FAVOLE AND ISTORIE

The Galeria, the magnificent collection of 624 poems that Marino dedicated to works of art, opens with two sections. They are perfectly complementary and yet conflicting in their ideals and tone, reflecting the most important strands in 16thand 17th-century visual narratives. On one side, Marino collects the Favole, derived from Ovidian mythological heritage, and from the other he composes the Istorie, inspired by stories from sacred scriptures and the lives of saints. These are two sections with different origins. The Favole are often connected to the collection of drawings that the poet accumulated over the years. The sheets displayed here offer eloquent examples from this collection. The Istorie, however, form a literary evocation of the works that Marino observed in the great art collections he visited over the course of his travelling career, like a list of the masterpieces that most impressed him for their style, but also for their rendering of the subject. In the first section of the Galeria, both strands that fed Marino’s fantasy – the sacred and the profane – invite the reader into an imaginary museum created by its verses. It even evokes the excitement provoked by an encounter with a work of art, by recording a reaction of surprise, sometimes confusion, or even pleasure mixed with discomfort. It is poetry that intentionally resists a developing narrative in order to restore the present moment and, in doing so, comes close to the communicative immediacy of the visual medium.

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