[In the following essay, Marinelli stresses the influence of Neoplatonist writers on the themes and structure of Orlando furioso.]

He was altogether outside the philosophy of the Renaissance, whether Ficino's or Pomponazzi's, as he was outside every philosophy.

Benedetto Croce, Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille

Non allettava l'Ariosto la mensa dei platonici, e d'altro s'infervorava che della sapienza del Ficino.

Ariosto was not suckled at the table of the Platonists, and he was kindled by something other than the wisdom of Ficino.

Arturo Farinelli, “Lodovico Ariosto”

In direct competition with the Innamorato, the Furioso announces itself, formally and immediately, as a poem of “loves” (“amori”) against a background of war (“arme”), and Boiardo's two antiphonal actions of love and war harden into a conceptual framework. A principle of concord operates against a principle of discord: Venus set against Mars, Love against Strife or Hate. The poem begins with the disastrous Saracen rout of Charlemagne's broken forces, the retreat from Montalbano to the beleaguered capital, the light escape of unattainable Angelica into an explicitly named “selva oscura” (1.22.5, 2.68.4), and her pursuit by any number of delinquent, irascibly appetitive warriors who thereby contribute to the disaster. Forty-six cantos later it ends with the achievement of Bradamante's quest for Ruggiero and her marriage in the pacified city of Paris. In its very broadest aspect, therefore, the Furioso enacts a long movement to reconciliation in the restoration of hierarchical order through an intricate concatenation of disorders. Love is born out of the strife and discord of Chaos, whose warring elements it organizes, so replacing enmity with concord. And all of this takes place under the direction of Providence, which gives it a teleological thrust.

The contrast between the beginning and the ending of the poem could not be more deliberately pointed. The antithetical poles of its action are the forest of its opening and the city of its close. Between those poles an initial chaos of war and passion, violently dispersive in effect, yields finally to the homecoming of warriors in the pacification of France and the union of the progenitors of the House of Ferrara. The Furioso is a vast organism of profoundly complex construction set circuitously in motion toward a definite objective, and it gathers its accumulated energies as it moves to its end. Its essential meaning is in its shape: if Ariosto has his own beginning in view at his conclusion, he is conscious as well of the beginnings of the entire matter, and he describes a vast rotary movement by matching his own conclusion to the Innamorato's beginning. For where Boiardo begins with Angelica arriving in Paris and setting the Christian world by the ears in her first disruptive appearance at Charlemagne's Whitsuntide feast, Ariosto terminates the vast and farflung action 115 cantos later with Bradamante's wedding at yet another feast in the very same city. The order effected at the conclusion of the Furioso is inescapably suggestive of a harmony wrought out of disorder, and in its total sweep the poem's movement enacts an elaborate, cherished concept of the Renaissance, that of discordia concors.¹

The Charlemagnic world is a world of disorder and strife, but with Bradamante's assumption of her quest for Ruggiero, a new love begins creatively to interpenetrate the disintegrating fabric of that disaster-ridden society, directing it ultimately to a new order and peace. In the process, the higher love of the young mother-to-be of all the Estensi wins out slowly over the centrifugal chaos that the old carnal love for Angelica inspires, and the result is a final harmony symbolized by the cessation not only of her own quest but also of all the other quests of the poem, the centripetal return of all the errant warriors, and the celebration of the wedding feast. Both exterior and interior disorders are stilled at the same time. The harmony of the macrocosm is simultaneously reflected in the harmony of the human microcosm, and the reintegration and renovation of a society is free to proceed. Indeed, once the Empire itself has again been consolidated, it extends itself, through Ruggiero and Bradamante, to a new territory in Italy. The lovers go out, “with Providence their guide,” to found Ferrara, a fief whose rulers are honored by imperial investiture.

The richly Empedoclean conjunction of “arme” and “amori” in the poem's opening line is not accidental. The association of ideas implicit in those words was available to Ariosto in the central document of Florentine Neoplatonism, Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium;² and on any day of his life as a courtier, he could have looked at a pictorial representation of the idea that love is more powerful than strife: one way of looking at the famous fresco of Francesco Cossa in the Schifanoia Palace in Ferrara, “The Triumph of Venus,” is to see it as dramatizing the concept in the submission of a kneeling Mars to a fertile Venus.³ We have encountered the word harmony previously as a deceptively romantic inheritance from Benedetto Croce, but in a context and with a meaning wholly alien to the one it had for a Neoplatonist poet of the sixteenth century. We should now adjust the perspective to ensure that we are not dealing with an anachronism. We may then venture the possibility that the purely technical and aesthetic harmony of a poem may not exist as an isolated, ineffable phenomenon; that indeed it may be the expression of a profound concern with many other kinds of harmony—cosmic, philosophic, social, moral, and artistic. “Harmonia est discordia concors” was a byword of the Renaissance.⁴ In Neoplatonic mythography Harmonia is personified as a goddess; she is the daughter of Venus and Mars, the respective patrons of love and strife, and she functions as a cosmic force, the fruit of their creative reconciliation in the submission of the irascible instinct to the creativity of the higher love.⁵ Harmonia is therefore the witness of the supremacy of the principle of integration to that of destruction and disintegration; and this is essentially the principle that Ariosto's energetic heroine embodies. For all its unliterary and unhistorical abstraction, then, Croce's splendid formula is essentially in accord with the values of the poem, an intuition of genius.

As an epic microcosm of love and war (“Le donne, i cavallier, l'arme, gli amori”), the Furioso is a poetic universe torn, like the original Chaos, by the passions of love and hate. Never is that depicted more pointedly than in canto 1, when the army of Charlemagne is flying in fragments and the Saracen hordes threaten the heart of the Empire. But Ariosto moves immediately to counter this initial explosion from the center with a contrasting centripetal movement, which is long in arriving but steadily directed to the poem's end. At the very moment when total dissolution threatens, he moves, swiftly and with only the slightest precedent from Boiardo, to set a young female warrior on a divinely guided quest for her husband-to-be. When the poem opens, Bradamante is already in search of Ruggiero, and the great arc of her hunt will not touch ground until the very end. The Furioso is, of course, an expansive and ample poem that accords a full measure of attention to the power of disorder embodied in Discordia, an allegorical figure that Ariosto sets at the center of the action, and the body of the work is a seething cauldron of contrary movements by thousands of figures. Yet the final object of the poem is to get the pagans out of France and the paganism out of Ruggiero, to restore wholeness to the land and integrity to the hero, so that, the Empire having been secured, an offshoot of its greatness may find fruitful soil in a North Italian city. In the poem's process of ordering disorderly situations, the relationship between the landscape and the individual is metaphoric and continuous. Put briefly, Ruggiero must become worthy of his destiny; the process he undergoes is educative, though he resists to the end.

Bradamante too is bedeviled by her own contumacy and by the amusingly refractory evasions of her intended spouse, but the conclusion of the poem sees her triumphant in the achievement of her mission. Her wedding forms the climax toward which all the multifaceted action drives, and it assures the birth of a new and splendid society to spring from her loins. The young heroine asserts an undeniably vigorous presence immediately on her first irruption into the action of the first canto. In Boiardo, her intended is one of the chief heroes of the Saracen army that has brought discord into the Empire; in Ariosto's development of the story, the pressures of a tyrannizing sense of personal honor keep returning him to that mistaken fealty. In effect, Ruggiero's perpetual wavering and search for personal glory reinforce and reinvigorate the faltering pagan enterprise in France. Bradamante's task is therefore to win him—as it turns out, to keep winning him again and again—to the destiny to which they have together been called. Their dynastic future as Italian princes necessitates his conversion, and baptism is the end she mistakenly imagines will terminate all problems: mistakenly, because not until the very conclusion of the poem is a bridle put on the bridegroom's roving and the seal set on the peace of the Frankish empire. Ruggiero is repeatedly unfaithful in both a romantic and a theological sense: faithless in love and an infidel in religion, and the one invariably involves the other. Yet Providence wins out at last. In Bradamante's success in bringing Ruggiero to his dynastic marriage, love wins out over strife and hate. She delivers him from paganism and bachelorhood, and she is (metaphorically only, to be sure, given her boisterous nature) the still center to whom he returns from a poem-long errancy of movement. Invariably constant herself, she makes his circle just and he ends where he began, perhaps knowing the place for the first time.

