Venice

That most powerful Republic, just out of a war with Ferrara, between1482 and 1484, and the much harder resistance against the League of Cambrai, (especially conceived by Julius II and his European allies against Venice), is a city that only enters into Ariosto’s biography in the latter years of his life. To Venice Ludovico went on 22 January 1531 almost certainly to accompany Duke Alfonso I d’Este, who had a meeting there with Francesco Sforza in November 1530. Of a second presence of Ariosto we are told of in a letter by Alessandra Benucci, written together with Ariosto, sent to Giovanfrancesco Strozzi: between the summer and the autumn of 1531, after having been unwell at Bagni di Abano and having stayed, to convalesce, in Padua with the ‘cavaliere degli Obici’ (Gausparro Obizi), he reached Venice together with Duke Alfonso albeit being unable to any longer visit Strozzi, or Bembo, who was waiting for him. It was probably on this occasion that Ludovico risked drowning, according to what is recounted by the doctor from Ferrara Antonio Musa Brasavola, author of De medicinis purgantibus. Once in Venice Duke Alfonso decided he wanted to go for a tour of the lagoon by boat, with Ludovico who however did not like being afloat very much. Despite the rather small dimensions of the boat, the Duke nevertheless decided to head out for the open sea but the arrival of a storm obliged the Duke, Ariosto, doctor Brasavola and others to gulp down gallons of water and fear impending wreckage. In Venice in1531 the great Titian drew a portrait of his poet friend for the purpose of decorating with a xylography the third edition of Furioso produced in Ferrara in 1532. Also linked to Venice is another portrait of  Ludovico that appears in the frontispiece of Furioso printed in the city in the lagoon in 1530 under the supervision of Zoppino from Ferrara.