4
The Renaissance Mythographers

John Mulryan

The reception of ancient Greek and Roman mythology took many forms during the Renaissance, but the Renaissance mythographers offered the most comprehensive, lucid, and appealing reformulation of the material. A mythography differs from other accounts of myth in that it both compiles and interprets classical myth. I will begin with a brief overview of the four great Italian mythographers (Giovanni Boccaccio, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, Vincenzo Cartari, and Natale Conti), as well as lesser figures, and then move on to specific themes.

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375)

Although Boccaccio (author of the Decameron and one of the greatest Italian writers in the vernacular) is, strictly speaking, a medieval writer, he is treated here because his Genealogia Deorum Gentilium was the first comprehensive compendium of classical myth, and the model for all of the great Renaissance mythographers, to wit, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, Vincenzo Cartari, and Natale Conti. It was composed over a period of 25 years, from Boccaccio’s first meeting with Petrarch in 1350 to the year of his death. There were at least 89 partial manuscripts of the work before the first printed edition appeared in 1472 (Solomon 2011, x–xii; for the translations, see the following). The work falls within the tradition of medieval allegory (the meaning being “other” than the literal) and the encyclopedic tradition. As C.V. Osgood (1930, 12) puts it: “Boccaccio makes the first attempt on a large scale to assemble, arrange, incorporate, and explain the vast accumulation of legend, and reduce it, after the manner of his time, to convenient encyclopedic form.”

Unfortunately, Boccaccio’s scheme for organizing the mythological content of ancient Greek and Latin texts is fundamentally in error. He creates a genealogical tree that takes its root in the god “Demogorgon,” “the first originator of all the other gods” “who I think is the father and ancestor of all the gentile gods” (1951, 12). Boccaccio has inadvertently picked up a misreading of Statius’s Thebaid by the commentator Lactantius Placidus. Where Statius writes “et triplicis mundi summum, quem scire nefastiuim” (and the greatest Lord of the triple world, whom it is impious to know), Lactantius Placidus mistakenly asserts that Statius “dicit deum demogorgona summum: cuius nomen scire non licet” (calls the god demogorgon, the greatest god whose name one must not know) (Statius et al. 1490, e8). Don Cameron Allen (1970, 216) wryly refers to this newly created god as a “slip of the pen.”1

Thus Boccaccio’s approach to the classical myths is basically genealogical, with occasional quotations from the Latin sources, but none from the Greek since he has no knowledge of Greek. Even his so‐called “translations” of Homer are cribbed from the editions and translations of Leonzio Pilato (Mulryan and Brown 2006b, 139). He paraphrases his sources, but acknowledges them only occasionally. His cribbed Latin is more medieval than neo‐Latin in style and structure, and is heavy going for the apprentice reader. Since he is following a false genealogical trail, discussions of individual myths are scattered throughout the work. Venus, for example, appears in several unrelated chapters, in sometimes contradictory accounts. All of these weaknesses would be addressed by later mythographers. From a reception perspective, Boccaccio sends the reader on a false trail and imposes an unworkable structure on the already disparate materials of classical myth.

Although Boccaccio’s De Genealogia Deorum is technically a medieval rather than a Renaissance mythography, it was influential during the Renaissance. According to Thomas Hyde (1985, 737), it functioned as “a compendium of quaint allegories, a reference manual to the undermeanings that myths may have in Renaissance poetry.”

Ludovicus Caelius Rhodiginus (1453–1525), Alexandro ab Alexandro (1463–1525)

While not strictly a mythography, Ludovicus Caelius Rhodiginus’s Lectionum Antiquarum (“Ancient Readings”), a massive 30‐book reference work that provides a series of random observations on the classical texts that are based on Caelius’s own omnivorous reading in the classics, was markedly influential and frequently cited by many of the mythographers, especially Pictor (see the following). It is in the nature of an almost formless commonplace book or encyclopedia, but the nearly comprehensive indices (1599) offer an excellent guide to the contents of the work. Giraldi also cites Caelius frequently, and these references are picked up in Cartari’s unacknowledged borrowings from Giraldi (1548) (Mulryan 1988). Alexandro’s Genialium dierum (Festival Days) (1522), one of Cartari’s favorite sources, is another classical miscellany like Caelius’s treatise, from which it frequently borrows.

