ARIOSTO, LUDOVICO. - 1. LIFE. - Born September 18, 1474 in Reggio Emilia to Count Niccolò, captain of the citadel, and to Daria Malaguzzi Valeri. Having moved with his family to Ferrara, he attended legal studies unwillingly for five years and then, with enthusiasm, literary studies under the guidance of the humanist Gregorio Elladio da Spoleto, who initiated him into the reading of the Latin classics. When his father died in 1500, he interrupted his studies and, in order to provide, as firstborn, for the needs of his numerous family, accepted from Duke Ercole I d'Este the captaincy of the fortress of Canossa for the two-year period 1502-1503. He was subsequently a familiar of Cardinal Ippolito, who entrusted him with important diplomatic missions, but distracted him from his inner world. The accession of Leo X to the papal throne in 1513 drew him to Rome, whence he brought back disappointments; a non-fleeting affection he found instead in Alessandra Benucci, widow of Tito Strozzi, whom he secretly married in his last years. In 1517, dismissed for having refused to follow the cardinal to Hungary, he was taken into service at court by Duke Alfonso I with a modest allowance, which permitted him to devote himself tranquilly to poetry. In '22, when the ducal stipend failed him because of the difficulties of the war, he was forced to accept the commissariat of the Garfagnana, which he administered with honesty and wisdom. Returned to Ferrara, he spent his last years serenely, dreaming and working, in the little house he had bought in the Mirasole district, where he died on July 6, 1533. He had entrusted to the art of Titian and Dosso the memory of his features, and his fame to the Furioso.
2. WORKS
The A.'s first poetic production was in Latin: the fragment in hexameters De laudibus philosophiae, the epithalamium for the marriage of Lucrezia Borgia to Prince Alfonso in 1503, but above all the Carmina reveal familiarity with the classics and an assimilative virtue regarding his sources. The study of the fourteenth-century writers infused in him an awareness of his capacities as a poet in the vernacular. Merits of formal elegance, rarely enlivened by depth of feeling, inform the Petrarchan Rime, while the Ecloga composed in 1506 echoes the dismay inspired in him by the conspiracy of Giulio d'Este. The seven Satire in terza rima, drafted between 1517 and 1525, are confidential autobiographical evocations of a Horatian tone that open glimpses into the author's soul. A youthful attempt at epic song in the vernacular, the Obizzeide, intended to celebrate the Este family, remained unfinished; a fragmentary episode entitled Scudo della regina Elena was excluded from the Furioso, and the Cinque Canti, a colorless sequel to the Poem, were published posthumously by his son Virginio. Passionate about the theater, in addition to the drama on an Ovidian subject Tisbe, which has not come down to us, he composed five morally censurable comedies, which, variously modeled on Plautine and Terentian molds, nonetheless mark the birth of the new Italian theater: the Cassaria, the Suppositi, the Negromante, the Lena, the Studenti (the latter finished by his brother Gabriele under the title Scolastica). The few prose works of A., an essentially poetic soul, besides the early drafts of two of the aforementioned comedies, are: the Erbolato, a charlatan's hawking of a wondrous specific, the Rapporti sulle cose di Garfagnana and about 200 letters.
The whole essence of the Ariostean spirit, however, is in the Orlando Furioso, which, begun between 1502 and 1503 and almost finished in '12, was first circulated from the presses of Giovanni Mazzocco dal Bondeno on 21 April 1516 and, after a reprint of 1521, received its definitive form of 46 cantos in the edition of 1532. Presented as a « gionta » to Boiardo's Innamorato, the Furioso is instead one of the most original affirmations of our literature. In it A. passed through the filter of his genius the raw material of the cantori and of the chivalric poems, indeed the contributions of almost all preceding poetry, fusing them with his own experience and his own ideals, and creating « the most finished work of the Italian imagination... a luminous column in the history of the human spirit » (F. De Sanctis).
Into a setting that stretches from the earth to the moon the poet introduces the throngs of his characters, expressed by dream and returning into dream: paladins of Charles, warriors of Agramante, women, monsters and fairies. Three principal motifs innervate the warp, of which any attempt at synthesis proves arduous: a world conflict, in which Agramante threatens the civilization of the West personified in King Charles; the passion, overwhelming to the point of madness, of Orlando for Angelica; the love of Ruggiero for Bradamante, progenitrix of the Este. Around these essential nuclei the episodes are innumerable. The Furioso appears as the field of action of two antagonistic forces: the one centrifugal, of the imagination that tends toward dispersion; the other of the constructive will, which tends toward concentration; from the tempering of these two forces proceeds the harmony of the whole complex.
