This poem, having remained unedited in the Vatican arcana, long escaped the literary historians of the Peninsula, but it has been recently quoted by two writers, Pungileone and Passavant, the former of whom had not seen it.[88] Although, in his dedication to Duke Guidobaldo, composed after 1490, the author accounts for his becoming a painter, as we shall see in chapter xxviii., he gives no further explanation of the motives which inspired the labour of a poem, containing some twenty-four thousand lines, than "that after anxious thought and consideration of such new ideas as offered themselves, I wished to sing in this little used style of _terza rima_, the story of your most excellent and most renowned father's glorious deeds," whose "brilliant reputation not only was and is well known throughout Italy, but is, if I may say so, the subject of discourse beyond the Caucasus," "not without a conscious blush at the idea of dipping so mean a vessel in the water of this limpid and sparkling spring." With equal modesty, he deprecates all rivalry with the learned commentators who had celebrated the same theme in Latin, limiting the ambition of his "rude and brief compend" to rendering its interest accessible to more ordinary readers; but, looking back upon his twenty-three ample cantos, he fervently thanks the Almighty that an undertaking of so extended time and toil had at length attained its termination, and concludes by "humbly beseeching that you will regard the hero's far-famed actions, rather than the baseness of my style, whose only grace is the sincere devotion of a faithful servant to his lord." A similar tone marks the outset of his Chronicle:--
"If e'er in by-gone times a shallow mind Shrank from the essay of a grand design, So quake I in the labour-pangs of fear."
[Footnote 88: _Elogio Storico di Giovanni Santi_, pp. 14 and 69, etc.; Rafael von Urbino. The original and only MS. is described in III. of our Appendix.]
Compared with contemporary epics, the rhythm is smooth and flowing, and the style dignified, interspersed with highly poetical episodes and finely expressed moral reflections as well as apt illustrations from ancient history and mythology. The epithets, though abundant, are more than usually appropriate, and many terse maxims are happily introduced. Yet, in his object of placing his poem and his hero among the popular literature of the day, Giovanni must have failed, the Vatican MS. being the only known copy. Readers it, however, doubtless had, one of whom has curiously commemorated his admiration by jotting on the margin, "Were you but as good a painter as a poet, who knows!" Modern critics, contrasting his fresco at Cagli with the rhyming Chronicle, would probably arrive at an inverse conclusion, especially were they to pronounce upon the latter from the preamble which called forth that exclamation--an allegorical vision, told in nine weary chapters, wherein figure a motley crowd of mythological and heroic personages belonging to ancient and contemporary times.