Posterity: Inventing Tradition from Petrarch to Gramsci 9780226807720

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Posterity

Posterity Inventing Tradition from Petrarch to Gramsci

Rocco Rubini

The University of Chicago Press  C h i c a g o & L o n d o n

The University of  Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of  Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of  Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of  Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21   1 2 3 4 5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­80755-­3 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­80772-­0 (e-­book) doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226807720.001.0001 Library of  Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Rubini, Rocco, author. Title: Posterity : inventing tradition from Petrarch to Gramsci / Rocco Rubini. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021024455 | ISBN 9780226807553 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226807720 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Petrarca, Francesco, 1304–1374. | Humanism—Italy. | Italy—Intellectual life—Philosophy. Classification: LCC DG442 .R77 2021 | DDC 851/.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024455 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Dedicated to the memory of my prima, my mother Virginia, and to the burgeoning life of my ultima, my daughter Gemma . . . may our tradition live on . . .

I grandi uomini non si onorano né con statue, né diversamente; ma con rivelarne lo spirito e farlo rivivere. Francesco De Sanctis

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix List of Abbreviations  xiii Introduction: Whole or Nothing The Method: Hermeneutics between Gadamer and Betti The Story: Humanism from Petrarch to Gramsci

1 Primi and Ultimi: Petrarch’s Corpus Introduction: Total Petrarch, Different Petrarch? “I was not born to be a slave of my body”: (Re-­)writing the Past Reading the Future Including the Excluded: Petrarch’s Familiar Invectives Conclusion

2 The Purpose of  Literary Criticism: Francesco De Sanctis’s (Anti-­)Petrarchism Introduction: Italian Petrarch, (Un-­)congenial Petrarch A Rhetorical Existence “Going to the people”: Literary Criticism as Moral Philosophy The Anti-­Petrarch Conclusion: Petrarch as Pharmakon

1 8 20 29 29

37 57 66 76 80 80 91 106 123 137

viii  Contents

3 “Do not grow weary of  reading, for I do not grow weary of  writing”: Goldoni’s Reform of  Italian Literature

143 143 145 158

Introduction Enough Is Enough: The Italian Comic Complex Reforming . . . from Without “With the mask I’m Brighella, without the mask I’m a man”: Reforming . . . from Within Conclusion: If Not Molière, Then What?

176 196

4 The Vichian Resurrection of  Commedia dell’Arte: Reciprocating Modernity between Italy and France

200

Introduction Vico’s Laughter Giving and Receiving Modernity: A Shared Vichism “À quoi bon le théâtre italien?” Conclusion

200 208 215 239 254

5 Remembering Is Not Thinking: Croce, Gramsci, and Italian Intellectual Autobiography

256

Introduction Beyond Laughter: For a “Reform” of Italian Thought “A tall and blond Marx”: Antonio Labriola and Benedetto Croce Rehearsing the Anti-­Croce The (Auto-­)biography of a Nation Conclusion

Conclusion: The Last Renaissance Man Index 331

256 259 269 287 299 311 313

Acknowledgments

The present book follows The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger (2014), as a second installment in a projected trilogy dedicated to the regeneration of high-­modern intellectual history in light of its Renaissance and early-­modern roots, a trilogy that I plan to conclude with a (possibly multivolume) study of Giambattista Vico’s reception at home and abroad. Family, friends, and mentors were fully and gratefully acknowledged in my first book, and I thank them again, here, alongside my savior and guardian angel, Loredana, to whom I owe my sanity and well-­being; Caterina, whose sisterly affection rescues me daily; and Antonella, an acquired family member and a life lesson in generosity. In dispatching my second monograph, I wish to indulge in an additional acknowledgment that may come off as pretentious, perhaps, but should be humored as the instinct of any intellectual historian or literary critic (and I consider myself both): namely, I wish to thank my sources or, as Vico would have it more fervently, my authors. Since my graduate student days and unceasingly during the first part of my career as an educator and scholar, Vico, yes, and also Francesco Petrarca, Carlo Goldoni, Francesco De Sanctis, and Antonio Gramsci—­to whom I have dedicated discrete undergraduate courses, graduate seminars, and chapters in this study—­have brokered and informed my conversation with students near and far. I thank them now, because, although I do not doubt that this conversation will continue and will be mediated by them for some time to come, I apprehensively anticipate that going public with these interpretations will alter our relationship in significant ways.

x  Acknowledgments

Of course, to the extent that my interpretations were hammered out in the classroom, they were also borne out in dialogue with congenial readers. Given that this work spans many centuries, and given that each one of my canonical authors deserves and indeed enjoys fully dedicated scholars, I have over time availed myself of their competencies in order to vet my theories. I am happy to say that at the least I did not fail to stir curiosity, if I did not always garner wholehearted approval. For Petrarch, I wish to thank Kathy Eden, whose approach was so influential in developing my own hermeneutical reading. Gratitude is also due to Nancy Struever, always and forever a beacon for me in conjuring up a Petrarch-­to-­Vico legacy; and to Victoria Kahn, whose characterization of Renaissance metadiscourses in one of  her earliest publications still informs my work and who has approved and supported my present endeavor. Taken together, they represent a formidable team of living Renaissance scholars on whom I rely for all things Petrarchan and beyond. I also wish to thank  Jane Tylus, who read and commented on a shorter version of my Petrarch chapter and agreed to publish it in the prestigious journal she edits. I thank David Quint, Christopher Celenza, and Ayesha Ramachandran for additional insights shared. As for Vico, Goldoni, and their reception, the list is shorter, as I did not have to go much further than the indisputably eminent scholarship of David L. Marshall and Anna Scannapieco in order to feel buttoned-­up and secure. Of course, Bob Kendrick, unfailingly generous, chimed in helpfully along the road, and Giorgio Ficara never shied away from wallowing in our shared, frenzied enthusiasm for De Sanctis. Finally, coming to Gramsci, I wish to acknowledge the late Joseph A. Buttigieg’s encouragement during the early stages of my work, with much regret that his premature death didn’t allow for a lasting collaboration. I know that my work would have profited enormously from his guidance but I was still lucky enough to find two very patient Gramscian readers at the University of Chicago, namely, Mauricio Tenorio, whose comments encouraged more changes than any other I have received, and my brother-­in-­ arms Miguel Martínez, a rascal who had me wait for a year (yes, one full year!), but whose bracing feedback pays off for readers in my clearer signposting and other concerted attempts to include them in my solipsistic intellectual vagaries. Because of the intensity of the exchange with my primary sources, I have leaned on existing translations of favorite books such as Petrarch’s Familiares and Seniles, De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana, Goldoni’s Mémoires, and Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere, sometimes tweaking things a bit, but generally respecting the translators’ deep and passionate engagement with these literary masterpieces. For many other sources, when left on my own, I have

Acknowledgments  xi

profited from the suggestions and advice of Elizabeth Blum, Alison James, Boris Maslov, and Caroline Stark. Moreover, the project as a whole owes its existence to a remarkable group of editors whom I treasure, including Elizabeth Branch Dyson, Dylan Montanari, and the true helmsman, as far as this volume goes, Randy Petilos. To my copy editor, Catherine Skeen, who for a decade now has streamlined my unwieldy Italianate prose . . . let the books we co-­authored be the monument you deserve. We are a team, and I will retire the day you do. Finally, more personally, beyond competencies, insightful exchanges, and syntax, and going straight to what nourishes the soul and all that touches (and wrenches) the heart: grazie a te, Alessandra . . . * The nucleus of this book, that is, discrete parts of chapter 1, timidly cropped up in “How Did We Come to Be Such as We Are and Not Otherwise? Petrarch, Humanism, and the History of Philosophy,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 33, no. 2 (2012): 403–­36, and was harvested a few years later in “Pe­ trarchan Hermeneutics between (and beyond) Gadamer and Betti,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 20, no. 2 (2017): 365–­89. Chapter 4 was rehearsed in “The Vichian ‘Renaissance’ between Giuseppe Ferrari and Jules Michelet,” Intellectual History Review 26, no. 1 (2016): 9–­15; and “The Vichian ‘Resurrection’ of Commedia Dell’Arte: Vico, Michelet, and George Sand,” Quaderni d’Italianistica 37, no. 2 (2016): 49–­74. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

Abbreviations

A Benedetto Croce, An Autobiography, trans. R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) CCF Jules Michelet, Cours au Collège de France (1838–­1851), ed. Paul Viallaneix, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1995) CT Carlo Goldoni, The Comic Theatre, trans.  John W. Miller (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 1969) Fam. Francesco Petrarca, Le familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi (vols. 1–­3) and Umberto Bosco (vol. 4) (Florence: Sansoni, 1933–­42) FSPN Antonio Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Derek Boothman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) G Francesco De Sanctis, La giovinezza: Memorie postume seguite da testimonianze biografiche di amici e discepoli, ed. Gennaro Savarese (Turin: Einaudi, 1961) HIL Francesco De Sanctis, History of Italian Literature, trans.  Joan Redfern, 2 vols. (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968) LFM Francesco Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols. (New York: Italica Press, 2005) LOA Francesco Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols. (New York: Italica Press, 2005) LP Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison, ed. Frank Rosengarten, trans. Ray Rosenthal, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994) Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni, Written by Himself, ed. William A. Drake, trans. M  John Black (New York: Knopf, 1926)

xiv  Abbreviations

MeB  Masques et bouffons (comédie italienne): Texte et dessins, ed. Maurice Sand, 2 vols. (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1860) MI Carlo Goldoni, Memorie italiane, ed. Roberta Turchi (Venice: Marsilio, 2008) NS Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984) OHO Francesco Petrarca, On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others, in Invectives, ed. and trans. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) OR Rocco Rubini, The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) PE Carlo Goldoni, Polemiche editoriali, ed. Roberta Turchi (Venice: Marsilio, 2009) PN Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed.  Joseph A. Buttigieg, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) Q Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana, 4 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1975) RIP  The Renaissance from an Italian Perspective: An Anthology of Essays (1860–­ 1968), ed. Rocco Rubini (Ravenna: Longo, 2014) SCP Francesco De Sanctis, Saggio critico sul Petrarca, ed. Niccolò Gallo (Turin: Einaudi, 1952) SCW Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-­Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012) Sen. Francesco Petrarca, Res seniles, ed. Silvia Rizzo and Monica Berté, 4 vols. (Florence: Le Lettere, 2006–­17) SPN Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971) TGI Emilio Betti, Teoria generale della interpretazione, 2 vols. (Milan: Giuffrè, 1955) TO Carlo Goldoni, Tutte le opere, ed. Giuseppe Ortolani, 14 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1935–­56)

Introduction

Whole or Nothing I wish my reader, whoever he may be, to consider me alone, and not his daughter’s mar­ riage, not a night with his lady friend, not the wiles of his enemy, not his security or his home, not his land or his money. Even as he reads me, I want him to be with me; if he is pressed by affairs, let him defer his reading. When he decides to read what I write, he must lay aside the burden of his affairs and the anxieties of his home life in order to direct his attention to what is before his eyes. If these conditions do not please him, let him stay away from my useless writings. I refuse to have him simultaneously carry on his business and study; I refuse to allow him to learn without labor what I wrote with labor. Petrarch

This book studies the underlying motives and the correlative literary forms attending to the making of an intellectual tradition that took shape in Italy and spanned the decades from Francesco De Sanctis to Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci. It is a tradition buttressed retrospectively by the influence of Giambattista Vico and Carlo Goldoni, and it brought to fruition, I argue, the humanism that Francesco Petrarca fathered at the dawn of modernity. My perspective in this study, which is admittedly idiosyncratic, posits that a domi­ nant strand of modern Italian thought was not only Petrarchan, but a Petrarch­ ism. In other words, it is inseparable from the Renaissance, which was long outstripped everywhere outside of Italy, and it does not rely on understand­ ing tradition, narrowly, as the conservative and often stubborn preservation of received conventions, values, and institutions. Rather, and more generously, it ventures to interpretatively partake in tradition, which it understands as a deliberate effort to convey a critically reformulated past across generations. Accordingly, I recast tradition as tradition making and—­paying attention to thinkers who were peculiarly attuned to issues of self-­perception, preservation, and fama (reputation, renown)—­as a practice devoted to the encoding of au­ thorial intentions in self-­perpetuating master works. Furthermore, I buck the habit of apprehending such literary monuments in isolation and treating them as inert and polished, and instead I read uniquely influential works for what they tend to be: the brightest stars within composite, often conscientiously

2  Introduction

reconstrued literary corpora, unquiet bodies of writing forever seeking fu­ ture congenial minds through which they will extend their applicability and endurance. I claim that such a congeniality can be found among the Italian intellectuals that I investigate, and that they collaboratively furthered each other’s agendas throughout the centuries. They are: Francesco Petrarca (1304–­74), alternately known as the “father of humanism” or the “first modern man”; Giambattista Vico (1668–­1744), the scourge of Cartesian rationalism, the principal Counter-­ Enlightenment figure, and as such often elected the precursor of any heterodox line of thought pursued in high and postmodernity; Carlo Goldoni (1707–­93), the self-­appointed reformer of early modern theater; Francesco De Sanctis (1817–­83), the founder of modern Italian literary criticism; Benedetto Croce (1866–­1952), the last Hegelian and architect of “absolute historicism”; and Antonio Gramsci (1891–­1937), arguably the most influential interpreter of Marxism. All staged a disaffiliation from their own era, as their monikers and common characterizations attest—­a disaffiliation that was perceived as reac­ tionary in its day but that amounted to a superlative intellectual achievement. Retrospectively (and ironically, perhaps) their achievements now inform our current interest in reassessing the movements and epochs that they rejected. Strung together and juxtaposed, their reworked hic’s and nunc’s add up to a new kind of continuity, a parallel intellectual history in which Petrarchan humanism is a forever viable methodology, and the study of the Renaissance is not just a periodizing category or a profession, but, as in the nineteenth cen­ tury, a heuristic for the intellectual at large, an opportunity to hone one’s own interpretive methodology, find one’s place in history, and define one’s personal as well as collective identity. Petrarch, Vico, De Sanctis, Gramsci all denounced what they perceived as their epoch’s vain intellectual pettiness, an antisocial stance rendered phil­ osophically as solipsism. As a corollary, they turned to the past for intimacy and acceptance. Does this make them antiquarians? Not quite. While it is true that they championed the past exemplarily (if differently), I believe that these thinkers shared the traumatic experience of (past) history’s incommensurabil­ ity. This spurred them to think toward the future and to posit its ontologi­ cal priority by developing an intellectual stance I call posteritism, by which I mean that they realized that the past had not done quite enough for its own survival, and so they undertook to make incarnate interlocutors of themselves and their works for future audiences. This stance informs the very structure of their works, which serve as vehicles of personal agency intended to stir mutual

Whole or Nothing  3

recognition and to restore sociability, of a transhistorical kind, to intellectual inquiry.1 The present book extends and complements a project I began in The Other Renaissance: Italian Humanism between Hegel and Heidegger (2014), an intellectual history of Italian Renaissance humanism’s reception among nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century European thinkers. In that study I sought to clarify the schism between historical humanism, as defined by scholars of the Renaissance, and the notion of humanism bandied about by philosophers in the years surrounding World War II, and I laid bare the intellectual sole­ cisms that, starting with Martin Heidegger, led to the collapse in philosophical thought of “Platonism,” “humanism,” and modern “metaphysics” in general. In Posterity, I address the literary consequences of the enduring antihuman­ ism that resulted from this historical misreading. In terms of philosophy, the Renaissance scholars whose careers I studied in my previous work alerted me to the fact that the relevant challenge is not simply to distinguish or disengage the Renaissance “Self ” and its project from the Cartesian metaphysics of sub­ ject (the true object of modern philosophical critique) but, more important, to genealogically and empathically demonstrate the endurance and adaptability of the Renaissance initiative throughout the early modern period and beyond, into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The diachronic presentism im­ plied in this approach requires mutual recognition that transcends historical bounds. As I put it in the conclusion of The Other Renaissance: “No one, I suspect, would find it strange that a Gramsci scholar might have something significant to say about Machiavelli; it seems all the more reasonable, then, for a student of Leonardo Bruni to offer an insightful reading of Benedetto Croce, who never tired of reminding us that ‘all true history is contemporary history’ ” (OR, 370). In the present study, I take up the challenge that I formulated under easier conditions, relying as I did on obvious correspondences and direct ac­ knowledgments. By contrast, the like-­mindedness that I recover now is hard won, often indirect, and thoroughly nonlinear—­a long-­term project relying on collaboration rather than detached observation for its emergence. Intellec­ tual collusion and participatory disbelief reward the reader with unsuspected pairings—­not the trite pairing of Machiavelli/Gramsci, nor the fanciful yet still plausible pairing of Bruni/Croce, but Petrarch/Gramsci, an utterly unlikely

1. On the transhistorical “sociability” of humanist inquiry, see Nancy S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

4  Introduction

reconciliation in tradition of two paragons of inkhorn scholarship and politi­ cal commitment, each elucidating the other, in turn. This study, therefore, seeks to requalify humanism within Italian intellectual history more transhistorically—­as a metacritical tradition, one that was at every stage self-­conscious of  its making, whose origins were in the Renaissance, but not its boundaries. The endeavor I propose requires that we perceive this historical continuity from the internalist Italian vantage shared—­indeed, formulated—­by the very same thinkers I correlate. The Italian perspective I define characteris­ tically operates within the horizon of a Renaissance-­informed modernity that ultimately proved to be illimitable despite the concerted effort, even in Italy, to curb its momentum and overcome its influence. This hard-­won perspective, frustrating in its experience, nonetheless freed Italians from the urge to theorize ultimate beginnings and conclusions, and made it possible for them to discount altogether the apparatus on which an epoch-­defining antihumanism would even­ tually be established, starting with the proclamation of the “death of the author” and the correlative unease regarding authorial “intentionality,” and extending to the obsessive reaffirmation of our historical self-­consciousness as postmoderns.2 What the Italians I study do away with is “theory” itself, or the idea that one can conceptualize befores and afters to an all-­engrossing and self-­accruing tradition, itself best described as an ongoing practice. And yet, while we may have come to accept a resistance to “theory conceived as an epistemological project” as one of Renaissance humanism’s staples, we still often approach humanist inquiry extraneously by too strenuously arguing for its philosophical worth and by too thoroughly circumstantiating its historical emergence and development: ironically, while we are willing to see much of the Renaissance already present in the Middle Ages, we struggle or just do not care to recover any of it beyond the Renaissance, strictly speaking.3 In so doing we may fail to disengage humanism from the straitjacket of those very same disciplinary (philosophy vs. literature or rhetoric) and periodizing (Renaissance vs. early modern or modern) categories, which are essential components of epistemo­ logical projects in the first place. This book attempts to overcome the impasse 2. On the imperishability of the author, see Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer­ sity Press, 1998); and William Irwin, ed., The Death and Resurrection of the Author? (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002). 3. See Victoria Kahn, “Humanism and the Resistance to Theory,” in Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds., Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 373–­96.

Whole or Nothing  5

by extending rather than unearthing or illustrating Renaissance humanism, for the humanism I am after demands to be experienced and practiced in its element, as it were. If humanism is something to be implemented rather than grasped, illustrated, and contemplated, however, then its cooperative readers are also called on to qualify its discourse(s), in terms of genre and form. Has Renaissance humanism been perpetuated by specific literary genres or formal concerns? If Renaissance humanism was indeed a transhistorical intellectual movement, can its apparent elision be attributed to our inability to perceive such generic or formal approximations as Renaissance restatements? It is the main contention of my work that the feat of recovering an endur­ ing Italian (Renaissance) humanism—­its agency, forms, permutations, and legacy—­requires that we act humanistically in the way illustrated above: namely, that we replace notions with people. No doubt, it is an odd fluke of intellectual history that humanism, unique among the paramount intellectual strands in Western thought, is not an eponym, that is, a reference to the cor­ pus of a particular thinker—­despite the fact that scholars are by and large in agreement on its origins and paternity. Appropriately, this study begins with a long overdue reappropriation of Renaissance humanism as Petrarchism, not least because the latter notion was in the early Renaissance “exactly synony­ mous” with what we have come to know as the former.4 Moreover, an epony­ mous reappropriation of this kind is, of course, metacritical and thus already an implementation, Petrarch himself having spent his later years doing just that: reconfiguring his scattered writings as a corpus, so that it would come to reflect a kind of thought dependent on congenial reception for its reactivation. Petrarch’s egocentrism is famous; in fact, he is credited with having single­ handedly launched modern individualism. If so, however, it is an achievement incompatible with the humanism he is also said to have fathered—­if human­ ism is understood as a self-­effacing devotion to the ancients, guided by goals of imitatio.5 To be sure, traditions rely on a Bloomian anxiety of influence, on the author’s fraught relationship to their precursors, but equally, and with far 4. Giuseppe Billanovich, “Il Petrarca e i classici,” Studi petrarcheschi 7 (1961): 21–­22. See also Riccardo Fubini, Umanesimo e secolarizzazione da Petrarca al Valla (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), 145–­46; Francisco Rico, El sueño del humanismo (Madrid: Alianza, 1993), 13. 5. On Petrarchan hermeneutics spurning sterile imitation, see Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), chap. 5; and, on creative imitation, David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). Also relevant is Dante’s own agonizing relationship to authorship accounted for by Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

6  Introduction

less acknowledgment, from an anxiety of reception, on the author’s concerted efforts to maneuver their readers.6 What I would suggest is that Petrarch, the most imitated of poets, reviewed his vernacular and Latin works, and acted as his own first legatee in order to devise an inquiry so minutely personal as to be inimitable, in that it defies exact reproduction, and yet reiterable in different personal or epochal terms. We can learn from Petrarch’s reexperiencing of his own literary produc­ tion to tell the story of how personal inquiry can be redirected, impersonally, to the literary corpus. As we will discover, in this process, unique texts are degeneralized—­that is, subtracted from strict formal determinations that in­ vite patterning and too firmly inform our horizon of expectations—­by being rechanneled into the co-­determining compass of the opera omnia that contain them, an unexampled unity. Meanwhile, this redirection exhorts via synecdo­ che the conception of an even bigger whole, and so on, toward the continuous corpus of a larger tradition of like-­minded readers. Thus, authorially mastered, the complete works, too, may constitute a genre, the whole by which parts are intelligible, individually and in conjunction. Arguably, it is only in the insuper­ able capacity or whole of the corpus that every part can be understood in its most specific determinacy, where every shade of the individual meets the com­ munal, where biography intersects social history, or, in terms closer to home, where writing and reading are truly reciprocal, as are creation and reception. Thus, the aim of this study is to define and follow the more or less conscious

6. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1973). Thomas M. Greene addresses the limited relevance of Bloom’s theory to the Renaissance in The Light in Troy, 31: “In Harold Bloom’s terms, the problem of the precursor is that he is not lost and not dead, thus not available for resurrection. His text has not suffered from any errancy, and thus no etiological itinerary away from it into the present is possible. The precursor constitutes the present; he determines the atmosphere the poet breathes. Between the precursor and follower, no discontinuity can intervene, since for Bloom discontinuity would be freedom. This is doubtless why Petrarch could make more controlled use of  Virgil than he could of Dante. The discovery of the ancient world imposed enormous anxiety upon the humanist Renaissance, but its living poetry represents a series of victories over anxiety, based upon a courage that confronts the model without neurotic paralysis and uses the anxiety to discover selfhood. The relationship to the subtext is deliberately and lucidly written into the poem as a visible and acknowledged construct.” And again (41): “The humanist poet is not a neurotic son crippled by a Freudian family romance, which is to say he is not in Harold Bloom’s terms Romantic. He is rather like the son in a classical comedy who displaces his father at the moment of reconciliation.”

Whole or Nothing  7

reiterations of Renaissance or Petrarchan humanism produced by its modern Italian heirs, noting its formal embodiments as a corpus, a tradition, and, ulti­ mately, as a collective intellectual autobiography. It is a common assumption that traditions are retrospectively “invented,” and therefore, necessarily, contrived a posteriori.7 But the thinkers I discuss had a degree of influence and a lasting impact that raises the question: is it possible not just to “imagine” or envision traditions but to devise them such that they will materialize postmortem?8 Posterity pursues this question by in­ vestigating how some Italian thinkers anticipated and manipulated their own legacies, programmatically, and how they attempted the practically impossi­ ble feat of engaging in live conversations with future agents. I argue that they conceived of reception in such a way that it was ever contemporaneous, able to ward off the exegetical fallacy of anachronism, and that they anchored the intelligibility of their works on a so-­to-­speak personal encounter with their readers. In an important sense, then, each literary corpus examined in this study may be said to have been strategically, if not originally, (re-­)written by its author from a posthumous perspective. The authorial corpora I analyze are composed of interconnected literary works intended to will traditions into life—­works that were read as much as written into existence by their authors, who acted as their own first trust­ ees and promulgators, and wished to be received from a temporal distance. These thinkers yearned for their legacy to be essentially futural, and in doing so they possessed hermeneutical finesse. Their works assimilate reception to the creative act, collapsing the difference between letter and spirit or between meaning and significance.9 Each thinker manages to osmose writing and reading in a way that enhances the Romantic notion of empathic understanding (or Verstehen), itself established on the idea that interpretation of a past text hinges on reexperiencing (Nacherleben) the creative event through recapitu­ latory identification (Einfühlung) with authorial consciousness.10 In these 7. On the retrospective and contrived “invention” of national traditions, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). 9. The distinction between “meaning” (Bedeutung) and “significance” (Bedeutsamkheit) is introduced in E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 249. 10. The long and wide-­ranging history of these notions has now been thoroughly retraced. See Jeff Malpas and Hans-­Helmuth Gander, eds., The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics

8  Introduction

works we find that the same circular homology between the creative and re­ ceptive acts lends insight to—­and anticipates and, in some cases, encourages— ­(mis-­)understandings to come and allows for the possibility of an equally em­ pathic, albeit divined, affiliation with one’s posterity. What I am proposing here is a potentially fruitful collaboration between hermeneutics and humanism, a collaboration, however, which runs the risk of amounting to a “blind leading the blind” story unless we can define more pre­ cisely both of these equally abused and mishandled terms. To that end, we may ask preliminarily: what occurs when we approximate humanism—­not just any humanism, but Petrarchan humanism, specifically, and hermeneutics—­and specifically, the concrete disciplinary shape that the latter took in the twentieth century? Given that the bulk of this book is dedicated to tracing Petrarchan humanism and its modern permutations in Italian thought, I feel obliged to take a moment to elucidate the hermeneutical frame of mind that inspires and guides my mission.

The Method: Hermeneutics between Gadamer and Betti For many, the term hermeneutics conjures up the name of Hans-­Georg Ga­ damer (1900–­2002), its last and most influential proponent. Indeed, the most edifying hermeneutical reading of Petrarch to date, that of Kathy Eden, is ex­ plicitly indebted to Gadamer. Aiming to recover through Petrarch an “early modern rhetoric of intimacy,” Eden relies on “the Gadamerian insight regard­ ing the inseparability of rhetoric and hermeneutics—­literary composition and literary interpretation.” She therefore takes as “axiomatic Gadamer’s dictum that the ‘rhetorical and hermeneutical aspects of human linguisticality com­ pletely interpenetrate each other’—­that how a culture writes is inextricably linked to how it reads.”11 Petrarch and Gadamer usefully gloss each other because “like Gadamerian hermeneutics [ . . . ], Petrarchan hermeneutics is text-­based”; they both view understanding as “most readily understood in the

(New York: Routledge, 2014); and Niall Keane and Chris Lawn, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2016). See also Walter Jost and Michael J. Hyde, eds., Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 11. Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 4.

Whole or Nothing  9

context of understanding written texts.”12 Furthermore, Gadamer is a useful partner in Petrarchan studies because he presumably views textual under­ standing through the prism of letter-­writing, a relationship “that motivates the reader not only to take the writer at his word—­‘to consider what he writes as true’—­but also to approach the matter, as the letter reader would, from the writer’s point of view, as if with his eyes.”13 We still might wonder, however, whether Gadamer alone can provide us with the wherewithal to reveal Petrarch’s own hermeneutics. If hermeneutics is indeed a theory geared toward dialogism and an empathic understanding of sorts, then we might achieve unexpected gains by reckoning with Gadamer’s intentions and situating him within the late history of a hermeneutical tradition that he followed his teacher, Martin Heidegger, in seeking to overcome. Ga­ damer’s magnum opus, Truth and Method (1960), was centered on an attempt to scrutinize the methodological tradition of the hermeneutics of the Romantic period according to a strict philosophical or existential critique, and thereby increase its scope well beyond that of understanding a text. “My real concern,” Gadamer affirmed in the foreword to the second edition of Truth and Method, acknowledging the criticism he had received from literary critics, “was and is philosophic: not what we do or ought to do, but what happens to us over and above our wanting and doing.”14 Gadamer’s ontologization of hermeneutics sought to elevate hermeneutics from a theory of textual understanding and a universal exegetical methodol­ ogy to an event attending the self-­disclosure of understanding itself, within the always a priori linguistic or discursive situatedness of human life. Of interest to us is that Gadamer’s move, if brought to fruition, would displace the centrality of text from hermeneutical consideration and, along with it, a given text’s origi­ nal creative or authorial intentions. It is well known that Heidegger’s claim that “language is the house of Being” and “in its home man dwells” informs Ga­ damer’s idealization of the written tradition. “In the form of writing,” Gadamer states, elaborating on Heidegger’s influence,

12. Kathy Eden, “Petrarchan Hermeneutics and the Rediscovery of Intimacy,” in Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey, eds., Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 233. 13. Eden, Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, 5. 14. Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Mar­ shall (New York: Continuum, 2004), xxv–­xxvi.

10  Introduction

all tradition is contemporaneous with each present time. [ . . . ] A written tradi­ tion is not a fragment of a past world, but has already raised itself beyond this into the sphere of the meaning that it expresses. The ideality of the word is what raises everything linguistic beyond the finitude and transience that char­ acterize other remnants of past existence. It is not this document, as a piece of the past, that is the bearer of tradition but the continuity of memory. [ . . . ] In writing, language gains its true ideality, for in encountering a written tradition understanding consciousness acquires its full sovereignty. Its being does not depend on anything.

A text is just a text, says Gadamer explicitly. The way to eternity is in un­ bounded and disembodied language. But, then, what happens to the author? In Gadamer’s view, unsurprisingly, the author ought to meet a premature Bar­ thesian death alongside the reader: To understand [literature] does not mean primarily to reason one’s way back into the past, but to have a present involvement in what is said. It is not really a relationship between persons, between the reader and the author (who is per­ haps quite unknown), but about sharing in what the text shares with us. [ . . . ] In actual fact, writing is central to the hermeneutical phenomenon insofar as its detachment both from the writer or author and from a specifically addressed recipient or reader gives it a life of its own. [ . . . ] In writing, the meaning of what is spoken exists purely for itself, completely detached from all emotional elements of expression and communication. A text is not to be understood as an expression of life but with respect to what it says. Writing is the abstract ideality of language.15

As noted by one of his most fervent critics, E. D. Hirsch, Gadamer recovers “the distinguishing feature and dignity of literary art,” broadly conceived, in the fact “that in it language is not speech. That is to say, while remaining inde­ pendent of all relation of speaking, or being addressed, or being persuaded, it still possesses meaning and form.”16 As Hirsch further notes, this tenet, which in effect exemplifies the “linguistic turn” of hermeneutics itself with respect to Romantic “psychologism,” subverts hermeneutical hierarchies by positing the priority of “significance” or reception over and above textual or authorial

15. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 391–­94, emphasis added. 16. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 248.

Whole or Nothing  11

“meaning.”17 No doubt, Gadamer presages the “death of the author.” At the same time, in American reception, his hermeneutics also lent support to the in­ fluential arguments of New Critics against the so-­called “intentional fallacy.”18 This glimpse into Gadamer’s intentions and the possible limitations should spark our curiosity. Can Petrarchan humanism and its legacy be served by an overtly philosophical framework—­one that, while paying tribute to textual­ ity and intentionality as part of a legacy it wishes to overcome, ultimately de­ pends on reifying language beyond its cognitive functions and sidestepping the affective dimension of intersubjective (more than merely dialogical) com­ munication? Furthermore, is the specificity of Petrarchan inquiry not that of conceiving and representing his encounter with the past as a human-­to-­human interaction rather than as an idealized and/or abstract relationship between present understanding and past linguistic vestiges?19 Perhaps it is not the Renaissance scholar’s task to affirm or deny the idea that language is not limited to the consciousness of speakers, as late moder­ nity has taught us. It might be up to them, however, to insulate the Renais­ sance from an incipient poststructuralist worldview that results in an apathetic characterization of Renaissance humanism. This is a worldview that ends up eschewing the identity, passions, and volitions of individual humanists, inter­ preting their contributions as superficial imitation of antiquity and unmedi­ ated participation in Latinity. Renaissance “humanists,” Gadamer writes, take pride in recognizing the absolute exemplariness of classical texts. For the true humanist, the classic author is certainly not such that the interpreter would claim to understand the work better than did the author himself. We must not forget that the highest aim of the humanist was not originally to “understand” his models, but to imitate or even to surpass them. Hence he was originally obligated to his models, not only as an expositor but also as an imitator—­if not 17. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 253. See also Cristina Lafont, The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy, trans. José Medina (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), chap. 3. 18. Reference is to W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” originally published in Sewanee Review 54, no.3 (1946): 468–­88. A recent and useful review of the debate is in Jeff Mitscherling, Tanya DiTommaso, and Aref Nayed, The Author’s Intention (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). Of course, the so-­called “death of the author” was famously sanctioned by Roland Barthes in 1967, seven years after the publication of Gadamer’s Truth and Method. 19. On the study of Renaissance humanism between “linguistic” and “cognitive” turns, see Kenneth Gouwens, “Perceiving the Past: Renaissance Humanism after the ‘Cognitive Turn,’ ” American Historical Review 103, no. 1 (1998): 55–­82.

12  Introduction

a rival. Like the dogmatic bond to the Bible, the humanist’s bond to the clas­ sics had to give way to a looser relationship, if the work of the interpreter was to reach the extreme self-­conscious assurance expressed in the formula we are considering [“that the aim of the interpreter is to understand a writer better than he understood himself ”].20

Since the Renaissance, interpreters have been fettered by excessive pieties, to the point of denying themselves any interpretive talent or concern, or, when released from those fetters, so arrogant as to crudely appropriate past meaning for themselves. Gadamer does not see himself in continuity with this (misrep­ resented) tradition; rather, as a traditional philosopher (and less so, literary critic) that he is, he seeks truth separate from meaning, his ultimate goal being to improve or, better, supersede dialectically—­rather than to recapitulate in empathic understanding. What, then, is Gadamer’s strand of hermeneutics superseding, exactly? In Gadamer’s translation of hermeneutics—­a practice anchored to textual exe­ gesis—­to philosophy, do we lose something now worth retrieving? Is it sim­ ply expedient to read a concern for textual interpretation back into Gadamer, and in doing so are we sacrificing insights we might have gathered from pre-­ Gadamerian hermeneutics, humanism, and Petrarchan inquiry? To assuage our concerns, we can usefully turn to Emilio Betti, whose massive General Theory of Interpretation (1955), although rarely read, is a repository of, and in­ troduction to, Romantic and/or methodological hermeneutics.21 Betti, whose original target was Heidegger, among others, countered what he eventually saw to be Gadamer’s philosophical relativism with a renewed defense of the “ob­ jectivity” of meaning and interpretation. Inspired by Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of the “objectification of spirit,” which he renamed “meaning-­full forms” (sinn­ haltige Formen) or “representational forms” ( forme rappresentative), Betti writes:

20. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 193. 21. After the publication of Gadamer’s Truth and Method in 1960, Betti put forth in 1962 a précis of his voluminous work that took account of Gadamer’s implicit criticism. For the English translation, see Emilio Betti, “Hermeneutics as the General Methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften,” in Josef Bleicher, Contemporary Hermeneutics: Hermeneutics as Method, Philosophy, and Critique (London: Routledge, 1980), 51–­94. The debate between Betti and Gadamer is contextualized in Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), chap. 4.

Whole or Nothing  13

[A]n interpretation is possible only in view of meaning-­full forms. “Form” is here to be understood in a wide sense as an homogenous structure in which a number of perceptible elements are related to one another and which is suitable for preserving the character of the mind that created it or that is embodied in it. The representational function of a meaning-­full form which transmits a piece of knowledge need not, by the way, be a conscious one: the meaning-­content it carries can be known through its meaning-­representational function in such a way that, owing to its mediation, another mind, which is nevertheless closely related to ours, can “speak” to us by addressing our ability to understand with an “appeal.” It is possible to enter into a spiritual relationship with one’s fellow-­ men only on the basis of such meaning-­full forms which are either given in actual perception or can be evoked as an image in one’s memory.22

Thus, an expressive or representational form mediates that “fundamental need for recognizability (by other community members), which is obeyed by all the communicative and social life of beings endowed with mind” (TGI, 63).23 The “form” Betti is after need not be material (text, sound, image), it need only abet intersubjective communication. Mutual recognition between two distinct individuals is a necessary requirement of the hermeneutical task.24 22. Betti, “General Methodology,” 54. 23. I cite from Emilio Betti, “The Epistemological Problem of Understanding as an Aspect of the General Problem of Knowing,” trans. Susan Noakes, in Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica, eds., Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 30. 24. Betti, “Epistemological Problem,” 32–­33: “Moreover, interpretation does not necessarily presuppose that the thought be expressed in symbols with a view to a representational goal, with a communicative intent and an interest dependent upon the life of relationship. Even a ‘manifestation’ devoid of such interest and a behavior not in itself directed toward making a thought recognizable to others may be the object of interpretation, when what is at issue is, in the case of such a ‘manifestation,’ the derivation of the expressive value proper to it, its style of art or of life, or, in the case of such a behavior, the drawing forth from this behavior, seen as a sign or index, of a taking of position or an orientation, which is revealed there, that is to say, the manner of conceiving and of valuing with which it shows itself objectively to be imbued. In particular, there inheres in any form of practical activity an implicit, or perhaps symptomatic, representa­ tional value, insofar as one can infer from it, by indirect deduction, an index to the personality at work, its manner of conceiving and of understanding, which is betrayed there and which—­for the interpreter—­it is a matter of digging out and of representing explicitly, while reflecting on it. Such a deduction may turn out to be difficult, or even impossible, in the case of a single practi­ cal act, when one knows neither the circumstances nor the antecedents nor the consequences, which form together with that act the links in a chain; but when they are known, at once a refer­ ence becomes possible to that whole that is the personality of the author.”

14  Introduction

Betti’s objectifications of spirit draw their solidity from the value content that meaning-­full forms represent and transmit. Betti removed universal values from the rigid hierarchies they occupied in a traditional Neo-­Kantian frame­ work, allowing them to participate in and partake of the historical world—­in other words, to exist amid the life vicissitudes of their congenial custodians: Repeated historical observations confirm the phenomenological fact that the enduring spiritual heritage of collective life, whether consisting of spiritual atti­ tudes and dispositions or of institutional and socially structured embodiments, always relies for its conservation on the active participation of individuals. An active participation that needs to be perennially renewed, albeit not necessar­ ily in an open fashion, in congruence with the initiative and participation that first brought it to life. Powers akin to those that generated these dispositions and institutions are also responsible for keeping them alive and for ensuring their continuity in the communion of the living and the dead over different genera­ tions. (TGI, 34, emphasis added)

Betti emphasizes something that he believed was too easily lost in philosophi­ cal hermeneutics: the idea that traditions are willed rather than given, that they rely on a collaborative reactivation and personal initiative without which moral values are nonexistent and, thus, incommunicable. In light of these claims, then, it would not be an exaggeration to describe Betti’s reformulation of tex­ tual hermeneutics as a moral philosophy (by contrast, he notices the absence of the ethical dimension in Heidegger and Gadamer) that seeks and advances a “magna viventium ac defunctorum communio” (TGI, 957). Indeed, this is a form of hermeneutics that offers training in the Pauline “virtues of character: listening, tolerance, patience, and respect for the other.”25 On this last point, Betti again wished to stand out. Whereas philosophical hermeneutics meant to him that interpretation can occur between any man and every form, he argues that a stronger, more effective and consequential transmission will take place between fraternal minds. Borrowing terms from J. L. Austin, Betti’s hermeneutics may be said to exchange a surface, locu­ tionary familiarity among human beings—­a familiarity predicated on the ideality of language—­for the active illocutionary and perlocutionary force of congeniality—­predicated on the morality of human exchange and mutual 25. Anthony C. Thiselton, The Hermeneutics of Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 87. In fact, Betti wished to make hermeneutical training compulsory in secondary schooling.

Whole or Nothing  15

recognition—­so achieving a spiritual communion of distinct individuals. “In­ deed, the doors of the mind can be opened only from the inside,” Betti states, “through an inner spontaneity, and that which is received is only an incitation to vibrate in harmony with the stimulus, as a function of the energy that com­ municates its signifying or semantic value. The evocative energy of the message that has been cast forth is not something innate in it for itself alone, but the fruit of collaboration on the part of the one who is called to gather it up [ . . . ]” (TGI, 64–­65, emphasis added).26 Betti’s theory of elective affinities points to hermeneutics’ civic and civil import. Interpretation is morally charged insofar as it leads to the “abnegation of the self,” to “humility” as much as to “intellec­ tual openness”—­all traits necessary for “a fraternal and congenial disposition towards the mind objectified in the representational form” (272–­73). Of particular interest in light of a hermeneutical reading of permutations of Petrarchan humanism that express themselves through no specific or in­ dividual literary genre, but, retrospectively, through all of them at once, via a corpus, is Betti’s concern with the regulations that attend to the “logic” or “laws of formation” of those surrogates of past lived life that are meaning-­full forms. These regulations are not “technical,” strictly speaking. Rather, befit­ ting their spiritual object, they are “morphological” in their attempt to tap into the original moment of creation. Betti claims that the homology between the creative and interpretive moments gives rise to a fundamental corollary, one that he derives from Giambattista Vico: “in the presence of any work ‘made by men’ [ . . . ] it is possible to grasp an interpretation oriented toward under­ standing the meaning of the work, according to the criterion of its own peculiar law of formation” (TGI, 436–­37).27 Betti, alongside the modern Italian thinkers discussed in this study (De Sanctis, Croce, Gramsci), all of whom also relied on Vico, is pointing here to the psychological and moral coherence of man’s behavior and “lived life” (vita vissuta), a stylistic consistency that reflects in­ tegrity of character. More important, he seems to reach beyond Romantic psy­ chologism in his own way by pointing to an intentionality of the text formed by, yet to some extent independent of in its circulation and propagation, the author’s will: hence, to the existence of a shared will. This is what differenti­ ates psychological interpretation—­the attempt to identify with and to relive the 26. Betti, “Epistemological Problem,” 31–­32. 27. See also Emilio Betti, “The Principles of New Science of G. B. Vico and the Theory of Historical Interpretation,” trans. Giorgio A. Pinton and Susan Noakes, New Vico Studies 6 (1988): 31–­50; and Susan Noakes, “Emilio Betti’s Debt to Vico,” New Vico Studies 6 (1988): 51–­57.

16  Introduction

creative experience of the author, which is anathema to Gadamer and Decon­ struction alike—­from technical or “morphological” interpretation, which aims at “recreating from within the work of art, thought, or action” according to its “internal logic” (logica interna) an “intrinsic coherence” (intrinseca coerenza), or “internal form” ( forma interiore) (448). It is this idea of “internal form,” which Betti derived from the work of the nineteenth-­century German classicist, August Boeckh, that has prevailed in reception, undergoing an updated or modern redress in Hirsch’s notion of “intrinsic genre,” which is indebted to both Betti and Boeckh. Hirsch coopted Betti against Gadamer and the anti-­intentionalism of American New Criticism to reestablish the “validity” of “meaning,” in the presence of which “one is driven to recognize the necessity of the author’s determining will.”28 Hirsch’s faith in authorial intentionality also governed his commitment to the illocu­ tionary rather than semantic autonomy of language, a conviction that, in turn, pushed him toward a reconsideration of typification, for “all understanding of verbal meaning is necessarily genre-­bound.”29 What Hirsch was after, however, was not a set of general and qualifying contextual (extrinsic) genres, but a tex­ tualizing typification that worked on a more local level and could provide “that sense of the whole by means of which an interpreter can correctly understand any part in its determinacy.”30 Such a typification, one derived from the object at hand, the particular text, or the utterance that is being interpreted in its individuality, is what Hirsch calls an “intrinsic genre,” a notion that, supported by a belief in intentional­ ity as it may be, actually liberates us from the burden of seeking direct access to the creative mind while also allowing for ad hoc development of different interpretive methods for different books. In a sense, each book assigns to itself a unique genre. Of course, “it is the speaker who wills the particular intrinsic genre,” and yet, bypassing Betti to draw directly from Boeckh, Hirsch grants the utterance a sort of independence that simultaneously echoes and disen­ gages itself from authorial intention. This residue of authorial will is termed Zweck, or “purpose,” by Boeckh and Hirsch. “[Purpose] must be an entelechy, a goal-­seeking force that animates a particular kind of utterance,” Hirsch ex­ plains. “If we conceive such purposiveness as being limited to the particular purposes of an intrinsic genre, then we have a direct connection between the idea of genre and the controlling principle of meaning—­the idea of will—­in 28. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 68. 29. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 76. 30. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 86, emphasis added.

Whole or Nothing  17

this case, a particularized genre will that is not arbitrary but channeled within social forms and unified by an idea.”31 Purpose, in other words, precedes (by guiding) the author’s will, and such “purposive willing” adheres to the text when it acquires its relative independence in reception. Criticized for an authorialism seen as polemical and even reactionary af­ ter Gadamer’s opus, Betti’s and Hirsch’s methodological hermeneutics have an openness to the idea of textual intentionality that seems to have gone un­ noticed.32 For example, a recent critique of Hirsch (which does not mention Betti) argues that familiarization with the highly “untheorized” notion of the “intentionality of form” may be attained only by a poststructuralist disman­ tling of the inveterate humanism (that is, “ethics of authorship”) of traditional hermeneutics.33 Liberation of (post)modern consciousness from any extra­ textual concern, such as authorial intention and subjectivity, brings about a novel rapprochement of form and intention focused on those “features of a text that [  .  .  .  ] themselves intend meaning” and, consequently, “the re-­ conceptualization of intention as material, linguistic, textual rather than mental, subjective.” This theory proposes that textual intentionalism be recovered in the “illocutionary force” and “internal purposiveness” of the text itself. From this angle, such a move is positively “de-­humanizing” and “post-­humanist.” But is it really? Eminent Renaissance scholar Thomas M. Greene, a pio­ neering explorer of Petrarchan hermeneutics and the humanism it engendered, and a curious receiver of the hermeneutical frenzy introduced into the Ameri­ can academy by Gadamer, also proposed something akin to an intentionality of form, but he offered it as an antidote to the hermeneutical relativism he at­ tributed to Gadamer and poststructuralist theory alike: The alternative to this hermeneutic play with free associations [as exemplified by Gadamer and Derrida] would be much more austere. This course would try to avoid that self-­indulgence as it avoided the opposite mirror indulgence that denies the work’s estrangement. This hermeneutic would accept estrangement as a given and then search out patiently some bridge, some passage, some com­ mon term, which might help to mitigate it. On this basis one would suspect all modernized versions and easy assimilations, one would settle for less than full understanding, but one would accept a responsibility for a partial interpretive 31. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, 101. 32. Hirsch. Validity in Interpretation, 78 and following. 33. Kaye Mitchell, Intention and Text: Towards an Intentionality of Literary Form (New York: Continuum, 2008), chap. 4 and conclusion, in particular.

18  Introduction

correspondence to an intrinsic meaning or complex of meanings. One would think not of appropriating but of working out a reading appropriate to those intrinsic meanings. One would conceive of a text coming to us bearing its own intentionality—­not the intentionality of its creator but simply its own patent design for a certain kind of use. A chair exists to be sat on; a text exists to be read and read appropriately, within certain limits of potential response. It car­ ries with it coded directions or provocations to the mind, and certain types of mental responses befit a given text more closely than others. The task of the reader is to ascertain the experience or the activity most perfectly correspond­ ing to the text’s coded instigations.34

Inspired by Greene, we thus ask: could the theorization or, more precisely, the enactment of an “intentional form” be, in fact, Petrarchan, and therefore foun­ dationally and historically humanistic and (early) modern? After all, wasn’t Pe­ trarch the first programmatic appropriator and competent reader of the past, and what was the solution he offered for the (re-­creative) endurance of textual and authorial meaning, his own included? And, finally, did that solution have a following? By comparing the respective aims and competences of textual and philo­ sophical hermeneutics via Gadamer and Betti, we can qualify more clearly the benefits that a certain kind of interpretive practice may offer for a recuperation of Petrarch and his humanist legacy in modern Italian intellectual thought. First, in modern reception, the Romantic tradition of textual hermeneutics allows us to retrogress to a now long and lamentably forgotten point before Deconstruction, where the subject-­object antinomy, rather than being always originally resolved, objectively, in language, or, subjectively, in the awareness of the historically effected character of understanding (Gadamer speaks of “wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein”), is purposively left unsettled and pending. In other words, where meaning is concerned, as opposed to truth—­ and even if we admit that meaning does not align neatly with authorial inten­ tions—­it is worth paying attention to how an author relates to and construes their spiritual objectification. Consideration of authorial awareness (to use a less offensive corollary of intention) may alert the interpreter to a sensitivity and to an agenda akin to one’s own, and thus to the possibility of a conver­ sation among more or less like-­minded interlocutors and, what is more, the 34. Thomas M. Greene, “Anti-­Hermeneutics: The Case of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129,” in Greene, The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia Univer­ sity Press, 1986), 172–­73.

Whole or Nothing  19

chance of a collaborative enterprise. Otherwise, in the absence of some degree of humanly intended contact between a creator and a receiver, any practically oriented theory such as hermeneutics must be morally inconsequential. Giv­ ing up on conscientiousness (again, as an alternative to the frowned-­on notion of consciousness) altogether is too much to ask, especially if, as Renaissance scholars or scholars of self-­conscious “beginnings” more generally, we wish to go beyond mere illustration and contextualization, and point, rather, to the perdurance of beginnings.35 The values of textual hermeneutics, even more than its techniques, are therefore hortatory. They ask us to restore a verbal and transitive quality to tradition as action and experience, and not just event. They ask us to participate in tradition, and they encourage the scholar who is not just competent but also an aficionado. Yes, enthusiasm counts, and it feeds on shared intentions. A lack of passion reflects the absence of a common resolve. Simply put: if intentions don’t matter at all, the author dies, but if the au­ thor dies, so, too, does the incentive to write oneself into immortality, and if author and writing go, then there goes the reader, in swift succession, if the reader’s understanding matters only when it is shared, that is, objectified, in turn, in writing. We see clearly how this is a slippery slope in which even a small concession may be fatal to the literary enterprise. Ultimately, practition­ ers of textual hermeneutics react to the poststructuralist provocation by claim­ ing that some risks are just not worth taking, if there is a viable compromise. Crass authorialism can be bypassed through formulations like “objectification of spirit,” “meaning-­full forms,” “intrinsic genre,” and so on. These formula­ tions admit that a recapitulatory identification with the author will always have limitations, yet, while granting freedom to texts—­and here Greene would seem to agree—­concerns of form and genre serve a restraining function: they hold the possibility of reckless reception in check. This kind of accommodation is enough to afford some room to innovate without disfiguring a tradition of writers and thinkers who, from Petrarch to Machiavelli or, dare I say, to Gram­ sci, prefigured and defined our hermeneutical concerns and characteristically staged their encounters with the past as face-­to-­face confrontations with illus­ trious men and their spiritual objectifications. The postmodern mind would here retort: this is the point, these self-­ assumed canonical thinkers were delusional in their appropriation and handling of meaning, present and past! But again, here the values of textual 35. On a Vichian reading of “beginnings” as abiding and generative, see Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975).

20  Introduction

hermeneutics properly understood are of advice, urging us to practice the modesty and discernment we accuse others of  lacking. If, as Gadamer pointed out, hermeneuticians have often been misled by the desire to know the author better than the author knew himself, we should not be ashamed to admit that in some cases—­and, indeed, in the case of some of the greats—­they have known and will continue to know themselves better than we may ever do. Simply put, self-­knowledge is central to the humanities, and not all self-­knowledge is self-­ delusion. One practical example of our own self-­confidence as more than mod­ ern readers has been the assumption that many major Renaissance humanists attacked the professional philosophers of their time in order to replace them. This is simply untrue. Some did, many others didn’t. Thinkers like Petrarch were interpreters who failed to name themselves professionally, yet they dared to claim that thinking was germane to their vocation, too, as literary critics or hermeneuticians. Likewise, Renaissance scholarship suffers from the post­ modern tendency to conflate the Cartesian ego with the humanist’s ego. While the former, the transcendent Self, is truly under attack in our epoch, the latter was usually based on a well-­founded sense of self-­esteem derived from one’s own proven and hard-­won skills in the art of historical, biblical, and literary interpretation.

The Story: Humanism from Petrarch to Gramsci Posterity tells one of the many possible stories that are available to us regarding the obstinate persistence of the Renaissance in later epochs. And like many other maieutic narratives dedicated to the spiritual parturition of modernity, including some referenced in this book, my story begins with Petrarch. Pe­ trarch as guarantor is a well-­known construct, for there resides in his works a self-­awareness that amounts to an epochal awareness. Yet the Petrarchan re­ birth, or renaissance, increasingly struggles to remain modern without quali­ fication and therefore relevant. In chapter 1, “Primi and Ultimi: Petrarch’s Corpus,” I argue that the Petrarchan new beginning, which the passing of time slowly but surely wants to consign to a generic early modern, if not to an en­ tirely premodern, era, is in fact still current and forever a watershed in that it was programmatically hermeneutical. In the chapter I am as much concerned with specifying how the hermeneutical considerations just introduced can ad­ vance our understanding of Petrarch, as I am with reintroducing Petrarch as a distant precedent to, and thus participant in, those very same debates. In fact, my comparison of Gadamer and Betti is not intended to give either thinker

Whole or Nothing  21

the edge, nor is it intended to rejuvenate a stultifying debate from the past. To be sure, Gadamer’s and Betti’s aims were different, and thus they were not in conversation—­or at least, not to the extent that Betti and Petrarch are. In their devotion to the text, Betti and Petrarch are true interlocutors—­allies, even—­in their shared pursuit of what Betti characterized as the principal aim of her­ meneutics: a spiritual exchange between the living and the dead. But here is properly the point. In the words of Giambattista Vico, who functions as a ghost in the machine throughout this study: “Ingenium facultas est in unum dissita, diversa coniungendi.” That is to say, real intellectual payoff is to be found not in logical inferences but in unexpected, far-­fetched genealogical comparisons, and when we adhere to the pursuits of textual interpretation and characterize the particular strain of hermeneutics to which Petrarch unforcedly belongs, we are rewarded with an appreciation of Petrarch’s sophistication and superiority, even with respect to his modern inheritors, including Betti. Moreover, this transhistorical confrontation allows us to pose questions that prima facie may seem anachronistic, but are not. Did Petrarch’s herme­ neutics also transcend textual practices in the direction of ontological con­ cerns about human experience, and did his concerns, consequently, grip less tightly to authorial identities and their conscious volitions? Or, rather, was he firmly operating within the framework of a methodology directed at forging transhistorical collaborations between congenial minds? And this raises the question, must these two aims be as incommensurable as modern hermeneu­ tics makes them out to be? While my inclination, admittedly, is to see Petrarch more as a gregarious practitioner than as a cloistered theoretician, in this study I leverage Petrarch to show how his works already definingly resolve the her­ meneutical dichotomies between the philosophical and the methodological, as well as, through his own conceptualization of spiritual objectifications (animi effigies/ingenii simulacra), the literary overcoming of the mind-­body problem. A comprehensive close reading of Petrarch’s most programmatic works, his letter collections (Familiares and Seniles) and invectives, which I pursue in chapter 1, reveals that Petrarchan humanism was originally less a form of antiquarianism, thus far synonymous with the practice of humanism, than a practice concerned with the formal codification of an appeal to posterity. To offer a concrete example, the recovery and restoration of Cicero, in the Familiares, is not an end unto itself for Petrarch; rather, it serves as a heuristic model that makes the case, in the Seniles, for Boccaccio’s own preservation of Petrarch. What I call Petrarch’s posteritism lends a hitherto unexplored fu­ tural dimension to Renaissance humanism and calls for a closer determination of its generic or formal embodiment(s). Maintaining that Petrarch conceived

22  Introduction

or reconceived of his work in reception, I aspire to requalify Petrarch’s letter collections as a repository of interpretive strategies by which to make sense of texts in general, themselves included. Beginning with Petrarch’s own texts, I will in subsequent chapters use these interpretive strategies on some of his Italian heirs, subjecting them, in turn, to a hermeneutical, indeed, Petrarchan reading. The works of these authors, I will conclude, are construed to ensure the production of comparable literary works that will perpetuate a tradition based on the critical (that is, nonimitative) furthering of the original authorial intention. Petrarch was merely the first to pinpoint and entrust his discourse to an inimitable genre, the corpus, and to an internal intertextuality that relies on congeniality for its reactivation. To an empathic reader, Petrarch’s humanism becomes a reiterable practice in which the original creative intention is for­ mally preserved in reciprocal acts of reading and writing that attend to the co­ operative task we call tradition—­itself not a ready-­made acquisition but rather the repeated and willful execution of responsive transmission. Petrarch, a man credited with having achieved modernity by defying me­ dieval teleology and transcendentals, brings a hermeneutical awareness to his dogged thematization of the impermanence of existence, and what will become obvious is that Petrarchan humanism will be a living legacy or nothing at all. It will succeed or fail to the extent that it is intended, purposive, and prac­ ticed, its receivers adapting its agenda and fully committing to its deontology or philological virtuousness. If this is the case, however, we might well ask if a Petrarchism of this kind has ever come about. This doubt is reinforced, not in­­validated, by the relentless and ubiquitous existence of other forms of Petrar­ ch­ism. There is the Petrarchism of the vernacular, which informed the idiom(s) and mindset of Western poetic expression, and there is the Petrarchism of the Latin legacy, from which an equally influential but largely apocryphal human­ ism developed.36 Such is the extent of Petrarch’s fame and influence. 36. For an assorted though by no means exhaustive sample of scholarly work on poetic Pe­ trarchism, see William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Cristina Montagnani, ed., I territori del petrarchismo. Frontiere e sconfinamenti (Rome: Bulzoni, 2005); Loredana Chines, ed., Il petrarchismo. Un modello di poesia per l’Europa, 2 vols. (Rome: Bulzoni, 2006); Sandro Gentili and Luigi Trenti, eds., Il petrarchismo nel Settecento e nell’Ottocento (Rome: Bulzoni, 2006); Tatiana Crivelli et al., eds., L’una et l’altra chiave. Figure e momenti del petrarchismo femminile europeo (Rome: Salerno, 2005). Conversely, for suggestions on how to begin to tackle the vast sea of Latin “Petrarchism” in the Renaissance, see Karl A. E. Enenkel and Jan Papy, “Introduction: Towards a New Approach of Petrarch’s Reception in the Renaissance—­The ‘Independent Reader,’ ” in Enenkel and Papy, eds., Petrarch and His Readers in the Renaissance, (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006), 1–­10.

Whole or Nothing  23

The topos of  fama or renown is quintessentially duplicitous, Philip Hardie maintains. It describes both the “rumor” that surrounds the making or “pro­ cess” of the literary artifact, as well as the complete “product”—­that “fixed cor­ pus of words” or “lasting literary monument” we identify as “tradition.”37 But fama is duplicitous in many other ways, not least in its relationship to the self, where “internal” and “external,” the “individual’s own desire of fame” and the reputation one enjoys among others, merge or clash. The oppositional qual­ ity of reputation informs what can be called Petrarch’s “narrativity of fama.” Renown or the quest for it often “takes the shape of a story,” a story that in turn is often made up of smaller units or “plots” the reader is asked to de­ tect and recompose into a larger whole for their significance. “Plots of  fama” inevitably abound in Petrarch, “whose writing career could be described as a life-­long quest to construct the author’s fame within literary and cultural tradition.”38 I have already mentioned the perseverance of poetic Petrarchism, of course, but we also know that the endless commentaries spawned by Pe­ trarch’s Canzoniere—­which, likewise, are fame plots of sorts—­were a fertile “site” for the honing of national or protonational European identities. And in the Petrarchism of Garcilaso de La Vega,  Joachim Du Bellay, Philip Sidney, and a slew of other major and minor readers, William Kennedy sees national awareness first emerge, drawing on the “totemic function” that Petrarch in­ vested in his patria: less the political Italy that condemned Petrarch’s father to exile, than the Italian-­centered republic of letters he came to envision through his correspondence.39 Petrarch is the bearer of an identity that is recollective as much as collective, an identity that can exist or that occurs as a self-­perpetuating gesture only in reception: in Petrarchism. If his sonnets were the “site” on which early mod­ ern French, Spanish, and English “protonationalisms” were founded, this study pushes further, to explore how intellectual or scholarly Petrarchism, the legacy of the Latin Petrarch, was the site for the distinctively modern patriot­ ism of the Italian Risorgimento, or, more accurately, how Petrarch’s works and aura inspired the postscript plot of that same era. Chapter 2, “The Purpose of 37. I am drawing here from Philip Hardie’s introduction to his Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–­47, and ch. 12 for a detailed investigation of fama in selected works by Petrarch. See also Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 38. Hardie, Rumour and Renown, 37. 39. William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 2–­4.

