SOURCE: Hoffman, Katherine. “‘Un così valoroso cavalliero’: Knightly Honor and Artistic Representation in Orlando furioso, Canto 26.” In Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso, edited by Valeria Finucci, pp. 178-212. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Hoffman explores Ariosto's apparent conflict between idealistic honor and pragmatic political practices by focusing on canto 26 of Orlando furioso.]

Insofar as the Orlando furioso with its breakneck succession of episodes can be said to have lulls, canto 26 is one of them. One of several cantos in which the plot is sustained and embroidered, it includes no major narrative beginnings, turning points, or endings. Canto 26's main distinction is its allegorical art passage, the description of a mysterious fountain whose sculptures represent sixteenth-century monarches battling a monster symbolizing avarice. But apart from this still center, in which the knights sit down and rest between bouts of furious activity, the narrative streams through, disregarding the boundaries of the canto. Looked at thematically, however, canto 26 displays a clear unity organized around the fountain scene, forming in effect a complete miniature discourse on one of the Furioso's main themes, knightly honor. This theme is associated particularly with Ruggiero, whose preoccupation with honor's conflicting dictates is the main stumbling block in the epic plot line of his union with Bradamante and founding of the Este dynasty.¹

The discourse of canto 26 defines honor by showing it in conflict with avarice. The canto's structure is simple: after a two-stanza exordium, the honorable, knightly rescue of Viviane and Malagigi from the Maganzesi in the first part (stanzas 3-29) contrasts with the extremely unchivalrous and avaricious brawl over horses and armor in the last half of the canto (stanzas 54-137). These two episodes are divided by a passage in which a relief sculpture shows honor, in the form of a group of knights, allegorically defeating avarice, in the form of a monster. But beneath its calm, celebratory surface, the allegory of the fountain passage complicates the surrounding discourse by placing the canto's discussion of individual honor and avarice in a broader perspective that is at once both historical and aesthetic. This dual perspective explicitly relates the theme of honor to the sixteenth-century Italian court culture out of which the poem itself originates. On the one hand, the knights allegorically battling avarice represent the rulers of Europe, circa 1516-32: what does canto 26's story of honor and avarice among fictitious knights imply about the real-life leaders of Ariosto's own day? On the other hand, these rulers also represent the poet's patron class, whose honor is the subject of his verses: what do honor and avarice mean in the relationship between poet and patron?²

I will demonstrate that as a thematic unit centered on the fountain passage, canto 26 creates a complex moral economy between individual honor and avarice that is developed in the action surrounding Ruggiero in the rest of the canto. Defining honor in opposition to avarice makes self-denial fundamental to the concept of honor being developed in the canto. Looking first as the juxtaposition of the beginning and ending battle scenes, and then at the effects of the central fountain passage, I will argue that the discourse of canto 26 demonstrates how problematic the relation between selfless honor and greedy avarice is on all three levels: the moral, the political, and the artistic. Morally, as the two contrasting battle episodes demonstrate, the problem is the impossibility of honorable knights keeping their motives clear of selfish pride and acquisitiveness. Politically, as the fountain allegory and its interpretation show, the problem is that knightly honor becomes a polite fiction, an ideological cover, for imperial power politics. And the canto's exploration of these two levels leads to the artistic problem of representing powerful patrons critically in a poem when the artistic means of production are implicated in the moral ambiguities of those politics. They are implicated both because the artist must navigate, and participate in, the politics of the court to gain an audience for his work, and because his dependence on the patron compromises his claim to objective analysis of the political and moral issues the poem raises. The play of honor and avarice in the two long narrative sections of the canto is reflected in the allegorical ecphrasis of the central, descriptive fountain passage, leading ultimately to the question of how to read its celebration of the nobility who are simultaneously the political leaders of Ariosto's day and the patrons who make it possible to publish poems such as the Furioso.

I. THE DANCE OF CHIVALRY

Canto 26 begins by introducing a complex view of honor in the short exordium, which, as often happens in the Furioso, sets up an interpretive framework for the entire canto.³ Contrasting the love of honor with the love of riches, the exordium relates this distinction in turn to the familiar theme of the superiority of a past golden age to decadent modern times:

                    Cortesi donne ebbe l'antiqua etade,
che le virté, non le richezze, amaro:
al tempo nostro si ritrovan rade
a cui, piú del guadagno, altro sia caro.
Ma quelle che per lor vera bontade
non seguon de le piú lo stile avaro,
vivendo, degne son d'esser contente;
gloriose e immortal poi che fian spente.
                    Degna d'eterna laude è Bradamante
che non amò tesor, non amò impero,
ma la virtú, ma l'animo prestante,
ma l'alta gentilezza di Ruggiero;
e meritò che ben le fosse amante
un cosí valoroso cavalliero,
e per piacere a lei facesse cose
nei secoli avenir miracolose

(26.1-2)⁴

(In days of old there used to be courteous ladies who prized virtue above wealth. In our own day it is hard to find a woman for whom things other than gain are important. But those who, out of true goodness, avoid the common style of greed, it is they who deserve to enjoy happiness in their lifetime and immortal glory after their death.

So Bradamante is worthy of eternal praise, who loved not wealth or power, but simply Ruggiero, for his martial valor and his eminence of heart and breeding. She merited so valorous a knight for her suitor; she merited that to please her he performed exploits in future times deemed miraculous.)

These stanzas set up categories of value by unpacking the various meanings of the Italian concept of valore. The positive values of “l'antiqua etade” (“days of old”)—virtú in the positive sense, the Roman moral quality of manliness—are contrasted with the degraded values of “il tempo nostro” (“our own day”), in which moral value has become economic value. In the second stanza of this opening, Bradamante is the shining example of the virtuous ladies of yore just described in the first stanza. Loving Ruggiero not out of selfishness or for material gain, but for his honor, she deserves his love in return; and insofar as she draws it, causes him to do the great deeds he does “per piacere a lei” (“to please her”). Indeed, so great is the power of this love that it inspires deeds which seem “miracolose”—incredible in ordinary human terms. The selfless love of honor instead of the selfish love of riches is “vera bontade,” true goodness, and those who practice it deserve happiness in this life and a glorious immortality after they die. The miraculousness of Ruggiero's deeds is the measure of the moral integrity of their love.

The exordium thus defines honor in contrast to avarice, as a quality that transcends it and, in fact, takes over its vocabulary. To most modern ladies of “il tempo nostro,” the measure of something's value would be how expensive, or “caro,” it is; but the rare virtuous lady is the one “a cui … altro sia caro” (“to whom … other things are dear”; emphasis mine). In the same way, in the second stanza, Bradamante's love of Ruggiero's heroic qualities makes her deserve love in return from this “valoroso cavalliero” (“valorous knight”); his “valore” in this context is both his knightly valor—which consists of his “virtù,” his “anima prestante,” and his “alta gentilezza”—and also his virtue or worth, which has nothing to do with the kind measured in material riches or power. Their relationship demonstrates the love and honor of “l'antiqua etade,” the golden age before human language and relations were tainted with monetary concerns. In the rest of the canto, the distinction between moral valor and material value will be shown to pervade the realm of history.

The first part of the canto, immediately following the exordium, presents an example of the sort of “virtú” and “alta gentilezza” that Bradamante loves in Ruggiero. Having saved Ricciardetto in the preceding canto, Ruggiero has set out with him and Aldigiero on a noble mission to rescue their kinsmen, Viviane and Malagigi, from being sold to their murderous enemies, the Maganzesi. Along the way they meet Marfisa, who foregoes her customary challenge to join their honorable enterprise. Once they reach the plain where the Moors are handing the brothers over to the Maganzesi, they attack, Ruggiero and Marfisa perform great deeds, and both forces are routed. The knights then free the captives, take possession of the abandoned ransom, and retire to a well-earned rest at the fountain nearby. The whole episode is a classic adventure of knightly honor in action. The honorable motives of Ruggiero and the other knights—rescuing kinsmen and the kinsmen of friends—contrast to the greedy and despicable ones of the Moors, who see Viviane and Malagigi merely as commodities to be turned into gold (10.6), and the Maganzesi, who are happy to receive their enemies bound and incapable of defending themselves. The courtly encounter with Marfisa strengthens the contrast between the knights' adherence to the human bonds of courtesy, and their opponents' greed for gold and revenge.

