Indeed much of The Palice’s stylistic power lies in its
leaps between highly rhetorical “aureate” language and
colloquial diction. The Palice shows an encyclopedic
command of the conventional motifs of courdy allegory,
but it also has descriptive fl air and vivid, often comic,
dramatic settings. Its narrative centers on the various
approaches to honor, through chastity, faithful love, and
especially through poetry itself. This looks forward to
the Eneados, in which lay Douglas’s greatest hope for
honor and worldly immortality.
The ambitious task of gathering a whole prior tradi-
tion into a new language and culture also characterizes
the Eneados. Douglas seeks to bring not merely the text
of Virgil but also the whole medieval and Renaissance
Latin tradition surrounding that text to a noble Scots
vernacular readership. In addition to the justly famous
Prologues to the books of the poem Douglas provides a
framework of prose commentary, chapter division, and
verse summaries that closely imitates the structure of
Latin Virgil manuscripts and early printed editions.
The Prologues are simultaneously apologetic and
boastful. They regret the “difference betwix my blunt
endyte / And thy scharp sugarate sang Virgiliane” (I Pro.
28–29), and they defuse attacks on Virgil’s pagan con-
tent by proposing euhemerist, astronomical, and chris-
tianizing interpretations of the gods. Yet they criticize
Caxton’s and Chaucer’s earlier English versions of the
story. Despite Douglass modesty about his native tradi-
tion the Prologues display formal and stylistic variety as
great as that which he praises in Virgil: heroic couplets,
rime royal, alliterative stanzas, and other forms.
Douglas’s translation itself, which replaces Virgil’s
hexameters with heroic couplets, is remarkably faith-
ful to Virgil, in both spirit and detail. If Douglas rarely
captures Virgil’s quieter metrical nuances, he consis-
tently succeeds with scenes of action and the more
emotional speeches. He expands on Virgil at various
points, sometimes adding brief explanations of Virgilian
terms (usually derived from Latin glosses on the poem)
and sometimes putting additional emphasis on Aeneas’s
political role. But even more, Douglas’s expansions
refl ect his own readerly enthusiasms: naval technol-
ogy, storms, hunts, landscapes, and battles. Here, even
more than in the artifi cial structure of the Prologues,
Virgil and his Scots translator coalesce into a single, if
extended, voice.
Further Reading
Primary Sources
Bawcutt, Priscilla J., ed. The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas.
STS, 4th ser. 3. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1967.
Coldwell, David F.C., ed. Virgil’s “Aeneid” Translated into Scot-
tish Verse by Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld. STS, 3d ser.
25, 27, 28, 30. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1957–64.
Secondary Sources
New CBEL 1:662–64.
Manual 4:988–1005, 1180–1204.
Bawcutt, Priscilla J. Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1976.
Blyth, Charles R. “The Knychtlyke Stile”: A Study of Gavin
Douglas’Aeneid. New York: Garland, 1987.
Scheps, Walter, and J. Anna Looney. Middle Scots Poets: A Refer-
ence Guide. Boston: Hall, 1986, pp. 195–246.
Christopher C. BaswellDUCCIO DI BUONINSEGNA
(c. 1255 or 1260–1319)
The painter Duccio di Buoninsegna was born in Siena.
He was active largely in Tuscany—and especially in
Siena—from the 1270s until he died. Along with a
few other artists, including Cimabue, Giotto, and the
Pisano family of sculptors, Duccio must be recognized
as responsible for taking the arts in a new direction and
thereby helping to usher in a new cultural era. Ducdo’s
art has a quality very different from Giotto’s but displays
the same earnest exploration and experimentation in
the depiction of pictorial space and human psychology.
Duccio would serve as the touchstone for the Sienese
approach to painting for the next 250 years, because he
originated a distinctively Sienese type of color, line,
composition, and narrative.
The earliest documentary mention of Duccio comes
from 1278, when he was paid by the commune of Siena
for painting twelve storage chests for offi cial documents.
The commune of Siena employed Duccio on numerous
occasions. In 1279, 1286, 1291, 1292, 1294, and 1295
he was commissioned by the offi ce of the biccherna, the
fi scal branch of the government, to paint the wooden
panels (known as biccherna covers) that bound the com-
munal registers kept in this offi ce. Duccio’s panels (now
lost) mark the inception of the commune’s practice of
commissioning such panels from its leading painters, a
tradition that was maintained through the fourteenth and
fi fteenth centuries. Also in 1295, the commune called
on Duccio, along with the sculptor Giovanni Pisano, to
be part of a commission to decide where to locate the
city’s new fountain, the Fonte Ovile.
Duccio’s frequent employment by the commune of
Siena in what appears to have been the early part of his
career must indicate that people had confi dence in his
ability. However, another side of the artist emerges in
some of the documents bound in Duccio’s biccherna
covers: his name appears regularly in the register of
penalties levied for offenses against the commune. The
fi rst of these, from 1280, does not specify Duccio’s
crime, but the considerable sum of 100 lire suggests that
it was serious. (To put this in perspective, Duccio was
paid only forty-eight lire for one of his largest commis-DUCCIO DI BUONINSEGNA