24  Introduction

Literary Criticism: Francesco De Sanctis’s (Anti-­)Petrarchism,” is an idiosyn­ cratic study of nineteenth-­century Petrarchan reception. I pay close attention to a distinct case in order to recover an intimate, existential Petrarchism that was privately experienced, and far removed, temporally, from its source, but greatly influential. Specifically, I will argue that the not yet extant Petrarchism recovered in this chapter was the guiding force behind the works of Francesco De Sanctis, the first minister of education of a unified Italy and author of the History of Italian Literature (1870–­71), arguably “the finest history of any lit­ erature ever written” and “an active instrument of aesthetic evolution,” as René Wellek put it—­and, certainly, in the (often disgruntled) opinion of (almost) everyone, the work that singlehandedly shaped the Italian literary critical ap­ proach to the same Italian literary canon it sanctioned.40 Those already conversant with De Sanctis’s work might find it paradoxical, even gratuitously provocative, to seek a genuine Petrarchism there. In fact, a cursory reading of the pages De Sanctis specifically dedicated to the father of humanism shows evidence of discomfort, if not downright annoyance. This paradox—­that the truest of Petrarchisms might nestle in what will in fact emerge as one of the most programmatic of anti-­Petrarchisms—­is what I un­ pack in chapter 2. Specifically, I examine the making of Francesco De Sanctis’s History in light of De Sanctis’s identification with Giambattista Vico (the phi­ losopher of human origins) and in the larger context of De Sanctis’s corpus, including his autobiographical writings, in order to reconnect widely shared Risorgimento anti-­Renaissance sentiments to De Sanctis’s programmatic (yet overlooked) anti-­Petrarchism. Or, to be blunt: why would De Sanctis, a fore­ most reformer of Hegelian aesthetics and codifier of one of the most distinct and influential of European patriotic discourses, have Italy’s modernity de­ pend on a psychological repression of Petrarch, its first modern man? To an­ swer this question, I compare De Sanctis’s methodology to some of his avowed scholarly models outside and within Italy (G. Voigt,  J. Michelet,  J. Burckhardt, G. Carducci, A. Mézières, and so on). Through these and other comparisons, I reassess the viability of De Sanctis’s belief that literary cultures, along with bodies of literary criticism and history, have national and patriotic attributes. Reconnecting more closely De Sanctis’s Critical Essay on Petrarch (1869) to the History, I delineate how, even as he attempted to avoid the Latin Petrarch extolled by his contemporaries in order to turn Petrarch into the whipping boy of Italian culture, De Sanctis’s works ended up offering an updated form 40. René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750–­1950, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale Uni­ versity Press, 1955–­92), 4:124.

Whole or Nothing  25

of the hermeneutical Petrarchism that I define in chapter 1. This intellectual history—­of a conformity in reception that did not even require conscious participation—­illustrates the suppleness of Petrarchan inquiry. It is a Renais­ sance heritage that, I argue, continued to live through twentieth-­century at­ tachments to De Sanctis—­namely, on the part of Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci, whom I discuss in more depth later in the book. In chapter 3, “ ‘Do not grow weary of reading, for I do not grow weary of writing’: Goldoni’s Reform of Italian Literature,” I explore solutions that De Sanctis hints at but does not fully develop in the conclusion of his History. As De Sanctis tells it, a Petrarchan lack of interest in civic affairs found expres­ sion in Italian letters in the form of comedy, and by following the development of comedy through the centuries, we can eventually trace an Italian rebirth into seriousness in both science and literature. According to De Sanctis, this came about because of Giambattista Vico, whose work resacralized any hu­ man endeavor, and Carlo Goldoni, the Venetian playwright who undertook the “reform” of Italian theater in the face of a degenerated commedia dell’arte. This chapter is a close parallel reading and reconnection of De Sanctis’s History and the work that it extends into a collective biography—­that is, Goldoni’s Mémoires—­and, of course selectively, the reform that Goldoni accomplished across 124(!) comedies. In my reading I treat Vico’s and Goldoni’s autobio­ graphism, not just as a literary form but as an epistemological penchant. More than that, it was a strategy by which to overturn the influence of Descartes and Molière, post-­Renaissance French predecessors who notably articulated their innovations as revolutions rather than as reforms, and who, according to their Italian emulators, sent an Italian legacy of humanism and commedia dell’arte to the guillotine without the need to provide detailed metacritical accounts of their own confrontation with either. Such an account is what Vico and Gol­ doni set out to provide, post-­factum. Petrarchan humanism was an antischolasticism and thus, as Petrarch makes clear in his invectives, misogallismo, or “anti-­French.” De Sanctis, I show, honed his Italian criticism with respect to French critical alternatives, while Vico and Goldoni consciously construed alternative, distinctively Italian mo­ dernities, initially in contrast to their French Enlightenment forebears, Molière and Descartes, and, eventually in terms of a revolution that was impossible in Italy, if not by imitation. Therefore, in chapter 4, “The Vichian Resurrection of Commedia dell’Arte: Reciprocating Modernity between Italy and France,” I bring the French perspective into a retelling of the story of the “Renaissance” and its invention. Specifically, I reconnect three intellectual events of major import in nineteenth-­century France: Jules Michelet’s rediscovery of Vico,

26  Introduction

Michelet’s own conceptualization of the periodizing category “Renaissance,” and the scholarly, artistic, and moral accreditation (contra Goldoni) of com­ media dell’arte that George and Maurice Sand achieved (relying on Michelet) in their Masques et Bouffons, a composite work of groundbreaking artistic and scholarly importance, published on the eve of Italy’s unification. I argue that together these events mark a turning point in the postrevolu­ tionary Romantic revision of the Enlightenment legacy. The association in re­ ception of  Vico and commedia dell’arte lengthens the intense but supposedly ephemeral epoch of French Vichism and endows it with a practical and liter­ ary consequentiality. Most important, an understanding of French Vichism sheds light on some neglected confrontations between France and Italy that coincided with the emergence of the Risorgimento. The trajectory of these Vichian appropriations lends a telling irony to the formation of Italian and French intellectual identities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We find that in both France, via Michelet, and Italy, via De Sanctis, the invention of the Renaissance was established on an application of Vico and a Vichian reassessment of comedy—­and yet the two nations would come to opposite conclusions. After this necessary French detour, I return my attention to Italy in the fi­ nal chapter, “Remembering Is Not Thinking: Croce, Gramsci and Italian In­ tellectual Autobiography,” where I consider what De Sanctis bequeathed to his two most influential heirs, Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci. Tak­ ing up Gramsci’s lament that Italian thinkers, weighed down by internal (or tradition-­informed) jargon, failed to make themselves understood internation­ ally, I ask, will the same fate befall Gramsci? Thus far he has come to be known in a piecemeal and anthologized manner, despite his fame. What will happen when he is finally fully translated and revealed as an Italian thinker who was engrossed in those same local and provincial debates? I conclude this study by building on the cultural translation I outlined in previous chapters, offer­ ing at once a contextualization and application of Gramscianism as a form of ethically charged hermeneutics—­one that avowedly derives from De Sanctis, but that is also, in light of the connections uncovered in this study, intimately tied to Petrarch and the hermeneutical humanism he initiated.41 In sum, just 41. On autobiography as a historiographical genre, an approach relevant to Gramsci’s au­ tobiographism as well as that of Petrarch, Vico, and Goldoni, see Jeremy Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Jaume Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention (New York: Routledge, 2016).

Whole or Nothing  27

as Gramsci endeavored to translate Italian intellectual history, this study aims to translate Gramsci in a way that remembers and restores his Italian mentors, such as Antonio Labriola and Benedetto Croce, and gains us an existential understanding of overthought Gramscian notions such as “hegemony,” “mo­ lecular,” and “Anti-­Croce,” and all in all, the rewards of a more holistic reading of the Prison Notebooks. The thinkers and authors studied in this book do not exhaustively represent the intellectual tradition they helped make, but they are not a congeries of case studies, either. It is my argument and aim to see them as connected, their works forming a unique corpus, and productively understandable in mutual enlight­ enment. Because traditional correspondences are never simply chronological, however, I have eschewed a sequential order that would feel artificial and have arranged the chapters of this book in cross-­reference, keyed to corpus analysis. For example, it takes a rejection of the Renaissance engendered by Petrarch to establish the patriotic discourse of the late or post-­Risorgimento. And so, it is only through De Sanctis’s anti-­Petrarchism in his History that we can come to appreciate Vico’s and Goldoni’s relationship to each other and their shared connection to the Renaissance enterprise—­a relationship, furthermore, that allows us to compare the Italian and French struggles to rebirth modernity for a third time after the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Tradition is made up of reception as much as rejection, it accrues on itself, often in disorderly fashion, until it is retrospectively systematized, as it is by Gramsci. Relying on De Sanctis, Gramsci, too, hounded the bogeyman—­who was not the first Re­ naissance man but the last, not Petrarch but Benedetto Croce. He did so armed with a philosophy of praxis that was in fact the long-­arc permutation of a hoary Petrarchism. From Petrarch to Gramsci . . . and back, via De Sanctis, we find that the Italian intellectual tradition lends itself to a palindromic reading. In conclusion, this book examines the various beginnings of one tradition, as a way to explore the literary embodiments taken by a collaborative reacti­ vation of past personal initiatives, literary embodiments without which intel­ lectual values do not come to pass, let alone get passed down. This is why, in wanting to absorb humanism as a viable moral code for addressing illustrious ancients as well as educating equally illustrious descendants, this study tries not just to understand humanism but to practice it. Each corpus analyzed in this study discloses a similar, albeit historically adapted, hermeneutical deon­ tology that I immediately reapply toward grasping the text that exemplifies it: Sensus non est inferendus sed efferendus . . . or, “meaning is to be read out of and not into the text.” Yes, indeed, Posterity produces its own theory from within and in so doing claims to rehearse the humanism(s) it unearths! Humbly and

28  Introduction

with all due caution and respect, this book also wishes to recuperate a fond­ ness for the Renaissance that hews closer to the therapeutic aspiration of nineteenth-­century scholarship. I am thinking of Burckhardt, the Italian reac­ tion to whom I explored in my previous book, The Other Renaissance (“other” to Burckhardt’s, that is); of Michelet, whose rationale I hope to have laid bare in one of my chapters here; and, especially, of De Sanctis, whom, I realize only now, Posterity pays tribute to, rewrites, and adapts for our times.

Chapter 1

Primi and Ultimi: Petrarch’s Corpus [H]eaven forbid that one or two fine phrases would cause me to embrace a thinker’s entire system! [ . . . ] If you wish to praise the whole safely, then you must view the whole, examine the whole, and weigh the whole. Francesco Petrarca

Introduction: T o ta l P e t r a r c h , D i f f e r e n t P e t r a r c h ? Shortly before 1874, the year that celebrated the 500th anniversary of Petrarch’s death, the pioneering Renaissance scholar, Francesco Fiorentino (1834–­84), was commissioned to compose an essay to be included in “a volume describ­ ing extensively and from every point of view the impressive figure of our greatest lyric poet,” Francesco Petrarca. “His philosophy,” says Fiorentino, “fell to me.”1 By 1876, his commissioners had dropped out of the picture, but the author of Studies and Portraits of the Renaissance (a book dedicated to the Risorgimento hero, Giuseppe Garibaldi) and of voluminous studies on Pomponazzi, Telesio, and Bruno, resolved to go ahead and include his essay, “Petrarch’s Philosophy,” in a volume of his miscellaneous works. “[Petrarch] did not have, or perhaps he did not wish to have, a theoretical mind of the kind we nowadays expect from a philosopher,” Fiorentino specifies in a telling disclaimer. “Rather, he had a mind capable of inquiring keenly into life’s con­ trasts, albeit stronger in revealing them than in arranging them harmoniously.”2 Reading Fiorentino’s comments today, we might wonder whether Petrarch really lacked the skill of “arranging,” or whether the lack was in his readers. 1. Francesco Fiorentino, “Petrarch’s Philosophy,” trans. Cosette Bruhns and Silvia Guslandi, in RIP, 127. 2. Fiorentino, “Petrarch’s Philosophy,” 128. Many of Francesco Fiorentino’s works have been reedited recently, including Studi e ritratti della Rinascenza (Naples: La Scuola di Pi­ tagora, 2008).

30  Chapter One

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when Fiorentino received his commission, scholars were starting to see that Petrarch might best be cele­ brated and understood if he were approached synchronically from different perspectives—­indeed, if at all possible, “from every point of view” made avail­ able by his varied corpus. If this early project floundered, it may have been because it was exceedingly difficult to bring to fruition an edition of Petrarch’s complete works, or even just a guide into them, until recently.3 By 1904, the date of the next major anniversary, marking six hundred years since Petrarch’s birth, even the Italian parliament saw the need to grasp Petrarch’s oeuvre in its entirety and called for a critical edition of Petrarch’s opera omnia by legisla­ tive decree. This projected national Grossforschung would turn into a national embarrassment despite the involvement of the Italian scholarly elite.4 Twenty volumes were planned; in actuality, an edition of Petrarch’s early epic, Africa, appeared in 1926 (edited by Nicola Festa), twenty-­two years after the enter­ prise formally began, and the multivolume edition of the Familiares/Letters on Familiar Matters began to emerge piecemeal in 1933 (edited by Vittorio Rossi), with the last installment published in 1942 (edited by Umberto Bosco). Only two more titles were added to the collection—­Rerum memorandarum libri/Books of Things to Be Remembered (edited by Giuseppe Billanovich, 1945) and part of De viris illustribus/On Famous Men (edited by Guido Martellotti, 1964)—­before the project died out. In the shadow of this scholarly legacy, in 2004 a humbler (or humbled) national committee was called to refurbish the enterprise on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Petrarch’s birth. Charged with producing “Petrarca per il Centenario,” Michele Feo confronted a legacy of “unfinished works.” “Why this long series of defeats?” he asked. Should it be attributed only to “the constitutional weakness of the cultural institutions of our liberal, Fas­ cist, Republican Italietta?” Or, worse, to genetic “inconclusiveness” of the Italians?5 Perhaps, he adds, scholars have been overly harsh, denigrating their colleagues’ efforts to provide critical editions of a Renaissance corpus that 3. See Victoria Kirkham and Armando Maggi, eds., Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Com­ plete Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 4. Among others, Vittorio Rossi, Pio Rajna, Remigio Sabbadini, Giuseppe De Luca, Giu­ seppe Billanovich, Giorgio Pasquali, Guido Martellotti, Umberto Bosco, Concetto Marchesi, and Augusto Campana. 5. Michele Feo, “L’edizione nazionale del Petrarca e le edizioni fatte con le forbici,” in Feo, ed., Petrarca nel tempo. Tradizione, lettori e immagini delle opere (Comitato nazionale per le celebrazioni del VII centenario della nascita di Francesco Petrarca, 2003), 34.

Petrarch’s Corpus  31

might, in the case of Petrarch’s Triumphs, for example, require the collation of more than six hundred manuscripts. And yet, Feo suggests, it is undeniable that we are witnessing a turning point in the Italian scholarly psyche and a liberation from excessive philological asceticism. The problem, other schol­ ars chime in, is not and cannot be “philology” but the excessively retarding aberrations of “philologism” that lie deep in the heart of the Italian modern humanist. Italian scholars, too, want freedom from a philological complex, a freedom that will lead, finally, to effective, albeit “commercial,” editions of Pe­ trarch, modeled after similar efforts—­philologically imperfect, yet reliable and transformative—­on the other side of the Atlantic.6 Indeed, if we turn to the American side of the Atlantic, we can more fully grasp what can be accomplished by a comprehensive approach to Petrarch’s impressive literary array. It is, of course, impossible to comment here on every one of the publications occasioned by the last Petrarchan anniversary, even in the American academy alone, but it is worth mentioning, as an example of an emerging central concern, the complaint that the confected nature of Petrarch’s work has often led scholars to disregard the “textual origins” of his compositions and, accordingly, to “override” Petrarch’s own suggestions as to how his work should be read. The consensus is now that “in Petrarch’s work philological issues are so authorially driven and so philosophically attuned to the author’s hermeneutics that we cannot in fact read or interpret him without understanding the relevant philological issues and reapplying them in our crit­ ical approach to his works.”7 In this reading, scholars have failed to “connect the Petrarch who reads to the Petrarch whom we read,” invoking basic herme­ neutical notions presumably familiar to Petrarch himself—­that interpretation reverses composition, that writing and reading are interrelated, as are the parts and the whole. What is pointed toward is the need for a metacritical, indeed, a doubly metacritical, awareness to be brought to the study of an author who, just as he was the first modern writer, was also the first modern reader, like us. Petrarch’s corpus should finally emerge as a primary source, to be perused in 6. Francesco Bausi, “Edizioni critiche e edizioni provvisorie. Il Petrarca del Centenario,” in Bausi, Petrarca antimoderno. Studi sulle invettive e sulle polemiche petrarchesche (Florence: Franco Cesati, 2008), 254. Reference is to Harvard University Press’s I Tatti Renaissance Li­ brary (ITRL), which, under the direction of  James Hankins, has put out an astonishing number of editions (with facing translation) of works by Renaissance thinkers, without the pretension, however, of being critical or definitive editions. 7. Teodolinda Barolini, “Introduction,” in Barolini and H. Wayne Storey, eds., Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 2.

32  Chapter One

accordance with secondary guidelines that are rarely neatly and paratextually announced but are embedded or, rather, instanced within the structuring of the text itself, thus involving us in their practice as attentive readers. The attempt to read Petrarch aright, as it were, is already bearing fruit—­as we see, for example, in the excavation of the logic attending to Petrarch’s Fa­ miliarum rerum liber (not libri!), as a single multivolume work of his letters on familiar matters.8 In recent years the Familiares, which are also the focus of my attention in this chapter, have been recognized as the locus of Petrarchan experi­ mentalism at its most intense, and as such the true master key to the study of Pe­ trarch’s works.9 These exhaustive and sympathetic readings begin by clarifying the structure of Petrarch’s epistolographic experimentalism and by suggesting, following Petrarch’s own advice, a diachronic reading of the 350 letters collected in the Familiares. Only a strictly chronological reading enables us to transform the biography of some of the letters into the autobiography of a collection that extends further into the Seniles. This shared approach, which is as novel as it is commonsensical, restores a long-­lost narrative edge to a work that was conceived as a book, or, better, as a continuous narrative from volume to volume, and not as a florilegium, or compendious anthology, a genre utterly despised by Petrarch. Furthermore, it frees us from one of the most inveterate of bad habits in Petrar­ chan studies: namely, the tendency to subject every single letter and slim ex­ cerpt to a biographical counter-­check, in a frenzy to refute the author’s sincerity. Wholeness or comprehensiveness, rather than truthfulness, are the only essential features of the “autobiographical pact” that Petrarch establishes plainly and con­ spicuously at the outset of his letter collections and, through these programmatic works, applies to every other work of his.10 Finally, we come face to face with the ancestral sin of Petrarchan scholar­ ship: the division of scholarly labor between Petrarch’s poetic/vernacular cor­ pus and the humanist/Latin one. Only relatively recently have the boundaries between these two realms begun to fade, allowing for gains on the literary side 8. Roberta Antognini, Il progetto autobiografico delle Familiares di Petrarca (Milan: Led, 2008), 19–­20; and Roberta Antognini, “Familiarium Rerum Liber: Tradizione materiale e au­ tobiografia,” in Barolini and Storey, eds., Petrarch and the Textual Origins of Interpretation, 205–­29. See also Daniela Goldin Folena, “ ‘Familiarum Rerum Liber,’ Petrarca e la problem­ atica epistolare,” in Adriana Chemello, ed., Alla lettera. Teorie e pratiche epistolari dai Greci al Novecento (Milan: Guerini, 1998), 51–­82. 9. See, for example, the rich collection of essays in Claudia Berra, ed., Motivi e forme delle Familiari di Francesco Petrarca (Milan: Cisalpino, 2003). 10. Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” in Lejeune, On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

Petrarch’s Corpus  33

of the whole to inform the research of the other, scholarly side, and vice versa. For example, the comprehensive and diachronic approach to the Familiares owes much to the attempt to restore unity to Petrarch’s poetic collection, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta or—­all the more now, given the new emphasis on its composite wholeness—­the Canzoniere. This, states Marco Santagata in his pioneering study, was a feat that required a move from the “lyricity” of the single poem to the “narrativity” of the entire collection.11 After the plague year of 1348, says Santagata, Petrarch, faced with the fragil­ ity of human existence, went through a veritable ordering frenzy that invested his poetic oeuvre as much as his other works, including those to which he returned with autobiographical retrospection in his mature years. These were not just the Familiares and Canzoniere, but also his Letters of Old Age, the Epys­ tole, the Secretum, and so on. What we may call Petrarch’s hermeneutical con­ version was a momentous event; it led to the reordering of some major works, as well as the willful exclusion of others, and to a renegotiated relationship to earlier productions, from the Africa to the De viris illustribus, and to his place in literary tradition, between Dante and Boccaccio. All the while, his conver­ sion serendipitously advanced a shift already under way in the thirteenth cen­ tury: a shift in taste from static poetry to diegetic prose forms.12 This extremely condensed review of the reorientation in Petrarchan studies starting with the last major anniversary aims to highlight Petrarch’s continuing centrality in the vexed problem of Renaissance self-­consciousness. If it is a tru­ ism that in selected works of Petrarch resides a self-­awareness that amounts to an epochal awareness, then the time is now right to refurbish and extend that truism by a comprehensive reading of a corpus that was established, like the humanism it codifies and practices, on the mutually constitutive and revers­ ible enterprises of reading and writing, the process of textual understanding we refer to as hermeneutic circle. This realization regarding the consonance of address and reception, of greeting and meeting, however, touches on how a literary identity and intellectual tradition are diegetically construed beyond 11. Marco Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima. Storia e racconto nel Canzoniere di Petrarca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), 11. See also Teodolinda Barolini, “The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s ‘Rerum vulgarium fragmenta,’ ” in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), chap. 10; and Thomas E. Peterson, Petrarch’s Fragmenta: The Narrative and Theological Unity of  Rerum vulgarium frag­ menta (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016). 12. Santagata, I frammenti dell’anima, 29–­30. For the recent attention to the “uncollected” Petrarch, see Claudia Berra and Paola Vecchi Galli, eds., Estravaganti, disperse, apocrifi petrarch­ eschi (Milan: Cisalpino, 2007).

34  Chapter One

and above an individual—­not despite the latter, but by virtue of their ability to reverberate.13 While willing to continue to grant Petrarch the role of “father of humanism” or codifier of a distinct kind of inquiry, in what follows I resist the temptation to read his instructions as injunctions for a monolithic definition of what we call humanism, and in any case I refrain from affirming or deny­ ing Renaissance humanism’s philosophical status.14 Instead, I aim to take Pe­ trarch on his own terms in this sense: to reauthorize humanism eponymously as Petrarchism, by which I mean a self-­conscious agenda whose value, essence, and, ultimately, endurance as a legacy depends on our grappling with and col­ laboratively furthering Petrarch’s intentions, which are seldom borne in mind by the reader, rather than with his style, which is what scholarship habitually harps on. In reception, this intentional strand of intellectual Petrarchism dif­ fers from the other, stylistic Petrarchism, often itself a passively imitative en­ deavor whether in poetry or in Latin prose. But why, then, wasn’t humanism named after Petrarch, its most influential initiator?15 Perhaps the difficulty resides in the fact that to reconceive human­ ism as Petrarchism entails a carefully mediated change in our own practice, a move from antiquarianism—­how did Petrarch relate to, recover, and in some 13. Particularly useful on the Italian “literary” identity are Stefano Jossa, L’Italia letteraria (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2006); and Giulio Bollati, L’italiano. Il carattere nazionale come storia e come invenzione (Turin: Einaudi, 1996). 14. On the innumerable, and often intransigent, interpretations of  “humanism” put forth be­ tween the nineteenth century and the twentieth, see my OR. For a well-­argued “philosophical” revaluation of Petrarchan humanism, see Timothy Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom: The Humanists, the Church, and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2006); and, through the influence of Pierre Hadot, see Gur Zak, Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010); and Christopher S. Celenza, “Pe­ trarch, Latin, and Italian Renaissance Latinity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35 (2005): 509–­36, at 512. On Renaissance humanism’s struggle to attain philosophical status, see Christopher S. Celenza, “What Counted as Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance? The His­ tory of Philosophy, the History of Science, and Styles of Life,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (2013): 367–­401; and Rocco Rubini, “How Did We Come to Be Such as We Are and Not Otherwise? Petrarch, Humanism, and the History of Philosophy,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 33, no. 2 (2012): 403–­36. 15. Ronald G. Witt has excavated an entire prehistory of humanism, yet for him, too, Pe­ trarch, a “third generation” humanist, remains a codifier and founding figure of the movement. See Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 231. Witt delved even deeper into the prehistory of humanism in The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Petrarch’s Corpus  35

cases adulate the ancients?—­which has until now described our understand­ ing of Renaissance humanism and past hermeneutical approaches to Petrarch, to a practice that takes up Petrarch’s other major concern.16 This, after all, is the concern of the mature Petrarch: the formal codification of his address to posterity, our attention to which could productively advance recent herme­ neutical approaches focused on Petrarch’s ability to forge familiar intimacy with his interlocutors.17 This chapter’s hermeneutical reading of Petrarch by Petrarch is thus geared toward the futural or what I wish to call posteric (in that it unfailingly addresses living individuals) dimension of Petrarchism. Fur­ thermore, it is an approach that will allow us to look beyond Petrarch and simultaneously grasp the core of the humanism that he himself envisioned, immediately and originally in reception, as being equally if not more concerned with itself as a primary source for future readers than as a forum for ancient voices. Petrarch draws his readers into an empathic exercise, the gist of which is essentially this: no matter how much the author tries to control response, eventually someone outside the self—­preferably a like-­minded reader—­is re­ quired to do the receiving and to enter into the praxis that initiates the making of a tradition that spans across time and survives the author. Even the most controlling personality had best admit this truth. In sum, my main goal in this chapter is to offer a congenial reading of Pe­ trarch’s letter collections, the interconnected Familiares and Seniles, a reading that presents Petrarch as both writer and reader of his own works: a reader pro­ jected into his own posterity, and an author who addresses friends, both those living and those whom he will never meet, among his future readers. Through his letter collections, Petrarch solidifies the parameters of his humanism. It is not mere antiquarianism, nor is it a universalizing, systematic philosophy; rather, it is a historically self-­conscious pursuit of truth and meaning that depends on a deontology of intersubjectivity, open-­mindedness, and humility, and it is ex­ pressed through a variety of different literary forms to ensure the appropriate comprehensiveness (wholeness and open-­endedness) required for such a pur­ suit. In fact, as I shall argue, Petrarchan humanism depends for its transmission 16. Any study of Petrarch’s “hermeneutics” is indebted to Thomas M. Greene’s magisterial articulation of Petrarch’s reception of the ancients. See The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discov­ ery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), chap. 5. 17. For more hermeneutical readings besides Kathy Eden’s, which cued my discussion in the introduction, see Nancy S. Struever, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Robert R. Edwards, “Petrarchan Narratives: Representation and Hermeneutics,” MLN 130, no. 1 (2015): 1–­23.

36  Chapter One

on the explosion of genre-­bound creativity and expectations. No single book, no single form can convey a humanism so conceived, for Petrarchism is discourse whose scope and inclusivity warrant the perusal of an author’s complete works for empathic reactivation. Paradoxically, thus, the corpus emerges in Petrarch as the only viable intrinsic genre, the only vehicle apt to further a comprehensive Petrarchism, each part in synechdochical relation to the whole. There is much to be learned from a congenial reading of Petrarch and from his plan for the formal survival of his authorial intentions. If it has been lamented, rightly, that scholars of humanism have had little use for modern theory in their approach to sources, it is also true that some humanist sources, in their seamless commingling of theory and practice, surprise us with their ability to resist theory as a universalizing venture.18 In this context, the hoary name of hermeneutics may have a certain appeal, as a safe(r) and sound(er) kind of theory, yet as a notion it is as opaque as the notion of humanism. While I hope that the critical review of contemporary hermeneutical debates offered in my introduction to this book provides a little disambiguation by reminding us what a textual hermeneutics ought to be, this chapter wishes to apply those insights fruitfully to Petrarch’s writing practice as much as to appreciate the extent to which his work can be understood as a preemptive strike against such poststructuralist and deconstructive intellectual fixtures as the “death of the au­ thor,” the autonomy of language, and the consequent indeterminacy of meaning and values. Just as hermeneutics may enlighten our understanding of Petrarchan humanism, so Petrarchism may help us further define and support a practical rather than ontological hermeneutics and a distinctive deontology: a respect for textual exegesis intended as a compassionate, morally charged rapprochement between distant human beings. In what follows, thus, we shall enjoy observing Petrarch thinking hermeneuti­ cally. We shall see how Petrarch interprets, and how he does so in the total ab­ sence of those dichotomies that undermine the project of modern hermeneutics: the distinctions between reading and writing, creating and understanding, pri­ mary and secondary sources that late modern practitioners reintroduce despite espousing the circularity between literary composition and literary interpreta­ tion. What we will notice along the way is that both the textual and philosophi­ cal hermeneutics of the modern era theorize what they fail to practice, whereas the hermeneutical work carried out by Petrarch accomplishes the mission 18. On modern “theory” and Renaissance humanism, see Christopher S. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Petrarch’s Corpus  37

impossible of fusing theory and practice into a single fluent operation. In the process of illustrating Petrarch’s hermeneutical superiority, we can indulge in an experiment not allowed in Renaissance scholarship, with its neat, chronological distribution of competences. I wish to affirm not only that Petrarch was a thinker and even a philosopher ( pace Fiorentino, and almost anyone after him)—­why not?—­but that I actually see him operating as such, side by side with compara­ ble modern thinkers.19 Philosophers do this all the time: they engage with, say, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, or Kant, as live interlocutors, as colleagues. In this the philosopher is more advanced. But for some reason the Renaissance scholar (or dare we say the modern humanist) is never on a par with their Renaissance sources and peers. However, if we do not approximate, we shall never relate to or propagate. We shall never advance or be a part of a tradition that only the zeal of antiquarians illuminates and keeps alive as an object of study rather than as a practice and a ritual. Indeed, in my reading, Petrarch’s single-­minded obsession is to prove that humanism is not antiquarianism. A hermeneutical reading of Petrarch, or more specifically a Petrarchan read­ ing of Petrarchism or Petrarch’s humanism such as I aim to provide, allows us to recover the hermeneutical circle of parts and whole that is proper to Petrarch’s body of literature or intrinsic genre. In the process, we shall see that, having failed so far to grasp the sense of wholeness that Petrarch brought to his oeuvre, we have also failed to grasp the horizon of exception in which his single works can be read. Petrarch, I suggest, conceived a sense of hermeneutical and generic totality that is even more generous and capacious than has hitherto been recognized or explored, let alone theorized.

“ I wa s n o t b o r n t o b e a s l av e o f m y b o d y ” : ( R e - ­) w r i t i n g t h e P a s t Petrarch’s proemial letter to his “Socrates” (the pseudonym for Ludwig van Kempen, a friend met in Avignon) shows him to be busy with his Nachlass. 19. On this prejudice regarding Petrarch’s lack of philosophy, see, for example, the oddly extraneous words with which Ernst Cassirer opened his vastly influential The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 1: “The attack Petrarch ventures in his [On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others] against the philosophy of the Schools is in fact only a witness to the unbroken force which that philosophy still exercises upon the time. Indeed, the principle that Petrarch opposes to the Scholastic and Aristotelian doctrine has neither philosophical origin nor content. It is not a new method of thought; rather, it is the new cultural ideal of ‘eloquence’ [ . . . ] Humanist criticism, then, turns against the style, not against the content of Aristotle’s work.”

38  Chapter One

The Familiares begin with a ritualistic and generalized interment of past life, of recent, contiguous history, a gesture that lends the entire collection forward thrust and momentum. Specifically, Petrarch broods on the plague year of 1348, an event that caused a temporal fissure, the irreparable loss of an entire generation of friends, patrons, and loved ones, and, along with them, hope—­ the feeling on which existence thrives (“spes nostre veteres cum amicis sepulte sunt” [Fam. 1.1.1–­2; LFM, 1:3]). In the intellectual economy of the Familiares, with its ideology of friendship, Petrarch’s opening qualifies him and his re­ maining interlocutors as “survivors”: witnesses of a past whose remembrance is at risk, having been lost, prematurely and without forewarning. In this post­ diluvian context in which cataclysmic events inevitably impinge on personal life, survivors are posterior to their own past selves.20 Recognizing death as his own and his interlocutor’s only final destination, one that may be reached sooner than expected, Petrarch rushes to “compose” or prepare his literary belongings according to the three options available: preserve, share, or burn. It is at this point that Petrarch, still enthralled by the fact that he is a survivor, comes face to face with the sheer copia of his literary production and its tangible generic diversity (“multa michi scriptorum diversi generis”) as it lies “scattered” around his house (Fam. 1.1.3; LFM, 1:4). Beset by the “heap of letters” and “formless piles of paper,” Petrarch begins to muse on their “strangeness” and “disordered” aspect. Less than a page into what has been defined as an “epistolary epic,” a text announcing an “adventure” as much as, if not more than, a “program,” Petrarch begins to see why his works seem strange: their strangeness is due less to their nature than to the newly acquired sharpness of his transformed mind (“non tam specie illorum quam intellectus mei acie mutate” [Fam. 1.1.4–­5; LFM, 1:4]).21 The experience of self-­estrangement is edifying, insofar as it allows Petrarch to perceive himself as the receiver rather than the producer of his works. Specifically, with regard

20. Compare Sen. 2.1.91 (LOA, 1:144): “I do not make a dying man speak, but one who is near death [vicinum morti] and already staring it in the face. Who is not aware that in such a state not only learned men but unlearned ones often say many things of grave and wondrous import, sometimes containing some presage and divination [ presagii ac divinationis]? Therefore, even if actual death crushes the mind and cuts off the life breath, impending death helps and rouses both, as if reminding one who will soon cross the threshold of his prison to look back and see how much toil and misery is being left behind.” 21. On the adventurousness of Petrarch’s letter collection, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, “Petrarch’s Epistolary Epic,” in Kirkham and Maggi, eds., Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, 312.

Petrarch’s Corpus  39

to letter writing, it allows him to perceive himself as the addressee of a message that is personally wrought but inchoate. As yet unable to draw formal or generic conclusions from this epiphany, Petrarch seeks to refamiliarize himself with this unwieldy collection (“variarum rerum tanta colluvio”). After a few days of solitary retreat, he discovers to his unexpected delight that he can reappropriate his works as his “own inventions” (“proprias inventiones”). For the moment, this realization diverts him from his resolve, as affectionate feelings overtake him in the presence of those “major works” (“maiorum operum”) he had left unfinished despite “the anticipation they had created in many.” Swiftly brought to his senses again by the “recollec­ tion of the brevity of life” (“recordatio vite brevis”), Petrarch uses this incident to chastise himself for his “rashness” and “madness” in undertaking so many “long works” (“longos labores”) and for dispersing his intellect—­“hardly suf­ ficing for single projects”—­into so many different enterprises (“vix ad singula suffecturum ingenium in diversa distrahere” [Fam. 1.1.7–­8; LFM, 1:4]). Stop­ ping short of admitting that he cannot make heads or tails of his chaotic writ­ ings (“congesta nullo ordine versanti”), Petrarch settles on a preliminary and grossly generic subdivision: “poetry” and “prose” (Fam. 1.1.5; LFM, 1:4). To this end, he has “weighed” the characters of his two best friends (“duo­ rum amicorum libranti ingenia”): “Socrates,” to whom prose is entrusted, and Barbato da Sulmona, to whom the epistles in verse are dedicated. During Petrarch’s intense retreat, they appeared on his “right” and “left,” respectively, like angels on his shoulders (Fam. 1.1.11; LFM, 1:5).22 His message to “Socrates” and therefore to all interlocutors and friends is that they are no mere dedicatees. Should they outlive Petrarch, “Socrates” and the others are all expected to take responsibility for safeguarding Petrarch’s legacy according to the model just pro­ vided. The testamentary executor is exhorted to keep these writings as much as possible to himself, to let them circulate frugally, and (as Petrarch puts it to another friend eager to “defend” and “propagate” his work) to “conglutinate” (“sparsa conglutina”) or ensure the cohesion of the painstakingly achieved unity that Petrarch has just impressed on his works.23 By these means alone will Petrarch’s legacy be secure (“fama mea tuta erit” [Fam. 1.1.19; LFM, 1.7]). 22. A partial edition of the Epystole is in Francesco Petrarca, Rime, trionfi e poesie latine, ed. Ferdinando Neri et al. (Milan: Ricciardi, 1951), 705–­805. 23. Fam. 13.9.6 (LFM, 2:207-­8): “As for your becoming a defender and propagator of my works [rerum mearum defensorem ac preconem], you have undertaken something necessary for me and honorable for you, but not easy, believe me. It will prove a considerable task, but I urge you to proceed and do as you think. Although you may say the contrary and perhaps may even

40  Chapter One

By making himself his own first reader, Petrarch draws closer to his read­ ing friends. He offers himself and his actions as a model; in turn, his immedi­ ate followers become the co-­producers of his “inventions.” In the gray area attained by this overlap of duties and mutual expectations, friends become “other selves,” or, in Petrarch’s understanding of alter ego, readers who can approach the texts without “aversion” despite the “contradictory diversity” that the texts display because of a lack of stylistic and intentional coherence (Fam. 1.1.19; LFM, 1:7). Friends are readers able to derive a stylistic coherence that is deep and existential rather than superficial. Furthermore, as Petrarch states in another letter to “Socrates,” such friendship extends beyond death: “If in forming true friendship simultaneous willing and unwilling is required, who will deny that two persons become one with as much harmony of wills [e duobus unum fieri tanta concordia voluntatum] as may scarcely be found in one and the same mind? . . . In short, a friend is another self [alter idem], . . .  an enduring and immortal solace not only during one’s lifetime but also be­ yond the grave. Indeed, whoever dies leaving friends behind [superstitibus amicis] seems to live especially after he has died” (Fam. 9.9.3–­4; LFM, 2:27). Again, friends are fellow “survivors” or, to put it another way, a ready-­at-­hand posterity imbued with personal intention, inclination, and design. Surviving friends are that part of posterity with which we are already one-­minded. They guarantee perseverance and furtherance of a transacted and thus faster and more secure purpose. Petrarch’s gregarious hermeneutics is no longer reca­ pitulatory; it loses the secondary, reflexive level implicit in the Romantic no­ tions of “refeel” (Nachfühlen) and “re-­live” (Nacherleben). The experience of the other here is not recognitory or retrospective (re-­/Nach-­) with regard to what is past. Rather, at any given time it is alive, personal, and truly empathic (Mitfühlen)—­already shared and personally experienced, rather than learned or mastered in recollection.24 Hermeneutical freedom or critical adaptation is granted to posterity as long as all share the same basic values and intentions.

believe it—­since love is the greatest persuader—­nevertheless I feel strongly that all my works need defense by friends and patience from readers, for they are fragile and unpolished [ fragilia et inculta], often emerging from my mind while it was very busy with other concerns. What you are doing voluntarily, then, do at my request: help their weak points as best you can [ fragilia qua potes adiuva], offer polish to what is unpolished [inculta excole] and cohesion to what is scattered [sparsa conglutina].” 24. See Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (New Haven: Yale Uni­ versity Press, 1954), 9: “The historian of motives, the novelist, the exponent of the dramatic arts, must all possess in high degree the gift of visualizing the feelings of others [Nacherleben],

Petrarch’s Corpus  41

And if it is the case that readers contribute to, if not properly determine, the appeal and genre of single works, should an author resign himself to the impos­ sibility of co-­determining meaning? On this point, Petrarch seems discour­ aged, if not for his own writings, then at least for the writings of the past. In a letter collected in Seniles that defends Virgil’s allegorical inventions, he writes: For the difference in intellects is also infinite [ingeniorum infinita dissimilitudo est], with no one to check the boldness of new opinions, while the subject itself is such as to fit many varying interpretations. If they are true and will stand literally, they should not be rejected even though they never entered the mind of those who created the stories. Who would dare proclaim amidst so much obscurity what the truth is in something deliberately hidden? Who would af­ firm unhesitatingly that those authors, thousands of years ago, meant this, not something else. It is enough to elicit a particular meaning from the words or more meanings that are true, regardless of whether the author had in mind more meanings or the very same ones, or fewer meanings and not all the same, or none of them whatever. For it is not as easy to know what each one thought as to know what is true. (Sen. 4.5.8–­10; LOA, 1:139–­40)

This passage appears to exemplify Petrarch’s assimilation of Augustine’s les­ son to forgo authorial intention in favor of a hermeneutics oriented toward the reader’s response.25 In fact, it points to the central hermeneutical challenge Petrarch sets out to resolve—­for his own sake and for the sake of his hopefully unambiguous legacy.

but there is not the slightest need for them to share the feelings [Mitgefühl] of their subjects and personages. The reproduction of feeling [Nachfühlen)] or experience [Nacherleben] must therefore be sharply distinguished from fellow-­feeling [Mitfühlen]. It is indeed a case of feeling the other’s feeling, not just knowing of it, nor judging that the other has it; but it is not the same as going through the experience itself. In reproduced feeling [Nachfühlen] we sense the quality of the other’s feeling, without it being transmitted to us, or evoking a similar real emotion in us.” 25. See Carol E. Quillen, Rereading the Renaissance: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 97: “Thus Augustine and Pe­ trarch can both concentrate less on an ‘objectifiable’ meaning of a text—­as determined, for ex­ ample, by authorial intention—­and more on each individual reader as constitutive of meaning.” On Augustine’s varied hermeneutical lessons to Petrarch, see also Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); and Victoria Kahn, “The Figure of the Reader in Petrarch’s Secretum,” PMLA 100 no.2 (1985): 154–­66.

42  Chapter One

Petrarch’s hermeneutical acumen is already on display in the programmatic letters that open the Familiares. Here he also refers to the infinite variety of human minds and argues that although meaning is inevitably determined in and by reception and is therefore largely a posteriori, the author who pays at­ tention to the spiritual predisposition of his reader or interlocutor may be able to assimilate reception, at least in part, to the moment of creative production: Indeed, the primary concern of a writer is to consider the identity of the person to whom he is writing [ prima quidem scribentis cura est, cui scribat attendere]. Only in this way can he know what and how to write, as well as other pertinent circumstances. The strong man must be addressed in one way, the spiritless one in another, the young and inexperienced one in still another. [ . . . ] Infinite are the differences between men [infinite sunt varietates hominum] nor are their minds any more alike than the shapes of their foreheads. [ . . . ] Thus, writing entails a double labor [geminus labor]: first to consider to whom you have undertaken to write, and then what his state of mind [affectus] will be at the time he undertakes to read what you propose to write. (Fam. 1.1.28–­29; LFM, 1:9)

Petrarch is not saying that the author is supposed to rely on generic expec­ tations but that they should make a more direct, ad hominem appeal to the reader, mindful of the reader’s frame of mind as well as (and here is the true Petrarchan challenge) their state of mind or mood (affectus) at the moment of reception. This is a proleptic challenge that dwarfs the challenge implicit in the Romantic hermeneutics of empathy, which, based on the circular homology of creation and reception, maintained the possibility of Einfühlung: the reca­ pitulatory emotional identification with authorial consciousness. In Petrarch, the same homology supports the (im-­)possibility of planning for an intellectual affiliation with one’s posterity. More important, the reciprocity of production and reception adheres to the work at hand, formally and structurally. Just as the familiar letters are individ­ ually and infallibly addressed, so is their collection, the form in which they will eventually be passed down, commissioned: “For I never suspected that you would request, or that I would consent, to gather these things into a single collection [in unam congeriem redigi] [ . . . ]. When recently they all were collected together at one time and in one place [unum in tempus locumque], after having been written over many years and sent to various regions of the world, the deformity of the collected corpus [deformitas uniti corporis] could be easily discerned though it was hidden in individual letters” (Fam. 1.1.31;

Petrarch’s Corpus  43

LFM, 1:10).26 The introductory letter of the Familiares introduces us to Pe­ trarch’s generic awareness, or rather, self-­consciousness, which eschews hard­ boiled taxonomies by serially substituting loose generic conceptions as the work progresses. Petrarch capaciously deems his works “major,” “minor,” “long,” short,” “prose,” or “poetry,” but his most definitive generic determina­ tion is intentional in nature: works are either dispersed (impulsive) or collected (predisposed). Petrarch appears to renounce other kinds of generic determinations for being merely functional—­for providing a norm or expectation while guiding readers through an encounter with a text. Instead he favors the only determina­ tion that is compendious enough for diversity of all kinds: the complete, albeit warped, “collection” of one’s works, or the corpus. Subsequently, he defines literary works not according to their topic or style but according to their crea­ tive “end,” their formal and/or existential confines, which further reinforces the ungeneric or suprageneric import of corpus as cumulative: Without question a great number of subjects will present themselves but I wel­ come this because for me writing and living are the same thing and I hope will be so to the very end [scribendi enim michi vivendique unus, ut auguror, finis erit]. But although all things must have their boundaries [suos fines] or are ex­ pected to, the affection of friends will allow no end [nullum finem] to this work which was begun haphazardly [sparsim] in my earliest years and which now I gather together again in a more advanced age and reduce to the form of a book [recolligo et in libri formam redigo]. [ . . . ] Only then will I no longer feel this obligation and will have to consider this work ended [huic opera positum finem scito] when you hear that I am dead and that I am freed from all the labors of life [defunctum et cunctis vite laboribus absolutum]. (Fam. 1.1.44–­45; LFM, 1:13)

An individual literary work, like a life, derives its nature from its telos, that is, from its completeness and fullness as well as its purposiveness. Through collection, Petrarch impresses upon the letters an infinitely summative trans­ figuration. The letter collection transcends any formal conclusion in the 26. Compare Fam. 23.20.4 (LFM, 3:303): “That gentleman insisted that because of your great affection for me I should write something in a friendly vein since for some reason you were hesitant to write me first. I refused first because I had no subject to write on and then because I was unaccustomed to addressing people unknown to me. This is why almost everything that I have written as correspondence takes either the form of a response or is addressed to close friends.”

44  Chapter One

coincidence of lived life and intellectual work. The literary corpus is cotermi­ nous, if not with infinity itself, then with the most extensive finitude available: a lifespan. In their unsurpassable capaciousness, collections or corpora are the only genre (or sense of the whole) determined not by formal boundaries or limits but by the purposeful redactional activity attending to their assembly (recol­ ligere, redigere). In a way, Petrarch sees even the single letter in similar fashion, as a composite whole made of thoughts that are unsettled or pending: I shall offer my friends not only my deliberations but the thoughts and move­ ments of my mind, which are called spontaneous [quos primos vocant]; nor will I write merely summaries and conclusions [rerum summas atque exitus], but the particulars of their beginnings and their progress [ primordia et progressus]; to the friends whom I meet I shall relate early in the morning whatever occurred to me during the night. If upon sitting at a table I change my mind, upon arising I shall tell my friends, and I shall take pleasure in seeing my opinions struggle until the better wins. This will more easily occur if my loyal friends are allowed to participate in my deliberations from the very beginning. (Fam. 18.8.12–­13; LFM, 3:58)

Participatory deliberation, the laying bare of one’s first thoughts and their de­ velopment, is Petrarch’s antidote to philosophical conclusiveness and systems. Petrarch defines his writing as radically expository. Unlike the enthymematic discourse of philosophy, it leaves nothing unsaid or suppressed. Not only are readers spared from having to guess at authorial intention, but its revelation is, as it were, the sole thematic and formal focus of Petrarchan inquiry. And yet, life and writing, body and corpus, are coterminous, not perfectly coincident, let alone consubstantial. Petrarch makes this clear in many passages that reflect his efforts to objectify his spirit in some sort of enduring “index,” “effigy,” or “simulacrum” of his character (“animi mei effigiem atque ingenii simulacrum” [Fam. 1.1.37; LFM, 1:11]), or, as he puts it in De vita solitaria/ The Life of Solitude, a “small mirror” (“parvo speculo”) able to reflect the hab­ its of his soul in its totality (“totum animi mei habitum”).27 At times—­as, for 27. See also Fam. 22.7.23 (LFM, 3:227–­28): “When you not merely think but know that you have become as I have asked (and in these pages you will see the reflection of your spirit as in a mirror), only then and no sooner may you hope with my consent to behold my face, which you scorned despite its kindness and good nature, which now is no longer as it was, but as you deserve and I consider fitting.”

Petrarch’s Corpus  45

example in Fam. 13.7, a letter dedicated to the “incurable mania of writing” (“insanabili scribendi morbo”)—­Petrarch shows himself “totally immersed in parchment” (“totum membranis incubuit”), delighting in that “soft (paper) blanket” (“lodice mollissima”) (Fam. 13.7.1; LFM, 2:199). Yet this absorption into the written page, this perfect osmosis of physical body and literary corpus, reveals itself to be an onerous task amid the social demands of Petrarch’s life. Fam. 5.17, a letter on “how the works of ugly people can be beautiful,” serves as a reflection on the discrepancy that inevitably arises between lived life and its literary objectification; it ponders whether it is possible for literature to provide any correspondence between the two. In this letter, Petrarch apologizes for los­ ing his composure after the irreparable loss of a “single letter.” Claiming not to expect any recognition for his letters, for glory is due to actions alone and not to words, Petrarch attributes his affection for the lost letter to its perceived utility: its futural benefit (“profuturas”) for readers is so great that Petrarch can hardly consider it a product of his mind (“vix ingenii mei opus credere”). He asserts that the letter was “beautiful” (“formosa”) despite the “bare name” (“nudum nomen”) and “deformity” (“deformitas”) of  its author. This event leads Petrarch into a consideration of different art forms—­painting and sculpture—­whose dif­ ferences are exemplified by the legacies of Phidias and Apelles: Nowhere is it written that Phidias and Apelles were handsome; nevertheless the remains of the outstanding works of one survive, and the fame of the other has come down to us. Therefore, despite so many intervening centuries, the remarkable talent of both artists lives on in different forms, of course, because of the different materials used [ pro varietate materie]. The work of the sculptor is of course more durable than that of the painter [vivacior enim sculptoris quam pictoris est opera] whence we learn about Apelles in books and about Phidias in marble [ut in libris Apellem, Phidiam in marmore videamus]. (Fam. 5.17.5; LFM, 1:273)

We know nothing about the “physical aspect” (“corporee forme”) of these art­ ists or of so many others, and yet one thing is certain, says Petrarch, drawing on his own experience: “the works of single artists differ a great deal from their creators” (“opera singulorum ab auctoribus suis multum differentia”) (Fam. 5.17.6; LFM, 1:273). The reason for this is a God-­willed mystery; it is God who bestows “both the appearance of a body and the possession of talent [ formam corporis et ingenium], which is the form of the soul [ forma est anime] from which these works which we praise and admire emerge as if it were a fountain” (Fam. 5.17.8; LFM, 1:273).

46  Chapter One

If so, can mind, or ingenium, the spiritual form whence works derive, as­ pire to its own objectification, as Romantic hermeneutics claimed? In a letter addressed to his onetime patron, Giovanni Colonna, defending his frequent use of exempla in his writings, Petrarch argues for the value of “having the mind desire to emulate” great men as much as possible. The intellectual and moral dearth of our contemporaries makes them “obscene and dreadful ca­ davers” (“obscena et horrenda cadavera”) in comparison to those who died “in glory and virtue” (“cum virtute et gloria”). But how best to stimulate such emulation? For indeed if statues of outstanding men can kindle noble minds with desire for imitation, [ . . . ], how much more should virtue itself directly bring this about since it would be reflected not from shiny marble but from direct example [non marmore sed exemplo]? To be sure, the outlines of bodies [corporum linia­ menta] are contained more distinctly in statues while description of deeds and customs as well as the condition of minds [habitus animorum] are undoubt­ edly expressed more fully and perfectly by words than by anvils [verbis quam incudibus]. Therefore I feel that it would not be improper to state that statues reflect images of persons while examples reflect images of virtues [statuas cor­ porum imagines, exempla virtutum]. (Fam. 6.4.11; LFM, 1:316)

An image of virtue, character, or mind is preserved and fashioned in letters, and so is a person’s immortality, for “fame follows virtue like a shadow follows a solid body [solidum corpus]” (Fam. 1.2.25; LFM, 1:20). Writing is a corpus, the material objectification of spirit; it allows for the otherwise invisible move­ ments of the mind to reverberate and cast their shadow.28 Ultimately, Petrarch’s aim is to extol the formal beauty of his letter with respect to his personal corporeal ugliness, and to muse on the disadvantages of a creation diverging too much from its author: Consequently [the lost letter’s] very form in which it outdid its sisters was the reason for its loss and my grief, so that I would understand why sometimes outstanding beauty is harmful not only to bodies but to writings [non solum 28. Compare Fam. 15.14.27 (LFM, 2:288): “This is the nature of glory: it pursues those who flee from it, it exalts those who do not seek it, often abandoning through flight those who desire it to excess. But how could a mighty stream descending from an unfailing spring dry up, or how could the shadow of a solid body [densi corporis umbra] struck by a sun ray disappear? Virtue itself, the source of man’s glory, which is but its shadow, does not die.”

Petrarch’s Corpus  47

in corporibus sed etiam in scripturis excellentem formam interdum nocere] and why one should seek moderation in all things. Thus my letter, which I had begotten but not yet adopted [michi non adoptaveram sed genueram], caused me to grieve over its loss as if involved in some kind of funeral rites, and in my memory I celebrate its anniversary, grieving that it had been removed so swiftly from my very presence and, so to speak, had been destroyed in its very cradle. My plaint in this matter is deeper because any hope of seeing another letter arise from the bones of that one, as if it were a Phoenix rising from its ashes, is very small. None of its remains have survived, for against my custom I had entrusted all of it to writing and none to memory [totam charte credideram, memorie nichil]. (Fam. 5.17. 9–­11; LFM, 1:274)

Petrarch confesses to committing the crime of excessive transposition: the let­ ter was overtly a most intimate description of himself and his emotions. By totally transcribing or objectifying his spirit, without taking care to recollect or “adopt” his letter through memory as a reader, the letter acquired indepen­­ dent status, abducted from its place in the collected corpus and left unclaimed. The eulogy to the lost letter is reminiscent of one of Petrarch’s most famous passages on imitation. Commending the ambitions and progress of his young transcriber in the realm of letters (this was Giovanni Malpaghini, who had assisted Petrarch in the transcription and collection of the Familiares), he ob­ serves that writers, differently from painters, will always seek for resemblance to rather than identification with their source or object. Petrarch describes the mediocritas (moderation) he wishes for his own writings: “While often very different in their individual features [diversitas sit membrorum], they have a certain something [umbra quedam] our painters call an “air” [aerem], espe­ cially noticeable about the face and eyes, that produces a resemblance; seeing the son’s face, we are reminded of the father’s [visio filio, patris in memoriam nos reducat], although if it came to measurement, the features would all be different, but there is something subtle that creates this effect” (Fam. 23.19.12; LFM, 3:301–­2). This paternal metaphor is all the more apt in autobiographi­ cal writing, where the effigy of the self, although it might enjoy a kind of filial emancipation in reception, should also, however, be readily traceable to its paternal origins by a certain je ne sais quoi. One achieves immortality for one’s writings by grounding them in genealogical freedom. “I was indeed born for greater things than to be the slave of my body,” says Petrarch, in a passage lay­ ing claim to his own grateful disenfranchisement from sources (Fam. 5.18.5; LFM, 1:277). To what kind of literary embodiment, then, should one entrust one’s memory?

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The organic metaphor of the corpus, at once living body and inert corpse, is determined more finely in the second letter of the Familiares, which relates it closely to reception and to the personal obsession with fame. Petrarch con­ siders his friend Tommaso da Messina’s thirst for immortality and reflects on what happens to literary works after their authors die: “The writings or deeds of anyone who is still alive [superstite] are hardly ever pleasing,” says Petrarch. “[D]eath lays the foundations for the praises of men.” The reason is physi­ cal: “Because with the body dies envy, just as it lives with the body [quia cum corpore moritur invidia, vivitque cum corpore].” In his role as resurrector of antiquity and privileged conversational partner of the ancients, Petrarch insists that he be taken at his word: You must first of all consider whose writings are being praised. Search for the authors: you will certainly find that they have been dead many years. Do you want yours to be praised also? Then you must die. Human favor begins with the death of a man; thus the end of life is the beginning of glory [vite finis principium est glorie]. Should it begin earlier, it would be a most unusual and untimely phenomenon. I shall tell you even more: while any of your contempo­ raries survive, you will not fully [cumulate] enjoy what recognition you seek; when a grave encloses all of them, there will come those who judge you without hatred and without envy. Therefore let the present age judge us as it will; if the judgment is just, let us accept it with equanimity; if it is unjust, since we cannot turn to others, let us appeal to the more equitable judges of posterity [ad equi­ ores iudices—­hoc est ad posteros—­provocemus]. (Fam. 1.2.3–­4; LFM, 1:15–­16)

Here Petrarch comes closer to declaring the programmatic kernel of his hu­ manism, that is, its futural dimension. Having been forced into an intensely so­ cial life against his wishes, he has learned, the hard way, that human interaction is fragile (“delicatissima res est iugis conversatio”). Personal acquaintance and physical presence stand in the way of reputation (“fama semper inimica pre­ sentia est”); it is better to avoid one’s contemporaries (ambiguous “friends”) altogether and to bet one’s (after-­)life on posterity, a true friendship into which we are delivered “cumulatively” (Fam. 1.2.5; LFM, 1:16). Thus, in Petrarch’s opinion, somatic and corporal “familiarity” (“famil­ iaritas”) “detracts a great deal from the admiration of fellow men,” as does “re­ peated intimacy” (“frequens convictus”) because it engenders a certain kind of reading. The proof, he says, lies in the hermeneutics of that “human [sub] species” (“genus hominum”) known as the scholastic or the academic pedant. Schoolmen “read” laboriously and “examine” nothing: “whatever substance

Petrarch’s Corpus  49

may be in anything, they disdain to seek it out when they feel they know the writer personally” (Fam. 1.2.5; LFM, 1:16). Authorial presence undermines textual exegesis, and for the schoolmen only “una lex,” “one rule,” holds true: “All the writings of those authors whom these men have seen even once are boring to them” (Fam. 1.2.5–­6; LFM, 1:16). The practices of small-­minded scholastics explain why Plato, Homer, Aristotle, Virgil, and, later, Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory were all detested until the day they died. The notion of familiaritas attracts attention for its role in determining the quality of Petrarch’s rhetoric and hermeneutics. But I would suggest that Petrarch relies on an­ other, intensified understanding of “intimacy” in the way that he relates to the ancients as well as future readers: namely, like-­mindedness or congeniality.29 The distinct though mutually imbricated notions of “intimacy” and “con­ geniality” are clearly juxtaposed at the outset of the Familiares. In his letter to his friend “Socrates,” Petrarch explains that the standard motivation for his letter collection originated with Cicero, arguably the ancient figure most be­ loved by Petrarch, whose familiar letters to Atticus and other friends Petrarch recovered by chance in the cathedral library of Verona in 1345. Petrarch notes that Cicero, like Seneca, Epicurus, and a few others, had the good fortune or judgment to address their familiar matters to a single interlocutor, or at most to a very small number: “To know the mind and heart of one’s interlocutor [collocutoris sui animum] is not a difficult art and assures great success,” and “to be accustomed to the personality of only one person [unius assuevisse in­ genio], to know what he likes to hear, and what you should say, is a good quality 29. Compare Fam. 22.2.8–­14 (LFM, 3:212–­13), on the dangers of too much “familiarity” with favorite sources: “Whenever we write something new, we often err in what is most familiar [ fa­ miliarius] to us, for it deceives us in the very act of writing; whatever we have slowly learned we know better. [ . . . ] I have read Virgil, Flaccus, Severinus, Tullius not once but countless times, nor was my reading rushed but leisurely, pondering them as I went with all the powers of my intellect; I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening, I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed [tam familiariter ingessere] these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow, and they have so become one with my mind [unumque cum ingenio facta sunt meo] that were I never to read them for the remainder of my life, they would cling to me, having taken root in the innermost recesses of my mind. But sometimes I may forget the author, since through long usage and continual possession I may adopt them and for some time regard them as my own; and besieged by the mass of such writings, I may forget whose they are and whether they are mine or others’. This then is what I meant about more familiar things deceiving us more than others; if at times out of habit they return to the memory, it often happens that to the preoccupied mind, deeply intent on something else, they seem not only to be yours but to your surprise, new and original.”

