It was in the latter half of the fifteenth century that the renaissance eclogue, abandoning its last claims to poetic inspiration, assumed its definitive form in the works of Battista Spagnuoli, more commonly known from the place of his birth by the name of Mantuanus.  His eclogues, ten in number, were accepted by the sixteenth century as models of pastoral composition, inferior to those of Vergil alone, were indeed any inferiority allowed.  Starting with the simple theme of love, the author proceeds to depict its excess in the love-lunes of the distraught Amyntas.  Thence he passes to one of those satires on women in which the fifteenth century delighted, so bitter, that when Thomas Harvey came to translate it in 1656 he felt constrained, for his credit’s sake, to add the note, ’What the author meant of all, the translater intends only of ill women[29].’  There follows the old complaint of the niggardliness of rich patrons towards poor poets, and a satire on the luxury of city life.  The remaining poems are ecclesiastical.  One is in praise of the religious life, another describes the simple faith of the country folk and the joys of conversion; finally, we have a satire on the abuses of Rome, and a discussion on points of theological controversy.  None of these subjects possess the least novelty; the author’s merit, if merit it can be called, lies in having stamped them with their definitive form for the use of subsequent ages.  Combined with this lack of originality, however, it is easy to trace a strong personal element in the bitterness of the satire that pervades many of the themes, the orthodox eclogue on conversion standing in curious contrast with that on ecclesiastical abuses.

It is not easy to account for Spagnuoli’s popularity, but the curiously representative quality of his work was no doubt in part the cause.  His poems were what, through the changing fashions of centuries, men had come to expect of bucolic verse.  They crystallized into a standard mould whatever in pastoral, whether classical or renaissance, was most obviously and easily reducible to a type, and so attained the position of models beyond which it was needless to go.  They were first printed in 1498, and went through a number of editions during the author’s lifetime.  As a young man—­and it is to his earlier years that the bulk of the eclogues must be attributed—­Spagnuoli was noted for the elegance of his Latin verse; but his facility led him into over-production, and Tiraboschi reports his later writings as absolutely unreadable.  He was of Spanish extraction, as his name implies, became a Carmelite, and rose to be general of the order, but retired in 1515, the year before his death.

Three eclogues are extant from the pen of Pontano, a distinguished humanist at the court of Ferdinand I and his successors at Naples, and a Latin poet of considerable grace and feeling.  His poems were first published by Aldus in 1505, two years after his death.  In one characteristic composition he laments the loss of his wife, to whom he was deeply attached; another introduces under a pastoral name his greater disciple Sannazzaro[30].