Georgius Pictor (1500–1569)

There is an obvious iconographical emphasis in Pictor’s mythographical treatises, Theologia mythologica (1532), and Apotheseos (1558). In each entry in the Theologia mythologica the deity’s name is provided, followed by a physical description and an interpretation that supposedly flows from the description. More than likely, Cartari knew this work. The Apotheseos contains illustrations, which were probably added after the date of publication. More importantly, it employs a catechetical mode, with the student Evander (“Good Man”) asking the teacher Theophrastus (“Talker of Divinity”) questions about the illustrations of the gods, whose responses form the commentary. Much of the commentary is borrowed from the earlier Theologia mythologica. The catechetical mode was also adopted by the Jesuit François Pomey (see the following).

Montifalchius; Julianus Aurelius Havrech

Where Boccaccio adopts a genealogical perspective toward the myths, and attempts to organize them around the mythical god Demogorgon, Giraldi (see the following) pursues an etymological method (to a greater extent than either Cartari or Conti), attempting to plumb the meaning of the gods through an analysis of the epithets associated with them. In this he was anticipated by two earlier mythographers, who had the misfortune of writing under the same title, De Cognominibus Deorum. Montifalchius’s treatise was published in Perugia in 1522, some 22 years before Julianus Aurelius Havrech’s work (1544).2 Since little is known about Havrech’s study, and Montifalchius is virtually unknown, some attempt to distinguish them is in order. It is unlikely that Havrech knew Montifalchius’s treatise, as they are markedly different in their approaches to myth. While Havrech’s work is subdivided into three books, Montifalchius provides an undivided text. Montifalchius supplies a series of chapters on individual gods, and several other chapters on ancient rituals and games. Havrech’s treatise is the more scholarly of the two, as its sources are carefully noted and placed in dialogue with each other. Havrech cites most of the sources in Montifalchius, and many additional ones. They both write about mythography, and follow the etymological method, but Havrech provides a more structured narrative for the topic than Montifalchius, and is more precise and comprehensive in his citation of sources.

Lilio Gregorio Giraldi (1479–1552)

Lilio Gregorio Giraldi was one of the most distinguished and unfortunate humanists of the sixteenth century. He lost almost all of his library during the sack of Rome in 1527, but he still managed to produce a very respectable body of work, including a treatise on the Muses, a study of ancient burial rites, a monograph on Hercules, an imitation of Ovid’s Fasti, histories of ancient calendrical systems and shipping routes, a history of ancient poets and a second history of contemporary poets, as well as his Animadversions, his history of poets and scholars that he doesn’t like! (Brown and Mulryan 2000, 5).

Giraldi’s most important work from our perspective is his De Deis Gentium (1548, 1560, 1580, 1565, 1696—Opera Omnia). Giraldi’s approach is etymological, drawing on the epithets associated with the gods and expanding their meaning. Unfortunately, he almost never quotes the classical writers directly, but rather provides mountains of Latin paraphrases of both Greek and Latin texts, presumably based on the notes he took on ancient writers before he lost his library during the sack of Rome. He developed a shadowy afterlife in the work of Vincenzo Cartari, who occasionally appropriates Giraldi’s text word for word, including the classical citations. Unlike the mythographical treatises of Boccaccio, Cartari, and Conti, Giraldi’s De Deis Gentium was never translated, and remains only in the original Latin to this day.

Vincenzo Cartari (1502?–1570?)