50  Chapter One

in a writer” (Fam. 1.1. 20; LFM, 1:7). Alas, circumstances dictated differently for Petrarch, burdening his literary production by requiring that he attempt something never tried before (“quod ante me [ . . . ] fecit nemo”): that he ad­ dress everyone and nobody at once in a single volume, as he put it in an uncol­ lected letter to Boccaccio.30 Facing this impossible challenge, Petrarch was helped, again, by Cicero, who in his first letter to his brother stated that “the true characteristic of an epistle is to make the recipient more informed about those things that he does not know” (Fam. 1.1.33; LFM, 1:11). This rather simple prescription, together with Cicero’s habit of entrusting serious matters to books and leaving the rest to letters, spurred Petrarch to think about the title of his own work. He first considered “Epistles,” but having already used that title for a collection of his letters in verse (Epystolarum libri tres), he settled on Familiarum rerum liber, envisioning a collection of his letters on familiar matters in a single multivol­ ume work.31 Yet, the Cicero of the familiar letters proved to be a less than per­ fect exemplum. He may have inspired Petrarch’s form, style, and tone, but he did not inspire Petrarch’s response to the vicissitudes of life: In such adversities, Cicero revealed himself so weak [molliter] that while I take pleasure in his style, I often feel offended by his attitude. I feel the same about his contentious letters and the many quarrels and abuses that he directs against famous men upon whom he had not long before lavished praise. And I feel the same about the casualness with which he does all of this. When I read his let­ ters, I feel as offended as I feel enticed. Indeed, beside myself, in a fit of anger [ira dictante] I wrote to him as if he were a friend living in my time [tanquam coetaneo amico] with an intimacy that I consider proper because of my deep and immediate acquaintance with his thought [ familiaritate que michi cum illius ingenio est]. (Fam. 1.1.42; LFM, 1:12)

In Petrarch’s first mention of Cicero, “intimacy” (or familiarity) and “conge­ niality” are contiguous and mutually supportive terms. But in his letters ad­ dressed to “illustrious ancients” (in book 24, the final book of the collection), Petrarch seeks an example of the interpretive model that he is really after: a hermeneutics that resists the contentiousness of an intimacy that is superficial 30. Francesco Petrarca, Lettere disperse. Varie e miscellanee, ed. Alessandro Pancheri (Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 1994), 346. 31. See H. Wayne Storey, “Il Liber nella formazione delle Familiari,” in Berra, ed., Motivi e Forme delle Familiari, 495–­506.

Petrarch’s Corpus  51

or merely physical rather than intellectual. This is the model he seems to want to be applied to the reception of his own work. In a letter to Pulice, the poet (Fam. 24.2), Petrarch introduces the group of nine letters addressed to the “illustrious ancients.” Here we learn that although these letters to Cicero are relegated to the final book because of their anachro­ nistic eccentricity, they were “hammered out long before,” that is, around 1345, when Petrarch first discovered the familiar Cicero. Indeed, chronologically, the letters to Cicero came first; this means they were first in a project that became a collection at the very moment that Petrarch composed two consecutive, in­ terrelated letters to his favorite ancient, thus establishing a sequence.32 To use Petrarch’s own terms from Fam. 18.8, his reference in the opening letter is not to the collection’s “exitus” but to its “primordia et progressus,” in other words, to his foundational, germinal thoughts and to their later fruition. This circumstance makes an orderly reading of the Familiares an accommodation, a return ad fontes. Petrarch’s letter to Pulice is fundamentally rhetorical insofar as it relates text and occasion. Namely, it sets Petrarch’s two letters to Cicero in the context of an evening spent in conversation with a group of hard-­nosed Ciceronians, the oldest and wisest of whom is baffled when Petrarch debuts the manuscript of his own letters: When it was brought in, it provoked even more discussion, for along with many letters to my contemporaries [coetaneos], a few are addressed to illustrious an­ cients [antiquis illustrioribus] for the sake of variety and as a diversion from my labors; and thus, an unsuspecting reader would be amazed at finding such out­ standing and honorable names mingled with those of contemporaries [vetusta nomina novis permixta]. Two are addressed to Cicero: one expresses reserva­ tions about his character, the other praises his genius. When you had read them to the attentive onlookers, a friendly argument ensued, in which some agreed with me that Cicero deserved the criticism. Only the old gentleman became more obstinate in his opposition. [ . . . ] With hand outstretched, he repeatedly exclaimed, “Gently, please, gently with my Cicero!” When asked whether he thought that Cicero could have erred, he shut his eyes, and as if smitten by the words, he would turn aside, groaning, “Alas, are they denouncing my Cicero?” as though we were dealing not with a man but with a god. I then asked whether 32. Francisco Rico, “Il nucleo della Posteritati (e le autobiografie di Petrarca),” in Berra, ed., Motivi e forme delle Familiari, 5. See also, in the same collection, Andrea Comboni, “Connes­ sioni intertestuali all’interno delle Familiari: Primi appunti,” 507–­26.

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in his opinion Tullius was a god or a man; immediately he responded, “A god,” but then realizing what he had said, he added, “really a god of eloquence.” (Fam. 24.2.6–­9; LFM, 3:314–­15)

The scene is now set for Petrarch to deliver an intimate aside to his readers, de­ claring his literary emancipation, his grateful deliverance from his sources, and thus the birth of his version of futural humanism with respect to its antiquarian kind. The “senile ardor” (“senili ardori”) of his interlocutor has reminded Petrarch of his own cult of the ancients as a youngster when he, too, had “no taste for anything but Cicero” (Sen. 16.1.43; LOA, 2:603). The hermeneutical accommodation of the collection—­that is, Petrarch’s return, in the final book, to the origins of the project—­reflects Petrarch’s own recapitulation or personal homecoming, a return to his youthful and naïve Ciceronianism. Petrarch is neither surprised by his interlocutors’ reaction nor contemptu­ ous of it, nor could he be. After all, Petrarch himself has only recently become aware that Cicero, too, was a man, and Petrarch learned this from the man’s familiar letters, a source unavailable to the general public. His interlocutors, and the whole sodality of antiquarians that Petrarch is about to criticize via a prospective reformulation of humanism’s task, are not yet privy to this insight, one that present and future readers will partake in by giving Petrarch the same congenial welcome he gave to Cicero’s letters. As Petrarch tells Pulice at the very end of the letter, the nature and meaning of Petrarchan humanism will emerge only when Cicero (and, it is implied, Petrarch) has been read entirely and thoroughly (“nisi omnibus Ciceronis epystolis [ . . . ] non a transcurrente perlectis” [Fam. 24.2.19; LFM, 3:316]). We accept Petrarch’s invitation to continue reading and discover that the first letter to Cicero (Fam. 24.3), though critical, is not the fierce harangue we were led to expect. Petrarch reproaches Cicero for the flimsiness and fickleness of his opinions, for being drawn into futile squabbles, and for his “intimacy” with Augustus (“quid tibi tam familiare cum Augusto?”). But mostly he criti­ cizes him for not embodying what he himself taught, fully and thoroughly, and thus for dying a death unworthy of a thinker. These remarks make up the gist of Petrarch’s “lament,” written from the perspective of “an admiring descen­dant” (“unus posterorum”) “from the land of the living” (“apud superos”). The first half of the second letter to Cicero (Fam. 24.4) is essentially a continuation of the first, as Petrarch apologizes for his impudence and explains that his criti­ cism applies to Cicero’s “existence” and the “inconstancy” of his life, not to his mind and eloquence (“non ingenium non linguam”). After all, he owes no small debt to Cicero; were it not for the “great father of Roman eloquence,”

Petrarch’s Corpus  53

the codifier of a common language, Petrarch would have been imprisoned in sterile silence and would not have had the wherewithal, “skill,” or “purpose” to express himself in writing (“scribendi facultatem ac propositum” [Fam. 24.4.4–­5; LFM, 3:319]). In this part of the second letter, Petrarch allows himself to indulge in the unattractive peevishness he censured in Cicero. He delivers a personal re­ proach to Cicero’s excessive reproaches of others, attributable to excessive “intimacy”—­familiaritas that is physical rather than congenial—­with the beloved source.33 Echoing his statement in the proemial letter, Petrarch is addressing Cicero anachronistically “tanquam coetaneo amico,” as a contem­ porary, and thus indulging in that mindless quasi-­physical exegetical approach he had attributed to the scholastics (Fam. 1.1.42; LFM, 1:12]). The sudden change of tone and concern in the second half of the letter, then, reveals the first half to have been nothing more than a rhetorical exercise. What Petrarch really intends to do is to inform Cicero about the legacy of his works, a responsibility that is the main theme and concern of all the remaining letters addressed to the “illustrious ancients”: Thus, some of your books, I suspect, are lost for us who still live, and I know not whether they will ever be recovered: how great is my grief, how great a shame for our times, how great a wrong to posterity [magna posteritatis ini­ uria]! [ . . . ] And furthermore, even of the surviving books, large portions are missing [superstitum librorum magnas partes amisimus]; it is as though after winning a great battle against oblivion and sloth, we now had to mourn our leaders, and not only those who had been killed but those who had been maimed or lost [truncos quoque vel perditos]. This we deplore in many of your works . . . which have reached us in such a fragmentary and mutilated [truncati fedatique] condition that it would perhaps have been better for them to have perished. (Fam. 24.4.12–­14; LFM, 3:320–­21)

It may be that the Renaissance had no definitive beginning or ending. Yet, to the extent that Petrarch’s humanism (his encounter with the ancients) 33. On the danger of too much proximity with beloved sources, namely Cicero, see Dispersa 46 (in Petrarca, Lettere disperse, 346–­50) and Fam. 21.10, which tell of a maiming strike Petrarch received by a Ciceronian codex. On the latter incident, Ronald L. Martinez, “Petrarch’s Lame Leg and the Corpus of Cicero: An Early Crisis of Humanism?” in Julia L. Hairston and Walter Stephens, eds., The Body in Early Modern Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 42–­58.

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represents the central milestone or “cultural revolution” informing the era, then 1345 marks a new beginning, epochal as much as intellectual.34 What is born at that moment is not the stultifying veneration of the ancients (which becomes identified with humanism when contemporary and later human­ ists’ pieties are superimposed onto Petrarch), but rather a hermeneutical con­ sciousness that makes sense of the ipse dixit or dogmatic culture deplored by Petrarch, and provides its antidote. The problem is in fragmentariness, and the solution is in wholeness. When Petrarch rediscovers Cicero, it amounts to a hermeneutical conversion, the discovery of the eternal circulation of parts and whole, and its relevance to congenial encounter. This is a conversation that necessitates its own literary objectification. In the next letter, addressed to Seneca (Fam. 24.5), the malady, again, is a shaky familiaritas: in Seneca’s case, an intimacy with Nero that disfigures like a purulent scar even the combined beauty of his body and soul (“corporum sic animorum egregias formas” [Fam. 24.4.4; LFM, 3:322]). Fragmentariness—­the need to rely on mediation, or on hearsay, and the impossibility of situating the part in the whole of the corpus—­forestalls congenial reception. This is true in the case of Marcus Varro as well (Fam. 24.6), to whom Petrarch must break the news that nothing save some fragment is left of his work. Livy (Fam. 24.8) does not fare any better, being unknown in whole (“non equidem totum” [Fam. 24.8.1; LFM, 3:332]), but mostly indirectly (“apud alios sparsim lego” [Fam. 24.8.5; LFM, 3:332]), like the orator Asinius Pollio (Fam. 24.9), who is known by hearsay. Petrarch regrets that with all of these ancient writers, like-­mindedness re­ mains an impossibility. This is apparent in his letter to Quintilian, an author he rediscovered through installments, never in his totality, as attested by this staging of a progressive yet asymptotic approximation of minds: A long time ago I had heard of your name and read something of yours, and I wondered where you had acquired your reputation of possessing keen insight; later I became acquainted with your intellect [sero ingenium tuum novi] when your work De institutione oratoria came into my hands, but, alas, mangled and mutilated [discerptus et lacer]. [ . . . ] O sterile and detestable times dedicated to learning and writing much that would have been better left unsaid, you failed 34. See Pierre Mesnard, “Le commerce épistolaire comme expression sociale de l’indi­ vidualisme humaniste,” in Individu et société à la Renaissance (Brussels: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1967), 20. On such discovery see also Remigio Sabbadini, Le scoperte dei codici latini e greci ne’ secoli XIV e XV, 2 vols. (Florence: le Lettere, 1996), 2:213; Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968–­76), 1:9–­11.

Petrarch’s Corpus  55

to keep this work intact [integrum]. But your book allowed me to form a correct opinion [veram opinionem] of you, for I had long erred in judging your work and am now pleased to have put an end to my error. Seeing the dismembered limbs of a beautiful body [ formosi corporis artus effusos], my mind was over­ come by admiration and grief; perhaps someone now possesses you in your entirety [totus] who is doubtlessly unaware of his guest’s renown. May whoever had the good fortune to discover you know that in his possession is this object of great value, which, if he is at all wise, he will consider among his greatest treasures. (Fam. 24.7.1–­2; LFM, 3:329)

In closing, Petrarch expresses the wish to meet Quintilian one day, whole and safe and sound in his integrity (“te incolumen videre”), and this is a wish, of course, that befits Quintilian’s hermeneutical injunctions. In a passage of the Institutio oratoria that may have inspired Petrarch’s salute, Quintilian stated: Nor is Disposition just a matter of the parts of the speech; within these parts too there is one thought which should come first, one second, one third. Our ef­ forts are needed not only to put these thoughts in order but to give them mutual connection and cohesion, so that no gap lets in the light. It must be a body, not just a collection of limbs [corpus sit, non membra]. And this will come about if we see what best fits each place, and if—­just as we combine word with word so that they embrace one another [complectanctur] and are not in conflict—­so also our facts, instead of emerging from different directions and, as it were, bump­ ing into one another like strangers [ignotae], are held together in some sort of association [societate] with what precedes and what follows. That is how the speech will come to seem not only properly composed [composita], but to be all of a piece [continua]. (7.10.16–­17)35

In words that seem to gloss Quintilian’s own, as they are glossed in return, Pe­ trarch strives toward a well-­composed discourse, a “corpus,” not a congeries of limbs or “membra,” a striving that points beyond language or “textual context” toward “mutual harmonization” or intimate interpenetration of minds, “asso­ ciation,” and, beyond, to the seamless “continuity” of tradition, and “historical context.” 35. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 3:295–­97. On this passage, see Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Ha­ ven: Yale University Press, 1997), 30–­31.

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Such a wish for Quintilian essentially captures the goal of Petrarchan herme­ neutics. Yet perhaps not surprisingly, because it is an impossibility, Petrarch fails to achieve wholeness for himself, despite granting his familiar letters a gener­ ous range of horizons. The final letter (Fam. 24.13), addressed, like the first, to “Socrates” (“a te principium, in te finis”), is a pause rather than a terminus in the interminable work that Petrarch “began as a young man” and hoped to have “completed in his old age.” He reiterates what he stated in the proemial letter when he writes, “I am continuing it since it is the only one that death alone can end. What other end can I expect for my conversations with friends but the end of life? Or how could I possibly remain silent with them while still alive if I plan to speak to them with my cold lips from the grave?” (Fam. 24.1.3; LFM, 3:351). Indeed, by the time Petrarch wrote this last letter to “Socrates,” his friend and fellow survivor had died. True to himself and to his encompassing purpose, and ever more posterior to himself, Petrarch continues writing beyond the death of his (other) self, inevitably spilling over the confines of life and book (“iusti volu­ minis meta transcenditur”), entering the next world, or afterlife, of another book (“alio volumine” [Fam. 24.13.6–­7; LFM, 3:351–­52]), The Letters of Old Age, with another self, or interlocutor, “Simonides,” or Francesco Nelli (who will likewise fail to survive him or to become his testamentary executor). Mediating this transi­ tion, Petrarch has no use for cognomina ex virtute anymore. In the last paragraph of the Familiares, the name of “Socrates” disappears, replaced by the nonspe­ cific “lector candidissimus.” Thus does “Socrates” become a member of a larger society of friends (“vos sodales”) who, in Petrarch’s formulation, will be keen to receive him in his totality (“mea omnia”), as they are focused solely on making sure that nothing of his is lost. A close reading of the Familiares reveals this letter collection to be a textual objectification of Petrarch’s hermeneutical consciousness, an achievement of his maturity that depends less on disembodied temporal coordinates (past/ future) than on their human instantiation. The reconnection of antiqui and posteri is necessary for the continuity of not only history, but tradition, the willed and never to be taken for granted sharing of a purpose. The future will come to pass despite ourselves, but posterity—­the future of a remembered and safeguarded past—­will not, unless there is the experience of like-­mindedness, an intersubjective hermeneutical effort. Petrarch unambiguously stated his program in De vita solitaria: to devote oneself to reading and writings, alternately finding employment and relief in each, to read what our forerunners have written [legere quod scrip­ serunt primi] and to write what later generations may wish to read [scribere

Petrarch’s Corpus  57

quod legant ultimi], to pay to posterity the debt we cannot pay to the dead for the gift of their writings, and yet not remain altogether ungrateful to the dead but to make their names more popular if they are little known, to restore them if they have been forgotten, to dig them out if they have been buried in the ruins of time and to hand them down to our grandchildren as objects of venerations [ad pronepotum populos veneranda transmittere].36

When understood as Petrarchism, humanism is no mere antiquarianism. Rather, it is an internal discipline in which “primi” and “ultimi” connect not retrospectively but immanently, not symmetrically, but fluidly. What is created in the process is not circular fullness, but a spiritual objectification whose sur­ face is radically reciprocal and, like a Möbius strip, ensures endless continuity and, through a sleight-­of-­hand, a reorientation of the reciprocal movements of reading and writing.37 This is what Petrarch stages in moving from the Fa­ miliares to the Seniles, where, after having engaged in the arduous task of re­ writing the ancients and his “coetaneos” (himself included), he moves on to a downright impossible assignment, that of reading juniors or successors: alter egos whose youth, he hopes, will guarantee an afterlife. In other words, after rewriting Cicero, Petrarch sets out to read Boccaccio, the undisputed protago­ nist of the Letters of Old Age.

Reading the Future That Boccaccio is Petrarch’s true interlocutor of old age, and that this amounts to some sort of investiture on the part of Petrarch, is well known. The proof is in the intensity of their correspondence and Petrarch’s subsumption of these letters—­including the four final letters of the Seniles—­in his collection. They serve in part as an intellectual testament and a clear counterpoint to the letters to the ancients that conclude the Familiares.38 What has received less atten­ tion, however, is the role played by this investiture and exchange in fulfilling the hermeneutical logic of Petrarch’s futural or posteric humanism and its 36. Francis Petrarch, The Life of Solitude, trans. Jacob Zeitlin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1924), 151. 37. For a similar observation, in fact, for a very congenial reading as a whole, see Albert Rus­ sell Ascoli, “Favola fui”: Petrarch Writes His Readers (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010), 11. 38. Gabriella Albanese, “La corrispondenza fra Petrarca e Boccaccio,” in Berra, ed., Motivi e forme delle Familiari, 40–­98.

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internal form as a collected corpus. It does not help that Letters of Old Age is itself incomplete. Petrarch announced its complementary status at the end of the Letters on Familiar Matters, as we have seen. However, the work never received his imprimatur, a fact that readers have overemphasized. Their reac­ tion is influenced by the letter that is usually made to follow the gran finale to Boccaccio and conclude the collection: the so-­called Posteritati. In this unfinished letter (Sen. 18.1) Petrarch, again in congruence with his salute in the last few lines of the Familiares, addresses posterity: “Francis Petrarch to posterity, greetings. Perhaps you will have heard something about me [ . . . ]” (LOA, 2:672). The problem of the letter to posterity, as predicted by Petrarch, is one of extrapolation, which becomes clear when we read it in the context of the en­ tire corpus of the Seniles. Scholars have long sought to read this particular letter as an independent text, believing it to be the “libellus,” or self-­enclosed autobiographical “effigy” that Petrarch often promised as a gift to future read­ ers and, given its incompleteness, failed to deliver.39 The fact that Petrarchan studies have taken a hermeneutical turn, attenuating scholars’ discomfort, would therefore seem to be a major gain. Now we are listening to Petrarch and focusing less on an anachronistic notion of autobiography as an independent genre and more on the phenomenological autobiographism of Petrarch’s en­ tire production. It is now more acceptable to understand Petrarch’s reference to the “effigy” as a reference to the letters in whole, the last letter being just that—­the last in a much vaster project on which it depends for its meaning.40 What remains to be done, then, is to pursue this hermeneutical reading of the letters and indeed of the whole of Petrarch’s corpus. This was the task that Petrarch bestowed on Boccaccio—­lest his wishes were not yet clear enough to his readers—­and through Boccaccio, to future readers. We can gain some complementary insights by parsing the correspondence between Boccaccio and Petrarch. Their exchange of letters began formally, in 1351, when Boccaccio was asked to persuade the exiled poet to return and take up a chair at the University of Florence (a failed attempt), and ended in 1374, a 39. On the reception of this important text, see Karl Enenkel et al., eds., Modelling the Indi­ vidual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance (With a Critical Edition of Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998). In a break with tradition, the editors of the latest edition of the Seniles, which I consult for the Latin text (see the entry for Sen. in the list of ab­ breviations at the start of this book, 9–­10), chose not to include the unfinished letter to posterity, for they wish to see this collection as a work attended to through and through, and completed by the very well-­polished ending to Boccaccio. 40. See Rico, “Il nucleo della Posteritati.”

Petrarch’s Corpus  59

month before Petrarch’s death, with Petrarch’s letter to a Boccaccio who had been fully Petrarchized or assimilated into his legacy.41 It is interesting that, just as Petrarch’s correspondence often points to a time beyond this life, the young Boccaccio addressed his first letter to his “magister” a decade before their first encounter. In this premature letter, Boccaccio assumes the stance of an intellectual vassal, oppressed by ignorance, a deformed entity without title waiting to be molded.42 In his highly aureated retelling, Boccaccio says that he first heard Petrarch’s sacred name (“sacratissimum nomen vestrum”) when a mysterious figure ap­ proached him after he had been enraptured by a vision of a donna angelicata. The figure tells Boccaccio that his personal salvation hinges on taking Petrarch’s words to heart: Heeding his words, I left my sorrowful sighs behind and grew calm, and shortly thereafter I began to speak: “This man will be present as a guard of my free­ dom, of my salvation, if I am able to carefully investigate his works.” Since with the aid of such a remarkable man, who, as a phoenix, holds a kingdom beyond the mountains, I am able to fight against the miseries of Fortune and the straits of love and to be stripped of my rudeness—­since I know myself to be wretched, rude, helpless, unskilled and likewise crude and shapeless [informem], made deformed [deformem] by father Jove [ . . . ]. In my status as a disciple [  forma discipuli], devoted, benevolent, and attentive, I await the teaching of such a master, through which I hope that my inert and unformed mass and abun­ dant ignorance may disperse like smoke and be transformed into marvelous lightness.43

By investigating Petrarch’s work Boccaccio will procure and safeguard his own freedom. Such proximity, literary rather than personal, will result in a refash­ ioning, in Boccaccio’s emancipation from his votary and dependent form of the soul. 41. Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Milan: Mondadori, 1964), 550. 42. In Lettere a Petrarca, ed. Ugo Dotti (Turin: Aragno, 2012), 226: “Cum me igitur vester subditus, ignorantie tenebris involutus, rudis ens, inhers indigestaque moles, informis, sine titulo vivens cum toto mei curriculo temporis sim Fortune ludibulis conquassatus.” 43. Lettere a Petrarca, 232–­34. I offer here a revised version of a translation of Boccaccio’s letter to Petrarch first outlined by my erstwhile and onetime students, David William and Leon Wash, for the final assignment in a course on philology I co-­taught with my colleague Boris Maslov, who also at some point worked on this text.

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These words, written in youthful ardor, retrospectively acquire a prophetic value as Petrarch goes about laboriously refashioning Boccaccio’s soul, while he begins his own transition into the afterlife. As he writes in his first letter to Boccaccio: “I find myself in that group known as freemen, being neither alive nor strong nor dying nor ill. Only when I find an exit from this labyrinth shall I begin living and feel well” (Fam. 12.10.2; LFM, 2:157). Like a slave freed by manumission, and stuck in a maze, Petrarch expresses existential angst. His real freedom will depend on an emancipation that only his friendships can pro­ vide, and his friendship with Boccaccio specifically will grow proportionally as Boccaccio’s understanding of Petrarch’s true concerns increases. In fact, congeniality in Petrarch’s terms is advanced through Boccaccio’s collation of Augustine’s texts in a single volume (“totum uno volumine comprehensum” [Fam. 18.3.3; LFM, 3:47]), for example, and his conjoining of Varrus and Cic­ ero under a single roof, that is, in one book, in harmonious coexistence (Fam. 18.4.3–­4; LFM, 3:49). Meanwhile, the terms of Petrarch and Boccaccio’s own cohabitation are worked out only toward the end of the Familiares. In response to a disgruntled Boccaccio, unhappy with his master for addressing him as a “poet,” Petrarch replies sharply: “You may call yourself whatever you wish to be called; I have long since determined my opinion of you. How you view yourself is your affair; how I view you is mine” (Fam. 18.15.3; LFM, 3:68). But the opinion of Petrarch is love, tough as it may be. By the end of the Familiares, Petrarch realizes that he is loved more than what he was able to reciprocate so far, and he indirectly acknowledges his congeniality with Boccaccio (“similitudo ingeniorum”) by recalling his first encounter with him, both literary and physical, with the im­ age of Boccaccio hastening after the dispatch of a letter of greeting. “I cannot forget the time when, as I was hastening across Italy in midwinter,” Petrarch writes, “you not only sent me affectionate greetings, which are like footsteps of the spirit [animi passus], but came personally in haste to meet me [cor­ poreo motu celer], on the heels of your admirable poem, motivated by your great desire to see a man whom you had yet to meet. You thus revealed to me, whom you had determined to love, first the face of your talent and later that of your person [prius ingenii et mox corporis tui vultum michi quem amare decreveras]” (Fam. 21.15.27; LFM, 3:206). Despite their contemporaneity, the connection between Petrarch and Boccaccio was the right kind of familiarity or intimacy, based on congeniality rather than physical proximity. The vision of a panting and sweating Boccaccio, symbolizing the longing of a mind behind which the body lags, eager to meet Petrarch on the summit of a mountain, becomes the transition from the labyrinth of the Familiares to the

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limbo of the Seniles, where Boccaccio is a sounding board for Petrarch’s medi­ tatio mortis. For example, in Sen. 1.5, the first letter addressed to Boccaccio in this collection, Petrarch reflects on the story of Pietro, a dying man from Siena, who, unable to carry out a good deed, “beseeched God with fervent prayers, certain to reach heaven, to designate substitutes fit for the undertaking; to them the Divinity would vouchsafe the completion, denied to him, of the task which had been begun or projected” (Sen. 1.5.15; LOA, 1:16). Indeed, Petrarch adds, commenting on a prophecy of death relating to Boccaccio, unexpected death could potentially disturb the order of their relationship (“nascendi ordinem mors pervertat”); after all, their birth order determines even the very order of the letters. If such an event came to pass, promises Petrarch, he would ac­ quire Boccaccio’s library, and he would do the same should any of their closest friends die. What matters is to avoid dispersion: Therefore, just as we have been one in spirit though separated in body [seiuncti licet corporibus, unum animum fuimus], so after we are gone, this parapher­ nalia of our studies should—­if God seconds my vow—­come intact and undi­ minished [indecerpta] to some pious, devout place in perpetual memory of us. This I decided after the passing of him who I had hoped would take up my studies [meorum speraveram successorem]. (Sen.1.5.135–­36; LOA, 1:25)

In this case, the reference is to Petrarch’s son, Giovanni, but the incident al­ ludes to the death, one by one, of all of Petrarch’s possible “successors,” deaths unfailingly announced by the return of sealed letters to Petrarch’s address. Little by little, as members of the sodality fall dead in another bout of plague, Boccaccio and Petrarch find themselves forced into “a lingering death again and again” (“diutius et sepius moriamur”) as they “behold the ashes” of all their dear ones (Sen. 3.1.24; LOA, 1:76). This is an experience that brings about “an unusual metamorphosis” (“insueta methamorphosis”)—­in effect, a trans­ formation from body to literary corpus, as Petrarch is emptied from within, and the only thing remaining is the very “effigy” he set out to produce from the start, in the introductory letter of the Familiares (“animi habitum moresque exui, sola restat effigies”). Simply put, so many friends or other “selves” have died (“amicorum mortibus in quibus ego moriens vivo”) that there is nothing left to think about except who will go next, who will survive whom. Petrarch’s greatest fear, since the introductory letter, is becoming reality: “I who wished to die before [primus] all of my friends now dread being the last [ultimus] to die” (Sen. 3.1.35; LOA, 1:77). Again here, as in the Life of Solitude, Petrarch refers to “primi” and “ultimi,” to the ancients and to posterity, but they now

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belong to the same generation. In an unforeseen turn of events, Petrarch, the first and the oldest, an illustrious ancient of the future, faces the possibility of having to bear the identity of “last,” and of having to represent his own posterity. Indeed, after the death of “Simonides,” the dedicatee of the Seniles, all hopes hang on Boccaccio, the sole surviving literary friend (“solus superes studiorum comes”): I used to consider you and him [“Simonides”] as another Varius and Tucca, should anything happen to me because of the human condition while my works remained unfinished [inexpletis operibus]. Now, since heaven likes this sequence of events, it is fitting, unless I am mistaken, that I should do for him what I had decided that he should do for me. Therefore, if any of his works and letters of any kind remain unfinished [imperfectum superest], divide them fairly between us. And inasmuch as our fortune also separates us, and considering our individual talents [extimatis ingeniis], send my portion to me; keep yours for yourself. We owe this to him, I admit, and you surely would not say no. Let him live in heaven and in our memories as long as we live; after us, however, let him live in the memory of posterity [in memoria posterorum] who, if they know him, will hold him dear—­and I am not being misled by love. (Sen. 3.1.53–­57; LOA, 1:79)

Boccaccio, in this division of labor (one that ironically leaves Petrarch to han­ dle the collection of Nelli’s letters, after the latter’s death), grows in his master’s affection because of circumstances.44 Boccaccio is loved more intensely due to his rarity (“raritas causa est”). Boccaccio is the only friend remaining (“e numero veterum amicorum, pene unus es michi”) who is up to the task; should he die, too, there would be nothing left but “inhumane solitude” (“solitudo inhumana”). Whether Petrarch will face such solitude is up to God, however, and in the meantime the only thing that Petrarch can do is negotiate his line of succession more solidly with his one remaining friend, to “conform” their souls (“michi conformius animo tuo”) and to unite them under a “bicorporal” legacy (“nos unius quasi bicorporis animi”). These considerations are elicited by Boccac­ cio’s stated intention, no doubt reflecting an anxiety of influence, to “reform” his work in old age and, in effect, to forsake his literary career. But Petrarch 44. For Petrarch’s collection of Nelli’s correspondence with him, see Lettere a Petrarca, 21–­221.

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does not want a mediocre disciple; his legacy, he realizes, depends on a strong advocate: [I]f I appear to block your way to first place, which I do not do, look, I gladly yield and leave second place to you; but if you spit at it, I am inclined to call you insufferable. In fact, if only those at the very top are illustrious, see how numerous are the ones in the dark, and how few are those reached by that light. You see, often second place is both safer and more advantageous. Ahead of you is someone to absorb envy’s first blows, to show you the way at the risk of his own reputation, whose steps will teach you what to avoid and what to follow, someone to rouse you or shake off your numbness, someone for you to try to equal or to wish to surpass, so as not to see him always ahead of you. These are the spurs of noble spirits who have often enjoyed amazing success. For, obvi­ ously, anyone who can put up with being in second place will soon be able to earn first place. But he who cannot tolerate it will become unworthy of the very place he has rejected. (Sen. 5.2. 33–­39; LOA, 1:160–­61)

It is here that Petrarch, again relying on the human instantiation of tempo­ ral coordinates (ancients for “past,” and posterity for “future”) launches the myth of the three crowns, the tradition-­making myth of an all-­Italian canon that includes, besides Petrarch and Boccaccio, Dante—­although Petrarch had resolved to leave Dante unmentioned in his works despite Boccaccio’s several provocations.45 According to the hermeneutical logic this chapter has eluci­ dated, Petrarch himself did not suffer so much from anxiety of influence, as is often assumed when relating him to his notable predecessor; rather, he suf­ fered from anxiety of reception, as it were, such that to be a successor of the scope that Petrarch envisioned for himself was so demanding that he saw until the very last minute he would have to act as his own successor, to be the legatee of his own literary corpus. In any case, Petrarch’s decision is made, and he is now in a position to reveal his age, something he had kept secret from most, and to yield to the transition to old age that he had long resisted (see Sen. 8.1). If Boccaccio, his junior of nine years, will survive him, as expected and hoped, he will be equipped to make the ends of Petrarch’s legacy meet (“cum prin­ cipium tum fine collato”).

45. On Petrarch’s fraught relationship to Dante, see Zygmunt G. Baranski and Theodore J. Cachey Jr., eds., Petrarch and Dante: Anti-­Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009).

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Or this would have been a fair conclusion, had Boccaccio, perhaps trying to carve some space for himself, not suggested that Petrarch retire from his stud­ ies. Did Boccaccio understand nothing? How could he suggest that Petrarch lie down in “sleepy inertia” (“somni et inertie”) and yield to “younger minds” (“ingeniis iuniorum”)? Petrarch is in the last sprint: not gone so far as to have entered his posterity, and more reluctant than ever to submit to others or trust anyone’s judgment but his own; he is “in acie standum,” keeping vigil on the frontlines of life: The high point of your argument seems to me that I should try to live as long as I can for the joy of my friends, and—­above all—­to cheer your old age, because, as you say, you wish me to outlive you [me tibi superstitem cupis]. [ . . . ] I wish to die while you are alive and well [opto ego vobis salvis mori], and to leave be­ hind some in whose memory and words I may live, by whose prayers I may be helped, by whom I may be loved and missed [ . . . ]. If in the midst of all this, the end of life comes, which now certainly cannot be far off, I confess I would wish, as they say, that it find me living as though my life is done [vita peracta viventem]. But since, as things are, I have no hope of that, I wish that death would find me reading or writing, or if it please Christ, praying or weeping. (Sen. 17.2.110-­132; LOA, 2:652–­54)

Here Petrarch rejects the Stoic apatheia expressed by Seneca in one of his famous moral epistles (32) to Lucilius. “I pray,” says Seneca, that you may get such control over yourself that your mind, now shaken by wan­ dering thoughts, may at last come to rest and be steadfast, that it may be con­ tent with itself and, having attained an understanding of what things are truly good,—­and they are in our possession as soon as we have this knowledge,—­ that it may have no need of added years. He has at length passed beyond all necessities [necessitates supergressus], —­he has won his honourable discharge [exauctoratus] and is free [liber],—­who still lives after his life has been com­ pleted [qui vivit vita peracta].46

Just as with the case of Quintilian, Petrarch appears to gloss Seneca’s words from his own familiar letters: “vivere vita peracta,” to live retrospectively as if his life is done and complete, is to allow himself to be surpassed or transcended 46. Seneca, Epistles, trans. Richard M. Gummere, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 2014), 1:233.

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(“supergressus”), de-­authorized (“exauctoratus”), and “liber”—­“free,” yes, but only in the form of a “book,” effigy, or spiritual objectification. The Seniles end with a last, grand act of defiance: Petrarch’s appropriation, through translation, of the last novella of Boccaccio’s Decameron, the story of Griselda. Petrarch makes his stand with a work written in prose and addressed to the masses in the vernacular. Petrarch says, “[I] set out to write that very story of yours, hoping that you would surely be delighted that I would, of my own accord, be a translator of your works [ultro rerum interpretem me tuarum fore], something I would not readily have undertaken for anyone else” (Sen. 17.3.10; LOA, 2:656). He warns Boccaccio that his is not a literal translation but an appropriation (“historiam tuam mei verbis explicui”). Yet he leaves it to Boccaccio to take responsibility (“tuarum rationem rerum esse reddendam”) for the redressed version (“mutata veste”). Certainly, people will inquire as to its authorial paternity, but in this case: “I prefaced that the guarantee would rest with the author, that is, with you” (Sen. 17.4.1; LOA, 2:669). Whereas Petrarch concluded the Familiares with a string of impossible conversations with the ancients, in concluding the Seniles he is even bolder. Having already qualified his relationship with Boccaccio as one between a “first” and a “last,” Petrarch goes a step further and provides his only extant successor with a response, the thrill of being apprehended and received by a predecessor, if not properly by an ancestor. The burden of creation and autho­ rial responsibility will rest with Boccaccio, as Petrarch, now a shadow, recedes after a last jolt into the role of inner voice. Friends or, what is much the same, congenial readers provide a gauge in the present of one’s legacy. The future is heedless: it will come to pass despite our selves and lives, but a preordained posterity, the human instantiation of time, will not—­for its existence overlaps with our existence and develops in continuity with our enterprises. In order to ensure such participation, Petrarch conceived of a suprageneric work: a work that is characteristically in fieri and, thus, as irreproducible, creatively, as it is infinitely debatable or expandable, in reception. At the same time, to reach for and achieve a higher, inimitable taxon means submitting to a strict hermeneutical coherence: varying and differing authorial intention(s) must give way to or be fully embodied in formal versions. In other words, once everything has been accounted for, Petrarch must forgo his right to have the last word, and not only with regard to Boccaccio’s production. After all, to have the last word is an expression that finds literal application in the Letters of Old Age. Indeed the scholarly debate surrounding the last, unfinished letter to posterity has been so rambunctious and the philologists’ regret so engrossing that we are prevented from appreciating the perfect hermeneutical consistency

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represented by a last letter that is not so much authorially unfinished as it is formally unending.47 Petrarch’s final ellipsis is so apt, in fact, so in tune and consistent with his doctrine and its formal embodiment, that it invites sus­ picions of aposiopesis, a deliberate trailing off of thought. And if so, then by whose design: God’s, Petrarch’s, or according to the work’s logic itself ? For those who have read the letters through and through, as required, the question is irrelevant, for at the crucial moment that is the moment of death the future is the instant, and they are one.

Including the Excluded: Petrarch’s Familiar Invectives Although Petrarch’s humanism bespeaks an active inclusiveness, it assumes a gathering alacrity (redigere, recolligere) that suggests residue: the letter collec­ tions are an ever-­widening horizon, to be sure, but a boundary nonetheless. Their expansiveness is forever falling short in assimilating a resistant other, whether it be from Petrarch’s own corpus or different-­minded. It has been noted, for example, that each of Petrarch’s uncollected or disbanded epistles “has survived to testify to what Petrarch revealed of himself to contemporar­ ies but chose to exclude, or neglected to include, in his letters destined for posterity.”48 In one such “dispersa” (no. 40), addressed to Boccaccio, Petrarch confronts “hostility,” defining it as a rapport between unlike minds that re­ quires its own “art” or form: “While reading [my invectives],” Petrarch writes, “you will laugh, and will say to yourself: ‘My friend masters this one art better than I expected: he has learned to speak ill.’ You are right: and I call you to bear witness to it. This skill does not pertain to me, but I can learn, though I would rather apply myself to something else.”49 It might not be in Petrarch’s nature to cast aspersion, but when he feels he must, as in the Invective contra medicum/ Invectives against a Physician, which was the occasion for writing the cited dispersa to Boccaccio, he takes consolation in concluding that slander, after all, amounts to a rhetorical exercise in the genus demonstrativum.50 47. See Albert Russell Ascoli, “Epistolary Petrarch,” in Albert Russell Ascoli and Unn Falkeid, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 131 and following. 48. Lynn Lara Westwater, “The Uncollected Poet: Lettere disperse,” in Kirkham and Maggi, eds., Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, 308. 49. Petrarca, Lettere disperse, 315. 50. On this undertheorized genre between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see Pier Giorgio Ricci, “La tradizione dell’invettiva tra il Medioevo e l’Umanesimo,” Lettere italiane 26

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Is unbridled anger, a weakness to which Petrarch is susceptible, as he la­ ments elsewhere, merely a way of dealing with the nonconforming? Or are Petrarch’s so-­called invectives profoundly—­that is, generically or formally—­ relatable to the humanist project as announced and practiced in his letter col­ lections? Letters and invectives may appear mutually exclusive, neatly falling on the side of either “benevolence” or “malevolence,” pursuing cooperation or strife, exclusively.51 In at least one particular instance, however, those neat distinctions do not hold. I am referring to that “invective” which goes by the inclusive title, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia/On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others—­a text that by longtime consensus stands out as the most succinct and complete of Petrarch’s manifestos, even in the opinion of those who would attribute to Petrarch no doctrine but only a concern for style. This programmatic text, I contend, conforms to and reiterates in nuce the Petrarchism so far described. After all, if the letter collections were written in reaction to Cicero’s disorderly contentiousness, we might reasonably expect Petrarch’s animosity to cohere—­at least in principle—­with his main corpus. And yet the title and the dedicatory letter are anomalous enough to sug­ gest that in On His Own Ignorance Petrarch explodes what may look like an otherwise clear-­cut dichotomy between “malevolence” and “benevolence,” and reshapes it. One could argue, further, that he does so in response to his particular readers, as he perceives them: neither friends nor enemies, strictly speaking, but something more hybrid. Petrarch does not name his antagonists (“the inviolable law of friendship does not permit us to cite our friends by name, even when their actions are unfriendly”), but he marks them as Italians who have rejected that alternative humanism which Petrarch represents (OHO, 231). They are aspiring dialecticians (“qui philosophi dicuntur”) drawn to the fray in the “street of straw” (Rue du Fouarre), the location of the theol­ ogy faculty of the university of “contentious Paris” (“contentiosa Pariseos”)

(1974): 405–­14; Marc Laureys, “Per una storia dell’invettiva umanistica,” Studi umanistici piceni 23 (2003): 9–­30; Bausi, Petrarca antimoderno. 51. Struever, Theory as Practice. 18: “Petrarch and later Humanists achieve a particularly useful division of labor between the letter and the invective. The invective, indeed, uses the situational premises which are the complement of the premises of the letter; they assume ma­ levolence where the letter assumes benevolence, and where the invectives adumbrate a disor­ derly realm of activity, moral and intellectual, the letters evoke order and progress, achievement through cooperation. Petrarch does not write letters to the “dialecticians,” but invectives; letters are addressed to members (or proposed members) of the sodality of proper inquiry, for Petrarch opposes the fellowship of writing to the nonwriting oral university combatants.”

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(315).52 They, as Italian worshippers of that “bare name” (“nudum nomen”) whose “five syllables delight the ignorant” (A-­ri-­sto-­ti-­les), are Petrarch’s tar­ get audience, to whom he confides, in a change of mind, perhaps, the reasons for his withdrawal from the scholastic or medieval epistemological framework (247). Even in a confrontation with apparently intractable minds, it seems that Petrarch would prefer his work to persuade rather than offend. Furthermore, in this confrontation Petrarch appears to be motivated by his experience of the rediscovery of antiquity, an experience, as we have seen in the context of his letter to Pulice and his account of the origins of his letters, that con­ trasts with the cult of antiquity of his humanist heirs, who ascribe to the sectarian ipse dixit! Pythagorean attitude that Petrarch here denounces in his scholastic contemporaries. In On His Own Ignorance, Petrarch turns his 1345 rediscovery of Cicero’s letters in the cathedral library of Verona into more of an event: A homuncio very much like himself, Petrarch realized, lurked hidden behind the literary monument. Petrarch felt doubly humbled, for it was Cicero who had provided him with a central hermeneutical tenet for approaching philosophy, or, rather, philosophers, a tenet fully articulated in his programmatic invective: [H]eaven forbid that one or two fine phrases would cause me to embrace a thinker’s entire system! I have learned from Cicero himself, or rather from in­ nate reason, that “philosophers must be judged not by isolated utterances, but by the coherence and consistency [ex perpetuitate atque constantia] of their thought.” Who is so uncouth that he does not occasionally utter a pleasing phrase? But is that enough? Often a timely phrase will disguise great igno­ rance; and often dazzling eyes or blond tresses will cover up ugly physical de­ fects [corporum mendas]. If you wish to praise the whole [totum] safely, then you must view the whole [totum], examine the whole [totum], and weigh the whole [totum]. For it may happen that, side by side with what is pleasing, there lies hidden something that offends as much or even more. (OHO, 289)53 52. This is also an indirect citation of Dante, who had mentioned the same street in Par. X.137. On Petrarch and his anti-­Scholastic (French and English) sentiments, see Eugenio Garin, “La cultura fiorentina nella seconda metà del ’300 e i ‘barbari britanni,’ ” La rassegna della lettera­ tura italiana 64 (1960): 181–­95; Piero Boitani, “Petrarch and the ‘barbari Britanni,’ ” in Martin McLaughlin and Letizia Panizza, eds., Petrarch in Britain: Interpreters, Imitators, and Trans­ lators over 700 Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9–­25; Vinicio Pacca, “L’‘infame coda’ degli inglesi,” Quaderni petrarcheschi 11 (2001): 167–­87; and Bausi, Petrarca antimoderno. 53. Petrarch cites from Tusculan Disputations 5.10.31. Compare Cicero, De inventione 2.40.117: “In the second place it must be shown that from what proceeds or follows in the

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Petrarch reaffirms here the view, first adumbrated in his letters to the an­ cients, that the defining experience of his incipient Renaissance is not so much the haphazard discovery of unknown texts but—­and the difference is all-­important—­the continual recovery of the full corpora of supposedly well-­ known authors. As a candidate for exemplarity, Cicero fails by his own hermeneutical standards—­because despite making observations worthy of a Christian, he eventually, Petrarch explains through Proverbs, “returns to his gods, like a dog to its vomit” (OHO, 289). Petrarch, borrowing from Calcidius, chooses to characterize Aristotle as selective, by contrast: “Given his method of estab­ lishing a complete and perfect doctrine, Aristotle selects what suits him, and neglects other views with disdainful indifference” (319). This in turn validates Petrarch’s establishment of his humanist counter-­initiative on a profoundly nondismissive attitude. Describing the sterility of conversations with his Aris­ totelian friends, Petrarch states: They used to propose some Aristotelian problem or some question about animals for discussion. I would remain silent, or joke, or introduce some other topic. Sometimes I would smile and ask how Aristotle could have known things that obey no reason and cannot be tested experimentally. They would be amazed and silently angered, and would look at me as a blasphemer for requir­ ing more than that man’s authority as proof of a fact. It was clear that, instead of philosophers and eager lovers of wisdom, we had become Aristotelians, or more truthfully, Pythagoreans. For we had revived the ridiculous custom of the Pythagoreans, who were only allowed to ask whether he had said so—­and “he” meant Pythagoras, as Cicero writes. (OHO, 265)

document the doubtful point becomes plain. Therefore, if words are to be considered separately by themselves [separatim ex se], every word, or at least many words, would seem ambiguous; but it is not right to regard as ambiguous what becomes plain on consideration of the whole context [ex omni considerata]. In the next place, one ought to estimate what the writer meant from his other writings, acts, words, disposition in fact of his whole life, and to examine the whole docu­ ment which contains the ambiguity in question in all its parts, to see if anything is apposite to our interpretation or opposed to the sense in which our opponent understands it. For it is easy to estimate what it is likely that the writer intends from the complete context [ex omni scriptura] and from the character of the writer [ex persona scriptoris], and from the qualities which are as­ sociated with certain characters” (trans. H. M. Hubbell [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949], 285–­87).

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What is striking here is that the uncongenial sodality associated with the scho­ lastics looks very much like the potential sodality that Petrarch encountered in Pulice’s home: purblind Ciceronians and heedless Aristotelians are birds of a feather. If so, the same antidote could possibly cure both. Accordingly, we come to appreciate again the pervasively autobiographi­ cal form and the way that it allows Petrarch to couch his inquiry as a form of intellectual altruism. If theory can be grounded firmly in life experiences, live exchanges, and real choices, then future readers will be spared the disillusion­ ment that Petrarch suffered on meeting the familiar Cicero. The gist of On His Own Ignorance is that if Cicero, as Petrarch painfully discovered, turned out to be human, it was only a matter of time before Aristotle, too, or any philosopher king (“scientiarum domine”), would be recovered fully and thus exposed as fully fallible. “Now, I believe,” Petrarch states candidly, “that Aristotle was a great man and a polymath. But he was still human and could therefore have been ignorant of some things, or even of many things” (OHO, 265). What also stands out here is that, upon his encounter with the posthu­ mously collected Cicero, Petrarch envisions the literary corpus as the only hegemonic genre. Private (or familiar) and public writings never weld hermeti­ cally; in their imperfect interconnection they allow for a glimpse of the wider world in which transactions of knowledge take place. Furthermore, literary corpora, porous and inclusive, may turn out to be coherent but should not be prized for that ceaseless uniformity (“ordo sempiternus”) and unadulterated wholeness (“integritas”) sought for by Aristotelianism, which apprehends it­ self as “angelic knowledge” (“angelica scientia”). In fact, it is when he contrasts “angelic,” “unedifying” philosophy and its supposed unities that Petrarch self-­ consciously begins to speak of a nascent modern humanism: “Secundum hu­ mane scientie morem loquor” (OHO, 251).54 Petrarch’s philosophical disillusionment (he refers to his sources as simply “my favorite books”) and the amplification of context gradually lead him to draw a distinction between a knowable, man-­made world and a God-­begotten, and thus unfathomable, natural universe. In reference to the Aristotelians, Pe­ trarch states: “In their haughty conceit, they strive to seize the secrets of nature and the even profounder mysteries of God, which we embrace in our humble 54. And here we realize that the idea of the Geisteswissenschaften, a term first coined to translate John Stuart Mill’s reference to the “moral sciences” in the Logic, and its self-­defining struggle against the Naturwissenschaften, was already adumbrated in—­and was, indeed, central to the birth of—­Petrarchan humanism.

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faith. Yet while they fail to attain or even approach them, in their madness they think they have reached heaven and clutch it in their fist” (OHO, 269). In contrast, in the newly carved-­out domain of man, everything is “equally debat­ able,” and the contest of opinions, despite the “ridiculous vanities of philoso­ phizers,” should not be ignored (351). Humanism comes into the world as inimical to systematic philosophy be­ cause it relies, in Petrarch’s words, on the “faithful sharing of all things” and on complicity for its survival (OHO, 263). It is not surprising, then, that hu­ manism should be concerned—­obsessed, even—­with audience and reception. Petrarch assumes a higher degree of kinship among his literary contemporaries (and noncontemporaries) than the bias and contentiousness of their disciples will admit. Can the radical inclusiveness of Petrarchan or humanist inquiry be defined and delimited, and if so, how? Certainly, one of the challenges in inves­ tigating the humanists as thinkers—­they are never only poets, philosophers, or scholars—­is the eclecticism of their writings. That they promiscuously used any literary form available to them (treatise, letter, philosophical dialogue, lyric poetry, epic, and so on.) testifies at once to humanism’s affinity for possibil­ ity, as opposed to philosophical necessity, and to an important hermeneutical problem. Again, if not a single principle, idea, or well-­defined method, then what is the whole by which the parts are correlated? Ultimately, Petrarch’s most valuable contribution to inquiry was to con­ ceptualize and mold a vessel that would enable his antidogmatic stance to be passed down and (re-­)appropriated, in the kind of congenial transaction that supports continuity and tradition, as opposed to factionalism. To understand this vessel, the modern hermeneutical category of “intrinsic genre,” a notion discussed in the introduction to this study, is useful. If we apply to Petrarch this insight—­that literary meaning resides in an author’s or even a group’s purpose—­then we can finally characterize the literary corpus as the intrinsic genre that corresponds to humanism’s—­or, better, Petrarchism’s—­purpose of opposing philosophy’s purpose (the search for absolute truth) and its intrin­ sic genre, the single and all-­encompassing magnum opus (be it a treatise or monograph). The idea of a single, greatest, and best work, Petrarch contends throughout his letters, is emblematic of the kind of thought that believes it­ self to be definitive, exact, and universal: “If we wish to be seen at our best we can display ourselves in books. In our letters let us discuss [in epystolis colloquamur],” that is, let us transact and achieve identity in discursive prac­ tice (Fam. 1.5.14; LFM, 1:31). Truth, philosophers tend to forget, cannot be appropriated by any single individual; it emerges and develops piecemeal.

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Humanism allows history to ask time to reveal truth. Knowing this, Petrarch was compelled to create a literary form that displayed other qualities: a sub­ jective perspective, supervised incompleteness, and, most important, open-­ endedness. On His Own Ignorance, furthermore, is unlike Petrarch’s other invectives in that, rather than jump into the brawl, it begins with a letter of dedication to a real friend, Donato, the counterpart of the false friends to whom the body of the text is addressed. Petrarch’s dedicatory letter feels metacritical. In the first line, Petrarch offers Donato a “small book on a vast subject” (“librum pa­ ruum de materia ingenti”). Next, he refers to the work at hand as a “treatise on human ignorance” (“humane tractatus ignorantiae”). The second paragraph brings more twists and is worth reading in its entirety: You will read it just as you often listen to my fireside chats on winter nights, when I ramble as the impulse moves me. I have called this work a book [liber], but it is really a talk [colloquium]. Except for the name, it has none of the quali­ ties of a book—­no amplitude, structure, style, or gravity—­for it was written rapidly during a journey made in haste. But I decided to call it a book, and thus to win your favor by sending this small gift under a great name. Although I was confident that you liked all my works [nostra omnia], I intended to beguile you in this way. (OHO, 223)

Now the work is no longer a “small book” or a “treatise” but a “talk,” because it lacks those very specific features that make books what they are. What comes across amid Petrarch’s reversals is that the book, as a genre, connotes conceit (philosophy), while familiarity with an author’s complete oeuvre (“nostra om­ nia”) connotes friendship (humanism). In the third paragraph, Petrarch introduces yet another determinant of genre: “I have dignified my little work with an attractive covering, and have called it a book when it might have been called a letter [epystolam]” (OHO, 223). The label of “letter” is further justified by the numerous additions, cor­ rections, and cramming of notes in the margins. Petrarch is presenting his work as in fieri, corresponding to its author’s life as a homo viator, in whom, Petrarch states, quoting Suetonius, thoughts are “penned as they were born in thought,” and works are “disfigured by many scars” (“cicatricibus defor­ matus”) (225). As such, the corpus reemerges metaphorically, and owing to the identification of man and thought, as properly a body. These “scars,” Petrarch’s interpolation and revisions in On His Own Ignorance, comprise

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200 lines, about 8 percent of the whole: a fairly mangled, but not disfigured, body.55 Petrarch carries this indecisiveness into the core of his so-­called invective, addressing his supposed foes as “my four friends,” while noting that they are “hostile friends,” or readers who might still be won over to the side of the humanist cause as long as “envy”—­the reason for their hostility—­can be sur­ gically removed: “[Envy] is the monster I must slay, while saving my friend­ ships.” Enemies would make for an easier target than envious friends, for “[w]hen two people hold each other in an embrace, it is quite a tricky business to stab one of them without harming the other” (OHO, 227). And: “Just so, sacred friendship now calls on me to strike impious spite with my pen point, even if I wound friendship herself, who warms this monster in her bosom with unrequited embraces. It is difficult to distinguish between two things that are so closely joined in such darkness. But I shall try to do so” (229). Petrarch is thus addressing people who are familiar with his talents, who “love me, and all that is mine [mea omnia], except my name alone [ preter unum nomen]” (237). Petrarch notes the disjunction: on the one hand, they love a whole corpus except for the “name” or reputation of its author, and on the other hand, as far as Aristotle is concerned, they love a “bare name”—­that is, a disembodied name—­of whose literary corpus and language they are ignorant, as is everyone else, including Petrarch. In order to put our finger on what and who Petrarch is really after, we should turn in conclusion to his most vituperative and thus less inclusive invective. This was the work known to Petrarch’s Italian contemporaries as Contra Gallum, composed one year before his death, and generally known today as Against a Detractor of Italy, the title preferred by its French com­ pilers, letting it speak for itself.56 This invective, often dismissed, has merit in that it gathers some otherwise scattered but nevertheless central features of Petrarch’s agenda. The personal occasion for this tirade, of course, was a derogatory text penned by a “nescio quis scolasticus,” an unnamed foe we know to be Jean d’Hesdin, a Frenchman, and thus, in Petrarch’s appreciation,

55. William J. Kennedy, “The Economy of Invective and a Man in the Middle (De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia),” in Kirkham and Maggi, eds., Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Com­ plete Works, 263–­76, at 266. 56. See Monica Berté, Introduction to Francesco Petrarca, Contra eum qui maledixit italie (Florence: Le Lettere, 2005), 10–­12.

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a “barbarian” devoted to scholasticism.57 The contraposition of Italy and France, which might seem at first unimportant because based, it appears, in a concrete personal conflict, immediately and more interestingly emerges as a contest of faculties and mindsets, each informed by a distinct set of authori­ ties and traditions. On the one hand, we have barbarism; scholasticism; an exclusive authority, Aristotle; and the rest of the derivative nonsense taught in Parisian universities. On the other hand, we have Rome, Latinity, Cicero (among many), civilization, and civilization’s last and most important catalyst and quasi-­institution: Petrarchan humanism itself. These two clusters, like the temporal coordinates of past and present that they also represent (France being a mainstream present-­past to be overcome), are not incommensurable (remember the friend-­enemy “embrace” at the outset of On His Own Igno­ rance). Rather they are imbricated along the axis of a twofold transition: the translatio imperii and studii, staunchly opposed by Petrarch, according to which a relocation of culture tout court would have followed the relocation of papal power to the south of France—­an event Petrarch witnessed as an exiled denizen in Avignon. In a passage that crystallizes this point, Petrarch derides his antagonist for his ignorance, for relying on the anthologized, which is to say, partial, knowledge distinctive of scholastics, embodied in the genre of the florilegia, the medieval compilations of excerpts of classic texts.58 In this, Hesdin is of one feather with his only authority, Aristotle, who was exposed by Petrarch, as we have seen, in On His Own Ignorance as an excerpter or extrapolator likewise. It is precisely this piecemeal knowledge that keeps the scholastic Hesdin from understanding the “sacredness” of Rome and the fullness of its tradition, a historical truth that Petrarch relates through a magniloquent sepulchral metaphor: [H]ow can I believe that [Hesdin] has any correct ideas or knowledge, when at one point in his treatise he asks what I mean by the “holy city”? He seems not to have heard the stipulation of the civil law that wherever a body is buried—­ the body not only of a free man, but of a slave, and not merely an entire body, but even part of one [nec corpus modo integrum, sed pars corporis]—­that place is 57. For Hesdin’s text and for an account of the origin of the polemic, see Monica Berté, ed., Jean de Hesdin e Francesco Petrarca (Messina: Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Umanistici, 2004). For Petrarch’s own contextualization, see Sen. 7.1 and 9.1. 58. Petrarch’s specific reference is to the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland, on which see Richard H. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons: Studies on the Manipulus florum of Thomas of Ireland (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1979).

