The pastoral is possibly the most pervasive and resilient artistic and literary phenomenon in the History of Western Art and Aesthetics. Warmly welcomed in its time, Renaissance bucolic literature unfolded in various forms of representation, in a ripple effect that perpetuated the genre, although its intended artificiality is, to some extent, unsettling and impervious to our contemporary taste. Pointing to some of the fundamental stages of the genre’s constitution and highlighting aspects of its structure, we seek to point to the operative devices that allowed conflicting forces of the social life experienced in that period to be negotiated and elaborated dialectically in the scene of pastoral fiction. Through this viewpoint, the pastoral culture unveils its fascinating and ingenious game of concealment, mirroring and smuggling.
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