The Romantic Epic—Its Plebeian Origin—The Popular Poet's Standpoint—The Pulci Family—The Carolingian Cycle—Turpin—Chanson de Roland—Historical Basis—Growth of the Myth of Roland—Causes of its Popularity in Italy—Burlesque Elements—TheMorgante Maggiore—Adventures in Paynimry—Roncesvalles—Episodes introduced by the Poet—Sources in older Poems—The Treason of Gano—Pulci's Characters—His Artistic Purpose—His Levity and Humor—Margutte—Astarotte—Pulci'sbourgeoisSpirit—Boiardo—His Life—Feudalism in Italy—Boiardo's Humor—His Enthusiasm for Knighthood—His Relation to Renaissance Art—Plot of theOrlando Innamorato—Angelica—Mechanism of the Poem—Creation of Characters—Orlando and Rinaldo—Ruggiero—Lesser Heroes—The Women—Love—Friendship—Courtesy—Orlando and Agricane at Albracca—Natural Delineation of Passions—Speed of Narration—Style of Versification—Classical and Medieval Legends—The Punishment of Rinaldo—The Tale of Narcissus—Treatment of Mythology—Treatment of Magic—Fate of theOrlando Innamorato.
The Romantic Epic—Its Plebeian Origin—The Popular Poet's Standpoint—The Pulci Family—The Carolingian Cycle—Turpin—Chanson de Roland—Historical Basis—Growth of the Myth of Roland—Causes of its Popularity in Italy—Burlesque Elements—TheMorgante Maggiore—Adventures in Paynimry—Roncesvalles—Episodes introduced by the Poet—Sources in older Poems—The Treason of Gano—Pulci's Characters—His Artistic Purpose—His Levity and Humor—Margutte—Astarotte—Pulci'sbourgeoisSpirit—Boiardo—His Life—Feudalism in Italy—Boiardo's Humor—His Enthusiasm for Knighthood—His Relation to Renaissance Art—Plot of theOrlando Innamorato—Angelica—Mechanism of the Poem—Creation of Characters—Orlando and Rinaldo—Ruggiero—Lesser Heroes—The Women—Love—Friendship—Courtesy—Orlando and Agricane at Albracca—Natural Delineation of Passions—Speed of Narration—Style of Versification—Classical and Medieval Legends—The Punishment of Rinaldo—The Tale of Narcissus—Treatment of Mythology—Treatment of Magic—Fate of theOrlando Innamorato.
Lorenzo de’ Mediciand Angelo Poliziano reunited the two currents of Italian literature, plebeian and cultivated, by giving the form of refined art to popular lyrics of divers kinds, to the rustic idyll, and to the sacred drama. Another member of the Medicean circle, Luigi Pulci, aided the same work of restoration by taking up the rude tales of theCantori da Piazzaand producing the first romantic poem of the Renaissance.
Of all the numerous forms of literature, three seem to have been specially adapted to the Italians of this Period. They were theNovella, the Romantic Epic,and the Idyll. With regard to theNovellaand the Idyll, it is enough in this place to say that we may reckon them indigenous to modern Italy. They suited the temper of the people and the age; theNovellafurnishing the fit artistic vehicle for Italian realism and objectivity; the Idyll presenting a point of contact with the literature of antiquity, and expressing that calm sensibility to natural beauty which was so marked a feature of the national character amid the distractions of the sixteenth century. The Idyll and theNovellaformed, moreover, the most precious portion of Boccaccio's legacy.
Concerning the Romantic Epic it is necessary to speak at greater length. At first sight the material of the Carolingian Cycle, which formed the basis of the most considerable narrative poems of the Renaissance, seems uncongenial to the Italians. Feudalism had never taken a firm hold on the country. Chivalry was more a pastime of the upper classes, more consciously artificial than it had been in France or even England. The interest of the Italians in the Crusades was rather commercial than religious, and the people were not stirred to their center by the impulse to recover the Holy Sepulcher. The enthusiasm of piety which animated the Northern myth of Charlemagne, was not characteristic of the race that earlier than the rest of Europe had indulged in speculative skepticism and sarcastic raillery; nor were the marvels of the legend congenial to their positive and practical imagination, turned ever to the beauties of the plastic arts. Charlemagne, again, was not a national hero. It seemed as though the great foreign epics, which had been transported into Italy during the thirteenth century, would find no permanent place in Southern literature after the close of the fourteenth. The cultivated classes in their eagerness to discover and appropriate the ancient authors lost sight of peer and paladin. Even Boccaccio alluded contemptuously to chivalrous romance, as fit reading only for idle women; and when he attempted an epical poem in octave stanzas, he chose a tale of ancient Greece. Still, in spite of these apparent drawbacks, in spite of learned scorn and polished indifference, the Carolingian Cycle had taken a firm hold upon the popular fancy. We have seen how a special class of literary craftsmen reproduced its principal episodes in prose and verse for the multitudes gathered on the squares to hear their recitations, or for readers in the workshop and the country farm. Now, in the renascence of the native literature, poets of the highest rank were destined to receive the same material from the people and to give it a form appropriate to their own culture. This fact must not be forgotten by the student of Pulci, Boiardo, Berni, and Ariosto. The romantic epics of the golden age had a plebeian origin; and the masters of verse who devoted their best energies to that brilliant series of poems, were dealing with legends which had taken shape in the imagination of the people, before they applied their own inventive faculties to the task of beautifying them with art unrivaled for splendor and variety of fancy. This, and this alone, explains the anomalies of the Italian romantic epic—the mixture of burlesque with seriousness, the irony and sarcasm alternating with gravity and pathos, the wealth ofcomic episodes, the interweaving of extraneous incidents, the antithesis between the professed importance of the subject-matter and the spirit of the poet who plays with it as though he felt its puerility—all the startling contrasts, in a word, which have made this glittering Harlequin of art in the Renaissance so puzzling to modern critics. If we remember that the poets of the sixteenth century adopted their subjects from the people, finding them already impregnated with the plebeian instincts ofimprovisatori, who felt no real sympathy with knighthood, and whose one aim was to amuse and gratify an audience eager for excitement; if we further recollect that these poets approached their own task in the same spirit, adding yet another element of irony proper to men who stood aloof and laughed, and who desired to entertain the Courts of Italy with masterpieces of humor and fantastic beauty; we shall succeed in comprehending the peculiarities of their productions.
