Ariosto mostly worked at drawing up the Rhymes in the period that went from the end of the XV century to the years of the first draft of the Orlando Furioso, hence circa 1516. He however also worked on lyrics in the vernacular during his period in Garfagnana [1522-1525]. Ludovico never put together his lyrics into an organic collection of his own; these works were published posthumously, together with his Latin lyrics, in1546, by Iacopo Coppa, who got the materials from those held in custody by the poet’s heirs. This edition contains 3 canzoni, 31 sonnets, 9 madrigals and 18 chapters in terza rima. There are also some stanzas and a spurious canzone, erroneously attributed to Ariosto. A number of unauthorised copies had been circulated before 1546. The poet certainly did not adopt the same care and attention for the Rhymes as he did for the Furioso, as is evident from the fragmented and substantially apographal traits to the text. In 1924 Giuseppe Fatini drew up a new edition of Ariosto’s lyrics, along the lines of a preceding XVIII century work by Paolo Rolli, which took into account, apart the 1546 edition, two manuscripts kept at the Municipal Library in Ferrara. In recent years, Cesare Bozzetti has worked on another edition that avails itself of Vaticano-Rossiano 633, subsequent to 1522, not written directly by the poet but ‘controlled’ by him. Ariosto’s lyrics fall within that category typical of the region of the Po Valley that is Petrarch’s courtly lyrics and which did not conform to Bembo’s normalization, with narrative and realistic solutions that are not structured as per rigid models. From a linguistic point of view we here see how Boiardo’s typical XV century Po Valley regionalism was superseded, and as to structure one notes the lack of a univocal and organic centre of gravity. The Rhymes give life to a singular experiment of ‘middling’ poetic communication, set between daily life and colloquial poetic instances, without unified thematic elements.

Cosmè Tura, Calliope [?], 1447-63, painting, National Gallery, London, from Belfiore’s private study in Ferrara