II
A keen observer of human nature, Ariosto was a man whose personality made him the ideal instrument to record a shift in attitude to the past contained in the notion of custom or usage. He loathed institutions at all times—patronage, church preferment, titles (he never used the title his father had bought from the Emperor Frederick III in 1472), marriage, and stilted forms of address (his second satire mocks the Spanish word signor that replaced the heartier Italian fratello in curial speech).[14] In his
third satire, he records how he was sent to Rome in 1513 to congratulate Giovanni de' Medici on his elevation to the papacy. Ariosto found his former friend so puffed by his election as to forbid access, leaving the poet to trudge home in the rain, where he took supper alone in his lodgings.[15] He practiced—but begrudged—persistence, the ability to serve as they do who only stand and wait that characterized the real life of a courtier more than the finer accomplishments Castiglione recommended. On another occasion he wrote to his friend Benedetto Fantino, chancellor to his patron Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, of his failure to reach the newly installed Cardinal Bibbiena, although he knew the man well,
either because he always has around him such a large circle of people that one cannot easily penetrate, or because one has to contend with ten entrance ways before arriving in his presence: such a procedure is obnoxious to me. I am never sure if I will see him, nor would I really try to see either him or any man in that palace, were it not that my regard for you forces me to act against my nature.[16]
Unlike Bradamante, Ariosto could not wave a magic staff to get through the crowd.
In the years after 1515, when the text of the first edition went to press, Ariosto struggled against the system of patronage that structured his life as a courtier. As indifferent to the institutions of Rome as he was to life in the cold climate of Hungary, he left Cardinal Ippolito's service. He waged a lawsuit with the Este over his cousin Rinaldo's inheritance. And then from 1522 to 1525, bowed by financial need, he served at his own suggestion as governor of the Garfagnana, a barbarous mountain province far from Ferrara, far from his mistress Alessandra Benucci Strozzi.
In his fourth satire, the poet complains of the constant noise made by the confluence of rivers beneath his castle walls. A visit to Castelnuovo confirms the tumult, but the noise may also be symbolic of the wild mountain populace whose ways Ariosto struggled to control.[17] As governor of the lawless and rugged Garfagnana he sought to play the part
of Spenser's Artegall, the knight of justice. He would not have the duke think that "through any fault of mine there is lacking justice, equity, or mercy" ("di mia volontà la iustizia, la equità e la misericordia, dove si conviene, non abbia luogo").[18] But if the grim scenes of his Cinque Canti were written during his residence at Castelnuovo, set in a north-south valley formed by slopes so steep that the morning sun emerges only in time to set early in the afternoon, Ariosto rejected them for another lesson he learned there.
For the local people, backed by the duke, refused to give up their weapons, to pay for more than twelve military deputies, or to let Ariosto form a local militia.[19] As captain, Ariosto found himself, like so many Renaissance officials, both constrained by his superiors and at the same time the source of constraint on others. Duke Alfonso permitted him no iron man (Talus) such as Spenser's Artegall would have. Without the proper means to eliminate injustice, Ariosto was forced to maintain order with prudence.
Having survived a bad period, Ariosto returned to Ferrara for the last eight years of his life, tempered by the experience of rule but also relieved of it. He himself acquiesced to the social order—not submitted, but acquiesced. The world was changing during Ariosto's final years, and he quieted his natural longing for individual expression, his distaste for mere social convention, his unblinkered perception of the motives of men and patrons. When he made his four large additions to his poem—the episode of Olympia, the Tower of Tristan, Marganorre,[20] and Ruggiero in Hungary—Ariosto had gained what Emilio Bigi identifies as a new appreciation of the moral and religious values of traditional ethics—courtesy, loyalty, faith in divine providence.[21] He bought a house with its famous inscription "parva sed mihi apta" ("small, but suitable to me"). The house is impressive even today, and the somewhat ironic inscription may have been put there earlier. The house was located, not closer to, but a little farther away from, where Alessandra Benucci lived.[22] Ariosto ultimately married her, but only, it seems, to assure her inheritance. They kept their relationship secret not
because he retained church benefices—Catalano has shown that he had given them up—but because Ariosto was uninterested in the social sanction of wedlock.[23]