The romances of Orlando must be regarded as works of pure art, wrought by courtly singers from a previously existing popular literature, which in its turn had been fashioned from the Frankish legends to suit the tastes of a non-chivalrous, but humorous and marvel-loving multitude. In passing from the Song of Roland or Turpin's Chronicle to theOrlando Furiosowe can trace two separate processes of transmutation. By the earlier process themateria di Franciawas adapted to the Italian people; by the second the new material thus obtained was reconstructed for the Italian Courts. The final product is a masterpiece of refined art, retaining something of the Frenchoriginals, something of the popular Italianrifacimento, but superadding the wisdom, the irony, and the poetry of one of the world's brightest geniuses. We might compare the growth of a romantic epic of the sixteenth century to the art of Calimala, whereby the rough stuffs of Flanders were wrought at Florence into finer cloths, and the finished fabric was tinted with the choicest dyes, and made fit for a king's chamber.
Hitherto I have spoken as though Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, Berni, and the lesser writers of romantic epics could be classed together in one sentence. The justification of so broad a treatment at the outset lies in this, that their relation to the popular romances they rehandled was substantially the same. But it will be the special purpose of the following pages to point out their essential differences, not only as poets, but also with regard to the spirit in which they viewed their common subject-matter.
Boccaccio, in his desire to fuse the classic and the medieval modes of thought and style, not merely adapted the periods of Latin to Italian prose, but also sought to treat an antique subject in the popular measure of the octave stanza. HisTeseideis a narrative poem in which the Greek hero plays a prominent part, while all the chiefs of Theban and Athenian legend are brought upon the scene. Yet the main motive is a tale of love, and the language is as modern as need be. Writing to please the mistress of his heart, and emulous of epic fame, Boccaccio rejected the usual apostrophes and envoys of theCantori da Banca, and constructed a poem divided into books. Poliziano approached the problem of fusing the antique andmodern from a different point of view. He adorned a courtly theme of his own day with phrases and decorative details borrowed from the classic authors, presenting in a series of brilliant pictures an epitome of ancient art. It remained for Pulci to develop, without classical admixture, the elements of poetry existing in the popular Italian romances. TheMorgante Maggioreis therefore more thoroughly and purely Tuscan than any work of equal magnitude that had preceded it. This is its great merit, and this gives it a place apart among the hybrid productions of the Renaissance.
The Pulci were a noble family, reduced in circumstances and attached to the Casa Medici by ties of political and domestic dependency. Bernardo, the eldest of three brothers, distinguished himself in literature by his translations of Virgil's Eclogues, by his elegies on Cosimo de' Medici, by aSacra Rappresentazioneon the tale of Barlaam, and by a poem on the Passion of Christ which he composed at the instance of a devout nun. Luca wrote the stanzas on the Tournament of Lorenzo de' Medici above mentioned,[512]and took some part at least in the composition of an obscure poem called theCiriffo Calvaneo.[513]But the most famous of the brothers was Luigi, whose correspondence with Lorenzo de' Medici proves him to have been a kind of Court-poet in the Palace of the Via Larga, while the sonnets he exchanged with Matteo Franco breathe Burchiello's plebeian spirit.[514]He had a wild fantastic temperament, inclining to bold speculations on religious topics; tinctured with curiosity that took the form of magic art; bizarre in expression, yet withal so purely Florentine that his prose and verse are a precious mine ofquattrocentoidioms gathered from the jargon of the streets and squares. Of humanistic culture he seems to have possessed but little. Still the terms of familiar intercourse on which he lived with Angelo Poliziano, Matteo Palmieri, and Paolo Toscanelli enabled him to gather much of the learning then in vogue. The theological and scientific speculations of the age are transmitted to us in his comic stanzas with a vernacular raciness that renders them doubly precious.[515]
Before engaging with theMorgante Maggiore, it is needful to inquire into the source of this and all the other Italian romantic poems, and to account for the fact that they were confined, so far as their subjectwent, within the circle of the Carolingian epic. In 1122 a prose history in monkish Latin, purporting to be the Chronicle of the last years of the reign of Charles the Great written by Turpin, Archbishop of Rheims, was admitted among the canonical books by Calixtus II., who in his Bull cursed those who should thenceforward listen to the "lying songs of Jongleurs." This Chronicle was merely a sanctimonious and prosaic version of the Songs of Roland and of Roncesvalles.[516]The object of the scribe who compiled it, and of the Pope who canonized it, was to give an ecclesiastical complexion to the martial chants which already possessed the ear of the public.[517]Accordingly, while he left untouched the tales of magic, the monstrous marvels and the unchristian ethics of the elder fable, this pseudo-Turpin interspersed prayers, confessions, vows, miracles, homilies, and pulpit admonitions. In order to secure verisimilitude for his narrative, he reversed the old account of Roncesvalles, according to which Turpin perished on the field, anathematized all previous poets, and pretended that his Chronicle was written by the hands of the Archbishop.[518]What he effected for the Song of Roland, Geoffrey of Monmouth did, without a sacerdotal bias, for the romance of Arthur.
We possess a MS. of theChanson de Rolandin Norman French. It was discovered in the Bodleian Library and published first in 1837 by M. Michel, afterwards in 1851 by M. Génin. The date of the MS. has been fixed by some critics as early as the eleventh, by others as late as the thirteenth, century. Purporting to be the work of one Turold, its most enthusiastic admirers claim it as the genuine production of Théroulde, tutor to William the Conqueror, which, after passing through the hands of Taillefer, the knightly bard of Senlac field, was deposited in his MS. chest by a second Théroulde, abbot of Peterborough.[519]Be that as it may, we can assume that the Bodleian MS. presents the ancient battle-song in nearly the same form as when the Normans followed Taillefer at Hastings, and heard him chanting of "Charlemain and Roland and Oliver who died in Roncesvalles." This song reverberated throughout medieval Europe. Poggio in theFacetiæcompares a man who weeps over the fall of Rome, to one who in Milan shed tears over Roland's death at Roncesvalles. Dante may have heard it on the lips of theCantores Francigenarumin Lombard towns, or in the halls of Fosdinovo above the Tyrrhene Sea; for he writes with an energy of style scarcely inspired by the pseudo-Turpin:
Orlando and Oliver (or Ogier) are carved upon the façade of the Duomo at Verona—Dietrich's town of Bern,where Northern traditions of chivalry long lingered.[520]Like the Spanish legend of the Cid, or the climax of theNiebelungenlied, this Song of Roland, in dignity and strength of style, in tragic heroism and passionate simplicity, is worthy to be ranked with a Canto of theIliad. Like all medieval romantic poetry, it is but a fragment—the portion of a cycle never wrought by intervention of a Homer into epical completeness. But its superiority over Turpin's Chronicle in all the qualities that could inspire a singer is immeasurable.
