There is no doubt that Vergil's great epic poem the Aeneid was one of the most well-known and intensely studied literary works in early modern Europe. Between 1469, when the first printed edition appeared in Rome, and the end of the sixteenth century, some 750 different print runs of Vergil and Vergil commentaries appeared to feed an "inexhaustible market" for his works.[1] These early editions of Vergil are, moreover, "the most profusely annotated classical texts the world has ever seen."[2] And the appetite for Vergilian poetry and themes did not stop there, as scenes from the Aeneid appeared in paintings, the fresco cycles of many palace walls, the illustrations of printed books, and just about every other artistic medium.[3] Authors of early modern epic poems from Petrarch on modeled their works on the Aeneid, the singers in the oral tradition of popular cantari continually reworked and embellished its stories into vernacular poetic form, and readers from schoolboys to mature scholars mined it for moral aphorisms and elegant phrases, copying them into "commonplace" books for eventual use in their own compositions. That a poem of such vast and varied reception, and one beginning with the line "I sing of arms and of the man," should also be rendered in musical settings is no surprise.
What is surprising is how little attention modern scholarship has given to these musical settings, and how little effort there has been to integrate them into the thriving field of Vergil reception.[4]
[1] Wilson-Okamura, Vergil in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 23. [nb: these figures take no account of the oral and literary traditions of popular literature—romances, cantari, etc.--devoted to the Aeneid. This is a study very much privileging the written (and specifically print) tradition. Hence the emphasis on "readers" and "texts" in the perhaps too-narrow sense]
[2] Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: the Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 140-41.
[3] Virgilio nell'arte a nella cultura europea, ed. Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: De Luca, 1981); Margaret Scherer. The Legends of Troy in Art and Literature (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 181-216.
[4] For ex., the very extensive bibliography (179 pp.!) on the Aeneid by Niklas Holzberg, accessible through the Vergilian Society's webpage (http://www.vergil.clarku.edu/bibliog1.htm ), includes none of the basic musicological studies of Aeneid musical settings by Strunk, Osthoff, Skei, Bossuyt, and others.