The formal, elegant, and rather verbose tone in which the episode is recounted reinforces this contrast. It includes elaborate asides by the speaker to explain the situation to the reader, thus courteously honoring the human bond between poet and reader as well—as, for example, when Marfisa first appears on the scene:

Parmi veder ch'alcun saper desia
il nome di costui, che quivi giunto
a Ruggiero e a' compagni si offeria
compagno d'arme al periglioso punto.

(8.1-4)

(It looks to me that some of you would like to know the name of this man who was offering to join Ruggiero and his comrades-in-arms at this perilous juncture.)

When the knights meet in the forest, they address each other as courtly knights should, with formulaic challenges and responses. No courtesy is omitted; they even jest to show their insouciance at the coming battle, in which four of them will fight two large forces. Marfisa compares the battle to a “festa,” a party, and Ruggiero picks up the joke:

                                                            Gl'invitati ancora
non ci son tutti, e manca una gran parte.
Gran ballo s'apparecchia di fare ora.

(11.1-3)

(The guests are not all here yet; a good number are still missing. We have a grand ball in preparation here.)

And when the Maganzesi arrive, they are “presso a cominciar la danza” (“ready to begin the dance”). The dance is a figure that formalizes and aestheticizes the chivalrous order that the knights are acting out, and the style of the passage as well as the behavior of the knights conforms to this order.

This courtly order among the episode's heroes contrasts with the immediate chaos and confusion that overcome the Moors and the Maganzesi as soon as they are attacked. The confusion results from more than just terror at the might of Marfisa and Ruggiero; there is another, unforeseen factor,

Di qui nacque un error tra gli assaliti,
che lor causò lor ultima ruina.

(15.1-2)

(This gave rise to an illusion among those assaulted—an illusion that ultimately caused their ruin.)

The two armies, seeing their leaders killed but not knowing the origin of the attack, naturally enough assume each other to have turned traitor (after all, one army is Christian and the other is Moorish), and start to fight among themselves. This little comment is slipped in just before we go on to hear of the amazing prowess of Ruggiero and Marfisa; yet it is this error as much as their strength that causes (“causò”) the ultimate ruin of the two armies. The courtly values that Ruggiero and his companions shared with Marfisa turned her from a potential enemy to a friend by allowing them to trust one another. But the selfish and materialistic values of the Moors and the Maganzesi keep them from acting together, even in their common interest. They are left open to the united attack of their enemies, unwitting abettors of their own downfall. Thus the rescue episode displays a pattern which lines up Ruggiero and his friends with orderly, chivalrous courtesy based on human consideration, while the Moors and Maganzesi display a chaotic selfishness, materiality, and greed.

There is, however, a note of qualification. So great is the prowess of Ruggiero and Marfisa that they take on a mythic status in each other's eyes, and compare each other to Hector, Mars, and Bellona. But in the rush of hyperbole and epic similes the speaker stops to admit that it all sounds rather incredible. Marfisa's admiration for Ruggiero becomes more and more inflated until the speaker breaks off in something like embarrassment:

e se non che pur dubito che manche
credenza al ver c'ha faccia di menzogna,
di piú direi; ma di men dir bisogna.

(22.6-8)⁵

(and were I not anxious lest truth, wearing the mask of falsehood, be denied belief, I would go further—but I had better understate the facts.)

In the face of the reader's probable disbelief, the speaker turns, as he has before, to the authority of Archbishop Turpin:

Il buon Turpin, che sa che dice il vero,
e lascia creder poi quel ch'a l'uom piace,
narra mirabil cose di Ruggiero,
ch'udendolo, il direste voi mendace.

(23.1-4)

(Our good Turpin, who knew he told the truth but let men believe what they would, attributes marvels to Ruggiero, though you might call him a liar if you heard him.)

This is one of many joking references to Turpin throughout the poem. Ruggiero's deeds are incredible—literally “cose / nei secoli avenir miracolose” (“exploits in future times deemed miraculous”), for we of this later day have a hard time believing them. Either times have degenerated so much that we can no longer conceive of such prowess, or we are fools to believe these historians, Ariosto and Turpin alike. Playfully deflating its own hyperbole, the passage reminds us, in effect, that this is literature, not life, we are witnessing—an artifice that lets men believe what they will. It's as we like it.

There is no attempt to reconcile these contradictory possibilities; the contradiction is simply presented, calling attention to the artifice being exercised in setting up the ideal of courtly honor in this episode, the artificial conflation of the classical ideal of a golden age and the medieval ideal of courtly honor, and the problems of interpretation that such artifices engender. This theme of artifice and interpretation will be picked up later in the canto. But even if it is presented with a wink, the ideal of courtly honor is affirmed as well as defined in the rescue episode as a whole, for its alternative, as shown in the behavior of the Moors and the Maganzesi, is a chaotic rapaciousness that is morally reprehensible, and ultimately self-destructive.

II. HONOR INTO AVARICE

The second and greater part of the canto's action, the lengthy contention between the four rescuers and two other knights, shows just how self-destructive the lack of true honor can be. After their battle, the knights rest at the fountain and admire its sculptures, but their interlude is broken off by the appearance of Ippalca, with news of Rodomonte's theft of the horse Bradamante had sent to Ruggiero. Once again it is time for a knightly adventure; but this time, the same knights who moved with the group precision of a courtly dance ensemble through the rescue episode gradually fall apart into a pack of squabbling individuals who resemble the chaos-prone Moors and Maganzesi rather than the heroic rescuers. The second episode of the canto in effect deconstructs the first one, showing us a side of the Christian knights which corresponds to the greed of “il tempo nostro” (“our own day”) rather than to the courtly honor of “l'antiqua etade” (“days of old”).

We follow the progress of this transformation in our epic hero, Ruggiero. He starts out by making sure that he is the one who will help Ippalca, while hiding his true motive for wanting to do so from Bradamante's kinsmen because he does not want them to realize his liaison with her. Ricciardetto, who would normally be the one to avenge the slight to his sister, defers to Ruggiero's desire to undertake the adventure alone because of the service Ruggiero has just performed in freeing his cousins. We are still in the territory of courteous formulas, but an unchivalrous deceptiveness now lurks behind them; Ruggiero is beset by the quandary that plagues him throughout the Furioso, pulled in different directions by his loyalty to Bradamante and his sense of his knightly honor. Once they have set off together, Ippalca tells him the full story of Rodomonte's challenge, and his rage swells:

vede che biasmo e dishonor gli fia,
se tôrlo a Rodomonte non s'affretta,
e sopra lui non fa degna vendetta.

(65.6-8; emphasis mine)

(it would be to his shame and discredit if he did not hasten to retrieve him from Rodomonte and wreak suitable vengeance upon the thief.)

The concept of honor has already undergone a metamorphosis here. Ruggiero feels dishonored for three reasons: the stolen horse is his, Bradamante sent it to him, and Rodomonte took it to spite him. Of the three, only one has to do with his love for his lady; the other two pertain to his horse and the challenge to his name. Instead of originating in a principled love and obligation to others, as in the exordium and the rescue episode, honor here has as much to do with personal considerations as with justice, and the personal considerations are two-thirds egotistical pride. Ruggiero's personal honor attaches not only to his behavior, but to his horse and to his name. A challenge to his name is in effect equated with the theft of his horse, both prized possessions deeply involved with his honor. When it comes to his own sense of identity as a knight, honor is a possession as much as an ethical program.

