Di soavi licor gli orli del vaso: La fortuna di Lucrezio dall'Umanesimo alla Controriforma

Scholars working independently across several disciplines continue to bring to light new indications of the considerable impact of Lucretius's work, both as a poetic model and as a body of philosophical doctrine, in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. Recent work demonstrates that it is no longer possible to assert that the fortune of the poem, since its discovery by Poggio Bracciolini, was largely underground, or that, after an intense campaign of publication around 1500, the momentum of transmission was halted following its condemnation in 1517 by the papal synod of Florence.

The circulation of Lucretius raises interesting questions about how we undertake the history of ideas. Clearly, the text's reception does not belong solely, or even substantially, in a history of Renaissance Epicureanism: since it was read, cited, and imitated by individuals who would never have aligned themselves with that philosophical school. Many literary adaptations of Lucretius are emulations of the sublime quality of his verse, often — despite the poem's materialism and denial of the soul's immortality — in the service of explicitly Christian ends. Lucretius can sometimes appear as a quarry for sober commonplaces about the fragility of the human condition, the pernicious effects of sexual desire, the philosophical imperative of liberating the mind from fear of death, and the unknown. Yet this can be said equally of the reception of Plato and other ancient philosophers, references to whom are still made to serve modern preconceptions that coherent bodies of philosophical doctrines — Platonism, Pythagoreanism — were revived in the Renaissance. Between the options of systematic philosophy on one hand, or the mere gleaning of topoi on the other, the impact of ideas imported under the name of a classical author has to be seen in terms of local objectives, and in accordance with a synchronic understanding of an often highly politicized intellectual field in which a Renaissance author operates. Thus, Charlotte Goddard has emphasized the orthodoxy of the Neapolitan poets in their Christianizing adaptations of De rerum natura, while Alison Brown, surveying the Florentine fortunes of Lucretius from Bartolomeo Scala beginning in the 1460s to Machiavelli in the 1520s, shows how the text served an anti-idealizing view of human nature: grounded in Lucretius's account of the primitive origins of mankind and his kinship with animals, itself deployed as an revolutionary alternative to Medicean myths of the Golden Age.

Neither Goddard nor Brown are mentioned in Prosperi's study, which for the most part is diachronic in scope. While its subtitle promises that this will be a comprehensive account of the Renaissance fortuna of Lucretius, its focus is — by the author's own admission — considerably narrower. It is largely a study of the topos of poetry as a sweetening of bitter philosophical medicine, employed by Lucretius — and other ancient writers — to characterize his own poem. In her first chapter, Prosperi provides a rich catalogue of instances of the topos between antiquity and the Counter-Reformation, observing that by the 1500s it was invariably attributed to Lucretius. This circumstance may have contributed to a reversal of its normal sense at the hands of orthodox Catholic writers in the later sixteenth century, who insisted that the honey of poetry could just as likely be sweetening the poison of dangerous and corrupting ideas. Ultimately, the book becomes a study of Tasso, to whom about one third of it is devoted, and from whose use of the Lucretian topos the title derives. Prosperi argues that the topos becomes the key to Tasso's embattled Counter-Reformation poetics. It was a crucial means of defending the enterprise of poet, while, at the same time, a network of allusions to De rerum natura in Gerusalemme Liberata signaled a larger bid for poetic and intellectual autonomy.

Readers who are not Tasso scholars might find the second chapter more useful as a program for further work. Here the author explores the Lucretian adaptations of writers such as Lorenzo Bonincontri, Gian Gioviano Pontano, Michele Marullo, Jacopo Sannazaro, Mario Equicola, Pietro Vettori, Bernardo Tasso, and Sperone Speroni. Although Prosperi addresses the deep Lucretian sympathies of Vettori and Speroni, her emphasis falls heavily on the increasingly urgent need to justify the poetic enterprise and on the efforts to normalize and Christianize Lucretius. Unlike the Tasso chapters that follow, which deal with philosophical and theological matters, the scope here is more limited to questions of poetic imitation. Scientific and medical thought is briefly touched on in the person of Girolamo Mercuriale.

Against the a priori view that the coercive orthodoxy of the Counter-Reformation would have inhibited the reading of Lucretius and the impact of his ideas, Prosperi amply demonstrates the continued resonance of his text. Not only was it not placed on the Index, but — as a correspondent of Benedetto Varchi noted in 1549 — Cardinal Marcello Cervini intervened to prevent its inclusion. Prosperi suggests that once an author adopted certain ritual protocols — a repudiation of Lucretian materialism and the doctrine of the soul's mortality — he was free to draw upon the Lucretian model. Authors who drew too liberally on the more controversial parts of the text, like Speroni, were apt to be censured. The chief virtue of the book is its useful array of primary sources, although the selection tends to be limited by Prosperi's focus on a limited number of topoi and on the question of poetics. It evidently remains to other scholars to complement her study by tracing the impact of other famous and notorious passages in the poem: the pathology of love material in book 4 and its impact on sixteenth-century, anti-erotic literature and anti-Petrarchism, the ideal of philosophical poetry itself, which influenced the sober Carmelite Baptista Mantuanus along with Pontano and Fracastoro, and, finally, the Lucretian polemic against religio (superstition) and its impact on anticlerical thought.