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  • Ariosto’s Genealogies
  • Eleonora Stoppino

At the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, at least six Renaissance depictions of the abduction of Helen await the visitor; and at least three of them are connected with a domestic space.1 The most complete depiction of the stories of Helen, only partially visible at the Walters, is the so-called Story of Helen, preserved on three fifteenth century wooden panels: Helen and Her Entourage Departing for the Island of Cythera, Helen Eloping with Paris from Cythera, and The Reception of Helen at Troy.2 The three panels tell the story of the courtly entourage of Helen of Sparta setting out on a trip to the island of Cythera, of the persuasion performed by Paris on the lady while on the island, and finally of the solemn welcome given by Priam of Troy to the new couple. This is, in tone and content, the tale of a voluntary journey: Helen follows Paris to Troy of her own accord. Two Urbinate ceramic plates from the second half of the sixteenth century, visible at the Walters, paint a different picture of the same subject: one, by the workshop [End Page 32] of the Fontana family, depicts the violent abduction of the woman;3 the other portrays a previous event in the traditional tales on Helen: the rescue by her brothers, Castor and Pollux, after she had been abducted by Theseus.4

The occasion for the production of both the dishes and the wooden paintings was most likely the celebration of a wedding. It is not uncommon for the abduction of Helen, an apparently violent act, to be the narrative used to celebrate a matrimonial union. This is the case, moreover, for many classical and medieval representations of violence against a woman, of kidnapping, of rape.5 The narrative functions in several different ways, each one possibly in contradiction with the other. On the one hand, it exorcises the violence, making it a story; on the other hand, it reinscribes the original, foundational violence of the patriarchal system in the current event; it re-etymologizes the act of marriage as a form of alliance. Somewhere in the middle ground between these two forms of communication, it also performs the function of a cautionary tale, as it happens emblematically with the famous depictions of the tale of Nastagio degli Onesti by Botticelli. A woman, these depictions seem to be positing, can either go willingly or refuse to go with her captor. If she does the latter, she will be deemed a cruel woman, like the noble lady who, in Boccaccio’s version of the tale, rejects Nastagio’s ancestor and is condemned to being eternally chased by her suitor and his hounds.

It is my goal to show that canto 34 of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso approaches the act of narrating history and celebrating dynastic foundation as an act of necessary violence. Moreover, it does so from a distinctly female perspective—or at the very least, by positing the unknowable quality of a female perspective—what I have elsewhere presented as “the Helen paradox” (Stoppino 88–115).6

As it is aptly shown by the examples on display at the Walters, Helen’s voyage from Sparta to Troy was, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, visible in two opposite ways: as kidnapping or eloping. Helen, the legend went, joined Paris either willingly or unwillingly—and for [End Page 33] each of these versions, she was either praised or blamed. A good case in point of this duplicitous or wavering attitude towards the legend of Helen is Boccaccio’s presentation of the tale in his De mulieribus claris (Famous Women, chapter 37): “Helena tam ob suam lasciviam—ut multis visum est—quam ob diuturnum bellum ex ea consecutum toto orbi notissima femina” (142).7 Boccaccio’s account of Helen’s misadventures is haunted by the issue of ineffability. He relates the painter Zeuxis’s attempt to represent her beauty, which necessarily fails, as the live movements and expressions of such supreme beauty could only be produced by nature itself: “Cum solius hoc nature officium sit” (144).8 Such ineffable quality seems to be conceptually related to the dubious...

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