University of Virginia Library

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

appreciate the effects achieved in Porro's plates and deliberately mean to transfer them into his own book? The truth, I think, embraces affirmative answers to all these questions. Harington intended his book to be a lavish production, but he also intended the illustrations to serve a practical purpose and to assist the reader in his understanding and enjoyment of the poem. He writes in the advertisement to the reader: The striking thing about the remarks on the perspective, and for that matter about Ruscelli's remarks in his "A i lettori", which Harington is here translating and abridging and which originally referred to the woodcuts in the Valgrisi edition, is that they give no hint of the use to which the perspective is put or of the other means employed by the unknown artist of the Valgrisi woodcuts to represent Ariosto's poem in picture. Yet the Valgrisi artist sought to illustrate not only the action of the poem but also its shape and spirit; so, in his own way, did Porro; and there are good grounds for believing that Harington appreciated and respected Pooro's artistic purposes, or at least came in the end to appreciate and respect them.

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

of different appearance to each beholder? How to represent the variety of personages in the poem, from the historical Charlemagne to the allegorical and prosopopoeical "Silence", "Pride" and "Discord"? How to illustrate immense journeys undertaken in the course of a few stanzas? What to do about the many reported narratives, some of which are the most vivid and amusing stories in the poem? Valgrisi's artist found solutions to all these problems and more, ranging from invention to systematic omission; but his aim was clearly to make his illustrations as comprehensive as possible. He even illustrated the final proeme, showing a large Ariosto in a small sailing boat approaching a quayside thronged with his patrons and friends.

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

of the Valgrisi scenes or—conversely again—by combining in one bold design actions represented successively in the woodcuts. He altered the perspective, nearly always in order to bring it into closer accord with the narrative sequence (and if this meant mingling Paris and Damascus together in one continuous architectural composition, so it had to be). Porro's designs are more representational and less schematic than those of the woodcuts. He does not imitate the Valgrisi artist in illustrating some of the cantos from a bird's eye view; nor does he use maps to illustrate journeys; he makes no attempt to portray allegorical personages, except quite inconspicuously, or to find a way of representing in the illustrations such a passage as Saint John's praise of writers in canto XXXV, illustrated in the Valgrisi edition by a statue of "Immortality". More particularly, in the interests of artistic clarity and simplicity—a relative simplicity, to be sure—Porro frequently reduces the amount of background detail illustrating the latter parts of a canto, or he even omits to illustrate them altogether. Narrative sequence, not narrative significance, is the guiding principle, together with the search for opportunities in the first few pages of a canto for a good, striking foreground scene.

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

intelligible, at least in a general way, to the reader who has finished the previous canto and not yet started the following one. No more than the principal scenes are thus broadly intelligible, and even they can only be fully interpreted by reading on. Moreover Porro departs from his usual practice, for perfectly defensible artistic reasons, in Plates XXII, XL and XLI, as well as in Plate XXXII where Ariosto's narrative required him to do so. Nevertheless, it may fairly be said that Porro's method of illustration reinforces the poet's own liaison at the canto-breaks rather more emphatically than does that of the Valgrisi artist. However Porro did not attempt to maintain any consistent kind of liaison from plate to plate. That kind of liaison is present or not in his plates, or sometimes only tenuously suggested, according to the exigencies of the designs.

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:

Plate XIII represents conspicuously, in the upper left-hand quarter, just how this was done. Orlando pulls at a rope to drag his prisoners out of the cave, and above, the outlaws' corpses hang by their chins from the lopped branches of a dead-looking tree. The outlaws' fate is clear to the English reader, even though some of the details in the plate may be puzzling. The other major discrepancy is similar. In Book XVII, Rodomont's martial exploits within the walls of Paris are much abbreviated in the translation, which preserves the vehicle of an epic simile of a snake shedding its skin but omits the tenor, the description of Rodomont's shining helmet and armour, together with all the narrative describing his Pyrrhus-like assault on the palace with fire and sword and the terror of the trapped Christians within (Ariosto, XVII:9-13; Harington, XVII:6-9). All this is carefully illustrated in the plate, and although the details are not explained in the text, the scene is readily comprehensible by an English reader as both illustrating and elaborating Harington's stanzas.

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.

Considering the plates by themselves, the eventual dropping of the Rogero and Angelica illustration is probably the strongest piece of evidence we have that Harington came in the end to understand and respect Porro's principle of using perspective to indicate narrative sequence. What of the effects of liaison from canto to canto? Harington understood and respected these, too, as can be seen from his treatment of the Italian verse-arguments and from the effects of their juxtaposition with the plates.