Two questions have now to be asked. What historical basis can be found for the Carolingian myth? and how did it happen that the Italians preferred this legend of French Paladins to any other of the feudal romances? The history of Charlemagne and his peers—of Roland, Oliver, Ogier, Turpin, Ganilo the traitor, Pinabel, Marsilius the Moorish king of Spain, and all the rest, of whom we read in the Norman Song, and who receive numerous additions from the Italian romancers—must not be sought in Eginhard. It is a Myth. But like all myths, it has some nucleus of reality, round which have crystallized the enthusiasms of a semi-barbarous age, the passionate memories of the people looking back to bygone greatness, the glowing fancies of poets intent on visions of the future. This nucleus of fact is little more than the name ofCharles the Frankish Emperor. All the legends of the cycle represent him as conducting a crusade, defeating the Saracens in mighty battles, besieged by them in Paris, betrayed by his own subject Ganilo, and bereft of his noblest paladins in the Pass of Roncesvalles. History knows nothing of these events. Nor can history account for the traditional character of the Emperor, who is feeble, credulous, browbeaten by lawless vassals, incapable of strenuous action, and yet respected as the conqueror of the world and the anointed of the Lord.[521]It is therefore clear that the myth has blent together divers incongruous elements, and that the spirit of the crusades has been at work, giving a kind of unity to scarce remembered acts of the chief of Christendom. We hear from Eginhard that Charlemagne in 778 advanced as far as Saragossa into Spain, and during his retreat had his rearguard cut off by the Basques.[522]Among the slain was "Roland, prefect of the Breton Marches." We read again in Eginhard (anno 824) how Louis le Debonair lost two of his counts, who were returning from Spain through the Pass of Roncesvalles. Furthermore, the Merovingian Chronicles tell us of a Pyrenean battle in the days of Dagobert, when twelve Frankish chiefs were surrounded in those passes and slain. These are sufficient data to account for the Pass of Roncesvalles becoming a valley dolorous, the vale of the great woe. Forthe crusading exploits of Charlemagne we have to look to his predecessor, Charles Martel, who defeated the Saracens at Tours and stemmed the tide of Mussulman invasion. His successors, the feeble monarchs of the Frankish line, several of whom bore the name of Charles, explain the transformation of the Emperor into a vacillating monarch, infirm of purpose and incapable of keeping his peers in order; for the distinguishing surnames of history are later additions, and Chronicles, though written, were not popularly read. The bard, therefore, mixed his materials without care for criticism, and the myth produced a hybrid Charlemagne composed of many royal Karls. As for the traitor Gano, we hear of Lupus, Duke of Gascony, who dealt treasonably with Charlemagne, and of one Ganilo, Ganelon, or Wenelon, Archbishop of Sens, who played the same part toward Charles the Bald in 864.[523]This portion of the myth may possibly be referred to these dim facts. Yet it would be wiser not to insist upon them; for the endeavor to rationalize an entire legend is always hazardous, and it is enough to say that a traitor was needed for the fight of Roncesvalles no less than Mordred for the death of Arthur in the plain of Glastonbury. To explain the legendary siege of Paris by the Saracens, so important an incident in the Italian romances, it has been ingeniously remarked that, though the Moors never menaced the French capital, the Normans did so repeatedly, while both Saracens and Normans were Pagans.[524]It may alsobe remembered that Saracens had pillaged Rome, and the Saracen forays were a common incident of Italian experience. The gathering of great armies from the far East and the incursions of hideous barbarian hordes, which form an integral element of Boiardo's and Ariosto's scheme, can be referred to the memory of Tartar, Hun, and Turk; while the episodes of Christian knights enamored of Pagan damsels are incidents drawn from actual history in the intercourse of Italy with the Levant. Allowing for this slight framework of fact, but not pressing even the few points that have been gathered by antiquarian research, it may be briefly said that the bulk of the Carolingian romance, with its numerous subordinate legends of knights and ladies, is purely mythical.
In the next place we have to consider what led the Italians to select the romances of Charlemagne for special development rather than those of Arthur, with which they were no less familiar.[525]We have seen that on the first introduction of themateria di Franciainto Italy, the Arthurian Cycle became the property of the nobles, who found in it a mirror of the feudal manners they affected, whereas the people listened toChansons de Gesteupon the market-place.[526]When, therefore,the polite poets of the fifteenth century adopted the romantic epic from the popular rhymers, they found a mass of Carolingian tales in vogue, to which they had themselves from infancy been used. But this preference of the multitude for Charlemagne and Roland requires further explanation. It must be remarked in the first place that the Empire exercised a fascination over the Italians in the middle ages, paralleled by no other power except the Papacy. They regarded it as their own, as their glory in the past, as their pride in the future, if only the inheritor of the Cæsars would do his duty and rule the world from Rome with equal justice. The pedigree of the Christian Emperors from Constantine to Charles the Great formed an integral part of the Carolingian romance as it took form in Italy.[527]It was something for the Italians that Charles had been crowned at Rome, a ceremony from time to time repeated by his German successors during the centuries which made his legend famous. Nor, though the people were but little influenced by the crusading fanaticism, was it of no importance that in the person of this Emperor Christendom had been imperiled by the infidels, and Christendom through him had triumphed. The Chronicle of Turpin, again, had received authoritative sanction. Add to it as the romancers chose, attribute nonsense to the Archbishop as they pleased, they always relied, in show at least, on his canonicalveracity. Pulci, Bello, Boiardo, and Ariosto appeal to his authority with mock seriousness; and even the burlesque Berni, while turning Turpin into ridicule, adopts the style:
The fashion lasted till the days of Folengo and Fortiguerra. It may further be mentioned that Orlando at an early date had been made a Roman by the popular Italian mythologists. They said that he was born at Sutri, and that Oliver was the son of the Roman prefect for the Pope. The sentiment of the people for this strangeSenator Romanusexpressed itself touchingly and pithily in his supposed epitaph: "One God, One Rome, One Roland."[529]Orlando was so rooted in the popular consciousness as a hero, that to have substituted for him another epical character would have been impossible.
