Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael had just passed away, but Michael Angelo, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese were still living, freeing men’s spirits by the productions of their pencil from formal fancies and conventional fetters, and sending them back to the fresh teaching of Nature.  The art of printing was giving a new birth to letters, and the reformation of religion a new growth to human thought.  A new power had descended into the stagnant waters of European life, and imparted to them a wonderful energy.  Along with the revival of classical learning and the general quickening of men’s minds, there was blended in the South of Europe a lingering love of romance and chivalry, and a strong religious feeling, which had arisen out of the vigorous reaction of Roman Catholicism.  Italy was at this time the acknowledged parent both of the poetry and the general literature of Europe; and the immortal works of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto had formed an almost perfect vernacular language in which the creations of genius could find fittest expression.

But Tasso was not only born in a poetic region and in a poetic age:  he was also the son of a poet.  He inherited the divine faculty; he was cradled in poetry.  His father, Bernardo, though he has been put into the shade by his more gifted son, has claims of his own to be remembered by posterity.  He occupies a high place in the well-defined group of the chivalric poets of Italy.  His principal poem, the Amadigi, which was composed about the time of his son’s birth, though not published for sixteen years afterwards, treats in a hundred cantos the romantic history of Amadis of Gaul, and deals in giants, enchanted swords, prodigious wounds, and miraculous cures.  Various estimates of this long poem have been formed by critics from the favourable analysis of Ginguene to the severe censure of Sismondi.  But in spite of its lack of dramatic power, and the monotony of its imagery, the heat of his genius crystallising only a part of the substance of his work, there can be no question that the poem is distinguished by a certain gravity and elevation of sentiment, which places it high above the romances of the older school, and brings it near to the dignity of epic poetry.  In this respect the Amadigi may be said to form an interesting transition from the irregular romance of Ariosto to the symmetrical epic of his own son.  The son’s poetic path was thus prepared, and the mould in which his immortal work was cast was formed by his father.  The fortunes of the two poets read remarkably alike.  They are marked by the same extraordinary vicissitudes, and the same general sadness and gloom.