Bradamante's love is the one immutable and constant thing in the poem, as strong in her great outpouring of fidelity in a late canto (44.61-66) as it is near the beginning (7.48). Even her terrific jealousy is an intensification of her constancy to one object, one goal. Throughout she functions as the very human agent of Providence's equally unrelenting pursuit of Ruggiero. This is an aspect of the poem that needs stressing, especially in view of attempts to see the poem as centrally and essentially committed to a presentation of reality as inexorable flux and impermanence.⁶ But surely this is to look at things through the eyes of Spenser's Mutability, for whom, because there is motion and change in the universe, there is nothing but motion and change. No poet is more concerned with slippery transience than Ariosto, yet all that evanescence and mutation is circumscribed by order and pattern, and it progresses inevitably toward a condition of rest. A vast homeward movement begins at the poem's end, and the banquet brings all the heroes together. Yet even here there is a final disturbance in the black appearance of Rodomonte, and the dagger-blow to the chief enemy's brain that so shockingly ends the poem's frenzied action is an assertion of a hard-won finality, for a moment at least.

The central female figure is, at one and the same time, the eventual center of the poem's repose and the source of its unwavering energy. Though he was eager to find fault with the Furioso's decorum in thus reversing masculine and feminine roles, Tasso's very objection called attention to this peculiarity of Ariosto's treatment in the very act of decrying it:

But this decorum [of the male pursuing the female] is not to be found in the Furioso, in which Ruggiero is rather more beloved than loving, and Bradamante more loving than loved, and she pursues Ruggiero and attempts to rescue him from prison and performs all those offices and operations that would seem more proper to a Knight in order to gain the love of his lady, however much of a warrior she may be. But Ruggiero doesn't do anything to gain the love of his lady, but seems rather to despise her and hold her in little esteem, which would not perhaps be so indecorous if the poet had not feigned that from this love and this marriage should derive the Princes of Este.⁷

Whatever the validity of Tasso's objections, he does not misrepresent Bradamante's role. As a personality, she is the very opposite of the static, merely timorous, and frightened Angelica to whom, in the first canto, she is directly opposed. She is active and bustling, headstrong, willful, and passionate, and her faults are not those of deficiency. If she were symbolized by a flower, it would be the tiger lily, not the violet. Presumably she incarnates something of the energy and dedication to the family's interests of the Este women throughout history: characteristics that go along amusingly with a certain willfulness and obstinacy. Her first falling off presents her truly; there she is “animosa” and “malcauta” (2.74.1-2), a promising combination of the “spirited” but “imprudent,” capable of being instructed, and generous rather than mean in her nature. If, then, Bradamante is hilarious (if also rather frightening) in her utter single-mindedness about her mission, she is also unswervingly faithful to her beloved through all kinds of vicissitudes and derelictions on his part. Again, she has none of the meaner instincts her parents seem determined to force on her, and she says herself that she is beyond Fortune in cherishing Ruggiero for himself rather than for worldly reputation or riches (44.64). The avarice that afflicts her beloved and her parents touches her not in the least.

Bradamante's hunting of Ruggiero is linked, by reflection, to Providence's unyielding pursuit of Ruggiero, and her love shares something of its single-minded intensity and, in the end, its jealousy; what her love lacks is its patience and serenity. Time tyrannizes, strong biological imperatives are at work in the story, and nothing is allowed to get in the way of the sacrifice of individual lives to the future destiny of a race. Hence, though the prophecy of Ruggiero's early death through treachery is known to both Bradamante and the hermit who finally converts him, neither of them fails to conceal that knowledge and both urge him on to his destiny. In this they master totally the sentimental magician, Atlante, whose entire project is to keep Ruggiero from Christianity, marriage, and death, and who invents, pathetically, one sensual enchantment after another to hold him aloof and remote from his heroic role, in vain hope that he will resist time, death, and destiny. Rescuing him from his first two prisons, but needing help herself in being rescued from the third, Bradamante wins out by sheer persistence. In the end her instinctive female energies cause her to overstep herself. Unknowingly but pridefully risking physical combat with her own beloved (canto 45), she must yield finally in her ambition to supremacy, and in her yielding is her final victory.

Bradamante makes the traditional submission of the comic heroine and becomes the virago gentled in marriage, the good Venus to a Mars converted from evil. In the process she becomes the exponent of a higher human love in the act of ordering itself for marriage, which is at once an end and a sign. She becomes, as well, a pattern for the spirited female descendants of her race who are called to be instructed by her story as well as delighted, and who are themselves liberally praised in its pages. Since her marriage is to have enormous historical consequences, she too must grow into the role to which destiny has called her. Necessarily, given her ardent nature, she becomes acquainted with many a passion along the way. A paradigm of her career would pass through stages of infatuated sentimentalism (cantos 2 and 4), illusion-ridden desire (canto 13), visceral longing (canto 30), jealousy and the suicidal self-dramatization of amorous frustration (canto 32), and murderous rage and frustration (cantos 35, 36, and 45). Her path is (sometimes hilariously) strewn with these steadily accumulating obstacles before she is humbled in order to be exalted. Hers is, then, an initiation into the world of a specific kind of love, the love that contemporary Neoplatonism denominated “amore umano,”⁸ neither bestial nor angelic, but coasting between. Her progression through these various stages asserts the nature of love as an ordering principle operating on disorderly elements. As cosmic love orders and calms the strife of the four elements in the original Chaos, so perfected love in the Furioso calms the strife and harmonizes the atmosphere of its poetic microcosm. In Boiardo, Bradamante appears and falls in love; in Ariosto, she grows mightily.

For both Boiardo and Ariosto, love is plural. Boiardo requires the reader to discriminate between loves; Ariosto, his poetry being altogether more complex in its greater schematic and programmatic quality, requires the reader to discriminate among them. One of the very first things the Furioso does is to bring Bradamante and Angelica face to face for a first and absolutely final time (1.60). The two women are to be the objects of two different kinds of love, and it is Angelica, not Bradamante, who will be the occasion of madness in her suitor, the source of his becoming “furioso.” In contrast, Bradamante's whole aim is to bring her lover to a rational, human love that will eventuate in marriage. The irony throughout is that she has to be so passionate in doing so. In excuse of her passion, the reader must note that a great weight has dropped on her woman's shoulders. In being granted, Aeneas-like, a vision of the shades of all her descendants in an underground cavern (canto 3), in scrutinizing murals mysteriously painted with their political fortunes in the far-distant future (canto 33), Bradamante assumes the immense historical burden of the dynast and a weighty knowledge she nourishes and shares with few others. Just as Aeneas had lifted the pictured shield of Vulcan, heavy with portents of the Roman future, onto his willing shoulders, alone though surrounded by many,⁹ so too Bradamante is fundamentally alone and comfortless in pursuing her destiny. At issue is all her family's history; all this destiny keeps being lost by the delays and the derelictions of the yet-pagan Ruggiero, and this is precisely what lends urgency to her cause and rouses her womanly fury. Ariosto's view is not the popular one at the moment, but Bradamante is relentless in her quest and imperious in her rages because she wants to doff her armor, be domesticated, and put history into motion. Angelica will leave the poem in canto 19, well before its midpoint is reached, returning happily with Medoro to the fabulous never-never-land of distant Cathay, but Bradamante has another, harder destiny as dynast, widow, and protector of her young son, and she accepts it with full knowledge.

In his first canto, therefore, Ariosto puts before us, at a single decisive stroke, a clarification of some major issues and contrasts implicit in Boiardo but never worked out in his poem. In Ariosto the opposition between the representative loves of the two women is joined at once and is never in doubt thereafter. That is why Orlando goes down to madness and why Ruggiero marries and triumphs. Masterfully and swiftly reversing Boiardo, Ariosto accords the love drama of the Este progenitors the primary place in his poem, giving it a long and intricate development of his own invention. In the Innamorato the lovers meet very late, sixty-five cantos after the poem begins, only four cantos before it comes to its truncated end. Their fated union is quickly established, they are separated, and there the poem breaks off. After ten years, in Ariosto's hands, the same pair of lovers is brought forward emphatically and at once, in the very first lines. They are the intense focus of the poet's attention for the first third of the poem's length. The adventures of the other heroes are subordinated to or intermingled with their vicissitudes, and they displace Orlando and Angelica as the major center of interest and importance. Now they are lovers who must earn each other and their mutual destiny as dynasts.

Addressed as it is to the descendants of Bradamante and Ruggiero (and one can imagine the delight of Isabella, if not of Cardinal Ippolito), the Furioso's immediate concern is with the quality of human love in its various manifestations and the varieties of experiences to which it leads. Love was the traditional great subject of Italian poetry in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and Vergil himself, in canto 18 of the Purgatorio, had read Dante a lesson on the passion, expounding a doctrine of its variety, multiplicity, and inescapability as a natural bent and craving.¹⁰ As a truly comic artist, Ariosto treats love on a scale ranging from romantic passion to a particular kind of contemplative vision. Writing of a spectrum of “amori,” he placed himself within an ancient tradition, newly revivified in the work of his famous contemporaries and friends. The treatment of love provides the chief content of his poem, and his style, in its achieved serenity and orderly progression, is the perfect mirror of its innermost meaning.