When we further investigate the naturalization of Orlando in Italy, we find that all the romantic poems written on his legend inclined to the burlesque. The chivalrous element of love which pervades the Arthurian Cycle, had been extracted and treated after their ownfashion by the lyrists of the fourteenth century. That was no immediate concern of the people, nor had the citizens any sympathy with the chivalry of arms. To deal as solemnly with medieval romance as the Northern bards had done, was quite beside the purpose of theimprovisatoriwho refashioned theChansons de Gestefor Italian townsfolk. When, therefore, Pulci undertook to amuse Lucrezia Tornabuoni, the mother of Lorenzo de' Medici, with a tale of Roland, he found his material already stripped of epical sobriety; nor was it hard for him to handle his theme in the spirit of Boccaccio, bent on exhausting every motive of amusement which it might suggest. He assumed the tone of a street-singer, opening each canto with the customary invocation to Madonna or a paraphrase of some Church collect, and dismissing his audience at the close with grateful thanks or brief good wishes. But Pulci was no mereCantastorie. The popular style served but for a cloak to cover his subtle-witted satire and his mocking levity. Sarcastic Tuscan humor keeps up anobbligatoaccompaniment throughout the poem. Sometimes this humor is in harmony with the plebeian spirit of the old Italian romances; sometimes it turns aside and treats it as a theme of ridicule. In reading theMorgante, we must bear in mind that it was written, canto by canto, to be recited in the Palace of the Via Larga, at the table where Poliziano and Ficino gathered with Michelangelo Buonarroti and Cristoforo Landino. Whatever topics may from time to time have occupied that brilliant circle, were reflected in its stanzas; and this alone suffices to account for its tender episodes and its burlesque extravagances, for the satiric picture ofMargutte and the serious discourses of the devil Astarotte. The external looseness of construction and the intellectual unity of the poem, are both attributable to these circumstances. Passing by rapid transitions from grave to gay, from pathos to cynicism, from theological speculations to ribaldry, it is at one and the same time a mirror of the popular taste which suggested the form, and also of the courtly wits who listened to it laughing. TheMorganteis nonaïveproduction of a simple age, but the artistic plaything of a cultivated and critical society, entertaining its leisure with old-world stories, accepting some for their beauty's sake in seriousness, and turning others into nonsense for pure mirth.
A careful study of theMorgante Maggiorereveals to the critic three separate strains of style. To begin with, it is clear that we are dealing with two poems fused in one—the first ending with the twenty-third canto, the second consisting of the last five cantos. Between these two divisions a considerable period of time is supposed to have elapsed. The first poem consists of a series of romantic adventures in strange countries, whither Orlando, Uliviero, Rinaldo and Astolfo have been driven by the craft of Gano, and where they fight giants, liberate ladies, and fall in love with Pagan damsels, after the jovial fashion of knights errant. The second assumes a more heroic tone, and tells in truly thrilling verse the tale of Roncesvalles. But over and above this double material, different in matter and in manner, we trace throughout the whole romance a third element, which seems to be more essentially the poet's own than either his fantastic tissue of adventures or his serious narrative of Roland's death.This third element consists of half-ironical half-sober dissertations, reflective digressions, and brilliant interpolated incidents, among which we have to reckon the splendid episodes of Astarotte and Margutte. So much was clear to my mind when I first read theMorgante, and attempted to comprehend the difficulties it presented to critics like Ginguené and Hallam. Since then the truth of this view has been substantiated by the eminent Italian scholar, Pio Rajna, who has proved that theMorganteis therifacimentoof two earlier popular poems, the first existing in MS. in the Laurentian library, the second entitledLa Spagna.[530]Pulci availed himself freely of his popular models, at times repeating the old stanzas with no alteration, but oftener rehandling them and adding to their comic spirit, and interpolating passages of his own invention. Since the two originals differed in character, hisrifacimentoretained their divers peculiarities, notwithstanding those master-touches which betray the same hand in both of its main sections. But the most precious part of the poem remains Pulci's own. Nothing can deprive him of Margutte and Astarotte; nor without his clever transmutation of the old material would the bulk of theMorgante Maggioredeserve more attention than many similar romances buried in condign oblivion. Between the two parts we may notice a considerable difference of literary merit. The second and shorter is by far the finer in poetic quality, earnestness, and power of treatment. The first is tedious to read. The second inthralls and carries us along.[531]
The poem takes its title from the comic hero Morgante, a giant captured and converted by Orlando in the first Canto.[532]He dies, however, in the twentieth, and the narrative proceeds with no interruption. If we seek for epical unity, in a romance so loosely put together from so many divers sources, we can find it in the treason of Gano. The action turns decisively and frequently upon this single point, returns to it from time to time for fresh motives, and reaches its conclusion in the execution of the traitor after the great deed of crime has been accomplished in the valley dolorous. An Italian of the fifteenth century could not have chosen a motive more suited to the temper and experience of his age, when conspiracies like that of the Pazzi at Florence and the Baglioni at Perugia were frightfully frequent, and when the successful massacre of Sinigaglia made Cesare Borgia the hero of historical romance.Il tradimento,il traditore, the kiss of Judas, the simile of the fox, recur with fatal resonance through all the Cantos of the poem. The style assumes a rugged grandeur of tragic realism, not unworthy of poets of the stamp of our own Webster or Marston, in the passage which describes the tempest by the well at Saragossa, where Gano met Marsilio to plan their fraud, and where the locust-tree let fall its fruit uponthe traitor's head.[533]TheMorganteis, in truth, the epic of treason, and the character of Gano, as an accomplished yet not utterly abandoned Judas, is admirably sustained throughout. The powerful impression of his perversity is heightened by contrast with the loyalty of his son Baldovino. In the fight at Roncesvalles Baldovino carries a mantle given to Gano by the Saracen king, without knowing for what purpose his father made him wear it; and wherever he charges through the press of men, the foes avoid him. Orlando learns that he is protected by this ensign of fraud, and accuses him of partaking in Gano's treason. Then the youth flings the cloak from his shoulders, and plunges into the fight with an indignant repudiation of this shame upon his lips. The scene is not unworthy of theIliad;[534]and his last words, as he fallspierced in the breast with two lances,Or non son io più traditiore!are dramatic.
Pulci deserves credit for strong delineation of character. Through all the apish tricks and fantastic arabesque-work of his style, the chief personages retain firmly-marked types. Never since theChanson de Rolandwas first sung, has a more heroic portrait of Orlando, the God-fearing knight, obedient to his liege-lord, serene in his courage and gentle in his strength, courteous, pious and affectionate, been painted.[535]Close adherence to the popular conception of Orlando's character here stood Pulci in good stead; nor was he hampered with the difficulties which beset Boiardo and Ariosto, when they showed the champion of Christianity subdued to madness and to love. Thus one work at least of the Renaissance maintained for the Italians an ideal of chivalrous heroism, first conceived by Franco-Norman bards, and afterwards transmitted through the fancy of the people, who are ever ready to discern and to preserve the lineaments of greatness. Oliver the true friend and doughty warrior, Rinaldo the fiery foe and reckless lover, to whom the press of men was Paradise,[536]and Malagigi the magician, are drawn with no less skill. Charles is such as the traditions of the myth and the requirements of the plotobliged Pulci to make him. Yet in spite of the feebleness which exposes him to the treasonable arts of Gano, he is not deficient in a certain nobility. In the conduct of these characters, amid the windings of the poet's freakish fancy, we trace the solidity of his plan, his faculty for earnest art. But should there still be found critics who, after a careful study of Gano, Orlando, Uliviero, Rinaldo and Carlo, think that Pulci meant his poem for a mere burlesque, this opinion cannot but be shaken by a perusal of the twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh Cantos. The refusal of Orlando to blow his horn:
his address to the knights when rushing into desperate battle at impossible odds[537]; the scene of his death, so tender in its pathos, so quaint in its piety; the agony of Charles when he comes, too late, to find him slain, and receives his sword from the Paladin's dead hands; these passages must surely be enough to convince the most incredulous of doctrinaires.
