Petrarch

The influence of Petrarch on Ariosto’s writings is linked to the poet’s progressive interest in Pietro Bembo’s linguistic codification, which was all the more marked in the third  reworking of the Furioso in 1532. Ariosto however had a dual standpoint towards this modern model: on the one hand Petrarch guaranteed the regularity and total decipherability of his poetic language, on the other it allowed him to operate a ‘deviation’ as to the ‘norm’ within which Ariosto in any case moved, with the free hand that Petrarch’s style gave him. As with Dante, also Petrarch acts as a mediator for classical models: for example Furioso XVI 3, 5-6: ‘Vorria il miser fuggire; e come cervo / ferito, ovunque va, porta la freccia’ looks to Virgil’s, Aeneid, IV, 69-73: ‘qualis coniecta cerva sagitta […] haeret lateri letalis harundo’ through Petrarch’s mediation, Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, CCIX 9-11: ‘E qual cervo ferito di saetta / col ferro avvelenato dentr’al fianco / fugge’. Whilst however Dante’s model functions as a new linguistic source for the reformulation of classical images or stylistic features, Petrarch’s model acts above all on the plane of the significative (the rhythm and sound of words) and at a syntactic level as concerns the so called ‘syntactic delay’, given Arisoto’s great use of the prolepsis of subordination. The mediation of models offered by Petrarch is also a conceptual mediation between the lyrical-introspective horizon of the Canzoniere and chivalrous narrative language, which finds a possible synthesis in the knights’ restlessness.

After Altichiero, Portrait of Petrarch, 1379, drawing, "De Viris Illustribus", ms. lat. 6069 f, Paris, Biblioteque Nationale