This ethical dimension is emphasized when Ruggiero immediately comes upon a fork in the road; the longer route leads gently over the plain, while the shorter is rough and mountainous. At this point we might recall the last time we saw Ruggiero faced with a choice of paths.⁶ On Alcina's island (6.60), even though he had been warned by Astolfo to take the rough, mountainous road to Logistilla, Ruggiero allowed himself to be detoured along the smooth level path to Alcina's castle, with disastrous results. In that encounter, too, Ruggiero was dealing with allegorical representations of avarice (Erifilla and her monster offspring and followers). In the island episode, the plot was carefully designed to strike at Ruggiero's pride in his knightly prowess. Alcina's handmaidens, simply by appearing, chased away the monsters he was having such difficulty vanquishing; his resulting humiliation (6.70) made him “content” to ignore Astolfo's advice and go with them down the smooth road. His manipulation by means of his pride was completed when, along the way, the maidens offered him the sop of defeating Erifilla, the figure of Avarice itself. He was encouraged to strike her down, but deterred from actually killing her. This hollow victory allowed Ruggiero to maintain a sense of himself as a valorous knight, when in fact it demonstrated his enslavement, through his pride, to Alcina and the principle of sensual satisfaction she represented. He became her “valoroso” knight, valuable to her, that is, for material (sensual) reasons, not for his honor and moral integrity; and he accepted this debased standard for himself by deluding himself that the two kinds of “valore” were one and the same.⁷

The reuse of the crossroads topos at this point in canto 26 serves to emphasize how Ruggiero, in his rage, has slipped back into the state of egotistical delusion that made him vulnerable to Alcina twenty cantos earlier. he has regressed from conceiving of honor as the service of a just cause in the rescue episode (easy enough to do when there is no pressing personal stake in the cause) to conceiving of it as pride in his own prowess and reputation, and the accoutrements that accompany and symbolize them; physical prowess has become a means of asserting his personal worth, rather than a manifestation of its intrinsic existence. And in his pride Ruggiero ceases to be heroic, and becomes subject to chance and luck, just as the Moors and the Maganzesi were in the rescue scene. As if to illustrate this, the trope of the divided road is turned on its head and emptied of its usual moral meaning: by taking the shorter road, Ruggiero and Ippalca miss Rodomonte going the other way on the longer one, and they are forced to track their prey back along the rejected road to the very fountain from which they started out. The faster way to Ruggiero's goal would have been the longer road, but the fastest way of all would have been to stay put. There is no way for Ruggiero to have known this; the laws of chance have taken over what was a moral trope, turning his perfectly reasonable shortcut into the longest cut possible.

With the entry of Rodomonte and Mandricardo into the action, we reach the midpoint of the canto. The entire remainder is taken up by an ignominious brawl among Rodomonte, Ruggiero, Mandricardo, and Marfisa. The two pagan knights, having made a truce in their fight over Doralice when they heard that Agramante needed their help, come with her to the fountain and find Ricciardetto, Aldigiero, Viviane, Malagigi, and Marfisa, who has donned woman's clothing. Mandricardo immediately devises a scheme to acquire Marfisa for Rodomonte, so that he himself can keep Doralice.⁸ He challenges the knights, and rapidly downs all four of them. But when he comes to claim Marfisa, she reveals herself to be a knight, too; they fight; and, since each wears enchanted armor, it ends in a draw. Rodomonte stops their fruitless combat by suggesting that Marfisa join them in helping Agramante and the pagan cause, and she gladly agrees. At this point Ruggiero returns, and challenges Rodomonte. The fighting starts all over again, only worse; at issue are Ruggiero's horse, which Rodomonte refuses to give up, and the arms and insignia of Hector, symbolic of imperial Trojan heritage, which both Ruggiero and Mandricardo claim the sole right to wear. Ruggiero challenges Rodomonte; Madricardo challenges Ruggiero; Ruggiero fights Rodomonte; Mandricardo fights Ruggiero; Marfisa fights Mandricardo again; Rodomonte fights Ruggiero again; Ruggiero fights Mandricardo again; Rodomonte fights Ricciardetto. There is every reason to believe that this series of duels will go on forever when Malagigi brings it to an abrupt halt by enchanting Doralice's palfrey so that it runs away with her, drawing Rodomonte and Mandricardo in hot pursuit. The result is a deafening silence.

But although Rodomonte and Mandricardo have brought most of the contention with them, and seem to take it away with them when they leave, they are not solely responsible for the brawl. As we have seen, Ruggiero's detour with Ippalca, characterized by his burgeoning pride and rage, has in fact led up to it. And the scene reinforces this connection in its vocabulary. Mandricardo, treating Marfisa as an object to be acquired by force, offends the honorable conception of love, replacing it with an economic one:

sí come Amor si regga a questa guisa,
che vender la sua donna o permutarla
possa l'amante, né a ragion s'attrista,
se quando una ne perde, una n'acquista.

(70.5-8)⁹

(as though Love could thus be ruled, so that a lover could sell or swap his lady, and have no reason to be sad if, on losing one lady, he acquired another!)

But love is more than just part of the subject-matter of the stanzas in which Mandricardo tries to carry out his scheme. Viviane unhorsed falls “all'erbe e ai fiori … in braccio” (“in the soft embrace of meadow-grass and flowers”; 74.4); Aldigiero falls similarly “tra fiori e erbe,” and, wounded, is described as having “rosso sul'arme, e pallido nel volto” (“crimson on his armor and pallor in his face,” 76.8). The language of the scene itself evokes the flowery landscape and traditional colors of courtly love poetry. Mandricardo is destroying the ideal of courtly love as he downs the four knights, and the ideal is connected precisely, as the exordium showed, with the love of honor. Even Marfisa is only able to fight Mandricardo to a draw; with his magic armor and Orlando's sword, he is invincible. Ruggiero's love for Bradamante is part of his motive for wanting revenge on Rodomonte, but it is his own honor, not hers, that he feels has been so grieviously slighted. Once Mandricardo has symbolically overthrown the basis of courtly honor in unselfish love, the field is open for the endless squabbling to follow, which only Malagigi's supernatural intervention can stop.

Another aspect of the scene's vocabulary also reinforces the Christian knights' degeneration. In stanza 77, Ricciardetto falls to Mandricardo, but “non già per suo fallo” (“not by his own fault”): he would have proved his worth better “se fosse stato pari alla bilancia,” had he been Mandricardo's equal or had equal luck. Had Rodomonte not intervened in stanza 84, Mandricardo and Marfisa could have fought for days: “tutto quel giorno e l'altro appresso ancora” (“all that day and the next one as well”). Similarly, when Rodomonte behaves in an uncharacteristically Job-like way and refrains from fighting Ruggiero, we are told he would do the same even if he had Ruggiero completely in his power; normally he would travel miles for such a contest, but on this occasion, with Agramante so much in need of him, he would refuse the chance to fight even Achilles. Meanwhile Ruggiero gives Mandricardo such a blow that

                                                                                                                                            partito
quel colpo gli avria il capo, come un torso,
se Ruggier Balisarda avesse avuta,
o Mandricardo in capo altra barbuta.

(126.5-8)

(that blow would have split open his head like a stalk, had he had Balisarda, or had Mandricardo been wearing a different helmet.)

Finally, Ricciardetto would have fared ill at Rodomonte's hands had Malagigi not intervened to stop the brawl. The episode is filled with “would haves” and “could haves”—conditional verbs which constantly remind us that under different circumstances, things would have turned out differently. We have left the realm of chivalrous moral convention and entered one of luck and circumstance, which is also the realm—as we saw with the Moors and the Maganzesi earlier in the canto—of self-defeating chaos. Within this realm, the one who prevails (however momentarily) is the one with enchanted armor or a special sword. Ruggiero and his companions have jettisoned all pretense that their honor consists in helping others and are simply fighting for their own personal prestige. The more they isolate their individual honor as a purely personal quality, the more it contradicts itself: it becomes a moral imperative which can only be fulfilled by physical force and by lucky chance.

