BOIARDO, MATTEO MARIA. - Poet, b. at Scandiano (Reggio Emilia) in 1441 and d. at Reggio Emilia in 1494. He lived at Ferrara at the court of the Este, who entrusted him with honorary offices, and he earned the friendship of Ercole I. He was ducal captain of Modena and Reggio; and when Charles VIII descended into Italy in 1494, with a embittered spirit he carried out the orders to move the French troops through with the least possible damage. Of no common lordly dignity, he was the perfect courtier as Castiglione would later wish him to be. Loyalty, love, religion and art, the ideals of chivalry, were also his dominant sentiments.
He began by translating from Latin and from Greek; but, having returned to Scandiano in 1459, he tried to express in original works as much as he had learned at court, and from this came the fifteen Carmina de laudibus Estensium, which celebrate the deeds of arms of his lords and patrons. At the same time he was testing himself in Latin bucolic poetry by writing the Pastorali, five heroic and five amatory. Certain translations seem true school exercises, such as that of the Histories of Herodotus, of the Cyropaedia of Xenophon, making use of the Latin translation of Poggio Bracciolini. He shows he possesses a greater mastery of the Latin language in the vernacular rendering of the Golden Ass of Apuleius and of the Lives of Cornelius Nepos then attributed to Aemilius Probus. As a translation from Riccobaldo of Ferrara he gives the Istoria imperiale, a collection of gross errors of no historical value. In praise of Ercole he wrote the Epigrammata.
He reveals himself as a poet in the Amorum libri published under the title Sonetti e canzoni (Reggio 1499). The woman sung of is a lady of Reggio named Antonia Caprara, as is revealed by the initial letters of the first 14 acrostic sonnets. The Canzoniere, even if it is modeled particularly on that of Petrarch, in almost all its rhymes lets the spring of original inspiration shine through. That poetry is not the expression of deep sorrow, but is an initial sadness corrected and consoled by the serene contemplation of nature. The poet has found himself, and it is no exaggeration to say that Boiardo's, as a work of art, is the best Canzoniere of the Quattrocento.
Boiardo wrote far more than encomiastic and amatory rhymes; but it was a chivalric poem that made him famous. Valor and courtesy was the motto of the Este city; therefore at that court more than elsewhere the chivalric poetry of France and of Brittany found suitable ground, wedding itself to the gentle customs of the beautiful, to the truly felt ardor for classical studies. To the court he gave a great novelty which the poet from the very beginning made known to his lord: that the great paladin of Charles, Orlando, defender of Christianity and of France, is vanquished by the power of love.
The Orlando innamorato was published at Venice in 1486; of this edition only one copy is known. It was reprinted in the Cinquecento; but until 1830 it saw no other edition, because the Tuscanizing purists preferred the Rifacimento dell'Orlando innamorato of the sixteenth-century writer Francesco Berni.
The Orlando innamorato is a poem of war and more a poem of love. The principal background is given by the chivalric matter of the Carolingian cycle, but the poet's sympathy is for the Breton cycle. To the old stories of the paladins of France Boiardo brought a new life that overturned the traditional forms, so much so that one cannot say he fused the two cycles, according to the common expression, but that instead he altered the Carolingian matter, not only the figure of Orlando, but all the pagan and Christian characters who set out on adventures and are brought together in the new spirit. He varied his tales with different subject matter, with true independence from his sources, with inexhaustible vivacity, by virtue of his truly overpowering inventive faculties. Boiardo made treasure of the heroic tales of the two cycles, of the classical epics, of the rough tales of the popular storytellers. He ranges freely among the inventions of others; he draws from them fragments of episodes and gives unity even to the other matter that he drew from the observation of reality. Let us leave aside the idle question whether by this he showed more imagination than Ariosto. One feels in the poem the pleasure of storytelling, characteristic of the literature of entertainment, of the romance of arms and of love. For this reason the poetry would be born fragmentary, as a series of episodes, of duels, of battles and even of lively caricatures. This episodic manner has given rise to the very recent opinion of a Boiardo prisoner of his own work, dragged from adventure to adventure to make the poem more pleasant to the detriment of unity.
But love, not arms or religion, gives unity to the poem, and it is to be sought above all in the representation of the great and ingenuous paladin portrayed in his vigorous vitality, not with sarcasm nor with irony, but with the poet's adherence and understanding. Boiardo's comicality is always illuminated by an open smile. A diffused joy accompanies that world populated with arms and armed men, with knights and damsels. And this constitutes the characteristic tone of the poem.
It is certainly not religion that is the characteristic note of the poem, as in the Chanson de Roland. Orlando, even if he continues to be a Christian and even cloaked in apostolic exercise by speaking to Agricane and to Brandimarte of the mysteries of the Christian religion, when he is swept away by passion, becomes even impious. For example, he prays to God for the rout of Charles's army in order to appear as its savior and to possess Angelica.
Religion, which is one of the essential characteristics of Carolingian chivalry in the early Middle Ages, is on the margins in our Renaissance poems.
Bibliography11 works
Emilio Santini