Liber eram. A Propertian Motif in Late Fifteenth-Century Latin Poetry

Abstract

This paper traces the history and evolution of humanist re-use of the first couplet of Propertius’s elegy 2, 2, from Gregorio Tifernate’s Poemata to the end of the Quattrocento. Continued re-use of the couplet, or of its constituent elements, make it a veritable commonplace at a time when collections of loci communi were first coming into existence as ordered and consciously prepared works. The attraction of this particular couplet from Propertius was enhanced considerably by a parallel use in the Petrarchan vernacular love poetry tradition. This poetic commonplace became so well established that its very language appears in Christian moral poetry from the period, as evidenced by an example taken from Baptista Mantuanus’s collection of eclogues entitled Adulescentia. The commonplace established by Quattrocento elegiac poets thus became a weapon in the arsenal of edifying Christian poetry, whose authors redeployed elegiac language in their criticism of mankind’s excessive devotion to earthly passions.

Joseph Justus Scaliger’s famous conjecture regarding the textual origins of Propertius II.ii, according to which the sixteen-line poem cannot stand alone as an independent composition but is a fragment of the thematically related text that follows it in the manuscripts, has on several occasions proved tempting to modern scholars.¹ Scaliger elaborated an original version through rearrangement of the two elegies, suggesting in particular that the opening lines of II.ii should be placed after the four initial verses of II.iii to become the fifth and sixth verses of a new, single construct.² Although the proposition did not ultimately gain wide approval or greatly affect modern editions of Propertius’s remaining works, it has at times prompted eminent commentators, such as A. E. Housman and L. Richardson, Jr, to refer approvingly to Scaliger’s acute intuition regarding Propertius’s inventive style.³ The very durability of this recurring suggestion doubtless reflects a larger discomfort, not only with the interpretation of the brief, epigrammatic poem situated near the opening of the collection’s second book, but also with the overarching structure and composition of the book itself.⁴

Humanist readers other than scribes and commentators, in the century and a half preceding Scaliger, seem also to have been interested by Propertius II.ii. Their poetic memory, however, instead of attempting any sustained imitation of the whole, fixed itself most frequently on the poem’s opening couplet, with particular attention to the incipit. Many commentators have noted that Propertius’s initial verse contains a likely reminiscence of the incipit of Tibullus I.v (‘Asper eram et bene discidium me ferre loquebar: / At mihi nunc longe gloria fortis abest’), in which the elegiac lover envisions a possible separation from his mistress.⁵ Propertius, however, simply declares that he has once again come under Love’s thrall, citing Cynthia’s beauty as justification:

Liber eram et vacuo meditabar vivere lecto;

• At me composita pace fefellit Amor.

Cur haec in terris facies humana moratur?

• Juppiter, ignosco pristina furta tua.⁶

The rest of the elegy is devoted to a mythologically enriched description of Cynthia, one that has often intrigued modern commentators, many of whom view it, with scant evidence, as ‘the product of thoroughgoing textual corruption’.⁷ Quattrocento humanists seem to have given rather less attention to the portrait of Cynthia than to the opening couplet. They visited this beginning with considerable frequency, generally adopting the strategy of amplifying the content of the first couplet, which itself became, for humanist imitators, the thematic template for the construction of an entire new elegy on the dangers of love. Borrowing verbatim only the two first words of the incipit, as well as some formula similar to Propertius’s use of the imperfect deponent followed by an infinitive, these authors made a recurring motif of the first couplet of a minor poem whose unusual brevity lent itself to enduring critical speculation on the elegy’s original length and contents.

Intent as they were on carving their own niche within the pantheon of poets stretching back to antiquity, Latin poets in fifteenth-century Italy deployed considerable ingenuity in the imitation and inventive recycling of ancient literary motifs and commonplaces. Their reception of Propertius II.ii.1–2 provides a striking example of the manner in which they interacted with ancient sources, and sometimes with each other, constructing a veritable tradition through the studied re-use of ancient motifs. The present essay will examine several examples of this practice in the works of Quattrocento Latin poets, with particular attention to their rewriting of this couplet from Propertius. Early and mid-century elegists such as Gregorio Tifernate and Giannantonio Campano revisit the passage in a variety of ways, from a conventional reflection on mortality in the spirit of Petrarch, to a kind of imitation that approaches more nearly the model of ancient erotic elegy. Florentine poets working at or near the Medici Court, such as Cristoforo Landino, Ugolino Verino and Naldo Naldi, follow the elegiac model with greater exactitude. Similarities in their use of the motif may reflect a heightened sense of the codification of poetic language and genre in a highly competitive cultural and literary milieu. The itinerant poet Filippo Buonaccorsi, a native of San Gimignano closely associated with these poets working in Florence, uses the motif in a way which is reminiscent both of the opening of Propertius II.ii and of his Florentine contemporaries. It also anticipates the use made of the motif by a little-studied Venetian author of elegiac verse, the Venetian nobleman and orator Pietro Contarini.

My analysis will show that Contarini’s use of the Propertian motif distinguishes him somewhat from his contemporaries and forebears. By situating the motif at the very beginning of his collection, Contarini confirms its central importance by raising it to an almost titular status, rendering it a veritable frontispiece of his entire elegiac opus. In a manuscript dedicated to Bernardo Bembo, Contarini places the Liber eram motif at the beginning of his three-book collection of elegies, Ad Gelliam. By thus using the Propertian locus as the incipit of – and thus the introduction to – an entire ensemble, Contarini, whose collection has yet to attract any sustained critical attention from scholars, deftly highlights the sequence borrowed from his ancient source. His use of the Propertian motif as an introduction to the Ad Gelliam subtly confirms its status as an entrenched motif of considerable moment, one which now stands as a familiarly emblematic opening to the entire collection of love elegies. It also offers a striking illustration of the manner in which fifteenth-century humanist reception of ancient works at times inventively elaborated its own loci communes around small passages and fragments of text, at a time when poetic motifs and rhetorical commonplaces often circulated in manuscript, before the advent of printed commonplace books during the century to follow.⁸ This regime of inventive poetic borrowing certainly suggests that literary investigation is not necessarily, in the first instance, specific to individual genres during an age of wide-ranging rhetorical education and oratorical practice. Nevertheless, that the corpus assembled here consists almost exclusively of elegies written in imitation of the ancient genre of love poetry also indicates that Quattrocento humanist authors consciously associated the ancient motif with the elegiac genre which they attempted to reframe through accommodation to their own, more contemporary elegiac ‘discourse’.⁹ A comparative analysis of these authors’ use of the Propertian source will, in the first part of the present study, provide a detailed illustration of the genre-specific motif constructed by fifteenth-century elegiac poets. The second part of the study will then show that Contarini’s use of the motif, placing it conspicuously at the very opening of his entire three-book collection, acts on a trend already in development in the writings of his contemporaries. Finally, the third part will demonstrate, through the reading of a passage from Baptista Mantuanus’s Adulescentiae, how this elegiac motif, having gained considerable importance in the works of fifteenth-century imitators of Propertius, is deployed as a linguistic trait characteristic of the moral failings of elegiac poets and the ethos represented in their writings on love and sexual desire.

