The Uses of Lyric in Orlando Furioso

In the famous, central canto 23 of Ludovico Ariosto’s romance-epic, as Orlando descends into madness, the poem moves into a distinctly Petrarchan landscape. The selva oscura of desire, of Dante and of Donato’s dispersed self, gives way to the “liete piante, verdi erbe, limpide acque” of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta.¹ Searching for his beloved, Orlando comes upon a locus amoenus beside a stream where he sees the names of Angelica and Medoro entwined together and engraved on the trees; in a nearby cave, he then finds the fatal inscription in Arabic that will undo him. As the terrible meaning of Medoro’s poem, a bad Petrarchan imitation, sinks in, Ariosto describes Orlando’s reaction in terms that also draw on the canzoniere:

   . . . vedea piú chiaro e piano:et ogni volta in mezzo il petto afflittostingersi il cor sentia con fredda mano.Rimase al fin con gli occhi e con la menteFissi nel sasso, al sasso indifferente.

(OF 23.111.4–8)

The anti-Petrarchism of this celebrated scene, often imitated and parodied in its own turn, is a critical commonplace.² Medoro’s transformation of Rvf 162, “Lieti fiori et felici, et ben nate herbe” into a sensual hymn to the naked Angelica seems to emblematize Ariosto’s parody and critique of Petrarchism, already set up in the earlier Alcina episode and repeated across the poem’s interweaving threads. Less noted, however, is Ariosto’s allusion to Petrarch’s canzone delle metamorfosi, Rvf 23.

The feeling of a “fredda mano” seizing Orlando’s heart, transforming him, metaphorically, into a stone directly echoes Petrarch’s own metamorphosis:

Questa che col mirar gli animi furaM’aperse il petto, e ’l cor prese con mano,Dicendo a me «Di ciò non far parola».Poi la rividi in altro habito sola,Tal ch’i’ non la conobbi, o senso humano,Anzi le dissi ’l ver pien di paura.Ed ella ne l’usata sua figuraTosto tornando fecemi, oimè lasso,D’un quasi vivo, et sbigottito sasso.

(Rvf 23, lines 72–80)³

Noting the strangeness of this allusion, Maria Cristina Cabani, in the only full-length study of Ariosto’s relation to Petrarch and Petrarchism, suggests that Rvf 23 might be a crucial source for interpreting Canto 23 by providing a “prolungato supporto narrativo” but stops short of explaining exactly how the Petrarchan intertext maps on to the concerns of Ariosto’s poem (Cabani 262–64). The details are indeed richly suggestive: the numerological patterning of canto and canzone (23), both of which explore the dispersal and constitution of a self through poetry; the triangulation of Petrarch and Ovid, which allows Ariosto to practice his favorite mode of imitating an imitation; the counterpointing of a derivative petrarchistic discourse in Medoro’s lyric against the true Petrarchan original, associated here with Orlando; the play of literal and metaphoric levels in poetic figuration between Ariosto, Petrarch and Ovid.

But before turning to a reading of this episode, it is worth reflecting on why Petrarch—and more generally, lyric poetry—has not been considered a significant critical subject in the history of the Furioso’s interpretation and critical tradition. While the poem’s many Petrarchan citations, allusions, and evocations have certainly been glossed, they have not been integrated into overarching accounts of the Furioso’s political and ethical themes. The Furioso is saturated in its very lexical fabric with traces of Petrarch: it is practically a commonplace to speak of Ariosto’s revisions at the level of language and style, particularly in the 1532 version of the poem, as strongly influenced by the Petrarchism of Bembo.⁴ And of course, even a casual reader of the poem immediately grasps the comic parodies of Petrarchan excess that mark the poems many laments, innamorati, love-wounds, and erotic torments. But are the plural Petrarchisms of the Furioso—and by extension, its many dalliances with lyric poetics in the form of lyrical interludes and intertextual engagements with classical lyricists such as Catullus, Horace, and Ovid—anything more than a matter of style or formal affectation? How might...