THE MATTER OF ORIGINS, OR WHICH MARFISA IS IT?

The reason for studying Marfisa d’Este through the lens of poetic fiction is that her origin derives from poetry itself. First cousins of Duke Alfonso II, Marfisa and her sister Bradamante d’Este (d. 1624), whose girlhood portraits appear on the walls of the Ferrarese palazzina (figs. 3 and 4), were named after two of the most popular female characters in Italian literary history.Footnote ³¹ Marfisa and Bradamante d’Este, whose family sponsored chivalric poetry, became embodiments themselves of that patronage’s fictional production. The girls’ images appear within the remodeled palazzina, not far from scenes inspired by classical myth. These include the rapes of Persephone and the huntress Diana, and two eighteenth-century depictions of the Battle of the Amazons. Myth, fiction, and their figural overlaps speak to and across one another in Marfisa’s modern home, as they do in Ferrara itself. In addition to its rulers named after classical heroes, Ercole (Hercules) d’Este (1431–1505) among them, the city has long witnessed thematic continuity with the story of Phaethon, whose descent upon the nearby Po River created a series of motifs linking Ferrara to its land’s fertile production. Yet, as Dennis Looney has demonstrated, elements from this myth reflect in the Este family’s struggles to sustain its position in the tide-turning political climate between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The uncertainty at court quickly bred anxieties regarding “issues of paternity and the legitimacy of succession.”Footnote ³² Marfisa’s privileged belonging to the Este clan, yet sheltered distance from its responsibility to endure, granted her the latitude to behave at court as she most pleased.

Figure 3. Portrait of Marfisa d’Este as a girl, ca. 1560, attributed to Camillo Filippi (ca. 1500–74). Fresco. Loggetta dei Ritratti, Palazzina Marfisa d’Este, Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. © A. De Gregorio / © NPL - DeA Picture Library / Bridgeman Images.

Figure 4. Portrait of Bradamante d’Este as a girl, ca. 1560, attributed to Camillo Filippi (ca. 1500–74). Fresco. Loggetta dei Ritratti, Palazzina Marfisa d’Este, Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy. Author’s photo.

Before historical and artistic fantasy would rewrite Marfisa d’Este’s unconventionality as unacceptable, sixteenth-century poets for whom she served as a patron, such as Torquato Tasso (1544–95), applauded her alternative attitudes in encomiastic poetry. Tasso’s sonnet Questa leggiadra e gloriosa Donna (This elegant and glorious woman), featured in his poetic commemoration of a recent portrait of the Este princess, likens her feminine appearance to the iconic military garb of her perceivably more masculine counterpart:

Tasso’s reference to Marfisa’s “lofty name” (“nome altero”) in his second verse recalls at once the noble status of the Este family and the personality trait (alterezza, or arrogance) with which Boiardo inaugurates this virago character.Footnote ³⁴ Yet Tasso’s Marfisa no longer has to take up arms to be seen as a chivalric figure pining for immortal glory; she is triumphant and beloved without asking permission.

Tasso includes mention of Marfisa d’Este elsewhere in his works, such that a certain friendship or professional partnership may be seen to have existed between the two. Marfisa d’Este fostered a similarly supportive relationship with the Lucchese poet and singer Leonora Bernardi (1559–1616), in whose tragicomedia pastorale Clorilli Marfisa features as an idol worthy of emulation. In act 2, Bernardi bestows upon her—code-named Cellia in the play—verses of encomiastic acclaim through the mouthpiece Licasta, who titles her “glory of Love, prize of the world, in whose beautiful visage lies eternal spring,…Cellia, in whose proud and honest gaze chaste love sparkles forth.”Footnote ³⁵ The perpetually renewing effects of “eternal spring” (“primavera eterna”) inscribed upon Cellia’s brow proleptically anticipate the renewing transformations of her figure over time. Yet fixity as a theme returns with some variation. When Licasta finds her gazing upon the Ligurian Sea, near the property owned by real-life Marfisa’s second husband, Alderano II Cybo-Malaspina (1552–1606), Cellia’s concentration reveals her historical double: “she fixed her lofty gaze upon the sea” (“in mar fissa tenea l’altere luci”).Footnote ³⁶ The language of haughtiness (“altere luci”) has not traveled far from Marfisa’s image, yet Bernardi arrays this trait for collective concerns.

Cellia-Marfisa’s lofty gaze spurs philosophical musing about female solidarity. Assessing the affective tides that govern women’s experiences of love, she critiques men’s wavering attentions that only guarantee harmful repercussions for women. As she explains to her interlocutor Licasta, “no sooner does a guileless nymph unfurl the sails of her fine desires upon this sea…than, in an instant—unleashing the reins of the infinite horde of their voluble volitions—[men] throw her into such turmoil that she seems now to rise to meet the stars; now to tread the lowest point of the abyss, until finally she is miserably devoured by the unholy depths.”Footnote ³⁷ Echoing querelle des femmes rhetoric that cautions against the strategies of male deception, Cellia’s words capture the heights and depths women (like Marfisa) can expect for trusting too much in men’s constant inconstancy.

