Concert Champetre - Crises of History [Unglaub]

The Concert Champ?tre: The Crises of

History and the Limits of Pastoral

JONATHAN UNGLAUB

While to some it may seem a paradox to suggest

that the most celebrated pastoral representation of the Renais

sance also bears a pointed topical significance, this is precisely what I shall argue here: the Concert Champ?tre was a response to

the gravest crisis in Cinquecento Venice, the invasion of the V?neto

by the League of Cambrai in 1509. This was the cataclysmic moment in Venetian history, when its "Arcadian" possessions on

the mainland succumbed to the aggressors and seemed forever

lost. Despite expectations, the Concert Champ?tre reveals not so

much an idyllic refuge from the ravages of history as a lush but

fragile counterbalance to the despoliation of the countryside. As

such, it could not but remind the contemporary beholder of his own deprivation. Pastoral poetry had long addressed the scourge

of warfare upon the landscape and its inhabitants. The topical allusions of Virgil's Eclogues, Petrarch's and Boccaccio's Bucol

icum Carmen, Boiardo's Pastorale, and Sannazaro's Arcadia dem

onstrate how the landscape balances precariously the bliss of

bucolic life and the menace of history.1 Landscape functions

equivocally in these works: although it provides a shady retreat for

music making, its unreal, mirage-like quality intensifies the mis

fortune of those compelled to abandon their land and leisure

through civil strife. This important facet of the pastoral has been

overlooked in the interpretations of "Giorgione's" picture and its

landscape of the V?neto.2 The collision of the bucolic setting with

history was a leitmotif grounded in the tradition of pastoral

poetry. Such topoi likely conditioned the reading of the Concert

Champ?tre at a time when the idyllic environs of Venice were in

turmoil.3

A series of antitheses structure Giorgione's painting (fig. 1): the

earthy seated nude and the elegant standing nude; the rustic shep

herd and the courtly lutenist; the pastoral flute and the sophisti cated stringed instrument; the decrepit shanty and the hilltop villa.

While any number of texts have been adduced to account for the

Jonathan Unglaub 47

rustic/refined duality of the composition, such oppositions lend

themselves most naturally to consideration as pastoral topoi.4 To

begin with, the urbane lutenist surely represents the pastoral poet.

One of the conventions of this genre is its contrast between the

humble style of bucolic song and the poet's ambition to summon

loftier muses. Often this aspiration expresses itself through allu

sions, whether overt or glossed, to political realities not unlike

those which imperiled the terraferma in 1509. The inevitable

intrusion of civilization into bucolic lyric compels the poet to ven

ture a noble style among the lowly tunes of the bower. In the figure of the aspiring poet, the pastoral tradition acknowledges its own

limits. The pictorial dialectics of the Concert Champ?tre illustrate

this tension between pastoral song and the solemn verse adequate

to the exigencies of history. The refined, urban components of the

composition both emblematize the drive toward a loftier style and

invoke the grave historical circumstances that occasion, even

demand, more elevated verse. The commentators and imitators of

the classical pastoral recognized its preoccupation with issues of

genre and historical allusion. This was the literary culture that

informed the reception of the Concert Champ?tre. Contemporary viewers were equipped to locate it within a well-established tradi

tion as a pastoral "text." What follows examines the associations

such a placement might have generated.

I. "Woods to dignify a consul"

The Renaissance understood the pastoral as a poetic mode that

humbly broached, through allegory, subjects that were typically the province of more elevated genres. This idea is present in a

manuscript illumination executed by Simone Martini in the 1340s

(fig. 2). It serves as the frontispiece to Petrarch's copy of Virgil and

Servius' Commentaries.5 The figures stand for each of the three

works that comprise the volume. A shepherd and a bramble-cutter

respectively represent the Eclogues and Georgics. Above, the epic

hero Aeneas accompanies the interpreter Servius, who unveils the

poet, hermeneutically as it were. Petrarch's verses on the scrolls

suspended in the center of the composition read:

Ytala preclaros tellus alis alma poetas:

Sed tibi grecorum dedit hie attingere metas.

48 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

Servius altiloqui retegens archana Maronis

ut pateant ducibus pastoribus atque colonis.

Italy, kind country, you feed famous poets. So this one [Virgil] allowed you to attain the Grecian goals.

[Here is] Servius, recovering the enigmas of high-spoken

Virgil, So that they are revealed in generals, shepherds and farmers.6

Virgil's "Grecian goals" entail an imitation not only of Homer,

but also of Theocritus. Servius states that Virgil transformed

Theocritus' Idylls into a metaphorical vehicle in which political concerns subtend the Arcadian imagery.7 He interprets the

Eclogues as a conscious imitation of the style of Theocritus and, in

places, a veiled acknowledgment of Virgil's patron Augustus.

Augustus had intervened to restore the poet's patrimonial lands in

the aftermath of the civil war when many of the farms in Virgil's native Mantua were being expropriated to compensate war veter

ans. Servius explains:

The poet's tension is this: that Theocritus may be imitated

. . . and that in some places by means of allegory he [Virgil]

may actually give thanks to Augustus and other noted men,

with whose support he received back his lost estate. In this

respect he differs greatly from Theocritus; namely in that the

latter is always simple. Virgil, compelled by necessity, mixes

figures in certain passages, which he often skillfully com

poses from the verses of Theocritus, known to have been said

simply by him. This, however, is done with poetic refinement

[po?tica urbanitate].8

Servius became an essential exegetical component to the recep

tion of Virgil. His allegorical conception of the Eclogues largely determined the subsequent development of the pastoral as a mode

conducive to autobiographical and social commentary. As the

lifted veil in Simone's illustration suggests, Servius' explication of

Virgil's "high-spoken enigmas" revealed what bucolic song could

achieve with "po?tica urbanitas."

The allegorical potential of the Latin eclogue was further devel

oped in the early Renaissance. Petrarch contributed to the pastoral

canon with his Bucolicum Carmen of 1357. This collection of

Jonathan Unglaub 49

eclogues deliberately revived Virgil's allegorical mode. Most

importantly, Petrarch related Servius' gloss of Virgil's Eclogues to

his own historical circumstances as an exile, at the Papal court in

Avignon, and as a recipient of official patronage.9 Servius limited

Virgil's use of allegory to those passages concerning the expropria

tion and recuperation of lands. Petrarch, however, filled his

eclogues with cryptic political, biographical, and artistic commen

tary. The meaning had little to do with the incidental rustic setting and generally required decoding. Boccaccio modeled his own

Bucolicum Carmen, finished by 1372, after Petrarch. Like his Are

tine master, he divulged the allegorical references in exegetical

epistles. In one such letter, Boccaccio sets forth the parameters for

conveying ulterior meaning using the bucolic code.10 He claims to

adhere to the Virgilian mode of occasional allegory. Boccaccio

nonetheless lauds Petrarch for imparting to the pastoral genre an

elevated style and hidden meaning, just as Servius commends Vir

gil for his "poetic refinement" over Theocritus. The importance of

Petrarch's and Boccaccio's eclogues, however obscure their sub

texts may be, lies in re-establishing the conventions of pastoral

poetry as amenable to the allegorical exposition of history.

An anthology of Latin eclogues, including Virgil, Petrarch, and

Boccaccio, was published in 1504, testifying to the continued pop

ularity of the Latin pastoral in Giorgione's time.11 Composing political eclogues per allegoriam only began to appear frequently

in eclogues written in the vernacular, such as Boiardo's Pastorale

and Sannazaro's Arcadia, after the publication of Bernardo Pulci's

translation of and commentary on Virgil in the Bucoliche ele

gantissime of 1481.12 The political orientation of Boiardo's Pasto

rale of c. 1482-1483, which refer to the current war between

Ferrara and Venice, may well have been indebted to Pulci's empha

sis on Virgil's allegorization of contemporary events.13 In the

Arcadia of 1504, Sannazaro recounts the genealogy of the pasto

ral, emphasizing the Virgilian allegorical manner (Prose 10).14 A

political lament for Naples follows, exemplifying the capacity of

the pastoral to allude to the tribulations that afflict the poet's idyl lic existence (Eclogue 10). Thus developments in pastoral poetry resonate intertextually with pastoral precedent and allude extra

textually to current history as sanctioned by previous practice.15

Reception follows in a complementary fashion. Audiences detect

the continuity of motifs, characters, and themes among pastoral

poems and expect references to contemporary history.

50 THE CONCERT CHAMPETRE

Petrarch's verses placed below the image of the Virgil frontis

piece read:

Mantua bore Virgil, who fashioned such things in poetry; Siena bore Simone, who painted such things with his own

hand.16

Painting is also a means to convey the metaphorical "such

things"?the "enigmas of high-spoken Virgil." In Petrarch's vol

ume, the illuminated folio is opposite Servius' preface to the

Eclogues, where he discusses the three-tiered stylistic hierarchy of

Virgil's eloquence.17 The figurai sweep from the lower right shep herd and pruner to the upper left warrior and commentator delin

eates the paradigmatic poetic progression from Eclogue and

G?orgie to epic. It also suggests the incursion of loftier concerns,

especially political subjects, into the pastoral grove as proleptic of

later poetic development. The pastoral presentiment of events of

epic importance occurs unabashedly in Virgil's fourth Eclogue, which augurs the birth of a divine hero. In the first lines of the

eclogue Virgil petitions the pastoral muse for a style that accords

with the portentous gravity of his subject:

Sicilian muse, let's sing a nobler song:

Low shrubs and orchards do not always please;

Let us sing woods to dignify a consul.

(Eclogue 4.1-3)

In his proem, the poet of Eclogue 4 forges a peaceable union

between Roman civic life and the pastoral. Elsewhere in the

Eclogues this forecasts the demise of the idyllic landscape. These

"woods to dignify a consul" were Virgil's hallmark. Later pastoral

poetry continued to develop the contradictions inherent in this

topos.18 Sannazaro, in particular, recognized the supra-pastoral

ambition evident in the opening o? Eclogue 4. Its realization neces

sitated a more ambitious reed pipe, foreshadowing Virgil's epic

trumpets.

But he by nature having a genius disposed to higher things, and not contenting himself with so humble a strain, took in

exchange that reed that you now see there, larger and newer

than the others, to be the better able to sing of greater things,

Jonathan Unglaub 51

and to make the woodlands worthy of the loftiest Roman

Consuls . . . perhaps with hope of later singing with more

sonorous trumpet the arms of Trojan Aeneas.

(10:M82, N104-105)

The Concert Champ?tre shares with Simone's Virgil frontis

piece the placement of the poet upon a grassy hill, shaded by

foliage. He similarly sits surrounded by indices of both his pastoral achievement and his adoption of loftier styles. While the attendant

figures in Giorgione are hardly as specific as the Virgilian person

ages in Simone's painting, we shall see that they evoke the pastoral

topoi which presage higher styles of poetry. Giorgione's poet is

incongruously dressed in the silken garments of a cosmopolitan bard. This figure relates to the numerous appearances of the

courtly poet in the Eclogues, the Bucolicum Carmen, the Pasto

rale, and the Arcadia either as himself or in the guise of a shep herd.19 The intrusion of the poet into his own idyllic creation

exhibits a literary self-consciousness that both concedes the limi

tations of his current genre and establishes his intention to sur

pass it.

In the Concert Champ?tre, the courtly attire of the poet sug

gests that his verse aspires to "po?tica urbanitas," notwithstand

ing the bucolic company and ambiance. The poet thus serenades

the unkempt rustic, not with the bucolic flute, but with a lute, a

stringed instrument emblematic of higher verse.20 The mounting

disdain toward the constraints of pastoral erupts in Prose 7 of San

nazaro's Arcadia. Here the cosmopolitan poet, Sannazaro's

pseudonymous Sincero, plays the non-pastoral lyre. In a lengthy

disgression on his nobility, literary accolades, and frustrated love,

the poet sighs: "Especially when in this feverish period of youth I

call to mind the pleasures of my delicious homeland, among these

Arcadian solitudes in which?by your leave I will say it?I can

hardly believe that the beasts of the woodlands can dwell with any

pleasure, to say nothing of young men nurtured in noble cities"

(7:M50, N72). Only through admittance to cultivated circles

might the erstwhile poet of rustic song yet realize the generic pro

gression charted in Simone's frontispiece. His listener, the cow

herd Carino, consoles the distraught poet: "'And even as up to this

point you have fruitlessly spent the beginnings of your adolescence

among the simple and rustic songs of shepherds, so hereafter you

will pass your fortunate young manhood among the sounding


trumpets of the most famous poets of your century, not without

hope of eternal fame.' When he said this, he fell silent; and I,

sounding my accustomed lyre, began" (7:M52, N74-5).21 The rap port between the shepherd and the courtly intruder in Giorgione's

painting hardly suggests Sincero's antagonism toward the Arca

dian ambiance. Nevertheless, the mere presence of the cultivated

poet, and his strumming of a sophisticated instrument, portends the eventual disavowal of this refuge.

At the conclusion of the Arcadia, the courtly poet affection

ately, but resolutely, retires his pastoral pipe (sampogna). Like wise in the Concert Champ?tre, the poet, simply by playing the

lute, consigns the sylvan nude's pipe to "here among these moun

tains to be given breath by the mouth of some shepherd." Forsak

ing the sampogna, Sannazaro's poet reminds us that "he who

composed you of these reeds, when he came into Arcadia, came

there not as a rustic shepherd but as a most cultured youth .... To

say nothing of the fact that in other times there have been already shepherds so daring that they have advanced their style even to the ears of Roman Consuls" (Epilogue, M129-31, N151-53). The instrument and couture of Giorgione's "most cultured youth" cor

respond to Carino's prediction of Sincero's poetic triumphs. Both

presage the return to a literary society and to poetic subjects com

mensurate with an enriched, "daring" style that embraces, not

evades, the tribulations of history.

If one accepts Giorgione's authorship of the Concert Champ?

tre, several interesting associations arise between the significance

of the poet/lutenist in the painting, and what we know about the artist. Vasari documents that Giorgione was indeed an accom

plished lutenist, and was patronized as such by the Venetian aris

tocracy. Giorgione thus might likely have portrayed himself, whether literally or

metaphorically, as the courtly lutenist.22

Another of his works also thematizes artistic self-consciousness.