Reading Ariosto without a knowledge of contemporary Neoplatonism is equivalent to reading Shakespeare in total ignorance of the Ptolemaic universe. It can be done, but who would claim it as a triumph? The years of instruction and study Ariosto underwent in the company of some of the leading Neoplatonists of his time are casually obliterated, but at enormous cost, for it can easily be demonstrated that the experience of Neoplatonism in his young manhood was the turning point of the poet's life. The wonder is not that he became an artist in the prevailing artistic tradition, but that he should ever have been considered apart from it. The Furioso witnesses constantly that he fully subscribed to a dictum of Bembo's: “Perciò che di poche altre cose può avenire, o forse di non niuna, che lo intendere ciò che elle sono più ci debba esser caro, che il sapere che cosa è Amore” (“For there are few if any other things of which we should be more desirous to gather knowledge than of love”).¹¹

The matter can be put briefly. At twenty Ariosto is a law student who loathes the profession into which his father has forced him; he turns increasingly to Latin studies and the writing of Latin lyric poems in the Horatian manner; and he has a bent toward literature and acting.¹² At thirty he emerges startlingly as a fully formed genius wholly committed to literature, ready to apply the fruits of his Latin scholarship in a vernacular poem, and with the daring to conceive of revivifying the Innamorato by impregnating it throughout with the spirit of Vergil and other classical poets. By 1505 the poem, its central images, values, and ideas already in place, is known to be under way, and within little more than ten years the first Furioso appears in its forty cantos. Clearly, the decade between 1494 and 1505 is crucial. Those were the years in which, having persuaded his father of the futility of his studying law, Ariosto gained permission to study literature at the Studio di Ferrara. Here he encountered the philosopher Sebastiano dell'Aquila; the Augustinian friar and lecturer in humanities, Gregorio da Spoleto; and the polymath, Celio Calcagnini, among others.¹³ In those years, in the service of Ercole and then Cardinal Ippolito, he evolved close and life-long friendships with Pietro Bembo, Mario Equicola, and Baldassare Castiglione at the courts of Ferrara, Mantua, and Urbino. All of them were second-generation Neoplatonists in Italy, with literary rather than philosophical gifts, but they were direct heirs, nevertheless, of Ficino and Pico. Pico was, after all, Lord of Mirandola in the Duchy of Ferrara, and his nephew, Gianfrancesco Pico, was the recipient of one of Ariosto's early Latin poems, mourning the departure into France of their beloved instructor, Fra Gregorio da Spoleto.¹⁴ It is not, then, as if Ariosto had to go a great distance out of his way to some recondite, impossibly exotic source for his Neoplatonic erudition. It was local, familiar, well established, and utterly central. Even genius has roots that need exploring, and Ariosto's in his formative years as a poet were in the Neoplatonism of his time. They became increasingly intertwined with his Carolingian and Vergilian interests.

The Neoplatonism of Ariosto's age was a literary phenomenon largely,¹⁵ and it was largely concerned with a variety of loves arranged in an ascending hierarchical order, from the most intractably material inclination of the body to the most transcendent longing of the spirit. The schematic elaborations of Platonic thought by Ficino and Pico are general knowledge, but we may restate them briefly. Ficino generally conceives of human love as having a two-fold direction: toward intellectual procreation and toward bodily generation. Both are worthy and virtuous though directed to hierarchically different ends, one moving away from the physical world and the other operating within it. The scheme allowed no place for sensual love aiming at personal gratification, which Ficino preferred to think of as a madness (“insania”) outside any scheme of loves, and which he viewed as merely evidence of a bodily disturbance; the notion originated in Greek medicine and is traceable down to the time of Robert Burton. Ficino's scheme of loves remains fundamentally dual in nature, therefore, and its “geminae Veneres” reflect the Platonic dualism of the Venus Urania and the Venus Pandemos of the Symposium.

Pico expanded the scheme by equating the triple capacity for love in humans with the three goddesses who figure in the legend of the Choice of Paris. To all three, however, he gave the generic name of Venus. This innovation produced a hierarchy of three loves arranged in a vertical scale, the topmost rung occupied by a Venus of transcendent love, a middle rung occupied by a Venus of purely human love, and a third, lowermost rung occupied by a Venus presiding over simple animal impulse. Mythographically, they are equated with Minerva, a virgin goddess sprung from the brain of Zeus and holding sway over the works of the rational mind; with Juno, a matron consort who patronizes worldly kingdoms and acts as the bestower of treasure and power; and with Venus, an adulterous whore who aims at the gratification of the senses. Located in the brain, the will, or the loins, love has a triple aspect and is therefore divine, societal, or egocentric. The three loves determine the names of the lives over which they hold sway. The highest Venus (Minerva) presides over the contemplative life, the intermediate Venus (Juno) over the active or civil life, and the lowest Venus (Venus herself) over the feral or bestial existence. Thus in Pico we have a hierarchy of “amor divino,” “amore umano,” and “amor bestiale” or “amor ferino.”¹⁶ Ironically, this “new” development of the late fifteenth century is an expansion of Fulgentius's fourth-century allegorization of the myth of Paris, itself based on the three loves expounded in the final pages of the Somnium Scipionis of Macrobius.¹⁷ The scheme of loves was to have enormous repercussions in the art of the generation immediately succeeding Pico's. They were the very years in which Ariosto, having left the barrenness of law, was devouring poetry and learning to practice his trade. The great fruit of his labors was a poem whose nominal “hero” goes mad for love, an action that conflates elements from both Ficino and Pico. By representing Orlando as “furioso,” Ariosto characterizes his condition as one of “insania” produced by sensual love for Angelica; and by portraying him as a hairy, naked savage wandering over the face of Europe, Ariosto gives new poetic force to the concept of “amore bestiale.” In dealing with the subject of love, Ariosto placed himself within an extensive artistic and literary tradition.

During his lifetime, Ariosto's closest friends and fellow artists were constantly creating works based on the ideas of their common Neoplatonist heritage. The great minds of the first generation of Neoplatonists had vanished: Ficino, Pico, and Poliziano were all dead in the decade before Ariosto began the Furioso, but around 1505 he was clearly at work within a specifically Neoplatonic tradition of love literature. From the last quarter of the fifteenth century onward, the philosophical love-writings of the Florentines provided the basis of numerous courtly popularizations. Whether dryly descriptive, technical compendia of the arcana of love or whether cast into the more appealing form of Platonic dialogues utilizing the resources of characterization and setting for the enhancement of their ideas, the love-treatises became widely and generally available to the courtly societies of the Renaissance, whose members were often actors in their dramas of love. It is no accident, then, that three of the most famous of these trattati d'amore were written by personal friends of Ariosto, two of them personages with whom he was for many years on terms of the closest intimacy. The first of these works, completed in 1495 and published in 1525, was Mario Equicola's Libro de natura d'amore, a voluminous, encyclopedic amplification of Pico's scheme of tripartite loves, a magisterial assortment of love lore many years in the compiling and still known in the seventeenth century to Robert Burton.¹⁸ In literary quality, if not in importance and influence, Equicola's work yielded, however, to Pietro Bembo's Gli Asolani, begun in Ferrara in 1497 and published in 1505, a date important because it cannot have been much before or after the date that Ariosto began to compose the Furioso.¹⁹

Though still quite young, Bembo had emerged as the great, undisputed literary dictator and authority on Neoplatonic love of his time, and Ariosto was bound to him by the strongest ties of affection and respect. The young Venetian was the poet's chief link to the older generation of Florentine Neoplatonists, for he had actually met Poliziano in Venice in 1491, and he had studied Greek under Lascaris in 1492. He was to be commemorated in the Furioso on two separate occasions, at 37.8 and 46.15, and Ariosto also addressed him in a Latin elegy and in one of his most famous Satires, “On Education,” when entrusting him with the care of his own son, Virginio, when he sent the boy to study in Padua. But perhaps the clearest witness of Bembo's impact on Ariosto's creative imagination is registered in the Furioso's debt to the Asolani. The direct influence of its ideas on the poem, which will emerge later, is often traceable in the very language Ariosto employs, as if in compliment to his master, throughout this work. Ironically, Ariosto has long been thought to have had the closest possible connection with the treatise: his modern biographer identifies the “Ludovico” whom Bembo entrusted with delivering the manuscript of the newly completed Asolani, in August of 1504, to Lucrezia Borgia d'Este, with Ludovico Ariosto himself.²⁰ That alone should have ensured a closer scrutiny of the treatise and the poem for ideas and techniques held in common.

