Ariosto’s Dialogue with Authority in the Erbolato

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Dennis Looney

1. Context for the Erbolato

Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) used the Erbolato, a work in Italian he probably wrote near the end of his life between 1530 and 1533,1 to defend his youthful decision just after the beginning of the new century to turn away from the philological world of his humanist contemporaries with its focus on scholarship and the composition of verse in Latin in order to pursue a different kind of learning better expressed in the vernacular. In the process of making this defense, he parodies humanism in general, Neoplatonic philosophy in particular, with a serious nod and a wink to the growing interest in some circles of Ferrarese culture to challenge the Church’s authority, doctrinal and political. The Erbolato is a satirical blast aimed at these various brands of authority served up by Ariosto as he grew more independent in the

1Ariosto’s reference to the Duke of Mantua establishes 1530 as a chronological point before which the work could not have been written since the Gonzaga family received its ducal title in that year. But of course the editor of the first edition, Jacopo Coppa, could have altered the text to that effect after the fact. In any case, other references, e.g. to Leoniceno after his death in 1524, make it clear that the work was completed at some point in the last eight years of Ariosto’s life, between 1524–25 and 1533. I refer throughout this essay to my translation of the text of the Erbolato and Ariosto’s letters in Ariosto, My Muse Will Have a Story to Paint; the passage on the Duke of Mantua is at 282. For references to the text in Italian, I refer to the edition of Gabriella Ronchi in volume 3 of Tutte le opera di Ludovico Ariosto, ed. Cesare Segre.

MLN 128 (2013): 20–39 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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final season of his life when he could look back and realize that he had paid obeisance to figures of authority long enough.2

Composed in the form of a monologue delivered by Master Antonio Faventino, the Erbolato develops its challenge to authority in the play-ful garb of street theater. In the venerable tradition of the charlatan or quack doctor, the protagonist is portrayed hawking a miraculous medicinal potion in the town square. If the typical context for a dia-logue in the sixteenth century (when the genre was especially promi-nent among writers of Italian) is to stage the scene of speaking, with the Erbolato Ariosto stages the scene of marketing in which the speaker tries to convince the audience to purchase his unique product.3 In this theatrical and commercial context, Ariosto invites the reader to associate the sales pitch of the quack with the ideas of the academic or perhaps even the ecclesiastic, each of whom also has a product, an intellectual rather than physical one, to sell to a would-be buyer.

Faventino may be fictitious but he is not invented out of whole cloth. David Gentilcore, author of the definitive Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy, has established and published a rich database that organizes the licenses of around 1600 charlatans from 1550 to 1800, which sheds some light on the kind of person Ariosto is imagining.4 In order to regulate the activities of wandering doctors and herbalists, the political states in which they wished to work required that they register with local officials in order to sell their wares and offer their services. The documents that outline the legal privileges of charlatans provide much information about the charlatan, including: name, stage name (when used), licensing authority, town and country of origin, year of license, precisely what the practitioner is licensed to sell. These invaluable data complement the vivid picture of the charlatan we see in a work like the Erbolato. In an article on the editor of the first edition of the Erbolato (1545), Jacopo Coppa, Gentilcore makes the case that Ariosto’s Faventino stands at the beginning of this long tradition of wandering doctors and herbalists and that the Erbolato is a foundational text in a kind of writing that becomes standardized as a genre in its own right. Ariosto’s editor Coppa, described by Pietro Aretino as “un dei primi ceretani del mondo,” was himself a wander-

2For a discussion of the fortune of the Erbolato, including its neglect until fairly recently, see my introduction to Ariosto, My Muse Will Have a Story to Paint, especially 12–13.

3See Snyder’s discussion of theories of dialogue in the late Renaissance. 4For the database, Italian Charlatans Database, 1550–1800. For terms and methodol-

ogy, see the introductory commentary: “SN 5800-Italian Charlatans Database. Study Documentation.”

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ing doctor who applied for patents for medicine in Venice, including a “wondrous elixir,” an “elettuario mirabile” (73–74).5

The model for Faventino, however, is from the previous genera-tion. The character is an amalgam of several identifiable contempo-raries of Ariosto, whose lives overlapped with his from his arrival on the intellectual scene in the 1490s to the last years of his life in the 1530s, first among them an itinerant teacher from the town of Faenza (whence the name Faventino), Antonio Cittadini, who was a public intellectual in Ferrara during Ariosto’s lifetime.6 The University of Ferrara hired Cittadini as a professor of physica extraordinaria in 1474 and he is recorded to have been teaching in studio medicinae in 1478. Between 1482–1487 he moved to the University of Pisa but the Fer-rarese lured him back with a higher salary in the late 1480s. In the early 1490s, he gained some notoriety when he became embroiled in a dispute with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola on the interpreta-tion of Platonic philosophy, which Pico’s nephew, Giovan Francesco, resumed at his uncle’s death in 1494.7 In a touch of the sort of irony for which Ariosto is notorious, it may be that Faventino is modeled simultaneously on both the disputants, Cittadini and Pico. After his debate with Pico, Cittadini moved on to teach medicina teorica ordinaria at the University of Padua from 1505–1509, and probably returned to Ferrara after this final stint of university teaching, where he lived until his death in 1523.8 While Ariosto may have modeled Faventino on Cittadini, the protagonist in the Erbolato refers directly to another professor Ariosto knew at the University of Ferrara, Nicolò da Lunigo, known as Leoniceno, a famous professor of medicine from 1464 to 1524. The poet ranks Leoniceno among those friends and colleagues who welcome him back to port at the end of his long poetic journey in the exordium to the final canto of Orlando Furioso at 46.14.7. Other

