[2] He studied there under the humanists Giorgio Merula and Gregorio Tifernate, and subsequently at Padua under Paolo Bagelardi, who was famous for weaving the other liberal arts into his lectures on philosophy.

In 1489 Mantuan traveled to Loreto, a town on the Adriatic coast where a shrine with the reputed house of the Virgin Mary had been put under Carmelite governance.

There he participated in an informal academy founded by Isabella d' Este, Marchioness of Mantua, and overseen at times by Baldassare Castiglione and other famous humanist writers and philosophers.

A three-book attack on the waywardness of the times, the poem includes a passage on Papal corruption that Martin Luther used prominently in Against the Roman Papacy, An Institution of the Devil, his last great polemic directed against the Curia.

The first successful humanist attempt to do so, these poems set a precedent for epic treatments of religious subjects as diverse as Jacopo Sannazaro's De partu virginis and John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Schoolmasters commonly used the poems because of their relatively easy Latin and attractive subject matter (the opening eclogues deal with love, a topic one educator notes of interest to all young men).

Eventually it shifted from being used to attack the Papal Curia to become in John Milton's "Lycidas" a sanction for his indictment in pastoral poetry of "our corrupted" English clergy.

The Italian poet's condemnation of Papal corruption is used in Spenser's "September" to indict pillaging the wealth of the English Church by Elizabeth and her courtiers.