A work in three books, Gli Asolani stands in contrast to Equicola's compilation by virtue of being an elegantly conceived piece of imaginative literature. It is a kind of dramatization, in three long monologues of Ciceronian prose separated by Petrarchan lyrical interludes, of the three loves of Neoplatonic tradition. These comprise, first, a complaint of disappointed sensual love; second, a eulogy of happy human love; third, an invocation of divine love. The setting is the hill-town of Asolo, ruled by the former queen of Cyprus, Caterina Cornaro, and the Venerean resonances are established at once through allusion. The occasion is the wedding of one of her handmaids, an event that charges the discussions of animal, human, and divine love with some significance. The work's tripartite form, finally, is the perfect mirror of its content, which traces an advance in moral and spiritual illumination in matters of love, love having here its broadest signification and encompassing all the major gradations of the passion.

With its remarkable opening paragraph, deeply Boethian in origin, commenting on life as a pilgrimage either on a stormy ocean or in a confusing place of ramifying paths, where men are either led astray or find their road by love, Gli Asolani is from the beginning a considerable influence on the endless voyages of the Furioso, which is similarly filled with error and shipwreck. However, the treatise provides an even more profoundly important precedent for the poem insofar as the three loves take on appropriate human forms and embodiments. The three loves are dramatized and incarnated in three distinct male “characters” who remain, nevertheless, emblematic rather than realistic. In the hierarchical order in which they are presented they are, first, a passionate and perturbed young lover called Perottino, the Petrarchistic rhetoric of whose lament identifies him immediately as a lover on the lowest rung of the scale; next, Gismondo, who, in contrast to Perottino's impassioned execrations of love, discourses reasonably and eloquently on the happiness of fulfilled human affection; and Lavinello, instructed by a hermit in the mysteries of divine love, who lectures him Boethianly on the universal scala amoris rising from vegetable and sentient to rational and divine love, and whose invocation of celestial, transcendent love ends the discussions on a lofty note.

Book 1 launches the discussion with Perottino's address, which is filled with love lore about Cupid and his portrayal in art and poetry, and with a view of love as being no more than a succession of the four perturbations of the soul, declining from joy through fear to grief, mounting through hope to joy once more, and being condemned to repeat the procedure constantly on an ever-turning wheel of Fortune. Of the three lovers only Perottino deals with love as fire and madness (“fuoco” and “furore”), and this is done in a context of egocentric, all-absorbing passion in which he, self-dramatizing and consciously delighting in the role, stands curiously apart and distanced, watching himself and watching his audience watch him in agony. Book 2, in contrast, opens with pronounced emphasis by the narrator on the life of reason and the mind, asserting the improvidence of humans in cultivating the life of the senses only and in neglecting their intellectual gifts and the cultivation of virtue. The passage functions as commentary both on Perottino's complaint in the previous book and on Gismondo's discourse that will ensue in this book, a speech that represents, in its eulogy of true love and marriage, a rational advance on the merely sensual and passionate existence of Perottino. For Gismondo invokes love as a social and civilizing process, the inborn, natural force that (to paraphrase closely) rescues men from wandering solitarily over the earth, naked, wild, and hairy, without roofs over their heads or human converse or domestic customs, and that permits them to meet together in a common life, of which the fruits are villages, the arts, laws, marriage, friendship, and large families: “It composes discord, fosters marriage, and makes our families large.” This is a civic ideal later to be embodied in Ruggiero's similar journey to a “cittadinesca vita,” and it is in direct opposition to the life that Orlando assumes, in yielding wholly to passion and illusory hope, joy, fear, and grief, and in wandering solitarily, like a hairy beast, over the face of Europe.

Like book 2, book 3 opens with a long passage by the narrator that “places” the previous discussion and opens the way for the third, last, and most important one. In the Neoplatonic scheme to which Bembo appeals in his narrative, neither the life of passion nor the life of reason can be an end in itself. Hence the narrator three times in a Boethian manner addresses the fundamental weakness of human capacities, preparing the way for the leap upward represented by the hermit's invocation of light from heaven to illuminate our human darkness. The opening paragraphs of book 3 harp constantly on the theme of the weakness of human judgment (“la debolezza de' nostri giudicii è molta,” “alla debolezza de' nostri giudicii s'aggiugne la oscurità del vero,” “essi vedranno essere e maggiore la oscurità nelle cose e ne' nostri giudicii minore e meno penetrevole la veduta”)²¹ and represent a judgment on human judgment, which Ariosto seized at once for his theme of human blindness. “Ecco il guidicio uman come spesso erra” (1.7.2) is the poet's very first authorial comment on the actors in his drama, and it intersects the otherwise complacent rehearsal of previous events in Boiardo with a lightning-like stroke asserting the new author's independence, his new breadth of vision, and his sense of control. He too, like Bembo finally, will make a leap into the heavens to contemplate ideas, but there his own artistic independence will come to the fore in a Platonism revivified by brilliant comedy. Bembo, the lesser genius, as it turned out, was altogether more orthodox and undramatic in tracing the upward movement of love to its final destination, but he was, of course, working in the more limiting form of the Platonic dialogue, and Ariosto was renovating a lively, colorful work of the imagination. The two young authors are nevertheless linked by their adherence to the triple scheme of love, capable of astonishing imaginative transformations at the hand of each. So it is, for instance, that the learned doctrine of the Neoplatonic triads of love is, in the medieval-romantic manner that Ariosto would soon adopt as his own, synopsized by Bembo in a charming little allegory of the Queen of the Fortunate Islands, demonstrating the three different ways in which she rewards the three classes of her human lovers. The hermit narrates her story to Lavinello:

Among their most esoteric memories, the ancients who were wise in sacred things held that on those islands which I have called Fortunate there was a queen of surpassing beauty, adorned with costly garments and ever young, who still remained a virgin, not wishing for a husband, but well contented to be loved and sought. And to those who loved her more she gave a greater reward; to the others one suitable to their affection. But she tested all of them as follows:

When each had come before her, as she had had them summoned one by one, she touched them with a wand and sent them off; and as soon as they had left the palace, they fell asleep and remained asleep until she had them wakened. When they returned to her presence once more, each had written on his forehead an exact description of his dreams which she instantly read.²²

The first group, whose dreams are filled with feral visions of “hunting, fishing, horses, forests, and wild beasts,” she reproves and condemns to live among the creatures of whom, thoughtless of her, they dreamed alone. The second, whose dreams are all of “trade or governing their families and communities and similar things,” she rewards by appointing as merchants, citizens, and rulers in the practical work of the active or civil life. But the third group, those who dreamt only of her, she keeps with her in rounds of endless felicity, symbolic of the happiness with which the contemplative existence is crowned. The hermit himself draws the conclusion for Lavinello: “Know, in fine, that your love is not virtuous. Granted that it is not evil like those which are mingled with bestial desires; still it falls short of virtue because it does not draw you toward an immortal object but holds you midway between the extremes of desire where it is not safe to remain, for on a slope it is easier to slide into the depths than to clamber to the summit.”²³

Apparently Bembo did not disdain to use a romantic allegorical method to inculcate familiar lessons about the tripartite nature of love, and he saw no danger in placing, in a Christian hermit's mouth for purposes of instruction and edification, a less than overtly Christian, apparently “trifling” narrative about the Queen of the Faeries. Neither, it will become plain, did Ariosto disdain this kind of art in his far more complex fiction. Ariostan legend often has it that all the allegorical readings of the Furioso in the sixteenth century were the direct result of the Counter-Reformation; were, in fact, imposed readings forced on a stubbornly resisting text to save it from censors. In fact this altogether discounts the Platonic tradition in which Bembo and Ariosto together worked, where allegory was, in the manner of the day and in the very nature of things, a literary device to point and set in relief the familiar and known. Ariosto uses the triadic system of Neoplatonism to organize and to give greater systematization to Boiardo's less coherent narrative, and readers who perceive the Furioso as basically structureless might, as a beginning, match in imagination an Orlando who surrenders totally to passion; a Ruggiero who initially makes a visit to Reason and, presuming on brief acquaintance and sliding more often into the depths than climbing to the summit, finds it “not safe” to remain there; and an Astolfo who escapes the gravity of earth and contemplates the world and its littleness with laughing disengagement from its concerns, his “lunacy” providing ironic counterpoint to Orlando's more worldly one. The internal complication represented by this continuous comparison and contrast of the three major heroes' actions is Ariosto's singular contribution to his Boiardan materials, his chief means of giving both structure and content to the narrative. In a word, the Furioso is not about nothing, nor about itself or its art. In large part it is about a hierarchy of lives in dynamic and constantly shifting interplay, with the lowest, highest, and intermediate kinds of love set into purposeful and illuminating juxtapositions, often sharing each others' characteristics.