5Aretino praises Coppa and distinguishes the world of the charlatan from that of the academy, commenting that he prefers the former (Gentilcore, ‘Biscantato’ 69).

6There has been disagreement over the attribution to Cittadini; see especially Cap-paroni and Malaguti. Giovanni Manardi, a disciple of Leoniceno, teacher at the univer-sity, and physician to Alfonso I d’Este, addresses Cittadini as Antonio Faventino in an undated letter on medical aphorisms (39–44). See Vasoli for the definitive biography and for a record of Cittadini’s dispute with Florentine humanists over Neoplatonism (68–69); see Garin’s entry “Antonio da Faenza, filosofo peripatetico” in Cultura filosofica (1961): 303–09. For a general outline of the state of philosophy in Ferrara from around 1450 to 1550, Garin’s essay, “Motivi della cultura filosofica ferrarese nel Rinascimento,” Cultura filosofica (1961): 402–31, is essential.

7Of note, Ariosto was a friend of Giovan Francesco Pico della Mirandola, who is praised along with his cousin, Alberto Pio, in Furioso 46.17.1–2.

8Here I correct the erroneous date of Cittadini’s death given in the introduction to Ariosto, My Muse Will Have a Story to Paint 9.

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figures who may bear the brunt of Ariosto’s irony with his portrait of Faventino include the humanist Celio Calcagnini, also praised alongside Leoniceno at Furioso 46.14.8, and Calcagnini’s student and eventual editor Antonio Musa Brasavola. Brasavola began teaching at the University of Ferrara in 1528, the timing of which makes him a likely source of inspiration for the satire, given its probable composi-tion some time just after that. Ariosto also perhaps takes aim at the papacy, recycling an earlier satirical jab at Leo X, filtered through his play Il Negromante, which he had originally composed for carnival in Rome in 1520 but then substantially rewrote and had performed for the first time in 1529 in Ferrara.

Before examining the Erbolato to explore how Ariosto alludes to these various figures of authority, we should consider an early work by Calcagnini that will allow us to reconstruct part of the context that motivated Ariosto to produce his satire in the first place. In his Equitatio, or A Dialogue on Horseback (ca. 1507), Calcagnini playfully dramatized Ariosto’s decision to separate from the pack of humanists who distinguished Ferrara in the first decades of the 1500s as a choice for the culture of chivalric romance. The roster of participants in the dialogue is an honor roll of Ferrarese and Mantuan humanism at the turn of the century including Calcagnini, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, Demetrio Mosco, Daniele Fini, Mario Equicola, and Ariosto.9 In the dialogue the interlocutors engage in a wide-ranging discussion of antiquarian topics—philosophical, literary, and philological—many of which reflect the growing interest in Neoplatonism among these leading intellectuals under the influence of the revival of interest in Plato in Florentine humanism associated with Marsilio Ficino. Ariosto himself had been very much a part of this revival. In fact, his earliest letter to survive, 9 January 1498, contains a request to Aldus Manutius for commentaries on Plato and for translations of Platonic works: “there is significant interest among scholars to have the books of Marsilio Ficino and however much has been translated into Latin from the pages of Greek Platonists” (25). One of his earliest poems in Latin, “De laudibus Sophiae” (In praise of wisdom), which Giovanni Battista Pigna positioned as the opening poem in the editio princeps of Ariosto’s Carmina (1553), and which was possibly delivered at the

9All these authors are mentioned in Giraldi’s own work, De poetis nostrorum temporum. Modern Poets was published in 1551 but composed at different moments over the previ-ous four decades. Giraldi has something positive to say about Ariosto (91), Equicola (93), Mosco (117), and Fini (211), and he heaps praise on Calcagnini who “has such a deep and wide erudition that I would place him above all whom I have known” (77).

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start of the academic year at the University of Ferrara in 1495,10 con-tributes to the impression of Ariosto as a leading intellectual of his youthful cohort. Beyond philosophy, Ariosto was deeply involved in the Ferrarese revival of classical studies in the late 1480s and 1490s, collaborating on important theatrical productions of Terence and Plautus, and composing other poems in Latin, most of which can be dated between 1494 and 1503.

