It was partly geographical coincidence, my living on the Tyrrhenian coast of southern Italy, that brought me to Herman Melville's long poem, Naples in the Time of Bomba. When I published my edition of that work, together with the linked poems At the Hostelry and "Pausilippo," in 1989,2 I wondered about the sources of the pictures and statues Melville described. Hostelry, a symposium of long-deceased artists, is particularly replete with references to works of art, real or imagined.

Real or imagined: this was one of the problems. (3) There is no doubt that when Spagnoletto cites his "Flaying of St. Bartholomew" or his "Lawrence on the gridiron lean," or Giotto his "Damned ...