King Agramante, ‘bowed by his disgrace’,2 likewise retreats. When night falls the remnants of the African and Spanish troops are entrenched within their stockade.

The bravura with which Ariosto sustains his description of this multiple encounter (for good measure, he complicates it further by a long and intricate digression) is an instance of the skill and zest for which he is famed. The self-generating energy of the action, the triumph of victory, the pathos of defeat, the courage, the cowardice, the exhilaration and the terror of battle, are here presented with the delight, yet at the same time with the detachment, of creative power fulfilled. Here is the hand of a master, in command.

One secret of the fascination of the Furioso lies in the mingling of human and superhuman dimensions, in the transitions from everyday experience to sublime and unattainable states of being. The battle-scenes exceed the human dimension in their ferocity. Not only do heads, arms, and other parts of the body, sometimes whole torsos, fly in all directions: Orlando skewers six warriors on one lance and leaves a seventh dying on the ground, the lance being full; Rodomonte scythes the crowd in Paris as though they were so many cabbage-stalks or turnip-tops. Yet there are moments of anticlimax, deliberately contrived, which reduce the knights to size, as when Ferraù, stooping to drink at a stream, drops his helmet in the water; or when Ferraù and Rinaldo continue to fight, unaware that the prize for whom they contend, namely Angelica, has ridden off and left them; or when Ruggiero, having performed Perseus-like miracles of agility upon the hippogriff in his battle with the sea-monster, cannot get his armour off in time to take advantage of the naked Angelica.

Ariosto’s relish for the telling of violence is unmistakable, but it is not a morbid relish; there are times when it resembles rather the rumbustious gusto of an animated cartoon. When Cloridano and Medoro creep about the battlefield in the dark, looking for Dardinello, Cloridano takes the opportunity to slay as many of the sleeping Christians as he can. Among them is Grillo, who has drunk himself into a stupor, his head propped on a barrel. As Cloridano cuts his head off,

Together blood and wine (which had approached

A vatful) spurted from the tub thus broached.1

Two lovers, sleeping in each other’s arms, are decapitated at one blow:

O happy death! O sweetest destiny!

I vow, as with their bodies they embraced,

Their spirits rose to heaven interlaced.2

These touches of macabre humour are perhaps among the ingredients which have the least appeal for serious-minded readers; but in whatever style Ariosto treats the subject of death, whether superhuman, grotesque, comic or elegiac, he does not linger, like Tasso, on the aesthetic effect of drops of blood like rubies on white flesh. The famous simile of the death of Dardinello which has already been quoted and a stanza comparing a vertical sword-wound to a ribbon of red silk,3 two exceptions which come to mind, are both imitated from the Iliad. Mandricardo’s fascinated contemplation of the bodies slain by Orlando brings in an alien element, intended perhaps to point the difference between the pagan and the Christian character.4

A fairy-tale quality, not unlike that of folk-lore, is to be seen, as well as humour, in Ariosto’s handling of ogres and monsters. Not all of these come creeping forth from the lairs of Celtic forests; some are from Greece. The land orc, unconvincing in his (its) ambiguity, is a latter-day Polyphemus, but without his primitive sublimity.1 The sea orc, on the other hand, is well imagined, a truly formidable monster, a marine emanation from the unfathomable deep, shapeless and measureless, which only superhuman powers can overcome.2 Erifilla and Alcina’s hybrid frontier guards, for all their allegorical self-importance, are like papier mâché figures in a carnival.3 The most successful of all the fee-fo-fi-fummery is perhaps the circumstantial and compelling narrative in Canto XV, where Astolfo first subdues the giant, Caligorante, and then kills the monster, Orrilo.

Caligorante is a hunter whose grisly dwelling is adorned with the remains of the human beings he has eaten. He is equipped with a magic net, the same in which Vulcan had caught Mars and Venus in flagrante. This trap, at the slightest touch, curls round the victim, and has never failed its present owner, until Astolfo so terrifies him by a blast on his magic horn that the giant tumbles into it:

A trapper trapped, he falls into the net,

Which round his body twists itself and wraps,

And brings that mighty strength to a collapse.4

Next, Astolfo defeats Orrilo, a much more difficult task, for Orrilo’s limbs mend as soon as they are severed; even his head can be picked up and will join on to his neck. Ariosto tells this tale with rollicking relish:

Orrilo’s fist is severed, club and all;

Both arms Astolfo chops, complete with hands.

Now with a transverse stroke, now vertical,

He slices and truncates and flying sends

Orrilo’s limbs; but wheresoe’er they fall,

He picks them up and instantly their ends

Re-join the parent stump and so once more

His members function as they did before.5

Astolfo cuts off his head and gallops away with it; meanwhile:

The stupid monster had not understood

And in the dust was groping for his head.…6

When he realizes that Astolfo has seized it, he rides after him:

He would have liked to shout: ‘Come back! Come back!’

