Omaggi poetici per le nozze franco-medicee del 1600: Guarini, Murtola, Marino

This essay focuses on Guarini’s 'Dialogo di Giunone e Minerva', a poetic contrasto in hendecasyllables and seven-syllable lines composed to animate Maria de’ Medici’s and Henry IV of France’s wedding banquet, which took place in Florence in October 1600. Firstly, the text is contextualized in the framework of the wedding celebrations thanks to the chronicles of the event and published and unpublished reports of guests that had attended the banquet. Secondly, the verses are analysed by tracking down the Latin and vernacular sources from which Guarini drew (in addition to the self-citations from the 'Pastor fido') and by verifying the impact and success they had during the years both on the literary side (in Italy and France) and on the figurative side (especially in Rubens’ canvases). The text, in fact, contributed to create the encomiastic image of Mary: on the one hand transfigured into a pacifying goddess through identification with Venus, on the other depicted as an enlightened sovereign thanks to the protection of the divinity of wisdom Minerva. In particular, the close comparison with the compositions dedicated to Henry and Mary present in Marino’s 'Rime' of 1602 and with the 'Epitalamio' that Gasparo Murtola composed for that wedding allows us to verify the dense network of intertextuality that came about among the three authors, pursuant to the early reading of the Guarini’s 'Dialogo' by Marino and Murtola, that they knew thanks to their common patron Melchiorre Crescenzi