LONDON.- Through a close and thorough examination of a great number of original texts of classical and early and later modern pastoral poetry, literature and drama in ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German and English, and of a wide range of visual imagery, ending just before 1800, A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature analyses the development of pastoral as, primarily, a means of representing human happiness on this earth – in the requited wooing of girl and boy. Of course, pastoral has come to embrace many other motifs, notions and ideas, which are here also ordered, explored and dissected or, in the case of myths, dispelled. With its numerous quotations and illustrations, the book constitutes an anthology as well as a commentary on what was once an important strand in European culture, now often misrepresented.

Subtitled ‘the quest for secular human happiness revealed in the pastoral: fortunato in terra’, the book contains numerous novelties as well as serving as a resource for pastoral texts and images in all European languages (given both in the original and in translation).

New ideas include:

VOLUME I

(Chapter 1) An explanation of Virgil’s choice of the persona of Tityrus as his mouthpiece in the Eclogues: he was referring back to Tityrus the slave of the poet Theocritus in his 7th Idyll, who sang of Daphnis, as Virgil sings of his friend and mentor Cornelius Gallus. Anatomization of allegory in pastoral poetry not only as encipherment but also as kind of ‘autofiction’.

(Chapters 2, 3) Insistence on the continuing importance of the pastourelle in later Renaissance pastoral, even humanist pastoral – of the ‘pastourelle situation’, that is, the man meeting the girl in the free space of the countryside. The prime importance of Petrarch’s ‘canzoni sorelle’, nos. 125, 126 (‘Chiare, fresche et dolci acque’) for early Renaissance pastoral.

(Chapters 3, 4, 5) Illuminating interpretations of prominent Venetian pastoral paintings such as the Louvre Concert champêtre, Giorgione’s Tempest and Titian’s Three Ages of Man.

(Chapter 6) A new discussion of the nature and development of landscape painting in the earlier Renaissance; a critique of the so-called ‘locus amoenus’.

(Chapter 7) A revelatory analysis of the (changing) nature of Neoplatonic (and Petrarchist) love in Renaissance poetry and song, from Boccaccio to Castiglione and on to Honoré d’Urfé.




(Chapter 8) Pastoral plays: self-choosing lovers and the arranged marriage through the lens of Torquato Tasso’s famous ‘honour’ chorus, and its later resonances, notably in Shakespeare.

(Chapter 9) The key to the pastoral romance in Europe: the notion of ‘faith’ between lovers, holding firm against all the odds (including their own quarrels).

(Chapter 10) Erotic madrigals in Italy; ‘Come live with me and be my love’ in England; the portrayal of sex and love in painting.

VOLUME II

(Chapter 11) A hard look at the use of the term ‘Arcadia’ in the Renaissance: pastoral is actually mostly local.

(Chapter 12, 13) That the contrast between city (or court) and country is not intrinsically pastoral, but imported into it from outside sources especially the Spanish Antonio Guevara’s Monosprecio. The ‘idleness’ of country living, a significant undertone in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

(Chapters 13, 14) The degree to which pastoral and real shepherds were distinguished by their dress has been overlooked, leading to great misunderstanding. English and Dutch resistance to the Italian pastore amante or French galant berger.

(Chapters 15, 17) New research into landscape painting in the 17th century: its relation to pastoral; the taste for small figures in landscapes rather than landscape proper; the notion of art and nature combining to make a perfect scene Reading meaning into landscapes: the example of Erasmus and of an album of landscape prints with accompanying couplets

(Chapter 16) Correction of Panofsky’s ideas about ‘et in Arcadia ego’;
the popularity of the theme in Germany

(Chapter 18) Self-projection (‘autofiction’) both by royals and by their subjects in ‘allegorical’ pastoral romances – a new thesis

(Chapter 19) A new emphasis on two ‘gays’ of the 18th century: the pastorals of John Gay and the country paintings of Thomas Gainsborough. The last pastoral: Keats’s Endymion.