Thursday 28 April

David Porter (Cambridge), 'Writing Neo-Latin Verse Satire at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century'.

The composition of formal verse satire, in Latin, on the models of Horace, Juvenal and Persius was revived in Italy during the fifteenth century. Around the beginning of the sixteenth century, under the influence of the Roman poets as well as the Italian poet, Francesco Filelfo, its practice spread throughout Europe. This paper will show how poets and critics throughout Europe, at the turn of the sixteenth century, understood the nature of Roman satire and how they incorporated that understanding into their own poetry. In particular, it will look at satirical poems by several authors, explore metrical and stylistic practices, and examine how the ancient form was adapted for contemporary concerns.

Thursday 12 May
David Rijser (Amsterdam), 'Ekphrasis at the Vatican: High Renaissance Reception of Vergilian Prophecy and Synecdoche'.

High Renaissance Reception of Vergilian Prophecy and Synecdoche An extraordinary corpus of ekphrastic epigrams was produced for the sculpture collection of Julius II in the Cortile delle Statue in the Vatican, witness the efforts of curial humanists like Fausto Maria Maddalena Capodiferro, Andrea Fulvio and Antonio Flaminio Siculo, but also more famous authors like Castiglione and, of course, Navagero. In fact, this genre seems to have taken precedence over all others in the Latin poetry of Julius' court. The critical attitude to these productions (to the extent that they have been studied at all) has predominantly been to consider them evidence for a new aesthetic and antiquarian sensibility at this time and place. Yet to explain the prominence of ekphrasis at Julius' court, other paradigms need to be taken into account. The connection of the subject matter of these poems with themes from the Aeneid, although noticed by (art-) historians, has not yet been sufficiently explored in this context, nor has the function of Vergilian ekphrasis in the Aeneid as postulated by recent Vergilian scholarship yet entered into the discussion of the Vatican poetry. This lecture will exemplify Vatican ekphrastic poetry and argue from it that the reception of Vergil is crucial to its understanding, and consequently to an interpretation of the Julian programme in general, connecting as it does Augustan strategies of propaganda and legitimacy in the Aeneid with Julian rule. As the Cortile delle Statue was visible from the Stanza della Segnatura when Julius officiated there, it is reasonable to connect both the sculpture collection and its ecphrastic poetry with the decorations of the Stanza della Segnatura in general, and Raphael's fresco of Parnassus and its Vergilian epigraph in particular. I will pursue this connection, concluding that art and poetry functioned together as prophetic utterance of papal supremacy and proof of the legitimacy of papal claims, to which both the use of the Latin language and the reference to the Aeneid were essential.