Bembo's discourses on love have a stunning impact on the Furioso, but neither his nor Equicola's writings were the only ones that Ariosto knew. As we have seen, Equicola's Libro de natura d'amore was begun in 1495 and Bembo's Gli Asolani in 1497, respectively one and three years after Boiardo's death, and thus intervening between the Innamorato and the Furioso. A third work in the tradition with which Ariosto has a certain connection was begun later, around 1508, contemporary with the first years of the Furioso's creation, and, since it was published in 1528, it appears to attest not only the continuity but also the tenacity of a literary tradition. Baldassare Castiglione's Il cortegiano is perhaps the greatest and most familiar of Renaissance works on love, but it shares with Bembo's Asolani the combination of matter and eloquence with graceful nonchalance and courtly atmosphere. Castiglione does not give us the vividly distinguished trio of personalities that Bembo brought to life, but the same escalation is visible in the hierarchically ascending movement of his four dialogues. Not so remarkably, considering the stature of Bembo as an authority on love, Castiglione casts him as a major character and gives him the chief speech at the work's end, in which the ascent from sensual to spiritual love is described and invoked in one of the most remarkable pages of Renaissance prose. What is not generally known, perhaps, is that Ariosto, Bembo, and Castiglione were all present together in Urbino in 1507, at the very time that the dialogues are imagined to have taken place, and that Ariosto memorialized that wonderful conjunction of lives in his Satires, recalling how Giuliano de' Medici, Pope Leo's young brother,

si riparò nella feltresca corte,
                    ove col formator del cortigiano,
col Bembo e gli altri sacri al divo Apollo,
facea l'essilio suo men duro e strano.

(3.90-93)

repaired to the court of Montefeltro, where, with the one who formed the courtier, with Bembo, and with the others consecrated to the god Apollo, he made his exile less harsh and desolate.²⁴

It is of interest, finally, that the Cortegiano's fourth book, in which Bembo's crucial speech on love appears, is dedicated to Ariosto's cousin Alfonso Ariosto, and that Ariosto himself praises the work at 37.8 of his own poem.

Ferrara, Mantua, and Urbino were three of the dominant city-states in Northern Italy in the sixteenth century, culturally as well as politically. They were, moreover, three courts united by intermarriage, a common way of life, and community of artistic interests. In passing from Ferrara to Mantua as the bride of Francesco Gonzaga, Isabella d'Este had become the sister-in-law of Elisabetta Gonzaga, wife of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro of Urbino; and by the marriage of her brother, Alfonso I, to the Pope's daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, Isabella had acquired another, less beloved but no less influential sister-in-law. For readers of Ariosto the cultural activities of the marchesa and the two duchesses should hold a certain interest, especially in their influence on literature. They presided over three of the most renowned courtly societies of their period, and their interests and the tenor of life in the worlds in which they moved are preserved in three influential literary works of the twenty-year period spanned by the last decade of the fifteenth century and the first decade of the sixteenth century. Each of them was the presiding spirit of a major work on Neoplatonic love that immediately preceded or exactly synchronized with the beginnings of the Furioso. In Mantua, Equicola's treatise was written expressly for Isabella d'Este;²⁵ in Ferrara, Bembo's monologues were dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia; and Castiglione's dialogues gave an immortalizing life to the gentle sway of Elisabetta Gonzaga da Montefeltro in the Urbino of 1507, the very year in which Ariosto is known to have been in attendance, as ambassador, on that brilliant court. No reader of the Furioso can fail to recall the recurring praises of the three women in the poem; they and their literary celebrators had both an explicit and an implicit impact on the poetry of Ariosto, which everywhere declares its origin and orientation.

In Ariosto's circle, the impact of Neoplatonism was registered by painters as well as writers, and we may cite a few examples of contemporary masters who were also his friends and who shared with him an interest in manipulating the dual and tripartite schemes of Neoplatonic love. The twin Venuses had been, of course, the subjects of Botticelli's two famous mythological paintings, the “Birth of Venus” and the “Primavera.”²⁶ A generation later, they reappeared in Titian's so-called “Sacred and Profane Love,” latterly interpreted by Panofsky as an allegory of celestial, human, and bestial love.²⁷ They appeared again in Correggio's “The School of Love” and the “Venus and a Satyr,” a complementary pair of paintings illustrating spiritual and carnal love, executed for Federigo Gonzaga, Isabella d'Este's son, whose tutor happened to be Mario Equicola.²⁸ In contrast to these explorations of the dual loves, the tripartite scheme of loves is rendered in Raphael's “Dream of Scipio,” where two women offer gifts to a dreaming warrior, the one on the left offering a nosegay of perishable flowers, symbol of hedonistic vegetable existence, while the woman on the right offers both a sword and a book, symbols respectively of the mutually helpful active and contemplative lives.²⁹ It would be superfluous to note that, like the personalities previously mentioned in literature, both Raphael and Titian were personal friends of Ariosto, that the former painted the backdrop for a performance of Ariosto's Suppositi in Castel Sant'Angelo, and, in addition, included his portrait among a host of famous contemporaries in the Vatican “Parnassus”;³⁰ or that the latter painted Ariosto's portrait, and that an engraving of the work was reproduced in the 1532 edition. What we should stress is that these relationships testify to the omnipresence and casualness of commonly held Neoplatonic ideas and images in the circles in which Ariosto moved throughout his life. More important still, they reveal how naturally artists, whether poets or painters, employed the particular imagery of Neoplatonism when addressing aristocrats in general, and rulers in particular, on the subject of the different lives and loves it was possible for a human being to achieve. The practice was Florentine in origin. The Botticelli Venuses as well as the overtly Neoplatonic “Pallas and the Centaur” were painted for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, the more famous Lorenzo's second cousin, himself an actual pupil of Ficino.³¹ Likewise, the Raphael depiction of Scipio's choice was addressed, very fittingly, to Scipione Borghese;³² while the Titian twin-loves painting was a compliment to Niccolò Aurelio, a Venetian aristocrat whom Panofsky identifies as “then secretary to the Council of Ten, later Grand Chancellor of the Serenissima, and lifelong friend of Pietro Bembo.”³³ Bembo himself, to make the circle complete, was the son of a friend and correspondent of Ficino, and the friend for twenty-six years of Ludovico Ariosto. As a cap on the matter, we should recall that Isabella d'Este herself was inclined to give explicit and imperious directions for Neoplatonic programs in the allegorical paintings she commissioned from artists of the rank of Perugino and Mantegna. Their respective paintings, “The Combat of Chastity and Lust” and “Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue,” both in the Louvre, are prime examples of the kind of painting she required,³⁴ and they contain elements similar to those in Ariosto's allegory of Alcina and Logistilla.

We are now prepared to see the impact of this background on the Furioso, not only in its content, vocabulary, and imagery, but in its structure as well. The poem's first four stanzas make its origins very clear. In rapid, decisive movements, in a summarizing pattern that constitutes his very first attempt to reorganize Boiardo's looser narrative, Ariosto outlines the three main actions of his epic and names the two main protagonists whose progress it will trace: first (in stanza 1), the all-enveloping action of the Saracen invasion of France and the assault of Agramante on the Empire; second (in stanza 2), the madness of Orlando, arising from frustrated love for Angelica; and third (in stanza 4, after a stanza of dedication to Ippolito), the exploits of Ruggiero, the destined ancestor of the family. The immediate juxtaposition of Orlando and Ruggiero, implicit in Boiardo but never realized poetically, deserves notice. Ariosto published three versions of the Furioso: in 1516 and 1521, a poem of forty cantos, and in 1532 the expanded version of forty-six. By deliberate manipulation of his materials, the madness of Orlando, darkly splendid, always occupied the central position: in canto 20 of the first two versions and in canto 23 of the last. In similar manner, the marriage of Ruggiero and Bradamante, an action by which the hero crowns his career and his fortunes, always formed the climax and conclusion: in canto 40 of the first two versions and in canto 46 of the third and last. Ariosto redeveloped, amplified, and closely joined two stories of lovers moving on two different planes of experience. His Orlando is subordinated to his Ruggiero at once, for now the tale of Bradamante and Ruggiero encompasses that of Orlando and Angelica, rather than the other way around, as in Boiardo. The opening stanzas therefore mark the Furioso immediately as a poem of two “amori” at least, and we may, for the time being, limit our attention to them.

The depiction of irrational passion and the collapse of Orlando's mind under the onslaught of fury, jealousy, and disappointed lust always marked the end of the first half of the narrative. It requires no fashionable mathematical calculation to see this, nor to see that the great climax toward which the poem moves is the marriage and triumph of Ruggiero, an earthly destiny and a mean between the two extremes. The emphasis clearly reveals that Ruggiero is to be more, much more, than Orlando, who in no way can be spoken of as the “hero” of the poem, but who serves rather as a manipulable mechanism. From the beginning, Ruggiero's story is interwoven with Orlando's by way of parallel at first and later of increasingly divergent and purposeful contrast. They move to different destinies, and at the very end, as Ruggiero prepares for the final combat with Rodomonte, Orlando's subordinate position is stressed as he helps to arm the hero and attaches the spurs to his feet (46.109). It can hardly be fortuitous that the demented Orlando is the victim of uncontrollable passion, and that Ruggiero, after a poem-long testing under the assualts of his own nature and those of freakish Fortune, finally attempts to conquer himself and seals his adventures with a wedding, traditional symbol of achieved harmony and ordered passion.