That Latin love elegy is recognizable during the Renaissance period not only by its form, but also by its discursive content, receives a striking confirmation in the works of the late fifteenth-century humanist and Carmelite monk Baptista Mantuanus (Battista Spagnoli), whose influential writings situate him well outside the imaginary world – or outside the ‘ideology’ – of erotic elegy.¹⁰ Giovanni Boccaccio’s famous vernacular prose complaint, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, provides an early template of elegiac discourse which is entirely independent of its characteristic poetic form. Mantuanus’s widely read collection of Latin eclogues entitled Adulescentia, written in dactylic hexameter, presents the case of a shepherd, Amyntas, driven to folly and ultimately to death by sickness from amorous passion and desire. In the collection’s second eclogue, Amyntas himself speaks at length, denouncing the ideology of an impossibly strict moral austerity with which mankind has shackled itself, pleading instead for a more natural, liberal attitude towards the necessary pleasures of erotic love. His principled libertine conviction will, in the bucolic universe of the Carmelite Mantuanus, lead him to ruin. As he makes his case in favour of abandoning the constraints of strict morality imposed on mankind by the authors of heavy, well-bound tomes of ‘Laws’, his language revisits the motif inherited from Propertius, reversing its sense to describe, not the servitude of amorous passion, but rather the senseless enslavement to what he views as a false and hollow moral rectitude. Amyntas’s reasoning is constructed on the reversal of the customary use of the Propertian motif, as well as on that of St Paul’s similar language in the sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans.¹¹

The reversal of meaning accomplished by Mantuanus’s attribution of the Propertian motif to an amorous shepherd, who clearly represents the moral excesses of traditional elegiac love discourse, aptly demonstrates the remarkable elasticity and variability of such motifs. The Carmelite author of pastoral verse is taking his cue, in part, from Virgil’s famous tenth Eclogue, in which the bucolic poet sings his homage to the elegiac love poet, Gallus.¹² Although, to my knowledge, this Propertian motif does not appear in any of the collections of motifs and commonplaces which were to become a mainstay of poets and orators during the sixteenth century, including the ones based specifically on the works of elegiac poets,¹³ it is abundantly clear that it had become a building block of Latin poetic eloquence. Mantuanus’s circumspect, or rather polemical, re-use of it in the Adulescentia serves to widen its field of relevance by inserting it into a Christian moral discourse which sounds an echo of St Paul’s exhortations to the Romans. Subsequent sixteenth-century authors, such as Girolamo Falletti, did not hesitate to use the by now traditional expression in parenetic compositions addressed to high-ranking members of princely courts. This studied re-use of the motif confirms certain observations by Eric MacPhail on the circulation of commonplaces in Renaissance literary writings, including works both in Latin and the vernacular languages: ‘Authors prize these sayings for their capacity to freeze and thaw, to expand and proliferate, and to adapt to ever new surroundings. However, these same properties deprive the commonplace of any stable moral authority’.¹⁴ As such, they are for many humanists the very backbone of fruitful poetic and rhetorical invention. Their inspired re-use, which hardly excludes satire or polemical opposition, becomes a significant part of a solidifying bedrock of critical discourse and principled reflection.

Propertius II.ii.1-2 in Quattrocento Elegy

Fully a century before Scaliger’s famous edition of Propertius in which he suggested that elegies II.ii and II.iii contain the material of a single poem, several elegies from the fifteenth century attest to an early Renaissance reception of Propertius’s opus that tends to underscore the distinctness of II.ii. Several elegiac compositions from the period begin with, or include, the Propertian Liber eram formula evoking a previous time of life when the lover-poet did not yet find himself under the sway of a tyrannical but irresistible mistress. Among the earliest and most remarkable of these poems is the eighty-verse elegy that appears in Gregorio’s Tifernate’s (1414–1462) collected poetic works, published posthumously in 1498 in a slender volume containing thirty-six poems of varying length in several genres. The poem entitled ‘Triumphus Cupidinis’ begins with a sequence of verses introducing the conventional motif of lost freedom:

Vivebam liber turba tranquillus ab omni,

• Nullius insidias, nullius arma timens.

Attulerat longum curarum oblivia tempus;

• Immemor ardoris, immemor ignis eram.

Sed tutum nihil est, hominem nec laedere magnus

• Est imprudentem difficilisque labor.

Rupit ab insidiis quas fecerat ecce Cupido,

• Ecce novus qui me sollicitaret Amor.¹⁵

Such a topical theme hardly admits of any precise dating based on internal evidence. A poem like this one, seemingly inspired by Petrarch’s Trionfi, would perhaps count among Tifernate’s earlier writings or at least those preceding his work at the papal court, which seems to have begun around 1449. Use of the pluperfect attulerat with the grammatical subject longum … tempus does perhaps militate against an overly precocious date of composition, although this is part of the poetic fiction. Even though Tifernate does not use the exact Propertian formula in the incipit, he recounts in very similar terms the calamitous event of the innamoramento which divides a love-poet’s life into ‘before’ and ‘after’ periods. The adjective liber appears in the first verse after the initial verb, followed at length by the imperfect eram, which finally occurs at the end of the second pentameter. Tifernate has thus already introduced a subtle amplification of the Propertian motif, using all four verses of these first two couplets, instead of merely the initial hexameter, to evoke his relatively carefree state of mind in the days before Love’s arrows struck him. The occurrence of the verb eram closes not only the poem’s fourth verse, but also the elegy’s entire first sentence and the idealized portrait of the poet’s initial state of innocence.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Tifernate’s use of this motif is to be found in his amplifying treatment of the adversative clause introduced in the hexameter of Propertius’s first couplet (‘at me composita pace fefellit Amor’). Here, the poet devotes two full couplets to the announcement that his freedom is gone, since Love has once again (‘Ecce novus … amor’) ambushed him (‘ab insidiis’) and reduced him to servitude. Particularly remarkable in this amplification of the Propertian pentametric apodosis is the fact that it introduces the principal thematic development of the poem’s remaining seventy-two verses. The hexameter that begins with the adversative conjunction (‘Sed …’) also presents a conventional reflection on the fragility of man (‘tutum nihil est …’), a mortal creature who may be destroyed utterly in an instant. This topical, contemporary theme, directly informed by a moral teaching that gained renewed impetus from the circulation of Innocent III’s famous treatise on the misery of humankind,¹⁶ and acquired renewed poetic currency in the vernacular writings of Petrarch and others, provides a surprising and enriched philosophical angle to Tifernate’s reworking of Propertius’ one-couplet development on freedom lost through Love’s tyranny. Through this reference to a theological and poetic meditation well known to Quattrocento humanists, one which underscores the fragility of humankind and its natural proclivity to moral weakness and fleshly temptation, Tifernate has grafted the Liber eram motif onto a strong vein of contemporary ethical discourse.

