A farewell to Arcadia. Marcantonio Flaminio from Poetry to Faith

This paper aims to reconstruct the meaning of the Arcadian mythology and imagery in some Latin collection of pastoral epigrams by Marcantonio Flaminio – one of the most important poets of Italian Renaissance – and the reasons for his renouncing humanistic poetry from 1540. The first part of my presentation will be dedicated to analyzing some Arcadian poems that Flaminio wrote between 1515 and 1536, specifying the occasion of their writing and explaining their sense. In this way we can understand that pastoral was for him more than the expression of an aesthetic ideal and of an existential desire: it was the real poetry. The second part will be focused on the 4th book of Flaminio’s carmina, a rare example of a pastoral canzoniere. This is the last secular work that he wrote (in 1539) before devoting himself entirely to spiritual matters inspired by Calvin and Valdés and to the Reformation of the Catholic Church (1540). It is therefore that this libellus can be considered the symbol of the autumn of the Italian Renaissance, in the sense of the renewal of pagan antiquity. In fact, although into some poems he quote Sannazaro, that in 1526 published the De partu Virginis, a poem on the birth of Christ in which ancient mythology (and pastoral too) was used as allegories and images symbolizing Christian mystery, mythological poetry was for Flaminio an “illnesses” and there is no possible agreement between faith and Arcadia. So, in the last collection’s poem, he bid farewell to the Muse.