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Un epilio barroco: el "Polifemo" y su género

Beginning with such works as Ronsard’s "Adonis" (1563) and "La mort de Narcisse" (1584) or Thomas Lodge’s "Scylla’s Metamorphosis" (1589), the late European Renaissance saw a notable revival of the ‘epyllion’, a long elegy or narrative poem with an Ovidian stamp. From its beginnings in ancient literature, the epyllion was a sophisticated intellectual genre based on the stories and figures of classical mythology and imbued with a refined eroticism, but in response to the complex ideological climate of the early modern period it became progressively more intricate and self-conscious. The amorphous mixture of steamy eroticism and stern moralization in Shakespeare’s "Venus and Adonis" (1593) already testified to the increasing convolution of the genre; but soon after, the epyllion grew to be a virtual prism for contemplating the various (etiological, aesthetic, philosophical, moral, burlesque) forms of myth. The most extreme example of this development was Marino’s "Adone" (1623), which juxtaposed a bewildering amount of mythical forms with the probable intention of letting them mutually relativize each other. In its introspective withdrawal into the recesses of myth, the Baroque epyllion basically reflected the contemporary surveillance of cultural productions, particularly those embracing the colourful world of the pagan gods; yet it also echoed the fundamental ambiguity as to the ontological status, cultural function, and proper aesthetic representation of myth that arose with the challenging of the medieval mythographical tradition through the fresh humanist translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.