Scipione Gonzaga

Born into the Gonzaga family in 1542 through the Gonzaga marquises of Gazzuolo, Scipione was destined from an early age for an ecclesiastical career, and undertook his studies in Padua. In the early 1560s in Padua, he met and developed a friendship with Tasso. In 1564, he encouraged the meetings of the Accademia degli Eterei (Academy of the Ethereals), to which Tasso was also admitted. During this time, a friendship was forged that was to last for thirty years (up until Gonzaga’s death, in January 1593), with two moments of great importance in Tasso’s life. The first of these was in 1575-1576, when Gonzaga was his main interlocutor during the revision of the Liberata (deriving from this collaboration is the Gonzaga codex, one of the most important manuscripts for the text of the poem) and at the same time tried privately to arrange for Tasso to move to the Medici courts since he was now unhappy with the situation at Ferrara. The second moment occurred after Tasso’s escape from Sant’Anna, when Gonzaga’s palace in Rome (he had meanwhile been appointed Cardinal (in December 1587) became a place of refuge for Tasso at the end of that year, and again from November 1588 to August 1589; at times, that is, when Tasso was tired and frequently intolerant of court life. Tasso’s work contains clear traces of this longstanding friendship. These emerge above all the many Lettere poetiche, but also in a series of verse compositions (see in particular Rime, 515-516, on the young Tasso’s admittance to the “Ethereals” group), and in his dedication in the Discorsi dell’arte poetica, written when he was a young man in Padua but printed only in 1587. Useful also in studying Tasso is Gonzaga’s autobiography, entitled Commentariorum rerum suarum libri tres, printed for the first time in 1791 (now available in an Italian version edited by D. Della Terza, Modena, Panini, 1987).