Adonis at the Crossroads: Two (Three) Early Modern Versions of the Venus and Adonis Myth

Giunto a quel passo il giovinetto Alcide, Che fa capo al camin di nostra vita, Trovò dubbio e sospeso infra due guide Una via, che ‘n due strade era partita. Facile e plana la sinistra ei vide, Di delizie e piacer tutta florita; L’altra vestia l’ispide balze alpine Di duri sassi e di pungenti spine.

Stette lung’ora irrisoluto in forse Tra’ duo sentieri il giovane inesperto; Al fine il piè ben consigliato ei torse Lunge dal calle morbido ed aperto; E dietro a lei, ch’a vero onor lo scorse, Scelse da destra il faticoso ed erto, Onde per gravi rischi e strane imprese Di somma gloria in su la cima ascese.

E così va chi con giudizio sano Di virtù segue l’onorata traccia, Ma chiunque credendo al vizio vano Cerca il mal, e’ha di ben semblanza e faccia, Giunge per molle e spazioso piano Dove in mille catene il piede allaccia. Quante il perfido ahi quante e in quanto modi N’ordisce astute insidiem occulte frodi.

Per l’arringo mortal, nova Atalanta, L’anima peregrina e semplicetta Corre veloce, e con spedita pianta Del gran viaggio al termine s’affretta. Ma spesso il corso suo stornar si vanta Il senso adulator, ch’a sè l’alletta Con l’oggetti piacevole e giocondo Di questo pomo d’or, che nome ha mondo.

(Marino, 21–21: 1–32)

If we follow Benedetto Croce, who claimed that Marino was being insincere when he proposed that the Adone (1623) showed how “immoderate pleasure ends in pain” (56), then the Hercules allegory opening its second canto must be seen as a joke played by the poet on his readers, twisting their expectation that a mythical fable necessarily contains a moral message (as we shall see in the following section, this was an entirely fair expectation since the dominant early modern approach to ancient myth was moral allegory). For it states that, confronted with the old Herculean choice between virtue and vice,¹ Adonis chose the former (“Al fine il piè ben consigliato ei torse/Lunge dal calle morbido ed aperto”) when in fact he is just about to enter the Palace of Love. Indeed, the irony appears to be so thick it can be cut with a knife. However, if Marino’s Hercules allegory is ironical, then its irony is surely a facetious double one that mocks readers’ tendency to moralize pagan mythology, only to turn the tables on them when the prelude continues with an apparently unironical moral reflection on how easily humans are lured away from the virtuous path by worldly temptations (“Ma spesso il corso suo stornar si vanta/Il senso adulator, ch’a sè alletta/Con l’oggetti piacevoli e giacondo”). It is now conceded that although he originally meant to choose wisely, the young man ended up fatally biting that golden apple which is the world with all its pleasures (“questo pomo d’or, che nome ha mondo”). With this re-moralizing turn, readers are left perplexed: Should they or should they not read the canto as a moral allegory? Empathizing with Adonis’s human frailty but contemplating it within a stern moral frame, the passage is impossible to commit to any single interpretation. It is as thoroughly ambivalent as the rest of the Adone.²

Whether he was joking, moralizing, or playing some kind of doubly ironical tongue-in-cheek game, Marino was not alone among his contemporaries in taking interest in the Adonis myth, nor was he the only early modern author exploring this myth through the perspective of psychomachy in a wholly ambivalent manner. The Adone is but the revelatory culmination of an extensive late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century paradigm comprising some of the most prestigious authors of the time—the monstrously proportioned zenith that illuminates all others like a magnifying glass. From Ronsard and Juan de la Cueva, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and Calderón to Marino, La Fontaine, and Hallmann, the Adonis theme keeps popping up as a favorite if enigmatic and even paradoxical subject...