Virginio Ariosto

Was born in Ferrara in 1509 and died in the same city in 1560. He was Ludovico’s second illegitimate son, born of Orsolina Sassomarino, a maidservant in the Ariosto household. At the age of thirteen he followed his father to Castelnuovo di Garfagnana; Ludovico personally took care of the education of this favourite son of his. In Satire VI, talking to Pietro Bembo, Ariosto asks for a good teacher for his son, who is free of the vice (very common among tutors) of sodomy. Perhaps after Bembo’s fruitless search, Virginio was sent to Scandiano where he studied under the humanist Antonio Caraffa. He was legitimised by Ludovico in 1530 and declared his heir. He studied law at Padua university in 1531. Again in 1531, Ludovico wrote to Bembo asking him to keep an eye on the boy, who was no keen student. Since an early age, Virginio was the beneficiary of ecclesiastical income but was given a post only two years before he died, in 1558, when he became a canon of the cathedral of Ferrara. He wrote poetry in Latin and the vernacular and it was he who composed the Prologue for Ariosto’s play I Studenti, left unfinished by Ludovico at the fourth scene of act IV and continued by Virginio. He is also the author of the Imperfetta, first staged in the presence of Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Parma, in 1556, and which Virginio himself acted in several times. He recorded several episodes of his father’s life and also promulgated certain of his minor works, such as Satire, in the edition produced by Doni in 1550, Lena and the Negromante published by Dolce in 1551. In the Ariosto family, Virginio, once his father had died, attracted the dislike of his uncles Galasso and Alessandro to the point that, in order to reduce the power left him by Ludovico in his will, they decide to legitimise the poet’s other son Giovanbattista.