The interpretative flexibility that surrounded Marfisa’s figure made her especially ripe for dramatic purposes. Her character’s suitability for sixteenth-century actresses reveals itself everywhere in her figural legacy on stage. The identification between actress Barbara Flaminia and her literary-dramatic alter ego Marfisa, as Eric Nicholson has shown, lasted from onstage shows to offstage street fights. An eyewitness account of the nighttime brawl between groups of tussling actors in Manuta in 1566 compares Flaminia’s stone-throwing to the “amazing feats” (“cose stupende”) executed by the virago Marfisa.Footnote ³⁸ Although the behavioral overlap between the dazzling commedia actress and the heroine from chivalric epic meant, as Nicholson notes, “to some extent, their own lives imitated art,” this did not always generate positive responses.Footnote ³⁹ In a letter dated June 1609, Giovan Battista Andreini (1576–1654), son of the famous diva Isabella Andreini (ca. 1562–1604), hostilely referred to Orsola Posmoni Cecchini (d. after 1620), an actress in a rival troupe, as a “Marfisa bizarra” (bizarre Marfisa), a dominant strand of Marfisa types to which I will return.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Furioso’s “valiant women” (“valorose donne”) may have been especially attractive to commedia dell’arte actresses precisely because the warrior woman’s fate avoided subservience to men.Footnote ⁴¹ The relative independence with which chivalric epic poetry inscribed Marfisa as a love-eschewing knight named for her fixedness on the Roman god of war proved especially influential for Venetian women writers intent on subverting social limitations. The unmarried women of the all-female dialogue Il merito delle donne (The worth of women, written in 1592, published in 1600) by Moderata Fonte (1555–92, born Modesta Pozzo) consider Marfisa an impeccable model of self-preservation.Footnote ⁴² Propelled by “encyclopedic meanderings,” as Virginia Cox has noted, Fonte’s interlocutors model intellectual freedom in ways that cohere with Margaret Tomalin’s notion of the warring woman as an “index of emancipation.”Footnote ⁴³ In Marfisa’s character, Tomalin suggests, one sees the “prime example of the independent woman:…she is tough, dedicated to a life of martial activity and still allowed to be beautiful.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Leonora, the young widow who prefers death by drowning to the prospect of remarrying, wishes that contemporary women would conduct themselves in the manner of the Amazons, even dressing in the style of her preferred literary heroine: “I’d like to see us women arming ourselves like those Amazons of old and going into battle against men.…I’d wear an image of a phoenix on my helmet.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The swooning bride Helena, another interlocutor, moves promptly to guess for whom Leonora expresses admiration: “so you’d be emulating that great Marfisa, who had the phoenix as her emblem.”Footnote ⁴⁶ An attentive reader of the Furioso, Helena cites the reasons for Marfisa’s choice of emblem from the poem: “the crest on her helmet was a phoenix, which she either wore out of pride, to communicate her unique martial prowess, or else to congratulate her chaste intention to live forever without a spouse.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The self-generating potential of Marfisa’s avian symbol ensures a life of self-sufficiency desired by the independent minds of Fonte’s circle.

Intertextual dialogue with Ariosto’s poem gives the cue elsewhere to women’s rejection of subservience. In canto 26 of the Furioso, the only occasion where Marfisa appears clothed in feminine attire, she makes clear her right to autonomous movement to the knight Mandricardo, who otherwise assumes her to be his personal possession. Defending the self-guided elections of sovereign desire, the virago bites back against Mandricardo’s presumptions: “I am not his, nor am I anyone else’s, but my own alone: therefore, let him who desires me, take me from myself.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Marfisa’s arguments for self-preservation are modeled on the claim to negative liberty, or the freedom from subservience to others.Footnote ⁴⁹ In Fonte’s dialogue, this principle appears widely at play in Marfisa’s exemplary status, which excites authorial aspirations in others. The group’s scholarly Corinna composes and recites a sonnet, guided (it would seem) by the virago’s air of defiance: “The heart that dwells within my breast is free: I serve no one, and belong to no one but myself.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Marfisa’s anthem of autonomous self-governance amplifies Fonte’s rhetoric of women’s right to independence.

The role of the singularly independent woman was one Marfisa d’Este played in her city “that was itself a stage.”Footnote ⁵¹ Marfisa and Bradamante d’Este were frequent performers in the court’s chivalric entertainment culture that extended from literary pages to musical-theatrical stages. With the arrival of Alfonso II’s third wife, Duchess Margherita Gonzaga (1564–1618), occasions for women’s performances greatly multiplied. Marfisa collaborated with Margherita—her cousin by marriage—in the all-female ensemble of dancers, the balletto delle donne, a complement to the court’s internationally esteemed concerto delle donne.Footnote ⁵² The group’s choreographed performances typically featured half of its members cross-dressed.Footnote ⁵³ Marfisa and Bradamante stood out among the balletto stars, eager to sport virile attire that would identify their bodies with their poetic other halves. The Este women danced as “fighting female warriors” (“guerriere combattenti”) in the wedding festivities held for Carlo Gesualdo (1566–1613) and Eleonora d’Este (1561–1637) in 1594. One eyewitness account of the celebratory performance records the audience’s reaction:

That these “fighting female warriors” stunned their audience is not surprising when considering the extravagance of their wardrobe. It is tempting to wonder whether the spectacular headdress (copricapo) Marfisa likely donned in choreographed performance (fig. 5), designed by Domenico Mona to fit like a crest atop a helmet, ever featured her character’s phoenix emblem nested among its radiant feathers.Footnote ⁵⁵ By assuming the guise of her cross-dressing fictional self during carnival, diplomatic ceremonies, and state visits by foreign ambassadors, Marfisa d’Este courted her own fictionalization—if not with pen and ink, then with her body and its various capacities to signify.

Figure 5. Headdress design for the Este court’s balletto delle donne, worn by a female dancer. Mappario estense, Stampe e disegni, nn. 89/34. Courtesy of the Archivio di Stato di Modena.

Because the Este noblewoman danced along the fragile lines—literally and figuratively—between fiction and reality, La gloria delle donne (The glory of women) (1590) by Giulio Cesare Croce (1550–1609) looked to her as the embodied exemplar of female defiance. The “valiant women” (“valorose donne”) of the Furioso’s canto 37 figure in Croce’s “donne valorose” of historic and contemporary fame, whose genealogy, like poetic Marfisa’s, stems from the Amazons.Footnote ⁵⁶ Croce’s criticism of the “evil agenda” (“odiosa operatione”) insidiously at work in the late sixteenth-century misogynist literary current recalls Ariosto’s reproof of men’s “evil tongues” (“odiose lingue”) used to spread lies about women.Footnote ⁵⁷ When the narrator of the Furioso predicts that women’s reputations, when preserved in writing, will one day surpass his Marfisa’s fame, he may have anticipated La gloria’s dedication to Marfisa d’Este. The title page of Croce’s poem-treatise recognizes its noble dedicatee as the marchioness of Massa, the position she earned through her second marriage to Alderano II Cibo Malaspina. La gloria’s composition in ottava rima, with frequent mentions of the poet-narrator figure, his struggling canto, and his Ferrarese dedicatee, reveals its indebtedness to the form that originated the Marfisa character.

Responding to Ariosto’s demand of modern poets,Footnote ⁵⁸ Croce adapts and emulates the Furioso thanks to Marfisa d’Este’s piloting hand. Marfisa’s patronage guarantees the poet the “more powerful arms” (“armi più forti”)—that is, her name (“il nome vostro”) wielded as a shield (“scudo”) and shelter (“ripar[o]”)—that allow thought to be put to ink.Footnote ⁵⁹ Croce’s verses and Marfisa’s reputation unite to silence the modern-day impersonators of “Momus and Zoilus, and other slanderers” (“I Momi, i Zoili, e gli altri maldicenti”).Footnote ⁶⁰ These and other villains emerge not only as defamatory but as intertextually significant. Whereas Ariosto’s Cinque canti (Five cantos) (begun 1519, printed 1545)Footnote ⁶¹ had compared Marfisa’s hawkish sword-wielding to “a Fury out of hell” (“Marfisa parve al stringer de la spade / una Furia che uscisse de lo inferno”),Footnote ⁶² Croce assigns this same metaphor to male offenders of women: “Men—iniquitous, treacherous, and villainous— / who are guilty of a thousand disgraces and a thousand evils,…and who, like furies out of the depths, / time and again have spoiled and ruined the world.”Footnote ⁶³ After reviewing a catalogue of Greco-Roman antiheroes whose actions accord with Croce’s denouncement, the narrator shifts his attention to more recent literary history.

