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But Boiardo's poem was unfinished: there are many prosaical passages in it, many lame and harsh lines, incorrect and even ungrammatical expressions, trivial images, and, above all, many Lombard provincialisms, which are not in their nature of a "significant or graceful" sort, and which shocked the fastidious Florentines, the arbiters of Italian taste.
The comedy of Timon, which was chiefly taken from Lucian, and one, if not more, of Boiardo's prose translations from other ancients, were written at the request of Duke Ercole, who was a great lover of dramatic versions of this kind, and built a theatre for their exhibition at an enormous expense.
The perfect light-heartedness, the delight in play of a gentle, serious, eminently kindly nature, which gives half the charm to Boiardo's work, seems to have become impossible after the ruin of Italian liberty and prosperity the frightful showing up of Italy's moral and social and political insignificance at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Pulci has a constant cheerfulness, but not with so much grace and dignity. Foscolo has remarked, that Boiardo's characters even surpass those of Ariosto in truth and variety, and that his Angelica more engages our feelings; to which I will venture to add, that if his style is less strong and complete, it never gives us a sense of elaboration.
On the other hand, nobody can respect the foolish old man with his unwarrantable marriage; and the moral of Boiardo's story is still useful for these "enlightened times," though conveyed with an air of levity. In addition to the classics, the poet has been to the Norman fablers for his story.
Some of the cleverest are by Francesco Berni, better known for his obscene capitoli and his rifacimento of Boiardo's Orlando, and appeared between 1537 and 1567; while in later days the kind attained its highest perfection in the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger, whose Tancia originally appeared in 1612 .
Can this story have been suggested, a ghastly nightmare, by the frightful tale of Sigismondo Malatesta and the beautiful Borbona, which was current in Boiardo's day? A serene and spotless art, a literature often impure but always cheerful, rational, civilized this is what the Italian Renaissance displays when we seek in it for spirits at all akin to Webster or Lope de Vega, to Holbein or Ribera.
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