Poetic matters: Giovanni Aurelio Augurello (1441–1524), materiality, and the visual arts

Abstract

Abstract Historians of Renaissance art have long been familiar with Giovanni Aurelio Augurello’s interest in painting and sculpture, while historians of alchemy are aware of his lifelong dedication to the gold-making art immortalized in his masterpiece, Chrysopoeia (1515). Yet the problem of how these interests intersect in the poet’s work has either been disregarded or framed within outdated categories such as occultism and hermeticism. In a dialogue with recent theoretical work on intermediality, and based on the identification of several key artistic allusions in Augurello’s Chrysopoeia, this article proposes to interpret them beyond the conventions of ekphrasis. A remarkable focus on artistic techniques, processes, and materials, we argue, defines the self-referential blend of poetry and alchemy inscribed in Chrysopoeia. Rather than being the expression of an occult or hermetic mentality, this poem’s fascination with the materiality and poetics of artworks, we propose, is attuned with the Northern Italian aesthetics nurtured by Andrea Mantegna, Giulio Campagnola, and other artists of the time.