The sheer number of Neo-Latin epics boggles the mind, and so it comes as no surprise that so many of these magna opera remain un(der)studied, unpublished, some even simply unknown. Today, Petrarch’s Africa (1343/1501) enjoys the distinction of being the first (major) and best (known) exemplar of the genre; in its day, Vida’s Christiad (1535/1550) was perhaps even more famous and highly regarded. In the past decade or so, the Christiad has made something of a resurgence, between James Gardner’s volume for the I Tatti Renaissance Library (see BMCR 2009.09.74) and the monumental edition, translation, and commentary produced by Eva von Contzen et al. (see BMCR 2013.12.40). Building on this recent scholarship, the book under review offers the first monograph on the Christiad since Mario A. Di Cesare’s Vida’s Christiad and Vergilian Epic (1964). In venturing far beyond any facile comparison between Vida and Vergil, the volume succeeds both in illuminating the densely intertextual nature of the Christiad and in demonstrating how that intertextuality shapes our reading of the poem.
In the “Introduction,” Cianciosi provides the essential background information about Vida himself, his literary output, and the place of his Christiad between the Classical tradition and Classical reception—what William Dominik has recently dubbed Classical “traception.” Unfortunately, not much is securely known about Vida, from the year of his birth (Cianciosi settles on sometime between 1480 and 1485, in Cremona) to the full scope and nature of his poetic endeavors (including the recently discovered Felsinais, Scacchia ludus, and De arte poetica). The editio princeps of the Christiad was published in 1535, followed by several later editions during the same century, as well as the first commentary, by Bartolomeo Botta, in 1569, shortly after Vida’s death in 1566, in Alba. Like the many other classicizing biblical or, perhaps more accurately, Christian epics of the Renaissance and, more broadly, the early modern period, the Christiad reflects a deep and abiding engagement with both “pagan” and “Christian” Latin epic, from Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid to Lucan, Silius Italicus, and Statius, to Claudian, Juvencus, and Sedulius. Cianciosi acknowledges the many challenges inherent in his project, from identifying which manuscript and printed editions Vida may have consulted to evaluating the degree of authorial intention in play. In the chapters that follow, Cianciosi overcomes these challenges to build on the work of Di Cesare and, at the same time, to open up many future lines of inquiry on the Christiad as well as on the ancient Latin epic tradition.
Chapter 1 (“Vida’s Imitative Technique in the Christiad”) begins with an exploration of the relationship between Vida’s De arte poetica (DAP) (1527) and his Christiad. Contra Di Cesare, Cianciosi discerns abundant evidence for “many points of consistency [between the two works], particularly in the realm of imitative technique,” from Vida’s “engagement with poets other than Vergil” to “the theory and practice of literary imitation” (p. 15). In support of this claim, Cianciosi identifies intertexts in the DAP from Lucretius and Ovid, in addition to Vergil, along with echoes from the post-Vergilian epics, fittingly enough, in Vida’s account of the decline of epic after the Aeneid. (To the discussion of DAP 1.208–215 on pp. 29–30, add the clear echo of Stat. Theb. 12.817 sed longe sequere et vestigia semper adora in DAP 1.209 atque unum sequere, utque potes, vestigia serva, an intertext that bolsters Cianciosi’s argument about how to read and interpret the passage.) Cianciosi then compares Vida’s views on literary imitation with those of his contemporary and friend, Pietro Bembo (1470–1547).
Cianciosi concludes, in a somewhat doctrinaire fashion, that “Vida’s primary model for writing epic poetry is Virgil; other epic poets are secondary sources of information” (p. 33), but, all the same, he qualifies this assertion by granting that the Christiad “allowed for more extensive and ideologically problematic borrowings compared to the didacticism of the DAP” (p. 34). Cianciosi broadens and deepens the analysis with a brief review of the major scholarship on the fraught relationship between allusion and intertextuality in Latin literature in order to illustrate how Vida’s imitative technique closely aligns with that of Petrarch in the Africa, as well as with that of contemporaries like Jacopo Sannazaro in the De partu Virginis. Cianciosi next considers the architecture of the Christiad. Much like the Aeneid, the epic (in six books, not twelve) displays clear evidence of both a bipartite and a tripartite structure, along with a division into balanced halves (i.e., 1 ~ 4, 2 ~ 5, 3 ~ 6), even a very Vergilian alternation between odd-number books on the human vs. even-number books on the divine nature of Christ. Lucretius’s six-book De rerum natura (DRN) likely served as a model, too. The chapter ends with a complementary exploration of the productive tension between the totalizing/universalizing (and teleological) aspirations of epic as a genre and the contingent nature of the (often cosmic) events that constitute its overarching narratives (and discourse). Cianciosi compares and contrasts the worldview of the Christiad with those of the DRN, the Aeneid, and the Metamorphoses, as well as Vergil’s “Messianic” Eclogue 4. On the whole, the chapter presents a reliable roadmap for how to read the Christiad as a Neo-Latin epic.