The same motif appears in the work of another Latin elegist working roughly at the same time as Tifernate, the Neapolitan-born humanist Giannantonio Campano, who spent much time at the papal court of Pius II in Rome, as well as in Siena, and, later, in the studium at Florence. In the opening poem of Campano’s (1429–1477) collected poetic works, as they are preserved in the 1502 editio princeps published by Michele Ferno and in several manuscript collections,¹⁷ the elegist summons Venus to his side and declares that he suffers from the pains of newly inflicted love.¹⁸ Campano’s first three couplets are devoted to a rapid invocation of the goddess and a general complaint about the unfairness of Love’s attack on the poet’s youthful inexperience. He then reiterates, in the next three couplets, his dismay at being thus rendered captive against his will, thinking fondly of the time when he was free to determine his own actions. Campano likens his complete submission to Love’s authority, to the helplessness of a sacrificial victim:

Nos tamen inviti Paphios urgemur ad ignes,

• Fertur ut in sanctas hostia vincta dapes.

Liber eram, nulloque olim vexabar amore,

• Et nil, quod nollem, ferre coactus eram;

Occulte subiique jugum, collumque tetendi;

Ah demens tacita commodus arte capi!¹⁹

Campano refers in general terms to the folly (‘demens’) of submitting to the tyranny of Love, without any supplementary reference to the moral weakness of humankind. Nevertheless, the placement of this elegy at the beginning of Campano’s collection tends to confer on these verses an ethical significance that extends beyond the selfish concerns of an elegiac lover. Although the ensemble has many addressees and considers a variety of themes, the situation of this ‘protest’ against Love at the very outset of the poetic sequence suggests that the content of this first piece is perceived to fulfil a kind of programmatic function. It is difficult to ascertain whether Campano himself deliberately ordered the poems in this way.²⁰ Even so, the continual presence of this poem at the beginning of several manuscripts and printed versions indicates, at the very least, that editors and curators of his work were keenly sensitive to this first elegy’s inherent qualities as a general declaration of poetic identity, in which the author considers retrospectively his own activity as a poet, and his own personal destiny, in relation to a specific turning point after which everything changed. Appearing thus early in one of Campano’s best-known elegies placed at the beginning of his poetic works, the Propertian Liber eram motif occupies a conspicuously emblematic position, one which may well reflect its growing status as a locus communis in elegiac Latin discourse.

The poets of Florence, contemporaries of Campano, also deployed this newly reinvigorated elegiac motif in their writings. Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498), professor of poetry and rhetoric in the Florentine studium, offers a kind of poetic chronicle of his life as lover, academic, and humanist courtier in the city and cultural circles of the Medici in his groundbreaking three-book collection of elegies entitled Xandra, which began circulating in the late 1450s and early 1460s. After two preliminary pieces, addressed to Piero de’ Medici and to the poet’s book itself as it makes its way to the court, the collection’s third poem is a fifty-two-verse elegy devoted specifically to the theme of the innamoramento, the reminiscence of the precise moment at which the poet became Love’s victim. In the elegy’s two initial couplets, Landino summons the muse Erato from ‘beneath the silence of the dark, wordless night’, to allow the poet to shed the copious tears of passion that he feels he must release. He then reminisces about the days of his ‘early youth’ when his heart was free to roam. In those carefree times, he most often slept the whole night in serene tranquillity:

Hic libet, heu, primae tempus meminisse juventae,

• Cum vacuum tanti pectus amoris erat,

Cum poteram totas securus stertere noctes

• Et ridere miser si quis amator erat,

Necdum turbabant moestum suspiria pectus,

• Ore nec a tristi salsa fluebat aqua.

Heu, quis tunc fueram, quis nunc ! An vertere mentes

• Jus tibi, proh, tantum saeve Cupido, datur?²¹

In reminiscing here about his youthful freedom now lost, the poet makes no use of the Propertian Liber eram formula. He does nevertheless open the sequence of poems treating specifically of the eponymous heroine, Xandra, by describing his sighting of the young lady as a point of no return. This event changed his life significantly by arranging it into two successive temporal sequences: the one preceding his acquaintance with Xandra, and the one following it; it is the second of these two phases which is the object of his poetry.

Deployed in this way to define the context of the poet’s elegiac discourse, such a reference to the innamoramento, and to the momentous changes that it wrought on his existence, serves as a kind of framing device, one which is well placed near the collection’s beginning. By early introducing the motif of momentary nostalgia for youthful liberty, Landino also prepares its possible recurrence at other points in the three-book cycle. One such recurrence appears in the fifth poem of the collection’s second book, where the poet complains of his beloved’s cruel and unremitting severity towards him. For a fleeting moment he even envisions renouncing her affections, then quickly changes his mind, explaining that he is now so wounded by Love’s darts that he could not hope to resume his former state of health. He reflects on his situation and notes that there was a time when such a reversal would have been possible:

Tunc potui, recta rectus dum mente vigebat

• Sensus et intacto pectore liber eram;

Nunc qua ducit amor, qua me rapit, usque sequendus:

• Heu nimium nobis imperiosus amor!

Ille quidem felix divisque beatior ipsis,

• Qui fugit imperium, saeve Cupido, tuum.²²

Here, the poet brings out the Propertian formula, inserting it now at the end of a pentameter – not at the beginning of the hexameter, much less in the poem’s incipit as a framing declaration for the amorous sufferings which he is about to describe. Its use in these verses clearly reflects the appropriate deployment of an ancient poetic motif, one which is strongly associated with poets’ precise memory of the moment when he was struck, and irretrievably affected, by Cupid. Yet, its status is in this case little more than that – a useful motif which, deployed judiciously, serves to fill out the end of a pentameter by providing a final full dactyl followed by a long measure to punctuate the verse. What it does not do is re-enact the Propertian initiative of introducing a larger pattern of discourse in the form of an entire book. Here, the motif is used, though hardly given central status, by Florence’s senior elegist, the influential professor at the studium. Early appearing in Landino’s impressive inventory of poetic motifs, it has not yet acquired the status of a common poetic theme revisited by several poets in a spirit of inventive emulation.

