The myth of the Hesperides’ golden apples in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and Giovanni Pontano’s De hortis Hesperidum sive de cultu citriorum

Abstract

The myth of the Hesperides’ golden apples in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato and Giovanni Pontano’s De hortis Hesperidum sive de cultu citriorum The eleventh Hercules’ labour was the conquest of the Hesperides’ golden apples. Those precious fruits, Gea’s wedding gift for Zeus and Hera, were planted in a beautiful garden situated in the world’s end. The guardians of this place were three nymphs called Hesperides and a snake. Two remarkable humanists of the Italian Quattrocento, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Giovanni Pontano, inspired by the ancient myth, recall in their poems an image of a garden in which grows a tree with mysterious golden apples. They give two different interpretations of this mythological motif. Falerina’s garden in the Cantos IV and V of the volume II of Orlando Innamorato is a very dangerous place. The tree that grows in the middle of this false Eden kills everyone who approaches it with a rain of enormous and heavy golden fruits. Giovanni Pontano indentifies the Hesperides’ golden apples with citrus fruits cultivated in the southern Italy and invents a legend about the origine of those plants. He imagines that Venus transformed the body of her beloved Adonis into a beautiful citrus tree.