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considered “religious.” How religious, then, the city of Rome must appear! In it repose the integral remains [integra corpora] of so many valorous and illustrious men and rulers! In it, indeed, there lies at rest—­and this I consider the crowning point that makes Rome the holy city par excellence—­a mighty host of glorious apostles, sainted martyrs, kindly pontiffs and doctors, and holy virgins.59

Rome is the mass grave of tradition, not only the locus of the greatest number of intact corporal vestiges, but the context with enough contiguities to allow even scattered members to find their rightful place in the continuity of history. The literary correlative of this image, of course, is Petrarch’s own compendi­ ous, if not integral, corpus. It, too, is a gravesite where the dead speak, and it, too, is a whole that accrues piecemeal, containing, for example, De viris illustribus, Petrarch’s youthful, unfinished, and necessarily inane attempt to “compress into one place” the stories of those very ancient authorities equally “scattered” in Rome and in his works.60 What interests us here is less the malady, as detected by Petrarch, than the proposed remedy: in a world spinning northwest (from Rome to Paris) to­ ward its demise, a correction of this nefarious rotation can only occur in in­ teriore homine; it is a matter of persuasion and, to be clear, conversion. But conversion to what, exactly? Petrarch, who referred to himself as a “dispenser of fame”—­he repeatedly postponed his answer to Hesdin for fear that his in­ tervention would win his antagonist a yearned-­for bishopric—­was also, in fact, a dispenser of true Latinity by virtue of his friendship and endorsement. The correction that Petrarch seeks is neither ethnic nor racial, of course, but intel­ lectual. He seeks to dissolve the “barbarian affinity” or kinship (“cognatione barbariei”) that he blames for the present, highly contagious, plague of insan­ ity (“contagiosus morbus est amentia”), and he seeks to show that affinity can be based on a different congruity.61 History disproves what Hesdin seems to imply, that whoever studied in Paris is irremediably French (“quisquis Pari­ sius studuerit, Gallus est”).62 Indeed, to the contrary, one needs only to recall 59. Francesco Petrarca, Invective against a Detractor of Italy, in Invectives, ed. and trans. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 385. 60. See “Petrarch’s Prefaces to De viris illustribus,” introd. and trans. Benjamin G. Kohl, History and Theory 13, no. 2 (1974): 132–­44, at 138: “I have decided, therefore, to collect or rather almost to compress into one place the praise of the illustrious men who flourished with out­ standing glory and whose memory—­which I found spread far and wide and scattered in sundry volumes—­has been handed to us through the skill of many learned men.” 61. Petrarca, Invective against a Detractor of Italy, 467. 62. Petrarca, Invective against a Detractor of Italy, 439.

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Statius, Lucan, and Seneca, all either French or Spanish by birth, to realize that kinship is a matter of style: in all of them “stilus est italus,” or “by style they were Italians”; their intellectual affiliation depends not on birth but on a variety of choices in rank, association, and study (“dignitate, et conversatione, stilo insuper ac studiis romanum esse”).63 It would be a mistake to dismiss Petrarch’s concerns in the Contra Gal­ lum as nothing more than bitter jabs expressed in the context of a lesser and more permissive rhetorical genre such as invective. In crude terms they reflect a constitutive element present in Petrarch’s most programmatic texts: that the desired congeniality that will trigger Petrarchan humanism will have an Ital­ ianate cast, not least because of Petrarch’s own affiliation. It could be argued, for example, that the unnamed, aspiring scholastics who are the target of On His Own Ignorance merit a reply because, as Italians, they can be reconquered and brought back more promptly to their native cultural sanity. More impor­ tant, it is significant that Petrarch hides the identity of the “barbarian,” Ludwig van Kempen, to whom he dedicates the Familiares, given that he invested this Belgian musician—­here, “Socrates”—­with the majestic responsibility of stand­ ing first in line to Petrarch’s literary succession.64 In this tactic Petrarch was so successful that until the beginning of the twentieth century “Socrates” was believed to be a fictitious character. Although separated geographically, Lud­ wig and Petrarch became one through “kinship of minds and union of wills” (“vicinitas animorum, coniunctio voluntatum”). In the process, Petrarch’s in­ terlocutor receives a new affiliation: “But you, my Socrates, you alone the Au­ sonian soil did not give me—­a fact posterity might wonder at [ . . . ]. Though your origin was foreign, the gentleness of your spirit, your extensive sociability and especially your love for me has made you in large measure Italian [in pri­ mis amor mei magna Italicum ex parte te fecerit]” (Fam. 9.2.8; LFM, 2:3–­4). Pe­ trarch’s works are endowed with the thaumaturgic power of rebirthing their readers as Ausonic or Italian.

Conclusion Petrarch expends a lot of effort trying to reform his contemporaries, but ulti­ mately he realizes that friendly readers will accrue in history, which is why he 63. Petrarca, Invective against a Detractor of Italy, 449 and 455. 64. See Jan Papy, “Creating an ‘Italian’ Friendship: From Petrarch’s Ideal Literary Critic ‘Socrates’ to the Historical Reader Ludovicus Sanctus of Beringen,” in Karl A. E. Enenkel and Jan Papy, eds., Petrarch and His Readers in the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 13–­28.

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dedicates as much time to defending past authors as to addressing concerns of posterity. He entrusts his fame to his literary corpus. As he writes in On His Own Ignorance, “My friends love me, but not wholeheartedly [non toto pec­ tore]. More exactly, they love me wholeheartedly, but not all of me [non totum me]. To all of them, or any one of them, I would entrust my life, my body and soul [corpusque et animam], and all that is mine with confidence and without hesitation. But not my fame, or my literary fame, at least” (OHO, 339). For fear of being ill served by his successors, Petrarch ends up again acting as his own literary executor, and more. Through the practice of assemblage, he unobtru­ sively rewrites self-­interpretation into his texts, texts that will accordingly be charged doubly with original authorial meaning as well as retrospective signifi­ cance that—­and here is the feat—­is still very much authorial and intentional. In Books of Things to Be Remembered (1.19.3–­4), Petrarch articulates a “complaint” in his capacity as the self-­conscious father of humanism. He la­ ments his epoch’s incomplete reception of the works of Livy and Pliny, and generally posterity’s neglect to safeguard the past. Rightly, he notes that his lament is novel in the history of letters, given that the ancients had nothing coming before them. But then Petrarch cannot help but wonder what will hap­ pen when history will extend even further into the future. Will his cry suffice to put descendants on their guard? Will past and future keep ignoring each other, so that ancients would have experienced false assurances of the peren­ nial “integrity” or completeness of their works and legacy, while their progeny would remain blissfully ignorant of the whole story (“ita apud alios integra, apud alios ignorata omnia”)? Petrarch takes it upon himself to stand between these two “people” (“velut in confinio duorum populorum constitutus”), as it were, alternatively urging one and the other (“ac simul ante retroque prospic­ iens”) to mutual recognition and collaboration.65 Petrarch suggests that such a complaint is the first step toward the establishment of  historical self-­awareness and fruitful transhistorical confrontation. This is a humanism that fosters intellectual unrest against scholarly acquiescence that manifests itself in two ways: antiquarianism, or a journey to the past, which is only half the venture (and depends on safe reentry!), and presentism, a scholarly effort that is arro­ gantly or naïvely confident about its own self-­worth and endurance. Petrarchan humanism is founded on a deliberate cooperation that is not just futural, or vaguely legacy-­oriented, but posteric, insofar as the dialogism established be­ tween epochs is thoroughly intersubjective. Only by preserving transmission 65. Francesco Petrarca, Rerum Memorandarum Libri, ed. Marco Petoletti (Florence: Le Lettere, 2014), 54.

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as a human rather than merely linguistic affair does humanism retain its moral significance. Through the lens of the Familiares and Seniles, we can see how some of Petrarch’s literary works were originally (re)written as a corpus or assembled from a posthumous perspective. Such a corpus is composed of interconnected works intended to will traditions into life—­works that were read as much as written into existence by their author and intended to be received from a tem­ poral distance. If this is indeed what Petrarch intended, then he possessed a fine hermeneutical acuity. His works subvert some longstanding axioms of her­ meneutics in the way that they successfully assimilate reception to the creative act and collapse the dichotomy between a textual (or literal) “meaning” that never varies, and a present “significance” that always changes. This collapse wards off the exegetical fallacy of anachronism and anchors intelligibility to a shared reception between the reader and the author himself. In an important sense, Petrarch’s hermeneutics was neither philosophical nor methodological, but rhetorical: it vouches for a different kind of source-­respectful presentism, one in which reception is forced to begin, ever ab ovo, with an evaluation of the decorum or appropriateness of the original, instantiating initiative. Attaining autonomy from the original and its meaning, what hermeneutics refers to as ap­ propriation is not disallowed per se, but rather enforced as an existential strug­ gle. If any appropriation of the past (for example, a Renaissance or Petrarchan past) can take place, then it does so as an end goal rather than as a starting point, a right always personally acquired, never delegated, let alone guaranteed or always resolved in the awareness of the historically effected character of understanding. Petrarch’s letter collections commit the individual to sharing a program for the future and adapting it for the conduct of his life, while committing him to an intellectual program as well. Most important, this is an experience that Pe­ trarch’s readers are made alive to, simply by being the receivers of the meaning-­ full form engendered by that encounter. That experience of aliveness persists; it does not die away. It is inimitable (it cannot be relived), but it persists be­ cause congenial collaboration allows for its reiteration. This is Petrarch and Petrarchism. If indeed Petrarch can be shown to transcend a modernity that by common consent he helped greatly to establish, then his corpus today may demonstrate not so much the endurance of the Renaissance as its potential contempora­ neity. In this sense, the Petrarchan Renaissance awaits, still, its legacy, its full reenactment. We may ask, then, who is the ideal addressee of a Petrarchism so conceived? Who, if anyone, lives up to such a call for cooperation? In the

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next chapter, I describe Petrarch’s preferred reader as sketched by Petrarch himself in order to recover a viable distant successor in Francesco De Sanctis, the founder of Italian literary criticism. The most fascinating aspect of this story, which links Petrarch and De Sanctis, of course, is that De Sanctis overtly claimed that the making of the modern Italian, after the Risorgimento, the cultural and political movement that achieved Italy’s unification, hung upon the spiritual slaying of Petrarch, the father of humanism and/or Italy’s first modern man.

Chapter 2

The Purpose of Literary Criticism: Francesco De Sanctis’s (Anti-­)Petrarchism Historical epochs are transient moments, they do not correspond to any absolute concept. A time will come when the notion of nationality will give way to the notion of humanity: precisely because of this, however, future historians won’t have the right to gloss over today’s national movement. Francesco De Sanctis

I n t r o d u c t i o n : I ta l i a n P e t r a r c h , ( U n -­) c o n g e n i a l P e t r a r c h The historiographers who are credited with having invented the Renaissance viewed the great men of that era not as inert figures collecting dust on a shelf but as an invocation of sorts. I am thinking of  Jules Michelet, who coined the periodizing term “Renaissance” in the seventh volume of  his History of France (1855), and Jacob Burckhardt, whose The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) defined a field of study. To an even greater extent, I am thinking of Georg Voigt, whose less often read Revival of Classical Antiquity, or The First Century of Humanism (1859) was the pioneering work on Renaissance humanism and the first to popularize the characterization of Petrarch as the “first modern man.” Voigt’s framing is of particular interest to us because he attempted something that has not been repeated: he described Renaissance humanism as a legacy that was, or rather ought to have been, thoroughly Petrarchan. Voigt eschews suspense: he tells us up front that his analysis will be top-­ heavy, dedicated to the origins of a revolution that “propagated,” or failed to do so, from the “inspiration” of a single man: It was following an indefinite hunch, at best, that Dante looked into a promised land he did not, however, set foot on. The discoverer of the new world of

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Humanism was Francesco Petrarch. He not only paved the way and disclosed its horizons, but pointed in almost every way and securely to its triumph. In his figure one has the most astonishing evidence of the importance of genius in the history of humanity, and how it is to be beheld as a remarkable manifestation rather than as the product of accountable circumstances. Whoever is willing to persuade himself of this fact needs only to emancipate himself from the conventional and almost canonical judgments currently surrounding Petrarch, in Italy as well as in France, and approach him, rather, with the opinion that his contemporaries had of him.1

Calling for a return to Petrarch’s contemporaneity, to that circle of Florentine civic humanists who first elected Petrarch their master and mediated his legacy, Voigt wishes to wipe Petrarch the vernacular poet off the table: Petrarch would have been just as great “even if he had never composed a single verse in the Tuscan language.” Voigt wishes to eradicate, too, what he perceives as the misguided scholarly emphasis of his Italian and French colleagues on the humanist’s nugae, or “trifles,” as Petrarch himself referred to his poetic production.2 It is only by focusing on the Latin Petrarch, Voigt’s project implies, that modernity’s ills will be pinpointed. In fact, “the unbalanced pursuit of antiquity turned” Petrarch’s purported descendants “into idealists and fanatics.” In the present, the Renaissance humanist’s “meek servility” in the study of classical sources should inspire a scholarly reorientation.3 As the “prophet of the new era” and “precursor of the modern world,” Voigt’s Petrarch is in tension with the future, a betrayed potential. A return to Petrarch will steer competing European nations aright, as they stand poised, in the mid-­1800s, to reform present and future on the basis of a new or renewed modern program. France and Italy will draw on Petrarch and his work in quest of an identity that was, like Petrarch’s, scholarly and national at once.4 1. Georg Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums oder Das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus, 2 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1859), 1:20–­21. 2. Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung, 1:22. 3. Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung, 2:364–­65. I cite here from Georg Voigt, “A New World in Italy,” in The Renaissance Debate, ed. and trans. Denys Hay (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965), 29–­35, which contains representative, albeit pithy, selections from Voigt’s work, at 33. For a useful contextualization of  Voigt’s contribution, see Paul F. Grendler, “Georg Voigt, Historian of  Humanism,” in Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt, ed. Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 295–­325. 4. On the attempted appropriation of Petrarch by the French and the role of this appropriation in the making of French patriotism, see Jennifer Rushworth, Petrarch and the Literary

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In hindsight, we notice that the eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century Italian intellectuals whose return to Petrarch informed their poetics and patriotic agenda—­and there were many, including Vittorio Alfieri (1749–­1803), Ugo Foscolo (1778–­1827), Giacomo Leopardi (1798–­1837), and Giosuè Carducci (1835–­1907),  just to name a few—­are strikingly reminiscent of that other group of exceptional fifteenth-­century civic humanists studied by Voigt: Coluccio Salutati, Petrarch’s correspondent and the first chancellor of Florence, and his acolytes Niccolò Niccoli, and Roberto Rossi, who were brought together by Leonardo Bruni, arguably the most active among them, in his Dialogues for Pier Paolo Vergerio (1402–­3). In this controversial, fictional (but plausible) two-­part conversation that was credited with the emergence of a renewed republican ideology, a self-­conscious first generation of humanists recalls itself to the practice of “disputation,” a practice that has been sidelined for too long and one they now regard as the very backbone of an active humanism. It is a metadiscursive discourse in which humanists reflect on themselves and their mission by comparing the relative merits of those who inspired them: Dante and Petrarch. In other works and biographies, those same humanists ask themselves: who was the greatest writer? what are the pros and cons of expressing oneself  in the vernacular as opposed to Latin? and, most important, which of them was the best representative of the vita activa and exemplary citizen of a literary patria, Florence, that disdained them both?5 Like the dialogue itself, suspended in utramque partem, arguable either way, the questions are as unsettled as they are unsettling. And how could it be otherwise? To have to choose between Dante and Petrarch is a true “Sophie’s choice,” and, as one might predict, the Risorgimento did not fare well on this Culture of Nineteenth-­Century France: Translation, Appropriation, Transformation (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2017). 5. A translation of this founding text is in Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins, and David Thompson, trans., The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1987), 63–­84; but see also, in the same volume, Bruni’s biographical parallel, “The Lives of Dante and Petrarch,” 85–­100. The notion of  “civic humanism” is famously introduced and articulated by Hans Baron in The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in the Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955). On the self-­conscious novelty of  Bruni’s project, see David Quint, “Humanism and Modernity: A Reconsideration of Bruni’s Dialogues,” Renaissance Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1985): 423–­45. For a recent and powerful attempt to reorient our understanding of Quattrocento Florentine culture after Baron, see James Hankins, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).

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point. Early on, supporters of Petrarch, the proudly withdrawn author of The Solitary Life, found it difficult to extol his civic engagement. Yet by the time the question became relevant again, at the height of the Risorgimento, Petrarch had long since scored an exceptional endorsement: Machiavelli had cited his poem “Italia mia” at the conclusion of the final, prophetically charged chapter of The Prince. From that point on, arguably, an “other Petrarchism” was born alongside the one that originated the lyric sequence. This was a Petrarchism that could be recruited to support a continuous series of civic and cultural rebirths as well as patriotic ideas in Italy and abroad.6 The rhetoric accompanying Risorgimento reappraisals of this other Petrarchism was not only lofty, but also materially spectacular and academically ambitious. Petrarch alone inspired three perfectly poised anniversaries (1804, 1874, 1904), lending himself to the commemorative cult and folklore of the age, which included sometimes competing “secular pilgrimages” in Italy and France to his homes and tomb. In a special event organized in 1862 in Turin, the recently dubbed first capital of a unified Italy, a pageant reenacted Petrarch’s entry into Rome on the occasion of the conferral of the laureate wreath.7 Meanwhile, very intricate projects were launched for national editions of the complete works of some of the nation’s best minds—­here, too, starting with Dante, Petrarch, and Giuseppe Mazzini. Plans for the erection of monuments and commemorative plaques proliferated while Italy and France competed for Petrarch, with artists, scholars, and politicians of different Italian municipalities all vying for the same meager financial resources.8 As an observer of the 6. This point is made by Gian Mario Anselmi in “L’eredità di Petrarca,” in Loredana Chines, ed., Il petrarchismo. Un modello di poesia per l’Europa, 2 vols. (Rome: Bulzoni, 2006), 1:15. See also Francesca D’Alessandro, Petrarca e i moderni. Da Machiavelli a Carducci (Pisa: ETS, 2007), chap. 1, which emphasizes similarities between Machiavelli’s The Prince and Petrarch’s letters. 7. For a detailed account of  the nature and spirit of these celebrations, see Harald Hendrix, “Petrarch 1804–­1904: Nation-­Building and Glocal Identities,” in Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney, ed., Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-­Century Europe: Nation-­Building and Centenary Fever (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 117–­33; Harald Hendrix, “Writers’ Houses as Media of Expression and Remembrance: From Self-­Fashioning to Cultural Memory,” in Hendrix, ed., Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory (New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–­11. and J. B. Trapp, “Petrarchan Places: An Essay in the Iconography of Commemoration,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 69 (2006): 1–­50. 8. On the celebration of  Petrarch in Italy, specifically, see Monica Berté, “Intendami chi può.” Il sogno del Petrarca nazionale nelle ricorrenze dall’unità d’Italia a oggi (Rome: Altana, 2004); and Mario Scotti and Flavia Cristiano, Storia e bibliografia delle Edizioni Nazionali (Milan: Bonnard, 2002).

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1904 celebrations stated, Petrarch would belong “to the one who takes him.”9 Petrarch was up for grabs not just geographically but spiritually. Perhaps the most distinguished of these aspirants was Carducci, Italy’s vate or national poet and thus self-­appointed heir of Petrarch, who in the midst of the 1874 fanfare delivered a memorable graveside eulogy. In this speech, Carducci reflects on his alter ego and his combination of talents (Carducci considered the poet and the humanist to be indissociable!), which he saw converging in the current reestablishment of a republic of letters and the flourishing of  “the notion and love for Italy.”10 Taking up Metternich’s famous dismissal of Italy as a “geographical expression,” Carducci responds knowingly: Metternich misunderstood. Italy is “a literary expression” and “a poetic tradition” held together by the composite Petrarch, a man and a corresponding life-­work whose flaunted, intimate contradictions reflect Italian partisanship, or campanilismo. Carducci monumentalizes Petrarch to great effect through an image of parts and whole: For those who consider how she actually was in the fourteenth century and how Petrarch envisioned her for the future, [Italy] may be compared to the image of the Milan Cathedral [ . . . ]: a jungle of spires which, unequal in their starting point, size, and height, and each with its base, shrine, ornaments, and each with its own saint, they nevertheless contrive toward a varied, merry, and amazing unity: above all of them, linearly lofty and golden bright, the spire that supports the Virgin [ . . . ].11

Indeed, Milan’s Duomo is a fitting choice of symbol in that it was built collaboratively and continuously in fieri through many centuries. It symbolizes Carducci’s “rhetorical philology” as well: a philology that resisted the anticlassicism of coeval trends by enforcing continuity among the Greek, Latin, and Italian cultures; a philology, furthermore, that Carducci wants to turn over to the erudite “commentary” of the classics, which is authorless (Carducci

9. Hendrix, “Petrarch 1804–­1904,” 129. 10. For Carducci’s identification with Petrarch, see D’Alessandro, Petrarca e i moderni, chap. 7. 11. Giosuè Carducci, “Presso la tomba di Francesco Petrarca,” in Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ed. Sabrina Stroppa (Turin: Einaudi, 2011), 593–­94. For more of Carducci on Petrarch, see also Giosuè Carducci, “Dante, Petrarca e il Boccaccio,” and “Dello svolgimento della letteratura nazionale,” both in Prose di Giosuè Carducci (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1922), 199–­252 and 265–­410.

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declaims against the scholarly “protagonism” of his era), the “product of a collective effort” meant to endlessly accrue from generation to generation. And yet as reliable as this model could have been, it failed to provide philology with a true modern paradigm; indeed, it came off as reactionary in some quarters.12 And what Carducci did not know at the time of this eulogy was that his own monument to Petrarch, an authoritative commentary on Petrarch’s poetry, had already lost out to the contemporary efforts of a competitor “he did not fear,” as he had stated a few years earlier in a letter to the editor who was pressuring him for his Petrarch manuscript.13 The competitor was, of course, Francesco De Sanctis, who was about to publish his Saggio critico sul Petrarca/Critical Essay on Petrarch (1869), which was in fact a revised compilation of courses and lectures that he had given at the University of Zurich. Carducci had taken care to distinguish himself, proud old-­school bookworm that he was, from those “fashionable philologists who despise long commentaries” and rely on “first impressions” and the corresponding genre, the essay, a graceful form that was refined by De Sanctis, their leader.14 De Sanctis’s study did not go on to win the prize for the best work on Petrarch written in Italy after 1859 (that is to say, since roughly Italy’s unification); it came in second to the more substantial Familiares collection edited by Giuseppe Fracassetti (who, like Voigt, wanted to see the Latin Petrarch trump Petrarch the vernacular poet). All of which shows that Carducci and the committee of the Accademia della Crusca, the prize-­granting institution, underestimated how influential that slender and seemingly negligible pamphlet would be once it was reworked and assimilated into De Sanctis’s larger corpus as the pivotal eighth chapter, titled “Il ‘Canzoniere,’ ” of the History of Italian Literature.15 At around this time the contraposition between “commentary” and “essay,” the generic embodiments of seemingly incompatible scholarly attitudes, was reabsorbed into another stylistic polarity, that between “criticism” and “historicism,” which, in the case of De Sanctis versus Carducci, referred to 12. See Sebastiano Timpanaro, Classicismo e Illuminismo nell’Ottocento italiano (Pisa: Nistri-­Lischi, 1965), 125-­6; and Roberto Tissoni, “Carducci umanista. L’arte del commento,” in Mario Saccenti, ed., Carducci e la letteratura italiana (Padua: Antenore, 1988), 55–­56 and 68. 13. The edition eventually came out, of course. See Francesco Petrarca, Le rime, ed. Giosuè Carducci and Severino Ferrari (Florence: Sansoni, 1957 [1899]). 14. See Giosuè Carducci’s introduction to his edition of Angelo Poliziano, Le Stanze, l’Orfeo e le Rime di Messer Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1912), xvii. 15. Giuseppe Fracassetti, Francisci Petrarcae Epistolae de rebus familiaribus et variae, 3 vols. (Florence: Le Monnier, 1859–­63). Fracassetti went on also to collect Petrarch’s Seniles and eventually attended to the translation of both corpora.

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the ability of the former to lend dynamic and narrative flow to his literary interpretations.16 What De Sanctis’s History gave to Italian literature and to students was a storyline and a plot, a before and after. This commissioned work, originally conceived as a school textbook and published in two volumes just as the capture of Rome completed Italy’s unification in 1870, reinvented the philological task as a form of diegetic exegesis. De Sanctis’s criticism relies, in narratological terms, on the mise en intrigue of its characters, and Petrarch, too, gains a plot; he is not only the first modern man, but also, less symbolically and more concretely, the transitional figure between Dante and modern Italian literature, and a nefarious influence to boot. As De Sanctis clarifies in the History: Had Petrarch been fully and clearly conscious of his ill, of this idle and useless activity, this slow consumption of the spirit—­the spirit’s impotence to come out of itself and reach reality—­we should have had the tragedy of the soul, in the sense in which Dante conceived its comedy. [ . . . ] Acute rather than profound, instead of probing into the deep-­lying causes of his ill he is content with describing its phenomena and enclosing them in images and lines that have passed into proverbs. [ . . . ] Petrarch was more of an artist than a poet and was easily consoled—­so long as imagination was able to provide him a simulacrum of the reality from whose absence he suffered [ . . . ]. Without country, without family or any social center except the purely literary, and living in retirement in the solitude of his study, in daily companionship with the ancients, the real truth and the seriousness of his life are in his aesthetic expansions,  just as the real life of the saint is in his ecstasies and contemplations.

According to De Sanctis, Petrarch, who lives in the shadow of  his predecessor, Dante, the poet of concrete reality, is the first to be infected by an illness called “rhetoric,” whereby living words crystallize into trite proverbs as they are spoken, and the consequences reach far beyond literature: Dante was sent into exile, but his soul remained in Florence. Petrarch feels himself called upon to insist how Italian he is [ . . . ]. With Dante there was no need for rhetoric. He felt himself to be Italian and had all the emotions [of a patriot]; we feel them in the tumult and throbbing of  his poetry. But in the solitary and 16. On this point, see Roberto Tissoni, Il commento ai classici italiani nel Sette e nell’Ottocento (Dante e Petrarca) (Padua: Antenore, 1993), 6–­10; and Luigi Russo, Carducci senza retorica (Rome: Laterza, 1999), 39.

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personal world of Petrarch, the thing that strikes us most is the absence of reality, and his feeble desire for it, a desire that he assuages in the docile dreams of the imagination. (HIL, 1:277–­79)

Petrarch’s patriotism is pastiche, the polished confection of a consummate “artist,” according to De Sanctis’s programmatic dichotomy. He is the degenerate proxy of the “poet” figure embodied by Dante. Finally, Petrarch’s work is an aesthetic artifact rather than an act of volontà, the edifying volition that Dante infused into his work, that allowed his Comedy to teach and to emancipate for posterity—­which in a sense was De Sanctis’s ambition for his own History, too. At this point, we begin to have an inkling of the story told between the previous chapter and the present one. Petrarch, ostensibly turning against his poetry, narrated himself in his letters. De Sanctis, refusing to look beyond the Canzoniere and acknowledging a lack of narrative in the poetic Petrarch, goes on to emplot Petrarch into his most canonical History, assigning him a specific function, that of representing the first postlapsarian figure (Dante being the transcendental originary figure) in Italian letters and thus liable, in reception, to historical deterioration. And here, finally, arrives the confrontation between the Rinascimento and the Risorgimento—­or, if we understand that in De Sanctis’s time the latter term was used for both epochs, the showdown between the beginning and the conclusion of the same single movement of resurgence. In the aftermath of the Risorgimento and the birth of Italy as a nation-­state, the forging of an Italian consciousness among Italy’s citizens will entail overcoming the Renaissance. More specifically, it will entail the overthrow of the Petrarchan man, that rhetorically detached and civically insouciant individual who continuously thwarted the development of an Italian consciousness throughout the centuries. The affaire Petrarca was part and parcel of De Sanctis’s wish to go head to head with the newly codified myth regarding the rebirth of Western modernity, by rewriting it from an Italian perspective. But then the question becomes: who will accomplish this overthrow? De Sanctis himself, or one of  his disciples? and what awaits Italy, beyond its protracted Renaissance? As De Sanctis perused Renaissance sources in order to lay the groundwork for the History, he experienced a “eureka moment,” an insight that would inform his entire narrative and endow it with a practical purpose of moral reform.17 Namely, it occurred to him that Italy, both during and after Dante’s 17. I summarize here an interpretation offered in OR, chap. 1, especially 73–­84. On De Sanctis’s fraught relationship with the Renaissance, see also Delio Cantimori, “De Sanctis e

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time, had advanced too fast; the nation’s collective genius had set the country on a course so speedy as to be precipitous, toppling the nation from a pinnacle into an era of decadence, and not allowing for the gradual assimilation and enjoyment of its intellectual achievement. In a discussion of Italy’s “profound indifference as to religion and morals,” unmediated by reform as in northern countries, De Sanctis suggested that in Italian intellectual history, beginnings and endings coincided: “Here [in the Renaissance] was the germ of life, and here also the germ of death: the greatness of the century and its weakness” (HIL, 1:433). De Sanctis’s Renaissance is not commensurable with the Renaissance invented by Burckhardt in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, the popular version that did not ignore the epoch’s darker side but tended to raise Italy’s entry into modernity to the status of utopian ideal. In light of this foreign cult, De Sanctis uses his History to make an introspective journey into the heart of the Italian man, the undying Renaissance man, that is to say, the self-­ absorbed letterato uniquely concerned with literary polish. It is upon these premises that Petrarch makes his debut in the History: Writers no longer express their ideas in the quicker, livelier language that in the old days had sprung to them, but cast around them for beauty and elegance of form. To these new men, thoroughly at home with Livy, Cicero, and Virgil, the Latin of  Dante seemed barbarous; as for the treatises and histories that had seemed so admirable to the strong generation that had passed, they despised them, and found the Latin of the scholastics and the Bible unendurable. Concerned chiefly with form to the neglect of content, the matter of a work was of small importance if only the form, the style, were stamped with the classic elegance. So behold the arrival of the very first purists and literati of Italy, led by Francesco Petrarch. (HIL, 1:266, emphasis added)

Petrarch is at once a prototype, the first of a kind, and an archetype, the unsurpassable model of a failed new man. While Petrarch may be deemed the first il ‘Rinascimento,’ ” in Cantimori, Studi di storia (Turin: Einaudi, 1959), 321–­39; Toni Iermano, “Francesco De Sanctis, la ‘Storia della letteratura italiana’ e il Rinascimento,” Studi rinascimentali 8 (2010): 15–­35; Pasquale Sabbatino, “Letteratura e ‘risurrezione della coscienza nazionale.’ Le occorrenze di Risorgimento e Rinascimento nella Storia di Francesco De Sanctis e il Rinnovamento dei tempi moderni,” in Toni Iermano and Pasquale Sabbatino, eds., La nuova scienza come rinascita dell’identità nazionale. La Storia della letteratura italiana di Francesco De Sanctis (1870–­2010) (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2012), 53–­88; and Paolo Orvieto, De Sanctis (Rome: Salerno, 2015), chaps. 5 and 6.

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modern man, as many contemporaries of De Sanctis claimed, he is equally for De Sanctis the “first of the purists;” an all-­important characterization as it implies the existence of a last purist. In De Sanctis’s reading, moreover, Petrarch is one with his legacy rather than a betrayed origin: he is a “Petrarchist” through self-­inoculation, and thus the carrier of what Arturo Graf, a student of De Sanctis, defined as a “chronic condition” from which Italians have not “fully and forever recovered,” but obviously one the History is intended to redress—­homeopathically, through the administration of the same rhetoric, and allopathically, through the supervised dispensation of countermeasures (so rare after Dante!).18 De Sanctis tries to glean such material from every source available, and often from outside the realm of literature strictly speaking, as many lament to this day: in Niccolò Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno, and Giambattista Vico, among others. With De Sanctis in mind no doubt, a kind of conspiracy theory was recently elaborated in Italy: that the nineteenth-­century elevation of Dante (to the detriment of Petrarch) was a “coup” aimed at “removing” Petrarch, “usurping the Petrarchan genealogy,” and promoting the victory of  Romanticism over the classicism that Petrarch and his legacy represented. This “intrigue,” this “parricide” masked as a “tyrannicide,” this “ruthless settling of scores” occurred in the pages of the History, the bearer of a “subliminal message” with its “apocalyptic” view of history while promulgating a severance between an unreachable past and a present condemned to an eternal Petrarchism or “infinite Arcadia.”19 The vehemence of such assaults reveals something about the heterogeneity of reception—­for surely no one on this side of the Atlantic has felt Petrarch’s absence, so relentlessly beloved a topic of scholarly research has he been. It goes without saying that despite De Sanctis, Petrarch remained a fixture in Italy, too. What has been mostly overlooked, then, is not De Sanctis’s opinion of Petrarch but De Sanctis’s influence over every successive generation of Italian literary critics, up until the present. Such disproportionate influence relies on congenial readers, and the case of De Sanctis is no exception. As is well known (and as I shall further explore in chapter 5), De Sanctis attracted 18. Arturo Graf, Attraverso il Cinquecento (Turin: Loescher, 1888), 1–­70, especially 3. See also Marziano Guglielminetti, “L’antipetrarchismo,” in Pierre Blanc, ed., Dynamique d’une expansion culturelle. Pétrarque en Europe, XIVe–­XXe siècle (Paris: Champion, 2001), 75–­83. 19. I am gleaning and gathering here exemplary phrases scattered in Amedeo Quondam, Petrarca. L’italiano dimenticato (Milan: Rizzoli, 2004). See also, by the same author, “Sul Petrarchismo,” in Chines, ed., Il petrarchismo, 1:27–­92; and Petrarchismo mediato. Per una critica della forma “antologia” (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974). See also Gian Mario Anselmi, “L’eredità di Petrarca,” in Chines, ed., Il Petrarchismo, 1:13–­26.

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the unwavering support of Benedetto Croce (1866–­1952) in the first part of the twentieth century, and benefited even more decisively from the advocacy of Croce’s political and intellectual peers, Giovanni Gentile (1875–­1944) on the right and Antonio Gramsci (1891–­1937) on the left. Such consensus is rare, if not unique, and it has been something of an albatross for late twentieth-­ century and present-­day literary criticism in Italy, where, in an attempt to shake it off, critics have attempted to individually rescue Italian literary icons such as Boccaccio, Ariosto, Tasso, and many others from De Sanctis’s firm grip. Similarly to Voigt, who asked that we view Petrarch through the lens of his contemporaries, this chapter, which deals with Petrarch’s late modern reception in Italy, challenges the reader to return their sensibilities to a comprehensive (and contemporary to him) grasp of De Sanctis, arguably the most influential of Petrarch’s nineteenth-­century readers. Does it matter if, ultimately, De Sanctis, the scourge of Petrarchism, turns out to be a Petrarchist or “purist” in his own right? How did it happen that the discourse he devised to disrupt Italian literary tradition and its propagation came to resemble another intellectual prison house, one as constricting as the Petrarchism it fought? The History may be universally reckoned a “novel”—­and perhaps, indeed, the greatest historical novel of the Italian nineteenth century—­but then how did we fail to recognize that opus, and the work that went into it, as part and parcel of the very literature it discusses and brings together, as at once a primary and secondary source?20 Finally, if Petrarchism is best understood as a hermeneutical practice by which to gauge intertextual and transhistorical reference to common sources, it now behooves us to explore De Sanctis’s own (anti-­)Petrarchism beyond its face value, profoundly and existentially, as an essential idiosyncrasy of the founder of modern Italian literary criticism and his agenda.21 In light of De Sanctis’s characterization of Petrarch as the “first purist,” this chapter turns first to De Sanctis’s late autobiographical works in order to recover the one we might dub the “last purist,” De Sanctis himself. At the very end of his life, De Sanctis dictated an autobiography, full of allegory and grossly underestimated, that attempts to reconstruct the forgotten lived experiences 20. The first to qualify De Sanctis’s History as an “intimate and psychological novel,” a notion infinitely and variedly reiterated after him, was Carlo Lozzi in his review of the History’s first edition in Rivista Europea 1, no. 1 (1870): 150–­60. 21. For some interesting interpretations of “Petrarchism,” see Roberto Gigliucci, “Appunti sul petrarchismo plurale,” Italianistica 34, no. 2 (2005): 71–­75; and Klaus W. Hempfer, “Per una definizione del petrarchismo,” in Blanc, ed., Dynamique d’une expansion culturelle, 23–­52.

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that abetted his science and illustrates his conversion from Petrarchan purism to his particular brand of literary criticism. It is a spiritual transition enabled by Giacomo Leopardi, whom De Sanctis met in his youth, adored, and later helped canonize in an account that showed Leopardi undergoing a similar rite of passage. But then, we may ask: did De Sanctis impose this anti-­Petrarchan conversion on his life story retroactively? Through a close reading of De Sanctis’s extant class notes and lectures, I show that De Sanctis had consciously begun purging himself of Petrarchism or rhetoric (which amounts to the same thing) once he became a schoolteacher at the young age of eighteen. In his lectures, I recover De Sanctis’s early ambition to bring about a pedagogical reform inspired by Vico against the Cartesian education that reigned in his time. This teaching experience also allowed De Sanctis to refine what he defines as the scopo, or “purpose,” of his criticism in some late programmatic manifestos, which I read as attempts not only to defend the Italian literary canon against foreign readings, but also to assert that literary criticism can be edifyingly conceived as national in its own right when it aims to reconnect intellectuals and the masses: a “going to the people,” in terms that were first De Sanctis’s, then those of Gramsci, his avowed successor. As we explore De Sanctis’s method throughout this chapter, we will notice that it is distinctively hermeneutical, like the Petrarchism he trounced focusing exclusively on the Canzoniere and neglecting the Familiares. In De Sanctis, the purpose of literary criticism is also moral: a deontological hermeneutics or ethics of reading. The chapter concludes by showing how an interpretative practice so conceived is honed and brought to bear on Petrarch in the Critical Essay on Petrarch, which I read as a sketch of De Sanctis’s History. Diagnosing and defining the Petrarchan malady—­a disengaged interest in form for form’s sake, and Petrarch’s consequent inability to tell a story of personal redemption—­De Sanctis is motivated to write the History. The History is the story Petrarch failed to tell, and in the next chapter I will tease out its plot in order to begin to recover De Sanctis’s proposed antidote.

A Rhetorical Existence As with Petrarch, we can best understand De Sanctis and the guiding intentionality of his complete works if we approach them from the end, from the vantage afforded by the self-­reflective and metadiscursive texts of his old age. For example, the oration titled “Science and Life” that De Sanctis delivered to inaugurate the academic year 1872–­73 in Naples—­and that he avowed would

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be his last—­begins by reiterating a historiographical insight that he gleaned later in life from his perusal of Italian Renaissance sources, and it is the same insight that he used to frame and inform the narrative of Italian intellectual identity in the History: namely, that scientific (which includes artistic and cultural) innovation does not in itself guarantee a nation’s well-­being. “Intellect appears last in life,” De Sanctis affirms, acknowledging his debt to the notion of  Vico’s ricorso while reflecting on the end of his own career. “[A]nd the more it knows, the more it becomes adult, weakening sentiments and imagination in the process [ . . . ]. Science is the product of mature age, and lacks the strength to retrace the course of the years, to recall youth. [ . . . ] Old age and disintegration follow to [maturity]: new, younger people take on, [in an] eternal law of nature; the dissolution of one [generation] is the regeneration of the other.”22 If the political debacle of Greek and Roman life, the Italian Renaissance, and the French Enlightenment, for that matter, proved to De Sanctis that science accrues to the detriment of life, preparing a world in which facts give way to words, history to historians, and art to criticism, renewal will depend not on a new synthesis or a new overcoming, as Hegel avowed, but on a Vichian correction of idealistic teleology, on a return or ricorso of sorts. At this point De Sanctis elaborates on the notion of “limit,” an (Hegelian) idea, he says, too often and mistakenly opposed in history to “liberty.” To the contrary, if “the motto of the past century was liberty against the limit,” De Sanctis claims, today the task is to “restore limits to liberty.”23 For liberty is a means, not a goal; it is an empty form unless we fill it with some content, which is national life and its corresponding ideals. Limits, in other words, endow ideas with a scopo, or “purpose”; they reconnect us to our original (or youthful) guiding intention, one grounded in lived life—­a sentimental and imaginative design that needs to be rescued from the oblivion to which it is relegated by scientific thought or pure mental constructs. The goal is not just “to give life to ideas,” as was recently advanced, but to reconnect ideas to the living substratum through an accommodation that will occur deductively by degrees.24 First, ideas will 22. Francesco De Sanctis, “La scienza e la vita,” in L’arte, la scienza e la vita. Nuovi saggi critici, conferenze e scritti vari, ed. Maria Teresa Lanza, vol. 14 of De Sanctis’s Opere (Turin: Einaudi, 1972), 318. 23. De Sanctis, “La scienza e la vita,” 337. Traces of  De Sanctis’s study of  the notion of  “limit” are in the synoptic tables he prepared (while in prison) of Hegel’s Logic. See the appendix to Benedetto Croce, “Studi hegeliani di Francesco De Sanctis,” in Scritti su Francesco De Sanctis, ed. Teodoro Tagliaferri and Fulvio Tessitore, 2 vols. (Naples: Giannini, 2007), 2:468. 24. Roberto Esposito, Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 133.

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be reconnected to patria (the motherland endows science with its “physiognomy,” De Sanctis avers) and, ultimately, to the patriotism of the single individual, a dynamic passion that spreads to a larger community, abetting the formation of a nation.25 We shall eventually see how the History was conceived as a limiting work, in these terms, meant to reconnect early personal stirrings and ideas to a programmatic patriotism in De Sanctis’s own work. For now, it behooves us to consider De Sanctis’s personal homecoming as an intellectual: how he grappled with or made sense of a destiny, a career, that was shared equally between scholarly (which for him meant pedagogical) and political pursuits, and that spanned many decades and made him into a living, albeit debated, legend. His own concerted effort to “recall youth” despite his achieved wisdom came to fruition, posthumously, in an autobiography that he dictated, blind, from his deathbed to his niece Agnese between 1881 and 1882. Appropriately, it was titled La giovinezza (Youth) by its compilers because (like Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity) it was left unfinished (or open-­ended) and covered that portion of his life that was unaccounted for by the extant literary corpus: his childhood and his early adult years as a schoolteacher. It is a life story devoted to the recovery of the existential etiology of his intellectual path, a task that had been defined and perfected by Vico, who authored a similar commissioned autobiography in 1725 and whom De Sanctis drew inspiration from, claiming Vico as his spiritual companion. La giovinezza, a text usually and at best ransacked for some amusing anecdote, merits closer examination for it offers a key to, or rather the mode by which to comprehend, De Sanctis’s other works. That mode is a historiographical narrativity that the reader is asked to sustain, collaboratively, when the story, strictly speaking, leaves off and merges with the career of its protagonist.26 In view of the manifesto “Science and Life,” De Sanctis’s La giovinezza acquires the features of a personal, purpose-­endowing check or restraint on De Sanctis’s corpus, at once a return to youthful intentions after the crowning feat of  his scientific adulthood, the History, and an opportunity for author and 25. De Sanctis, “La scienza e la vita,” 336: “La scienza non può germogliare senza una patria, che le dà la sua fisionomia e la sua originalità. E là dove cresce bastarda e presa ad imprestito, non ha fisionomia, e rimane fuori di noi, non opera in noi, non riscalda il cervello.” 26. For an introduction to De Sanctis’s autobiography, see Rossana Esposito, “Il realismo nell’autobiografia di F. De Sanctis” in De Sanctis e il realismo, 2 vols. (Naples: Giannini, 1978), 1:709–­17. See also Matteo Palumbo, “Tempo del soggetto e tempo della storia nella ‘Giovinezza’ di Francesco De Sanctis,” in L’occhio e la memoria. Miscellanea di studi in onore di Natale Tedesco (Caltanissetta: Sciascia, 2004), 347–­55.

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reader alike to partake of a Vichian experiment: to evaluate, or, if necessary, restore, congruence between scholarly achievement and originally moving passions and first intentions. Not unexpectedly, De Sanctis, like Vico, introduces his youthful self as a predestined scholar. La giovinezza introduces us to a young Francesco running in the streets of  the Neapolitan province always with a volume in hand: “I fancied myself the most learned man in Italy, and I was barely fifteen. Certainly none of my peers had read as many books or knew as many things” (G, 14). De Sanctis points to his intellectually rebellious and independent disposition, for each book read in private was in reaction to the many untimely and corruptive reading assignments received in school. Again, like his model Vico, De Sanctis is mainly an autodidact. Before he even encounters Vico, he is intuitively applying the “order of studies” that Vico taught in his academic orations and in De nostri temporis studiorum ratione/On the Study Methods of Our Time, namely, that youth should read in conformance with the development of their faculties: honing memory and imagination first, critical and logical tools later. In Vico’s time, as in De Sanctis’s, this would have been advice opposite to that tendered by the Cartesian-­inflected pedagogy of the Jansenist group of Port-­Royal, a ratio studiorum, by Antoine Arnauld (1612–­94) and Pierre Nicole (1625–­95), whose nefarious effects De Sanctis apparently wards off by reading the illustrated pedagogy proffered in The Adventures of Telemachus by the anti-­Jansenist François Fénelon (1651–­1715). Impressed from an early age by what he defines as the “fantastic part of history” and “naturally inclined to daydreaming” (“avevo una inclinazione naturale al rêve”), he sees the histories as “animated by living people” whose voice he “distinctively heard” beckoning him to join them until he inevitably gave in. “Those phantasms would generate other phantasms,” De Sanctis confesses, “and I would turn myself into the protagonist of  history, and I was always the king, emperor, or general, wielding great battles, skilled in my schemes and movements, and often this daydreaming would last many days” (12). A concrete example of such daydreaming and the sought-­after perme­ ation between life and history—­which in this case is literary history—­arrives in one of the two very short chapters that immediately follow this admission, and which are dedicated to his relationship with women, specifically his aunt and, especially, his “first love,” his older sister Genoviefa, whom De Sanctis describes walking down the streets “with her bare and white arms” along the lines of Dante’s description of a demure Beatrice strolling the streets of Florence in the Vita nova. As it happens, De Sanctis’s contemplation, like Dante’s,

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is disrupted by earthshaking news of the premature death of his sister, at age nineteen: These first feminine appearances, these little angels who upon just having toasted to life return to the sky laughing and joyful, are abundant in the human imagination. Genoviefa was my first woman, observed from afar through the mediation of literature [ . . . ]. This little and beloved dead girl would then always come to my mind when I was presented with some new poetic darling. I beheld and understood Beatrice through Genoviefa [ . . . ]. (G, 21)

But what exactly is De Sanctis understanding? The message of this passage and its momentous location in the autobiography is best deciphered by turning to De Sanctis’s drafts for a never completed monograph on Dante. Here, De Sanctis, through a comparative reading of the Vita nova and the Convivio, sees Dante’s Beatrice as the symbol of a burgeoning science, and therefore conceives of his love for his dead sister as a cornerstone of his acquisition of wisdom. Who has not endured the death of a beloved one? De Sanctis asks in his lectures on Dante. And what happens to that physical form and the ideal it represented for us? Erotic love, De Sanctis avows, trains us for the ideal love we have for the “five moving words of civilization,” which are “religion, science, freedom, motherland, and humanity.”27 When young men immolate themselves for liberty, is this for them “an abstract idea”? “No: it is a wonderful woman, with whom they once fell in love, for whom they lived, and for whom they learned how to die.”28 Citing Dante’s appreciation of his “donna gentile,” who by Dante’s own admission inspired him to learn at the school of religion and philosophy, De Sanctis identifies love as the guiding motion toward a science that transcends mere speculation and acquires concreteness: Poetry is not allegory, but a transfiguration, in which the old is contained in the new. It is the very same story, if grasped intimately, a lofty kind of poetry, a living poetry. And what else is the history of  humanity if not a restless transition from one form to another, of old and exhausted forms into young and lively forms, which are increasingly less corporeal and constantly pointing toward 27. Francesco De Sanctis, “Corso torinese sopra Dante,” in Lezioni e saggi su Dante, ed. Sergio Romagnoli, vol. 5 of De Sanctis’s Opere (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 140. 28. De Sanctis, “Corso torinese sopra Dante,” 141.

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their divine type? And what else is the history of society if not a regulated progress from imagination to reason [dalla fantasia alla ragione], from barbarism to civilization [dalle barbarie alla civiltà], from the word to the idea, from the symbol to thought, from Beatrice the woman to Beatrice the ideal?29

A dead Beatrice is a symbol of science, but contrary to the medieval imagination, and thus to Dante’s own metaphysical encrustation, not abstract but concrete, steeped in the memory of past feelings and passions. De Sanctis elaborates on the passage just cited in his History. He writes that in Beatrice’s death, “we have the feeling, clear and alive, of the unity of life, founded on the unity of thought with act, or, as we should put it today, of the ideal with the real” (HIL, 1:67). What Dante offered, and what De Sanctis, too, is after, following in Dante’s footsteps, is not “science” but “wisdom,” “or, in other words the management of life”—­a discourse in which “to understand” and “to do” are interchangeable (65). By the time Francesco is in his teens and has moved past his first Dantesque or Petrarchan loves, the South of Italy, Naples in particular, is witnessing the “golden age of free schooling”: Any man of some knowledge [including his own uncle Carlo] would begin his career by opening a school. Seminars were schools of Latin and philosophy. Government schools were entrusted to monks. The form of teaching was still scholastic. Rhetoric and philosophy were written in that conventional Latin that pertained to scholastics. Sciences were neglected, and the same goes for the national language. (G, 25)

Indeed, there was a possibility that this kind of schooling might have gotten the better of De Sanctis; at one point his head spun with “arguments, theorems, problems, scholia and corollaries” and with “syllogisms, enthymemes, and dilemmas,” all of which together turned him into a skilled disputer as he went about totally obsessed by questions about God and the immortality of the soul (26). At age sixteen, De Sanctis, increasingly disgruntled with the nominalism of his day (schooling was devoted more “to forms than things and one focused more on learning words and argumentations than the things to which they referred”), began feeling the urge for “something new” (G, 31). This is how, in his account, he landed at the school of Basilio Puoti (1782–­1847), who was without 29. De Sanctis, “Corso torinese sopra Dante,” 145.

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question the greatest living influence on his education. But Puoti is not exactly what we might think of as cutting-­edge.30 Rather, he was the conservative leader of a movement, known as “Purism,” that was devoted to the study and distillation of the perfect language, through careful perusal of the thirteenth-­, fourteenth-­, and sixteenth-­century Italian literary canon (the fifteenth century was neglected because in the hands of the Latinate humanists!). This movement sought to detect and distinguish between “poetic,” “commonplace,” “vulgar,” “overused,” and “archaic” words, and, most important, to purge the Italian language of any form of “Gallicism” ( francesismo) and to resist French influence in matters of style and vocabulary. Complying with this way of thinking, De Sanctis swiftly ascended the social ladder of Puoti’s school, first joining an “elect” group in that school and later, after surpassing them, too, earning the title of “the Grammarian,” as his admiring peers dubbed him out of respect (50). Just as De Sanctis begins to distinguish himself, he comes to yet another turning point, instigated this time by the debilitating illness (and eventual death) of his uncle Carlo, a man who served as his role model. De Sanctis, just eighteen years old and in need of income, was forced to take over his uncle’s school (of the traditional kind he disliked) and manage it every morning, “spending the day explaining grammar and rhetoric books and Latin and Greek authors,” while continuing his studies with Puoti in the evening, albeit with equal ambivalence: “Disenchanted by the study of words, I began yearning for the study of things” (G, 57). The transition into adulthood that followed amounted to a conversion, and De Sanctis narrates it in three chapters—­ “Crisis,” “Solitude,” “Cholera”—­mirroring Augustine’s classic example in the Confessions. (We cannot fail to notice that Augustine, too, was a disenchanted teacher of rhetoric.) At a time of religious and spiritual crisis, De Sanctis experiences the illness and death of his uncle, which goads his conversion along. He lives through the crisis with the help of an intimate friend with a speaking name, who in this case was Enrico Amante (1816–­83), a future senator of the kingdom of Italy, but more pertinently a fervent lover of Giambattista Vico. This is the first mention of Vico, and Amante swears by this philosopher and cherishes him for his devotion to Italy and to Roman Latinity in works such as De antiquissima italorum sapientia/The Most Ancient Wisdom of Italians and for his promotion of Italy’s resurgence in the contemporary world.31 It is 30. For a rare sustained study of Neapolitan “Purism,” see Antonio Vinciguerra, Purismo e antipurismo a Napoli nell’Ottocento (Florence: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2015). 31. Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language, trans. L. M. Palmer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

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Amante who introduces De Sanctis to Vico, and, what is more important, it is apparently Amante’s Vichism that introduces De Sanctis to “moral greatness” and “passionate patriotism” (73). A reader of Augustine might expect De Sanctis at this juncture to tolle lege—­in other words, to pick up a book and read a passage at random, just as Augustine did, allowing that passage of scripture to trigger his conversion. We might expect De Sanctis to pick up a text by Vico, perhaps the New Science, and allow a passage there to convey him toward the right intellectual and scholarly mission. But Francesco, despite his admiration for his friend, is no antiquarian and no Latinist zealot; he has no taste for “Vico’s cast-­iron language,” clearly not having perused the New Science yet, and his allegiance at this time is still wholly for poetry and sentiments. His calling will come not from a book but from other, living sources. It is at this point that De Sanctis’s narrative takes an abrupt shift: One evening, [Puoti] announced that Giacomo Leopardi would pay us a visit: he briefly praised his language and his verses. When the day came, there was great expectation. [Puoti] was correcting us on a translation we made of Cornelius Nepos, but we were all distracted; all we did was glance at the door. And, behold, here came the count Giacomo Leopardi. We all jumped to our feet, while [Puoti] moved to greet him. The count thanked us and entreated us to continue with our studies. All eyes were on him. That giant [colosso] of our imagination came off at first glance as paltry. Not only did he appear a man like any other, but less so, too. In that expressionless gaunt face all of life had concentrated itself in the sweetness of his smile. One of the “senior” students began reading one of his works. [Puoti] questioned many of us, and each spoke his mind. All of a sudden he turned towards me: “And you, De Sanctis, what is your opinion?” (G, 74–­75)

Francesco rises to the occasion and speaks confidently for over half an hour, going so far as to correct Leopardi on the use of a split infinitive. It is at this moment that Leopardi, sealing the deal on this young scholar’s fate, commends De Sanctis, who in his opinion is very “predisposed” to literary criticism. To appreciate its implicit allegory, we should read the anecdote about Leo­ pardi’s visit in light of the following chapter, which relates in novelistic language the devastating bout of cholera that struck the province of Naples at that time, amounting to what was, in effect, a year zero for the city and for De Sanctis. “Public life was suspended; schools, and shops were deserted,” including Puoti’s seminar:

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The gullible spoke about miraculous cures, but the epidemic carried on so violently leaving little time for charlatanry. There was no dearth of processions, exhibitions of  Saints and Marys, invocations, prayers, and atonements; but the fear of contagion damped religious zeal. Eventually, as to no longer wear out people’s souls, anything spectacular was done away with, this goes for bells, monks’ congregations, priests and organizations of Christian brothers and the rest, which did little to quell fear and, rather, increased the squalor. There were nighttime burials so buzzed about in the morning that the city would be overcome with renewed terror. [ . . . ] I perceived things not as they actually were, but as I wished them to be according to my mental disposition. Those evils, grave in and of themselves, were inadequate to my literary imagination, and I would treat and twist some trivial facts I would hear of, as if they were pages from a novel. [ . . . ] Everyone took notice, many without begrudging me, and sometimes they would laugh at my laugh and would refer to me as the poet. (G, 78–­79)

De Sanctis inhabits a quixotic inner space. The effect of his literary alienation is that he no longer draws a boundary between a living world turned illusory or fictional by the onset of plague and a literary canon that comes to life, as it does with Leopardi’s visit. (One might note in passing that Puoti was given to rewarding his students with the reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron, an exemplary plague narrative!). He experiences an abrupt altering of perspective, with traumatic consequences. Thus De Sanctis’s La giovinezza develops like an autobiographical Bildungsroman with Vichian overtones. In this story, coming of age is specifically a transition from an age of imagination to one of reason. Leopardi is a colosso, a Vichian giant before he is made flesh, in an epiphany that is all too human, that amounts to inverted Euhemerism, the rationalization of an innate mythopoetic attitude. But who, then, is Leopardi? Is he the living man who once paid Puoti a visit, or is he a giant of the Italian literary canon, next to Dante? “I adored him [ . . . ] since my early youth [ . . . ]. [A]nd I feel almost as if  I were his friend,” De Sanctis says of Leopardi, in whom “thought is not something abstract, and extrinsic to life, but is concrete as words and as powerful as action [ . . . ] from which eloquent truth is born.”32 It is somewhat surprising, then, that De Sanctis makes only brief mention of Leopardi in the final pages of the History as a poetic thinker whose skepticism “heralds the end of [ . . . ] theology 32. Francesco De Sanctis, “Epistolario di Giacomo Leopardi,” in Leopardi, ed. Carlo Muscetta and Antonia Perna, vol. 13 of De Sanctis’s Opere (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), 394–­95.

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and metaphysics.” An emblematic figure of the “laborious transition which was called the ‘nineteenth century,’ ” Leopardi is the advocate of an Augustinian withdrawal into and “exploration of one’s own soul,” itself a “renovation” whose instrument is “criticism,” the literary pendant of political “socialism” and scientific “positivism,” and an attitude borne out in the intellectual concreteness of Machiavelli, Galileo, and Vico (HIL, 2:943–­44). De Sanctis states in his conclusion that in each of these thinkers separately, and now finally universally, “[t]he idea is no longer above and detached from the content, the content no longer stands out from the form.” Rather, [t]here is one thing existing and one thing only—­the Alive [il vivente]. From the womb of idealism is born realism in science, in art, in history. The fantastic, the mystical, the metaphysical, and the rhetorical are vanishing at last. The new literature, reconstructed now in the consciousness, freed now from every wrapping whether classical or romantic, the echo now of the life of the day both national and universal, as philosophy, art, history, and criticism—­intent on making its content increasingly realistic—­not only is called but definitely is “modern literature.” (HIL, 2:945)

The “criticism” Leopardi advances in the footsteps of his notable Italian predecessors vanquishes “ontologism,” a mindset devoted to the cult of form as rendered rhetorically in writing. By the end of the History it is Petrarchism or “Purism” that is in decline at last, as “investigation” overcomes “postulation,” overcoming, too, De Sanctis’s History in the process, for among the casualties of this transformation are “philosophical and literary synthesis,” as “their place is being taken by the humble and patient monographs” (2:945). In the last paragraph of the History, De Sanctis calls for a new monographic age in the realm of criticism through an appeal to Leopardi: “Let us look into our hearts, as Leopardi bids us in his parting message; let us look into our customs, ideas, and prejudices, our qualities both good and bad; let us seize on this modern world and make it our own, by studying, assimilating, and transforming it” (2:946–­47). In light of this announcement, De Sanctis’s scant (if momentous) use of Leopardi in the History is no longer surprising. If De Sanctis had had his way, in fact, the History, published in two dense volumes, would have been followed by two complementary monographs of the kind he mentions here; but the project was turned down by the publisher. One of these sketched monographs, of course, was dedicated to Leopardi (the other to Alessandro Manzoni), which is fortunate for us, because it exemplifies the postmetaphysical

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and post-­Petrarchan method that De Sanctis would have adopted, extant in its rough form. De Sanctis describes the critical method to be advanced in the monographic study of an author as a formal psychologism, the study not of the living man per se but of his mind as it is textually objectified. In this he follows the model of his own Studio su Giacomo Leopardi/Study on Giacomo Leopardi, which was the only work besides his autobiography that De Sanctis left unfinished and a work that he defined as a racconto (a story, tale, or narrative). This psychologism is a method that De Sanctis wants applied to himself, as the development of Leopardi’s life and work unfolds chronologically and in striking similarity to De Sanctis’s own. It is clear that De Sanctis feels an empathic affinity with Leopardi: the experience of Leopardi as an immature youth is marked by mistakes much like those of his reader. Leopardi is a “precocious” “grammarian” or “vir eruditissimus” whose early works are deeply “rhetorical” as he inhabits the “world of the dead” that was his personal library. Furthermore, the young Leopardi would express himself “halfway in French” until his “literary conversion” came about—­a conversion, it should be noted, in which his old and new selves do not collide irreconcilably but rather accrue on each other organically.33 De Sanctis takes care to specify that he is not indulging in so-­called “historical criticism,” a scholarly scrutinizing of  biographical details—­fashionable in his day—­for the purpose of determining the “year, month, and days, as it were, of psychological facts.” De Sanctis’s contemporaries mistake “occurrences” for actual “evolutions,” therefore neglecting their “preparation” and their “continuity” with antecedents.34 These are the symptoms that De Sanctis wants to lay bare through psychological criticism of what is immanent, or that which concerns itself uniquely with what emerges in writing. Leopardi’s “conversion” is to be sought for in his “pedantic” phase and, most successfully, in what De Sanctis defines as the “psychometric” paratexts of an author, such as letters’ heads and codas.35 In De Sanctis’s psychological reading Leopardi emerges as a casualty of the malady investigated by Vico in On the Study Methods of Our Times, the “disorder” of studies, as it were. “Precocious studies kill,” and Leopardi’s 33. Francesco De Sanctis, “Studio su Giacomo Leopardi,” in Leopardi, 51–­54. See also Paolo Botti, “Tra ‘La Giovinezza’ e lo ‘Studio.’ Il leopardismo autobiografico di De Sanctis,” in Iermano and Sabbatino, eds., La nuova scienza come rinascita dell’identità nazionale, 225–­43. 34. De Sanctis, “Studio su Giacomo Leopardi,” 53. 35. De Sanctis, “Studio su Giacomo Leopardi,” 77.

