CHAPTER VI
THE RENAISSANCE AND ARIOSTO
We have seen that Petrarch is considered the founder of the Renaissance in Italy. He died in 1374, and it took a century and more to complete the work he inaugurated. The whole of the fifteenth century is of importance in the history of Italian literature, not so much for what it produced, as for the fact that it prepared the way for the so-called "Golden Age" of the sixteenth century. During these hundred years classical scholarship became more and more widely diffused, being no longer confined to a few cities or princely courts, but spread over all Italy and through all classes of society.
Yet Florence still remained the great center of this influence. Under the powerful family of the Medici the city had risen to great power and prosperity, and amid all the political confusion of the times it continued to be characterized by a keen intellectual and æsthetic life. The immediate successors of Petrarch and Boccaccio in the spread of the new learning, Luigi Marsili and Coluccio Salutati, lived and worked at Florence. Later came Poggio Bracciolini, who equaled Petrarch himself as an eager and successful collector of manuscripts; Marsilio Ficino, who founded under Cosimo de' Medici the famous Platonic academy; Pico della Mirandola, the youthful prodigy of learning and mystical enthusiast; and Politian, the greatest scholar and most elegant poet of his day. These men studied not only Latin as Petrarch had done, but obtained a good knowledge of Greek. They plunged eagerly into the study of Plato, who for so many centuries had been unknown to western Europe, and who now threatened to take the place of Aristotle in the world of philosophy. They gathered statues, coins, and inscriptions, and studied ruins in order to obtain as clear an idea as possible of the ancient world. It is hard for us to-day to get an idea of the eager enthusiasm and intense delight in study of these men of the Renaissance; they must have felt as Wordsworth did when he cried out:
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven."
The scholars of the time enjoyed an immense popularity. A new caste of society arose, not dependent on birth or wealth, but on learning and intelligence. Princes and cities sought for their services, for which they paid large sums. Everywhere they were received as equal to the noblest in the land. The movement reached its highest point in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the intellectual and artistic life of Italy was of almost incredible greatness. In proof of this statement we need only mention a few names, such as Michel Angelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Ariosto, and Macchiavelli; Tasso belongs to the same group, though born out of due season.
Naturally enough the early Humanists wrote for the most part in Latin, which they still looked upon as the language of their ancestors and thus, in a certain sense, their mother-tongue. Indeed, many at first despised the vernacular as a base corruption. Later, however, a reaction set in; the example of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio induced others to write in Italian, which now became more and more polished and adapted to become the medium of a great literature. This new impulse toward a national literature was first given at Florence, at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, who himself, next to Politian, was the greatest poet of his day. We cannot linger, however, over these fifteenth century writers, but must hasten on to the next century and to the consideration of Ariosto, the supreme poet of the Renaissance.
In discussing the romantic poetry of Ariosto, however, we must go back a number of years in order to get the proper perspective. Among the brilliant men of letters of the court of the Medici was a certain Luigi Pulci, of a poor but noble family. It was he who was the first to introduce into elegant literature the old romances of the Carlovingian cycle, which for centuries had been sung and recited by rude, wandering minstrels in the public streets of Italy.
We have seen in Chapter I. how in the thirteenth century the old French chansons de gestes had been introduced into North Italy and had there become popular; these had been rewritten and worked over in rude forms for the amusement of the common folk, but up to the time of Pulci had found no place in literature proper. Now it is the glory of Pulci to have brought this popular material into the realm of artistic poetry. This he is said to have done at the request of Lorenzo's mother, the result being the poem known as Morgante. In this poem Pulci introduces as the chief character Orlando, the Italian form of Roland, the nephew of Charlemagne, and the hero of Roncesvalles, who plays so large a rôle in the French romances. The title is derived from the name of a giant whose life has been saved by Orlando, whom he, in gratitude therefor, follows as a faithful servant; he drops out of the story in the twentieth canto.