The year 1507, the likely date of Calcagnini’s dialogue, was, we can now reconstruct in retrospect, a crucial juncture in the creative life of Ariosto. For the previous decade, more or less, he had identified as a humanist, a classically-inspired neo-Latin poet of an extended circle of similarly inclined men. Something was about to happen in his career as a poet to change all that. In Calcagnini’s dialogue, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi urges Ariosto to reveal what he has been working on. Their exchange is as follows:

But since I surprised Ariosto who from the look on his face and the move-ment of his eyes appeared to be deep in thought, I urged him thus: “My Ariosto, since you seem already prepared to speak having thought at some length, take my place in the conversation and give us your opinion on the hardly obscure feats of giants and heroes—I know you are all caught up in that work right now—or tell us what you think of what we’ve just been discussing. You know that bit of wisdom: ‘No one hears hidden music.’” Then that brilliant young man [Ariosto] said, “May that book of mine fare well, which has nearly squeezed every drop of my wits out of me. For while I was trying to please our most noble prince, Ippolito, I have been spending all my days and nights at work on the book, wasting my best hours on it. What weighs on me most of all is the sense that I have frittered away my most beautiful and elegant literary efforts (if you and my other friends are not deceiving me) merely on French enticements (I don’t hesitate to call them that) and on the subjects that one hears in the town squares. How much better it would have been if I had prepared feasts as you men have done. But for the man who has donned the helmet, there is no time to repent the duel. Why go looking for advice when already in the arena? Rest assured, however, that when I left the city today to enjoy these pleasures with you, I left behind those silly things on the other side of the Po, because I wanted to enjoy these few days.”11

10Ariosto’s brother, Gabriele, first mentions that “De laudibus Sophiae” was delivered to open the academic year in the eulogy he writes at Ludovico’s death, “Epicedio”; Catalano (1:102–3) contests the date of 1495 but Carducci (158) and Segre (Ariosto, Opere minori 14) follow it.

11My translation of Calcagnini, Opera 562.

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This rich snatch of dialogue points to the decision Ariosto must make about which language to use from among the different ones available to him and his peers, implying with the reference to giants and heroes that he is composing in the vernacular. Calcagnini’s text is in Ciceronian Latin, peppered throughout with vocabulary and phrases in Greek (the words in italics above are in Greek in the original). To be sure, there is nothing to say that the members of this humanistic posse couldn’t discourse freely in Latin while galloping over the Emilian countryside, inserting bits of Greek here and there along the way, as the fiction of the dialogue maintains. But we should interpret this scene as Calcagnini’s attempt to portray the classicizing linguistic culture of the humanists of his day for whom Latin was nearly a native language. Calcagnini and his peers were in many cases becom-ing trilingual with excellent command of Latin and their respective vernaculars, and with growing proficiency in Greek. Horseback riding aside, it is a realistic depiction of the linguistic world in which many humanists worked. By focusing on Ariosto’s literary production in Italian, this passage juxtaposes the learned erudition of the humanists with what was perceived to be the more limited linguistic experience of those committed to the vernacular. The crux of the matter was whether to be a humanist and perfect a form of literary expression in Latin (influenced by Greek to a greater or lesser extent) or to be a writer who could default to any number of vernaculars—Tuscan or non-Tuscan, archaic or contemporary—that is, to be a vernacular humanist.12 Or to try to be both at the same time.

Among those opting for some form of Italian, many, such as Ari-osto, were not monolingual, of course; they also knew Latin well. In fact, an anecdote recounted by Pigna (not in his edition of Ariosto’s Carmina but rather in I romanzi) has it that none other than Pietro Bembo encouraged Ariosto to continue writing in Latin, to whom the poet is reported to have said: “che più tosto volea essere uno de primi tra scritttori Thoscani che appena il secondo tra Latini” (75).13 In the passage from Equitatio, Ariosto’s comment about frittering away his talents may refer to similar conversations with critics like Bembo in which he was praised for his Latin. But at the moment in Ariosto’s career that Calcagini’s dialogue dramatizes, he seems to have decided to emphasize the vernacular over the classical.

12For a synoptic discussion of the linguistic options for authors in the vernacular in Ariosto’s lifetime, see Hall. For a provocative reassessment of the juxtaposition of Latin and Italian and of the impact of the tension between these two linguistic cultures on Renaissance historiography, see Celenza.

13Discussed in Carducci 182–84.