In the Self-Portrait As David, Giorgione inserts himself into a

painted meditation on the power of representation and on the art

ist's relationship to others. In the Tempest and the Three Philoso

phers, Giorgione effaces the generic distinction between landscape and history painting. Here he paints with po?tica urbanitas by

using allegory to conceal the "hidden subject."23 The insertion of

the artist into his own creation, the transgression of genre bound

aries between pastoral and history, and the creation of meaning

through allusion and allegory are all notions at play in the Concert

Jonathan Unglaub 53

Champ?tre. Nonetheless, it would be circuitous to argue attribu

tion based on thematic interpretation. Since authorship remains an open question, it would be similarly reckless to identify the

courtly lutenist with "Giorgione" or even the "painter." I simply

refer to the figure as the "poet," however unsettling this disrespect

for different media might be for some readers. I believe that this

designation at least reflects how contemporary viewers, given

some exposure to pastoral texts, would have been inclined to read

the figure.24

II. "Abandoning my rude pastoral style, begin again, O Muses, your complaint"

The two nudes allegorize the poetic alternatives offered to the

pastoral poet harboring epic ambitions. Such alternatives confront

Virgil's pseudonymous Tityrus in Eclogue 6. He aspires to com

memorate the martial achievements of the consul Varus. Like the

seated nude nestled into the herbage, Tityrus' first Sicilian muse

"did not blush to dwell among the woods." Apollo gently rebukes

the poet's precocious effort to compose "a song of kings and bat

tles," for "a shepherd, Tityrus,/Should feed fat sheep, recite a fine

spun song." The chastised Tityrus reluctantly continues to "tune

rustic musings on a delicate reed." Nevertheless, he remains

beholden to the potential of higher verse, "for poets enough will

long to speak/Your praises, Varus, and compose sad wars" (6.1

8). It is this aim to commemorate political agents and lament war

fare that leads the poet to seek an ennobled style. In the painting,

the standing nude alludes to those conventions through which the

pastoral attains a "higher mood."25

Giorgione's juxtaposition of the standing nude, the gesture of

pouring, a fountain, and a distant river has led several scholars to

identify the figure as a personification of the Source. She is remi

niscent of the fountain nymph of Arcadia, described in Sanna

zaro's Prose 12: 26

But from the river nearby, without my perceiving how, all at

once there presented herself before me a young damsel most

beautiful of feature, and in her walk and her gestures truly divine . . . with a strange coil of hair, on which she bore a

green garland, and in her hand a vase of whitest marble.

(12:M112-13,N135)


The journey to the Source involves the maturation from the

generically delimited expressivity of the pastoral to the boldness of

higher modes of poetry. Sannazaro's Sincero follows the nymph to

the source of the world's rivers, through which he is finally escorted from Arcadia back to Naples. The Source topos derives

from the close of Virgil's fourth G?orgie. At the source, both Aris

taeus (the apiarist in the Georgics) and Sincero learn of the

Orpheus myth. This exemplifies the power of song to resurrect an

expended life or historical event?or at least its capacity to memo

rialize with refined verses.27 The passage through the Source thus

inspires the poet to embrace an urban literariness that expounds

the sorrows of death and the afflictions of history. The standing nude assumes an elegant posture and a ritualistic

dignity that encourage her identification with the Source. Physi

cally and emotionally detached from the concert trio, she decants

into the fountain?almost emblematically affirming her function

as the inspiration of song. The Concert Champ?tre has been inter

preted as an elegiac scene?the nymph of the source endowing the

poet with the orphie capacity to memorialize with song. This cor

responds with the solemnity, even mournfulness, that the figures

and atmosphere of the painting convey. In the tradition of elegy,

the poet follows Orpheus in deploring the transience of nature, while his verse nevertheless confers a poetic immortality upon the

subject.28 These poetic effects characterize Virgil's paradigmatic

pastoral elegy, that for Daphnis in Eclogue 5. Here the first singer,

Mopsus, bemoans the collapse of the natural order occasioned by

the death of Daphnis. Alternately, his companion, Menalcas, envi

sions the shepherd's apotheosis. He thereby comes to realize that

commemoration restores the health of the landscape.29

. . . Daphnis loves peace.

The shaggy mountains hurl their joyous cries

Up to the stars; now rocky cliffs and trees

Sing out, "A god! he is a god, Menalcas!"

Bless us and make us prosper! . . .

While boars love mountain ridges, fish the streams, Bees feed on thyme and grasshoppers on dew,

Your honor, name, and praises will endure.

(5.61-64, 76-78)

Jonathan Unglaub 55

The pastoral elegy endows both the singer and his subject with a literary immortality, reifying the endurance of poetry over the evanescence of existence. The commemoration of the shepherd

brings about the corresponding resurgence of the countryside?so

evident in Giorgione's lush, vital landscape. The introspection of

the musical ensemble and the ritualistic sobriety of the Source qui

etly foster the attainment, via song, of a profane eternal life in cul

tural memory.

In Sannazaro's Arcadia there is much occasion for elegiac verse.

His emphasis on this aspect of the pastoral draws on the precedent of Virgil. The elegy in Eclogue 11 is especially interesting in rela

tion to the role of the Source and of the poet in the Concert Cham

p?tre. Here, Ergasto commemorates his mother Massilia. She rests

beneath an elaborate fountain described at length in Prose 10. As

this grandiose monument is an anomaly within the rusticity of the

landscape, Ergasto is painfully aware of the inadequacy of pastoral verse. He requires an illustrious style to pronounce a fitting memo

rial dirge:

But you, O Blessed and fortunate River, call together your Nymphs in the sacred depths,

and renew your ancient beloved custom.

See to it that she find another trumpet to sing of her, so that the name be heard

forever, that of itself reverberates.

And?so may your lovely course be never disturbed

by the rains?give aid in some degree to my rough style, that pity temper it.

and then, year by year, hourly more increasing let there be memory of her among woods and mountains,

while there shall be grass on earth and stars in heaven.

Beasts, birds, caverns, trees, and springs,

men and gods will exalt with proud verses

and tales that name excellent and holy.

And because at the close it behooves me somewhat to rise,

abandoning my rude pastoral style,

begin again, O Muses, your complaint.

(11.88-90,94-99,106-114)

5 6 THE CONCER T CHAMP? TRE

The Concert Champ?tre is in several ways reminiscent of

Ergasto's eulogy. The standing nude evokes the nymph of the

Source whom Ergasto petitions for a noble mode of expression.

The wooded glade encircling Massilia's fountain presages the

arboreal and fluvial components of Giorgione's landscape. This

enclave of grove, river and vale becomes an active agent of pastoral

commemoration, a perpetual reverberation of Ergasto's lament:

And that which I sing now the springs and the streams

will recite along the valleys, murmuring

with their far-shining crystal waters.

And the trees that now I consecrate here and plant

whispering will make answer to the wind.

(11.136-140)

Ergasto consecrates commemorative trees during the elegy in

which he implores the Source to grant him lofty verse. In the Con

cert Champ?tre, an imposing tree rises behind the font. Its trunk

extends the tensed vertical arm of the standing nude, whose fingers adhere to the marble cornice as a metaphor of its vitalizing roots.

As the tree appears to be almost an extension grafted onto the

body of the nymph of the Source, so too their significance

overlaps.

At least one scholar has identified the tree in the Concert Cham

p?tre as a laurel, thus evoking a gamut of references to poetic

acheivement.30 The laurel as a sign of superior poetic skill figures

prominently in Petrarch's Bucolicum Carmen. In the third

Eclogue, Petrarch, as Stupeus, approaches Daphne with a laurel

bough bestowed upon him by the Muses. Eager to display his

poetic proficiency, Stupeus lobbies Daphne for confirmation of his

artistry. He concedes that his initial efforts were clumsy, but he

eventually mastered the woodland idiom. With her consent, he is

now emboldened to proceed further:

Only hoarse sounds emerged from my pipe. But at length I won favor;

Fauns and their dryads no longer were loath to list to my numbers.

Then I did see the she-goats, moved by the charm of the

music,

Leave the green boughs hardly nibbled and gaze upon me in

Jonathan Unglaub 57

wonder.

Bees I have seen leave their clover and locusts fall still in

midsummer.

Great was my joy. But faith in my song was born in me only

When the immortal Argus approved and charged me, "Sing

boldly." (3.64-70)

In the Concert Champ?tre, the hoarse-sounding pipe is held in

abeyance, while the lute-playing poet aspires to "sing boldly." The

approbation of Daphne, like the inspiration of the Source, enables

the "hope of the shepherds" to materialize as they evolve into

"bards of renown" (3.76-77).

The standing nude of the Concert Champ?tre, while connoting the Source, also suggests Daphne through her merger with the tree.

I do not intend to identify the standing nude with the figure of

Daphne, but rather with her function, equivalent to that of the

Source, as an agent of poetry and a mark of literary achievement.

Whether through her association with the regenerative waters of

the Source or the literary acclaim marked by the foliage, the stand

ing nude signifies the supervention of the pastoral mode through the cultivation of elegiac and heroic verse.

Boccaccio's twelfth Eclogue, modeled on Petrarch's third, also

charts the poetic ascension of the bucolic bard through the media

tion of a female allegorizing higher genres of verse. In his explana

tion of this Eclogue, Boccaccio reveals that "I substitute Aristeus

for myself, most eager to reach the art of poetry."31 As with San

nazaro's Sincero and Petrarch's Stupeus, the poet's self-insertion

occurs at the point where issues of poetic ambition are addressed.

The same concern pertains to the poet's function in the painting.

Wandering into a laurel grove, Aristeus entreats the Muse Caliope

to lead him to Saphos?here the elusive figure of poetic inspira tion. Caliope haughtily interrogates the acorn-bearing lad:

Pray, do you thus compare

your oaks with laurels? Though in ancient cults

they're consecrate to Jove, he did not raise

them as high as these. Don't you know, stupid dolt, acorns are served to pigs, and laurel wreaths

to poets whom Apollo put in charge

5 8 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

of grove and sacred fount and lovely Muses

and of his lyre and plectra? (12.8-14)

The singer's lowly station first arouses the suspicion, even

scorn, of the Muse. Caliope condescendingly suggests that Aris teus seeks the bucolic nymph "Phyllis or perhaps Lupisca, whom

you with apples do sometimes allure among the shadows of the

wood" (12.60-61). Caliope typecasts Aristeus in a role not unlike

the rustic shepherd in the Concert Champ?tre: who lounges with a woodland nymph on the grass, and likely remains content with

the vulgar flute and the shade of oaks. Aristeus insists that he

aspires, like his courtly counterpart in the Concert Champ?tre, to

join the ranks of those laurel-worthy poets admitted to the "Cas

talian grove and sonorous fount" of the Muses and entrusted with

the stringed instruments of Apollo. He prepares himself for the

arduous ascent to Saphos. He resolves to refine his song to suit the

lofty subjects that she "encompasses with her sublimest lyre" (12.117). In the Concert Champ?tre, the nymph of the Source

infuses the poet with the capacity to sing of sublime matters with

his own stringed instrument.

The agent of generic ascension, whether Daphne, Saphos, or the

Source, transforms the landscape of Concert Champ?tre into a

place of poetic rebirth. So inspired, the urbane poet can indeed strum his lute and sing "woods to dignify a consul." There is a

long tradition in pastoral poetry whereby the elegy honors just this

type of person. Conforming with Virgil's Daphnis, the eulogized individual is generally the master-singer among the shepherds and

custodian of the pastoral realm. He allegorically represents a polit

ical figure or patron upon whom the landscape, and indeed the

poet, depends. Servius initiated the long accepted identity of

Daphnis as Julius Caesar.32 Generals and kings, even in their

bucolic guises, demand a higher style. The eulogizing of pastoral

sovereigns grants the poet an opportunity to allegorize historical

events and, concomitantly, to pretend to higher genres. Yet, the

elegiac topos of the countryside bereft of its custodian exposes its

dependency upon the larger political world.33

Petrarch, in an exegetical epistle to his second Eclogue, reveals

that Argus, who bid him "Sing boldly," is Robert of Anjou, King of Naples. His death in 1343 brought about much civil discord, to

which both Petrarch and Boccaccio allude.34 Petrarch uses the

Jonathan Unglaub 59

topos of the bucolic landscape's deterioration after the loss of its

custodian to express the political upheaval.

"If once the shepherds sang only of Daphnis,

Now it behooves your song to tell of magnanimous Argus."

Who would survive?if he could?your passing? Truly, ye

shepherds, Life without Argus is death. Erelong you will see all around

you

Marshes and lakes dry up and the springs and the very ocean.

Winds will be different in breath, the herbs will bear altered

colors,

Flowers another fragrance, nor shall fruits maintain their

accustomed

Flavors nor meadows their wonted green nor the streams

their clear waters.

Flocks will bear different fleece, the fields yield rich harvests no longer.

Well do we know it was he and he only who with his glances

Brightened the world around him and caused all things to be

fecund.

Under his rule the woodlands were always serene and

tranquil;

Peace crowned his brow; with a word he could sweep the clouds from the heavens.

Now he has gone and ill fortune sorely troubles his faithful.

(2.62-63, 91-102)

The instability of the urban agency of support and the menace

of destructive forces are recurrent themes in the canon. The tradi

tion of pastoral elegy is relevant to the Concert Champ?tre, and its

reception, in two respects. First, it forces the pastoral to confront

death, a rupture with the timeless spring of Arcadia. In so doing, it marks the point at which the poet requires a high style?espe

cially if a political figure or a historical crisis is to be allegorically understood. Second, and more importantly, the elegiac convention

expresses the vulnerability of the bucolic landscape and its sus

taining song to larger historical tribulations. The contemporary

beholder, familiar with pastoral topoi, would have been aware of the circumstantial nature in which the idyllic landscape presents

6o THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

itself, whether in verse or painting, before one's eyes. Such notions

lie at the heart of the Concert Champ?tre?painted at a time when

the Venetian landscape it depicts, like Argus' Neapolitan domain, had indeed expired.

