Alan Fisher - Destrucción Estatua Virgilio

Three Meditations on the Destruction of Vergil's Statue: The Early Humanist Theory of
Poetry
Author(s): Alan Fisher
Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Winter, 1987), pp. 607-635
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2862444 .
Accessed: 25/06/2014 02:42
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press and Renaissance Society of America are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to Renaissance Quarterly.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY
Editedby
MARGARET L. KING BRIDGET GELLERT LYONS
AssociateEditors
COLIN EISLER WALLACE T. MACCAFFREY JAMES V. MIROLLO
News and Notes Editor MARGARETL. RANALD

Managing Editor DEBRA M. SZYBINSKI
ThreeMeditationson theDestructionof Vergil's

Statue:The EarlyHumanistTheoryofPoetry
by ALAN FISHER
n the last day of August, 1397, Carlo Malatesta, Count of

Rimini and commander of the Florentine League, won a bat-
tle outside Mantua. He entered the city and shortly afterward or-
dered the destruction of a statue of Vergil which had stood there "for
centuries"upon the poet's tomb. In Bologna and Florence, human-
ists were alarmed. Carlo was no ordinary military vandal: he was a
cultivatedman, trainedin the virtues of the bonaelitterae;members of
his family had been friends with Petrarch;the chief men of his league
were enthusiastic about the new literary culture. Yet here he was,
desecrating the memory of the king of poets. To desecrate Vergil
was to desecratepoetry itself-or so the humanists construed it when
they responded to the event.
Three cries of outrage have survived the intervening centuries, all
in privateletters. One was written from Bologna, soon afterthe fact,
from Pier Paolo Vergerio to Lodovico degli Alidosi, on the eight-
eenth of September. A second came forth on 25 October, this too
from Bologna, author unknown. The third is some months later,
from the Chancellor of Florence, Coluccio Salutati, to Peregrino
Zambeccario, on 23 April I398.1 All three declare that the act had
1Epistolariodi PierPaulo Vergerio,ed. LeonardoSmith (Rome, 1934), pp. I89-202;

D.J. B. Robey, "Virgil's Statue at Mantua and the Defence of Poetry," Rinascimento,
Ser. 2, 9 (1969), 183-203; and Epistolariodi ColuccioSalutati,ed. FrancescoNovati, 4
vols (Rome, I89I-I9II), III, 285-308. All translation from these documents is my
own, but see the translationof Salutati'sletterby RonaldG. Witt in The EarthlyRepub-
lic: Italian Humanists on Governmentand Society (Philadelphia, I978), pp. 93- I 4.
[607]

608 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY
been wrong, and all three treat a wrong to Vergil as a threat to liter-
ary culture. All three end up defending poetry, and each defense is
differentfrom the others. Together they make a dossier from which
an early humanist theory of poetry may be assembled. It is we, how-
ever, who must assemble it: the humanists themselves did little the-
ory.
The early humanists had their enthusiasm, their discoveries, and
their scholarship, but when it came to theory, they seem to have
made do with a handful of traditional notions. Their activities are
consistent enough to imply a theoretical position they might have
shared, but none of them seems fully to have worked one out. The
focus of their attention was more concrete. But their enthusiasm and
activity had long-range effects upon the way people thought about
literature,and the effects arevisible in the criticalpracticeand theoriz-
ing of the later Renaissance. It is as though they transmitted a theory
to after ages without explicitly formulating it for themselves. If they
produced fragments, like the ones I have mentioned, it is valid, I
think, to assemble them as a "theory" and see what they amount to.
The problem has been that these fragments are scattered. One finds
them in letters and introductions, buried in dialogues, invectives,
and treatises on other subjects. They appear casually, not formally,
colored strongly by the contexts in which they arise. They do not
often come in clusters, either, and taken singly as they come, they
seem derivative, repetitions of notions which had been cherished for
centuries. The responses to Carlo's outrage do form a cluster, how-
ever, and they do not repeatbut complement one another. Every one
of them is commonplace, but that is an advantage, in this instance,
not a deficit. Since none of the writers was aware of what the others
had written, the commonplace nature of what they wrote allows
their individual bits to be fitted together.
The world of humanism was small, as yet, held together by com-
mon enthusiasms, fears, specific experiences, and geographicalprox-
imity. Commonplace is the very stuff of such a world. When its
members are at their most commonplace, we can surmise that they
most agree. Relations are close, furthermore, between commonplace
and formal theory. The prejudiceexpressed by commonplace is the-
ory in an unexamined form. Had these notions been challenged, their
authors would not have recanted them, and though the positions
may not be fully thought out, they are firm enough to be examined
as though they were. I shall treatthem, in other words, as formal po-

ON THE DESTRUCTION OF VERGIL'S STATUE 609
sitions from which their authors' thinking began, because in all but
the formality, this is exactly what they were. Had there been a full-
fledged early humanist theory of poetry, I think, it would have the
one that I am to articulatehere.
A theory of poetry needs enabling postulates, a working defini-
tion of the poetic act, and an account of the status of the poetic arti-
fact. Each of these letters supplies one of these components. Salutati's
has the postulates:though it is itself a pastiche of medieval common-
places, the way it gathers them is enabling and new. The anonymous
writer has the working definition: it is from Boccaccio, but as he uses
it, he makes certain things explicit which were only latent in the
source, and traces of his notions can be found as late as Pope. Verge-
rio provides the status of the artifact:his remarks are on statues, but
in the light of what we know about Renaissance reading, they also
apply to poetry. He has the semiotics on which the entire theory
must stand. I shall begin by looking at each fragment separately;it
should then be clearhow the fragments fit together.
Carlo was reported to have said at the time that statues were for
saints, not for poets or pagans.2Poets did not deserve them because
poets were nothing more than "mimes." Salutaticould not respond
to this with direct public outrage, since he was Chancellor of Flor-
ence, and Carlo was his condottiere. Indirectly, however, he has
much to say. Insisting all along that the report must be false, he at-
tends to it closely as a contrary-to-fact hypothesis. Carlo could not
have said that poets are "mimes," because Carlowould not have said
it, and becauseit is an absurdthing to say. It is not, on the other hand,
an absurdthing to refute, for the insult it contains is very dangerous.
Histriois the word I translateas "mime"; it is the common word
for "actor," and it looks bland enough in a dictionary. But Latin let-
ters did not give histrionesa good press,3nor was their repute any bet-
ter in fourteenth-century Italy. Salutati glossed the word as "jesters
2Reported in Vergerio's letter, Smith ed., p. 196.

3For a survey of Roman, patristic, and medieval attitudes toward stage entertainers,
see Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, 198I), chaps. ii and iii. Refer-
ences to actors are almost universally derogatory, often intensely so, with a violence
that Barish describes as close to mad.

who represent exploits by miming them,"4 thinking of the mimes

and buffoons at court, whosejob, for the most part, was to amuse by
parody and comic debasement, and who were kept upon the bounty
of some great lord. It was maliciously logical to call poets by this
name, for poets and mimes both "imitate" reality, and poets and
mimes are both in the business of giving pleasure. Since poets and
mimes both lived on patronage as well, poets and mimes would be
essentially the same. What we despise in mimes, therefore, we shall
find despicablein poets, as well, since poets and mimes are cut from
the same bolt of cloth. This is the logic which Salutatiaddresses, but
he addressesit by feigning that he does not understand.To call a poet
a mime, he says, is "a new kind of detraction indeed," and it is one
that is based on an elementary mistake. "Poets do not makethe ges-
tures," he points out, "they compose the things that areto be mimed;
they differno less from jesting mimes than they do from monkeys."
Just as "man is the most beautiful of the animals, and the ape is
lower," so one should distinguish between creator and reproducer,
poet and player.5This may seem naively literal-minded, but his re-
fusal to take the point is both deliberate and strategic. Of course it
makes sense to call a poet an imitator, even if he does not literallyper-
form his imitations. But the implication in "mime" is that the imita-
tion is tawdry, and by refusing even to consider its point, Salutatican
declare that poets do not "imitate" at all. Their discourse is self-
originating, not derivative, as men are directly the image of God,
while monkeys, at best, are awkward and distant likenesses of men.
4A free translation. The Latin is "quasi ioculatores res gestas personatis habitibus
representantes," which Witt translates as "players representing actions in appropriate
costume" (Earthly Republic, p. 94). I am giving ioculatorits literal and more negative
meaning, and I take personatishabitibusto be an ablative absolute: "the characteristics of
[that action at the time] counterfeited in an assumed character. Witt seems to take the
phrase as an ablative of means, where habitus would mean "clothing," not general
character, and personatiswould qualify it: "ofa counterfeit sort." The passage is a crux,
and it is hard to translate; I offer my translation because I think it reflects more closely
what Salutati took to be the dangers in Carlo's opinion.
5Novati ed., III, 288: "novum profecto detractionis genus. verum si secundum
communem acceptionem histriones vult esse poetas, quasi ioculatores res gestas per-
sonatis habitibus representantes, supino tenetur errore. poete quidem non gesticulan-
tur, sed gesticulanda componunt; qui non minus ab histrionibus differunt, quam a si-
miis homines. nam cum simie plurimum hominibus similentur et quadam naturali
aptitudine multa que faciunt homines imitentur, taliter attamen ab hominibus dif-
ferunt, quod, cum homo sit pulcerrimum animantium, simia sit turpius; .. ."