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spirit grows disproportionately to his famously hunched body. But Leopardi’s greatest illness, De Sanctis shows in a careful interpretation of his early poetic production, is Petrarchism: He imitated Petrarch, and he wanted to imitate Dante, too. Purist and imitator in prose; a Purist and imitator in verse: identification of studies and taste. [ . . . ] We all in our early youth have gone through the phase of prosaic and poetic Purism. This youngster follows Dante in the structure, and one feels the presence of Petrarch in the superficiality of his Triumphs and in the distillation of phrases.36

Wholly dependent on “borrowed concepts,” “delivered in Petrarchan forms,” the young Leopardi is an “idyllic” shadow with no personality or character, though he attains both in his mature poetry: Those who judge works of art with archaeological inclination will say immediately: Behold, you find here stuff of the Platonic and Petrarchan kind. [ . . . ] But who could, because of this, mistake this poem with the infinite Petrarchan imitations? Platonic and Petrarchan stuff, too, enter into the history of Leopardi’s spirit, of he who was formed by studies. [ . . . ] But now Leopardi is a man. He has acquired his personality and his originality.37

Coming into one’s own, poetically and morally, is an emancipation from Petrarch and an overcoming of puristic inclinations. Through Leopardi, De Sanctis uses his autobiography to show himself going through the same process. And so, to resume with De Sanctis’s autobiography, cholera forces Francesco, against his wishes, to make a final return to his origins—­a perilous journey among cadavers and plague walkers to his hometown, a “new Gerusalem,” and a long-­estranged mother. It is during this pilgrimage to the ends of the earth that Francesco first comes to terms with the reality of the world that surrounds him: the “back and forth of hearses, the whispered prayers [ . . . ] alerted me to what cholera actually was. I cuddled up with myself, stopped my mouth, held my nose, as if to save myself from contagion” (G, 81–­82). De Sanctis is primed for conversion and ready to leave his childhood behind, as we learn when he reaches his destination: 36. De Sanctis, “Studio su Giacomo Leopardi,” 90–­93. 37. De Sanctis, “Studio su Giacomo Leopardi,” 217–­18.

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In the morning mother coddled me. She unlatched the baby from her bosom, leaned her breast into me, laughing, as if to say: “Do you remember?” And she told me about many things, and I, standing next to the little bed [letticci­ uolo], would return in the intimate depths of my memory to certain long nights, when I would wake up screaming and with uproarious cries, and she would come running, hold me to herself, and while fondling me, say: “Don’t be afraid, mother is with you.” (84)

What “baby” could De Sanctis possibly be referring to? At the time, the youngest of De Sanctis’s siblings, Raffaele, was seven years old! Is the jaundiced and exhausted Francesco hallucinating? Is the elderly De Sanctis’s memory failing? Or do we cling too tightly to a matter-­of-­fact reading of his autobiography? Again, this perplexing passage makes more sense in light of the allegory it invokes, one that brings together Augustine and his fellow homines viatores Dante, Petrarch, and Vico, all of whom staged a pilgrim’s progress to a primordial source (one sought by Leopardi, too, albeit not in narrative terms) and embarked upon a journey to recompose a doubled self. Bringing himself into proximity with his own birth and conception, to a preverbal and barely recollectable past, De Sanctis effects an ultimate homecoming, a rejuvenation marked in the text by a disregard for Aristotelian unity of time and place that is not typical of his writing. After spending one night in his incubator-­like “letticciuolo,” in which De Sanctis, like Leopardi, shrinks to a size that is all too human, indeed, childlike, Francesco wakes to new life, as does the entire world. At dawn, Francesco returns to a Naples in which the epidemic is already subsiding and schools are reopening: “The novelty was the freshly printed edition of Giacomo Leopardi’s poetry. I went mad for it, always with that book in hand” (G, 85). But Francesco realizes that Leopardi’s canonization came at a price: “After a little while I came to know that the great poet had died [in Naples]. How, when, where, nobody knew.” But here is the point: “The imagination of the people, bashed by so many deaths, was little impressed by that mysterious death” (86). De Sanctis offers a gloss to this event when he qualifies Leopardi’s “morality” in his diachronic study of Leopardi’s work. While the intellect says that “love is illusion and that the only truth is death,” man replies, “And I love, and live, and want to live. The heart redoes the life that is destroyed by the intellect. This is why love and death are fraternal forces; one completes the other. Life wants to die. And death wants to live. Death is generated from life and from

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death life is reborn.”38 This is Leopardi’s realization, and this is why we need death, for it allows us to retrace our life but with a stronger awareness as to our guiding volition. “Leopardi’s death is my life,” De Sanctis seems to say, as his autobiography comes to a conclusion, and he sets out on a new intellectual course. Specifically, in light of the place De Sanctis reserved for him in the Italian literary canon, the death of Leopardi marks in Vichian terms the end of the age of imagination and of poetic wisdom, populated by arrogant and inflated giants, just as the (re)collection of Leopardi into a book signals a transition to scientism—­in this case to De Sanctis’s very own critica, a unique literary criticism that De Sanctis will strive to differentiate from philosophical thought, placing it in a middle earth between reason and myth. De Sanctis’s fantastic account of how he came into his own as a literary critic makes him a survivor, like Petrarch—­not just a posthumous reader of his self and works, but a reader who brings a corrective or critical or, better, youthful perspective. As early as 1868, when he was first conceiving his History, he offered an appraisal of his upbringing at the school of Puoti, in an autobiographical essay titled “The Last of the Purists.” Ostensibly a review of a book by his old classmate, Ferdinando Ranalli (1813–­94), this essay offered the first opportunity for an introspective journey that ends in self-­characterization. From the outset, De Sanctis makes clear that his friend’s book, which he admits does not interest him much as a reviewer, is an occasion for traveling back “many centuries” to a time when he and his peers were “full of sacred horror at anything foreign [  forestierume], and staunchly determined to be nothing but Italian in language, style, and thought.”39 Such resolve is reflected in the published essay itself, as De Sanctis, in plain view of the reader, corrects his own word choice and syntax along the way. De Sanctis’s contextualization here is intimately historical, that is, generational, as he goes on to identify moments in his life with turning points in the Risorgimento: And [traveling in mind] all the way back, this is how I find myself at the dawn of the third decade of this century, when the men of 1821 [marking the first uprisings against Neapolitan monarchy] were already a passing generation, and we, coming up, youngsters between fifteen and twenty years of age, the new generation, the predestined of 1848 and 1860 [the main ages of revolutions against Austrian invasions]. Thousands of youngsters poured in every year from the 38. De Sanctis, “Studio su Giacomo Leopardi,” 272. 39. Giacomo Leopardi, “L’ultimo dei Puristi” in G, 222.

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province into Naples; they were called the “students” or even the “hicks” [calabresi]. They came from the seminaries, carried along with them as trophies the books learned by heart [ . . . ]. Naples was the city of sun, the beacon that was to guide them to glory, progress. [ . . . ] Those were times of suspicion: any freedom of thought was impossible; any literary or scientific movement obstructed; progress had taken refuge in that humble marquee: “School of the Italian Language of the Marquis Puoti.”40

De Sanctis distrusts sudden and violent revolutions and views as such any movement marked by a too profound disconnect between the cultural achievements of the few and the ignorance of the many. “Purism,” a term we first saw applied to Petrarch’s work and his influence, is not only an existential phase of sorts, as De Sanctis had explained when describing Leopardi’s linguistic fastidiousness, but a marked historical phase. It clearly defines a threshold too often unconsciously overstepped: it has allowed his generation to “find a past to fight against” and “a future to conquer.” This is an ideal(istic) transition finely scanned, one that De Sanctis wishes to render concretely as a relay between educational forms. “Purism,” due to the pedagogically collaborative setting in which it occurred, and thanks to Puoti, “amounted to the first act in the great drama accomplished in 1860 [with the unification of Italy], the first sign of  life that a new generation gave out as it turned its back on seminaries.”41 To this point we have followed De Sanctis’s rhetorical existence as he himself grasped it in retrospect. What we have recovered in the process are strong intertextual cross-­references between his autobiographical works, essays, literary sources, and lived life. It is a web of interconnections that, taken together, tell a story of a particular Italian intellectual penchant or forma mentis—­one that De Sanctis characterized in autobiographical terms as a Purism whose first representative was Petrarch and the last, Puoti, and, by extension, De Sanctis himself. Such a characterization connects Petrarch and De Sanctis as the alpha and omega of the Italian modern literary canon while burdening De Sanctis, the best and foremost student of Puoti, with the duty and responsibility of  broaching a new beginning—­through self-­immolation, if necessary. And yet, let us not forget De Sanctis’s advice: things do not happen all at once, they evolve. Likewise, we would be remiss if we believed that his reading was simply a retrospective imposition on an otherwise uncohesive corpus. To the contrary, the puristic shame—­and the mission to overcome it—­was present 40. Leopardi, “L’ultimo dei Puristi,” 222. 41. Leopardi, “L’ultimo dei Puristi,” 224.

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from the start, or at least from the first moment of independence, which in De Sanctis’s case corresponds to the opening of his own school. Thus, to the natural continuation of his autobiography, to his lecture notes—­seldom read, seldom integrated—­we now turn.

“Going to the people”: Literary Criticism as Moral Philosophy As De Sanctis tells it, the account of his giovinezza or youth tapers off before a substantial publication signals his official entry into the realm of academia. Intentionally or not, we can never know, he repeatedly defers the autobiography’s (open) ending by devoting distinct, successive chapters to “grammar,” “language,” “style,” “rhetoric,” “lyric poetry,” and “literary genres”—­the topics of the courses he taught at his “school of  Vico Bisi,” as it was known from its location. Here, according to a semi-­authorized account by one of his students, De Sanctis taught from 1839 to 1848 and went from being perceived as a stand­in for Puoti to being Puoti’s “rebellious student” and eventually the founder of “the new Italian critical school,” a school based on rejecting “empty forms” and “pedantry” and taking a renewed look at the close association between “word and thought.” Furthermore, to the shocked excitement of bystanders, a young De Sanctis dared to place an almost blasphemous emphasis on “propriety,” or language’s ability to adhere to its signified content, over “purity,” the exclusive concern of literary autochthony.42 It would seem that when De Sanctis set out to dictate the final chapters of his autobiography at the very end of his life, he harbored doubts about whether the original intentions behind his intellectual mission would be remembered in posterity: A synopsis of those classes [De Sanctis’s course topics] came to my attention in the midst of my many scribblings, since it was my custom to note in writing the most important ideas of my lectures. That synopsis appeared to me scant and coarse. I had the habit of foraging for those concepts within me, and meditating on them for a long time, and then, while I spoke, they would emerge again, but more vividly and powerfully. That synopsis appeared to me like my corpse. 42. I gather here impressions scattered in Nicola Gaetani-­Tamburini, “Francesco De Sanctis. Cenno biografico,” in G, 485–­99. For a detailed survey of Neapolitan academic life at the time of De Sanctis, see Luigi Russo, Francesco De Sanctis e la cultura napoletana (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1983).

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Who will restore the living man to me? Who will hand me such a part of myself [ . . . ]? All of that is dead in my spirit, and I cannot revive it. Dead, too, are those analyses and those criticisms, a collaboration by which youth and teacher would enter into spiritual communion, emitting sparks in their collision. What are recollections good for? The best part of us dies, and there is no memory that can revive it. (G, 141–­42)

What reminiscence cannot do, or can only partially accomplish, philology and archival excavation can. In the thick volumes that now collect De Sanctis’s and his students’ many notes, we have not only an opportunity to scrutinize De Sanctis’s early design but also the ability to recover his courses fully and to flesh out the reform that they attempted—­achieving the paligenetic crossing from dead corpse to living corpus that De Sanctis felt, with despair, was not possible. Indeed, what we discover is that once De Sanctis had gained some confidence, he brought about a new ratio studiorum, a rebirth in studies and pedagogy. Like any other rebirth, it began with a rejection of the present—­in De Sanctis’s case, the Jansenist-­inflected method in which he was raised. From the beginning—­as early as his first extant lecture on grammar, a discipline whose “subject” is “thought,” he says—­it seems clear that the elephant in the room is the rationalist account of language put forth by Antoine Arnauld and the Port-­Royalists, who argue that thought is prior to language, and thus words are merely external and conventional signs of independent and self-­evident mental states, following the Cartesian mind-­body dualism and Descartes’s distrust of sensory experiences and passions.43 De Sanctis objected to Cartesian semantics for its lack of moral value. He felt that by positing logic as the only foundation of language and defining human thought narrowly as “conceiving,” “judging,” and “reasoning,” Jansenism omitted the best part of intelligence—­namely, “imagination” and “phantasy”—­ and volontà, or “will,” too.44 De Sanctis decries the analysis of language as 43. A useful contextualization of and commentary on Port-­Royal pedagogy is offered in Maria Tsiapera and Garon Wheeler, The Port-­Royal Grammar: Sources and Influences (Münster: Nodus, 1993). 44. Francesco De Sanctis, “Lezioni di Grammatica (1846–­47),” in Attilio Marinari, ed., Purismo, illuminismo, storicismo, 2 vols., vols. 2 and 3 of De Sanctis’s Opere (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 1:326. For the text De Sanctis is presumably reacting to, see Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot, The Port-­Royal Grammar, ed. and trans. Jacques Rieux and Bernard E. Rollin (The Hague: Mouton, 1975).

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something inert rather than as something alive, as a performative speech act, in modern terms. In his view, the solitaires, as the Port-­Royalists were also significantly known, fail to see the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of language that grants utterances intentional significance as a socially valid verbal action: “Because man is not alone but always related to other men.”45 In their purely logical framework, where communication is secondary at best, any deviation from a preestablished norm simply adds itself to an infinite number of “irregularities.” In reaction, De Sanctis conceives of a new historiographical/educational goal: [W]e will try to harmonize practice and science, and while I do not venture to say that we will solve every question, I will offer my opinion and will seek as much as possible a course opposite to the one followed thus far. Grammar is the expression of thought; therefore, we will not start with the syllables to move on to letters, words, and sentences as hitherto done, nor will we disconnect etymology from syntax, but we will start from the first emergence of our thought. Men, when confronted with the need to express thought, always in the same way went from a mute or corporal language, which was insufficient for their needs, to written and spoken language. At first, speaking was imitative and writing pictorial, as attested by onomatopoeia and the imitative words of primitive languages and by Mexican drawings carved in trees [ . . . ]. [But] since it was not possible to give shape to moral things [ . . . ], so came metaphoric language, and symbolic or hieroglyphic writing, as in Egypt.46

De Sanctis’s grammar lectures begin with a provocation, a return to the first emergence of language, a move that raises grammar to a powerful, perhaps necessary, tool in the study “of man in his entirety and of his social conditions,” conditions that were ever-­changing and that only at a very advanced stage crystallized in the analytic language of the “philosophers,” and therefore an abstraction—­or, in De Sanctis’s own words, a “utopia,” which is what an end goal detached from its development and history necessarily is.47 De Sanctis reaches over “clear” and “distinct” ideas, seeking the whole story, a prehistory of passions. “Criticism is mere pedantry [ . . . ], when it is

45. Francesco De Sanctis, “Quadernetto di grammatica (1847–­8),” in Marinari, ed., Purismo, illuminismo, storicismo, 1:403. 46. De Sanctis, “Lezioni di Grammatica (1846–­47),” 1:326–­27. 47. De Sanctis, “Quadernetto di grammatica (1847–­8),” 1:404.

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not founded [ . . . ] on the ability to feel,” he states elsewhere in his lectures.48 We gain access to these passions only by “transporting ourselves with our minds to primitive people” and to their “poetic reasoning,” for the ancient languages were more “robust” and “energetic” before imagination lost out to intelligence over the course of time. The method will vary accordingly. Thus, if “man first perceives things as a whole, only to later, through cold observation, distinguish the parts,” De Sanctis will proceed by synthesis, looping back when French grammars take off at the end of his course.49 We can easily recognize Giambattista Vico as the main if not sole source of inspiration for De Sanctis’s reform; De Sanctis paraphrases and adapts passages from the New Science and from On the Study Methods, the latter an unsuccessful precursor to his attempt to reform Cartesian-­styled education.50 Parting from Puoti at the end of  “The Last of the Purists,” De Sanctis writes that a new epoch in his youth had been heralded by forays into foreign literature under Vico’s supervision: Literature could not avoid this scientific renewal. [ . . . ] One supplemented with the study of foreign literatures, principally German and English, and one immediately favored Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Victor Hugo. [ . . . ] The reading of Schlegel radically changed among us the literary taste: a higher form of criticism emerged, new horizons opened to youth. So came Cousin, and then Hegel. What a revolution in just a few years! Its symbol was Vico reborn, publicly interpreted by Prof. Amante, read, admired, everywhere cited. (G, 243) 48. Francesco De Sanctis, “Lingua e stile (1840–­1841),” in Marinari, ed., Purismo, illumin­ ismo, storicismo, 1:470. See the opening to Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logic or the Art of Thinking, trans. Jill Vance Buroker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5: “Nothing is more praiseworthy than good sense and mental accuracy in discerning the true and the false. All the other mental qualities have limited uses, but an exact reason is generally useful in all aspects and all walks of life. It is difficult to distinguish truth from error not only in the sciences, but also in the majority of subjects people discuss and affairs they conduct. There are different routes practically everywhere, some true, others false. It is up to reason to choose among them. Those who choose well are those who are mentally acute; those who take the wrong path have faulty minds. This is the first and most important difference we can note in the qualities of people’s minds.” 49. De Sanctis, “Quadernetto di grammatica (1847–­8),” 1:405. 50. On Vico’s influence on the young De Sanctis’s courses, see Angela Borghesi, L’officina del metodo. Le lezioni del giovane De Sanctis (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1999). See also Walter Binni, Critici e poeti dal Cinquecento al Novecento (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969), chap. 3; and Paola Luciani, L’ “Estetica Applicata” di Francesco De Sanctis. Quaderni napoletani e lezioni torinesi (Florence: Olschki, 1983).

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At the time of Leopardi’s visit to the school of Puoti, as we have seen, De Sanctis, although he admired his friend Amante, was not yet ready to make Vico a standard for his intellectual progress. However, it appears that by the time he came into his own as a teacher and had shared living quarters with Amante for a while, he accepted Vico not only as a theoretical inspiration but also as a concrete precedent. If Vico had begun to formulate an epistemological alternative to Descartes, De Sanctis would take that initiative further, advancing Vico’s legacy in the realm of education, and in the process becoming a vehicle for Vico’s philosophy in a way that was similar to what Arnauld had been for Descartes. It is not for us to say whether De Sanctis may have set his general aims too high. To be sure, the challenge was formidable: to take on Purism, which De Sanctis conceded had been a necessary tool for Italian redemption from the foreigner, and transform it (outright rejection was not in order), without dampening, but rather strengthening and advancing, patriotic feelings for a new era. From reading De Sanctis we can gather that Puoti’s “relentless hatred for Gallicisms” might have been inspired by Vico, too. “According to [Puoti],” De Sanctis recollects, “the French man understands and thinks differently than the Italian man, hence the difference in writing between the two people” (G, 236). This view had famously been put forth by the Jesuit and grammarian Dominique Bouhours (1628–­1702), who gave the advantage to the French. Vico joined and extended the debate in an exhilarating passage in On the Study Methods of Our Time, a passage that Puoti’s student certainly read with secret delight, in which he stood the axiom on its head: “[G]enius is a product of  language, not language of genius.”51 He saw language as the only means by which 51. Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 40: “While we Italians praise our orators for fluency, lucidity, and eloquence, the French praise theirs for reasoning truly. Whenever the French wish to designate the mental faculty by which we rapidly, aptly, and felicitously couple things which stand apart, they call it esprit, and are inclined to view as a naive, simple trick what we consider as forceful power of combination; their minds, characterized by exceeding penetration, do not excel in synthetic power, but in piercing subtlety of reasoning. Consequently, if there is any truth in this statement, which is the theme of a famous debate, ‘genius is a product of language, not language of genius,’ we must recognize that the French are the only people who, thanks to the subtlety of their language, were able to invent the new philosophical criticism which seems so thoroughly intellectualistic, and analytical geometry, by which the subject matter of mathematics is, as far as possible, stripped of all concrete, figural elements; and reduced to pure rationality. The French are in the habit of praising the kind of eloquence which characterizes their language, i.e., an eloquence characterized by great fidelity to truth and subtlety, as well as by its notable

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to access thought, thus putting language first and, in the process, vindicating the Italian penchant for linguistic creativity (that is, poetry or metaphoric language) versus French “dull” analysis (that is, philosophy). I would argue, however, that De Sanctis’s quarrel with what he defined as “false purism,” the single-­minded desire to shield the Italian language from contamination, was based on a more careful reading of Vico, and furthermore that, even at this early stage, his reading was informed by political interpretations of Vico put forward by Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–­1823), another great, connecting figure between the generations of Neapolitan intellectuals that included Vico and Puoti and De Sanctis.52 Cuoco’s Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799 (1801) is arguably the first comprehensive work of applied Vichism, for in it Cuoco employs Vico, mostly indirectly, to plumb the reasons why southern Italy failed to follow in France’s footsteps when it attempted its own historical rebirth into modernity. Famously, Cuoco concluded that in Naples there coexisted “two peoples,” the learned and the masses, whose passions and intentions had proven to be irreconcilable.53 deductive order. We Italians, instead, are endowed with a language which constantly evokes images. We stand far above other nations by our achievements in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. Our language, thanks to its perpetual dynamism, forces the attention of the listeners by means of metaphorical expressions, and prompts it to move back and forth between ideas which are far apart.” On the “famous debate” referred to by Vico, see Paola Gambarota, Irresistible Signs: The Genius of Language and Italian National Identity (Toronto: University of  Toronto Press, 2011), 100 and following. 52. On Cuoco and the Risorgimento, see OR, chap. 1, especially 38–­47; and Fulvio Tessitore, Da Cuoco a De Sanctis. Studi sulla filosofia napoletana nel primo Ottocento (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1988). 53. Vincenzo Cuoco, Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, trans. David Gibbons (Toronto: University of  Toronto Press, 2014), 91: “Our revolution was a passive revolution, and the only way for it to be successful would have been to win over popular opinion. But the patriots and the people did not hold the same views: they had different ideas, different customs, and even different languages. The admiration for foreigners, which had slowed down our culture at the time of the king, now formed the greatest obstacle to the establishment of liberty at the birth of our republic. The Neapolitan nation was split into two peoples, separated by two centuries in terms of history and two degrees in terms of climate. As the cultured part of the nation had been formed on the basis of foreign models, its culture was different from the one that the nation as a whole needed, one that could come about only through the development of our own faculties. Some had become French, others British; and those that stayed Neapolitan—­ most of the people—­were as yet uncultured. Thus the culture of the few had not benefitted the nation as a whole; which, in turn, virtually despised a culture that was not beneficial to it and which it did not understand.”

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Cuoco followed this diagnosis with a program that informed the best part of the Risorgimento. Rather than imitate neighboring countries and pursue an always premature revolution in the trenches, Italy was to embrace its “passive revolution,” a much slower, wholly intellectual, and unarmed attempt to reconcile the higher and lower tiers of society. Ultimately, his suggestion amounted to a vast and transgenerational plan intended to advance the education of the masses while forcing intellectuals to put their philosophical notions to the test of common sense and engage in a process of self-­understanding.54 Perhaps in the beginning the young De Sanctis and his students entertained the ambitious idea that attacking Jansenism would make De Sanctis the “man who would phase out the French and irradiate Italy with a new science,” yet eventually he came to understand his contribution, an “ideal history of grammatical forms” fashioned after Vico (who spoke of an “ideal eternal history”), as a necessary means to bridge the gap between “writers” and “people” (G, 116–­18). Here we jump the gun a little and use a phrase that is ever present in De Sanctis’s History to note that learning how to “go to the people” as both a writer and critic became De Sanctis’s single-­minded obsession. (It was a phrase that Antonio Gramsci would make famous when he returned to De Sanctis for a similar project of emancipation, as I explore in chapter 5 of this study.) Indeed, what we shall find in the History is De Sanctis judging canonical writers almost solely by this particular social and moral skill! “Common language,” De Sanctis states in his autobiography, “was for me like aristocracy, which would be a corpse [corpo morto] without the power to assimilate itself to and absorb elements from different [social] classes” (G, 137). In his early maturity De Sanctis went to great contortions and efforts not to sever his ties and affiliation to Puoti’s school, but it is clear that what can be termed his linguistic Fabianism had little use for “purity,” which he would replace with “propriety,” or the concern for language’s ability to adhere to its signified “content” or “substance” without reference to authorial intentions. In fact, another old chestnut that De Sanctis strived to put to rest in these years was (Georges-­Louis Leclerc, Comte de) Buffon’s celebrated saying that “style is man himself.” This was false for De Sanctis, for whom “style” was the “thing” (cosa), “subject” (argomento), “content” (contenuto), or, better still, the “situation” (situazione) of a literary work, and by this he meant its inner context, the formal intentions that point to “the unity of the design and to the structure and construct of its parts” (G, 165). Through the “situation,” and/ 54. On Cuoco’s influence on the Risorgimento up to and including De Sanctis, see OR, chap. 1.

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or the formal intentions of a literary work, one can gauge the solidity of the bond between “form” and “content” in the work and predict its endurance and legacy: “Only [the content that] receives its formal seal endures in posterity” (176). This is how in retrospect, yet quite accurately, De Sanctis came to understand his courses as amounting to an “anti-­Rhetoric,” a subversion of accepted norms that should also alter our generic expectations (170). What, then, came of De Sanctis’s school? Did it mark, like Puoti’s school in De Sanctis’s account, a new historical turning point? These questions do not lend themselves to easy or unqualified answers. One could argue, in fact, that the school of  Vico Bisi meddled too closely in historical circumstances. If its aim was to further patriotism and to make literary criticism a tool of social change, then the school met its appropriate, albeit tragic, end. In the spring of 1848, De Sanctis led his students to the front lines of the Neapolitan uprising against the Bourbon regime with consequences that would torment his conscience forever after: Luigi La Vista (1826–­48), his most beloved student and designated intellectual heir, was gunned down by the Swiss mercenary army at the age of twenty-­two. “I will die before being known,” is a recurring phrase in La Vista’s class notes and reading notes, and it proved to be a self-­fulfilling prophecy.55 But De Sanctis and others survived—­Pasquale Villari (1827–­1917), for example, La Vista’s fellow student and posthumous editor, as he was the posthumous editor, also, of  De Sanctis’s La giovinezza. In contrast to abjuring Purists, they saw bearing arms for their nation as a necessity when they could no longer countenance the prospect that the hoary name of “Italy” amounted to “the subject of a rhetorical exercise.”56 We might speculate, perhaps, that De Sanctis needed to experience his own failed revolution before he could fully assimilate what Cuoco had said regarding the impossibility of overhauling Italy unless by slow and steady moral reform. And perhaps “passive revolution” was a Cuochian concept he was forced to ponder during his years on the run and subsequently in prison in Naples, where, in the repressive aftermath that followed the 1848 events, he resided for three years (1850–­53), reading Hegel and translating his works. Here we might well remind ourselves that at the time of his imprisonment De Sanctis was barely older than his students, and in his early thirties he was forced into the fundamentally Petrarchan experience of surviving his designated successors. In De Sanctis’s proud and melodramatic prison writings, 55. Luigi La Vista, Memorie e scritti, ed. Pasquale Villari (Florence: Le Monnier, 1863), ii. 56. La Vista, Memorie e scritti, xvii.

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the past is bygone and the only task at hand is the reformulation of the “present day’s appeal to the future,” a reformulation that realizes that “good” and “evil” are dialectically interconnected in human becoming.57 In keeping with his heartfelt pedagogic creed that education is self-­knowledge, De Sanctis prepared to be his own first legatee. With little if anything published as yet, he would emerge as the foremost student of his own school, assimilating his own lessons at Vico Bisi, and then going on to refine and hone those lessons throughout his career. We can best understand De Sanctis’s effort in self-­education by juxtaposing his early lectures to a cluster of methodological essays he began writing while incarcerated and continued writing in the years leading up to the commission and execution of the History of Italian Literature. The example of La Vista had alerted him to the futility marked by premature death, in which “corpse and name” are equally “unhonored and unknown to posterity,” as he stated in a eulogy from 1848, and De Sanctis was determined not to die before leaving instructions toward his own congenial reappraisal.58 We first glimpse this determination in 1855, in his reaction to Georg Gott­ fried Gervinus’s review of patriotic Italian literature. In his voluminous History of the 19th Century (1853), Gervinus had directed his attention briefly but penetratingly to Vittorio Alfieri and Ugo Foscolo. As De Sanctis relates it, Gervinus found fault with their classicism for two reasons: for the establishment of their patriotism on the exaltation of Roman and Greek heroes, and for their overall and relentless tendency to politicize literature, attributing ulterior motives to letters and thus perverting “the purity of the artistic ideal.” “[These] poets and their readers,” De Sanctis paraphrases: were led by ambition for fame [ . . . ], and were at odds with the modest collaboration and labor of all for the good of the many, itself effective only in modern, advanced states in which [geographical] extension, the population numbers, and the condition of the inferior classes require that the focus be on the needs of the masses and on waiting patiently for their maturity. Failing to distinguish between their feelings and abilities, and those of the people for whom they toiled, and having the gulf between the lower classes and the cultured part become deeper in Italy, Alfieri and Foscolo, having experienced the coarseness

57. Francesco De Sanctis, “La prigione,” in La crisi del romanticismo. Scritti del carcere e primi saggi critici, ed. Guido Nicastro, vol. 4 of De Sanctis’s Opere (Turin: Einaudi, 1972), 5. 58. Francesco De Sanctis, “Agli amici di Luigi La Vista,” in La Vista, Memorie e scritti, xliii.

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of the plebes, looked down on them with scorn from a height, as if they were helots to be treated with the shovel, priest, and hangman.59

If indeed Gervinus was after “a popular literature directly obtained from the soul of a nation”—­a wish that De Sanctis had expressed in identical words while in prison translating Karl Rosenkranz’s Handbook of a General History of Poetry—­then what were German scholars failing to realize?60 De Sanctis’s disagreement was less with Gervinus’s opinion, which he shared in the main, and more with the attitude and method he observed in his German colleague. In his view, Gervinus had failed in relation to his own scopo, the inner content or purpose that is as proper to the work of criticism as it is to the work of literature. By asserting this point, De Sanctis significantly puts what we call primary and secondary literature on equal terms from the point of view of reception: What one sees in [Gervinus] is the German man, the Protestant, and the moderate: before consulting the facts, he already entertains a whole system a priori in his head. When this happens history is less a narration than a collection of facts in support of a system. [ . . . ] As the critic’s engagement grows, he reveals himself little by little, and finally the narrator takes on the semblance of a judge, and life is turned into an indictment.61

It will not do to read this passage simply as De Sanctis attempting to indict in turn the “Germanic-­Protestant element,” which after all was a culture De Sanctis, qua Hegelian, strived to adapt and popularize in Italy. Here patriotism plays a different role; it is the “mother of all virtues” and intentions; it animates an epoch, and for this very reason it is unexcisable. “Historical epochs are transient moments,” warns De Sanctis in a passage that stands as the epigraph to his chapter. “[T]hey do not correspond to any absolute concept. A time will come when the notion of nationality will give way to the notion of humanity: precisely because of this, however, future historians won’t have the right to

59. Francesco De Sanctis, “ ‘Storia del secolo decimonono’ di G. G. Gervinus,” in Verso il realismo. Prolusioni e lezioni zurighesi sulla poesia cavalleresca, frammenti di estetica, saggi di metodo critico, ed. Nino Borsellino, vol. 7 of De Sanctis’s Opere, 224. 60. Francesco De Sanctis, “Per la traduzione del Rosenkranz,” in La crisi del romanticismo, 119. 61. De Sanctis, “‘Storia del secolo decimonono’ di G. G. Gervinus,” 237.

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gloss over today’s national movement.”62 Why, then, would Gervinus fail to empathically comprehend the Italian nineteenth-­century Zeitgeist? Why did he refuse to investigate the precedents and consequences of the patriotism (itself an ever-­evolving organism) that he disparaged? De Sanctis is again demanding a before and after: a narrative. The story he fails to recover in Gervinus runs far and deep, in fact, from Dante and Machiavelli to Metastasio, and it will show that the Italian “classical tradition was uninterrupted.” Certainly, at times, it might display a “ridiculous” identification with the past, but upon further reading, one’s “smile freezes” once the notion of patria exits the schools, frees itself from the fetters of a stale rhetoric, and begins to emerge as the only scopo of a reunited people. In conclusion, addressing Gervinus in person, De Sanctis states: Do you really believe that in the midst of such heated circulation of ideas, and in such a storm of events, the people [of different nations] ought to have said: “Let’s take a break! The world progresses slowly: the interests of aristocracy are against us as is the ignorance of the masses. Let’s bargain with those interests, let’s lighten that ignorance”? This peaceful and logical progress is a desire of the wise man, a hope for the future. Maybe this utopia will come about one day, but we will achieve it only after many other painful experiences. [ . . . ] In order to prove to me the need to educate the masses you can, serenely sitting in your armchair, come up with a syllogism. The syllogisms of history, however, are battles and gallows, oppression and resistance, and a consequence cannot be derived if it does not follow blood-­soaked premises.63

The present is informed by the past, and Italy’s active patriotism that was then (in just five years) finally preparing for the “new patria,” a unified Italy, was an outgrowth of and (had better be) gratefully indebted to the “old patria,” its exaggerated classicism notwithstanding. Literature, as always, accompanies and reflects this process: classicism “had no reason to be anymore” as it moved from Alfieri and Foscolo to Alessandro Manzoni, an author but really a succedent whom Gervinus would have profited from reading. And so, revealing his own personal imbrication with the story he is telling, De Sanctis confidently reports that Alfieri’s “afterlife [ posterità] has now only just begun,” and De Sanctis, by now posterior to his own young Purist self, will be very much part of this posterity. 62. De Sanctis, “ ‘Storia del secolo decimonono’ di G. G. Gervinus,” 238. 63. De Sanctis, “ ‘Storia del secolo decimonono’ di G. G. Gervinus,” 240–­41 and 247–­48.

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Two years after wrangling with Gervinus and the “German element,” De Sanctis jumped at the chance to fine-­tune his self-­understanding as a literary critic through a consideration of Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–­1869) and, through him, French aesthetics. In this 1857 essay he defends Lamartine, in fact, from the attacks of professional aestheticians, those who dispense judgments like many “Minoses” from their high pulpits. In contrast to them, Lamartine, who was a poet first and a literary critic second, speaks to the heart, and his only intent is to relate his impressions, following in the best French tradition, the “naturalization of art,” going back to Montaigne. So what fault does De Sanctis find with the French? As it turns out, Lamartine and his compatriots represent an opposite and equally exaggerated counterpoint to the Germans. They are “naïve” and “vague,” and all in all representative of the “infancy” of literary criticism. Their otherwise welcome “impressions” lie scattered and are not made to cohere according to a specific “purpose” of their own.64 What is the point of indicating what is beautiful and ugly, and relating one’s enthusiasm or disappointment, if one does not involve or instruct the reader, or tackle the fundamental questions that emerge when one is face to face with a literary work: “What are you?” “And what is he who created you?” The literary critic, says De Sanctis, addressing himself as much as his reader, ought not be a philosopher, as the German would refashion them, but they are not just a reader, either. Rather, they are a collaborator in the creative process: The poet, allow me the comparison, is like a harmonious echo that only repeats some syllables of a word, but an animated and conscious echo, that hears and sees more than what its sound conveys. The critic collects those few syllables, and surmises the whole word. [ . . . ] The critic resembles the actor: neither of them simply reproduces the poetic world, but they integrate it, they fill in the gaps. Drama provides you with the word, but not the gesture, not the sound of the voice, not the character—­hence the need for the actor. Take away

64. Francesco De Sanctis, “ ‘Cours familier de littérature,’ par M. de Lamartine,” in Verso il realismo, 250–­51. See also Ferdinando Neri, “De Sanctis e la critica francese,” in Storia e poesia (Turin: Chiantore, 1944), 223–­90; Pierre Antonetti, Francesco De Sanctis et la culture française (Florence: Sansoni Antiquariato, 1964); and Ugo Piscopo, “De Sanctis e la cultura francese,” in Attilio Marinari, ed., Francesco De Sanctis un secolo dopo, 2 vols. (Rome: Laterza, 1985), 2:569–­94.

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representation from dramatic poetry and this will necessarily be a crippled and imperfect genre. The same goes for criticism.65

Within this phenomenological shift, which adumbrates the achievements of the twentieth-­century hermeneutics explored in the introduction to this study, literature is no longer an inert thing with respect to a contemplating subject, but a participated event; creation and reception, intentions as much as effects, complete literature, which is an experience rather than an object. Needless to say, the nature of the literary critic changes accordingly. More than a contemplating subject, the critic is what contemporary reception theory calls an “implied reader,” a “function” whose role as a textual construct is to endow with coherence a text riddled with “gaps” that call for judicious filling.66 The phenomenological pairing of reader and writer holds the two in closer communion, of course, but it also allows De Sanctis to avoid what he perceived as the greatest pitfall of French analysis: its tendency to explain literary works psychologically, appealing to the biographies of their authors as well as their readers. De Sanctis upends the principles of crass authorialism, stating, “In criticism, if you want to know what the author is, you need to know what the book is.” If “a portrait [of the author] is necessary, so be it, as long as the knowledge of the man serves our knowledge of the writer: a portrait is a means and not an end,” while the presumed “secret story of an author” is of no use.67 Again De Sanctis is claiming precedence for the organic intentions of the literary work over the intentions of the author, for the latter endure only partially as a shared element between writer and reader in the finished product. Morality, a tactful engagement between author and critic, is what attends literary criticism, not moralism. And so we are left wondering whether, just as there is something like a German and French criticism, there might, too, be a kind of scholarship that could be considered congruously Italian, flaws included. De Sanctis would appear to take on this challenge in his methodological and deontological excursuses that make up two essays from 1865 and 1869. He dedicates the first to Cesare Cantú (1804–­95) and the second to Luigi Settembrini (1813–­77), his most notable peers and soon-­to-­be predecessors in literary historiography; their 65. De Sanctis, “ ‘Cours familier de littérature,’ par M. de Lamartine,” 254. 66. Reference is of course to one of the capital texts in so-­called “reception aesthetics” or “reader-­response criticism,” Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 67. De Sanctis, “ ‘Cours familier de littérature,’ par M. de Lamartine,” 265–­66.

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juxtaposition serves De Sanctis’s goal of representing a movement or, again, a transition (one still very much in fieri, of course), from literary criticism that is old and stale to that which is new and progressive.68 Cantú had just published his History of Italian Literature (1865) rather momentously on the 600th anniversary of Dante’s birth, and for him ev­ erything seemed to come together and to bode well. His History reads like a “narration,” and his overt purpose is sound; it aims at “blurring the difference between the art of judging and the talent to compose,” turning literary criticism in its own right into a “creative” artifact and the critic into an artist.69 By these lofty standards, however, Cantú failed. He was guilty not only of producing a disconnected congeries of facts without a “purpose” of their own but also of committing two egregious blunders in the art of competent reading: namely, disparaging “form” in favor of “content,” and, as a consequence of this bifurcation—­which abandons ideas to the mercy of anachronistic reckoning—­ allowing moralism to creep everywhere into his story. In Cantú’s criticism, “thought taken in and for itself is [ . . . ] the principal thing and form an accessory,” De Sanctis writes, rehashing and expanding his attack on Cartesianism thirty years later.70 Whereas the Purists would shout “Word!” the likes of Cantú would reply even louder, “Thought!” thereby neglecting the middle course offered by the school of Vico Bisi (reinforced here), and in effect widening the schism between art and science that for centuries deemed that “scientists were barbarians” or illiterate, and “men of letters empty,” with no effective contribution of their own. This is a divide that De Sanctis allows us to appreciate socialistically, as it were, as an epiphenomenon of a structural breach between those who “know” and those who “live,” the cultured and the masses. In fact, the greatest flaw of this approach is the moralism that it engenders, a moralism that precludes participation. What De Sanctis cannot countenance is the critic’s habit of “blaming” the writer: “[t]his disposition to linger on the bad rather than partaking of the good” and “the [finding] pleasure not so much in the contemplation of what is beautiful but in the nitpicking of flaws.”71 Does it make sense, asks De Sanctis, to approach Ariosto, Alfieri, Leopardi, 68. On Italian literary historiography, see Giovanni Getto, Storia delle storie letterarie (Milan: Bompiani, 1946) ; and Sergio Romagnoli, Per una storia della critica letteraria. Da De Sanctis al Novecento (Florence: Le Lettere, 1993). 69. Francesco De Sanctis, “Una ‘Storia della letteratura italiana’ di Cesare Cantú,” in Verso il realismo, 277–­78. 70. De Sanctis, “Una ‘Storia della letteratura italiana’ di Cesare Cantú,” 280. 71. De Sanctis, “Una ‘Storia della letteratura italiana’ di Cesare Cantú,” 282.

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Poliziano, and Machiavelli without at least some degree of admiration? The “grim spiritual disposition” displayed by Cantú has no place in literary criticism, and his fierce denunciation of Ariosto the man for his obsequiousness to the powerful illuminates the point: That [to curry favor with the Este family] was Ariosto’s intention is something that one cannot either confirm or deny without this having anything to do with the real value of his work. A literary work carries its own intentions within, and it is of little importance what the intentions of the author have been. If Ariosto wanted to turn his work into a panegyric for the Estes, too bad for him, the panegyric vanished and the poem endured. Who today recalls anymore those praises or recalls anything more than the names of those Dukes and Duchesses? All of this is forgotten, and the reader shrugs it off like useless linen: proof that the personal intentions of an author are something that is pasted and superimposed on the work and that the latter, with or without them, remains in and of itself complete and perfect.72

“If only Ariosto had not been Ariosto!” De Sanctis sneers in contempt of those critics who don’t realize that “genius is not a mere potentiality applicable to anything, but something concrete that individuates itself in one way and not another.” So what use is it to be a critic if you cannot detect “purpose”? “Purpose is the generator of the entire organism.”73 As De Sanctis nears the end of the long and winding path that leads to the composition of his own History, he comes to the defense of Luigi Settembrini, whose Lectures on Literature had been roundly attacked by a younger generation indifferent to authorities and intent only on “burying the past.” De Sanctis sees an opportunity for introspection in this new and unprecedented wave of “frankness” and “sincerity” in literary criticism. He also sees an opportunity for a reckoning by his generation, the older generation, with their proclivity for “simulation and dissimulation,” their “sectarian conspiracies” in politics, and more generally their characteristic lack of intellectual “freedom,” marked by their “Arcadian, rhetorical, and sometimes nebulous” style, itself typical of “people who have lived detached from the practicality of things and were raised in the midst of abstractions.”74 Such may be the case, but do not the younger generations owe their freedom to a previous one? asks De Sanctis, 72. De Sanctis, “Una ‘Storia della letteratura italiana’ di Cesare Cantú,” 288. 73. De Sanctis, “Una ‘Storia della letteratura italiana’ di Cesare Cantú,” 289–­90. 74. Francesco De Sanctis, “Settembrini e i suoi critici,” in Verso il realismo, 296–­97.

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staging a metaphysical dialogue between epochs. If you want to “verify” our systems and conclusions, if you want to “judge Settembrini,” his militancy and his abhorrence for the Church, then “you cannot pull out of the fray, but [must] delve into it, make yourself his shadow, and follow him through all the events of the struggle, study his character, his culture, his inclinations, and his genius. Only in this way will you stand in front of the living man, among living men, and discern his work in the way it was conceived, and not abstractly.”75 In Settembrini, says De Sanctis in self-­identification, we find someone in whom the “man of letters and the patriot are one and the same. You take away the struggle and you have half the man, and all you are left with is the man of letters.” The same goes for his history, which is a “war cry,” a “protest.” Settembrini is the image of the Italian “radical,” that specimen of man wholly delivered to the cause of unification and to emancipation from religion.76 De Sanctis concludes with a salutation as he and his “dying” peers “step away,” and a word of advice regarding the work to be undertaken: A history of literature is like an epilogue, the ultimate synthesis of an immense labor on behalf of an entire generation of its single parts. [ . . . ] Today everything is renewed, a new world, philosophy, criticism, art, history and philology exude from everything. There is not a single page of our history that is left intact. The historian and the philologist penetrate into everything with their research, the philosophers and critics with their speculations. The old synthesis is dissolved. The patient labor of analysis resumes, part by part. When will a history of literature be possible? When this patient work will have unearthed each of its parts, when each epoch and each important writer will have its own monographic study or essay that will spell out the last word and solve the issue. Today’s work is not history but the single monograph. What the French call a study. [ . . . ] A history of literature is a result of all of these labors; it is not at the base but at the top, it is not the beginning but the crowning achievement of this endeavor.77

De Sanctis is making a statement against the present convenience of engaging in literary historiography, just as he is about to compose the most influential specimen in its genre. It is a statement that continues to befuddle De Sanctis’s readers. Did De Sanctis unwittingly defy his own advice? Or did he except 75. De Sanctis, “Settembrini e i suoi critici,” 307. 76. De Sanctis, “Settembrini e i suoi critici,” 308–­9. 77. De Sanctis, “Settembrini e i suoi critici,” 315–­16.

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himself, and if so, on what grounds? These recurrent questions, while legitimate, attempt to explain logically what is best resolved empathically—­by reinstating this blatant self-­contradiction within De Sanctis’s larger hermeneutical project and by revealing the interpretive opportunities obtained via an inclusive or corpus-­oriented reading. In fact, as we shall learn in the next section, the Critical Essay on Petrarch, a work De Sanctis dedicated to the author of the Canzoniere—­and, I argue, a blueprint of larger works to come, namely, the History—­can in fact be read as the extension of a “monographic” study dedicated to the first modern man and his legacy: Petrarch and Petrarchism. This thesis concurs with the present state of literature as De Sanctis describes it at the end of his career, an opinion that affects the History’s own open-­endedness. The History itself, we may recall, concludes with a Leopardian incitation to follow through with the enterprise of achieving intellectual emancipation from the metaphysical mind frame and its corresponding literary habit, rhetoric. It does this not only in defiance of the Hegelian trust in teleology, but as a way of insisting that modern literature, although at hand and everywhere adumbrated, is equally unachieved, and this due to none other than Petrarch, whom, we may recall, De Sanctis condemned for his inability to attain or concretize reality in his works. At the moment De Sanctis is offering his farewell on behalf of an entire generation, science is at a turning point. So, too, is literature, as concreteness and actuality acquire new emphasis, a goal that De Sanctis in his last published essays characterizes as “realism” in opposition to the rhetorical idealism of the post-­Dantean tradition. What comes first and influences the other, science or literature? This is a chicken-­and-­egg question. What is sure is that the new criticism will no longer sit back in contemplation of reality, but rather will emerge as an “instrument” in a “renovation” that raises “realism” to [a] principle common to all human beings, who acquire knowledge with it, determine their truths, and to this philosophy it is possible to have a clear and precise language, purified of contradictions, accessible to the most ignorant and to the greatest simpleton, who will find therein the same powers and laws of which he avails himself in his everyday life and which have concurred to form a great part of his way of conceiving and of communicating.78

As science and literature concur in realism, form and content again align, and the chasm between intellectuals and the masses is bridged. Realism is a 78. Francesco De Sanctis, “Il principio del realismo,” in L’arte, la scienza e la vita, 349.

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philosophy that recomposes civil society by substituting mutual comprehension for truths that are unavailable and dividing. It restores the humanities to their rightful place next to the natural sciences, as the guardians of human experience and its long neglected moral sphere. Affirming that realism is in fact a diffused moral philosophy, De Sanctis writes on the same page: “Ethics, above all, is not possible if time and space, as the idealists affirm, is not real, and if what is truly real is without space and time, so that human actions become mere appearance, deprived of moral value.” Realism and its corresponding criticism are thus a “humanism,” in De Sanctis’s own characterization. They both seek “that which is made by man and for man” and should not be mistaken for other so-­called realisms, such as scientific empiricism and literary naturalism, although De Sanctis dedicates his last published works to their best exponents, Charles Darwin and Émile Zola. In Darwin, De Sanctis saw simply a reaction against the heightened humanism of the Western tradition, a reaction that brings about a yearning for “animalism in its exaggerated form.”79 Of Zola, De Sanctis wrote that in his literature society is deprived of its highest “joys”: “no God, no nature, and no fatherland.” In both writers, nature supersedes man and his volition. In turn, De Sanctis will conclude his career cautioning against determinism, for the “omnipotence of the environment” that might enthrall everyone at present will never stand a chance with regard to a “strong personality.”80 Human action always has governed and will forever govern the world. This was the lesson that informed De Sanctis’s literary criticism. Indeed, confronting strong personalities, eye to eye, is exactly what he did in his History and in its preparatory studies, and, of course, he started with Petrarch.

T h e A n t i -­P e t r a r c h René Wellek, still De Sanctis’s unsurpassed champion outside Italian borders, claimed that one of De Sanctis’s greatest challenges (and merits) with respect to the Hegelianism that informed him was to have resisted “submitting” aesthetics to ethics.81 Again, we can see how ethics comes to the fore when we consider an idea such as beauty from the vantage of what De Sanctis defines as its embodiment’s “situation,” which is a dynamic process. He would have 79. Francesco De Sanctis, “Il darwinismo nell’arte,” in L’arte, la scienza e la vita, 468. 80. Francesco De Sanctis, “Zola e L’assommoir,” in L’arte, la scienza e la vita, 436–­37. 81. René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (1750–­1950), 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 4:98.

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us appraise beauty contextually: the time, place, and personality of both the creator and the receiver concur in the finished work which, as a living organism, not a static object, infinitely (re-­)performs its constitutive (co-­)creative gestation. It follows that any literary artifact is to be grasped diachronically, as it were, following and reliving the transition from what De Sanctis describes as the work’s “intentional world” (which can be defined roughly as the potential and goals invested in it, or “what the poet meant to do”), to its “effective world,” or what ultimately came of it (“what [the poet] actually did”). As he puts it, commending Dante’s achievements in the History: “A man does not what he wishes, but what he can” (HIL, 1:177). And as we read De Sanctis further, we shall see more clearly that this creative volitional process does not exist somewhere beyond the artifact (that is, in its sources or in the author’s life) but—­as stated by the brand of textual hermeneutics illustrated in the introduction and by Petrarch—­is built diegetically into the great work itself and thus cooperatively shared with the perspicacious reader. Only in this sense is literary art truly a moral interaction among fellow men. Of course, De Sanctis is also describing a process of distillation that is ongoing. At any given moment of reception, the effective product of poetic creation meets the still ineffective intentional world of the critic, in the ancillary and detachable form through which criticism first emerges: the erudite commentary.82 But when put through the pot still of reception, the critic’s work is alchemically transformed in turn, into a co-­determining agent: a re-­work. “Criticism,” De Sanctis explains, 82. The scholarly approach is exemplified by the eternally misguided exegesis of Dante’s Divine Comedy. See HIL, 1:179: “And so were born two separate Dantesque worlds, one literal and evident, the other occult: the figure, and the thing figured. And because the intellectual interest of the poem lies in its occultness, in its ‘beyond,’ the learned have searched and searched for the occult meaning. But they have failed to find it. [ . . . ] With renewed devotions Italians and foreigners set to work to explain this Janus with two faces, or rather with two worlds, one of them visible, the other hidden, and each student in turn has tried to lift just an edge of the veil that wraps the divinity. But in spite of their wisdom, their doctrine, their deep knowledge of those times, and their patient study of the other works of Dante, we are still in the region of conjecture and hypothesis. The old interpreters were divided only on minor points, but modern students disagree fundamentally; they have given us whole systems, each confuting the others. In Germany, even today, no edition of Dante can appear without a string of new explanations being attached to it, and if we take up a criticism of the Divine Comedy we are at once engulfed in a confusion of questions. Dante has become a name to frighten with, a name hideous from syllogisms and supermeanings, and often we ask in despair, ‘Which is the real Dante?’ Each commentator gives us his own Dante, and makes him a peg for his own opinions and passions, compelling the poet to sing to his tune.”

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is opposite the work of art what philosophy is opposite the work of nature. One could actually say that there are as many forms of criticism as there were forms of philosophy throughout the centuries. Even criticism has its own natural history, its anatomy, its physiology, its physics and metaphysics. Just as thought has gradually raised itself to the interpretation of nature, so has the criticism of the most direct and crassest forms of artistic production gradually raised itself to form, to the immediate and organic unity of content, in which lies the secret of life. Here the critic can feel at one with the artist and with his work, he can re-­create it, give it a second life, he can say with Fichte’s pride: I create God! (SCP, 19)

This passage, which occurs in De Sanctis’s Critical Essay on Petrarch, the preparatory text to the History, bestows demiurgic powers on the critic and in so doing extends and explodes the hierarchies of  Platonic aesthetics. Criticism is equated to nature and deemed a properly productive rather than imitative or representational realm in its own right. More to the point, in the absence of the Platonic ideal that traditionally placed poetry at a remove from a transcendental truth, the poietic collaboration of literature and criticism finally allows for the world to be disclosed (or communicated) without residue in its effective reality. “[C]riticism should not only be negatively understood,” as a mere appraisal of art, De Sanctis specifies. “It should not only tell you how a work was made but how it ought to be made. The author of a work does not have the right to tell the critic: ‘You do it!’—­given that creating and judging are two distinct things, but he certainly can ask him how things are to be done.”83 Again, criticism should bring about collaborative change in the world it compasses, and it should do so with historiographical self-­awareness, genealogically renarrating the problem that it pinpoints and that it can help resolve. In one of the passages quoted above, De Sanctis alludes to the parallel histories of philosophy and criticism. He had shelved his dream of the latter, after broaching it in one of his earliest lectures at Vico Bisi. There, De Sanctis, who as a youth was inclined to hark back to the very origins of any linguistic issue, locates the birth of criticism in democratic Greece, specifically in the original conflict between philosophers and sophists over the content and style of eloquence. His account is original in that he does not see the conflict resolved

83. Francesco De Sanctis, “ ‘Sulla mitologia’: Sermone di Vincenzo Monti alla Marchesa Antonietta Costa,” in La crisi del romanticismo, 391.

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in either Socrates (who “proclaimed rhetoric useless”), Plato (who, continuing Socrates, cared about nothing but thought), or Aristotle (who resorted to logic). Rather, he points to Cicero (in whose person and work, alike, philosophy and rhetoric coexisted harmoniously), to Quintilian (who closely reconnected eloquence to virtue and the moral sphere, including education), and to Tacitus (who endowed the conflict with a long-­lost historicity).84 All in all, he uses this latter group to show that criticism, far from being born from “frigid intellect” and “calculation,” is a matter of the heart, so to speak, a matter of “impressions,” “commotion,” and ultimately a “social” affair. Furthermore, De Sanctis sees the rift between the “two peoples”—­a theory made popular again, as we have seen, by Cuoco’s Vichian interpretation of the Neapolitan revolution—­as endemic in Western discourse. Far from being a product of a postrevolutionary world, it has existed at least since the Greeks first distinguished the philologoi, or “educated men,” from the idiotai, or “laymen.” That De Sanctis never refers directly to Cuoco and his “two peoples” theory has long been a source of frustration for his readers, yet we can surmise that it was in his sights at the time he set out to write his most definitive works, based on its appearance in a controversial pamphlet that Angelo Camillo De Meis (1817–­91), one of De Sanctis’s favored disciples, published in 1868. Treating the matter of sovereignty allusively and metaphorically at a time of postunitary transition, De Meis redefined the role of the intellectual: People are sovereign by law, who, then, is the sovereign in fact? He who stands above, he who speaks on behalf of everyone and commands and rules them? Who legitimately has and exercises sovereignty? He who gathers and hosts within himself more of the popular customs and ideas. He is the Sovereign, because the People see themselves in him more clearly than in themselves. And they feel more active, more powerful and more whole in him than in themselves. He is the Sovereign, because he is the external or natural consciousness of the People. The People are free, because the laws of the Sovereign are not perceived as the laws of someone else: they are their own customs made law.85

84. Francesco De Sanctis, “Storia della critica (1845–­1846),” in Marinari, ed., Purismo, illuminismo, storicismo, 2:1174–­77. On the understudied influence of Greek and Roman classics on De Sanctis, see Gerardo Bianco, Francesco De Sanctis. Cultura classica e critica letteraria (Naples: Guida, 2009). 85. Angelo Camillo De Meis, Il sovrano. Saggio di filosofia politica con riferenza all’Italia, ed. Benedetto Croce (Bari: Laterza, 1927), 8.

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In modern times, De Meis admits, the older “harmony between those who think and those who feel is lost” and “the Sovereign is a tyrant,” but he adds prophetically, “the time will come when the ancient social unity will be reestablished.” This will be the time of a “true democracy” and of  “moral equality,” and a time, we may add, in which the histories of philosophy and rhetoric will again intertwine as they did at the outset.86 At the beginning was the philosopher king, a privileged seer who ruled over the masses he should have emancipated but did not. At the end of this philosophical eschatology, we can assume, will be the critic—­a philosopher, too, surely, but a peasant philosopher raised deep within the cave, one who finally expresses himself in the demotic language of the people and according to popular common sense. Historicist to the core, De Sanctis was more concerned with outlining the work needed to bridge the gap than he was with imagining its fulfillment; he does make some attempt to explain what an “aesthetic utopia” or “the achieved identity of form and idea” would feel like, however: “[t]he true transparency of form consists in its obliteration, in form turning into transference [or communication] pure and simple, something that does not itself attract the eye: just like a mirror whose glass goes unperceived.”87 In other words, it would amount to a shareable, sensual observation of reality, as opposed to the intellectual apprehension of its idea. The social missions of art and criticism combine, raising a liquid mirror to a reality that is advanced (though by no means definitively perfected) in (re-­)constructive (self-­)reflection rather than in imitation. De Sanctis’s mirror is a gateway into a world made contiguous, nearer at hand, and thus demystified. How one achieves this transference and thereby overturns the Platonic mimetic framework is unknown to this point, but De Sanctis suggests that reviewing the flaws and reliving the failures of great minds in attempting to bring about the “full communication between the seer and the seen” will be productive, starting with Petrarch—­who, we now realize, might possibly function as an alternative lodestar in the journey of aesthetics from Plato to Hegel. De Sanctis approaches Petrarch with the specific intent of “overturning the terms of the aesthetic problem.” He will “ask the poet not about all that he was able to conjure up [idealizzare], but what he was actually able to realize [realizzare].” Because for all the attention garnered by Petrarch throughout the centuries, 86. De Meis, Il sovrano, 12. 87. Francesco De Sanctis, “Lezioni zurighesi,” in Verso il realismo, 115. Compare SCP, 107.

