Alphonso discerned the singular gifts of the young scholar, and made him tutor to his sons,[4] notably Alfonso, who would reign for a single year but whose energies in the decade 1485 to 1495 brought the Renaissance to Naples in many fields, from poetry to villas, from portrait sculpture to fortifications.

He was almost immediately made the companion and trusted friend of its sovereign, loaded with honours, lodged in a fine house, enrolled among the nobles of the realm, enriched, and placed at the very height of social importance.

He was passionately attached to his wife and children; and, while his friend Beccadelli signed the licentious verses of Hermaphroditus, his own Muse celebrated in liberal but loyal strains the pleasures of conjugal affection, the charm of infancy and the sorrows of a husband and a father in the loss of those he loved.

[4] Although he was at least sixty-five years of age at this period, his poetic faculty displayed itself with more than usual warmth and lustre in the glowing series of elegies, styled Eridanus, which he poured forth to commemorate the rapture of this union.

[4] He was distinguished for energy of Latin style, for vigorous intellectual powers, and for the faculty, rare among his contemporaries, of expressing the facts of modern life, the actualities of personal emotion, in language sufficiently classical yet always characteristic of the man.

An ambitious didactic composition in hexameters, entitled Urania, embodying the astronomical science of the age, and adorning this high theme with brilliant mythological episodes, won the admiration of Italy.

His most original compositions in verse, however, are elegiac and hendecasyllabic pieces on personal topics — the De conjugali amore, Eridanus, Tumuli, Naeniae, Baiae, in which he uttered his vehemently passionate emotions with a warmth of colouring, an evident sincerity, and a truth of painting from reality which excuse their erotic freedom.