It is absurd, therefore, to think that poets are mimes of any kind,

but Salutatiwants to speculate on how the thought could ever have
come about. Poets might resemble mimes because poets, like
mimes, can overdo their praises.6They will sometimes praise men
who do not deserve their praising, and though their language may be
high and their sentiments grand, the discrepancy is so strong that it
comes across as mockery. However sincere the poet may have been,
his effectwill have been that of the mocking buffoon. This is the
charge to which Salutatiturns, and refuting it takes him to the heart
of his position.
Aristotle had said that the essence of poetry is praise and blame.
The "Aristotle" who said this was the Aristotle of the middle ages,
the one handed down by the Arabian commentators, and the only
one that Salutati knew on the Poetics.Where the Poeticsitself men-
tions a "sober" kind of poet, who presents actions of a nobler sort,
and a "cheaper" kind, who settles for invectives on "worthless"
lives,7 the commentary makes poetry itselfinto praise and blame, so
that praise-and-blame becomes the poet's job description.8 Since
praise and blame can be either true or false, there are four categories
for theory to consider: true blame, true praise, false blame, and false
praise. True blame and praise are straightforward,jobs well done
about which no more need be said. False blame, too, is not of theo-
retical interest: it is defamation, not "poetry," and discussion of it
ends as soon as it begins. The interesting case is false praise, and this
6Novati ed., III, 288: "sin autem forte voluerit quod poete dicendi sint histriones,
quoniamin laudandosicut ioculariimodum excedant, non minus erraredicendusest,
quoniamin hoc laudandigenerenulla prorsussit inter ipsos de laudationeconsensio."
7PoeticsI448b25;ed. and trans. GeraldElse (Ann Arbor, 1967;rpt. 1970), p. 2I.
8"Aristotlesays: Since imitators and makers of likenesses wished through their art
to impel people toward certainchoices and discouragethem from others, they had to
treatsubjectsthat, being represented,would suggest either virtues or vices. All action
andcharacterareconcernedwith one of these two-that is, virtue or vice. . . . Sinceall
'likening' and representationoccurs through showing the proper or the improper or
base, it is evident that representationaims at nothing but the encouragementof what is
proper and the rejection of what is base. Necessarily, then, there are imitators of
virtue-that is, men who naturallyincline to representingthe more virtuous andbetter
sorts of men-and imitators of evil, who areless perfectand nearerto evil men. From
thesetwo kinds of men, praiseandblame arose-that is, praiseof good men and blame
of bad ones." "The Middle Commentary of Averroes of Cordova on the Poetics of
Aristotle,," Latintrans. by HermannusAlemannus (1256), English trans. 0. B. Har-
dison,Jr., in ClassicalandMedievalLiteraryCriticism:Translations andInterpretations,
ed.
Alex Preminger,O. B. Hardison,Jr., and Kevin Kerrane(New York, 1974), p. 35I.

is the one to which Carlo seems to point. Does false praisebelong to

poetry? and if it does, is it or is it not the same as miming mockery?
A mime's praises, says Salutati, are either flattery, when sincere,
or ridicule, when not. A poet, on the other hand, intends "to profit
and delight": that is his intent by definition, and without such intent,
he cannot qualify as "poet" at all. The difference between poet and
mime is a difference in the quality of their intentions. As the inten-
tions differin quality, so also do the effects. The praiseof a true poet,
even if false, gives delight and profit. "Those who arepraiseddelight
in their glory," says Salutati, for "no condition is so low . . . that it
cannot be touched by the sweetness of glory. And it profits them,
too, for nothing more effectively confirms one in virtues and good
exploits than the reward of praise."9The key term here would seem
to be "glory": poetry can confer this, whereas mimicry cannot; the
differencesin intention will be palpableand clear.
When a man is praisedin true poetic spirit, therefore, a certainpsy-
chology is set to work: spurred by a fear of diminishing the good
opinion he has gained, he not only continues to toe the mark but
tends to go on and do better still. It does not matter whether the
praisethat causes this be false or true;if it pleases its recipient and sets
this betterment in motion, it fulfills the criteriaof delight and profit,
and it does good work in the world.
Salutati backs up this argument with another of a very similar
kind. Praising-and-blaming is a ticklish business, he says, and the
only person whosejob this can be is a person who "feels himself to be
above reproach." Unqualified people do their praising and blaming,
of course, but as a job, defined abstractly, it is only for the high-
minded and consciously virtuous. But false commendation, with
such a one performing it, must be one of two things: "the very bitter-
est blame"-which, of course, is not low mockery-or "the purest
teaching": "for what is there more replete with shame and reproof
than to hear a man praisedfor things that do not pertainto him, or to
hear things said about yourself which you know are not in you?
What greaterprod to good living, what teaching more effective, than
to hear of yourself as the kind of person that you would wish to be
9Novati ed., III, 289: "delectant enim gloria collaudati, quoniam . . . nulla tanta sit
humilitas, que glorie dulcedine non tangatur. prodest et hec eisdem, non nichil effica-
cius ad firmandum animos in virtutibus et in rebus bene gestis premio laudationis."

thought to be?"10The psychology here works only when the speaker

is above reproach, when he commands respect completely as an in-
dependent, high minded lover of truth alone. And that is to say that it
works only when the speakeris a poet, for such a person as this must
the poet, by definition, be.
Instances do occur in which the praiser's seriousness is not this
high, instances in which it is clear that ajest is meant. In considering
these, Salutatireturnsto Aristotle-to the Ethics,this time, not to the
Poetics-and brings in another version of his distinction between dis-
positions. There is, he says, a "decent, modest, and graceful"kind of
playfulness, and there is the attitude of "those . .. who too much
abound injokes."11Even where the false praiseris notthe gravest and
best of men, the distinction still holds between poetically false praise
and malicious miming. It is still, as before, a distinction between dis-
positions, expressed this time as a distinction between a virtue and its
correspondingvice. The whole theory rests on this set of paralleldis-
tinctions: as men are to monkeys, as self-originating discourse is to
that which is derivative, as gravity is to levity, as virtue is to its cor-
responding vice, so are poets, even when making things up, to
jesters, actors, mimes, or histriones.Q.e.d.
This may not strike one as impressive theorizing. For the most
partit is raw assertion or question-begging. If the histriois frivolous,
by definition, and if, by definition, the poet is not, then obviously a
poet is not a histrio.Carlo's charge had been practicaland suggestive:
in effect,he was saying, the poet is no better than a mime because the
poet imitates, and imitation is inherently undignified. Salutati's an-
swer is abstractand to the letter: poets write the plays, and only ac-
tors mime them. If a poet recreatesa man's actions, it is not miming,
such as an actor would do, but a serious stimulus to good, through
direct or indirect exhortation. This, too, is argued abstractly and to
the letter: it is the poet's job to provide such stimulus, and since it is
10Novati ed., III, 289: "quid enim pudore criminationeque plenius, quam audire de
rebus, que non pertineant ad laudatum, aliquem commendari; quam quod ipse sentias
de te predicari que tibi noveris non inesse? quid autem maius calcar ad bene vivendum
efficaciorque doctrina, quam audire te talem dici, qualem desideres reputari?"
"Novati ed., III, 289: "quantum enim apud Philosophum honeste, moderate et
gratiose ludentes, quos eutrapelosvocat, a vomolicis differunt, qui, scilicet, nimis in iocis
abundant; tantum nostri poete ab histrionibus differunt et, velut a vitiis virtus et a vi-
tiosis honestissimi, separantur." Novati notes that the reference is to NicomacheanEth-
tCS
ics, ii.vii. I 3.
11. l. 13.

