L'Adone  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Redirected from Adone)
Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

'L'Adone (Adonis) is an Italian epic poem by Giovan Battista Marino, published in 1623. It is a long, sensual poem, which elaborates the myth of Adonis, and represents the transition in Italian literature from Mannerism to the Baroque.

L'Adone was dedicated to the French king Louis XIII and was written in ottava rima divided into twenty cantos.

The plot

The poem deals with the love of the goddess Venus for Prince Adonis, who escapes from a sea storm to take refuge on the island of Cyprus, the site of the goddess's palace. Cupid uses his arrows to make his mother and Adonis fall in love with one another.

Adonis listens to Cupid and Mercury telling love stories and is then led to the Garden of Pleasure, which is divided into five parts, one for each of the senses, and to the fountain of Apollo. Jealousy warns the god Mars of Venus's new love and he heads for Cyprus. When Adonis finds out Mars is on his way, he flees and is transformed into a parrot for refusing the goddess's love. Having regained his human form thanks to Mercury, he is taken captive by a band of robbers.

Adonis returns to Cyprus where he wins a contest of beauty, is made ruler of the island and is reunited with Venus. But Mars has Adonis killed on a hunting expedition by a wild boar. He dies in the arms of Venus and his heart is transformed into a red flower, the anemone. The poem ends with a long description of the funeral games in honour of the dead youth.

Narrative technique

Into this flimsy framework Marino inserts the most famous stories from mythology, including the Judgement of Paris, Cupid and Psyche, Echo and Narcissus, Hero and Leander, Polyphemus and numerous others. Thus the poem, which was originally intended to be only three cantos in length, was so enriched that it became one of the longest epics in Italian literature, made up of 5123 eight-line stanzas (40,984 verses), an immense story with digressions from the main theme and descriptive pauses.

All this tends to characterise “L’Adone” as a labyrinth of entangled situations without any real structure. The lengthy Canto XX, which takes place after the protagonist's death, serves to undermine any pretence to narrative unity. But this very lack of unity constitutes Marino's narrative innovation. The poet composes his work using various levels and passes from one episode to the next without any apparent logical connection, basing the links solely on a language rich in hyperboles, antitheses and metaphors.

In Adone, Marino quotes and rewrites passages from Dante's Divine Comedy, Ariosto, Tasso and the French literature of the day. The aim of these borrowings is not plagiarism but rather to introduce an erudite game with the reader who must recognise the sources and appreciate the results of the revision. Marino challenges the reader to pick up on the quotations and to enjoy the way in which the material has been reworked, as part of a conception of poetic creation in which everything in the world (including the literature of the past) can become the object of new poetry. In this way, Marino also turns Adone into a kind of poetic encyclopaedia, which collects and modernises all the previous productions of human genius.

The poem is also evidence of a new sensibility connected with the latest scientific discoveries (see for example the eulogy of Galileo in Canto X) and geographical findings (such as Canto VII with its praise of the passiflora, a plant recently imported into Europe from the Americas).

Thus Adone, in spite of its technical virtuosity, is a work rich in authentic poetry written in a style which often achieves perfection of rhythm.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "L'Adone" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools