The strange combination of physical vice with intellectual appetite produced throughout Italy what Symonds has happily called an "esthetic sensuality." The Italian's intellectual pursuits satisfied a craving quite sensuous in its nature.
It is not at all astonishing that in these conditions we find no national epic and no national drama, but a gradual growth of a poetry saturated with physical realism and the final appearance of a dramatic form equipped with the most potent charms of sensuous art.

It was in such a period that a special kind of public was developed.

The "Cortegiano" of Castiglione, Bembo's "Asolani," the "Camaldolese Discourses" of Landino could have been addressed only to social oligarchies standing on a basis of polite culture.
In such conditions the stern ideals of early Christianity were thrust into obscurity and the sensuous charms of a hybrid paganism, a bastard child of ancient Greece and medieval Italy herself, excited the desires of scholars and dilettanti from the lagoons of Venice to the Bay of Naples.

In the midst of this era it is not remarkable that we hear the pipe of Pan, slightly out of tune and somewhat clogged by artifice, as it was later in the day of Rousseau, but none the less playing the ancient hymns to Nature and the open air life.
Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458-1530) embodied the ideals of the time in his "Arcadia," in which Symonds finds the literary counterparts of the frescoes of Gozzo and Lippo Lippi.

At any rate the poem contains the whole apparatus of nymphs and satyrs transplanted to Italian landscape and living a life of commingled Hellenism and Italianism.