What is it about?
This chapter explores how Girolamo Vida, a sixteenth-century Italian poet and priest, engaged with the Roman poet Lucretius, whose On the Nature of Things expressed a materialistic, non-Christian view of the world. Vida’s Christiad adapts Lucretian images, language, and ideas to tell the story of Christ within a Catholic framework. By reshaping passages that once denied divine action or the immortality of the soul, Vida turns Lucretius into a poetic model for expressing Christian truth. The chapter shows how this “contrastive imitation” turns an ancient poem about atoms and nature into a celebration of divine creation and redemption.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The chapter demonstrates how Renaissance authors could transform even the most unorthodox classical sources into vehicles of religious meaning. It reveals a new facet of humanist creativity—how admiration for Latin poetry could coexist with theological orthodoxy. By examining Vida’s subtle reworking of Lucretian language and imagery, this study contributes to a better understanding of the dialogue between science, faith, and literature in early modern Europe, and highlights Vida’s role in the wider revival of Lucretius during the 1530s.
Perspectives
Writing this chapter allowed me to trace how a Christian poet read and “answered” a pagan school of thought through artful imitation. What fascinated me most was Vida’s ability to keep Lucretius’ poetic beauty while overturning his materialism—a process that shows how Renaissance Latin poets thought critically about belief, art, and the past. I hope readers will see in Vida not only a devout author but also a subtle interpreter of one of antiquity’s most daring thinkers.
Stefano Cianciosi
University of Oxford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Presence of Lucretius, September 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004738713_004.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
