Torquato Tasso ( TASS-oh, also US: TAH-soh; Italian: [torˈkwaːto ˈtasso]; 11 March 1544 – 25 April 1595) was an Italian poet of the 16th century, known for his 1581 poem Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), in which he depicts a highly imaginative version of the combats between Christians and Muslims at the end of the First Crusade, during the Siege of Jerusalem of 1099.
Tasso had a mental illness and died a few days before he was to be crowned on the Capitoline Hill as the king of poets by Pope Clement VIII. His work was widely translated and adapted, and until the beginning of the 20th century, he remained one of the most widely read poets in Europe.
Born in Sorrento, Torquato was the son of Bernardo Tasso, a nobleman of Bergamo and an epic and lyric poet of considerable fame in his day, and his wife Porzia de' Rossi, a noblewoman born in Naples of Tuscan origins. His father had for many years been secretary in the service of Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno, and his mother was closely connected with the most illustrious Neapolitan families. When, during the boy's childhood, the prince of Salerno came into collision with the Spanish government of Naples, being subsequently outlawed and deprived of his hereditary fiefs, Tasso's father shared his patron's fate. He was proclaimed a rebel to the state, along with his son Torquato, and his patrimony was sequestered. In 1552, Torquato was living with his mother and his only sister Cornelia at Naples, pursuing his education under the Jesuits, who had recently opened a school there. The precocity of intellect and the religious fervour of the boy attracted general admiration. At the age of eight, he was already famous.
Soon after this date, he was allowed to join his father, who then lived in great poverty and unemployment in exile in Rome. News reached them in 1556 that Porzia Tasso had died suddenly and mysteriously at Naples. Her husband was firmly convinced that she had been poisoned by her brother with the object of getting control over her property.
As it subsequently happened, Porzia's estate never descended to her son, and the daughter Cornelia married below her birth, at the instigation of her maternal relatives. Tasso's father was a poet by predilection and a professional courtier. Therefore, when an opening at the court of Urbino was offered in 1557, Bernardo Tasso gladly accepted it.
The young Torquato, a handsome and brilliant lad, became the companion in sports and studies of Francesco Maria della Rovere, heir to the duke of Urbino. At Urbino, a society of cultivated men pursued the aesthetic and literary studies which were then in vogue. Bernardo Tasso read cantos of his poem L'Amadigi to the duchess and her ladies, or discussed the merits of Homer and Virgil, Trissino and Ariosto, with the duke's librarians and secretaries. Torquato grew up in an atmosphere of refined luxury and somewhat pedantic criticism, both of which gave a permanent tone to his character.
In Venice, where his father went to superintend the printing of his own epic, L'Amadigi (1560), these influences continued. He found himself the pet and prodigy of a distinguished literary circle, but Bernardo had suffered in his own career so seriously from dependence on his writings and the nobility that he now determined on a lucrative profession for his son. Torquato was sent to study law at Padua. Instead of applying himself to law, the young man bestowed all his attention upon philosophy and poetry. Before the end of 1562, he had produced a twelve-canto epic poem called Rinaldo, which was meant to combine the regularity of the Virgilian with the attractions of the romantic epic. In the attainment of this object, and in all the minor qualities of style and handling, Rinaldo showed marked originality, although other parts seem unfinished and betray the haste in which the poem was composed. Nevertheless, its author was recognised as the most promising young poet of his time. The flattered father allowed the work to be printed, and, after a short period of study at Bologna, he consented to his son's entering the service of Cardinal Luigi d'Este. Even before that date, the young Tasso had been a frequent visitor at the Este court in Ferrara, where in 1561 he had encountered Lucrezia Bendidio, one of Eleanora d'Este's ladies-in-waiting, and fallen in love with her. She became the addressee of his first series of love sonnets, to be followed in 1563 by Laura Peperara, the next object of Tasso's affections. Both Lucrezia and Laura had, in the meantime, become well-known singers, and for a while Tasso seems to have courted them both.
From 1565, Tasso's life was centred on the castle at Ferrara, the scene of many later glories and cruel sufferings. After the publication of Rinaldo he had expressed his views upon the epic in some Discourses on the Art of Poetry, which committed him to a distinct theory and gained for him the additional celebrity of a philosophical critic. The next five years seem to have been the happiest of Tasso's life, although his father's death in 1569 caused his affectionate nature profound pain. Young, handsome, accomplished in all the exercises of a well-bred gentleman, accustomed to the society of the great and learned, illustrious by his published works in verse and prose, he became the idol of the most brilliant court in Italy. The first two books of his five-hundred-odd love poems were addressed to Lucrezia Bendidio and Laura Peverara. The princesses Lucrezia and Eleonora d'Este, both unmarried, both his seniors by about ten years, took him under their protection. He was admitted to their familiarity. He owed much to the constant kindness of both sisters. In 1570, he travelled to Paris with the cardinal.
Frankness of speech and a certain habitual want of tact caused a disagreement with his worldly patron. He left France next year and took service under Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara, the Cardinal's brother. The most important events in Tasso's biography during the following four years are the completion of Aminta in 1573 and Gerusalemme Liberata in 1574. Aminta is a pastoral drama of very simple plot, but of exquisite lyrical charm. It appeared at the moment when music, under the influence of composers like Palestrina, Monteverdi, Marenzio, and others, was becoming the dominant art of Italy. The honeyed melodies and sensuous melancholy of Aminta exactly suited and interpreted the spirit of its age. Its influence, in opera and cantata, was felt through two successive centuries. Aminta, played by courtiers in an island of Po river where the duke had his Giardino di delizie, was first printed by Aldus Manutius the Younger in Venice in January 1581. A Croatian translation of Aminta by the poet Dominko Zlatarić, Ljubmir, pripovijest pastijerska, was printed one year before the original, also in Venice.
The Gerusalemme Liberata or Jerusalem Delivered occupies a larger space in the history of European literature, and is a more considerable work. Yet the commanding qualities of this epic poem, those which revealed Tasso's individuality, and which made it immediately pass into the rank of classics, beloved by the people no less than by persons of culture, are akin to the lyrical graces of Aminta.
In the Gerusalemme Liberata, as in the Rinaldo, Tasso aimed at ennobling the Italian epic style by preserving the strict unity of plot and heightening poetic diction. He chose Virgil for his model, took the First Crusade for subject, infused the fervour of religion into his conception of the hero, Godfrey. But his natural bent was for romance.
As he had done in Rinaldo, Tasso adorned Gerusalemme Liberata with a number of romantic episodes, which have proved more popular and influential than the grand sweep of the main theme. Thus, while the nominal hero of Gerusalemme Liberata is Godfrey of Bouillon ("Goffredo"), the leader of the First Crusade, and the climax of the epic is the capture of the holy city, Tasso's Goffredo, who is a mixture of Virgil's pious Aeneas and Tridentine Catholicism, is not the real hero of the epic. Instead, the reader is attracted to the stories of Ruggiero, fiery and passionate Rinaldo, melancholy and impulsive Tancredi, and also by the chivalrous Saracens with whom they clash in love and war.