Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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perpetuity. `05106
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By 1474 the University had forty-five well paid professors, and
the faculties of astronomy, mathematics, and medicine were rivaled
in Italy only by those at Bologna and Padua.
Guarino, born at Verona in 1370, went to Constantinople, lived there
five years, mastered the Greek language, and returned to Venice with a
cargo of Greek manuscripts; a legend told how, when a box of these was
lost in a storm, his hair turned white overnight. He taught Greek at
Venice, where he had Vittorino da Feltre among his pupils, and then at
Verona, Padua, Bologna, and Florence, absorbing the classical
scholarship of each city in turn. He was already fifty-nine when he
accepted an invitation to Ferrara. There, as tutor to Leonello, Borso,
and Ercole, he trained three of the most enlightened rulers in
Renaissance history. As professor of Greek and rhetoric in the
University his success was the talk of Italy. So popular were his
lectures that students made their way through any rigor of winter to
wait outside the unopened doors of the room in which he was
scheduled to speak. They came not only from Italian cities, but from
Hungary, Germany, England, and France; and many of them went forth
from his instruction to fill vital posts in education, law, and
statesmanship. Like Vittorino, he supported poor students out of his
personal funds; he lived in humble quarters, ate but one meal a day,
and used to invite his friends not to feasts but to fave e favole -
beans and conversation. `05107 He was not quite the equal of Vittorino
as a moral paragon; he could pen virulent invectives like any
humanist, perhaps as a literary game; but his thirteen children were
apparently begotten on one wife, he was temperate in everything but
study, and he maintained health, vigor, and mental clarity till his
ninetieth year. `05108 It was chiefly due to him that the dukes of
Ferrara supported education, scholarship, and poetry, and made their
capital one of the most renowned cultural centers in Europe.
The revival of antiquity brought with it a renewed acquaintance with
classic drama. Plautus, son of the people, and Terence, manumitted
darling of the aristocracy, came alive again after fifteen
centuries, and were acted on temporary stages at Florence and Rome,
above all at Ferrara. Ercole I, in particular, loved the old comedies,
and spared no revenues in producing them; one representation of the
Menaechmi cost him a thousand ducats. When Lodovico of Milan saw a
performance of this play at Ferrara he begged Ercole to send the
players to repeat it at Pavia; Ercole not only sent them but went with
them (1493). When Lucrezia Borgia came to Ferrara, Ercole celebrated
her hymeneals with five of Plautus' comedies performed by 110
actors, with lavish interludes of music and ballet. Guarino,
Ariosto, and Ercole himself translated Latin plays into Italian, and
performances were given in the vernacular. It was through imitation of
these classic comedies that Italian drama took form. Boiardo, Ariosto,
and others wrote plays for the ducal company. Ariosto drew up plans,
and Dosso Dossi painted the fixed scenery, for the first permanent
theater of Ferrara and modern Europe (1532).
Music and poetry also won the patronage of the court. Tito
Vespasiano Strozzi needed no ducal subsidies for his verse, for he was
the scion of a rich Florentine family. He composed in Latin ten
"books" of a poem in praise of Borso; leaving it unfinished at his
death, he bequeathed to his son Ercole the task of completing it.
Ercole was well fitted for the assignment; he wrote excellent
lyrics, Latin and Italian, and a longer poem, La caccia - The Hunt -
dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia. In 1508 he married a poetess, Barbara
Torelli; thirteen days later he was found dead near his home, his body
savagely pierced with twenty-two wounds. This is a mystery story still
unsolved after four centuries. Some have thought that Alfonso had
approached Barbara, had been repulsed, and revenged himself by
hiring assassins to kill his successful rival. It is unlikely, for
Alfonso, as long as Lucrezia lived, showed her every sign of fidelity.
The desolate young widow composed an elegy whose ring of sincerity
is rare in the usually artificial literature of the Ferrara court.
