Torquato Tasso e Francesco Patrizi: tra polemiche letterarie e incontri intellettuali. .

Micaela Rinaldi. Torquato Tasso e Francesco Patrizi: tra polemiche letterarie e incontri intellettuali.

Ravenna: A. Longo Editore, 2001. 120 pp. index, append. [euro]10.33. ISBN: 88-8063-289-2.

Micaela Rinaldi's study is a useful addition to the field of critical studies on the proliferation of theoretical and literary works and the debate between the supporters of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata in the late sixteenth century. The Latin and Italian translation of Aristotle's Poetics further stimulated this debate with an array of commentaries and literary productions that considered the Poetics the model for or against which authors formulated their literary criticism. Emphasizing the "componenti ermetiche operanti all'inrerno del neoplatonismo ficiniano" (Rinaldi, 9), Rinaldi offers an original investigation of this intellectual debate by showing the links between philosophical speculation on the one hand and literary and theoretical elaboration of the period on the other. Rinaldi focuses her analysis on the theoretical production of the Neoplaronist Francesco Patrizi da Cherso and his intellectual connection with Torquato Tasso. She reconstructs the connection by drawing from biographical sources, carefully performing a comparative analysis of the authors' critical productions. She emphasizes similarities between the two authors in the philosophical outlook of the poetic production and of the figure of the poet.

The relationship between Patrizi and Tasso spanned the period from 1578 to approximately 1592. Rinaldi's analysis of this relation goes against a critical tradition that emphasizes the polemical tone of their exchange which reached its culmination between 1585 and 1586. Rinaldi views the texts of Giraldi Cinzio, Pigna, Pellegrino, and the representatives of the Accademia della Crusca as the stimuli and the larger theoretical context for the debate between Tasso and Patrizi. Tasso's resentful response to Patrizi's Parere in difesa di Ludovico Ariosto (1585) provoked Patrizi's reply in the second volume of Della Poetica and in its appendix, the Trimerone, both published in 1586. For Rinaldi, the fact that Patrizi repeatedly calls Tasso "amico nostro" in the Trimerone -- which is reproduced in her book -- proves that Patrizi's respect for Tasso's work never faded, even when he used the text of the Orlando Furioso to systematically destroy Aristotle's poetics.

The most interesting and original part of Rinaldi's investigation is her careful literary analysis of Patrizi's philosophical and critical works. She demonstrates the links between Patrizi's Neoplatonic, hermetic notions of poetry and the figure of the poet and Tasso's theoretical reflections about these topics in several works of literary criticism -- Discorsi dell'arte poetica, Discorsi del poema eroico, and the dialogue Il Conte overo de l'imprese. Rinaldi emphasizes the underlying Neoplatonic elements in Tasso's work, which she suggests could be the result of Patrizi's influence (48), even if Tasso progressively leaned toward the "rassicuranti lidi del razionalisrno arisrorelico" (15), a tendency evident in his reply to Patrizi's defense of Ariosto's poem.

Patrizi argued that the poet was not an imitator, but a "maker," whose creative energy he equated to the poetic expression stemming from divine "furor" (50). For Patrizi, the poet's divine inspiration was the effect of the cosmic order of the universe, which the poet recollected and organized through what Lina Bulzoni defines as Patrizi's rationalistic channeling of the Platonic "furor" by way of knowledge and culture (Rinaldi, 52). Rinaldi points out that Tasso offered a similar blending of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian notions by adopting the Platonic notion of concordia discors, which both authors used in their writings. Even though Tasso rejected the idea of "furor," he embraced a metaphysical notion of poetry (52). He conceived of the poem as a "picciol mondo" the variety of which the poet, as creator, organized into a unity similar to that of nature within a world created by God. In the Deca plastica and Il Conte overo de 1'imprese, Patrizi and Tasso also shared the belief in the poetics of "meraviglia" and in the symbolic power of the language of images that the two authors equate to poetic language.

This book is a useful tool to explore the figure of Patrizi, whom Rinaldi admits is marginal in studies on Tasso. It also offers a close reading of the little-known Trimerione in light of Patrizi's connection with and possible philosophical influence on the author of the Gerusalemme Liberata.