La Arcadia
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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La Arcadia, (Italian, 1504) is a pastoral novel by Jacopo Sannazaro.
This humanist classic is considered a masterwork that illustrated the possibilities of poetical prose in Italian, and instituted the theme of Arcadia, representing an idyllic land, in European literature. Sannazaro's elegant style was the inspiration for much courtly literature of the 16th century, including Sir Philip Sydney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.
Sannazaro's La Arcadia - coupled with the Spanish author Jorge de Montemayor's La Diana (1559), itself indebted to Sannazaro's work - had a profound impact on literature throughout Europe up until the middle of the seventeenth century.
The Arcadia of Sannazaro was written in the 1480s and circulated in manuscript before its initial publication. Begun in early life and published in Naples in 1504, the Arcadia is a pastoral Romance, in which Sincero, the persona of the poet, disappointed in love, withdraws from the city (Naples in this case) to pursue in Arcadia an idealized pastoral existence among the shepherd-poets, in the manner of the Idylls of Theocritus. But a frightful dream induces him to return to the city, traversing a dark tunnel to his native Naples, where he learns of the death of his beloved. The events are amplified by extensive imagery drawn from classic sources, by the poet's languid melancholy and by atmospheric elegiac descriptions of the lost world of Arcadia. It was the first pastoral work in Renaissance Europe to gain international success. Inspired in part by classical authors who wrote in the pastoral mode— in addition to Virgil and Theocritus including comparatively obscure recently rediscovered Latin poets Calpurnius and Nemesianus— and by Boccaccio's Ameto, Sannazaro depicts a lovelorn first-person narrator ("Sincero") wandering the countryside (Arcadia) and listening to the amorous or mournful songs of the shepherds he meets. In addition to its pastoral setting, the other great originality of the work stems from its novel structure of alternating prose and verse.
