Ovid's Fasti and the Neo-Latin Christian Calendar Poem.

Well-known Renaissance painters and writers who draw from Ovid's fragmentary calendar poem, the Fasti, tend to assimilate it to the more famous masterwork, the Metamorphoses. A group of humanist Latin poets, however, took inspiration from the central idea of Ovid's Fasti as a versified religious almanac. The Christian calendar poems vary widely in the degree to which they imitate the Ovidian exemplar. Of particular interest is Lodovico Lazzarelli's Fasti christianae religionis, which exhibits a kind of anxiety of influence by both embracing Ovid's Fasti as model and using it to exemplify the antique pagan festivals now supplanted by the true Christian faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]