The Voyage of Columbus as a “non pensato male”: The Search for Boundaries, Grammar, and Authority in the Aftermath of the New World Discoveries

Erin McCarthy-King

Ma volgendosi gli anni, io veggio uscire da l’estreme contrade di ponente nuovi Argonauti e nuovi Tifi, e aprire la strada ignota infin al dì presente: altri volteggiar l’Africa, e seguire tanto la costa de la negra gente, che passino quel segno onde ritorno fa il sole a noi, lasciando il Capricorno; e ritrovar del lungo tratto il fine, che questo fa parer dui mar diversi; e scorrer tutti i liti e le vicine isole d’Indi, d’Arabi e di Persi: altri lasciar le destre e le mancine rive che due per opra Erculea fêrsi; e del sole imitando il camin tondo, ritrovar nuove terre e nuovo mondo. (Orlando Furioso 15.21–22)1 Canto 15 of the Orlando Furioso glorifies the exploratory enterprises of fif- teenth- and sixteenth-century navigators. While the English duke Astolfo journeys westward from India toward Europe, he asks his guide Andron- ica about the possibility of reaching the same destination by going in the opposite direction: “s’andar può senza toccar mai terra,/ chi d’India scioglia, in Francia o in Inghilterra” (“was it possible to set sail from India

1 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso (Milan: Rizzoli, 1997). “But with the passage of time I see new Argonauts, new Tiphyses hailing from the lands which lie furthest to the West, who shall open routes unknown to this day. Some of them shall round Africa, following the shores of the black peoples right on past the limits whence the sun returns to us after leaving Capricorn;/ they shall discover the limit of the long stretch of land which makes us imagine two separate seas. They shall sail along every shore and past the neighbouring islands of the Indians, Arabians, and Persians. Others shall leave to their left and right the Pillars established by Hercules, and, following the circuit of the sun, discover new lands, a new world.” The English translation is taken from Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (here- after abbreviated OF), trans. Guido Waldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 26 erin mccarthy-king and reach France or England without once making land?”).2 Andronica’s lengthy response in stanzas 19–35 celebrates the expansion of the Span- ish realm under Charles V and alludes to the explorers of the future who would “ritrovar nuove terre e nuovo mondo”. Here, Astolfo is the explorer figure, the precursor to Vasco de Gama and Christopher Columbus, whose identities are only thinly veiled in this passage.3 The captain of a mythi- cal journey to the moon to reclaim the sanity of Orlando, Astolfo appears both as one who exceeds the boundaries of the known world, irrevocably changing its parameters, and as one who—as an almost paradoxical out- come of his lunar journey—reconstitutes the figure of the traditional hero by restoring the “old” Orlando. He both expands traversable space and regains a classical paradigm, returning the world to order. The way in which Ariosto casts the ground-breaking journey of the his- torical Columbus through the fictitious Astolfo demonstrates a tension between the new and the old, the scientific and the classical, the truth of history and the verisimilitude of the epic—a tension with which many poets struggle in their efforts to create of Columbus an epic protagonist. Some Italian poets and thinkers, claiming the Genovese expatriate as their own (despite Spanish patronage of the expedition) place the figure in a pivotal, heroic role during an era when classical ideals and a desire to reclaim the preeminence of the classical tradition are at the forefront. They hope to render him a warrior, conqueror, and victor. Like many writ- ers in the Renaissance, Ariosto seeks to instill in the classical a sense of modernity and to emphasize that which is new while remaining within a classical context. We see this in his portraiture of Columbus as one of the “nuovi Tifi” for “nuovi Argonauti” who push beyond the limits denoted by the Pillars of Hercules. However, there are other poets who hope to construct around Columbus and his story a new kind of epic with a pro- tagonist unlike the classical heroes led by divine Providence, one whose experiential study of the world leads to the advancement of knowledge. These writers proffer Columbus as a scientist, attributing his achievement to his use of math and astronomy and, more importantly, his willingness to abandon conventional wisdom when it seemed to contradict the con- clusions of an empirical study of the world.

2 OF 15.18. 3 For Angela Caracciolo Aricò’s theory as to why the reference is implicit, see “Da Cortés a Colombo, da Ariosto a Tasso,” in Il letterato tra miti e realtà del Nuovo Mondo: Venezia, il Mondo Iberico, e l’Italia (Rome: Bulzoni, 1994), 135, where she posits that Ariosto omits the name of Columbus (and de Gama as well) in an effort to exalt the rising Charles V in Italy.