Ludovico Ariosto was an Italian poet.
Although the central themes of Ariosto's poem are deeply serious--the power of illusion that drives men forward in restless pursuit of something they can never fully possess, the difficulties of loyalty in an inveterately mutable world --the characteristic note of his poetry is a kind of brilliant gaiety.
Background
He was born at Reggio, in Emilia, Sept. 8, 1474, but while he was still a child his family moved to Ferrara. Under the rule of the house of Este, Ferrara was an independent political power of some importance as well as a great center of Renaissance culture. Ariosto spent his life in the service of the Este and his great poem, the Orlando Furioso, was written, ostensibly, to celebrate their house.
Education
At the age of fifteen, Ariosto entered the University of Ferrara and spent five years studying law--much against his will, he recorded. Released from this bondage, he studied Latin with the humanist Gregorio da Spoleto, and it is to this period that his earliest work, verse in both Latin and Italian, must probably be assigned.
Career
His first datable poem, the Latin ode "To Philiroe," seems to have been written in 1494 when Charles VIII of France was preparing to invade Italy. In this neat little Horatian exercise Ariosto confesses, with the largeness of extreme youth, to an Epicurean distaste for the affairs of the great world.
A more serious threat to his studies was the death in 1500 of his father, an official of the Ferrarese state. As the eldest son, Ariosto found himself responsible for a family of five sisters and four brothers. Reluctantly, he had to set about earning his living seriously.
He had already been in the service of the Este for several years, and in 1503 he joined the household of the powerful young cardinal, Ippolito d'Este.
Ariosto seems to have hoped that the cardinal would accept him as a court poet, but he soon found that less intangible services were required of him. His position is hard to define in modern terms, for it combined quite humble personal duties with those of civil servant and minor diplomat. Ariosto always resented the constraints of a courtier's life, complaining about the amount of work expected of him.
As his experience increased, he was entrusted with a number of diplomatic missions, some of them involving considerable personal risk. Ferrara's most dangerous enemy at this time was the pope, Julius II, who had put himself at the head of a confederacy of Italian states with the purpose of driving the French from Italy, and therefore disapproved strongly of the pro-French policy followed by the Este. Ariosto was sent on several precipitate trips to Rome to explain and if possible defend Ferrarese policy. The most hazardous of these missions was undertaken in 1510 on behalf of his master the cardinal who had incurred the pope's particular displeasure by forcibly imposing himself on a rich abbey near Modena. Judging it imprudent to appear in person, Ippolito sent Ariosto to plead his cause. Julius, who had threatened to have a previous messenger from Ferrara hanged, ordered Ariosto to be thrown into the Tiber. Fortunately the poet had friends in the papal court and with their aid he was able to escape from Rome.
A visit to Florence, in 1513, was to have happier results. He was there during the elaborate celebrations held to mark the Feast of St. John the Baptist. In a poem he describes how, for him, the rich scene was dominated by a single figure: the figure of a beautiful woman in a black dress, her blond hair caught up in a subtle net. Ariosto was a circumspect man and he does not name her, but there is little doubt that she was Alessandra, wife of a certain Tito Strozzi. Alessandra was to be the great love of his life, a deep source of tranquil happiness and joy, but even when two years later her husband died, their relation still had to be kept secret, for Ariosto enjoyed certain ecclesiastical benefices which he would have forfeited on marriage. They did eventually marry, sometime between 1526 and 1530, but even then the ceremony was kept secret.
In October 1515, his great poem, written, as he said, "with long vigils and labors," was at last ready to be taken to the printers. It was published in April the following year. The Orlando Furioso is one of those works which fulfill the deepest aspirations of its age and the response was immediate. The greatest of Ariosto's literary contemporaries, Machiavelli, wrote a year later: "I have recently been reading Orland Furioso of Ariosto; and truly the poem is beautiful everywhere and in many parts marvelous." Ippolito, however, despite the fact that the poem was dedicated to him and contained a number of very flattering references, did not show any great enthusiasm. "If I have praised him in my work," Ariosto wrote, "he says I have done so to please myself and in idleness; he would sooner I had attended to his service." This ungenerous response may well have precipitated the rupture which took place in 1517 when Ippolito announced that he was transferring his court to Hungary where he possessed a valuable bishopric. Alleging the ill effects which the Hungarian climate and cuisine would have on his health, Ariosto flatly refused to go. Ippolito was not the man to forgive an act of open rebellion, and in the same year Ariosto left his service for that of his brother, Alphonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara. The post was still far from a sinecure, but at least it did not involve spending his life on horseback and so gave him more time to attend to what he called his "studies." As a man, he performed the services the world required of him loyally enough, but his heart was elsewhere. The real business of his life was the creation, and then through years of patient work, the revision, of his great poem. In a letter written in 1519, he describes himself as "making a few additions" to the Furioso, and in 1521 he brought out a second edition, revised but not differing substantially from the previous one.
To this period, roughly 1517 to 1525, belongs his only other major work, the set of seven so-called Satires. They are in fact verse epistles in the Horatian manner, discursive, colloquial, intimate, masterpieces of the carpet-slipper style. Though the "Satires" should be read as poems rather than autobiographical essays, they do in fact throw a great deal of light on the man. We see him struggling, with humor and integrity though without much success, to "maintain a poet's dignity and ease" in a brilliant but uncomfortable age. Less important is the group of comedies which he wrote for the court theater of Ferrara. They are too closely based on classical Roman models to be much to modern taste, and they show relatively little of Ariosto's true spirit. The liveliest of them is La Lena ("The Bawd"), first produced in 1528, which contains some vivid pictures from contemporary Ferrarese life.
Ariosto's finances were always troublesome, and in 1519 the constant worry about his ecclesiastical benefices was increased by an interminably protracted lawsuit. By 1522 his fortunes were at a low ebb. Ferrara was again at war with the pope, and the poet's salary grew at first irregular, then dried up altogether. He went to ask the duke for a job that would bring him enough to live on. He was given the post of ducal commissioner at Garfagnana, a small town in western Tuscany, about twenty miles north of Lucca. Garfagnana had only recently returned to Ferrarese allegiance and was badly in need of someone capable of imposing a little law and order. Ariosto arrived in this nest of brigands in February 1522, and spent the three most testing years of his life there. "I confess frankly," he wrote to the duke, "that I am not the man to govern other men, because I have too much pity." He had only twelve archers at his disposal, and his difficulties were increased by the fact that the duke, unwilling to alienate local sympathies, frequently refused to support him in the measures he recommended.
Back in Ferrara again in 1525, the last and relatively the easiest period of his life began. He was recognized universally as the greatest living Italian poet, and he had saved enough money during his spell at Garfagnana to buy a house (Number 67 in the modern Via Ariosto). There he set about preparing the third and final version of the Furioso. Thoroughly revised in accordance with the exacting linguistic standards of the day and enlarged by six new cantos, it was published in 1532.