Volume 19, 2007 - Brown University

126 Francesco Pucci
By the end of the fifteenth century, Renaissance neo-Latin poets were
attracted to the pastoral genre—especially to Virgil’s pastoral poetry—on
account of its hybrid nature, its natural allusiveness, and its self-reference. The
Neapolitan humanist Jacopo Sannazaro (A.D. 1458-1530) contributed perhaps
the most to the pastoral genre since Virgil; in fact, nineteenth-century pastoralists
often regarded Theocritus, Virgil, and Sannazaro as the archetypal trinity of
bucolic verse (Smith, 2002). The pursuit of neo-Latin poetry in the Southern
Italian Renaissance was largely archeological: poets used composition and the
Latin language as a means of understanding ancient history and literature.
Pastoral poetry, as a hybrid and naturally allusive genre, was conducive to this
end, as it allowed for Renaissance authors to experiment in different themes,
styles, and forms. It would be Virgil’s development of inner and outer worlds
that would most appeal to Sannazaro for its subtlety and irony, which could
ultimately break down the rigid historical, allegorical, tropological, and
anagogical medieval interpretations of pastoral poetry. Virgil’s Bucolica not
only served as a source of imitatio in Sannazaro’s Piscatoriae but also as a
source of profound allusion; just as Virgil’s pastoral poetry is an examination of
poetry and the genre itself, Sannazaro’s allusions to Virgil examine the ancient
genre in an attempt to understand it in his own time.
Jacopo Sannazaro was born into a wealthy Neapolitan family that encouraged
his scholarship from an early age—he was a life-long humanist born at the
peak of the Southern Italian Renaissance. By the late 1480s, he had already
composed many short Latin and vernacular poems and had been admitted into
the literary circle at the Academia Antoniana. Upon his admission, he chose the
name Actius Syncerius for himself, alluding both to his endearing personality (accius)
and to the seashore (acta) that would become the setting of the
Piscatoriae (Kennedy, 1983). His studies in Latin were an experiment in the
pastoral. Most contemporary neo-Latinists used Latin composition as a proving
ground to perfect their knowledge of the language and then composed in the
vernacular in order to expand upon the classical tradition. Sannazaro, however,
took the reverse approach. His first major pastoral masterpiece, Arcadia (1504),
consisted of poems and prose in the vernacular Italian. Through them,
Sannazaro wished to show that the classical world can be revealed through the
vernacular and that the Latin language can enrich modern literature.
The Piscatoriae (1526), however, represents a formal rebirth of the Latin
pastoral tradition—through them Sannazaro hoped to revive the ancient Latin
bucolic tradition to actively understand the poetry of antiquity. The Piscatorial
Eclogues are palpably Virgilian: they are a cycle of five eclogues in classical
diction and dactylic hexameter that adapt dramatic situations from the Bucolica.
Unlike earlier Renaissance pastoralists who used bucolic poetry as a forum for
satire, Sannazaro, like Virgil, is self-reflective as well as ironic (Heninger, 1961:
254). The “other” world of Sannazaro’s Piscatoriae, however, was uniquely his
own. The poems are set in his beloved Bay of Naples rather than Arcadia. Fishermen
have replaced shepherds, and dolphins and tuna are a substitute for sheep