“O Mie Arti Fallaci”

Abstract

The second half of Torquato Tasso’s tormented life was taken up by his epic poem Gerusalemme liberata and the painstaking revisions he made to it following its unauthorized publication in 1581. Both the Liberata and the Conquistata tell of her strident independence and her baptism into her mother’s Christian faith as she lies dying by hand of Tancredi, who has killed what he loved. The chapter examines some of the arguments by turning to developments that led to Conquistata , necessarily addressing selective incidents within both poems in order to depict the nature of Tasso’s poetic transformation. Tasso’s redefinition of the epic poet in his unfinished Giudizio del poema riformato may instead have been in response to those readers of the pirated Liberata who complained about inauthenticity of some of the characters’ emotions that drove the poem. The Conquistata seems dedicated rather to making female behavior transparent and unquestionably sincere, a sincerity that Erminia/Nicea’s rebuke of her “arti fallaci” confirms.

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