Stjepan Gradić: Ad Venerem Titiani Artificio Pictam

In this elegy Stjepan Gradić addresses a Venus painted by Titian which hung in the house of his friend Casanatta. He asks the goddess why she is pleased with this house rather than her own Golgi, Amathus, Cnidos or Idalian groves, and whether she knows what kind of man its owner is: raised from childhood in virtue and learning, wealthy and noble, scorning her son and her delights, an incorruptible judge in the Roman courts who cares more for Minerva and Juno’s severity than for her girdle. He goes on to describe Casanatta’s learning in history, nature and medicine, and his frugal habits, as reasons why Venus is out of place there.

The poem is a witty compliment to Girolamo Casanate, the learned Roman prelate and later cardinal whose library became the Biblioteca Casanatense, framed as an address to a famous painting. It belongs to the tradition of ekphrastic poems on works of art and shows the cultivated circles in which Gradić moved in Rome. It is also a document of the collecting of Titian’s paintings in seventeenth-century Rome.