SOURCE: Hampton, Timothy. “The Body's Two Crowns: Narrative and Martyrdom in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata.” Stanford Italian Review 9, nos. 1-2 (1990): 133-54.

[In the following essay, Hampton discusses how exemplary figures are presented in the narrative in Gerusalemme liberata and the way in which action defines the self, both for those characters and their humanist readers.]

1. IMITATION AND THE EPIC HERO

“Nothing moves me like the examples of illustrious men,” writes Petrarch in a letter to his friend Giovanni Colonna.¹ With these words the first modern humanist evokes a central topos of the aristocratic humanism that informs Renaissance culture. By asserting the connection between the examples (words and deeds) of the “illustrious men” he has read about in history and liberature (most specifically for him, Scipio Africanus) and the “movements” of the self, Petrarch recalls a principal feature of the humanist appropriation of the past. He defines the question of imitatio, much discussed in recent years as an issue of poetics, of writing, as a problem of interpretation, that is, of reading. One of the basic tenets of Renaissance humanist hermeneutics is that ancient poetry and history have a moral and political significance: the heroic actors of classical culture offer models of comportment upon which the Renaissance reader may form or fashion himself. Through the image of the exemplary ancient the problem of imitating the past is projected into the sphere of action and onto the stage of political life. The reader who imitates the deeds of the illustrious ancients realizes the act of reading in its fullest sense, moving beyond word to flesh. For Petrarch, characteristically, the contemplation of the exemplary ancients was tied to a private quest for personal self-creation. However, for later generations of humanists, from Salutati and Bruni to Montaigne and Shakespeare, the representation and interpretation of exemplary figures from antiquity engages issues of public life, political ideology, and the very constitution of the self as a “subject” in history and society. Through his relationship to heroic models the humanist trained reader (usually male), grows into the skin prepared for him by family and society. The heroic model from the past mediates between the individual subject and ideals of public virtue. It helps to socialize and “mark” the reader ideologically.²

Because of the central function of the heroic or exemplary personage in the dynamic relationship between readers and texts in humanist culture, a study of the changing representation of exemplary figures can open perspectives on the evolving ideological function of literature in the early modern period. Changes in the representation of exemplary figures may be seen as symptoms of political and ideological struggles which demand new figurations of the self. These figurations, embodied in the heroic model held up as an image to the reader, in turn act dialectically to produce new discursive modes for representing virtue and, ultimately, new literary forms.

This process of transformation finds its privileged terrain in the epic. From the time of Plato the epic had been used as a pedagogical tool, with its characters taken as models of excellence. In the Renaissance, however, this link between epic and the representation of exemplarity becomes a locus of considerable critical attention. Following the humanist interest in both the pedagogical value of heroic models and the moral superiority of ancient culture, educators and theorists of poetry insist upon the exemplary status of the epic hero. Thus, for example, the Florentine humanist Cristoforo Landino, in the preface to his influential fifteenth-century commentary on the Aeneid, makes the claim that Aeneas was to be taken as “the sole exemplar for the living of our lives” [unicus exemplar ad vitam degendam] and “the perfect man” [ex omni parte perfectus vir]. Landino pairs Virgil's poem with Xenophon's fictionalized biography of Cyrus the Great, the Cyropaedia, claiming that both tell, from the cradle, the story of perfect princes whose souls offer images of excellence.³

This humanist tendency to read the epic hero in exemplary terms becomes a central focus in late-Renaissance debates on the nature of poetry. Following the dissemination of Aristotle's Poetics in the 1560s, Italian commentators of Aristotle's text forge an essential link between exemplarity and epic. Aristotle had noted in chapter 3 of the Poetics that the protagonists of comedy are morally inferior to us, whereas tragedy and epic represent men above us—with the tragic hero, of course, being flawed by his hamartia. This modest observation was transformed by cinquecento critics into a touchstone for distinguishing epic and tragedy. Tragedy, they maintained, represents men who are good but flawed; epic represents perfect actors who offer images for imitation in the sphere of public action. Thus, for example, in a neo-Aristotelian defense of poetry, the late sixteenth-century Italian critic Giason Denores defines epic precisely in terms of its presentation of heroic or exemplary models of civic action. Epic, he writes, is the representation of a heroic action by famous persons who are the height of goodness (“sommamente buone”). Its function is to inflame the reader to imitate the heroic deeds represented on paper (“per accendere gli ascoltatori all'amor ed al desiderio d'imitare l'imprese magnanime”) and to promote their love and support of the monarchy in which they live (“a conservazione di quella tal ben regolata monarchia nella quale si trovaronno”). These sentiments about the exemplary function of epic are echoed through countless poetic and rhetorical treatises of the late sixteenth century.⁴ Indeed, Torquato Tasso, whose Gerusalemme liberata was the focus of late Renaissance Italian debates on the nature of poetry, makes a similar claim in his Discorsi del poema eroico, when he notes that the heroic poem's greatness lies in its depiction of absolutes of virtue—features that are out of place in tragedy.⁵

2. EXEMPLARITY AND NARRATIVES OF THE SELF

When the humanist Landino, stretching things a bit, claims that Virgil and Xenophon told the exemplary stories of Aeneas and Cyrus the Great “from the cradle” [a primis incunabulis] he articulates an issue of great importance to the history of exemplarity. This is the fact that, regardless of how they may be deployed or alluded to in literary texts, exemplary figures have an existence as narratives which is crucial to their functioning as models. I use the term “narrative” here with at least two senses in mind. First, of course, is the fact that the heroic exemplars from antiquity come to the Renaissance as a series of narratives, as heroic biographies—be they the Lives of Plutarch or the epics of Virgil and Homer. Yet this link between the forms of heroic narrative and the representation of exemplarity has another, more rhetorical, dimension as well. For it is only through the consistent demonstration of virtue that the heroic model shows the heroism which makes him a figure worth imitating. The deeds of the heroic exemplar are signs in time, signs which must be strung together into a narrative movement that constitutes a unified and morally coherent identity. This means that the relationship between the moral significance of the various moments in the heroic biography is crucially important in defining the ideological and pedagogical function of the exemplary figure for the reader.⁶