Ariosto's Orlando is very patently the embodiment, propelled here into richly significant emblematic action, of the lowest form of love in the Neoplatonic hierarchy, and he incarnates the merely appetitive flesh-hunger with whose description the contemporaneous love-treatises are positively saturated. He is unmistakably the victim of what Ficino and Pico described as malady and bestial affection, what Boiardo suggested in calling Orlando “quella anima insana,” and what Bembo less drastically dramatized in Perottino. His will crumbles and falls past the higher slopes of laughter on which Boiardo had kept him suspended, into a world of consequence, blindness of intellect, and bestiality of nature. He becomes inexorably what Perottino would become logically if, sunk into the sea of his contrarious passions of joy and grief, fear and desire, he persisted in a course of self-abandonment to the point of insanity. He is also what Raphael's Scipio would become if, breaking out of his position of arrest, he were to choose the “sinister” lady offering the flower of fleshly delight instead of the modest maiden on the right proffering the sword and book of virtue. Not without clear memories of book 1 of Gli Asolani is Orlando depicted as a tormented dreamer torn by the four perturbations of the soul on his first appearance in canto 8 of the Furioso, or as the thin-voiced Petrarchist of self-pitying soliloquies, singing in terror of losing Angelica's “rose.” Nor was Ariosto unmindful of Bembo in the Queen of Faerie's bequest, to those who dream only of sensual blisses, of a lifetime of “hunting, fishing, horses, forest, and wild beasts.” Orlando achieves precisely that image when, remorselessly following his runaway appetite, he runs bestially and terrifically mad in a forest at the midpoint of the poem; or when he confuses his faithless beloved with her own white palfrey and “rides” the poor beast to death in as savage and brutal an emblematic encounter as Renaissance poetry can provide. If, somehow, we should have mistaken or ignored all this as the play of a mind fundamentally frolicsome or meretricious, Ariosto is there with overt iconographic imagery and direct commentary, asserting that the animalistic Orlando wallows in the mud like a swine (“come porco”) just before he comes upon Angelica for the last time. Immediately after Orlando's descent into madness, he will inform us with Ficinian precision of language, “Che non è in somma, amor, se non insania” (24.1.3). If all else fails, he will prompt us with his usual fine irony when the paladin, so soon to be himself berserk, haughtily addresses his rival, Ferraù, with the reverberative and philosophically evocative phrase, “Uom bestiale” (12.40.1). It seems highly improbable that Ariosto's contemporaries were as inattentive as we have become, or that they failed to match the hairy savage against the dynast who had rooted their family in Ferrara and who maintained himself, only with effort, from becoming an Orlando.

The brutish Orlando, naked and roofless, so forgetful of civilization as to make no distinction between “le cru et le cuit” (24.12.7-8), is nothing but primitive unaccommodated man, the reminder of a time, as the Aeneid says, when “neque mos neque cultus erat” (8.316); a time also, as Bembo said in Gismondo's speech, into which all men could slip again for lack of civilizing love. Orlando is therefore the antithesis of what Bradamante and Ruggiero are called to establish—local habitations and ordered centers of human activity. In a very real sense, he incarnates what any civilization originally labors to expel; and, unfortunately, what it is capable of reverting to at any moment in its history. Like all cities, Ferrara is an experiment in civilization, and only those who recognize how tenuous are the threads by which such order is woven can appreciate the difficulty and the magnificence of the achievement. The city gives continuity to the endeavors by which the human potential is realized, and it requires, in turn, only the madness of a single will to fracture and break them. Civilization, dependent on a concord of appetitive wills, lives perpetually on a knife-edge.

The contrast of Orlando and Ruggiero could not be more strictly drawn; it prepares us for yet another, more complex contrast between Ruggiero and another character who soars higher than he. Though both Orlando and Ruggiero are represented as lovers of the same fleshly kind in the beginning, their paths begin to draw apart thereafter, the static moral state of Orlando moving him irretrievably to madness, and the dynamism of Ruggiero taking him, progressively and by a jagged course, to his conversion, marriage, and victory. He is to emerge as the embodiment of three major facets of the active life—husband, soldier, and ruler—and as the representative of the human love of the treatises, fixed in the middle position but acknowledging the level above him. In attaining the second rung of the ladder of love, he preserves a mean between extremes, and ultimately he finds his proper sphere as the head of his wife and the future head of his people. As the antecedent of the Estensi, it is Ruggiero who is in pride of place as the true hero of the poem, and it is his love, being proper to the generality of men, that mediates in a sphere properly and particularly human. Marital love (in this case, dynastic marital love) is a chief aspect of the active life, resulting as it does not only in an order lost at the Fall and in a calming of the passions but in the propagation of scions and hence of a continuous social order as well. Tasso phrased the concept eloquently:

And therefore (most sacred matrimonie) doest not thou thinke it sufficient to separate us from rude beasts, but thou makest us resemble and to be like unto immortal creatures; for through our stock and issue, perpetuated and continued in our children by legittimate succession, the most strong Citties and most spatious kingdomes, are successively deliuered from one unto another, passing from one heire, unto the government of another.³⁵

At its best, dynasty involves the stabilization and orderly transmission of political order. It provides a bulwark against change, a “momentary stay against confusion.”

Renaissance Ferrara is a city of destiny, a great center of international culture to which all the great thinkers, artists, and scholars of contemporary Europe were inevitably drawn: men as various as Petrarch and Bembo, Pannonius of Hungary and John Tiptoft of England, Paracelsus and Copernicus, Erasmus and Josquin des Pres and Giaches de Wert.³⁶ The fact of Ferrara's greatness, its cost in human effort and discipline, is, fundamentally, what the Furioso celebrates, and it openly reveals the influence of the superb passage in the Aeneid when Evander shows Aeneas the fated site of the Capitol:

hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolium ducit,
aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis.

(8.347.8)

which now is all gold, but was once wild and ragged, covered with woodland growth.

So, too, in cantos 35 and 43, Ariosto calls attention to the long and painful process by which what was once only a marshland or forest becomes, in time, an influential and powerful city, a sphere of glory and splendor. St. John is the first to take up this Vergilian note of praise while discoursing to Astolfo:

          —Del re de' fiumi tra l'altiere corna
or siede umil (diceagli) e piccol borgo:
dinanzi il Po, di dietro gli soggiorna
d'alta palude un nebuloso gorgo;
che, volgendosi gli anni, la più adorna
di tutte le città d'Italia scorgo,
non pur di mura e d'ampli tetti regi,
ma di bei studi e di costumi egregi.

(35.6)

“Between the proud branches of the king of rivers,” he said, “there now sits a humble little town—before it flows the Po, behind it lies the misty whirlpool of a deep swamp—which, with the passage of the years, I perceive becoming the most beautiful of all the cities of Italy, not only for its walls and ample royal roofs, but for its humane studies and its excellent manners.”

Later, Rinaldo voyages down the Po and in even more extended a passage (43.53-63), directly recalling St. John's, passes the site of Ferrara's future glory, the neglected and deserted island that is to emerge many centuries later as the famous Belvedere, the marshes that will blossom with art and science:

—Come esser può ch'ancor (seco dicea)
debban così fiorir queste paludi
de tutti i liberali e degni studi?
e crescer abbia di sì piccol borgo
ampla cittade e di sì gran bellezza?
e ciò ch'intorno è tutto stagno e gorgo,
sien lieti e pieni campi di ricchezza?

(43.60.6-8; 61.1-4)

“How can it be,” he said to himself, “that these marshes are to flower with every worthy liberal study? and how, from so small a town, so great and beautiful a city grow? and all those ponds and swamps be pleasurable fields, full of riches?”

Ruggiero and Bradamante are working their way forward in preparation for their descendants' glory, and by no easy route. Their story connects Ariosto's double vision of the city achieved and the city yet in potency—what lies in the future in the reigns of Ercole I and Alfonso I, and the discordant world of perpetually restless motion in which the lovers move toward their destiny. Necessarily the process of civilization in which they are involved requires a subordination of certain aspects of man's nature to others, of lower affections to higher, as a reading of the Aeneid, the single greatest poem about the founding of a city, makes abundantly plain. Ordered love of any kind transforms the individual, but dynastic love, equipped with unusual power, extends beyond itself and becomes capable of transforming not only the individual but also the society he founds or regenerates. The process of ordering his passions is what Ariosto's dynastic hero so painfully undergoes.