The last lines of La gloria delle donne predict that Marfisa d’Este will triumph over contemporary denigrators, just as fictional Marfisa had overthrown male miscreants. The poet’s advice for women readers to “let these Birenos and Marganorres vent and carry on” (“lass[are] pur sfogare, e far processo/questi Bireni, e questi Marganori”) disarms the threats that spill from men’s angry mouths.Footnote ⁶⁴ A discourse that once spouted noxious lies is now barely equipped to handle breathy, hot air. Croce would have struggled to make his point any clearer: if the real-life equivalents of Ariosto’s deserting men ignite any reaction in women, then it is not in their capacity to betray and abandon them, as Bireno had done to Olimpia, nor to exile and humiliate them in the likeness of the tyrant Marganorre. Rather, women dress for combat whenever men are delinquent. The hazards of injury these figures once represented become neutralized and miniaturized in La gloria’s final line, whereby men’s aggression amounts scarcely to a “flea” (“pulce”) poised to tackle an “elephant” (“elefante”).Footnote ⁶⁵ Holding up Marfisa d’Este as the guarantor of his text’s aspirations, Croce tips the scale of gendered triumph not one ounce in men’s favor.

If Ariosto had commissioned the Marfisa character to ensure respect for poetry’s women would be maintained over time, Croce solicits Marfisa d’Este to do the same for their historical counterparts. Virago Marfisa succeeded in overturning the law of Marganorre’s that had made refugees out of female citizens. Her institution of a law in its place—indeed, “her law” (“la legge sua”)—promises to extend beyond the pages of the poem’s fiction.Footnote ⁶⁶ Marfisa pledges her return to the land the giant once ruled before the close of the year; should she witness any inhabitant breach her command to obey one’s wife, the town can expect “fire and ruin” (“fuoco e ruina”) in response.Footnote ⁶⁷ Marfisa’s cluster of associations with truculent behavior—no matter its defensive or offensive design—would catalyze her transformation into a wholly bizarre figure more undefinable than ever.

BIZARRE, UNTAMED, BOOKISH, LEGENDARY: THE VIRAGO’S GENEALOGIES

Much of how Marfisa developed as a more comic figure over time has to do with her increasingly eruptive temper. While Boiardo’s Marfisa appears without an ancestral tale rich in any great detail, the Furioso’s canto 36 imparts the virago’s Amazonian descent: she and her twin brother Ruggiero are the orphaned children of Galiziella.Footnote ⁶⁸ At the time of her baptism Marfisa discloses her parentage in a manner that verges on confession. She details her deadly rejection of a Persian king’s unwanted advances, and how she was forced to fend him off when a slave at age eighteen. In an act of self-preservation, Marfisa chose death before sex, murder before surrender. Regicide marked Marfisa’s first act of “fury” (“furore”), a lethal trait born in her to combat male hostility.Footnote ⁶⁹

Yet Marfisa’s renunciation of her wrath after baptism does not spill over to Ariosto’s other writings. The Cinque canti paint the virago’s submission to folly in colors that evoke Orlando’s frenzy. Not unlike the count’s senseless slaughter of shepherds and forests, Marfisa moves “per follia” (out of madness) to extinguish innocent townsfolk.Footnote ⁷⁰ If the Cinque canti emphasize, as David Quint has shown, “the dark underside of the imaginative world [Ariosto] had created in the Furioso,” their Marfisa embodies bizarreness, menacing and without reins.Footnote ⁷¹ It would be to this character trait that philologist Orazio Toscanella (1510–80) later wed Marfisa’s figure in his allegorical reading of individual names from the Furioso, wherein she takes on the representation of “pride and bizarreness” (“significatrice della superbia, et della bizzarria”).Footnote ⁷² Whatever trace remained of Marfisa’s sober chivalric obedience had all but vanished by the late sixteenth century.Footnote ⁷³

Virago Marfisa’s developing associations with bizzarria did not, however, emerge out of a stylistic vacuum. The vogue for the literary bizarre and its adoption by unconventional early modern women, as Jessica Goethals has deftly demonstrated, built upon the popularity of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century experiments in carnivalesque poetry.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the decades before Giambattista Marino (1569–1625) would famously establish rule-breaking as the only rule poets ought to follow, appetite for the bizarre gained in momentum in carnival songs, or canti carnascialeschi, versed by such prominent figures of the lyric canon as Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92). Francesco Berni (ca. 1497–1535), from whom bernesque poetry gets its name, transformed this repertoire in his sampling of chivalric romance epic. Amending Boiardo’s minstrel narrative style and varying his language “in the direction of Tuscanization,” Berni’s Rifacimento dell’Orlando Innamorato (Reworking of Orlando in love) (posthumously published in 1541) freely redistributes octaves, even episodes.Footnote ⁷⁵ Berni carried out these editorial decisions in the name of legitimizing chivalric literature as worthy reading material. Even under the guise of moralizing refinement, zest for the sexually irreverent still found its way into circulation, as Berni scratched some erotic passages from the original—while unable to resist introducing others of his own making.Footnote ⁷⁶

Similar to Marfisa’s art of categorical evasion, attempts to define bizzarria only render the term more undefinable.Footnote ⁷⁷ An umbrella signifier today that ranges from the whimsical, fanciful, and fantastical to the grotesque, eccentric, odd, and weird, bizzarria appealed to early modern writers to describe instances of capriciousness and unpredictability.Footnote ⁷⁸ The suite of associations that orbit the bizza, a tantrum or scene, evoke the earliest uses of bizzarria in vernacular Italian literature. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) pair bizzarria/bizzarro with irascible figures and incensed encounters.Footnote ⁷⁹ Despite the term’s near-custom labeling of each of the hot-tempered, snappish knights of Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s fictions, neither bizzarra nor any of its variants ever appear in the Orlando poems to describe Marfisa; they denote instead an object’s extraordinary brightness, or a character’s martial—and strictly masculine—fury.Footnote ⁸⁰ No mention of bizarre Marfisa appears in either the Innamorato or the Furioso; it was in mock epic that she learned to behave so.

