This, however, is not the main point about the poem.  The Adone should rather be classed as the epic of voluptuousness in all its forms and species.  If the love-poetry of the Italian Renaissance began with the sensuality of Boccaccio’s Amoroso Visione, it ended, after traversing the idyl, the novel, the pastoral, the elegy and the romance, in the more complex sensuality of Marino’s Adone; for this, like the Amoroso Visione, but far more emphatically, proclaims the beatification of man by sexual pleasure:—­

    Tramortiscon di gioia ebbre e languenti
    L’anime stanche, al ciel d’Amor rapite. 
    Gl’iterati sospiri, i rotti accenti,
    Le dolcissime guerre e le ferite,
    Narrar non so—­fresche aure, onde correnti,
    Voi che il miraste, e ben l’udiste, il dite! 
    Voi secretari de’felici amori,
    Verdi mirti, alti pini, ombrosi allori! (Canto viii.)

[Footnote 188:  Ferrari, in his Rivolnzioni d’Italia, vol. iii. p. 563, observes:  ’Una Venere sospetta versa lagrime forse maschili sul bellissimo Adonide,’ etc.  Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, in like manner, is so written as to force the reader to feel with Venus the seduction of Adonis.]

Thus voluptuousness has its transcendentalism; and Marino finds even his prolific vocabulary inadequate to express the mysteries of this heaven of sensuous delights.[189]

It must not be thought that the Adone is an obscene poem.  Marino was too skillful a master in the craft of pleasure to revolt or to regale his readers with grossness.  He had too much of the Neapolitan’s frank self-abandonment to nature for broad indecency in art to afford him special satisfaction; and the taste of his age demanded innuendo.  The laureate of Courts and cities saturated with licentiousness knew well that Coan vestments are more provocative than nudity.  It was his object to flatter the senses and seduce the understanding rather than to stimulate coarse appetite.  Refinement was the aphrodisiac of a sated society, and millinery formed a main ingredient in its love-philters.[190] Marino, therefore, took the carnal instincts for granted, and played upon them as a lutist plays the strings of some lax thrilling instrument.  Of moral judgment, of antipathy to this or that form of lust, of prejudice or preference in the material of pleasure, there is no trace.  He shows himself equally indulgent to the passion of Mirra for her father, of Jove for Ganymede, of Bacchus for Pampinus, of Venus for Adonis, of Apollo for Hyacinth.  He tells the disgusting story of Cinisca with the same fluent ease as the lovely tale of Psyche; passes with the same light touch over Falserina at the bedside of Adonis and Feronia in his dungeon; uses the same palette for the picture of Venus caressing Mars and the struggles of the nymph and satyr.  All he demanded was a basis of soft sensuality, from which, as from putrescent soil, might spring the pale and scented flower of artful luxury.