Francisco Medrano

A Spanish lyric poet, b. in Seville, not to be confounded with Sebastian Francisco de Medrano who was also a poet and lived at about the same time. The dates of his birth and death are unknown, but he lived during the latter part of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Little is known of his life except that he visited Rome. His works were published at Palermo (1617) as an appendix to the imitation of Ovid's "De Remedio Amoris" by Pedro Venegas, a poet of Seville. According to the Spanish critic Adolfo de Castro, Medrano is the best of the Spanish imitators of Horace, comparing favourably in that respect with Fray Luis de Léon. Endowed with literary taste, he writes in good Spanish, and his style is free from the gongorism of his time. Among the odes of Medrano, his "La profecia del Tajo" is very similar to one of Fray Luis de Léon of the same title. Although both are based upon Horace's ode to Mark Antony in which he would separate him and Cleopatra, there is a great difference between them. Léon's ode departs from the original of Horace, while Medrano's is an imitation of the latter so close as to amount almost to a translation. The poems of Medrano are reprinted in "La Biblioteca de Autores Españoles".