Agostino della Croce (Da Cruz)

AGOSTINO della CROCE (da CRUZ). - Portuguese religious, in the world A. Pimenta, brother of the celebrated poet Diego Bernardes. Born at Ponte da Barca (Minho) in 1540 or 1542, he entered the convent of Serra de Cintra in 1561. He spent the last period of his life in a dwelling that he himself had built in the Serra da Arrábida, where he lived in recollection and in hermit-like isolation. He died at Setubal in 1619, the object of manifestations of great veneration.

A. composed in his youth amorous verses, which he himself later consigned to the flames. Some of them, however, were spared, and they suffice to give us an idea of his passionate and sensitive soul, expressed in sonnets mostly of Petrarchan and Camonian stamp. This passion and this sensitivity he then transmitted, transformed and purified, to his religious lyric poetry.

The poetic production of A. da Cruz consists essentially of 141 sonnets, 15 eclogues, 19 elegies, some epigrams and some odes, to which are furthermore added an epitaph and three letters. The sonnets on religious subjects preferably take the form of prayer or of panegyric. Among them one admires, for example, beautiful paraphrases of the Pater, the Ave, the Credo, of morning or evening prayers, and the like; the others sing of God, the Crucified, the Virgin, the saints (e.g. St. Clare, St. John the Baptist) or solemn liturgical recurrences. In a great part of these compositions there seethes a deeply moved asceticism, which nevertheless expresses itself in smooth and harmonious verses, without the apology becoming rhetoric and the style stiffening into the conceptual formulas with which dogmatic matter must often clothe itself.

Ruggero M. Ruggieri