Greatest romance epic influenced art and culture
Dar Al Athar Preti delivers lecture on Arioto’s ‘Orlando Furioso’
By Cinatra Fernandes
Arab Times Staff
KUWAIT CITY, April 27: Monica Preti, Head of Academic Programs at the Auditorium of Louvre Museum, delivered a lecture on one of the greatest romance epics of European literature, Arioto’s ‘Orlando Furioso’, expounding on the mutual influences of images and texts that fuelled artistic and literary creation. The lecture was held at the Yarmouk Cultural Center on Monday evening, as part of the Dar Al Athar Al Islamiyyah’s 21st cultural season.
Preti has published studies on the history of collecting (18th-19th centuries) and on the relationship between arts and literature in the Renaissance. Among her main publications, are: L’Arioste et les arts (ed., with M. Paoli), Éditions du Musée du Louvre — Officina Libraria, Paris-Milan 2011 and Delicious Decadence: The rediscovery of French 18th-century painting in the 19th century (ed.; with G. Faroult — C. Voghterr), Ashgate, London 2014.
‘Orlando Furioso’ by Ludovico Ariosto was published exactly five centuries ago. It is a chivalric poem (almost 40,000 verses) exuding the exuberance, grace and intellectual curiosity of the Italian Renaissance. From the backdrop of war between Charlemagne and the Saracen army attempting to invade Europe, the poem wanders at will from Japan to the Hebrides. With its magicians and enchanted forests, fabulous fights, extravagant knights and troubling heroines, the text exerted a wide influence on later art and culture, stimulating the imagination of several generations of artists from all over Europe.
Preti started her lecture by stating that during the Hellenistic period, an integrated, although highly heterogeneous, civilization grew up around the Mediterranean. After the fall of the roman empire, this convergence was interrupted and the sea became a great frontier between the Arab and Christian worlds. It was a frontier in movement, along which over the centuries there were as many encounters as there were clashes.
Preti discussed a series of stories inspired by the conflicts which involved opposition between the Christian armies and the Saracens, as Arabs were called in Europe in the Middle Ages. “Conflicts which then fed not only literary imagination but also artistic representations in Europe for centuries, up until the end of the 19th century. One of the most fascinating products of this vein is a masterpiece of Italian literature: ‘Orlando Furioso’, or ‘Mad Orlando’.”
Success
She revealed that the text, given its great success in Europe, profoundly influenced not only western chivalric imagery but to some extent the image of the Islamic world which started to circulate in Europe, an image that was essentially fantasy but no less influential. She informed the audience that the story originated with a related episode which involved an incursion by Charlemagne in Spain where he was invited by the Abbasid Wali of Barcelona to fight against the Umayyad Emir of Cordoba in 778. Charlemagne plundered the land of the Basques and left one of his vassals named Roland in charge of his rearguard with all the spoils. While crossing the Roncevaux Pass, the rearguard was ambushed by the Basques and Roland was killed along with all his men.
Preti pointed out that it is not clear how this heroic failure of the Carolingian army gave rise to one of the most successful narrative cycles in western literature. For some centuries, it was not mentioned in any written sources, but its traces could be found in works of art. The story, she stressed, probably circulated through oral traditions and spread far and wide by minstrels and storytellers.
The first manuscript of the song of Roland dates back to the end of the 11th century. “In these hundred years the story was enriched by several completely invented details which continued to stimulate the imagina- tion of readers”, she stated. Orlando transformed into one of the most valiant knights of the court of Charlemagne, and became the incarnation of Christian values — virtuous, courageous, chivalrous and chaste. The story became epic against the backdrop of great clashes of civilisations which involved the whole of staging duels and battles between the great champions of the two opposing forces — chivalric virtues on the one hand and wickedness on the other.
“This division actually intersected, traversed the forced in play because on both sides there were champions of great virtue and cowards. A topic completely lacking in the first songs of Roland was love affairs, the female characters in these stories were entirely marginal”, she remarked.
A photo from the event
and the number of manuscripts of which there are copies in libraries.
The Italian society was to a large extent an urban society, open to traffic and trade with foreigners rather than waging wars with them. Relations with those who lived on the other banks of the Mediterranean were very close for centuries as seen in the iconography at the end of the Middle Ages. She showed examples of the Anatolian prayer rugs that could be glimpsed in paintings from this period and in the Feast of Gods, painted by Giovanni Bellini, art objects from the near and far east are featured.
