SANNAZARO, Jacopo. Poet, born in Naples on 28 July 1456, died there on 24 April 1530. He was a member of the Pontano Academy under the name of Azio Sincero; he lived at the court of the Aragonese, loyally devoted to the Infante Federico, whom in 1501, at the fall of the monarchy, he followed into exile and did not abandon until Federico’s death in 1504. He then returned to his villa at Mergellina. He was buried in the adjoining church, in the tomb he had had prepared and which is still preserved.
What is singular in his figure as a writer, however, does not represent an exception; it rather belongs to a tradition to which, on different levels, both Boiardo and Castiglione equally belong. Like them, he was both a humanist and a gentleman; he shared the almost religious feeling for Latin of the humanists, but he also shared the tastes and curiosities of the profane world of the court, which was also his world, and he met it with the work of his pen, notably in the famous *Glimmeri*, bizarre and incongruous, and could never be anything else (such is the meaning of the word) or a tangle of subjects most disparate, sometimes in the tone of a riddle, held together by jest. Among these concessions to profane taste, the most fortunate was the *Arcadia*, the story of Azio Sincero (his pseudonym), who, to escape the pains of unrequited love, migrates to seek oblivion and peace in the land of shepherds, to one of whom he confides, receiving in return confidences no less painful. Then, one fine day, inspired by a dream and guided by a nymph, he plunges into the bowels of the earth, reaches by that path the native Sebeto, and here finds the news that the girl who was the cause of his sorrows is dead. This, in the first version of 1485, consisting of ten eclogues and ten prose passages, circulated for a long time in manuscript. In 1501 he published it, enriched with two more eclogues and two more prose passages. What then is the *Arcadia*? It is probable that at first Sannazaro, like Boccaccio in the *Ninfale Fiesolano* or even in the *Filocolo*, intended to take his starting point from well-known classical motifs and to allegorize in their development the events of courtly life. And in fact he did this, for the book is full of such allusions, almost to the point of gossip. Yet he was truly a humanist; and therefore this classical material, which in his predecessors, especially in Boccaccio, quickly lost its seriousness and, tainted with Petrarchan and Provençal tones, could end in an unconscious caricature of itself, with him retains to the end its dignity and its charm. He might well think that he was writing in the vernacular and that his public was estranged from this culture; the Latin poets continued to suggest their reminiscences to him one after another, and he could not help weaving them into a prose which is undoubtedly artificial, but which ends by being the closest to the good Tuscan tradition ever written in Naples. In the history of vernacular literature in southern Italy, the prose of the *Arcadia* represents a dramatic turn. In short, there emerged a strange, composite, refined, soft and cold work at the same time, and the first to perceive within it a contrast between intention and culture, between form and content, was probably Sannazaro himself. Perhaps the expression of this is in the words: “Uncertain is that fame which has no other foundation than the judgment of the common people.” For all that, the work had enormous success: it was translated into all the hidden vernaculars, and represented Italian Renaissance throughout the world. There is no reason to be surprised: without knowing it, in full classicism, with an advance of several decades, it anticipated the tendencies of the classicist age.
Perfectly in harmony with his own aesthetic, Sannazaro felt otherwise in the *De partu Virginis*, where he set out to bring the language of Virgil to the glorification of the Christian crib. When the great bucolic poem in three books and about a thousand verses was completed in 1513, Leo X, through the hand of Bembo, complimented the author thus: “We have awaited your work with eagerness, and now we rejoice to see it completed. It would have been dear to us at any time; but it is particularly dear to us now. We need writers like you today, when the Christian tradition is assailed *iniquo stilo*.” Certainly great is the distance between the simplicity of the Gospel narrative and the splendor of Sannazaro’s evocation, enriched with mythological intrusions; Christ gathering the angels with authority may resemble Jupiter; Joy descending to earth may resemble Mercury; it may surprise that Proteus is introduced to prophesy the Baptism of Jesus, and that the prophecy is evoked precisely by the blue Jordan. Yet in this florid and warm Alexandrinism one must be cautious in speaking of discord. As for speaking of insincerity, it would be ridiculous. The piety that shines through here has an unmistakable gentleness: the gentleness of humanist Renaissance. Sannazaro also wrote psalm eclogues, elegies to Cassandra Marchese, and epigrams, some of which do not seem to belong to this gentle gentleman, so bitter do they sound.
SAN NICOLÁS DE LOS ARROYOS, DIOCESE OF. City and diocese in the province of Buenos Aires in Argentina, for which no statistical data are available.
Pope Pius XII, with the apostolic constitution *Maxime quidem invenit* of 3 March 1947, erected it as a diocese, detaching it from the archdiocese of La Plata and the diocese of Mercedes, as a suffragan of the archdiocese of Buenos Aires, and elevating the church of St Nicholas of Bari to the rank and dignity of a cathedral.