These various issues surrounding the representation of exemplarity—the authority of history, narrative, the demonstration of virtue, the ideological function of texts—come to a head in the work of Torquato Tasso. Tasso's epic of the First Crusade, the Gerusalemme liberata, purports to offer a heroic poem based entirely upon historical fact. Each of his characters, claims Tasso in the Apologia he wrote after the poem's publication, is based upon the truth of history.⁷ Yet for all of its claims to be rooted in the historical ground of the Christian middle ages, the Gerusalemme liberata is centrally implicated in the ideological struggles of the late sixteenth century. It aims to offer a model of poetry that conforms to the strictures of neo-Aristotelian poetic theory and that speaks the orthodox line of the Counter-Reformation Church. To achieve this ideological end, Tasso's poem ceaselessly contends with the poetics and ideology of that cultural moment which precedes it and which the Counter-Reformation seeks in so many ways to correct. This is the moment of early sixteenth-century humanism, the moment of such “paganizing” writers as Castiglione, Machiavelli, and Tasso's poetic predecessor and rival Ariosto. Indeed, as Sergio Zatti has demonstrated in a recent study, the efforts of Tasso's protagonist Goffredo, the leader of the crusade, to unite the head-strong knights or “compagni erranti” that constitute the Christian army can be read as an allegorical working out of the poem's attempt to define its own orthodox collectivist ideology against a humanist ethos that favors the conquest of earthly glory. The poem figures this ethos as chivalric self-promotion.⁸ As Goffredo struggles to marshal his unruly troops, Tasso seeks as well to respond to what he perceives to be an ideology of errant individualism. It is this ideology which the authoritarianism of the Counter-Reformation Church seeks to replace by a more unified and conformist value system that might bolster up a centralized power structure.

Thus, the definition of an exemplary self for the reader of the poem is a process which must engage the ideological complexity of the relationship between epic and its humanist heroic past. Tasso makes it quite clear that his poem is intended to offer its reader models of virtuous action. At several points in the poem the poet's patron, Alfonso d'Este is enjoined to undertake a new crusade in imitation of the text's protagonists Goffredo and Rinaldo.⁹ Yet to understand Tasso's attempt to come to terms with models of humanist heroism bequeathed him by the early sixteenth century, we must look elsewhere, to a series of scenes in which the question of exemplarity is staged in such a manner as to raise questions about reading and interpretation.

The first of these occurs in canto 7. Early in the poem Argante, the semi-bestial hero of the Saracen army, challenges Rinaldo to a duel whose outcome would decide the war. When Rinaldo is banished from camp for the impetuous murder of Dudone, Tancredi volunteers to replace him. When Tancredi disappears, lured from camp by an image of his beloved Clorinda, it is Goffredo himself who proposes to fight Argante. He is stopped, however, by Raimondo, the aging count of Toulouse. Raimondo objects to Goffredo's desire to fight by claiming that the leader should not endanger the entire camp by risking his life: “Duce sei tu, non semplice guerriero: / publico fora e non privato il lutto” (7.62.3-4). The question of the public battle and the private battle, which recalls the distinction set up by Zatti between group-oriented Counter-Reformation orthodoxy and chivalry or individualistic humanism, is then extended as Raimondo reproaches the other Christian soldiers for their lack of heart. He recalls his own youthful defeat of the “feroce Leopaldo” before the entire court of Corrado, and then laments his present infirmity, vowing to arm himself for battle:

Se fosse in me quella virtù, quel sangue,
di questo alter l'orgoglio avrei già spento.
Ma qualunque io mi sia, non però langue
il core in me, né vecchio anco pavento.
E s'io pur rimarrò nel campo essangue,
né il pagan di vittoria andrà contento.
Armarmi i'vuo': sia questo il dí ch'illustri
con novo onor tutti i miei scorsi lustri.

(7.65)

These words spur the Christians to abandon their repose. Yet as they clamor for the right to meet Argante in combat, Raimondo appears before them, already in arms.

Raimondo's speech most explicitly recalls Nestor's reproach of Achilles and Agamemnon in the first book of the Iliad (vv. 247ff.). As Nestor urges the quarrelling captains to settle their differences he evokes the great tradition of heroes he has known (“better men than you are”), who have heeded his advice in the past. To strengthen the authority of his plea, he recalls his own past victories. In contrast to Nestor, however, Raimondo not only recalls his past triumphs, he longs to revive them. Tasso underscores the fact that Raimondo's ardor departs from convention by inscribing his speech with echoes of two passages from the Aeneid. Raimondo recalls both Evander (8.560-63), who declares that his youth is past, that he can no longer fight and must therefore send his son Pallas to do battle alongside Aeneas, as well as the aging Entellus, who in the wrestling matches of Aeneid 5 (397-98), decides to gird his loins for one last attempt at glory.¹⁰ By juxtaposing the two Virgilian allusions Tasso proposes two possible functions for the aging warrior: he may retire from battle and send younger men to the fray (like both Nestor and Evander), or he may attempt one final conflict (like Entellus). Raimondo chooses the latter alternative. Yet perhaps as important as the difference in responses to old age is the difference in the settings of the Virgilian loci. The battle between Entellus and Dares is no real battle at all. It is a wrestling match, a sporting event, and its sixteenth-century equivalent would be a tournament of the type in which Henry II of France met his death. Thus, Tasso's citation of Virgil underscores Raimondo's own testimony of the place in which his valor was tested—not a holy war but a courtly tournament. The evocation of this chivalric context suggests that Raimondo's mind may still be focused upon a value system which privileges individual heroics, a value system which the poem's own insistence upon unity and group struggle would question.