hisjob, so the reasoning goes, it must indeed be the job that he is do-
ing. Water, by the same logic, is indubitably wet; the whole argu-
ment comes round in a tautology.
What is interesting, however, is not the argument or its structure,
but the implications which accompany the way it all is used. Salutati
refuses to consider the idea that poets imitate. Actors imitate; poets
create. Aquinas had said plainly that "poetic" was "the least of all the
sciences," since it mapped the truth by similitude, and similitude, if it
worked at all, was imitation, mapping by indirect means.12 Salutati
suggests that Aquinas is mistaken. Without going so far as to createa
theoryof original discourse and imitation, he implies that poetry must
be original discourse. If that is what it is, however, then poetry is not
to be judged on its relation to a reality it purports to map. It must be
judged for the effectit has, for the work that it actuallydoes within the
world.
Carlo's scorn, in fact, was on his estimate ofjust this effect. It was
the poet's work he was talking about: that was what was no better
than the work of the mime and thejester. This, too, Salutatianswers
by refusing to consider it. No, he argues;the poet's work, by defini-
tion, is something else. This something else is from medieval com-
monplace, extended by a simple psychology, and shored up by tau-
tology: the "Aristotelian" notion that a poet's job is praise and
blame, the Horatian dictum that the effect ofthis job is profit and de-
light, an ideal psychology in which this praise and blame produces
profit and delight, and an insistence that where profit and delight do
not occur, poetry has not occurred either. So tight a circle does not
answer Carlo, perhaps, but it does enact its own implications. When
Salutatirefuses to consider poetry as any kind of imitation, he puts
poetry in a realm of its own; but because it has affect, it retainsa bear-
ing on what really is. Poetry is not "aesthetically"divorced from the
world, but neither is it derivative from, secondary-or even
responsible-to what really is. Its value is not determined by its faith-
'2Aquinas is asking whether it is proper that Scripture use metaphor, and one objec-
tion to its so doing is that theology is the "highest" of sciences, whereas poetry is the
"lowest." The ranking of poetry as infima scientiais "the common property of Scholas-
ticism." Ernst Robert Curtius, EuropeanLiteratureand the Latin Middle Ages, trans Wil-
lard R. Trask (New York, 1953), p. 224. "The Nature and Domain of Sacred Doc-
trine," Article 9, "Whether the Holy Scripture should use metaphors," is quoted from
Hazard Adams, ed. Critical Theory Since Plato (New York, 1971), p. I I7.

fulness to a prior reality which it purports to reflect, but by its bear-

ing upona reality that flows from reading it. Though false when ut-
tered, it can stimulate the existence of that which it utters, and so the
poetic world need not matchthe realworld to have a useful bearing on
what goes on there. Salutati'sdefense of poetry behaves exactly as he
says poetry itself behaves, for he speaks against Carlo without ever
descending to a recognition of Carlo's practicalpoint. To the charge
that poets are in fact the same as mimes, it says that those who are in
fact the same as mimes arenot (by definition) poets. This cannot save
particularmen and their poetic performances from Carlo's practical
charge, for it does not prove that anybody-even Vergil-actually is
a poet. But what it does do is save the possibility that there might be
poetry-that "poets" may have existed and may yet exist. The rela-
tion between the poet's fiction and actual reality is also the relation
between Salutati's ideal notions and Carlo's practical scorn: that
which is does not determine that which may be. As practicaltheoriz-
ing, this reasoning is not impressive, and none of its component
ideas is anything specially new. But its turning away from imitation
is new-a crucial postulate for what poetry was to become-and its
enactment of its own notions shows how the freedom thus adum-
brated might actually work. For a practicalaccount of how it was to
work, we must take up the letter from Bologna.
The anonymous writer had no responsibility to Carlo; he could

stand forth as an orator and denounce the destruction as a flagitious
crime. When poets and histrionescome into the question, he pours
forth his choicest words upon a comparison of the two: the poet, pre-
dictably, is all utility and virtue; the actor all worthlessness and vice.
The core of this comparison is a passage from Boccaccio, which he
follows closely and sometimes quotes verbatim. Boccaccio's pur-
poses were sober and judicious, but his follower makes him an in-
strument of attack. This change of emphasis has an interesting result:
it lays bare a premise which both Boccaccio and his follower share,
which is, I think, the major practicalpremise of early humanist po-
etic theory. The premise is this: poetry is neither process nor product
but an act of cognition.
In the seventh chapter of the fourteenth book of the Genaeologyof
thePaganGods, Boccaccio defines poetry: it is

[i] a certain fervor for finding exquisite conceptions and reciting or writing
down what you have found, which comes to a few minds from the bosom of
God and is granted to those minds, I think, at their creation. Since this would
be miraculous, poets, accordingly, have always been very rare.
[ii] The lofty effects [effectus]of this fervor are to drive the mind into a yearning
for utterance; to think out inventions that are strange and unheard of; to set
these meditations down in a definite order; to fit them out, once ordered, with
an unusual weaving together of words and sententiae;and [in all] to cover a
truth with fittingly fictitious drapery.
[iii] To take it further: if the invention so requires, it is to arm kings for battle
and bring them forth in ships, to send out fleets, to describe skies, lands, and
seas, to honor maidens with flowery garlands, to sort out the deeds of men ac-
cording to their qualities, to stir up sluggish men, put heart in apathetic ones,
restrain bold ones, overcome criminal ones, lift up outstanding ones with the
praises they deserve, and many more things of this sort.
[iv] Anyone upon whom this fervor has been lavished who does these things at
less than full capacity is, in my judgment, no poet worthy of praise. However
much it stirs the mind into which it has been poured, this impulsion very rarely
gets its job done well if the ordinary tools are lacking by which we put a finish
on our thoughts. I mean the precepts of grammar and rhetoric, full knowledge
of which is advantageous.
[v] And granted that a good many now write very well in their mother tongue,
fulfilling one or another of the various duties of poetry: it is also necessary to
know at least the principles of the other liberal arts, both moral and natural, to
have the strength of a rich vocabulary, to have seen the memorials of our fore-
fathers, to have in memory the histories of the peoples and the settings of the
regions of the earth: the seas, rivers, and mountains.13
is mine. The standardEnglish translationis that of CharlesOsgood

13Translation
(Boccaccioon Poetry [New York, 1956], pp. 39-40), which is a good deal smoother and
somewhat higher-toned. I bring in my own because I need one a bit more literal; my
argument turns on a small point of language. The Latin is as follows (Genealogie, 4th ed
[Venice, 1494], fol. Io4; facsimile repr [New York, 1976]): "Est fervor quidam exqui-
site inveniendi: atque dicendi seu scribendi quod inveneris. Qui ex sinu dei procedens
paucis mentibus: ut arbitror: in creatione conceditur. Ex quo quoniam mirabilis sit:
rarissimi semper fuere poetae. Huius enim fervoris sunt sublimes effectus utputa men-
tem in desiderium dicendi compellere: peregrinas & inauditas inventiones excogitare:
meditatas ordine certo componere: Ornare compositum inusitato quodam verborum
atque sententiarum contextu: velamento fabuloso atque decenti veritatem contegere.
Praeterea si exquirat inventio: reges armare in bella: deducere navalibus: classes emit-
tere: caelum terras & aequora describere: virgines sertis & floribus insignire: actus
hominum pro qualitatibus designare: irritare torpentes: desides animare: temerarios re-
trahere. sontes vincire: & egregios meritis extollere laudibus & huiusmodi plura. Siquis
autem ex his quibus hic infundit fervor haec minus plene fecerit iudicio meo laudabilis

Its original readershad this all in a lump; I break it into paragraphsto

facilitate analysis. If I have done so properly, the argument runs as
follows: [i] Poetry is, first of all, a mental event, afervoror "seething"
of the mind. [ii] Events of this kind have a certaingeneraleffect,a com-
plex effect, which follows this sequence: an urge to speak, an act of
conception which gives this urge some focus, the setting of this con-
ception in its proper order, and the finding of words and phrases to
clothe this conception and bring it into the world. This whole effect
may be taken as a truth presented obliquely, an insight made attrac-
tively visible by a clothing of invented fiction. [iii] Typical fictions
would include such matters as kings going to war, imaginary land-
scapes, the decking of one's mistress with flowers, and standardplot
lines in which lazy men areroused to action or criminalmen of action
arebrought to defeat. [iv] But if this sort of invention is the particular
duty of the poet, the poet also bears the responsibilitiesof any learned
man: he must know the ordinary arts of discourse, grammar and
rhetoric, and [v] have stocked his mind with ordinary general
knowledge. The poet must be at leasta learned man; the particular
gifts that make him a poet are not to be praised without that base of
generallearning.
All in all, it is a tidy presentation. Firstis the definition: poetry is a
fervor;next, the general effectusof that fervor, the yearning to speak
and all the inventing, composing and fitting out that enable it; third,
some specific examples of how these efectus are manifest; fourth,
a second stipulation, which requires the usual preparation of a
learnedman, and fifth, an extension of what that preparationentails.
The anonymous writer had all this at his elbow and treats it like a
quarry. He saws out blocks of it for his own use, and these uses are
not tidy at all. What happens therein is most informative, but it takes
close comparison to see it clearly.
poeta non erit. insuperquantumcunqueurgeat animos: quibus infusus est perraroim-

pulsus commendible perficit si instrumenta:quibus meditataperfici consuevere defe-
cerint. Utputa grammaticaepraeceptaatque rhetoricae:quorum plena notitia oppor-
tuna est. Esto nonnulli mirabiliter materno sermone iam scripserint& per singula
poesis officia pergerint:hinc et liberaliumaliarumartium:& moralium atque natura-
lium saltem novisse principiaest necesse:necnon & vocabulorumvalere copia:vidisse
monimentamaiorum:ac etiam meminissehystoriasnationum:& regionum orbis:ma-
rium:fluviorum:& montium dispositiones....."

