Dans la sylve du désir. L’ombre de l’Arioste dans la pensée de Giordano Bruno

The presence and the use of the sources in an author’s literary production raises some questions that go beyond the simple erudition. This is the case of Orlando furioso’s echoes in Giordano Bruno’s works. If Ariosto’s octaves and the references to his paladins mark many important passages in the Italian dialogues, there are not just simples formal and stylistic references. The Furioso, as Italo Calvino said, is a tremendous machina that constantly multiplies the discursive levels through the infinity of possible worlds. In the heyday of both the art of memory and the combinatorial art, the logic that animates Ariosto’s poem is for Giordano Bruno the character of an authentic thought in motion. From the ontological works to the last attempts to construct a mens artificiata able to reproduce the living rhythm of nature, Bruno’s production is always penetrated by a subjacent force that opens the finite to primordial chaos. That same force seems to me one of the main constituent trait of Ariosto’s poetic. In this article, I would like to draw some conclusions about the reading and the quotation mechanism of Ariosto in Giordano Bruno’s works.