Similar to the reactive force of bizzarria—understood as either provoked or unconventional behavior—this “antigenre” names a literary practice executed in response.Footnote ⁸¹ Mock epic balances in its purview sustained regard for classical and Renaissance precedents with opportunities to exaggerate their seriousness to subversive effects. The textual examples studied thus far locate in Marfisa attributes and attitudes worthy of emulation by others. This would change, however, when a more sardonic take on her overstated qualities in arms and love began to appeal to authors. Standing before the world of mock epic as an unmarried, pugnacious quibbler hungry for bloodshed and celebrity, Marfisa was ripe for comic reinterpretation.Footnote ⁸² While the Innamorato and the Furioso had depicted the virago’s austerity not without some amusing touches—her choosing to remain in armor for five years without ever taking it off indicates just one example—in mock epic Marfisa becomes more bizarre the more self-conscious she is of her displaced, relational status to chivalric epic romance. In the shift from the serio to the ludere, Marfisa’s textual genealogies emerge as multidirectional: forward-facing in showing off her new behaviors and desires, while backward-glancing in transforming and redefining the tradition from which she came.

Venetian poet Giovanni Battista Dragoncino da Fano (1497–d. after 1553) was the first to cast a bizarre Marfisa as the titular heroine, in his longest experiment with chivalric poetic fiction.Footnote ⁸³ Comprised of fourteen cantos, Marphisa bizarra (1531, revised 1532) narrates the maddening experience of unrequited love and its protagonist’s surprise, even distress, at having to confront it for the first time. Adopting Boiardo’s spelling of the virago’s name, Dragoncino recalls Marphisa as the transliteration of the Amazon warrior Marpesia, the “snatcher” or “seizer” of classical historiography.Footnote ⁸⁴ Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (On famous women) (ca. 1361) narrates Marpesia’s sprawling imperial successes, alongside her legendary sister Lampedo, won for their militant sorority. Boccaccio does not fail to mention Marpesia’s overly confident strides in territorial expansion, echoes of which resound in Ariosto’s Marfisa implicitly hoping to inherit from Alexander the Great all rule in Asia, or, as Plutarch would have it, all the world.Footnote ⁸⁵ Although as a character Marfisa is distinctly the making of Renaissance chivalric epic poetry, Boccaccio’s heroine attests to the classical and medieval implied heritages that shaped her development in the sixteenth century. Textual study of Dragoncino’s bizarre Marphisa can be best anticipated by visualizing precisely the woman he sought to construct.

An Italian woodcut by an unknown artist (fig. 6), housed at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, depicts the virago riding astride a rearing horse with hairs raised along its mane. “Marfisa bizara,” the title indicated by the woodcut’s inscription, appears unstirred, indeed perfectly balanced, her penetrating eyes pinned on the viewer.Footnote ⁸⁶ Her ornately patterned skirt and lion-hide armor—a visual cue tying her to Cybele, the mother of gods friendly to the Amazons and, per Vergil, the Trojans—convey at once the androgyny and genealogy with which chivalric romance epic supplies her figure.Footnote ⁸⁷ The sumptuous plumes that sprout from her decorative helmet put the final touch on this truly extravagant image.Footnote ⁸⁸ While the representation of “Marfisa guerriera” (“woman warrior Marfisa”) by Antonio Tempesta (1555–1630) (fig. 7) similarly depicts the equipped maiden riding an elegant, lavish destrier with battle arms hanging securely by her side, she is moving away from the viewer and the artist reveals only Marfisa’s profile.Footnote ⁸⁹ This angle allows the decorum of her two strands of braids to reflect in the horse’s orderly tied tail. The difference in each Marfisa’s weaponry, however, is certainly suggestive. While Tempesta’s engraved figure rides astride a trotting mount clearly under her control, holding a lowered shield at a distance from her viewers with no offensive weapons visible, her “bizara” counterpart arrives thirsty for combat: she is kitted out for war, ready to lose her lance through using it and continue fighting with her deadly battle sword. Bizarre Marfisa is surely more penetrating, immediate, and daring than her “guerriera” other half. The stunning color version of this same image (fig. 8), though it appears without the “Marfisa bizara” inscription, is included in the sixteenth-century collection Libro del Sarto (Book of the tailor) (ca. 1540–50). This image is practically identical in composition to the Ashmolean woodcut, apart from one significant detail. The figure’s face in the color image conveys little that announces itself as alarming about her presence. In contrast, with tightened, upturned lips, hand theatrically popped on her left hip, Marfisa bizara dares onlookers not to miss her entrance, lest they risk inciting her further.Footnote ⁹⁰

Figure 6. “Marfisa Bizara” woodcut. WA2003.Douce.2111. 37.5 x 27.1 cm. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Figure 7. Antonio Tempesta. “Marfisa guerriera,” 1597. 139 mm x 96 mm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Accession number A 96173 (in KB A 838,2, Bl. 031r.). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 8. Il Libro del Sarto, 1540–50. Fondazione Querini Stampalia Onlus, Venice, fol. 24^r.

The subtlest exposure of skin in the Ashmolean woodcut and its color version, just above where the figure’s mid-calf hose ends and the fastenings on her skirt begin suggests a spicy provocation. For Marfisa bizara, this hint of flirtatious challenge suggests a more sensual side of this typically aromantic figure. But while readers familiar with Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s Marfisa would have recognized her in Dragoncino’s Marphisa, “bold and wise as she is haughty and beautiful (“gagliarda, e saggia quanto altera, e bella”), as the Innamorato introduces her character with these same attributes, her newfound smitten lovesickness would have struck them by surprise.Footnote ⁹¹ Reeling from her sudden fluency in love’s torturous vocabulary, Marphisa strains to grapple with her unwelcome circumstance:

Rivaled against one another and forced into dialogue through alternating pronouns are Marphisas from two very different worlds: one of literary tradition, who had expertly avoided both love and limitation, and a reinvented literary other, driven mad by lust at a premium price.