III. "Venice found itself in the greatest affliction"

Through the Source's inspiration, the pastoral incorporates sol

emn subjects and ennobling verse within its rustic songs. This col

lapse of genre boundaries enables the poet to eulogize great men

and their influence upon the vitality of the landscape. Virgil's imi

tators expanded this subtext of the pastoral to employ the land

scape as a metaphor for the deterioration and restoration of states.

Petrarch, in his fifth Eclogue, presents a dialogue on filial piety. Two brothers debate their obligation to restore the health of their senescent mother. She represents Rome torn apart by the Avignon

schism and Italian factionalism.35 The younger, dutiful son recalls

the "mother" as having:

... a great mansion; it stands on a wooded summit;

Brothers of ours long ago, high-minded, to it would render

Pious observence. Renowned far and wide in those days

our mother

Stirred all to envy of her among the neighboring forests, Famed for her sylvan treasures, blessed too in her offspring,

Sovereign queen of the woodland, she ruled through the

years until jealous Death bore away her children. Now all our brothers have

perished. Their fair renown still endures while we, the despised

survivors,

Draw out our lives, unsung, and our name is buried in

darkness.

Fortune has changed for the homestead in our day; through out the ages

Prosperous, now it has fallen, collapsing under our follies.

Let us restore the old house; our mother would hold nothing dearer. . .

(5.33-44)

Jonathan Unglaub 61

Petrarch employs the pastoral landscape and its civilized counter

point, the mother's mansion and estate, to allegorize his appeal for

a Roman restoration to resolve the papal schism.

In the Concert Champ?tre, the prominence of the background architecture invites interpretation. It occupies the "wooded sum

mit" that crowns the compositional triangle outlining the partici

pants in the concert. The marble, or stucco, porticoed edifice is a

Venetian villa in the terraferma.36 It recalls Petrarch's mansion. A

modest building seems to have been placed next to the villa as a

direct contrast, a reinforcement of the rustic/refined duality that

structures the picture. It breaks the horizon and towers over the

villa, perhaps as a sign of humility, similar to that which the for

mer estate of the Petrarchan mother has been reduced.

The investments of the Venetian patriciate in the V?neto for rec

reation, reclamation, and agriculture transformed the terraferma

into an Arcadian space by the first decade of the Cinquecento.37 Pietro Bembo's poetic rendition of the countryside in Gli Asolani

(1505) confirmed this assessment of the terraferma's idyllic charms.38 Like the more prosperous days of the mother's estate in

Petrarch, the V?neto became "Famed for her sylvan treasures."39

This renewed appreciation of the terraferma resulted from shifting Venetian economic and imperial objectives away from the Adriatic

and inland toward the Lombard frontier. Venetians developed a

mythic nostalgia for the terraferma. The patrician class cultivated

a mainland villa culture as an Arcadian refuge from the battered

maritime empire.40 Nobles and humanists constructed villas in the

recently drained Trevigian marshlands. Owning a retreat on the

mainland became a necessary component of social status in Ven

ice, as one chronicler, Girolamo Priuli, observed in 1509:

There was not a single citadino or noble, or even commoner,

who had the means, who had not purchased at least property and a house in the terraferma, and most often in the Pado

vano and Trevigiano, being nearby locations enabling one to

travel there for amusement and to return in a day or two. And

the great houses truly amounted to a treasure. . . . And upon

these properties one proceeded to live very delicately and lav

ishly, as opposed to the ancient Venetian, who desired to live

moderately, one now lives most abundantly.41

The annexation of the terraferma and its conversion into pros

perous estates greatly enriched Venice. La Serenissima emerged as


Petrarch's undisputed "Sovereign queen of the woodland." Yet

with the consolidation of the pan-European League of Cambrai, Venice temporarily lost the terraferma. The villa culture was anni

hilated?"Fortune has changed for the homestead in our day;

throughout the ages /Prosperous, now it has fallen, collapsing under our follies." Priuli attributed Venetian folly to the charms of the terraferma, which had enticed the patriciate rashly to forsake their historical commitment to the sea. One may associate the

close interaction of the noble youth and the rustic shepherd in the Concert Champ?tre with Priuli's complaint that instead of study

ing navigation to become wise counselors to the state, the patri

cian youth remain on the mainland to "practice with countryfolk" the leisurely life of the villa, and "indeed have become rustics."42

The War of the League of Cambrai nearly brought about Ven

ice's demise. The League was founded on December 10, 1508. It

comprised France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Papal States, and the Italian principalities allied with these powers. King Louis XII and Emperor Maximilian I colluded with Julius II to

strip Venice of its mainland possessions and reassert their territo

rial claims, of dubious legitimacy, to Lombardy and the V?neto. The Italian conspirators had often been wary of Venice's mainland

expansion, fearing her ultimate peninsular objective.43

The forces of the League penetrated Venetian territory in April 1509. They massed along the bank of the Adda at the Lombard frontier. French troops, having stealthily crossed the river, van

quished the ill-commanded Venetian mercenary armies at Agna

dello on May 9, 1509. As a result of low morale and diminished

prospects of booty, the remaining Venetian legions effectively dis

banded. The V?neto was placed in jeopardy. The nobles of the

mainland cities pledged allegiance to the Emperor to reassert their

birthright, lost under Venetian rule. The combination of this crip

pling defeat and the imminent threat of Imperial invasion per suaded the Venetian Senate to surrender Verona, Vicenza, and

Padua to the Germans.44 The terraferma, now unprotected by

Venetian arms, was devastated. Ironically, the patriciate had

hoped to preserve their villas by ceding their property to the

enemy. They expected eventually to recoup their estates.45 Never

theless, the misguided policy of appeasement ultimately exacer

bated the sack of the terraferma. As the released provinces

succumbed to depredation, many began to reconsider the wisdom

Jonathan Unglaub 63

of forfeiting so much of the V?neto. By mid-July a polarized Sen ate debated whether to forsake the terraferma as the bane of the

Republic, as Doge Leonardo Loredan proposed, or risk all in order to regain the imperiled lands.46 The ardent proponent of the latter

course, Luigi da Molino, proclaimed that "the commodious and

convenient private estates of our citizens, the abundance of fruits

one gathers there, and the pleasantness and amenity of the villas,

these things, desirable as they are, must drive and incite us to act

more willingly."47

The sudden surrender of the V?neto placated the Emperor.

Occupying forces grew complacent; reinforcements were scarce.

The Imperial treasury was depleted. These factors enabled Venice to reconquer Padua on the seventeenth of July, 1509. Drastic

defensive measures were then undertaken in anticipation of mas

sive retaliation by the Germans. The Venetians set fire to many

patrician estates in the vicinity of Treviso and Padua in order to

prevent their conversion into bulwarks by the forces of the

League.48 In his entry for September 15, 1509, Priuli records that

the Venetian regiments, "for the fortification of the city of Padua,

wrought great ruin, that only with great weariness would one be

able to judge the great and intolerable damage and the value of the

buildings of every sort ruined. And he who has not seen it with his own eyes, will never be able to judge nor think about it: It is neces

sary to have patience, because these are the fruits of war."49 The

"fructi dele gu?re" included the conflagration of the most opulent

villas in the Paduan campagna.

The rapacity of the invaders, coupled with the arson of the Paduan estates, decimated the idyllic landscape. Priuli records that the trail of destruction extended from the Trevigian territories

near Castelfranco to Mestre:

Also today, the Venetian fathers were advised by means of let

ters from the chancellor of Mestre, a city next to the lagoon,

how the enemy cavalry, circa five hundred in number, have

raced across the Trevigiano reaching Mestre, and all in order

to rob and plunder the peasants and territories. . . . Truly, I

cannot describe how much these updates contaminated and

afflicted the city of Venice from the first one until the last; and there they seemed to find themselves in the utmost dan

ger, having never seen, nor thought, nor imagined, nor judged to see the enemies reaching Mestre and upon the salty shores


and their palaces, buildings, and villas costing so much

money to take some leisure time and pleasure; and their prop

erties so well maintained and costing verily a treasure?the

ground alone more than thirty ducats; and their gardens so

honorably made with every diligence and care that verily they seemed an earthly paradise, especially for being near the

lagoon.... And each great noble gentleman would have been

able to lodge in such places, but now, truly, one would never

have imagined it possible to witness such ruin, seeing every

thing in the hand of the enemy, and how there they wreaked

havoc, set fires, and felled the trees in spitefulness and to fuel the fire. And without doubt, for similar respects, the city of

Venice found itself in the greatest affliction, and this I saw

with my own eyes.50

The plunder of the invaders uprooted the otium of terraferma villa culture. In poetry, Petrarch employed the estate as a metaphor

of the decline and desired restoration of Rome. In history, the estate was literally sacrificed in both Venice's surrender and

reconquest of the terraferma. Petrarch's Roman laments, such as

the fifth Eclogue, attained a poignant resonance in Venice after

Agnadello. In history and cultural ideology, Venice viewed herself as the successor to Rome.51 Now that the Serene Republic's own

downfall appeared imminent, Petrarch's fifth Eclogue, and his famous political elegies, "Spirito gentil" and "Italia mia," inspired a barrage of lamenti storici. They versified the demoralizing crisis of Cambrai.52 Sections of the "Italia mia" presage the later Vene

tian political laments, and read as poetic accounts of the stark

reversal of Venice's fortune.53

Petrarch uses the countryside as the figurative locus of societal

degeneration and civil strife. He also initiated the tradition of cul

tivating a contemplative life on the terraferma by retiring to his own retreat at Arqua in the Paduan campagna.54 The villa in the

Concert Champ?tre conflates these Petrarchan notions of the

landscape. The porticoed structure crowns the head of the genteel poet. Giorgione depicts the tranquillity of a poet's retreat in the

V?neto?a space not unlike the grove of poetic inspiration that

faced Petrarch's copy of the Eclogues. Yet the conception and

reception of a landscape portraying the terraferma villa culture,

painted so soon after the Venetian defense of the retaken Padua,

Jonathan Unglaub 65

could hardly have been innocent of the devastation described in

Priuli and contemporary poetic laments.

Sannazaro, an exile like Petrarch, envisages his return to

Naples. He contemplates the abandoned villas, including his own

Mergellina, where so much literary activity took place:55

But who will come that can vouch for us your sufferings,

noble Mergellina, how you so burn, and your laurels are become dry and barren sticks?

How many shepherds, Sebeto, and how many peoples will you see dying, of those that are settled beside you,

before your banks are elmed or poplared? Alas, once great Eridanus honored you

and Tiber at your name benignly nodded: now your own Nymphs are scarcely faithful to you.

Dead is she that made ornament to your lovely fountain,

and preferred your depths to all mirrors:

whence your fame, flying to heaven, exalted itself.

(12.88-90,103-111)

Sannazaro places the villa in the background of a pastoral lament on the impotence of the Source (the Sebeto) to nourish lit

erary ambition. Similarly, the Concert Champ?tre juxtaposes the

elegiac ensemble of poet, Source, and fountain with the villa.

Although metaphorical in Sannazaro, would not the burning Mergellina remind the Venetian reader of the conflagration of the

terraferma villas?the dying shepherds, the inhabitants terrorized,

tortured, and defiled by the enemy? While harbingers of disaster are subtle at best in the Concert Champ?tre, an affecting mourn

fulness permeates the figures of the foreground. At the apogee of

the composition's central, unifying structure rests the multivalent

villa?the icon of Venetian investment in the terraferma, the prod uct of the Venetian expansion provoking the formation of the

League, the locus of literary inspiration, and the site of the

destruction feared to portend the demise of the Republic. As in

Petrarch and Sannazaro, the villa assumes a mediating position

between landscape and urban society. Its imposition upon the

bucolic field registers the historical vicissitudes from which Arca dia yearns, but ultimately fails, to escape. In the months following

Agnadello, the villa placed in Giorgione's landscape constituted a


poignantly charged image. Might it not have reminded some eru

dite beholders of Petrarch's metaphorical use of the villa to deplore the degeneration of Rome and appeal for its renovation? An even

more topical reference may have been Sannazaro's Mergellina, a

monument to the reality of foreign occupation.

I am not proposing a programmatic correspondence between

Petrarch or Sannazaro and Giorgione, but rather an analogous

response provoked by similar historical circumstances. Recourse

to pastoral topoi underlies the composition and reception of the

pastoral?the audience is alert to these nuanced references. Topi

cal issues condition the selection of conventions in constructing an

avatar of this inherently intertextual genre. The features of the

Concert Champ?tre derive from, among other sources, a highly familiar corpus of pastoral leitmotifs. These topoi were well suited

to express reactions to the^political crisis which occasioned the

creation of a plaintive, elegiac pastoral picture in 1509-1510.56

IV. "Our fields are everywhere in turmoil"

The tribulations of war not only wreak havoc upon the coun

tryside and its villa culture. The desecration of the sylvan grove

prevents it from functioning as the locus of poetic inspiration.

Boccaccio's fifth Eclogue, entitled "Silva Cadens," recounts the

devastation of the countryside through the voice of Caliopus,

whom Boccaccio describes as "someone reciting most perfectly

the misfortunes of the desolate city."57 This figure has a function

equivalent to the Source in emblematizing the privileged poetic

genres suited to solemn subjects. Caliopus recites the dirge of the

nymph Chalcidia who remembers how the ravaged forest had once

soothed the nymphs to song.

This wood touched heaven

with beechtrees and was thick with ilex too,

distinguished with its oaks, and worth beholding for its green laurel, dense with cedar, lovely

with mournful cypress.

Why should I mention

the clear streams winding leisurely through grasses,

the springs, fresh lakes, and caves artlessly hidden

by limestone?

Jonathan Unglaub 6j

Ah wretched me! for I remember well

in what blithe dances I saw satyrs leaping and gentle nymphs adorned with blooms and garlands entwined with oakleaf, how they sang sweet verses

to the woodlands now with reeds and now with strings made tuneful by their art. But why review

so many things?