It has been customary to explain the apparent contradictions of theMorgante Maggiore—Pulci'sbrusque transitions from piety to ribaldry, from pathos to satire—by reference to the circumstances of Florence at the date of its composition. The republic was at war with Sixtus IV., who had taken part in the Pazzi conspiracy. To his Bull of excommunication the Signoria had retorted by terming it "maledictam maledictionem damnatissimi judicis," and had described the Pope himself as "delirum senem," "leno matris suæ, adulterorum minister, diaboli vicarius." It was not to be expected that even an orthodox Christian should be tender toward the vices of the clergy or careful in guarding his religious utterances at such a moment. Yet we need not go far afield to account for Pulci's profanity. The Italians of the age in which he lived, were freethinkers without ceasing to be Catholics. To begin a Canto with a prayer, and to end it with speculations on the destiny of the soul after death, was consistent with their intellectual temper. The schools and private coteries of Florence were the arena in which Platonism and Averroism waged war with orthodoxy, where questions of freewill and creation, the relation of man to God, and the essence of the human spirit, were being discussed with a philosophic indifference and warmth of curiosity that prepared the way for Pomponazzi's materialism. Criticism, the modern Hercules, was already in its cradle, strangling the serpents of sacerdotal authority: and as yet the Inquisition had not become a power of terror; the Council of Trent and the Spanish tyranny had not turned Italians into trembling bigots or sleek hypocrites. Externally they remained tenacious of their old beliefs; and from the point of view of art at least,they were desirous of adhering to tradition. For Pulci to have celebrated Orlando without assuming the customary style of thecantastorie, would have been beside his purpose. Therefore, the mixture of magic, theology, impiety, speculation and religious fervor which perplexes a reader of the present day in theMorgante, corresponded to the mental attitude of the educated majority at Pulci's date. On the border-land between the middle ages and the modern world the keen Italian intellect loved to entertain itself with a perpetualperhaps, impartially including in the sphere of doubt old dogmas and novel hypotheses, and finding satisfaction in an insecurity that flattered it with the sense of disengagement from formulæ.[538]With some minds this volatile questioning was serious; with others it assumed a Rabelaisian joviality. Pulci ranked with those who made the problems of the world material for humorous debate.
A few instances of Pulci's peculiar levity might be selected from the last Cantos of theMorgante, where no one can maintain that his intention was burlesque. We have just heard from the minstrel's lips how Roland died, recommending his soul to God and delivering his glove in sign of feudal fealty to Gabriel. The sound of his horn has startled Charlemagne from thesleep of false tranquillity, and the Emperor is on his way to Roncesvalles. But time is short. He prays Christ that as of old for Joshua, so now for him in his sore need, the sun may be stayed and the day be prolonged[539]:
The prayer is worthy, in its solemn tone, of this exordium; and the desired effect soon follows. But now Pulci changes his note from grave to gay[540]:
A few lines further he describes the carnage in the dolorous valley, and finds this comic phrase to express the confusion of the field[541]:
Pulci's grotesque humor gives an air of false absurdity to many incidents which, together with his hearers, he undoubtedly took in good faith. During the slaughter of the Christians he wishes to impress the audience with the multitude of souls who crowded into Paradise. S. Peter is tired to death with opening the door for them and deafened with their jubilations[542]:
In the same spirit is the picture of the fiends seated like hawks upon the bell-towers of a little chapel, waiting to pounce upon the souls of Pagans.[543]
Sometimes a flash of purely Bernesque humor appears in Pulci; as when he says that the Saracens:
Bestemmiavano Dio divotamente,
or when Oliver, after a pathetic love-lament, complains that it is impossible:
Celar per certo l'amore e la tossa.
According to modern notions his jokes not unfrequently savor of profanity. Rinaldo and Ricciardetto are feasting upon ortolans, and give this punning reason for their excellence[544]:
On the same occasion Rinaldo is so pleased with his fare that he exclaims:
Such expressions flash forth from mere Florentine sense of fun in passages by no means deliberately comic.