A Marphisa cornered by epic’s political teleology would also have been new to readers. Ariosto’s mythopoetic choice to designate a woman warrior as the recipient of a genealogical prophecy reflects in the similarly dynastic design of Dragoncino’s poem. Marphisa’s prized dedicatee is the first Duke of Mantua, Federico II Gonzaga (1500–40), whose genealogy takes origin in Dragoncino’s titular heroine, “that singular noble root” (“quella singular nobil radice”), the narrator tells Federico, “which was your ancestors’ progenitrix” (“che fu degli avi tuoi progenitrice”).Footnote ⁹³ Though neither Boiardo nor Ariosto ever destined her character for chronicle, Marfisa/Marphisa’s significance for the Gonzaga family is unexpected but not unimaginable: she is, after all, the long-lost twin sister of the cofounder of the Este clan. The close ties between the two powerful families—Marfisa d’Este’s great aunt, Isabella, was indeed Federico’s mother—ripened the potential for overlap in poetic accounts of their dynastic origins. More than simply a double of Bradamante reimagined for Mantuan rulers, Marphisa comes to represent and even replace Orlando as the central figure in Carolingian fiction. In doing so, she unravels and resews the poetics of entrelacement that had kept the protagonist’s story separate, as in Boiardo and Ariosto, from poetry’s genealogical thread.

Further dismantled are the size and scope of the narrator’s purview. Marphisa bizarra’s multitextual blend of Ariostan- and Virgilian-style incipits makes clear its romance-epic heritage:

Echoing “the courtly chivalry and daring deeds” (“le cortesie, l’audaci imprese”) from the first stanza of the Furioso,Footnote ⁹⁵ the plurality of Ariosto’s “ladies, knights, arms, loves” (“le donne, i cavallier, l’arme, gli amori”)Footnote ⁹⁶ is reduced in Dragoncino to a single body. Such narrowed attention renders more immediate the intertextual dialogue with the beginning of Boiardo’s Innamorato and its emphasis on “the immeasurable deeds, stupendous feats and amazing labors carried out by Orlando, the Frank.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Notably, Dragoncino’s regal subject emerges as the very source of arms of love (“l’arme, e l’amor d’una Regina”), not their object. Such terms represent a liberated state from subjected positioning not always afforded chivalric epic women and one that inverts the direction of its very genealogy. As the titular character framed by a rhetoric of opposites (arms/arme vs. love/amor, ire/ire vs. peace/paci, hope/speme vs. fear/timor, laughter/riso vs. tears/pianto), Marphisa embodies the bitter contrast between love and fury, amor and furor, reflected in the thematic sequence from the Innamorato to the Furioso.Footnote ⁹⁸

Throughout the poem, Marphisa’s obsessive affections for the male knight Filinoro take their cue from Orlando’s errant frenzy.Footnote ⁹⁹ Chasing after Filinoro’s absent body in a wood where paladins and pagans alike go missing, Marphisa weathers the count’s experience of self-alienation. Just as Orlando had dissolved into a spirit divided from the man he once was,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ “no longer is Marphisa what she once was / but a pathetic woman.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Haunting traces of the virago’s once independent life multiply the effects of her aching self-diffraction. Marphisa’s transformation into Orlando’s boiling shadow prompts her to emulate his storming naked and senseless through the trees. Choleric that a nearby nightingale would interrupt her “blissful dream” (“beato sogno”) with a song, Marphisa lunges toward the creature with a “furious assault” (“furioso assalto”), speedily sawing down trees as improvised weaponry.Footnote ¹⁰² The virago’s destruction of her woodland environment is caused not by the stinging realization that her beloved pines for another, as prompted Orlando’s fury, but that he escapes her clutches even in dreamlike fiction.

Marphisa’s encounters with other animals peel back further layers to her bizarre temperament. In her attempt to track the forest for mislaid Filinoro, the Innamorata adopts the likeness of a bear prowling for its prey: “she went about abandoning every custom / wrathful and bizarre like a bear.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Beast and woman merge in the mirroring effects of canto 13’s combat between Marphisa and an actual bear, risen up like a human to stand on its hind legs. Synonymous language binds these two figures’ characterizations, when “in this new brawl, the upper-hand passes from one bizarre creature to the other.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The comparison between the “bizarre creature” (“bizarra creatura”) and the bear brings into relief elements from the myth of Calisto, transformed into a she-bear and the celestial body Ursa Major after Jove violated her sacred vow of chastity.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the nymph struggles because she retains her human intellect while shapeshifting into a beast.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Dragoncino, however, divides the woman-bear combination into two warring figures. In this way, the already self-split Marphisa seeks to extinguish the symbols and body associated with her former autonomous self.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Essential to reading Marphisa and the bear as opponents is the close kinship that huntresses have shared with this animal since antiquity, as evidenced in the earliest myths of the Greek heroine Atalanta and Venus’s account of her story narrated in Ovid.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Raised like a cub by a she-bear in Arcadia, Atalanta shares Marfisa’s defiance of men and marriage.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Atalanta’s fabled footrace, a requirement she levied as a prerequisite to handing herself over as a bride, resulted in a metamorphosis that would become suggestive for the origins of Ariosto’s character. Hippomenes, the youth whose slick trickery with Aphrodite won him the race, conquered Atalanta’s heart. Yet the couple’s premarital passions swiftly met serious consequences. Chastised for their sacrosanct lovemaking in a temple dedicated to Cybele, Hippomenes and Atalanta witnessed their bodies change into lions.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It would be one of these animals that suckled infant Marfisa, as told by the sorcerer Atlante.Footnote ¹¹¹ If Atalanta’s genealogy proceeds from an ursine past to a leonine future, Marphisa’s evolves in reverse order between Ariosto’s and Dragoncino’s poems. A veritable opponent in every sense, the bear in Marphisa bizarra descends from an ancestry from which the protagonist must sever herself. She is forced to carry out her “amorous bizarreness” (“amorosa bizaria”) to the bitter end.Footnote ¹¹²

The passion-scorched queen slays her feral rival by plunging her sword into its chest, suggesting an ability to kill off bizzarria in others even as it continues to consume her.Footnote ¹¹³ The animal escapes just barely alive, zigzagging her way across the blood-soaked forest floor: “That bizarre and fugitive animal runs, knowing not where it is headed. It is not yet dead, nor can one say that it lives.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Yet is this animal the beast or the maiden? Wounded herself by Cupid’s pointed arrow, Marphisa disappears into the edges of the poem’s conclusion, tracking still the dusty footprints of her fleeing beloved. She lingers on, bizarre and blinded by a quest that has lost sight of its end. Unlike the wedding ceremony that draws the Furioso to a close, Dragoncino’s poem stops short of fully realizing Marphisa in the role of a dynastic heroine: she is last seen astride a purloined horse, dressed in the borrowed arms of a fallen knight, errant within a fiction whose promise to become history remains ever at a distance.