"Why may I not go down to the grave with thee?" she asks the slain
poet:
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Vorrei col foco mio quel freddo ghiaccio
Intorpidire, e rimpastar col pianto
La polve, e ravivarla a nuove vita!
E vorrei poscia, baldanzosa e ardita,
Mostrarlo a lui che ruppe il caro laccio,
E dirgli: amor, mostro crudel, puo tanto. *05028
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In this courtly society, dowered with leisure and fair women, the
French romances of chivalry were a daily food. In Ferrara Provencal
troubadours had sung their lays in Dante's time, and had left a mood
of fanciful, not onerous, chivalry. Here, and throughout northern
Italy, the legends of Charlemagne, his knights, and his wars with
the Moslem infidels had become almost as familiar as in France. The
French trouveres had spread and swelled these legends as chansons
de geste; and their recitals, piling episode upon episode, hero
upon heroine, had become a mass of fiction monumental and confused,
crying out for some Homer to weave the tales into sequence and unity.
As an English knight, Sir Thomas Malory, had recently accomplished
this with the legends of Arthur and the Round Table, so now an Italian
nobleman took up the task for the cycle of Charlemagne. Matteo Maria
Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, was among the most distinguished
members of the Ferrara court. He served the Estensi as ambassador on
important missions, and was entrusted by them with the
administration of their largest dependencies, Modena and Reggio. He
governed poorly but sang well. He addressed passionate verses to
Antonia Caprara, soliciting and publishing her charms, or
reproaching her for lack of fidelity in sin. When he married Taddea
Gonzaga he turned his muse to graze in safer pastures, and began an
epic- Orlando innamorato (1486f)- recounting the troubled love of
Orlando (i.e., Roland) for the enchantress Angelica, and mingling with
this romance a hundred scenes of tilt, tournament, and war. A humorous
legend tells how Boiardo sought far and wide to find a properly
resounding name for the boastful Saracen in his tale, and how, when he
hit upon the mighty cognomen of Rodomonte, the bells of the Count's
fief, Scandiano, were set ringing for joy, as if aware that their lord
was unwittingly giving a word to a dozen languages.
It is hard for us, in our own exciting times, agitated even in peace
with the tilts and tournaments of hostile words, to interest ourselves
in the imaginary wars and loves of Orlando, Rinaldo, Astolfo,
Ruggiero, Agramante, Marfisa, Fiordelisa, Sacripante, Agricane; and
Angelica, who might have stirred us by her beauty, disconcerts us by
the supernatural enchantments that she practises; we are no longer
bewitched by sorceresses. These are tales that befitted a comely
audience in some palace bower or garden close; and indeed, we are
told, the Count read these cantos at the Ferrara court- `05109
doubtless a canto or two at a sitting; we do Boiardo and Ariosto
injustice when we try to take them an epic at a time. They wrote for a
leisurely generation and class, and Boiardo for one that had not yet
seen the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. When that disillusioning
humiliation came, and Italy saw how helpless she was, with all her art
and poetry, against the ruthless powers of the North, Boiardo lost
heart, and after writing 60,000 lines he dropped his pen with a stanza
of despair:
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Mentre che io canto, o Dio redentore,
Vedo l'Italia tutto a fiamma e foco,
Per questi Galli, che con gran valore
Vengon, per disertar non so che loco... *05029
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He did well to end, and wisely died (1494) before the invasion had
reached full force. The noble sentiment of chivalry that had found
rough utterance in his poetry evoked only the rarest response in the
troubled generation that ensued. Though he had earned a niche in
history by developing the modern romantic epic, his voice was soon
forgotten in the wars and turmoil of Alfonso's reign, in the alien
rape of Italy, and in the seductive beauty of Ariosto's gentler verse.
