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- Through the Renaissance literature of Italy the story spread rapidly. At the end of the fifteenth and at the beginning of the sixteenth century it was a frequent theme in Italy of scholarly Latin verse¹, and early in the sixteenth century it found its way into the vernacular Italian poetry. The vogue of the story was greatly extended by an Italian rendering of Bion’s elegy (wrongly assigned to Theocritus under the title of *Epitafio di Adone di Teocrito*), which appeared in a collection of *Rime Toscane* in 1535.² A very
¹ Numerous Latin poems on Venus and Adonis by Italian scholars, including Alciati, Sannazaro, and Minturno, are found in Gruter’s *Delitiae Balorum Poetarum*, vol. i, pp. 32, 90, 1311; vol. ii, pp. 723, 924, 1452. In *Pentani Opera*, 1503, an epigram *De Adonide et Venere*, p. 10, gives a vivid description of nature’s grief on Adonis’ death; see also *De conversione Adonidis in citrium*, p. 139. Slight reference is made to Adonis by Ariosto in his *Orlando Foriese*. He is mentioned under Ovidian influence as a type of ardent lover, Canto vi, Stanza 57, and as the child of an incestuous union in Canto xxv, Stanza 36.
² This was first published in Paris in 1535 and reissued in Venice in 1538 and 1547. The author’s name is given on the title-page as Amomo; nothing else seems known of him. Cf. F. Flamini’s *Studi di istoria litteraria italiana e straniera*, 1895, pp. 256 sq.
In the Renaissance poetry of Italy.
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VENUS AND ADONIS
few years later three well-known figures in the history of Italian literature developed almost simultaneously the theme in original Italian verse. All wrote in the same eight-lined stanza under Greek and Latin influences, which were mingled in different proportions, but they arranged the common material according to their individual fancy.
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