The Concert Champ?

tre: The Crises of

History and the Limits of Pastoral

JONATHAN UNGLAUB

While to some it may seem a to suggest

paradox
that the most celebrated pastoral representation of the Renais
sance also bears a pointed topical significance, this is precisely
what I shall argue here: the Concert Champ?tre was a response to
the gravest crisis in Cinquecento Venice, the invasion of the V?neto

by the League of Cambrai in 1509. This was the cataclysmic

moment in Venetian when its "Arcadian" on
history, possessions
the mainland succumbed to the aggressors and seemed forever

lost. the Concert reveals not so

Despite expectations, Champ?tre
much an idyllic refuge from the ravages of history as a lush but
fragile counterbalance to the despoliation of the countryside. As
such, it could not but remind the contemporary beholder of his
own Pastoral poetry had addressed the scourge
deprivation. long
of warfare upon the landscape and its inhabitants. The topical
allusions of Virgil's Eclogues, Petrarch's and Boccaccio's Bucol
icum Carmen, Boiardo's Pastorale, and Sannazaro's Arcadia dem
onstrate how the landscape balances precariously the bliss of

bucolic life and the menace of history.1 Landscape functions

equivocally in these works: although it provides a shady retreat for
music making, its unreal, mirage-like quality intensifies the mis

fortune of those compelled to abandon their land and leisure

through civil strife. This important facet of the pastoral has been
overlooked in the interpretations of "Giorgione's" picture and its
landscape of the V?neto.2 The collision of the bucolic setting with
history was a leitmotif grounded in the tradition of pastoral
poetry. Such topoi likely conditioned the reading of the Concert
Champ?tre at a time when the idyllic environs of Venice were in
turmoil.3
A series of antitheses structure Giorgione's painting (fig. 1): the
earthy seated nude and the elegant standing nude; the rustic shep
herd and the courtly lutenist; the pastoral flute and the sophisti
cated stringed instrument; the decrepit shanty and the hilltop villa.
While any number of texts have been adduced to account for the
 Jonathan Unglaub 47

rustic/refined duality of the composition, such oppositions lend

themselves most to consideration as To
naturally pastoral topoi.4

begin with, the urbane lutenist surely represents the pastoral poet.
One of the conventions of this genre is its contrast between the

humble style of bucolic song and the poet's ambition to summon

loftier muses. Often this aspiration expresses itself through allu
sions, whether overt or to realities not unlike
glossed, political
those which imperiled the terraferma inevitable in 1509. The
intrusion of civilization into bucolic lyric compels the poet to ven
ture a noble style among the lowly tunes of the bower. In the figure
of the aspiring poet, the pastoral tradition acknowledges its own
limits. The pictorial dialectics of the Concert Champ?tre illustrate
this tension between song and the solemn verse
pastoral adequate
to the exigencies of history. The refined, urban components of the
composition both emblematize the drive toward a loftier style and
invoke the grave historical circumstances that occasion, even

demand, more elevated verse. The commentators and imitators of

the classical pastoral recognized its preoccupation with issues of

genre and historical allusion. This was the literary culture that
informed the reception of the Concert Champ?tre. Contemporary
viewers were equipped to locate itwithin a well-established tradi
tion as a "text." What follows examines the associations
pastoral
such a have
placement might generated.

I. "Woods to a consul"
dignify

The Renaissance understood the pastoral as a mode that

poetic
humbly broached, through allegory, subjects that were typically
the province of more elevated genres. This idea is present in a

manuscript illumination executed by Simone Martini in the 1340s

(fig. 2). It serves as the frontispiece to Petrarch's copy of Virgil and
Servius' Commentaries.5 The figures stand for each of the three
works that the volume. A and a bramble-cutter
comprise shepherd

respectively represent the Eclogues and Georgics. Above, the epic

hero Aeneas accompanies the interpreter Servius, who unveils the

poet, as it were. Petrarch's verses on the scrolls

hermeneutically
in the center of the composition read:
suspended

Ytala preclaros tellus alis alma poetas:

Sed tibi grecorum dedit hie attingere metas.
48 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

Servius altiloqui retegens archana Maronis

ut pateant ducibus pastoribus atque colonis.

Italy, kind country, you feed famous poets.

So this one [Virgil] allowed you to attain the Grecian goals.
[Here is] Servius, recovering the enigmas of high-spoken
Virgil,
So that are revealed in generals, and farmers.6
they shepherds

"Grecian entail an imitation not of Homer,

Virgil's goals" only
but also of Theocritus. Servius states that Virgil transformed
Theocritus' Idylls into a metaphorical vehicle in which political
concerns subtend the Arcadian imagery.7 He interprets the
as a conscious imitation of the style of Theocritus and, in
Eclogues
a veiled of patron Augustus.
places, acknowledgment Virgil's
had intervened to restore the poet's patrimonial lands in
Augustus
the aftermath of the civil war when many of the farms in Virgil's
native Mantua were to compensate war veter
being expropriated
ans. Servius explains:

The poet's tension is this: that Theocritus may be imitated

. . . and that in some places by means of allegory he [Virgil]
may actually give thanks to Augustus and other noted men,
with whose support he received back his lost estate. In this
respect he differs greatly from Theocritus; namely in that the
latter is always Virgil, by necessity, mixes
simple. compelled
in certain passages, which he often com
figures skillfully
from the verses of Theocritus, known to have been said
poses

simply by him. This, however, is done with poetic refinement

[po?tica urbanitate].8

Servius became an essential component to the recep

exegetical
tion of Virgil. His allegorical conception of the Eclogues largely
determined the of the pastoral as a mode
subsequent development
conducive to and social commentary. As the
autobiographical
lifted veil in Simone's illustration suggests, Servius' explication of
Virgil's "high-spoken enigmas" revealed what bucolic song could
achieve with "po?tica urbanitas."

The allegorical potential of the Latin eclogue was further devel

in the Renaissance. Petrarch contributed to the
oped early pastoral
canon with his Bucolicum Carmen of 1357. This collection of
 Jonathan Unglaub 49

eclogues deliberately revived Virgil's allegorical mode. Most

importantly, Petrarch related Servius' gloss of Virgil's Eclogues to
his own historical circumstances as an exile, at the Papal court in

and as a of official Servius limited

Avignon, recipient patronage.9
use of allegory to those passages the expropria
Virgil's concerning
tion and recuperation of lands. Petrarch, however, filled his
eclogues with cryptic political, biographical, and artistic commen
tary. The meaning had little to do with the incidental rustic setting
and generally required decoding. Boccaccio modeled his own
Bucolicum Carmen, finished by 1372, after Petrarch. Like his Are
tine master, he divulged the allegorical references in exegetical
In one such letter, Boccaccio sets forth the parameters for
epistles.
conveying ulterior meaning using the bucolic code.10 He claims to

adhere to the Virgilian mode of occasional allegory. Boccaccio

nonetheless lauds Petrarch for imparting to the pastoral genre an
elevated style and hidden meaning, just as Servius commends Vir
gil for his "poetic refinement" over Theocritus. The importance of
Petrarch's and Boccaccio's eclogues, however obscure their sub
texts may be, lies in re-establishing the conventions of pastoral
poetry as amenable to the of history.
allegorical exposition
An anthology of Latin eclogues, including Virgil, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio, was published in 1504, testifying to the continued pop
ularity of the Latin pastoral in Giorgione's time.11 Composing
political eclogues per allegoriam only began to appear frequently
in eclogues written in the vernacular, such as Boiardo's Pastorale

and Sannazaro's Arcadia, after the publication of Bernardo Pulci's

translation of and commentary on in the Bucoliche ele
Virgil
gantissime of 1481.12 The political orientation of Boiardo's Pasto
rale of c. 1482-1483, which refer to the current war between
Ferrara and Venice, may well have been indebted to Pulci's
empha
sis on of contemporary events.13 In the
Virgil's allegorization
Arcadia of 1504, Sannazaro recounts the genealogy of the pasto

ral, emphasizing the Virgilian allegorical manner (Prose 10).14 A

political lament for Naples follows, exemplifying the capacity of
the pastoral to allude to the tribulations that afflict the poet's idyl
lic existence (Eclogue 10). Thus developments in pastoral poetry
resonate with and allude extra
intertextually pastoral precedent
to current as sanctioned
textually history by previous practice.15
Reception follows in a complementary fashion. Audiences detect
the continuity of motifs, characters, and themes among pastoral
poems and expect references to contemporary history.
 50 THE CONCERT CHAMPETRE

Petrarch's verses below the of the Virgil frontis

placed image

piece read:

Mantua bore Virgil, who fashioned such things in poetry;

Siena bore Simone, who painted such things with his own
hand.16

is also a means to convey the "such

Painting metaphorical

things"?the "enigmas of high-spoken Virgil." In Petrarch's vol

ume, the illuminated folio is opposite Servius' preface to the
Eclogues, where he discusses the three-tiered stylistic hierarchy of
Virgil's eloquence.17 The figurai sweep from the lower right shep
herd and pruner to the upper left warrior and commentator delin
eates the progression from and
paradigmatic poetic Eclogue
G?orgie to epic. It also suggests the incursion of loftier concerns,

especially political subjects, into the pastoral grove as proleptic of

later The of events of
poetic development. pastoral presentiment

epic importance occurs unabashedly in Virgil's fourth Eclogue,

which augurs the birth of a divine hero. In the first lines of the
the pastoral muse for a style that accords
eclogue Virgil petitions
with the portentous gravity of his subject:

Sicilian muse, let's a nobler song:

sing
Low shrubs and orchards do not always please;
Let us to a consul.
sing woods dignify
(Eclogue 4.1-3)

In his proem, the poet of Eclogue 4 forges a peaceable union

between Roman civic life and the pastoral. Elsewhere in the
Eclogues this forecasts the demise of the idyllic landscape. These
"woods to dignify a consul" were Virgil's hallmark. Later pastoral
poetry continued to develop the contradictions inherent in this
Sannazaro, in particular, recognized the supra-pastoral
topos.18
ambition evident in the opening o? Eclogue 4. Its realization neces

sitated a more ambitious reed pipe, foreshadowing Virgil's epic

trumpets.

But he by nature having a genius disposed to higher things,

and not contenting himself with so humble a strain, took in
that reed that you now see there, and newer
exchange larger
than the others, to be the better able to sing of greater things,
 Jonathan Unglaub 51

and to make the woodlands worthy of the loftiest Roman

Consuls . . . with of later with more
perhaps hope singing
sonorous trumpet the arms of Trojan Aeneas.

(10:M82, N104-105)

The Concert Champ?tre shares with Simone's Virgil frontis

piece the placement of the poet upon a grassy hill, shaded by
foliage. He similarly sits surrounded by indices of both his pastoral
achievement and his adoption of loftier styles. While the attendant
figures inGiorgione are hardly as specific as the Virgilian person
ages in Simone's we shall see that evoke the pastoral
painting, they

topoi which presage higher styles of poetry. Giorgione's poet is

incongruously dressed in the silken garments of a cosmopolitan
bard. This relates to the numerous appearances of the
figure

courtly poet in the Eclogues, the Bucolicum Carmen, the Pasto

rale, and the Arcadia either as himself or in the guise of a shep
herd.19 The intrusion of the poet into his own idyllic creation
exhibits a literary self-consciousness that both concedes the limi
tations of his current genre and establishes his intention to sur

pass it.

In the Concert Champ?tre, the courtly attire of the poet sug

gests that his verse to "po?tica urbanitas," notwithstand
aspires

ing the bucolic company and ambiance. The poet thus serenades
the unkempt rustic, not with the bucolic flute, but with a lute, a

stringed instrument emblematic of higher verse.20 The mounting

disdain toward the constraints of pastoral erupts in Prose 7 of San
nazaro's Arcadia. Here the cosmopolitan poet, Sannazaro's

Sincero, plays the non-pastoral lyre. In a lengthy

pseudonymous
on his nobility, literary accolades, and frustrated love,
disgression
the poet sighs: "Especially when in this feverish period of youth I
call to mind the pleasures of my delicious homeland, among these
Arcadian solitudes in which?by your leave Iwill say it?I can
hardly believe that the beasts of the woodlands can dwell with any
to say of young men nurtured in noble cities"
pleasure, nothing
(7:M50, N72). Only through admittance to cultivated circles
might the erstwhile poet of rustic song yet realize the generic pro
charted in Simone's His listener, the cow
gression frontispiece.
herd Carino, consoles the distraught poet: "'And even as up to this

point you have fruitlessly spent the beginnings of your adolescence

among the and rustic songs of so hereafter you
simple shepherds,
will pass your fortunate young manhood among the sounding
 52 THE CONCERT CHAMPETRE

trumpets of the most famous poets of your century, not without

hope of eternal fame.' When he said this, he fell silent; and I,

sounding my accustomed lyre, began" (7:M52, N74-5).21 The rap
port between the shepherd and the courtly intruder inGiorgione's
painting hardly suggests Sincero's antagonism toward the Arca
dian ambiance. Nevertheless, the mere presence of the cultivated

poet, and his strumming of a sophisticated instrument, portends

the eventual disavowal of this refuge.
At the conclusion of the Arcadia, the poet affection
courtly
ately, but resolutely, retires his pastoral pipe (sampogna). Like
wise in the Concert Champ?tre, the poet, simply by playing the
lute, consigns the sylvan nude's pipe to "here among these moun

tains to be given breath by the mouth of some shepherd." Forsak

ing the sampogna, Sannazaro's poet reminds us that "he who

composed you of these reeds, when he came into Arcadia, came

there not as a rustic but as a most cultured .... To

shepherd youth
say nothing of the fact that in other times there have been already
shepherds so daring that they have advanced their style even to the
ears of Roman Consuls" (Epilogue, M129-31, N151-53). The
instrument and couture of Giorgione's "most cultured cor
youth"
to Carino's of Sincero's Both
respond prediction poetic triumphs.
presage the return to a and to com
literary society poetic subjects
mensurate with an enriched, that embraces, not
"daring" style
evades, the tribulations of history.
If one accepts Giorgione's of the Concert
authorship Champ?
tre, several interesting associations arise between the significance
of the poet/lutenist in the painting, and what we know about the
artist. Vasari documents that was indeed an accom
Giorgione

plished lutenist, and was patronized as such by the Venetian aris

tocracy. Giorgione thus might likely have portrayed himself,
whether or as the lutenist.22
literally metaphorically, courtly
Another of his works also thematizes artistic self-consciousness.
In the Self-Portrait As David, Giorgione inserts himself into a
meditation on the power of and on the art
painted representation
ist's relationship to others. In the Tempest and the Three Philoso
phers, Giorgione effaces the generic distinction between landscape
and history painting. Here he paints with po?tica urbanitas by
to conceal the "hidden The insertion of
using allegory subject."23
the artist into his own creation, the of genre bound
transgression
aries between pastoral and history, and the creation of meaning

through allusion and allegory are all notions at play in the Concert
 Jonathan Unglaub 53

