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Sannazzaro also wrote a mythological poem entitled Salices, in which certain nymphs pursued by satyrs are changed by Diana into willows. The tale was evidently suggested by Ovid, and cannot strictly be classed as pastoral, though it may have helped to fix in pastoral convention the character of the satyr; who, however, at no time enjoyed a very savoury reputation.
It was, undoubtedly, Montemayor's romance which served as a model for, or rather suggested the character of, Sidney's work . Thus the chivalric element, unknown to Sannazzaro, is with Sidney even more prominent than with Montemayor and his followers.
Among the last was a procession of nymphs, with their queen at their head, riding upon a bull, with satyrs disporting themselves about her. Sannazzaro may have thought that the epigram in which he had referred to Giulia Farnese as Europa on the bull suggested this representation of the Borgia arms.
Sannazzaro was content to transfer certain personages from real life into his imaginary Arcadia, while in the Spanish romances the whole mise en scène consists of the actual surroundings of the author disguised but little under the veil of pastoralism.
There he received from Cardinal Doria and from the Prince the commission for the statue of that Prince, which was to be placed on the Piazza Doria; to which having set his hand, yet without altogether neglecting the tomb of Sannazzaro, while Tadda was executing the squared work and the carvings at Carrara, he finished it to the great satisfaction of the Prince and the people of Genoa.
Next the reverend Opico is induced to discourse of the powers of magic as the shepherds proceed to the sacred grove of Pan, who shares with Pales the honours of Arcadian worship, and to the games held at the tomb of sibyllic Massilia a name under which Sannazzaro is said to have commemorated his own mother.
The drawing in brown upon the socle beneath this fresco, is by Pierino del Vaga, and represents the death of Archimedes. 'Right Wall. "Parnassus." Apollo surrounded by the Muses; on his right, Homer, Virgil, and Dante. Below on the right, Sappho, supposed to be addressing Corinna, Petrarch, Propertius, and Anacreon; on the left Pindar and Horace, Sannazzaro, Boccaccio, and others.
It must be remembered that Sannazzaro was himself of Spanish extraction, and that he may have had relations with the land of his fathers of a nature to facilitate the diffusion of his works. The next and by far the most important contribution made by the peninsula to pastoral literature was the work of an hispaniolized Portuguese, who composed in Castilian dialect the famous Diana.
Between it and the work of Boccaccio and Sannazzaro there exists no such continuity of tradition as between the bucolics of the classical Mantuan and those of his renaissance follower. The Italian pastoral romance, in spite of its almost pedantic endeavour after classical and mythological colouring, was as essentially a product of its age as the pastoral drama itself.
But Sannazzaro, like all the early pastoral poets of Italy, proposed to himself, as the highest excellence, a close imitation of Virgil; he took his shepherds from the fabulous ages of antiquity, borrowed the mythology of the Greeks, and completed the machinery with fauns, nymphs, and satyrs.
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