This paradox is manifest in the way the knights' identities melt together as the scene progresses. Viviane, Malagigi, Aldigiero, and Ricciardetto fall indistinguishably one after the other to Mandricardo's lance. When Mandricardo comes to claim Marfisa, he cites common usage as his claim to her: “che di ragion di guerra così s'usa” (“the custom of war must be observed”). She, however, cites the same rule to defy him, since she belongs to no knight but herself. When they run at each other and both fall, he curses the sky and the elements, she curses Heaven. Both are cursing their bad luck, but both are wearing enchanted armor which protects them at the same time that it frustrates their ability to attack each other. The harder they fight against each other, the more they are the same. And as the brawl continues, counterchallenge follows challenge, counterattack follows attack, and each knight claims what the other has until there is literally nothing to choose among them. The irony is of course that the things for which they are fighting are badges of identity, signs that designate the bearer as being unique and a hero.¹⁰ Both Mandricardo and Ruggiero claim the distinguished valor and heritage that the arms of Hector symbolize, both Ruggiero and Rodomonte the distinguishing advantage of a horse like Frontino. Yet in contending for these mobile evidences of particularity, they only become more and more alike, while their personal honor becomes indistinguishable from childish egotism and pride. For these greedy knights, instead of something that inspires chivalrous action, honor has become a commodity that one acquires. Honor has become a form of avarice.

The two-part narrative action of canto 26, then, presents us with two pictures of knightly honor: a definitive, ideal one, associated with a golden age and presented as an orderly relation among people which is both moral and aesthetic; and a degenerate version of this ideal, the parody of heroism found in the brawl scene, in which moral valor has been reduced to the physical value of swords and armor and horses. But what are we to make, finally, of this juxtaposition? Canto 26's exordium would have us believe that the ideal of honor was the norm in the golden age, only to degenerate in “our time”; but when was this golden age? Bradamante and Ruggiero are given as the examples of golden-age love and honor, yet the same knights, and especially Ruggiero, who displayed mythic heroism based on moral superiority in the rescue episode effortlessly match the rage, pride, and moral blindness of their foes by the canto's end. The Furioso's action ostensibly takes place in the new golden age of the founding of the Este dynasty, yet in the second episode of the canto the very founder of the dynasty is the prime example of modern degeneracy. How far back do we have to go for the golden age?¹¹

III. IMPERO AND THE ALLEGORY OF HONOR

This is precisely the question addressed by the descriptive passage that divides the canto. To Ruggiero and his friends, stanzas 30-53 are an interlude of well-earned rest after an arduous fight; the relief sculpture on the fountain is only added entertainment, just as the Furioso itself is an entertainment for the Este court and the nobles of Italy in their moments of leisure. But the subject matter of the relief is more than just entertainment; it picks up the themes of the exordium, illustrating the moral struggle of honor against avarice that Ruggiero has just won and is about to lose in the following action. In the exordium, it was not only love of riches that stood opposed to honor: Bradamante “non amò tesor, non amò impero” (“loved not wealth or power”). This broader definition of avarice is taken up in the fountain passage, which thus enlarges the scale of the canto's discussion. At the same time that the fountain sculptures allegorize the struggle between honor and avarice, they prophesy the glory of sixteenth-century Europe; the allegory and the prophecy invite the reader to step back and consider the discussion of honor and avarice in terms of their actual operation in history. The individual knightly honor and avarice embodied in Ruggiero's adventures is seen in the context of political behavior.

In the fountain relief, avarice is represented as an emblematic beast reminiscent of Erifilla on Alcina's island, wreaking havoc in the courts of sixteenth-century Europe. The beast is fought and defeated by the great Renaissance monarchs Francis I, Maximilian of Austria, Charles V, and Henry VIII, along with Pope Leo X; but like Erifilla, though it is defeated, it is not eliminated. Avarice preys upon both the Christian and the pagan nobility: “a re, a signori, a principi, a satrapi” (“kings and barons, princes and satraps”; 32.4). But its worst damage is done at the papal court at Rome. The kings and the pope are presented as its natural enemies; it is a corruption that must be rooted out of a healthy society from the top down, in typical Renaissance hierarchical fashion. Yet when the beast is finally subdued, the freed nobles who troop to the victory celebration are few: “Parea del mondo ogni timor rimosso” (“it appeared that the world was freed of every terror”), but “nobil gente accorrea, non però molta” (“nobles hastened up—however, not many”; 36.5.7). The story is thus a commentary on sixteenth-century European society and on society and human nature in general.

Curiously enough, however, this story is told twice during the fountain interlude. First it is told by the brief inscriptions and the poem's description of the allegorical figures, which were so artfully carved that but for the lack of voices they seem to the viewers to be alive. The allegory shows all fortresses, castles, and cities falling to the beast, who overruns more and more territory until it has overtaken the entire world: “tutta / e Francia e Italia e Inghilterra, / l'Europa e l'Asia, e al fin tutta la terra” (“all of France and Italy and England, Europe and Asia, and in the end all the world”; 31.6-8). Thus its influence is described in terms of conquering power; the avaricious behavior of the nations is their warlike contention and territorial greed. But it doesn't stop there; at its extreme, Avarice takes over the entire cosmos:

Par che agli onor divini anco s'estenda,
e sia adorata da la gente sciocca,
e che le chiave s'arroghi d'avere
del cielo e de l'abisso in suo potere.

(33.5-8)

(It seemed he was even acceding to divine honors and being worshipped by the mindless rabble; and that he had arrogated to himself the custody of the keys to heaven and hell.)

Taking over the keys of Saint Peter, Avarice has invaded the papacy as well as the temporal world; the pope, selling clerical honors and moral sanctions to enrich himself materially, is adored for his splendor by the credulous folk to whom he is supposed to be ministering. The allegorical correction for this state of affairs shows the kings and the pope throwing off their avaricious ways in stylized victory over the beast: Francis I and Maximilian wound each of its sides with their swords, Charles V stabs its throat with his lance, and Henry VIII gores its breast with his dart, while Leo X holds it by the ears.

Malagigi's interpretation of this allegory gives the figures the voice they lack, telling the story a second time, but with major additions. First he adds an explanation of the fountain's origin: Merlin created it in King Arthur's time to prophecy future glory, and yet the great deeds of the future will be necessary only because avarice will have spread so pervasively. Malagigi also adds an account of the beast's own origins to the depiction of the fountain's creation. It came into the world from hell

                              a quel tempo che fur fatti
alle campagne i termini, e fu il pondo
trovato e la misura, e scritti i patti.

(40.2-4)

(at the time when lands were assigned boundaries, when weights and measures were established, and pacts written.)

Avarice, having come into the world along with the measures and rules that govern both internal and external social relations, is inextricable from civilization, from national and political self-consciousness, and from the rules that govern them. The coming of Avarice marks the end of the golden age when harmony was the natural state of affairs, there were no nations, and laws and measures were therefore unnecessary.

We have come full circle to “l'antiqua etade” (“days of old”) again. But at this point the true golden age, the age when avarice was unknown, has been pushed back into an irretrievable past: before the age of Ruggiero and Bradamante and Charlemagne, which seems a golden age to the sixteenth-century nobility; before even the age of Arthur and Merlin, the golden age to which the characters of the Furioso, in turn, look back; back into an age before boundaries between territories, weights and measures, or pacts among nations. That is, it is beyond the reach of imaginable history, and even of the founding myths that are appropriated as history. Once appropriated, such myths lose their “golden age” quality because there is always a further golden past from which they, too, derive their values.¹² By showing the world of the poem as part of an infinite progression of golden age myths, Ariosto points out the interpretive constructedness of history: each age looks back to the illusion of a historical golden age, a real connection with its founding myth. This critique of idealized, mythic history discredits the entire dynastic structure of history that the poem is supposed to be celebrating. There is a sense here that the old view of history was losing its value in explaining current events—the same conviction which was leading Machiavelli and Guicciardini to write history in new ways during Ariosto's lifetime.