Champ?tre. Nonetheless, it would be circuitous to argue attribu

tion based on thematic interpretation. Since authorship remains

an open question, it would be similarly reckless to identify the
lutenist with or even the I simply
courtly "Giorgione" "painter."
refer to the as the however this disrespect
figure "poet," unsettling
for different media might be for some readers. I believe that this
at least reflects how contemporary viewers,
designation given
some exposure to texts, would have been inclined to read
pastoral
the figure.24

II. "Abandoning my rude pastoral style, begin again,

O Muses, your complaint"

two nudes allegorize the poetic alternatives offered to the

The
pastoral poet harboring epic ambitions. Such alternatives confront
Tityrus in Eclogue 6. He to com
Virgil's pseudonymous aspires
memorate the martial achievements of the consul Varus. Like the

seated nude nestled into the herbage, Tityrus' first Sicilian muse
"did not blush to dwell among the woods." Apollo gently rebukes
the poet's effort to compose "a song of kings and bat
precocious
tles," for "a shepherd, Tityrus,/Should feed fat sheep, recite a fine
spun song." The chastised Tityrus continues to "tune
reluctantly
rustic on a delicate reed." Nevertheless, he remains
musings
beholden to the of higher verse, "for poets will
potential enough
to Varus, and compose sad wars" (6.1
long speak/Your praises,
8). It is this aim to commemorate agents and lament war
political
fare that leads the poet to seek an ennobled In the painting,
style.
the standing nude alludes to those conventions which the
through
attains a mood."25
pastoral "higher
Giorgione's juxtaposition of the standing nude, the gesture of
a fountain, and a distant river has led several scholars to
pouring,
the as a of the Source. She is remi
identify figure personification
niscent of the fountain nymph of Arcadia, described in Sanna
26
zaro's Prose 12:

But from the river nearby, without my perceiving how, all at

once there herself before me a young damsel most
presented
beautiful of feature, and in her walk and her gestures truly
divine . . .with a strange coil of on which she bore a
hair,
green and in her hand a vase of whitest marble.
garland,
(12:M112-13,N135)
 54 THE CONCERT CHAMPETRE

The journey to the Source involves the maturation from the

generically delimited expressivity of the pastoral to the boldness of

higher modes of poetry. Sannazaro's Sincero follows the nymph to
the source of the world's rivers, through which he is finally
escorted from Arcadia back to Naples. The Source topos derives
from the close of Virgil's fourth G?orgie. At the source, both Aris
taeus (the apiarist in the Georgics) and Sincero learn of the
Orpheus myth. This exemplifies the power of song to resurrect an
expended life or historical event?or at least its capacity to memo

rialize with refined verses.27 The passage through the Source thus
the poet to embrace an urban literariness that
inspires expounds
the sorrows of death and the afflictions of history.
The nude assumes an posture and a ritualistic
standing elegant

dignity that encourage her identification with the Source. Physi

cally and emotionally detached from the concert trio, she decants
into the fountain?almost emblematically affirming her function
as the inspiration of song. The Concert Champ?tre has been inter
preted as an elegiac scene?the nymph of the source endowing the
poet with the orphie capacity to memorialize with song. This cor
with the even mournfulness, that the
responds solemnity, figures
and atmosphere of the painting convey. In the tradition of elegy,
the poet follows Orpheus in deploring the transience of nature,
while his verse nevertheless confers a upon the
poetic immortality

subject.28 These poetic effects characterize Virgil's paradigmatic

pastoral elegy, that for Daphnis in Eclogue 5. Here the first singer,
Mopsus, bemoans the collapse of the natural order occasioned by
the death of Daphnis. Alternately, his companion, Menalcas, envi

sions the He comes to realize that

shepherd's apotheosis. thereby
commemoration restores the health of the landscape.29

. . . loves
Daphnis peace.
The shaggy mountains hurl their joyous cries
Up to the stars; now rocky cliffs and trees
Sing out, "A god! he is a god, Menalcas!"
Bless us and make us . . .
prosper!

While boars love mountain ridges, fish the streams,

Bees feed on and on dew,
thyme grasshoppers
Your honor, name, and praises will endure.

(5.61-64, 76-78)
 Jonathan Unglaub 55

The pastoral elegy endows both the singer and his subject with
a literary immortality, reifying the endurance of poetry over the
evanescence of existence. The commemoration of the shepherd
brings about the corresponding resurgence of the countryside?so

evident inGiorgione's lush, vital landscape. The introspection of

the musical ensemble and the ritualistic sobriety of the Source qui
etly foster the attainment, via song, of a profane eternal life in cul

tural memory.
In Sannazaro's Arcadia there is much occasion for elegiac verse.

His emphasis on this aspect of the pastoral draws on the precedent

of Virgil. The elegy in Eclogue 11 is especially interesting in rela
tion to the role of the Source and of the poet in the Concert Cham
p?tre. Here, commemorates his mother Massilia. She rests
Ergasto
beneath an elaborate fountain described at length in Prose 10. As
this grandiose monument is an anomaly within the rusticity of the

landscape, Ergasto is painfully aware of the inadequacy of pastoral

verse. He an illustrious to pronounce a memo
requires style fitting
rial dirge:

But you, O Blessed and fortunate River,

call together your Nymphs in the sacred depths,
and renew your ancient beloved custom.

See to it that she find another trumpet

to sing of her, so that the name be heard

forever, that of itself reverberates.

And?so may your course be never disturbed
lovely
by the rains?give aid in some degree
to my that temper it.
rough style, pity

and then, year by year, hourly more increasing

let there be memory of her among woods and mountains,

while there shall be grass on earth and stars in heaven.

Beasts, birds, caverns, trees, and springs,
men and gods will exalt with proud verses
and tales that name excellent and holy.
And because at the close it behooves me somewhat to rise,

abandoning my rude pastoral style,

begin again, O Muses, your complaint.
(11.88-90,94-99,106-114)
 56 THE CONCERT CHAMP? TRE

The Concert Champ?tre is in several ways reminiscent of

Ergasto's eulogy. The standing nude evokes the nymph of the

Source whom for a noble mode of
Ergasto petitions expression.
The wooded glade encircling Massilia's fountain presages the
arboreal and fluvial components of Giorgione's landscape. This
enclave of grove, river and vale becomes an active agent of pastoral

commemoration, a reverberation of Ergasto's lament:

perpetual

And that which I sing now the springs and the streams
will recite along the valleys, murmuring
with their waters.
far-shining crystal
And the trees that now I consecrate here and plant

whispering will make answer to the wind.

(11.136-140)

consecrates commemorative trees the in

Ergasto during elegy
which he implores the Source to grant him lofty verse. In the Con
cert Champ?tre, an imposing tree rises behind the font. Its trunk
extends the tensed vertical arm of the standing nude, whose fingers
adhere to the marble cornice as a metaphor of its vitalizing roots.

As the tree appears to be almost an extension onto the

grafted
body of the nymph of the Source, so too their significance
overlaps.
At least one scholar has identified the tree in the Concert Cham
as a laurel, thus a gamut of references to poetic
p?tre evoking
acheivement.30 The laurel as a sign of superior poetic skill figures
in Petrarch's Bucolicum Carmen. In the third
prominently
Petrarch, as with a laurel
Eclogue, Stupeus, approaches Daphne

bough upon him by the Muses. Eager to display his

bestowed
poetic proficiency, Stupeus lobbies Daphne for confirmation of his
artistry. He concedes that his initial efforts were clumsy, but he
eventually mastered the woodland idiom. With her consent, he is
now emboldened to proceed further:

Only hoarse sounds emerged from my pipe. But at length I

won favor;
Fauns and their dryads no longer were loath to list to my
numbers.

Then I did see the she-goats, moved by the charm of the

music,
Leave the green boughs hardly nibbled and gaze upon me in
 Jonathan Unglaub 57

wonder.

Bees I have seen leave their clover and locusts fall still in
midsummer.

Great was my joy. But faith in my song was born in me only

When the immortal Argus approved and charged me, "Sing
boldly."
(3.64-70)

In the Concert Champ?tre, the hoarse-sounding pipe is held in

abeyance, while the lute-playing poet aspires to "sing boldly." The
approbation of Daphne, like the inspiration of the Source, enables
the "hope of the shepherds" to materialize as they evolve into
"bards of renown" (3.76-77).
The standing nude of the Concert Champ?tre, while connoting
the Source, also suggests Daphne through her merger with the tree.

I do not intend to identify the standing nude with the figure of

Daphne, but rather with her function, equivalent to that of the
Source, as an agent of poetry and a mark of achievement.
literary
Whether through her association with the regenerative waters of

the Source or the acclaim marked the the stand

literary by foliage,

ing nude signifies the supervention of the pastoral mode through

the cultivation of and heroic verse.
elegiac
Boccaccio's twelfth modeled on Petrarch's third, also
Eclogue,
charts the poetic ascension of the bucolic bard through the media
tion of a female allegorizing higher genres of verse. In his explana

tion of this Eclogue, Boccaccio reveals that "I substitute Aristeus

for myself, most eager to reach the art of As with San

poetry."31
nazaro's Sincero and Petrarch's Stupeus, the poet's self-insertion
occurs at the point where issues of poetic ambition are addressed.
The same concern to the poet's function in the painting.
pertains
into a laurel grove, Aristeus entreats the Muse
Wandering Caliope
to lead him to Saphos?here the elusive figure of poetic inspira
tion. Caliope haughtily interrogates the acorn-bearing lad:

Pray, do you thus compare

your oaks with laurels? Though in ancient cults
consecrate to Jove, he did not raise
they're
them as high as these. Don't you know, stupid dolt,
acorns are served to pigs, and laurel wreaths
to poets whom put in charge
Apollo
 5 8 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

of grove and sacred fount and lovely Muses

and of his lyre and plectra?
(12.8-14)

The station first arouses the even

singer's lowly suspicion,
scorn, of theMuse. Caliope condescendingly suggests that Aris
teus seeks the bucolic nymph "Phyllis or perhaps Lupisca, whom
you with apples do sometimes allure among the shadows of the
wood" (12.60-61). Caliope typecasts Aristeus in a role not unlike
the rustic shepherd in the Concert Champ?tre: who lounges with
a woodland nymph on the grass, and likely remains content with
the vulgar flute and the shade of oaks. Aristeus insists that he
aspires, like his courtly counterpart in the Concert Champ?tre, to
join the ranks of those laurel-worthy poets admitted to the "Cas
talian grove and sonorous fount" of theMuses and entrusted with
the stringed instruments of Apollo. He prepares himself for the
arduous ascent to He resolves to refine his song to suit the
Saphos.
lofty subjects that she "encompasses with her sublimest
lyre"
(12.117). In the Concert Champ?tre, the nymph of the Source
infuses the poet with the capacity to sing of sublime matters with
his own instrument.
stringed
The agent of generic ascension, whether or the
Daphne, Saphos,
Source, transforms the of Concert into a
landscape Champ?tre

place of poetic rebirth. So inspired, the urbane poet can indeed

strum his lute and "woods to a consul." There is a
sing dignify

long tradition in pastoral poetry whereby the elegy honors just this
type of person. Conforming with Virgil's Daphnis, the eulogized
individual is generally the master-singer among the shepherds and
custodian of the pastoral realm. He represents a
allegorically polit
ical figure or patron upon whom the landscape, and indeed the
poet, depends. Servius initiated the long accepted identity of
Daphnis as Julius Caesar.32 Generals and kings, even in their
bucolic guises, demand a higher style. The eulogizing of pastoral
grants the poet an to historical
sovereigns opportunity allegorize
events and, concomitantly, to to genres. Yet, the
pretend higher

elegiac topos of the countryside bereft of its custodian exposes its

dependency upon the larger political world.33

Petrarch, in an exegetical epistle
to his second Eclogue, reveals

that Argus, who bid him "Sing boldly," is Robert of Anjou, King
of Naples. His death in 1343 brought about much civil discord, to
which both Petrarch and Boccaccio allude.34 Petrarch uses the
 Jonathan Unglaub 59

topos of the bucolic landscape's deterioration after the loss of its

custodian to express the political upheaval.

"If once the shepherds sang only of Daphnis,

Now it behooves your song to tell of magnanimous
Argus."

Who would survive?if he could?your passing? Truly, ye

shepherds,
Life without Argus is death. Erelong you will see all around
you
Marshes and lakes dry up and the springs and the very ocean.
Winds will be different in breath, the herbs will bear altered
colors,
Flowers another nor shall fruits maintain their
fragrance,
accustomed

Flavors nor meadows their wonted green nor the streams

their clear waters.

Flocks will bear different fleece, the fields yield rich harvests
no longer.
Well do we know itwas he and he only who with his glances
Brightened the world around him and caused all things to be
fecund.

Under his rule the woodlands were always serene and

tranquil;
Peace crowned his brow; with a word he could sweep the
clouds from the heavens.
Now he has gone and ill fortune sorely troubles his faithful.
(2.62-63, 91-102)

The instability of the urban agency of support and the menace

of destructive forces are recurrent themes in the canon. The tradi
tion of pastoral elegy is relevant to the Concert Champ?tre, and its
reception, in two respects. First, it forces the pastoral to confront

death, a rupture with the timeless spring of Arcadia. In so doing,

itmarks the point at which the poet requires a high style?espe
cially if a political figure or a historical crisis is to be allegorically
understood. Second, and more importantly, the elegiac convention

expresses the vulnerability of the bucolic and its sus

landscape
taining song to larger historical tribulations. The contemporary
beholder, familiar with pastoral topoi, would have been aware of
the circumstantial nature in which the idyllic landscape presents
6o THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

itself, whether in verse or

painting, before one's eyes. Such notions

lie at the heart of the Concert Champ?tre?painted at a time when

the Venetian landscape it depicts, like Argus' Neapolitan domain,
had indeed expired.

