The moralization of Boscan’s «Leandro»: sources, diffusion and interpretation of a fable

Abstract

Boscan carries out a clear moral standards to the fable of Leandro and Hero by eliminating certain elements of its main source, the epilio of Museum, and add others that had not found in the Greek poem. Deleted, for example, the scene in which Leander has released the Hero’s belt and expands instead of the anointing of the body that the bride carried out in the body of the boyfriend, especially through other classical sources (the anointing of Aeneas by his mother Venus to become a God) and also biblical (the anointing of Christ at Bethany for a sinful woman). At the end she decided to save the lovers by placing them after their deaths by suicide in the Elysian fields when one of their sources, Bernardo Tasso, had located them not in those places but also in the forests of Myrtle. If Boscán has moralized the fable it is because he wanted to defend the conjugal above another type of love, as he had done in book II of his works (Barcelona, 1543) and to commemorate your wedding with Ana Girón de Rebolledo in September 1939.