Ariosto and Boiardo: The Origins of Orlando Furioso by Peter V. Marinelli (review)

104Rocky Mountain Review the gray eyes—although Marcus reports that Lukács' eyes were more blue than gray. Ofhis attire, nothing ofimportance. Naphta was a sharp dresser; Lukács after his turn to communism ceased to worry about how he looked. It is when Marcus, in her long final chapter, proceeds to the category of personality— that ofNaphta and that ofLukács—that she strikes gold, and it centers about the fact that both Naphta and Lukács fall within the rubric, "the stranger par excellence," the "questionable character" (90, 91). Further: "the educator" and indeed "the non-German educator." Finally, both Lukács and Naphta are ascetic communists (as Marcus notes, ascetic fascists are unthinkable). But Naphta—to continue Marcus' line ofthought—is not susceptible to clearcut identification. For example, his ascetic communism is laced with a dollop of the religious—while Lukács in his 1912 essay, "Von der Armut am Geiste" (On Poverty of Spirit), draws from St. Francis of Assisi and even more from the thirteenth-century Dominican, Meister Eckhart (sometimes called, traditionally but uncritically, a mystic, a term that Lukács—and Marcusretain , perhaps because Lukács' focus is the unio mystica). And, subscribing to the Marxist imperative of salvation as the mission—mission is a religious concept, after all—of the proletariat, Lukács can define terror as the "truly and tragically moral" (147) act, at which point he is joined by Naphta. As Marcus is careful to point out, however, Mann's appropriations ofcharacter are not crass but rather subtle and multilevel, subject to such imponderables as what was in the air at a given time. There are non-Lukácsian components in Naphta's personality, for instance, an ideal-typical Jewishness that is to be found—whether in Jews or Gentiles—in earlier Mann fiction, in members ofthe Hagenström family in Buddenbrooks, in the Aarenhold children in "The Blood of the Walsungs," in Dr.Überbein in Royal Highness, and in Gustav Aschenbach in Death in Venice, as well as in characters in succeeding works. Marcus' fine book is marred by too many printing errors and inconsistent spellings of proper names in the text and the bibliography, as if there had been inadequate opportunity to read proof. RICHARD H. LAWSON University of North Carolina PETER V. MARINELLI. Ariosto and Boiardo: The Origins of Orlando Furioso. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. 247 p. Modern America's paucity ofappreciation for Ariosto was pointedly addressed in Remo Ceserani's review article "Ariosto in America" (Forum Italicum 19 [1985]: 322-32) and marginally mentioned in Maristella Lorch's review article "On Ferrara and Chivalric/Epic Poetry in Italian Criticism Today" (Journal ofthe Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 7 [1986]: 143-50). As ifin response to charges that Ariosto had been neglected by North American Italianists as well, the last three years have witnessed the publication in the United States ofimpressive book-length studies, including Peter DeSa Wiggins' Book Reviews105 Figures in Ariosto's Tapestry: Character and Design in the Orlando Furioso (1986), Albert R. Ascoli's Ariosto's Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance (1987), and Marianne Shapiro's The Poetics ofAriosto (1988). The erudite work under review nicely complements these distinguished studies and significantly contributes to what appears to be a broadening American scholarly interest in the four major Italian Renaissance epic poets—i.e., not only Ariosto and his predecessor Boiardo but also Pulci and Tàsso. Ariosto and Boiardo is decidedly not another general introduction to the two Ferrarese court poets. Instead this sophisticated study assumes an audience familiar with the authors treated and explores the often glossed-over but nevertheless intriguing relationship of the Ariostan Orlando Furioso to the epic that it completes, the Boiardan Orlando Innamorato. Handsomely printed with lovely illustrations by Fragonard, Marinelli's book begins with an introduction suggesting the seminality ofItalian Renaissance chivalric poems to European culture—from Tiepolo to Doré, from Handel to Vivaldi, and from Milton to Byron—and arguing "the need for a fuller and more precise account of the Ariosto-Boiardo relationship" (5). The remainder of the study consists of two long sections ("Orlando Innamorato: The Palimpsest," subdivided into...