Mythologiae (review)

Renaissance reawakening to classical mythology is often easily documented. Virgil's alcove in posterity was long established before Dante, even errantly in such anchored habits as the sortes Vergilianae and dubious hermeneutics applied to his Eclogue 4. Ovidian ekphrases also abounded in painterly visions from Antonio del Pollaiuolo to Botticelli, Hans Baldung, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Titian.

Few, however, have been aware of or appreciated the mythographic contributions of Natale Conti (1520–82), which lacuna is greatly rectified in Mulryan and Brown's translation of Mythologiae (first edition, 1567) into English with copious annotation as befits this Renaissance scholar, whose work saw at least twenty-five Latin editions over intervening centuries. Quoting the introduction: "An English translation of Natale Conti's Mythologiae is long overdue; there is no modern edition of the original Latin text. . . . Although the Mythologiae was constantly cited by the learned and taken for granted as the standard reference work on classical myth during the Renaissance, many scholars still dismiss it as no more than a handy compendium of facts, and refuse to acknowledge its value as a creative source of mythology for the aspiring Renaissance poet" (1:xi). Mulryan and Brown also contextualize Conti within the medieval and Renaissance mythographers, pointing out both his similarities and differences with precedents and near contemporaries. Most importantly, they cite Boccaccio (De Genealogia Deorum gentilium libri, ca. 1363–74), Georgius Pictor (Theologia Mythologica, 1532), Lilio Giraldi (De deis gentium varia & multiplex historia, 1548), and Vincenzo Cartari (Imagini de i dei de gli antichi, 1556); they are careful to delineate not only Conti's weaknesses but also his strengths relative to other mythographies.

Understanding Conti's day, when some form of late Neoplatonicism in the like of Marsilio Ficino's Theologia Platonica (ca. 1482) had already offered a rationalizing impetus to accepting many "paganisms" as dim pre-Christian candles before daybreak, perhaps we can be persuaded to indulge Conti's intermittent acquiescence to contemporary Christian theology, at times reasonable in his easily-flagged interpolations of Vatican-stamped apologetics with Greco-Roman literature. This syncretic philosophic impulse is apparent, for example, in volume 1, book 2, ("On the One God, the Originator and Creator of all Things"), in volume 2, book 8 ("How to Make Sensible Connections Between the Many Ancient Gods and the One God"), as well as in constant reminders throughout his work, almost as if he expected to be vetted for heresy. In the main, this theologizing does not detract from his love for classical scholarship or his meditations on myth.

Conti's moralizing on mythology is less digestible, as he often heavy-handedly interprets many details and meanings via a thinly veiled ethical purview. Mulryan and Brown do not omit or mitigate that Conti's interpretations, while learned, usually carefully sourced, and colorfully mirroring their times, are also often tendentious or tangential: "On Scylla: To put it briefly as possible, the ancients proved the axiom that Aristotle had posited in the Ethics, namely that virtue is the mean between two extremes, both of which are vices (EN. 2.6.10; EE 2.3.6). For anyone who sailed on the Sicilian sea [Straits of Messina] had to avoid two really fierce monsters: Scylla on the one side and Charybdis on the other. And a ship had to hold its course between those two monsters. For whoever can avoid swerving too much toward either side will eventually get out of there in one piece. . . . Moderation is the key in all of these situations" (2:924). Here Conti appears to miss the mark; the dilemma of being between a proverbial rock and a hard place is all the more poignant because the Greeks wisely knew many choices to be fraught with complicated consequences on either hand and invested the myth with this deeper human reality.

But Mulryan and Brown make sure the reader sees that Conti's contributions extend far beyond such...