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Giraldi’s exchange with Ariosto also provides three specific details about the latter’s new project in the vernacular. Giraldi makes a dis-tinction between Ariosto’s writing and what Ariosto will refer to as the literary “feasts” of his contemporaries, presumably a reference to their compositions, most likely poetic, in Latin. The narrator first states that Ariosto is writing about “the feats of giants and heroes,” an accurate enough characterization, if somewhat superficial, of the Furioso’s blending of elements from Arthurian romance, known for its themes of magic, love, and, yes, in some cases, giants, and Caro-lingian epic, whose heroes animate Ariosto’s narrative poem. Giraldi calls attention to his description with the rhetorical figure of litotes: their feats are “hardly obscure,” that is, they are very well known. And he emphasizes the phrase all the more by putting the adjective “obscure” in Greek. Ariosto himself states the other two comments on the Furioso, associating his new literary project with “French entice-ments” and “subjects that one hears in the town squares.” An earlier generation of critics (Fatini, Catalano) took the reference to “French enticements” literally, proposing that Ariosto either wrote lyrics to be set to music by some of the resident French composers in the Estense court or, more salaciously, wrote poems (now missing, of course) for various French courtesans in the court. But as Gennaro Savarese has convincingly argued, embedded in Ariosto’s own comments is a clue that clarifies the passage: “the subjects that one hears in the town squares” is a gloss on “French enticements.” The town square or piazza is that shared public space used for the presentation of Franco-Italian narrative poetry produced by cantastorie, the wandering minstrels or rhapsodes of medieval chivalric romance. With this gloss, Calcagnini has Ariosto the character in the dialogue clarify that the French liter-ary culture of adventure and heroic narratives presented in the piazza defines the generic boundaries of his new project. The town square also calls to mind the theatrical space used by charlatans to make their pitch, much as Antonio Faventino does in the Erbolato. The new project is associated with the performance of literature.

The passage as a whole conjures up the cultural background that will bring forth Ariosto’s Furioso in 1516, the narrative poem that he had recently begun to unveil in 1507. The earliest certain date in reference to the Furioso is the letter of Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, 3 February 1507, in which she thanks her brother Ippolito for having commissioned Ariosto to spend several days in Mantua with her while she recovered from a difficult birth: “. . . luy [Ariosto] anche per conto suo mi ha adduta gran satisfactione havendomi, cum la naratione de

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l’opera che ’l compone, facto passare questi dui giorni, non solum senza fastidio, ma cum piacere grandissimo. . . .” (Catalano 2: 79). At the time of Calcagnini’s dialogue, Ariosto had recently abandoned the path of the neo-Latinists, riding off, as it were, in a different direction toward vernacular romance, which Calcagnini critiques as merely the literature of enticements and entertainment. Isabella, too, emphasizes the poem’s capacity to entertain but she takes delight in the poet’s new project. Ariosto did ride off in a different direction from his humanist companions, but he did not completely reject their world; he headed toward a new kind of writing that incorporates the classical into vernacular romance in ways that Calcagnini could not accept or perhaps even understand. Calcagnini imagined an either/or literary career for the young humanist poet: either erudite neo-Latin verse of the sort that he and his peers composed or romance narrative poetry in the vernacular.14 But Ariosto, it turns out, had another possibility in mind, something more like a blend of the two. He perfected a compositional practice of rendering the classical in a vernacular mode, of blending or compromising the Latin and Greek classics with medieval sources.15 And later readers, swayed by this intrinsic quality of Ariosto’s poetics, would consequently proclaim his poem a classic in its own right.16

2. Reading the Erbolato

The Erbolato consists of five short sections, each of approximately the same length.17 In the first, the speaker details the human predicament of being born helpless. Humans, however, we learn in the second section, have a unique faculty, that of reason, which they can use in their self-defense; for example, with their cognitive powers they have developed the art of medicine to treat disease. This leads the speaker to praise the practitioners of medicine in general, ancient and mod-ern. In the third section, Faventino introduces himself as a doctor

14This is a line of interpretation that runs all the way to Benedetto Croce who similarly interprets Ariosto’s career choices as an either/or move from humanism to vernacu-lar writing (38–39). See Savarese’s fundamental discussion of Calcagnini’s portrait of Ariosto, as well as Prandi’s interesting recontextualization of Savarese’s reading (8–10) and his comments on Croce (11).

15See Looney, Compromising the Classics.16See Javitch.17The division of the work into five sections is based on the prudent editorial deci-

sions of Gabriella Ronchi for her definitive edition of 1984. She further divides the sections into lines: section 1 contains 92 lines, 2 contains 93, 3 contains 87, 4 contains 69, and 5 contains 111.

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(“medico”), shifting from discourse in the third person to the first and he gestures to the stage props he has around him: a banner advertising his credentials and the temporary platform from which he delivers his speech. He launches into an attack against the charlatans who give the profession a bad name by promoting themselves as knowledge-able when they in fact know little of the medicinal arts. Faventino’s authority derives from his reputation which ranges widely throughout Italy, he claims, especially in the cities of Ferrara and Mantua, where the political leaders have honored him for his knowledge. Thus, his audience learns of his good connections with the well-heeled distribu-tors of power, assuming of course that he is telling the truth about his relations with these dukes.18 In the work’s fourth section, Faventino prepares to demonstrate the elixir of life, but before he reveals it to his audience, he further shores up his authority by relating that he received the recipe from none other than Nicolò Leoniceno. The fourth section recounts how the master handed down the medicinal knowledge to his pupil, concluding with a reference to the booklet that contains the actual recipe that Leoniceno gave to his disciple. Finally, in the fifth section, the speaker offers the elixir for sale.