(5.30-33,41-43, 64-69)

The seemingly inviolable serenity of this pastoral dreamscape evokes the Concert Champ?tre. The once-habitual concerts alter

nating reeds and strings anticipate the musical diversions in Gior

gione's idyll. The lofty verse of the nymph memorializes the

landscape and its music. Yet her inspired commemoration of hal

cyon times heightens the present "sorrow" for the "wretched

woods" where "the Italian oak is burning with set fires /in every

part, no pine remains, alas!" (5.3, 78-80). A similar realization

overcomes the nymph Galatea in Boiardo's second Eclogue as she

witnesses the extirpation of the land.

I speak, and yet I turn my face often

to the beautiful countryside that once was full

of every pleasantry, now miserable and oppressed.

Where are both the choruses and the song so serene

that it was worthy of Parnassus and its fountain?

How has so much happiness failed?

Where are the sisters of Phaeton

who used to shade with such verdure

this beautiful river from the mouth to the mountain?

Which malignant planet or dark star

has wrought such misfortune in so blossoming a place

that merely to gaze upon it is fearsome.

(2.58-69)58

In contrast, the Concert Champ?tre presents the beholder with

precisely this elusive vision of a serene Parnassus. There, a foun

tain and a verdure-framed river do gently coax its inhabitants to

song. Like Boccaccio's and Boiardo's lost idylls, Giorgione's por

trayal of the terraferma is stridently eloquent in its obliviousness to the fearsome place the V?neto had so precipitously become. The


only songs the terraferma now induced, besides Petrarchan politi

cal laments, were the cries of the dispossessed countrymen.

Indeed, it is in this dissonance between the placid grove of pastoral song and the woeful realities of its historical moment that the Con

cert Champ?tre re-enacts the greatest pastoral poem: Virgil's

Eclogue 1.

Virgil's first Eclogue tells of the confrontation between Meli

boeus and Tityrus. The former is a farmer commanded to vacate

his property so Rome could reward its soldiers with the confis

cated acreage. The latter is a slave granted liberty and a secure par

cel of land by the imperial powers in Rome. With disbelief, Meliboeus observes how Tityrus insouciantly plays music in his

protected glade:

You, Tityrus, under the spreading, sheltering beech,

Tune woodland musings on a delicate reed;

We flee our country's borders, our sweet fields,

Abandon home; you, lazing in the shade, Make woods resound with lovely Amaryllis.

Not jealous, but amazed am I?our fields

Are everywhere in turmoil. . .

(1.1-5, 11-12)

At the outset of the Eclogues, Virgil offers a glimpse of leisure

but discredits the pastoral existence through Meilboeus' banish ment. The bucolic ambiance can no longer be taken for granted

but relies upon the benevolence of a ruler and the compensation of

his soldiers. Servius reveals that Tityrus is to be identified with

Virgil. His placement "under the spreading, sheltering beech"

(patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi, 1), alludes to Virgil's Man

tuan estate, restored to him through Augustus' intervention.59

This is the ultimate admission of dependency upon the larger

political world for the maintenance of the pastoral mode of life. In

his analysis of the phrase undique totis usque adeo turbatur agris

("Our fields are everywhere in turmoil," 12), Servius affirms its

emphasis upon the "communal expulsion" of the Mantuan farm

ers. Tityrus' singular immunity is all the more remarkable for this

reason.60 Otium remains, but only as a privileged commodity

administered by the Roman leader from his urban seat. Meliboeus

claims not to envy Tityrus' privileged space of repose. But his

Jonathan Unglaub 69

denial only enhances the reader's sense of injustice and his sympa

thy for the dispossessed farmer and his countrymen. As one

scholar acutely surmises, "Meliboeus' opening words make it

clear that it is no longer possible to assume the idyll. Rather, we

must stand, like Meliboeus, on the border line between dream and

reality, and behold the idyll's essence by watching someone else's

happiness. Meliboeus is a spectator in a land whose survival is

now an object of awe to him."61

The serenity of Giorgione's vision of the terraferma must also

have struck contemporary Venetian beholders as the antithesis to

"fields . . . everywhere in turmoil" left by the Cambrai invaders.

Like Meliboeus, the Venetian witnessing the devastation and sur

render of the V?neto submits to the exigencies of the historical

moment and forfeits his land. Meliboeus' irreconcilability with

Tityrus' leisure and bucolic ambiance becomes literally displaced outside the space of representation in the Concert Champ?tre.

From this external, "Meliboean" vantage point, the Venetian

beholder could survey the commodious landscape and the indolent

music-making with sorrowful disbelief. Like Tityrus, the urbane

poet continues playing unabated in an illusory pastoral world.

Tityrus' "woods resound with lovely Amaryllis," a nymph that,

according to some ancient interpreters, allegorizes Rome. She sug

gests, by extension, the majestic verse necessary to exalt Caesar's

beneficence. By contrast, Tityrus' former "Mantuan" nymph Gal

atea represents the impoverishing bucolic voice. Under her he "had

no care of property nor hope of freedom" (1.31-32).62 Similarly,

the courtly poet in the Concert Champ?tre is nourished by the ele

gant nymph of the Source, an Amaryllis of urban song. He remains

oblivious to the lowly woodland nymph, whose rustic musings

bring neither reward nor reprieve. As a poet of urban society and

its villa culture, Giorgione's lutenist has been allocated a parcel of

Arcadia in which to practice his art. Nonetheless, the singular

otium of the poet underscores the banishment of everyone else.

This transforms the serene landscape into an

improbable appari

tion of halcyon times.63

Similar ontological structures, in which the spectator is placed

outside the mirage of pastoral innocence, can be seen in another

image produced in Venice during the League of Cambrai conflict

(fig. 3). In Giulio Campagnola's Old Shepherd of 1509, the shep herd, his mouth resting on a "delicate reed," recalls Tityrus, whom

Meliboeus addresses thus: "Lucky old man (Fortunate senex)\


your lands will then remain" (1.46).64 Tityrus relaxes, sheltered by the rustic building of his secured farm. Meliboeus' forlorn posi tion is assumed by the beholder outside of the space of representa tion. Glimpsing Tityrus' safeguarded realm, the Venetian viewer,

dispossessed of his terraferma estate, might well ponder, like Mel

iboeus, "Shall I ever again, within my country's borders,/With wonder see a

turf-heaped cottage roof?" (1.67-68). Giulio's exten

sive humanistic education would more than account for this not so

oblique reference to Virgil. Giulio engraved this illustration of

Tityrus' spared pastoral realm in the year of the loss of the terra

ferma. Its topical aptness, and irony, would hardly have escaped him, or his stylistic and spiritual kinsman in pastoral art,

Giorgione.65

Campagnola and Giorgione appropriated the Tityrus/Meli boeus dialectic in constructing their topically charged pastoral

images created during the Cambrai crisis. This tragic period for

the terraferma shared much with Virgil's poetically veiled account

of the aftermath of the Roman civil war and the horrors of Augus tan land redistribution. The reapplication of Virgilian conventions to express the oppression of the countryside has many precedents

in post-classical variations of the pastoral. Boiardo reformulated

the Virgilian dialectic in the eighth Eclogue of his Pastorale to

allude to the wars that ravaged Ferrara in 1482-84. Ironically, Ven

ice was then the culprit in the devastation of the Ferrarese cam

pagna. As in the terraferma twenty-six years later, Ferrarese fields

were overrun, forests were burned, villages were deserted and

country estates were ransacked.66 Melibeo, now acting the oppo

site role, finds Menalca weeping. He inquires about the cause of

Menalca's bereavement. Menalca responds with a "Meliboean"

outburst contrasting the misery of the shepherds with the oblivi ous prosperity of his interrogator:

Well must you stay away from every person,

0 Melibeo, if even here it remains secret

that which is evident and all the world hears. 1 am bold just to speak here of war, and I fear that it listens to me not,

this beautiful place where peace resides.

Your lambs, here gathered around the usual fountains and rivers,

they go on grazing freely and unbound;

Jonathan Unglaub 71

and here, secure, you have sung of love.

How different from this is our fortune!

Our herds and sheep as booty, and ourselves driven out of or dead in the forest;

Never under the Heavens could I have imagined seeing

something so cruel, that to narrate it

I become anxious and fear not to be believed.

(8.13-22, 25-30)67

Boiardo also modeled his first Eclogue on the dialogue between

Tityrus and Meliboeus. Again reversing his model, Titiro deplores his unjust misfortune and dreams of the bountiful landscape now

lost to him (1.7-15). Mopsus, his reprieved companion, offers

only uncomprehending platitudes to console him. Titiro envisions

what he has lost since that time when the landscape flourished in a

happier state. Like his Venetian counterpart surveying his

scourged estate with the memory of its former beauty, Titiro sifts

through the ashes to contemplate what was:

Where is my dwelling along the shore?

Where is the rich garden of golden fruits?

Everything is broken and burned into ruin.

Where is the new little glade and its green laurel

with tender sprigs that I myself planted, whence, once singing of love, now, suffering, I weep?

My herd was abducted from me, the flock infected

with pestilence died, my pleasant countryside is left only wasted and squalid.

(1.49-54,106-108)68

Titiro, like Virgil's Meliboeus, revels in remembrance while

despairingly submitting to the sorrows of history. In the Concert

Champ?tre, Giorgione similarly seems to envision the plenteous

countryside as a private mental refuge, an idyllic memory, in the

midst of desolation. Yet in 1509-1510, the picture would have

offered only bittersweet consolation to the Venetian groping for

past tranquillity.

The exchange between Meliboeus and Tityrus became not only

the topos employed by Boiardo and others, but also the image that


signified all of Virgil's Eclogues. Characteristically, it was the only illustrated episode from the Eclogues in the first printed editions

of Virgil. It constituted the visual emblem of pastoral poetry in the

Renaissance. In addition to the poem's relevance to the historically

conditioned experience of the Concert Champ?tre, contemporary

illustrations of Virgil's first Eclogue furnished a more immediate

paradigm for the painting. In the Stagnino edition of Virgil, pub lished at Venice in 1507, the Eclogues are illustrated with a single

image of the encounter between Tityrus and Meliboeus (fig. 4).69 Unlike Campagnola, the wood-block printmaker departs signifi

cantly from Virgil's designation of Tityrus as Fortunate Senex and

pictures a young, clean-shaven musician. The Stagnino image was

the literal illustration of Virgil's first Eclogue closest in time and

place to Giorgione's portrayal of the youthful lutenist in the Con

cert Champ?tre. In Sebastian Brant's edition of Virgil published at

Strasbourg in 1502, woodcuts illustrate each Eclogue, creating a

veritable biblia pauperum of pastoral poetry.70 Being first, the

depiction o? Eclogue 1 was privileged (fig. 5). Like Petrarch's inti

mation that Simone could paint the "enigmas of high-spoken Vir

gil," Brant proclaims, in his introductory poem, that the

illustrations lift the veil for learned and unlearned alike?pictorial

exegesis becomes the visual counterpart to Servius.71

In Virgil, the dialogue between Tityrus and Meliboeus occurs in

the shaded enclosure preserving otium, while constantly implying

a more expansive geography through which one must pass in his

torical time. These spaces are identified, respectively, with Tityrus

and Meliboeus. Brant's cartographic rendition of the landscape lit

erally depicts the topographical allusions of the Eclogue.72

Tityrus, we recall, allegorizes Virgil's own status. Augustus had

interceded to exempt his Mantuan farm from compulsory land

redistribution. Brant makes explicit Servius' geographical gloss on

the eclogue. He pictures Mantua as the hamlet behind the ousted

Meliboeus and Rome as the metropolis looming over Tityrus'

sheltering beech. The background juxtaposition of views of Man

tua and Rome synecdochically encodes the tension of the dialogue: the agrarian locus of reprieve and exile versus the urban arbiter of

pastoral peace and banishment.73 Both Virgil and Brant enact a

juxtaposition between the private immediacy of "familiar

streams" and "cooling shade" and the space of exile to which the

masses have been consigned. Meliboeus sighs while surveying the

fertile lands he will soon abandon to the Roman legions:

Jonathan Unglaub 73

Think of these fields in a soldier's cruel hands!

These crops for foreigners! See how discord leaves

Countrymen wretched: for them we've tilled and sown!

(Eclogue 1.70-72)

He resigns himself to exile in the panoramic expanse of historical

space:

Ah, but we others leave for thirsty lands?

Africa, Scythia, or Oxus' chalky waves,

Or Britain, wholly cut off from the world.

Shall I ever again, within my country's borders

With wonder see a turf-heaped cottage roof,

My realm, at last, some modest ears of grain?

(Eclogue 1.64-69)

In the Concert Champ?tre, Giorgione also places the locus of

exile and abandonment in the mental space of the background

panorama?the villa, the distant town and even the rustic struc

ture. The latter recalls the building in Campagnola's print and

likewise evokes Meliboeus' painfully abandoned "turf-heaped

cottage." Besides being an Arcadian refuge from the city, the ter

raferma estate was also devoted to agricultural production.74 Like

Meliboeus' Mantuan farm, the terraferma villas succumbed to

"foreign" soldiers. In a mass emulation of Meliboeus, the peas

antry of the V?neto abandoned their "country's borders . . . sweet

fields," as imperial soldiers overran them. Escaping from the

forces of Christendom occupying the "fields everywhere in tur

moil," the terraferma husbandman, "Sick, driving [his] goats,

scarcely leading this one" (Eclogue 1.12-13), journeyed toward the

city in the lagoon, "wholly cut off from the world." In his entries

between September 11 and 16, 1509, Priuli describes the doleful

practice of "abandonando il dolze e charo domicilio."75 He and

Sanuto repeatedly recount the wretched spectacle of fugitives

from Giorgione's own Trevigian territories clamoring their way to

Venice and into its canals, calli and campi. Ordered to evacuate in

anticipation of German invasion, they clogged the road to Venice

with their makeshift carts, battered families, and animals.76

Truly all the territories of Treviso and Mestre were placed in

such flight, that it was not possible to judge, nor was one able


to deduce, if everyone escaped. Each peasant had mounted

upon his carts the women and children and their meager pos

sessions to come to Venice. All the roads that headed toward

the salty shores were so jammed with carts that one was not

able to pass; and the road from Treviso to Marghera, called

"il Teragio," was so choked by carts laden with these poor

country folk, their children, and all of their animals that there was no space to move. And with so much weeping, sobbing,

screaming and lamentations, they contaminated the heavens,

not just the men. I do not believe that so many lamentations,

tears and sighs are heard even in Hell. ... It was certainly

something incredible and pathetic to see and hear, much

more so than what I write of it.77

The Senate was moved by the unflagging loyalty of the terra

ferma peasantry, especially the Trevigiani, who alone never

yielded to imperial might. In gratitude, they dispatched patrician vessels to facilitate the lagoon crossing from Mestre.78

Once in Venice, the refugees dispersed to several temporary shelters, the largest of which was the recently rebuilt Fondaco dei

Tedeschi.79 Ironically, Giorgione and Titian had frescoed the exte

rior, only the year before, with allegories of Venetian invincibil

ity.80 The center of Venetian economic relations with the Germans

now served as provisional lodging for the terraferma peasants,

ousted from their homes by the armies of the warehouse's epony

mous tenants.