III. "Venice found itself in the greatest affliction"

Through the Source's inspiration, the pastoral incorporates sol

emn and verse within its rustic songs. This col
subjects ennobling
of genre boundaries enables the poet to great men
lapse eulogize
and their influence upon the vitality of the landscape. Virgil's imi
tators expanded this subtext of the pastoral to employ the land
scape as a for the deterioration and restoration of states.
metaphor
Petrarch, in his fifth Eclogue, presents a dialogue on filial piety.
Two brothers debate their obligation to restore the health of their
senescent mother. She represents Rome torn apart the Avignon
by
schism and Italian factionalism.35 The younger, dutiful son recalls
the "mother" as
having:

... a great it stands on a wooded

mansion; summit;
Brothers of ours long ago, high-minded, to itwould render
Pious observence. Renowned far and wide in those days
our mother

Stirred all to envy of her among the neighboring forests,

Famed for her sylvan treasures, blessed too in her offspring,
Sovereign queen of the woodland, she ruled through the
years until jealous
Death bore away her children. Now all our brothers have
perished.
Their fair renown still endures while we, the despised
survivors,
Draw out our lives, unsung, and our name is buried in

darkness.

Fortune has changed for the homestead in our day; through

out the ages
now it has fallen, under our follies.
Prosperous, collapsing
Let us restore the old house; our mother would hold nothing
dearer. . .

(5.33-44)
 Jonathan Unglaub 61

Petrarch the pastoral and its civilized counter

employs landscape
the mother's mansion and estate, to allegorize his for
point, appeal
a Roman restoration to resolve the papal schism.

In the Concert Champ?tre, the prominence of the background

architecture invites It occupies the "wooded sum
interpretation.
mit" that crowns the triangle outlining the partici
compositional
pants in the concert. The marble, or stucco, porticoed edifice is a

Venetian villa in the terraferma.36 It recalls Petrarch's mansion. A

modest building seems to have been placed next to the villa as a

direct contrast, a reinforcement of the rustic/refined duality that

structures the picture. It breaks the horizon and towers over the

villa, perhaps as a sign of humility, similar to that which the for

mer estate of the Petrarchan mother has been reduced.

The investments of the Venetian in the V?neto for rec

patriciate
reation, reclamation, and agriculture transformed the terraferma

into an Arcadian space by the first decade of the Cinquecento.37

Pietro Bembo's poetic rendition of the countryside in Gli Asolani
(1505) confirmed this assessment of the terraferma's idyllic
charms.38 Like the more prosperous of the mother's estate in
days
Petrarch, the V?neto became "Famed for her sylvan treasures."39

This renewed appreciation of the terraferma resulted from shifting

Venetian economic and imperial objectives away from the Adriatic
and inland toward the Lombard frontier. Venetians developed a
mythic nostalgia for the terraferma. The patrician class cultivated
a mainland villa culture as an Arcadian refuge from the battered

maritime Nobles and humanists constructed villas in the

empire.40
drained marshlands. a retreat on the
recently Trevigian Owning
mainland became a necessary component of social status in Ven

ice, as one chronicler, Girolamo Priuli, observed in 1509:

There was not a citadino or noble, or even commoner,

single
who had the means, who had not purchased at least property
and a house in the terraferma, and most often in the Pado
vano and Trevigiano, locations one to
being nearby enabling
travel there for amusement and to return in a or two. And
day
the great houses amounted to a treasure. . . .And
truly upon
these one to live very delicately and lav
properties proceeded

ishly, as opposed to the ancient Venetian, who desired to live

one now lives most
moderately, abundantly.41

The annexation of the terraferma and its conversion into pros

perous estates enriched Venice. La Serenissima as

greatly emerged
 62 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

Petrarch's undisputed "Sovereign queen of the woodland." Yet

with the consolidation of the pan-European League of Cambrai,
Venice temporarily lost the terraferma. The villa culture was anni

hilated?"Fortune has changed for the homestead in our day;

throughout the ages /Prosperous, now it has fallen, collapsing
under our follies." Priuli attributed Venetian folly to the charms of
the terraferma, which had enticed the patriciate rashly to forsake
their historical commitment to the sea. One may associate the
close interaction of the noble youth and the rustic shepherd in the
Concert Champ?tre with Priuli's complaint that instead of study
ing navigation to become wise counselors to the state, the patri
cian youth remain on the mainland to "practice with countryfolk"
the leisurely life of the villa, and "indeed have become rustics."42
The War of the League of Cambrai nearly brought about Ven
ice's demise. The League was founded on December 10, 1508. It
comprised France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, the Papal
States, and the Italian principalities allied with these powers. King
Louis XII and Emperor Maximilian I colluded with Julius II to
strip Venice of its mainland possessions and reassert their territo
rial claims, of dubious legitimacy, to Lombardy and the V?neto.
The Italian conspirators had often been wary of Venice's mainland

expansion, fearing her ultimate peninsular objective.43

The forces of the League penetrated Venetian territory in April
1509. They massed along the bank of the Adda at the Lombard
frontier. French troops, having stealthily crossed the river, van

quished the ill-commanded Venetian mercenary armies at Agna

dello on May 9, 1509. As a result of low morale and diminished

prospects of booty, the remaining Venetian legions effectively dis
banded. The V?neto was placed in jeopardy. The nobles of the
mainland cities pledged allegiance to the Emperor to reassert their
birthright, lost under Venetian rule. The combination of this crip
pling defeat and the imminent threat of Imperial invasion per
suaded the Venetian Senate to surrender Verona, Vicenza, and
Padua to the Germans.44 The terraferma, now
unprotected by
Venetian arms, was devastated. the had
Ironically, patriciate

hoped to preserve their villas by ceding their property to the

enemy. to recoup their estates.45 Never
They expected eventually
theless, the misguided policy of appeasement exacer
ultimately
bated the sack of the terraferma. As the released provinces
succumbed to many to reconsider the wisdom
depredation, began
 Jonathan Unglaub 63

of forfeiting so much of the V?neto. By mid-July a polarized Sen

ate debated whether to forsake the terraferma as the bane of the
Republic, as Doge Leonardo Loredan proposed, or risk all in order
to regain the lands.46 The ardent proponent of the latter
imperiled
course, Luigi da Molino, proclaimed that "the commodious and
convenient estates of our citizens, the abundance of fruits
private
one there, and the pleasantness and of the villas,
gathers amenity
as
these things, desirable they are, must drive and incite us to act
more
willingly."47
The sudden surrender of the V?neto placated the Emperor.
forces grew reinforcements were scarce.
Occupying complacent;
The Imperial treasury was depleted. These factors enabled Venice
to reconquer Padua on the seventeenth of July, 1509. Drastic
defensive measures were then undertaken in anticipation of mas
sive retaliation by the Germans. The Venetians set fire to many
estates in the of Treviso and Padua in order to
patrician vicinity
prevent their conversion into bulwarks by the forces of the
League.48 In his entry for September 15, 1509, Priuli records that
the Venetian regiments, "for the fortification of the city of Padua,
wrought great ruin, that only with great weariness would one be
able to judge the great and intolerable damage and the value of the
buildings of every sort ruined. And he who has not seen itwith his
own eyes, will never be able to judge nor think about it: It is neces

sary to have because these are the fruits of war."49 The

patience,
"fructi dele gu?re" included the conflagration of the most opulent
villas in the Paduan campagna.
The rapacity of the invaders, coupled with the arson of the
Paduan estates, decimated the idyllic landscape. Priuli records that
the trail of destruction extended from the Trevigian territories
near Castelfranco to Mestre:

were
Also today, the Venetian fathers advised by means of let
ters from the chancellor of Mestre, a next to the
city lagoon,
how the enemy cavalry, circa five hundred in number, have
raced across the Trevigiano Mestre, and all in order
reaching
to rob and the peasants and territories. . . . I
plunder Truly,
cannot describe how much these contaminated and
updates
afflicted the city of Venice from the first one until the last;
and there they seemed to find themselves in the utmost dan
ger, never seen, nor nor nor
having thought, imagined, judged
to see the enemies Mestre and upon the shores
reaching salty
 64 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

and their palaces, and villas so much

buildings, costing
money to take some leisure time and and their
pleasure; prop
erties so well maintained and a treasure?the
costing verily
ground alone more than ducats; and their so
thirty gardens
honorably made with every diligence and care that verily they
seemed an earthly paradise, especially for being near the
lagoon.... And each great noble gentleman would have been
able to lodge in such places, but now, truly, one would never
have imagined it possible to witness such ruin, every
seeing
thing in the hand of the enemy, and how there they wreaked
havoc, set fires, and felled the trees in spitefulness and to fuel
the fire. And without doubt, for similar respects, the city of
Venice found itself in the greatest affliction, and this I saw
with my own
eyes.50

The plunder of the invaders uprooted the otium of terraferma

villa culture. In poetry, Petrarch the estate as a
employed metaphor
of the decline and desired restoration of Rome. In history, the
estate was literally sacrificed in both Venice's surrender and
reconquest of the terraferma. Petrarch's Roman laments, such as

the fifth attained a resonance in Venice after

Eclogue, poignant
Agnadello. In history and cultural ideology, Venice viewed herself
as the successor to Rome.51 Now that the Serene own
Republic's
downfall appeared imminent, Petrarch's fifth Eclogue, and his
famous political elegies, "Spirito gentil" and "Italia mia," inspired
a barrage of lamenti storici. They versified the demoralizing crisis
of Cambrai.52 Sections of the "Italia mia" presage the later Vene
tian laments, and read as accounts of the stark
political poetic
reversal of Venice's fortune.53

Petrarch uses the countryside as the figurative locus of societal

degeneration and civil strife. He also initiated the tradition of cul
tivating a contemplative life on the terraferma by retiring to his
own retreat at in the Paduan The villa in the
Arqua campagna.54
Concert Champ?tre conflates these Petrarchan notions of the
landscape. The porticoed structure crowns the head of the genteel
poet. Giorgione the of a retreat in the
depicts tranquillity poet's
V?neto?a space not unlike the grove of that
poetic inspiration
faced Petrarch's copy of the Eclogues. Yet the conception and
of a the terraferma villa culture,
reception landscape portraying
so soon after the Venetian defense of the retaken Padua,
painted
 Jonathan Unglaub 65

could hardly have been innocent of the devastation described in

Priuli and contemporary poetic laments.
Sannazaro, an exile like Petrarch, his return to
envisages

Naples. He contemplates the abandoned villas, including his own

Mergellina, where so much literary activity took place:55

But who will come that can vouch for us your sufferings,
noble Mergellina, how you so burn,
and your laurels are become dry and barren sticks?

How many shepherds, Sebeto, and how many peoples

will you see dying, of those that are settled beside you,
before your banks are elmed or poplared?
Alas, once great Eridanus honored you
and Tiber at your name benignly nodded:
now your own are faithful to you.
Nymphs scarcely
Dead is she that made ornament to your fountain,
lovely
and preferred your depths to all mirrors:
whence your fame, flying to heaven, exalted itself.
(12.88-90,103-111)

Sannazaro places the villa in the background of a pastoral

lament on the impotence of the Source (the Sebeto) to nourish lit
erary ambition. Similarly, the Concert Champ?tre juxtaposes the

elegiac ensemble of poet, Source, and fountain with the villa.

Although metaphorical in Sannazaro, would not the burning

Mergellina remind the Venetian reader of the conflagration of the
terraferma villas?the dying shepherds, the inhabitants terrorized,
tortured, and defiled by the enemy? While harbingers of disaster
are subtle at best in the Concert an mourn
Champ?tre, affecting
fulness permeates the figures of the foreground. At the apogee of
the composition's central, structure rests the multivalent
unifying
villa?the icon of Venetian investment in the terraferma, the prod
uct of the Venetian expansion provoking the formation of the
League, the locus of literary inspiration, and the site of the
destruction feared to portend the demise of the Republic. As in
Petrarch and Sannazaro, the villa assumes a
mediating position
between landscape and urban
society. Its imposition upon the
bucolic field registers the historical vicissitudes from which Arca
dia yearns, but fails, to escape. In the months
ultimately following
Agnadello, the villa placed inGiorgione's landscape constituted a
66 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

poignantly charged image. Might it not have reminded some eru

dite beholders of Petrarch's metaphorical use of the villa to deplore

the degeneration of Rome and appeal for its renovation? An even
more reference may have been Sannazaro's a
topical Mergellina,
monument to the reality of foreign occupation.
I am not
proposing
a
programmatic between
correspondence
Petrarch or Sannazaro and but rather an
Giorgione, analogous
response provoked by similar historical circumstances. Recourse
to pastoral topoi underlies the composition and reception of the
audience is alert to these nuanced references.
pastoral?the Topi
cal issues condition the selection of conventions in constructing an

avatar of this inherently intertextual genre. The features of the

Concert Champ?tre derive from, among other sources, a highly
familiar corpus of pastoral leitmotifs. These topoi were well suited
to express reactions to the^political crisis which occasioned the
creation of a plaintive, elegiac pastoral picture in 1509-1510.56

IV. "Our fields are in turmoil"

everywhere

The tribulations of war not wreak havoc upon the coun

only
tryside and its villa culture. The desecration of the sylvan grove

prevents it from as the locus of

functioning poetic inspiration.
Boccaccio's fifth Eclogue, entitled "Silva Cadens," recounts the

devastation of the countryside through the voice of Caliopus,

whom Boccaccio describes as "someone most
reciting perfectly
the misfortunes of the desolate city."57 This figure has a function
equivalent to the Source in emblematizing the privileged poetic
genres suited to solemn subjects. Caliopus recites the dirge of the
nymph Chalcidia who remembers how the ravaged forest had once
soothed the nymphs to song.

This wood touched heaven

with beechtrees and was thick with ilex too,
distinguished with its oaks, and worth beholding
for its green laurel, dense with cedar, lovely
with mournful cypress.

