Orazio Romano’s Porcaria

This chapter presents a thorough critical study of Orazio Romano’s poem Porcaria, a not very well-known text on Stefano Porcari’s conspiracy against Pope Nicholas V, in 1453. The comprehensive analysis of this work provides a complete reconstruction of the history of the text, based on the examination of the only manuscript copy of the poem still extant, and a thorough investigation of the wide-ranging classical sources used by the author in his work: in particular Vergil, Lucan, Statius, Sallust, Livy, and Claudian. The intertextual analysis points out the complex and multifunctional process of imitation performed by Orazio Romano in the creation of his sophisticated poem: a practice that affects both stylistic and thematic elements and is also aimed at creating a complex dimension of exemplarity. Moreover, the chapter analyses the political perspective of the text, which proves to be closely connected with the system of cultural politics developed by Nicholas V in the same years. Orazio Romano’s poem, in fact, is informed by a secular dimension in dealing with the issue of the conspiracy against the pope. Nicholas V himself emerges in the Porcaria as the figure of a papal prince, whose power is legitimized by an ennobling connection with the classical tradition. Classical symbols, values, and exemplars play a prominent function in bestowing authority on a new kind of papal government typical of the Renaissance age, which assumes the traits of a secular principality.