Another, slightly younger, Florentine poet, Ugolino Verino (1438–1510), who styles himself a student and imitator of Landino, introduces a new way of echoing the phrase originally borrowed from Propertius II.ii. It is here that the motif becomes a regular humanist topos. In his two-book collection of erotic elegies entitled Fiammetta, Verino addresses poem 49 of the second book both to his friend Niccolò del Benino and to Niccolò’s beloved, a certain Ginevra. Chastising his amorous friend for having once mocked him as a prisoner of love, Verino begins the elegy with a slight variation on the Propertian phrase:

Liber eras quondam nostrique illusor amoris,

• Aligeri spernens regna superba dei.

Nunc te dejectum nec grandia verba sonantem

• Depressit niveis flava Ginevra comis,

Et tua bis centum religavit bracchia nodis,

• Et libertatis spes tibi nulla datur.

I nunc et saevos contemne Cupidinis arcus;

• Infelix nostras experiere vices.²³

Seeing that Niccolò del Benino has now become an enlisted and obedient member in Cupid’s service, the poet indulges himself in a bit of learned irony as he echoes Propertius while changing the verbal form. In a note to his recent edition of the Fiammetta, A. M. Wilson observes that Verino has grafted the expression adapted from Propertius II.ii onto another well-known Propertian theme. Verino seems to have in mind a development from poem I.ix, in which Verino addresses a certain irrisor who, having once made light of Propertius’s suffering, now finally experiences it on his own account. Verino’s clever deployment of Propertian contaminatio here seems a stroke of learned virtuosity in the humanists’ favourite game of classical allusion and the varied re-use of ancient poetic loci. The formulation he produces, in these verses addressed to a friend who would doubtless recognize the classical echoes, further confirms that the Liber eram motif has now acquired the singular status of a recurring expression, one that experienced poets and orators are likely to include among their stock of ready-made lines to be inventively altered and reworked.

The group of elegiac poets working in Florence during the Medici era exhibit a high degree of sensitivity to the artistic fruitfulness of ancient expressions in contemporary circulation. It would appear that the increasing currency of such motifs contributes to a shared aesthetic.²⁴ A poem in Naldo Naldi’s (1436–1513) collection of elegies dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici thus describes how the pensive and gloomy poet found himself on the verge of abandoning Love’s anguish altogether, when the imperious god suddenly took hold of him again, ordering him against his will to rejoin the ranks of labouring lovers:

Liber eram et tristes meditabar ponere curas,

• Hactenus intulerat quas mihi saevus Amor.

Invitum rapiens sic me, velut ante Cupido,

• In sua cum iussit castra redire gravis.

Quid me, dire, tuas totiens sentire sagittas,

• Quid cupis ignitas fervere in ossa faces?

Nonne satis fuerat, dum me mea pertulit aetas,

• Saeve Cupido, tuas saepe tulisse minas?

Dum puer extiteram, nusquam tua signa reliqui

• Saucius inde miser vulnere saepe gravi.²⁵

The poet’s use of the imperfect meditabar followed by an infinitive in the opening verse and the appearance of the god’s name in final position of the first hexameter clearly recalls the beginning of Propertius’s elegy. Naldi’s deft insertion of the Ovidian saevus Amor at the pentameter’s final dactyl,²⁶ where Propertius often uses a proper noun,²⁷ nonetheless introduces a variation that considerably alters the tone of the Propertian locus. Instead of admiring the beauty of his beloved, and comparing her to divine mythological figures, the humanist expresses weariness and even some anger (‘Quid me, dire ...’) on being conscripted once again into the ranks of the militia Amoris. With this inventive remodulation of the original motif, Naldi thus nicely carves his own niche among the inhabitants of the ancient poetic motif now vigorously renewed in the humanist poetic circles of fifteenth-century Florence and beyond.

Despite this elegant practice of poetic contamination, Naldi’s use of Propertius’s deponent meditabar seems explicitly to confirm his intertext’s status as the source of a direct borrowing. At least one other elegist of the same generation adopts this procedure in the opening verse of a poem that begins with an account of how, at the moment when the poet thought of renouncing love altogether, his old acquaintance Cupid attacked and vanquished him once again. An itinerant humanist originally from San Gimignano, Filippo Buonaccorsi (1437–1496), better known under the pseudonym Callimachus Experiens, provides his own reworking of the Liber eram motif at the beginning of an elegy composed sometime between 1470 and 1472²⁸ and addressed to his friend Aulo Basso. Buonaccorsi declares that he is once again enthralled by passion, having now slipped his neck into the yoke driven by a young woman from Cracow named ‘Fannia’. Buonaccorsi’s vocabulary in these lines, where he evokes the temporary flame of a former love (‘Doris’), reveals at once a close imitation of Propertius and the inventive exploitation of related elegiac motifs:

Liber eram nullosque mihi meditabar amores,

• Contentus casto vivere posse thoro:

Ast amor abrupit pactae mihi federa pacis

• Et iubet assueto reddere colla iugo.

Prima peregrinis faculis mea pectora Doris

• Attigit et mentis sedit in arce meae,

Dura sed inceptas fregerunt sidera curas

• Et periit subito vix bene natus amor.²⁹

The author’s use of meditabar, not to express an intention to remain chaste and forego love’s inevitable trials, but rather to describe more negatively his lack of amores, separates him from both Propertius and many of his humanist descendants in the use of this motif. His deployment of the accusative adjective nullos with amores in the elegy’s opening verse situates him most closely to Tifernate, whose earlier work may have been known to him. He is also the only author of all the elegies examined here to follow Propertius in using the infinitive vivere in the initial couplet, as the direct object of another verb. The insertion of the genitive of pax in the second hexameter (‘pactae … pacis’) also further exemplifies his close but inventive observation of the Propertian model. The sudden, violent, intervention of Cupid in the second couplet is nonetheless more reminiscent of the opening elegy of Ovid’s Amores, where the Love-god imperiously commands that the poet abandon the plan to write epic, than of Propertius’s plaintive acceptance of his fate. Here again, Buonaccorsi’s vocabulary, particularly his use of the perfect abrupit, also suggests a secondary rapprochement with Tifernate’s similar ‘Rupit ab ... Cupido’. Such use of ancient elegiac language and motifs situates him well in line with the contemporary fashion in Florentine circles, practised by poets such as Verino and Naldi, which consists of conspicuous imitation of Propertius II.ii, beginning with a slight variation on the poem’s incipit. The comparative evidence adduced in this study of the reception of this passage from the ancient elegiac poet strongly suggests that humanist versifiers plying their trade in the Florentine cultural milieu close to Landino re-used a motif already present in the poetic inventory of his important and influential Xandra and codified it through inventive redeployment.

