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.