The argument in the Erbolato proceeds from the introduction of the human species, through the remarks on good and bad doctors, to the selling of the wonder drug. The first part of this progression has precedents in classical literature, at least in its movement from the reflection on the helplessness of the human creature to the utility of medicine in curtailing human mortality. The opening paragraph on the plight of early man bears some resemblance to Lucretius’s com-ments on the rise of civilization in De rerum natura 5 (and to humanist rewritings of the Lucretian narrative),19 while it concludes with a direct allusion to Pliny’s Natural History.

[Man] saw some species of animals armed with pointed horns, others with the strongest teeth, still others with the sturdiest feet, or with feet fast enough to get them out of any danger at a moment’s notice. Taking a look at him-self, by contrast, he recognized that he was lazy, slow, and weaker than all the others. Nor was he provided with any defense either to stand and fight or to flee. He saw himself alone created nude, cast upon the naked earth in the midst of wailing and sighing on the day of his birth. He saw that no creature had tears more ready than he. Created so inept, so imbecilic that

18Santoro reads the praise of the leaders of Mantua and Ferrara in section 3 as ambigu-ous and he links it to Ariosto’s criticism of courtly life and patrons in OF 35 (374–76).

19There has been a resurgence of interest in the Renaissance Lucretius in recent years; see Brown, Greenblatt, Passannante, and Reeve, to name but a few.

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he cannot move at his beginning but on all fours, nor can he hold up his body until long after birth, nor can he change, nor steady his steps, nor articulate his voice, nor even grasp how to eat, nor feed himself. Then he saw that he was subject to great and countless illnesses much more than all the other living beings. Wherefore, taking these things into account, he began to believe that it would have been much better not to have been born and that nature was for him more a stepmother than a mother, as Pliny says in the seventh book of his Natural History (277).

This direct reference to Pliny in the opening section of the Erbo-lato —together with the prominent discussion of Leoniceno in the fourth section—alerts us to a controversy during Ariosto’s lifetime concerning Pliny. Much of what Pliny wrote on medicinal herbs was challenged by the historical Leoniceno in his controversial treatise of 1492, De Plinii et plurium aliorum medicorum in medicina erroribus, reprinted in expanded form by Mazzocchi in 1509. Leoniceno and his contemporaries were involved in a fundamental debate over medi-cal knowledge to which Ariosto’s citation of the passage from Pliny’s Natural History draws attention.20 Pliny became a focal point of this debate in the 1490s and the critique and defense of Pliny continued in the 1500s with newly printed editions of Leoniceno’s work against Pliny in circulation. At the heart of the debate was the specific ques-tion of whether a text like Pliny’s Natural History was a reliable source of medical (or other) information in the first place; this question was discussed in the context of the larger issue of which authorities were the most accurate and dependable sources in general. Leoniceno had developed an impressive expertise in medicinal herbs through study and practice and he used this knowledge to critique Pliny.21 Leoniceno and Angelo Poliziano argued over the status of Pliny’s text with the latter pitting philological expertise and philosophical rigor against the former’s accumulated medical experience and knowledge of the

20For Leoniceno in general, see Carrara. For discussions of the debate surrounding Pliny, see Thorndike and Nauert; and for a brief discussion of the debate in the context of the ongoing criticism of Avicenna and medieval Latin commentaries by medical humanists like Leoniceno, see Siraisi, Avicenna 67–69.

21Carrara’s study of Leoniceno’s library reveals that it was divided into five parts: humanitas, philosophia, medicina, Galenus, mathematica. Among the books in his col-lection of medical works were copies of Theophrastus’s De causis plantarum and Historia plantarum, both in a Greek manuscript copy and in the 1483 printed translation by Theodore Gaza. He owned several copies of Dioscorides’s De materia medica on herbs in Greek: one in manuscript, one said to be “impressus,” probably either the Aldine editio princeps of 1499 or the later Aldine edition of 1518. And he had the translations of Dioscorides by Ermolao Barbaro and Marcello Virgilio Adriani. The historical Le-oniceno was clearly interested in the medicinal capabilities of herbs.

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sources.22 Leoniceno’s primary concerns in the debate over Pliny were two: that the corrupt text of the Natural History might lead doctors astray and that Pliny’s information regardless of the status of the text was often erroneous. Pandolfo Collenucio, who was a member of the Este court alongside Leoniceno,23 weighed in forcefully on the side of Poliziano in a brilliant defense of Pliny. Whereas Leoniceno favored Greek sources above all others, especially over medieval Arabic and Latin works, Collenucio made a coherent case for the value of any reliable source of information, even a modern vernacular source. Collenucio dismisses Leoniceno indirectly when he claims that those who are “addicted to the vanities of the Greeks” should “admire and cherish likewise the genius of our modern writers” (Thorndike 601).