The first change is this: Boccaccio's general definition becomes the

premise for a particularargument. It was dangerously insulting to
say that poets were mimes, because mimes are vile and should be
driven from the sight of men. "O let these fools be corrected!"cries
the man from Bologna, and the way to correctthem is to bring in the
definition. "Poetry, therefore, (though stern-minded Carlo makes
nothing of it) is, according to Johannes de Certaldo-a man of spirit
more divine than human-'a certainfervor for finding excellent con-
ceptions and reciting or writing down what you have found, which
comes to a few minds from the bosom of God and is grantedto those
minds, I think at their creation. Since this would be miraculous, po-
ets, accordingly, have always been very rare.' "14Now if mimes are
poets, then mimes must be men of exquisite invention, with talents
directly from God, whose appearanceis very rare. But this plainly is
false, since everyone knows that mimes are dull buffoons, that what
they invent is from the devil, and that crowds of them are found "in
every corner of the city." So poets are not mimes, q.e.d. Whatever
one thinks of the logic, it scarcely matters for the purpose in hand.
The purpose is to demolish Carlo, and the means of demolition is the
negative comparison. Boccaccio's definition becomes a "topic" for
this writer, a "place"wherein to find matter for making his contrast.
The result is to sever definition from efectus. In Boccaccio, they
flow together, because effectus makes plain what the "fervor"
amounts to. For the man from Bologna, both are topics, separate
closets, as it were, in the house of memory. In both he finds sticks
with which to cudgel mimes, and having opened the one, (and hav-
ing laid about him boldly), he comes now to the other, which holds
his main supply:
In what aspectshall the mime be said to match the poet? Effectusmaybe?Well
this, very briefly,is the poets' effectus:
to thinkup the newest andloftiest modes
of strangeinvention, to set his inventionsin usablesequencewhen once he has
thought them up; to dress up every single passage with a lively and worthy
splendor of word and sentence;to know well the deeds of the ancients and
commit them to our memorieswith the pen of an angel, so thatliving men and
posterityboth may regardthem and reform their lives, and so that by the ex-
ample of their magnificent deeds every generationmay come to better pur-
poses; to cover the truthin pleasantdraperyso that delight may proceedfrom
the charmoffabulaeandfrom the orderingof unheardthings;to narratethe acts
14Robey, p. I92.

of men according to their qualities-like this (if you ask): "the soldier with
rasping rent [acerbo lumine] spills out his enemy's blood with hasty blade"-
and many things similar; and especially it is to intensify the hesitant with the
ardor of great-mindedness, to reproach the over-bold, to blame the plague of
excess, to praise moderate things and as many sacred courses of this kind as he
can, and, finally, to raise each and every person according to his merits and
surpass all with the brilliance of his praise. And since he who lacks instruction
in all the liberal arts can scarcely become a poet, let that not be left out of the
account. He whose mind is estranged from these effectusis not a man who
should rightly be thought a poet.15
It is easy enough to see where all this leads: for every one of these
essential attributesof the poet, the mime's essential attribute will be
the opposite, and thus will Carlo's bad idea be argued down. These
points, too, depend heavily on Boccaccio, but they lack one thing en-
tirely, and that is Boccaccio's articulation.He had distinguished gen-
eral effectusfrom the sample fictions through which it worked, and
had distinguished the poet's special duties from the general responsi-
bilities of learned men. For the anonymous writer, a single "topic"
holds all. Released from the subordinationsBoccaccio gave them, all
come herding, pell-mell, into the one arenaof effectus.The very idea
of efectus, as a result of this, undergoes a change, and it is this change,
I think, that is instructive.
Effectusis not easy to translateinto English. The obvious transla-
tion would be its cognate, "effects," but this can mislead. Effectusis a
verbal noun of the fourth declension, derived from efficio, "to do" or
"5Thiswriter is very difficult to translateinto decent English, and my translation

takes more liberties than I should like. The Latin reads as follows (Robey, p. 193):
"Qua ergo parte convenire cum poeta dicetur?Ab effectu forsan?Poetarum effectus
brevissimushic est: peregrinaruminventionum altissimosatquenovissimos excogitare
modos; excogitatos in seriem distributionibuscompetentibusducere;unumquemque
locum festivo et digno tam vocum quam sententiarumpalliarenitore; maiorum gesta
optime noscere, eaque, ut presenteset posteri in frugem melioris vite contemplentur,
angelico calamomandarememorie;et ut magnificorumfactorumexemplo omnis etas
concurratin melius, atque ut delectenturquadam fabularumlepiditate rerumquein-
auditarumcompositione, ameno velamine tegere veritatem;inde actus quoscumque
hominum pro qualitatenuntiare,ut, si querasres, militem acerbolumine cruoremhos-
tilem precipitiqueense diffundere,et taliamulta;insuperhesitantesmagnanimitatisar-
dore contendere,audacescorripere,pestiferamdamnareluxuriam, modica laudare,et
huiusmodiquam plurasanctissima;et demum unumquemquepro meritisextollere at-
que insignibus vincire laudibus. Et ut liberaliumomnium instructionem, qua carente
vix poeta fieri potest, non pretermittat.Qui mentem ab his effictibusalienaverit,rite
haberipoeta non debet."

"to work out"-to produce, to bring about, or to amount to. Nouns

of this sort present the processin the verb, so that the effectusof a thing
would be its doing or working out, its producing or amounting to.
The activity one imagines can either be transitiveor absolute:the one
would be seen in relation to an object or cause;the other would sim-
ply be-activity. Drop a certain headache tablet in a glass of water
and "listen to it fizz": this is absoluteeffectus, the general performance
of the thing, the tablet doing what is in the tablet to do. Drink off this
potion and feel better within the hour: this is transitiveeffectus, the
thing that happens from an encounter with. These two aspects can-
not be kept entirely separate, as the example can be made to show.
The fizzing can be called the effect of an encounter with the water,
whereas the conferring of well-being, so its makers would argue, is
the absolute "performance"for which the pill was made. But these
two ways of viewing efectusare worth distinguishing, because the
difference between them can be significant. Boccaccio's ejfectusis
conceived as something transitive: definite effects that come from a
fervor's activity in the mind. The anonymous writer's ejfectusis con-
ceived as something absolute: general tasks that the poet-as poet-
may be expected to perform.
In the new emphasis, then, everything becomes a generalperform-
ancestandard,and the shift does not seem accidental. Boccaccio, for
instance, speaks of a fiction in which an overbold person is admon-
ished; the new account has the poet admonishing overbold readersin
real life. Sample fiction for the one becomes general requirement for
the other, and the more specific sample themes, which cannot make
this transitionwithout absurdity, get no mention in the new account.
Other general purposes are added instead, such as the condemning of
excess or the praising of middling courses. Remembering the deeds
of the ancients, which appearsin Boccaccio as part of "grammar,"
joins the others as a poet's performance standard. Invention, then,
composition, setting out in words, draping the bare truth in fiction,
and admonishing the bold, etc., and praising worthy men, etc., and
recallingthe ancients and knowing the precepts of all the liberal arts:
all are brought upon a single level, and all are to a poet what fizzing is
to a headache tablet: the performance of what is in him to perform,
the activities which define his state of being.
I do not think that Boccaccio would have repudiated these
changes. Of course poets should admonish the overbold, praise
moderate courses, inspire the sluggish, and keep the deeds of the an-