The grouping of rulers who fight Avarice reinforces this sense of historical constructedness. In the final, 1532 version, the group's membership telescopes the time period over which the poem appeared, for example mixing the Emperor Maximilian, who died in 1519, with his successor Charles V. In La strategia delle varianti Alberto Casadei traces the way that, in passages like these, Ariosto typically added new historical figures and events without erasing the earlier, outdated ones in the successive editions of the Furioso, thus achieving an “atemporal” effect, which is emphasized even more in canto 26 by a shift in verb tense from imperfect to present between the 1521 and 1532 editions (Casadei 50). This collapsing of contemporary history into one scene emphasizes a sense of continuity behind the political changes which occurred between 1516 and 1532, even as it registers them.

The idea that modern times have degenerated from an ideal past is not jettisoned completely, however; the situation has worsened as history has proceeded. Malagigi explains that in their own time, avarice has managed to overwhelm only the common folk, but that by the time of the prophesied future (that is to say, in the present of the Furioso's sixteenth-century readers) the monster will have conquered the nobility as well, and things will be so bad that all the world will beg them to vanquish it. Malagigi has put the sculpture's depiction of Avarice's gradual conquest into a historical context that points directly to the moral responsibility of the Furioso's Este readers.

In his interpretation of the sculpture, Malagigi further emphasizes the beast's connection with the mythical dawn of civilization by comparing it to the Python of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1.438-44), the great snake which was one of the first creatures to result from the union of earth and water when the world was made. In Ovid, Apollo is only able to kill the Python with great difficulty, by shooting it with the arrows he has used hitherto only to kill animals for food; civilization begins when the animal within man is subdued for the good of the collectivity, and when hunger is no longer the greatest enemy of humankind. Like Erifilla and the allegorical beast, the Python is hard to kill, but unlike them it finally is done away with. But while Ovid's Python is subdued to make civilization possible, avarice in the fountain story comes along with civilization—including the pacts that define honorable relations among nations. Avarice arises with national self-consciousness, honor, and responsibility, and seems therefore to be involved in their very essence. History, in this sense, is the history of avarice's destructive progress through the world. This view corresponds to what Felix Gilbert has called the Boethian view of history common in the Middle Ages—that in the fallen world, Providence looks exactly like Fortune (Gilbert 218). But where is the controlling Providence that gives the medieval and humanist historian a sense of a world beyond the human realm of fortune? Of what does the honor of these conquerors of the beast Avarice consist?

In the allegory, Francis I conquers avarice by crossing the Alps and capturing Milan. The invasion described in this passage is that of 1515, which was launched by the newly crowned king in revenge for the French defeat at Novara two years earlier.¹³ The allegory assumes that Francis I's just reign will replace the corrupt, avaricious one that defied him, yet no mention is made of his generosity or justice, as we might expect. Instead Malagigi emphasizes Francis I's splendor:

quando in splendor real, quando nel resto
di virtú farà molti parer manchi,
che già parver compiuti; come cede
tosto ogn'altro splendor, che'l sol si vede.

(43.5-8)

(regal in splendor, a paragon of every virtue, he shall expose the shortcomings of many who had seemed perfect—just as every light is diminished the moment the sun appears.)

Exploiting the familiar etymological ambivalence between moral virtue and physical strength in “virtú,” Malagigi presents the king's royal splendor as his chief virtue, the only one mentioned separately and by name. The four rulers and the pope of this passage were famous in the early sixteenth century for their liberality, especially Maximilian and Henry VIII, and like all Renaissance princes they led lives of private luxury and ostentatious public display. But in the context of this passage, their splendor is not a generous, but a conquering one. Thus Francis I's heroic qualities put him on the level of Caesar, Hannibal, and Alexander, the great conquerors of antiquity: his “eccellenze” include

l'animo del gran Cesar, la prudenza
di chi mostrolla a Transimeno e a Trebbia,
con la fortuna d'Alessandro, senza
cui saria fumo ogni disegno, e nebbia.

(47.3-6)

(the courage of great Caesar, judgment such as Hannibal showed at Trasimene and Trebbia, and the fortune of Alexander, without which every scheme must be but smoke and mist.)

In stanza 44, the reference to Francis I's recent (in 1516) ascension to the throne, “non ferma ancor ben la corona in fronte” (“his crown not yet firmly on his brow”), emphasizes his need to secure his power and that of France as much as the “giusto … e generoso sdegno” (“righteous and noble anger”) that the speaker piously attributes to him in the next breath. The figurative level of the allegory's meaning, in this historicizing explanation of it, keeps collapsing into the literal one; the metaphor of conquest keeps pointing not to a moral process that is like conquest, but to actual conquest. Francis's honor is based not on his virtues, but on his conquering power.

The entire stanza immediately following the description of the battle reinforces the comparison between Francis and the conquerors of classical times by lingering on the conquering power of his sword:

Sopra ogn'altr'arme, ad espugnarlo, molto
piú gli varrà quella onorata spada.

(46.1-2)

(To conquer it, one weapon will be worth far more to him than any other: his honored sword.)

Symbol either of violent conquest or of just retribution, Francis I's honored sword draws together and inextricably connects his valor, his splendor, and his conquering might. The corruption of the Milanese court, symbolized by the beast, resides presumably in the greed of its rulers, who rule badly because they rule only for themselves. Yet we have found no assurance in the passage's presentation of him that the leader of the antiavarice league has motives that are any less self-serving. Instead the implication is that they have directly to do with his desire for personal power and the desire of France as a nation to rule in Italy—in a word, impero.¹⁴ Honor and avarice are the measure of national as well as personal relations, and they threaten to become confused on the national level in the same way that they do (as in the brawl scene) on the personal one. In 1516 when the first Furioso appeared, Francis I had recently ascended the throne and, with the invasion of 1515, was the new Machiavellian hero on the scene. By 1532, Francis had been decisively defeated, and Charles, now emperor and newly crowned by Pope Leo's successor, had consolidated his power and was in firm control of northern Italy. Yet despite the revisions between 1516 and 1532, Francis remains the active hero of the fountain allegory; the knightly hero and the imperial conqueror are melded together, reinforcing the collapse of political honor into avarice.

Thus Malagigi's version of the allegory represents the rulers, especially Francis I, as demonstrating something very like the avarice they are supposed to be fighting—but on a national scale. The description of the sculpture that precedes Malagigi's interpretation allows room for a good, honorable kind of impero that opposes and can vanquish the avaricious conquering power the beast displays. Malagigi's interpretation, however, relegates this optimistic view of societal, national honor to a golden age which is by definition irretrievable; throughout history, and increasingly so, impero has been the tool of avarice, not honor. Malagigi has introduced a sense of history into the allegory, which, when examined, raises the persistent possibility that the “historical” connections between present acts and a past golden age are wishful constructs, idealizations that contradict reality. Ruggiero and Bradamante are supposed to represent a golden age of the Este dynasty, yet Ruggiero himself must look either back to an unimaginable time before history, or forward by prophecy to the very future that is looking back to him, for a golden age. History and human experience admit no golden-age moral certainty; the moral superiority of courtly honor is literally out of date. When the historical past is conceived of in mythic terms as a golden age, the history ends up corrupting the myth instead of the myth purifying the history. The myth loses its moral fixity and becomes hopelessly enmeshed in the moral ambiguities of human experience.

