{"id":79,"date":"2023-10-11T19:57:07","date_gmt":"2023-10-11T18:57:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/poetryandmagic\/?p=79"},"modified":"2023-10-25T08:33:49","modified_gmt":"2023-10-25T07:33:49","slug":"portrait-of-marino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/poetryandmagic\/2023\/10\/11\/portrait-of-marino\/","title":{"rendered":"Portrait of Marino"},"content":{"rendered":"

Johann Friedrich Greuter, Portrait of Giambattista Marino<\/em>, after Simon Vouet, 1630-40, engraving.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Inscription: Ioannes Baptista Marinus Eques\/ Simon Vouet pinx. \/ Fed. Greuter incid. \/Si tua vita Marine, leves est lapsa per umbras, \/ Clarior ex umbris en tibi vita redit.<\/p>\n

This engraving<\/a> reproduces a portrait of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan poet Giovanni Battista Marino by the French painter Simon Vouet. Marino died in 1625 and the inscription on this posthumous portrait suggests that poetry restores him to a brighter life from the shadows of death. He wears the crown of laurels of a celebrated poet, which he surely was, acclaimed across Europe for his brilliant verse and facility with words. Marino\u2019s works included La galleria <\/em>(1619), La strage degli innocenti<\/em> (published posthumously), and above all L\u2019Adone<\/em> (1623). The latter is a sprawling compendium of mythical stories, beginning with the tale of Venus and Adonis, each section of the text accompanied with allegorical explanations provided by Don Lorenzo Scoto. Marino\u2019s dedicatory letter to his patron, Maria de\u2019 Medici, the Queen of France, states that ancient Greece \u2018concealed most of its mysteries under the veil of fabulous situations\u2019, and that Hercules was called the \u2018leader and captain of the Muses\u2019 as a way of stating the proximity of poetry and power: \u2018of crowns of gold with those of laurel\u2019.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

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Marino\u2019s use of allegory developed that of previous Italian poets like Tasso and Ariosto. In the preface to his Gerusalemme Liberata<\/em> (1581), itself entitled \u2018Allegoria\u2019, Torquato Tasso argued that his poetry combined imitation, which aims to please, with allegory, which aims to instruct. Different characters in his epic tale represented separate \u2018powers of the soul\u2019 with the episode of the Rinaldo and the enchantress Armida representing the struggle of reason and concupiscence. While Seppilli does not comment on the poetry of either Marino or Tasso, she does discuss the sixteenth-century poet Ariosto whose work she saw as achieving a balance between fantasy and irony: \u2018And indeed, in the most perfect renaissance poem, Orlando Furioso<\/em> [by Ludovico Ariosto], art is fully achieved, because it relies, on the one hand on the archaic pleasure linked to the spontaneity of the irrational fantasy, from which the artist is not yet remote, because it fermented, more than is generally believed, in this environment, and on the other hand, on the subtle irony with which the text regards its world: and a supreme moment of balance between rational and irrational is thereby expressed, before this dichotomy imposes itself once again, but this time in a different way, or to put it more precisely the two opposites collide fiercely in the contrasting spirits of the Seventeenth Century\u2019 [Ed infatti, nel pi\u00fa perfetto poema rinascimentale, l\u2019Orlando Furioso, l\u2019arte \u00e8 raggiunta, perch\u00e9 posa, da un lato sul piacere arcaico legato alla spontaneit\u00e0 dell\u2019irrazionale fantastico, da cui l\u2019artista non \u00e8 ancora lontano, in quanto fermentava, pi\u00fa che generalmente non ci creda, nel suo ambiente stesso, e dall\u2019altro, sulla fine ironia con cui si guarda a quel mondo: e si esprime un attimo supremo di equilibrio fra razionale ed irrazionale, prima che si imponga nuovamente, ma in altro modo, quest\u2019ultimo, o meglio i due opposti collidano fieramente negli spiriti contrasti del Seicento<\/em>].[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

