Torquato Tasso - Essay Example

Torquato Tasso knew to exemplify Renaissance art through poetry, drama, play, and dialogues revolutionized art and love in Italy during his lifetime. The Aminta first performed for Duke Alfonso in 1573 was a lyrical drama depicting enduring love despite hindrances. His works reflect the tragic life besieged by mental anguish and instability causing him heartaches, misery, paranoia, and poverty.

Two of the works of art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Vignette Illustrating Torquato Tasso's "Gerusalemme Liberata” and Tasso Contemplating Beauty attest to his influence on various artists' expression and interpretation of his significant works of which La Gerusalemme Liberate was considered his masterpiece.

The life and works of Tasso enlighten art enthusiasts in the realization that the concept of love unfulfilled might have contributed to his insanity – as it still happens in contemporary times. In Amita, the object of the shepherd hero’s amorous desires, Sylvia, found pleasure in engaging in a chase for her heart even to the point of death. Tasso, thought to have represented himself in the character of Thyrsis, revealed his inner thoughts through analogies of love with goddesses and beams of emotions like silver and gold: insurmountable, ephemeral, distant. He sees this as bondage ever seeking freedom and hope of realization even in the face of death.

Tasso was credited for various works of art including Rinaldo, a narrative poem “meant to combine the regularity of the Virgilian with the attractions of the romantic epic” (NNDB, par. 1); Torrismondo, a meritorious tragedy; Monte Olivet, a poem considered as dull by critics; Gerusalemme Conquistata, a grim revision of his masterpiece; and Le Sette Giornate, “a prosaic composition in Italian blank verse” ((NNDB, par. 1). Despite his illness and notoriety, he was to be crowned in Rome by

Pope Clement VIII was Italy's Poet Laureate but died one day before the coronation. (Liukkonen, par. 11) The themes and poetic expression of Tasso clearly reflected the life of the poet with its extreme touches of poverty amidst living in the presence of dukes, duchesses, princes, and princesses of his era. Like his Aminta, his life ended just on the verge of being ascended into the realization of his dreams.