cients in memory. For all its transformations, the new account is not
radicallydifferent;poetry, for both, is the same loved thing. Boccac-
cio carves his subject neatly at the joints, while his sedulous follower
tries to swallow it whole, but this is a differencein method or in table
manners;what they savor is for both of them the same.
Boccaccio's greater deftness may be, in fact, deceptively atypical.
He sorts process from product as modem thinking tends to do, ex-
cluding specific choices of theme and moral outlook from his essen-
tial definition of what poetry "is." His follower brings in a list of
such concerns, and as a result his treatment seems cumbersome. But
ifBoccaccio carvesneatly, it is not the modern subject that he carves,
and that is why the other account, though awkward, is good to have.
It brings into the open what is latent in its original, and I think it
points to what they both must have in mind.
This will appearmore clearlyin contrastwith post-humanist prac-
tices. Critics can and perhapsshould ignore the theoreticaldistinction
between process and product; we expect to hear theirjudgments on
choice of subject, moral purpose, overall outlook, and matters such
as these. The custom, however, is to treat all this as past and done
with-effecta, or things done, not effectus, or things doing. We hear
that such and such a theme or attitude turnsout to be high enough,
reverentor impassioned enough, or close enough to the well-springs
of life to qualify as "poetry." The position that allows this talk is
similarto that of the anonymous writer, who makes specific subjects
and purposes and outlooks the essence of poetry and fears not to be
prescriptive about them. But it is also to treat poetry as something
finished, as the product of a process now complete. To bring subject,
purpose, and outlook under effectusis to treat them not as things to
bejudged afterthe fact but as things to be prescribedas premeditated
choices. "He who has estrangedhis mindfrom these effectus,"says the
anonymous writer-and he means everything he recommends, both
general and specific-"is no true poet."
This distinction may seem small, but it matters. "Poetry," as the
old theory envisions it, is not the conveying, nor the thing conveyed,
but the priorintentionof the whole conveyance, to wit: a specific in-
sight or "reality"at issue, as seenfroman appropriatespecific attitude
or set of them, in termsof a specific fictional transformationby which
this insight actually entered the mind, with certainstanding purposes
as the context in which this experience is had-and all this comes
forth together, as a single integrated mental event, the specific mani-

festation of which is the "weaving together" of words and sententiae

which is the poetic artifact.This mental event is poesis. It is amenable
equally to a deft, though vague exposition beginning with "fervor"
(because it is a single event), or to the awkward, but more explicit
descriptionof an effectuslist, embracing all the specific purposes, out-
looks, and choices of subject that the theorist happens to think wor-
thy. Sidney was to have a single word for it all: "foreconceit." Like
Boccaccio's imitator, Sidney had a list of concrete recommendations
about what foreconceits should contain: any foreconceit that hap-
pened not to satisfy them found itself excluded from truepoesis. The
notions of 1397 were still alive and well in 1585. Whenever human-
ists consider poetry, in fact, these notions seem to be in effect.
There is one other point about this theory that ought to be made.
Boccaccio, on the strength of his keyword "fervor," sounds
Platonic-in that way of being "Platonic" one encounters so often
among the humanists, which steadfastlyignores the irony of the Ion.
His imitator, who tucks "fervor" away in his first topical argument,
seems to deal more in prescriptions than in inspirations. When
Horace and Aristotle began to make a mark on poetic theory, theo-
rists of this bent, rules theorists, seemed "Aristotelian" rather than
"Platonic." And in more recent years, the two systems of thought
have been regarded as mighty opposites. Creative imagination, or
fervor, has no scope when hemmed in by prescriptions, but it has no
pleasing form, unless it is willing to submit to them. The present
analysis shows, I think, that in the humanist context, these two em-
phases do not exclude each other at all; their differenceis the same as
that between the meanings of effectus.It would follow, I think, that
Sidney is not waffling or confused when he is Platonic and Aristote-
lian by turns in the Defenceof Poesie;neither, in fact, is he being syn-
cretic. In his mind-as in Boccaccio's, as in that of the anonymous
Bolognian, as in that of Milton later and even as in that of Pope-
poetry, to put it simply, is cognition, knowledge. It is not a thing
done with words, though it results in that; it is not an act of imagin-
ing, though it cannot exist without such an act; it is an itemof knowl-
edge, something known, not a procedure, per se. The foreconceit is
the poem, and the foreconceit is an insight about reality in terms of
something other than that particular reality. Drawing out those
terms, be it the elaborating of a large-scalefiction or the working out
of a single metaphor, arranging the terms, finding the appropriate
diction, adding the weight of sententiae-all this is the procedure

which brings the insight forth, and the poet must be good at it. But
any wordsmith must be good at such things; what distinguishes the
poet is the special knowledge that he has, whether we call it forecon-
ceit, fervor, or-more prosaically-reason. Poetry, it turns out, is
exactly what moral philosophers and historians have in theirheads,
but with the crucial differencethat the poet's conception is indirect,
not literal, and concrete, not abstract-and for those reasons is a
stronger conception: more gripping, more fervid, seemingly beyond
all ordinary accounts. It was this kind of thing that Sidney had in
mind when he said that the poet had a "Zodiac of his own wit"; Pe-
trarchhad it in mind when he announced, in his coronation speech,
that dreamers with laurel crowns on their heads never dreamed lies;
Milton assumed it in his discussion of poetry in Of Education;and it is
this idea, too, which makes Pope's "nature to advantage dress'd"
more than an empty notion of plain-truth-plus-decoration.16 From
Boccaccio to Pope: thus far would I extend the line of the humanist
theoreticaltradition.
* * * * *
Unlike the others, Vergerio retains an interest in the actual statue.

Carlo destroyed it, he thinks, primarily for the sake of fame. Like
what's-his-name17who destroyed the Temple of Diana at Ephesus,
Carlo must have reasoned that great crimes were as famous as great
benefactions. It is a shame that he did, Vergerio says, not least be-
cause the reasoning is rather stupid. For Carlo has made war upon
16Sidney's phrase appears on p. 14 of Forrest Robinson's edition of An Apologiefor

Poetry (Indianapolis, 1970) with a long footnote showing how much the idea was
shared by his contemporaries and forebears. Petrarch's coronation speech is translated
by Ernest H. Wilkins (PMLA, 68 [I953], 1242-50), reference here to p. 1249. Milton's
notion that poetry, by nature, is "simple, sensuous, and passionate" appears on p. 637
of the Hughes edition (John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose [New York, I957]).
And Pope's often-quoted tag is line 297 of his Essay on Criticism; lines 299-300 declare
that wit is "Something, whose Truth convinc'd at Sight we find, / That gives us back
the Image of our Mind" (The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt [New Haven,
1963], p. I53).
17"One Herostratus," according to The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature(ed.
Sir Paul Harvey [Oxford, 1937], s.v. "Ephesus"), but Vergerio's source would have
been Valerius Maximus, VIII. xiv, which records the incident as a bid for fame-and
carefully leaves out the perpetrator's name (Factorum et dictorumMemorabilium Libri
Novem, ed. Carolus Kempf[Leipsig, I888], p. 413).

the dignity of writers,"and how can the memory of anything be long

at all, ... without a writer's help?" Hercules himself was unknown
among the shades, and men, too, would have forgotten him, were it
not for the poets'figmenta.Ulysses, Alexander, Thebes, Pharsalia:all
would have been forgotten, had they not been preserved in poetry.
"They would be bare names, wouldn't they-not even names, in
fact,-were it not that they, mortal by nature, were made immortal
by divine ingenia."The same would be true of the glories of ancient
Rome. Thus a glory-seeking man is a fool to despise writers, for they
both createhis glory and make it last.18 Poesis is knowledge; knowl-
edge begets glory, and the preserving of poesis in writing gives it
worldly scope.
Carlo himself had not spoken of glory; he had spoken of religion.
"Statuesare for saints," he had said, not for poets and pagans. "I am
not one to deny that statues and honor are for saints," says Vergerio;
"since from the merit of their lives and from the teaching of their vir-
tues they deserve to be honored on earthand to pass a blessed, eternal
life in heaven. But I do not see why [statues]can't be set up for poets
andfor these illustrious men. For if it is usual to have a monument to
the memory of men who were notable and outstanding in their lives,
on what grounds should there not be such monuments for poets,
too, if they should happen to be notable beyond other men? For
when posterity sees them, they are great incitements of the spirit,
added spurs to a naturalbent toward virtue and glory of life. That is
what Scipio used to say: when he saw the images of famous men, he
was enormously driven to imitate them."19Statues matter, in other
words, not for themselves but semiotically; Vergerio's sentiments
are commonplace, but at the root of them lies the humanist theory of
signs.
8Smith ed., p. I92.

19Smith ed., p. I96: "non sum qui negem et statuas et honorem sanctis deberi, qui
merito vite virtutumque doctrina sunt digni ut celebrentur in terris et in cells beatam
sempiternamque vitam agant; poetis vero hisque illustribus non video cur constitui
non possint. si enim munus tale in eorum memoriam fieri solet, qui illustres et in vita
prestantes fuerint, quid vetat ne vatibus quoque, si qui preter ceteros insignes sint, ta-
lium rerum monumenta debeantur? nam et posteris, cum hec vident, magna sunt inci-
tamenta animorum, ingeniisque ad virtutem et vite gloriam ingens calcar ex his addi-
tur; quale solebat dicere Scipio, cum illustrium virorum imagines cerneret, magnopere
se ad eorum imitationem concitari."

To Vergerio, Carlo's iconoclasm seems foolishly literal-minded.