In the end, then, Malagigi's interpretation has the effect of teasing out the ambiguities that were latent in the allegory and highlighting the difference between the moral ideal of a providential history the allegory holds up, and a narrower, sharper perspective on the historical events to which it refers. In war-torn northern Italy of the early sixteenth century, it would be hard to see the “conquering sword” as merely a metaphor. The French invasions of Italy, starting in 1494, were by the early sixteenth century recognized as inaugurating an era of war, international interference in Italian affairs, and dizzying political reversals that made the last half of the Quattrocento seem in contrast, ironically, itself a golden age of stability and prosperity (see especially Gundersheimer 225-77, Durling 138-40, Gilbert 203-70, Pocock 114-55). Since 1494, Ferrara had passed repeatedly into and out of alliance with France and Rome and Venice, buffeted like all the Italian states by political forces it could not control. In the fountain allegory, Francis I is the heroic scourge of the beast Avarice, a conqueror who is motivated by justice, not greed; but the passage as a whole emphasizes the distance between this idealization and the practical concerns of power politics and war. And in fact, the dedication to national self-aggrandizement and the greed for power which motivate these practical concerns are exactly the characteristics represented by the allegorical beast. Read in this light, then, the seeming encomium of Francis I can be seen as a piece of mocking sarcasm. By describing the French king as the ideal of generous, disinterested international diplomacy, the passage only emphasizes how much the French seemed in retrospect to have been a dreadful incarnation of the destructive greed the beast represents. Beast and pursuers are one, just as Ruggiero and his friends degenerated into the image of their former enemies.

At the same time, however, that this allegory read ironically deplores the French invasions and the general political situation in sixteenth-century Italy, it can be read straightforwardly as a castigation of the Italian city-states. In this view, their greedy strife, reminiscent of the Christian-pagan brawl that ends the canto, was not only intensified by the invasions from the north but occasioned them in the first place. These periodic invasions (which became commonplace in the Cinquecento, with Italy a battleground for the great struggle between the Valois and the Hapsburgs) were seen as a chastening scourge, culminating in 1527 with the ignominious sack of Rome by uncontrollable mercenaries. The beast Avarice, if it represents the pride and greed of the Italian states, got a severe beating from the northern invasions—even if the invaders were hardly the ideal chivalrous figures depicted in the fountain allegory. The French could be seen as having performed some of the function, in Italy, of the allegorical heroes.

But if the fountain passage suggests a resemblance, under the idealized facade, between the allegory's heroic rulers and the squabbling knights in the canto's narrative action, the parallel works the other way too. Honor in the fountain allegory is, at least in theory, directed toward the righting of social wrongs—the corruption of church and state because of the greed of those who run them. But avarice is so pervasive in society and in human nature in these times, according to the allegory, that those who celebrate its downfall

          eran pochi verso gl'infiniti
ch'ella v'avea chi morti e che feriti.

(53.7-8)

(were few compared with the countless number that the monster had slain or wounded)

This emphasis on the need to fight avarice as a social ill only reminds us that the knights in canto 26's action are ignoring their social responsibilities (to fight for their kings) in their pursuit of personal ends. The obvious parallel to this state of affairs in the poem as a whole is Orlando's desertion of Charlemagne to pursue Angelica. Malagigi makes this point about social responsibility, however, just before the knights demonstrate in the ensuing episode that they have missed it completely. The fountain allegory and the brawl, from this perspective, reflect back and forth upon each other: the rulers of sixteenth-century Europe are unlike their idealized pictures on the fountain in exactly the same way that the enraged Ruggiero charging alternately at Rodomonte and Mandricardo is the complete opposite of the chivalrous hero of the rescue episode. The moral degeneration traced on the individual level in the narrative sections of canto 26 mirrors the moral problems with sixteenth-century politics traced in the fountain episode. All of these heroes, like Orlando, have left off fighting for their common cause, leaving their moral duty languishing in their preoccupation with personal concerns.

The example of Orlando, in fact, underlies the whole canto, and underlines the connection between the knights of the poem and their sixteenth-century counterparts. Like Orlando, the knights Mandricardo, Rodomonte, and Marfisa immediately drop all thought of Agramante and the siege of Paris the moment their honor is questioned; Ruggiero submerges his ultimate Christian duty to Bradamante in his rage over his horse and arms; and the other knights are inevitably drawn into the whirlpool of ever-renewed challenge and attack. But it goes even further than that; as the brawl continues, they all come closer and closer to a state of furor which is reminiscent of Orlando's madness, witnessed only three cantos earlier in Canto 23. Underneath his staunch refusal, at first, to fight Ruggiero, Rodomonte hides a burning rage, “tanto a quel punto sotte le faville / le fiamme avea del suo furor sopite” (“so well had he doused the flames of his wrathful temper to a mere glow,” 95.5-6; emphasis mine). When Mandricardo challenges Ruggiero's right to wear Hector's arms,

Come ben riscaldato àrrido legno
a piccol soffio subito s'accende,
cosí s'avampa di Ruggier lo sdegno.

(103.1-3)

(As a piece of dry tinder, warmed through, will catch fire at the slightest puff, so Ruggiero's fury blazed up.)

Against the rising wrath of the three knights, Marfisa's efforts to conciliate the growing conflict are as futile as those of a peasant trying to stave off the flood and save his fields (no fruitful intercourse here). Ruggiero and Rodomonte, prefiguring their final battle in Canto 46, attack each other like beasts: “come cinghial, … come il lione … tolto su le corna / dal bue” (“like a boar, like a lion who has been tossed by a bull”). And Ruggiero storms about Rodomonte like a tempest. Thus their madness, like Orlando's, is a loss of humanity as well as identity; like Orlando, they have become raging animals, forces of nature. The beast Avarice is one more manifestation of the frustrated desire to possess that drove Orlando mad, and thus it is no accident that the canto ends with Doralice fleeing in a way that makes her resemble Angelica in canto 1.¹⁵ The movement of Doralice at the end of canto 26 also contrasts with the faithful fixity of Bradamante at the canto's opening, just as Bradamante's love of honor in another contrasts with the self-seeking prestige-grubbing of the brawlers. Yet apart from her idealized portrayal in this canto, Bradamante spends the greater part of the poem wandering out in search of Ruggiero; the ideal of stationary faith turns so easily into the movement of desire. Their pursuit of personal honor, at its extreme, brings them to the same impasse as the pursuit of desire—the endless chase after the ever-receding object. At the end of the canto, Rodomonte and Mandricardo are chasing Doralice, while Ruggiero and Marfisa are chasing Rodomonte and Mandricardo; the chase of desire and the chase of personal honor are the same chase, and this fruitless, ongoing chase is the very stuff of history.

IV. LITERARY HONOR AND AVARICE IN THE FURIOSO

There is a further similarity between the furor of Orlando and that of the canto 26 knights. Malagigi mounts the spell that ends the brawl “sol con parole” (“only with words”). His voice prompts another; the spell, causing the horse to jump and run, makes Doralice scream, and her voice is the only thing that can rouse Rodomonte and Mandricardo from their rage. If language is the feature that separates humanity from animals, it is appropriate that it should be a verbal magic which is able to bring the self-perpetuating brawl to an end. Malagigi plays an interesting role in his control over the action at this decisive moment. His verbal magic, along with his magical powers of interpretation in the fountain scene, display a power with words that mirrors that of his own poet-creator, Ariosto, the creator of the verbal magic that is the Furioso. But although Malagigi's spell is Ariosto's instrument for changing the course of the canto's action, it does not resolve the conflict. Instead it simply moves the story to another part of the forest: the squabbling of these knights over their horses and arms continues, with even more complications, through canto 27 and beyond. What Malagigi's spell does is to set a horse in motion, recollecting the original flight of Angelica, which not only began the poem's action in canto 1, but also established the runaway horse and the pursuit of desire as the quintessential emblem of Ariosto's narrative technique.¹⁶ Malagigi's spell ending the brawl highlights the fact that the poem's narrative is after all a verbal creation of Ariosto's, perpetuated or terminated at the artist's will.