Vincenzo Cartari’s approach is iconographical and fits in with the title of his work, the Imagini (“Images”). He focuses on the physical appearances of the gods, and ignores (for the most part) interpretations that cannot be supported in this way. He is the first Italian mythographer to write in the vernacular, thus enlarging his audience to include women, who were not trained in Latin. The work was very popular, and was printed at least 28 times. Moreover, he is the only Italian mythographer to be illustrated with images of the gods; some editions have in excess of a hundred illustrations. Moreover, the reader is provided with captioned illustrations, making it possible to connect the illustration directly with the printed text. For example, the symbolic positioning of the Graces (two of the three face us, because we get twice back for what we give) is explained in the text and revealed in the image, as are the names of the Graces and their symbolic import (Mulryan 2012, 429‐32). The Venetian illustrator Bologno Zaltieri illustrated the Venice 1571 edition with copper plates. In 1615, Fillipo Ferroverde produced a set of woodcuts to replace Zaltieri’s copper plates, along with a learned commentary by Lorenzo Pignoria. His illustrations are much inferior to Zaltieri’s. With Cartari, mythography grows in importance for artists as well as writers (Bull 2005, 23). This is indicated in the title page of the Padua 1608 edition, edited by Pietro Paolo Tozzi: “Opera utilissima à historici, Poeti, Pittori, Scultori, & professori di belle lettere” (an extremely useful work for historians, poets, painters, sculptors, and professors of polite literature).3

Natale Conti

Natale Conti’s thematic approach is ethical, and thus the least restrictive approach among the mythographers. He divides meaning into historical, moral, and “scientific.” In fact the triadic approach to myth is applied in detail in the first nine books of the Mythologiae, and is neatly summarized in the tenth book, which is an epitome of the first nine books. However, not all myths yield fully to the triadic approach:

It’s rather amazing that some of the Greek myths include historical, physical, and ethical narratives, while others contain only the physical, and still others are concerned only with the ethical. Thus in some stories I’ll discuss all three of these applications, while with some others I’ll just do the physical and the ethical

(Mulryan and Brown 2006a, 888).

The historical often focuses on the theory of Euhemerus, that all of the gods were originally mortal beings. Conti goes so far as to identify the burial site of the supreme god Jupiter, and to dismiss that god as an extremely flawed human being, unworthy of veneration:

Lucian is once again our source for the claim that Jupiter died and was buried in Crete.… Epiphanius, in his Ancoratus, wrote that in his time Jupiter’s tomb was usually pointed out on Mount Iasios of Crete. … The many crimes that he committed … certainly suggest that there was nothing divine about this man.

(Mulryan and Brown 2006a, 82)

Like Cartari, Conti (in his first book) discusses the history of religions, their sacrificial practices, and the statues and paintings they inspired. He takes the high ground in his approach to myth, pointedly ignoring the fabulist tradition associated with Ovid:

We will not bother with interpretations about men changed into trees or bodies devoid of sense or reason, unless they have some demonstrable worth. We won’t provide any accounts of those stories that some have foolishly invented, nor, again, shall we try to ascribe to the ingenious work of nature any portents or prodigious monsters. We intend to gloss only those stories that raise men to the heights of celestial knowledge, that counsel proper behavior and discourage unlawful pleasures, that reveal Nature’s secrets, that ultimately teach us all we absolutely need to know to lead a decent human life, that enhance our understanding of all the great writers.

(Mulryan and Brown 2006a, 3).

Conti’s structural approach consists in marking a distinct division between the narrative and the commentary in every chapter of his work, as in this formulaic phrase in his chapter on Venus: “That’s just about all the ancient writers had to say about Venus; now let’s try to find out what these things mean” (Mulryan and Brown 2006a, 325). The Mythologiae appeared in 25 Latin editions, and several editions of the French translation by J. de Montlyard, and a final revision by Jean Baudoin. Conti’s very orderly, systematic approach to the myths promoted ease of reference, and is probably the reason why he is the most frequently cited of the mythographers. His footprints are everywhere in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and his Mythologiae was used as a textbook in Elizabethan schools (Baldwin 1944, 1:421, 2:291, 396; Lotspeich 1965, 15).

