MARINO, GIAMBATTISTA. — Poet, b. in Naples on 18 October 1569, d. there on 25 March 1625. He led an adventurous life, marked at first by rapid successes and adverse circumstances, and later, through a characteristic aberration of the taste of an entire age, increasingly bound to a reputation as a marvelous poet. He did not lack the homage of princes, men of letters, and crowds: he was dear to the Duke of Savoy, to Margherita di Valois (he resided in France from 1615 to 1623), to the Roman Curia, and to the Viceroy of Naples; he received praise and courtesies from academies. Even the controversies in which he became entangled (some, such as the one with Murtola, tedious and tragicomic) ended by giving him still greater publicity. In his varied and undisciplined talent, in his colorful and at times musical versification, but all too often artificial and empty, the entire century seemed to recognize itself; and “Marinism” was the name given to the “new and marvelous” kind of poetry woven from tinsel and grandiloquence.
M. essentially made his own, exaggerating them, weaknesses and witticisms already visible in the poets of the second half of the sixteenth century. But his spiritual world is poor and, in essence, monotonous: his characters are either stiffened by elaborate allegory, as in the Adone, or moved solely by sensual passion.
In addition to the polemical writings, mention must be made of the abundant collection of lyrics (Lira, Venice 1608), including the celebrated Canzone dei baci with its 27 madrigals, inspired by Catullus and devoted to a subtle play of stylistic and metrical virtuosity. La Sampogna (Paris 1620) gathers pastoral idylls, eclogues, and mythological narratives: material of varied inspiration, drawn from Ovid, Virgil, Theocritus, Claudian, and other poets closer to M.; and, as usual, weighed down by metaphors and precise yet useless digressions, without any psychological investigation of the various characters. Le Dicerie sacre (Turin 1614), a merely formal homage to sacred oratory,
served throughout the seventeenth century as a model for so much Baroque prose from the pulpit and in the novel; la Galleria (Venice 1620), a great anthology of paintings and sculptures commemorating poets, military commanders, heretics, brigands, and so forth, with descriptions of celebrated paintings and statues, earned the author, among other things, the grateful friendship of artists such as Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Reni, and Poussin. But M.’s most ambitious work remains the Adone (Paris 1623), a long allegorical poem that sought to compare itself with those of the greatest poets, from Ovid to Tasso; taking up a theme already treated by a Parabosco or a Dolce, it became, around a slender plot, an overwrought construction without a soul. M. is also the author of an Epistolario (collected in the Bari ed. of 1911–12). The following works by M. are on the Index: the Adone (decrees of 11 June 1624; 17 July 1625; 5 November 1626), the Canzone dei baci (decree of 12 April 1628), the Lira (decree of 27 September 1678), and other minor works.