Ariosto and the Prophetic Moment

Ludovico Ariosto composed his epic romance Orlando Furioso at a prophetic moment in Italian and European history. The climate of war and upheaval that characterized the Italian peninsula from the French invasion of 1494 to the fall of the Florentine Republic in 1530 encouraged the proliferation of prophetic expectations in all regions and all strata of society. ¹ Many of the prophecies that circulated in those years in print or in manuscript were adapted from Medieval eschatology and political propaganda in order to respond to the urgent expectations evoked by a long succession of portentous events unfolding in Ariosto's lifetime (1474-1533). The discovery of America, the wars in Italy, the Lutheran Reformation, the expansion of the Turks, the rivalry over the imperial succession to Maximilian, the great planetary conjunction of 1524, and the sack of Rome in 1527 all helped to sustain a mood of prophetic tension from the earliest composition of the Furioso until the publication of the much revised third edition in 1532. Some of the most celebrated documents in this tradition were the Pronosticatio of Lichtenberger first published in 1488, Savonarola's anti-papal Compendium revelationum of 1495, the Libro de las profecías (1502) in which Christopher Columbus sought to establish the scriptural and astrological authority for his Enterprise of the Indies, the Apocalypsis Nova portending the advent of an Angelic Pope, the various prophecies of papal succession known generically as Vaticinia pontificum, and finally a whole series of prophetic works attributed to Gioacchino da Fiore. Beginning in 1516 in Venice, the Augustan Friar Silvestro Meuccio reedited a series of Joachimist prophecies that epitomized many of the political and eschatological themes of the period coinciding with the composition and the revision of the Furioso. ² Given the widespread diffusion of these themes in Renaissance Europe, their appearance in the prophetic decor of Ariosto's poem contributes to the poem's actuality and thus, paradoxically, to its liberation of narrative time from prophetic closure.

This essay proposes to examine all the major prophecies delivered in the course of Ariosto's poem in order to assess their intertextual relations, their metaphors of historical process, and the revisions whereby they testify to the impact of historical contingency on poetry itself. The Orlando Furioso introduces a broad array of seers and visionaries including Merlin, Cassandra, the allegorical figure Andronica, and St. John the Evangelist, who variously portray or recite the glorious triumphs of Ariosto's patrons, the Estense dynasty of Ferrara, and of their allies and protectors among the sovereigns of Europe. At the same time, the narrator exercises his own prophetic powers by promising his work a long and illustrious posterity. While these prophecies of literary fame remain largely immune to the enveloping irony of the work, Ariosto's political prophecies cannot evade the uncertainties of the historical present, which are accentuated by the author's revision of his work in response to the shifting political alliances of the early 16th century. ³ Moreover, the poem consistently confronts the teleological urgency of prophecy with the digressive, centripetal tendencies of romance narrative so as to deny the closure which prophecy would impose on history. What is most striking about Ariosto's orientation to the future is how he looks forward to the failure of prophecy while relying on the continuity of poetic tradition to vindicate his most authentic expectations. ⁴

Prophecy and Actuality

The Orlando Furioso was first published in 1516 in 40 cantos with a second edition in 1521 and a third edition expanded to 46 cantos in 1532. For the revised edition of 1532, Ariosto added to canto 15 a prophetic speech by Andronica to Astolfo foretelling the discovery of the New World and the reign of Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor. Ariosto scholars have not failed to remark on the classical reminiscences of this passage nor have historians neglected to cite these verses in their suveys of Renaissance prophecy. ⁵ What remains to be seen is how Ariosto uses the convention...