Dialoghi (1578-1595)

Tasso’s main form of writing during his years of confinement had been the dialogue, which at first seems to take second place in the period after Sant’Anna, since Tasso was busy working on the Torrismondo and his collection of lyrical poems, and rewriting and correcting the dialogues already written, starting with the Messaggiero. His prose writing became more substantial towards the end of the 1580s, with the dialogue on clemency addressed to the Medici family, with the aim of obtaining their patronage, and later with a dialogue on the nature of love (Cataneo overo de le conclusioni amorose) and another on art, this last with two famous Florentines, Landino and Ficino, busy discussing divine art, the art of nature and human art, in obvious connection with the thinking behind the Mondo creato. This marks Tasso’s growing focus in his dialogues on the major themes of the day, in an attempt to grasp their characteristics and modalities. Continuing to structure his dialogues on texts by Plato and Aristotle, and on the commentaries by the Neoplatonics and St Thomas, Tasso discussed themes such as friendship (dedicated to Manso) and virtue. His last dialogue, Il Conte overo de l’imprese, is exceptional both in scope and subject-matter. Based on a close reading of sixteenth century treatises on the impresa genre (“an expression of a significant thought of the soul”), it offers a vast collection of mottoes and imprese (some composed by Tasso himself), and a keen reflection on the relationship of meaning between word and image, at a crucial moment in the transition phase involving the Renaissance, Mannerism and the Baroque period.