Pliny is by no means the only authority Ariosto defies in the Erbo-lato. From its beginning, the Erbolato also launches into a satire of Neoplatonic writings on the essential nature of the human, the most familiar of which in Ariosto’s day was Pico’s Oratio, first published in 1496 (shortly before Ariosto sent his request to Aldus Manutius for Neoplatonic writings). It was not until the Basel edition of 1557 that the Oratio was subtitled “On the Dignity of Man,” but its opening pages clearly proclaim this topic as its argument.24 The Erbolato, too, was given a similar descriptive title, though we cannot be sure if by Ariosto or the work’s first editor, Jacopo Coppa, or by the printers of the first edition, Giovanni Antonio and Pietro da Sabio. All three of the early printed editions of the Erbolato (1545, 1581, 1609) refer to Faventino’s topic on the title page as “the nobility of man.”25

Like the opening of Ariosto’s work, Pico’s begins with the creation of the human. The creator endows man with an unspecified quality from every other creature: “At last the best of artisans ordained that that creature to whom He had been able to give nothing proper to

22Leoniceno includes a letter from Poliziano to him, dated 3 January 1491 in the front matter of De Plinii . . . erroribus, which he dedicates to the Florentine humanist. I have consulted the Mazzocchi edition (1509), with Poliziano’s letter on pages 2–3. The short text was expanded significantly with material from subsequent exchanges with other humanists—Ermolao Barbaro, Francesco Totti, Girolamo Menocchio—incorporated into later editions. Further example of the widespread interest in Leoniceno’s work during Ariosto’s lifetime (to choose one among several) is the 1532 edition published by Cratander in Basel with De Plinii on pages 1–61 and Poliziano’s letter on an unnumbered page that precedes the text.

23Both men are mentioned in the same passage in Giraldi’s Commentario delle cose di Ferrara 110.

24I would not go as far as Ascoli, who calls the Erbolato “a point-by-point travesty of the Oratio” (Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony 75), but he is correct about Ariosto’s overall engagement with the work. I follow the translation of Forbes in citations below.

25For descriptions of the editions, see Agnelli and Ravegnani 2: 147–51.

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himself should have joint possession of whatever had been peculiar to each of the different kinds of being” (224). Similarly, the human in the Erbolato has nothing properly his own when compared to the other creatures but Ariosto makes this into a melodramatic moment by emphasizing man’s emotional state at realizing his ineptitude. Only later, in section two of the work, does Ariosto suggest that the human can get by with the faculty of reason. In Pico’s account of creation, God plants the seeds of different possible degrees of being in the human, which the individual must actualize in the hierarchy of being. The degrees of possibility range from the vegetative state of a plant, to the brutish state of an animal, to the rational state of a human, to the mystical intellect of an angel. The human, compared by Pico to a chameleon, has the potential to go up or down this chain of being (225). None less than God explains this situation to the first man Adam, who is told that free will empowers him to go in any direction he pleases.

The identification of Faventino with Antonio Cittadini offers another possible connection to Pico. Between 1491 and 1494, Cittadini reacted against Pico’s attempt in De ente et uno (Of Being and Unity) to recon-cile Platonic and Aristotelian theories on the relation between being and unity. Pico examines the apparent disconnect between the unity of divinity and the multiplicity of the real world in the context of clarifying the subject matter for a larger project he never completed, which he referred to as the Concord of Aristotle and Plato (134).26 In an exchange of three letters after De ente et uno,27 Cittadini attacked Pico for arguing that Plato viewed the godhead as unified and for not knowing Aristotle well enough (“our Aristotle,” Cittadini calls him [228]), to attempt such a philosophical reconciliation.

Much as in Pico’s Oratio, Ariosto’s human has the potential to rise up and overcome all the obstacles recounted in the opening passage of the Erbolato. The emphasis is on the use or potential abuse of the faculty of reason, which can be more or less ennobling. Faventino claims that the faculty of reason fosters the development of the art of medicine: “Thus man, newly made, listening first to his senses, thought himself the poorest and most needy of all creatures, then taking counsel with his reason, realized that he was the richest and best off of them all” (279). The metaphor, “consigliandosi poi con la

26I follow the edition of Toussaint’s De ente et uno 133–89. 27Also available in Toussaint 226–331. Pico’s nephew concluded the debate with an

additional letter in defense of his uncle’s De ente et uno, in Giovan Francesco’s Opera Omnia 2: 109–31.

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ragione,” represents the dialogue that takes place between man and his unique constitutive faculty. In fact, human reason distinguishes itself by endowing the creature with the ability to speak. As Faventino outlines in section two of the work, reason thus enables the would-be doctor to learn from others through conversation, dialogue, communication: “Humans have received the gift of speech more completely than other animals so that one person who learns one thing, another, another thing, and a third, a third, might come together for the purpose of elucidating and clarifying their thoughts, with each person explicating and sharing his discovery with the others” (280). Through dialogue the student learns about the ancient tradition of the medicinal arts. Faventino interrupts his evaluation of reasoned speech with a rhe-torical question: “But why am I saying that there may not be anyone sufficient in and of himself to know all those things, when not even as many as there are in a large city, nor as many as there are in a large region are sufficient to know even the one-hundredth part of them” (280)? He goes on to make the case that doctors need to talk to one another. Doctors need to be peripatetic to take advantage of the tradi-tions of distant locales. The literal road down which the wandering doctor travels becomes an information highway, a road to knowledge.