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[a] task still remains to be accomplished: to determine what is alive and what is dead [of Petrarch’s poetry]. And we shall realize that what is dead in Petrarch is all that has been imitated and is imitable, the double Petrarchism, rhetorical and Platonic [ . . . ]. A work of this kind will not be a panegyric of Petrarch, but will be the true Petrarch [ . . . ]. (SCP, 35–­36)

To prove his aliveness, Petrarch must prove to be immune to imitation at both a linguistic and a conceptual level. In the composite work that was eventually published in 1869 as the Critical Essay on Petrarch, we finally see a mature De Sanctis deploying his long-­honed aesthetic and deontological beliefs on the “body” or corpus of a canonical writer. In the main, this slim work is a series of lectures on Petrarch that De Sanctis delivered during his exile in Switzerland, where he grudgingly assumed a teaching position in Zurich from 1856 to 1860. De Sanctis immediately reveals what drives him, namely, his German colleagues’ superciliousness: “[G]ermans looked down on us [Italians] with a certain air of protective superiority that offended me. [ . . . ] [W]e had done our part, the world belonged to them now.” What is worse, these northerners seem to ignore the entire Italian literary tradition, except for Dante. They have never heard of Leopardi, and even their appreciation of Petrarch is mediated: he is “apprehended through the lens of Petrarchism,” exclusively (SCP, 4–­5). It was during one of  his many fights with his colleagues, and after “a lot of bad things were said about Petrarch” and, through Petrarch, about Italians in general, that De Sanctis set out to subtract Petrarch from the endless imitative legacy he had engendered. He writes, [Petrarch] was held as a poetical model in Italy and abroad, he has been for a long time praised for this, and then later too bitterly blamed for it. Petrarchists have stripped him naked, they have plundered him of all that can be taken from a poet—­concepts, phrases, words—­without being able to steal either his imagination or his love, and have perpetuated a false image of Petrarch, which was traditionally passed on among foreigners. If concepts have come into honor, it is Petrarch’s fault; if archaic puns have taken over, it is again Petrarch’s fault; if poetry turned into an empty formal game, into a lullaby rocking Italy to sleep in her sweet idleness [dolce far niente], it was always Petrarch’s fault. (SCP, 62)

De Sanctis targets Petrarchism in order to render Petrarch his due but, further, “in the name of national dignity,” so that foreigners will no longer expect Italians, themselves nothing but “sonnetists, fiddlers and singers” in their

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appreciation, to provide musical accompaniment at social gatherings; as De Sanctis himself, always greeted with the question, “Are you a singer?” experienced repeatedly, to his humiliation, during social gatherings in Switzerland.88 But something intervened to turn indignation into critical patriotism when De Sanctis began reworking his lectures into a book, namely, the publication of Alfred Mézières’s Pétrarque. This study was also dedicated to salvaging Petrarch from “the bad reputation of his imitators” but relied on sources that De Sanctis shunned: Georg Voigt’s The Revival of Classical Antiquity and, especially, Giuseppe Fracassetti’s complete edition of Petrarch’s Familiares. Mézières’s study, like Voigt’s, made the recovery of the “true” Petrarch hinge on a programmatic and unwavering turn away from Petrarch’s poetic and vernacular writings. The historical relevance, the genius, of Petrarch was “not all [if at all] contained in the Canzoniere” but was rather to be found in his letters, which, now available in their entirety thanks to Fracassetti, emerge as Petrarch’s true magnum opus. Finally, Mézières argues, the letters, which provide a daily account of the poet’s spiritual development, are the sole means through which we can obtain an “étude psychologique” of the “greatest figure of the fourteenth century.”89 Mézières’s statement of purpose not only confirmed De Sanctis’s opinion, expressed in his essay on Lamartine, regarding the naïve psychologism of French criticism; it forced De Sanctis to reframe his lectures metacritically and account for what he now understood to be a doppio petrarchismo. This “double Petrarchism” referred to the poet’s imitators, on the one hand, and, on the other, to those modern critics who, though not necessarily concerned with Petrarch, persevered in their “Platonism” by relying on and everywhere seeking disembodied and unreified ideas (SCP, 25 and 33). It should be clear by now that “Petrarchism” is the term that De Sanctis, working from within the Italian literary tradition, employs to refer to what the postmodern age has identified as the trappings of metaphysical Platonism. And for De Sanctis, as for our age, the mission was to overcome it. De Sanctis realized that what he espoused in his lectures—­that a painstakingly close reading of Petrarch’s Canzoniere could forestall the enticements of Petrarchism—­was no longer enough. After Mézières’s challenge, De Sanctis 88. Legend goes that it was none other than Wagner who repeatedly slighted De Sanctis by asking him to sing opera arias along to his tunes at dinner parties. On De Sanctis’s Zurich years, see Renato Martinoni, “Gli anni zurighesi (1856–­1860),” in Carlo Muscetta, ed., Francesco De Sanctis nella storia della cultura, 2 vols. (Rome: Laterza, 1984), 1:89–­110. 89. Alfred Mézières, Pétrarque. Étude d’après de nouveaux documents (Paris: Didier, 1868), vii.

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saw that his method, meant for and delivered to untainted students, was insufficient to counter the blight of the scholar, a blight that needed vanquishing if the entire project was to succeed: Now, I felt what it was to behold a glorified Petrarch in Mézières’s book, a Petrarch taken at face value. [ . . . ] That chasing after abstract ideals, which easily slip into theses and concepts, appeared to me more like the tired dragging of the past than the foundation of something alive. We were threatened by a new rhetoric, and I jumped at the opportunity to give its diagnosis; I called it the malady of the ideal. I was convinced that there is no other remedy to certain illnesses than to reconnect things to their origin; I recalled art to its foundations, which is life or the living form, what is true in art. My Petrarch was conceived on these premises [ . . . ]. [T]his is how the Essay on Petrarch came about. (SCP, 7)

Can a text be deconstructed before a postmetaphysical mind frame has even come into play? Or is the overcoming of such a mind frame dependent on—­ and occurring only—­when deconstruction is at work? In his introduction to the Critical Essay on Petrarch, which in effect was originally an independently published review article of Mézières’s study, De Sanctis is confident that Petrarchism can be bypassed and Petrarch rediscovered with new eyes as an original source (compare the postmodern attempt to reach into the true Plato before Platonism). While not quite ready yet to provide details as to where his journey will take us, De Sanctis is at this point claiming success. The exegesis of the Canzoniere, poem by poem, is delayed by an important matter of principle. De Sanctis cannot countenance Mézières’s leading premise: that the “Petrarch of the Canzoniere is the Petrarch of the common people [volgo]” and that therefore Petrarch, who was in fact a learned man whose erudition was unmatched, needs saving from the “mutilation” he received at the hand of the layperson (SCP, 16). De Sanctis took a dim view of this argument, which perpetuates a social and intellectual division exemplified unconsciously in the Petrarchism he wished to trounce. Simply put: “Mézières [the man of letters] is wrong, the volgo right”—­always right, in fact, as literary canonization is the common man’s prerogative: Take away the Canzoniere, and Petrarch would have been a figure known only to learned and erudite men, he would never have become a popular character among all civilized people, he would never have achieved universal fame. To make your way down to the people and remain there for many centuries is

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the surest proof of a true and superior merit. But nobody goes to the people without losing a part of their personality, given that popular judgment, that is, the judgment of history, is a work of purification and elimination. People appropriate the Divine Comedy for themselves and ignore the Convivio, they appropriate the Canzoniere and ignore the Africa. Moving through the centuries, man leaves his earthly and individual part on the way, a dead weight on the way to immortality. (17–­18)

In the great social project of reconnecting theory to practice, the knowledge of the learned and the feelings of masses, one thing is clear: it is the people who create the reading list, criticism follows feelings! To judge a canonical writer by his minor or unpopular works is a scholarly diversion; it amounts to engaging in counterfactual history rather than contributing to its narration and progress. If Mézières had not come along, we might wonder whether De Sanctis’s reading of the Canzoniere would have been more inclusive. But the point is that Mézières did provoke, and the provocation did inspire De Sanctis to reframe the Essay, which ultimately proved to be programmatically and, we may add, miserably delinquent (to its detriment) with respect to Petrarch’s Latin works, the letters in particular. At the height of the nineteenth century and by De Sanctis’s decree, then, Petrarch will continue to “live or die” by the Canzoniere. And when De Sanctis finally unveils his statue, we realize with surprise that, in fact, when put to the test of his own popular work . . . Petrarch dies! Petrarch dies a bad death and a sudden one, as we see in the opening, and frankly surprising, paragraph of the Essay: [Petrarch] was endowed with great intelligence, not such, however, to be deemed a superior intelligence. He possessed all the elementary and assimilative faculties, a strong memory, great mental sharpness and acuity, but he lacked the productive faculties. He was endowed with neither originality nor penetration, that is to say, he had neither the strength to find new ideas and associations, and impress his stamp upon them, nor the power to crack the surface, discard frills and trimmings, and get to the substance of things. He was instead endowed with those qualities that ape these, those that imitate these same mechanical procedures all the less effectively, the more conspicuously one tries. He was not original, he was peculiar: he gives his thoughts and sentences a certain twist, a certain aristocratic air and refinement to impress. He was not profound, he was acute. He does not linger on the surface, he goes deep, but once there his vision is impaired, and gives in to trivialities [ . . . ]. He wrote philosophical works, but he was not a philosopher; he wrote didactic works,

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but was not a thinker. A superior intelligence marshals all the other faculties and employs them to its end. Petrarch is not endowed with a noble intelligence, which supremely governs the soul; he is instead endowed with an intelligence born to be auxiliary to the other faculties. (SCP, 37–­38)

The reader who has followed De Sanctis’s epic journey thus far, thinking to arrive at a salvific Petrarch, may rub their eyes in utter stupefaction and wonder if something was lost in translation. What can account for this anticlimactic setup? something in the context in which De Sanctis was writing? something in his personality? The fact is that De Sanctis’s students were just as befuddled, deeming their teacher as somewhat of a testa stramba, or “wack job”: “Petrarch is his hero, and until now he has done nothing but badmouth him.” One student added, venturing an explanation: “The devil! He has buried [Petrarch] in order to exalt him even more.”90 But the truth is that De Sanctis had buried Petrarch too deep for a rescue attempt to be possible, and although De Sanctis goads the reader throughout his work with the tantalizing prospect of redemption, we must admit that in fact De Sanctis’s repeated deferrals and adjournments serve a different plan. At any given moment, a sentence and its sub-­clauses will reveal that Petrarch is one thing or another, always good but . . . in immediate and relentless contrasting conjunctions, not good enough. This is the form that De Sanctis gives to his Petrarchan reflections, and it is a form that reproduces Petrarch’s own indecisiveness, such that this inching forward by argument and counter-­argument signals not second thoughts or second-­guessing on behalf of De Sanctis, but rather the pull and tug of polarities that coexist in Petrarch as in his reader’s judgment, without an ultimate resolution. This is not to say that the analysis is ultimately sterile. Rather, much is gained. For example, we learn that Petrarch himself was infected with a strain of Petrarchism—­the strain associated with the scholars—­in the way that he turned against the vernacular language and thus against himself as a poet. As talented as he was, he, too, did not realize that “it is impossible to creatively express oneself  in a dead language,” says De Sanctis, impossible “because the life of a word lies not in its material significance, [ . . . ] but in the images, in the accessory ideas, in certain fine nuances that are an underlying meaning brought in by the people” (SCP, 43). Here De Sanctis leads us to assume that Petrarch became a Petrarchist after his humanistic turn, but several pages later, 90. Francesco De Sanctis, Epistolario (1856–­1858), ed. Giovanni Ferretti and Muzio Mazzocchi Alemanni, vol. 19 of De Sanctis’s Opere (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), 533.

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and after a close examination of his poetry, we see the verdict confirmed: irrefutably, one already and everywhere “comes across Petrarchism,” even in Petrarch’s poetry. With variations only in degree, one runs into “Petrarch’s corpse, the poet who imitates himself just as his imitators did” (191). What we find, with all due caution and against all expectations, is Petrarch proving Petrarchism to be a protracted form of self-­loathing, one whose remedy must be sought at a far remove: A precursor of Tasso and Leopardi, in the midst of the Middle Ages, Pe­ trarch [ . . . ] was unconsciously drawn to that kind of moral illness which has asserted itself in modern times with a profusion of examples. The illness consists in an uneven relation between what we want and what we can do [ . . . ]. This ailment has afflicted Italians to the point that, as if roused from deep slumber, they begin yearning for a new life, albeit without being able to attain it yet, and you feel the pangs of this yearning in Alfieri’s frenzies and in Foscolo’s despairs. After it has spread into the soul of many lofty minds like hidden cholera, I see it laid bare, and I want to believe, vanquished, in the work of Leopardi, who was so devastatingly aware of it. And it will come to an end when an equitable balance and love of the real will invest the man and people who are affected by it, of whom Manzoni is a poised example. It will come to an end when instead of fantasizing about the absurd, one will make it his principal task to examine what he uncovers and fully learn about it: to know is already almost to own. (166)

The cure to Petrarchism is not homeopathic after all, and Petrarch is not an antidote to an illness that in modernity he, like patient zero, can only help us detect with more accuracy. As a scholar-­poet Petrarch fell back upon his writing, almost as if always rewriting, rather than writing, his emotions and feelings: “[H]e is like a critic who by professional hazard is predisposed to analyze his impressions in the very moment in which he forms them” (101). And if like does not cure like, De Sanctis’s remarks seem to suggest, the solution will have to be found beyond the combined corpora of his works and legacy, in a futural literature that struggles to come about without the prodding reinforcement of a conforming science or criticism. In his analeptic return to origins via a phenomenological reading of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, De Sanctis did not recover a pretheoretical (or pre-­ Petrarchist) safe haven, after all, but he did find a reorientation and a proleptic program: Leopardi, Foscolo, Manzoni are a story untold but one that De Sanctis can take over because, on the criticism side, it dovetails with his own life and

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intellectual path. Furthermore, we see his autobiography once again spill over into his criticism, as he renders the malady of idealism as “cholera,” recall­ ing the moment when his childhood innocence ended, together with Leo­ pardi’s life, during the Neapolitan pestilence. Once again, he sets out to save Petrarch from the backlash of Petrarchism and acquires full cognizance of what he had preached all along: that criticism as a new philosophy is self-­healing and, specifically, that because of the way Petrarchism affected him, he also was in great need of the cure he wanted to administer to others. In this way he is similar to the Petrarch we recovered in chapter 1, whose hermeneutics relied on sharing the traumatic experience of his encounter with Cicero. De Sanctis here embeds his own disillusionment with that of Petrarch in his corpus, as a purpose-­making or situating experience that must be grappled with as part of his interpretive venture. It can be argued that the Critical Essay on Petrarch aspires to be state-­of-­ the-­art. In collecting a series of lectures, it brazenly defies scholarly norms by experimenting with the possibility of rendering the immediacy and efficacy of oral communication in book form. In fact, De Sanctis, a literary critic who could never bring himself to write the kind of “monograph” or study he eventually welcomed from the hands of younger colleagues, is expressing a very Petrarchan mistrust for the book form intended as a repository of settled resolutions, a genre in which scholarly disillusionment with one’s working hypotheses—­the most edifying gain to be had—­is written out of the story and denied to the reader. Judged by its overt and more asinine scholarly goal—­to split Petrarch from Petrarchism—­De Sanctis’s essay fails, but it succeeds insofar as its true “purpose,” in De Sanctis’s understanding of the term, is to endow his own work with a motive power and an inner dynamic infused in the diegetic grain of the text. If there is a split to be observed in this text, it is that between De Sanctis and his own Petrarchism—­that is, the penchant that he denounced in his colleagues for forcibly and analytically subsuming the object of criticism into the mold of presuppositions and schemas. The alternative to the closed-­fist approach of the philosophers, what De Sanctis describes as a form of critical “apriorism,” is an expansive or open-­ handed discourse, something sought in the Essay and the Canzoniere alike. As De Sanctis declares in the fifth chapter of his Petrarchan exegesis, titled “The Petrarchan Form”: We can now open the Canzoniere, in fact we can open it at random. Just as the thoughts and feelings stand on their own, and not as parts developing out of an intrinsic process, so is every poem an intelligible whole in and of itself. You

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can read [the Canzoniere] just as you would read Pascal’s Pensées, thought by thought, sonnet by sonnet. And you would have a hard time reading it in any other way and, as it were, all in one go, because, there not being a variety of themes to arouse your attention, nor a true historical sequence to hold you in pleasant anticipation, you would soon set the book aside out of weariness. Above all, we are better off not lingering on the first poems and immediately expressing our judgments, given that they are the worst ones in the collection, presumably composed at a later time as an introduction. (SCP, 103)

This passage allows us to grasp the Essay and the Canzoniere in mutual enlightenment. De Sanctis is not merely reproaching Petrarch and admonishing him on what he ought to have done, he is forming his commentary according to his own counsel and in antithesis to the Canzoniere. Namely, as we have seen, he is imbuing his narrative with pro-­airetic codes that goad the reader forward by suspension, and he is pointing to the anachronistic artificiality of any introductory statement, which—­like a merkin retrospectively glued on the body of a text and like his comments on Mézières, a preamble to his thoughts on Petrarch’s Canzoniere—­estranges the reader from the work’s core values and action. No doubt, De Sanctis grants, the problem is in the very form poetry takes: the sonnet favors “simultaneity” over “successiveness” (SCP, 104). But couldn’t the same be said of the essay, De Sanctis’s preferred form? And is his Critical Essay on Petrarch, in effect a first attempt at sequentially stringing together a number of essays or lectures into a composite whole, an experiment of some sort, not unlike a canzoniere? The self-­enclosure of Petrarch’s poetry will create the “superstitious cult” of Petrarchism, a cult that has “tyrannized over Italy” and that can be summarized in four words: “purity, dignity, elegance, sonority” (106). De Sanctis, of course, never made a secret of the fact that he was raised on those very same words at the school of Puoti, an admission that, again, helps us see beyond the apparent paradox of his encounter with Petrarch. If we read the Essay looking for Petrarch’s failed evolution, then De Sanctis’s text is as idiosyncratic as the Canzoniere, but if we read it looking for the true protagonist of the story, De Sanctis himself and his performance of his critical conversion, then a narrative emerges. Manifest contradictions and inconsistencies iron out into a confession story or, in this case, an account of De Sanctis’s change of heart: the spiritual reform of his mindset as a Petrarchist or Purist critic. It is no accident that De Sanctis introduces an autobiographical recollection here, in the midst of these considerations, and not in the introduction,

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either—­as if he is sharing it with his reader as it occurs to him. Worn out by his close readings and repetitions, De Sanctis turns to prosopopoeia and addresses Petrarch’s indecisiveness through the eyes of a “farmer,” that is, a common man endowed with “great good sense.” De Sanctis has this representative of the people ask Petrarch: “Do you, or don’t you want to? If you do, then go for it, otherwise, stop it already!” Petrarch, of course, is heedless of popular demands, he never “crosses the [social] Rubicon” with great consequences on the form of his work. His loving feelings are like “the first page of a novel; one misses the novel and the story,” and this is dehumanizing, for feelings develop and so does man: “Tale l’uomo, tale la sua storia” (Such is the man, such is the story) (SCP, 82–­83). Now, the easy solution to Petrarch’s irresolution, De Sanctis claims, is to provide what is missing: narrative momentum. But the real challenge is to resist this importation: [C]ritics are like the metaphysicians, who in the midst of the world’s vaga­ ries and accidents impatiently endeavor, they themselves, to impose some or­ der [ . . . ]. From the start, critics applied themselves to order Petrarch’s poetry better than he ever did, and precisely because such order does not exist, you cannot find two critics that are in agreement. When criticism evolved, then, one went from the material and exterior order to the internal order of content, and the illusion was easily born that a connection could be found between these emotional expressions. I humbly confess that I myself partook of this illusion in my youth when, lecturing on the Canzoniere, and believing to have found a logical thread, a before and an after, or better said, a post hoc ergo propter hoc [after this, therefore because of this], I composed some sort of critical novel of which I was very proud. (SCP, 83)

Here the reader is finally made privy to the specific “situation” or intentional context of the Essay, which now reemerges as palinode: the retelling of a story already told in his youth on the basis of a logical fallacy and, like a recantation, truly graspable only in confrontation with the original, that is, within the evolving context of De Sanctis’s own intellectual development. The lesson to be drawn is that when first lecturing on Petrarch at the school of Vico Bisi, De Sanctis was not wrong; rather, he was young and therefore limited in his ability to recognize existence as too complex a phenomenon to be grasped in causal or syllogistic terms, instead of narratively within an all-­inclusive genre. A similar hermeneutical and existential realization had led

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Petrarch to redirect his life toward the letters, a corpus programmatically eschewed by De Sanctis due to its unpopular Latinity, but (un-­)intentionally reiterated by him when he moved from the single critical essay to a full-­fledged history of Italian literature via the Essay, its template. We have seen that for De Sanctis “narration” amounts to a an “ethical impulse” because, as the above passage makes clear, only the strong-­willed, those who manage to concretize their wishes, effectively transform ideas into action. In this sense the Essay (and later on the History, the expanded version of this nucleus) can be read as an “anti-­Canzoniere,” a story in which content grows on itself slowly and by no means linearly, but surely and progressively. In fact, as De Sanctis states in concluding the Essay, the urge to narrate further comes from reading the Canzoniere, which he describes as a score on which “the simple notes of a posterior music are sketched” and an index case of a “spiritual malady.” “It would be an important work to follow through in the history of modern poetry the progress and the forms of this malady, always battled, but always reborn ever stronger, like a fatal curse attached to the modern spirit” (SCP, 247–­48). But if men, as De Sanctis says, are to be judged by their stories (or histories), then it follows that if De Sanctis’s “anti-­Rhetoric” (his courses together with his writings) succeeds, he will emerge as the Anti-­ Petrarch—­an alternative to that distant patient zero, a first modern man in his own right—­and his work will be seen as ushering in a post-­Petrarchan age.

Conclusion: Petrarch as

pharmakon

In his Critical Essay on Petrarch or, to be more precise, in the lectures that went into the book by this title, De Sanctis set out to explain Petrarch to a foreign audience for the sake of Italian “national dignity.” What he learned with regard to Petrarch was to be a better patriot himself. The “fissure of thought and action” he observed in Petrarch, his perennially irresolute “would like to, but” (SCP, 146), alerted him to the distinction between a “participatory” commitment to “political reality” and the “semblance of a passionate participation: whence that artificiality and rhetoric are born that reveal an unserious and for the most part literary inspiration” (154). For Petrarch, “Italy was a philosophical love,” and to come to Petrarch’s rescue would have amounted, likewise, to a “literary abstraction” (165). Good faith and intellectual honesty forced De Sanctis to realize that he, too, like Petrarch, was acting upon the impulse of a “false patriotism,” a sentiment that “makes us deem it acceptable to dissimulate the flaws of one’s country, something that is the ridiculous habit of a weak people and

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[weak] men.” This is how De Sanctis ultimately came to judge Petrarch even more “severely” than his foreign detractors had. “A blemish acknowledged is a blemish halved: let’s dare to stare ourselves [guardarci] in the eye, if we want to mend ourselves [guarirci]!” (249). The Critical Essay on Petrarch, thus, like most of De Sanctis’s other essays, ends with a hortatory message which is best rendered through pronominal verbs (guardarci, guarirci) that point to the fusion of the author’s and readers’ volitions—­a collective will—­and hint at the collaborative work lying ahead. The fact of the matter is that by the end of the Essay, De Sanctis has redirected his attention to a new readership: he is no longer after (if he ever was) the foreigner addressed in the introduction on Mézières, but rather, and exclusively, an Italian reader. For who else could be so personally invested as to make Petrarch their alter ego and a vehicle for spiritual rejuvenation and psychological self-­knowledge? Who else could be so empathetically attuned to De Sanctis’s ciphered message as to receive the Essay as a spiritual or therapeutic exercise? Who else, finally, other than the Italian mind could comprehend and ratify the immolation of Petrarch on the altar of an unfulfilled nation? Only to an Italian reader could Petrarch be presented as pharmakon, at once poison and remedy of a rhetorical malady, as well as pharmakos, the sacrificial victim on whose undoing depends the end of an interior, spiritual tyranny and the establishment of a consciousness attuned with a new patria.91 Just as Petrarch confronted the Cicero of the familiar letters, recovering a living man behind the literary monument, this time, in the Essay, De Sanctis confronts Petrarch—­he, too, a flawed man despite his greatness—­and likewise attains posteriority with his own past self. De Sanctis’s hermeneutical reorientation steers him away from Petrarch’s Latin writings, not simply because they were unpopular, but also, we can say now, because to recover a solution in Petrarch’s humanism, in the past, would have amounted to placing Italy’s future behind its own shoulders. By pitting Petrarch’s Renaissance and the Risorgimento against each other, De Sanctis portends a third rebirth, one that is ostensibly against Petrarch but in fact pins to him the destiny of modernity. He is more than ever the first modern man, and De Sanctis makes this apparent faster than his European colleagues, from Voigt to Fracassetti and Mézières, had done, by exclusively emphasizing his Latin production.

91. On the notions, see, of course, Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 61–­171.

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Furthermore, through these juxtaposed readings of Petrarch and De Sanctis, the Essay emerges as a letter to an illustrious ancient, one in which humanism, criticism, or let us just say, letters, divest themselves of their antiquarian garb by telling the stories of their own authors’ emancipation from the imitative idolatry that at different times was rendered as Ciceronianism and Petrarchism. In order to overcome his youthful Ciceronianism, Petrarch rewrites Cicero’s familiar letters in dialogue with their author, and in order to move beyond his own adolescent Purism or Petrarchism, De Sanctis appeals to Petrarch directly to rewrite the Canzoniere. This said, if these parallels point to the negative argument of the Italian humanist enterprise, they do not stop there. If stalwart devotion to a source or authority is stultifying, if it leads to the kind of discourse that negates “humanism” as Petrarch and De Sanctis wish to reformulate it, and if such inquiry is a prerogative of a hitherto misconstrued Italian tradition, then the first stage of the positive argument is to prove that the metaphysical or rhetorical mindset, despite being a chronic plague among Italians, is not congenital to the Italian tradition. Petrarch and De Sanctis are the first and the last of the Purists, thus transitional figures: not essences but stories. They stood on a similar threshold between sickness and healing, and, equally, they ended their careers pointing to the extraneousness of the intellectual illness they saw festering around them and, at times, within themselves. Indeed, these two Francescos, Petrarch and De Sanctis, carried the pathogen in their very name, we might say, having been christened “French”! To be clear, though, even as he eyed Petrarch’s Latin writings from a wary remove, De Sanctis not only recovered the corporal form and hermeneutics of Petrarch’s epistolographic project, he came to qualify his love of country similarly to Petrarch in his so-­called invectives, leveling charges against the uncongeniality of French thought. In the conclusion to the previous chapter, we saw that Petrarch brought this indictment to bear outside the corpus of the letters but in a way that allows a return to the letters, like a spiritual exercise intended to initiate novices to an alternative theory and practice of  knowledge. As for De Sanctis, he came into his own as an Italian critic against German and French colleagues alike. However, by the time he is composing the composite Essay on Petrarch, he is targeting French psychological criticism exclusively, as his old Purist self, raised in Puoti’s fierce miso-­gallismo or anti-­French sentiments, reemerges to make one last stand, proving that old habits are hard to break. De Sanctis shows a rare hint of pride in his Latin heritage when, discussing Mézières in the introduction to the Essay, he points to historical exceptions

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to the rule of a generally pervasive idealism. Ancient Romans were the most “positive” people, he writes, and the “least tormented from the terrible malady of the ideal,” and so today are the American people who swear by the motto “ ‘time is money’ and realize that even a minute given to daydreaming [rêve] is a minute subtracted from action.” “I insist” on this point, De Sanctis adds, because this is the great illness Italy ought to be cured of. And this is possible, because this illness is not congenital to her. The country of Scipio, Caesar, Dante, and Machiavelli is naturally endowed with the clarity of its goal, because it has the power to realize it. (SCP, 26–­27, emphasis added)

This passage could be read as a rare slip on De Sanctis’s part into the rhetoric of a crass nationalism, but it is worth noting that the malady of the ideal is rendered here, as it is throughout his works, as “rêverie,” a French term De Sanctis claims is unrenderable in Italian, its connotation essentially and culturally indifferent to the Italian people, who never had the need to coin a similar mode of expression.92 These considerations lend substance to De Sanctis’s choice to characterize his youthful self as a profound “rêveur” in La giovinezza. He first returned to that pivotal point of his existence in a letter-­essay addressed to his former student, De Meis, in 1856, published with the apt title, “The Starting Point for a History of Italian Literature,” in which he outlined his plans for his Zurich lectures and shared his evolving attitude toward one of the critical questions regarding Italian literature: the origin of the Italian vernacular. More than a decade later, he developed these ruminations in the opening chapter of the History, which formed a backdrop to his consideration of Petrarch. Writing from “abroad” and feeling “forgotten by everyone,” De Sanctis avows that the vexed question regarding the origins of the Italian language brings back into focus his embrace of Puristic zealotry when he first joined Puoti’s school at the age of sixteen: “I could not contain my anger especially when I would hear someone derive the origins of the Italian language from Provençal; I would 92. Compare SCP, 170: “Il carattere proprio di questa malattia morale è quello che i francesi chiamano rêverie, a cui non saprei trovar parola nostra che vi risponda appuntino. L’italiano è vivo, pronto, tutto gesti, a salti e a impeti, espansivo; questo ripiegamento braminico dell’anima in sé, questa immobilità e tristezza contemplativa, comune al nord, non si affà al nostro genio. Solo inaudite oppressioni e compressioni hanno potuto qualche volta far piegare il capo pensoso al piú vivace popolo del mondo. In bocca del popolo non troverai dunque parola che esprima uno stato di cui non ha esperienza.”

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call them enemies and traitors to their country, and if I had been a government official, I would have instituted a commission to bludgeon love of country into them.”93 Though ashamed by his early fanaticism, De Sanctis cannot conceal from De Meis that even now, when studying the literature of the Sicilian court of Frederick II, the first literary circle in Italy, he still “cannot find there any hint of national poetry: nothing that pours out from within social life,” nothing in that poetry that carries the “personality” of its author, be it emperor or farmer, for poetry was their leisure and “their Sunday, as if they wrote verses to forget themselves: just as the worker gets drunk on the holiday to forget that tomorrow will be Monday.”94 In sum, although the Italian Middle Ages displayed an incredibly rich array of advanced dialects, Italian poets did not derive their creations from autochthonous idioms but, indeed, from the despised Provençal: “When alongside the dialect another language emerged, refined and courtly, they fashioned from it a poetry that was thoroughly ready-­made and borrowed. The literary language made the poetry of the people sink into oblivion,” and when this happened, a “wall” was immediately raised between the people and the cultured classes, henceforth “two peoples residing in the same place without mixing.”95 In the first chapter of the History, De Sanctis returned to this point, claiming that Italian poetry was first forged in an “original sin,” that the chivalric poetry of the period was completely “a foreign importation,” “born and nourished abroad,” “not taken from Italian soil,” coming rather “to Italians by means of translations” and thus “already mechanized and refined,” that is to say, “inert”: displaying no movement or progress. All in all, this was “presaging” Petrarch and the “decadence” that would follow (HIL, 1:12–­13). We ended the previous chapter wondering who could be a congenial reader of Petrarch. Having recovered such a reader in De Sanctis, we may ask the same question about De Sanctis himself. If De Sanctis provokes impatience today, it is no doubt because we perceive that, having touched on and narratively related the highest points of the Italian literary tradition, his work leaves little undone and lends itself to wholesale embrace or rejection. In fact, the opposite is true. When we look closely at De Sanctis’s engagement with Petrarch and its situation or place within De Sanctis’s larger corpus, we see that this body of work, while providing an intellectual reorientation, willfully leaves 93. Francesco De Sanctis, “Il punto di partenza per una storia della letteratura italiana,” in Verso il realismo, 18. 94. De Sanctis, “Il punto di partenza per una storia della letteratura italiana,” 20. 95. De Sanctis, “Il punto di partenza per una storia della letteratura italiana,” 30–­31.

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everything undone. In this way it is like Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (published three years after) in that the Essay is heuristic, a model for an alternative philology and a reform of the scholar’s task that is so novel that it is shunted into para-­institutional realms, awaiting its application in a foreseeable but as yet unattained future. In the concluding chapter of this study, I will analyze Croce’s and Gramsci’s competitive attempts to rise to the occasion, as it were. Before doing so, I will explore in chapter 3 De Sanctis’s suggested solutions to the Petrarchan problem that he had identified, and in chapter 4, it seems fair to give the French the right of rebuttal.

Chapter 3

“Do not grow weary of reading, for I do not grow weary of writing”: Goldoni’s Reform of Italian Literature With the comedians I am like an artist in his workshop. They are worthy people, much more estimable than the slaves of pride and ambition. Carlo Goldoni Here in the Italian theater are to be found the secrets of Italian life and character, more than in all the classical imitations put together. A history of the comedy and the tale in all their forms would be extremely instructive. And what precious material it would give us for a history of Italian society! Francesco De Sanctis

Introduction The previous chapter researched the etiology of an intellectual affliction that Francesco De Sanctis was wont to attribute to the Italian letterato. De Sanctis sounded the alarm in the conclusion to his Critical Essay on Petrarch by suggesting that a sustained analysis of post-­Petrarchan literature could detect a systemic ailment affecting the entire corpus of Italian letters, from Petrarch to that form of Petrarchism called Purism, the educational ideology in which De Sanctis himself was raised. By the time he composes the History of Italian Literature (1870–­71), De Sanctis is fully committed to the medical metaphor, and his literary criticism acquires a (self-­)diagnostic bent. Likewise, his many critical essays, autobiographical writings, and course notes, dating before and after the History, invest De Sanctis’s work with an overt therapeutic function. This is why the History lends itself to be interpreted as a detailed and expansive pathology, a study of a pandemic that afflicts, to varying degrees, every representative of the Italian literary canon.

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We have familiarized ourselves with the origins and progress of what De Sanctis defined as the “purpose” of literary criticism—­and we may notice that those intentions find no paratextual presentation in the History because, uncharacteristically, De Sanctis forgoes any introductory or concluding remark, as if to goad the reader to a more comprehensive perusal of his works. In this chapter, I wish to seize and expand on some of De Sanctis’s scattered insights in the History regarding the Italian intellectual malady; its prognosis and treatment in the History. In order to do this, however, we must probe a little further to discover why and how De Sanctis renamed what in the Critical Essay on Petrarch he still referred to vaguely as the “malady of the ideal,” and I will show how this leitmotif recurs pervasively throughout the History. Finally, we shall extrapolate, relate, and submit to histological observation those exceptional individuals whose works and methodology De Sanctis identified as remedial. I start with an overdue chapter-­by-­chapter exploration of the History of Italian Literature. Only through attentive close reading of the entire work, from beginning to end, can one perceive Petrarchism’s formal consolidation into comedy, the genre that in De Sanctis’s view best expresses the self-­derisive and all-­irreverent attitude that arose as a result of Petrarch’s contentless zeal for literary polish, an attitude that started with Boccaccio. Indeed, we must understand comedy as a Petrarchan byproduct if we are to follow Petrarchism in its various permutations throughout the history of  Italian letters up until the eighteenth century, where, finally, two solitary nonconformists, Giambattista Vico (1668–­ 1744) and Carlo Goldoni (1707–­93), who are unknown to each other but fraternally united in the work of De Sanctis, upend the fate of the Italian mind—­Vico, by reconsecrating all human endeavor; and Goldoni, by reforming Italian theater, specifically commedia dell’arte, the lowest variety of comedy. Here we might interject that if De Sanctis perceived Petrarchism to be rampant in his day and age, and in himself, then his History is necessarily incomplete, and it does not reap the benefits of the powerful Vichian/Goldonian shot in the arm with which it concludes. Accordingly, this chapter goes on to imagine what a Vichian reading of Goldoni’s theatrical reform might look like, to follow through on De Sanctis’s suggestions. I account for the transhistorical exchange between Goldoni’s Mémoires and De Sanctis’s History, characterizing the latter as an extension of Goldoni’s personal, autobiographical work into the national or collective plane. Finally, I conclude by examining Goldoni’s vast corpus cross-­sectionally in an attempt to lay bare the hermeneutical procedures that accompany what De Sanctis exalted as the most influential of deliberate attempts to reform a literary legacy. Here, as in previous chapters, my hope is that by scrutinizing the fine interplay between creation and

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reception, I will bring out a gradually epiphanic apperception of a tradition’s making, according to De Sanctis’s (and Goldoni’s) wishes and demands.

Enough Is Enough: T h e I ta l i a n C o m i c C o m p l e x As we saw at the end of chapter 2, De Sanctis’s History begins (chap. 1) with a self-­conscious review of Sicilian chivalric culture, a courtly world in which a wholly French divide between upper and lower classes was imported (the “original sin” of Italian letters) into Italy alongside a slew of “troubadours,” “buffoons,” and “minstrels” (HIL, 1:12–­13). Next (chap. 2), De Sanctis takes on the Tuscan poets, who themselves were unconcerned with the “active and true content fed by the life of the common people,” but rather, as a group, were devoted to “fixed” contents and confected models “with precise, unchanging features.” “As at a later date we get the masks, that is, comic characters with traditional features, which nobody ever dreamed of altering,” De Sanctis adds, clearly presaging a connection with commedia dell’arte and its reform (27–­28). This rather grim beginning is followed by an embedded monograph (chaps. 3–­ 7) dedicated to the “Dantesque synthesis,” a lodestar of the divine, in accord with these chapters’ emphasis on mystical literature (HIL, 1:270). De Sanctis tackles the subject head on, in cataphatic or positive terms, while introducing the apophatic or negative theology that guides the rest of his history: Italian literature is understood best as a negation of its Dantesque origins. In short, Dante’s principal merit was to have been utterly un-­French in his understanding that scientific culture should be not only “speculative” but “practical,” that it “must also work on the will,” that it “must be popularized, must be given a moral scope—­directed toward action” (169). This explains Dante’s “enormous popularity [ . . . ] with every class” (158): “[T]he Divine Comedy as a whole is so perfectly clear and so perfectly simple that even the laziest of imaginations must take it in at a glance” (265). Despite Dante, however, a culture of classism prevailed: “Dante, who ought to have been the beginning of a whole literature, was the end of one” (288). With this caesura, the History proceeds to Petrarch’s Canzoniere (chap. 8) and a pithy rehashing of the Critical Essay on Petrarch. With Petrarch, the reader of the Essay already knows, “a purely literary consciousness is developing with the cult of form for form’s sake, apart from content” (HIL, 1:266). More resolutely than before, De Sanctis now diagnoses Petrarch with “a sickness of the spirit” (276) or an “incurable [ . . . ] disease [ . . . ] not in the intellect but in the will” (284), in any case an “ill” (277) of which Petrarch is

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unconscious, as he lacks the power “to concentrate all the forces of life in a single point, in which power lies the seriousness of  life” (283). The “illustrious sick man” we call Petrarch (289) cannot after all be grasped in a sentence, for he is “one of those contradictory beings who belong to times of transition—­not yet the new man, but no longer the old” (284). But here is the rub: although Petrarch himself had “no story” (he failed to account for his “graduated progress” [275]), De Sanctis finally does have a story, and he is now hungering to share it with his readers—­indeed, to pyrotechnic effect. What we learn from reading further is that Petrarch is more of a ringleader than a transitional figure. Riding shotgun alongside Petrarch, Italian letters are driven off a cliff and into the great void of a discontinuous future. “And now,” De Sanctis resumes at the start of the following chapter (chap. 9), dedicated to Boccaccio, “if we open the Decameron, hardly have we read the first tale when we seem to have fallen from the clouds and to be asking with Petrarch, ‘How came I here, and when?’ ” After Petrarch, the Italian literary legacy no longer presents itself as “an evolution,” but rather as “a cataclysm” or “a revolution—­ one of those sudden revolutions that from one day to another show us a changed world.” Even Petrarch himself would have lost his bearings in such circumstances. With Boccaccio “we have the Middle Ages not only denied, but made fun of ” (HIL, 1:290). At this juncture, De Sanctis’s narrative begins to take shape as the story of a satirical upheaval against an ancient regime, an upheaval that falters because it is far ahead of its time. Indeed, nothing like it will be seen again until distant future events in French history. De Sanctis spells out the historical analogy in the second paragraph, where he describes “Ser Cepperello,” a pious fraudster whose story is told in the first novella of the Decameron: [He is] a Tartuffe some centuries before his time, with the difference, however, that where Molière aims at rousing us to hatred and disgust for the hypocrisy of  Tartuffe, Boccaccio gets fun out of Cepperello’s, and is less concerned with our feelings toward the hypocrite than with making us laugh at the expense of his good confessor and the credulous friars and the credulous people. So the weapon of Molière is sarcastic irony, whereas the weapon of Boccaccio is merry caricature. To meet again with Boccaccio’s forms and aims we must go as far as Voltaire; Giovanni Boccaccio, in certain aspects, is the Voltaire of the fourteenth century. (HIL, 1:290)

On his deathbed, after a life of immoral lechery, Boccaccio’s Cepperello secures sanctity for himself through a feigned conversion. Thus turning

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a previous theme on its head, with respect to Dante’s pilgrimage toward God, Italian letters self-­consciously enter into modernity through apostasy, a counter-­conversion from Paradise to earthly life. “Our eyes are no longer fixed on the sky in ecstasy [ . . . ],” De Sanctis states in reference to Boccaccio’s work, “[t]he flesh, making its reappearance in the world, seems to have stripped itself naked for our enjoyment, and fills our Paradise with allurement and caresses. And so we get cynicism, more especially when an ironical sense of modesty is used to stir up the senses” (352). Naturally, Bocaccio stands in contrast to Dante who, even when steeped deep in Hell, in this “world of the comic feels himself arid, cold, and out of place.” No doubt, “situations are comic” even in the Inferno, but “they lack the true form of the comic, which is caricature, and its result, which is laughter” (HIL, 1:210). But Boccaccio is also incommensurable with his French heirs, Rabelais or Montaigne, for example, whose “laughter [ . . . ] is serious because it leaves something behind it in the consciousness.” As for Boccaccio, his “laughter is an end in itself,” mere divertissement (348). While showing his disapproval, De Sanctis yields to the revolting comic vortex of Boccaccio for the sake of research. He is willing to experience comedy so as to redefine it as “the realm of the finite and the senses,” whose “first impressions are centered in minute observation of habits, whereas in serious literature the first impressions give us the forms of allegories and personifications.” Comedy first appears as “caricature,” De Sanctis explains, which means depicting the object directly in such a way as to put its defective and ridiculous side into evidence. No doubt it would have been enough just to show us the defect and leave us to guess the rest: a single ray is enough to light up the whole and show it to our imagination. But Boccaccio aims at more than this; he is like a painter who depicts the entire figure, choosing and distributing the accessories in such a way that more light is thrown on the defective parts than on the others. Therefore the element of the ridiculous is not isolated, but spreads to the whole picture; each part contributes to the effect produced; there is a kind of crescendo in the comic scale. He so prepares us and puts us in the right mood for laughter that it rarely breaks out unexpectedly and irresistibly, as in those short passages which give us unexpected connections; instead of  laughter we more often get a feeling of equable pleasure, are kept gently satisfied. We are appeased, not excited. Though we do not actually laugh, our faces are serene and happy; the laugh is there, but is latent; it is not an irresistible laugh that breaks out in spite of ourselves. [ . . . ] [W]e seem to be rocked deliciously in our contemplation. (HIL, 1:351–­52)

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We may at this point recall Petrarch’s fraught farewell to letters, analyzed in chapter 1 of this study, which took the form of a moralizing translation (into Latin) of one of Boccaccio’s novellas: the last in the Decameron. In this passage, however, as if to deflect Petrarch’s strategy in his letter collections—­the very corpus that De Sanctis programmatically leaves unmentioned—­the progress of the Italian literary tradition is anchored to the first novella of the Decameron, the inaugural and ineluctable materialization of vernacular comic prose. If Petrarch’s intention was to incorporate Boccaccio, then De Sanctis seems to want to use Boccaccio more expansively. Boccaccio’s comedy, situated at the very center of  De Sanctis’s narration, in chapter 9 of 20 (but really of 18, as we shall see that the last two are made to stand on their own), acquires a centrifugal energy, radiating and enveloping, in ever widening and devastating circles the past and future of  Italian letters, and their account in the History, as past and present readers nod and smile on. The point is that the listless and brainwashed reader described by De Sanctis is none other than the Renaissance man himself. This becomes increasingly evident in the following chapters, where De Sanctis gives his interpretation of the Italian early modern legacy as a moment of great glory and equal decadence. The Decameron is a mirror of the sociocultural context of  Renaissance times. Boccaccio’s comedy, “utterly lacking in any high or serious intention, either to break down prejudice, or to attack institutions, or to fight ignorance, or to moralize, or to reform”—­in other words, unconcerned with the emancipation of the “uncultured people” it ridiculed—­left the status quo unaltered (HIL, 1:347–­48). As De Sanctis sees it, Italian literature ran against the course of  history. While “culture was no longer the privilege of the few,” “was widening out” in the fourteenth century, French “feudal gaiety” spread to the larger class of Italian “rich burghers,” a “licentious,” “cynical,” and “carefree” company (367–­68). In fact, it is the life of  Boccaccio, truly a transitional figure, and the arc of  his career, which spans from “great volumes in Latin” to the vapid merriment of the Decameron, that offers a “compendium” of the intimate sodality between the unknowingly joyous novellieri of the Trecento (chap. 10) and the Latinist (or humanist) pedantries of the Quattrocento (chap. 11) (HIL, 1:369). By juxtaposing Petrarch and Boccaccio, thus, we gain an insight that Petrarch alone could not provide. While the malady afflicting Italy takes many forms in the Italian literary legacy (and in De Sanctis’s characterization of it in the History and other writings), what strikes us here is that at the height of the Cinquecento (chap. 12) its most symptomatic manifestation may be grasped, finally, as a merry, mocking, humoristic, in a word, unserious approach to life and the

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world. “The thing that is alive in all of [Renaissance] literature,” De Sanctis announces, “is not the tragic and not the fantastic, but the comic: a comic that is often obscene and superficial and mixed with alloy, which remains at the level of caricature” (458–­59). Superiority and inferiority complexes intermingle and overlap in the existential attitude expressed so irresponsibly by the Italian Renaissance intelligentsia. The outcome of their overbearing arrogance was a long time coming and swept everyone away in its wake, as De Sanctis puts it in an explosive rant (in fact, a précis of chapters 13–­18 to come) that concludes the Cinquecento chapter of his History: The comic art of the day is the Decameron in putrefaction. The vice of the capitolo is the habit of  looking for the comic means rather in the abstract combinations of the mind than in the living depiction of reality. It is the vice of Petrarchism: Francesco Berni is the Petrarch of the capitolo, and the Petrarchists are his imitators, who by dint of looking for connections and combinations succeed in being cold and subtle. The vice of the novella is a prosaic sensuality and vain curiosity; it is empty of ideals and of color, and often has a pedantic and anaemic form. So the capitolo and the novella have a fault in common—­ both are superficial, both of them skim the surface of existence, and barely that, as though the whole of life were a series of chance appearances, without man and without Nature. And as literature is nothing more than a game of the imagination, without heart or mind in it, the comic form into which it dissolves is caricature, degraded to the point of pure buffoonery. Everything is turned into a game, including that game of the imagination which Boccaccio, Sacchetti, Lorenzo, Politian, Pulci, Berni had toiled at so seriously, and which in the Orlando furioso became the organic world of Italian art. The irony of Ariosto is turned into open buffoonery, and all the idols of the imagination, old and new alike, are smothered in noisy laughter. The new art, which has issued from the religious, political, and moral dissolution of the Middle Ages and has remained in the void, in love only with itself like Narcissus, is to meet its death at the hands of  “Teofilo” Folengo, the renegade monk. And it dies making fun of everything, even of  itself. This negative and comic cycle of  Italian art is closed with Folengo’s Maccaronea. (HIL, 1:459–­60)

This passage reveals that for De Sanctis comedy is not just a form among others, it acquires ontological status as the chief mode of expression of the Italian mind in the age of the Renaissance. In its pure form, as in Boccaccio’s exemplary “opposition” to the medieval world, it “putrefies” or degenerates

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in imitation. The comic is associated with laughter only in its most corrupted form, while its origins lie—­prior to any physical reaction—­in Petrarch’s ce­ rebral withdrawal whose imitation is Petrarchism: in fact, comedy is also a Petrarchism, the last and most deleterious form of it.1 In the quoted passage, De Sanctis avers that the Italian Renaissance—­a deathless epoch that the History is finally escorting to a close in the nineteenth century—­was a “comic cycle,” in literary terms. The History adheres formally to this assertion by giving us, between the Cinquecento chapter and the conclusion, a series of  buffer chapters (dedicated respectively to Ludovico Ariosto, Teofilo Folengo, Pietro Aretino, Torquato Tasso, and Giambattista Marino) that sum up all of the forms (high and low) adopted by the Italian comic spirit. Thus we get Ariosto (chap. 13), who when trying “to be comic [ . . . ] only succeeded in being gross” (HIL, 2:473); Folengo (chap. 14), in whose hands comedy turns on itself, fomenting a droll and self-­parodic language (523); Pietro Aretino (chap. 16), a degenerate “Camorrist” (605) who simmers Boccaccio’s “piquant sauce of  lubricity” into a lip-­smacking “ragout” (607); and finally, like the light at the end of the tunnel, Torquato Tasso (chap. 17), who is “looking for seriousness of life in times of transition” (647); and Giambattista Marino (chap. 18), whose idyllic or pastoral “Naturalism” ushers the comic degeneration of the period into a new phase (682–­83 and 707). It is in fact in the chapter on Marino or in the midst of the Baroque, what De Sanctis’s age defined as the period of Italian decadence, that the ebbing tide of De Sanctis’s narrative finally begins to flow back toward shore. The possibility of emerging from the gironi of Italian comic hell is signaled by a metacritical realization: if the history of Italian letters is in fact more instructively intended as a “history of the comedy,” it follows that “in Italian theater are to be found the secrets of Italian life and character, more than in all the classical imitations put 1. Compare: “With Ariosto this world of  Dante had already been dissolved, in both its reality and its forms, and dissolved by a work that had been written before his time, in which he had taken no part. In Petrarch we already saw the dawning of the artist who was fashioning the world of his heart composing it like a painter, believing in it and becoming impassioned by it, feeling its torments and joys. And in Boccaccio art had begun to amuse itself at the expense of that reality and those forms of  Dante. The smirk of  Lorenzo and the mocking laugh of  Pulci had already passed over that world; and on the altars of the empty temple had already risen the new divinity announced by Orpheus, among the refined perfumes of  Politian. There was nothing left for Ludovico Ariosto either to affirm or to deny; he found a surface already cleared, through no work of  his own. He neither believed nor disbelieved: he was just indifferent. He found himself in a world empty of everything that is noble and lofty—­without religion, without fatherland, without morality—­and he was not very interested in it” (HIL, 2:486–­87).

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together” (HIL, 2:673). And since De Sanctis has been focusing on the latter until now (or pretended to), he is like the Latin Petrarch here (and elsewhere) in seeking mutuality with his readers by sharing and displaying every phase of his discernment. It thus dawns on De Sanctis and the reader alike that most of the authors treated, though often owing their glory to other kinds of works, were at some point in their careers active, albeit not necessarily professional, playwrights. This is true of  Leon Battista Alberti (1404–­72), whom De Sanctis singles out as the most representative man of the Quattrocento (“So perfect was his knowledge of  Latin that a comic play written when he was only twenty, called Philodoxus, was thought by all the learned men to be the work of one of the ancient Latin writers” [1:413]); Ariosto and Machiavelli, the “two great men, who between them were to typify the [Renaissance] in its double face” (2:535); Aretino, “in whom the image of the [Renaissance] received its last [most “cynical” and “depraved”] touches” (598), and so on. It is also true of Pe­­ trarch, we might add, if we cast a sidelong glance at opposite ends of the Italian Renaissance simultaneously, since he was the author of Philologia, which, though nonextant, provides the first example of humanist comedy. Likewise, the same Giordano Bruno who, as De Sanctis will point out in due time, set Italian sciences on a course that would climax with Vico, started off by writing the odd (some say the last) of the so-­called erudite comedies of the period, Il Candelaio/The Candle-­bearer. Viewed through this lens, the Italian comic cycle may be seen as coming to an end, at least in its elite expression, in Folengo’s macaronic claptrap, as De Sanctis avers. At the same time, this can also be seen as a moment of  new beginning in the equally plurilingual, but unscripted and thus extraliterary and popular, repertory of those improvisers who “spread through the whole of Italy, and later as far as Paris and London,” influencing the new literature of Europe and its Shakespeares and Molières. In commedia dell’arte or commedia a soggetto “a fund of fixed and predetermined types of characters,” the conventions of past rhetoric, exit the books and take the stage, where, fully alive and nimble, they perform the illness of the Italian intellect (HIL, 2:672–­73). It is thus amid the throng of charlatans and mountebanks surrounding the wagons of the itinerant “Pantaloon[s], Brighella[s], Harlequin[s] Pulcinella[s], the Doctor[s] from Bologna, the Capitan[s] Spaventa,” and so on that De Sanctis escorts his readers into the History’s double-­pronged conclusion, two chapters (19 and 20) titled respectively “The New Science” and the “The New Literature.” In these chapters, theater emerges more emphatically as a factor in the early stirrings of  Italy’s as yet inchoate rebirth into seriousness. The malady now fully diagnosed, a prognosis is ventured, and Italy, having almost laughed itself to

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death, begins to be “unthought” as national sentiments are awakened, and a new Italian man, a de-­Frenchified and humorless one, begins to be modeled from scratch.2 As anticipated at the beginning of this chapter, the two champions of the transition described by De Sanctis are Giambattista Vico and Carlo Goldoni. Although Vico’s scientific reform made Goldoni’s literary reform possible, it is by looking at the contexts surrounding Goldoni that we come to know the difficulties at hand. When Goldoni set out to overhaul Italian theater, De Sanctis explains, [Antonio] Sacchi [the celebrated Harlequin of the time] was the last of those able comic improvisers who traveled with their companies to Paris, Vienna, and London, upholding the glories of Italian comedy in Europe. The Italian improvised comedy (a soggetto), which had risen on the ruins of the old dull and academic literary comedies, had entirely conquered the field in Rome, Naples, Bologna, Milan, and Venice. It was the only form of the old literature that still had life in it, and belonged peculiarly to Italy; it was the one form of Italian art that still survived in Europe. When an actor in Italy rose to some little fame, he usually moved to Paris, where the pay was better. But in Paris now there had arisen Molière, who was founding French comedy, and wanted to oust the Italian comedy; and in Venice there had arisen Goldoni, who was reforming comedy, and wanted to abolish the masks and the improvised comedy. (HIL, 2:866)

Here De Sanctis points to a telling irony: If commedia dell’arte was perhaps the most recognizable staple of Italian culture at the turn of the seventeenth century (and later), it was the staple of a culture so compromised that it was no longer literary. De Sanctis understands that Goldoni’s reform was something more sophisticated than the moralization of an anonymous inherited corpus; it was, rather, foundational, “the revival of the word, the restoration of literature to the place that belonged to it and with the honors that were due to it; in fact, to put it shortly, it was the New Literature” (870). 2. Compare: “[Alfieri] aimed at being the redeemer of  Italy, the great precursor of a new era. As he could not do it by deeds, he would do it with his pen. [ . . . ] To lose his ‘Frenchification’ and become ‘Tuscanized,’ he lived as much as was possible in Tuscany. He took up the study of Latin, and plunged with ardor into the trecentisti, prepared, as he put it, ‘to unthink, so as to be able to think.’ He lived in spirit with Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, copying and annotating and translating, ‘sinking himself deep in the vortex of grammar’ ” (HIL, 2:888).

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Specifically, he positions Goldoni between Pietro Metastasio (1698–­1782), the famed opera seria librettist, and Carlo Gozzi (1720–­1806), who is rather superficially considered to be the apologist of commedia dell’arte contra Goldoni. Unlike them, however, Goldoni doggedly eschewed the “extraordinary” and the “marvelous” for the sake of the real, the natural, and the human. De Sanctis writes, “Manner, convention, rhetoric, Arcadianism, reminiscence, quotation, the mythological machinery and the classical machinery, were all of them banished—­all that was included in the expression ‘literary form.’ The center of drama was man; and man moreover in his ordinary, everyday life” (HIL, 2:873). Goldoni’s humanism, his restoration of faith in words, necessitated an implosion of “form,” as “characters,” concretized in his Socratic hands, dropped from heaven to earth, and dialogue, rather than pointing to content beyond itself, flowed at last, like “action itself in movement” (872). De Sanctis did not exempt Goldoni from reproach. He faults the playwright as unread and shallow, and ready to sell himself to please the audience, and yet such criticism, from which no figure is spared in De Sanctis, is, for once, outweighed by praise. Famously, De Sanctis calls Goldoni “the Galileo of the new literature, the telescope here being the true and quick perception of the soul, guided by good sense.” Goldoni’s banishment of “the fantastic, the declamatory, and the rhetorical” was no less of an achievement than Galileo’s slaying of the “occult” and “supernatural” in science. Goldoni was preceded in some ways by Molière, yet one might argue that his achievement was greater, given the circumstances, for it took place in Italy, “the classical land of the academy and of rhetoric,” a land where literature had worn itself out so much that “words were no longer the principal thing,” and where even comedy, the lowest of forms, “was afraid to appear by itself,” that is, barefaced and scripted, “without the help of the masks and the improvised lazzi of the Harlequins, Truffaldinos, Brighellas, and Pantaloons” (HIL, 2:869–­70). It is worth dwelling on this point because in De Sanctis’s view transitions should be not merely announced but experienced anew as conquests of the collective spirit. The reader is drawn into their long and painful gestation and asked to participate in their activation. In the process, not only does literature change, but so does the very physiognomy of the Italian man, including, hopefully for De Sanctis, that of the engrossed reader of the History. At an important turning point, for example, we are told that Giuseppe Parini (1729–­99), an exemplary uomo nuovo, or “new man,” “never really manages to laugh” at the old “forms,” at best “laughs with a wry mouth” while feeling nothing but

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“disgust and contempt.”3 It was “Italy,” as a whole, that “had laughed enough, and was laughing still with” Goldoni until a “redeemer,” a “hero,” a “gigantic solitary statue” came along, wagging his finger, to wipe that grin off its face, to “eliminate the irony,” and “allow the disgust, anger, and contempt to rise openly and defiantly to the surface” (HIL, 2:885). This epiphanic hero was Alfieri, whose first feat was to supply his country, otherwise “immeasurably ahead of all the nations in all forms of  literature,” with the one form it lacked: tragedy (887). De Sanctis’s claims and accompanying fervor betray his Vichism, his understanding of history as a metaphorical journey through the ages of gods, heroes, and men. The birth of the new literature, we can now appreciate, was a rebirth of the Italian spirit and as such a heroic act. When De Sanctis juxtaposes Metastasio and Goldoni, he does so to assert that the realism of the latter brought the heroic age to a close (“To paint from the real meant the end of the heroic as conceived in Italy—­the end of Metastasio” [HIL, 2:862]), and, thus, according to a Vichian framework, rebirth into the age of man.4 Such a feat is not just literary but spiritual, and hence philosophical; it signals, in contemporary terms, an epistemic turn that might already have occurred in the realm of science. This might prompt us to ask: was De Sanctis’s Goldoni, the 3. De Sanctis compares Parini to his Renaissance predecessors: “Here the laugh is on the surface; beneath it, repressed and contained, is the man’s indignation. Parini has the power of repression; rarely does feeling rise to the surface, or irony become sarcasm. The irony of the old forefathers of the Renaissance was merry and skeptical, as we see in Boccaccio and Ariosto. It was chiefly intellectual; it was the intellect refusing to be a party to the absurdities of theology and feudalism; it was a vindication of the intellect accompanied by moral dissolution; it was science looking at ignorance with irony. In Parini irony is the awakening of conscience in the midst of an empty and superficial society. The irony of the Renaissance was the irony of common sense; the irony of  Parini is the irony of the moral sense. We feel that man and the inner life have been born again” (HIL, 2:885). 4. Metastasio, too, was impeded in his “heroism” by the pervasiveness and force of comedy: “In the numberless comedies and novels of Italy anyone wishing for dreams and fables had a bottomless quarry to draw from. Foreigners dug in it, and so did Metastasio.” Specifically, on Metastasio’s theater, De Sanctis adds: “Being combinations purely of the theater, they are wanting of course in inner seriousness, and often have the air of comic intrigues, with the entanglements and equivocal situations and parallelisms usual in comedies. Often the events are comic in themselves, being episodes of ordinary life seen from its gossipy and trivial angle. So the heroic (which is really idyllic) not seldom ends in the lowest regions of the comic. It is Caesar fiddling and making love. Such was the poet Metastasio, and such was the age he belonged to: idyllic, elegiac, and comic—­everyday life decked in heroic trappings, tickled by the feeling of elegy, and idealized in the idyll” (HIL, 2:845–­46).

