My current project traces the fortunes of Virgil's fourth Eclogue, the so-called ‘messianic’ eclogue, in art and literature from antiquity to the present day. This mysterious poem of 63 lines has exerted a truly astonishing impact on almost all branches of western culture since its composition in the late 40s bc, and attracted literary responses from the very beginning. From late antiquity onwards the eclogue enjoyed enormous popularity throughout Christendom as a conscious or unconscious prophecy of the birth of Christ, an inference from its enigmatic allusions to the appearance of a miraculous child and the return of ‘the Virgin’ (the latter originally a reference to the return of the allegorical figure of Justice, who was supposed to have fled the earth at the end of the Golden Age). Even before this appropriation of the poem for the new religion, Virgil's lines were established firmly as a model for political panegyric, with regular proclamations of the return of the Golden Age heralding the accession of successive Roman emperors. Both these tendencies were to continue virtually unbroken for the next two millennia, in the fulsome imperial eulogies of late antiquity and the extravagant courtly tributes of the Renaissance, in the doctrinal writings of the Church Fathers and later essays in devotion and polemic, in the vast corpus of neo-Latin literature and the emerging body of vernacular poetry and prose. They also found visual expression in a variety of secular and ecclesiastical contexts, notably in representations of the Cumaean Sibyl (to whom Virgil attributes the prophecies contained in his poem) accompanied by extracts from the eclogue, which gave its pagan author an enduring place in settings of Christian worship. Nor was engagement with the fourth Eclogue confined to the political and religious spheres; it could be invoked also as a vehicle for reflection on literary or artistic matters, and its distinctive imagery of regeneration and renewal may well have contributed to the assertions of cultural ‘rebirth’ that have done so much to entrench the notion of a Renaissance in subsequent historiography.

During my time in Rome I was able to make significant progress on this project, drawing principally on the resources of the British School at Rome, the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Vatican Library. The BSR not only afforded tranquil and comfortable surroundings for study and writing, but also provided an opportunity to discuss my research with scholars from a very wide range of academic disciplines, with a multitude of different interests and specialisms, which has been indispensable to the development of my thinking on this fundamentally interdisciplinary topic. In addition to intensive reading and writing, I was able to visit and assemble a detailed photographic record of many sites in Rome that feature material relevant to my subject — in particular, the churches of San Pietro in Montorio, Santa Maria della Pace and Santa Maria sopra Minerva; the Appartamento Borgia in the Vatican; and the Galleria Sciarra, a late nineteenth-century courtyard with frescoes of bourgeois female life by Giuseppe Cellini. A weekend in Florence allowed me to add Ghirlandaio's magnificent scheme of frescoes in the Sassetti Chapel of Santa Trinità, watched over from the vault by the Sibyl of Cumae, holding in her lap a scroll with the legend HEC TESTE VIRGIL MAGNVS — a somewhat condensed reference to the famous words of Eclogue 4.5, ‘magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo’ (‘the great sequence of the ages is born anew’). I also enjoyed and benefited from several excursions organized by the BSR and its residents: a visit with Robert Coates-Stephens to the Casa dei Cavalieri di Rodi above the Forum of Augustus gave the opportunity to inspect the fifteenth-century graffito portrait of Virgil with a quotation from Dante's Inferno, while a trip to the Palazzo Pamphilj (now the Brazilian Embassy) in Piazza Navona led by Sue Russell offered a rare Virgilian treat in the form of Pietro da Cortona's ceiling depicting scenes from the Aeneid — perhaps with an allusion to the fourth Eclogue in the figure of Justice (re)descending to earth with her scales?

I am immensely grateful to all the staff, scholars and residents of the BSR for a highly productive, consistently stimulating and unfailingly convivial stay in Rome; my only regret is that my determined efforts to persuade the artists to continue the tradition of the fourth Eclogue in their own productions have so far proved unsuccessful …