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

Abstract

On the last day of August, 1397, Carlo Malatesta, Count of Rimini and commander of the Florentine League, won a battle outside Mantua. He entered the city and shortly afterward ordered the destruction of a statue of Vergil which had stood there “for centuries” upon the poet's tomb. In Bologna and Florence, humanists were alarmed. Carlo was no ordinary military vandal: he was a cultivated man, trained in the virtues of the bonae litterae; members of his family had been friends with Petrarch; the chief men of his league were enthusiastic about the new literary culture. Yet here he was, desecrating the memory of the king of poets. To desecrate Vergil was to desecrate poetry itself—or so the humanists construed it when they responded to the event.

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