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first realist in Italian literature, a thinker in his own right? De Sanctis does not make that leap, but in the way that he structures his narrative and his argument, grafting the new literature onto the new science and the thought of preceding centuries, he endows Goldoni with an unexpected ancestry. From this angle, Goldoni’s realism is not merely the product of a professional manipulation of the commedia a soggetto. Rather, it comes from the assimilation of the achievements of those “new philosophers,” the intellectual “reformers” to whom we owe the end of aestheticism, a world rediscovered and illustrated by science. It was the likes of Giordano Bruno (1548–­1600), Tommaso Campanella (1568–­ 1639), Galileo Galilei (1564–­1642), Paolo Sarpi (1552–­1623), and Vico who made naturalism and criticism possible; it was they who sought “for reality behind the appearance, for “spirit beyond the forms, “for the real and the positive, and not in books but in the direct study of things.” In short, it is they who first began looking “at things unveiled, in their substance and reality” (773). But for De Sanctis it is not necessarily the case that literature is an excrescence of science, for the opposite is equally true. In the origins of Italian philosophy, which he recovers in Bruno, he sees proof that the lotus of science springs from the mud of literature. After all, asks De Sanctis coyly, what was Bruno’s first book? “It was a comedy—­Il Candelaio (The Candle-­bearer) (HIL, 2:718). De Sanctis is pointing to the fact that the philosopher Bruno is also a man of his time and place—­an Italian comedian. “In Bruno too there is satire and irony in plenty”; he draws from the tradition that spans from Boccaccio to Aretino, but he was repulsed by it, long before Parini expressed a similar reaction (740). It is why Bruno raises an existential mirror to his face, in the “antiprologue” of Il Candelaio: “The Author, if ever you should see him, has a bewildered look on his face, as of a man who is forever contemplating the pains of Hell [ . . . ] if he laughs it is only because others are laughing. As a rule you will see him disgusted, restive, and strange” (719). Driven by these feelings, Bruno goes beyond parody. His characters self-­consciously embrace life’s ideals (“literature,” “science,” and “love”) in their “comic degeneration” (“pedantry,” “imposture,” and “bestiality”) (721). Bruno partakes of the “old and exhausted forms” only to sap their roots from within. The new matter of his philosophy and speculation feeds off the remains of the literary forms at his disposal. De Sanctis, who is not just a Vichian but a Hegelian, has Bruno leading the way in the long process of taming transcendence, a process that ultimately entailed the creative negation, rather, Aufhebung or sublation of the Middle Ages. The synthesis of ideal and real did not arrive quickly, however. Bruno’s project would not be fulfilled until the second modernity, postrevolutionary

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and subdued, that was the Romantic movement. In the concluding pages of his History, De Sanctis describes how this movement reconnected to and fulfilled the premature revolution heralded by Boccaccio: It was not a reaction, it was a reconciliation. It was the Revolution again, but defeated and innocuous—­no longer sarcastic or abusive or ironical [ . . . ]. The spirit had ceased to dwell on the heights of the supernatural, had emerged from the generalities of dogma and come down among men. The spirit had at last gained self-­consciousness, and now was molding the divine in its own image, tracing its course, and assigning it its place in history. It was the “divine comedy” again, but upside-­down; the human is not merged into the divine, but the divine is merged into the human. It is true that the divine had been born again into the world—­but all the same we are conscious that Bruno, Campanella, and Vico had been born before it. (HIL, 2:917–­18)

In the nineteenth century, reaction, opposition, and their form, comedy, gave way to reconciliation. Accordingly, comedy, after long corruption, was again “divine,” albeit inside-­out. With this assertion De Sanctis brings his national biography full circle, to a literal recapitulation. The intimate literary biography of the Italian nation had begun with Dante (the “Tuscan Homer,” according to Gravina and Vico). His Divine Comedy was a bible, a universal concept, a point of encounter of the two literatures (scientific and popular), in which knowledge equaled action. Now, at the end of the cycle, that force is finally released, running unchecked, no longer bounded by a book and now authored collectively by humanity. Thus goes the official story. It appears, however, that this “new century” may have had its own “bible” after all, its own “moral and intellectual lever” (HIL, 2:927). Little read, and perhaps too premature, this would have been Vico’s New Science. The science contained therein offered a bracing corrective to the comic tradition: namely, that “[t]o remake society it is not enough to condemn it: it must be studied and understood. And this precisely is the Scienza nuova” (801). Vico’s New Science, “the Divine Comedy of science” (808), does something unique in beginning to treat history “psychologically,” realizing that ideal history is made of a mind and a body, and that “the natural course of individual life is also the natural course or history of every nation” (802). In De Sanctis’s appreciation, Vico was a great “observer of facts,” like Machiavelli; his distinction was that he was no mere portraitist but a metaphysician. Vico’s metaphysical psychologism is unparalleled in that it breathes dynamism back into thought and history, it allows for things to be grasped as they always are

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in nature: in movement. In so doing he “imparted the new word of the century: ‘criticism.’ ” “Vico’s history is a criticism of  humanity,” De Sanctis, a self-­ described “critic,” explains, illustrating his own agenda in the History: “It is the living idea made history, and followed, comprehended, and justified in all the moments of its life, in all the moments of its never-­ending pilgrimage” (811). What we finally get with Vico, thus, is “real drama, the story of the mind in the world” (HIL, 2:805). And with this infusion of temporality, everything becomes narrative—­that is, literature—­and in the process, philosophy becomes antecedent (“The new science was no longer science: it was literature” [832]). The impact on literature, which was left to divulge and popularize this new turn in philosophy, was momentous: Every work of literary criticism was ushered in with philosophy and history. A work of art was no longer regarded as an arbitrary and subjective product of the mind in its immutable rules and examples, but was a product, partly unconscious, of the spirit of the world at a given moment of its existence. [ . . . ] With this changed point of view came a change in criteria. The literature of the Renaissance was condemned as classical and conventional, and the use of mythology was ridiculed. [ . . . ] Rhetoric and poetics declined; the empty forms of rhetoric and the mechanical and arbitrary rules of poetics were seen to be absurd. There returned to favor that old motto of Goldoni, “Paint from life; avoid falsifying Nature.” (928)

Italian thinkers prefigured the Romantic period, which, in assimilating rather than fighting or ridiculing medieval asceticism, also brought it to a close. Likewise, when we finally see De Sanctis’s History for what it is—­the story of the long process of Italian emancipation from comedy—­we see the wrong turn of the Italian literary renaissance made right. Moreover, this emancipation would not have succeeded to the same extent, if at all, if not for Vico and Goldoni, two authors who are never elsewhere connected as intimately as they are by De Sanctis, who is able to see their spiritual affinity. It took a double-­edged reform, as much Vichian as Goldonian, to begin to cure the Italian comic complex, the most obdurate symptom of the Petrarchan illness. But this is as far as De Sanctis goes, or could go. When he realized that his early modern material had grown disproportionately in his hands, he asked his editor if he could narrate further—­a request that was denied, with a reminder that the commission was for a high-­school compendium. As it stands, then, the History, the story of the divine and lowly comedies of  Italian letters, stops short, and De Sanctis, like Dante’s Virgil, is forbidden to enter the Paradise

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of completion.5 In hindsight, however, and only through an attentive and sustained reading of the complete plot of De Sanctis’s History, rightly considered one of greatest Italian historical novels of the nineteenth century, may the reader deem an open ending a fit conclusion. As we have seen in chapter 2, the literary critic should not, perhaps,  journey all the way to the people but rather should urge them to meet them halfway. In this case, De Sanctis, whose goal in the History was to illustrate the multifarious manifestations and evolution of the Petrarchan intellectual malady, leaves it to future readers of his work and of the Italian literary tradition to test, debate, and expand narratively on his intuitions, including the one we have been focusing on all along: the complementarity of science and literature, and how this complementarity is embodied in Vico and Goldoni. As De Sanctis’s fellow and future readers, we accept this task, and we begin, in the next section, by putting Goldoni’s intentions through the test of De Sanctis’s Vico-­inflected interpretation—­to see if Goldoni passes muster, of course, but also to recover reciprocity, to make explicit De Sanctis’s own unacknowledged debt to Goldoni for the creation of his story.

Reforming . . . from Without If we seek hard evidence to support De Sanctis’s hunch regarding the affinity between Vico and Goldoni, there are several leads we can pursue. We could speculate, for example, about the circulation in manuscript form of an early version of  Vico’s New Science, sent upon request to Venice on or around 1728, but never published there.6 Or, more promisingly, we could look into Goldoni’s admiration for Gian Vincenzo Gravina (1664–­1718), Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–­1750), Scipione Maffei (1675–­1755), and other precursors, contemporaries, and associates of  Vico, whom Goldoni at some point either met or read and who earned a citation in his Mémoires.7 Here, though, Goldoni himself intervenes, cautioning avant la lettre against such a line of investigation. Immediately following a mention in passing of his encounter with Muratori during a visit to 5. On the making of De Sanctis’s History, see Benedetto Croce, “Storia della letteratura italiana: Nota bibliografica,” in Scritti su Francesco De Sanctis, ed. Teodoro Tagliaferri and Fulvio Tessitore, 2 vols. (Naples: Giannini, 2007), 2:225–­39; and Amedeo Quondam, De Sanctis e la “Storia” (Naples: Giannini, 2017), chaps. 3–­5. 6. On Vico’s elusive presence in Venice, see the essays collected in Cesare De Michelis and Gilberto Pizzamiglio, eds., Vico e Venezia (Florence: Olschki, 1982). 7. On Vico’s early Italian reception, see Benedetto Croce and Fausto Nicolini, Bibliografia vichiana, 2 vols. (Naples: Ricciardi, 1947–­48), 1:165–­400.

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Modena, his recollections abruptly shift to a “frightful scene” witnessed during a leisurely stroll in that city: “a crowd of  people, a scaffold elevated to the height of five feet, on which a man appeared with his head uncovered and his hands tied.” This “enlightened literary man” being publicly pilloried, personally known to Goldoni, was none other than “G*** B*** V***.” As readers of De Sanctis, we are taunted with the possibility of a penitent Giambattista Vico being immolated on the altar of  religious prejudice. Of course, this was not and could not have been the case, but then, who was the mysterious figure “accused of uttering indecent language to a woman who had been taking the sacrament”? (M, 79). Footnotes point to Giovanni Battista Vicini (1709–­82), an abbot persecuted by the Inquisition in 1747–­48, and not in 1727, when the tale takes place. Are we to believe that Goldoni’s memory played a trick on him as he went about setting up an episode that describes a momentous, albeit fleeting, religious conversion and his desire to enter the order of  Capuchins? We can take this moot point in Goldonian scholarship to symbolize the ever elusive, if not allusive, presence of  Vico in Goldoni’s work. At the same time, however, it deflects the scholar’s attention from proving De Sanctis either right or wrong in his original intuition, when the necessary evidence could be found by dint of empathic consideration. Indeed, it seems preferable to attempt the latter approach, relying on questions such as: how may a Vichian interpretation further our understanding of Goldoni’s career and agenda? and what, in turn, can be learned about De Sanctis’s History by grasping Goldoni’s reform according to De Sanctis’s demands, as indeed a Vichian event? In the next chapter, I will more closely examine Vico, or more precisely, Vico frenzy. Here, however, we can begin to understand Goldoni better by restating what Vico meant to De Sanctis, and what this meant for De Sanctis’s Vichian appreciation of Goldoni. In chapter 2, we saw Vico playing a pivotal role in every phase of De Sanctis’s existence. As a student, and through his friend’s eyes, De Sanctis first learned about Vico as the inspirer of a genuine patriotism. Later, as a young and independent teacher, De Sanctis resorted to Vico to reform the Cartesian-­inflected poetics of his time. Eventually, later in his career, De Sanctis credited Vico for the programmatic reconnection of science and life, and for the realization, deployed in the History, that cultural peaks coincide with the beginnings of decadence. Finally, as we have shown, De Sanctis clearly drew from Vico’s New Science and autobiography in La giovinezza, in order to represent his own life story as a tale of personal redemption from a stifling background steeped in rhetoric. All of these elements play a role in De Sanctis’s Vichian appreciation of Goldoni, and they reinforce what he writes in the History: namely, that a

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regeneration of society may be brought about only through conscious, informed, and compassionate consideration of the past one wishes to supersede; that individuals and nations progress according to commensurable phases and in reciprocal exchange; and, most important, that truths are not given and static, but rather are grasped in their becoming and making. Taken together, these remarks point to the need to recast the historiographical task as a narrative endeavor, and specifically as an autobiographical one. Genealogical narration of the self is the only true antidote to Platonism or Petrarchism, that repertory of eternally imitable convictions in which the personality and passions of individual thinkers are made to drown in the anonymizing claim to universality. De Sanctis’s agenda should appeal to contemporary minds. Like our generation, he seems to be waging a battle against the sovereign subject of the metaphysical tradition (the Cartesian “Cogito, ergo sum”), arguing instead for the primacy of what contemporary theory refers to as the “narratability of the self ” when pointing to the aporias of philosophical discourse in the face of the challenge of accounting for the relational “who” as much as the autonomous and disembodied “what” of  human existence.8 Moreover, it aligns exactly with the point that Vico was making when he assimilated his overt and longstanding antagonism against Descartes into his life narrative, a commissioned intellectual autobiography that he wrote in the third person in 1725: We shall not here feign what René Descartes craftily feigned as to the method of  his studies simply in order to exalt his own philosophy and mathematics and degrade all the other studies included in divine and human erudition. Rather, with the candor proper to a historian, we shall narrate plainly and step by step the entire series of  Vico’s studies, in order that the proper and natural causes of  his particular development [tale e non altra riuscita] as a man of  letters may be known.9

To be a historian (as opposed to a philosopher) is to believe in the therapeutic effects of the minute diachronization and sharing of one’s intellectual development. Only by genealogically parsing ourselves do we come to understand ourselves completely—­not only who we are, of course, but also, relationally, 8. Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (New York: Routledge, 2000), 13. 9. Giambattista Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max H. Fisch and Thomas G. Bergin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944), 113, emphasis added.

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who we are not: tali e non altri. Nevertheless, the philosophical penchant for teleology, for having one’s uniqueness or difference point to a predestined end-­ goal, is still present, and Vico, too, succumbs to it when he rephrases this passage in a 1731 addendum: And, as may be seen, he wrote it as a philosopher, meditating the causes, natural and moral, and the occasions of fortune; why even from childhood he had felt an inclination for certain studies and an aversion from others; what opportunities and obstacles had advanced or retarded his progress; and lastly the effect of his own exertions in right directions, which were destined later to bear fruit in those reflections on which he built his final work, the New Science, which was to demonstrate that his intellectual life was bound to have been such as it was and not otherwise [tale e non altra].10

Such is the gist of what is still considered the “application of the New Science [or the genetic method] to the life of its author.”11 Vico’s intellectual autobiography was first published in Venice in 1728 (serendipitously, in very close proximity to Goldoni’s epiphanic vision of G***B***V***’s public shaming), and in it Vico was asked by his commissioners to provide a “model” and a “norm” for similarly experimental and educational ways of conceiving the autobiographical task.12 Given the place and date of publication of Vico’s autobiography, it is tantalizing to speculate that Goldoni had direct knowledge of Vico, but, again, it is more important to consider what a reader of Vico and Goldoni (including De Sanctis, no doubt) took away from the experience of reading the autobiographical Vico alongside the corpus of Goldoni, for the latter was truly the obsessive diachronizer that Vico failed to be. I have argued that Petrarch and De Sanctis (and likewise Croce and Gramsci, in the last chapter of this study) must be understood through a corpus-­oriented reading in order to discern 10. Vico, Autobiography, 182, emphasis added. 11. Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 266. 12. On the Venetian publication of Vico’s autobiography, see the essays by Cesare De Michelis, Pietro Giuseppe Gaspardo, and Gilberto Pizzamiglio in Vico e Venezia, at 91–­106 and 107–­30. On Vico’s autobiography more generally, see Donald Phillip Verene, The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Nancy S. Struever, “Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir,” in Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted, eds., A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism Malden, MA.: Blackwell, 2004), 425–­41.

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the Italian penchant for autobiographical thinking, but Goldoni, it becomes clear, was the master of the form. Not only did he write a typical end-­of-­life autobiography in French, the aforementioned Mémoires, while living in Paris in his eighties (presumably influenced by Rousseau’s Confessions), but he also left behind a rich metacritical apparatus: autobiographical introductions to his plays, known as the Memorie italiane/Italian Recollections , and his related prefaces to or polemics surrounding the publication of the innumerable editions of his hypertrophic literary production (no less than 200 plays!). Taken together, these outlets form a gigantic metacritical hypertext, one that eschews the pitfalls of autobiographies strictly speaking, particularly the normative views-­from-­an-­ending intended to endow life and intellectual projects with a degree of coherence that was not always there. By contrast, Goldoni’s Memorie italiane and annexed prefaces and polemics were written in fieri, in the course of life, and were paced and delimited by the individual plays they introduced and by their sequence. As such, these paratexts allow us to unravel and delin­ eate that which is necessarily contracted and foreshortened in the retrospective view of the Mémoires, our primary focus in what immediately follows.13 Like Vico’s addendum, therefore, which was written after a more definitive version of the New Science could attest to the coherence of the thinker’s intellectual path, Goldoni’s Mémoires tells a tale of predestination centered on Goldoni’s reform of Italian theater—­a story of intention if not fulfillment. Thus it begins with his account of being born in the theatrical salon of a grandfather who “had the best and most celebrated actors and musicians at his command [ . . . ]. Amid this riot and luxury did I enter the world. Could I possibly contemn theatrical amusements, or not be a lover of gaiety?” (M, 4). With a puppet theater as his first toy, Goldoni suggests that it is no surprise that “at the age of eight” he “had the presumption to compose a comedy” (5). At age thirteen, when his father introduced him to the home theater of Palazzo Antinori in Perugia, Goldoni was finally given the chance to perform publicly—­in this instance a flamboyant “prologue” learned by rote. It is perhaps at this time, an older Goldoni muses, that he began to reckon with the reformative direction of his vocation: “In the last century the Italian literature was so corrupted that both prose and poetry were turgid and bombastical; and metaphors, hyperboles, and antitheses supplied the place of common sense” (11). And here the reader of Vico might sit up, for like Vico, Goldoni begins to refer to common sense as an antidote to the scholastic education he was receiving. Bored stiff 13. On Goldoni’s multifarious autobiographical dedication, see Bartolo Anglani, Le passioni allo specchio. Autobiografie goldoniane (Rome: Kepos, 1996).

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by the “barbara and baralipton” and other “scholastic circumlocutions” of his teachers, devotees of Duns Scotus and Aquinas, Goldoni secretly turns to “a much more useful and agreeable philosophy”—­“Plautus, Terence, Aristophanes, and the fragments of Menander”—­for edification (14–­15). It is not, however, in books that Goldoni comes face to face with his vocation. Rather, he happens across an itinerant theatrical company in Rimini. To his adolescent self, Goldoni admits unabashedly, this means the opportunity to share close quarters for the first time with young women. As Goldoni tells it, these attractive females return his sidelong glances—­and the rest is history. Goldoni forsakes his professors to set sail with that merry crew: “Twelve persons, actors as well as actresses, a prompter, a machinist, a property man, eight domestics, four chambermaids, two nurses, children of every age, cats, dogs, monkeys, parrots, birds, pigeons, and a lamb; it was another Noah’s ark!” The young Goldoni is living the dream, but a dream that an older Goldoni understood to be a clichéd circus and a projection of  his own youthful idealizations. In his recounting, actors daily gathered for lunch at the war-­cry of  “Macaroni!” “Everyone fell upon it, and three dishes were devoured. We had also à la mode beef, cold fowl, a loin of veal, a dessert, and excellent wine. What a charming dinner! No cheer like a good appetite” (16–­17). Fact or fiction? Are these macaroni-­devouring, belly-­stroking Harlequins people or personae? Just as De Sanctis narrates an eye-­opening homecoming in the midst of cholera and a meeting with Leopardi in the flesh, a poet whom he will make canonical, in a passage that signals De Sanctis’s own fiction-­to-­fact transition, Goldoni does something similar here, also resorting to a form of Vichian poetic wisdom to describe his personal encounter with literary surroundings, namely, the object of his reform as an internal agent. As an unwitting participant in a phenomenon for which he will coin the enduring term “commedia dell’arte,” Goldoni is the object of his study; the study of the history of Italian theater, alive and well around him, amounts to an injunction to “know thyself.” The Mémoires, in other words, seems to provide the autobiographically narrated history of Italian theater that De Sanctis called for—­or is it more accurate to say that De Sanctis, in his History, bestowed this status on Goldoni’s personal feat? Ultimately, Goldoni was forced by his understandably concerned parents to distance himself from the beloved troupe of comedians, and he returned to his Greek and Latin sources, albeit with a new understanding. “I profoundly wished,” he says of  his second perusal of that corpus, “that it were in my power to imitate them in their plans, their style, and their precision; but I should not be well pleased if I did not throw more interest into my works, more marked

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characters, more of the vis comica, and bring about a more successful termination of the plot” (M, 32). Goldoni’s desire to reform the classics is at this point abetted by the stirrings of patriotic feelings: “every age has its peculiar genius, and every climate its national taste,” hence to each their comedy. But what, then, are the idiosyncrasies of Italian comedy? To his dismay, Goldoni finds no groundwork on the subject. To the contrary, “rummaging about” in a library, he recollects, I saw English, Spanish, and French theaters; but I found no Italian theater. There were here and there old Italian plays, but no collection that could do honor to Italy. It was with pain that I saw that the nation which was acquainted with the dramatic art before every other in modern times, was deficient in something essential. I could not conceive how Italy had in this respect grown negligent, vulgar, and degenerated. I passionately desired to see my country rise to the level of others, and I vowed to endeavor to contribute to it. (M, 32–­33)

Goldoni, it should be noted, is looking for continuity. Not just good editions of single Italian plays, but a collection or an anthology that might even put him on the world stage as the last comprimario in a well-­established tradition. The lack of one, it is clear, means that Goldoni cannot limit himself to deploy his creativity on top of or in addition to a preexisting corpus, but is given the opportunity to autobiographically reinvent such legacy as, specifically, a precedent that patiently awaits his reformative hand. This is how Goldoni begins to relive the history of Italian letters within himself. By now he is a young law student, perpetually en route among the universities of northern Italy, and thus impersonating the disgruntled student characters who were the protagonists of fourteenth-­and fifteenth-­century goliardic and humanist comedies.14 In this way he experiences the topos of comedy as a forbidden fruit. We find Goldoni confiding his craving for comedy to a cleric who happened to have been a patient of Goldoni’s father, a doctor, by whom he was cured of an “imaginary” illness. It is from this Molièresque 14. Unfortunately, so-­called “goliardic” theater remains untranslated into English. See Teatro goliardico dell’umanesimo, ed. Vito Pandolfi and Erminia Artese (Milan: Lerici, 1965). For fifteenth-­century humanist comedy, see Gary R. Grund, ed. and trans., Humanist Comedies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). For a rare and insightful attempt to thematically reconnect goliardic theater, Renaissance erudite comedy, and Goldoni, see Jack­son I. Cope, Secret Sharers in Italian Comedy: From Machiavelli to Goldoni (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

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character, in a scene that again blurs the boundary between personal life and theatrical history, that Goldoni receives the golden bough: an “old comedy, bound in parchment” that turns out to be none other than Machiavelli’s infamous play, Mandragola/The Mandrake. By the time Goldoni’s parents hear of the transaction, it is too late. A smitten Goldoni has read the play ten times over and has persuaded himself that he has found a worthy model: It was neither the free style nor the scandalous intrigue of the piece which fascinated me; its lubricity even disgusted me; and I could perceive that the abuse of confession was a heinous crime in the eye of both God and man; but it was the first comedy of character which had ever fallen into my hands, and I was quite enchanted with it. (M, 37–­38)

An older, chaste Goldoni cannot but censure Fra Timoteo, the priest character in Mandragola who famously accepts a bribe to persuade Lucrezia to yield to the criminal ploys of seduction of  her suitor, Callimaco; but the rest of Machiavelli’s play, in its form and character development, might really be the pioneering, all-­Italian creation he had been seeking: How desirable it would have been, had the Italian authors continued, after this comedy, to give decent and respectful plays, and to draw their characters from nature, instead of the romantic intrigues in which they indulged. But the honor of ennobling comedy, and making it subservient to purposes of utility, by exposing vice and absurdity to derision and correction, was reserved for Molière. I was yet unacquainted with this great man, for I knew nothing of French. I proposed, however, to learn it, and in the meantime, I accustomed myself to consider men closely, and to never lose sight of their original character. (38)

Goldoni’s specific task is now to revitalize the unheeded potential of Machiavelli’s theater, a task (unwittingly?) fulfilled elsewhere by Molière, who is here cited for the first time. But is Goldoni then charging himself with the belated task of importing a French experience into Italy, an action that would relegate him to the role of an imitator? Accepting his rebirth as the “Italian Molière,” a moniker welcomed by Goldoni with false modesty from the time it was first bestowed on him by his Italian editors and French admirers, he also implies that the emphasis should be on the modifier Italian more than on Molière. In other words, by what means, by what dispositions, and by what internal understanding of the specificity of Italian theater (its actors and its audience) can Molière be modernized?

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To answer this question, it might help to turn to De Sanctis’s Vichian understanding of Goldoni, for if we see France and Italy as incommensurable, as a disparity relived firsthand by Vico in his opposition to Descartes, and later rendered by Vincenzo Cuoco politically as the impossibility of Italy experiencing a (French) revolution other than passively, as the end and distant result of a protracted cultural reformulation, then we can grasp, mutatis mutandis, Goldoni’s Molière as the equivalent of  Vico’s Descartes, the embodiment of an intellectual shift unobtainable in Italy as revolution. And in Italy, the land of canovacci, or merely outlined scenarios, what is necessary is for this story to be written out fully, as it were: it calls for a literary reform, a sustained and, in this case, narrative action in which modernity is achieved as an organic outgrowth of the past, rather than through negation of that past. In this light, the vast and obsessive metacritical/autobiographical apparatus that Goldoni attaches to the infinite or infinitely itemized corpus represented by his individual plays becomes the way to Italianize the Molièresque experience, in contrast to Molière himself, who, not unlike Descartes, had presented his innovations tout court, with little if any introduction, commentary, or metacritical contextualization. Under Vico’s influence, and through Cuoco and De Sanctis, Goldoni’s “reform” of Italian theater may be said to amount to an antirevolutionary statement; it at once defies the revolutionary bent of French culture (political, literary, and philosophical) even as it corrects and/ or de-­Frenchifies the revolutionary bent in Italian letters that De Sanctis had perceived and traced back to Boccaccio. Reading Risorgimento patriotism back into Goldoni is not far-­fetched or anachronistic, because so-­called miso-­gallismo, or programmatic anti-­French sentiment, had been present in Italian culture at least since Petrarch, as we have seen, and was rehearsed to perfection in the theatrical debates surrounding and involving Goldoni. The outlines of these debates become clearer if we turn, for example, to the long neglected theoretical works of Carlo Gozzi, who, although he can come across as a polemical Anti-­Goldoni in his impassioned and often aggressive defense of the hoary tradition of commedia dell’arte, eventually came to view attempted reforms (and thus Goldoni) more favorably than the restorative projects that were based on a wholesale replacement of Italian by French theater. Meanwhile, one of the most prominent Venetian Francophiles, and Gozzi’s true nemesis, was Elisabetta Caminer (1751–­96), a pioneering  journalist, unflagging translator of all things French, and an editorial as well as theatrical impresario devoted to the popularization of French Enlightenment culture in the Venetian republic of  letters. Among her many cultural initiatives, the most

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contested was her four tomes of translated French plays, which she published with a programmatic introduction in 1772, in direct response to Gozzi’s polemicism and sabotaging efforts. Caminer’s argument is clear and to the point: “All nations have their golden centuries,” and in the present, Italian splendor has given way to French leadership. This is most evident in theater, where Italians “did not have the gift of rendering their own theatrical works moving and new.”15 Rather, as she recounts in her compendious description of Italian theatrical vicissitudes: While the seeds of poetry that had been born again and had fallen again became more bastardized every day in Italy, they slowly sent down much deeper and healthier roots beyond the Alps. Almost at the same time, the great Corneille, Racine, Quinault, and Molière brought the tragedy, the drama, and the comedy to their highest perfection. Italian theaters were cluttered with extravagant monstrosities and insipid patchworks to which the name Commedie dell’Arte was given. All the extravagances left in Spain by the Arabs, and grown happily there, arrived here along with the Spaniards. Contrived marvels invaded the prerogatives of the sensible comedy; the tedious monotony that had reigned for a long time was with little effort superseded by clamor, variety, and ornamentation. People no longer went to the theater to engage their minds, but only their eyes and their ears. Reason, common sense, regulation of the passions, delicacy, and the power of theatrical poetry established itself on the French stage and even now remain there. The century of Italian barbarities passed, or at least barbarities and extravagances no longer dominated our theaters absolutely and without opposition.16

In other words, to make French bourgeois drama welcome on the Italian stage is a moral obligation for anyone who takes Italian literary and social regeneration to heart. Gozzi was a proud aristocrat who could not but frown upon the French innovation of bringing middle-­class life and mores into the limelight; he was convinced that theater is first and foremost an escape (in his famous words, a “recinto di divertimento,” or “enclosure of diversion”), and he argued that the audience and the audience alone is the arbiter of merit. So, just as he overtly undertook the staging of “puerile” fairytales for the sole overt purpose of 15. Elisabetta Caminer Turra, Selected Writings of an Eighteenth-­Century Venetian Woman of Letters, ed. and trans. Catherine M. Sama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 121–­22. 16. Caminer, Selected Writings, 123–­24.

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beating Goldoni at the box office, he went so far as to translate and, to his delight, unsuccessfully produce a French play (but the production may in fact have been more successful than he avows), François d’Arnaud’s Fayel (1770), in order to confirm the folly of Caminer’s translation and failed production of Pierre-­Laurent de Belloy’s Gabrielle de Verg y (1770). Caminer, according to Gozzi, is just another of those “Frenchified fanatics” attracted to the “monstrous phenomena of novelty,” and one can only pity those Italian professionals who stoop and follow suit, “enslaved by a scurvy subjugation to foreign writers, lowering themselves to the point of employing their talents only to scratch about like chickens, to sniff out like little hound dogs, and to translate as best they can those French works that to their noses appear apt to sustain the Italian comedic troupes, and to please the taste of an Italian audience.”17 And to drive the point home, he adds elsewhere, “He who thinks Nations equal themselves in genius, is gravely mistaken.” Gozzi’s campaign is protracted and fierce. Nations cannot be reformed “with the mirror of other nations,” he writes. If they do not “take into account the nature of their own people, the genius, circumstances, and system of their states, [nations] will become ridiculous, replete with discordances, confusions, and with minds deranged, disquieted, and insatiable.”18 A glance at eighteenth-­century theatrical miso-­gallismo shows that anti-­ French sentiments were old hat; indeed, by De Sanctis’s time they were a fixture of the repertory. Later in this chapter and into the next, we will come to appreciate Goldoni’s sophisticated variation on the theme, but at this point, having viewed Goldoni’s program through a Vichian lens, it is worth our while to look more closely at the ways in which Goldoni’s Mémoires may have informed De Sanctis’s History—­its argument, its structure, as well as its peculiar literary patriotism. The earlier review, chapter by chapter, of De Sanctis’s History skipped over the section (chap. 14) in which De Sanctis confronts Machiavelli, a figure sandwiched between De Sanctis’s commentaries on Folengo’s macaronic epics and on Pietro Aretino’s pornographic dialogues—­in other words, in the company of the lowest rung of Italian Renaissance comedy. Returning to the chapter on Machiavelli now, one could argue that it is a unique episode in that it brings the relentless crescendo (or diminuendo) of  De Sanctis’s account of Italian comic pathology to an abrupt halt. Here,  just this 17. Carlo Gozzi, “La prefazione al ‘Fajel,’ ” in Ragionamento ingenuo. Dai “Preamboli” all’ “Appendice”: Scritti di teoria teatrale, ed. Anna Scannapieco (Venice: Marsilio, 2013), 169, 175, and 178. 18. Gozzi, “Appendice al Ragionamento ingenuo,” in Ragionamento ingenuo, 562.

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once, De Sanctis’s caustic assessments are replaced by unconditional flattery. Machiavelli, the only author besides Dante whom De Sanctis treats in view of his entire corpus and not exclusively by his chef d’oeuvre, is described as representing a self-­enclosed Eden, a failed opportunity to bring about a timely regeneration of Italian letters. De Sanctis’s account follows a familiar pattern: after a false start as a lewd poet, “affected and Boccaccian” (that is, a typical Renaissance man), De Sanctis’s “Machiavelli” eventually comes to distinguish himself primarily as a master of  “form,” writing “as the words came to him, completely absorbed in the thing he is saying, and with the air of a man who thinks it beneath his gravity to go running after words and periods. [ . . . ] Without looking for Italian prose he found it” (HIL, 2:537–­38). As De Sanctis delves more deeply, he finds that “not only does [Machiavelli] do away with literary form, but he kills form in itself—­and this in a century in which form was the only remaining god on the altars. [ . . . ] What matters to him is not that the thing is reasonable or moral, or beautiful, but that it is. [ . . . ] The basis of  life, and therefore of  knowledge is Nosce te ipsum—­the knowing of the world as it is” (556). If so, however, Machiavelli’s modern prose, established on the primacy of what he called “effectual truth,” precociously manifests that “realism” which remains unfulfilled in De Sanctis’s day,  just as it points to an epistemic turn: The whole of the scholastic formulary collapses. Instead of its empty mechanism, founded on the abstract combinations of the intellect and depending on the supposed existence of universals, [with Machiavelli] we get the ordinary direct way of speaking, straight and natural. Those general propositions, the “majors” of the syllogism, are all turned about and changed, and in the end appear as results of experience made clear by thinking. Instead of the syllogism we have a “series,” in other words, we have a chain of facts that in themselves are both cause and effect. (554)

If it is true that, starting with Petrarch, Italy had produced nothing but artists, then with Machiavelli, Italy has finally delivered something else: neither a new poet, like Dante, nor the nation’s philosopher, but rather its “critic” or narrator, and thus in a clear act of self-­identification, De Sanctis’s own precursor (538). In fact, we cannot fail to appreciate that Machiavelli is De Sanctis, he “is the clear and serious consciousness of all that movement which stretched spontaneously from Petrarch and Boccaccio down to the second half of the Cinquecento,” a world of arrogant, “laughing and careless” literati who, when

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faced with the invasion of the “barbarians,” were “confident that they would chase them out by their own superior intelligence” (HIL, 2:540–­41). It is to Machiavelli’s credit to have given a name to this pathological presumption: “corruption” (corrutela), or what De Sanctis wants to rename “decadence.” “Pensive and ill at ease in the middle of the Italian carnival,” Machiavelli “saw this corruption of Italy as nothing else than the Middle Ages in putrefaction [ . . . ]. To renew the people of Italy it was first necessary to renew their consciousness, and this was precisely the aim of Machiavelli”—­and of  De Sanctis, too, naturally (542–­43). Finally, Machiavelli not only “set up the fatherland as the basis of his life,” but he did this in a Dantesque or pre-­Petrarchan fashion (“picture a Dante born after Lorenzo and fed on the spirit of Boccaccio” [HIL, 2:572]). He did so with the understanding that culture should be conceived “vox populi,” with “the consent of everyone” in mind (549). “What has happened with Machiavelli,” De Sanctis explains, referring as much to his Critical Essay on Petrarch as to Machiavelli, is the same thing that happened with Petrarch. The thing called “Petrarchism” is a by-­product, but his imitators took it to be the whole of him. And “Machiavellism” [wrongly understood] is a by-­product, secondary or relative to Machiavelli’s teaching, and the absolute and permanent part has been forgotten. Machiavelli has come down to us conventionalized, seen from one side only, and moreover from the least interesting side. It is time that someone should reinstate him in his completeness. (583)

De Sanctis, we know, is straining the truth of  his own analysis here. If anything, his Petrarchan scholarship, itself based on an incomplete reading of Petrarch, came to the conclusion that Petrarch and Petrarchism are hardly distinguishable. Therefore, if “Machiavellism,” patriotically reconceived as a demotic popularization of science, is to offer the solution, then “Machiavellism,” or “criticism,” will amount to an anti-­Petrarchism—­just as the Critical Essay on Petrarch and the History, which we can now grasp as a self-­conscious instantiation of a true “Machiavellism,” amounted to an anti-­Canzoniere. But were Machiavelli’s critical works (The Prince, Discourses, Art of  War), really all that popular in De Sanctis’s sense? Judging from the inordinate number of pages De Sanctis dedicates to Machiavelli’s Mandragola at the end of a for him all-­important chapter (the sole case for a play in the History), it seems that the merging of Machiavelli and De Sanctis, himself all but a playwright, could only occur through the mediation of Goldoni: through the extension, assimilation,

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and elaboration of the latter’s single autobiographical allusion to Machiavelli into De Sanctis’s own historiographical masterpiece. And in fact, when De Sanctis turns his sights to Mandragola, the History also briefly assumes the features of a history of Italian theater—­the very genre that De Sanctis explicitly calls for in a later chapter. Shut into the forms of Plautus and Terence, De Sanctis writes, Italian theater basked in imitation, courtesy of a young Ariosto, whose plays heralded so-­called Renaissance erudite comedy. On the heels of Ariosto, comedy acquired freshness and a Boccaccesque efficiency in Cardinal Bibbiena’s Calandria (1513), considered the masterpiece of the epoch, a commedia d’intreccio whose title recalls the duped protagonist, Calandrino, of many of the Deca­ meron’s tales (“We might almost be watching a stage version of one of the most cynical tales of the Decameron” [HIL, 2:575]). Then, in close succession, came Mandragola (1518), which, too, offered complications and surprises aplenty, but with a “difference”: “not a single incident in this play arises from chance. For Machiavelli conceived comedy in the same way that he conceived history: he saw it as the result of an interplay of forces, each with its own nature, that must lead inevitably to a given result.” Thus spared from the “caprices” of a hypertrophic plot, Machiavelli and his readers are for the first time allowed the leisure to focus on “the study of the characters” and on “their development.” Only a superficial reader, De Sanctis states, would take Nicia, Lucrezia’s husband, as yet another cuckold or Calandrino; he is, rather, “an educated man who knows Latin, but is easily taken in by people who have read less but know much more of the world.” The same goes for Lucretia, not your average malmaritata but “a highly virtuous and very prudent lady, a real Lucretia” (576). The other characters in the play earn similar treatment. But then, “how did it happen that Machiavelli was able to put his genius to the writing of comedies?” (HIL, 2:576) This question perplexes Machiavelli scholars to this day, and it may have been a stumbling block for De Sanctis as he set out, paradoxically, to reinvent Machiavelli, a comic playwright, as the veltro (the savior-­greyhound of Dante’s Inferno), redeemer prince or, let’s just say, deus ex machina of a literary legacy marred by comedic rhetoric. Here De Sanctis finally makes the most of a corpus-­oriented or, as he states, “complete,” reading of  Machiavelli, revealing that Machiavelli was unique in turning to comedy in his old age, while for most, if not all, of  his Renaissance peers that same genre had represented a youthful introduction into the realm of letters. As a product of a mature mind (Clizia, Machiavelli’s second and last play, is not fully analyzed by De Sanctis but was more the product of a senile mind), Mandragola could be identified as the first commedia all’italiana, to borrow a category from Italian cinema—­a bittersweet comedy, its laughter steeped in

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sadness: “[Machiavelli’s] laughter is the fruit of melancholy,” as De Sanctis puts it (577). The depravities of Fra Timoteo, whose “rottenness” Machiavelli “exposes without pity, were arousing indignation in Germany, and provoking the Reformation. But in Italy people laughed at them. And the first to laugh was the pope. When an evil is spread like this through a whole country and has become so ordinary a thing that people only laugh at it, then it is gangrene, and incurable” (581). Like Goldoni, De Sanctis sees no future in Italian letters for the innovations of Mandragola. “The Mandragola has had its day,” he writes, adding, “[W]e of today could never, never make a comedy” of that same anticlericalism (581). But paradoxically, precisely because it was unreceived and unheeded, Machiavelli’s play may be deemed “the basis of a whole new literature.” De Sanctis intends the reader of the History to understand that the play would one day, two hundred years or so later, and by chance, inspire the true “new literature” of  Goldoni (582). In conclusion, his varied corpus allows Machiavelli to be a common ancestor for De Sanctis and Goldoni alike, and a precursor of  both. In the process, an unlikely tradition is born. With these considerations, and with nowhere else to go, the History abandons its enactment of a history of Italian theater, beckoning the reader to turn once again to Goldoni’s Mémoires for its continuation, turning the making of the intellectual tradition recounted here into an endless game of tag. We have seen how Goldoni’s recollections begin with his youthful and therefore oblivious introduction to the theatrical genre that he will later reencounter from a mature perspective and define as commedia dell’arte. Through his peripatetic and picaresque journey through the Italian city-­states, a journey that recalls the linguistic topography of  Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (sub specie theatri!), Goldoni touches upon all the loci of the Italian theatrical tradition: the university towns of humanist comedies, Ariosto’s Ferrara, Machiavelli’s Florence, and, ultimately, Siena, the setting of Gl’ingannati/The Deceived (1532), the collectively authored play that eventually follows Mandragola in every standard history of Renaissance erudite comedy. Gl’ingannati is not directly mentioned, but Goldoni’s account goes one better. He is welcomed to town by a group of loose-­living, irreverent rascals descending from the Accademia degli Intronati, the group that authored Gl’ingannati a couple of centuries earlier, the pièce de résistance of a cooperative form of  literary production that by common consent had brokered a novel relationship between theater and its female audience.19 In 19. An English translation of Gl’ingannati/The Deceived is in Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance, ed. and trans. Laura Giannetti and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 205–­84. Its famous prologue (pp. 206–­9) metacritically peforms the

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this, the final episode in which life and theatrical history overlap, one wonders whether Goldoni is traveling in time and meeting not with the scions of the group but with that old brigade itself. “The Society of Siena was delightful,” Goldoni recollects. “There was not a gaming party which was not preceded by a literary conversation; everyone read his own compositions, or those of others, and the ladies participated in this as well as men. Such at least was the case in my time.” The latter sentence suggests that Goldoni is conscious of the apparent anachronism of his memories. He adds, “I know not whether gallantry may not have there since gained an exclusive preference, as well as in the rest of Italy” (214). At this point, Goldoni understands that his restless traveling is an opportunity for Euhemerization, the retracing to human origins of Italian theater’s mythology. In a last act, then, he takes himself to Bergamo to come face to face with the hoi polloi that inspired the two Zanni—­Brighella and Harlequin—­ the sharp servant and the doltish servant, the archetypal masks of commedia dell’arte. “In traversing the country of Harlequin,” Goldoni recounts, “I was curious to observe whether there was any existing trace of that comic character which afforded such entertainment to the Italian theater” (M, 118). And what he discovers—­surprise, surprise!—­is that “these two extremes [cleverness and stupidity] are only to be found among the lower orders of that part of the country [ . . . ]. His dress is a species of livery; his swarthy mask is a caricature of the color of the inhabitants of those high mountains, tanned by the heat of the sun. [ . . . ] Their dress is an exact representation of that of a poor devil who has picked up pieces of stuffs of different colors to patch his dress; his hat corresponds with his mendicity, and the hare’s tail with which it is ornamented is still common in the dress of the peasantry of Bergamo” (299–­300). Ancient types do indeed tie into the concrete socioeconomic substrata of specific locales, their hexis and habitus. And with this realization, Goldoni brings himself closer to that which will be considered his guiding insight and, eventually, his innovation. As he goes on, disgruntledly, to pursue a legal career, Goldoni continues to dabble in theater and garners experience and advice in the process. His true theatrical debut, he avows self-­consciously, was a tragedy, Belisario (1734), which he later rewrote and successfully staged as a tragicomedy. Those who saw it could not but commend the fact that it was written “according to the

Accademia’s absorption of female audiences into mainstream Renaissance theater, the very feat Goldoni will allude to shortly.

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principles of tragedy,” Aristotelian and Horatian, yet he was advised: “Were you in France, you might take more pains to please the public; but here [in Italy] you must begin by pleasing the actors and actresses” (M, 123). At this point in his career, the allusion to a French audience might have flown over his head, but Goldoni took the latter injunction to heart: that not only are types a reflection of society, but that, vice versa, the actors and actresses who impersonate those masks are not figments of imagination but actual living people, themselves born and raised in specific places and according to a particular education, each one different, each one a carrier of a spiritual complexus. They, too, are autobiographical beings, tali e non altri, in Vichian terms. This realization halted Goldoni’s travels and sent him into contemplative retreat. Specifically, it obliged Goldoni, whose spiritual heirs would be the Copeaus, Artauds, and Stanislavskis of nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century theater, to reconceive staging and performance as a collaborative exchange between actor and the director/author, one to be carried out in the confines of a laboratory that is a complete microcosm of the infinite worlds lying beyond its bound­ aries. “With the comedians I am like an artist in his workshop,” Goldoni avers. “They are worthy people, much more estimable than the slaves of pride and ambition” (M, 156). Furthermore, “the reputation of an author frequently depends on the execution of the actors.” An author signs their own death warrant when they “lose sight of that truth. We require the assistance of one another, and we ought to entertain for one another reciprocal love and esteem, servatis servandis” (188). On such a foundation of esteem and respect is Goldoni’s reform established, as is the demythologization of Italian theater that it brought about. “My heroes,” Goldoni states in reference to his Belisario, were men and not demigods; their passions had the degree of elevation suitable to their rank, but they appeared with the properties of human nature with which we are acquainted, and their virtues and vices were not carried to an imaginary excess. My style was not elegant, and my versification has never been in any way sublime; but this was precisely what was requisite to bring back to reason a public accustomed to hyperboles, antitheses, and everything ridiculously gigantic and romantic. (160)

And here, again, Goldoni is strikingly Vichian in wanting to scale back gigan­ tisms of any sort to human proportions. But as was the case with De Sanctis in proximity to his letticciuolo, where he went from being a skilled grammarian/rhetorician to a content-­craving teacher, this process applies also to Goldoni’s own enlarged ego, as we see him make the full journey, from his rote

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performance of convoluted platitudes as a child, to the plain-­speaking spectacles of his mature age. With Goldoni’s maturity comes Italy’s maturity, it seems. Goldoni might be deluding himself, but to him it appears that “the public began to think that rational comedy [comico razionale] was preferable to low farce [comico volgare]” (M, 175), a hopeful thought that sends him into a Shakespearean soliloquy in the midst of the Mémoires, as we might imagine him staring into the primitive mask of a Pantalone or Harlequin, and reciting: “I am now,” said I to myself, “perfectly at my ease, and I can give rein to my imagination. Hitherto I have labored on old subjects, but now I must create and invent for myself. I have the advantage of very promising actors; but in order to employ them usefully, I must begin by studying them. Every person has his peculiar character from nature; if the author gives him a part to represent in unison with his own, he may lay his account with success. Well, then,” continued I, “this is perhaps the happy moment to set on foot the reform which I have so long meditated. Yes, I must treat subjects of character: this is the source of good comedy; with this the great Molière began his career, and he carried it to a degree of perfection which the ancients merely indicated to us, and which the moderns have never seen equaled.” (181)

“I saw the impending reform, but I could not yet boast of it,” Goldoni observes, adding that to match or even surpass Molière “requir[es] no great extent of learning to accomplish.” With Goldoni, as we have seen with Petrarch and De Sanctis, nothing but patience will bring about a gradual habituation of those who surround you to what you see so clearly. “[I] could not reform ev­ erything at once without stirring up against me all the admirers of the national comedy, and I waited for a favorable moment to attack them boldly with greater vigor and greater safety” (183).20

20. Compare: “Quando pensai a scrivere le Commedie per il Teatro, ed a togliere, per quanto io avessi potuto, le infinite improprietà, che si tolleravano, mi venne in mente di smascherare i ridicoli, bandire i Zanni, e correggere le caricature dei Vecchi. Ma ci pensai assaissimo, e pensandoci appresi, che se ciò avessi fatto, mille ostacoli mi si sarebbero opposti; e che non dovevasi sulle prime andar di fronte al costume, ma questo a poco a poco procurar di correggere, e riformare. In fatti nel primo, e secondo anno di tale mio esercizio non ho azzardata Commedia alcuna senza le maschere, ma queste bensì a poco per volta sono andato rendendo men necessarie, facendo vedere al popolo, che si poteva ridere senza di loro, e che anzi quella specie di riso, che viene dal frizzo nobile, e spiritoso è quella ch’è propria degl’uomini di giudizio” (PE, 133).

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Only when read against the light of De Sanctis’s interpretation does Goldoni’s autobiography stand out as a figurative journey through the history of Italian theater. And only with the help of Vico does the personal life story—­ and reformative agency therein recounted—­become transfigurative for a larger, national community. This is the story of collective regeneration that De Sanctis puts forth in his History. I have argued that the History, together with its outline, the Critical Essay on Petrarch, stands as anti-­Canzoniere, narrativizing a spiritual evolution that Petrarch had failed to provide. Centuries later, Vico and Goldoni restore the narrative bent and rekindle what Machiavelli, unheeded, had achieved before them. With De Sanctis, story and methodology finally cohere. His History catalyzes the fusion of a reformed science and literature, of  Vico’s New Science and Goldoni’s Mémoires, and, in the process, vindicates Machiavelli’s oeuvre as postsyllogistic philosophy, that is, based on serious criticism—­which at last comes into its own, in the form of autobiographical, personally invested, narration. Already we have discussed the first part of the Mémoires (which consists of three equal parts), which recounts Goldoni’s upbringing. The last part—­in which Goldoni refashions himself as a French playwright—­we shall save for the next chapter. What we examine now is the second part, which details the events leading up to, surrounding, and following the writing and staging of most of his plays. This part of the Mémoires allows Goldoni to roam outside of De Sanctis’s analysis and is best understood in conjunction with the so-­called Memorie italiane and a close reading of the plays themselves.

“With the mask I’m Brighella, without the mask I’m a man”: Reforming . . . from Within In his programmatic introduction to the Bettinelli edition (1750–­57) of his works, his first of several failed attempts to bring forth his complete works during his lifetime, Goldoni goes so far as to commit to publishing his plays in chronological, unedited form: “I do not want people to say that by correcting my texts, I try to increase the merit of my first efforts beyond what is due to them; on the contrary, I wish for the differences that pass between earlier and later plays to illustrate to the world how I gradually progressed by dint of observation and of experience” (PE, 101).21 In the same piece, Goldoni avows that 21. Goldoni only attended to the first three of the nine volumes published by Bettinelli, his first editor, before their disastrous and career-­informing falling out. Goldoni’s editorial vicissitudes are an integral part of his life and work that I cannot delve into here. See, at the very least,

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his career as a comic playwright began not with a single memorable exploit but with a diptych, Momolo Cortesan (1739) and Momolo sul Brenta (1739) (published, respectively, as L’uomo di mondo [1757] and Il prodigo [1757]), thus suggesting that the nature of his distinct creations was originally correlative and interdependent. The two “Momolos” were Goldoni’s first attempt to write commedie di carattere as opposed to commedie a soggetto—­that is, he went beyond merely outlining the peripeteia and dénouement, and fully scripted the role of the eponymous protagonist. In his Italian recollections, he specified: “since I could not yet meddle with the other Masks, who were unused to reciting by heart, I wrote up only Momolo’s part, and some of the dialogues between him and the serious characters, leaving the others, and Harlequin, in particular, free to make up their parts with improvisation” (MI, 267). Despite his wish to “reform [such] improvisation,” Goldoni does “not dare go against the grain all at once, hoping, rather, to win over the performers and the audience little by little” (MI, 267, emphasis added). Even here, at an earlier stage in his recollections, Goldoni understands that timing is crucial to the outcome of his reform.22 The claim that he will proceed a poco a poco rather than tutto ad un tratto is both an observation on tempo and a hermeneutical injunction for his contemporary and future readers. Unlike theater audiences, readers will necessarily encounter even his first plays as full-­fledged, printed pieces. He is therefore calling them to a cadenced, chronological, and evolutionary reading of the plays that must always be metatheatrical: they serve the purpose of illustrating the author’s intentions, mainly; they are enjoyable individually,

Ivo Mattozzi, “Carlo Goldoni e la professione di scrittore,” Studi e problemi di critica testuale 4 (1972): 95–­153; as well as Anna Scannapieco’s many contributions: “ ‘Io non soglio scrivere per le stampe . . .’ Genesi e prima configurazione della prassi editoriale goldoniana,” Quaderni veneti 20 (1994): 119–­86; “Giuseppe Bettinelli editore di Goldoni,” Problemi di critica goldoniana 1 (1994): 63–­188; “Ancora a proposito di Giuseppe Bettinelli editore di Goldoni,” Problemi di critica goldoniana 2 (1995): 281–­92; “ ‘. . . gli erarii vastissimi del goldoniano repertorio.’ Per una storia della fortuna goldoniana tra Sette e Ottocento,” Problemi di critica goldoniana 6 (1999): 143–­238; and “Scrittoio, scena, torchio. Per una mappa della produzione goldoniana,” Problemi di critica goldoniana 7 (2000): 25–­242. 22. The so-­called Memorie italiane comprise his autobiographical introductions to seventeen of thirty projected volumes in the Pasquali edition (1761–­77) of his works, which was his third attempt to oversee their complete publication. This edition included autobiographical illustrations; see Carlo Goldoni, Il teatro illustrato nelle edizioni del Settecento, ed. Cesare Molinari (Venice: Marsilio, 1993), which includes a useful appendix detailing dates and vicissitudes surrounding the many editions of Goldoni’s works in the eighteenth century.

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why not?; yet they are best apprehended within the larger whole(s) or the distinct “perfect bodies” they come to be a part of in publication.23 Of course, in later editions Goldoni could not make good on his promise to leave his hypertrophic production untouched and sequential. However, he never gave up “accounting for his mindset [ forma di pensare] within every work” (PE, 128), for it was only through assiduous sharing of one’s intentions that one could hope for posterity’s empathic intervention in correcting and bettering one’s oeuvre: “I should hope that anyone who devotes himself to writing, no matter in what field, would inform others about the road he has chosen to follow, since it would always serve as a means for illuminating and improving the arts” (122–­23; CT, 4). Heeding his own advice, Goldoni realizes that one’s “direction is not always sure when it comes to matters of the spirit,” where “the outcome most often depends on the unpredictable disposition of the soul.” In later disclaimers, tempering his progressive optimism, he eventually realizes that “at times earlier works are better than the last, and at other times later ones are better than the first.” The point is, as Petrarch found, when dealing with his collected letters, that “inequality of conduct, thought, and style” will necessarily prevail in an existential literary product recast for collected enjoyment (MI, 97). In his prefaces and other polemical pieces, Goldoni is clearly trying to codify the horizon of expectation for the supergenre of the theatrical corpus, and in so doing he is forced to relinquish all prerogatives of the playwright as we might define them. By denying his career a linear progression and by omitting criteria by which to evaluate each individual play on its merits, Goldoni is preemptively rejecting the cathartic claims attached to the representation of single theatrical masterpieces, in favor of the more lasting therapeutic effects attached to the edifying perusal of an entire body of work, the plays and paratextual writings all together. In other words, Goldoni is eager 23. Compare: “A Tenore de’ manifesti, che ho fatto a questa mia edizione precedere, eccomi a dar principio alla stampa, che avrà per titolo: Opere di Carlo Goldoni. Sono dette mie opere in varie classi divise; ma io le dividerò in tre parti soltanto. Comprenderà la prima Commedie, Tragedie, e Tragicommedie. Comprenderà la seconda i Drammi Musicali seri e giocosi, Oratori, Cantate, e simili Componimenti per Musica. Comprenderà la terza tutte le mie Poetiche composizioni edite, e inedite, in vari tempi, ed occasioni prodotte. Ciascheduna di queste tre parti formerà un corpo da sé, separato dagli altri, onde potrà alcuno aver le Commedie senza i Drammi, e senza le Poesie Miscellanee, ed avrà un corpo perfetto, e così parimenti sarà perfetto il corpo delle Poesie Musicali o Miscellanee, principiando e quelle e queste coll’indicazione di Tomo I. [ . . . ] Tutto ciò dichiarai molto prima ne’ manifesti suddetti, ma qui ho voluto ripeterlo, acciò rimanga perpetuamente la maniera con cui s’hanno a dividere le cose mie, che ponno sussistere separate, ed unite” (MI, 95–­96; emphasis added).

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to transform his theater into a narrative or readable product, endowing it with a degree of authorialism that theater typically lacks, being essentially cooperative and infinitely mediated. What strikes us, further, is Goldoni’s awareness of the variations in his audience. Like a clinician, his care is first directed toward the limited test group of his acting company, starting with the leading actor, then, in ever widening circles, toward the rest of the troupe, then those same artists’ live audiences, and finally, it is implied, his readers, present and future. Even if his reform fails to bring about a “conversion” in all (M, 190), and predictably so, a strong and genealogical link between the original interpreter and the latest reader will provide herd immunity against the lewd Arlecchinate or cheap theatrics of commedia dell’arte, “nauseating even to the coarsest stomachs” (PE, 102). But then again, the first step is to win over the protagonist and the prime donne to the cause, and this alone is no easy task, as Goldoni is eager to share.24 The character of Momolo, he recalls, was thrashed out intersubjectively, that is, in dialogical observation of the exigencies of the character itself and the physical and spiritual disposition (or body techniques, in a Maussian sense) of Fran­ cesco Bruna, the actor better known as Golinetti. Golinetti excelled in the role of Pantalone, but more to the point, he excelled “without a mask in the role of the Veneziano, young, bright, and frisky, and he was particularly suited to the role of the so-­called Paroncin in commedia dell’arte plays.” Goldoni goes on to explain—­and thereby reveals his paratextual writings for what they are, that is, director’s notes—­that “the Venetian Paroncin almost equals the French petit-­Maître [ . . . ]; but the paroncin accords with the moronic kind of petit-­ Maître, and so I came up with the Venetian Courtier, who accords with the high-­spirited type of petit-­Maître.” It is not that Goldoni was looking for a nuanced version of the cosmopolitan dandy figure from the start; rather, this character imposed itself on his attention as he observed Golinetti during long casting sessions, as well as, mainly, “during meals [alla tavola], in conversation [alla conversazione], and leisurely strolls [al passeggio],” and so on (MI, 266–­67). Eventually, and through another Pantalone, the Pantalone of his time, Cesare Dàrbes (1710–­78), Goldoni refined his approach into a theater of the psychosomatic. A man intimately scrutinized, Dàrbes displayed depressive lows and manic highs. “At one time, he was the gayest, the most brilliant and lively man in the world; and at another, he assumed the air, the manners, and 24. On Goldoni’s struggles with actors, see Luigi Ferrante, I comici goldoniani (1721–­1960) (Bologna: Cappelli, 1961).