Why should Imention

the clear streams leisurely through grasses,
winding
the springs, fresh lakes, and caves artlessly hidden
by limestone?
 Jonathan Unglaub 6j

Ah wretched me! for I remember well

inwhat blithe dances I saw satyrs leaping
and gentle nymphs adorned with blooms and garlands
entwined with oakleaf, how sang sweet verses
they
to the woodlands now with reeds and now with strings
made tuneful by their art. But why review
so many
things?
(5.30-33,41-43, 64-69)

The seemingly inviolable serenity of this pastoral dreamscape

evokes the Concert Champ?tre. The once-habitual concerts alter

nating reeds and strings anticipate the musical diversions inGior

gione's idyll. The lofty verse of the nymph memorializes the
landscape and its music. Yet her inspired commemoration of hal
cyon times heightens the present "sorrow" for the "wretched

woods" where "the Italian oak is burning with set fires /in every
part, no remains, alas!" (5.3, 78-80). A similar realization
pine
overcomes the nymph Galatea in Boiardo's second as she
Eclogue
witnesses the extirpation of the land.

I speak, and yet I turn my face often

to the beautiful countryside that once was full
of every now miserable and
pleasantry, oppressed.
Where are both the choruses and the song so serene

that it was worthy of Parnassus and its fountain?

How has so much happiness failed?
Where are the sisters of Phaeton
who used to shade with such verdure
this beautiful river from the mouth to the mountain?
Which malignant planet or dark star
has wrought such misfortune in so blossoming a
place
that merely to gaze upon it is fearsome.

(2.58-69)58

In contrast, the Concert Champ?tre presents the beholder with

this elusive vision of a serene Parnassus. There, a foun
precisely
tain and a verdure-framed river do coax its inhabitants to
gently
song. Like Boccaccio's and Boiardo's lost idylls, Giorgione's por
trayal of the terraferma is stridently eloquent in its obliviousness
to the fearsome place the V?neto had so precipitously become. The
68 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

songs the terraferma now induced, besides Petrarchan

only politi
cal laments, were the cries of the countrymen.
dispossessed
Indeed, it is in this dissonance between the placid grove of pastoral
song and the woeful realities of its historical moment that the Con
cert Champ?tre re-enacts the greatest poem: Virgil's
pastoral

Eclogue 1.
Virgil's first Eclogue tells of the confrontation between Meli
boeus and Tityrus. The former is a farmer commanded to vacate

his property so Rome could reward its soldiers with the confis
cated acreage. The latter is a slave granted liberty and a secure par
cel of land by the imperial powers in Rome. With disbelief,
Meliboeus observes how Tityrus insouciantly plays music in his
protected glade:

You, Tityrus, under the spreading, sheltering beech,

Tune woodland on a delicate reed;
musings
We flee our borders, our sweet fields,
country's
home; you, lazing in the shade,
Abandon
Make woods resound with lovely Amaryllis.

Not jealous, but amazed am I?our fields

Are in turmoil. . .
everywhere
(1.1-5, 11-12)

At the outset of the Eclogues, Virgil offers a glimpse of leisure

but discredits the pastoral existence through Meilboeus' banish
ment. The bucolic ambiance can no be taken for granted
longer
but relies upon the benevolence of a ruler and the of
compensation
his soldiers. Servius reveals that Tityrus is to be identified with
Virgil. His placement "under the spreading, sheltering beech"
(patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi, 1), alludes to Virgil's Man
tuan estate, restored to him Augustus' intervention.59
through
This is the ultimate of dependency upon the larger
admission
political world for the maintenance of the pastoral mode of life. In
his analysis of the phrase totis usque adeo turbatur agris
undique
("Our fields are in turmoil," 12), Servius affirms its
everywhere
upon the "communal expulsion" of the Mantuan farm
emphasis
ers. Tityrus' singular immunity is all the more remarkable for this

reason.60 Otium remains, but as a

only privileged commodity
administered by the Roman leader from his urban seat. Meliboeus
claims not to envy Tityrus' privileged space of repose. But his
 Jonathan Unglaub 69

denial enhances the reader's sense of and his sympa

only injustice
for the farmer and his countrymen. As one
thy dispossessed
scholar acutely surmises, "Meliboeus' opening words make it

clear that it is no to assume the idyll. Rather, we

longer possible
must stand, likeMeliboeus, on the border line between dream and
reality, and behold the idyll's essence by watching someone else's
happiness. Meliboeus is a spectator in a land whose survival is
now an object of awe to him."61

The of Giorgione's vision of the terraferma must also

serenity
have struck contemporary Venetian beholders as the antithesis to

"fields . . . in turmoil" left by the Cambrai invaders.

everywhere
Like Meliboeus, the Venetian the devastation and sur
witnessing
render of the V?neto submits to the exigencies of the historical
moment and forfeits his land. Meliboeus' irreconcilability with
Tityrus' leisure and bucolic ambiance becomes literally displaced
outside the space of representation in the Concert Champ?tre.
From this external, "Meliboean" vantage point, the Venetian

beholder could survey the commodious landscape and the indolent

music-making with sorrowful disbelief. Like Tityrus, the urbane
poet continues playing unabated in an illusory pastoral world.
Tityrus' "woods resound with lovely Amaryllis," a nymph that,
to some ancient interpreters, Rome. She sug
according allegorizes
gests, extension, the majestic verse necessary to exalt Caesar's
by
beneficence. By contrast, Tityrus' former "Mantuan" nymph Gal
atea represents the impoverishing bucolic voice. Under her he "had
no care of property nor of freedom" (1.31-32).62 Similarly,
hope
the courtly poet in the Concert Champ?tre is nourished by the ele
gant of the Source, an Amaryllis of urban song. He remains
nymph
oblivious to the lowly woodland nymph, whose rustic musings
neither reward nor As a poet of urban and
bring reprieve. society
its villa culture, Giorgione's lutenist has been allocated a parcel of
Arcadia in which to his art. Nonetheless, the
practice singular
otium of the poet underscores the banishment of everyone else.

This transforms the serene into an

landscape improbable appari
tion of halcyon times.63

Similar ontological structures, in which the spectator is placed

outside the mirage of innocence, can be seen in another

pastoral

image produced in Venice during the League of Cambrai conflict

(fig. 3). In Giulio Campagnola's Old Shepherd of 1509, the shep
herd, his mouth on a "delicate reed," recalls whom
resting Tityrus,
Meliboeus addresses thus: old man (Fortunate senex)\
"Lucky
 70 THE CONCERT CHAMPETRE

your lands will then remain" (1.46).64 Tityrus relaxes, sheltered by

the rustic building of his secured farm. Meliboeus' forlorn posi
tion is assumed by the beholder outside of the space of representa
tion. Glimpsing Tityrus' safeguarded realm, the Venetian viewer,
dispossessed of his terraferma estate, might well ponder, likeMel
iboeus, "Shall I ever again, within my country's borders,/With
wonder see a cottage roof?" (1.67-68). Giulio's exten
turf-heaped
sive humanistic education would more than account for this not so

oblique reference to Virgil. Giulio engraved this illustration of

Tityrus' spared pastoral realm in the year of the loss of the terra
ferma. Its topical aptness, and irony, would hardly have escaped
him, or his stylistic and spiritual kinsman in pastoral art,
Giorgione.65

Campagnola and Giorgione

appropriated the Tityrus/Meli
boeus dialectic in constructing
their topically charged pastoral
images created during the Cambrai crisis. This tragic period for
the terraferma shared much with Virgil's poetically veiled account
of the aftermath of the Roman civil war and the horrors of Augus
tan land redistribution. The reapplication of Virgilian conventions
to express the oppression of the countryside has many precedents
in post-classical variations of the pastoral. Boiardo reformulated
the Virgilian dialectic in the eighth Eclogue of his Pastorale to
allude to the wars that Ferrara in 1482-84. Ven
ravaged Ironically,
ice was then the culprit in the devastation of the Ferrarese cam

pagna. As in the terraferma twenty-six years later, Ferrarese fields

were overrun, forests were burned, were deserted and
villages
country estates were ransacked.66 Melibeo, now the oppo
acting
site role, finds Menalca He about the cause of
weeping. inquires
Menalca's bereavement. Menalca with a "Meliboean"
responds
outburst contrasting the misery of the shepherds with the oblivi
ous of his
prosperity interrogator:

Well must you stay away from every person,

0 Melibeo, if even here it remains secret
that which is evident and all the world hears.
1 am bold just to speak
here of war, and I fear that it listens to me not,
this beautiful place where peace resides.
Your lambs, here gathered
around the usual fountains and rivers,

they go on grazing freely and unbound;

 Jonathan Unglaub 71

and here, secure, you have sung of love.

How from this is our fortune!

different
Our herds and sheep as booty,
and ourselves driven out of or dead in the forest;
Never under the Heavens could I have imagined seeing
so cruel, that to narrate it
something
I become anxious and fear not to be believed.

(8.13-22, 25-30)67

Boiardo also modeled his first Eclogue on the dialogue between

Tityrus Again reversing his model, Titiro deplores
andMeliboeus.
his unjust misfortune and dreams of the bountiful landscape now
lost to him (1.7-15). Mopsus, his reprieved companion, offers
only uncomprehending platitudes to console him. Titiro envisions
what he has lost since that time when the landscape flourished in a
happier state.
Like his Venetian counterpart surveying his
scourged estate with the memory of its former beauty, Titiro sifts
the ashes to contemplate what was:
through

Where ismy dwelling along the shore?

Where is the rich garden of golden fruits?
Everything is broken and burned into ruin.
Where is the new little glade and its green laurel

with tender sprigs that Imyself planted,

whence, once of love, now, Iweep?
singing suffering,

My herd was abducted from me, the flock infected

with pestilence died, my pleasant countryside
is left only wasted and squalid.
(1.49-54,106-108)68

Titiro, like Virgil's Meliboeus, revels in remembrance while

despairingly submitting to the sorrows of history. In the Concert
Champ?tre, Giorgione similarly seems to envision the plenteous
as a mental an memory, in the
countryside private refuge, idyllic
midst of desolation. Yet in 1509-1510, the picture would have
offered only bittersweet consolation to the Venetian groping for
past tranquillity.
The between Meliboeus and Tityrus became not only
exchange
the topos employed by Boiardo and others, but also the image that
 72 THE CONCERT CHAMPETRE

signified all of Virgil's Eclogues. Characteristically, itwas the only

illustrated episode from the Eclogues in the first printed editions
of Virgil. It constituted the visual emblem of pastoral poetry in the
Renaissance. In addition to the poem's relevance to the historically

conditioned experience of the Concert Champ?tre, contemporary

illustrations of Virgil's first Eclogue furnished a more immediate
paradigm for the painting. In the Stagnino edition of Virgil, pub
lished at Venice in 1507, the Eclogues are illustrated with a single
image of the encounter between Tityrus and Meliboeus (fig. 4).69
Unlike Campagnola, the wood-block printmaker departs signifi
cantly from Virgil's designation of Tityrus as Fortunate Senex and
a young, clean-shaven musician. The was
pictures Stagnino image
the literal illustration of Virgil's first Eclogue closest in time and
place to Giorgione's portrayal of the youthful lutenist in the Con
cert Champ?tre. In Sebastian Brant's edition of Virgil published at
in 1502, woodcuts illustrate each a
Strasbourg Eclogue, creating
veritable biblia pauperum of pastoral poetry.70 Being first, the
depiction o? Eclogue 1was privileged (fig. 5). Like Petrarch's inti
mation that Simone could paint the "enigmas of high-spoken Vir
gil," Brant proclaims, in his introductory poem, that the

illustrations lift the veil for learned and unlearned alike?pictorial

becomes the visual counterpart to Servius.71
exegesis
InVirgil, the dialogue between Tityrus andMeliboeus occurs in
the shaded enclosure preserving otium, while constantly implying
a more which one must pass in his
expansive geography through
torical time. These spaces are identified, with Tityrus
respectively,
and Meliboeus. Brant's cartographic rendition of the landscape lit

erally depicts the topographical allusions of the Eclogue.72

we recall, own status. had
Tityrus, allegorizes Virgil's Augustus
interceded to exempt his Mantuan farm from compulsory land
redistribution. Brant makes explicit Servius' geographical gloss on
the eclogue. He pictures Mantua as the hamlet behind the ousted
Meliboeus and Rome as the metropolis looming over Tityrus'
sheltering beech. The background juxtaposition of views of Man
tua and Rome synecdochically encodes the tension of the dialogue:
the agrarian locus of and exile versus the urban arbiter of
reprieve
and banishment.73 Both and Brant enact a
pastoral peace Virgil

juxtaposition between the private immediacy of "familiar

streams" and shade" and the space of exile to which the
"cooling
masses have been consigned. Meliboeus sighs while surveying the
fertile lands he will soon abandon to the Roman legions:
 Jonathan Unglaub 73

Think of these fields in a soldier's cruel hands!

These crops for foreigners! See how discord leaves
Countrymen wretched: for them we've tilled and sown!

(Eclogue 1.70-72)

He resigns himself to exile in the panoramic expanse of historical

space:

Ah, but we others leave for thirsty lands?

