Renaissance in Italy, Volume 4 (of 7) / Italian Literature, Part 1

by John Addington Symonds

Pulci dealt with the Carolingian Cycle in what may be termed a bourgeois spirit. Whether humorous or earnest, he maintained the tone of Florentine society: and his Morgante reflects the peculiar conditions of the Medicean circle at the date of its composition. The second great poem on the same group of legends, Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, transports us into a very different social and intellectual atmosphere. The highborn Count of Scandiano, reciting his cantos in the huge square castle surrounded by its moat, which still survives to speak of medieval Italy in the midst of Ferrara, had but little in common with Luigi Pulci, whose Tuscan fun and satire amused the merchant-princes of the Via Larga. The value of the Orlando Innamorato for the student of Italian development is principally this, that it is the most purely chivalrous poem of the Renaissance. Composed before the French invasion, and while the classical Revival was still unaccomplished, we find in it an echo of an earlier semi-feudal civility. Unlike the other literary performances of that age, which were produced for the most part by professional humanists, it was the work of a nobleman to whom feats of arms and the chase were familiar, who disdained the common folk (popolaccio, canaglia, as he always calls them), and whose ideal both of life and of art was contained in this couplet[559]:

E raccontare il pregio e 'l grande onore Che donan l'armi giunte con l'amore.

Matteo Maria Boiardo was almost an exact contemporary of Pulci. He was born about 1434 at his hereditary fief of Scandiano, a village seven miles from Reggio, at the foot of the Apennines, celebrated for its excellent vineyards. His mother was Lucia Strozzi, a member of the Ferrarese house, connected by descent with the Strozzi of Florence. At the age of twenty-eight he married Taddea Gonzaga, daughter of the Count of Novellara. He lived until 1494, when he died at the same time as Pico and Poliziano, in the year of Charles VIII.'s invasion, two years after the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, and four years before Ficino. These dates are not unimportant as fixing the exact epoch of Boiardo's literary activity. At the Court of Ferrara, where the Count of Scandiano enjoyed the friendship of Duke Borso and Duke Ercole, this bard of chivalry held a position worthy of his noble rank and his great talents. The princes of the House of Este employed him as embassador in diplomatic missions of high trust and honor. He also administered for them the government of Reggio and Modena, their two chief subject cities. As a ruler, he was celebrated for his clemency and for his indifference to legal formalities. An enemy, Panciroli, wrote of him: "He was a man of excessive kindness, more fit for writing poems than for punishing crimes." He is even reported to have held that no offense deserved capital punishment—an opinion which at that period could only have been seriously entertained in Italy, and which even there was strangely at variance with the temper of the petty tyrants. Well versed in Greek and Latin literature, he translated Herodotus, parts of Xenophon, the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and the Ass of Lucian into Italian. He also versified Lucian's Timon for the stage, and wrote Latin poems of fair merit. His lyrics addressed to Antonia Caprara prove that, like Lorenzo de' Medici, he was capable of following the path of Petrarch without falling into Petrarchistic mannerism.[560] But his literary fame depends less upon these minor works than on the Orlando Innamorato, a masterpiece of inventive genius, which furnished Ariosto with the theme of the Orlando Furioso. Without the Innamorato the Furioso is meaningless. The handling and structure of the romance, the characters of the heroes and heroines, the conception of Love and Arms as the double theme of romantic poetry, the interpolation of novelle in the manner of Boccaccio, and the magic machinery by which the poem is conducted, are due to the originality of Boiardo. Ariosto adopted his plot, continued the story where he left it, and brought it to a close; so that, taken together, both poems form one gigantic narrative, of about 100,000 lines, which has for its main subject the love and the marriage of Ruggiero and Bradamante, mythical progenitors of the Estensi. Yet because the style of Boiardo is rough and provincial, while that of Ariosto is by all consent "divine," Boiardo has been almost forgotten by posterity.

