Ambrogio Fracco’s Christian Ovidian Fasti

John F. Miller (University of Virginia)

The monumental influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on Renaissance literature and art throughout Europe is well known. Nearly forgotten is the genre of Neo-Latin Christian calendar poems inspired by Ovid’s Fasti. Mantuan in the early sixteenth century is the only noted poet to have produced a Christian Sacri Fasti, but the other examples of the genre engage with Ovid’s calendrical elegy in much more interesting ways, namely the Latin poetic calendars of Alexander de Villa Dei, Fracco, Lazzarelli, Buonincontri, Chytraeus, and Vaillant. This paper discusses the Sacroroum fastorum libri duodecim (1547) of the Ambrogio Fracco as an exuberant and complex instance of Ovidian reception among the Renaissance humanists. Fracco’s Ovidian aspirations are powerfully announced on the very title page by the poet’s adopted name Novidius, i.e. novus Ovidius. Readers of the poem encounter at nearly every turn clear echoes of Ovid’s Fasti and imitation of that model’s most conspicuous techniques, such as dialogues with local inhabitants and meetings with the divine. Most interesting of all, Fracco’s Fasti offers a detailed, sustained Christian commentary on the pagan calendar as Ovid presents it.

Instances (among many) of Fracco’s updated aetiological dialogues include his encounter in Rome with a man from Lombardy who explains the day’s festivities in honor of Milan’s most famous native son St. Ambrose and the epiphany of the Holy Spirit in the form of a radiant youth who comments extensively on himself. The former entry alludes both to Ovid’s festival of Anna Perenna, another merry celebration “not far from your banks, Tiber” (Ov. F. 3.524) and to the Floralia, yet another festive feast, where the flowery goddess’s imagined inspirational beneficence to Naso (F. 5.377–78) becomes a similarly punning anticipation of St. Ambrose’s flowery, ‘ambrosial’ gift to the poet Ambrogio. One of the richest examples of Fracco’s ‘commentary’ on Ovid’s pagan calendar occurs in the entry for January 1, where in a conversation with Fracco the Trinity cleverly rivals Janus, who appeared to the inquiring poet at the very same point in Ovid’s Fasti, by allegorically reinterpreting the personal symbols that the pagan deity discussed with Ovid—the two-faced god’s keys are really those of the Church, the ship stamped on Janus’ coin signifies Noah, etc

My paper analyzes these and other instances of the three types of Ovidian imitation at work in Fracco’s Christian Fasti—verbal, situational, and Christian reinterpretation of ancient deities and festivals. Particularly rich examples include the Blessed Virgin’s pointed replacement of Mars on March and the three Muses’ debate over the most suitable honoree for April (Venus, Nature, Jesus) in the light both of Ovid’s possibilities in Fasti 4 and his contentious Muses at the start of Fasti 5.