Petrarch

“But I put Petrarch before all the rest” wrote Tasso in the Discorsi del poema eroico, long familiar with the Fragmenta, which he had thoroughly assimilated at an early stage and later returned to, particularly when analysing in detail literary genres and related hierarchies. With Petrarch as the model for sixteenth century lyric poetry, although criticised and even filtered through original work, Tasso meditated long and hard on the possibility of deploying the Pertrarchan lyric code within the framework of the epic. Virgil’s Aeneas and Dido story pointed to the use of love episodes as a way of adding to the main plot on war, but was also a way of combining the lofty style suited to the epic with the middle style of the lyric. Taken throughout by Tasso as a model for his lyric poetry, and referred to in his self-commentary, Petrarch’s Canzoniere was thus a formidable precedent, used for each of the love episodes of the Liberata, in the complex dynamics linking Tancredi, Erminia and Clorinda (revolving to a great extent around the idea of the enemy lover and love as a disease), but also in the lines describing Armida’s beauty as an attraction (and distraction) first for the Crusaders’ camp and later for Rinaldo.