The most diverting character of theMorganteis Margutte, an eccentric heteroclite creature, the prototype of Folengo's Cingar and Rabelais' Panurge, whom the giant met upon his wanderings and adopted for a comrade. It has been supposed with some reason that Pulci here intended to satirize the Greeks who flocked to Florence after the fall of Constantinople, and that either Marullo, the personal enemy of Poliziano, or Demetrius Chalcondylas, his rival in erudition, sat for Margutte's portrait. The character of the rogue, described by himself in thirty stanzas of fantastic humor, contains a complete epitome of the abuse which the scholars of those days used to vomit forth in their reciprocal invectives.[545]Part of the comic effect produced by his speech is due to this self-attribution of qualities which supplied the arsenals of humanistic combatants with poisoned arrows. But Margutte has far more than a merely illustrative or temporary value. He is the first finished humoristic portrait sketched in modern literature, the first broadly-conceived and jovially-executed Rabelaisian study. Though it is very improbable that Pulci had any knowledge of Aristophanes, though he died eight years or thereabouts before the Curé of Meudon was born, his Margutte is cousin-german of the Sausage-seller and Panurge.[546]Margutte takes an impish pride in reckoning up his villanies and vices. WhenMorgante asks him whether he believes in Christ or Appollino, he replies:
He explains his disengagement from all creeds by referring to his parentage:
Beginning life by murdering his father, he next set out to seek adventures in the world:
Margutte's humor consists in the baboon-like self-contentment of his infamous confessions, and in the effect they produce upon Morgante, who feels that he has found in him a finished gentleman. After amusing his audience with this puppet for a while, Pulci flings him aside. Margutte, like Pietro Aretino, dies at last of immoderate laughter.[547]
Another of Pulci's own creations is Astarotte, the proud and courteous fiend, summoned by Malagigi to bring Rinaldo from Egypt to Roncesvalles. Thisfeat he accomplishes in a few hours by entering the body of the horse Baiardo. The journey consists of a series of splendid leaps, across lakes, rivers, mountains, seas and cities; and when the paladin hungers, Astarotte spreads a table for him in the wilderness or introduces him invisible into the company of queens at banquet in fair Saragossa. The humor and the fancy of this magic journey are both of a high order.[548]Yet Astarotte is made to serve a second purpose. Into his mouth Pulci places all his theological speculations, and makes him reason learnedly like Mephistophilis:
He is introduced in these lines[549]:
Of his noble descent from the highest of created intelligences Astarotte is well aware[550]:
He is in earnest to prove that courtesy exists in Hell[551]:
When Malagigi questions him concerning divine foreknowledge and his own state in Hell, he replies with a complete theory of sin and punishment founded upon the doctrine of freewill.[552]The angels sinned with knowledge. Therefore for them there is no redemption. Adam sinned in ignorance. Therefore there is hope for all men, and a probability of final restitution for the whole human race[553]:
Astarotte's own torment in Hell causes him bitter anguish; but he recognizes the justice of God; and knowing that the sentence of damnation cannot be canceled, he is too courageous to complain. When Rinaldo offers to intercede for him, he answers[554]:
There is great refinement in this momentary sadness of Astarotte, followed by his return to more cheerful topics. He is the Italian counterpart of Marlowe's fiend, that melancholy demon of the North, who tempts his victim by the fascination of mere horror.[555]Like Mephistophilis, again, Astarotte is ready to satisfy the curiosity of mortals, and condescends to amuse them with elfish tricks.[556]He explains to Rinaldo that it is quite a mistake to suppose that there are no inhabited lands beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. The earth, he says, is round, and can be circumnavigated; and cities full of people, worshiping our planets and our sun, are found in the antipodes. Hercules ought to blush for having fixed his pillars where he did.[557]The good understanding established betweenAstarotte and Rinaldo on their journey is one of the prettiest incidents of this strange poem. When they part, the fiend and the paladin have become firm friends. Astarotte vows henceforth to serve Rinaldo for love; and Rinaldo promises to free him from Malagigi's power.[558]
Pulci dealt with the Carolingian Cycle in what may be termed abourgeoisspirit. Whether humorous or earnest, he maintained the tone of Florentine society: and hisMorgantereflects the peculiar conditions of the Medicean circle at the date of its composition. The second great poem on the same group of legends, Boiardo'sOrlando Innamorato, transports us into a very different social and intellectual atmosphere. The highborn Count of Scandiano, reciting his cantos in the huge square castle surrounded by its moat, which still survives to speak of medieval Italy in the midst of Ferrara, had but little in common with Luigi Pulci, whose Tuscan fun and satire amused the merchant-princes of the Via Larga. The value of theOrlando Innamoratofor the student of Italian development is principally this, that it is the most purely chivalrous poem of the Renaissance. Composed before theFrench invasion, and while the classical Revival was still unaccomplished, we find in it an echo of an earlier semi-feudal civility. Unlike the other literary performances of that age, which were produced for the most part by professional humanists, it was the work of a nobleman to whom feats of arms and the chase were familiar, who disdained the common folk (popolaccio,canaglia, as he always calls them), and whose ideal both of life and of art was contained in this couplet[559]:
Matteo Maria Boiardo was almost an exact contemporary of Pulci. He was born about 1434 at his hereditary fief of Scandiano, a village seven miles from Reggio, at the foot of the Apennines, celebrated for its excellent vineyards. His mother was Lucia Strozzi, a member of the Ferrarese house, connected by descent with the Strozzi of Florence. At the age of twenty-eight he married Taddea Gonzaga, daughter of the Count of Novellara. He lived until 1494, when he died at the same time as Pico and Poliziano, in the year of Charles VIII.'s invasion, two years after the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, and four years before Ficino. These dates are not unimportant as fixing the exact epoch of Boiardo's literary activity. At the Court of Ferrara, where the Count of Scandiano enjoyed the friendship of Duke Borso and Duke Ercole, this bard of chivalry held a position worthy of his noble rank and his great talents. The princes of the House of Este employed him as embassador in diplomatic missions of high trust and honor. He alsoadministered for them the government of Reggio and Modena, their two chief subject cities. As a ruler, he was celebrated for his clemency and for his indifference to legal formalities. An enemy, Panciroli, wrote of him: "He was a man of excessive kindness, more fit for writing poems than for punishing crimes." He is even reported to have held that no offense deserved capital punishment—an opinion which at that period could only have been seriously entertained in Italy, and which even there was strangely at variance with the temper of the petty tyrants. Well versed in Greek and Latin literature, he translated Herodotus, parts of Xenophon, theGolden Assof Apuleius, and theAssof Lucian into Italian. He also versified Lucian'sTimonfor the stage, and wrote Latin poems of fair merit. His lyrics addressed to Antonia Caprara prove that, like Lorenzo de' Medici, he was capable of following the path of Petrarch without falling into Petrarchistic mannerism.[560]But his literary fame depends less upon these minor works than on theOrlando Innamorato, a masterpiece of inventive genius, which furnished Ariosto with the theme of theOrlando Furioso. Without theInnamoratotheFuriosois meaningless. The handling and structure of the romance, the characters of the heroes and heroines, the conception of Love and Arms as the double theme of romantic poetry, the interpolation ofnovellein themanner of Boccaccio, and the magic machinery by which the poem is conducted, are due to the originality of Boiardo. Ariosto adopted his plot, continued the story where he left it, and brought it to a close; so that, taken together, both poems form one gigantic narrative, of about 100,000 lines, which has for its main subject the love and the marriage of Ruggiero and Bradamante, mythical progenitors of the Estensi. Yet because the style of Boiardo is rough and provincial, while that of Ariosto is by all consent "divine," Boiardo has been almost forgotten by posterity.