The beleaguered and burdened Ruggiero begins as a moral kinsman of the sensual Orlando, and though he at once and prudently demonstrates a willingness not to remain on that level, his falls and failures are regular, as predictable as spectacular. In struggling to become ultimately a married lover, a soldiering prince, and a Christian who, only after difficulty, comes to recognize the meaning of his conversion by a hermit, thus participating in all three lives and all three loves, this prototype of the Estensi illustrates the all-inclusive love that Ficino found characteristic of Lorenzo de' Medici, the foremost contemporary representative of the active life.³⁷

Unlike Orlando, in whom the Paris aspect predominates, Ruggiero initially makes the choice of Hercules (6.55-57) and gives an earnest at least of his essential good will and future success. Blindness of intellect and infection of his will at once could his perceptions and misdirect his energies. He is presented with his choice of life in the Furioso's most explicitly allegorical passage, the tale of Alcina, Morgana, and Logistilla (cantos 6-10), a paradigm of psychomachia whose reverberations are heard throughout the poem's long career. But after Ruggiero's first fleshly lapse (in canto 7) with Alcina, the “puttana vecchia” of human carnality, Ariosto represents him as a man striving to avoid succumbing to passion (canto 8), temporarily and superficially undergoing the instruction of Reason herself in the person of Logistilla and her four handmaids, the Cardinal Virtues (canto 10), but falling easily into the snare of lust (canto 11), passing finally from visceral to cognitive love and promising to be baptized and to marry (canto 22), delaying his conversion through a false attachment to personal honor (cantos 25-41 passim), and undergoing thereafter (as a Christian now, and therefore in greater spiritual peril than ever before) the increasingly difficult, hierarchically arranged temptations of worldly glory, diabolic pride, and utter despair. At the end he is saved, by direct intervention of Providence, only after the most total self-sacrifice of all his ambitions and loves, only after offering, in agonized requital of a debt, to yield up even Bradamante to Leo, his rival (canto 45). The seal on this obstacle-ridden process of perfecting himself is his marriage, by which (if we may avail ourselves of Tasso's words in another context) he sets “iust lawes to humane pleasures, and a lawdable bridle to untaimed headlong desires.”³⁸

Ruggiero runs an increasingly difficult and thoroughly erratic course, but there is a clearly perceptible continuity in his moral career. In what may, at first glance, look like a mere jumble of difficulties, the continuity is provided by a hierarchical escalation of difficulties rising, in ever more crisis-ridden intensity, from temptations in the world of matter (Alcina) to temptations in the realm of the spirit (Agramante, the entire adventure in the East). Lust, avarice, worldly glory, wrathful fury, pride, and despair are the perturbers of Ruggiero's peace, and his laborious course is a more highly structured and more deeply serious reflection of the one that his beloved Bradamante negotiates. The fief of Ateste is won at a very high price. “Tantae molis erat,” the poet seems, Vergilianly, to be saying, “Ferrariae condere gentem.”

If Ariosto knew the cost involved in building and maintaining civilizations, he knew equally well and was perfectly serious about the value of poetry in persuading men to pass from beastly solitariness into the forms of civil order. Readers of the Furioso could turn profitably to the Satires (6.67-87) for an allegorical treatment of the service that poets perform in the gentling of human instinct, the bonding into societies, and the creation of cities, in the tale of the first singers, Phoebus and Amphion. This represents, of course, the old classical ideal of eloquence, Ciceronian and Horatian; and in fact Ariosto's lines are almost translations of those lines about Orpheus and Amphion in the Ars poetica. In the De oratore also, eloquence is directed to leading men out of the brutishness and savagery of life in the wild, to giving them, in social communities, laws for behavior.³⁹ But in poetry eloquence is evoked in its highest form by the writer of epic, who celebrates, even as he participates in, the work of civilization. The Furioso is the work of a law student studying Latin glosses turned poet imitating Vergilian epic. It memorializes the process of preparation necessary for undertaking to civilize a wilderness, and it does so by dramatizing at length the “civilization” of its mythic founder. Throughout, Ruggiero is in quest of a name and an identity, very much like Ferrara itself, an undistinguished expanse of dust in the Po valley until it is named and marked out by human cultivation. Neither the man nor the territory will amount to much without the shaping and the definition conferred by effort and labor. Cultivation of the wilderness, the “hyle” or “silva” of the self, is the only preparation for cultivation of the landscape, a moral art addressed to reordering the richly rooted forests of nature, forests wildly alive in both the smaller and the greater worlds.

In recording the historical process of tempering chaos, the Furioso enacts the process of civilization in its very own pages by building, Amphion-like, structures of song and (in reordering the Innamorato) by partaking itself in the ordering process implicit in its subject. It is itself an “addizione Erculea,” breaking out of the bounds of an older and smaller city and enlarging and beautifying its domains. The first witness of its attempt at order is its arrangement of its major characters into perceptible patterns, thus giving shape to their otherwise confusing movements. Ariosto embraces the teeming multiplicity of Boiardo's narrative but simplifies and gives contour to all that madness by selecting and distinguishing. In no way striving for the clear unities of Vergil, irrevocably lost in the meanderings of Carolingian romance, he was nevertheless attempting, through the transformation of an older poem, to say for Ferrara and its rulers something in the nature of the Vergilian “genus unde Latinum.”

Notes

1. For a discussion of the concept of discordia concors, the idea of universal order achieved by the countermovements exerted by opposed principles of love and strife, embodied mythologically in the figures of Venus and Mars, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 86ff. Wind's note 18 (p. 87) is especially relevant to the Furioso: quoting Plutarch's Moralia, where the fable of Mars and Venus is allegorized as Empedoclean Strife and Love, from whose union the goddess Harmonia was born, Wind notes that Celio Calcagnini, Ariosto's lifelong friend and whose epitaph the great humanist wrote, paraphrased the Plutarchan passage in his own essay, “De concordia.” Once again, the availability of such notions to Ariosto is beyond question. In addition, the reader should consult E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 82-84, for another discussin of discordia concors, which is relevant for the connection of the concept and the “Parnassus” of Andrea Mantegna, commissioned from the artist by Isabella d'Este herself.

2. In the “First Speech,” Orpheus is said to have “placed Love in the heart of Chaos itself” (p. 125); shortly afterward, we find the same phrase repeated: “Out of a chaos was made a world” (p. 129) [Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium, ed. and tr. Sears Jayne, University of Missouri Studies, 19 (Columbia, University of Missouri, 1944].

3. See André Chastel's The Myth of the Renaissance, 1420-1520, tr. Stuart Gilbert (Geneva: Skira, 1969), pp. 82-83, for reproductions of two frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia by Francesco del Cossa (circa 1436-1478). The frescoes themselves, still in place after many vicissitudes, date from circa 1470, four years before Ariosto's birth; the fresco for the month of April depicts a throned Venus being reconciled to a shackled Mars.

4. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, p. 86.

5. For an expression in poetry of this concept of the amicable reconciliation of Mars to a beneficent Venus, see one of Boiardo's most beautiful proems in the Innamorato, 3.19.1-3.

6. See D. S. Carne-Ross, “In Quest of Mutability,” TLS, 31 October 1975, pp. 1303-4, reviewing volume 1 of the translation of Orlando Furioso by Barbara Reynolds. For a similar view, expressed in an earlier review of Robert McNulty's edition of Harington's Ariosto, see the anonymous article, “Ariosto Approached,” TLS, 6 October 1972, in which the poem's “life-line” is said to be “not the God-directed loves of Bradamante and Ruggiero but Orlando's ill-starred passion for Angelica” (oddly, since the latter comes to an end when the poem has twenty-three more cantos to run) and in which Ariosto is said to create a “fluid discontinuous world where the only constant is perpetual change.” Further, “the Furioso is a poem in praise of mutability. It looks for no permanence beyond the flux, yearns for the certainties of no farther shore” and “celebrates the vagaries of impenitent process” (pp. 1195-96).

7. Apologia del S. Torquato Tasso in difesa della sua Gierusalemme Liberata, a gli Accademici della Crusca (Ferrara, 1586), p. 132: “Ma questa conveneuolezza non si ritrova nel Furioso, nel quale Ruggiero è amato più, che amante, & Bradamante ama più, che non è amata, & segue Ruggiero, & cerca di trarlo di prigione, & fa tutti quegli ufficci, & quelle operationi, che parebbono più tosto conveneuoli, a Cavalliero, per acquistar l'amore della sua donna, quantunque ella fosse guerriera; la dove Ruggiero non fa cosa alcuna per guadagnarsi quello di Bradamante, ma quasi par che la disprezzi, & ne faccia poca stima, il che non sarebbe peravventura tanto sconvenevole, se il poeta non fingesse, che da questo amore, & da questo matrimonio dovesse derivare i Principi d'Este” (the translation in the text is my own).