In this context, she added, the confrontations between the paladins and the Saracens lost their relevance and became just narrative material in the subject of new poems, novels and tales which took names and settings from the previous chivalrous cycles, although completely altering the plot, personalities of the characters and the interweaving of events.
Matteo Maria Boiardo in his ‘Orlando Innamorto’, at the end of the 15th century, portrayed Orlando
Monica Preti delivers a lecture at the Yarmouk Cultural Center on Monday
evening.
as a courtier in the court of Ferrara, linking the cosmopolitan world of the Mediterranean with the identity of medieval chivalry. Boiardo intended to merge the epic chivalric themes of the Carolingian cycle with the amorous courteous ones of the Breton Cycle.
Boiardo changed Orlando’s chaste character and made him fall in love with a Saracen princess, this was orchestrated by the King of Cathay who in order to capture Christian paladins sent the extremely beautiful Angelica with her brother to their camp in Paris. He was armed with magic weapons and she with an invisibility ring. All the knights, Christian and Saracen, fell in love with Angelica on seeing her and began to duel furiously to conquer her while she escaped, chased by ‘Rinaldo’.
While fleeing, the thirsty Angelica drank from a magic fountain of love and in doing so fell in love with Rinaldo while he, drinking from a fountain of hate, became her enemy and ran away. Now it was she who followed him while he tried to get away, turning the story into a frenetic succession of duels, spells, wizards, twists and irruptions of characters. not only took the plot, characters and general setting from his predecessor but also the rhythm of the narrative which interweaves the stories of dozens of characters. The main story line is that of the Orlando who from being unlucky in love with Angelica goes raving mad. Another paladin Astolpho embarks on a trip to bring back Orlando’s wits from the moon atop a hippogriff, and succeeds. Orlando starts to fight the Saracens again while Angelica falls in love with a common soldier from the Arab army, Medoro.
The crusades were now a distant memory and one of the most recurrent narrative plots of the poem is that of two people of different religions falling in love with each other, this happens not only to the main protagonists but also countless secondary characters. With several references to Arab folklore evident in subplots, it can be inferred that the attitude that prevailed was one that was essentially free of prejudice, curious and open to being inspired by a variety of cues in an atmosphere of tension and fear of the Turks.
Ariosto’s balanced position stands out because he avoided propagandist topics and polemic reference to the opponents of Charlemagne and his paladins. In his imaginative world, it is impossible to identify a character that can embody an entirely positive model of a Christian hero, contrasted with an entirely negative Islamic model. He scatters defects and qualities randomly among the characters who share a common object of desire and Arab cities are not depicted with the shadow of hostility, but rather with interest.
‘Orlando Furioso’ was not read as a work hostile to the Islamic world at the time it was written since some of Ariosto’s early critics believed that the poem could easily become a bestseller in the Arab world too. This overtone of neutrality gave rise to a notable feature of Ariostesque iconography from the 16th and 17th centuries, the countless paintings drew inspiration from the poems, and the knights were almost never characterised by particularly marked ethnic or religious attributes.
Literature
Preti shared that ‘Orlando Furioso’ was a resounding success and the first real bestseller of European literature. There were 200 editions over the course of the 16th century which were soon translated into other European languages with an editorial success that encompassed literary as well as visual influence. A contingent factor hugely important in its dissemination was the invention of the mechanical moveable type printing by Johannes Gutenberg. ‘Orlando Furioso’ was probably the first European poem written in vernacular to have been printed and conceived as a book aimed at a general audience of generic readers.
With the proliferation of the editions, publishers even had the idea of producing a set of illustrations to go with the text to increase its appeal and legibility.
She presented examples of glazed earthenware plates, commissioned for weddings and other ceremonies with representation of ‘Orlando Furioso’, showing how it was immediately perceived as a classic.
She stated the widespread success was not contained among the wealthiest classes which were able to commission works of art. But it is also known that Ariosto had extraordinary success from the outset even among the masses. Orlando’s adventures were devoured not only by those who could afford costly books but also in squares and market places, around the makeshift stages where the story was declaimed by actors or even through puppet shows.
“The fact that a poem that started out as entertainment for a very small group of courtiers has been capable of speaking to an infinite number of people from the most varied cultures and still continues to do so centuries later, in a completely different context from the one in which it was written is really quite fascinating”, she concluded.