It reminds him of people who, "when they see in churchesimages of
pagansorJews scourging of crucifying Christ, tearout their eyes ...
and defacethe scowling visages of the lictors from much religion and
piety, as though the merit of their lives consisted in destroying im-
ages and not more in doing away with sins and establishing vir-
tues."20This is to take sign directly for substance, as though the one
were literally the other, and it is obvious, from Vergerio's point of
view, that this is superstitiousor naive. Images are signs, not the very
presencesof what they seem to stand for; indeed, the thing signified
is not even morphologically equivalent to the sign. The scowling lic-
tor on the wall is not a real lictor, obviously, but his image does not
really even signify a lictor, either. His scowling visage is part of a
larger composition, in which the important things signified are gen-
eral human possibilities: the sinful, uncontrolled anger which is so
usual to man, and the special heavenly calm of Christ's peace. That is
what one is to get from the scene, not some literal-minded impres-
sion of Our Savior's being beaten.
The same, presumably, applies to the statue of Vergil. It would
stand not for Vergil but for the memoryof Vergil, and the content of
this memory would not be the pagan who once lived in Mantua. The
content of this memory would be a complex mental event: the expe-
rience of reading Vergil's poetry. Just as a saint's image reminds one
of a whole significant pattern of living-the saint's "virtues"-and
not of his literal, timebound existence in the physical sphere, so the
image of Vergil calls to mind the only "Vergil" that anyone now
could know: readings of poems and the patterns of mind that are
caused by those. These readings have value because they activate the
principlesof virtue within the mind. In this crucialsense-that of the
knowledge which irradiates the mind-there is no difference be-
tween a real saint's life and a pagan poetic construct. The virtues are
the virtues, whatever be their source, and we should value any
agency which brings them back to mind as knowledge. For this
20Smithed., p. I97: "similequehoc michi videtur eorum rationi, qui, cum in tem-
plis Iudeorum gentiliumque imagines vident Christum aut verberantiumaut cruci-
figentium, oculos illis, ut queque iratior videtur, eruunt, truculentasquelictorum fa-
cies ex multa religione pietatequedeformant, quasi quidem in delendis imaginibus ac
non magis in tollendis peccatiscompenendisquevirtutibusmeritum vite consistat."

"knowledge" infuses the mind with their power, and that power, in
turn, preparesthe knower to make those virtues active in the world.
If all this is implied in Vergerio's thinking about icons, it is not al-
together obvious why Vergerio is so alarmed. If"Vergil" really does
amount to readings of Vergil's poems, then pulling down his statue
would seem an insignificant act. If texts remained, and men re-
mained to read them, would not Vergil's presence endure?-would
it not endure, moreover, in the place that mattered most, not upon
his tomb but in the hearts of those who understood him? But Verge-
rio is alarmed. He speaks of Carlo's "triumph over the poets," of his
"foul deed," of his "crime to be detested in every succeeding genera-
tion." Destroying Vergil's statue was to send him into exile: "In a
single victory the enemy is pushed beyond the borders and Vergil is
thrust from his own fatherland-and both the prince of the city and
its people endure it! But the city was not itself to blame, and he him-
self bewailed its fall in tearful verse when it was cut through by sol-
diers: 'too close a neighbor' it was 'to [poor] Cremona!' Is Mantua
famous for her fetid swamps and unhealthy air, and not more for her
founder, Manto, that ancient daughter of Tiresias, and still more for
Vergil, the poet who was the city's son?" Homer had a "better lot,"
Vergerio says, though no particularcity was his home. "Most Greek
cities claimed him for a citizen, whereas Vergil, because it is known
where he comes from, got thrown out of his."21
All this is obvious rhetoricalexaggeration, and it is hard to say ex-
actly what is felt. But in some degree, at least, Vergil is lost when his
statueis pulled down, and this despite the books and minds in which
he chiefly may be said to "live." What the statue would do, I think, is
jog the memory. This memory, as I have said, would be the memory
21Smith ed., pp. 195-96: "o facinusindignum, o scelus omni seculo detestandum!
una ergo victoriaet hostis finibus et Virgilius patriasua pulsus est, idque etiam et prin-
ceps urbis et populus patitur!at non ita de se meritaurbs illa fuerat, cuius casum, cum
militibusdivideretur,quod esset nimium [misere]Cremone vicina, lacrimoso carmine
ille questus est. fetidis fortasse paludibussuis et insano aere Mantua claraest, an non
magis ex Manto, illa antiquissimaTiresie filia, que urbem condidit, et magis ex poeta
Virgilio, eius urbis alumno? . . . melior Homeri sors fuit, quem primum poetarum
Grecifaciunt <et> nostri non negant, si modo Virgilius exceptus sit: melior quidem
sors eius fuit, quod, cum qua esset patriaignoraretur,plurime Grecie civitates eum
civem suum dixerunt;hunc, quia unde sit constat, civitassua eicit."

of a reading experience-and the understandingof virtue which that

experience would entail. It would come by far the oftener for the
statue's being on daily view. The statue would be to the full experi-
ence of readingVergil what a file-name on a computer disk would be
to the file it has the power to recall. It is not the memory itself, but
the memory's enabler. And as computer workers know, loss of the
file nameentailsloss of the whole file: it sits on the disk unaltered, but
with the name pulled down, the machinery knows not how to reach
it. To destroy the statue, then, is to destroy a means of remembering.
One should not destroy such means, however trivial they might be,
for without some means of recall, the experience of reading Vergil
can simply lie in the mind unheeded. This is the sense, I think, in
which Vergil is "expelled" from his own city: what is expelled, liter-
ally, is a means of remembering him, and the result will be that
memories of him are diminished. In that real sense, he will be less
present than before, and this, without too much strain, amounts to
"exile."
But "exile" makes no sense, as a concept, without the assumption
that what undergoes it will be roughly the same for all. The lost sig-
nifier is the same for all, of course, for that is a single statue that had
once been standing. But if what is signified, for each, is a memory of
a mental experience, and if, for each, that experience is substantially
different, then though everyone may be said to have lost his own
Vergil, it scarcely makes sense to say that "Vergil" has been lost.
This makes sense only if everyone's Vergil, in the end, is essentially
the same. Vergerio, as we have seen, thinks it silly to take signs liter-
ally. But if he is serious at all about the metaphor he uses here, he
does not have a doctrine of arbitrarysigns. His doctrine must fall be-
tween the two extremes, hard to define and harderyet to defend.
I cannot prove, of course, that Vergerio is all this serious about his
metaphor. It could simply have been a throwaway, a bit of exaggera-
tion to fit the moment. But I can suggest that he couldhave been seri-
ous, for it fits the standard treatment of poetic texts. We get a
glimpse of this treatment in Petrarch's Secret,when "Franciscus,"
who represents Petrarch himself in the dialogue, quotes Vergil to
"Augustine." Augustine has urged him to "make notes" on his read-
ing, so that when he meets with "wholesome maxims" he may
"learnthem by heart." Franciscusagrees wholeheartedly, and shows
what he has learnedby heart from the Aeneid.Consider, he says, the
bit with Aeolus and the winds:

I have often thought that he may have meant to denote anger and the other
passions of the soul ... which, unless controlled by the curb of reason, would
in their furious haste, as he says, drag us in their train and sweep us over sea and
land and the very sky itself. In effect, he has given us to understand he means by
the earth our bodily frame; by the sea, the water through which it lives; and by
the depths of the sky, the soul that has its dwelling in a place remote, and of
which elsewhere he says that its essence is formed out a divine fire. It is as
though he said that these passions will hurl body, soul, and man himself into
the abyss. On the other side, these mountains and this King sitting on high-
what can they mean but the head placed on high where reason is enthroned?
At this point he quotes Aeneid I, 52-57: "Here in his vast cavern,
Aeolus, their king, keeps under his sway and with prison bonds
curbs the struggling winds and the roaring gales. They, to the moun-
tain's mighty moans, chafe blustering around the barriers. In his
lofty citadel sits Aeolus, sceptre in hand, taming their passions and
soothing their rage ....22 And then he continues:
As I carefully study every word, I have heard with my ears the fury, the rage,
the roar of the winds; I have heard the trembling of the mountain and the din.
Notice how well it all applies to the tempest of anger. And, on the other hand, I
have heard the King, sitting on his high place, his sceptre imprisoning those
rebel blasts,-who can doubt that with equal appropriateness this applies to the
Reason? However, lest any one should miss the truth that all this refers to the
soul and the wrath that vexes it, you see he adds the line-"taming their pas-
sions and soothing their rage."
Aug. I cannot but applaud that meaning which I understand you find hidden in
the poet's story, familiar as it is to you; for whether Virgil had this in mind
when writing, or whether without any such idea he only meant to depict a
storm at sea and nothing else, what you have said about the rush of anger and
authority of reason seems to me expressed with equal wit and truth.23
"Franciscus" responds to the literal signification of the words, yet
despite his excitement, he refers them onward to the abstract point
on which all men agree. "Augustine" wonders, too, whether Pe-
trarch is not reading moral allegory into Vergil. But in the end it does
not matter, since the allegory is true-and since a thinking man is apt
22Translation from the Loeb edition of Vergil by H. Rushton Fairclough (Cam-

bridge, Mass. and London, 1932), p. 245.
23Petrarch'sSecret: or the Soul's Conflict with Passion: Three Dialogues between Himself
and St. Augustine, trans. William H. Draper (London, I9II), pp. 99-I02. Draper's
translation of the Vergil passage is altered to Fairclough's in order to match the passage
cited above.