Similarly, the fountain itself, even in the description that precedes Malagigi's interpretation, is a verbal creation of the poet Ariosto, who has added it to the series of supposedly Merlin-built fountains created “sol con parole” by his predecessor Boiardo in the Innamorato. The knights' request that Malagigi explain the fountain's allegory to them highlights art as the carrier of multiple meanings, a construct that must be interpreted. Their initial reaction to the fountain, naive enjoyment, also points the way to a more sophisticated interpretive response by the knowledgeable reader, who by this time in the poem has certainly picked up the cues of moral meanings behind the poem's actions and descriptions. Finally, the contemporary historical content of the fountain's supposed prophecies also raises the whole question of the Furioso's celebratory poetic project.

Looking back at the exordium, we can see that Ariosto has linked the theme of honor to that of literary art from the very beginning of the canto. In stanza 1, honor's opposite is described in quasi-literary terms as “lo stile avaro” (“style of greed”)—not only as avarice itself, but as a style; and the principal way that ladies who do not follow the style of greed can become “gloriose e immortal” (“glorious and immortal”) after death is through the sort of artistic celebration which the poem, throughout its length and in the very next lines, performs for Bradamante. The suggestion is that to the opposing moral styles for ladies' behavior there correspond opposing literary styles; behind the greedy ladies of “il tempo nostro” (“our own day”) we discern the shadows of the greedy poets of today who flatter their patrons for gain regardless of their real virtue or sinfulness. This questioning of the poet's motives is a recurrent theme of the Furioso, culminating in the allegory of fame on the moon in canto 35 (35.1-30) and in the exordium to canto 36 (36.1-10). The canto 26 exordium of course aligns itself with the virtuous few who follow the old style of praising only “vera bontade” (“true goodness”), with the second stanza presented as a prime example. In fact, the second stanza includes an idealized rendition of the Furioso's whole dynastic element, including the love of Bradamante for the valorous Ruggiero and the many “cose / nei secoli avenir miracolose” (“exploits in future times deemed miraculous”) that they do and that befall them. The exordium as a whole, then, both defines the moral discussion to come in the canto, and suggests a self-conscious link between the problem of honor and avarice and the Furioso's own poetic enterprise.

This view of the poem as verbal creation collapses the sculpted figures together with Malagigi's explanation, and in fact with the narrative surrounding the fountain episode, into one verbal construct; the sculptures themselves are only linguistic constructs in Ariosto's game of building upon and surpassing Boiardo and his other literary predecessors. The point of view represented by the poet and his stand-in, Malagigi—as interpreter, spell-worker, creator—might seem at first one of power, from which we could for a moment gain perspective on the confusing, continuous process by which honor and avarice, greed and desire succeed each other.¹⁷ But how effective is this magic? Doralice's wordless scream echoes the howls of the mad Orlando, who lost the power of language along with his sanity, just as Rodomonte's and Mandricardo's pursuit of her echoes Orlando's of Angelica. If the runaway horse figures the runaway passion that eludes moral and rational control,¹⁸ then the passions of anger and pride have only been replaced by the passion of desire, and the poet implicates himself (as he has in the Turpin passage and many others throughout the poem) in the uncontrolled blindness of passion.

Of course, balancing every runaway horse in the Furioso, as A. Bartlett Giamatti pointed out, is the unforgettable image of the hippogriff curbed and ridden by Astolfo (“Headlong Horses” 300). Giamatti traces the way that this classical image of moral and rational control over the passions has by the Renaissance, in the literary epic, also become an image of aesthetic control.¹⁹ But at the end of canto 26 the knights are all galloping off after each other, completely out of control. Any knight who was “in se raccolto” (“self-possessed”) in the rescue episode is now “di se tolto” (“out of control”) in the brawl (Ariosto's terms, highlighted by Giamatti); and they have all passed from one state to the other without comprehension. Any understanding of the connection comes from viewing these experiences, not living them. In just such a way, the plight of Viviane and Malagigi in the first part of the canto did not touch Ruggiero personally, and his and Marfisa's emotional detachment went along with their mythical heroism. Once they have a personal stake in what is happening, and especially it seems when their pride is involved, they descend inevitably to the world of real human experience, where motives are mixed and moral absolutes become façades behind which to hide the more unsavory ones.

This realm of mixed motives extends to include the poem itself and its author. Far from being merely a disinterested observer, Ariosto has a direct personal stake in the reception of his poem, his literary reputation, and the operations of power at the Este court, which extend to the arena of artistic patronage and production. His checkered career with Ippolito and Alfonso gave him frequent cause for bitterness (Catalano 439-454, 533-34, 538-39, 555; Gardner 118-29, 158-64, 178-84, 233). The Este are notably absent from the fountain's potentially scathing political analysis (there is a brief mention of “due Erculi, due Ippoliti” among the nobles who cheer Francis I's victory)—for very clear reasons, given the way that the beast and its pursuers tend to merge. This moral analysis of the current political scene, too dangerously critical to make directly to one's patrons, can be made more safely on the level of humanity and general international politics, while at the same time it can apply to the general conditions of northern Italian society.²⁰ By leaving the Este patrons out of the analysis, the passage allows them to participate in its moral outrage at Italy's desolation without having to acknowledge their own part in it. The Este were at the height of their power in the first half of the Cinquecento; this canto demonstrates—by what it leaves unsaid as well as by what it hints at and shows directly—exactly how precarious the dependence of artists like Ariosto on their patrons' princely favor was. It shows the dark side of what Lauro Martines calls art's “alliance with power” in the Italian Renaissance (Martines 241-71). In Ferrara, Boiardo's Innamorato has given way to Ariosto's Furioso, which only continues the chase after both generous patronage and a stable point from which meaning can be reliably constructed, and moral values applied to experience.

Canto 26 thus invites two seemingly conflicting readings: a celebratory interpretation which seems to correspond to the heroic, chivalrous order of the “danza” (“dance”) in “l'antiqua etade” (“days of old”) represented by Ruggiero and Marfisa in the rescue episode, and which underlies the prophecy of a providential dynastic history; and another more critical interpretation whose negative name is “lo stile avaro” (“style of greed”), which corresponds to “il tempo nostro” (“our own day”) and appears as a corrupt and debased version of the first, and which leads us to a sense of history as merely opportunistic human action.²¹ As we saw in the exordium, “lo stile avaro” is that of those who flatter for gain. And yet taken as a whole, while canto 26 has shown the impossibility of the ideal, heroic style in the real world of overwhelming human passions, it does not play flattering sycophant to the Este patrons either. Instead, Ariosto treads a thin line between the two styles. He cannot simply praise the worthy, for as the fountain scene and the brawl amply show, the patrons and all they represent are not simply (or even mainly) worthy; but neither does he simply flatter them at the expense of all moral integrity. His critique of his patrons is indirect, yet it is there, and it is scathing. The art of the Furioso in this canto self-consciously inhabits the gap between an impossible (but worthy) ideal and a reprehensible (but recalcitrant) reality, between values and experience, between old and new senses of history—using the former in each case to criticize the latter and the latter to show the insufficiency of the former. The fountain scene, the silent allegory in conjunction with Malagigi's deconstructing interpretation of it, enlarges the scale of this dialectical critique beyond the question of personal morality to include the question of national morality, and finally, of aesthetic morality as well.

Notes

1. On the play between epic closure and romance digressiveness in the Furioso, see especially Giamatti, “Headlong Horses” 270, 298-307; Parker 40-53; Ascoli 363-64; and Zatti 9-14.

