[Footnote 189:  With the stanza quoted above Marino closes the cycle which Boccaccio in the Amoroso Visione (canto xlix.) had opened.]

[Footnote 190:  On this point I may call attention to the elaborate portraits drawn by Marino (canto xvi.) of the seven young men who contend with Adonis for the prize of beauty and the crown of Cyprus.  Quite as many words are bestowed upon their costumes, jewelry and hair-dressing as upon their personal charms.]

In harmony with the spirit of an age reformed or deformed by the Catholic Revival, Marino parades cynical hypocrisy.  The eighth canto of Adone is an elaborately-wrought initiation into the mysteries of carnal pleasure.  It is a hymn to the sense of touch:[191]

    Ogni altro senso puo ben di leggiero
    Deluso esser talor da falsi oggetti: 
    Questo sol no, lo qual sempre e del vero
    Fido ministro e padre dei diletti. 
    Gli altri non possedendo il corpo intero,
    Ma qualche parte sol, non son perfetti. 
    Questo con atto universal distende
    Lesue forze per tutto, e tutto il prende.

[Footnote 191:  I have pleasure in inviting my readers to study the true doctrine regarding the place of touch among the senses as laid down by Ruskin in Modern Painters, part iii. sec. 1, chap. ii.]

We are led by subtle gradations, by labyrinthine delays, to the final beatification of Adonis.  Picture is interwoven with picture, each in turn contributing to the panorama of sensual Paradise.  Yet while straining all the resources of his art, with intense sympathy, to seduce his reader, the poet drops of set purpose phrases like the following: 

    Flora non so, non so se Frine o Taide
    Trovar mai seppe oscenita si laide.

Here the ape masked in the man turns around and grins, gibbering vulgar words to point his meaning, and casting dirt on his pretended decency.  While racking the resources of allusive diction to veil and to suggest an immodest movement of his hero (Adonis being goaded beyond the bounds of boyish delicacy by lascivious sights), he suddenly subsides with a knavish titter into prose: 

    Cosi il fanciullo all’inonesto gioco.

But the end of all this practice is that innocent Adonis has been conducted by slow and artfully contrived approaches to a wanton’s embrace, and that the spectators of his seduction have become, as it were, parties to his fall.  To make Marino’s cynicism of hypocrisy more glaring, he prefaces each canto with an allegory, declaring that Adonis and Venus symbolize the human soul abandoned to vice, and the allurements of sensuality which work its ruin.  In the poem itself, meanwhile, the hero and heroine are consistently treated as a pair of enviable, devoted, and at last unfortunate lovers.[192]