Matteo Maria Boiardo

Boiardo was born in 1440,^[2] at or near, Scandiano (today's province of Reggio Emilia); the son of Giovanni di Feltrino and Lucia Strozzi. His mother Lucia was the sister of the humanist poet Tito Vespasiano Strozzi, his father Giovanni the son of Feltrino Boiardo, whom Niccolò III d'Este, Marquis of Ferrara, had made Count of Scandiano, with seignorial power over Arceto, Casalgrande, Gesso, and Torricella. Boiardo was an ideal example of a gifted and accomplished courtier, possessing both a gallant heart and deep humanistic learning.

In 1441 the family moved to Ferrara, where Matteo Maria grew up until his father died in 1451. At an early age he entered the University of Ferrara, where he acquired a good knowledge of Greek and Latin, and even of the Oriental languages. He was in due time admitted doctor in philosophy and in law.^[3]

When his grandfather Feltrino died in 1460, Matteo Maria and his cousin Giovanni inherited the fief of Scandiano with its attached lands, but the joint administration gave rise to family feuds culminating in 1474, when Matteo Maria narrowly averted poisoning at the instigation of his aunt Taddea Pio, Giovanni's mother. This caused the lands to be divided, and Boiardo became Lord of Scandiano. But already in 1461 disputes with relatives had forced him to take up residence in Ferrara.

Up to the year of his marriage to Taddea Gonzaga, the daughter of the Count of Novellara (1472), he had received many marks of favour from Borso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, having been sent to meet Frederick III (1469), and afterwards visiting Pope Paul II (1471) in the train of Borso. In 1473 he joined the retinue which escorted Eleonora of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand I, to meet her spouse, Ercole, at Ferrara.

In 1476 Boiardo returned to Ferrara to become Duke Ercole's companion; here he witnessed the unfolding of Niccolò d'Este's conspiracy against Ercole, his cousin, whose victory Boiardo promptly celebrated in his Latin Epigrammata. In 1478 Boiardo married Taddea dei Gonzaga of Novellara, by whom he had six children.

In 1481 Boiardo was invested with the governorship of Reggio, an office which he filled with noted success till his death, except for a brief interval (1481–86) when he was governor of Modena. The outbreak of war between Ferrara and Venice, the vicissitudes of which are reflected in his Ecloghe volgari, and his concern for his native Scandiano, forced him to relinquish the post.

In 1487 Ercole appointed Boiardo ducal emissary for Reggio, an office which he was to hold until his death, and which has left us the largest nucleus of his Lettere, mostly of an administrative nature. When Charles VIII of France invaded Italy, in September 1494, Boiardo's health had deteriorated. He died in Reggio on 19 December, his death, with that of Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in the same year, marking the end of an era.

In his youth Boiardo had been a successful imitator of Petrarch's love poems. For Ercole d'Este he produced his first humanist works in Latin, the Carmina de laudibus Estensium and the Pastoralia, both dating from 1463–4; he also undertook a number of free translations into the vernacular, from Cornelius Nepos, Xenophon, Apuleius, Herodotus, and the chronicler Riccobaldo of Ferrara.

While in Reggio in 1469 Boiardo met Antonia Caprara, who inspired his canzoniere, his first original work in the vernacular, now regarded as one of the highest poetic achievements of the 15th century. Entitled Amorum libri tres and comprising 180 sonnets, canzoni, and madrigals, it recounts in Petrarchan mode the three phases of the poet's love, from initial joy to subsequent disillusionment and final mourning. Shortly afterwards Boiardo wrote the comedy Il Timone (1487?), loosely based on the dialogue of the same name by Lucian.

Around 1476 Boiardo began his major work, Orlando Innamorato, originally also called Inamoramento de Orlando, a grandiose poem of chivalry and romance absorbing the poetic experience of the canzoniere and the encomiastic intent of the earlier Latin works (the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition provides a detailed discussion of Orlando in its several editions).^[4] Within the chivalric tradition Orlando Innamorato is the first poem to effect a deliberate fusion of the Carolingian and Arthurian narrative cycles; hence the poem's novelty, the fact that Orlando, the hero of the Song of Roland, is in love. Seen as a cosmic force as well as an essential attribute to chivalry, love is by far the main theme, alongside other major themes of arms, magic, honour, and adventure. Fabulous and anachronistic as this narrative material may seem, the poet relates it to the present by creating the illusion of a live recitation to a courtly audience, whose reactions he registers at various points. Within this frame the narration itself unfolds at a relentless pace, governed by the so-called entrelacement technique of suspending one story and shifting to another at the point of maximum expectation.

Almost all Boiardo's works, and especially the Orlando innamorato, were composed for the amusement of Duke Ercole and his court, though not written within its precincts. His practice, it is said, was to retire to Scandiano or some other of his estates, and there to devote himself to composition, and historians state that he took care to insert in the descriptions of his poem those of the agreeable environs of his château, and that the greater part of the names of his heroes, as Mandricardo, Gradasse, Sacripant, Agramant and others, were merely the names of some of his peasants, which, from their uncouthness, appeared to him proper to be given to Saracen warriors.^{[citation needed]}

Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato enjoyed great popularity amongst his contemporaries, its unfinished state prompting a number of sequels by, amongst others, Nicolò degli Agostini, Raffaele Valcieco, and above all Ludovico Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso. But Pietro Bembo's reformation of the language in 1525, the rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics in the 1530s, and the incipient Counter-Reformation in the 1540s all caused it to fall from favour amongst critics and writers, including Torquato Tasso, who found it lacking on linguistic, theoretical, and moral grounds. Gradually, Boiardo's original version was supplanted by Francesco Berni's rifacimento (1542), a recasting of the poem in literary Tuscan, and by Lodovico Domenichi's contemporary revision, the publication of which (1544), significantly, coincided with the last edition of Boiardo to appear in the Renaissance in the original text.

Following centuries of neglect, the rediscovery of Boiardo took place in England during the Romantic period. Starting in 1830 Anthony Panizzi, the expatriate Italian professor later to become librarian of the British Museum, produced a historic combined edition of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. This marked both the restoration of the Innamorato's original text and the beginning of modern Boiardo criticism.

Described by the critic Carlo Dionisotti as the most misunderstood poet in Italian literature, and for a long time overshadowed by Ariosto, Boiardo has since emerged as one of the most forceful poets of the Renaissance, his work recognized as the first vernacular masterpiece by a Northern Italian author. As a result of this critical acclaim he now seems set to rival Ariosto's long-standing supremacy.

The first translation of Boiardo into English was Robert Tofte's Orlando Inamorato: The Three First Bookes (1598), in reality the first three cantos of book 1 in Domenichi's version. The Italian text was known to Spenser and Milton, but it was not until the 19th century that other partial translations were attempted, by Richard Wharton (1804), William Stewart Rose (1823), and Leigh Hunt (1846).