François Pomey (1618–1673)

The Jesuit François Pomey’s illustrated Pantheum Mythicum was first published in 1659, again in Utrecht in 1697, and reprinted six times, finally in 1741. As Samuel Pitiscus notes in his preface to the Pantheum Mythicum, Pomey derives his work from Boccaccio, Giraldi, and Conti, as the marginal notes attest. He does not mention Cartari, although the physical description Pomey provides for each god would suggest that he was also used. The catechetical approach (probably appropriated from Pictor’s teacherly text, the Apotheseos) used by Pomey points to an audience of schoolboys, and the work was in fact used in Jesuit schools. Pomey’s organizational scheme of subdividing the gods into celestial, sea, and underworld gods is more straightforward than any of the other manuals. In addition to carrying on the traditions of the Italian mythographers, Pomey’s own work achieved great popularity when it was translated into English by “Andrew Tooke.” It was also translated into French by Tenand (no first name recorded) in 1715. (See “Translations,” in the following.)

The Occult Tradition

The Renaissance, as is well known, justified the study of pagan mythology on the assumption that the myths contained hidden truths that the wise ancients hid under the veil of myth, including the idea of the one true God. This constitutes a massive rereading of the classical texts, since there is little evidence that the ancient writers were intentionally obscure (Mulryan 1972, 53–72).

We will explore this issue in the mythographies, but the best expression of the tradition is found in Leone Ebreo’s (b. 1460) Dialoghi D’Amore. Leone was a Spanish Jew, one of the intellectual elite who were cast out of Spain in the diaspora of 1492. Here Philo (Learning) instructs Sophia (Wisdom, creating the term “philosophy”) on the arcane nature of truth:

The ancient poets, implied not only one but many intentions in their poems, and these intentions are called senses. First they placed the literal sense, as a kind of exterior rind, the story of some people and their noteworthy and memorable deeds. Within this same fiction they place, like an inner rind nearer to the core, the moral sense, which is useful to the active life of human beings, in approving virtuous acts and condemning vices. Beyond this, beneath those same words they signify some true knowledge of natural, celestial, astrological, or theological things, and sometimes these two or even three scientific senses are included in the fable, like the kernels of the fruit beneath its rind. And these core senses are called allegorical.

(Ebreo 2009, 106)

The mythographers also offer a key to the hidden truths of the myths, or as Boccaccio puts it in addressing King Hugo, the dedicatee of the Genealogia, “what meaning some illustrious men found concealed at the root of these fables” (Book 1, Preface 1, 9). Boccaccio also presents himself as an occultist working to extract the hidden essence of the myths: “to produce the exegetical element, I will begin by peeling off the hard outer shell and discovering the concealed systems beneath, but I still make no promise to do this exactly as the author intended” (Book 1, Preface, 1, 19). In terms of reception theory, Boccaccio acknowledges that the writers of the ancient classics no longer have control of their own material: “Indeed the ancients, after leaving behind names endowed with literary fame, have expired, surrendering interpretations of their work to the judgment of posterity, who have almost as many opinions as there are opinion makers” (Book I, Preface I, 19, 21). Thus Boccaccio’s reception of the classical texts containing the myths constitutes an attempt to transform those same myths into a key to moral (i.e., Christian) truth. At the same time, however, all of the mythographers resolutely take Christianity off the table and focus almost exclusively on the myths themselves.

Cartari interprets the occult tradition imagistically:

For Egypt was the location of those highly praised columns of Mercury that were crammed with occult teaching, especially on astronomical subjects. This teaching was set down in the shape of different figures of animals, plants, and other things that the Egyptians used to take the place of letters.

(Mulryan 2012, 5)

Presumably, his own analyses of the texts of the ancient writers and the images provided in his text are also part of the occult tradition.

Conti espouses the elitist view of the occult:

In fact not many years before the times of Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers, the ancients did not openly teach the principles of philosophy: instead they found a secret mythological disguise for disseminating these truths. … They wanted to stop ordinary men from gaining access to such remarkable subjects, for if the unlettered were to misunderstand them, it would be easy for them to lose their religion and all of their virtue. … We still lack an acceptable expositor … to reveal the deepest, most concealed secrets of the stories.

(Mulryan and Brown 2006a, 1–2)

Unlike both Conti and Giraldi, Cartari does not focus on letters but on images, as the title of his work indicates. He notes that the Jews regarded any attempt to make an image of the one god to be an abomination, and he traces the first use of images to the Euhemeristic tradition of making mortals into gods:

Lactantius says that the first statues were made for those kings and courageous men who had governed the subjects of their nations with justice and prudence; for they wanted the statues to show how they honored the memory of the just kings, and preserved a respectful affection for them after their deaths.

