3 - Erotic Transformation

Summary

As the last chapter has briefly demonstrated, many early modern poets composed imitations which kept more or less to the channels suggested to them by the original poems of Catullus. This is not to say that an intervening tradition played no part in them. Far from it. Their very existence in such numbers reveals a tradition at work, and some of the changes wrought to the themes during the unfolding of that tradition, from Martial to Secundus, have already been intimated. But now a much more important and subtle change must be investigated. For the kisses of Catullus underwent, throughout the Renaissance, a process of eroticization. This was largely thanks to the early and extensive influence of Pontano, and also to the way in which the poetic theme of the kiss, so tenaciously ‘Catullan’ in the humanist imagination, accrued descriptive and thematic baggage from the humanist poets’ wider reading in Roman poetry. In truth, the Neo-Catullan kiss was also Ovidian, Tibullan and Propertian, as well as Martialian. In order to understand these processes of assimilation and transformation, let us begin where the last chapter left off, with the question of sexual euphemism.

EUPHEMISM AND TITILLATION

The kiss in art and literature has always had a latent euphemistic capability. The sexual subtext can be activated in many different ways, and in different degrees, according to tone and context. But euphemism is not quite the same as innuendo: it can be pitched almost anywhere on the scale of innocence. Often, for example, the kiss may stand for physical love simply (although perhaps never quite simply) by virtue of its basic meaning as a gesture, without necessarily having the appearance of an artfully manipulated euphemism. That is, it can sometimes be mere shorthand, making no particular enticements to the imagination, rather than being the modest face behind which we are meant to intuit and envision the steamier thing really meant.

If kisses were liable to be understood or intended euphemistically, so too were sparrows. Kisses and sparrows were almost certainly the two themes or motifs most commonly associated with Catullus in the Renaissance.