to find it. These are the purposes to which Vergil should be put, and
these would be the experiences that the statue would recall.
This example is typical, I think, of reading habits in the early Ren-
aissance.It responds to the text's particularity,it senses even that par-
ticularity may be primary-but in the end it seeks to allegorize and
find the uncontestable generality. Fictions are particular, and they
excite; but they are also drapery-or, as Petrarchmakes both charac-
ters in his dialogue agree, even if they are not (in fact) drapery at all,
the good readerwill regardthem as such. It is the fiction'sjob to viv-
ify the generality, bring it back to mind in a powerful manner. A
large poem, like the Aeneid, has an overarching fiction and a multi-
tude of local ones. Each local fiction figures forth its own uncontest-
able truth;that of the grand fiction is also uncontestable, and often at
the same level of generality as the local ones. Reading of this sort
would seem to break a work into fragments, but it doesn't, quite,
becauseit is accompaniedby a feeling that all truths are one. All these
truths, that is, belong to a single system of moral and religious truth.
All would thereforebe compatible and point the same way, so that in
some ultimate sense, all particular reading experiences-if true-
come out the same. Readers of texts, like parties of golfers, begin
from the same place, spread apartin their individual transitstoward
the goal, and come together at the end, directed by a common
course. Thus a statue of Vergil might jog the memory of hundreds of
locally different reading experiences, but when the statue is de-
stroyed it is one "Vergil" that is lost, because in the last analysis all
those readingexperiencesimply each other. Indeed, if the truth is one
in this fashion, "Vergil" would be a particularpower conferredupon
a particularsegment of the truth. "Homer" would be another, "Ci-
cero," "Sallust," and "Ovid" others still. This is not a theory that
distinguishes oratory and history from literature proper. All come
together in their figuring forth of truth.
Vergerio is not saying all this, but I think it is implied and corrob-
orated by Petrarchand by what we know of Renaissancetendencies
in handling literary texts: the habit of allegorizing and the refusal to
distinguish sharply between oratory, history, and fiction. A "semi-
otics" can be constructedwhich contains it all. In this semiotics a sign
does not literally bring in the presence of the thing signified, and the
same sign will point to different actual things for different people.
But these signs will not be arbitrary,because local differencesin sig-
nification do not matter. That is because there is a metaphysical

ground, something true and uncontestable, with which all true in-
sights are compatible and to which all true insights ultimately point.
Signs can be trusted, because despite what may seem to be their local
differences, right and wrong grasps of them can be distinguished
from one another. Poesis, being knowledge-in-the-form-of-sign,
can be trusted, too, and ought to be. Vergil's statue is to "Vergil" as
the poetic fiction is to its truth, as all local truths (paganor Christian)
are to Truth itself-and vivent les differences,such as they are. For
thanks to them, Truth, which is one, is also lively.
Here, then, is a set of three documents. All are responses to a sin-

gle incident; all regard the incident as an outrage against poetry in
general;all take up the general defense. Salutati'sdefense is to asserta
tautology; the Bolognian has his from Boccaccio; and Vergerio's is
implied in his notions about statues. None is aware of the others,
each has a differentcontext and specific purpose, but all are common-
place-and all are commonplaces of the same community. All ex-
press the desires and aspirations of that community, and insofar as
they fit together they can, as a set, representthat community's "the-
ory.
Salutati's letter contains two major postulates. The first is that
poets do not "imitate." From this it follows that poetry cannot be
judged on how closely it "maps" an actualworld which is exterior to
the poem. Poetry does relate to such a world, however; it does not
map it, but it does work upon it. And so the second grand postulate
is that the work of poetry is psychological. Being original, not deriv-
ative, poetry begins as an act of mind, a conception, a bit of knowl-
edge. Since the bit of knowledge is not to be taken as merely the im-
age of something outside itself, the test of poetry is whether, and
how well, it conveys this bit of knowing to other minds. It is not po-
etry,Salutatiinsists, unless it does this conveying well-nigh perfectly.
Firstit createsin the mind of its recipient the bit of knowledge that it
embodies and transmits. Second, that bit of knowledge inspires
those who possess it to activity in the world, thus creating in the
world's actuality an image or implication of itself. The poet con-
ceives in the form of an idea; the idea creates a will to do; the will to
do makes the conception actual. Salutati does not show how actual

poetic writings might do all this, but ifthere is such a thing as poetry
(as he insists that there is), then these are the marks by which it is
known.
Salutati'spostulates give a hypothetical definition of poetry. The
anonymous writer gives a working definition, which he has from
Boccaccio, and which is fully in accord with Salutati. Poetry is in-
deed a process of mind: a disruption, a "fervor," which has always
certaingeneral effects. It issues in a definite cognitive act or "inven-
tion," which makes one want to speak or write and which also en-
ables that desire by ordering and elaborating the primary invention.
Thus far Boccaccio, but this writer goes farther. From general effect
he goes to specific effectiveness,and the poet is defined in a list of spe-
cific purposes-particular moral effectshe should have and particular
intellectualexercises he should perform. Becausethe poet has the fer-
vor with its general inventive and compositional effects, we can be
sure he has specific impact on other minds. By the force of his con-
ceptions, then, he will give courage to the hesitant, restraintto the
overbold, effective abhorrenceof excess, and do other things like that
for as long as one wants to extend the list. This is the poet's work,
and this the definition which guaranteesit.
But what the definition does notinclude is an account of the poetic
artifact.The poet will produce these artifacts, and they will get cer-
tain things done, but what arethey, andjust how do they have their
effect?At this point one turns to Vergerio, because the specific effec-
tiveness of poems is guaranteedby their status as signs.
A poem, like a statue, is a sign. Just as a statue, though physical,
does not literally signify the physical presence of the person it repre-
sents, so a poem, though a fiction, does not literally signify that
which embodies it. The statue signifies the ideaof its referend, and
the poem, through its fiction, also signifies an idea. But this significa-
tion, though not literal, is not arbitrary,either. For though ideas dif-
fer from person to person in the specific content that they have, ideas
come in groups, and all ideas within a group, despite their differ-
ences, have a tendency which is the same. Ideasin thisrelation are in-
terchangeablewith one another, for if any specific one of them is fol-
lowed to the end, that end will be the end for any other within its
group. Ideas of Vergil (say) are actually reading experiences, for that
is the "Vergil" we happen to have. Reading experiences must vary as
passagesvary, as readers'temperamentsvary, as mental states within
a single reader may vary. Vergerio's notion, however, seems to be

that all these experiences, locally differentas they are, tend to a com-
mon center, a "Vergil" whose presence is real and ultimately single,
because all true reading experiences of a single author, taken broadly
enough or deeply enough, will lead to the understanding of the
world which is that author's understanding. Nowadays we call this
an author's "vision," but it is also a "presence"of that author in our
minds, a stable, ultimately single thing that the sign may be said to
signify. A poem, likewise, is a sign; differentreaderswill have differ-
ent particularexperiences from reading it, but the tendency of all
those experiences will come to a focus. Each reader, in that reader's
own way, will have his mind rearrangedby the impact of the poetic
fiction, but the tendency of that rearrangementwill be the same for
all readers, for it is one knowledge of the world-and, for that mat-
ter, it points to one will for acting on that knowledge. Thus are signs
neither literal nor arbitrary,and thus are poetic fictions both various
in their effects, yet stable in their ultimate meaning.
This, then, is what I call the "early renaissancetheory of poetry":
[i] Poets do not imitate; they conceive. [ii] Their conceiving is in
terms of a certain fiction, which represents the truth of the concep-
tion but is not literallythat conception; the conceiving is in terms of a
sign. [iii] Signs signify variously in local and individual terms, but
single artifactsgive single setsof individual significant experiences, all
with a common tendency, and the stable meaning of a given sign is
the final meaning common to its set. Just as there are dozens of beds,
but only one Bed in the ideal sense for which Plato argues, so there
are dozens of experiences of a single poem, but only one Meaning
which those experiences truly adumbrate. It is a Platonic theory of
poetry, though Plato himself would have denied its enabling postu-
late. For Plato, unlike his latter day followers, took poetry as the
meanest sort of imitation.
This theory truly existed, I think, though I must assemble it from
fragments and though I know of no document in which it can be
found whole. The best proof of its existence would be to find its
traces, and there are two sets of tracesthat it definitely left. One set is
left upon the critical practice of the time (such as we know it), the
other upon later Renaissancecriticaltheorizing.
We have little direct evidence of early Renaissancecriticalpractice.
Much of it must have been tropological, like the reading of the
Aeneidwe have had from Petrarch. Salutati proclaimed that poetry

