MARINO, GIAMBATTISTA. - Poet, b. in Naples on 18 Oct. 1569, d. there on 25 March 1625. He had an adventurous life, full of rapid fortunes and adverse vicissitudes at the beginning, then, through a characteristic aberration of the taste of an entire age, ever more bound to a fame as a marvelous poet. He did not lack the homage of princes, of men of letters, of crowds: he was dear to the Duke of Savoy, to Margaret of Valois (he resided in France from 1615 to 1623), to the Roman Curia, to the Viceroy of Naples: he received praise and courtesies from academies; even the polemics in which he became entangled (some, like that with Murtola, tedious and tragicomic) ended by giving him even more publicity. In his varied and unruly genius, in his colorful and at times musical versifying, but too often artificial and vacuous, the entire century seemed to recognize itself; and "Marinism" was the name given to that "new and marvelous" kind of poetry woven of tinsel and pomp.
Marino at bottom made his own, exaggerating them, weaknesses and witticisms already visible in the poets of the later sixteenth century. But his spiritual world is poor, and in substance monotonous: his characters are either stiffened by labored allegory, as in the Adone, or appear moved only by the passion of the senses.
Besides the polemical writings, mention should be made of the abundant collection of lyrics (Lira, Venice 1608), among which the famous Canzone dei baci with its 27 madrigals, from a Catullan starting point, aimed at a subtle play of stylistic and metrical virtuosity. La Sampogna (Paris 1620) gathers pastoral idylls, eclogues, mythological narratives: material of varied inspiration, drawn from Ovid, Virgil, Theocritus, Claudian and other poets closer to Marino; and as usual weighed down by metaphors, by careful and useless digressions, beyond any psychological inquiry into the various characters. The Dicerie sacre (Turin 1614), a merely formal homage to sacred oratory, served as a model throughout the seventeenth century for so much baroque prose of the pulpit and of the novel; the Galleria (Venice 1620), a great florilegium of paintings and sculptures in memory of poets, commanders, heretics, brigands, and so on, with descriptions of famous paintings and statues, earned the author, among other things, the grateful friendship of artists such as Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Reni, Poussin. But Marino's most ambitious work remains the Adone (Paris 1623), a long allegorical poem that would have wished to compare itself with those of the greatest, from Ovid to Tasso, and taking up a theme already treated by a Parabosco or a Dolce, it turned out, around a slender fable, to be a labored construction without a soul. Marino is moreover the author of an Epistolario (collected in the edition of Bari 1911-12). Placed on the Index are: the Adone (decree 11 June 1624; 17 July 1625; 5 Nov. 1626), the Canzone dei baci (decree 12 Apr. 1628), the Lira (decree 27 Sept. 1678) and other minor works.