(Mulryan 2012, 11)

At the same time, drawing on Alexander of Naples, Cartari ridicules the ancients for their obsession with statues:

One can see how much pleasure the ancients took in statues from the great number that there were. Pliny writes that there were more than three thousand of them in Rhodes, nor were there any fewer in Athens, in Delphi, and in other locations in Greece. Nor were the Romans any less ambitious about this than the Greeks, for they had so many statues that it was said that Rome had another population of stone

(Mulryan 2012, 14).

One example of Cartari’s iconographical expertise must suffice. In his image of Venus, Cupid, Play, and the Goat, Cartari interprets the image of Venus standing on the tortoise as a symbol of female domesticity, since the tortoise is mute, is always at home, and fears the dangers of sexual intercourse and the pain of childbirth, the common lot of women (Mulryan 2012, 414–416) (Figure 4.1). The destructive power of sexuality is also imaged in the other female figure in the illustration; a Venus dressed in mourning keening over the recumbent figure of the dead Adonis. Venus also leans on the figure of a goat, a perennial symbol of lust. All of these figures constitute an ironic contrast to the figure of Play, the illusion of joy in love relationships (Fig. 4.1)

Image described by caption and surrounding text.

Figure 4.1 Images of Venus, of Cupid, Play, and the Goat, all of which symbolize generation. And the image of the tortoise, a hieroglyphic that refers to the danger that married women experience in giving birth, and a reminder that their real responsibility is to take care of their families and bring up children. And that Silence, more than any other quality, is essential for women.

Source: Mulryan 2012, 416.

Conti obviously addresses his remarks to the literate if not the learned, and suggests that everyone else will have to get by with images:

It is obvious that women (as a group) and the unlettered crowd had to be taught religion, fear of the gods, respectability, and temperance; for they would neither understand the nature of the gods nor prefer integrity before theft and debauchery if they were not made to fear the gods. This is why the ancient sages devised mythical stories about the gods, and indeed built statues of mythological figures and painted pictures of these deities that looked very much like monsters. Thus they attributed lightning bolts to Jupiter, a trident to Neptune, arrows to Cupid, a torch to Vulcan, and different instruments of terror to the other gods.

(Mulryan and Brown 2006a, 3–4)

Here Conti is not only discussing the classical tradition, but also interpreting its purposes for the uneducated populace. Women would of course be illiterate by society’s own design. Thus Conti differs markedly from Cartari, who welcomed female readers by composing in a vernacular language.

Conceptions of Myth in the Renaissance Mythographers

Boccaccio combines the idea of myth with bad theology: “This is a kind of theology which is called mythical … it contains a significant amount of ludicrous falsehood; it nevertheless demands much skill to elicit” (Book 1, Preface 1, 11).

Giraldi does not discuss myth directly: instead, in his dedication to D. Hercules, Duke of Ferrara, in the De Deis Gentium (1548, a2v), he dismisses Boccaccio’s Demogorgon theory with ill‐concealed impatience:

Please, most learned Duke, don’t be surprised that I have not begun my account of the gods with the much touted Demogorgon, whom Boccaccio thought was the oldest of the gods. … Boccaccio’s remark that “Gorgon” represents Earth and “Demon”’ God, is his own interpretation. It’s partly true, partly false, but a complete distortion.

In the first syntagma of De Deis Gentium, Giraldi, in his discussion of the various pagan gods (both Greek and Latin), takes myth to be synonymous with fable, that is, “Myth, that is Fable” (1548, 28), and to be distinguished from physical (e.g., scientific) and political (the activity of citizens) meanings. He also acknowledges that myths about the gods can be allegorically interpreted: “Porphyry notes in another place that statements about the gods ought to be allegorically interpreted, and Eusebius Pamphilius repeats the claim” (Giraldi 1548. 19). In effect, his remarks on myth and allegory are no more than sidebars to his focus on the etymologies of the gods.