Africa, or Oxus' waves,
Scythia, chalky
Or Britain, wholly cut off from the world.
Shall I ever again, within my country's borders

With wonder see a cottage roof,

turf-heaped
realm, at last, some modest ears of grain?
My

(Eclogue 1.64-69)

In the Concert Champ?tre, Giorgione also places the locus of

exile and abandonment in the mental space of the background
villa, the distant town and even the rustic struc
panorama?the
ture. The latter recalls the building in Campagnola's print and
likewise evokes Meliboeus' painfully abandoned "turf-heaped
Besides an Arcadian from the the ter
cottage." being refuge city,
raferma estate was also devoted to Like
agricultural production.74
Meliboeus' Mantuan farm, the terraferma villas succumbed to

"foreign" soldiers. In a mass emulation of Meliboeus, the peas

of the V?neto abandoned their borders . . . sweet
antry "country's
fields," as soldiers overran them. from the
imperial Escaping
forces of Christendom occupying the "fields everywhere in tur

moil," the terraferma husbandman, "Sick, driving [his] goats,

scarcely leading this one" (Eclogue 1.12-13), journeyed toward the
city in the lagoon, "wholly cut off from the world." In his entries
between September 11 and 16, 1509, Priuli describes the doleful
practice of "abandonando il dolze e charo domicilio."75 He and
Sanuto recount the wretched of
repeatedly spectacle fugitives
from own territories their way to
Giorgione's Trevigian clamoring
Venice and into its canals, calli and campi. Ordered to evacuate in

anticipation of German invasion, they clogged the road to Venice

with their makeshift carts, battered families, and animals.76

Truly all the territories of Treviso and Mestre were placed in

such flight, that it was not
possible
to
judge,
nor was one able
74 THE CONCERT CHAMPETRE

to deduce, if everyone escaped. Each peasant had mounted

upon his carts the women and children and their meager pos
sessions to come to Venice. All the roads that headed toward
the shores were so with carts that one was not
salty jammed
able to pass; and the road from Treviso toMarghera, called
"il Teragio," was so choked by carts laden with these poor
country folk, their children, and all of their animals that there
was no space to move. And with so much
weeping, sobbing,

screaming and lamentations, they contaminated the heavens,

not just the men. I do not believe that so many lamentations,
tears and are heard even in Hell. ... It was
sighs certainly

something incredible and pathetic to see and hear, much

more so than what Iwrite of it.77

The Senate was moved by the unflagging loyalty of the terra

ferma peasantry, the who alone never
especially Trevigiani,

yielded to imperial might. In gratitude, they dispatched patrician

vessels to facilitate the crossing from Mestre.78
lagoon
Once in Venice, the refugees dispersed to several temporary
shelters, the of which was the recently rebuilt Fondaco dei
largest
Tedeschi.79 Ironically, Giorgione and Titian had frescoed the exte
rior, only the year before, with allegories of Venetian invincibil
ity.80 The center of Venetian economic relations with the Germans
now served as for the terraferma peasants,
provisional lodging
ousted from their homes by the armies of the warehouse's epony
mous tenants.

The wretched consequences of exile were evident in

abundantly
Venice. Priuli and Sanuto record that the refugees and their flocks
were Lamentations and wails reverberated
ubiquitous. pathetic

throughout the city. Corralled in its narrow calli and campi, dis
oriented animals bellowed day and night.81 With shepherds and
farmers lodging in the great urban hall of commerce, sheep and
swine herds congregating in Piazza San Marco, Venice after Agna
dello had become a displaced perversion of the pastoral.82 The har
mony of bucolic song had given way to a cacophony of despair.
How could the painter of the Concert Champ?tre, a likely native
of the terraferma, or any Venetian, not have been moved by the

plight of his countrymen with whom he shared asylum in Venice?

Confronted with this spectacle, the painting's idyllic portrayal of
the terraferma, its topography, its villa culture, and its musical

diversion could only have been viewed with the greatest irony. The
 Jonathan Unglaub 75

Concert Champ?tre is a wistful souvenir of a landscape now

utterly annihilated and purged of its populace. Like Virgil's
implicit geography and Brant's landscape, Giorgione's prospect of
the V?neto represents both the bucolic realm to be forsaken and
the space to be traversed toward a future full of suffering and
bereft of otium. With Meliboeus' misery manifested in the refu
gees inundating the city, would not the creator and beholders of
the Concert Champ?tre have interpreted the encounter with this
conventional, even space as an all too real dra
"Tityran," pastoral
matization of Virgil's first Eclogue? A picture emblematic of the
genre thus re-enacts its most renowned Eclogue, whose
pastoral
verses would have resonated with an almost documentary
relevance.

The Virgilian themes of dispossession and expulsion also

became in later bucolic verse. In Sannazaro's tenth Eclogue,
topoi
the poet Caracciolo demurs to seek Arcadia. He remains in the

campagna as an embittered witness to its abandon

Neapolitan
ment. His verses narrate a Meliboean of exile and
plight

deprivation:

Let him thank Heaven, then, whoever has plenty,

for any good of his own in this vile wretchedness
that drives away everybody from his own fold.
The cowherds and the shepherds abandon Hesperia,
the familiar woods and beloved fountains;
for the hard times them cause of it.
give

They wander among mountains uncultivated, uninhabitable,

so not to see their little flock oppressed
by foreign peoples, unjust, inexorable.

(10.61-69)

Similar to theMantuan setting of Virgil's Eclogue 1, Caracciolo

couches the turmoil of history in the language of pastoral exile.
Like Mantua, Sannazaro's characterization of Naples as
Virgil's
the abandoned "Hesperia" of "familiar woods and beloved foun
tains" and as evokes the actual sta
"oppressed by foreign peoples"
tus of the Venetian terraferma. The daily encounter with exiles
from his homeland, the continuing evacuation of an idyllic land
scape, and the immediate threat of foreign invasion compelled the
author and audience of the Concert like Sannazaro, to
Champ?tre,
recast the Virgilian to register current historical crises.
paradigm
 76 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

ninth forms a to the first and serves to

Virgil's Eclogue pendant
frame the entire collection within the theme of lost leisure and
lands.83 The poem recounts the of two farm
journey dispossessed
ers, Lycidas and Moeris, toward the city. Moeris agonizes:

0 have we lived for . . We

. never dreamt
Lycidas,
An outsider would lay claim to our little farm
And say, "This ismine, old plowmen. Now clear out!"
Defeated, grieving?chance turns down?
everything upside
(9.2-5)

Lycidas, dumbfounded, wonders aloud of a landscape anticipating

Giorgione's pastoral oasis:

1 thought I'd heard that where the hills draw back

And begin to make the ridge slope gently down
To the stream and age-worn beeches, brittle-topped?

He stops, insisting to his disconsolate companion, "All this Men

alcas had preserved with songs" (9.7-10). Moeris, with the sapi
ence of ill-fortune, reminds him of the grim inefficacy of poetry.
The hills and valley lie utterly defenseless against the ravages of
war (9.10-13). As in the Concert the vital
Champ?tre, landscape's
ity remains as a memory of times. Yet even
only poetic halcyon
poetic conjuration of the locus amoenus is ineffective when con

fronting the violence to the land and the ruthless expulsion of its
inhabitants. Moeris discloses that the poet, Menalcas, has been
banished from the pastoral ambiance. If one follows Servius by
reading Menalcas as Virgil, then Caesar's dispensation fails to
even part of the as a enclosure
safeguard countryside reposeful
given to song.84 Lycidas, in trepidation of poetry's demise and the
consequent loss of an ideal exclaims:
landscape,

Your comforts?you too?almost snatched from us?

Who would sing of nymphs? or spread the grassy earth

With flowers, or bring on fountains with green shade?
(9.18-20)

In an elegiac manner, attributes the of the

Virgil expiration

landscape to the exile of the Daphnis-like poet.85 His songs had

preserved the locus amoenus; his now the
departure consigns
 Jonathan Unglaub 77

Giorgionesque of mossy herbage and fountains to the

landscape
forces of history. Like memories of the shady greensward and
music Menalcas' songs are "comforts," bitter
peaceful making,
sweet diversions offering solace in oppressive, joyless times.86

Yet despite the precarious status of song and the landscape it

sustains, the despair of the farmers dissipates as they recite the
songs of the departed Menalcas. Their alternating reminiscences

oscillate between Menalcas' droll Theocritan bucolics?

"Tityrus, pasture my goats till I return?

I sha'n't be gone water them when fed,

long?and
And don't bump into that goat, for he butts."
(9.23-25)87

?and his encomiastic verses "to a consul"

dignify incorporating

topical allusions to history:

"Varus, your name, should Mantua survive,

Mantua all too near to sad Cremona,

Melodious swans will raise up to the stars."

(9.27-29)

In the Concert Champ?tre, the seated nude representing bucolic

song and the Source of ennobled verse bracket the musi
paired
cians. They suggest the rustic/refined duality of Menalcas' (Vir

gil's) repertory. To the left of the flutist, under a thick canopy of

foliage, a Theocritan shepherd approaches what might just be that
notoriously insolent goat. Behind the Source and above the accom

plished poet stands a Venetian villa, icon of the decimated terra

ferma and its expelled inhabitants, one not, dissimilar to
perhaps,
the estates of Virgil's "Mantua, all to near sad Cremona."88 In Vir

gil, the juxtaposition of blithe "Idylls" and topical lament entails

a or suffusion of dissonance their
"suspension" permitted through
as Memories of songs are
performance pastoral songs.89 simply
as objects of "comfort" and cherished as commemo
contemplated
rations. Similarly inGiorgione, the crepuscular beauty of the land
scape has the accommodating effect of Virgilian "suspension."
The viewer's sorrow, provoked by the circumstances of the work,

is diffused within the pastoral atmosphere of peaceful reflection.90

The remembrance of Menalcas' verses
shepherds' consoling
alerts them to the power of song. Their surrogate voices
Orphic
78 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

commemorate the Daphnis-like poet. This ignites the concomitant

hope for the landscape's resurgence.91 To this end, Lycidas recites

a song where the pastoral augurs rebirth:
deity

"Daphnis, why study ancient constellations?

Behold, the star of Caesar has burst forth,

To make the fields rejoice in crops, and grapes
Ripen and color on the sunny hills.
Graft pear trees, Daphnis; your sons will pluck the fruits."
(9.46-50)

Although the landscape is deprived of its protector, Menalcas,

the perpetuation of his verse at least some future peace
portends
when song will resound in fruitful woodlands. InVirgil, the boun
tiful landscape is not only a memory orphically revitalized; it is
also the hope for an auspicious future. The burdens of the
moment, however, sweet memories, stifle reverie,
pierce hopeful
and silence song. While Lycidas urges Moeris to continue singing
in order to "Make the trip less painful," he wearily replies "No
more, my boy, let's do what must be done" (9.64, 66). Similarly,
the of the Concert presents a
landscape Champ?tre consoling
memory of a past and, future. But its elu
placid, songful perhaps,
sive remote from current rein
beauty, experience, poignantly
forces the present nadir in Venice's fortunes. The beholder's

displacement in viewing the painted idyll is similar to that in hear

ing the landscape eulogized in contemporary poetic laments. In

these verses, as in one witnesses an between a lin

Virgil, interplay

gering mirage of the abundant Italian landscape and an outcry at

the historical forces conspiring to destroy it. Indeed, at the height
of the Paduan crisis in 1509, the author of La Obsidione di Padua
castigates the Italian conspirators in the League of Cam
renegade
brai for failing to cherish the once-flourishing terraferma country
side as their locus amoenus. In his exposition of history, the

author implies that it is precisely the pastoral which is at stake:

Are not of Italian stock?. . .

you

But favor those who try with every art

To destroy of the world the most beautiful part?

That which of every land is nurturing mother
And for her divinity elected by the gods;
 Jonathan Unglaub 79

That which ismore fertile and felicitous,

Healthy, pleasant and of everything most perfect.

That which one can say nature

Endows with all her art and care?
Where are fields more fertile and felicitous?
Where are forests more dense and woods more shadowy?
Where are the hills happier and so bright?
Where are more and harbored from the sun?
valleys pleasant

Where are groves of oil and wine more fertile?

Where, if not in the garden of Italy?
Where are more rivers, lakes, and fountains?

Where are more beautiful and numerous seas?

Where are more inhabited and useful mountains?

Where is the to the heavens more and
countryside gracious
dear?

Where is this place, if not among us, dear Italians?

If only you had looked after your own richness.92

NOTES

This study owes much to the inexhaustible insight and encouragement of David
Rosand. I am also grateful to David Freedberg for valuable criticisms and sugges
tions, as well as to my colleagues Frederick Ilchman, Emily O'Brien, and Domi
nique Surh, who reviewed the text at various stages. Of course, I am solely

responsible for any faults that remain.

1.1 use these works extensively throughout. I quote from the following editions:

Virgil, "Eclogues," tr. Paul Alpers, in Paul Alpers, The Singer of the Eclogues: A

Study of Virgilian Pastoral (Berkeley 1979), 9-63; Petrarch, Bucolicum Carmen, tr.
Thomas G. Bergin (New Haven 1974); Giovanni Boccaccio, Eclogues (Bucolicum
Carmen), tr. Janet Smarr (New York 1987); Matteo M. Boiardo, "Pastorale," in

Opere Volgari, Scrittori d'ltalia 224, ed. Pier V. Mengaldo (Bari 1962), 131-72; J.
Sannazaro, Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, tr. Ralph Nash (Detroit 1966), 29
154. Hereafter these editions will be referred to by author alone with verse refer
ences following the translation given in the text. In the case of Boiardo the
translations are my own. In the case of the prose passages from Sannazaro, I cite
page references from Nash's translation ( hereafter "N") and the following Italian
edition (hereafter "M"): Jacopo Sannazaro, "Arcadia," in Opere Volgari, Scrittori
d'ltalia 220, ed. Alfredo Mauro (Ban 1962), 1-132.
8o THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

is not my concern. I adopt Giorgione's

2. Attribution authorship for consistency.
The arguments of my study would not fundamentally differ if Titian were defini

tively shown to be solely or partially responsible for the work. An exhaustive biblio
graphic survey of the arguments upholding both Giorgione's and Titian's

authorship can be found in Alessandro Ballarin, "Le probl?me des oeuvres de la

jeunesse de Titien avanc?es et recul?es de la critique," in Le si?cle de Titien: L'?ge
d'or de la peinture ? Venise, ed. Michel Laclotte, exh. cat., Grand Palais (Paris
1993), 305-14, and cat. no. 43, 340-8. He advocates theTitian attribution. Recent
adherents of the Giorgione attribution include Christian Hornig, Giorgiones
Sp?twerk (Munich 1987), 75-82; David Rosand, "Giorgione, Venice and the Pasto
ral Vision," in Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape, ed. Robert Cafritz, exh.
cat., National Gallery (Washington, DC 1988), 43-45; and Konrad Oberhuber, "Le
message de Giorgione et du jeune Titien dessinateurs," in Le si?cle de Titien: L'?ge
d'or de la peinture ? Venise, ed. Michael Laclotte, exh. cat., Grand Palais (Paris
1993), 431-43. For a new attribution to Domenico Mancini, see Paul Holberton,
"The Pastorale or F?te Champ?tre in the Early Sixteenth Century," in Titian 500,
Studies in the History of Art 45 (Washington, DC 1994), 255-258; and Charles

