Pour un retour aux manuscrits de l’Arioste

Santorre Debenedetti published in 1937 what is known as the « olograph fragments » of Orlando Furioso, related to the drafting of the parts that were added by Ludovico Ariosto to the third edition of his masterpiece (1532). In his timely review of the Debenedetti edition, the young Gianfranco Contini interpreted Ariosto’s variants in a way that allowed him to confirm the judgement of Benedetto Croce, who saw in Orlando Furioso the application of a principle of harmony. To reach such a conclusion, Contini considered only the part of the textual elaboration of the poem that was compatible with Crocean esthetics and endorsed other claims of the Neapolitan philosopher that are no longer considered valid. The birth of the Contini-inspired “critica delle varianti”, based on those premises, has been greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but it has never been reconsidered on a historico-critical basis, so as to verify its philological and interpretative relevance. The aim of this paper is to launch such a process of reconsideration.