Finally, it should be mentioned that nearly all of the elegies reviewed here use the Propertian Liber eram motif in such a way as to underscore the significance of the adversative conjunction At situated at the beginning of the pentameter. For the humanist poets, the initial couplet of Propertius II.ii is not only an effective opening declaration, but also a veritable thematic summary worthy of expansion into an entire elegy. Several of the authors cited (Verino, Naldi, Buonaccorsi) use the ancient source precisely in this way: while maintaining Propertius’s expression in the beginning line, they compose elegies in which they simply amplify and illustrate the theme suggestively set forth in his opening couplet. Tifernate follows this same compositional formula, choosing to emphasize with even greater strength the reversal signalled by the adversative in the pentameter. His long elegy thus becomes a moral essay on the dangers of unbridled passion, the weakness of the flesh and the fragility of human existence, reminiscent of Petrarch’s own Triumphus Cupidinis. Landino, for his part, does not accord the same structural prominence to the Propertian motif, which he situates neither at the incipit of an elegy nor even at the beginning of a couplet, choosing rather to place it at the end of a pentameter in such a way as to underscore a more wistful, nostalgic tone. His use of the motif nevertheless seems to have sparked a trend among his younger Florentine contemporaries, whose repeated use of it confirmed its status as an entrenched poetic motif during the latter part of the fifteenth century. Perhaps the most intriguing use of it here belongs to Giannantonio Campano, who, much like Landino, does not place it at the opening of an elegy, though he does use it to begin a couplet like that of Propertius. Campano’s use of the motif is (nearly) unique in this corpus insofar as his oeuvre situates it in the poem that generally appears, in printed editions and most manuscripts, as the inaugural piece of his entire collection of poetic works. It thus seems to have acquired in his verse writings a certain representative thematic prominence, one which places it at the heart of the collection’s frontispiece. Though such an arrangement in extant manuscript copies may ultimately have had little to do with the will of the author himself, it nevertheless sets an interesting precedent for the Liber eram motif’s appearance in the very first couplet of the Venetian Pietro Contarini’s three-book elegiac cycle.

Pietro Contarini’s Ad Gelliam, I.1 (Biblioteca Marciana MS Lat. XII, 234)

Known to modern historians principally as the author of a funeral oration in honour of Marco Corner pronounced on 27 August 1479, in the Church of Santi Apostoli, Pietro Contarini (1446–?1495), a descendant of one of Venice’s most prominent aristocratic families, was himself known to his contemporaries both as an historiographer and as a poet.³⁰ Although his historical writings are by all accounts now lost, his poetic works, consisting of a collection entitled Ad Gelliam elegiarum libri tres, have survived in a single manuscript preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice. This splendid 2,390 verse ensemble contains forty-nine elegies ranging in length from 20 to 178 verses, divided into three books of fifteen, sixteen and eighteen poems. The unilluminated manuscript’s initial page, on the first folio, contains no prefatory material other than the title of the first book of elegies, identifying the author as ‘Pietro Contarini, son of Adorno’ and a member of the ‘senatorial’ class.³¹ At the end of the third book, at the bottom of f. 42^r, immediately after the collection’s final elegy, the reader finds a three couplet epigram addressed to his fellow Venetian Bernardo Bembo.³² Contarini explains that his ‘Gellia’ was formerly pleasing to ‘many men’, but that, due to the natural effects of age, her beauty has now faded; she nonetheless obediently presents herself to Bembo at his request:

Tempora florebant viridis dum prima juventae

• Perplacuit multis Gellia nostra viris.

Sed quia multa solet turpis mutare senectus

• Non eadem forsan forma decusque manent.

Qualis cumque tamen sit: ne tua jussa recuset

• Bembe tuis oculis conspicienda venit.³³

Referring thus metonymically to the poetic cycle itself under the name of its elegiac heroine, Contarini here gives an indication that his collection is – or was – well known to many readers, but that its pertinence and newness have long since disappeared. The epigram therefore suggests that the cycle of poems circulated in manuscript primarily through ‘social transmission’, Contarini showing it to those who, like Bembo, explicitly requested to view it.³⁴ Despite his use of the modesty topos in these verses, Contarini makes no stipulation here regarding Bembo’s use of the manuscript, although the two men may have reached an understanding through other correspondence. Among the unnamed ‘many men’ who had viewed the collection previously, one may reasonably include the several addressees of one or more individual elegies in the three-book cycle, several of whom seem to have been Venetian nobleman with humanist interests. Men such as Andrea Mocenigo, Niccolò Dolfin, Benedetto Sanudo, Lorenzo Giorgio and Gentile Bellini, among others, are all gratified with at least one elegy addressed specifically to them. It seems probable that these individuals, and those who formed the elite cultural circles in which they moved, were Contarini’s highly select initial readership.

A precise dating of individual poems in Ad Gelliam is hardly an easy task, since, as Paolo Frasson has speculated in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani entry on Contarini, the manuscript collection of Latin elegies may quite possibly have been the author’s principal opus in the literary sphere, one that he worked on all his life.³⁵ This is all the more true in the case of the collection’s initial poem, constructed as it is on an ancient half-verse which was inherited from Propertius and used, as we have seen, with increasing frequency by elegiac poets active during the second half of the fifteenth century.

One aspect, though, clearly sets Contarini’s use of the Propertian Liber eram motif apart from that exhibited by virtually all his contemporaries. Whereas most of the other poets deploy the expression at the beginning of a poem in a manner like their ancient elegiac model, only Contarini seems to have acted on the intuition of placing it squarely at the opening of an entire three-book ensemble. In so doing, he brings the expression from Propertius II.ii into considerable relief, setting it up formally as the beginning of a kind of prologue, one which serves to introduce and contextualize the entirety of the Ad Gelliam.