Hope, "The Tempest over Titian," New York Review of Books, 19 June 1993,
22-6.
3. Recent effortsto place Giorgione's works, especially the Tempesta, in the con
text of the Cambrai crisis, have been seminal to my interpretation of the Concert
Champ?tre: Deborah Howard, "Giorgione's Tempesta and Titian's Assunta in the
Context of the Cambrai Wars," Art History 8 (1985), 271-278, and Paul Kaplan,
"The Storm of War: The Paduan Key to Giorgione's Tempesta," Art History 9
(1986), 405-427.
4. A detailed survey of the numerous interpretations of the Concert Champ?tre
is found in Ballarin (note 2), 340-348. The fundamental study is Patricia Egan,
"Poesia and the F?te Champ?tre," Art Bulletin 41 (1959), 303-313. She relates con
temporary tarot card allegorical figures of Music and Poetry to features of Giorgi
one's painting, especially the female nudes. Since both pipe-playing and decanting
into a spring are attributes of "Poesia," Egan argues that the nudes allegorize higher
and lower genres of poetry as differentiated in Aristotle's Poetics. This distinction
is then echoed throughout the composition. Other studies adduce texts ranging
from Pietro Bembo's Gli Asolani, to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, to Ficino's De
Amore to interpret the high-low, male-female dialectics of the picture. To list a few:

Philip Fehl, "The Hidden Genre: A Study of the Concert Champ?tre in the Lou
vre," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 16 (1957), 153-168; Robert Klein,
"La biblioth?que de laMir?ndole et le Concert Champ?tre de Giorgione," in La

forme et l'intelligibile: ?crits sur la Renaissance et l'art moderne, ed. Andr? Chastel
(Paris 1970), 193-203; Francis Broun, "The Louvre Concert Champ?tre: A Neopla
tonic Interpretation," in Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, ed. Konrad Eisen
bichler and Olga Zorzi Pugliesi (Ottawa 1986), 29-38; Augusto Gentili, Da
Tiziano a Tiziano: Mito e allegoria nella cultura veneziana del Cinquecento, 2nd
ed. (Milan 1988), 22-28; Patricia Emison, "The Concert Champ?tre and Gilding
the Lily," Burlington Magazine 133 (1991), 195-196. Other studies?such as
Rudolf Wittkower, "Giorgione and Arcady," in Idea and Image: Studies in the Ital
ian Renaissance (London 1978), 161-73; Elizabeth Buckley, "Poesia Muta: Alle
gory and Pastoral in the Early Paintings of Titian," Ph.D. diss. University of
California, Los Angeles, 1977 (Ann Arbor 1978), 64-78; Luba Freedman, "The
 Jonathan Unglaub 81

Pastoral Theme in the Visual Arts of the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo," Ph.D.
diss, Hebrew University, 1983, 188-196; Rosand (note 2), 30-51; Paul Holberton,
"Painting and Poetry at the Time of Giorgione," Ph.D. diss., Warburg Institue
(London 1989), 374-403, and (note 2); Paul Barolsky, The Faun in the Garden:
Michelangelo and the Poetic Origins of Italian Renaissance Art (University Park
1994), 48-56?have examined pastoral motifs and topoi to elucidate the meaning
of the Concert Champ?tre.
5. Francisa Petrarcae Vergilianus codex, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, codex A.49 in
folio. Andrew Martindale, Simone Martini?Complete Edition (Oxford 1988),
cat. 15,191-92, dates the painting to between 1338 and 1344. Joel Brink, "Simone
Martini, Francesco Petrarca and the Humanistic Program of the Virgil Frontis
piece," Mediaevalia 3 (1977), 94-109, dates the work to immediately prior to
Petrarch's own coronation on the Capitoline during Easter 1341; a biographical
milestone that he finds at the heart of the iconography of the frontispiece. For the

post-Petrarchan, mostly Milanese, provenance of the volume, see Luciano Bellosi,

// G?tico a Siena (Florence 1982), 183-84.
6. Text and translation from Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology (Berkeley
1987), 20.
7. The nature of Virgil's "imitation" of Theocritus has dominated Virgil scholar

ship from antiquity to the present day. For early, late antique, attempts to deduce
the causa of the Eclogues and define its relationship with Theocritus, see Patterson

(note 6), 30-42. Alpers (note 1), 204-8, instructively elaborates the distinctions
between Theocritus and Virgil in terms of Schiller's categories of "naive" and "sen
timental" poetry.
8. Servius, "In Vergilii Bucolicon Lihrum Commentarius," in Vergilii Buc?lica et

Ge?rgica Commentarii, ed. Georgius Thilo (Leipzig 1887), 2: intentio poetae haec
est, ut imitetur Theocritum. . . . et locis per allegoriam
aliquibus agat gratias
Augusto vel aliis nobilibus, quorum favore amissum agrum recepit. in qua re tan
tum dissentit a Theocrito: Ule enim ubique simplex est, hic necessitate compulsus
aliquibus locis miscet figuras, quas perite plerumque etiam ex Theocriti versibus
facit, quos ab illo dictos constat esse simpliciter. hoc autem fit po?tica urbanitate.
9. SeeWilliam J. Kennedy, "The Virgilian Legacies of Petrarch's Bucolicum Car
men and Spenser's Shepheardes Calender," in The Early Renaissance and the Pas
toral Tradition, ed. Anthony Pellegrino (Binghamton 1982), 84-91 and Patterson
(note 6), 2-52, who discusses Petrarch's "Imitation as Interpretation" of Virgil as a
conscious application of Servian biographical and political allegory to his own cir
cumstances as poet and exile.
10. Giovanni Boccaccio, Rime, Carmina, Epistole e lettere, vita, De Carnaria,
Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio 5, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan 1992), 712 (Ep?s
tola 23, to Fra Martino da Signa). Theocritus syragusanus poeta, ut ab antiquis
accepimus, primus fuit qui greco carmine buccolicum excogitavit stilum, verum
nil sensit pr?ter quod cortex ipse verborum demonstrat. Post hune latine scripsit

Virgilius, sed sub cortice nonnullos abscondit sensus, esto non semper voluerit sub
nominibus colloquentium aliquid sentiremus. Post hunc autem scripserunt et alii,
sed ignobiles, de quibus nil curandum est, excepto ?nclito preceptore meo Fran
cisco Petrarca, qui stilum pr?ter solitum paululum sublimavit et secundum eglo
garum suarum materias continue collocutorum nomina aliquid significantia
posuit. Ex his ego Virgilium secutus sum, quapropter non curavi in omnibus collo

quentium nominibus sensum abscondere. On Boccaccio's "pastoral cryptograms"

82 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

after the model of Petrarch, specifically the political and elegiac eclogues in his
Bucolicum Carmen, see W. Leonard Grant, Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral

(Chapel Hill 1965), 86-110, and Smarr's introduction to Boccaccio (note 1),
xxxii-1.
11. Eclogae. Vergilii. Calpurnii. Nemesiani. Francisci Pe(trarcae). loannis

Boc(caccii). loan bap. Ma(ntuani). Pomponii Gaurici, impressum Florentiae opera

et impensa Philippi de Giunta, Mille. CCCCC.IIII.
12. Holberton (note 4), 174?224, traces the development of the Renaissance pas
toral from a vernacular tradition of amorous poetry and a Latin allegorical tradi
tion. Pulci's of Virgil's allegorical eclogues facilitated the conflation of
translation
these two trends in later fifteenth-century vernacular pastoral poetry such as Boi
ardo and Sannazaro. The full bibliographic citation for Pulci's important publica
tion reads: Bucoliche elegantissime composte da Bernardo Pulci fiorentino e da
Francesco Arsochi senese et da Hyeronimo Benivieni et da Jacopo Fiorino de Boni

nsegni senese, impressum Florentia per me Antonium Bartholomei Miscomini,

A.D. MCCCCLXXXI. The names following Pulci's in the title refer to the other
authors who contributed to the anthology.
13. Giovanni Ponte, "Esigenze politiche e aspirazioni poetiche nelle egloghe

volgari del Boiardo," Rassegna della letteratura italiana 66 (1962), 25-28; Mauda

Bergoli Russo, "Le Pastorale del Boiardo tra le egloghe del Quattrocento/' Studi e

problemi di critica testuale 20 (1980), 161-164; Ignacio Navarrete, "Boiardo's Pas

torali as Macrotext," Stanford Italian Review 5 (1985), 39; and Holberton (note
4), 236.
14. The official first edition was published at Naples in 1504: Arcadia del Sanna
zaro tutta fornita et tratta emendatissima dal suo originale. Nevertheless a pirated
version appeared inVenice in 1502, lacking the concluding chapters (11,12) and the
epilogue: Libro Pastorale Nominato Arcadia de Iacobo Sannazaro neapolitano.
The 83 printed editions of the Arcadia between 1502 and 1650 testify to the work's
enduring popularity; see William J. Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of
Pastoral (Hanover, N.H. 1983), 107. On Sannazaro's reformulation of Virgil's
notion of Arcadia as an imaginative landscape where the real world and a dreamy
escape tenuously intersect, see Eleanor W. Leach, "Parthenian Caverns: Remap
ping of an Imaginative Topography," Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978),
542-51; and Holberton (note 2), 245-47.
15. Kennedy (note 14), 104-106; Patterson (note 6), 60-61. On how the pastoral
motifs "not only exemplify continuity but mythologize it," see Paul Alpers, "What
is Pastoral?" Critical Inquiry 8 (1982), 440-55. He views this continuity in terms of
Burke's notion of a "representative anecdote." Though structurally constant, the

pastoral expresses the evolving historical realities each age brings to bear upon it.
16. Mantua Virgilium qui talia carmine finxitj Sena tulit Symonem digito qui
talia pinxit: Patterson (note 6), 20.1 have benefitted from the analysis of Simone's

painting and the discussion of its critical reception, 20-27.

17. Brink (note 5), 91-93, observes that, in Simone's painting, Servius points pre

cisely at the place in the text where the stylistic hierarchy is expounded: tres enim
sunt characteres, humilis, m?dius, grandiloquus: quos omnes in hoc invenimus
poeta, nam in Aeneide grandiloquum habet, in georgicis medium, in bucolicis
humilem pro qualitate negotiorum et personarum (Servius [note 8], 12).
18. Michael J. K. O'Loughlin, "'Woods Worthy of a Consul': Pastoral and the
Sense of History," in Literary Studies: Essays inMemory of Francis A. Drumm, ed.

John H. Doremkamp (Worcester, Mass. 1973), 144-158.

 Jonathan Unglaub 83

19. On the courtly roles and affiliations of Virgil's, Petrarch's, and Sannazaro's

pseudonymous poets, see Danielle Boillet, "Paradis perdus et retrouv?s dans I'Area
die de Sannazaro," in Ville et campagne dans la litt?rature italienne de la Renais
sance II Le courtisan travesti, Centre de recherche sur laRenaissance italienne 6, ed.
Andr? Rochon (Paris 1977), 99-106,120-1; Kennedy (note 14), 144-8, and Episto
lae Variae 49 in Petrarch, Epistolae De Rebus Familiaribus et Variae, ed. Josephi
Fracassetti (Florence 1863), 3:438-39.
20. Egan (note 4), 309-312;
Kennedy (note 14), 127.
21. This and the passagesI quote from Sannazaro's Arcadia in the next para

graph have been cited by Buckley (note 4), 64-78, and Ballarin (note 2), 347-8.
Buckley notes Sannazaro's emphasis on lengthy descriptions and continuity of
characters, and argues that these features facilitated "the migration of pastoral
themes and characters into the visual arts and into drama." She contends that the

exchange between Sincero and Carino in Prose 7 is the narrative event which the

painter (here "Titian") depicts. Like Ballarin, I find this almost illustrational rela

tionship between text and image too literal. For me the text ismore valuable in its
modal tension, where the purely pastoral gives way to the urbane poet's higher
poetic ambitions. Buckley, however, rightly associates the dislocation that Sanna
zaro's (Sincero's) self-intrusion causes in the pastoral environment with the dialec
tics of the painting.
22. Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de'pi? eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, ed.
Paola della Pergola, Luigi Grassi, Giovanni Previtali (Milan 1963), 3:415. On the
artist's "self-reflectiveness" in the figure of the lutenist-poet, see Barolsky (note
4), 49-56.
23. These aspects of Giorgione's art are discussed at length in Salvatore Settis, La

Tempesta interpretata (Turin 1978), especially chapter 5, "II soggetto nascosto,"

124-47.
24. In fact, the patrons attracted to Giorgione, and to things Giorgionesque,
included young, well-educated aristocratic collectors, such as Gabriele Vendramin,
for whom such exposure would have been likely, Settis (note 23), 126-34.
25. See the analysis of Eclogues 4,5 and 10 inAlpers (note 1), 155-249, where "in

essaying a 'higher mood,' Virgil raises the question of pastoral song to engage
larger forces of life and to face painful and turbulent aspects of experience."
26. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven 1958), 123, n.
1;G?nther Tschmelitsch, Zorzo, gennant Giorgione: Der Genius und sein Bannk
ries (Vienna 1975), 293; Buckley (note 4), 75-7; Marie Tanner, "Ubi Sunt: An Ele
giac Topos in the F?te Champ?tre," in Giorgione: Atti del convego internazionale
di Studi per il 5o Centenario della nascita, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini (Castelfraneo
V?neto 1979), 62; and Ballarin (note 2), 346. The latter three have associated the
Source figure with the text from Sannazaro.
27. On the significance of the Orpheus myth at the Source, and the pr?figuration
of epic concerns in both Virgil and Sannazaro, see Charles P. Segal, "Orpheus and
the Fourth G?orgie: Vergil on Nature and Civilization," American Journal of Phi
lology 87 (1966), 320-24, and David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance
Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven 1983), 32-42.
28. Tanner (note 26), 615. This scholar specifically relates the elegiac character
of the Concert Champ?tre to the "ubi sunt qui ante nos inmundo fuore" topos of
medieval laments.
29. Ellen Lambert, Placing Sorrow: A Study of the Pastoral Elegy Convention
from Theocritus toMilton, University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative
 84 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

Literature 60 (Chapel Hill 1976), analyzes the bipartite structure o? Eclogue 5 and
its influence on later reformulations of the pastoral elegy.
30. Egan (note 4), 307 and n. 18.
31. Aristeum pro me pono ?vido ad poeticam devenire, Boccaccio, Epistola 23
to Fra Martino da Signa (note 10), 718. On the relationship between Boccaccio's

Eclogue 12 and Petrarch's Eclogue 3, see Smarr's commentary in Boccaccio (note

1), xxxviii-xxxix.
32. Servius (note 8), 56-7, identifies Daphnis "snuffed out by cruel death" as the
murdered Caesar: alii dicunt significan per allegoriam C. lulium Caesarem, qui in
senatu a Cassio et Brtuo viginti tribus vulneribus interemptus est: unde et 'crudeli
funere' volunt dictum.
33. On the pastoral dependency upon a "custodian" who governs the bower from
the political world beyond, see Lambert (note 29), 36-45.
34. The insubordination of the Neapolitan barons to Prince Andrew of Hungary,
consort to Robert's heir Queen Giovanna, his assassination in 1347, and the ruth
less Hungarian invasion to purge Naples of conspirators destabilized the Angevin
realm following Robert's death. For more on the historical context and personages
of Petrarch's and Boccaccio's political eclogues, see Smarr's commentary (note 1),
201-213, and Petrarch's Epistolae Variae 49 (note 19), 3:438-9.
35. Again Petrarch supplies the gloss to his eclogue: Epistolae Variae 42 (note
19), 3:409-12.
36. For a survey of fiftheen-century Vicentine and Veronese villa types, see
Marco Rosci, "Forme e funzioni d?lie ville venete pre-palladiane," L'arte 2 (1968),
27-54. These hybrid structures, predating by over half a century the development
of a distinct villa morphology, combine elements from farm houses, castles, and
urban palaces. Most have a prominent portico or loggia like the edifice in the back

ground of Giorgione's painting.