The disastrous consequences of this split between Raimondo's individualist ethos and the poem's group-oriented ideology are demonstrated in the scene that follows. Goffredo praises Raimondo as an example for his entire army (“O vivo specchio / del valor prisco, in te la nostra gente / miri e virtù n'apprenda” [7.68]) and sets up a drawing to determine which of the Christian soldiers shall fight Argante. The lot falls to Raimondo himself, who is rejuvenated, says Tasso in an image borrowed from Virgil and Ariosto, like a snake shedding his skin: “e cosi alor ringiovenisce / qual serpe fier che in nove spogli avolto / d'oro fiammeggi e'n contra il sol si lisce” (71.4-6). Yet despite Raimondo's new set of armor and his new vigor he requires divine help once he enters the battle. Unbeknownst to any of the Christian army, God sends Raimondo an angel who protects him with a diamond shield. In the midst of the conflict, however, Raimondo's chivalric ethos manifests itself once again. Argante's sword breaks on contact with the angel's shield. The scene recalls the breaking of the sword of Turnus against the shield of Aeneas in Aeneid 12. In Virgil, Turnus saves himself by immediately taking flight. In Tasso, however, a pause ensues, as Raimondo considers what to do: “Ma però ch'egli disarmata vede / la man nemica, si riman sospeso, / ché stima ignobil palma e vili spoglie quelle ch'altrui con tal vantaggio togli. / —Prendi—volea già dirgli—un'altra spada—” (94.5-95.1-2). Raimondo's disdain at taking advantage of an unarmed foe is a disdain born of the chivalric ethos. Oblivious to the mockeries which Argante has heaped upon both his comrades and his faith only a few lines earlier, indifferent to the stakes of the battle, his first impulse is to see in the Saracen a knight like himself, a double to whom chivalric courtesy should be extended.

Raimondo's hesitation is only momentary, but it provides Argante with the chance to act. As the aging count suddenly remembers that he is the defender of his faith (“di publica causa è difensore” [95.8]—a phrase recalling his own reproach to Goffredo that the battle is “publico” and not “privato” [63.4]), he turns to put an end to his opponent. But Argante has already escaped and will return to fight another day. There follows a pitched battle in which Raimondo is wounded by an arrow. Following a rout, the Christian army is saved only at the last minute by a rainstorm sent from heaven.

The doubt or dubbio that prevents Raimondo from putting a swift end to Argante is a sign of his position within the ideological configuration of the Christian camp. He stands between two codes of behavior, private and public, chivalric virtue and Counter-Reformation piety. His exemplary “valor prisco” is an ancient valor indeed. It is symptomatic of an ideology which Tasso's poem would displace. As suggested by the Virgilian echoes, Raimondo's virtue is the virtue of the courtly tournament. In the ethos of Raimondo's chivalric world aging knights must choose between polite retirement (Evander) and momentary rejuvenation (Entellus). In Tasso's world, however, a third choice is possible: with help from heaven the old can receive a miraculous force greater than the force of youth. Raimondo, a chivalric exemplar in the world of the Counter-Reformation, is incapable of exploiting the advantage offered by divine intervention.¹¹

Tasso's ambivalence toward chivalric virtue, signaled by the fact that, however laudable, it fails to produce acts sufficient to the demands of the poem's ideology, takes on yet another guise a few cantos later. At the outset of canto 11, in the exact center of the poem, the Christian soldiers prepare to assault Jerusalem. They pass the day in solemn procession, a communal meal and meditation. As day breaks and the troops dress for battle, we see Goffredo, busy with his preparations. But he has clearly spent his time of meditation thinking, not of his duty as commander, but of himself. For in place of his normal suit of armor he wears the garb of footsoldier. Raimondo reproaches him for his change of uniform—a fitting gesture since Raimondo's own earlier hesitation in battle against Argante stemmed from an insensitivity to the public good. Goffredo, however, defends his actions by evoking a heretofore unknown episode from his personal history:

                              Or ti sia noto
che quando in Chiaramonte il grande Urbano
questa spada mi cinse, e me devoto
fe' cavalier l'onnipotente mano,
tacitamente a Dio promisi in voto
non pur l'opera qui di capitano,
ma d'impiegarvi ancor, quando che fosse
qual privato guerrier l'arme e le posse.

(23)

He goes on to assert that his decision to dress as a common soldier is tactically wise. His men are perfectly aligned for the assault. It is only right that he should fight as a commoner.

These may be noble sentiments, but they are wrong. Goffredo mistakenly believes that the “voto” or pledge made to the Pope at the time of arming (note the chivalric formula, “questa spada mi cinse” [23.3]), holds power over all others and nullifies them. The first duty of the “cavalier devoto” is not to his personal vow but to the good of the group. Indeed, this doctrinal error is underscored by his reference to the Pope's hand as “onnipotente”; it overrides all other wishes. Moreover, Goffredo's description of himself as a “privato guerrier” echoes the words of Argante to the Saracen leader Soldano back in canto 6, when he claims that he will fight Tancredi as “privato cavalier, non tuo campion” (6.13.7). By placing the words of the individualist pagan Argante in the mouth of the Christian leader at the moment he asserts the piety of his acts, Tasso suggests that individually motivated action is by definition erroneous. The issue is not Goffredo's piety, but the fact that he claims for himself a particularized relationship with God in which private virtue can remain separate from public duty.

Goffredo's error is not exclusively doctrinal; it is also practical. His hesitation to accept his role as captain is simply a more pious version of Rinaldo's rambunctious individualism. The French knights all follow their exemplary leader (“i cavalier francesi / seguir l'essempio” [25.1-2]), and with the entire French nobility underdressed for battle, the fight is a disaster. Like Raimondo in the scene discussed a moment ago, Goffredo is wounded by an arrow. He is forced to leave the scene of action, and the Christian troops are routed. Only an angel is eventually able to cure Goffredo of his wound, and only nightfall puts an end to the carnage.¹²

Thus, the two low points for Christian military fortunes in the middle cantos of the poem follow episodes in which the functions of ancient virtue (Raimondo) and individualist piety (Goffredo) are dramatized. In these two scenes Tasso illustrates the dangers of private action. Private virtue, which Tasso figures as a trait of chivalry and individualism, shows its limits in striking terms. In the case of Raimondo, momentary adherence to an outmoded ethos was quickly corrected. The scene of Goffredo's error followed logically as an intensification of Raimondo's hesitation, shifting focus from a single knight to a captain whose acts are imitated by an entire officer corps, taking us from errant thought to errant action, from confusion to outright folly. But in both cases the cause of the misstep was the influence of the character's earlier words and deeds upon his attempt to act correctly in the present. Raimondo was caught between an older, chivalric code of behavior and the new ethos of Counter-Reformation holy war. For Goffredo, the problem was his need to maintain a private relationship with God which would stand outside his public duty.