But of his mouth he felt a grievous lack.1

The only way to destroy Orrilo is to cut off a certain magic hair on his head. Unable to distinguish this one hair among the many, Astolfo shaves the scalp with his sword. As he does so, the gruesome head, which he is dangling by the nose, turns pale, its eyes squint, and by every sign it shows ‘Orrilo has gone west’:2

The torso, following the severed head,

Had tumbled from the saddle and lay dead.3

Humour is not an international commodity; it is not always transferable within the same country from century to century, or even from decade to decade. The grotesque Gabrina is ludicrous tricked out in youthful clothing, but our present attitude to old age no longer allows us to laugh at her. Gabrina is in any case too evil a character to be a figure of fun. The sportive jesting between Marfisa and Zerbino and the imposition of absurd obligations in the name of chivalry, like some heavy-handed game of forfeits, creak with the outworn machinery of a disused merry-go-round. Difficulties of another category are created when humour is introduced in contexts where it now seems to be incongruous. When Angelica, chained naked to a rock off the island of Ebuda, awaits a terrible death, Ariosto asks:

Who can describe her tears, her sobs, her cries,

The pleas she utters on each wailing breath,

Her lamentation reaching to the skies?

It is a miracle the shore beneath

Does not divide, as on the rock she lies,

Chained, helpless, waiting for a hideous death.

Not I, indeed, who am so grieved, I swear,

That I must move my narrative elsewhere,

Hoping to make my verses less lugubrious,

Until my weary spirit has revived.

No snakes dwelling in regions insalubrious,

No tigress of her progeny deprived,

No desert reptile, venomous, opprobrious,

‘Twixt Red Sea shores and Atlas ever lived

Which could without compassion contemplate

The beautiful Angelica’s dire fate.1

Such disengagement is a measure of the limits within which Ariosto explores the fabulous. His poetic world is situated somewhere between high fantasy and reality, and is made visible by the blending of both or the transition from one to the other. Soon after this abrupt withdrawal from the full dimensions of Angelica’s tragedy, which would have been discordant with the harmony of his poem, he writes this exquisite description of her. Ruggiero, flying past on the hippogriff, looks down and sees what he thinks at first is a statue of marble or alabaster:

He might have thought she was a statue, made

By skilful and ingenious artistry

Of alabaster or fine marble, laid

Upon the rock, but that he chanced to see

A tear steal down her countenance, amid

The roses and white lilies, tenderly

Bedewing the young fruit, so firm and fair,

And breezes softly lift her golden hair.2

Poetic imagination, reassembling the fragments of illusion, deliberately broken, has here created a reality of beauty.

That Ariosto believed he had found a magic formula in such contrasting artistry may be seen from the fact that in the last version of his poem, published sixteen years after the first, he used an identical method in the story of Olimpia.3 Blown off course when sailing with her husband, Bireno, to Zealand, Olimpia awakes in a tent on an island off Scotland.

Reaching out in her half sleep to embrace him, she finds him gone. This is a moment of poignant tragedy:

… her arm she gently moves

Bireno to embrace whom she so loves….

There’s no-one there; her hand again she tends;

She gropes once more; then, finding no-one still,

First one and then another leg extends,

This way and that, but all to no avail.1

Here Ariosto has deliberately toppled pathos into bathos. Arm, yes; hand, yes; legs, no: that pushes this Ariadne-evoking episode to the edge of parody.2 Then he retrieves it, restoring it to a sublime classical height, as in the climax of her grief:

Again she runs along the sandy shore,

Hither and thither; not Olimpia

She seems, but some mad creature by a score

Of demons driven, or like Hecuba,

A prey to frenzy when her Polydore

She found there lying dead; and then afar

Olimpia gazes seawards, like a stock,

Standing so still, a rock upon a rock.3

And, once again, as in the case of the plight of Angelica, Ariosto instantly drops down to a plane of cheerful realism:

But let us leave her there, her fate to mourn,

While now Ruggiero’s tale I take in hand.4

Having thus disengaged himself and the reader from the full horror of her tragedy, Ariosto returns later to her story and we find her, a successor to Angelica, captive on the same rock, also awaiting death from the sea monster. In his description of her beauty, Ariosto, in the full maturity of his art, surpasses himself in this revelation of the Renaissance ideal of perfect womanhood:

Her beauty is indeed beyond compare:

Not only on her brow, her eyes, her nose,

Her cheeks, her mouth, her shoulders and her hair

The observer’s glance may with delight repose,

But from her breasts descending, down to where

A gown is wont to cover her, she shows

A miracle of form, so exquisite

None in the world, perhaps, can equal it.

Whiter than snow unstained by the earth’s smutch

The perfect lily-whiteness of her skin,

And smoother far than ivory to touch;

Like milky curds but freshly heaped within

Their plaited moulds, her rounded breasts, and such

The gently curving space which lies between,

It calls to mind a valley ’twixt two hills

Which winter with its snowy softness fills.

Her lovely hips, the curving of her thighs,

Her belly, smooth as any looking-glass,

Her ivory limbs, were rounded in such wise

They might have been the work of Phidias.

Those other parts which to conceal she tries

I will, as it behoves, in silence pass,

Content to say that she, from top to toe,

Embodies all of beauty man can know.1

This is the art of Titian.