IV. ARIOSTO
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As we approach the supreme poet of the Italian Renaissance, we
must remind ourselves that poetry is an untranslatable music, and that
those of us to whom the Italian language is not a native boon must not
expect to understand why Italy ranks Lodovico Ariosto only next to
Dante among her bards, and reads the Orlando furioso with an
affectionate delight surpassing that which Englishmen take in
Shakespeare's plays. We shall hear the words but miss the melody.
He was born on September 14, 1474, at Reggio Emilia, where his
father was governor. In 1481 the family moved to Rovigo, but
apparently Lodovico received his education in Ferrara. Like Petrarch
he was set to study law, but preferred to write poetry. He was not
much disturbed by the French invasion of 1494; and when Charles VIII
prepared a second descent into Italy (1496), Ariosto composed an
ode, in Horatian style, putting the matter in what seemed to him a
proper perspective:
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What signifies to me the coming of Charles and his hosts? I shall
rest in the shade, hearkening to the gentle murmur of the waters,
watching the reapers at work; and thou, O my Phyllis, wilt stretch thy
white hand among the enameled flowers, and weave me garlands to the
music of thy voice. `051010
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In 1500 the father died, leaving to his ten children a patrimony
sufficient to support one or two. Lodovico, the oldest, became
father of the family, and began a long struggle with economic
insecurity. His anxieties warped his character into a timidity and
angry subservience unintelligible to those who have never hungered
between rhymes. In 1503 he entered the service of Cardinal Ippolito
d'Este. Ippolito had little taste for poetry, and kept Ariosto
uncomfortably busy with diplomatic errands and trivia, for which the
poet received 240 lire ($3000?) a year, irregularly paid. He sought to
improve his position by writing lauds of the Cardinal's courage and
chastity, and defending the blinding of Giulio. Ippolito offered to
raise his salary if he would take holy orders and become eligible
for certain available benefices; but Ariosto disliked the clergy,
and preferred to philander rather than to burn.
It was during his service with Ippolito that he wrote most of his
plays. He had begun as an actor, and had been one of the company
that Ercole sent to Pavia. When he himself devised dramas they bore
the stamp of Terence or Plautus, and were frankly offered as
imitations. `051011 His Cassaria was performed at Ferrara in 1508, his
Suppositi at Rome in 1519 before an approving Leo X. He continued to
write plays till his last year, and left the best of them,
Scolastica, unfinished at his death. Nearly all turn on the
classic theme of how one or more young men, usually through the wits
of their servants, may possess themselves, by marriage or seduction,
of one or more young women. Ariosto's plays rank high in Italian
comedy, low in the history of drama.
It was again during his employment with Ippolito that the poet wrote
most of his enormous epic, Orlando furioso; apparently the
Cardinal was no hard taskmaster after all. When Ariosto showed
Ippolito the manuscript the realistic prelate, according to an
uncertain tradition- se non vero, ben trovato - asked him, "Where,
Messer Lodovico, have you found so much nonsense ( tante
corbellerie )?" `051012 But the laudatory dedication seemed to make
more sense, and the Cardinal paid the cost of publishing the poem
(1515), and secured all rights and profits of its sale to Ariosto.
Italy did not think the poem nonsense, or thought it delectable
nonsense; nine printings were bought up between 1524 and 1527. Soon
the choicest passages were being recited or sung throughout the
peninsula. Ariosto himself read much of it to Isabella d'Este in her
illness at Mantua, and rewarded her patience with a eulogy in later
editions. He spent ten years (1505-15) writing the Furioso,
sixteen more in polishing it; every now and then he added a canto,
until the whole ran to almost 39,000 lines, equivalent to the
Iliad and the Odyssey combined.
At first he merely proposed to continue and expand Boiardo's
Orlando innamorato. He took from his predecessor the chivalric
setting and theme, the loves and battles of Charlemagne's knights, the
central characters, the loose episodic construction, the suspension of
one narrative to pass to another, the magic operations that often turn
the tale, even the idea of tracing the pedigree of the Estensi to
the marriage of the mythical Ruggiero and Bradamante. And yet, while
praising a hundred others, he never mentions Boiardo's name; no man is
a hero to his debtor. Perhaps Ariosto felt that the theme and
characters belonged to the cycle of legends themselves, rather than to
Boiardo.
