De diversis amoribus

Ariosto’s best known ode in Latin is the elegy LIV, entitled De diversis amoribus (various loves), datable in 1503. The work, which is clearly autobiographical, was written when he was commander of Canossa, in the same period in which Ludovico conceived his first illegitimate son Giovanbattista with his maid Maria. The way in which the poet flitted from one love to another,  quite happily also skipped from one literary style to another, abandoned his studies in law to become a poet, was court servant and soldier (‘Iuratusque pio celebri sub principe miles / excepto horrisonae martia signa tubae’, vv. 41-42) is indicative of his voluble and inconstant mental dimension. What moves the poet is a lack of constancy in his life and sentiments which however keeps firm and invariable his faith in the passion of love, whoever the women the object of that passion, as is written in the last verse of the elegy: ‘igne tamen perpetue semper amo’. This work, composed of 70 verses, expresses the young Ariosto’s sense of incompleteness and fickleness  (‘Dum vaga mens aliud poscat, procul este, Catones’, v. 59) during his first task for the House of Este away from home, and seems to be shot through with an existential restlessness that, it would seem, could be linked to the poet’s dissatisfaction at having been given the post at the lonely fortress of  Canossa and the forced suspension of his lessons with Sebastiano dall’Aquila and his humanistic studies. More than the style of Horace in this ode one feels the influence of Catullus’ hexameter and the elegiac distich. Scholars agree that the work is highly autobiographical, for that praise of intellectual freedom that seems to here anticipate a more mature period of Ariosto’s writings, but they all further agree that his subsequent autobiographical works in the vernacular were far better.