Il culto della croce e la poesia per immagini: il caso della granadiglia nel diciassettesimo secolo

The article focuses on an unknown phenomenon developed within the frame of the Counter-reformation Italy, in which interact the Catholic faith and a sort of transfer from painting to literature. At the time, the Latin-American flower maracock (maracuja), renamed granadilla by the Spanish conquistadores, was transformed by the Jesuits into Flos passionis/passionflower, whose components were forced to represent Christ crucifixion. From 1608 to the 1660s, priests and poets, like the well-known G. Botero and G. B. Marino, wrote poems on the passionflower on the basis of some unreal images spread by the Jesuits. Aiming at experiencing a new form of ancient ékfrasis, they had described the Passionflower without any reference to the authentic flower. These poets and intellectuals dealt with different paradigms employing metaphors to give the flower a distorted meaning presenting it either as the book of nature, or as the symbol of a mysterious gift given by God, in which are contained both the “officium occultandi” and the “ratio docendi”. All these strategies had the final goal to consider the flower as a means in nature to reveal the secrets of Christ’s Passion after his death. However, the comparison among poems and botanical treatises shows a diminished interest about this kind of “ut pictura poësis”, especially when the descriptions and the drawings of the true granadiglia increased without any religious implications since 1630s.