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III
Harington "gaue direction" for the making of the plates and was particularly proud that they were "all cut in brasse". However, it is a striking fact that in only three of the plates were significant changes made to the designs. The remaining forty-three were copied as closely as possible within the limits of the English engravers' abilities. Why was this so? Lack of ideas, lack of a skilled draughtsman, or some such reason? Was Harington merely taking the easy—though most costly—way out, and filching the best illustrations he could find in the Italian editions? Or did he really understand and
Porro's practice differs in a number of respects from that of his immediate predecessor, the Valgrisi artist, but the basic principles of illustration are the same. These Valgrisi woodcuts, too, had their models and precedents, as Mrs Falaschi has shown, but their unique character is what is of interest. They are the first full-page illustrations of Ariosto's poem and the first and last attempts to represent in full detail and in a single plate the entire substance of each canto. The perspective is the key to the interpretation of the multiple scenes, which usually (though not quite invariably) follow one another in narrative sequence upwards from the foot of the page, so that the figures—"cosi sfuggendosi, & diminuendo a poco a poco"—become reduced to minute proportions at the top. Where the perspective does not follow the narrative sequence, it is because the artist has sensibly chosen to separate Paris from Damascus, for example, and to arrange the illustrated actions geographically in different parts of the illustration (Plate XVIII). The problem of perspective diminution was compounded by the small size of the wood-blocks. For Valgrisi's quarto edition, they were inserted in a series of what look like quite unnecessarily broad and elaborate factotum borders. They were used without the borders in Valgrisi's octavo edition, also first published in 1556.
The task undertaken by the Valgrisi artist is indeed quite breathtaking, as well as eye-straining, in its ambition. The problems of illustration posed by Ariosto's poem each seem to have been systematically isolated and tackled. How to represent—say—a lady who vanishes, a palace which dissolves, a phantasm
From our point of view, the important thing about the Valgrisi illustrations is that both the beginnings and the endings of the cantos are systematically represented: the first in the main scene of larger figures at the foot of the page, the latter diminutively somewhere at the top, very often in the top right-hand corner. There is thus a kind of pictorial liaison from one woodcut to the next, which parallels the poet's own liaison between the cantos. So, also, the points at which stories are "abruptly broken off" and later picked up again are illustrated in the body of the pictures, somewhere in the nearer or further middle distance.
Porro, taking these woodcuts as his model, took over many of the same technical solutions. He, too, but more consistently, used perspective to represent the narrative sequence. He, too, omitted reported narratives, had his problems with the phantasms, represented the naked and invisible Angelica all too visibly, the palace of illusions all too solidly. His designs usually borrow a good deal from the Valgrisi woodcuts, often containing details that are reversed adaptations of those in the woodcuts, so that (for example) the endings of the narrative sequences usually appear in the top left-hand corner. We may confidently presume that Porro worked with the Valgrisi edition open before him, but he also consulted the text, usually carefully, in order to make his own adaptations and improvements.[22] Allowing himself more space by including his own narrow borders as an integral part of the engravings, he gave much greater prominence to the foreground scenes and carefully strengthened and varied the composition of the designs. He enlarged the principal figures and made use of architecture, rocks, foliage, and so on, to separate the smaller groups of figures into discrete sequences. However detailed they may be, his plates do not become mere frames for a mêlée of minute figures—as some of the Valgrisi woodcuts certainly do.
Porro's main concern was to make his designs bolder and more dramatic. To do this, he occasionally omitted or conversely added or enlarged the illustration of the very first narrative stanzas of a canto. If these were omitted, the next few stanzas supplied the principal subject. He clarified the action, either by separating successive phases of an episode combined in one
The results of this procedure are at once admirable and curiously unsatisfactory. To take the most obvious example, Ruggiero's rescue of Angelica takes place towards the very end of canto X and is therefore illustrated only by tiny figures in the top left-hand corner of Plate X. Similarly, the pastoral idyll of Angelica and Medoro is shown only in the background of Plate XIX. The foreground of Plate XIX, at least, gives prominent treatment to Cloridan and Medoro, thanks to the continuation of that episode at the start of the canto; but, even there, it is a later part of the episode that is illustrated, not the famous passage in canto XVIII describing their nocturnal search for the body of Dardanello, hidden in darkness and then suddenly illuminated by the moon. (This is illustrated in the background of Valgrisi's Plate XVIII, but not in Porro's.) At their worst, Porro's methods bring about some quite ludicrous distortions of emphasis. Thus, in Plate IV, a conspicuous detail in the foreground of an otherwise admirable design illustrates Bradamante's purchase of a horse from an inn-keeper—a mere narrative iota (Ariosto, IV: 10. 3-5) and omitted by Harington from his translation—but Ruggiero's conversion and baptism (Ariosto, XLI:59) are not illustrated at all in Plate XLI, though the deficiency is partially made good in Plate XLIV. The lack of illustration of reported narrative is also unsatisfying. It means the omission, for example, of Pinabello's vivid description of Atlante and his flying horse in canto II, an important passage because it gives the reader his introduction to the hippogriff.
