Giraldi's discourse on the _romanzi_ gave rise to a curious dispute with his own pupil, Giambattista Pigna, who published a similar work, entitled _I Romanzi_, in the same year (1554). Pigna asserted that he had suggested to Giraldi the main argument of the discourse, and that Giraldi had adopted it as his own. Without entering into the details of this controversy, it would seem that the priority of Giraldi cannot fairly be contested.[225] At all events, there is a very great resemblance between the works of Giraldi and Pigna. Pigna's treatise, however, is more detailed than Giraldi's. In the first book, Pigna deals with the general subject of the _romanzi_; in the second he gives a life of Ariosto, and discusses the _Furioso_, point by point; in the third he demonstrates the good taste and critical acumen of Ariosto by comparing the first version of the _Furioso_ with the completed and perfected copy.[226] Both Pigna and Giraldi consider the _romanzi_ to constitute a new _genre_, unknown to the ancients, and therefore not subject to Aristotle's rules. Giraldi's sympathies were in favor of the biographical form of the _romanzi_, and his poem, the _Ercole_ (1557), recounts the whole life of a single hero. Pigna, who keeps closer to the tradition of Ariosto, regards the biographical form as not proper to poetry, because too much like history. These arguments, presented by Giraldi and Pigna, were answered by Speroni, Minturno, and others. Speroni pointed out that while it is not necessary for the romantic poets to follow the rules prescribed by the ancients, they cannot disobey the fundamental laws of poetry. "The _romanzi_," says Speroni, "are epics, which are poems, or they are histories in verse, and not poems."[227] That is, how does a poem differ from a well-written historical narrative, if the former be without organic unity?[228] As to the whole discussion, it may be said here, without attempting to pass judgment on Ariosto, or any other writer of _romanzi_, that unity of some sort every true poem must necessarily have; and, flawless as the _Orlando Furioso_ is in its details, the unity of the poem certainly has not the obviousness of perfect, and especially classical, art. A work of art without organic unity may be compared with an unsymmetrical circle; and, while the _Furioso_ is not to be judged by any arbitrary or mechanical rules of unity, yet if it has not that internal unity which transcends all mere external form, it may be considered, as a work of art, hardly less than a failure; and the farther it is removed from perfect unity, the more imperfect is the art. "Poetry adapts itself to its times, but cannot depart from its own fundamental laws."[229]