"Il ricco edificio": Arte allusiva nella.

Raffaele Antonio Ruggiero. "Il ricco edificio": Arte allusiva nella Gerusalemme Liberata.

Biblioteca dell' "Archivum Romanicum" Series 1: Storia, Letteratura, Paleografia 328. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2005. xxii + 194 pp. index. bibl. [euro]22. ISBN: 88-222-5466-X.

Raffaele Ruggiero's title alludes to Armida's palace in canto 16 of Tasso's epic ("Tondo e il ricco edificio"). Ruggiero revisits the question of allusion in Gerusalemme liberata, on principles the philologist Giorgio Pasquali enunciated in 1942: "[I]n cultivated, learned poetry, I search for what ... I no longer call reminiscences, but rather allusions; I would even say evocations, and in some cases, quotations. Reminiscences can be unconscious; the poet can want his imitations to escape the reader; allusions do not produce the desired effect except on a reader who clearly remembers the text those allusions refer to" (xi; translation and emphases are mine). For Ruggiero, Pasquali's categories inspire an approach to intertextuality that feels no need of that concept, nor of Genette's hypotexte and hypertexte, Foucault's problematic of the author, nor Eco's intentio operis: "Examining the numerous episodes of the Liberata that reproduce Homeric structures, the auctoris intentio emerges clearly, revealed by the epistolary exchange with the critical readers under [Scipione] Gonzaga's guidance, aiming at an allusive exercise serving to reproduce formal structures of proven narrative efficacy, rather than aiming at mere thematic recalls" (xiii).

It is unclear what Ruggiero means by "mere" thematic recalls, but he does specify that "formal structures" can be "interi episodi" or "singole parole" (xvi). An example is the "meonie ancelle" among whom a cross-dressed Hercules spins and weaves, in the ekphrasis of Armida's "ricco edificio" (GL 16.3). Ruggiero treats the adjective meonie as a "rare epithet" that Tasso took from Homer's vivid simile of an ivory horse-ornament being colored by a "Maeonian or Carian" woman (Iliad 4.140-47). For Ruggiero, the context, describing Menelaus's wounding during his duel with Paris, allusively ties the effeminacy of Tasso's Hercules to Dido's despair over her relations with Aeneas, and to Rinaldo's humiliation at his reflection in the mirror-shield, all via Agamemnon's shame at his brother's wounding, which Homer describes just after the simile of the artful Maeonian (xvi-xvii, 56-57, 89-90; Iliad 4.164-82).

Where does this connection take place? In the auctoris intentio, presumably. Yet theorists and scholars have long asked how we know such connections are intentional, and whether it matters if they are. Allusions and echoes function semiotically, as a network of established or potential significations, whatever the intentions of an empirical or historical author. In Tasso's case, the distinction between intention and potential is particularly important: his poetic texts frequently ignore, subvert, and contradict his assertions as critic, theorist, and author.

Proof that the connections Ruggiero describes reflect precise intentions of Tasso, the empirical auctor who lived from 1544 to 1595, ought to be found in the modifications that such connections make to the empirical or implied reader's sense of what the poem is doing. While Ruggiero discovers some interesting nodes between the Liberata and epic tradition, his detailed comparisons between Tasso's poem and its sources are often disappointingly superficial. Most notably, Ruggiero accepts without demur the reconciliation of Rinaldo and Armida, which has struck generations of readers as contrived and abrupt. While critics agree that Armida's echo of the Annunciation ("Ecco l'ancilla tua," GL 20.136) is intended "to underline the inseparable wedding of love and faith in the restored moral order at the end of the poem" (110), many have observed that the biblical echo intrudes awkwardly. Ruggiero ignores the problem, since he interprets the episode entirely via Tasso's contention in the Discorsi that epic and romance are essentially one genre: Rinaldo and Armida rewrite Aeneid 4 as a romance ending for Dido and Aeneas, transcending both Vergilian epic and the historic destruction of Carthage. The reconciliation of Rinaldo and Armida is indeed a "reflection on literary genre," but it necessarily involves more genres than epic and romance. The best way to make Armida's biblical evocation less disruptive is to read it against the narrator's lyric allusions, which describe Armida's Petrarchan trajectory from Laura to Mary (see, most recently, Ayesha Ramachandran, "Tasso's Petrarch: The Lyric Means to Epic Ends," forthcoming in MLN Italian Issue [2007]). Petrarchan lyric cannot be excluded from the "echo chamber" of this passage, for precisely the reason Ruggieri cites: "il tessuto del poema parrebbe architettato non gia per nascondere ma per disvelare i procedimenti d'atelier. Il lettore doctus percepisce l'operazione autoriale come straniamento costante e imprevisto" (111). In concert with Tasso's "thefts"--including whole verses--from Petrarch, the biblical echo is just such a provocation.

Despite the limitations of its focus on intentionality, Il ricco edificio offers a number of welcome insights, particularly on Tasso's use of Homer and on his fortunes among artists and critics, from the cruscanti onward.

WALTER STEPHENS

The Johns Hopkins University