BOIARDO, MATTEO MARIA. — Poet, born at Scandiano (Reggio Emilia) in 1441 and died at Reggio Emilia in 1494. He lived at Ferrara at the court of the Este family, who entrusted him with honorary offices, thereby earning him the friendship of Ercole I. He was ducal captain of Modena and Reggio; and when Carlo VIII descended into Italy in 1494, he carried out, with embittered spirit, the orders to allow the French troops to pass with the least possible damage. Possessed of an uncommon lordly dignity, he was the perfect courtier such as Castiglione would later desire. Loyalty, love, religion, and art—the ideals of chivalry—were also his dominant sentiments.
He began by translating from Latin and Greek; but, having returned to Scandiano in 1459, he tried to express in original works what he had learned at court, and produced the fifteen Carmina de laudibus Estensium, which celebrate the military exploits of his lords and patrons. At the same time he was experimenting in Latin bucolic poetry, writing the Pastorali, five heroic and five amorous poems. Some translations appear to be genuine school exercises, such as those of Herodotus’ Storie and Xenophon’s Ciropedia, using Poggio Bracciolini’s Latin translation. He displays a greater command of the Latin language in his vernacular versions of Apuleius’ Asino d’oro and the Vite of Cornelius Nepos, then attributed to Emilio Probo. As a translation from Riccobaldo ferrarese he produced the Istoria imperiale, a collection of gross errors of no historical value. In praise of Ercole he wrote the Epigrammata.
He revealed himself as a poet in the Amorum libri, published under the title Sonetti e canzoni (Reggio 1499). The woman celebrated is a lady from Reggio named Antonia Caprara, as revealed by the initial letters of the first fourteen sonnets, which form an acrostic. The Canzoniere, although modeled particularly on Petrarch’s, allows the source of original inspiration to shine through in almost all its rhymes. That poetry is not an expression of profound sorrow, but an initial sadness corrected and consoled by the serene contemplation of nature. The poet found himself, and it is no exaggeration to say that B.’s Canzoniere, as a work of art, is the finest Canzoniere of the fifteenth century.
B. wrote far more than encomiastic and amorous verse; but it was a chivalric poem that made him famous. Valor and courtesy were the motto of the Este city; consequently, at that court more than anywhere else, the chivalric poetry of France and Brittany found suitable ground, joining with the refined customs of beauty and the ardor genuinely felt for classical studies. He presented the court with a great novelty, which the poet from the very beginning made known to his lord: that Carlo’s great paladin, Orlando, defender of Christianity and France, was conquered by the power of love.
L’Orlando innamorato was published in Venice in 1486; only one copy of this edition is known. It was reprinted in the sixteenth century; but until 1830 it saw no other edition, because the Tuscanizing purists preferred the Rifacimento dell’Orlando innamorato by the sixteenth-century writer Francesco Berni.
L’Orlando innamorato is a poem of war, and even more a poem of love. Its principal background is provided by the chivalric material of the Carolingian cycle, but the poet’s sympathies lie with the Breton cycle. B. introduced a new life into the old stories of the paladins of France, disrupting their traditional forms to such an extent that it cannot be said that he fused the two cycles, according to the usual expression; rather, he altered the Carolingian material—not merely the figure of Orlando, but all the pagan and Christian characters who embark upon adventures and become united with the new spirit. He varied his narratives with different subject matter, with genuine independence from his sources, and with inexhaustible vivacity, by virtue of his truly overwhelming inventive powers. B. drew upon the heroic narratives of the two cycles, the classical epics, and the crude tales of popular storytellers. He moves freely among the inventions of others; he extracts fragments of episodes from them and gives unity even to the other material that he drew from observation of reality. Let us set aside the idle question of whether this showed more imagination than Ariosto. The pleasure of storytelling, characteristic of literature intended for entertainment and of the romance of arms and love, is felt throughout the poem. Because of this characteristic, the poetry would arise in fragmentary form, as a series of episodes, duels, battles, and even lively character sketches. This episodic manner has given rise to the very recent opinion that B. was a prisoner of his own work, dragged from one adventure to another in order to make the poem more enjoyable at the expense of its unity.
But love, not arms or religion, gives the poem its unity, which is to be sought above all in the portrayal of the great and ingenuous paladin, depicted in his vigorous vitality, neither with sarcasm nor irony, but with the poet’s sympathy and understanding. B.’s comedy is always illuminated by an open smile. A widespread joy accompanies that world populated by weapons and armed men, knights and maidens. And this constitutes the poem’s characteristic tone.
Religion is certainly not the poem’s characteristic note, as it is in the Chanson de Roland. Orlando, although he remains a Christian and is even cloaked in apostolic zeal when speaking to Agricane and Brandimarte about the mysteries of the Christian religion, becomes downright impious when overcome by passion. For example, he prays to God for the defeat of Carlo’s army so that he may appear as its savior and possess Angelica.
Religion, which is one of the essential characteristics of Carolingian chivalry in the early Middle Ages, stands at the margins of our Renaissance poems.