The wretched consequences of exile were abundantly evident in

Venice. Priuli and Sanuto record that the refugees and their flocks were

ubiquitous. Lamentations and pathetic wails reverberated

throughout the city. Corralled in its narrow calli and campi, dis

oriented animals bellowed day and night.81 With shepherds and

farmers lodging in the great urban hall of commerce, sheep and

swine herds congregating in Piazza San Marco, Venice after Agna

dello had become a displaced perversion of the pastoral.82 The har

mony of bucolic song had given way to a cacophony of despair. How could the painter of the Concert Champ?tre, a likely native

of the terraferma, or any Venetian, not have been moved by the

plight of his countrymen with whom he shared asylum in Venice?

Confronted with this spectacle, the painting's idyllic portrayal of

the terraferma, its topography, its villa culture, and its musical

diversion could only have been viewed with the greatest irony. The

Jonathan Unglaub 75

Concert Champ?tre is a wistful souvenir of a landscape now

utterly annihilated and purged of its populace. Like Virgil's

implicit geography and Brant's landscape, Giorgione's prospect of

the V?neto represents both the bucolic realm to be forsaken and

the space to be traversed toward a future full of suffering and

bereft of otium. With Meliboeus' misery manifested in the refu

gees inundating the city, would not the creator and beholders of

the Concert Champ?tre have interpreted the encounter with this

conventional, even "Tityran," pastoral space as an all too real dra

matization of Virgil's first Eclogue? A picture emblematic of the

pastoral genre thus re-enacts its most renowned Eclogue, whose

verses would have resonated with an almost documentary

relevance.

The Virgilian themes of dispossession and expulsion also

became topoi in later bucolic verse. In Sannazaro's tenth Eclogue,

the poet Caracciolo demurs to seek Arcadia. He remains in the

Neapolitan campagna as an embittered witness to its abandon

ment. His verses narrate a Meliboean plight of exile and

deprivation:

Let him thank Heaven, then, whoever has plenty,

for any good of his own in this vile wretchedness

that drives away everybody from his own fold.

The cowherds and the shepherds abandon Hesperia, the familiar woods and beloved fountains; for the hard times give them cause of it.

They wander among mountains uncultivated, uninhabitable,

so not to see their little flock oppressed

by foreign peoples, unjust, inexorable.

(10.61-69)

Similar to the Mantuan setting of Virgil's Eclogue 1, Caracciolo

couches the turmoil of history in the language of pastoral exile.

Like Virgil's Mantua, Sannazaro's characterization of Naples as

the abandoned "Hesperia" of "familiar woods and beloved foun

tains" and as "oppressed by foreign peoples" evokes the actual sta

tus of the Venetian terraferma. The daily encounter with exiles

from his homeland, the continuing evacuation of an idyllic land

scape, and the immediate threat of foreign invasion compelled the

author and audience of the Concert Champ?tre, like Sannazaro, to

recast the Virgilian paradigm to register current historical crises.


Virgil's ninth Eclogue forms a pendant to the first and serves to

frame the entire collection within the theme of lost leisure and lands.83 The poem recounts the journey of two dispossessed farm

ers, Lycidas and Moeris, toward the city. Moeris agonizes:

0 Lycidas, have we lived for . . . We never dreamt

An outsider would lay claim to our little farm

And say, "This is mine, old plowmen. Now clear out!"

Defeated, grieving?chance turns everything upside down?

(9.2-5)

Lycidas, dumbfounded, wonders aloud of a landscape anticipating

Giorgione's pastoral oasis:

1 thought I'd heard that where the hills draw back

And begin to make the ridge slope gently down

To the stream and age-worn beeches, brittle-topped?

He stops, insisting to his disconsolate companion, "All this Men alcas had preserved with songs" (9.7-10). Moeris, with the sapi ence of ill-fortune, reminds him of the grim inefficacy of poetry.

The hills and valley lie utterly defenseless against the ravages of war (9.10-13). As in the Concert Champ?tre, the landscape's vital

ity remains only as a poetic memory of halcyon times. Yet even

poetic conjuration of the locus amoenus is ineffective when con

fronting the violence to the land and the ruthless expulsion of its inhabitants. Moeris discloses that the poet, Menalcas, has been

banished from the pastoral ambiance. If one follows Servius by

reading Menalcas as Virgil, then Caesar's dispensation fails to

safeguard even part of the countryside as a reposeful enclosure

given to song.84 Lycidas, in trepidation of poetry's demise and the

consequent loss of an ideal landscape, exclaims:

Your comforts?you too?almost snatched from us?

Who would sing of nymphs? or spread the grassy earth With flowers, or bring on fountains with green shade?

(9.18-20)

In an elegiac manner, Virgil attributes the expiration of the

landscape to the exile of the Daphnis-like poet.85 His songs had

preserved the locus amoenus; his departure now consigns the

Jonathan Unglaub 77

Giorgionesque landscape of mossy herbage and fountains to the

forces of history. Like memories of the shady greensward and

peaceful music making, Menalcas' songs are "comforts," bitter

sweet diversions offering solace in oppressive, joyless times.86

Yet despite the precarious status of song and the landscape it

sustains, the despair of the farmers dissipates as they recite the

songs of the departed Menalcas. Their alternating reminiscences

oscillate between Menalcas' droll Theocritan bucolics?

"Tityrus, pasture my goats till I return?

I sha'n't be gone long?and water them when fed,

And don't bump into that goat, for he butts."

(9.23-25)87

?and his encomiastic verses "to dignify a consul" incorporating

topical allusions to history:

"Varus, your name, should Mantua survive,

Mantua all too near to sad Cremona,

Melodious swans will raise up to the stars."

(9.27-29)

In the Concert Champ?tre, the seated nude representing bucolic

song and the Source of ennobled verse bracket the paired musi

cians. They suggest the rustic/refined duality of Menalcas' (Vir

gil's) repertory. To the left of the flutist, under a thick canopy of

foliage, a Theocritan shepherd approaches what might just be that

notoriously insolent goat. Behind the Source and above the accom

plished poet stands a Venetian villa, icon of the decimated terra

ferma and its expelled inhabitants, one not, perhaps, dissimilar to

the estates of Virgil's "Mantua, all to near sad Cremona."88 In Vir

gil, the juxtaposition of blithe "Idylls" and topical lament entails a "suspension" or suffusion of dissonance permitted through their

performance as

pastoral songs.89 Memories of songs are simply

contemplated as objects of "comfort" and cherished as commemo

rations. Similarly in Giorgione, the crepuscular beauty of the land

scape has the accommodating effect of Virgilian "suspension."

The viewer's sorrow, provoked by the circumstances of the work,

is diffused within the pastoral atmosphere of peaceful reflection.90

The shepherds' consoling remembrance of Menalcas' verses

alerts them to the Orphic power of song. Their surrogate voices


commemorate the Daphnis-like poet. This ignites the concomitant

hope for the landscape's resurgence.91 To this end, Lycidas recites

a song where the pastoral deity augurs rebirth:

"Daphnis, why study ancient constellations?

Behold, the star of Caesar has burst forth, To make the fields rejoice in crops, and grapes

Ripen and color on the sunny hills.

Graft pear trees, Daphnis; your sons will pluck the fruits."

(9.46-50)

Although the landscape is deprived of its protector, Menalcas, the perpetuation of his verse at least portends some future peace

when song will resound in fruitful woodlands. In Virgil, the boun

tiful landscape is not only a memory orphically revitalized; it is

also the hope for an auspicious future. The burdens of the

moment, however, pierce sweet memories, stifle hopeful reverie,

and silence song. While Lycidas urges Moeris to continue singing in order to "Make the trip less painful," he wearily replies "No

more, my boy, let's do what must be done" (9.64, 66). Similarly,

the landscape of the Concert Champ?tre presents a consoling

memory of a placid, songful past and, perhaps, future. But its elu

sive beauty, remote from current experience, poignantly rein

forces the present nadir in Venice's fortunes. The beholder's

displacement in viewing the painted idyll is similar to that in hear

ing the landscape eulogized in contemporary poetic laments. In

these verses, as in Virgil, one witnesses an interplay between a lin

gering mirage of the abundant Italian landscape and an outcry at

the historical forces conspiring to destroy it. Indeed, at the height of the Paduan crisis in 1509, the author of La Obsidione di Padua

castigates the renegade Italian conspirators in the League of Cam

brai for failing to cherish the once-flourishing terraferma country side as their locus amoenus. In his exposition of history, the

author implies that it is precisely the pastoral which is at stake:

Are you not of Italian stock?. . .

But favor those who try with every art

To destroy of the world the most beautiful part? That which of every land is nurturing mother

And for her divinity elected by the gods;

Jonathan Unglaub 79

That which is more fertile and felicitous,

Healthy, pleasant and of everything most perfect.

That which one can say nature

Endows with all her art and care?

Where are fields more fertile and felicitous?

Where are forests more dense and woods more shadowy?

Where are the hills happier and so bright? Where are valleys more pleasant and harbored from the sun?

Where are groves of oil and wine more fertile?

Where, if not in the garden of Italy? Where are more rivers, lakes, and fountains?

Where are more beautiful and numerous seas?

Where are more inhabited and useful mountains?

Where is the countryside to the heavens more gracious and

dear?

Where is this place, if not among us, dear Italians?

If only you had looked after your own richness.92

NOTES

This study owes much to the inexhaustible insight and encouragement of David

Rosand. I am also grateful to David Freedberg for valuable criticisms and sugges

tions, as well as to my colleagues Frederick Ilchman, Emily O'Brien, and Domi

nique Surh, who reviewed the text at various stages. Of course, I am solely

responsible for any faults that remain.

1.1 use these works extensively throughout. I quote from the following editions:

Virgil, "Eclogues," tr. Paul Alpers, in Paul Alpers, The Singer of the Eclogues: A

Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley 1979), 9-63; Petrarch, Bucolicum Carmen, tr.

Thomas G. Bergin (New Haven 1974); Giovanni Boccaccio, Eclogues (Bucolicum

Carmen), tr. Janet Smarr (New York 1987); Matteo M. Boiardo, "Pastorale," in

Opere Volgari, Scrittori d'ltalia 224, ed. Pier V. Mengaldo (Bari 1962), 131-72; J.

Sannazaro, Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, tr. Ralph Nash (Detroit 1966), 29

154. Hereafter these editions will be referred to by author alone with verse refer

ences following the translation given in the text. In the case of Boiardo the

translations are my own. In the case of the prose passages from Sannazaro, I cite

page references from Nash's translation ( hereafter "N") and the following Italian

edition (hereafter "M"): Jacopo Sannazaro, "Arcadia," in Opere Volgari, Scrittori

d'ltalia 220, ed. Alfredo Mauro (Ban 1962), 1-132.

8o THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

2. Attribution is not my concern. I adopt Giorgione's authorship for consistency. The arguments of my study would not fundamentally differ if Titian were defini

tively shown to be solely or partially responsible for the work. An exhaustive biblio

graphic survey of the arguments upholding both Giorgione's and Titian's

authorship can be found in Alessandro Ballarin, "Le probl?me des oeuvres de la

jeunesse de Titien avanc?es et recul?es de la critique," in Le si?cle de Titien: L'?ge d'or de la peinture ? Venise, ed. Michel Laclotte, exh. cat., Grand Palais (Paris

1993), 305-14, and cat. no. 43, 340-8. He advocates theTitian attribution. Recent

adherents of the Giorgione attribution include Christian Hornig, Giorgiones

Sp?twerk (Munich 1987), 75-82; David Rosand, "Giorgione, Venice and the Pasto

ral Vision," in Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape, ed. Robert Cafritz, exh.

cat., National Gallery (Washington, DC 1988), 43-45; and Konrad Oberhuber, "Le

message de Giorgione et du jeune Titien dessinateurs," in Le si?cle de Titien: L'?ge d'or de la peinture ? Venise, ed. Michael Laclotte, exh. cat., Grand Palais (Paris

1993), 431-43. For a new attribution to Domenico Mancini, see Paul Holberton, "The Pastorale or F?te Champ?tre in the Early Sixteenth Century," in Titian 500,

Studies in the History of Art 45 (Washington, DC 1994), 255-258; and Charles

Hope, "The Tempest over Titian," New York Review of Books, 19 June 1993, 22-6.

3. Recent efforts to place Giorgione's works, especially the Tempesta, in the con

text of the Cambrai crisis, have been seminal to my interpretation of the Concert

Champ?tre: Deborah Howard, "Giorgione's Tempesta and Titian's Assunta in the

Context of the Cambrai Wars," Art History 8 (1985), 271-278, and Paul Kaplan, "The Storm of War: The Paduan Key to Giorgione's Tempesta," Art History 9

(1986), 405-427.

