ABSTRACT
The versatile art historian John Shearman once compared Tasso’s Aminta to a miniature bronze sculpture by Giambologna: ‘Aminta is the most perfect thing that Tasso ever wrote: it is tiny, polished, exquisitely interlaced yet balanced and gracefully at ease. As one turns the bronze in the hand so one may read and re-read Aminta, continually satisfied by the discovery of new formal felicities.’1 Many well-considered critical paths have led to this summation of Tasso’s Aminta as a literary acme. Some literary historians and philologists have agreed that the ‘immaculate purity of the language’ of Aminta makes it a perfect masterpiece.2 But Aminta is not without its interpretive infelicities. As a love tragedy with a happy ending, Aminta has also endured the charge of being an uneven hybrid that resists classification, a Petrarchan epic, a pure entertainment, a Platonic love-romance. The eighteenth-century poet Gravina observed that its theatrical splendor belied an ‘abstract and artificial’ text, an aesthetic judgment that, interestingly enough, has played into the Aminta’s moral indeterminacy. A host of interpretations in more recent years, many of which stem from comparisons of Aminta to the Gerusalemme liberata and Tasso’s other lyrical works, has revealed the variety of inspirations that Tasso knew how to wield with remarkable mastery.3 Indeed, if one were inclined to look into every thematic and figural element in Tasso’s little masterpiece, reading would become an ambitious exercise in iconographical exegesis.