Chivalry at no time took firm root in Italy, where the first act of the Communes upon their achievement of independence had been to suppress feudalism by forcing the nobles to reside as burghers within their walls. The true centers of national vitality were the towns. Here the Latin race assimilated to itself the Teutonic elements which might, if left to flourish in the country, have given a different direction to Italian development. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the immense extension of mercantile activity, the formation of tyrannies, the secular importance of the Papacy, and the absorption of the cultivated classes in humanistic studies, removed the people ever further from feudal traditions. Even the new system of warfare, whereby the scions of noble families took pay from citizens and priests for the conduct of military enterprises, tended to destroy the stronghold of chivalrous feeling in a nation that grew to regard the profession of arms as another branch of commerce. Still Italy could not wholly separate herself from the rest of Europe, and there remained provinces where a kind of semi-feudalism flourished. The most important of these undoubtedly was the kingdom of Naples, subject to alternate influence from France and Spain, and governed by monarchs at frequent warfare with their barons. The second was Ferrara, where the House of Este had maintained unbroken lordship from the period when still the Empire was a power in Italy. Here the ancient Lombard traditions of chivalry, the customs of the Marca Amorosa, and the literature of the troubadours still lingered.[561] Externally at least, the manners of the Court were feudal, however far removed its princes may have been in spirit from the ideal of knighthood. In Ferrara, therefore, more than in Florence and Venice, those cities of financiers and traders, could the romance of chivalry be seriously treated by a poet who admired the knightly virtues, and looked back upon the days of Arthur and of Roland as a golden age of honor, far removed but real. While the humanists of Florence indulged their fancy with dreams of Virgil's Saturnian reign, the baron of Ferrara refashioned a visionary world from the wrecks of old romance.[562]

Boiardo did not disdain to assume the style of a minstrel addressing his courtly audience with compliments and congés at the beginning and ending of each canto. The first opens with these words:

Signori e cavalieri che v'adunati Per odir cose dilettose e nuove, State attenti, quieti, ed ascoltati La bella istoria che 'l mio canto muove.

But his spirit is always knightly, and he refrains from the quaint pietism of Pulci's preambles. He is no mere jongleur or Cantatore da Banca, but a new Sir Tristram, celebrating in heroic verse the valorous deeds and amorous emotions of which he had himself partaken. Nor does he, like Ariosto, appear before us as a courtier accomplished in the arts of flattery, or as a man of letters anxious above all things to refine his style. Neither the Court-life of Italy nor the humanism of the revival had destroyed in him the spirit of old-world freedom and noble courtesy. At the same time he was so far imbued with the culture of the Renaissance as to appreciate the value of poetic unity and to combine certain elements of classic learning with the material of romance. Setting out with the aim of connecting all the Frankish legends in one poem, he made Orlando his hero; but he perceived that the element of love, which added so great a charm to the Arthurian Cycle, had hitherto been neglected by the minstrels of Charlemagne. He therefore resolved to tell a new tale of the mighty Roland; and the originality of his poem consisted in the fact that he treated the material of the Chansons de Geste in the spirit of the Breton legends.[563] Turpin, he asserts with a grave irony, had hidden away the secret of Orlando's love; but he will unfold the truth, believing that no knight was ever the less noble for his love. Accordingly the passion of Orlando for "the fairest of her sex, Angelica," like the wrath of Achilles in the Iliad, is the mainspring of Boiardo's poem. To his genius we owe the creation of that fascinating princess of the East, as well as the invention of the fountains of Cupid and Merlin, which cause the alternate loves and hates of his heroes and heroines—the whole of that closely-woven mesh of sentiment in which the adventures and the warlike achievements of Paladins and Saracens alike are involved.

