ABSTRACT
Standing between modern readers and Torquato Tasso’s heavily religious work of the 1590s are a number of commonplaces and critical presuppositions. Those presuppositions might perhaps best be emblematized by Romantic images of the poet, such as Delacroix’s 1839 painting of a misunderstood Tasso languishing in a cell in Sant’Anna, his writings scattered on the floor, leering faces from the ignorant world outside mocking him through the bars. This notion of Tasso’s sensibility becoming increasingly restricted by his desire to be conform to the Church, at the great expense of his artistic expression, continues to echo in various ways in criticism of the poet’s work – yet the assumptions underlying it are worth questioning, and in many ways hinder a full understanding of artistic and poetic expression in the wake of the Council of Trent. One such assumption is that any sign of the poet willingly conforming to the dictates of an increasingly authoritarian Church necessarily indicates a relinquishing of his authentic poetic voice, and inevitably diminishes the value and interest of his work. Perhaps because of our knowledge of Tasso’s difficult personal history, and because the appeal of works such as the Gerusalemme liberata and Aminta was never matched by these later texts, modern scholars have largely neglected the possibility that the orthodoxy of the later works might represent not intellectual inhibition, but the discovery of new theological and poetic resources. Even if the poetry which emerged from that discovery failed to match the heights of the earlier works, which were so quickly established in the Western canon, it is worth taking seriously, and indeed represents a form of subtle orthodoxy which deserves attention alongside the cultural modes of resistance to the authority of the Church, which are rightly the focus of much current research on Counter-Reformation Italy.
