Torquato Tasso

Torquato Tasso wrote Jerusalem Delivered, the last great epic of the Italian Renaissance, and spent seven years confined as a madman. He was the son of a court poet and grew up moving between patrons, which he never stopped doing. At Ferrara under the Este he produced the pastoral play Aminta and then, in 1581, the epic: a poem about the First Crusade and the siege of Jerusalem in 1099, built on the historical chroniclers and filled out with enchantresses, single combats and a Muslim warrior-maiden, Clorinda, who is killed by the Christian knight who loves her and baptised as she dies. It is a poem about religious war written by a man frightened of the Inquisition, and the fear shows: he submitted it to censors before publication, revised it under their instruction, and later rewrote it entirely into a stiffer and more orthodox version that nobody reads. His mental collapse in 1579 - persecution mania, outbursts, a knife drawn at court - had him shut in the hospital of Sant'Anna until 1586. Whether he was mad, or a difficult man in a court that could not tolerate one, was argued at the time and became a Romantic industry afterwards: Goethe, Byron and Delacroix all made him a subject. He was to be crowned poet laureate on the Capitol in Rome in 1595 and died a few weeks before the ceremony. Monteverdi, Handel, Lully and Rossini all set his epic to music. His life became a subject in its own right. Goethe wrote a play about him, Byron a lament in his voice, and Delacroix painted him in the madhouse. The cell shown to visitors at Ferrara is almost certainly not the one he was kept in.

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