Like the Count, and unlike the legends, he stressed the role of love
above that of war, and so proclaimed in his opening lines:
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Le donne, i cavalier, l'arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese io canto-
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"Women I sing, and knights, and arms, and loves, and deeds of
chivalry and bold emprise." The story carries out this program
faithfully: it is a series of combats, some for Christianity against
Islam, most for women. A dozen counts and kings contest Angelica;
she flirts with them all, plays them one against another, and is
caught in an anticlimax when she falls in love with a handsome
mediocrity, and marries him before she has time to make the usual
examination of his income. Orlando, who enters the story after eight
cantos have rolled by, pursues her over three continents, neglecting
meanwhile to go to the aid of his sovereign Charlemagne when the
Saracens attack Paris. He goes mad on learning that he has lost her
(canto XXIII), and recovers sanity sixteen cantos later when his
lost wits are found in the moon and brought back to him by a
predecessor of Jules Verne's lunar navigators. This central theme is
confused and obfuscated by the interpolated adventures of a dozen
other knights, who pursue their respective women through forty-six
cantos of seductive verse. The women enjoy the chase, perhaps
excepting Isabella, who persuades Rodomonte to cut off her head rather
than to deflower her, and earns a monument. The old legend of St.
George is included: the beautiful Angelica is chained to the rocks
beside the sea as a propitiatory offering to a dragon who hungers
for a virgin annually; and before Ruggiero can arrive to rescue her
the poet contemplates her with Correggian appreciation:
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La fiera gente inospitale e cruda
Alla bestia crudel nel lito espose
La bellissima donna cosi ignuda
Come Natura prima la compose.
Un velo non ha pure in che rinchiuda
I bianchi gigli e le vermiglie rose,
Da non cader per Iuglio o per Decembre,
Di che non sparse le polite membre.
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Creduta avria che fosse statua finta
O d'alabastro o d'altri marmi illustri
Ruggiero, e su lo scoglio cosi avvinta
Per artificio di scultori industri;
Se non videa la lachrima distinta
Tra fresche rose e candidi ligustri
Far rugiadose le crudette pome,
E l'aura sventolar l'aurate chiome. `051013
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Which may be rendered, musicless:
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A people fierce, inhospitable, crude
Exposed upon the shore, to savage beast,
A woman fairest of the fair, and nude
As when first Nature her sweet form composed.
No smallest veil enclosed the lilies white
And vermeil roses of her flesh, that bear
Midsummer's ardor and December's cold
Unhurt, and gleam on her resplendent limbs.
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She might have seemed to him a statue made
Of alabaster, or some marble form
Bound to the stone by sculptor's artifice,
Had he not seen a bright tear fall between
The roses and white privets of her cheeks,
Bedewing breasts like apples firm, and seen
The breezes breathing on her golden hair.