In dealing with his subject Boiardo is serious—as serious, that is to say, as a writer of romance can be.[564] His belief in chivalry itself is earnest, though the presentation of knightly prowess runs into intentional extravagance. A dash of Italian merriment mingles with his enthusiasm; but he has none of Pulci's skeptical satiric humor, none of Ariosto's all-pervasive irony. The second thoughts of the burlesque poet or of the humorous philosopher do not cross the warp of his conception, and his exaggerations are romantic. Such a poem as the Orlando Innamorato could not have been planned or executed in Italy at any other period or under any other circumstances. A few years after Boiardo's death Italy was plunged into the wars that led to her enslavement. Charles V. was born and Luther was beginning to shake Germany. The forces of the Renaissance were in full operation, destroying the faiths and fervors of the medieval world, closing the old æon with laughter and lamentation, raising new ideals as yet imperfectly apprehended. Meanwhile Boiardo, whose life coincided with the final period of Italian independence, uttered the last note of the bygone age. His poem, chivalrous, free, joyous, with not one stain of Ariosto's servility or of Tasso's melancholy, corresponded to a brief and passing moment in the evolution of the national art. In the pure and vivid beauty which distinguish it, the sunset of chivalry and the sunrise of modern culture blend their colors, as in some far northern twilight of midsummer night. Joyousness pervades its cantos and is elemental to its inspiration—the joy of open nature, of sensual though steadfast love, of strong limbs and eventful living, of restless activity, of childlike security. Boiardo's style reminds us somewhat of Benozzo Gozzoli in painting, or of Piero di Cosimo, who used the skill of the Renaissance to express the cheerful naïveté of a less self-conscious time. It is sad to read the last stanza of the Innamorato, cut short ere it was half completed by the entry of the French into Italy, and to know that so free and freshly-tuned a "native wood-note wild" would never sound again.[565] When Ariosto repieced the broken thread, the spirit of the times was changed. Servitude, adulation, irony, and the meridian splendor of Renaissance art had succeeded to independence, frankness, enthusiasm and the poetry of natural enjoyment. Far more magnificent is Ariosto's Muse; but we lack the spontaneity of the elder poet. And as the years advance, the change is more apparent toward decay. The genius of Boiardo might be compared to some high-born lad, bred in the country, pure-hearted, muscular, brave, fair to look upon. That of Ariosto is studious and accomplished with the smile of worldly sarcasm upon his lips. The elegances of Bembo and the Petrarchisti remind one of a hectic scented fop, emasculate and artificial. Aretino resembles his own bardassonacci, paggi da taverna, flaunting meretricious charms with brazen impudence. Tasso in the distance wears a hair shirt beneath his armor of parade; he is a Jesuit's pupil, crossing himself when he awakes from love-dreams and reveries of pleasure. It was probably the discord between Boiardo's spirit and the prevailing temper of the sixteenth century, far more than the roughness of his verse or the provinciality of his language, that caused him to be so strangely and completely forgotten. In the Italy of Machiavelli and the Borgias, of Michelangelo and Julius II., his aims, enthusiasms and artistic ideals found alike no sympathy. To class him with his own kind, we must go beyond the Alps and seek his brethren in France or England.

Boiardo's merit as a constructive artist can best be measured by the analysis of his plot. Crowded as the Orlando Innamorato is with incidents and episodes, and inexhaustible as may be the luxuriance of the poet's fancy, the unity of his romance is complete. From the moment of Angelica's appearance in the first canto, the whole action depends upon her movements. She withdraws the Paladins to Albracca, and forces Charlemagne to bear the brunt of Marsilio's invasion alone. She restores Orlando to the French host before Montalbano. It is her ring which frees the fated Ruggiero from Atlante's charms. The nations of the earth are in motion. East, West, and South and North send forth their countless hordes to combat; but these vast forces are controlled by one woman's caprice, and events are so handled by the poet as to make the fate of myriads waver in the balance of her passions. We might compare Boiardo's romance to an immense web, in which a variety of scenes and figures are depicted by the constant addition of new threads. None of the old threads are wasted; not one is merely superfluous. If one is dropped for a moment and lost to sight, it reappears again. The slightest incidents lead to the gravest results. Narratives of widely different character are so interwoven as to aid each other, introducing fresh agents, combining these with those whom we have learned to know, but leaving the grand outlines of the main design untouched.