Chivalry at no time took firm root in Italy, where the first act of the Communes upon their achievement of independence had been to suppress feudalism by forcing the nobles to reside as burghers within their walls. The true centers of national vitality were the towns. Here the Latin race assimilated to itself the Teutonic elements which might, if left to flourish in the country, have given a different direction to Italian development. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the immense extension of mercantile activity, the formation of tyrannies, the secular importance of the Papacy, and the absorption of the cultivated classes in humanistic studies, removed the people ever further from feudal traditions. Even the new system of warfare, whereby the scions of noble families took pay from citizens and priests for the conduct of military enterprises, tended to destroy the stronghold of chivalrous feeling in a nation that grew to regard the profession of arms as another branch of commerce. Still Italy could not wholly separate herself from the rest of Europe, and there remained provinces where akind of semi-feudalism flourished. The most important of these undoubtedly was the kingdom of Naples, subject to alternate influence from France and Spain, and governed by monarchs at frequent warfare with their barons. The second was Ferrara, where the House of Este had maintained unbroken lordship from the period when still the Empire was a power in Italy. Here the ancient Lombard traditions of chivalry, the customs of the Marca Amorosa, and the literature of the troubadours still lingered.[561]Externally at least, the manners of the Court were feudal, however far removed its princes may have been in spirit from the ideal of knighthood. In Ferrara, therefore, more than in Florence and Venice, those cities of financiers and traders, could the romance of chivalry be seriously treated by a poet who admired the knightly virtues, and looked back upon the days of Arthur and of Roland as a golden age of honor, far removed but real. While the humanists of Florence indulged their fancy with dreams of Virgil's Saturnian reign, the baron of Ferrara refashioned a visionary world from the wrecks of old romance.[562]
Boiardo did not disdain to assume the style of a minstrel addressing his courtly audience with compliments andcongésat the beginning and ending of each canto. The first opens with these words:
But his spirit is always knightly, and he refrains from the quaint pietism of Pulci's preambles. He is no mere jongleur orCantatore da Banca, but a new Sir Tristram, celebrating in heroic verse the valorous deeds and amorous emotions of which he had himself partaken. Nor does he, like Ariosto, appear before us as a courtier accomplished in the arts of flattery, or as a man of letters anxious above all things to refine his style. Neither the Court-life of Italy nor the humanism of the revival had destroyed in him the spirit of old-world freedom and noble courtesy. At the same time he was so far imbued with the culture of the Renaissance as to appreciate the value of poetic unity and to combine certain elements of classic learning with the material of romance. Setting out with the aim of connecting all the Frankish legends in one poem, he made Orlando his hero; but he perceived that the element of love, which added so great a charm to the Arthurian Cycle, had hitherto been neglected by the minstrels of Charlemagne. He therefore resolved to tell a new tale of the mighty Roland; and the originality of his poem consisted in the fact that he treated the material of theChansons de Gestein the spirit of the Breton legends.[563]Turpin, he asserts with a grave irony, had hidden away the secret of Orlando's love; but he will unfold the truth, believing that no knight was ever the less noble for his love. Accordingly the passion of Orlando for "the fairest of her sex, Angelica," like the wrath of Achilles in theIliad, is the mainspring of Boiardo's poem. Tohis genius we owe the creation of that fascinating princess of the East, as well as the invention of the fountains of Cupid and Merlin, which cause the alternate loves and hates of his heroes and heroines—the whole of that closely-woven mesh of sentiment in which the adventures and the warlike achievements of Paladins and Saracens alike are involved.
In dealing with his subject Boiardo is serious—as serious, that is to say, as a writer of romance can be.[564]His belief in chivalry itself is earnest, though the presentation of knightly prowess runs into intentional extravagance. A dash of Italian merriment mingles with his enthusiasm; but he has none of Pulci's skeptical satiric humor, none of Ariosto's all-pervasive irony. The second thoughts of the burlesque poet or of the humorous philosopher do not cross the warp of his conception, and his exaggerations are romantic. Such a poem as theOrlando Innamoratocould not have been planned or executed in Italy at any other period or under any other circumstances. A few years after Boiardo's death Italy was plunged into the wars that led to her enslavement. Charles V. was born and Luther was beginning to shake Germany. The forces of the Renaissance were in full operation, destroying the faiths and fervors of the medievalworld, closing the old æon with laughter and lamentation, raising new ideals as yet imperfectly apprehended. Meanwhile Boiardo, whose life coincided with the final period of Italian independence, uttered the last note of the bygone age. His poem, chivalrous, free, joyous, with not one stain of Ariosto's servility or of Tasso's melancholy, corresponded to a brief and passing moment in the evolution of the national art. In the pure and vivid beauty which distinguish it, the sunset of chivalry and the sunrise of modern culture blend their colors, as in some far northern twilight of midsummer night. Joyousness pervades its cantos and is elemental to its inspiration—the joy of open nature, of sensual though steadfast love, of strong limbs and eventful living, of restless activity, of childlike security. Boiardo's style reminds us somewhat of Benozzo Gozzoli in painting, or of Piero di Cosimo, who used the skill of the Renaissance to express the cheerfulnaïvetéof a less self-conscious time. It is sad to read the last stanza of theInnamorato, cut short ere it was half completed by the entry of the French into Italy, and to know that so free and freshly-tuned a "native wood-note wild" would never sound again.[565]When Ariosto repieced the broken thread, the spirit of the times was changed. Servitude, adulation, irony, and the meridian splendor of Renaissance art had succeeded to independence, frankness, enthusiasm and the poetry of natural enjoyment. Far more magnificent isAriosto's Muse; but we lack the spontaneity of the elder poet. And as the years advance, the change is more apparent toward decay. The genius of Boiardo might be compared to some high-born lad, bred in the country, pure-hearted, muscular, brave, fair to look upon. That of Ariosto is studious and accomplished with the smile of worldly sarcasm upon his lips. The elegances of Bembo and the Petrarchisti remind one of a hectic scented fop, emasculate and artificial. Aretino resembles his ownbardassonacci, paggi da taverna, flaunting meretricious charms with brazen impudence. Tasso in the distance wears a hair shirt beneath his armor of parade; he is a Jesuit's pupil, crossing himself when he awakes from love-dreams and reveries of pleasure. It was probably the discord between Boiardo's spirit and the prevailing temper of the sixteenth century, far more than the roughness of his verse or the provinciality of his language, that caused him to be so strangely and completely forgotten. In the Italy of Machiavelli and the Borgias, of Michelangelo and Julius II., his aims, enthusiasms and artistic ideals found alike no sympathy. To class him with his own kind, we must go beyond the Alps and seek his brethren in France or England.
Boiardo's merit as a constructive artist can best be measured by the analysis of his plot. Crowded as theOrlando Innamoratois with incidents and episodes, and inexhaustible as may be the luxuriance of the poet's fancy, the unity of his romance is complete. From the moment of Angelica's appearance in the first canto, the whole action depends upon her movements. She withdraws the Paladins to Albracca, and forcesCharlemagne to bear the brunt of Marsilio's invasion alone. She restores Orlando to the French host before Montalbano. It is her ring which frees the fated Ruggiero from Atlante's charms. The nations of the earth are in motion. East, West, and South and North send forth their countless hordes to combat; but these vast forces are controlled by one woman's caprice, and events are so handled by the poet as to make the fate of myriads waver in the balance of her passions. We might compare Boiardo's romance to an immense web, in which a variety of scenes and figures are depicted by the constant addition of new threads. None of the old threads are wasted; not one is merely superfluous. If one is dropped for a moment and lost to sight, it reappears again. The slightest incidents lead to the gravest results. Narratives of widely different character are so interwoven as to aid each other, introducing fresh agents, combining these with those whom we have learned to know, but leaving the grand outlines of the main design untouched.