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Ariosto does not take all this too seriously; he is writing to
amuse; he deliberately charms us, by the incantation of his verse,
into an unreal world, and mystifies his tale with fairies, magic
weapons and enchantments, winged horses touring the clouds, men turned
into trees, fortresses melting at an imperious word. Orlando spits six
Dutchmen on one spear; Astolfo creates a fleet by throwing leaves into
the air, and catches the wind in a bladder. Ariosto laughs with us
at all this, and smiles tolerantly, not sarcastically, at the tilts
and shams of chivalry. He has an excellent sense of humor, salted with
gentle irony; so he includes, in the waste deposited by the earth upon
the moon, the prayers of hypocrites, the flatteries of poets
( peccavit ), the services of courtiers, the Donation of Constantine
(XXXIV). Only now and then, in a few moral exordiums, does Ariosto
pretend to philosophy. He was so completely the poet that he lost
and consumed himself in forging and polishing a beautiful form for his
verse; he had no energy left to pour into it an ennobling purpose or a
philosophy of life. `051013a
Italians love the Furioso because it is a treasury of exciting
stories- with never a pretty woman too far away- told in melodious and
yet unaffected language, and in racy stanzas that lure us swiftly on
from scene to scene. They forgive the long detours and descriptions,
the innumerable and sometimes labored similes, for these too are
dressed in sparkling verse. They are rewarded, and silently shout
"Bravo!" when the poet hammers out a striking line, as when he says of
Zerbino,
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Natura il fece, e poi roppe la stampa,- `051014
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"Nature made him, and then broke the mold." They are not long
disturbed by Ariosto's expectant flattery of the Estensi, his paeans
to Ippolito, his praise of Lucrezia's chastity. These obeisances
were in the manner of the times; Machiavelli would stoop as low to
conquer a subsidy; and a poet must live.
But this became difficult when the Cardinal decided to campaign in
Hungary, and desired Ariosto to accompany him. Ariosto demurred, and
Ippolito freed him from further service and recompense (1517). Alfonso
saved the poet from penury by giving him an annual stipend of
eighty-four crowns ($1050?), plus three servants and two horses, and
requiring almost nothing in return. After forty-seven years of
obstinate but hardly celibate bachelordom, Ariosto now married
Alessandra Benucci, whom he had loved when she was still the wife of
Tito Vespasiano Strozzi. By her he had no children, but two natural
sons had rewarded his premarital efforts.
For three years (1522-5) he served unhappily as governor of the
Garfagnana, a mountainous region racked with brigandage. But he was
unfit for action or command, and gladly retired to spend the remaining
eight years of his life in Ferrara. In 1528 he bought a plot of land
on the outskirts of the city, and built a pretty house, still shown in
the Via Ariosto, and maintained by the state. Across the front he
inscribed Horatian lines of proud simplicity: Parva sed apta mihi,
sed nulli obnoxia, sed non sordida, parta meo sed tamen aere domus -
"Small but suitable for me, hurtful to no one, not mean, yet
acquired by my own funds: home." There he lived quietly, working
occasionally in his garden, and revising or expanding the Furioso
every day.
Meanwhile, further emulating Horace, he had written to various
friends seven poetical epistles that have come down to us under the
name of satires. They are not as sharp and compact as those of his
model, nor as bitter and lethal as Juvenal's; they were the product of
a mind loving and never quite finding peace, bearing fretfully the
whips and scorns of time, the proud man's contumely. They describe the
faults of the clergy, the simony rampant in Rome, the nepotism of
worldly popes (Satire i). They excoriate Ippolito for paying his
menials better than his poet (ii). They expound a cynical conception
of women as rarely faithful or honest, and offer the advice of a tardy
expert on choosing and taming a wife (iii). They lament the
indignities of a courtier's life, and wryly recount an unsuccessful
visit to Leo X (iv):
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I kissed his foot, he bent down from the holy seat, took my hand,
and saluted me on both cheeks. Besides, he made me free of half the
stamp dues I was bound to pay. Then, breast full of hope but body
soaked with rain and smirched with mud, I went and had my supper at
the Ram.
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Two satires mourn his narrow life at Garfagnana, his days "spent
in threatening, punishing, persuading, or acquitting," his muse
frightened and paralyzed into silence by crimes, lawsuits, and brawls;
and his mistress so many miles away! (v-vi) The last epistle asks
Bembo to recommend a Greek tutor for Ariosto's son Virginio:
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The Greek must be learned but also of sound principles, for
erudition without morality is worse than worthless. Unhappily, in
these days, it is difficult to find a teacher of this sort. Few
humanists are free from the most infamous of vices, and intellectual
vanity makes most of them skeptics also. Why is it that learning and
infidelity go hand in hand? `051015
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