Ariosto's biography

Lodovico Ariosto was born in northern Italy on September 8, 1474, in Reggio nell'Emilia, a small town in the Emilian duchy of Modena. The duchy belonged to the d'Este family, whose court was in Ferrara. Niccolò Ariosto, of whom Lodovico was the eldest son, commanded the fortress of Reggio for the Este family. The family soon moved to Ferrara, where Lodovico was first taught by a private tutor, then studied law at the University of Ferrara. In 1494, he unapologetically abandoned law for letters, and followed the teachings of the Latinist Gregorio da Spoleto, an Augustinian monk. At the time, he was a close friend of Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, the future Pope Leo X, of whom Gregorio da Spoleto had been one of the tutors.

Hippolyte d'Este

On the death of his father, Lodovico had to provide for his large family. In 1498, he entered the service of Hercules I d'Este and, from 1501 to 1502, left to command the fortress of Canossa. In 1503, he left Hercules for his youngest son, Cardinal Hippolyte d'Este, and in the same year received minor orders, which enabled him to obtain a small ecclesiastical benefice. Hippolytus entrusted Lodovico with various diplomatic missions to the Vatican: in 1509-1510 to Pope Julius II, and in 1513 to congratulate Leo X on his election. That same year, during a stay in Florence, he declared his love for Alessandra Benucci Strozzi, with whom he had fallen in love in Ferrara. Despite a tumultuous love life, full of wives and children, Lodovico remained attached to Alessandra for the rest of his life. In 1515, Alessandra's husband died; she moved to Ferrara, but the poet did not marry her until 1527. In 1517, Hippolytus left for his diocese of Eger in Hungary, but Lodovico refused to follow him and, in 1518, he moved into the service of the cardinal's brother, Alfonso I d'Este, the new duke since the death of his father Hercules in 1505.

La Garfagnana

In 1519, Rinaldo Ariosto, Lodovico's cousin, died intestate : the cardinal and the duke tried to reclaim part of his properties ; Lodovico brought a lawsuit that would only be successful in 1536, three years after his death ! In 1522, Alfonso I stopped paying him his usual pension and forced him to accept the post of governor of Garfagnana, on the mountainous borders of the duchy, in the Serchio valley. Lodovico resented this exile and resigned in 1525. He bought himself a small house in Ferrara, in the Mirasole district (today via Ariosto), and had Horace's line parva sed apta mihi (it's small but it suits me) inscribed on the façade, with which the Latin poet celebrated the house given to him by Maecenas.

The new alliance with Charles V

However, in 1526 the Este left the old alliance they had always kept with France against Venice, to draw closer to Charles V. Lodovico accompanied the Duke to meet Charles V in Modena in 1528; the same year, he was entrusted with organizing theatrical performances at the Ferrara court. In 1529, his embassy to Alphonse d'Avalos, Marquis del Vasto, earned him an annual pension of one hundred gold ducas. In 1532, he accompanied Alphonse d'Este to Charles V in Mantua. He died on July 6, 1533.

Ariosto's work

Lodovico Ariosto's most famous and important work is the Orlando furioso. As early as 1506, he began a first draft of what was to be his life's work. In 1507, in Mantua, he told the story to Isabelle d'Este Gonzague, daughter of Hercules I (and thus sister of Hippolytus and Alphonso). The first edition dates from April 1516. In 1521 appeared the second edition of Roland furieux, in forty songs, with some linguistic and stylistic corrections. He completed but did not publish the Cinque ati, begun probably around 1518-1519, and supposedly grafted on after stanza 68 of the current chant 46 (the Cinq chants would not be published until after his death). But if the second edition differs little from the first, the third edition, of 1532, after ten years of intense work, completely remodels the work, now cut into 46 songs, with entirely new episodes.

In addition to the Roland furieux, Ariosto's Satires (1517-1525) and an important theatrical production  should be mentioned: two prose comedies, the Cassaria (1508, rewritten in 1528) and the Suppositi (1509, rewritten in 1531), which transpose the plots of ancient comedy into the vulgar language (the classical Italian language was in the process of being formed), then I Studenti (1518), Il Negromante (1520), La Lena (1528), which truly founded the genre of new comedy.