C.'s exploration of the figure of Adonis in Italian Renaissance literature is an accomplished and detailed exemplar of the variety of interpretation and afterlife of classical myths. The book demonstrates how specific elements of the relatively minor narrative of Adonis were employed by Italian poets and mythographers over a period of approximately 150 years in relation to a range of topics, from horticulture to political flattery, and how the chosen elements have resounding potential to connect to cultural discourses of constancy, fertility, resurrection and rebirth. The emphasis is placed on the narrative's revival in the Italian Renaissance: ‘to assess the layers of meaning that early modern authors and mythographers deposited over the “original” story, forging new narratives and new meanings for their readers’ (p. xii).

Certainly, the figure of Adonis seems to have been of particular interest to poets of the period, the ‘fascination for young and fragile male beauty overshadowed by untimely death’ (p. xi). In comparative English work the dominant focus is Adonis' desirable beauty but, as indicated, the Italian focus on the Adonis myth identified by C. here is less on his status as Venus' lover or his perverse conception and birth than on his death and his metamorphosis into the anemone. Such regeneration, briefly and routinely related in Metamorphoses, refers to Adonis' ancient cultural past as a deity of fertility and cyclic regeneration; his sacrifice (C.'s ‘Dying God’ of the title) in order to secure fecundity a syncretistic echo of ancient figures like Tammuz and Osiris. This is established, and the introduction deftly summarises the syncretic mythological roles of Adonis in classical texts and those of Late Antiquity. The originality of the book is in its focus on three areas. These comprise the earliest deployment of the figure of Adonis in the work of Giovanni Pontano in the late fifteenth century, a comparison of sixteenth-century Italian mythographic encyclopaedias, and an analysis of Giovan Battista Marino's 1623 epic Adone, concluded, it is argued, as a piece of allegorical political flattery for the beleaguered French royal family.

In the first chapter, C. explores the ‘revisiting’ of the myth of Adonis by the great Latin poet and humanist Pontano. C. traces the increasing focus of Pontano from more conventional references to Adonis to implicit figurative deployment in his later poems. Two posthumously published texts offer intriguing and subtle ramifications of Pontano's interest in Adonis. C. teases out of Urania (1505) the allegory of Adonis' life and death in relation to the sun and the earth's seasons and regarding De hortis Hesperidum sive de cultu citriorum (The Garden of the Hesperides, or the Cultivation of Orange Trees) (1505) draws attention to the keen horticulturalist's playful assertion that Adonis was turned into an orange tree, rather than the anemone. Pontano claims that orange trees are thereby sacred to Venus, repudiating the classic myth in order to use it aetiologically to explain both the citrus trees on the Neapolitan shore and the perpetual blossom and fruit, as emblematic of Venus' continual grief.

C. identifies in Pontano an ‘eloquent example’ of fifteenth-century Italian humanism's ‘fresh, uninhibited and emulation-driven approach to the ancient models’ in contrast to the obsession with decorum, rigid genre codification and inflexibility of the dominant literary modes of the sixteenth century (p. 21). Whilst Pontano influenced many, C. identifies the influential Pietro Bembo's distaste for Pontano's creative genre hybridisation as indirectly stymieing the potential of the narrative of Adonis. As C. summarises, ‘an adherence to the tradition of the pastoral-idyllic genre characterized virtually every sixteenth-century European literary text dealing with the myth of Adonis’, and he explores these in detail (p. 39). However, the interest in Adonis' deeper cultural and cosmic links is to be found in contemporary mythographers. Natale Conti provides C. with the most bountiful implications, as Conti groups Adonis with Bacchus, Ceres, Priapus and the Sun. As C. writes, ‘This is clearly a group of “vitalistic” deities, all somehow connected with the notion of natural cycles of death and revival’ (p. 47).

Moving away from the arguably divided sixteenth-century formulations of Adonis into the early seventeenth century is the irrepressible figure of Marino. C. devotes two chapters to Marino's Adone, examining this vast text via pastoral, mythological intertexts and political allegory. As this suggests, Marino succeeds in synthesising (or at least including) all previous approaches to Adonis in his 40,000 verses published in Paris in 1623. There is commendable original research here, as Marino's focus on Adonis is relatively critically unexplored. The lengthy and tangled plot of Adone is often compared to the prose romances of Tasso and Ariosto, and the pastoral aspect indicates Marino's debt to the conventional sixteenth-century focus of the myth. However, C. foregrounds two important elements which demonstrate the scope of Marino's text. First, the narrative takes a year to unfold, and thereby ‘tallies with an allegorical interpretation of the story as referring to the sun cult or the planting, growing, and harvesting of wheat’ (p. 65). Marino's awareness and utilisation of this aspect of the Adonis myth is highly significant. The key events of Adone are shown to relate to this cycle of nature; for example, Adonis is trapped underground for the whole of winter and rejoins Venus at the beginning of spring. Furthermore, Marino makes the syncretic link to the sacrifice of Christ in, among other allusions, moving Adonis' fatal wound (usually located in his groin) to his side, with the use of the word ‘costato’.

The link between the sacrificed deities is further examined in the closing section of the poem. After Adonis' death he is reborn in two royal characters, male and female, who clearly represent Louis XIII of France and Anne of Austria. Here C. embarks on a fascinating analysis of the text as political allegory. The turbulent and uncertain history of the Bourbon dynasty saw Marino seizing on the recently established peace in potentially a ‘hurried solution largely dictated by necessity’ (p. 69). The sterile god is rejuvenated in the royal couple, with attendant implications for the future prosperity of France. Marino's intertextual inspiration for this political allegory (as well as self-interest and self-preservation) has some intriguing possibilities. C. identifies earlier literary constructions of Charles IX as Adonis and offers a detailed and persuasive exploration concerning the overlapping and concurrent images possible in figuring the death of French kings (tantalisingly associated with the sun and with the regenerating phoenix) as the death of Adonis: both convey the hope of regeneration / succession, both can be aligned, following royalist strategies, with the sacrifice of Christ.

The final chapter concludes, appropriately coming full circle, with consideration of Giovan Battista Ferrari's Hesperides (1646). This is a consideration of absence, in that Adonis is not referred to overtly in this text. However, the textual echoes, almost indecent images of fruit, plus an engraving which could be taken for a composite of Adonis' life, allow C. to find a continuation of the ‘symbolic forms’ (p. 110) of the narrative as first explored in Pontano. This is evidently an exhaustive and illuminating book as it attempts to trace the evolution of the figure of Adonis in the Italian Renaissance and as such is invaluable to researchers of this period or those interested in the cultural afterlife of mythology. It is worth commenting that the notes and bibliographical material comprise precisely half of the text's length, indicating C.'s meticulous research and dense referencing. As with Adonis himself, the myth's ‘survival and revival’ (p. 110) is key, its enduring potential indicated by its continual resurfacing and rejuvenation, as traced so skilfully in this period by C.