These two scenes of failed exemplarity frame another episode which offers a different version of exemplarity—one which might be said to “correct” the errors of the humanist heroism seen in Raimondo and Goffredo. This episode depicts the death of the martyr Sveno. In canto 8 the Christian army has just suffered a major defeat. Camped before the gates of the Saracen-held holy city, they are exhausted, thirsty, and disheartened by the absence of Rinaldo. Into this scene staggers a messenger, who brings more bad news. He identifies himself as the sole survivor of an army of Christian reinforcements massacred en route to the camp by an immense Saracen army. He then proceeds to tell a story. The story he tells is not, however, his own story. He recounts the entire life of his master, Sveno, the leader of the recently massacred reinforcements. The messenger first tells of Sveno's childhood in Denmark. He recalls that Sveno's education consisted of reading about the heroic deeds of Goffredo and Rinaldo—the very knights who are figured as twin exemplars for the poet's patron, Alfonso d'Este. Like a kind of adolescent Don Quixote, Sveno runs away from home to seek fame as a warrior. The centerpiece of the messenger's tale is his depiction of the scene of the battle in which Sveno and his men meet their death. Nowhere else are Tasso's extraordinary narrative and descriptive powers as evident as in the messenger's evocation of the encounter between the small band of Christians and the numberless infidel army. Beneath a cloud-covered crepuscular sky, Sveno leads his men in valiant but futile struggle, like a kind of medieval George Armstrong Custer, until, we are told, his body takes on the appearance of a single giant wound—“fatto è il corpo suo solo una piaga” (8.21.8). So great is the general carnage that by sunset the earth itself has disappeared beneath the piles of bodies. In the dim light the cadaver of the young Sveno virtually vanishes among the heaps of wounded flesh around it, losing its very identity in the mass of gore until a miraculous ray of light pierces the cloud cover to illuminate its wounds. It is only thanks to this marvelous incandescence that the messenger, assisted by a pair of venerable hermits who conveniently live in the neighborhood, is able to separate his master's body from that of his men: “ogni sua piaga ne sfavilla e splende, / e subito da me si raffigura / ne la sanguigna orribile mistura” (32.6-8). And as if this marvel were not enough, as soon as the body has been set apart, a second miracle comes to pass. In a flash, Sveno's corpse is encased by a glorious tomb covered with inscriptions—before which the messenger and his new found hermit friends bow in adoration.

When the messenger has completed his extraordinary story, the men of the crusader camp are moved and astonished. Their expected despondancy over the loss of reinforcements is offset by their amazement before the miracle of virtue and martyrdom. The messenger transmits Sveno's sword to Goffredo, who will later pass it on to Rinaldo in the poem's final cantos. Goffredo then interprets the story for his men by remarking that Sveno is a model for each to follow, that antiquity itself could offer no example more worthy of imitation (“né dar l'antico Campidoglio essempio / d'alcun può mai sí glorioso alloro” [44.3-4]). As the scene closes, he points out that Sveno and his men now reside in the luminous temple of heaven, where each wears an immortal crown and flashes his wounds: “ivi credo io che le sue belle piaghe / chiascun lieto dimostri e se n'appaghe” (44.7-8).

Goffredo's evocation of the martyr's crown recalls an earlier moment in the scene at which the messenger quotes Sveno's exhortation to battle. As Sveno and his men ride into the fray the young prince urges them ahead: “Oh quale omai vicina abbiamo / corona o di martirio o di vittoria! / L'una spero io ben piú, ma non men bramo / l'altra ove è maggior merto e pari gloria” (15.1-2). As Sveno enters the fray, he imagines two possible but mutually exclusive destinies for himself, figured by the two crowns of martyrdom and victory. If he wins the battle, he wears the crown of victory; if he loses it, he wears the crown of martyrdom. These two crowns have precise but distinct prototypes. The crown of martyrdom, of course, is a halo. The crown of victory, on the other hand, recalls the crown of laurel awarded the hero in the Roman triumph. If Sveno receives the crown of martyrdom, he will join the elect in heaven—as king for all time. In the fantasy of the crown of victory, however, he would find himself paraded through the city streets in the manner of an ancient military hero, say, Caesar or Petrarch's hero Scipio—as king for a day. To wear the crown of victory, in short, is to celebrate, not the glory of God, but one's own mortal excellence. Thus, the central ideological split that structures the poem—the struggle between humanist paganism and Counter-Reformation beatitude—is emblematically figured by the young Sveno's choice of crowns.

But these two crowns also stand as figures of distinct ways of conceiving of both the self and the narrative that represents it. The two ideals they articulate connote distinct modes of understanding the hero's life—that is, of writing of his biography. The crown of martyrdom which Sveno imagines for himself here comports a particular narrative genre, which is the saint's life or martyrological tale. The crown of victory, which he desires but never wins, implies its own literary genre or form of narrative history. This is the heroic biography whose prototype is Plutarch's Lives. Were Sveno to win the crown of victory, his life would be written in a very different form from the martyr's story which eventually finds it way into Tasso's poem. Both of these biographical forms, the Plutarchan heroic biography and the martyr's story, are exemplary. That is to say, both present a model of comportment for imitation by the reader. Both conform to the dominant Renaissance understanding of the past as a reservoir of examples, to the tendency to read history as moral philosophy. Yet the model of Plutarchan or humanist heroism is a model which the poem can only imagine. The crown of victory is a crown implicitly demanded by the conventions of Virgilian epic, but which the poem's ideology cannot tolerate.