was by nature a "two-tongued faculty"24and Boccaccio's Genealogy

was, in its massive entirety, a tropological handbook to ancient po-
etry.25But unpacking allegories may have been typical of the older,
as opposed to the younger generation of early humanists. Petrarch
himself thought about reading literally, and the educational estab-
lishments of the Quattrocento seem to have preferredit over allegory.
I cannot assertthat philology and "historicalgrammar"26entirely re-
placed the tropological habit, but when commentary editions of the
ancient writers began to come off the printing presses, it was clear
that it had gone far toward doing so. Those commentaries almost
never offer "readings":they gloss words, explain allusions, and give
historical background; making a "reading" was left up to the
reader.27
Different as they seem at first glance, however, these two ways of
reading share an essential tendency. Tropological reading knows
where it wants to go before it begins: the truths that matter are
known beforehand, and harmony amongst these truths is taken for
granted. Readings of a passage may vary considerably, but their focal
point will be the same, because all bits of doctrine, when true, are
eventually in harmony with one another. This was the grand as-
sumption behind fourfold allegoricalreading, and it had been the rule
24Quoted from Salutati's long, apologetic letter to Fra Giovanni Dominici (I406),
in which he defends poetry and all secular learning, Novati ed., IV, i, 235: "sic etiam
poetriam nichil aliud arbitrantur quam fabulas, quam scelera, que profecto commenta
sunt honestum aliquid contegentia, et ob id damnant et abhorrent poesim; non intelli-
gentes quod, ut superius diffinitum est, ipsa sit sermocinalis quedam ars atque facultas
bilinguis, unum exterius exhibens, aliud autem intrinseca ratione significans; .. ."
25Seehis preface (Osgood, p. I ): "I must proceed to tear the hidden significations
from their tough sheathing."
26See A. T. Grafton and Lisa Jardine, "Humanism and the School of Guarino: A
Problem of Evaluation," Past and Present96 (1982), 5I-80; p. 62.
27Madeleine Doran discusses the editions of Ovid: "moralized" Ovids still appeared
among the early printed editions, but more and more the standard treatment was the
"ennaratio," which covered the text with glosses on vocabulary, explained "periphra-
sis," noted elegances of"diction and figure," and supplied genaeologies, etymologies,
and histories. It was clear that the reader was supposed to assemble all this for himself.
"Some Renaissance 'Ovids'," Literatureand Society, ed. Bernice Slote (Lincoln, 1964),
pp. 44-62; p. 53.

of reading for centuries.28Grammarians of the newer mold might

scorn this procedure, but not because they believed that reading was
open-ended. They, too, assumed a single, general, and ideal point
toward which all individual readings of text would tend; their guid-
ing principle was not harmony of doctrines, (though I am sure they
believed in that harmony), but philology and "historicalgrammar."
Focus would therefore be much narrower for them, and under their
scheme it would be considerablymore compulsive. Alternative read-
ings would not seem equally valid, since better philology and histori-
cal knowledge would make one reading not only differentfrom an-
other, but also better. Still, the reader was not presented with that
reading. He was left to make it on his own, which meant that al-
though he was not as free to create readings as the allegoricalreader,
he was still to createthem, and what he createdwas both his own and
at the same time responsible to a common center. Thus both the
grammariansand the allegorists would seem to have been operating
from the position I have articulated.They would not have needed to
articulateit for themselves, because no one, as yet, was proposing
anything else. So long as the truth was one, all readinghad to do was
point the way.
The impulse to examine the basis of critical practice came in first
with the commentaries on Horace's Ars Poeticaand later with the
commentaries on the newly recovered text of Aristotle's Poetics.
Theorizing proliferated,particularlyin the latter half of the sixteenth
century, and at first glance it would seem a hopeless scatter. Starting
points, emphases, and methods of development are so differentfrom
one another that it is hard to get a grasp on all this activity. Yet be-
neath the variety, two assumptions seem to dominate. One is that
poetry is a faculty of thinking, like rhetoric and logic, and the other is
that it is a part of moral philosophy, or an instrument thereof. And
these two assumptions turn out to be related. The first, says Bernard
Weinberg, "insisted on the characterof poetry as useful for serving
some final purpose"; the second "insisted upon the kinds of useful-
ness provided." Thus "the second group" of theories "comes to con-
28Augustine, Christian Doctrine, III.ii.2 calls it the "rule of faith", and all paths of
faith eventually end in the same place (trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr [1958; rpt. Indianap-
olis, 1978], p. 79.)

stitute a kind of specification of the first, a pushing of assumptions to

further conclusions"; where one assumption is "concerned with the
problem of instrumentality," the other is concerned "with the ends
for which the instrument is used."29This is the same relation that we
have seen between Boccaccio and his follower in 1397. Boccaccio de-
scribed the general instrumentality of poetry; his follower extended
the account to specific purposes. And if all these discussions of po-
etry, despite their bewildering variety, relate to one another on this
principle, the suggestion is strong that they are still operating on the
earlier enabling assumptions. With the re-emergence of Aristotle,
poetry again becomes "imitation." But imitation is not the literal
thing that Salutatirefused to consider; it is original discourse which
in some way is responsible to life: the creative, but not as yet "aes-
thetic" activity which had been envisioned by the humanists of the
early Renaissance.
Anthologies of critical theory put in little from the early Renais-
sance. There is little actualtheorythat an anthologist could put in. Yet
the humanists had one, and it is important, I think, to recognize it
and to know that it was there. For not only is it implied in humanist
critical practice and in the theorizing of the cinquecento,but it also
makes sense of Sidney, helps to explicate Milton, and turns up as a
living influenceeven as late as Pope. Consider Sidney, strangely con-
fident in the idea of poetry and strangely unconfident about the actual
poetic achievements of his own time; consider Milton, who calls po-
etry "simple, sensuous, and passionate," and yet thinks it the most
difficult of all the faculties in which the mind is trained; consider
Pope, who, in an age of criticism, makes criticismitself a semi-poetic
art:it should be clearwhat persisting strength the humanists' notions
had. The line, as I have suggested, runs from Boccaccio to Pope. It is
not entirely broken until the "aesthetic"idea of truth became, as the
cliche puts it, the "state of the art."
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
29BernardWeinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols.

(Chicago, I961), I, 31 andpassim.


Alan Fisher - Destrucción Estatua Virgilio

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Alan Fisher - Destrucción Estatua Virgilio

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Three Meditations on the Destruction of Vergil's Statue: The Early Humanist Theory of

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

News and Notes Editor MARGARETL. RANALD

ThreeMeditationson theDestructionof Vergil's

n the last day of August, 1397, Carlo Malatesta, Count of

1Epistolariodi PierPaulo Vergerio,ed. LeonardoSmith (Rome, 1934), pp. I89-202;

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

2Reported in Vergerio's letter, Smith ed., p. 196.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

who represent exploits by miming them,"4 thinking of the mimes

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

It is absurd, therefore, to think that poets are mimes of any kind,

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

is the one to which Carlo seems to point. Does false praisebelong to

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

thought to be?"10The psychology here works only when the speaker

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

fulness to a prior reality which it purports to reflect, but by its bear-

The anonymous writer had no responsibility to Carlo; he could

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

is mine. The standardEnglish translationis that of CharlesOsgood

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

Its original readershad this all in a lump; I break it into paragraphsto

poeta non erit. insuperquantumcunqueurgeat animos: quibus infusus est perraroim-

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

The first change is this: Boccaccio's general definition becomes the

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

"5Thiswriter is very difficult to translateinto decent English, and my translation

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

"to work out"-to produce, to bring about, or to amount to. Nouns

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

festation of which is the "weaving together" of words and sententiae

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

Unlike the others, Vergerio retains an interest in the actual statue.

16Sidney's phrase appears on p. 14 of Forrest Robinson's edition of An Apologiefor

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

the dignity of writers,"and how can the memory of anything be long

8Smith ed., p. I92.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

To Vergerio, Carlo's iconoclasm seems foolishly literal-minded.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

of a reading experience-and the understandingof virtue which that

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

22Translation from the Loeb edition of Vergil by H. Rushton Fairclough (Cam-

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

Here, then, is a set of three documents. All are responses to a sin-

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

was by nature a "two-tongued faculty"24and Boccaccio's Genealogy

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

of reading for centuries.28Grammarians of the newer mold might

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

stitute a kind of specification of the first, a pushing of assumptions to

29BernardWeinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols.

This content downloaded from 188.72.96.55 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 02:42:33 AM

You might also like