Cartari never defines the term “myth,” but it is clear from his use of the term in relation to Saturn that it refers both to the story being told (through images and/or words) and its hidden meaning. Thus when Saturn devours his children, “what all this means … is that all things produced by Time are also consumed by it” (Mulryan 2012, 31). Thus before discussing the images of Venus, Cartari pauses to discuss the goddess in “scientific” and “ethical” terms, and to appropriate the etymological bias of Giraldi:

Thus Venus was, according to the fables, the goddess of lust and lechery. … But then in terms of natural events, which are symbolized for us in different ways under that goddess’s name, she represents that hidden strength which implants the desire to bear young in all the animals. … Therefore, the Greeks call her Aphrodite from the foam, and the word for foam is almost the same word in Greek as Aphrodite [a folk etymology].

(Mulryan 2012, 405–406)

Conti is the only mythographer who makes a serious attempt to define myth (basically stories about the gods). He proceeds on sound historical grounds. For Conti, the apologue is a story with a moral, for example, Aesop’s fables. The aenus or aeni is employed for simple tales Logoi or “words” designate tales, and muthoi fables, which encompass the complete plots of comedies and tragedies. Thus for Conti myth refers to stories about the gods, including all of literature, beast fables, and simple tales.

Translations

The concept of translation is crucial to an understanding of reception theory. The mythographies themselves are “translations” in two senses: translations and paraphrases of the classical texts themselves, combining into a new Latin (or Italian) synthesis of the tradition. Some of the Latin works cited are themselves interpretations of the Greek texts, particularly in the case of Conti, who not only cites the texts in their original Greek and Latin, but also supplies a Latin translation of the Greek originals. Thus in many of Conti’s citations, the Greek and Latin passages are in dialogue with each other. In Cartari’s case, all of the ancient writings cited, Greek or Latin, are translated into Italian and the reader then views the entire tradition from an Italian perspective. Conti transliterates individual Greek words into Latin. Giraldi prefers to paraphrase both the Greek and Latin texts instead of quoting from them, and these paraphrases constitute another form of textual transmission.

Boccaccio’s mythography exists in some 49 (partial) manuscripts, and in several French and Italian translations. The first 13 books of the Genealogia were translated into French by Antoine Vérard in 1498 and into Italian by Giuseppe Betussi in 1548. It was not until 2011 that a complete English translation of the Genealogia became available (Solomon 2011). Despite the existence of the French and Italian translations, it is clear that the Latin text prevailed over all other versions, and was the one utilized by later mythographers (Giraldi, Cartari, Conti).

Cartari was translated into both Latin and French by Antoine Du Verdier (1544–1600). The French edition was re‐issued by Claude Michel in 1602, 1606, and 1610, and again by Paul Frellon in 1623 and 1624. The Latin version was reissued as the Pantheon Antiquorum in 1683, as the Imagines in 1687, and again in 1699 as the Theatrum Ethnico idolatricum Politico‐Historicum Ethnicorum Idolatrias. Du Verdier’s Latin translation (the Imagines Deorum) puts all the Latin passages that Cartari translated back into Latin. Some of the sexually suggestive illustrations are not reproduced, and Cartari’s diatribe on women (in the chapter on Fortune), is expunged from the text. Partial translations are also available in German by Paul Hachenberg (Cartari 1692) and in English by Richard Linche (Cartari 1599) (Mulryan 1981).

It may be that the Latin version was more popular than the Italian original. This is borne out by the satirist John Marston’s gibe at Cartari, where he cites the titles of Du Verdier’s Latin translation (Imagines) rather than the original Italian (Imagini): “Reach me some Poets Index that will show./Imagines Deorum, book of Epithetes” (Marston 1961, 72). Du Verdier conveniently restores the original Latin imbedded in Cartari’s Italian paraphrases, but he does not attempt to provide the Greek. He also supplied some minimal documentation (e.g., Horace’s Odes, but not always the number of the ode and never the lines being cited).

