Abstract
The epic Orlandofurioso by Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) both celebrates human creativity and warns of the perils that can accompany journeys of the mind. In Ariosto's text, Orlando and Astolfo represent two aspects of the human imagination and its role in the journey towards knowledge. One is an earth-bound voyage of desire and insanity, the other is an otherworldly journey incorporating the metaphor of flight. Through this earthly odyssey and its lunar counterpart we will examine the places in Ariosto's text that are caught in the balance between reason and love's madness. The focus will be on Ariosto's portrayal ofknowledge and its relationship to the self and to poetry. The danger inherent in the imagination and the search for knowledge, concepts that connect Ariosto, a Renaissance humanist, to other scholars of his time will be of particular interest to this examination. Ariosto's treatment ofmadness and the selfechoes the ideas of his contemporaries clustered at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent. His portrayal of these concepts, as reflected in the very title of his work, places the Neoplatonic emphasis on divine fury at the heart of his epic' Ariosto's language in the Furioso lead me to focus on two scholars central to the circle of Florentine Renaissance Neoplatonism: Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), and his friend, teacher and supporter, Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498), a poet and a critic. The differences in Ficino and Landino's respective treatments of knowledge and the imagination remind us that the Neoplatonic circle was not homogeneous in its thinking, but varied, evolving and dialectical. In this article I will show how Landino defines the creative imagination in terms of an external relationship, that is, as an activity that seeks knowledge in the divine sphere, while Ficino's definition, on the other hand, focuses on the relationship between genius and the internal, human self Ariosto would have known well the works ofboth Ficino and Landino,
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