Vida wrote a considerable amount of
Renaissance Latin poetry, both secular and
sacred, in classical style, particular the style of
Virgil. Among his best-known works are the didactic poem in three books,
De arte poetica (On the Art of Poetry), partly inspired by
Horace, and
Scacchia Ludus ("The Game of Chess"). Both poems, after circulating in manuscript and seeing unauthorised publications, were first published in 1527. According to
H.J.R. Murray, Vida's poem about
Chess, "attained a great popularity in the 16th c.: it was repeatedly printed, and translations or imitations exist in most of the European languages." Murray continues, "In the opening lines, Vida tells how he has written this poem, on a subject never before attempted by the poets, at the insistence of
Federigo Fregoso, and he expresses the hope that it might afford some relaxation to
Guiliano de Medici in the heavy task which he and his brother (Giovanni, later
Pope Leo X, a keen chess-player), had undertaken in repelling the French invaders of Italy. V.d. Lasa has shown that the allusions to Italian events point definitively to the early summer of 1513 as the date of the poem. Vida was then aged twenty-three. The aim of the poem is to describe in Virgilian Latin a game of chess played between
Apollo and
Mercury in the presence of the
other gods. Vida apparently experienced some difficulty in deciding on a suitable classical nomenclature for the
Bishop and
Rook. In the earlier version the Bishops are represented as
centaurs with bows and arrows; in later version the Centaurs have disappeared and the Bishop is an
Archer. In the earlier version the Rooks are represented as
Cyclops... In the later version the Rooks appear as warring towers borne upon the backs of
elephants... Elsewhere in the poem the name
Elephas is used, generally, however, with an allusion to the tower it is supposed to carry on its back... The extraordinary thing is that Vida's choice of names should have caught the popular fancy. All three terms -
Archer for the Bishop,
Elephant and
Tower (Castle) for the Rook - were adopted by players in different parts of
Western Europe. Even the term
Amazon, which he used for the
Queen, was tried by the writers of chess books." His major work was the Latin epic poem
Christiados libri sex ("The
Christiad in Six Books"), an
epic poem about the Life of Christ in the style and the
literary language of Virgil. He began work on "The Christiad" at the request of
Pope Leo X, who was elected in the
1513 Conclave, but Vida did not complete it until the early 1530s. It was published in 1535, well after the pope's death on 1 December 1521. According to
Watson Kirkconnell, the
Christiad, "was one of the most famous poems of the Early Renaissance". Furthermore, according to Kirkconnell, Vida's, "description of the Council in Hell, addressed by
Lucifer, in Book I", was, "a feature later to be copied", by
Torquato Tasso,
Abraham Cowley, and by
John Milton in
Paradise Lost. The standard English translations, which render Vida's poem into
heroic couplets, were published by
John Cranwell in 1768 and by
Edward Granan in 1771. == Editions ==