Thomas Taylor, the eighteenth-century English Platonist whose lectures influenced William Blake, followed Plotinus in reading the epic poetry of Homer and Virgil allegorically: the tale of the Odyssey<\/em>, for example, obscurely signifies the soul\u2019s desire to return to the One and to resist corporeal vision (represented by the magic power of Circe). Similarly, for Taylor, Calypso represents the fantasy, Hermes the intervention of reason, and Ulysses leaving Calypso\u2019s enchanted isle, the \u2018star-sailor\u2019 moving from the sensible to the intelligible realm. Or, in the sixth book of Virgil\u2019s Aeneid<\/em> where the hero descends into the underworld to consult his dead father, Taylor saw a version of the Eleusinian Mysteries – in which the soul descends into matter, receives a cathartic cleansing, and rises again to the knowledge of true being \u2013 figured beneath the poetic veil of fable. This type of allegorical interpretation leads to a somewhat elitist view of culture in which the true and elevated meaning of, say, the Odyssey<\/em>, is comprehensible only to the enlightened few who can understand the allegorical beyond the literal meaning of the fable. It also assumes an author intentionally operating on several different levels of meaning – which may be the case with Dante but is it true of Homer?<\/p>\n

Seppilli, on the other hand, sees myth as comprehensive and inclusive, living and three-dimensional. Her reading of the Iliad<\/em> and Odyssey <\/em>discovered in these texts, not a resolved hermetic philosophy hidden from the sight of the uninitiated, but rather the traces of magical rituals from which myths arise, which unconsciously shaped the narrative of texts that have their origin in oral recitation. Parallel storylines, the doubling of characters, episodes reminiscent of other myths, strange details, or illogical developments all suggest the subterranean shaping force of myths and rites even more archaic than the poetry they influence and through which they survive in degraded forms. Ultimately, allegory represents the degradation of myth: \u2018This same personification of ideas, when it takes place beyond faith and outside of ritual, when it is practised by critical minds, is nevertheless understood as allegory. Allegory, which no-one interprets as reality, let alone super-reality, and which has enjoyed particular consideration for long periods, is undoubtedly a branch which grows, from a psychological point of view, from the same trunk from which metonymy derives; but it is linear, flat, and lacking sufficient impulse to achieve an individuality, to live in the world of myth, existing meagrely in the shadows, whereas the mythic symbol instead takes in an unbounded wealth of valences, and it is, dare I say it, three-dimensional, is a living organism, in which a series of abstract concepts are entirely achieved (that is to say they are no longer, or not yet concepts)\u2019 [Questo medesimo personificare idee, quando sia fuori dalla fede e dal rito, quando sia operato da menti critiche, \u00e8 invece inteso come allegoria. L\u2019allegoria, che nessuno interpreta come realt\u00e0, o come soprarealt\u00e0, e che ha goduto per lunghi periodi di particular considerazione, \u00e8 indubbiamente un ramo che nasce, da un punto di vista psicologico, dallo stesso tronco da cui nasce la metonomia; ma \u00e8 lineare, piatta, non ha impulse sufficienti a raggiungere una individualit\u00e0, a vivere nel mondo del mito, ma appena in quello delle ombre, l\u00e0 dove il simbolo mitico invece include una ricchezza sconfinata di valenze, ed \u00e8, oserei dire, tridiensionale, \u00e8 un organism vivente, in cui una serie di concetti astratti sono interamente risolti (cio\u00e8 non sono pi\u00fa, o non sono ancora concetti)<\/em>].[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> Giovanni Battista Marino, L\u2019Adone<\/em>, Paris, 1623.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Anita Seppilli, Poesia e magia<\/em>, Torino: Einaudi, 1971, p. 69.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid, p. 319.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Johann Friedrich Greuter, Portrait of Giambattista Marino, after Simon Vouet, 1630-40, engraving.   Inscription: Ioannes Baptista Marinus Eques\/ Simon Vouet pinx. \/ Fed. Greuter incid. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73374,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[283393],"tags":[290629,289649,290043,37406,290395,283518],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/poetryandmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/poetryandmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/poetryandmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/poetryandmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73374"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/poetryandmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/poetryandmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/poetryandmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/poetryandmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/poetryandmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/poetryandmagic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}