Contarini’s initial elegy thus also begins with an incipit invoking the Propertian model. Here, too, the poet uses the spare, epigrammatic paradigm as the starting-point of a longer, amplifying development in which he deplores the fact that an irresistible captivity has made of him a young woman’s slave (vv. 1–10). He remembers the time when he was ‘free’, that is, when the thought of a woman had not yet come to occupy and subjugate his mind. Contarini, unlike Propertius, then expands the reminiscence and describes his former life and the activities of an active youth still unfettered by love’s shackles. Hunting rabbits was then his only care, and he remembers fondly the time when he would return home with his prey swinging over shoulder (vv. 11–18). Then, one day, the poet encountered his beloved Gellia, whom he describes as appearing to him under the guise of Diana the huntress, her charming traits negligently enveloped in a tunic from Cos (vv. 19–24). This was the moment of the innamoramento, in which the astonished poet suddenly felt Love’s flame sear through his bones and entrails. At that very second, he saw the extent of Love’s divine power and hence irretrievably relinquished his liberty (vv. 25–32). Now that his mistress has come to acquire absolute power over him, he has forever abandoned hunting wild game, which used to be an all-consuming passion. Unable to run the fields in the company of his hounds, he no longer pursues deer, fallow deer, hares, wild goats or wild boars (vv. 33–40). His sole objective is the pursuit of his enchanting mistress, for the stricken poet’s entire happiness depends on the attitude she displays towards him (vv. 41–6). In the elegy’s final verses, he announces that his state of mind and his very moods are entirely in thrall to those of the all-powerful Gellia. This, in sum, is the confession he makes to the reader, much to his embarrassment.

The incipit reveals the poem’s Propertian allegiance, as the first two words reproduce the celebrated formula which appears at the beginning of Propertius’s elegy II.ii, while the clausula of the opening hexameter – ‘cura Puellae’ – sounds an echo from another of his poems.³⁶ One difference between the ancient model and its Renaissance ‘imitation’ appears in these initial verses, for Contarini, like a Petrarchan lover, carefully draws a portrait of his former life, the one he led before being wounded and hence irrevocably changed by Cupid:

Liber eram, nec me vexabat cura Puellae;

• Non fax, non arcus notus amoris erat.

Gaudebam studio venandi: et ponere fessa

• Pectora gramineo margine dulcis aquae.

Cingere laetabar totos Indagine saltus

• Et celeri leporum cum cane terga sequi.

Optabamque ferae spaciosae occurrere telo

• Comminus: et forti vulnera ferre manu,

Occiduoque domum praedam sub sole ferebam

• Pendebat captus post mea terga lepus.³⁷

To the incipit borrowed from Propertius II.ii, Contarini studiously endeavours to add poetic expressions culled from a variety of Latin poets, with a decided, though hardly exclusive, preference for the elegists. References to Love’s arc (‘bow’), for example, are not infrequently met with in elegiac poetry. Propertius’s poem I.ix offers an example of similar usage, where the poet declares triumphantly that his friend Ponticus, who still recently mocked Love, has now succumbed to the god’s irresistible power.³⁸ Humanist Latin contemporaries of Contarini such as Giovanni Pontano refer frequently to the bow, in the use of which both Cupid and his divine mother conspire.³⁹ The ‘torch’ in the same initial pentameter reflects our author’s familiarity with the Augustan poets, for the image is attested in both Propertius⁴⁰ and Tibullus⁴¹, as well as in Horace’s Odes.⁴² Presented as complementary parallels in anaphoric sequence in the poem’s initial couplet, these two conventional images announce both the entire collection’s elegiac love theme and Contarini’s familiarity with the linguistic usage of the ancients. The adjective gramineo, though often used by Virgil,⁴³ is deployed by Contarini in such a way as to describe the idyllic pastures of an innocence that he has now relinquished forever, after the manner of a descriptive sequence from Ovid’s Amores where the elegiac lover is suddenly confronted by a terrifying nocturnal vision concerning his mistress.⁴⁴ Contarini then deploys an ablative – ‘cingere ... Indagine’ – which calls explicitly to mind the famous hunting scene of double import in the fourth book of the Aeneid.⁴⁵ In Virgil’s narrative context, the word is pronounced by the goddess Juno, who plots with Venus to ensure that Dido and Aeneas are ensnared by love at the moment when the hunters are surrounding the woods with their nets. Contarini inserts this Virgilian echo into the sequence of verses that prepares the innamoramento, where roles are suddenly reversed, and the hunter becomes the prey. As a further prelude to this reversal, Contarini follows the lead of his Augustan forebears by using the verb occurrere to describe the imprudent lover’s sudden and violent encounter with his foe.⁴⁶ Finally, the image of the conquered rabbit dangling over the hunter’s shoulder as he heads for home concludes this symbolic portrait with a final snapshot of peaceful, rustic domestic life, while anticipating the carefree youth’s imminent metamorphosis into a suffering, conquered lover after he himself falls prey to the wiles of Love and to the sight of Gellia’s irresistible beauty.

When compared with the opening of Propertius II.ii, these initial ten verses in Contarini’s poem present an amplifying digression; for Propertius’s elegy, which does briefly evoke the possibility of a celibate life, nevertheless presents no such detailed and nostalgic meditation on the habits that were once characteristic of the poet’s now abandoned ‘freedom’. This development resembles the sort of contrasting description of a young man’s fanciful (and unfulfilled) bachelor life that is sometimes met with in epithalamia from antiquity onwards. An example of this is to be found in Claudian’s famous celebration of the marriage of Stilicho’s daughter Maria to the emperor Honorius, at the beginning of which he similarly declares that the bridegroom suddenly left off all of his old sporting activities – hunting, horses and javelin-throwing – once he had become inflamed with love at the sight of his future bride.⁴⁷ Late medieval vernacular poets working in the Petrarchan vein often visit it in similar fashion when they describe how Love’s sudden strike has turned their life topsy-turvy.⁴⁸ Inversely, authors such as Landino also at times declare in frustration that they have decided to take up again their old hunting pastime.⁴⁹ Of course, the ‘adversary’ whom Contarini’s lover finds in his path is hardly a wild animal ready to challenge the hunter’s prowess, but rather the irresistible sight of a beautiful young girl, whose very appearance has now put an end to his liberty.

Contarini’s inventive elegiac composition, starting from the incipit of Propertius II.ii, thus leans heavily on ancient poetic sources close to Propertius’s spare, epigrammatic piece, in which one memorable couplet is followed by a densely allusive feminine portrait. Contarini, much in the manner of his fifteenth-century contemporaries, amplifies the opening with a Petrarchan-like rumination on the unfolding of the innamoramento. By adopting a more self-reflexive point of view, Contarini also strengthens the symbolic import of a poem that he has chosen to situate at the very opening of his three-book collection of elegies. This more explicitly subjective imitation of the Propertian elegy also deepens the impression of a solitary man who describes the crossing of an emotional threshold, using Virgilian echoes and with particular reference to the Book IV of the Aeneid. The humanist’s delicate insistence on the ultimate loneliness of excessive passion, even when it is inspired by love, offers a peculiarly suitable modern accommodation to the ancient elegiac motif of the lover’s nostalgic remembrance of his days of youthful innocence. It is doubtless also a subtle echo of the Triumphus Cupidinis theme revisited by Gregorio Tifernate, in which the ancient elegiac rumination on love’s suffering becomes infused with the larger ethical reflection on the misery of humanity.

