LITMIR.BIZ

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Moreover, these same qualities also characterize Rinaldo's horse in Ariosto's immediate precursor, the Orlando innamorato of Matteo Boiardo (1483). The key scene here unfolds when Baiardo, who has become separated from Ranaldo (Boiardo's spelling) and has passed through the hands of several caretakers in the process, finds himself bearing Orlando into combat, ironically, against Orlando's cousin and the horse's own true master, Ranaldo himself:

      Valiant Orlando and Aymone's

      strong son converged: both violent,

      each thought he’d knock the other down.

      Now listen to what's strange and new.

      The good Baiardo recognized

      its master when it saw Ranaldo.

      …. …. …. ……

      [A]nd that horse, as if he could think,

      had no desire to go against

      Ranaldo, so he swerved, despite

      Orlando, to avoid the clash.

      …. …. …. ……

      At the same time, [Orlando] yanked the reins,

      believing he would turn Baiardo,

      but the horse moved no more or less

      than if it stood to graze on grass.

      [Il franco Orlando e il forte fio d’Amone

      Se vanno addosso con tanto flagella,

      Che profondar l’un l’altro ha opinione.

      Ora ascoltare che strana novella:

      Il bon Baiardo cognobbe di saldo,

      Come fu gionto, il suo patron Ranaldo.

      …. …. …. ……

      E quel destrier, come avesse intelletto,

      Contra Ranaldo non volse venire;

      Ma voltasi a traverso a mal disperto

      De Orlando, proprio al contro del ferire

      ................................

      Ed a quel tempo ben ricolse il freno,

      Credendolo a tal guisa rivoltare;

      Non si muove Baiardo più di meno,

      Come fosse nel prato a pascolare.

      (1.26.26.2-8, 27.3-6, 30.1-4)

      In sum, from his first appearance in the Quatre fils Aymon through his appropriations by the Italian romances of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the figure of Baiardo maintains a distinctive and steady character profile consonant with his intelligence and ability to engage in considered acts of disobedience. In the Quatre fils, Bayard already understands human language and successfully opposes the tyranny of Charlemagne; in Pulci, the horse serves as a “buon compagno” to Rinaldo, resisting his enemies in combat and refusing to obey when they seek to command him; in Boiardo, the horse behaves “come avesse intelletto,” refusing to engage in combat with his master; and in Ariosto, Baiardo expressly possesses “intelletto umano,” which he exercises in part by refusing to obey Rinaldo's enemies and in part by refusing to obey Rinaldo himself. Moreover, the various poets who develop Baiardo's character do so through consistent narrative gestures—topoi deployed after the manner of a Wagnerian leitmotif to serve, in effect, as the literary signature of the character in question. Baiardo's repeated human behavior—his “gesto umano”—provides a case in point, but perhaps the most distinctive such feature of the horse's presentation is what I would call the topos of equine civil disobedience: Baiardo's set-piece refusal to comply with commands or submit to conditions that he considers unjust or misguided. This refusal already appears in the Quatre fils, where, among other exploits, Bayard carries Charlemagne without his consent into Renaud's castle of Montaubon and then later escapes the emperor's persecution. However, the topos reaches its most distinctive form in Boiardo and Ariosto, in the horse's flat refusal to enter into combat against his master.

      As I have argued above, this refusal—together with the broader qualities of character it presupposes—serves to ally Baiardo with Rinaldo, establishing a cross-species bond between the two companions that is grounded in their shared heroism and nobility and that serves to distinguish them from lesser human beings and lesser horses. However, this distinction does not prevent Baiardo from also serving as a symbolic referent for all horses everywhere. Indeed, the extreme popularity of the romances that deal with Baiardo, coupled with Baiardo's own status in those romances as the paragon of equine nobility, virtually assures that he will enter into late medieval popular culture as a synecdoche for horses in general. In England, for instance, the noun “bayard” becomes established in the mid-1300s as referring to “a bay horse”—in homage, the OED declares, to “the bright-bay-coloured magic steed given by Charlemagne to Renaud”; thereafter the term generalizes as “a kind of mock-heroic name for any horse” (s.v. “Bayard,” sb. 1, 2). Yet even in this downscale popularization, the character of Baiardo can assert itself in complex fashion across the species barrier. That, at least, is what it does in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (1380–88), where a humble namesake of Renaud's horse offers a figurative referent for Troilus's sudden and irresistible infatuation:

      As proude Bayard gynneth for to skippe

      Out of the weye, so pryketh him his corn,

      Til he a lasshe have of the longe whippe—

      Than thynketh he, “Though I praunce al byforn

      First in the trays, ful fat and newe shorn,

      Yet am I but an hors, and horses lawe

      I moot endure, and with my feres drawe”—

      So ferde it by this fierse and proude knyght.

      (1.218–25)

      Even as it marks boundaries and specifies limits, Chaucer's simile expands into an interspecies mise-en-abîme, tracing discriminations and affiliations in the same moment. For all his pride, Bayard discovers that a horse is a horse, that even the most exemplary specimen of the kind must endure “horses lawe” and draw in the traces with his companions, and yet this discovery is made possible by the unhorselike fact that Bayard—like his descendants in Boiardo and Ariosto—“thinketh.” His hard-won self-awareness thus traces a bond between horse and man, especially the love-captivated Troilus, with whom he shares both consciousness of his situation and an inability to escape its constraints. In this case, at least, the human-animal boundary seems especially significant for the differences it fails to mark.

      On the other hand, Baiardo's literary legacy does seem to inspire at least one English writer to draw the boundary between species with a firmer hand. Ariosto's great early modern translator, Sir John Harington, appears determined to distance Rinaldo's horse from human capacities and human character; at any rate, Harington consistently downplays the moments in Ariosto's narrative that endow the horse with intelligence and agency. When, for instance, Baiardo greets Angelica in canto 1, Ariosto describes him as going “mansueto alla donzella, / con umile sembiante e gesto umano, / come intorno al padrone il can saltella, / che sia duo giorni o tre stato lontano” (1.75.1–4)—that is, approaching “the damsel gently, with humble appearance and human gesture, as a dog dances about its master when he has been absent for two or three days.” Harington's version of these lines suppresses the phrase “gesto umano,” leaving the horse much more firmly situated within a subordinate and separate order of creation:

      But to the damsell gently he doth go

      In humble manner and in lowly sort,

      A spaniell after absence fauneth so

      And seekes to make his master play and sport.

      (1.75.1–4)

      Likewise, when Ariosto excuses Baiardo's disobedience of Rinaldo by explicitly crediting the horse with human understanding, Harington lessens the force of the attribution. Ariosto's phrase “il destrier, ch’avea intelletto umano, / non per vizio seguirsi tante miglia” [“the horse, which had human intellect, did not follow such a course out of vice”

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