Natale Conti’s Mythologiae was translated into French by Jean de Montlyard, in frequent editions: 1600, 1604, 1607, 1611, 1612, and 1637. His smooth Latin posed no difficulties for the scholars of his time, but the popularity of the French translation suggests that it was warmly received by non‐humanist readers as well. Of course a translation is not always an accurate barometer of the original text. Montlyard omits passages from Conti that he finds difficult to translate, and he often adds, without acknowledgment, his own observations on mythology, or on other things that interest him. The translation, however, is seldom cited, although it was obviously widely read. Conti was so thoroughly indexed that even an indifferent scholar could puzzle his way through the Latin without the assistance of a translation.

The Pantheon, a translation of Pomey’s Pantheum Mythicum, usually attributed to Andrew Tooke, was first published in 1694 and followed by at least 35 more editions to 1771.4 Two editions were published in Baltimore, and may well have influenced Thomas Bulfinch’s school‐text, The Age of Fable, which is still in print since 1881, thus creating an indirect path for Pomey’s entry into the American school system. “Tooke” allowed readers to assume that he was the author of the Pantheum, but a close examination of the two texts makes it obvious that he is translating: Here are Pomey and “Tooke” on the tasks of Mercury:

Adesse morituris, & animas corporeis solver vinculis, solutasque ad orcum deducere, & quae jam apud Elysios campos tempus explessent, iterum in vitam revocare, reducereque in nova corpora. Quae ferè omnia his versibius Maro 6. complexus est.

(Pomey 1757, 42)

He attended upon dying persons to unloose their souls from the chains of the body, and carry them to hell: he also revived, and placed in new bodies those souls which had completed their full time in the Elysian fields. Almost all of which things Virgil comprises in seven verses.

(Tooke 1701, 59)

Thus through the medium of Pomey’s integration of the mythographies of Boccaccio, Giraldi, and Conti, and the plagiarized translation of “Tooke,” the legacy of the Italian mythographers moved across the Atlantic into American schools, diffusing the ancient Greek and Latin texts still further from their original form, but also renewing them and reshaping them for a new audience.

Guide to Further Reading

In line with the iconographical and imagistic emphasis of Vincenzo Cartari’s Imagini, several seminal works examine the interplay between art and literature in the Renaissance: Panofsky (one of the founders of icon or image studies) (1939), Wind (1967), Freedman (2003). See also Barkan (1986). The many permutations of classical mythology and its continuing influence on literature are the subject of Bush’s (1963) generous survey of classical mythology in England. Barkan (1986) pursues the same subject, but with a focus on the Ovidian tradition, in both literature and art. The transformation of the allegorical tradition in the Renaissance, with a renewed emphasis on occultism, imitatio, and contextuality, is scrutinized in Steadman (1974, 1979). Steadman also evaluates the Renaissance Mythographers as potential sources for Renaissance dictionaries and other digests of classical mythology.

Two recent studies mark the renewed interest in Vincenzo Cartari’s Imagini as a major study of classical myth in the vernacular: Maffei and Arbizzoni (and 16 other contributors) (2013) and Basile and Calderoni (2015).