4. A detailed survey of the numerous interpretations of the Concert Champ?tre is found in Ballarin (note 2), 340-348. The fundamental study is Patricia Egan, "Poesia and the F?te Champ?tre," Art Bulletin 41 (1959), 303-313. She relates con

temporary tarot card allegorical figures of Music and Poetry to features of Giorgi one's painting, especially the female nudes. Since both pipe-playing and decanting into a spring are attributes of "Poesia," Egan argues that the nudes allegorize higher and lower genres of poetry as differentiated in Aristotle's Poetics. This distinction

is then echoed throughout the composition. Other studies adduce texts ranging from Pietro Bembo's Gli Asolani, to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, to Ficino's De

Amore to interpret the high-low, male-female dialectics of the picture. To list a few:

Philip Fehl, "The Hidden Genre: A Study of the Concert Champ?tre in the Lou

vre," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 16 (1957), 153-168; Robert Klein,

"La biblioth?que de la Mir?ndole et le Concert Champ?tre de Giorgione," in La

forme et l'intelligibile: ?crits sur la Renaissance et l'art moderne, ed. Andr? Chastel

(Paris 1970), 193-203; Francis Broun, "The Louvre Concert Champ?tre: A Neopla tonic Interpretation," in Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, ed. Konrad Eisen

bichler and Olga Zorzi Pugliesi (Ottawa 1986), 29-38; Augusto Gentili, Da

Tiziano a Tiziano: Mito e allegoria nella cultura veneziana del Cinquecento, 2nd

ed. (Milan 1988), 22-28; Patricia Emison, "The Concert Champ?tre and Gilding the Lily," Burlington Magazine 133 (1991), 195-196. Other studies?such as

Rudolf Wittkower, "Giorgione and Arcady," in Idea and Image: Studies in the Ital

ian Renaissance (London 1978), 161-73; Elizabeth Buckley, "Poesia Muta: Alle

gory and Pastoral in the Early Paintings of Titian," Ph.D. diss. University of

California, Los Angeles, 1977 (Ann Arbor 1978), 64-78; Luba Freedman, "The

Jonathan Unglaub 81

Pastoral Theme in the Visual Arts of the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo," Ph.D.

diss, Hebrew University, 1983, 188-196; Rosand (note 2), 30-51; Paul Holberton,

"Painting and Poetry at the Time of Giorgione," Ph.D. diss., Warburg Institue

(London 1989), 374-403, and (note 2); Paul Barolsky, The Faun in the Garden:

Michelangelo and the Poetic Origins of Italian Renaissance Art (University Park

1994), 48-56?have examined pastoral motifs and topoi to elucidate the meaning of the Concert Champ?tre.

5. Francisa Petrarcae Vergilianus codex, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, codex A.49 in

folio. Andrew Martindale, Simone Martini?Complete Edition (Oxford 1988), cat. 15,191-92, dates the painting to between 1338 and 1344. Joel Brink, "Simone

Martini, Francesco Petrarca and the Humanistic Program of the Virgil Frontis

piece," Mediaevalia 3 (1977), 94-109, dates the work to immediately prior to

Petrarch's own coronation on the Capitoline during Easter 1341; a biographical milestone that he finds at the heart of the iconography of the frontispiece. For the

post-Petrarchan, mostly Milanese, provenance of the volume, see Luciano Bellosi,

// G?tico a Siena (Florence 1982), 183-84.

6. Text and translation from Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology (Berkeley

1987), 20.

7. The nature of Virgil's "imitation" of Theocritus has dominated Virgil scholar

ship from antiquity to the present day. For early, late antique, attempts to deduce

the causa of the Eclogues and define its relationship with Theocritus, see Patterson

(note 6), 30-42. Alpers (note 1), 204-8, instructively elaborates the distinctions

between Theocritus and Virgil in terms of Schiller's categories of "naive" and "sen

timental" poetry. 8. Servius, "In Vergilii Bucolicon Lihrum Commentarius," in Vergilii Buc?lica et

Ge?rgica Commentarii, ed. Georgius Thilo (Leipzig 1887), 2: intentio poetae haec

est, ut imitetur Theocritum. . . . et aliquibus locis per allegoriam agat gratias

Augusto vel aliis nobilibus, quorum favore amissum agrum recepit. in qua re tan

tum dissentit a Theocrito: Ule enim ubique simplex est, hic necessitate compulsus

aliquibus locis miscet figuras, quas perite plerumque etiam ex Theocriti versibus

facit, quos ab illo dictos constat esse simpliciter. hoc autem fit po?tica urbanitate.

9. See William J. Kennedy, "The Virgilian Legacies of Petrarch's Bucolicum Car

men and Spenser's Shepheardes Calender," in The Early Renaissance and the Pas

toral Tradition, ed. Anthony Pellegrino (Binghamton 1982), 84-91 and Patterson

(note 6), 2-52, who discusses Petrarch's "Imitation as Interpretation" of Virgil as a

conscious application of Servian biographical and political allegory to his own cir

cumstances as poet and exile.

10. Giovanni Boccaccio, Rime, Carmina, Epistole e lettere, vita, De Carnaria,

Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio 5, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan 1992), 712 (Ep?s tola 23, to Fra Martino da Signa). Theocritus syragusanus poeta, ut ab antiquis

accepimus, primus fuit qui greco carmine buccolicum excogitavit stilum, verum

nil sensit pr?ter quod cortex ipse verborum demonstrat. Post hune latine scripsit

Virgilius, sed sub cortice nonnullos abscondit sensus, esto non semper voluerit sub

nominibus colloquentium aliquid sentiremus. Post hunc autem scripserunt et alii,

sed ignobiles, de quibus nil curandum est, excepto ?nclito preceptore meo Fran

cisco Petrarca, qui stilum pr?ter solitum paululum sublimavit et secundum eglo

garum suarum materias continue collocutorum nomina aliquid significantia

posuit. Ex his ego Virgilium secutus sum, quapropter non curavi in omnibus collo

quentium nominibus sensum abscondere. On Boccaccio's "pastoral cryptograms"


after the model of Petrarch, specifically the political and elegiac eclogues in his

Bucolicum Carmen, see W. Leonard Grant, Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral

(Chapel Hill 1965), 86-110, and Smarr's introduction to Boccaccio (note 1), xxxii-1.

11. Eclogae. Vergilii. Calpurnii. Nemesiani. Francisci Pe(trarcae). loannis

Boc(caccii). loan bap. Ma(ntuani). Pomponii Gaurici, impressum Florentiae opera et impensa Philippi de Giunta, Mille. CCCCC.IIII.

12. Holberton (note 4), 174?224, traces the development of the Renaissance pas

toral from a vernacular tradition of amorous poetry and a Latin allegorical tradi

tion. Pulci's translation of Virgil's allegorical eclogues facilitated the conflation of

these two trends in later fifteenth-century vernacular pastoral poetry such as Boi

ardo and Sannazaro. The full bibliographic citation for Pulci's important publica tion reads: Bucoliche elegantissime composte da Bernardo Pulci fiorentino e da

Francesco Arsochi senese et da Hyeronimo Benivieni et da Jacopo Fiorino de Boni

nsegni senese, impressum Florentia per me Antonium Bartholomei Miscomini,

A.D. MCCCCLXXXI. The names following Pulci's in the title refer to the other

authors who contributed to the anthology. 13. Giovanni Ponte, "Esigenze politiche e aspirazioni poetiche nelle egloghe

volgari del Boiardo," Rassegna della letteratura italiana 66 (1962), 25-28; Mauda

Bergoli Russo, "Le Pastorale del Boiardo tra le egloghe del Quattrocento/' Studi e

problemi di critica testuale 20 (1980), 161-164; Ignacio Navarrete, "Boiardo's Pas

torali as Macrotext," Stanford Italian Review 5 (1985), 39; and Holberton (note

4), 236.

14. The official first edition was published at Naples in 1504: Arcadia del Sanna

zaro tutta fornita et tratta emendatissima dal suo originale. Nevertheless a pirated version appeared in Venice in 1502, lacking the concluding chapters (11,12) and the

epilogue: Libro Pastorale Nominato Arcadia de Iacobo Sannazaro neapolitano. The 83 printed editions of the Arcadia between 1502 and 1650 testify to the work's

enduring popularity; see William J. Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (Hanover, N.H. 1983), 107. On Sannazaro's reformulation of Virgil's notion of Arcadia as an imaginative landscape where the real world and a dreamy

escape tenuously intersect, see Eleanor W. Leach, "Parthenian Caverns: Remap

ping of an Imaginative Topography," Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978),

542-51; and Holberton (note 2), 245-47.

15. Kennedy (note 14), 104-106; Patterson (note 6), 60-61. On how the pastoral motifs "not only exemplify continuity but mythologize it," see Paul Alpers, "What

is Pastoral?" Critical Inquiry 8 (1982), 440-55. He views this continuity in terms of

Burke's notion of a "representative anecdote." Though structurally constant, the

pastoral expresses the evolving historical realities each age brings to bear upon it.

16. Mantua Virgilium qui talia carmine finxitj Sena tulit Symonem digito qui talia pinxit: Patterson (note 6), 20.1 have benefitted from the analysis of Simone's

painting and the discussion of its critical reception, 20-27.

17. Brink (note 5), 91-93, observes that, in Simone's painting, Servius points pre

cisely at the place in the text where the stylistic hierarchy is expounded: tres enim

sunt characteres, humilis, m?dius, grandiloquus: quos omnes in hoc invenimus

poeta, nam in Aeneide grandiloquum habet, in georgicis medium, in bucolicis

humilem pro qualitate negotiorum et personarum (Servius [note 8], 12).

18. Michael J. K. O'Loughlin, "'Woods Worthy of a Consul': Pastoral and the

Sense of History," in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Francis A. Drumm, ed.

John H. Doremkamp (Worcester, Mass. 1973), 144-158.

Jonathan Unglaub 83

19. On the courtly roles and affiliations of Virgil's, Petrarch's, and Sannazaro's

pseudonymous poets, see Danielle Boillet, "Paradis perdus et retrouv?s dans I'Area

die de Sannazaro," in Ville et campagne dans la litt?rature italienne de la Renais

sance II Le courtisan travesti, Centre de recherche sur la Renaissance italienne 6, ed.

Andr? Rochon (Paris 1977), 99-106,120-1; Kennedy (note 14), 144-8, and Episto lae Variae 49 in Petrarch, Epistolae De Rebus Familiaribus et Variae, ed. Josephi

Fracassetti (Florence 1863), 3:438-39.

20. Egan (note 4), 309-312; Kennedy (note 14), 127.

21. This and the passages I quote from Sannazaro's Arcadia in the next para

graph have been cited by Buckley (note 4), 64-78, and Ballarin (note 2), 347-8.

Buckley notes Sannazaro's emphasis on lengthy descriptions and continuity of

characters, and argues that these features facilitated "the migration of pastoral themes and characters into the visual arts and into drama." She contends that the

exchange between Sincero and Carino in Prose 7 is the narrative event which the

painter (here "Titian") depicts. Like Ballarin, I find this almost illustrational rela

tionship between text and image too literal. For me the text is more valuable in its

modal tension, where the purely pastoral gives way to the urbane poet's higher

poetic ambitions. Buckley, however, rightly associates the dislocation that Sanna

zaro's (Sincero's) self-intrusion causes in the pastoral environment with the dialec

tics of the painting. 22. Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de'pi? eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, ed.

Paola della Pergola, Luigi Grassi, Giovanni Previtali (Milan 1963), 3:415. On the

artist's "self-reflectiveness" in the figure of the lutenist-poet, see Barolsky (note

4), 49-56.

23. These aspects of Giorgione's art are discussed at length in Salvatore Settis, La

Tempesta interpretata (Turin 1978), especially chapter 5, "II soggetto nascosto," 124-47.

24. In fact, the patrons attracted to Giorgione, and to things Giorgionesque, included young, well-educated aristocratic collectors, such as Gabriele Vendramin, for whom such exposure would have been likely, Settis (note 23), 126-34.

25. See the analysis of Eclogues 4,5 and 10 in Alpers (note 1), 155-249, where "in

essaying a 'higher mood,' Virgil raises the question of pastoral song to engage

larger forces of life and to face painful and turbulent aspects of experience." 26. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven 1958), 123, n.

1; G?nther Tschmelitsch, Zorzo, gennant Giorgione: Der Genius und sein Bannk

ries (Vienna 1975), 293; Buckley (note 4), 75-7; Marie Tanner, "Ubi Sunt: An Ele

giac Topos in the F?te Champ?tre," in Giorgione: Atti del convego internazionale

di Studi per il 5o Centenario della nascita, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Castelfraneo V?neto 1979), 62; and Ballarin (note 2), 346. The latter three have associated the

Source figure with the text from Sannazaro.

27. On the significance of the Orpheus myth at the Source, and the pr?figuration of epic concerns in both Virgil and Sannazaro, see Charles P. Segal, "Orpheus and

the Fourth G?orgie: Vergil on Nature and Civilization," American Journal of Phi

lology 87 (1966), 320-24, and David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance

Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven 1983), 32-42.

28. Tanner (note 26), 615. This scholar specifically relates the elegiac character

of the Concert Champ?tre to the "ubi sunt qui ante nos in mundo fuore" topos of

medieval laments.

29. Ellen Lambert, Placing Sorrow: A Study of the Pastoral Elegy Convention

from Theocritus to Milton, University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative


Literature 60 (Chapel Hill 1976), analyzes the bipartite structure o? Eclogue 5 and

its influence on later reformulations of the pastoral elegy. 30. Egan (note 4), 307 and n. 18.

31. Aristeum pro me pono ?vido ad poeticam devenire, Boccaccio, Epistola 23

to Fra Martino da Signa (note 10), 718. On the relationship between Boccaccio's

Eclogue 12 and Petrarch's Eclogue 3, see Smarr's commentary in Boccaccio (note

1), xxxviii-xxxix.

