Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance.

At a time when many literary scholars are dedicated to the project of ransoming unknown or neglected works from the oblivion that their non-canonical status has imposed on them, Daniel L. Heiple proposes a "revaluation" of Garcilaso de la Vega's lyric, which has always enjoyed a privileged status in the canon of "Golden Age" poetry. Complaining that the concept of a sincere grieving lover has too long dominated Garcilaso scholarship, Heiple argues that critics have traditionally ignored the intellectual aspect of the poet, who in fact was a "thinker more inclined to humanistic speculation than to emotive outpourings" (394). According to Heiple's lengthy study, it is Garcilaso's aesthetic and cultural milieu that must inform these "new" readings of his poetry. The critic affirms that only by taking into account various types of Italian Renaissance influence - Bembo's theories of poetic imitation, Bernardo Tasso's spearheading of a reaction against Petrarchism, and mythological iconography in Italian painting of the period - can we appreciate how Garcilaso's brief opus actually breaks down into three distinct stages: the Hispanic cancionero style, the Petrarchan style, and the Neoclassical style. It is not the "masochistic" Petrarchist lover in Garcilaso's verses who interests Heiple, but the "serious thinker struggling with new material and norms of poetic expression" (xi).

Heiple reviews the critical tradition that established Garcilaso's "sincerity" as the determinative criterion for explaining his artistic superiority. The line of that tradition roughly parallels that of the biographical reading of Garcilaso's best-known poems, according to which both the characters of the Eclogues and the poetic speaker of many sonnets are representations of Garcilaso's anguished love for Isabel Freire. The author rejects both the "sincere" Garcilaso and the notion that there is any basis for a biographical reading of all his poetry. Heiple is not alone in this, by any means, nor is his position entirely new. As he himself states, it was scholars such as Frank Goodwyn, Pamela Waley, and David Darst who first debunked the biographical reading of Garcilaso, a reading that is now generally considered outmoded in "Golden Age" studies. But if Heiple unnecessarily polemicizes the issue of Garcilaso's "sincerity," the fact that he poses his argument in these terms shows just how dominant the idea of Garcilaso as suffering lover and poet has been during most of the twentieth century.

Heiple's excursion into Garcilaso's Petrarchism obliges him to explore the Italian Renaissance practice of poetic imitation. His book therefore shares a certain common project with Anne J. Cruz's Imitacion y transformacion. El petrarquismo en la poesia de Boscan y Garcilaso de la Vega, with which Heiple is familiar. He does not refer to the important work of Alicia de Colombi-Monguio on Renaissance imitatio, particularly the chapters of her Petrarquismo peruano: Diego Davalos y Figueroa y la poesia de la Miscelanea Austral that detail the connection between Spanish "Golden Age" poets and the theories of Bartolommeo Ricci and Pietro Bembo. Here Heiple may have found material to complement his use of G.W. Pigman III's adaptation of Ricci's imitative categories. Heiple's analysis of Tasso's influence on the later poetry of Garcilaso is more novel. It challenges not only the notion of a monolithic, "Petrarchist" Garcilaso, but the idea that Garcilaso's poems comprise a contiguous, undiversified corpus. This is one of the most important contributions of Heiple's book.

The book ends with several chapters on some of Garcilaso's longer poems. Heiple dedicates the most space to the "Ode ad florem Gnidi," which he examines in the context of iconological mystery as it appears in Italian Renaissance painting, exploring "images whose symbolic allusions produce a complex structure of parallel meanings" (365). He rejects the traditional identification of the ode's characters as "illogical," then gives a new twist to the textual association with Venus by identifying the addressee with the iconological figure of the "Armed Venus." Heiple's reading attempts to project the events of the poem into a "realm of archetypes in which they assume greater significance" (392), but does not radically challenge the way Garcilaso's text has always been understood - as the poet's plea to a hard-hearted woman on behalf of a male friend, now "feminized" by her rejections. Heiple's research on the "Armed Venus" figure in Renaissance iconology is intriguing. However, the value of his book lies in the fact that he challenges us to refocus our view of Garcilaso by paying attention to neglected texts and by taking into account the complexity of his poetic corpus.

ELIZABETH B. DAVIS Ohio State University