2. The use of allegory in the Furioso has mostly been discussed in relation to the episode of Alcina's island in cantos 6-7 and that of the moon in cantos 34-35. On the allegorical aspect of these episodes, see especially Ascoli 124, 264-71, and Kennedy. For a view of Aristo's poetics, apparently apart from overtly allegorical passages like these, as actively resisting allegorical interpretation, see Javitch. Javitch sees allegorical interpretation as inherently reductive; in my view, however, the importance of allegory is that it foreground the whole issue of interpretation.

3. For Ariosto's use of exordia, see Durling 132-38.

4. Quotations from the Furioso are taken from the Lanfranco Caretti edition of the poem, 3rd edition (Einaudi, 1966). Translations are from Guido Waldman's version of the poem (Oxford, 1974).

5. “Ver c'ha faccia di menzogna” (“truth with a lying face”) is a direct quote from Dante's description of Geryon (Inferno 16.124). For a discussion of Ariosto's debt to Dante in his representation of the truth-speaking powers of poetry, see Ascoli 252-54.

6. For Ariosto's use of the topos of the crossroads and the figure of Hercules in relation to Ruggiero and the Furioso as a whole, see Saccone 210-19 and Ascoli 52-70.

7. For some suggestive extended readings of the Alcina episode, see Giamatti, Earthly Paradise, 142-64, and Ascoli 121-246.

8. Marfisa's proposed role as a currency of exchange between male knights, and her challenge of it, raise the issue of the “valore” of women in the poem. Gender issues have been highlighted in some excellent recent criticism of the Furioso, centering mainly on the figures of Bradamante and Angelica; see Benson, Finucci, and both articles by Shemek.

9. On the proposed exchange of Marfisa for Doralice, as well as the speaker's outrage over it, see Zatti 98-99. He argues that Mandricardo's proposal strikes at an ideological nexus of the Furioso, since it questions the whole ideal of coutly love which sends Orlando mad and makes Zerbino and Isabella tragic heroes: “la spregiudicatezza del cavaliere pagano riflette una luce ambigua non solo sul negativo della follia di Orlando, ma anche sul positivo della sublime devozione di Zerbino, procedenti da una medesima matrice ideale” (“the pagan knight's broadmindedness casts an ambiguous light not only on the negative spectacle of Orlando's madness, but on the positive spectacle of Zerbino's sublime devotion, since both proceed from the same ideal,” 99; translation mine).

10. Discussing the even more extreme continuation of this brawl in canto 27, Donato highlights the same themes I have been stressing, of identity, difference, and the objects of desire: “Since the objects that generate quarrels matter little and for any practical purpose are interchangeable, every quarrel is identical to any other and there is absolutely no possible way of establishing an order within the quarrels themselves except through the drawing of lots—that is to say, by establishing from the very beginning purely arbitrary differences where there is [really] nothing but identity” (41).

11. This sense of nostalgia might usefully be related to Quint's discussion in Epic and Empire of the death of the epic, even as it was experiencing a last revival, in the Renaissance. According to Quint, the epic's “nostalgic visions of aristocratic autonomy” were ceasing to be relevent in a world where “the nobility … found their traditional role and their identity undermined both from below, in competition with a newly powerful mercantile bourgeoisie, and from above, as their role and identity were absorbed as instruments in the war machinery of modern absolutist monarchy” (10).

12. For a good general overview of the golden age myth, see Levin. Defining the golden age as “a nostalgic statement of man's orientation in time, an attempt at transcending the limits of history” (xv), he maintains that “the growth of historical consciousness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries encouraged a mood of lateness,” which led to a resurgence of nostalgia for an ideal past (148).

13. The French avoided the trap laid at Monginevro by Prospero Colonna (“chi all'incontro avrà occupato il monte” [“who shall have invaded the mountains from the other side”]; defeated the Swiss mercenaries at Marignano (“l'Elvezio spezzerà” [“shall devastate the Swiss”]); and captured Milan (“espugnerà il catel” [“shall capture the castle”]): stanzas 44-45.

14. Casadei differs from this reading of Francis I, placing the emphasis in the comparison on the virtues, rather than on imperial status of the classical rulers. Thus he sees Francis being made a type of the ideal Renaissance knight. Casadei argues that the imperial comparison is not made until the 1532 Furioso and the imagery it adds surrounding Charles V, who is set up as political conqueror in contrast to Francis's ideal knight. This is part of his larger thesis that the local, Este-oriented politics of the 1516 Furioso are broadened to a more comprehensive view of Italian peninsular politics by the 1532 edition (Casadei 51-57). The added stanzas (50-52) in the later edition, which add many more Italian nobles of the 1520s to the list of those applauding Avarice's defeat, confirm his contention that the politics of the poem broadened in its successive editions, but in my view Casadei downplays too much the imperial imagery surrounding Francis I.

15. Zatti also makes the connection between canto 26 and Orlando's madness (98). Zatti argues that these characters' madness mediates the poem's critique of a dogmatic and rigid adhesion to both the courtly code of ideal chivalric behavior and the Petrarchan literary code of sublime love.

16. The seminal analysis of frustrated desire as a major thematic and structural principle of the Furioso is of course by Donato. The imagery of horses and reining is explored in detail by Giamatti, “Headlong Horses,” 292-304 and Ascoli 376-93.

17. Durling's analysis of the poet-persona's control of the narrative in the Furioso (114-32) has been reinforced by many, including Donato, Parker, and Zatti; Giamatti makes one of the strongest cases for it in “Headlong Horses.” Astolfo's control of the hippogriff and detachment single him out, in Giamatti's view, as a stand-in for the poet. While Giamatti may overstate the case—by underemphasizing both the irony with which Astolfo's career is presented and the balancing metaphors in the poem which emphasize moral action rather than detached control—it is clear that Astolfo and parallel figures such as Malagigi are used to raise the issue of the effect of the medium of poetry on its message in key places throughout the poem.

18. As it does in the exordium to canto 11 (11.1-2), just at the point when Ruggiero, in his eagerness to ravish the naked Angelica, has speedily forgotten every moral lesson he learned from Logistilla, and is about to lose the hippogriff.

19. Via Dante; according to Giamatti, in the Commedia the aesthetic and the moral are united in the imagery of curbing” (“Headlong Horses,” 270), and it passes this imagery down to its descendants in the Renaissance epic. Ascoli, however, sets Giamatti's positive reading against Donato's negative interpretation of the hippogriff representing the impossibility, by its very grotesqueness, of such a union (Donato 58), in order to raise the possibility that Ariosto is using this imagery ironically (Ascoli 248).

20. The only Italian states specifically mentioned are those who were enemies of Ferrara and the French. The particular drubbing that Rome receives may be due to a combination of Ferrara's increasing rebelliousness against the tradition of papal control, the time-honored tradition of criticizing clerical corruption, and Ariosto's personal disappointment in the lack of expected patronage from Leo X.

21. My reading here may be compared to that of Zatti, who traces the way that the Furioso consistently questions the “cortese-cavalleresco” value-system that it is based upon and tries to validate. See especially Zatti ch. 4, 91-111. Comparing Ariosto's and Machiavelli's analysis of ideals subject to fortune, Zatti contends that in the Furioso, “più che la presenza di due codici moral-comportamentali a confronto, si registra qui la contraddizione interna a un modello classicheggiante di umanistica misura e di idealità cavalleresca, che tuttavia non ha la forza di generare una consapevole alternativa, limitandosi così a farsi specchio delle sue lacune e delle sue ‘disarmonie’” (“more than the presence of two moral-behavioral codes in confrontation, we find registered here the internal contradictions of a classicizing model of humanistic measure and chivalric ideals; which all the same does not have the force to generate a conscious alternative, limiting itself to holding up a mirror to its own limitations and ‘disharmonies,’” 100; translation mine).

I gratefully acknowledge many helpful suggestions I received from Virginia Green, Michael Hakkenberg, and Michael Heller, who were kind enough to read drafts of this article. And I am especially indebted to Albert Ascoli, who presided over several metamorphoses of what began as a paper for an independant study.

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