37. For patrician agrarian investment in the terraferma, seeMichelangelo Mur
aro, Venetian Villas: The History and Culture (New York 1986), 39-40.
38. Several scholars have viewed the Concert Champ?tre in relation to Gli Aso
lani and the court in exile of Queen Caterina Cornaro. See Wittkower (note 4), 167;
Tschmelitsch (note 26), 295-9, notes landscape motifs in the painting that corre
to the shady setting of the meditations on love in Gli Asolani.
spond
39. It should be noted that Petrarch's autograph manuscript of the Bucolicum
Carmen (Vat. lat. 3358) was owned by the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo, who
kept it until his death in 1547. In addition to the 1504 Latin pastoral anthology,
printed editions of the Bucolicum Carmen appeared in Venice in 1496, 1501 and
1503. See Antonio Avena, // Bucolicum Carmen e i suoi commenti inediti (Padua
1906), 6-13, 44-6.
40. On the massive inland expansion of the Venetian Republic in the Quattro
cento, see Alberto
Tenenti, "The Sense of Space and Time in the Venetian World
of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries," inRenaissance Venice, ed. John R. Hale
(Totowa, NJ 1973), 19-31; and Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic
(Baltimore 1973), 225-49. The waning of Venetian maritime primacy due to Turk
ish prowess and the Portugese circumnavigation of Africa encouraged Venice's

imperialistic objectives on the mainland. Muraro (note 37), 39?40, discusses the
foundation, in 1469, of the Ufficio delle Acque, which oversaw the land reclama
tion that made the Trevigian territories suitable for habitation and agriculture.
41. Girolamo Priuli, JDiarii, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 24 no. 3, ed. Roberto
Cessi (Bologna 1938), 4:50. All translations from Priuli are my own.
 Jonathan Unglaub 85

42. Priuli (note 41), 4:49-51.

43.1 have relied upon Pietro Bembo's account of the events precipitating the for
mation of the League of Cambrai, and the ensuing invasion and defense of the
Venetian mainland, in his Delia istoria viniziana o? 1552, reprinted in Opere del
Cardinale Pietro Bembo (Milan 1809), vols. 3-4. For an incisive modern study of
the Cambrai crisis, with special emphasis on the domestic front and Venetian
morale, see Felix Gilbert, "Venice in the Crisis of the League of Cambrai," Renais
sance Venice, ed. John R. Hale (Totowa, NJ 1973), 274-92. On the suspicions of
the Italian states toward the "imperialist" expansion of Venice, see Nicolai Rubin
stein, "Italian Reactions to Terraferma Expansion in the Fifteenth Century,"
ibid., 197-217.
44. For the tactical factors leading to the disastrous defeat at Agnadello, see
Bembo (note 43), 4:80-95. On the decision to relinquish the remaining Venetian
towns, 110-16.
45. Lester J. Libby, "The Reconquest of Padua in 1509 According to the Diary of
Girolamo Priuli," Renaissance Quarterly 28 (1975), 328-9. Priuli (note 41), 4:51,

censoriously remarks that the Venetian fathers were concerned not with the welfare
of the state as much as the eventual recuperation of their estates.
46. For the fervent debate in the Senate over the reconquest of the terraferma ter

ritories, especially Padua, see Bembo (note 43), 4:135-47. Doge Loredan censured
those who would jeopardize the security of the Republic simply to recoup their lav
ish villas in the Paduan campagna. Luigi da Molino, Savio della terraferma, pas

sionately argued for the reconquest of the mainland, and prevailed. He insisted that
the private concerns of the patriciate served the welfare of the Republic, which must

boldly recapture and protect its dominions, undeterred by risk or expense. This
debate concluded with the resolution to retake Padua, seeM. Sanuto, JDiarii, eds.
Nicolo Barozzi and Federico Stefani (Venice 1883), 8:507-8, and Priuli (note 41),
4:149-52.
47. Bembo (note 43), 4:146. Priuli (note 41), 4:51, offers a more cynical gloss on
these same motivations for the reconquest of the terraferma: "non hera possibelle
che li Padri et Senatori Veneti volessenno abandonar il Stato di terraferma, perch?
li apareva troppo bella chossa, ne pensavanno in altro salvo recuperarlo, et heranno
tanto impliciti, come se dice, in le posessione, bestie et pecorre loro et animali, che
non desideravanno altro, salvo che'l fusse recuperato et ritornare chadauno ali pot
en et posessione loro, ne consideravanno quanto di sopra se dice, che la terraferma
et le posessione sianno state la ruina del? Rep?blica Veneta."
48. On the secret assault of Padua, and the ensuing defense and siege, see Bembo
(note 43), 4:147-54,163-82. On the guasto or "wasting" of the countryside around
the strategic sites of Padua and Treviso, see Sanuto (note 46), 8:238; Bembo (note
43), 170-1,181-2; and Muraro (note 37), 38.
49. Priuli (note 41), 4:329.
50. Priuli (note 41), 4:328.
51. Rome's rise and fall was seen as analogous to Venice's victorious past and
ignominious present in contemporary political laments such as the anonymous
"Lamento della repubblica v?neta" of 1509 (142-7, 37-9: "Quanto pi? nostri facti
eran lodati,/ Quanto pi? era(n) excelse e degne Popre,/Che pi? a pena ai Roman
fur titul dato;/Tanto pi? gran dolor in noi si scopre,/Tanto pi? crescie in noi
affano e nolia /E l'alt?ra ruina pi? ne copre . .. Dove ? l'animo excelso e sublevato/
Di nostri natri. che ciascun di loro /Era un Cesar in arme, e in consio un Cato?"
 86 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

(Antonio Medin, ed., Lamenti storici de secoli XIV e XV, Scelta di curiosit? let
terarie 236 [Bologna 1890], 90, 86).
52. Peter Meiler, "La Madre di Giorgione," in Giorgione: Atti del convegno
internazionale di studi per il 5o centenario della nascita, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini
(Castelfranco V?neto 1979), 113-14, observes that Petrarch's Roman laments pro
vided a font of topoi for contemporary political elegies. He adduces the senescent
matron, Rome, from the fifth Eclogue, to read a political significance in Giorgi
one's La Vecchia.
53. The following lines are indicative of the arresting imagery of the "Italia mia":
"Voi cui fortuna ? posto in mano il freno / de le belle contrade, / di che nulla piet?
par che vi stringa, / che fan qui tante pellegrine spade? / Perch? '1verde terreno / dal
barb?rico sangue si depinga?" (Petrarch, Sonnets and Songs, ed., Anna Maria Armi
[London 1978], 128.17?22). While the subject ismore specific, Domino Simeone's
"Lamento dei Veneziani" of 1509 employs some of Petrarch's motifs: "Son Venetia
sconsolata / posta in pianto e gran dolore:/Franza e Spanga e Imperatore/m'?no
tuta disolata! /La Fortuna s? proterba/la sua rotta coss?, vol ta .. .Un gran tempo ?

prosperata / e ho vivuto in sancta pace: / in gran pena son cascata / tra le rette, laci e
face, / posta son in (tal) contumace / e vegnuto in tanto extremo;. . .Venetiani e '1
re de Galia / ?no facto tanta guerra, / sparso in questa gran bataglia / tanto sangue
che non erra: / putrefacta sta la terra / de la gente che son morte; / cosi che a le stigie
? consolata./Son Venetia . . tuto el piano/
porte/Prosperpina ./Sanguimento
Venetiani e de Franzesi." See Medin (note 51), 99-100,106.
54. Muraro (note 37), 24,116, and Les Villas de la V?n?tie (Venice 1954), 29-31.
55. Sannazaro was exiled with his patron, King Federigo, by the Spanish usurp
ers of the House of Aragon, see Kennedy (note 14), 21-25. For a full account of the
historical and political context of Sannazaro's service to Aragonese court at

Naples, see Carol Kidwell, Sannazaro and Arcadia (London 1993), 76?104.
56. One must concede that the dating of the painting, like its attribution, is based
on connoisseurship alone. In fact, the painting iswithout secure provenance before
Le Brun's 1683 inventory of Louis XIV's pictures, see Ballarin (note 2), 340-1. Nev
ertheless, most scholars, regardless of attribution to Giorgione or Titian, date the

picture to 1509 or 1510, the year of Giorgione's death, or slightly later: Terisio Pig
natti, Giorgione (Venice 1969), cat. no. A42, 129-30. Harold Wethey, The Paint
ings of Titian Complete Edition: The Mythological and Historical Paintings
(London 1975), cat. no. 29, 167-8; Ballarin, cat. no. 43, 340. Hornig (note 2), cat.
no. 25, 217, however, argues for an earlier date around 1508.
57. Pro Caliopo ego intelligo aliquem optime recitantem damna desolate civita
tis. On the historical allusions of this eclogue, which allegorizes the chaos rampant
in Angevin Naples following the deaths of King Robert and Andrew of Hungary,
see Boccaccio's Ep?stola 23 to Fra Martino da Signa (note 10), 714.
58. "lo parlo, e pur rivolgo il viso spesso/al bel paese che un tempo era pieno/
de ogni leticia, or misero ed oppresso. / Ove ?no e' cori? e il canto si sereno / che ade
quava Parnaso e la sua fonte? / Come ? venuta tanta zoglia meno? /Ove son le sorelle
di Fetonte/che soliano ombregiar di tal verdura / questo bel fiume da la foce al

monte?/Quai malegno pianeta o Stella oscura/fatto ha tal stracio in si fiorito

loco, / che pur a rimirarlo ? una paura?"
59. Servius (note 8), 4-5. 'Tityre tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi' inducitur
pastor quidam iacens sub arbore securus et otiosus dare operam cantilenae . . . et
hoc loco Tityri sub persona Vergilium debemus . . . hoc videtur dicere:
accipere;
iaces sub umbra fagi in agris tuis, tuas retentans possessiones.
 Jonathan Unglaub 87

60. Servius (note 8), 6. sane vera lectio est 'turbatur', ut sit inpersonale, quod ad
omnes p er tinet gener aliter: nam Mantuanorum fuerat communis expulsio. si enim
'turbamur' legeris, videtur ad paucos referri.
61. Michael Putnam, Virgil's Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues (Princeton
1970), 26-7. Alpers (note 15), 450-53, observes that Tityrus "presents otium in cir
cumstantial terms," whereas the bereft Meliboeus can only view the landscape
denied him as an idealized phantom.
62. Servius (note 8), 5, though reluctant to endorse too strict an allegorical read

ing of "Amaryllis," nevertheless records such an interpretation for posterity, which

accords with his overall
conception of Eclogue 1: 'Resonare doces Amaryllida sil
vas' id est carmen tuum de arnica Amaryllide compositum doces silvas sonare, et
melius est, ut simpliciter intellegamus: maie enim quidam allegoriam volunt, tu
carmen de urbe Roma componis celebrandum omnibus gentibus. Later in his com
mentary, Servius, 9, identifies Galatea and Amaryllis with Mantua and Rome, the
respective spaces of rustic hardship and secured leisure: allegoricos autem hoc dicit,
postquam relicta Mantua Romam me contuli: nam Galateam Mantuam vult esse,
Romam Amaryllida.
63. See Putnam (note 61), 75: "The affliction which Meliboeus endures offers a
contrast with this perfection all the more impressive because Meliboeus does not
stand for himself alone. He is a symbol of universal ruin, whereas Tityrus symbol
izes an individual, exclusive idyll."
64. On the identity of the old shepherd as Tityrus, see Patricia Emison, "Inven
tion and the Italian Renaissance Print: Mantegna to Parmigianino," Ph.D. diss.,
Columbia University, 1985, 105-6. Emison sees Giulio's Old Shepherd as almost
emblematic of the Virgilian pastoral both in the characterization of Tityrus and

through the intrusion of civilizing elements, such as the "overbearing presence of

buildings," into Arcadia.