32. Servius (note 8), 56-7, identifies Daphnis "snuffed out by cruel death" as the

murdered Caesar: alii dicunt significan per allegoriam C. lulium Caesarem, qui in

senatu a Cassio et Brtuo viginti tribus vulneribus interemptus est: unde et 'crudeli

funere' volunt dictum.

33. On the pastoral dependency upon a "custodian" who governs the bower from

the political world beyond, see Lambert (note 29), 36-45.

34. The insubordination of the Neapolitan barons to Prince Andrew of Hungary, consort to Robert's heir Queen Giovanna, his assassination in 1347, and the ruth

less Hungarian invasion to purge Naples of conspirators destabilized the Angevin realm following Robert's death. For more on the historical context and personages of Petrarch's and Boccaccio's political eclogues, see Smarr's commentary (note 1),

201-213, and Petrarch's Epistolae Variae 49 (note 19), 3:438-9.

35. Again Petrarch supplies the gloss to his eclogue: Epistolae Variae 42 (note

19), 3:409-12.

36. For a survey of fiftheen-century Vicentine and Veronese villa types, see

Marco Rosci, "Forme e funzioni d?lie ville venete pre-palladiane," L'arte 2 (1968), 27-54. These hybrid structures, predating by over half a century the development of a distinct villa morphology, combine elements from farm houses, castles, and

urban palaces. Most have a prominent portico or loggia like the edifice in the back

ground of Giorgione's painting. 37. For patrician agrarian investment in the terraferma, see Michelangelo Mur

aro, Venetian Villas: The History and Culture (New York 1986), 39-40.

38. Several scholars have viewed the Concert Champ?tre in relation to Gli Aso

lani and the court in exile of Queen Caterina Cornaro. See Wittkower (note 4), 167;

Tschmelitsch (note 26), 295-9, notes landscape motifs in the painting that corre

spond to the shady setting of the meditations on love in Gli Asolani.

39. It should be noted that Petrarch's autograph manuscript of the Bucolicum

Carmen (Vat. lat. 3358) was owned by the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo, who

kept it until his death in 1547. In addition to the 1504 Latin pastoral anthology,

printed editions of the Bucolicum Carmen appeared in Venice in 1496, 1501 and

1503. See Antonio Avena, // Bucolicum Carmen e i suoi commenti inediti (Padua

1906), 6-13, 44-6.

40. On the massive inland expansion of the Venetian Republic in the Quattro

cento, see Alberto Tenenti, "The Sense of Space and Time in the Venetian World

of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries," in Renaissance Venice, ed. John R. Hale

(Totowa, NJ 1973), 19-31; and Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic

(Baltimore 1973), 225-49. The waning of Venetian maritime primacy due to Turk

ish prowess and the Portugese circumnavigation of Africa encouraged Venice's

imperialistic objectives on the mainland. Muraro (note 37), 39?40, discusses the

foundation, in 1469, of the Ufficio delle Acque, which oversaw the land reclama

tion that made the Trevigian territories suitable for habitation and agriculture. 41. Girolamo Priuli, J Diarii, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 24 no. 3, ed. Roberto

Cessi (Bologna 1938), 4:50. All translations from Priuli are my own.

Jonathan Unglaub 85

42. Priuli (note 41), 4:49-51.

43.1 have relied upon Pietro Bembo's account of the events precipitating the for

mation of the League of Cambrai, and the ensuing invasion and defense of the

Venetian mainland, in his Delia istoria viniziana o? 1552, reprinted in Opere del

Cardinale Pietro Bembo (Milan 1809), vols. 3-4. For an incisive modern study of

the Cambrai crisis, with special emphasis on the domestic front and Venetian

morale, see Felix Gilbert, "Venice in the Crisis of the League of Cambrai," Renais

sance Venice, ed. John R. Hale (Totowa, NJ 1973), 274-92. On the suspicions of

the Italian states toward the "imperialist" expansion of Venice, see Nicolai Rubin

stein, "Italian Reactions to Terraferma Expansion in the Fifteenth Century,"

ibid., 197-217.

44. For the tactical factors leading to the disastrous defeat at Agnadello, see

Bembo (note 43), 4:80-95. On the decision to relinquish the remaining Venetian

towns, 110-16.

45. Lester J. Libby, "The Reconquest of Padua in 1509 According to the Diary of

Girolamo Priuli," Renaissance Quarterly 28 (1975), 328-9. Priuli (note 41), 4:51,

censoriously remarks that the Venetian fathers were concerned not with the welfare

of the state as much as the eventual recuperation of their estates.

46. For the fervent debate in the Senate over the reconquest of the terraferma ter

ritories, especially Padua, see Bembo (note 43), 4:135-47. Doge Loredan censured

those who would jeopardize the security of the Republic simply to recoup their lav

ish villas in the Paduan campagna. Luigi da Molino, Savio della terraferma, pas

sionately argued for the reconquest of the mainland, and prevailed. He insisted that

the private concerns of the patriciate served the welfare of the Republic, which must

boldly recapture and protect its dominions, undeterred by risk or expense. This

debate concluded with the resolution to retake Padua, see M. Sanuto, J Diarii, eds.

Nicolo Barozzi and Federico Stefani (Venice 1883), 8:507-8, and Priuli (note 41), 4:149-52.

47. Bembo (note 43), 4:146. Priuli (note 41), 4:51, offers a more cynical gloss on

these same motivations for the reconquest of the terraferma: "non hera possibelle che li Padri et Senatori Veneti volessenno abandonar il Stato di terraferma, perch? li apareva troppo bella chossa, ne pensavanno in altro salvo recuperarlo, et heranno

tanto impliciti, come se dice, in le posessione, bestie et pecorre loro et animali, che

non desideravanno altro, salvo che'l fusse recuperato et ritornare chadauno ali pot en et posessione loro, ne consideravanno quanto di sopra se dice, che la terraferma

et le posessione sianno state la ruina del? Rep?blica Veneta."

48. On the secret assault of Padua, and the ensuing defense and siege, see Bembo

(note 43), 4:147-54,163-82. On the guasto or "wasting" of the countryside around

the strategic sites of Padua and Treviso, see Sanuto (note 46), 8:238; Bembo (note

43), 170-1,181-2; and Muraro (note 37), 38.

49. Priuli (note 41), 4:329.

50. Priuli (note 41), 4:328.

51. Rome's rise and fall was seen as analogous to Venice's victorious past and

ignominious present in contemporary political laments such as the anonymous "Lamento della repubblica v?neta" of 1509 (142-7, 37-9: "Quanto pi? nostri facti

eran lodati,/ Quanto pi? era(n) excelse e degne Popre,/Che pi? a pena ai Roman

fur titul dato;/Tanto pi? gran dolor in noi si scopre,/Tanto pi? crescie in noi

affano e nolia /E l'alt?ra ruina pi? ne copre . .. Dove ? l'animo excelso e sublevato/

Di nostri natri. che ciascun di loro /Era un Cesar in arme, e in consio un Cato?"


(Antonio Medin, ed., Lamenti storici de secoli XIV e XV, Scelta di curiosit? let

terarie 236 [Bologna 1890], 90, 86). 52. Peter Meiler, "La Madre di Giorgione," in Giorgione: Atti del convegno

internazionale di studi per il 5o centenario della nascita, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini

(Castelfranco V?neto 1979), 113-14, observes that Petrarch's Roman laments pro vided a font of topoi for contemporary political elegies. He adduces the senescent

matron, Rome, from the fifth Eclogue, to read a political significance in Giorgi one's La Vecchia.

53. The following lines are indicative of the arresting imagery of the "Italia mia":

"Voi cui fortuna ? posto in mano il freno / de le belle contrade, / di che nulla piet?

par che vi stringa, / che fan qui tante pellegrine spade? / Perch? '1 verde terreno / dal

barb?rico sangue si depinga?" (Petrarch, Sonnets and Songs, ed., Anna Maria Armi

[London 1978], 128.17?22). While the subject is more specific, Domino Simeone's

"Lamento dei Veneziani" of 1509 employs some of Petrarch's motifs: "Son Venetia

sconsolata / posta in pianto e gran dolore:/Franza e Spanga e Imperatore/m'?no tuta disolata! /La Fortuna s? proterba/la sua rotta coss?, vol ta .. .Un gran tempo ?

prosperata / e ho vivuto in sancta pace: / in gran pena son cascata / tra le rette, laci e

face, / posta son in (tal) contumace / e vegnuto in tanto extremo;. . . Venetiani e '1

re de Galia / ?no facto tanta guerra, / sparso in questa gran bataglia / tanto sangue che non erra: / putrefacta sta la terra / de la gente che son morte; / cosi che a le stigie

porte/Prosperpina ? consolata./Son Venetia . . ./Sanguimento tuto el piano/ Venetiani e de Franzesi." See Medin (note 51), 99-100,106.

54. Muraro (note 37), 24,116, and Les Villas de la V?n?tie (Venice 1954), 29-31.

55. Sannazaro was exiled with his patron, King Federigo, by the Spanish usurp ers of the House of Aragon, see Kennedy (note 14), 21-25. For a full account of the

historical and political context of Sannazaro's service to Aragonese court at

Naples, see Carol Kidwell, Sannazaro and Arcadia (London 1993), 76?104.

56. One must concede that the dating of the painting, like its attribution, is based

on connoisseurship alone. In fact, the painting is without secure provenance before

Le Brun's 1683 inventory of Louis XIV's pictures, see Ballarin (note 2), 340-1. Nev

ertheless, most scholars, regardless of attribution to Giorgione or Titian, date the

picture to 1509 or 1510, the year of Giorgione's death, or slightly later: Terisio Pig

natti, Giorgione (Venice 1969), cat. no. A42, 129-30. Harold Wethey, The Paint

ings of Titian Complete Edition: The Mythological and Historical Paintings

(London 1975), cat. no. 29, 167-8; Ballarin, cat. no. 43, 340. Hornig (note 2), cat.

no. 25, 217, however, argues for an earlier date around 1508.

57. Pro Caliopo ego intelligo aliquem optime recitantem damna desolate civita

tis. On the historical allusions of this eclogue, which allegorizes the chaos rampant in Angevin Naples following the deaths of King Robert and Andrew of Hungary, see Boccaccio's Ep?stola 23 to Fra Martino da Signa (note 10), 714.

58. "lo parlo, e pur rivolgo il viso spesso/al bel paese che un tempo era pieno/ de ogni leticia, or misero ed oppresso. / Ove ?no e' cori? e il canto si sereno / che ade

quava Parnaso e la sua fonte? / Come ? venuta tanta zoglia meno? / Ove son le sorelle

di Fetonte/che soliano ombregiar di tal verdura / questo bel fiume da la foce al

monte?/Quai malegno pianeta o Stella oscura/fatto ha tal stracio in si fiorito

loco, / che pur a rimirarlo ? una paura?" 59. Servius (note 8), 4-5. 'Tityre tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi' inducitur

pastor quidam iacens sub arbore securus et otiosus dare operam cantilenae . . . et

hoc loco Tityri sub persona Vergilium debemus accipere; . . . hoc videtur dicere:

iaces sub umbra fagi in agris tuis, tuas retentans possessiones.

Jonathan Unglaub 87

60. Servius (note 8), 6. sane vera lectio est 'turbatur', ut sit inpersonale, quod ad

omnes p er tinet gener aliter: nam Mantuanorum fuerat communis expulsio. si enim

'turbamur' legeris, videtur ad paucos referri. 61. Michael Putnam, Virgil's Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues (Princeton

1970), 26-7. Alpers (note 15), 450-53, observes that Tityrus "presents otium in cir

cumstantial terms," whereas the bereft Meliboeus can only view the landscape denied him as an idealized phantom.

62. Servius (note 8), 5, though reluctant to endorse too strict an allegorical read

ing of "Amaryllis," nevertheless records such an interpretation for posterity, which

accords with his overall conception of Eclogue 1: 'Resonare doces Amaryllida sil

vas' id est carmen tuum de arnica Amaryllide compositum doces silvas sonare, et

melius est, ut simpliciter intellegamus: maie enim quidam allegoriam volunt, tu

carmen de urbe Roma componis celebrandum omnibus gentibus. Later in his com

mentary, Servius, 9, identifies Galatea and Amaryllis with Mantua and Rome, the

respective spaces of rustic hardship and secured leisure: allegoricos autem hoc dicit,

postquam relicta Mantua Romam me contuli: nam Galateam Mantuam vult esse,

Romam Amaryllida. 63. See Putnam (note 61), 75: "The affliction which Meliboeus endures offers a

contrast with this perfection all the more impressive because Meliboeus does not

stand for himself alone. He is a symbol of universal ruin, whereas Tityrus symbol izes an individual, exclusive idyll."

64. On the identity of the old shepherd as Tityrus, see Patricia Emison, "Inven

tion and the Italian Renaissance Print: Mantegna to Parmigianino," Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1985, 105-6. Emison sees Giulio's Old Shepherd as almost

emblematic of the Virgilian pastoral both in the characterization of Tityrus and

through the intrusion of civilizing elements, such as the "overbearing presence of

buildings," into Arcadia.

65. On Guilio's literary erudition and his activity as a musician and courtier, and

for the date of the engraving, see Arthur Hind, Early Italian Engraving (London

1948), part 2, 5:189-91. On the close aesthetic relationship between Guilio and

Giorgione, see Oberhuber (note 2), 433-43. Holberton (note 4), 362, has argued that another print by Campagnola relates to the Cambrai crisis. In Giulio's Astrol

oger, the date 1509 appears on the globe that the aged scholar studies, while a view

of Venice appears in background. Holberton maintains that the juxtaposition of

Venice and the date creates inevitable associations with Cambrai, while the astro

logical theme may refer to prognostications of the disastrous events of that year. 66. On the political circumstances that motivated, at least in part, Boiardo's

composition of the Pastorale, see Ponte (note 13), 22-4; and Navarrete (note 13),

39-42, 48-50. Boiardo composed the martial eclogues of his Pastorale in 1482

1483, when Venetian forces had nearly captured Reggio and Modena, where the

poet was stationed as governor. On the political and military aspects of the War of

Ferrara, see Michael E. Mallett, "Venice and the War of Ferrara, 1482-1484," in

War, Culture and Society in Renaissance Venice: Essays in Honor of John Hale, eds. David S. Chambers, Cecil H. Clough, and Michael E. Mallett (London 1993), 56-72. On the resulting ruination of the Ferrarese campagna, see Trevor Dean, "After the War of Ferrara: Relations between Venice and Ercole d'Est?, 1484

1550," ibid., 73-74.

