Género caballeresco y género bizantino: la imitación de las Etiópicas de Heliodoro en el Esferamundi de Grecia (Venecia, 1565)

This article focuses on a romance of chivalry by Mambrino Roseo da Fabriano, Sferamundi of Greece (Venice, Tramezzino 1558-1565) which includes in its pages an authentic Byzantine novel inspired in Eliodoro’s Ethiopicas. The fervent literary environment of the Venetian printing press in which the book was published is also studied in relation to the spread of the Greek novel in Italy, the same context that encouraged Alonso Núñez de Reinoso in the publication of his Historia de los amores de Clareo y Florisea, Venice, Giolito, 1552. Contrary to a diffused academic assumption, the Byzantine genre was not opposed to the chivalric. In Roseo’s novel (as in Reinoso’s) the Byzantine and the chivalric genres work together and show common narrative forms in their different declinations and hybridisations.