Contarini’s use of the elegiac motif descended from Propertius II.ii.1–2 represents the summit of the motif’s curious fifteenth-century destiny. Contarini uses the expression borrowed from the ancient poet as the opening utterance of a long, three-book collection of love elegies addressed to a woman whose name appears in the title. It introduces the poet, as a man who speaks in the past tense when referring to the initial moments of a passion that now entirely consumes his life, and the woman whose presence and image occupy him constantly. The expression Liber eram, encountered in a minor elegy of Propertius, here acquires a rhetorical status that is out of all proportion to the relative obscurity of its ancient source. Fifteenth-century elegiac poets have thus managed to breathe new life into the ancient poetic genre, by developing a recurring motif from an expression which lends itself well to the increasingly subjective preoccupations and rhetorical tendencies of late medieval and Renaissance vernacular poets such as Petrarch and his many imitators.

The Portrayal of Elegiac Folly in Baptista Mantuanus’s Adulescentia

The motif inherited from Propertius’s brief elegy and used repeatedly by fifteenth-century elegiac poets seeking to describe the devastation wrought by the arrows of Cupid acquires a new dimension in the second eclogue of Baptista Mantuanus’s famous collection entitled Adulescentia, first printed at Mantua in September 1498. This 174-verse poem written in hexameters consists of a dialogue between the shepherds Faustus and Fortunatus, whose lively exchanges provide the material for the first three of the ten bucolic poems which make up the collection. In this second piece, the two friends, temporarily separated due to the rising waters of the river Po which prevented Fortunatus from arriving at their usual meeting, resume their most recent conversation, the object of Mantuanus’s first eclogue, on the topic of love. Fortunatus declares that he will now tell his friend of the experience of a certain Amyntas, who was driven to madness by his amorous passion. One day this Amyntas led a group of six calves, six heifers of equal age and a lone bull to a grassy pasture in a place named ‘Coitus’, a towering stronghold situated on the banks of the Mincio. As the shepherd dallied by a stream, his bull wandered off among the hilly meadows. Seeking the lost animal, he encountered a group of young women, one among which was a tall blonde girl whose extraordinary beauty far surpassed that of her companions. Fortunatus offers a descriptive portrait of her (vv. 98–102), then exclaims that ‘when the lad saw her, he perished’, such that he was thereafter unable to think of anything else. Six verses then describe the harrowing effects that this sudden vision exercised on his mind:

Hanc puer ut vidit, periit flammasque tuendo

• Hausit et in pectus caecos absorbuit ignes,

Ignes qui nec aquis perimi potuere nec umbris

• Diminui neque graminibus magicisve susurris.

Oblitusque greges et damna domestica totus

• Uriter et noctes in luctum expendit amaras.

⁵⁰

In his commentary on the Adulescentia, Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462–1535) rightly noted a reminiscence of Virgil, Eclogues, VIII.41 in these lines.⁵¹ W. P. Mustard and Lee Piepho add additional references to Virgil (Aeneid, IV.2) and Ovid (Heroides, V.142; XVII.190; Metamorphoses, I.523; XIII.762– 3).⁵² One might also observe a certain resemblance to the Petrarchan innamoramento motif. From this moment, Amyntas has become a prisoner – or a slave – to the whims of his passion and the tyranny of Love. Fortunatus confirms that Amyntas behaved like a man possessed by an ‘insane rage’ (‘insanum ... furorem’, v. 110). He then produces a misogynistic commonplace about the dangers to which women often give rise, for they are, according to Fortunatus, the source of much armed strife and even death. Love of this sort, driven by the madness of desire, is strictly forbidden by austere ‘laws written in volumes enclosed by red leather bindings’.⁵³

This reference to ‘laws’ forbidding love and warning against the wiles of women, notes Fortunatus, roused extreme anger in Amyntas, and he replied without delay that such reasoning reveals only a false intelligence, by which mankind subjects itself to laws that are against its very nature and which it cannot seriously hope to obey. It is in this context that Mantuanus introduces a subtle poetic echo of the elegiac Liber eram motif, with the verb now conjugated in the third person as Amyntas refers to the universality of a human madness that is all the more devastating for its claims to a foundation in unassailable universal reason:

Error hic, haec passim sapiens dementia regnat.

• Ipse sibi blanditur homo sollersque putari

Vult animal; tamen incautus sibi multa tetendit

• Retia et in foveam cecidit quam fecerat. Ante

Liber erat; servile jugum sibi condidit ipse;

• Pondus id est legum (vidi ipse volumina) quas nec

Antiqui potuere patres, nec possumus ipsi,

• Nec servare aetas poterit ventura nepotum.

Aspice quam stulta est hominum prudentia: caelum

• Sperat et esse sibi sedem inter sidera credit;

Forsitan in volucrem morions transibit et altum

• Spiritus assumptis tranabit ad aethera pennis.

⁵⁴

Beginning with Badius’s published annotations on the Adulescentia, several modern commentators have rightly noted the parallel between Mantuanus’s vv. 140–2 and St Peter’s words to the apostles and the elders in Acts 15.10: ‘Now, therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?’⁵⁵ The yoke that man has fashioned for himself, says Amyntas, is one of moral laws proscribing pleasures and desires that no generation has been able to resist. In the Carmelite Spagnoli’s moral universe, Amyntas is destined to succumb to the poisons of love in horrible torment, a narrative that the poet presents in the Adulescentia’s third eclogue. Andrea Severi, following Mustard, notes the parallel idea expressed by Ovid’s Myrrha in Metamorphoses, X.329–31.⁵⁶ In Ovid, the young girl, driven nearly mad by incestuous desire, pleads in favour of a radical liberation of natural amorous impulse, without regard for the moral identity of its object, even in the case of relations with members of one’s own family. Myrrha imputes the evil from which she suffers to ‘spiteful laws’ (‘malignas ... leges’) and ‘jealous laws’ (‘invida jura’) established by humankind in defiance of natural impulses which, she says, do not recognize the same limits.⁵⁷