Faventino is a doctor on the move to be distinguished from those doctors, presumably among his critics, who are not peripatetic. In emphasizing the difference between mobility and stability, Ariosto raises questions about the claims on knowledge by the wandering herbalist and the residential court physician who was becoming a permanent fixture in early modern Italy. And the author raises the unanswered question, albeit in the parodic voice of Faventino: are these court doctors (often also usually university professors, as in the case of Leoniceno) as authoritative as they would have their patrons and patients believe? In the Erbolato’s third section Faventino maps out his itinerary across Italy, from Venice to Sicily (282), through Germany, Flanders, Holland, France, England, and Scotland (282), not to mention Albania, Bosnia, Romania, Greece, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus, Egypt, and the Holy Land (283): “Everywhere you go through-out this land, you might hear the name of Master Antonio Faventino mentioned with the same respect used by the ancient Epidaurians when speaking of Asclepius” (283). The catalog of Faventino’s travels indicates the depth and breadth of his cultural learning but it also is the springboard for referring to what he has done: “But now to avoid a long speech, I will not mention all the successful actions that I performed in all the places that I have named (and in many others that I have not!)” (283).

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In the fourth section of the Erbolato, Faventino’s report of the mas-ter’s speech claims that Leoniceno has come up with a medicinal recipe that the great doctors of the past could not produce. But the speech’s main focus is on the pupil, Faventino, who is praised in detail. The speech begins by suggesting that the student has been so successful he hardly needs any help from the master. Leoniceno remarks that he would leave money and property to Faventino but the pupil has already made enough on his own (285). A humorous contradiction occurs at the end of section four, as Faventino concludes his report of the speech: “And finishing his comments, that loving and saintly elder handed me a little booklet in which a lengthy treatise contained the instructions on how to make the most excellent elixir” (286). The teacher passes a little book on to the student, actually a tiny little book, “un piccolo libretto,” a redundancy emphasized in contrast to the book’s contents, which contains a “lungo trattato” (104).

Faventino describes the secret recipe as a gift from his master (284). This rhetoric of munificence reaches its crescendo at the end of the Erbolato as the charlatan prepares “to donate” the concoction to anyone who will pay a small price for it. Lexical accuracy is sacrificed for the spirit of comedy. Forms of the noun “dono” or the verb “donare” are used over a dozen times in the Erbolato, foregrounding the idea of the gift, culminating with five such references in the final paragraph.28 This image of the “dono” has an ominous echo in Ariosto’s theatrical works, especially in the play most closely tied by theme to the Erbolato, Il Negromante. Ariosto’s necromancer is an astrologer who specializes in curing sexual problems, a doctor amoris, who makes exaggerated claims for his skill in healing the lovesick and the sexually dysfunctional. And while the theme lends itself to a critique of medicine and its practi-tioners, the playwright focuses instead on the moral shortcomings of everyone on stage, good and bad, most of all, on the incompetent and corrupt astrologer. Ariosto wrote the play at the invitation of Leo X, to be performed in Rome during the carnival of 1520. But it was not staged then, most likely because comments in the prologue about ecclesiastical abuses upset the pope so much that he blocked its performance. When it was finally staged for the carnival in Ferrara in 1529, it had been substantially rewritten with a new prologue in which the offensive comments about the papacy had been removed. The expunged lines included these: “You mustn’t think that necessity brings

28In Ronchi’s edition, see pages 94, 96, 97, 100, 102, 105, and 107, for various forms of the words “dono” or “donare.”

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her [the comedy] here [to Rome], that she comes out of a desire to be absolved of murders, vows, or other similar things; for she has no such need. And, even if she did, she would have expected the liberal pontiff to send a plenary indulgence to her at home. And if not as a gift, then for a price . . .”29 The prologue to the first version of the Negromante emphasizes that absolution for the sinner, which as a gift should be free, is actually for sale. The ultimate source of the gift, of course, is God, but the pope as intermediary turns the dispensation into a business transaction. In the Erbolato, Faventino confuses things in a similar manner when he donates his medicine for a price.