65. On Guilio's literary erudition and his activity as a musician and courtier, and
for the date of the engraving, see Arthur Hind, Early Italian Engraving (London
1948), part 2, 5:189-91. On the close aesthetic relationship between Guilio and
Giorgione, see Oberhuber (note 2), 433-43. Holberton (note 4), 362, has argued
that another print by Campagnola relates to the Cambrai crisis. In Giulio's Astrol
oger, the date 1509 appears on the globe that the aged scholar studies, while a view
of Venice appears in background. Holberton maintains that the juxtaposition of
Venice and the date creates inevitable associations with Cambrai, while the astro
logical theme may refer to prognostications of the disastrous events of that year.
66. On the political circumstances that motivated, at least in part, Boiardo's

composition of the Pastorale, see Ponte (note 13), 22-4; and Navarrete (note 13),
39-42, 48-50. Boiardo composed the martial eclogues of his Pastorale in 1482
1483, when Venetian forces had nearly captured Reggio and Modena, where the
poet was stationed as governor. On the political and military aspects of theWar of
Ferrara, see Michael E. Mallett, "Venice and the War of Ferrara, 1482-1484," in
War, Culture and Society in Renaissance Venice: Essays in Honor of John Hale,
eds. David S. Chambers, Cecil H. Clough, and Michael E. Mallett
(London 1993),
56-72. On the resulting ruination of the Ferrarese campagna, see Trevor Dean,
"After the War of Ferrara: Relations between Venice and Ercole d'Est?, 1484
1550," ibid., 73-74.
67. "Ben doveti voi star fuor de ogni gente,/o Melibeo, se ancor quivi si tace/

quel ch'? palese e tuto ilmondo sente./Apena di parlare io sono audace/quivi di

88 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

guerra, e temo non me ascolte/questo bel loco, ove abita la pace./Le vostre peco
relle, qua ricolte / intorno a le fontane e fiumi usati,/vano pascendo libere e
disolte;/e voi sicuri qua de amor cantati, . . . ? diversa nostra sorte a
Quanto
questa! / Li nostri armenti e le p?core in preda, / e noi scaciati o morti a la foresta; /
n? sotto al cel stimo io che mai si veda /cosa tanto crudel, onde a nararla / vengo
sospeso e temo non si creda."
68. "Ove ? ilmio ostello a lato a lamarina? / ove il rico giardin dai frutti d'oro? /
Tutto ? fiaccato ? il novo boschetto
ed arso cun ruina. /Ove e il verde aloro / qu?le
io stesso piantai cum rame tenere,/de amor cantando onde or di doglia ploro?. . .

Rapito mi ? l'armento, il grege invaso / da peste muore, ilmio paese ameno / inculto
solo e squalido ? rimaso."
69. Publii Vergilii Buc?lica, Ge?rgica, Aeneis cum Serv?t commentariis accura
tissime emendatis. Venetijs, Bernardinus Stagninus impensam fecit, 1507.
70. Publii Virgilii Maronis opera cum quinqu? vulgatis commentariis: expolitis
simisque atque imaginibus
figuris nuper per Sebastianaum Brant superadditis:

exactissimeque revisis: atque eliminatis, (Strasbourg 1502). On Brant's edition and

illustrations of Virgil, see Eleanor W. Leach, "Illustration as Interpretation in
Brant's and Dryden's Editions of Vergil," in The Early Illustrated Book: Essays in
Honor of Lessing J. Rosenwald, ed. Sandra Hindman (Washington, D.C. 1982),
175-91; and Patterson (note 6), 92-106.
71. Brant (note 70), fols. Aiv, Aiir: Hie legere historias commentaque plurima
doctus: INee minus indoctus perlegere illa potest... picturam potuit perlegere Ule
tarnen . . . has nostras quas pinximus ecce tabellas I Virgilio: Charas tu quoque
habere velis.l Has tibi nemo ante haec tarn plane ostenderat usquam. On Brant's
exegetical and pictorial enterprise, as outlined in the introductory poem, see Pat
terson (note 6), 92-106.
72. On the spatial dynamics of Eclogue 1, see Michael Putnam, "Virgil's First
Eclogue: Poetics of Enclosure," in Essays on Latin Lyric, Elegy and Epic (Princeton
1982), 254?6, 260-2; and Eleanor W. Leach, Vergil's Eclogues: Landscapes of
Experience (Ithaca, NY 1974), 116-17. On Brant's visualization of the implicit

geography o? Eclogue 1, see Leach (note 70), 181-4; Patterson (note 6), 99-102.
73. Patterson (note 6), 96-102; Leach (note 70), 182. Putnam (note 61), 60-1,
elaborates on Rome as the arbiter of both otium and exile.
74. For the agricultural importance of the terraferma campagna, see Libby (note

45), 324-7, who notes that halted grain shipments from the mainland was one of the
primary motivations for Venice's bold campaign to retake Padua. Virgil couched
his Arcadia in agrarian imagery. Leach (note 72), 63-6, 72, interprets the bucolic
scenes of Virgil in light of the Roman praise of farming as the source of civic virtue.
This renders Meliboeus' officially sanctioned deprivation all the more ironic. Simi
lar notions of the virtue of farming existed in Venice, with Alvise Cornaro being its
most important promoter. See James S. Ackerman, "The Geopolitics of Venetian
Architecture in the Time of Titian," in Titian, His World and His Legacy, ed.
David Rosand (New York 1982), 45-6; Muraro (note 37), 55-7.
75. Priuli (note 41), 4:327-8.
76. Sanuto (note 46), 9:15, 154, describes the flight from Giorgione's birthplace
of Castelfraneo in the Trevigiano: "Et vene aviso ch?me ogi i nimici, zercha cavali
400, erano corsi da Castelfranco, dove ? il campo reduto, verso ?ola fino a Scorz?
brusando case et depredando il tuto fino mia . . . lontan di Mestre, adeo li villani
erano in fuga, e tutti chi poteva fuzer fuziva." "Tutta questa note, villani e villane
 Jonathan Unglaub 89

con puti et robe venivano a Veniexia fuzendo la persecutione de'inimici, et aloza

vano in diversi lochi, come he scritto di sopra, et era gran extreminio vederli venir."
77. Pruili (note 41), 4:310. For similar accounts of the emigration from the

besieged terraferma, see 308-10, 328-32.

78. On the ferrying of the fugitive peasantry across the lagoon to Venice, see Pri
uli (note 41), 4:308-10, 330; Sanuto (note 46), 9:152, 167; and Bembo (note 43),
4:174-175. The peasantry's fidelity to Venice stood in marked contrast to the

opportunistic aristocracy of the V?neto towns welcoming the invaders. On the

tenacious loyalty of the Trevigiani and their long, symbiotic relationship with the

Republic, see Muraro (note 37), 47.

79. Priuli (note 41), 4:315-16: ". . . il fontego di Todeschi novamente fabricato,
el quale hera vuodo, perch? anchora li Todeschi non heranno entrati in quello, et

questo ettiam hera grande alogiamento da logare assai numero di persone." Sanuto
(note 46), 9:161: "... ne alozoe tutti a San Zorzi quelli poteno star, e parte erano
altrove alozati, et nel Fontego di Todeschi. E nota. Era un grandissimo pecato veder
tanta quantit? di contadini fuzir."
80. Contemporary documents support a completion date of 1508 for the Fondaco
dei Tedeschi frescoes. On the irony between the triumphant tenor of Giorgione's,
and Titian's, political allegories and the city's actual desperation in the face of the
Cambrai invasion, seeMichelangelo Muraro, "The Political Interpretation of Gior

gione's Frescoes on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi," Gazette des beaux-arts, 6th series,
86 (1975), 179-82.
81. See Priuli's(note 41), 4:331, almost audible description of the bewailing peas
antry,uprooted to Venice: "li poveri et desfortunatti vilani in tanta quantitade
scampati in la citade, che giorno et nocte se andavanno lamentando per la citade,
che haverianno contaminato uno corre de diamante; li bestiami di questi miseri con
tadini menati in la citade, quali non haveanno da vivere, chridavanno giorno et
nocte, che le loro voce penetravanno le orechie de chadauno.... Donde che breviter
concluendo per ogni strada et locho del? citade predicta non se sentiva salvo che
lamentatione, suspiri, lachrime, singulti, timori, spaventti; et meritamente se

poteva ahora chiamare questa virg?nea citade uno imferno."

82. Sanuto (note 46), 9:164: "Ogi vidi cossa notanda. Prima, porzi e piegore in

chiapo in piaza di San Marco; item, uno aseno con sachi di farina adosso passar per
il Ponte di Rialto; item, il Fontego di Todeschi novo fo tutto empito de villani."
This spectacle made quite an impression on the average Venetian, as the merchant,
Martino Merlini, wrote his brother stationed in the Orient on 28 September 1509:
"La nostra 111.ma Signoria ia dado lozamento a tuti quelli che non aveva amixi o
. . .
patroni dove andar, che molti sono sta lozadi da patroni e amixi da compasi?n
e age d? el Fontego di Todeschi e la Cha del Marchexe et moite altre chaxe e lugi

per la tera, per si che tuta la tera xe piena e de chavali e buo, vedeli, porzi et altri
anemali: li champi da le erbe son pieni" (G. Dalla Santa, La lega di Cambrai e gli
avvenimenti dell'anno 1509 descritti da un mercante veneziano contempor?neo
[Venice 1903], 22).
83. On the structural and thematic comparison of these eclogues of exile, see
Charles P. Segal, "'Tarnen Cantabitis Arcades'?Exile and Arcadia in Eclogues
One and Nine," Arion 4 (1965), 237-9, 258-60.
84. Servius (note 8), 110.
85. On Menalcas functioning as a tutelary Daphnis figure, see Alpers (note 1),
140-1, 150-1, and Putnam (note 61), 306-7.
 90 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

86. As Patterson (note 6), 37-8, indicates, Servius (note 8), 112, notes that
Augustus' policies caused such universal despair that song could only provide con
solation, solada, not pleasure: et dicendo 'solatia' latenter t?mpora carpit Augusti,

quibus carmina non oblectamento fuerunt, sed solacio, quod infelicium esse con
suevit. vel Hua solatia' tua carmina, quibus consolamur.
87. Menalcas' songs paraphrase Idylls 3.3-5,11.42-9.
88. Servius (note 8), 113, explains that farms in Cremona, and many inMantua,
were confiscated by Augustus' soldiers after the civil war. Cremona was punished
for its loyalty to Anthony, Mantua merely for its proximity, notwithstanding its

support of Caesar.
89. Segal (note 83), 247,257. See Alpers (note 1), 103,139, who defines Virgilian
"suspension" as "a poised and secure contemplation of things disparate or ironi
cally related, and yet at the same time does not imply that disparities or conflicts are
actually resolved."
90. Although he does not use the term "suspension," Erwin Panofsky, "'Et in
Arcadia Ego': Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition," inMeaning in the Visual Arts

(Chicago 1982), 300, offers the most eloquent articulation of this phenomenon in

Virgilian pastoral: "In Virgil's ideal Arcady human suffering and superhumanly

perfect surroundings create a dissonance. This dissonance, once felt, had to be

resolved, and itwas resolved in that vespertinal mixture of sadness and tranquility
which is perhaps Virgil's most personal contribution to poetry. With only slight
exaggeration one might say that he 'discovered' the evening."
91. On the qualified optimism evinced in the memory of Menalcas' songs, see

Alpers (note 1), 136-44,150-1.

92. Non s?ti voi de la stirpe italiana ?... Che per la patria niun voglia pugnare, /
Ma favorir chi cerca con ogni arte/Guastar dil mondo la pi? bella parte?/Quella
che ? d'ogni terra madre altrice/E per divinit? da' de electa; / Quella che ? assai pi?
fertile e felice, / Salubre, amena e d'ogni ben perfecta;... Quella che si p? dire che
la natura /Puose in dotarla ogni sua arte e cura? / U' son campi pi? fertile e felici? /
U' son boschi pi? folti et silve ombrose? / U' son colli pi? lieti e tanto aprici? / U' son
valli pi? amen? e al sol nascose?. . .U' son
pi? f?rtil lochi di oleo o vino?/U' son,
se non de Italia nel giardino? / U' son pi? fiumi, lagi, stagni e fonti? / U'son pi? belli
e tanti mari?/U' son pi? abitad et util monti?/U' son paesi al ciel pi? grati e
cari?. . .Dove ?, se non tra voi, cari Italiani?/Si che guard?ti ben vostra richezza"
(Antonio Medin, ed., La obsidione di Padua, Scelta di curiosit? letterarie, 244,
[Bologna 1892], 121-2). The author of the epic was Bartolomeo Credo. For more on
this poet, as well as the historical background and content of the poem, see III?L.
 Jonathan Unglaub 91

*?:%.,^%.

-'??#K* ? .-h^S*

l?i^Si

s#r'

V
SJ^

Fig. 1 Attributed to Giorgione, Concert Champ?tre, ca. 1510. Paris, Mus?e du

Louvre. (Photo: Alinari / Art Resource, New York)
 Jonathan Unglaub 93

sa?rl

V^f?^pji *v??s
y-n*-t?sr
?:;K:P*rr:i*.
^g,|?|?i^iM.

lilil?

Fig. 2 Simone Martini, Francisa Petrarcae Vergilianus codex, ca. 1340. Milan,
Biblioteca Ambrosiana, codex A. 49, frontispiece. Propreit? d?lia Biblioteca
Ambrosiana. All rights reserved. (Photo from facsimile, Rare Book and Manu
script Library, Columbia University)
94 THE CONCERT CHAMPETRE

'U'o
'r&-v\?'

#??.

Sigh

Fig. 3 Giulio Campagnola, T/7e O/d Shepherd, ca. 1509. Engraving. New York,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1937. (37.3.11)
 Jonathan Unglaub 95

-M?>"*** *******MA41AM??MViM**M>*
V%**?W ? i:i;*Mi;ua <u*vi*m? *!??*'^
tgibus
cuitur' idem g?
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quod muspu?.. ?omedo.
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vtfiar?s?arbor:oatens eftotf ? au?;

Fig. 4 Publii Vergilii Buc?lica, Ge?rgica, Aeneis cum Servii commentariis accur
atissime emendatis, Venice: Bernardinus Stagninus impensam fecit, 1507, fol. br.
Woodcut. (Photo: Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University)
96 THE CONCERT CHAMP?TRE

Fig. 5 Sebastian Brant, Publij Virgilij maronis opera, Strasbourg: Johann Gruni
ger, 1502, fol. A 1 v. Woodcut (Photo: Spencer Collection, The New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation)