Notes to Chapter 18 John Evelyn, The Diary, ed. E. S. DeBeer, 5 vols (Oxford, 1955), II, 180.
9 On September 16 he read a Latin poem in the Svogliati Academy (LR I, 389). Academy
records for July may refer to visits by Milton, though he is not mentioned by name (LR
V, 385–6).
10 The impact of Italian art on Milton is much disputed. Roland M. Frye, Milton’s
Imagery and the Visual Arts (Princeton, NJ, 1978), collects many visual parallels,
arguing that these visual traditions inform Milton’s conceptions of characters, events,
and places in his great epics. Michael O’Connell, “Milton and the Art of Italy,”
in Mario Di Cesare, Milton in Italy (Binghamton, NY, 1991), 215–36, argues that
Milton was likely unimpressed or actively repelled by much Italian art, owing
to England’s backwardness in the visual arts, to the iconoclasm that rendered reli-
gious art suspect, and to the absolutist politics and Counter-Reformation ethos
informing the Baroque art everywhere on view. But it is also the case that Milton
describes his journey as part of polemic treatises addressed to Puritan audiences, in
which discourses on Italian art would be counterproductive. See Diane McColley,
A Gust for Paradise (Chicago, 1993) for a sensitive appraisal of the way such arts
might inform Milton’s poems, not as influence but as visual environment. John
Evelyn’s Diary reports what was available to be seen throughout Italy, if the traveler
wished.
11 See John Arthos, Milton and the Italian Cities (London, 1968), 16–20; A. Field, The
Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence (Princeton, NJ, 1988); D. S. Chambers and F.
Quiviger, eds, Italian Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1995); and Estelle
Haan, From Academia to Amicitia: Milton’s Latin Writings and the Italian Academies (Phila-
delphia, 1998), 3–4.
12 See, for example, Haan, From Academia to Amicitia, 8–9; Eric Cochrane, Tradition and
Enlightenment: Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (Chicago, 1973), 4–27.
13 Salvino Salvini, Fasti consolari dell’Accademia Fiorentina (Florence, 1717), 488–50.
14 There are no records of his attendance at the Apatisti but he mentions six of its mem-
bers as friends, most of them also members of the Svogliati (Parker, II, 824); see Haan,
From Academia to Amicitia, 10–37.
15 Arthos, Italian Cities, 12.
16 His only other hexameter poems were “Ad Patrem” and the mini-epic on Guy Fawkes
Day; the former might be too personal and the latter would hardly do for this audience.
He might, of course, have composed something new for this occasion, now lost, but
this is less likely given his penchant for saving all his verse. See pp. 102–4 for his later
visits to the Svogliati.
17 Minutes (Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, Magliabechiana MS, Cl.IX. cod. 60, fol. 47)
quoted in Haan, From Academia to Amicitia, 13–14. See Neil Harris, “Galileo as Symbol:
The ‘Tuscan artist’ in Paradise Lost,” Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di
Firenze 10 (1985), 3–29.
18 The manuscript is by Anton Francesco Gori, a member of the Apastisti writing a cen-
tury later but evidently with access to records now lost (Manoscritto Marucelliano A.
36f. 53r, Florence, Biblioteca Marucelliana); cited in Haan, From Academia to Amicitia,
36.
19 His works include Poematum Libri Duo (Padua, 1628), Elogia Historica (Florence, 1637),
Corollarium Poeticum, scil. Poemata (Florence, 1636), and Adlocutiones et Elogia, Exemplaria,
Notes to Chapter 4