as if it were a collection, the symbolic masterpiece of the Baroque in poetry. A work packed with artistic material, in keeping with Marino’s immense passion for art. It is no accident that during the years when he was writing the poem Marino sent requests to various contemporary artists for paintings and drawings depicting this myth.

In this section, we have collected a few sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works that present the various phases of the myth and can be abstractly linked to Marino’s poetic masterpiece. On the one hand, carnal love, with Venus embracing the beautiful young man’s body, represented in the works by Cambiaso and Palma the Younger (IV.2–IV.3) that are mirrored in the four tondi by Francesco Albani in the Borghese Collection, which are also connected to different moments of the myth. On the other hand, in the works by Scarsellino (IV.1), La Hyre (IV.7) and Poussin (IV.6), tragedy and mourning, with Adonis dying, already wounded by the wild boar, and Venus desperate with sorrow, in a pose that has been likened to that of the Virgin’s grief over the body of Christ. Here, it needs to be stressed that this was not a rash juxtaposition, since Marino deliberately played on the cross-fertilisation between sacred and profane across the entire poem, lessening the religious aspect through the lofty celebration of the secular one of carnal love and the senses. This was a risky choice that determined one of the most sensitive aspects of the poem, which was indeed blocked by the Inquisition in 1627 and added to the Index of Forbidden Books.

Emilio Russo

Farewell. The Apotheosis of Marino and the Discovery of Nicolas Poussin

Marino’s continuous and passionate relationship with the visual arts was reciprocated by that of many artists with his poetry. And while his poetry was compared to the art of Cavaliere d’Arpino, Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci and the young Bernini, the discovery and leverage of the talent of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) is Marino’s most manifest and valuable legacy to the history of the visual arts. The poet and the painter met in the Paris of Louis XIII and Marie de Médicis. Marino had found wealth and stability there and had begun to plan a personal museum/library, on which he said he had “most of the painters in Italy” work, not finding artists who were talented enough north of the Alps. He did not fail to notice the talent of the painter from Normandy, who was already twenty-eight at the time and had until then painted only “unmemorable” works, to cite Bellori, a friend of Poussin’s and the one who left us the most well-known account of their meeting. Marino “took him in, to paint in his home” and began to praise him as “stimulated by the Muses, just like the poets are”. For the ailing poet, “his company was an immense relief, because, for the most part confined to his bed, he enjoyed representing his own poems, and especially those of Adonis, in drawings”.

Marino encouraged the young artist to follow him to Rome, where he himself moved in 1623, but when the Frenchman arrived, in March 1625, the poet, hounded by the Inquisition and ill received by the new pope, Urban VIII, had already taken refuge in Naples, where he died just a few months later. All Poussin’s early biographers unanimously agree: the close friendship that the painter formed with Marino in Paris in 1622 determined the poetic colour of his work: “without the greatest of poets, Poussin would not be the greatest of painters” (Szanto).

The Death of Chion (V.1) is an invaluable attestation of the period during which Marino and Poussin, in France, developed their friendship around their shared interest in the artistic representation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It was the start of what would be a turning point in the life and poetics of both: for Poussin, the moment of his definitive orientation towards Rome and its ancient and modern culture; for Marino, the beginning of a relationship with the individual who would be the most intelligent and original interpreter of his poetic world.

Poussin made many paintings on the theme of Adonis, including the Venus Weeping Over Adonis in Caen (V.2). Painted in Rome, it is one of the oldest and it adheres to the complex stratification of meanings, sentiments and tones of Marino’s poems devoted to the death of the hero, in which the tragic event is described in lyric, sensual tones but also with a wealth of allusions to more profound and hidden theme. Poussin, like Marino, was drawn to the analogies between the myth of Adonis, symbol of resurrection, and the story of Christ. And so, he sometimes handled the theme of the Death of Adonis ambiguously, alluding to Christological meanings, as revealed by comparison of the painting in Caen with the Lamentation in Munich, which highlights the theme of syncretism between pagan antiquity and the Christian world, a theme common to both artists.

According to a famous essay by the German scholar Erwin Panofsky, the Parnassus (V.5) includes an ideal portrait of Marino, welcomed on the sacred mount with two of his most complex creations: the Adonis and the Strage de gl’Innocenti. This theory has been abandoned in the more recent studies, but the painting clearly shows the strengthening in seventeenth-century Rome of the link between imagination and poetic tradition and imagination and artistic tradition.

The exhibition closes with the Empire of Flora (V.4), Poussin’s most intensely Marinian painting, in which the painter encourages, through the representation of myths drawn from Ovid, reflection on the time of the seasons, love, birth, death and the “manner of Adonis, through a moving play between images and text, […] he dazzles the eye, exalts a thousand perfumes, enchants the ear to the rhythm of dance and the gentle swish of water, and make the flesh tremble in the melodious weave” (Szanto).

Andrea Zezza

in the month of November 2024