The reasons for this emblematic rejection of a particular model of heroic exemplarity become clear if the contrast between the “heroism” of Goffredo and Raimondo and the martyrdom of Sveno is seen as a problem of narrative. The Plutarchan model of the exemplary narrative, the mode evoked by Sveno's mention of the crown of victory as he rides into battle, involves the narration of a series of words and deeds in history which are taken to be the signs of the hero's virtue and thus models for comportment. Yet if the hero is to be worthy of imitation, if he is to make good copy for an exemplary biography, these words and deeds must be consistently virtuous. Within the moralizing context of humanist hermeneutics, the heroic exemplar's status as a model for the reader is contingent upon the ethical homogeneity or coherence of the deeds constituting the various moments of the biography. Humanism's veneration of the illustrious ancients demands that their lives offer morally consistent images for imitation. The problem with this moralistic attempt to read history is that the more humanism learns about history the less consistent the virtuous deeds of the venerated exemplars begin to appear, and the more their universal value as models is marred by historical particularity and moral ambiguity. The closer the humanist reads the biographies of the pagan exemplars, the more anxiety is produced over the difficulty of appropriating them as models upon which sixteenth-century readers may fashion themselves. This moral ambiguity is precisely what is figured in the instances of Raimondo and Goffredo, whose “heroic” deeds are disfigured by vestiges of now outmoded ideologies. What appears to be exemplary virtue turns out to have its roots in a repressed past whose return mars the effectiveness of present action. These problems of ambiguity and ideological confusion vanish, however, in the model of the martyrological tale, the model introduced by Tasso into the world of the Virgilian epic. For it is not the heroic deeds of the martyr that make him worthy of imitation by the reader, but the moment of his death. The production of virtue is reduced, in the story of the martyr, to the moment at which his narrative ends, to, one might say, his date of expiration. In fact, the martyr need hardly be consistently virtuous at all to be a model for the reader. He need only die a martyr's death. The moment of death subsumes and defines all previous acts in his life, standing as a synechdoche for the whole story. This point is demonstrated quite clearly in the story of Tasso's Sveno, who is in fact anything but virtuous until his death. Indeed, his first desire was for earthly glory. His initial decision to go to war was in imitation of Rinaldo, the figure who is the very embodiment of error in Tasso's poem. Not only did Sveno ignore his sacred duty toward family and state by running away from home, it was his own imprudent rejection of repeated warnings from advisors that resulted in the massacre of his men. If anything, Sveno is a negative exemplar, an ambiguous figure whose virtue is questionable; and even as he rides into battle, the syntax of his exhortation to his men makes it difficult to determine which of the two crowns he desires most (“l'una spero io ben piú, ma non men bramo l'altra”). Yet at the moment of his death his story ends and his exemplary value is fixed.¹³

3. THE BODY AND ITS NARRATIVES

Yet this rhetorical representation of models of the self demands more than a narrative to make itself known. It also requires a body. As Michel de Certeau has written, “normative discourse ‘operates’ only if it has already become a story, a text articulated on something real and speaking in its name, i.e., a law made into a story and historicized, recounted by bodies.”¹⁴ The problem of exemplarity is the problem of how readers are to move from the words of a text representing virtuous action to the deeds which will constitute their own stories. Given the fact that the image of the exemplar lies at the border of language and action, it is worth noting the central function in Tasso's text of the body as an ideological sign, as something that both moves (deeds) and signifies (words). In the Gerusalemme liberata it is the body that offers the surface upon which the ideological difference between humanist exemplary narrative and Counter-Reformation hagiography is articulated. The wounds which the martyr receives at death are the marks of his beatitude—marks which replace all other signs in his story. Indeed, in the story of his life they are the only truly significant marks. Here, again, the contrast between Counter-Reformation martyrology and humanist exemplarity could not be more patent. In Plutarch we learn of the Roman custom of showing one's wounds as a way of proving one's virtue. Shakespeare's Coriolanus reverses this tradition, it will be recalled, by refusing to show his wounds, thereby provoking the ire of the masses. For Tasso, however, the scars or wounds of the heroic pagan or humanist exemplar are the marks of weakness, the traces of Fortune's victory over virtue, the vestiges of the past moments at which the limits of strength were reached. In one of his prose treatises entitled “Risposta di Roma a Plutarco,” Tasso argues that Alexander, universally acknowledged to be the ancient exemplar of martial virtue par excellence, was in fact a man of quite limited virtue. This is so, says Tasso, because his many wounds emphasize the fragility of his mortality:

Ma nel corpo d'Alessandro non sono impressi pochi segni della nemica fortuna … tu [Alessandro] che per la stima della tua virtù credevi d'esser immortale; per lo spargimento del sangue t'avvedesti d'esser mortale.¹⁵

Thus, pagan wounds are the marks of Fortune's power over virtue. They signify the imprint of historical and physical contingency upon human ambition. Christian wounds signify that one has earned a place with God. Like the arrow wounds received by the erroneous Goffredo and the hesitating Raimondo earlier in the poem, heroic or chivalric wounds spell weakness; Christian martyrs' wounds spell blessed strength. An Alexander with no wounds is all the more heroic. A martyr with no wounds is no martyr at all.¹⁶

The importance of wounding as a process of ideological marking can be understood if we compare Sveno with the other character in the poem who is described as a martyr. This is Sofronia, who in canto 2 confesses to the execution of a crime she has not committed and offers herself as a sacrifice to save the Christian population of Jerusalem. Tasso introduces Sofronia as a virgin, chaste and beautiful, who seeks modestly to hide her beauty from the world. Her seclusion, however, cannot exempt her from the prying eyes of lust. She is sought by the young Olindo: “Pur guardia esser non può ch'in tutto celi / beltà degna ch'appaia e che s'ammiri; / né tu il consenti, Amor, ma la riveli / d'un giovenetto a i cupidi desiri” (2.15.1-4). The curious ambiguity which surrounds Sofronia—she is both chaste and, because of her beauty, an object of desire “worthy to be seen”—is underscored by Tasso as she traverses the city to make her confession at the King's palace:

La vergine tra 'l vulgo uscí soletta,
non copri sue bellezze, e non l'espose, raccolse
gli occhi, andò nel vel ristretta,
con ischive maniere e generose.
Non sai ben dir s'adorna o se negletta,
se caso od arte il bel volto compose.
Di natura, d'Amor, de' cieli amici
le negligenze sue sono artifici.