Yet Porro's methods do peculiarly and no doubt deliberately befit and exploit the exact location of his plates in the Franceschi edition, coming as they do regularly between the end of one canto and the beginning of the next. The principal scenes represent, if not precisely the moments of narrative "freeze" (and some of them do exactly that), then at least the immediately following or closely following action. Their subjects are usually
The English engravers' copies of the Italian plates now need to be compared with Harington's translation itself. Philip Hofer remarked that the English engravers "copied both subject and style, while the translator . . . went to the opposite extreme, and took bold liberties with the text!"[23] This, I believe, gives quite the wrong impression. The generally good accord between the plates and the translation is what needs to be emphasized, not the quite numerous small discrepancies. The principal scenes are all perfectly intelligible by reference to the translation, and apart from Plate IV, already mentioned, there are only two plates out of the forty-six where details given prominent or conspicuous treatment by Porro are inadequately explained in the text. These discrepancies occur in Books XIII and XVII. In both, it may be said that they work ultimately to the benefit of the book as a whole—faute de mieux, that is, and assuming thorough revision of the verse was impracticable. Both, interestingly, are the result of Harington's systematic abridgement in the translation of scenes of cruelty and suffering. In Book XIII, Orlando's brutal punishment of the outlaws who had held Isabella captive in their cave is condensed to a single undescriptive final couplet:
But that he brought them to the hanging ward.
(Harington, XIII:36; cf. Ariosto, XIII:41)
A few words also need to be said about the alterations made to Porro's designs as they were copied for Harington's book.[24] Plate XXVIII, as is well known, was altered by the removal of an architectural background to make room for a pictorial summary of the "Tale of mine Host" about Jocundo, the story which—as tradition has it—first involved Harington in his work of translation and for which he incurred his penance of having to carry it through to completion before being allowed back to court. The light-hearted spirit in which the penance was probably imposed may be gauged from the inclusion in the plate of three scenes of copulation as background vignettes. Plate V was also altered, no doubt by Harington's direction, to include scenes of love. Dalinda's tale of Polinesso's amorous "sleights" is represented at bottom left and the traveller's tale of Ariodante's "saltus amatorius" at top right. There was also a minor change, with nothing (for once) overtly amorous about it, in Plate III. Atlante's castle is shown at top left, presumably to illustrate Melissa's description of it (although according to the narrative the castle does not come into view until the next canto), and a mountain goat at top right is presumably there to suggest the dizzy height of the precipice. Otherwise, the only changes are just as Mrs Falaschi has reported them: two plates reversed (Plate IV and XVII), one copied perforce not from Porro's engraving but from the Valgrisi woodcut and enlarged and reversed in the process (Plate XXXIV), some minor but sensitive improvements (Plates XIII and XXIII), some errors of copying in the labelling, and a number of small omissions and simplifications of detail in the designs and in the borders. Plates XXXIX and XLVI, particularly, are rather crude and simplified by comparison with the originals. None of Porro's various errors of interpretation, large or small, was corrected.[25]
The alterations in Plates III, V and XXVIII all violate Porro's principle of not illustrating reported narrative. We may assume that Harington disliked that principle, or at least was not going to let it stand in his way in his treatment of two favourite cantos. He seems also to have been dissatisfied by the lack of prominence given in Porro's Plate X to Rogero's rescue of Angelica. The Bodleian manuscript shows that he had toyed with the idea of including a full-page plate illustrating that episode, though just where it might have been fitted into the printed book is not at all clear.
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