Marco Girolamo Vida: Difference between revisions

Murray continues, "In the opening lines, Vida tells how he has written this poem, on a subject never before attempted by the poets, at the insistence of [[Federigo Fregoso]], and he expresses the hope that it might afford some relaxation to [[Guiliano dedi Medici]] in the heavy task which he and his brother (Giovanni, later [[Pope Leo X]], a keen chess-player), had undertaken in repelling the French invaders of Italy. V.d. Lasa has shown that the allusions to Italian events point definitively to the early summer of 1513 as the date of the poem. Vida was then aged twenty-three. The aim of the poem is to describe in Virgilian Latin a game of chess played between [[Apollo]] and [[Mercury]] in the presence of the other gods."<ref> H.J.R. Murray (1913), ''A History of Chess'', page 790-791.</ref>