La Villa. Bartolomeo Taegio
younger Pliny. Taegio also drew from the works of the Italian authors Angelo Poliziano and Jacopo Sannazaro, as well as Petrarch and the Florentine humanists. Taegio did not, as a rule, identify his sources, and he usually referred to them indirectly, either by alluding to the author’s oeuvre in general, rather than to a specific work, or by simply mentioning the author’s name. Often he neglected to identify the authors whose words or ideas he clearly was borrowing. Not once in La Villa did Taegio provide the title of a literary source, although here and there he dropped a hint, such as “Virgil in his rustic poem” (meaning the Georgics). Nowhere did he quote a classical text in its original language or render a literal translation; rather, he consistently presented paraphrases of Greek and Latin works. There is no reason to doubt that Taegio could have composed the paraphrases of classical texts himself; his seventeenth-century biographers praised him for his scholarship, and his ability to write verse is evident from the fact that he published his own poetry in Italian. Wherever Taegio’s classical source is poetry, his paraphrase appears in his native Italian with a rhyme scheme and meter of its own. Taegio quoted verbatim some of his Italian sources, such as Sannazaro’s Arcadia, but where he quoted Petrarch’s Rime sparse he did so without mentioning the poet’s name or in any way giving him credit for his verses.
Taegio used literary sources to support virtually every point of his argument for the superiority of country life over city life. He put his argument in the mouth of Vitauro, whose literary references are both more numerous and more effective than Partenio’s. In the first thirty-three pages of the dialogue, Partenio makes four references to literary sources. First he alludes to Aristotle, whose “man is by nature a social being” from the Nichomachean Ethics Partenio recalls with the words “Man came into this world not for himself alone but also for others” (p. 10). Then Partenio’s summarizes the plot of Homer’s Odyssey, in which, he says, Ulysses is praised for action, not contemplation. The third reference, which is unattributed, is an expression that appears more than once in fourteenth-century Italian literature. Partenio’s phrase “Cities are made for men and villas for beasts” (p. 15) echoes the words of the raconteur Franco Sacchetti who, in the 1380s, wrote that “la citta buon’ uomini de’ fare, la villa buone bestie a notricare” (the city should produce good men, the villa good livestock).219 Sacchetti was apparently retelling the same proverb quoted by Paolo da Certaldo in his Libro di buoni costumi. Finally Partenio makes a specific and attributed reference to Virgil’s Georgics, which he paraphrases to support his claim that men were happier in the age of iron, after cities were built, than in the golden age.
Responding to Partenio’s assertion that men in the country are less virtuous than those in the city, Vitauro replies, in words that bring to mind the ideas of Pico, Ficino, Bovillus, Petrarch, and Pomponazzi, that the vices of city dwellers outweigh their virtues because they neglect to apply the intellect to the purpose for which it was created; that is, contemplation. Vitauro answers Partenio’s objection, that the solitude of the villa is not conducive to knowledge of the world, with a logical proof that solitude is necessary for contemplation, which in turn leads to something far greater than knowledge of the world: knowledge of the truth.
Vitauro’s thesis, that villa life is naturally more agreeable to gentlemen than city life, consists of three points. The first point, that city life is not the way of life originally intended for humankind, is supported with refences to Latin sources, specifically Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the De architectura of Vitruvius. In making his second point, that life in the country is more pleasant than life in the city, Vitauro cites Virgil and Horace, and he misquotes Plato. Finally, Vitauro argues that country life is nobler than city life by enumerating the ancient kings and heroes who farmed.
In the middle of the dialogue, Partenio cites Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque Fortune and Virgil’s Georgics in an attempt to convince Vitauro that farming is not a suitable occupation for a scholar. In his rebuttal, Vitauro cites the same passage of the Georgics to prove that Partenio is misinterpreting Virgil. Then Partenio concedes the nobility of farming, and he refrains from citing literary sources for the remainder of the conversation. Vitauro makes more than fifteen references to literary sources as he argues that farming is a noble, useful, and necessary occupation, and that the villa accommodates philosophical studies more easily than the city. He cites a few lines each of Virgil’s Georgics, Varro’s Rerum rusticarum, and Petrarch’s Rime sparse, and he alludes briefly to Cato’s De agri cultura, where these sources concur in asserting that farming is the most honest way to earn a living. At greater length, he paraphrases the passage from Cicero’s dialogue De senectute, where Cato is depicted rejoicing in the delightfulness and usefulness of agriculture, and excerpts from Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, in which Cyrus, king of Persia, is portrayed saying he was as concerned about cultivating the land as he was about defending it. To illustrate his point that philosophical studies are more easily accommodated in the villa than in the city, Vitauro alludes to Pliny the Younger’s letter “To Minicius Fundanus,” in which he described the secluson he enjoyed at his villa in Laurentum. Vitauro also quotes two poems from Petrarch’s Rime Sparse and three stanzas from book 1 of Poliziano’s Stanze, in which those poets described the sweetness of their scholarly seclusion in villa.
At the end of the dialogue, Partenio’s role as Vitauro’s opponent is diminished. The dialectical character of the conversation is preserved only where Partenio argues, unconvincingly and without citing authorities, that the products of culture are no less delightful than the effects of nature. Vitauro, citing Virgil in praise of rugged mountains and uncultivated fields, persuades Partenio that nature is more delightful than art because the thing imitated is superior to the imitation. Vitauro deduces from this that villa gardens are more delightful than gardens in the city because they are closer to, and offer views of, wild countryside, which, he implies, is what gardens imitate.
The bulk of Vitauro’s increasingly monological discourse toward the end of La Villa is given over to an elaboration of one of the points he made earlier, that life in villa is more pleasant than city life. Vitauro begins to develop this theme by describing a variety of sensual pleasures that arise from being in the country: seeing animals, hearing waterfalls and birds, and smelling flowers. The country he describes is neither wilderness nor agricultural land but something in between; something more like paradise. It is shaped, at least in part, by human hands. There are trees in groves, water is in fountains, and grapevines are “married to the elms.” Its fauna includes domesticated as well as wild animals, and it is a country inhabited by people. Among its pleasures are the sight of rugged peasants and the sounds of villagers singing and shepherds playing pipes. The verses of the Georgics paraphrased to complement this description express Virgil’s delight in the regimented orderliness of a regularly planted vineyard. Vitauro continues to argue for the pleasantness of country life by retelling the tale of “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,” in which the advantages of city life over country life (symbolized by better food) are outweighed by its greater dangers. In the satire in which Horace originally set the story, excellent food and elevated conversation over dinner in a villa are presented as antidotes to the anxiety that comes from working in the city. Vitauro juxtaposes this tale with a story about a horse and a stag, which teaches that freedom is better than plenty, from one of Horace’s Epistles that also recommends the country as a site for a house. Although Taegio made no references to the original contexts of these stories beyond mentioning the author’s name, he might have expected an educated reader in the sixteenth-century to have been able to recall them. Taegio concluded his argument for the comparative pleasantness of country life by having Vitauro tell Partenio that what delights him most when he is in villa is catching birds, and by quoting Sannazaro’s Arcadia where that rural pastime, which had been a favorite of leisured aristocrats in Italy since the time of the Roman Empire, is described in detail.220
With the conclusion of the conversation about the respective pleasures of the city and the country, La Villa assumes the character of a monological treatise, as Vitauro alone continues to cite literary sources—Virgil’s Georgics, Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, and Xenophon’s Oeconomicus—to particularize the kinds of pleasure offered by life in villa. Vitauro speaks of three kinds of pleasure: sensual, intellectual,