Both art and artlessness, culture and nature, Sofronia's body is an ambiguous indicator of her true virtue. She may be naturally modest and beautiful, or she may attract only through adornment and artifice. Both the uncustomary turn to the reader (“non sai ben dire …”) and the oxymoronic formulation of the last line suggest the difficulty in interpreting her beauty. Indeed, the ruler of Jerusalem himself is taken by her appearance and manner, but, here again, the source of his attraction is unclear: “Fu stupor, fu vaghezza, e fu diletto, / s'amor non fu, che mosse il cor villano” (21.102). Sofronia cuts such an uncertain figure, in fact, that as she ascends to the stake to be burned, her face changes color, to a shade which, were it not glossed for us by the narrator, might well signify fear: “Ella si tace, e in lei non sbigottita, / ma pur commosso aliquanto è il petto forte; / e smarrisce il bel volto in un colore / che non è pallidezza, ma candore” (26.5-8).

Sofronia's ambiguity says much about the representation of martyrdom. None of those who watch her traverse the streets of Jerusalem notes her virtue since, so long as she lives, she is subject to misreading. Her virtue may be simple artifice. Her candor may be pallor. From the perspective of non-virtue, virtue may always be misread as ostentation. Unlike Sveno, Sofronia remains ideologically ambiguous precisely because her body is never marked and her narrative never reaches a definitive endpoint. Would-be martyrs who never die have no exemplary value. It is doubtless for this reason that, once she has been rescued from the stake by Clorinda and married off to Olindo, Sofronia completely disappears from the poem. Like Ariosto's Angelica once she has lost her virginity to Medoro, Sofronia loses her signifying function. She ends up neither as an ambivalent temptress nor a true martyr, but simply another married woman.

But if Sofronia's body is never marked and her narrative has no end, it is the very marking of Sveno's body that ends his story. The martyr's wounding takes its importance as a frame in a biographical narrative, as a moment which closes that narrative off and renders it ideologically useful. The contrasting ideologies of humanism and Counter-Reformation orthodoxy that structure Tasso's poem thus offer contrasting models of the relationship between the exemplary body and its biography. The exemplary humanist hero (like the virtuous woman) must prove his virtue by maintaining the integrity of his body and keeping his life's history open for ever more tests of virtue. The martyr's virtue is demonstrated by the violation of his body and by the end of his narrative. The rhetorical utility of the martyrological tale for Counter-Reformation ideology lies in the way it functions here as an allegory of textual and interpretive closure. In an age in which the ecclesiastical and political expropriation of interpretation extends to virtually every level of intellectual and cultural activity, the model of martrydom enables the poet both to represent history through narrative and to control its meaning. Tasso's insertion of a martyr tale into a Virgilian epic affirms the pedagogical importance of martyrological models for the poem's dynastic hero Rinaldo, for Tasso's own patron Alfonso d'Este, and for the Christian reader. At the same time it responds to an entire tradition of humanist historiography and moral philosophy with a gesture of ideological authority. The wounds of Sveno ultimately cut, not merely into his “corpo,” but into the entire corpus of the heroic genre of epic itself.¹⁷

In addition to its importance as a paradigm which Tasso sets against the chivalric or humanist model of exemplarity, Sveno's death has important consequences for the narrative development of the Gerusalemme liberata. In fact, it may be seen as the hinge which motivates the poem's rhetorical exhortations to virtuous action. For Sveno leaves Denmark a runaway, determined to imitate Rinaldo. Through a brilliant narrative chiasmus the poem ends, however, with Rinaldo avenging the martyrdom of Sveno. As we move from Sveno's initial appearance toward the final duel between Rinaldo and Solimano, then, the relationship of imitator to model is turned on its head. In his lust for glory, Sveno follows Rinaldo; in his unbending devotion to the cause, Rinaldo follows Sveno's martyred example, symbolized by his reception of the young prince's sword from the hand of Goffredo.

Rinaldo's transformation reaches its dramatic climax in the opening stanzas of canto 18, when the hero ascends the Mount of Olives. The canto opens with Rinaldo asking forgiveness from Goffredo, who suggests that past errors be forgotten—an ironic recommendation, given his own problems with his past mentioned earlier. Following this reconciliation and a confession to Peter the Hermit, Rinaldo passes the night in vigil. As the day breaks, he asks God for forgiveness and a state of grace. In response a heavenly dew descends upon his head.

La rugiada del ciel su le spoglie
cade, che parean cenere al colore,
e sí l'asperge che 'l pallor ne toglie
e induce in esse un lucido candore;
tal rabbellisce le smarrite foglie
a i matutine geli arido fiore,
e tal di vaga gioventù ritorna
lieto il serpente e di novo or s'adorna.

(18.16)

This remarkable passage and the stanzas that surround it contain unmistakable references to each of the scenes of exemplarity examined heretofore. Raimondo's entreaty to Goffredo in canto 11 to resume his place as captain “e di te stesso a nostro pro ti caglia” (11.22.6), is recalled by Goffredo's own command to Rinaldo: “e' n danno de' nemici e' n pro de' nostri / vincer convienti de la selva i mostri” (18.2.7-8). Even more striking is the reappearance of the serpent image, seen earlier in a description of Raimondo's preparations for the fight with Argante. And if the misstep of Goffredo and the outmoded chivalry of Raimondo are recalled in this scene, the ambiguities surrounding the figure of Sofronia are evoked in order to be resolved. The “onesta baldanza” (2.20.1) with which the maiden addresses the king (thereby provoking his ambiguous desire) is recalled as “secura baldanza”:

Il bel candor de la mutata vesta
egli medesmo riguardando ammira,
poscia verso l'antica alta foresta
con secura baldanza i passi gira.

(18.17.1-4)

More important, Sofronia's uncertain hue as she mounts to the stake (“un colore / che non è pallidezza, ma candore” [2.26.8])—echoed by the “bianca pallidezza” of Sveno's fearful troops on their entry into battle) is recalled in the “bel candor” of Rinaldo's armor. This time, however, “candor” definitely replaces “pallor”: “La rugiada del ciel in su le sue spoglie cade … / e sí l'asperge che 'l pallor ne toglie / e induce in esse un lucido candore.”

