Vespucci’s father, Guido Antonio, purchased the palazzo on March 5th, 1499 on the Via dei Servi and Giovanni married the following year. Giorgio Vasari records that these “Bacchanals” were commissioned by Giovanni Vespucci to decorate an apartment in his palace in Florence. This unpublished 1989 thesis explores the classical textual sources and allegorical meaning of Piero di Cosimo’s two spalliere panels, The Discovery of Honey (Worcester Art Museum) and The Misfortunes of Silenus (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard). The interplay of the two Ovidian texts is construed as evoking the generic relationship between satyr play and tragedy in the fifth-century Attic tetralogy and reflects a broader generic dialogue between "tragic" episodes of the Metamorphoses and "satyric" narratives of the Fasti. In particular, the Fasti story functions as a lighthearted counterpart to the Metamorphoses tale by echoing its themes, structure, and figures. Moreover, it is shown that the narrative engages in an intertextual dialogue with another Ovidian generic hybrid, the Pentheus episode in the Metamorphoses (3.511-733), which constitutes an epicized tragedy being an epic narrative modeled on Euripides' Bacchae. In this context, I contend that the episode illustrates Ovid's adherence to Horace's artistic principles concerning proper satyric style as expounded in the Ars Poetica. This paper argues that the story can be read as a miniature elegiac version of a satyr play, on the grounds that it displays trademark elements of the genre. The humorous episode of Bacchus' institution of apiculture and Silenus' failed attempt to replicate the discovery is a satyric narrative in the Fasti (3.735-762) which has received hardly any attention as such.
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