3. THE « FURIOSO » IN THE LIGHT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND THE SUPERNATURAL
Wishing now - beyond any aesthetic concern - to isolate the moral substratum from the matter of the poem, one will find an A. who, like the Angelica of his canto, in a flash appears and disappears. For he, because of the noted detachment from the world of his dream, passes with an ease that seems cynicism and is lightness through the entire gamut of affections, without preferences and with equal joy.
Ludovico's morality is characterized by a foundation of sound goodness, which makes him inclined to domestic affections, to friendship, to grace and compassion toward his neighbor, to loyalty. Add to this a sense of constant equilibrium, which preserves him from libertine licentiousness, prevents him from moral rebellions even amid the vicissitudes of an adverse life, expresses from his lips not coarse laughter but a discreet smile, restrains ambitions, holds out an ideal of modest and serene life. Nor is the sense of dignity lacking, which, even in necessary flattery, keeps him far from servile bending, of which Settembrini wrongly accused him. An assertor of marriage as a bulwark against moral excesses, in the third satire he advises his cousin Annibale to choose a virtuous wife. And there are those who maintain that with the madness of Orlando he wished to deplore the waste of energies inherent in the attractions of love. If, finally, he admires the virtues of intellect, he values far more those of the soul: one need only read, on this point, satire VII to M. Pietro Bembo.
Passing from the man to the poem, the moral lines lose their incisiveness and intersect and overlap, like the manifold interweaving of its paladins; one would say that the genius of Good and that of Evil had met together in the Furioso. The triumph of caprice and of the senses is balanced by a diffuse feeling of melancholy of sensuality, which weighs upon the whole warp. The figures of Isabella, Ginevra, Fiordiligi, Logiatilla, Bradamante and Marfisa find a dark counterpart in Fiordispina, Fiammetta, Doralice, Gabrina, Alcina. At the boundary of the two moral worlds, almost to weld them together, stands Angelica, who for a long time flees cunning, lascivious, arrogant, but ends by redeeming herself in a love haloed even by a sense of maternity at the bedside of the wounded youth Medoro.
The poet, who trembles with chaste vertigo in delineating the profiles of his amorous and most sweet creatures, does not refuse to linger with reprehensible lightness in portraying scenes of lasciviousness.
The balance is in some way restored by noting that from the whole complex breathes a tendency toward a higher justice, which has made one think of the moral rigidity of Dante. It should further be observed that the poem resolves itself substantially into an exaltation of Christian thought incarnated in chivalry, with its ideals of defense of the Faith and protection of the weak, and enacted by a noble host of valiant men: Orlando, Rinaldo, Ruggiero, Astolfo, Brandimarte, Zerbino.
True it is, however, that A. did not intend to do the work of a moralist; sterile labor, therefore, has been that of distilling from the poem arcane ethical allegories. At most it may be said that the innate sense of probity of A. the man radiated, unconsciously, into his work, even while indulging, with excessive frequency, in censurable moral excesses.
Finally, the terms of the « moral seriousness » attributed by certain critics to the Furioso must be kept within their proper bounds. It is a morality without transcendence and without connections with the divine; a lay and pagan morality, which does not surpass the ideal of the ancient sage. If the attitude of one who lingers to consider of the Orlando only the touches of religious seriousness, conferring on the poem an anticipated austerity of the Counter-Reformation, is exaggerated, equally arbitrary is the identification of the Ariostean jest with the later Voltairian sneer.
It may be affirmed that A. was not properly an intentional impious man, but an indifferent and a distracted one. Nor can it be denied that a turning back toward seriousness is evident in the last cantos of the poem: with the years even lightness has been attenuated or has vanished; after the fantastic outpouring, the interweaving of the Orlando tends from the romantic to the severe tone of the epos; historical conditions have become too tearful not to reach, at least as a tempering echo, the heart of Ludovico; and death knocks insistently at the doors, bringing the Poet late wisdom.
Bibliography27 works
Enzo Navarra
ARIŠ, WĀDI EL.: V. TORRENTE D'EGITTO.