Thus, Rinaldo's purification on the Mount of Olives offers what might be called a recuperation of all of the scenes examined heretofore. As Rinaldo becomes worthy to follow Sveno's image and serve as a model to the reader of the poem, he redeems and replaces the earlier moments of error. On an allegorical level, within the configurations of the Christian scheme of conversion, Sveno might be seen as the old Adam, the errant self that Rinaldo must leave behind him in order to be reborn as a new man dedicated to the Crusade. Yet this movement of the soul can only be represented through the conjunction of a narrative and a body. And in this conjunction lies the ideological function of the martyr's example. Sveno offers an image of the Counter-Reformation self, which Tasso sets in contrast to more problematic figures whose exemplarity is marred by vestiges of humanist or chivalric individualism.

4. BODY AND GENRE

The conjunction of body and narrative offered by the figure of Sveno has importance as well for the history of literary genres in early modernity. I should like to illustrate this importance by comparing Tasso's poem with Don Quixote, the other major narrative text of the period—a text concerned not with promoting exemplary figures but with parodying them. Cervantes speaks in propria persona only once in his novel. In the prologue to its second half—that is to say, in what are probably the last words he wrote before publication—he complains to his reader of slanderous remarks made about him by his literary rival Avellaneda, the author of the spurious Quixote which appeared after the first volume of Cervantes's work. Cervantes grumbles that Avellaneda has made fun of him for being old and for having only one hand. The other hand was lost fighting the Turks at the battle of Lepanto, in 1571: “What I cannot ignore,” writes Cervantes, “is that Avellaneda describes me as old and maimed, as if it were in my hand to hold back time and keep it from passing through me, or as if my infirmity had come about in some tavern instead of in the most noble occasion ever seen by centuries past, present or to come.”¹⁸ Cervantes acknowledges that he is caught in history, unable to arrest the passage of time through his very body. Yet the metaphorical hand or “mano” which cannot halt time's passage is redeemed by the symbolic function of the very real hand which Cervantes lost at the battle of Lepanto, fighting, like the heroes of Tasso's epic, against the infidel. And this wound, this “manquedad” or lack, as Cervantes calls it, lends his exploits at Lepanto and his subsequent captivity in North Africa a significance that transcends history. As a wounded participant in the greatest battle ever seen, past, present, or to come, Cervantes enjoys exemplary status, which he goes on to describe in terms recalling Tasso's praise of martyrdom: “If my wounds do not shine in the eyes of those who see them, they are at least esteemed by those who know their origin … The wounds which the soldier shows in his face and breast are stars guiding others to the heaven of honor.”¹⁹ If Tasso inserts the figure of the martyr into Virgilian epic as an ideologically charged exemplar of Counter-Reformation virtue, Cervantes here figures himself as an exemplar of Spanish military excellence whose wounds lead the reader to heaven, like the wounds of Tasso's martyrs. Cervantes's problem, however, is that he is neither consistently heroic, like a humanist exemplar, nor dead, like a martyr. Though his wounds seem to signify martyrdom, the narrative of his life did not close at Lepanto. He is a martyr who had the luck to survive—thus, he is no martyr at all. Because his life continues, Cervantes's scars have become, to the uninformed observer, ambiguous signs, potentially the traces of a tavern brawl. Cervantes's wounds are a writing wrenched from its frame of historical reference, orphaned from the moment of presence in which it was, however painfully, inscribed on his body. This openness and ambiguity point to the pathetic biographical underpinning of Cervantes's protests. For the last years of his adventurous life were increasingly taken up with repeated futile attempts to obtain a royal pension to compensate for his lost hand and his suffering. Indeed, these bitter words are written at a time when the glorious Battle of Lepanto is forty years past, little more than a distant heroic glimmer in the dark sky of Spanish imperial collapse.

This moment of self-description suggests the personal tragedy which mediates between the high drama of an epic of martyrdom like the Gerusalemme liberata and the low comedy of Cervantes's novel. Cervantes himself is living proof of the limits of both humanist exemplarity and martyrdom as models of selfhood. Yet it is out of this failure that a new literary genre is born. For, having lost the hand which would permit him to act, Cervantes's only choice is to use the other hand to write. With this other hand he draws the fable of Don Quixote, whose wounds are the result of tavern brawls, who sets out to conquer infidel kingdoms by the force of his arm, “por el valor de su brazo.” Cervantes's failed martyrdom and unnoticed exemplary virtue give way to the narrative of a hero who believes himself to be exemplary and invulnerable, but who, as he rides through the chaotic world of the novel, slowly and painfully learns otherwise. Cervantes's misinterpreted body is redeemed by the bruised body of Don Quixote, a body on which scars are the marks, not of virtue or beatitude, as they are for Alexander the Great and Sveno, but of self-knowledge. And this redemption occurs, not through a series of heroic deeds, but through the processes of memory and judgment, through the increasing self-consciousness which leads Quixote ultimately to reject his madness and return to the quotidian world. As Quixote says on his deathbed, “Now I am no longer Don Quixote of La Mancha, but Alonso Quixano, the man whose habits earned him the name of the Good.”²⁰ It is no longer heroic deeds or miracles of virtue that lead to renown, but simply good behavior, costumbres. Don Quixote's education occurs, not through the imitation of heroic models, the “illustrious men” who moved the soul of Petrarch, but from his own attempt to accept the mortality of his bruised and aching body. From this reflection on the limits of the body is born the new narrative form of the novel—the form that will replace documents of aristocratic heroism such as the Gerusalemme liberata and define new models of the self for the bourgeois era.²¹

Notes

1. “Me quidem nichil est quod moveat quantum exempla clarorum hominum,” Francesco Petrarca, Le familiari, ed. V. Rossi (Florence: Sansoni, 1933-1942) 6.4, my translation.