Faventino’s wonder drug itself is associated with “grazia” or “grazie” at several points in his presentation. He conflates the vocabulary of “dono” and “grazia,” gift and grace/blessing, when he refers to how God, the Highest Good, saved humankind with the introduction of the “grazia” of reason (278). God’s grace also enables longevity (280). But it is in the actual concocting of the medicine where the full power of God’s grace is on display: “per divina grazia l’ho condotto a perfezi-one” (103, line 49), Leoniceno explains to Faventino. One might be tempted to hear the claim, “with the aid of divine grace, I have brought it to perfection” (285), as an expression of false humility, as if to say, I couldn’t prepare this on my own. But in the context of Ariosto’s, not to mention Ferrara’s, sometimes antagonistic relationship with the papacy, one can also hear in the comment a not-so-veiled critique of the Curia. The gifts of grace should be free whereas some in power, including the pope himself, intervene for financial profit. That the first city called to witness Faventino’s works is “the most holy city of Rome” suggests further that we should interpret the donated gift as a critique of the papacy (282).30

In the fifth and final section Faventino prescribes the regimen one has to follow in order to benefit from the elixir. He prescribes the time of day, time of year, and time in one’s life to imbibe the elixir, depending on one’s specific malady. To take the elixir requires, it turns out, a liquid supplement. There is mention of chicken broth, but the most common recurrent ingredient in the application of the medicine is wine: “vino bianco,” “vernaccia,” “malvasia,” “vino vermi-glio, e piu carico di colore che si possa ritrovare,” and “vino negro”

29Ariosto, Comedies 102. But for reasons I can’t determine Beame and Sbrocchi do not translate the crucial final verse I give above in my version: “E se pur non in dono, per un prezio” (360, line 23).

30On Ariosto’s strained rapport with Leo X, see Ascoli, “Ariosto’s ‘Fier Pastor’”; on Ariosto’s anticlericalism, see Mayer.

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(105–06). There is nothing extraordinary in the prescription of wine as a remedy by a doctor in early modern Europe, but Faventino does appear to depend rather heavily on it as a supplementary ingredient. He reaches his climax by praising his audience before he charges them for the medicinal donation. He hopes that when he comes back, he will be honored for what he has donated to them. Again, the peripa-tetic doctor sticks his foot in his mouth, saying that he’ll be back as long as he’s alive to return, completely contradicting the spirit of the remarks he has just made: “. . . rest assured that he who uses it will spare himself any kind of disease the human body may suffer” (287).

The monologue ends with Faventino’s aggressive sales pitch. The moment of retail is still comically confused with the language of making a donation: “I said I wished to donate this to you and I truly want to give it to you as a gift. And in fact would you call giving away something of the greatest value for a small and insignificant price anything but a gift” (288)? The verb “donare” suggests again a level of public munificence consistent with his comments about sharing and spreading knowledge. But the final point he makes is that to partake and to benefit costs money! Not much, he says, but there is a charge, a small one: “in fact all I want from you is a silver coin for each bottle” (288). A series of questions sketches out the deficiencies in character of anyone who would not find a single silver coin to purchase health and a better life.

Then the final appeal: “Alas, do not let this opportunity flee away! Opportunity is like a lady who shows you her forelock of hair. You must react quickly in order to seize it. But if she decides to turn the back of her bald head to you, I really would not know when or if she will be so benevolent as to let you come close to her again” (288). Renaissance iconographers of “Occasione,” Opportunity, often represent her as a woman fleeing, bald at the back of her head but with a lock at the front. To seize the forehead’s lock of hair is to take advantage of the moment. This same image appears in Ariosto’s Satire 6 to describe squandered occasions in the author’s own education (6.181–83). By the mid-1520s, when Ariosto sounded some very ambiguous notes about humanistic learning in the sixth satire, he had moved far beyond the youthful enthusiasm of his early letter to Aldus Manutius of 1498 with its suggestion that the budding humanist was interested in classical knowledge for its own sake. In the Erbolato, to seize the occasion is to make the purchase, to buy the elixir, to acquire the wonder drug that ensures one a long and healthy life. On that note Faventino stops speaking and presumably starts selling before he leaves town to move on to another piazza and another performance.

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In the Erbolato, Ariosto questions the relation between the world of ideas and the reality of the marketplace, erudition versus practical knowledge, scholarly sources versus lived experience, not to mention the overriding theme of the ability of the human to use reason to challenge death through the mastery of medicine, and incorporates them all into his satire. Faventino claims that his herbal medicine is a universal remedy for any illness. His pseudo-philosophical description of the importance of medicine for humankind eventually becomes a theatrical sales pitch for his elixir, with many of the elements of the performance recalling comedy. As the rhetoric modulates from a pastiche of Pliny and Neoplatonic oratory to the verbal playfulness of theater, Ariosto’s satire becomes a searing criticism of the academy, the Curia, and their respective relations to the marketplace. That rather vague socio-economic construct, the marketplace of ideas, gives way to the actual market stall from which Faventino tries to sell his brain child. Ariosto’s analysis of the relation between the world of ideas and the reality of the marketplace calls into question many of those same points that philological humanists and medical authorities were then debating. With the Erbolato Ariosto makes his contribution to that burgeoning cultural dialogue: the intellectual is a kind of retailer, if not a huckster. Caveat emptor!

University of Pittsburgh

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