By the time of his death in 1534 he had accumulated about three hundred major pieces. The battle of Ravenna, which was fought on Easter Day, 11 April, 1512, between Spain and the Papacy on one side, and France, allied with Ferrara, on the other, was won by Alfonso, who by a brilliant manoeuvre brought his artillery up on the side of the battlefield, raking the enemy upon the flank just as the French were about to retreat. This was not the first time that artillery had been used in Italy in an important encounter: when Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494, he brought 43 pieces of ordnance, 14 of which weighed 2,137 kilograms; they were drawn by 23 horses and 100 men; but the battle of Ravenna showed conclusively for the first time that artillery could have a decisive effect upon the result.1

Ariosto praises Alfonso for his victory, won at so little cost to his side, in comparison with the expensive victories of the pagan armies in his poem,2 and he refers admiringly to Alfonso’s famous cannons, Terremoto and Diavolo, to which Ruggiero is compared.3 Yet his denunciation of artillery is one of the most forceful utterances in the work. When Orlando casts King Cimosco’s anachronistic cannon into the North Sea, he shouts:

‘Accursèd and abominable tool,

In Tartarean depths devised and forged

By that Beelzebub beneath whose rule

The world to its destruction thus is urged,

I re-consign you to the deepest hole

Of the Abyss whence you were first disgorged!’4

But his noble action is to no avail, for ‘in our grandfathers’ time, or just before’,

The hellish instrument, which fathoms deep

(More than a hundred) hidden in the sea

For years remained, was by vile craftsmanship

Raised to the top; and first in Germany,

Where they experimented, step by step,

To find what sort of engine this might be,

The devil sharpening their acumen,

They learned the damage it could do to men.

O hideous invention! By what means

Did you gain access to the human heart?

Because of you all glory’s fled long since;

No honour now attaches to the art

Of soldiering; all valour is pretence;

Not Good but Evil seems the better part;

Gone is all courage, chivalry is gone,

In combat once the only paragon.

How many lords, alas! how many more

Among the bravest of our cavaliers

Have died and still must perish in this war

By which you brought the world to bitter tears

And Italy left stricken to the core?

This is the worst device, in all the years

Of the inventiveness of humankind,

Which e’er imagined was by evil mind.1

Until the development of artillery as a decisive weapon, in which Alfonso played so important a role as pioneer, battles were fought on a comparatively small scale. Mercenary warfare in Italy is no longer believed by military historians to have been as bloodless as Machiavelli made out, but far larger numbers of casualties occurred after 1494.2 When Ariosto visited the field of Ravenna on 12 April 1512 (the day after the battle), the dead lay so close together that for many miles it was impossible to step without walking on them – a spectacle which he describes in one of his minor poems3 and which is prophesied by Melissa in the Furioso when she foretells Alfonso’s victory:

‘Such skill he’ll show, so masterful a lance

He’ll brandish on Romagna’s battlefield,

That he’ll secure the victory to France,

Forcing Pope Julius and Spain to yield.

The horses, fetlock-deep, can scarce advance

For human blood which saturates the weald –

The dead so many, and so small the trench

For Germans, Spaniards, Greeks, Italians, French.’1

Though Melissa has remarkable powers of prevision, they do not enable her to see just what sort of lance it is that Alfonso will brandish on the battlefield of Ravenna; but Ariosto knew, and he had seen the result. His condemnation of such means of slaughter is given expression only in the third and last edition of his poem, occurring in the material which he added between 1521 and 1532. For four years of this period he was living in independent retirement, in his own house, a circumstance which perhaps throws light on the reservations which patronage imposes.

Enough has been said to show that part of Ariosto’s purpose was to awaken response to the ideals of Christendom and chivalry. Yet the Orlando Furioso is not primarily a work of exhortation (far from it) and to stress such powerful and stirring utterances at the expense of the exuberant vitality of the narrative or of the beauty, elegance and wit of its pleasure-giving stanzas would do disservice to the poem as a whole. Ariosto places all the fertility of his creative genius and all the skill of his poetic art at the disposal of his readers, whom it is his delight to entertain, move and surprise. The apparently random introduction of one story after another, the abrupt transitions, the cliff-hanging ends of cantos, the leaps from the sublime to the grotesque, from tragic to comic, are all part of the enjoyment he desires to provide. Such contrasts are characteristic of other arts of the Renaissance. The tone-colours of sixteenth-century instruments, more varied and less homogeneous than those of the modern symphony orchestra, offered a range of sound that was sometimes sensuous, sometimes austere, sometimes earthy, sometimes bitter-sweet. This was the Renaissance sound, which, like the Renaissance taste, gave pleasure by sharp contrasts. The menus which survive of Renaissance banquets show that sweet, sour and savoury dishes were served in combinations which some modern palates might find strange: stuffed fat geese flavoured with cheese, sugar and cinnamon, for instance, or almonds in garlic sauce. An exuberance of appetite, apparent from sixteenth-century menus, is matched by the gusto with which the cornucopia of Ariosto’s creation was poured forth and with which it was relished. The element of surprise, so important an ingredient in Ariosto’s art, was also present at the table. In 1532, at a banquet in Venice, a mock pie was prepared which when cut was found to contain a number of live birds which flew out and all about the room.

Like the Renaissance musician and the Renaissance chef, Ariosto contrasts his effects, stimulating the reader’s responses and playing upon them with masterly skill. The randomness of the poem’s structure is only apparent; its purpose is to offer a rich diversity, a sense of splendour and plenitude, regaling the mind and senses with vivid awareness of the multifarious-ness of life. Ariosto is firmly in control of all his stage properties, his magic paraphernalia and his immense cast of characters. He remembers who has the magic ring, where the magic shield is and who has won whose helmet. He knows when he intends to move up thousands of troops for the siege of Paris and when to focus on two knights in single combat, when to scatter his protagonists to the farthest corners of the earth and how to bring them back. The entire globe is his stage but even this does not suffice: part of his action spills over on to the moon, that nightmare repository of so many futile actions and vain hopes. Travel is achieved mostly on horses. Some of them have names and are well known to readers of earlier romances: Baiardo, Brigliadoro, Frontino and Rabicano. They create problems of logistics when separated from their riders, but Ariosto is scrupulous in accounting for them. Twice he entrusts a horse to Bradamante’s care; there is good stabling at Montalbano. Baiardo, in his concern for his master, Rinaldo, plays a more than equine role. When Orlando has to face the vile king of Frisia’s cannon, Ariosto arranges for him to leave his irreplaceable charger, Brigliadoro, safely behind. One manifestation of Orlando’s madness is that he leaves him unattended and that he deals savagely with other horses.

Journeys by sea, though less frequent in the poem than journeys on horseback, are infinitely more perilous, reflecting perhaps the reality of sea travel in Ariosto’s day. Almost always the ships are blown off course; hurricanes, whirlwinds and shipwrecks are all part of the repertoire which Fortune commands, tossing the characters now here, now there, diversifying their adventures and extending and complicating the plot.