References

  1. Alexandro, A. 1522. Genialium dierum. Rome.
  2. Allen, D.C. 1970. Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  3. Baldwin, T.W. 1944. William Shaksper’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke. 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
  4. Barkan, L. 1986. The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
  5. Basile, B. and Calderoni, E. 2015. Raccontare gli Antichi: le “Imagini” di Vincenzo Cartari. Thesis. University of Bologna.
  6. Boccaccio, G. 1951. Genealogie Deorum Gentilium Libri, ed. by V. Romano. Bari: Laterza.
  7. Brown, S. and Mulryan, J. 2000. “‘Venus’ from the Thirteenth Syntagma of Lilio Gregorio Giraldi’s The Varied and Manifold History of the Pagan Gods,” Allegorica, 21: 5–46.
  8. Bull, M. 2005. The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art. Oxford: Allen Lane.
  9. Bush, D. 1963. Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, rev. edn. New York, W.W. Norton.
  10. Cartari, V. 1599. Fountaine of Ancient Fiction, trans. R. Linche. London: Adam Islip.
  11. Cartari, V. 1692. Neu‐eröffneter Götzen‐Tempel, trans. P. Hachenberg. Frankfurt: Bourgeat.
  12. Ebreo, L. 2009. Dialogues of Love, tans. C.D. Bacich and R. Pescatori. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
  13. Enenkel, K. 2002. “The Making of 16th‐Century Mythography: Giraldi’s Syntagma De Musis (1507, 1511, and 1539), De Deis Gentium Historia (ca. 1500–1548) and Julian de Havrech’s De Cognominibus Deorum Gentilium (1541),” Humanistica Lovaniensia, 5: 9–53.
  14. Freedman, L. 2003. The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  15. Giraldi, L.G. 1548. De Deis Gentium. Basel: per Ioannem Oporinum.
  16. Hyde, T. 1985. “Boccaccio: The Genealogies of Myth.” PMLA, 100, 5: 737–745.
  17. Lotspeich, H.G. 1965. Classical Mythology in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser. New York: Gordian Press.
  18. Maffei, S. and Arbizzoni, G., eds 2013. Vincenzo Cartari e le direzioni del mito nel cinquecento. Rome: Ginevra Bentivoglio editoria.
  19. Marston, J. 1961. The Poems of John Marston, ed. Arnold Davenport. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
  20. Mulryan, J. 1972. “The Occult Tradition and English Renaissance Literature.” Bucknell Review, 20: 53–72.
  21. Mulryan, J. 1981. “Translations and Adaptations of Vincenzo Cartari’s Imagini and Natale Conti’s Mythologiae: The Mythographic Tradition in the Renaissance,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 8: 272–283.
  22. Mulryan, J. 1988. “The Lectionum Antiquarum of Ludovicus Caelius and the Italian Mythographers,” in S.P. Revard, F. Radel, and M.A. Di Cesare, eds, Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Neo‐Latin Studies, 99–105. Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies.
  23. Mulryan, J., ed. and trans. 2012. Vincenzo Cartari’s ‘Images of the Gods of the Ancients’: The First Italian Mythography. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
  24. Mulryan, J. and Brown, S., eds and trans. 2006a. Natale Conti’s “Mythologiae.” Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
  25. Mulryan, J. and Brown, S. 2006b. “Venus and the Classical Tradition in Boccaccio’s Genealogia Deorum Gentilium Libri and Natale Conti’s Mythologiae,” Mediaevalia, 27, 2: 135–156.
  26. Osgood, C.G., ed. and trans. 1930. Boccaccio on Poetry. New York: Liberal Arts Press.
  27. Panofsky, E. 1939. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Harper & Row.
  28. Pictor, G. 1532. Theologia mythological. Freiburg: Emmeus.
  29. Pictor, G. 1558. Apotheseos. Basel: Nikolaus Brylinger.
  30. Pomey, F. 1757. Pantheum Mythicum. Amsterdam: ex officina Schouteniana: Trajecti ad Rhenum: apud J.J. a Poolsum.
  31. Rhodiginus, L.C. 1599. Lectionum Antiquarum. Frankfort: Wecheli.
  32. Seznec, J. 1953. The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. B.F. Sessions. New York: Princeton University Press.
  33. Solomon, J., ed. and trans. 2011. Genealogy of the Pagan Gods. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  34. Statius, P.P., Maturanzio, F., Calderino, D., Maffei, A., d’Aragona, F.F., Paganini, G., Urswick, C., Moore, J., George, King of Great Britain, and Placidus, L. 1490. Thebadios liber primus. Venice: Jacobus de Paganinis.
  35. Steadman, J. 1974. The Lamb and the Elephant: Ideal Imitation and the Context of Renaissance Allegory. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library.
  36. Steadman, J. 1979. Nature into Myth: Medieval and Renaissance Moral Symbols. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
  37. Tooke, A. 1701. Pantheon. London: printed for Robert Clavel.
  38. Treadwell, M. 1985. “Benjamin Motte, Andrew Tooke and Gulliver’s Travels.” in H.J. Real and H.J. Vienken, eds, Proceedings of the First Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift, 287–304. Munich: Wilhelm Fink.
  39. Wind, E. 1967. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 2nd ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Notes