Part 1 — CHAPTER VII. (continued 2)

In taking up the thread of Boiardo's narrative, Ariosto made use of all his predecessor had invented. He adopted the machinery of the two fountains, the lance of Argalia, Angelica's ring, Rabicane, and the magic arts of Atalante. The characters of the Innamorato reappear with slight but subtle changes and with somewhat softened names in the Furioso.[595] Ariosto, again, followed Boiardo closely in his peculiar method of interweaving novelle with the main narrative; of suspending one story to resume another at a critical moment; of prefacing his cantos with reflections, and of concluding them with a courteous license.[596] Lastly, Ariosto is at great pains, while connecting his poem with the Innamorato, to make it intelligible by giving short abstracts at intervals of the previous action. Yet throughout this long laborious work of continuation he preserves a studied silence respecting the poet to whom he owed so much. Was this due to the desire of burying Boiardo's fame beneath his own? Did he so contrive that the contemporary repute of the Innamorato should serve to float his Furioso and then be forgotten by posterity? If so, he calculated wisely; for this is what almost immediately happened. Though the Orlando Innamorato was printed four times before 1513—once at Venice in 1486, once at Scandiano in 1495, and again at Venice in 1506, 1511, and 1513—and though it continued to be reprinted at Venice through the first half of the sixteenth century, yet the sudden silence of the press after this period shows that the Furioso had eclipsed Boiardo's fame. Still the integral connection between the two poems could not be overlooked; and just about the period of Ariosto's death, Francesco Berni conceived the notion of rewriting Boiardo's epic with the expressed intention of correcting its diction and rendering it more equal in style to the Orlando Furioso. This rifacimento was published in 1541, after his death. The mysterious circumstances that attended its publication, and the nature of the changes introduced by Berni into the substance of Boiardo's poem, will be touched upon when we arrive at this illustrious writer of burlesque verse. It is enough to mention here that Berni's version was printed twice between 1541 and 1545, and that then, like the original, it fell into comparative oblivion till the end of the last century. Meanwhile the second rifacimento by Domenichi appeared in 1545; and though this new issue was a mere piece of impudent book-making, it superseded Berni's masterpiece during the next two hundred years. The critics of the last century rediscovered Berni's rifacimento, and began to quote Boiardo's poem under his name, treating the real author as an ignorant and uncouth writer of a barbarous dialect. Thus one of the most original poets of the fifteenth century, to whom Italy owes the form and substance of the Furioso, has been thrust aside and covered with contempt, by a curious irony of fortune, owing to the very qualities that ought to have insured his immortality. Used by Ariosto as the ladder for ascending to Parnassus; by Berni as an exercising ground for the display of style; by Domenichi as the means of getting his name widely known, the Orlando Innamorato served any purposes but that of its great author's fame. Panizzi, by reprinting the original poem along with the Orlando Furioso, restored Boiardo at length to his right place in Italian literature. From that time forward it has been impossible to overlook his merits or to underestimate Ariosto's obligations to so gifted and original a master.