The miscellaneous details which enliven a tale of chivalry, are grouped round four chief centers—Paris, where the poem opens with the tournament that introduces Angelica, and where, at the end of the second book, all the actors are assembled for the supreme struggle between Christendom and Islam; Albracca, where Angelica is besieged in the far East; Biserta, where the hosts of pagan Agramante muster, and the hero Ruggiero is brought upon the scene; Montalbano, where Charlemagne sustains defeat at the hands of Agramante, Rodamonte, Marsilio, and Ruggiero. In order to combine such distant places in one action,Boiardo was obliged to set geography and time at defiance. Between Tartary and Circassia, France and Spain, Africa and Hungary, the knights make marches and countermarches within the space of a few weeks or even days. All arrive at the same dangerous gates and passes, the same seductive lakes and gardens; for the magical machinery of the romance was more important to the poet's scheme than cosmographical conditions. His more than dramatic contempt for distance was indispensable in the conduct of a romance which admitted of no pause in the succession of attractive incidents, and was also pardonable in an age devoid of accurate geography. His chief aim was to secure novelty, excitement, variety, ideal unity.
Boiardo further showed his grasp of art by the emphatic presentation of the chief personages, whose action determined the salient features of his tale. It is impossible to forget Angelica after her first entrance on the scene at Paris. In like manner Marfisa at Albracca, Rodamonte in the council-chamber at Biserta, Ruggiero on the heights of Mount Carena, Orlando entering the combat before Albracca, Mandricardo passing forth unarmed and unattended to avenge his father's death, are brought so vividly before our eyes, that the earliest impression of each character remains with us in all their subsequent appearances. The inferior actors are introduced with less preparation and diminished emphasis, because they have to occupy subordinate positions, and to group themselves around the heroes; and thus the whole vast poem is like a piece of arras-work, where the strongest definition of form, and the most striking colors, serve to throw into relief the principal figuresamid a multitude of minor shapes. Not less skill is manifested in the preservation of the types of character outlined in these first descriptions. To vary the specific qualities of all those knights engaged in the same pursuit of love and arms, was extremely difficult. Yet Boiardo, sometimes working on the lines laid down by earlier romancers, sometimes inventing wholly new conceptions (as in the case of Rodamonte, Ruggiero, Marfisa, Brandiamante), may be said to have succeeded in this master-stroke of art. The Homeric heroes are scarcely less firmly and subtly differentiated than his champions of chivalry.
Orlando is the ideal of Christian knighthood, fearless, indifferent to wealth, chaste, religious, respectful in his love, courteous toward women, swift to wrath, but generous even in his rage, exerting his strength only when the occasion is worthy of him.[566]His one weakness is the passion for Angelica. Twice he refuses for her sake to accompany Dudone to the help of his liege-lord, and in the fight at Montalbano he is careless of Christendom so long as he can win his lady.[567]Studying Boiardo's delineation of love-lunacy in Orlando, we understand how Ariosto was led by it to the conception of theFurioso. Rinaldo is cast in a somewhat inferior mold. Lion-hearted, fierce, rebellious against Charles, prone to love and hate excessively, he is the type of the feudal baron, turbulent and troublesome to his suzerain. Astolfo, slight, vain, garrulous, fond of finery and flirting, boastful, yet as fearless as the leopards on hisshield, and winning hearts by his courtesy and grace, offers a spirited contrast to the massive vigor of Rinaldo. It was a master-stroke of humor to have provided this fop of a Paladin with the lance of Argalia, whereby his physical weakness is supplemented and his bravery becomes a match for the muscles of the doughtiest champions.[568]Brandimarte presents another aspect of the chivalrous ideal. Fidelity is his chief virtue—loyalty to his love, Fiordelisa, and his hero, Orlando, combined with a delightful frankness and the freshness of untainted youth. He is not wise, but boyish, amorous, of a simple, trustful soul; a kind of Italian Sir Bors. Ferraguto, on the contrary, is all fire and fury, as petulantly fierce in love as in arms, so hot in his temerity that even at times he can forget the laws of honor.[569]Mandricardo's distinctive quality (beside that of generous daring, displayed in his solitary and unarmed quest of Orlando, and in the achievement of Hector's armor) is singular good fortune. Ruggiero has for his special mark victorious beauty, blent with a courtesy and loftiness of soul, that opens his heart to romantic love, and renders him peerless among youthful warriors. Boiardo has spared no pains to impress our imagination with the potency of his unrivaled comeliness.[570]He moves before our eyes like the angelicknight in Mantegna'sMadonna of the Victory, or like Giorgione's picture of the fair-haired and mail-clad donzel, born to conquer by the might of beauty. Agramante, the Eastern Emperor, whose council is composed of thirty-two crowned heads, enhances by his arrogance of youth the world-worn prudence of old Charlemagne. Marfisa, the Amazonian Indian queen, who has the force of twenty knights, and is as cruel in her courage as a famished tigress, sets off the gentler prowess of Brandiamante, Rinaldo's heroic sister. Rodamonte is the blustering, atheistic, insolent young Ajax, standing alone against armies, and hurling defiance at heaven from the midst of a sinking navy.[571]Agricane is distinguished as the knight who loves fighting for its own sake, and disdains culture; Sacripante, as the gentle and fearless suitor of Angelica; Gradasso, as the hyperbolical champion of the Orient, inflamed with a romantic desire to gain Durlindana and Baiardo, the enchanted sword and horse. Gano and Truffaldino, among these paragons of honor, are notable traitors, the one brave when he chooses to abandon craft, the other cowardly. Brunello is the Thersites of the company, a perfect thief, misshapen, mischievous, consummate in his guile.[572]Malagise deals in magic, and has a swarm of demons at his back for all exigences. Turpin's chivalry is tempered with a subtle flavor ofthe priest, exposing him to Boiardo's mockery. Of Oliver and Ogier we hear, accidentally perhaps, but little. Such are some of Boiardo's personages. Not a few were given to him by the old romancers; but these he has new-fashioned to his needs.[573]Others he has molded from his own imagination with such plastic force that they fall short in no respect of the time-honored standard. It is no slight tribute to his creative power that we recognize a real fraternity between these puppets of his fancy and the mythic heroes with whom they are associated. As Boiardo left the actors in his drama, so Ariosto took them up and with but slight change treated them in his continuation of the tale.