Bernardo Tasso, the father of Torquato, had originally been one of the defenders of the classical epic; but he seems to have been converted to the opposite view by Giraldi Cintio, and in his poem of the _Amadigi_ he follows romantic models. His son Torquato, in his _Discorsi dell' Arte Poetica_, originally written one or two years after the appearance of Minturno's _Arte Poetica_, although not published until 1587, was the first to attempt a reconciliation of the epic and romantic forms; and he may be said to have effected a solution of the problem by the formulation of the theory of a narrative poem which would have the romantic subject-matter, with its delightful variety, and the epic form, with its essential unity. The question at issue, as we have seen, is that of unity; that is, does the heroic poem need unity? Tasso denies that there is any difference between the epic poem and the romantic poem as poems. The reason why the latter is more pleasing, is to be found in the fact of the greater delightfulness of the themes treated.[231] Variety in itself is not pleasing, for a variety of disagreeable things would not please at all. Hence the perfect and at the same time most pleasing form of heroic poem would deal with the chivalrous themes of the _romanzi_, but would possess that unity of structure which, according to the precepts of Aristotle and the practice of Homer and Virgil, is essential to every epic. There are two sorts of unity possible in art as in nature,--the simple unity of a chemical element, and the complex unity of an organism like an animal or plant,--and of these the latter is the sort of unity that the heroic poet should aim at.[232] Capriano (1555) had referred to this same distinction, when he pointed out that poetry ought not to be the imitation of a single act, such as a single act of weeping in the elegy, or a single act of pastoral life in the eclogue, for such a sporadic imitation is to be compared to a picture of a single hand without the rest of the body; on the contrary, poetry ought to be the representation of a number of attendant or dependent acts, leading from a given beginning to a suitable end.[233]