Across Chapters 2 (“The Presence of Lucretius”), 3 (“The Virgilian Epic Model”), and 4 (“Vida’s Appropriation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses”), Cianciosi delves more deeply into Vida’s intertextual dialogue with the three major Latin epic poets of the Late Republic and the Early Empire. In his reading of Lucretius, Cianciosi emphasizes how “Vida’s contrastive imitation reveals that he took seriously the Epicureanism of Lucretius but in an ultimately antagonistic manner and with no substantial concessions on a philosophical and scientific level” (p. 61). Whether outlining the history of the collocation machina mundi, tracing what he calls the “theological swerve” (p. 70), or juxtaposing Epicurus and Christ, time and again he illustrates how Vida uses Lucretian language and imagery to explore Lucretian themes. In his reading of Vergil, Cianciosi likewise (re)considers Vida’s engagement through a wide variety of examples, from the relationship between the portrayal of Jesus as “god, man, hero and sacrificial victim” (p. 89) in the Christiad and those of Hercules, Aeneas, and Turnus in the Aeneid (mediated by St. Augustine?—see p. 91 n. 45), to the complementary portrayals of God the Father and Jupiter, as well as of Satan and Juno—a fascinatingly gendered theology.
More broadly, Cianciosi examines how Vida grounds his own interrogation of the complex “pagan” and/vs. “Christian” cultural dynamic, including a sympathetic presentation of both Pontius Pilate and Judaism, in Vergil’s interrogation of the equally complex Greek and/vs. (proto-)Roman cultural dynamic. In the same vein, Cianciosi identifies significant echoes, imitative and contrastive, between the exile and wandering of Aeneas and family, on the one hand, and of the Holy Family, on the other, as well as between the heroic mirabilia of the Aeneid and Jesus’s miracula in the Christiad. To underscore the innovatory nature of Vida’s intertextual dialogue with Vergil, in particular, Cianciosi concludes that “Vida’s epic on Christ is a testament to his skills as a predecessor not only of future epicists but also of future Virgilianists” (p. 130).
In his reading of Ovid, Cianciosi argues strongly for Vida’s direct use of the Metamorphoses but tentatively against his use of the exegetical tradition that had transformed the epic into a series of “Christian moralising allegories” (p. 133). (To the discussion of Ov. Met. 15.713–714 lentisciferumque … / Liternum on p. 136 n. 23, add Fabio Barignani, Gigantomachia [1550] 3.43, which repeats the Ovidian collocation in the same metrical position.) In an elegant example of a “window reference,” Cianciosi devotes special attention to the possible influence of Ovid’s “Little Aeneid” in Metamorphoses 13–14 on Vida, but he declines to see any humor, much less parody, in the Christiad. Across the chapters on Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid, Cianciosi convincingly demonstrates how Vida integrates all three epics into his poem.
Chapter 5 (“The Christiad and Post-Virgilian Epics from Lucan to Sedulius”) tackles a wide swathe of poetry spanning nearly a half millennium. In broadening the scope of the analysis to embrace these post-Virgilian epics, Cianciosi cautiously detects a burgeoning “metapoetic self-consciousness” (p. 154) in Vida, as well. As in his reading of Lucretius, in his reading of Lucan, Cianciosi concentrates on the role of the divine and succinctly concludes, “The gods are absent in the Bellum Civile, but God is present in the Christiad” (p. 162). Of the Flavian epicists, Cianciosi discerns evidence for the possible influence of Silius’s Scipio Africanus (mediated by Petrarch?—see p. 167) on Vida’s Christ, as well as of Statian female laments in the Thebaid on Mary’s lament before the Cross in Christiad 5.758–893, but no real evidence for the influence of Valerius Flaccus. (To the discussion of deinde profatur on pp. 171–173, add Pier Angelio Bargeo, Syrias [1596] 4.164, the only other example from Latin epic.)
Cianciosi expresses even greater scepticism about the likelihood of Vida’s engagement with Late Antique Latin epic, although he does concede that the idea is tempting, “especially given that some of them undertook a similar endeavor: re-writing the Gospel in the style of Virgil” (p. 187). Perhaps the most intriguing example comes from Christiad 4.420, where Vida adopts and adapts the Vergilian tag timor omnis abesto (Aen. 11.14) via an (I would argue) inevitable “window reference” in Juvencus 3.107, which essentially paves the way for Vida’s Christianization of the Vergilian original (see also Gardner 2009: 418 ad 4.419–420). All the same, as Cianciosi emphasizes, Vida makes no allusion or reference to any of these works in the epic’s coda at Christiad 6.880–896, and so, while it is tempting to transform the “full-knowing reader” into the “full-knowing author,” the reality is probably far less grandiose.
In a (too?) brief “Epilogue,” Cianciosi turns his attention to “the influence of the Christiad on later authors’ engagement with the same ancient Latin epicists” (p. 195). First, he suggests that future scholars study the stylometry and meter of the Christiad in greater detail, that they reexamine the possible mediating influence of Late Antique, medieval, and early Renaissance Latin epic on the poem, and that they likewise consider the possible mediating influence of vernacular poetry like Dante’s Divine Comedy. Then, he offers three short case studies in the reception of the Christiad itself in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), Milton, especially in his Paradise Lost (16671/16742), and Francesco Benci’s Quinque martyres (1591). To these instances of reception, I would add the many later Christiads, which provide seemingly limitless opportunities for observing the complex interplay between “pagan” and “Christian” Latin epic. The Vergilian tag timor omnis abesto cited in the previous paragraph appears time and again across a variety of Christological epics, from Iacobus Bonus Racusaeus, De vita et gestis Christi (1534) 4.108 and Damianus Benessa, De morte Christi (1539) 6.757 and 10.290, to Alexander Ross, Christias (1634/1664) 9 (p. 292—the verses are unnumbered). Cianciosi has done much here to make the Christiad interesting and relevant—I for one hope that he will heed his own advice and turn his attention to the rest of Vida’s corpus (p. 196).