Simone Carboni

A New Focus on Radivilias, a Prelude to the Baroque Era

Simone Carboni

A New Focus on Radivilias, a Prelude to the Baroque Era

Keywords: Radivilias, Kochanowski, Baroque, Bennet, baroque images

The famous Latin poem "Radivilias" (1592) by Ioannes Radvanus is the best poetic fruit of the Neo-Latin epic genre, flowered within the boarder of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, at the end of the 16th century. The poem in four books, following the classical epic lectio (the Virgilian and Homeric ones), represents some known war events which go under the name of ‘Livonian war’ (1558-1583): a series of campaigns conducted by the Russian czar Ivan ‘the Terrible'.          The poem focuses mainly on the deeds of the military captain Mikolajus ‘The Red’ Radvila, at the service of the Polish-Lithuanian state, represented, in Radvanus verses, as a sort of novellus Aeneas.