2. The representation of exemplars aids in the promotion of what Michel Foucault has deemed “arts of existence,” “those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being.” See his discussion in The Use of Pleasure, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985) 10ff. On the representation of self-transformation in the Renaissance, see Thomas M. Greene, “The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature,” The Disciplines of Criticism, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas M. Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) 241-68, as well as Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). For background on the exemplar theory of history, see George H. Nadel, “Philosophy of History before Historicism,” History and Theory 3.3 (1964) 291-315, and Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae,” Natur und Geschichte: Karl Löwith zum 70 Geburtstag (Stuttgart: W. Kohlammer, 1967). For the traditions of humanist pedagogy, see Eugenio Garin, L'educazione in Europa: 1400-1600 (Bari: Laterza, 1964), as well as the recent study by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

3. I cite from Cristoforo Landino: scritti critici e teorici, ed. Roberto Cardini (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974) 1.215. Translation mine.

4. The full title of Denores's treatise is Discorso a que' principii, cause et accrescimenti che la comedia, la tragedia et il poema eroico ricevono della filosofia morale et civile e de' governatori delle republiche. It can be found in Bernard Weinberg's Trattati di poetica e retorica del cinquecento (Bari: Laterza, 1972) 3.375-419. An argument similar to Denores's was made by Nicolò degli Oddi, in his Dialogo in difesa di Camillo Pelegrini of 1587. Full discussion of the late-Renaissance Italian attempt to appropriate Aristotle can be found in Weinberg's A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

5. I have used Francesco Flora's edition of the Prose of Tasso (Milan: Rizzoli, 1935). See 368ff.

6. For the relationship between notions of selfhood and narrative in pre-modern cultures, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1981) 61ff.

7. For a discussion in the Apologia of the differences between history and poetry, see vol. 5 of Bruno Maier's edition of the Opere (Milan: Rizzoli, 1965), 345ff. There is no space here to offer a full analysis of Tasso's attempt to resolve the complicated debates on the relationship between history and poetry in the late sixteenth century. For good background on these problems, see Weinberg's History, passim., Baxter Hathaway's The Age of Criticism: The Late Renaissance in Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962) 152ff., and Alban K. Forcione's Cervantes, Aristotle and the “Persiles” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

8. In his study L'uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1983), Sergio Zatti speaks of “la netta distinzione politica e morale fra Goffredo e i ‘compagni erranti,’ che egli è chiamato a riunificare nel nome del fine militare cristiano” (14). He notes the ideological tension between Counter Reformation authoritarianism and “un umanesimo laico, materialista e pluralista” (12), which sets up a series of ontological, psychological, and generic binary oppositions that structure the poem: one/many; conformity/deviance; epic/romance. Margaret Ferguson's fine discussion of Tasso in Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) analyzes the poem along similar lines.

9. See, for example, 1.4 and 17.39. All quotations from the Gerusalemme liberata will refer to Lanfranco Caretti's edition (Turin: Einaudi, 1980). Canto, stanza, and line numbers will be indicated in parentheses following each citation.

10. For the references to ancient epic in this scene, I am indebted to Caretti's notes.

11. Raimondo's hesitation will be corrected in the duel between Argante and Tancredi in canto 19. Tancredi disarms Argante and then demands that he surrender: “Renditi—grida, e gli fa nuove offerte, / senza noiarlo, il vincitore cortese” (19.25.5-6). When, instead of surrendering, Argante attempts most uncourteously to wound his conqueror in the heel, Tancredi slays him. For this parallel, I am indebted to an unpublished paper by Lauren Scancarelli Seem entitled “The Limits of Chivalry: Tasso and the Virgilian Solution.” On the Christian camp as a scene of ideological and personal struggle, see Riccardo Bruscagli, “Il campo cristiano nella ‘Liberata,’” Stagioni della civilità estense (Pisa: Nistri Lischi, 1983) 187-223.

12. On the doctrinal implications of Goffredo's error, see Fredi Chiapelli, Il conoscitore del caos (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981) 99ff. For Goffredo's development through the poem, see Ulrich Leo, Ritterepos Gottesepos (Köln: Bohlau Verlag, 1958), and Eugenio Donadoni, Torquato Tasso: Saggio Critico (Florence: Batistelli, 1920). In his study Poets Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982) 139, Andrew Fichter likens Goffredo's entry into the battle at the midpoint of the poem to Christ's entry into human form at the midpoint of history. He neglects to follow up the implications of the fact that Goffredo's descent is a descent into error, however. On Tasso's attempt to repress past ideology—including his own humanist education—see Ferguson's discussion in Trials of Desire.

13. For a discussion of the incongruity between Sveno's errant life and his holy death, see Donadoni, Torquato Tasso 415.

14. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 149.

15. The text appears in Le prose diverse di Torquato Tasso, ed. Cesare Guasti (Florence: 1875), 2.317-78.

16. In Book 22, chapter 19 of the City of God, St. Augustine points out that martyrs are the only Christians who will not receive new and perfect bodies in heaven. This is so, he says, because their wounds must stand as the marks of their suffering for Christ. This tradition is echoed in Counter-Reformation discussions of artistic representation. Thus, for example, Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano, in a dialogue on painting (in his Due dialoghi [Rome, 1564]), reproaches Michelangelo for representing martyrs without their wounds—thereby focusing attention upon their physical beauty instead of their piety.

17. The obvious literary predecessor to Sveno is Manfred, the martyr whom Dante encounters in the third canto of Purgatorio. As John Freccero notes in an essay on the scene, Manfred's wounds are the marks of his life in history: “His wounds, apparently accidental, are in fact signs of his identity and distinction … Their presence in the Purgatorio is at the same time the poet's mark, his intervention in the fiction that otherwise purports to be an unmediated representation of the other world” (“Manfred's Wounds and the Poetics of the Purgatorio,” Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honor of Northrop Fyre, ed. Elenore Cook, et al. [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983] 73). Tasso's poetic strategy would seem to oppose Dante's. In a representation which roots itself in history, wounds become marks of divinity.

18. References are to Walter Starkie's translation of Don Quixote (New York: Signet, 1979). I have altered Starkie's version to conform more closely to the original. I here cite p. 525.

19. Cervantes 526.

20. Cervantes 1045.

21. The problem of imitation as a structuring element in the novel has, of course, its own history. See, on this question, René Girard's fundamental study Deceit, Desire and the Novel, tr. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965).