“Bizarre Marfisa” would return in the eighteenth century as a similarly spellbound lover racing after an absent beloved. By this time, twinned ideas about aesthetics and morality had doused bizzarria in sourly admonishing terms, with language guided in no small part by the bitter reception of the Baroque as an era of “bad taste.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ This character’s stationed residency at the publishing houses of Venice provided, however, some interpretative wiggle room.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Venetian literary circles that saw Marfisa bizzara by Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806) come to press in 1772 extended their “incessant fascination with educated, independent-minded, and socially unconventional women” to this daring heroine.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Marfisa’s dexterity in the autonomous application of rules, which dovetailed nicely with the resonant attitudes of Marinist poetics, resonated with the theatrical and satirical currents in vogue throughout Settecento Venice. With Gozzi’s poem, readers return to Carolingian Paris to find a familiar cast of chivalric names, each endowed with new tastes and tricks: the English Duke Astolfo is a fussy stylist, Rinaldo a guzzling smuggler, the emperor is aging and gluttonous, and Bradamante schemes as a seedy landlady. Marfisa stands out among this crowd of comic miscreants as a petite, short-tempered shopaholic with a harrowing fear of growing older. Yet there is a deeply intellectual side to this coquettish gambler. Learning that the more she reads the more mad she becomes, Marfisa loses herself in the pages of literature and philosophy. She assumes the role of a proper Donna Quixote, bewitched by the same soluble lines between fiction and reality that had seized Cervantes’s protagonist.Footnote ¹¹⁸ As Gozzi makes clear, “ancient romances” (“romanzi antichi”) might have given Marfisa a history but “new romanzi” (“nuovi romanzi”) will dictate her future.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Caught in the fold between these two categories are poems like Dragoncino’s Marphisa bizarra, where readers had already met the paramour Filinoro. A chivalric Casanova tailed by a sex-parched redhead in Gozzi, Filinoro and Marfisa make for a most unusual couple.Footnote ¹²⁰ While these two are almost too much alike to be truly compatible mates, Marfisa appears in stark contrast to her sister-in-law Bradamante, who has “remodernized her mind” (“rimodernato avea il cervello”) from a “woman warrior” (“guerriera”) and “jouster” (“giostrante”) to a domestic caretaker.Footnote ¹²¹ She and her husband Ruggiero have grown tired of Marfisa’s tomfoolery, and are resolved to find la bizarra a proper husband. Terigi, a former squire for Orlando who has become a tremendously wealthy tax collector, rises to the top as the most eligible bachelor. The married duo’s plot falls to pieces, however, when handsome philanderer Filinoro catches Marfisa’s eye, dispatching the rest of the poem’s adventures across Europe and back again to Paris.

While comprehensive analysis of Gozzi’s poem and its “restless and excessive” (“inquieta e eccessiva”) heroine cannot be included here, its portrayal of Marfisa’s carnivorous appetite for pleasure is worthy of some reflection.Footnote ¹²² Marfisa might have become a bookworm by the eighteenth century, yet she excels in the bedroom. She has no fewer than one hundred lovers, and gratifying them all is the art only she knows best. Intimate relations in Gozzi have little to do with founding dynastic families and everything to do with feasting on euphoria. “In terms of the art of making love” (“quanto all’arte di far all’amore”), readers learn, “there will never be a woman on par with Marfisa” (“non verrà al mondo una pari a Marfisa”).Footnote ¹²³ Intent on expanding her count of sexual conquests, Marfisa juggles ten times the number of bodies in need of satisfaction that she had faced in the Furioso.Footnote ¹²⁴ This exaggerated version of Marfisa’s erotic odyssey curiously recalls court gossip surrounding the death of Marfisa d’Este’s first husband, Alfonsino di Alfonso di Montecchio (1560–78). Accounts of the engaged pair’s clashing physiques had circulated two years before their wedding in 1578, pitting the “tender, frail…and small-framed” (“tenero, gracile…e sparuto”) prince against his “robust, full, blushing” (“durotta, piena, colorita”) fiancée.Footnote ¹²⁵ Three months into their marriage, Alfonsino’s sudden death raised inquiries among Este house chroniclers. They assumed the prince’s lack of equally exuberant energy behind closed doors quite literally drained the life from him.Footnote ¹²⁶ In other words, they claimed, Marfisa’s sex killed.

The parallel imaginaries of enterprising sexuality that span historical and poetic Marfisas have targeted other Ferrarese women. Bradamante d’Este, Marfisa’s sister, has similarly found herself twisted into fantasies of lust, treachery, and assassination, while her poetic doppelgänger remains relatively unspoiled over time.Footnote ¹²⁷ Bradamante’s status as fabled Este progenitrix, her marriage, her motherhood, and her “immun[ity] from the otherness of…paganism” safeguarded her from Marfisa’s fate, regardless of the latter’s conversion.Footnote ¹²⁸ While Gozzi’s Bradamante appears abnormally comical, she is not undone by any bizzarria.

Even if promiscuity rules the majority of Marfisa’s actions, she consistently desires to live the life of another. Charmed by the prism of alternative existences modeled by the heroines included in her library, Marfisa aims to immortalize her capriciousness, to leave behind a legacy (“memoria assai famosa”) of all she is or could be: “Now she would like to be a Ballerina, / now she wishes to become a Singer / now an Actress, now a Peasant / now a Gypsy [sic], and to run away into the world.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Like the versatile commedia dell’arte divas who embraced the virago as their dramatic alter ego, bizarre Marfisa longs for the generative potential of fiction. By the poem’s final canto, the tensions between Marfisa’s fixity and adaptability seem to settle. An “unsurmountable” (“insuperabil”) cough and fever have compromised her health (for three decades, no less), bringing Marfisa indoors to dress as a “pinzochera” and profess vows of chastity and obedience.Footnote ¹³⁰ A pinzochera was a well-known figure, a woman who “lived within a complex dual status, neither canonically religious nor wholly lay.”Footnote ¹³¹ Her reformed behavior colors within the lines of the code of religious chivalry, yet bizzarria has not quite given up. Indeed, Marfisa’s freshly acquired sanctity takes on the role of the “bizarre and strange” (“una santità bizzarra e strana”).Footnote ¹³² In her final role as a domestic saint (“santa in casa”), veiled and deemed charitable by her neighbors, Marfisa fulfills her desire to embody versatility—an outcome that defies most expectations.Footnote ¹³³

A figure bound to transformation over time, Marfisa carried bizzarria in her valise when she eventually returned to Ferrara in the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the Este family’s inability to produce a legitimate male heir and the ensuing papal takeover in 1598, the city that once hosted a utopia of secular playgrounds became a labyrinth of haunted houses. Within this eerie echo chamber of Ferrarese cultural patrimony, Marfisa and Marfisa d’Este collided in the longue durée of the chivalric city, expired, reborn, and imagined anew.

