ABSTRACT
Like the owl of Minerva, the encyclopedic compilation only appears at the end of the day. A century’s revival of antiquity had passed before publication of the great rnythographic works that seemed to bring the harvest of the new erudition to bear on the interpretation of the ancient gods. The best known and most influential of these works, Lilio Giraldi’s, De Deis Gentium (1548), Natali Conti’s Mythologiae (1551) and Vincenzo Cartari’s Imagini de gli dei degli antichi (1556) remind us how much had been learned in the century after the heroes of Renaissance philology, Poggio, Niccoli, and Ciriaco, first woke the dead. 1 But they do this because of how little rather than how much they reflect this great and continuing historical revohrtion. As Jean Seznec observed, “in spite of appearances none of them represents a really decisive advance over the earlier treatises; not one contains anything new.” 2