In so far as the folly denounced by Mantuanus’s ill-fated and rebellious shepherd, Amyntas, may be compared with the relative freedom of animals (‘homo sollersque putari / vult animal ...’), as is explicitly the case in the episode from the Metamorphoses (X.322–8), the parallel between the two texts remains an informative illustration of the type of poetic sources brought to bear by the author of the Adulescentia. Yet, whereas Ovid’s Myrrha refers to contemporary tribes, ‘among whom mother and son, daughter with father mates, and natural love is increased by the double bond’,⁵⁸ Mantuanus’s Amyntas wilfully establishes a pointed distinction between an idealized past and a grim, joyless present ruled by tyrannical and unnatural moral laws. His melancholy qualitative separation of two distinct epochs provides a temporal paradigm bearing a superficial resemblance to the one presented by Paul in Romans 6, in which he describes Christ’s liberation of the faithful from the old Law and thence from death:

(17) Gratias autem Deo quod fuistis servi peccati, oboedistis autem ex corde in eam formam doctrinae,in quam traditi estis, (18) liberati autem a peccato servi facti estis iustitiae. (19) Humanum dico propter infirmitatem /carnis vestrae. Sicut enim exhibuistis membra vestra servientia immunditiae et iniquitati ad iniquitatem, ita nunc exhibete membra vestra servientia iustitiae ad sanctificationem. (20) Cum enim servi essetis peccati, liberi eratis iustitiae. (21) Quem ergo fructum habebatis tunc, in quibus nunc erubescitis? Nam finis illorum mors! (22) Nunc vero liberati a peccato, servi autem facti Deo, habetis fructum vestrum in sanctificationem, finem vero vitam aeternam!⁵⁹

A major difference between the two positions resides in the fact that, whereas in the Pauline discourse freedom from the old Law entails a new, happier servitude to justice through faith in Christ, Mantuanus’s Amyntas simply pines for what he perceives to be lost pleasures of the flesh. His characterization of the elegiac discourse in this way, as a frivolous and ultimately fatal attachment to sensual gratification, well reflects the fundamental, stern moral teaching brought to the fore in the Adulescentia. In the first poem of the series, the shepherd Fortunatus confirms that Love is a thief who ‘deceives the senses, blinds the eye, steals away the mind’s freedom, and bewitches us with his wondrous art’.⁶⁰ Further on, the same shepherd produces a new commonplace on the theme of Love’s imperious enslavement of his followers, according to which ‘he who loves also serves: he follows his lover as a captive, endures the yoke on his conquered neck, endures her sweet scourging and goading, and like an ox he draws the plow’.⁶¹ Observations such as these, which draw liberally on the elegiac servitium amoris theme, are framed in dialogue by Mantuanus’s characters in such a way as to point up the moral failings in young men who simply follow their own unbridled desires. By attributing the expression Liber erat… to a shepherd who is doomed to die as a result of his zealous and excessive attachment to the elegiac ideology of servitium amoris, Mantuanus offers the emblematic caricature of a poetic genre which, in the poetry of Tibullus, Propertius, and their fifteenth-century imitators, remains largely devoted to the celebration and pursuit of erotic pleasure. He also frames its use in such a way as to suggest that the embittered shepherd’s remarks take aim at a facet of Christian morality articulated by St Paul in terms like those originally used by the ancient pagan elegiac poet. Mantuanus lets Amyntas speak at length as a means of illustrating the folly of his passion.⁶² His speech features an expression borrowed from ancient elegy, which, at the time when Mantuanus composed his eclogue, had attained the status of a commonly recurring motif, or even a commonplace, in fifteenth-century elegiac love poetry.

This same moral discourse, in which erotic elegy is offered up as the very exemplar of immoral excess and thoughtless proclivity to sin, is used at times in sixteenth-century Latin parenetic verse, now utterly shorn of elegy’s joyous irony. A remarkable instance of this is found in one of Girolamo Falletti’s (1518–1564) verse compositions addressed to the young Ferrarese prince Alfonso d’Este, on the dangers of marriage and women’s ‘mutability’. Two years before Alfonso was to ascend the throne in Ferrara, Falletti exhorted the young man to remain wary of deceitful feminine allures:

Illecebras fugias meretricum. Foemina turpe

• Mancipium faciet. Poteris tolerare labores,

Imperiumque pati? victusque recedere capta

• Infelix praeda, atque iterum parere superbae?

Turpius esse nihil, reputo nil peius, avarae

• Subdere quam collum Veneri, et servire leaenae.

Liber, eris servus: si poscet munera, danda.

• Sin minus, eiiciet cernens te lumine torvo.

Mobile fert pectus, mentem quoque foemina versat

• Mutantem huc illuc.

⁶³

Although the Propertian formula is reduced to a distant echo in these lines, the poet preserves the basic structure and vocabulary of the first dactyl and the initial long syllable of the second: Liber + conjugated form of esse (‘Liber, eris ...’). Also conspicuous is the distinction between two temporal phases, in which the poet now warns his addressee that today’s pleasures and desires may well jeopardize his freedom in the future. Here, the language of ancient elegy, though considerably reduced in this parenetic piece addressed to a young member of the Este family, remains conspicuous, offering the poet a handy means of moral caricature which is readily associated with the follies of desperate lovers who have abandoned all sense of measure and of social decorum. Poets such as Falletti, eager to offer the fruits of their wisdom to members of the local court, reveal an allegiance to the edifying verse of Mantuanus’s Adulescentia, a central posture of which resides in the polemical use of elegiac language to portray immoral excess.

Echoes in humanist poetry of Propertius’s wistful reminiscence of his youthful innocence in times preceding his fateful enthrallment to Cynthia’s charms only seldom reproduce a sustained imitation of his full elegy II.ii. Much more frequent is the inspired re-use of the poem’s famous incipit, which expresses the sentiment of regret and longing that informs the Petrarchan motif of the innamoramento, the poignant moment beyond which the poet’s existence was forever altered because of love. Quattrocento elegiac poets revisit this sequence with sufficient regularity to make it a recurring motif in the humanist renewal of the ancient genre. For the most part, the use they make of it preserves the elegiac lamentation over lost freedom and youthful vigour, a telltale symptom of the debilitating dominion exercised by Cupid over entrapped lovers. At the end of the fifteenth century, the elegiac motif appears in Baptista Mantuanus’s Adulescentiae, in the declarations of an earthly lover, the shepherd Amyntas, whose excessive passion will lead to his ruin and death. Mantuanus’s choice of the expression originating in Propertius well reflects the Christian humanist’s familiarity with the rhetorical tropes conspicuously associated with ancient erotic elegy. He uses the expression as he constructs a moral caricature of foolish devotion to earthly pleasures and desires. Elegiac language itself is here stigmatized as tendentious and excessive, a symptomatic reflection of the speaker’s moral disequilibrium and folly. Poets working in a court setting during the later Renaissance come to recognize it as part of a specific brand of discourse, one that may easily be exploited in parenetic verse expounding moral values for the greater edification of the later humanists’ wealthy, powerful employers.