HEIRESS TO FICTION: MARFISA AFTER MARFISA

Nineteenth-century accounts of Marfisa’s city illuminate its silent streets as a lifeless wasteland. Charles Dickens’s (1812–70) travelogue Pictures of Italy (1846) laments the “grim” fate of “old Ferrara,” where sites like “Ariosto’s house” and “Tasso’s prison” stand out amid the “dismantled palaces, where ivy waves in lieu of banners.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Dickens’s hollow portrait recalls Goethe’s (1749–1832) ominous vision of this “large and beautiful, flat, depopulated city” (“groß[e] und schön[e], flachgelegen[e], entvölkert[e] Stadt”),Footnote ¹³⁵ what the English author names the “city of the dead, without one solitary survivor.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Their woven convergence of death and romance would reappear in the legacy of Marfisa d’Este. She was the last standing member of the Este family living in Ferrara at the time of the dynasty’s dissolution. The image of Marfisa as a fallen ghostly woman thus collapsed neatly into the memory of Ferrara, the fallen gothic city.Footnote ¹³⁷

In his autobiographical chapter titled “Marfisa e la vecchiezza” (Marfisa and old age), Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938) constructs Marfisa d’Este’s image as inextricably linked with death. Phantom traces of Marfisa’s passion for choreography populate the author’s recollections of visiting her “house of…pleasure” (“casa della…voluttà”).Footnote ¹³⁸ D’Annunzio stumbles upon Marfisa’s “theater of the danse macabre” (“teatro delle danze macabre”) where “death dances with poetry” (“la Morte danza con la Poesia”), encapsulating the contradictions of her legacy: she is a deathly figure defiant in the face of death itself, a memento mori intent on living.Footnote ¹³⁹ Like her character’s phoenix emblem, Marfisa d’Este prevails as a symbol of renewal, as bound to the fate of ruin as she is to that of rebirth. Macabre imagery saturates Gabriele Turola’s depiction of Marfisa as a hair-to-the-wind princess flanked by skeletons, forming a visual dialogue with medieval and early modern representations of the triumph of death.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ If “repetition, trauma and voyeurism are central features of macabre images,” as Paul Binski has shown, they serve to quelch and rejuvenate Marfisa’s legendary status.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Ferrarese visual culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries further realized intermedial dialogue between the city’s uncanny palace and its heroine’s unsafe potential. Completed in 1921, Marfisa, leggenda ferrarese (fig. 9) by Giovan Battista Crema (1883–1964) envisions a rapturous encounter with the dead. Skeletons clad in relics of Ferrara’s elegant courtly past float above a naked Marfisa, who writhes in erotic ecstasy. Crema paints a skeleton intruder in the top right-hand corner of his canvas, much as Turola does almost a century later. It bears observing that Turola’s skeletal figure pinches the top of Marfisa’s right breast, accentuating the perceived availability of her already fully displayed body. This recalls the “death and the maiden” (“Der Tod und die Frau”) motif, originating in German Renaissance art and the work of Hans Baldung (ca. 1484–1545), who later modulated this tradition to accommodate “death and lust.”Footnote ¹⁴² Crema conveys these layers of death and seduction in his painting and his writing. He, like D’Annunzio, experienced a chilling visit to the Palazzina Marfisa, describing the sounds of “fantastic, lustful affairs and hellish traps” (“vicende fantastiche di lussuria e di trabocchetti infernali”) emanating from within the walls.Footnote ¹⁴³

Figure 9. Giovan Battista Crema. Marfisa, leggenda ferrarese, 1921. Oil on canvas, 92 x 99 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of the Galleria d’Arte Athena, Livorno.

Skeletal courtiers looming in close proximity to Marfisa and her Ferrarese home occupy a long history. One example, by a fellow student of Domenico Morelli (1823–1901), appears to have influenced Crema’s work. La principessa Marfisa scompariva, stretta fra i suoi rimorsi (The Princess Marfisa disappeared, gripped by her regrets) (fig. 10) by Adolfo Magrini (1876–1957) captures the bizarre errancy of Marfisa’s moonlit manhunt. Depicted inside a carriage drawn by wild horses, three transformed lovers clinging to its back (a detail conveyed similarly by Turola), Marfisa embarks on her quest for male prey. Though it is initially hard to spot her, the distinctive facade of Marfisa’s cursed palazzina is immediately identifiable. While the photograph of the painting reproduced here (the original work is kept in an unidentified private collection) does not clearly show the other figures that ride in Marfisa’s carriage, the catalogue entry from when Magrini displayed this work at the 1899 Biennale in Venice supplies tantalizing details. The entry describes Marfisa as accompanied by her two husbands, “one lying on a bed of pillows from the poison his wife gave him, the other with a dagger plunged into his heart.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ These visual elements, as riveting as they are, have oddly escaped attention in previous scholarship. This comes as a surprise since, to date, no other visual representation of Marfisa exists that imagines her as an assassin twice over.

Figure 10. Photograph of Adolfo Magrini. La principessa Marfisa scompariva, stretta fra i suoi rimorsi, 1897. Fondo Vecchi e Graziani, n. 471. Courtesy of Ministero della Cultura – Direzione regionale Musei dell’Emilia-Romagna. No further reproductions permitted.

Over time and across media, the Este woman has become increasingly more mortal as part of her immortality. Magrini’s literary interlocutor, Domenico Tumiati (1874–1943), penned a libretto for men’s voices (“a voci d’uomini”) that would expand Marfisa’s legend into musical registers.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The cover art for Tumiati’s Marfisa (fig. 11) features a miniature representation of Magrini’s painting, with one important change: morphed into the skeletal shape of her mad horsemen, this fatal Marfisa now appears in the likeness of death itself.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The unnerving soundscape of this “choral poem” (“poema corale”), with music by Vittore Veneziani (1878–1958), unfolds with “errant voices” (“voci erranti”) that praise Ferrara’s chivalric past, paying homage to the “errant knights” (“cavallieri erranti”) so essential to its fiction.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Like Dickens and Goethe, Tumiati’s “deceased poets” (“poeti morti”) mourn a lost but not wholly forgotten city.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Boiardo and Ariosto seek in vain the characters they once created, in “the silent palaces, looking for the shadows of ladies and heroes,” just as their poems’ protagonists wandered through illusory palaces searching after the same.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Yet among all that the palazzina indexes as dead, Marfisa returns alive. At the end of Tumiati’s short poem, the sign of the green flash stirs Marfisa into action, charging forth into a city that has given her both life and death.

