The ‘Eccentric’ Propertius at the Service of the Canon

Piccolomini’s Cinthia

Abstract

Poetry/versification in Latin is a marginal part of Piccolomini’s literary oeuvre. However, his Cinthia, even if not a poetic masterpiece, is an interesting example of the creative imitation of the Latin classics. Convinced that behind the elegiac ‘muses’ of the Roman love elegy there are real women, probably married, Piccolomini portrays his relationship with the married Sienese Angela Acherisi as a literary reenactment of Propertius’ story with Cynthia. Like Propertius and the troubadours, he understands the love elegy partly as ‘poetry of courtship’ and follows still other conventions of the Roman elegy, while consciously intensifying the motif of unrequited love ‘from afar’ and the existential configuration eros-thanatos (concluding poem, nr. 23). Cinthia is also interesting as a textbook example of humanist versification, in which poetics overrides erotic experience from the outset: the programmatic poem for ‘Cinthia’ is followed by two distinctly superficial eulogies to Virgil. The presence of Propertius, who as an unconventional poetic model lends the collection its programmatic skeleton (ingenium ipsa puella facit; Cynthia finis erit), is less prominent in the text itself compared to Virgil’s. The predominance of poetics over eroticism is therefore also reflected in the fact that the ‘eccentric’ Propertius (sunt qui Propertium malint, Quintilian) in the new context primarily reinforces Virgil’s canonical position.