67. "Ben doveti voi star fuor de ogni gente,/o Melibeo, se ancor quivi si tace/

quel ch'? palese e tuto il mondo sente./Apena di parlare io sono audace/quivi di


guerra, e temo non me ascolte/questo bel loco, ove abita la pace./Le vostre peco

relle, qua ricolte / intorno a le fontane e fiumi usati,/vano pascendo libere e

disolte;/e voi sicuri qua de amor cantati, . . . Quanto ? diversa nostra sorte a

questa! / Li nostri armenti e le p?core in preda, / e noi scaciati o morti a la foresta; /

n? sotto al cel stimo io che mai si veda /cosa tanto crudel, onde a nararla / vengo

sospeso e temo non si creda."

68. "Ove ? il mio ostello a lato a la marina? / ove il rico giardin dai frutti d'oro? /

Tutto ? fiaccato ed arso cun ruina. / Ove ? il novo boschetto e il verde aloro / qu?le io stesso piantai cum rame tenere,/de amor cantando onde or di doglia ploro?. . .

Rapito mi ? l'armento, il grege invaso / da peste muore, il mio paese ameno / inculto

solo e squalido ? rimaso."

69. Publii Vergilii Buc?lica, Ge?rgica, Aeneis cum Serv?t commentariis accura

tissime emendatis. Venetijs, Bernardinus Stagninus impensam fecit, 1507.

70. Publii Virgilii Maronis opera cum quinqu? vulgatis commentariis: expolitis

simisque figuris atque imaginibus nuper per Sebastianaum Brant superadditis:

exactissimeque revisis: atque eliminatis, (Strasbourg 1502). On Brant's edition and

illustrations of Virgil, see Eleanor W. Leach, "Illustration as Interpretation in

Brant's and Dryden's Editions of Vergil," in The Early Illustrated Book: Essays in

Honor of Lessing J. Rosenwald, ed. Sandra Hindman (Washington, D.C. 1982),

175-91; and Patterson (note 6), 92-106.

71. Brant (note 70), fols. Aiv, Aiir: Hie legere historias commentaque plurima doctus: I Nee minus indoctus perlegere illa potest... picturam potuit perlegere Ule

tarnen . . . has nostras quas pinximus ecce tabellas I Virgilio: Charas tu quoque habere velis.l Has tibi nemo ante haec tarn plane ostenderat usquam. On Brant's

exegetical and pictorial enterprise, as outlined in the introductory poem, see Pat

terson (note 6), 92-106.

72. On the spatial dynamics of Eclogue 1, see Michael Putnam, "Virgil's First

Eclogue: Poetics of Enclosure," in Essays on Latin Lyric, Elegy and Epic (Princeton

1982), 254?6, 260-2; and Eleanor W. Leach, Vergil's Eclogues: Landscapes of

Experience (Ithaca, NY 1974), 116-17. On Brant's visualization of the implicit

geography o? Eclogue 1, see Leach (note 70), 181-4; Patterson (note 6), 99-102.

73. Patterson (note 6), 96-102; Leach (note 70), 182. Putnam (note 61), 60-1,

elaborates on Rome as the arbiter of both otium and exile.

74. For the agricultural importance of the terraferma campagna, see Libby (note

45), 324-7, who notes that halted grain shipments from the mainland was one of the

primary motivations for Venice's bold campaign to retake Padua. Virgil couched

his Arcadia in agrarian imagery. Leach (note 72), 63-6, 72, interprets the bucolic

scenes of Virgil in light of the Roman praise of farming as the source of civic virtue.

This renders Meliboeus' officially sanctioned deprivation all the more ironic. Simi

lar notions of the virtue of farming existed in Venice, with Alvise Cornaro being its

most important promoter. See James S. Ackerman, "The Geopolitics of Venetian

Architecture in the Time of Titian," in Titian, His World and His Legacy, ed.

David Rosand (New York 1982), 45-6; Muraro (note 37), 55-7.

75. Priuli (note 41), 4:327-8.

76. Sanuto (note 46), 9:15, 154, describes the flight from Giorgione's birthplace of Castelfraneo in the Trevigiano: "Et vene aviso ch?me ogi i nimici, zercha cavali

400, erano corsi da Castelfranco, dove ? il campo reduto, verso ?ola fino a Scorz?

brusando case et depredando il tuto fino mia . . . lontan di Mestre, adeo li villani

erano in fuga, e tutti chi poteva fuzer fuziva." "Tutta questa note, villani e villane

Jonathan Unglaub 89

con puti et robe venivano a Veniexia fuzendo la persecutione de'inimici, et aloza

vano in diversi lochi, come he scritto di sopra, et era gran extreminio vederli venir."

77. Pruili (note 41), 4:310. For similar accounts of the emigration from the

besieged terraferma, see 308-10, 328-32.

78. On the ferrying of the fugitive peasantry across the lagoon to Venice, see Pri

uli (note 41), 4:308-10, 330; Sanuto (note 46), 9:152, 167; and Bembo (note 43), 4:174-175. The peasantry's fidelity to Venice stood in marked contrast to the

opportunistic aristocracy of the V?neto towns welcoming the invaders. On the

tenacious loyalty of the Trevigiani and their long, symbiotic relationship with the

Republic, see Muraro (note 37), 47.

79. Priuli (note 41), 4:315-16: ". . . il fontego di Todeschi novamente fabricato, el quale hera vuodo, perch? anchora li Todeschi non heranno entrati in quello, et

questo ettiam hera grande alogiamento da logare assai numero di persone." Sanuto

(note 46), 9:161: "... ne alozoe tutti a San Zorzi quelli poteno star, e parte erano

altrove alozati, et nel Fontego di Todeschi. E nota. Era un grandissimo pecato veder

tanta quantit? di contadini fuzir."

80. Contemporary documents support a completion date of 1508 for the Fondaco

dei Tedeschi frescoes. On the irony between the triumphant tenor of Giorgione's, and Titian's, political allegories and the city's actual desperation in the face of the

Cambrai invasion, see Michelangelo Muraro, "The Political Interpretation of Gior

gione's Frescoes on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi," Gazette des beaux-arts, 6th series, 86 (1975), 179-82.

81. See Priuli's (note 41), 4:331, almost audible description of the bewailing peas

antry, uprooted to Venice: "li poveri et desfortunatti vilani in tanta quantitade

scampati in la citade, che giorno et nocte se andavanno lamentando per la citade, che haverianno contaminato uno corre de diamante; li bestiami di questi miseri con

tadini menati in la citade, quali non haveanno da vivere, chridavanno giorno et

nocte, che le loro voce penetravanno le orechie de chadauno.... Donde che breviter

concluendo per ogni strada et locho del? citade predicta non se sentiva salvo che

lamentatione, suspiri, lachrime, singulti, timori, spaventti; et meritamente se

poteva ahora chiamare questa virg?nea citade uno imferno."

82. Sanuto (note 46), 9:164: "Ogi vidi cossa notanda. Prima, porzi e piegore in

chiapo in piaza di San Marco; item, uno aseno con sachi di farina adosso passar per il Ponte di Rialto; item, il Fontego di Todeschi novo fo tutto empito de villani."

This spectacle made quite an impression on the average Venetian, as the merchant, Martino Merlini, wrote his brother stationed in the Orient on 28 September 1509:

"La nostra 111. ma Signoria ia dado lozamento a tuti quelli che non aveva amixi o

patroni dove andar, che molti sono sta lozadi da patroni e amixi da compasi?n . . .

e age d? el Fontego di Todeschi e la Cha del Marchexe et moite altre chaxe e lugi

per la tera, per si che tuta la tera xe piena e de chavali e buo, vedeli, porzi et altri

anemali: li champi da le erbe son pieni" (G. Dalla Santa, La lega di Cambrai e gli avvenimenti dell'anno 1509 descritti da un mercante veneziano contempor?neo

[Venice 1903], 22). 83. On the structural and thematic comparison of these eclogues of exile, see

Charles P. Segal, "'Tarnen Cantabitis Arcades'?Exile and Arcadia in Eclogues One and Nine," Arion 4 (1965), 237-9, 258-60.

84. Servius (note 8), 110.

85. On Menalcas functioning as a tutelary Daphnis figure, see Alpers (note 1),

140-1, 150-1, and Putnam (note 61), 306-7.


86. As Patterson (note 6), 37-8, indicates, Servius (note 8), 112, notes that

Augustus' policies caused such universal despair that song could only provide con

solation, solada, not pleasure: et dicendo 'solatia' latenter t?mpora carpit Augusti,

quibus carmina non oblectamento fuerunt, sed solacio, quod infelicium esse con

suevit. vel Hua solatia' tua carmina, quibus consolamur.

87. Menalcas' songs paraphrase Idylls 3.3-5,11.42-9. 88. Servius (note 8), 113, explains that farms in Cremona, and many in Mantua,

were confiscated by Augustus' soldiers after the civil war. Cremona was punished for its loyalty to Anthony, Mantua merely for its proximity, notwithstanding its

support of Caesar.

89. Segal (note 83), 247,257. See Alpers (note 1), 103,139, who defines Virgilian

"suspension" as "a poised and secure contemplation of things disparate or ironi

cally related, and yet at the same time does not imply that disparities or conflicts are

actually resolved."

90. Although he does not use the term "suspension," Erwin Panofsky, "'Et in

Arcadia Ego': Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition," in Meaning in the Visual Arts

(Chicago 1982), 300, offers the most eloquent articulation of this phenomenon in

Virgilian pastoral: "In Virgil's ideal Arcady human suffering and superhumanly

perfect surroundings create a dissonance. This dissonance, once felt, had to be

resolved, and it was resolved in that vespertinal mixture of sadness and tranquility which is perhaps Virgil's most personal contribution to poetry. With only slight

exaggeration one might say that he 'discovered' the evening." 91. On the qualified optimism evinced in the memory of Menalcas' songs, see

Alpers (note 1), 136-44,150-1. 92. Non s?ti voi de la stirpe italiana ?... Che per la patria niun voglia pugnare, /

Ma favorir chi cerca con ogni arte/Guastar dil mondo la pi? bella parte?/Quella che ? d'ogni terra madre altrice/E per divinit? da' de electa; / Quella che ? assai pi? fertile e felice, / Salubre, amena e d'ogni ben perfecta;... Quella che si p? dire che

la natura /Puose in dotarla ogni sua arte e cura? / U' son campi pi? fertile e felici? /

U' son boschi pi? folti et silve ombrose? / U' son colli pi? lieti e tanto aprici? / U' son

valli pi? amen? e al sol nascose?. . . U' son pi? f?rtil lochi di oleo o vino?/U' son, se non de Italia nel giardino? / U' son pi? fiumi, lagi, stagni e fonti? / U'son pi? belli

e tanti mari?/U' son pi? abitad et util monti?/U' son paesi al ciel pi? grati e

cari?. . . Dove ?, se non tra voi, cari Italiani?/Si che guard?ti ben vostra richezza"

(Antonio Medin, ed., La obsidione di Padua, Scelta di curiosit? letterarie, 244,

[Bologna 1892], 121-2). The author of the epic was Bartolomeo Credo. For more on

this poet, as well as the historical background and content of the poem, see III?L.

Jonathan Unglaub 91

s#r'

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l?i^Si

V SJ^

Fig. 1 Attributed to Giorgione, Concert Champ?tre, ca. 1510. Paris, Mus?e du

Louvre. (Photo: Alinari / Art Resource, New York)

Jonathan Unglaub 93

sa?rl

V ̂f?^pji * v??s y-n* -t?sr ?:;K:P*rr:i*.

^g,|?|?iîM.

lilil?

Fig. 2 Simone Martini, Francisa Petrarcae Vergilianus codex, ca. 1340. Milan,

Biblioteca Ambrosiana, codex A. 49, frontispiece. Propreit? d?lia Biblioteca

Ambrosiana. All rights reserved. (Photo from facsimile, Rare Book and Manu

script Library, Columbia University)


'r&-v\?' 'U'o

#??.

Sigh

Fig. 3 Giulio Campagnola, T/7e O/d Shepherd, ca. 1509. Engraving. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937. (37.3.11)

Jonathan Unglaub 95

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Vifgi lusac on W

qîed bi exi

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regla tas fuit aufa .

%ho andu ?ban* ret?as ta eft rqt*a tod eft e.sJS )i?ere

?reten MB'

?usa?c etiam s?aier e.rnor

TTu atti?uj

quod xtna/ vtfiar?s?arbor:oatens eftotf ? au?;

? i:i;*Mi;ua <u*vi*m? *!??*'^

idem g? ?cr a?lej facitfee

*yr?m*r boeum; <

lium Ga ?radmin

gros retir

tap?ate tis.Patu? uc5 Plaui

pdlabat: corrtua i fe ac late

r?"t:vl*< -?et? ff3 bansdac fccrtsria tenil?m nusfede tel??genc

PÂBfip?lIp^

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Agfeffcnictenu?dmufamm6dt/ bra, r

NGS|^Klnes,tlHildaHnqu? l?ltincvo

muspu?.. citur:??h: ?omedo.

. fagus; v

Fig. 4 Publii Vergilii Buc?lica, Ge?rgica, Aeneis cum Servii commentariis accur

atissime emendatis, Venice: Bernardinus Stagninus impensam fecit, 1507, fol. br.

Woodcut. (Photo: Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University)


Fig. 5 Sebastian Brant, Publij Virgilij maronis opera, Strasbourg: Johann Gruni

ger, 1502, fol. A 1 v. Woodcut (Photo: Spencer Collection, The New York Public

Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation)

Documents

Concert Champetre - Crises of History [Unglaub]