Figure 11. Giulio Cisari, woodcut for Domenico Tumiati. Marfisa, poema musicato per coro a voci d’uomini, 1931. Archivio Storico Ricordi, Milan, Italy. Courtesy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wilson Special Collections Library.

If already by the nineteenth century the Renaissance itself had become a lieu de mémoire (place of memory), the next hundred years would see an even greater surge in the number of “fragmented, multiform, contradictory” images of both Marfisa and Ferrara.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The early twentieth-century stitching of Marfisa’s many transformations occurred within the broader context of the city’s attempts to appropriate Ariosto for Fascist cultural propaganda. As Alessandro Giammei has thoroughly demonstrated, the 1933 quatercentenary of the great poet’s death revitalized the image of the Este golden age. Fascist intellectuals pursued a “monologue in the present,” as Giammei describes, that sought to liberate Ariosto from bookish philological study and submit his image in service to the regime as “a relic, a trophy, a fetish, a revenant.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ In his description of encountering Ludovico along the freshly restored city streets, a journalist from a Ferrarese newspaper, Nello Quilici (1890–1940), saw in the poet’s return the “resurrection of the city of Ferrara from its ashes” (“la…risurrezione dalle ceneri della città di Ferrara”).Footnote ¹⁵² Risen like a phoenix, Fascist Ferrara used Ariosto in an effort to banish the city’s ties with “the Romantic nightmare” (“l’incubo romantico”) that had so consumed the images of Ariosto, Tasso, and their poetry.Footnote ¹⁵³ Marfisa’s nightly return to conduct her legendary flight embodies cyclical resistance to the regime’s manipulation of this past. She preserves the strong independence of her phoenix emblem, despite Fascism’s attempt to adopt this symbol for its idealized city. Gendered dynamics of perceivable danger are surely at play in Quilici’s vision. While he imagines peacefully walking alongside Ariosto in ways that confirmed Ferrara’s restored splendor, the idea of confronting a noble huntress, hungry and loose on the prowl, would no doubt have signaled urban precarity. Quilici smoothly sidesteps any mention of the character Marfisa in his essay on Ariosto, where he evokes “the eternal feminine” (“l’eterno femminino”) to offer up praise for Angelica, Fiordiligi, Bradamante, and other moral guardians.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ This evasion confirms that the regime had to not only misremember virago Marfisa—it had to forget her entirely. Quilici championed Ariosto as “The Poet of the Eternal Renaissance” (“Il Poeta dell’eterno rinascimento”), yet he seems to have cowered at Marfisa for her ability to authorize the same.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

This friction was apparent more than a decade before Ariosto’s quatercentenary. In 1921, the same year Crema completed his Marfisa, leggenda ferrarese, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) delivered a speech on the very grounds of the Palazzina Marfisa d’Este, and newspaper coverage reported D’Annunzio’s presence in the audience. Rallying the “Ferrarese people” (“popolo di Ferrara”) with inflammatory patriotic discourse, Mussolini aligned the Corso della Giovecca, the Este princess’s street, with the “greatness of the nation and the collectivity’s wellbeing.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ If one part of Ferrarese society saw in Marfisa’s gardens the rosy future of a nation transformed under Fascism, another part conserved and celebrated her image as the city’s surviving fiction, rebellious against the regime.

Named the UNESCO World Heritage City of the Renaissance in 1995, Ferrara has cycled through deaths and rebirths alongside a woman anchored to a similar fate. Although the Ferrarese palazzina fell to ruin at the end of the eighteenth century, when Marfisa’s Cybo descendants lost jurisdiction over it, city leaders in the 1930s sought to restore the building and repurpose it as a museum.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The reconstruction of Marfisa’s gardens in 1930 inaugurated the Tennis Club Marfisa d’Este, home to the Ferrarese bourgeoisie that had frequented these grounds’ sprawling sport complexes since 1905.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The restoration’s artistic director Nino Barbantini (1884–1952) explained the project’s aim to make the palazzina “the representative palace of the city of Ferrara.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ When contemporary visitors enter the garden immediately behind the Palazzina Marfisa d’Este today, they encounter a plaque (fig. 12) mounted on the exterior archway. Affixed to the building when it reopened to the public in 1938, the plaque celebrates the joint project of legend and history (“la leggenda e la storia insieme congiunte”) to “conserve and pass along to future centuries the fascination of bygone times” (“conserv[are] e tramand[are] nei secoli il fascino delle trascorse età”). The wording of the memorial reappeared that same year in the Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara’s centenary calendar (fig. 13), wherein flaxen-haired Marfisa leads a vibrant parade of stylishly dressed horsemen, a possible allusion to the city’s revamped palio race of five years prior.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Marfisa’s retinue evokes the courtiers who would have listened to chivalric poetry sung at court, and appears lifted from the Palazzo Schifanoia’s Sala dei Mesi (Hall of the Months) frescoes, commissioned by Borso d’Este (1413–71) in the 1460s and admired by young Marfisa when she lived at the palazzo as a child. At the same time as her palazzina’s doors are opened to the public, Marfisa’s chivalric-civic image rides forth into Ferrara, the glistening Este castle surging from the clouds behind her.

Figure 12. Commemorative plaque on the exterior archway of Palazzina Marfisa d’Este, 1938. Ferrara, Italy. Author’s photo.

Figure 13. Nino Nanni. Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara, 1938 calendar. Courtesy of the Archivio Storico BPER Banca. Modena, Italy.

Continuing to transgress—only to dissolve—the edges between fiction and history, the many versions of Marfisa and Marfisa d’Este converge in the production of the Ferrarese cultural imagination. The re-elaborations of her character, literary and historical, negotiate epic’s twinned task of transforming myth into history, and to do so along genealogical and gendered lines. But as Dragoncino’s experiment with the bizarre demonstrates, it is Marfisa’s very inconclusiveness that renders her incompatible with epic’s extratextual ends. Rather than bear responsibility for one genealogy, Marfisa has given rise to many. As an heiress to and progenitrix of fictions of several kinds, Marfisa is an Este woman in every sense: a figure unfettered with more stories still to tell, forever a knight-errant mounted and ready at arms.