8. See Flaminio Nobili, Il trattato dell'amore humano (Rome, 1895), a work for which Tasso himself provided the notes.

9. Aeneid, 8.729-31. All references to the Latin text are taken from the Loeb edition, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1954). All English translations from the Aeneid are taken from the Penguin translation by W. F. Jackson Knight (1956; rpt., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).

10. Relevant to Ariosto's depiction of ceaseless motion in quest of desired objects are lines 31 through 33 of canto 18 of the Purgatorio, in which Dante defines desire as “moto spiritale,” “a movement of the spirit which never rests until the object of its love makes it rejoice.” All references to The Divine Comedy are to the Temple Classics edition, 3 vols. (London: Dent, 1941).

11. This is the hermit's instruction of the lover Lavinello in the higher love in book 3 of Bembo's Gli Asolani, in Prose e rime di Pietro Bembo, ed. Carlo Dionisotti (Turin: UTET, 1966), p. 482, and tr. Rudolf B. Gottfried, Indiana University Publications Humanities Series No. 31 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954), p. 173.

12. See Peter De Sa Wiggins, The Satires of Ludovico Ariosto: A Renaissance Autobiography (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), pp. 160-61. Satire VI, addressed to Bembo, narrates the barrenness of law study as Ariosto experienced it in his youth. See Carducci for the Latin lyrics of his apprenticeship. For Ariosto's part in the revival of classical theatrical entertainment at the court of Ercole I (again under the aegis of the Strozzi family), see E. G. Gardner, The King of Court Poets: A Study of the Work, Life, and Times of Ludovico Ariosto (London, 1906), pp. 25-26.

13. Gardner notes (King of Court Poets, p. 37, n. 1) that the documentary records on the presence of Sebastiano dell'Aquila as reader in law and medicine at the Studio, the University of Ferrara, apparently run from January 1495 to August 1502; see also, for this personality, Giulio Bertoni, La Biblioteca Estense e la cultura ferrarese ai tempi del duca Ercole I (Turin, 1903), p. 189. Ariosto studied philosophy with him from 1497 to 1498 (see Michele Catalano, Vita di Ludovico Ariosto, 2 vols. [Geneva, 1930], 1:103), a period that coincided exactly with Bembo's arrival in Ferrara in 1497, the year in which he set about composing the Neoplatonic Asolani (ed. Dionisotti, p. 20). The biographical facts we possess about Gregorio da Spoleto will occupy us in a later chapter; for Calcagnini, who was in the Cardinal Ippolito's service contemporaneously with Ariosto (and followed him, as Ariosto did not, to Hungary), and who held the chair of rhetoric for nearly thirty years at the Studio di Ferrara, see Alessandro Luzio and Rudolfo Renier, “La coltura et le relazione letterarie di Isabella d'Este Gonzaga,” GSLI 35 (1900): 240-44.

14. See the entry “Pio” (for Alberto Pio, Lord of Carpi, Ariosto's fellow student while studying with Gregorio da Spoleto) in the index to Nicola Zingarelli's edition of Orlando Furioso (Milan, 1934), p. 579.

15. For critical works on the popular diffusion of Neoplatonism, see Nesca Robb, The Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (London, 1935), and John Charles Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno's “Eroici Furori” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958). Giuseppe Zonta collected some of the chief Neoplatonic literary treatises in Trattati d'amore del cinquecento (Bari, 1914).

16. For a clear graphic visualization of Pico's alteration of Ficino's hierarchy of two loves into his own hierarchy of three, see Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford, 1939; rpt., New York: Harper & Row: 1972), p. 145.

17. See Fabii Planciades Fulgentii opera, ed. Rudolf Helm (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1970), pp. 36-37, for the “Fabula de iudicio Paridis” in bk. 2, ch. 1 of the Mitologiarum libri tres; and for Macrobius, ch. 17 of The Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, pp. 244-46. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, p. 78, gives a variety of sources for the tripartite scale of life and love.

18. I have used the copy of Mario Equicola's work in the Houghton Library, Harvard University: Di natura d'amore (Venice, 1561), ed. Thomaso Porcacchi, otherwise known as one of the allegorists of the Furioso in Le bellezze del Furioso. For Equicola, Isabella's Latin teacher and later her secretary, see Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 146, n. 58; and for Robert Burton's reference to him as an authority in love matters, see pt. 3 (“Love-Melancholy”), sec. 1 of Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 4.

19. See Prosa e rime di Pietro Bembo, ed. Dionisotti, p. 19.

20. See Catalano, Vita, 1:463, for the letter from Bembo to Lucrezia, repeatedly mentioning “nostro Lodovico,” who will convey the manuscript to her. See also Wiggins, Satires, p. 148: “It is believed that Ariosto was privy from the start to the infatuation Bembo felt for Lucrezia Borgia, the dedicatee of the Asolani, and that he, personally, in the author's absence, was entrusted with conveying to Lucrezia a copy of the manuscript as soon as the work was completed.”

21. Asolani, ed. Dionisotti, p. 457.

22. Asolani, tr. Gottfried, pp. 184-85.

23. Ibid., p. 186.

24. The whole introduction to Satire III (Wiggins, Satires, pp. 51-52) is relevant here, as are his highly informative notes (pp. 76-81).

25. See Rudolfo Renier, “Per la cronologia et la composizione del Libro de natura d'amore,” GSLI 14 (1889): 212-33, which notes that Equicola was Isabella's first preceptor and then her secretary (pp. 214-15) and that, while there is evidence that the book on love was not originally planned with Isabella in mind, as it progressed it increasingly became her book and was finally dedicated to her. Other materials relevant to Isabella's relationship to Equicola are in Luzio and Renier's “La coltura et le relazione letterarie d'Isabella d'Este Gonzaga,” GSLI 34 (1899): 1-21.

26. See “Botticelli's Mythologies,” in Gombrich, Symbolic Images, pp. 31-81.

27. See Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York University Press, 1969), pp. 110-19.

28. See Cecil Gould, The School of Love and Correggio's Mythologies (London: National Gallery Publications [1970]), pp. 7-8. The “School of Love” represents Mercury, god of wisdom, educating Cupid, who is engaged in the symbolic act of reading a book under the mild eye of his tutor; the “Venus and a Satyr” is, tout court, a scene of incipient rape. The paintings were executed for Isabella's son, Duke Federigo II of Mantua, as a gift for Charles V. Alberto Bevilacqua, L'opera completa del Correggio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1970), p. 107, provides the information that the “Education,” as he prefers to call it, is a “pendant” to the “Venus and a Satyr,” and that for a time they were the property of Charles I of England. The “School” remained in England when the King's collection was broken up and sold by Cromwell; the “Venus” was removed to France and is now in the Louvre. In his later study, The Paintings of Correggio (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), p. 127, Gould mentions the Louvre allegories (“Allegory of Virtue” and “Allegory of Vice”) as “being allegories of a learned kind, painted at the request, and indeed to the specifications of, Isabella d'Este, who had a well-known taste for such things, and among whose possessions these paintings were first recorded in the inventory of 1542.”

29. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, p. 81.

30. Wiggins, Satires, p. 54; see also the entry “Rafael” in Zingarelli's edition of Orlando Furioso, p. 581.

31. See Gombrich, Symbolic Images, pp. 33 and 70.

32. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, p. 81.

33. Panofsky, Problems in Titian, p. 110.

34. See Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods (1953; Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 109.

35. Of Marriage and Wiving, tr. R[obert] T[ofte] (London, 1599), sig. L. Robert Tofte is also the Elizabethan translator of Boiardo's first three cantos.

36. See Bertoni, La Biblioteca Estense, pp. 115-16, for scholars journeying from France, Germany, Hungary, and Greece to study with Guarino in Ferrara; and, for musicians from northern Europe who repeatedly found favor at the court of Ferrara, see Domenico Fava, La Biblioteca Estense nel suo sviluppo storico (Modena, 1925), pp. 160-61.

37. Wind, Pagan Mysteries, p. 82.

38. Tasso, Of Marriage and Wiving, sig. K³.

39. See Horace, Ars poetica, pp. 391ff., in the Loeb edition of Satires, Epistles and Ars poetica, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough (London, 1932). All further references to Horace are to this edition. See also Cicero, De oratore, in the Loeb edition, tr. E. W. Sutton (London: Heinemann, 1948). Both passages must inevitably have been in Ariosto's mind as he wrote his striking paraphrase of the Horatian passage in his own Satires (see Wiggins, Satires, p. 27).