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conversation of a simpleton and a blockhead. These changes took place quite naturally and without reflection” (M, 239). We cannot fail to notice that the two poles of Dàrbes’s personality manifested according to opposites congenial to the theatrical pivot he was called on to express: his was no random personality split, but rather, he carried within himself the specific duality of a Harlequin, the “blockhead” and his reformed counterpart, the traits of the shrewd zanni and beyond, the qualities of the everyday man that an emancipated playwright and audience alike want to see represented on stage. What could be better, Goldoni asks, than to seize on the opportunity “to make [Dàrbes] appear under these different aspects in the same play,” and in the process dislocate stock setups associated with one of the longest lasting subgenres of comedy, the comedy of mistaken identities and sets of twins? As Pantalone, Dàrbes never attained the level of success he reached with Goldoni’s I due gemelli vene­ ziani/ The Venetian Twins (1747): “The Play was extolled to the very skies. The incomparable acting of Dàrbes contributed infinitely to its success. His glory and his joy were at their height” (M, 239–­40). I gemelli veneziani was still a spin on Plautus’s Menaechmi, to be sure, but a play that was less a comedy of errors, relying on frustrated expectations, abrupt changes, and mistaken identities, and more a discovery of the disquieting duality at the heart of every man, with the annexed death (great allegorical daring!) of Zanetto, the blockheaded twin or Harlequin, the signature role of old-­style comedy.25 With this cooperative feat, Goldoni won Dàrbes’s lasting gratitude and found the agent provocateur who would smuggle his ideas into the heart of the troupe. At the same time, we notice that Dàrbes’s appreciative reaction, related in the Mémoires, contrasts with that of Golinetti as related in the Memorie italiane, and, comparing them, we realize that Goldoni’s interest is in the man behind the mask rather than in the character. Unlike Dàrbes, Golinetti did not cherish the agency Goldoni bestowed upon him. Rather, old-­fashioned capo­ comico that he was, he continued to tout his improvisational skills as if to claim credit for the carefully wrought dialogues Goldoni had provided for him. For 25. Carlo Goldoni, I due gemelli veneziani, in TO, 2:155: “Io ho creduto di poter inalzare sul fondamento vecchio una fabbrica affatto nuova, e ciò mi venne in mente sull’osservazione da me fatta che in tutte le antiche pariglie i due Gemelli, oltre al doversi supporre somigliantissimi in tutto l’estrinseco della persona, il che è pur nella mia, sono rappresentati eziandio d’un somiglian­ tissimo carattere, e certamente non guari diverso. Mi son però voluto provare a farli di carattere affatto differenti l’uno dall’altro, e dar loro nomi distinti. L’impresa mi venne agevolata dalla certa scienza ch’io aveva della straordinaria abilità del bravo Comico Cesare d’Arbes, nel fare il diverso Personaggio dello spiritoso e dello sciocco; ed ecco quel che mi ha condotto a scrivere questa Commedia.”

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their part, audiences were equally oblivious to the epochal change they were channeling, and they did not realize that Momolo’s dialogues were the same, night after night. This collective lack of appreciation persuaded Goldoni to wreak “revenge” and “humiliation” with his second play, Momolo sul Brenta, at first providing his actors with nothing more than a canovaccio. The play, needless to say, was a resounding dud, with Momolo/Golinetti being jeered off the stage for three consecutive nights before Goldoni resolved to furnish his shamed troupe with a complete script. Goldoni delivers the moral of this episode with satisfaction: “Golinetti confessed his wrongdoing, he regained his credit as a good actor, without usurping that of author, and all the comedians began from that point to recognize the difference between memorized dialogues and those that are born haphazardly from different minds, from different and not always happy moods, and almost always at odds with each other” (MI, 275). By revising Pantalone and by observing the psychology of the men behind that mask, Goldoni figured out how to break old habits. For if it is an unalterable rule of theater that an actor will always take an uncongenial role rather than accept a lesser part, how does one convince them otherwise? The secret to enabling the transition from quantity to quality lay in the perfect tailoring of the role: [A]ll the theatrical works that I went on to compose were written for those people I knew, with a clear view of the personality of those actors who had to perform them, and this, I believe, played a big role in the success of my compositions, and I have so conformed to this rule [regola], that when I found the subject of a play I would not start by sketching the characters, only to then look for the actors, but I would start by examining the actors in order to then conceive of the characters. This is one of my secrets. (MI, 202–­3)

With this counterintuitive approach, in effect a reversal of the Stanislavskian method (which calls for on-­as well as off-­stage interiorization of the character), Goldoni, alongside his actors, acquired ensemble awareness and went on to (co-­)author his “first born” play, La donna di garbo/The Fashionable Woman (1743), the first play in which “all of the roles that appear within it are endowed with an original character” (286). But here, just as Goldoni ushers himself and Italian improvised theater beyond the self-­alienating phase of actor/author identification, the Memorie italiane come to an abrupt halt. They are left unfinished, like the edition they introduce, for circumstantial reasons, no doubt, and yet we notice that just as

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De Sanctis’s La giovinezza halts, unfinished, precisely when the author is about to enter his adult life, Goldoni’s paratextual autobiography fatefully concludes at the very moment when the author has come of age. This leaves the reader, by now intellectually and emotionally invested in the existence recounted, to persevere in an exercise of coherence on Goldoni’s behalf. Specifically, readers must make sense of the epiphanic appearance in Goldoni’s life of Antonio Sacchi (1708–­88), an actor whom Goldoni ranked with David Garrick (1717–­79) in England and Préville (1721–­99) in France as a paradigm of dramatic excellence (M, 368). In other words, at the very moment in which Goldoni has achieved his feat of demythologization and has made us believe that the dragon is slain, he and his reader alike must confront the very cynosure of the mythology just defeated: Harlequin! What kind of final battle are we in for? It becomes immediately evident that Antonio Sacchi, arguably the greatest Truffaldino of all times, is not a vanquishable enemy. He represents, rather, the stubborn residue of a bygone era, and his endurance reminds us that reforms are not revolutions; reforms assert corrections on a generally esteemed past, addressing its undelivered promises and unfulfilled potentials. “If all the masks had the talent of a Sacchi,” Goldoni writes, referring to an earlier collaboration with the actor, “improvised comedies would be delightful. Therefore I will repeat here what I have said at other times: I am not an enemy of improvised comedies [Commedie a soggetto], but of those comedians who lack sufficient skills to sustain them” (MI, 267).26 In the Mémoires, Goldoni articulates his admiration: Antonio Sacchi possessed a lively and brilliant imagination; he played in comedies of intrigues; but while other harlequins merely repeated themselves, Sacchi, who always adhered to the essence of the play, contrived to give an air of freshness to the piece, by his new sallies and unexpected repartees. It was Sacchi alone whom the people crowded to see. His comic traits, and his jests, were taken from neither the language of the lower orders nor that of the comedians. He levied contributions on comic authors, on poets, orators, and philosophers; and in his impromptus we could recognize the thoughts of Seneca, Cicero, or Montaigne: but he possessed the art of appropriating the maxims of these great men to himself, and allying them to the simplicity of the blockhead; and the same proposition which was admired in a serious author, became highly ridiculous in the mouth of this excellent actor. (M, 187) 26. On Goldoni’s conflictual relationship with stock characters, see Giorgio Padoan, Putte, zanni, rusteghi. Scena e testo nella commedia goldoniana (Ravenna: Longo, 2001), 81–­110.

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Sacchi, we notice, reconciles what in Dàrbes remains juxtaposed. In Sacchi’s performance, high and low registers cohere in a primordial way—­a unity that is typically torn asunder by the diagnostic and highminded inquisitiveness of literary poetics, a genre loathed by Goldoni, a theater practitioner. Sacchi’s talent is mythologically protean: he works above and beyond the dualities that drive comedies, and he is able to embody the entire repertoire of Baroque theatricality, in any of its historical variations, including the Goldonian phase. As Giacomo Casanova, another fan of the actor, spells out, the point is that Sacchi is essentially unrhetorical: he is inimitable.27 Who better than Sacchi, then, to administer to Goldoni’s corpus a kind of cardiac resuscitation? After La donna di garbo, a play that was fully di carattere and, as such, a conclusion of one chapter in its author’s artistic vocation, Goldoni had relocated to Pisa to pursue a legal career.28 But just as he was settling reluctantly into the notion that his stage years were a youthful stint, he received a letter from Sacchi, commissioning a new script that would be tailor-­ made for him: “The subject proposed was ‘The Servant of  Two Masters’; and 27. “Quest’Uomo non avendo preso ad imitar nessuno, si compose un carattere formato a suo dosso, e piacque tanto, che tutti gli Arlecchini, vedendosi divenuti nojosi, e malaccetti al Pubblico, si videro obbligati a studiare d’imitarlo; ma perdettero, e perdono il tempo, perché converrebbe, a venire a capo della loro impresa, che rinascessero, e che rinascessero col di lui ingegno. Egli parla il vernacolo Veneziano, ed avendo affatto bandita dal suo carattere la bassa, e mostruosa scurrilità, fa sempre ridere, o che cammini, o che gesteggi, o che parli, oltre tutto il popolo spettatore, gli Uomini savj ancora, i dotti, i melanconici, e fino i suoi nemici. [ . . . ] Molti l’ammirano, perché cambia sempre, ma in ciò io non l’ammiro, anzi sostengo, che è forza che cambi. Le fini sue arguzie, le belle frasi, che infilza, il leggiadro modo con cui le stroppia, le rare erudizioni, e i dotti spropositi, che dice, sono tutte imagini informi, voli di fantasia, ombre, larve, e quasi sogni momentanei, e passeggeri, che nascono allora in lui per un effetto di vera reminiscenza. Sono embrioni disordinati, ed indigesti, che raccoglie in quegl’istanti, e che rende presto agli astanti, e che non sarebbero più quelli, se volesse pensando polirli, comporli, aggiustarli; perderebbero la grazia della loro elegantissima incoltura. Per essere un tale Arlecchino parmi, che sia di mestierj aver letto una quantità di libri, aver ascoltate a parlare mille sorti di persone, avere una memoria immensa, un ingegno unico, ed una pratica estrema del cuore, dello spirito dell’Uomo.” Cited in Siro Ferrone’s introduction to Carlo Goldoni, Il servitore di due padroni, ed. Valentina Gallo (Venice: Marsilio, 2011), 16–­17. For the Baroque demands on the profession of the actor, possibly only met by Sacchi, see Andrea Perrucci, A Treatise on Acting, from Memory and by Improvisation, ed. and trans. Francesco Cotticelli, Anne Goodrich Heck, and Thomas F. Heck (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008). 28. On Goldoni’s interim years as a lawyer, see the essays collected in Giancarlo De Fecondo and Maria Augusta Morelli Timpanaro, eds., Carlo Goldoni, avvocato a Pisa: 1744–­1748 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009).

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I easily saw what might be made of it with such an actor as Sacchi,” Goldoni recollects, replicating Harlequin’s own ambivalence in his yet unwritten script: “I was therefore devoured with a desire of trying my hand again . . . I knew not what to do . . . lawsuits and clients crowded on me . . . but my poor Sacchi . . . but the servant with two masters . . . Well, for this time . . . but I cannot . . . Yes I can . . . At length I wrote in answer that I would undertake it” (M, 220). And just like that, Goldoni resumed his career once and for all with an assignment that served as a reverse exercise—­a commissioned play (and we cannot fail to notice here that Petrarch’s letter collections and De Sanctis’s History were equally reader requests) in which the lovers’ roles and serious roles were fully scripted, leaving stock characters, and Harlequin in particular, free rein to improvise. In hindsight (or really, in reception), there is something ironic, if not paradoxical, about the story of this commission, the circumstances of which take up more of Goldoni’s attention than the resulting play, about which he says little. For it is well known that Il servitore di due padroni was often revived ad fontes in times of artistic crises, first under the direction of Max Reinhardt (in 1907 and 1924) in collaboration with Hugo Thimig (as Pantalone) and Thimig’s son, Hermann (as Truffaldino), and later, even more influentially, under the auspices of Milan’s newly instituted Piccolo Teatro, whose co-­founder, Giorgio Strehler (1921–­97) turned to Goldoni and to Bertolt Brecht equally and as kindred spirits for inspiration throughout his career.29 Accordingly, Strehler put Goldoni’s play on the bill of the Piccolo’s 1947 inaugural season, alongside works by Maxim Gorky, Armand Salacrou, Calderón, and so on. We might speculate as to what drew Strehler, a Jewish refugee in Switzerland during World War II, to Goldoni’s least reformed play during a period of postapocalyptic regeneration in Italian and European theater.30 29. Interestingly, Strehler characterized Goldoni and Brecht as both “reformers” and thus true “revolutionaries”! See Giorgio Strehler, Intorno a Goldoni. Spettacoli e scritti, ed. Flavia Foradini (Milan: Mursia, 2004), 25: “Due tra i maggiori rivoluzionari della storia del teatro prendono le mosse da un’adesione al linguaggio preesistente, che nulla lascia prevedere della ri­ voluzione successiva. [ . . . ] Questa partenza ha un analogo significato metodologico: la riforma esige riflessione, maturità, tempismo; non ignora il passato, ma vi si fonda. Non brucia le tappe: matura a poco a poco riassumendo nel proprio sviluppo quello della disciplina stessa che intende riformare.” On Goldoni and Reinhardt, see Danilo Reato, “Max Reinhardt e il ‘Servitore di due padroni,’ ” in Studi goldoniani 5 (1979): 103–­14. 30. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there are have been five different productions of Il servitore di due padroni under Strehler’s direction. Together they amount to the longest running production in Italian theater, counting on two consecutive Harlequins of

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Likewise, we might consider that Sacchi’s commission in effect reinvigorated Goldoni’s creative genius, because within five years of the staging of Il servitore di due padroni, Goldoni wrote a dozen more scripts (mere drops in the mare magnum of his production), and then set himself a new challenge. At the end of the 1749–­50 season, he prompted the prima donna to reappear from behind the curtain and promise a perceptibly disenchanted audience that he would write sixteen new plays for the following year.31 Presumably, Goldoni chose the number sixteen because it amounted to a new play a week over a four-­month season. While this story tends to be mentioned in passing and treated as anecdote—­pointing to Goldoni’s wish to arouse audiences by proposing a hardly manageable, borderline preposterous feat—­this feat does in fact bear programmatic significance for the reader attuned to his reformative impetus. If we understand Goldoni to be both playwright and editor of his ever-­evolving body of work, then we can understand his attempt to write sixteen new plays over the course of a theatrical season as an experiment in training live audiences to the reading experience of the corpus. Work seen en masse allows for a metatheatrical appreciation that would not be available in the standard, sporadic play-­by-­play theatrical enjoyment of Sacchi’s stature: Marcello Moretti and, starting in 1963, his understudy, Ferruccio Soleri. On the two interpreters of Harlequin, see Strehler, Intorno a Goldoni, 62–­72, and for a qualification of Strehler’s choices, 62–­63: “Sette anni fa, il nostro Arlecchino segnava in Europa, alla fine di una sanguinosa guerra che aveva ceduto il suo inevitabile debito di sconforto e di disperazioni per tanti, il ritrovamento di alcuni eterni valori di poesia e al tempo stesso di un messaggio di fiducia per gli uomini, attraverso la liberazione del riso più aperto, del gioco più puro. Era il teatro che, con i suoi attori, ritornava (o tentava di ritornare) alle fonti primitive di un avvenimento scenico dimenticato, attraverso le vicende della storia, e indicava un cammino di semplicità, di amore e di solidarietà ai pubblici contemporanei. Era il teatro che riscopriva (se così si può dire) una sua epoca gloriosa: la Commedia dell’Arte non più come un fatto intellettuale, ma come un esercizio di vita presente, operante.” On Strehler’s early years, see Clarissa Mambrini, Il giovane Strehler. Da Novara al Piccolo teatro di Milano (Vignate: Lampi di Stampa, 2013). 31. To be precise, Goldoni had his actress promise that he would no longer recycle his texts, that starting the following season the audience would be introduced to all new material, possibly with a new play per week, which over a four-­month season could have brought the number to sixteen. The promise was confirmed in the first play in the cycle, Teatro comico/The Comic Theater, where an almost accurate list of plays and their titles is provided. The announcement is in Carlo Goldoni, Introduzioni, Prologhi, Ringraziamenti, ed. Roberta Turchi (Venice: Marsilio, 2011), 176–­80, at 178: “Sto progetto l’ha fatto, / Che le Comedie soe de st’anno e l’altro / No le s’abbia mai più da veder altro; / E osservando da scaltro, / Che Venezia va drio alle novità, / Tutte Comedie niove el produrà; / E se ghe ne farà, / Se la so fantasia non vien al manco, / Una alla settimana per el manco.”

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the same group of works. Only through a mechanism that compresses time can the audience be brought to perceive at once synchronically and continuously, in the here and now, an open-­ended reform that is otherwise a slow-­paced evolution, one that will span the entire career of its author, and thus be graspable only in an ultimate, postmortem recapitulation. We might ask, then, whether theater lends itself to compendious enjoyment? Or, for that matter, to simultaneous writing? For we must reckon with the obvious fact that Goldoni could not have written and produced sixteen plays in neat, chronological succession, but rather, like the composer of a musical score, must have worked via accretion and palimpsest, first, by sketching a lead sheet and determining a melody and harmony, then, by moving to the arrangement or orchestration of a whole in which he could insert riffs and solos. Indeed, when we look at these sixteen distinct plays, we see that they do not relate sequentially, nor do they narrate the story of a theatrical evolution, starting with a canovaccio and ending with a fully reformed play di carattere—­an evolution that we saw in the years of Goldoni’s early production between Momolo Cortesan and La donna di garbo. Taken together, rather, the plays convey a bumpy and spasmodic narrative of their author’s—­and actors’—­increasing awareness with respect to the pertinence and applicability of reform. For awareness, more than fruition, is what is at stake. The cycle of sixteen new plays seems intended to offer a cross-­sectional view of the reform; it retrieves the loci or places that in future comprehensive readings of his plays will prove instrumental to a collaborative journey into Goldoni’s reformative project. What is lost in composition, disposition, and structure is regained in publi­ cation, however, for Goldoni adamantly dictated the order in which his plays should be published. The first, Il teatro comico/The Comic Theater, seldom performed, was conceived by Goldoni as a metatheatrical poetics, a “Foreword to all my Comedies,” by which we presume he meant all plays, including those that preceded the cycle of the 1750–­51 season. “[N]o other difference exists between this piece and a more conventional introduction,” Goldoni states, “except that the latter would probably have bored readers more easily, while in this I have partially avoided this tedium with the help of some action” (CT, 3). What audiences witness in the play are the live or viva voce negotiations of theatrical archetypes or masks who are undergoing the difficult metamorphosis of being reborn into human beings during rehearsals. The subject matter is addressed by Pantalone/Tonino: My dear Orazio, let’s put aside the joking and talk seriously. These character comedies have turned our profession upside down. A poor player who has

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learned his craft in the commedia dell’arte and who is used to spilling out whatever pops into his head, now finds himself forced to study books and say what somebody else has thought up; if he has a reputation to worry about, he must wear his brains out memorizing, and every time a new comedy comes along, he’s afraid that either he won’t know it well enough or he won’t play his part as he’s supposed to. (11–­12)

In a strange reversal of the Pinocchio effect, the player must trade his improvisatory agency for submission to a premeditated text in order to overthrow his puppetlike existence and come alive. In the words of one of the main stock characters: “With the mask I’m Brighella, without the mask I’m a man who may not have enough invention to be a poet, but at least has enough discernment to understand his own craft. An ignorant actor never plays any character well” (31). Again, awareness, that is, complicity, is key. The point, as De Sanctis later noted, is that in Italy, where improvisation has become second nature, there is little left that is truly extemporaneous or surprising in the trite and overly codified heap of “dialogues, witticisms, soliloquies, insults, conceits, lamentations, tirades and such” that make up the anticaglie (a key word in the Goldonian lexicon), the “old-­fashioned tricks” of Italian theater (CT, 30). The form has become so predictable, so generally stultifying, that, as Rosaura/Placida points out, “[t]he audience knows what Harlequin will say even before he opens his mouth (10).” In Il teatro comico, we see each character or set of characters (Pantalone; the pair of  lovers; the two zanni, Harlequin and Brighella) come to terms with the benefits of the nuovo stile, with the notable exception of Lelio, a young aspiring playwright and diehard reactionary. Throughout the play, Lelio is burdened with the task of recalling the stockpile of clichés associated with the tradition of improvised comedy (“With the most subtle rhetoric I will investigate all the topics of your heart,” Lelio menacingly declares [CT, 33, emphasis added]), to increasingly laughable effect and to the point of depleting that stockpile, when finally, having exhausted the potential of national resources, he turns as a last resort to foreign theater, translated from the French. This proposition elicits the following retort from Ottavio, Goldoni’s alter ego: The French have triumphed in the art of drama for an entire century; I think the time has come for Italy to show the world that the germ of those good authors, who, after the Greeks and Romans, were the first to enrich and ennoble the theatre, is still alive. One cannot deny that in their plays the French have created fine and well-­depicted characters, that the passions are well handled

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and the ideas are keen and witty and brilliant; but their public is satisfied with very little. An entire French play can rest on the shoulders of a single character. Around one single passion—­of course, well developed throughout the play—­ they spin out dialogue upon dialogue, conveying an air of novelty by mere strength of expression. Our Italians demand much more. They expect that the principal character be strong, original, and recognizable; that virtually all the figures in the episodes be characters in their own right; that the plot be reasonably rich in surprises and innovations. They want the moral mixed with the spice of jokes and banter. They want an unexpected ending, yet one deriving from the play in its entirety. Their demands are too numerous to list; and only with experience, practice, and time can we ever come to know them and satisfy them. (35–­36, emphasis added)

It may have been this very passage that incited Elisabetta Caminer’s prefatory, and seemingly paraphrastic, comments in her volume, Modern Theatrical Compositions in Translation. What is clear is that on this one point, at least, the archenemies Gozzi and Goldoni are of one mind: whether through reform or through reaction, Italian theater must seek a solution from within. Thus Il teatro comico and the cited passage set the overall agenda for the remaining fifteen plays, urging the reader to comb through them for the restorative principles of Italian theater. We notice, for example, the honorable discharge of Harlequin, the unreformable character whose survival or demise lies outside Goldoni’s control and will depend on a cyclical return of exceptional talent. What is also of interest is that Goldoni seems responsive to his era in seeing the second (or moronic) zanni to the door. As we have already observed, Pantalone, more than other characters, is readily translatable into a representative of a rising Venetian mercantile bourgeoisie and is the most available vehicle for Goldoni’s reform. We see how this plays out in Le femmine puntigliose/The Obstinate Women, the second installment in the cycle. In this play, it is the character of Pantalone who delivers an outraged reaction to the treatment of the “Arlecchino particolare,” a type who is represented here—­ uniquely and uncharacteristically—­as a moro, or “Moor,” who is brought to Italy as a result of a slave sale.32 This black-­faced, pidgin-­speaking Harlequin is the main victim of a gratuitously violent and punitive expedition coordi­ 32. Goldoni, Le femmine puntigliose, in TO 2:1121. Compare 2:1139: “Vi dirò; questo è un moro che, quando fu preso, fu portato a Venezia, dove ha principiato a parlar italiano; e sentitelo, che dice quasi tutte parole veneziane corrotte. Egli poi venne in Sicilia sopra una nave, e piacendomi infinitamente il suo spirito e le sue facezie, l’ho comprato dal capitano.”

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nated by Florindo in keeping with his interpretation of the laws of retaliation: “Bludgeon the servant, to punish the master!”33 To which Pantalone responds, “Cudgel servants for an affront received by their masters? For what reason? According to what rule? What moral sense? [ . . . ] This I deem injustice, cruelty, barbarity.”34 We might be witnessing here a display of class consciousness on Goldoni’s part, but really we are faced with an attempt to decouple masters and servants, low and high registers, to overturn the absolute symmetries on which commedia dell’arte relies.35 Goldoni resumes and expands on this line of questioning in a later play of the cycle, L’adulatore/The Flatterer, a play written à la française in that its very title stresses the flaws of a “single character.” While Sigismondo, a sycophantic secretary, is cajoling his boss, Don Sancio, to dismiss his large household staff on false grounds, the Pantalone character here is a factory owner pleading the cause of his poor lavoranti (workers). This intrigue allows for the emancipation of another reformable character, Brighella, the traditional first zanni and the clever counterpart of Harlequin, who over the course of the action is promoted to the rank of a second, younger Pantalone. Upon hearing a suggestion that he alone be paid the salary that is denied to his fellow minions, Brighella responds: “This, I do not approve. I do not want to be set apart from others; we are all comrades: all or none.”36 This subplot, which nods to the unpretentious camaraderie Goldoni wished to establish among the members of his ensemble, climaxes at the beginning of the third act when Brighella rallies the “tumultuous” servants and, to quiet their nerves, emblematically divests himself of his uniform—­really, his mask, given that Brighella is most easily 33. Goldoni, Le femmine puntigliose, 2:1183. 34. Goldoni, Le femmine puntigliose, 2:1185: “Oh bella vendetta! Veramente eroica e da omo de garbo! No me posso tegnir, bisogna che diga quel che sento, e la me cazza via, se la vol, che la gh’ha rason. Per un affronto recevudo dai patroni, far bastonar i servitori? Con che rason? Con che leze? Con che conscienza? Che colpa gh’ha i servitori in tei mancamenti dei so patroni? A questo la ghe dise risarcimento dell’offesa? A questa mi ghe digo ingiustizia, crudeltà, barbarità; ghe digo maltrattar l’innocente, senza vendicarse dell’offensor. Ma po, se parlemo della vendetta, che razza de vendetta xe questa? Ghe vol assae a trovar quattr’omeni, che a sangue freddo bastona quella povera servitù? Sior Florindo caro, tutte le pazzie, tutti inganni della fantasia, inganni dell’ambizion, che lusinga i omeni e ghe dà da intender che la vendetta più facile sia la più vera, e che per vendicarse del reo, sia lecito opprimer anca l’innocente.” 35. See Giulio Ferroni, “L’ossessione del raddoppiamento nella commedia dell’arte,” in Domenico Pietropaolo, ed., The Science of Buffoonery: Theory and History of the Commedia dell’Arte (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989), 135–­47. 36. Carlo Goldoni, L’adulatore, in TO, 3:203.

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recognizable for his green-­striped outfit—­in solidarity with his “brothers.” “Just like the three of you, I will quit my livery, I will give it up with tears in my eyes, but honorably, in the same spirit as when I first put it on, with the dignity of always having been a loyal servant, a good friend, a sincere and impartial man.”37 This scene, in turn, points to Il cavaliere di buon gusto/The Gentleman of Good Taste, in which Brighella again forfeits his uniform, only this time it is because he is promoted to maestro di casa, a plainclothes butler figure, who, more to the point, is also the overseer of the servants’ decorum and happiness.38 To the reader, if not to contemporary audiences, the impact of Brighella’s grand gesture may feel retroactive, for in what is certainly the best known play in the cycle, La bottega del caffè/The Coffee House, Brighella and Arlecchino appeared first in their traditional garb, only to be demasked in the published version.39 It is worth noting, too, that in this case the play’s title points to the ensemble and, thus, to the Italian maniera (way) sought for by the experimental series. As Ridolfo, as he is renamed in print, Brighella is called upon to harmonize the lower instincts of society from the vantage point of  his coffeehouse, the space destined to become the “secular temple of bourgeois society.”40 Ridolfo/Brighella’s business is a cross between a barbershop (the locus of malevolent gossip), a gambling house (the site of perdition), and a dancer’s boudoir (illicit love), and his ability to moralize his surroundings will determine the “familarity” of the reformed characters and their “human, lifelike, and maybe even real” demeanor.41 These examples should provide an idea of Goldoni’s rhizomatic handling of character reformation, which we see displayed tout court in Il teatro comico, and then throughout his impressive output of 1750–­51. The same diffused approach is employed for Lelio, a “metatheatrical character” and countervailing agent of reform who features almost everywhere, but to the highest effect in 37. Goldoni, L’adulatore, 3:226. 38. Carlo Goldoni, Il cavaliere di buon gusto, in TO, 3:413–­81, at 428. 39. Carlo Goldoni, The Coffee House, trans. Jeremy Parzen, in Five Comedies, ed. Gianluca Rizzo and Michael Hackett (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 78: “When I first wrote the present comedy, I used the characters Brighella and Arlecchino and, to tell the truth, it enjoyed success everywhere. In spite of this, in giving it to the press, I believed that I could better serve the public by rendering it more universal. I thus changed to Tuscan not only the language of the two characters mentioned above but also that of three others who spoke in the Venetian dialect.” 40. See Roberta Turchi’s introduction to Carlo Goldoni, La bottega del caffè (Venice: Marsilio, 2005), 12. 41. Goldoni, The Coffee House, 78.

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another cluster of plays in the sixteen-­play cycle, consisting of Il giocatore/The Gambler, where the auxiliary pair of  Florindo and Lelio, here, two cardsharpers, are tasked with “uprooting what [Goldoni, himself an addict] consider[s] the worst of all vices,” gambling; L’incognita/The Unknown Woman, in which Lelio, this time a rancorous and unstable son, reaches rock bottom by kidnapping his love interest and threatening the life of his father, a reformed Pantalone; and I pettegolezzi delle donne/Women’s Gossip, in which Lelio is a pretentious effete, an overbearing custodian of the Tuscan language amid a group of petty, idiomatically prattling Venetians.42 This last permutation of Lelio highlights what we saw in Il teatro comico: that character reformation, or demasking, amounts to a derhetoricization. We see this more explicitly in another batch from the sixteen plays: for example, La finta ammalata/The Imaginary Invalid Woman, a Molièresque tribute by title, takes aim at academia and medicine, lampooning the “grecismi,” or, more accurately, the latinate nonsense of quacks, who, “in order to mesmerize dolts, employ strange terms, pompous and bombastic, in order to express those same things that have their correlative in Italian, easy and well-­known.”43 La dama prudente/The Prudent Lady, a more subtle satire of customs and manners, targets one of the tritest passions on which comedy thrives—­namely, jealousy—­and its accompanying language.44 Finally, derhetoricization features prominently in Il poeta fanatico/The Fanatical Poet. Goldoni deemed this play one of  his weakest, but we can assume that it must have particularly delighted De Sanctis in that it amounts to an anti-­academic, and specifically, anti-­Petrarchan, parody. A mix of poetry and dialogue, this plotless theatrical prosimetrum represents the ultimate clash between high and low registers, shown here as different poetic worldviews: the “heroic style” of Ottavio, a dieheart Petrarchist, and the “macaronic style” of Brighella, a self-­avowed improviser.45 This certamen, or head-­on poetic confrontation between the academic and the popular, affords a “phenomenology of the poetic practice” that reveals the inorganic nature of literary stereotypes at the level of the psychological and the social. Highbrow and lowbrow 42. Carlo Goldoni, Il giocatore, ed. Alessandro Zaniol (Venice: Marsilio, 1997), 95; Goldoni, L’incognita, in TO, 3:791–­861; Goldoni, I pettegolezzi delle donne, ed. Paola Luciani (Venice: Marsilio, 1994). On Lelio as a “metatheatrical” character, see Turchi’s notes in La bottega del caffè, 34. 43. Carlo Goldoni, La finta ammalata, in TO, 3:643–­708, at 648. 44. Carlo Goldoni, La dama prudente, in TO, 3:711–­88. 45. Carlo Goldoni, Il poeta fanatico, ed. Marco Amato (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), 150.

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solutions alike represent the “pathological form of expressive alienation” typical of Baroque “metromania.”46 And this pathology is not without its moral repercussions, as we witness Ottavio authorizing his daughter Rosaura (his “Petrarchessa”) to flirt poetically with her paramour under his paternal roof as long as she carries out her amorous badinage according to the dicta of the most stringent poetic Petrarchism.47 Characters reformed, rhetoric eviscerated, one more bugbear remained for Goldoni to tackle in these sixteen new plays: foreign temptation. In this case, the relevant plays are Il bugiardo/The Liar, by Goldoni’s own admission an Italianization of Pierre Corneille’s Le menteur (1644), which in turn was a Frenchification of a Spanish original; and La donna volubile/The Fickle Woman, which was inspired by L’irrésolu (1713), authored by Philippe Néricault Destouches (1680–­1754), whose complete works had recently been translated into Italian by Maria Vittoria Ottoboni (1721–­90), another purveyor of French bourgeois drama alongside Caminer.48 A third play, Il vero amico/The True Friend, attracted some notoriety and put Goldoni on the international map when it became known that Denis Diderot (1713–­84) had plagiarized it for his Le fils naturel (1757). As a consequence, Diderot recruited his fellow encyclopédistes and other notables, including Friederich Melchior Grimm (1723–­ 1807), to engage in a smear campaign that forever branded Goldoni in some French circles as nothing more than a petty farceur.49 Ironically, Goldoni, who was unvaryingly apologetic toward Diderot and his acolytes, was never confrontational in his own use of European drama. His forays seem motivated by no wish other than to hone his adaptation skills and explore what adjustments a play required in order to appeal to different national tastes. This is confirmed by the fact that his most programmatic engagement with European letters within the 1750–­51 series was undeniably Pamela, a twofold refitting. It was at once a theatrical conversion of Samuel Richardson’s famous novel of the same title, and a salute to Voltaire, who had achieved a similar feat with Nanine, an adaptation of the same novel, a year 46. I draw from Marco Amato’s insightful introduction to Goldoni, Il poeta fanatico, 19–­20. 47. Goldoni, Il poeta fanatico, 195. 48. Carlo Goldoni, Il bugiardo, ed. Alessandro Zaniol (Venice: Marsilio, 1994); Goldoni, La donna volubile, in TO, 3:941–­1001. 49. Carlo Goldoni, Il vero amico, in TO, 3:569–­640. On the controversy, see Manlio Duilio Busnelli, Diderot et l’Italie (Paris: Champion, 1925); Nicola Mangini, “La polemica Goldoni-­ Diderot,” Problemi di critica goldoniana 1 (1994): 261–­71; and Anne-­Marie Chouillet, “Dossier du ‘Fils naturel’ et du ‘Père de famille,’ ” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 208 (1982): 73–­166.

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earlier. While the gesture did ingratiate Goldoni with Voltaire—­who dubbed Goldoni the “painter of nature” and was in turn described by Goldoni as his “shield and protection” during the spat with Diderot—­Goldoni also referred to Pamela as one of his più dilette (most beloved) plays, because it was his first comedy entirely “without masks,” which he “had gradually rendered less necessary, proving that laughter was allowed without them, and, indeed, that laughter which derives from a lofty and witty kind of jest better befits people of  judgment” (PE, 133).50 This last statement, which Goldoni addressed to one of his editors, echoes and reaffirms something said in Pamela to Ernold, the nephew of Lord Bonfil, who upon his return from a European grand tour is taken to task for putting on (French) “airs” (“Vedetelo, come ha l’aria francese”).51 Smug in his acquired worldliness, Ernold simply will not shut up about his appreciation for Harlequin, a character he discovers during his Italian travels and wishes were introduced into English theater. His benevolent uncle chides him: Gentleman, if [Arlecchino] provokes your laughter, I do not know what to think of you. You will not have me believe that in Italy, learned men, men of high spirit, laugh at such nonsense. Laughter is proper to man, but not every man laughs for the same reason. There is a lofty kind of ridicule, which originates from the charm of words, from argute sallies, from witty and brilliant quips. And there is the vile laughter which is born of ribaldry and cheap theatrics. Allow me to address you with the freedom proper to a relative and friend. Your travels were premature. It would have been advisable for you to have preceded your travels with better studies. History, chronology, drawing, mathematics, sound philosophy are the most necessary sciences for a traveler. Gentleman, if you had applied yourself to these before leaving London, your spirit would not have been attracted to the entertainments of Vienna, to Parisian gallantry, and to the Italian Harlequin.52

And with that, with the reprobation of the foolish gasconades of a young En­ glish aristocrat and wannabe Frenchman, Goldoni’s cycle may be said to have come full circle. Harlequin and commedia dell’arte may remain the hallmarks 50. For Goldoni’s exchange with Voltaire, see Goldoni’s dedicatory letter and notes to the reader in Pamela fanciulla–­Pamela maritata, ed. Ilaria Crotti (Venice: Marsilio, 1995), respectively at 183–­87 and 189–­97. 51. Goldoni, Pamela fanciulla–­Pamela maritata, 106. 52. Goldoni, Pamela fanciulla–­Pamela maritata, 110.

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of Italy, even despite Goldoni’s best efforts, but if they do, they represent a prereformed Italy that exists and will continue to exist only in the eyes of foreign beholders, callow tourists in search of cheap folkloristic corroborations of their own ignorant assumptions. It is fitting that Pamela fanciulla, perhaps the only Goldonian play to engender a sequel, Pamela maritata/Married Pamela (1760), derives from a novel, as it also points to Goldoni’s penchant for romanzesco, his urge for sustained, sweeping narratives of the kind that theater, a piecemeal genre, cannot afford. After Pamela, audiences clamored for more novel-­inspired works, to which Goldoni retorted: “instead of reading a novel for the sake of composing a play, I should prefer composing a piece from which a novel might be made” (M, 259). Indeed, one could argue that his Mémoires and other autobiographical paratexts amount to a kind of novelization of the last play left for us to mention in the cycle of sixteen, L’avventuriere onorato/The Honorable Adventurer. This picaresque “novel in action,” whose hero Goldoni dared to “class” with the likes of Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe, no less, recalls the only narrative form that Goldoni truly sought to master: autobiography (260). At the same time, it captures the fact that the success of Goldoni’s reform depends on his ability to saturate his corpus with reformative intentions and his readers’ acknowledgment of and collaborative attention to that same procreative artistic will. By Goldoni’s own admission L’avventuriere onorato is “allegorical,” a transparent representation of Goldoni’s own evolution via the character of Guglielmo, an inscrutable freeloader, who within the span of seven scenes is demasked or exposed six times in the first act as, respectively, a former schoolteacher in Messina, an assistant doctor in Gaeta, a personal secretary in Rome, an attorney in Tuscany, a court clerk in Venice, and a playwright in Naples.53 Goldoni coyly suggests that this serial anagnorisis, “while not impossible, is very unlikely.”54 Yet while readers may take the trope to symbolize Goldoni’s attempt to unify the traditional localism of Italian theater, it also simultaneously stages a personal “prophecy,” for Goldoni had at some time or other performed all of the professions listed, except for that of teacher.55 As it turned out, some dozen years later, Goldoni left Italy to take a job in Paris, and he was eventually summoned to Versailles as preceptor of the daughters of King Louis XV, 53. On Goldoni’s theatrical self-­representation, see Paladini Volterra, “Oh quante favole di me scriveranno.” Goldoni personaggio in commedia (Rome: Euroma, 1997). 54. Carlo Goldoni, L’avventuriere onorato, ed. Bianca Danna (Venice: Marsilio, 2001), 95. 55. I draw these insights from Luigi Squarzina’s introduction to L’avventuriere onorato, 16–­17 and 20–­21.

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whom he taught Italian through the reading and rehearsal of his plays. It was at this point, writes Goldoni, that he was finally “freed from the comedians.”56 Just as a careful perusal of the full plotline of De Sanctis’s History affords insight into a rationale otherwise lost, a synchronic review of the complete 1750–­51 cycle of plays affords something similar. It helps illustrate Goldoni’s extraordinary and arguably unmatched, metatheatrical audacity, of course, but, more to the point, it proves Goldoni right in insisting that every individual play in his hypertrophic corpus participates in the reformative purpose that he was honing, gradually and ever more precisely, and furthermore, that he offered it to the reader not in retrospect as a complete achievement, but in fieri, with the aid of an intense paratextual autobiographism. Author and reader thus come to understand reform as a renewable exercise, simultaneously. Again, we see how Goldoni is congenial to Petrarch and De Sanctis. He does not seek to impose a simplistic authorialism; rather, he is keen to show, heuristically, that the endurance of his art depends on a participatory hermeneutics if it is to bear fruit beyond its immediate creation and reception. Until that creation is ready for independent consummation, the reader is not asked to approve, but simply to allow for the corpus to unfurl until exhausted. “Do not grow weary of reading, for I do not grow weary of writing,” Goldoni pleads.57 Corpus reading is indeed an exhausting tour de force, and we can appreciate that the sixteen plays amount to an early experiment in what today might be called “marathon theater.” Or, given that Goldoni addresses his work to the private reader as much as, if not more than, to theater audiences, we might say that the reader who experiences Goldoni’s plays collectively, in accordance with the author’s wishes, participates in a kind of “durational performance.”58 But, then the question becomes, is it ever “a wrap”? When (if ever), and how, is the experiment over and the torch passed on? The answer, we know, is death, but not as a matter of course. As we will see in chapter 4, death can be rehearsed many times over metaphorically. Yet, at times, even the most autobiographical of authors can simply grow weary of writing and reading before 56. In a letter from Paris dated 24 February 1765 (to Gabriele Cornet), in TO, 14:332. 57. Carlo Goldoni, “L’osteria della posta,” in Teatro di società, ed. Enrico Mattioda (Venice: Marsilio, 1998), 508. 58. On marathon theater, see Jonathan Kalb, Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). Unfortunately, Strehler’s dabbling in marathon theater with the contracting and simultaneous staging of Goldoni’s so-­called Holiday Trilogy does not feature among Kalb’s test cases. See Carlo Goldoni, Trilogia della villeggia­ tura, ed. Franco Fido (Venice: Marsilio, 2005). An English translation of all three installments is in Goldoni, Five Comedies.

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their time is up. And recounting that experience is important, too, because it illustrates the incongruity of impatience in a reformative program.

C o n c lu s i o n : I f N ot M o l i è r e , T h e n W h at ? The wager of 1750–­51, by all counts an early example of endurance art, left Goldoni bone-­tired and emotionally drained. At the same time, the attempt to fulfill the reformation cycle is both extracorporeal and out-­of-­body. The play that followed L’avventuriere onorato lies just outside the boundaries of the cycle of sixteen, yet it reconnects to them in that it stages a future transmigration of Goldoni’s soul into Molière. Indeed, as mentioned, L’avventuriere onorato presages Goldoni’s distant future, while Il Moliere/Molière, written for the 1751–­52 season, predicts more fully the fraught and frustrated outcome of that very French future. This play, perhaps best characterized as an “extra,” seventeenth play, is only the second, after Pamela, to omit masks, and it was written to please an exceptionally idiosyncratic and isolated audience, the people of Turin. In an appreciation of the city that a century later would become the first capital of a unified Italy, Goldoni writes: Turin is a city that infinitely honors our Italy: although poised, as it were, on the border of France, it has acquired many of its praiseworthy customs; thus having the privilege of picking the best of  both Nations, it forged a system worthy of admiration and praise. [ . . . ] Due to the aforementioned mix of the two nations, French comedy held sway among the torinesi, and I cannot but commend them if they detested other Italians for their corrupt taste in comedy. I had begun to transform [comedic] customs, and as I was in the habit of finding abundant and pleasing enjoyment elsewhere, I reckoned that I had received less from there; and yet, one cannot but expect a good outcome in a place where bad seeds have not sprouted roots, but where the reform of the valiant Molière has been embraced.59

Turin affords Goldoni the chance to both cross borders and travel across time, or, more fittingly, to inhabit the ever-­liminal existential space required for the achievement of his reform, which, French though it may have been in inspiration (but we know that inspiration was equally Machiavellian, thus, local), was firmly Italian in its metacritical diachronization of its Molièresque precedent.

59. Carlo Goldoni, La donna volubile, in TO, 3:941–­42.

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In Il Moliere things and characters are again “allegorical,” Goldoni avows, by which we now know he means “autobiographical,” which in this case means his retroactive self-­identification with Molière, of course.60 Goldoni’s play, which relies on the widely read but unreliable The Life of Molière (1705) by Grimarest, overtly pays tribute to Molière as an admirable and unsurpass­ able model and is centered on events surrounding the censorship of Tartuffe by King Louis XIV. Looking beneath the surface, however, we can see the piece as an attempted cannibalization of Molière that ultimately ends in self-­betrayal. Molière had already put himself on stage in a rare one-­act methateatrical piece, The Impromptu at Versailles (1663), and so Goldoni’s Il Moliere amounts to an extended mise-­en-­abîme (a metatheatrical play within a metatheatrical play within a metatheatrical play . . .) in which the historical figure being represented is made to ventriloquize an agency he never explicitly conceded to. Goldoni’s eviscerated and repossessed Molière is a conscious reformer and the scourge of Scaramouche—­hence, really, a more than Goldonian figure.61 If reform was indeed Goldoni’s obsession, while not avowedly Molière’s, it is also true that even Goldoni, as we have seen, did not dare trample on Sacchi/Harlequin, for whom he held the same kind of esteem and respect that famously tied Molière to Tiberio Fiorilli (1608–­94), the impersonator of the French Harlequin. And so, we may ask, what line is Il Moliere really crossing, if any? I would advance that the true allegory of the play is lost on the reader who approaches this explicit tribute in a vacuum. In fact, the play may be read as a ruse of sorts, one specifically set up to test the reader’s and Goldoni’s own patience for reform, to test our internalization of the hermeneutical deontology or ethics of reading painstakingly put forth in and enlivened by the sixteen plays. The strategy succeeds in that Goldoni and most of his readers (including the present reader, perhaps) hanker at this point for a landing, for fulfillment after

60. Carlo Goldoni, Il Moliere, ed. Bodo Guthmüller (Venice: Marsilio, 2004), 171. 61. Goldoni, Il Moliere, 110: “Di Francia era, il sapete, il comico teatro / in balia di persone nate sol per l’aratro. / Farse vedeansi solo, burlette all’improvviso, / atte a muover soltanto di sciocca gente il riso, / e i cittadin più colti, e il popolo gentile, / l’ore perdean preziose in un piacer sì vile. / Gl’istrioni più abietti venian d’altro paese / a ridersi di noi, godendo a nostre spese; / fra i quali Scaramuccia, siccome tutti sanno, / dodicimila lire si fe’ d’entrata l’anno; / e i nostri cittadini, con poco piacer loro, / le sue buffonerie pagarno a peso d’oro. / Tratto dal genio innato e dal desio d’onore, / al comico teatro died’io la mano e il core; / a riformar m’accinsi il pessimo costume, / e fur Plauto e Terenzio la mia guida, il mio lume.” On Goldoni and Molière, see Giorgio Padoan, Putte, zanni, rusteghi, 111–­50.

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so much waiting and indirection, and may come to expect and even to wish for Goldoni’s Frenchification/Molièrization. But, as we have seen over and over again, the lesson is that attention to finished product is French-­minded; what is truly Italian is, instead, an unwavering account of processes. Goldoni seems to acknowledge as much when he publishes the play and reintroduces it to himself and his readers, noting that Il Moliere’s “imitative” nature represents an aberration from his principles. Il Moliere is a grab bag of concessions of the kind Goldoni usually eschewed: it is written in five acts, while Goldoni had to this point preferred three acts; it adheres to unities of action, place, and time that had not much mattered to Goldoni previously; it presents no masks or stock characters, while other Goldoni plays (with the exception of the less-­than-­Italian Pamela, which in any case also ends with a panegyric about Harlequin) retain some mementos of that tradition; and, finally, and most “repulsively” to Goldoni in retrospect, it is written in verse, specifically in Martellian verse, the Italian meter that most closely corresponded to the French Alexandrine.62 Even though Goldoni tried to make up for these concessions by moderating the characters, which tended to be more crudely drawn, even in Molière, by deepening the intreccio or plotline, which was often sacrificed in French drama, and more generally by attempting to “universalize” or de-­intellectualize the play for a wider reception, Goldoni realized the effort was fruitless. His reverence for Molière could not compete with the fact that the latter was endowed with a uniform genius in semblance to his nation, where everything converges on one city, Paris, and one audience, whereas a decentered Italy requires a manifold genius who appeals to its many centers and people.63 For the time being hybrid Turin afforded Goldoni the single realization, expressed by a member of his audience and duly noted by Goldoni in his Mémoires, that though overall “fine,” his work “was no Molière” (M, 264). Mid-­career, 62. Goldoni, Il Moliere, 90–­92. 63. Carlo Goldoni, La famiglia dell’antiquario, in TO, 2:882: “Dove manca per dir vero la nostra Italia, è nel Teatro Comico, poiché la Francia, l’Inghilterra e la Spagna lo superano di gran lunga. S’io avessi lo spirito di Molier, farei nel Paese nostro quello ch’egli ha fatto nel suo. Ma troppo debole io sono per reggere a tanto peso; e può bene Vostra Eccelenza incoraggirmi e tutta impiegare la sua eloquenza, per farmi sperare che dalle mie fatiche la cara mia Nazione qualche ristoro in questa parte ricever possa, poiché oltre il conoscer me stesso, che poco vaglio, convien riflettere che l’Italia non è il Paese che abbia una sola Metropoli, un solo genio ed un popolo solo. Per piacere in Francia, basta piacere a Parigi: per avere gli applausi dell’Inghilterra, basta ottenerli da Londra, così almeno fra noi risuona, e da quelle Dominanti soltanto veggiamo uscire le opere rinomate.”

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Goldoni realized he was no match for his French idol. But if he was no Molière, then who was he, and what did his reform amount to? This question was answered differently in Italy and in France. We have traced the story of Goldoni’s legacy in Italy, and how, via De Sanctis with the help of a Vichian intercession, Goldoni inspired, or rather, co-­authored as intertextual reference the stirrings of a post-­Petrarchan era in Italian letters. In France, as we shall see in the next chapter, the story is equally Vichian, yet anti-­Goldonian, and ultimately obverse to the one just recounted.

Chapter 4

The Vichian Resurrection of Commedia dell’Arte: Reciprocating Modernity between Italy and France The history of Vico’s reputation is an ironical reflection of his own cyclical theory of culture: obscure beginnings, slow development, rise to fame and influence, followed by an inevitable decline and fall, after which the entire cycle is repeated once again—­we cannot be sure how soon or how often. Isaiah Berlin

Introduction In the last chapter we left Carlo Goldoni barely at the halfway mark in his career, yet having achieved his reform of commedia a soggetto twice over: once, diachronically and by direct route, from the reworked canovaccio of  Momolo Cortesan to his first play di carattere, which was La vedova scaltra, and again, synchronically and programmatically, through the metatheatrical cycle of the sixteen new plays of  1750–­51. The latter effort, I argued, was capped by a seventeenth play titled Il Moliere, a blatantly unbefitting attempt to enact Goldonian reform through appropriation of the French playwright. As I have suggested, this endeavor may have had the aim of alerting readers to the inexhaustibility of the reform’s momentum. If so, we may now venture, Goldoni was reminding himself and his readers that reform, despite its backward glance, is never antiquarian but always futural; it requires eventually coming into one’s own. Hence, if the autobiographical play L’avventuriere onorato recalls us to Goldoni’s many and varied past achievements, Il Moliere strikes us not simply for its ability to predict Goldoni’s future—­namely, his relocation to France in 1762—­but, as we shall see in more detail, for its value as a first, failed experiment against which to gauge the degree of  his advancement. Petrarch, we know, staged a similar self-­reckoning when he transitioned from Ciceronianism to Petrarchism proper throughout the combined efforts of the Familiares and

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Seniles. And De Sanctis, too, came to terms with his anti-­Petrarchism only af­ ter he recanted his youthful belief that the Canzoniere contained a before and an after, a story of spiritual evolution that he found, on second perusal, was just not there, a story that De Sanctis accordingly took upon himself in the Es­ say and in the History. In its own distinct way, Goldoni’s theater also takes the form of a palinode. In the ten years’ interval between Il Moliere and his relocation to France, he blithely kept up his prolific poetical productivity—­composing many of his masterpieces during this period, no doubt—­but the call to France brought him to a new threshold, and here his first instinct was to reconnect to L’avventuriere onorato and Il Moliere by composing a third “allegorical” work, Una delle ul­ time sere di carnovale/One of the Last Carnival Evenings (1762), a farewell piece to Italy. We know that in Goldoni’s terms “allegorical” stands for “autobiographical,” and the autobiographical metaphor contained in Una delle ultime sere di carnovale, is self-­evident, says Goldoni in his introduction: the play tells the story of a company of tapestry weavers, whose mission, like that of the actors, is to collaboratively bring to life the sketches of a “draftsman” or writer, in this case, the character of Anzoletto, a formidable disegnatore whose talent brings him to “Moscovia,” and who is an obvious stand-­in for Goldoni.1 One of Anzoletto’s monologues gives us insight into Goldoni’s expectations at the time of his own departure: For quite a while everyone has been fond of this country’s popular designs. Whether it is the skill of the designers, or that of the weavers, our tapestries captivate the mind’s eye. Our workers were welcomed everywhere they traveled. When the designs were shipped away, they were appreciated; yet even this will not suffice. It is easy to see that an Italian hand, designing on site for the tastes of the Muscovites, is capable of creating a blend that will please both nations. This isn’t easy, yet it’s not impossible. The great fault, however, lies in the failure of their choice, for I am the lowest designer, and have put the most magnificent project at risk. Nevertheless, I have resolved to go. Who can tell . . . My own Country accepted me without my being worthy; perhaps I will find this same fortune elsewhere. I will do my duty; on this, I stake my honor. I always have done and will keep doing so; and if my inabilities prohibit the praise of my works in Moscovia, I will strive to learn, I will return with new knowledge, new

1. Carlo Goldoni, Una delle ultime sere di carnovale, ed. Gilberto Pizzamiglio (Venice: Marsilio, 1993), 41.

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light, I will provide for my weavers, and I will serve my Motherland, which has never ceased to show great mercy for me and has always been so kind.2

The “blend that will please two nations” sought by Anzoletto recalls Goldoni’s description of  Turin, a hybrid city, whose naturally bicultural inhabitants inspired Il Moliere, an imitative concoction. But Anzoletto is not the vigorous and self-­assured version of himself that Goldoni had advanced in identifying with the author of Tartuffe. Instead, this chief disegnatore is fully aware of  his cultural identity and thus able to anticipate the possibility of his failure abroad and an eventual homecoming. Will Goldoni succeed, this time, in being two things at once: French and Italian? Will he live up to his sobriquet, the Italian Molière? Anzoletto’s prudence stands in contrast to the bolder and complacently Frenchified Goldoni of the Mémoires, who opts to symbolize his relocation to France with a portentous (shall we dare say, rhetorical?!) story of a near-­shipwreck, thus relying on the conventional theme of life and resurrection.3 In the Mémoires, the farewell to Italy is dragged out: Goldoni makes the rounds of Italy for one last time, traveling to Venice, Bologna, Modena, Parma, and Piacenza, among other cities, eventually choosing Genoa rather than Turin, water rather than land, for the final crossing. Having boarded a felucca in the maritime city of Liguria, Goldoni and his wife travel along the Italian Riviera until they are “driven from the route by a hurricane, and almost wrecked in doubling capo Noli” (M, 350). In other words, he comes close to washing up on the shores of the rather unique town of  Varigotti. This is not your typical medieval Italian hamlet, like Noli itself, but instead a Saracen enclave whose shoreline of  motley square buildings, palm trees, and a fortified watchtower recalls the theatrical backdrops employed to represent fanciful exotic settings in the kind of pièces à spectacle Goldoni systematically avoided throughout his career. And yet, unknown to Goldoni at this point, fables and only fables would be required of him by the enchantment-­craving audiences of the Comédie-­Italienne. If Goldoni’s nautical coordinates are true, then his brush with death was perhaps another presage. But ultimately he survives and reaches Nice, where he “reiterated [his] adieu to [his] own country, and invoked the shade of 2. Goldoni, Una delle ultime sere di carnovale, 87. I cite from Cesare De Michelis’s “Afterword” to Carlo Goldoni, Five Comedies, ed. Gianluca Rizzo and Michael Hackett (Toronto: University of  Toronto Press, 2016), 373. 3. On Goldoni’s concerted attempt to present himself as French, see Jessica Goodman, Gol­ doni in Paris: La Gloire et le Malentendu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Molière to be [his] guide in that of his” (M, 351). This invocation concludes part 2 of Goldoni’s Mémoires, which reviews his corpus, play by play. (An equal and third part is a carefree recollection of the impressions gathered over three decades spent in Paris.) The story of  his  journey recalls and glosses the tale of a similarly deadly journey that Goldoni recounts at the end of book 1 of the Mémoires, a teleological portrayal of  his youth. On that  journey, also in the company of  his wife Nicoletta, Goldoni meanders through Italy, traversing many towns, including, for the second time in his life, Rimini, on whose shores Goldoni had first met his destiny in the form of a group of macaroni-­eating stock characters. Against the backdrop of a ravaging war with Spanish and German invaders, they barely make it, his wife on his shoulder, to Florence, where the inhabitants are “the living texts of the pure Italian language” (213). These complementary metaphorical journeys represent Goldoni’s cultural elevation from the parochial and idiomatic past of commedia dell’arte and his own Venetian ties to a more harmonious, less stratified society aligned with his Italian/national and French/international aspirations, respectively abetted by Machiavelli and Molière.4 In turn, both of these autobiographical accounts are reinforced by an exchange of letters that Goldoni insisted be published as an appendix to the first play he composed on French soil. Immediately upon his arrival in Paris, Goldoni sought out the advice of a certain M. Meslé, a man who in Goldoni’s appreciation had achieved linguistic and cultural mastery of Italy and France alike. In his response, Meslé did not hold back. He writes that the French are “still enslaved [ . . . ] to those masks from which your spirit has liberated you,” adding that “[o]ne of the most striking contradictions of the human spirit is without doubt the different dispositions which one finds in the two Comédies of Paris. We bring ourselves to the Italian comedies with an altogether different taste, different eyes, and almost as if with another soul, than we do to the French comedies.” Indeed, he concludes: “One could almost believe that a talisman stands over the doors of the two theaters, one that transforms us as soon as we step into either one of them, and changes us, without us realizing it.”5 4. On Goldoni’s linguistic registers, see Gianfranco Folena, “L’esperienza linguistica di Carlo Goldoni,” in Vittore Branca and Nicola Mangini, eds., Studi goldoniani. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi goldoniani (Venezia, 28 Settembre—­1 Ottobre 1957), 2 vols. (Venice: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1960), 1:143–­89; and by the same author, “Il francese di Carlo Goldoni,” in Atti del colloquio sul tema Goldoni in Francia (Roma, 29–­30 Maggio 1970) (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1972), 47–­76. 5. The Goldoni-­Meslé exchange is included in Carlo Goldoni, L’amore paterno, ed. Andrea Fabiano (Venice: Marsilio, 2000), 169–­99, at 179–­80.

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Again, these words seem to herald Goldoni’s immediate future, for shortly thereafter he began work on Il genio buono e il genio cattivo/The Good and Evil Genies (1764), a spirit-­infested fantasy of a Harlequin traveling through cultures, from Paris to London to “Tripoli di Barbaria,” by means of a magic ring.6 Meslé, a historically unknown figure who might in fact be a mouthpiece for Goldoni’s own opinions, paints Parisian theatergoers as subject to a kind of dissociative identity disorder, tossed like the magic-­ring-­wearing Harlequin between the incommensurable worlds of the Comédie-­Italienne and the Comédie-­Française, between Paris and the fanciful realms of a “Tripoli di Barbaria.” But, again, to the attentive reader of the Mémoires and the Memorie italiane, this will feel like déjà vu, for Goldoni had already introduced a similar dualism to his audience through Cesare Dàrbes and his portrayal of Pantalone as a split personality, at once a base Harlequin and a uomo di mondo, a portrayal on which he based I due gemelli veneziani, a mistaken identity play that, we may recall, ended with the death of the “blockheaded” or Harlequinesque twin, a therapeutic plot that symbolizes the suppression of  Italian theater’s underbelly. And thus, through a close reading, the long tale of Goldoni’s life and work seems to be coming together. Meslé, or whoever hides behind that name, is clear on one point: The “traces of Molière are lost in France,” and therefore imitation or emulation of the kind attempted in Il Moliere is not an option. Goldoni is instead summoned to a higher and harder task: to rekindle that reform in the soul of the French audience, to reintroduce reform in a way that renews the French spirit (“la réformation de l’un conduira insensiblement à la réformation de l’autre, et en voyant de bonnes comédies italiennes, en apprendra à faire de bonnes comédies françoises”), and such a reform will succeed only on one condition: that the comédie avoid “monstrous” mixes, but rather stay the course, raising the French to Goldoni’s level of accomplishment.7 Meslé’s words, which point to the exigency of naturalization, elucidate the events recounted in the Mémoires, where Goldoni could not but experience his association with the Comédie-­Italienne as a regression into a painstakingly overcome past. Of his first encounter with his French-­based ensemble, Goldoni writes: I communicated my ideas to my comedians. Some of them encouraged me to follow my plan, and others asked only for farces. The first were lovers, who 6. Carlo Goldoni, Il genio buono e il genio cattivo, ed. Andrea Fabiano (Venice: Marsilio, 2006). 7. Goldoni, L’amore paterno, 185.

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were desirous of written pieces; the second, comic actors, who, unaccustomed to learning anything by heart, were ambitious of shining without taking the pains of studying. [ . . . ] Most of the Italian actors asked only for outlines; the public were accustomed to them, the court suffered them, and why should I refuse to comply with the established practice? “Well, then,” said I, “let us compose outlines, if they will have them; every sacrifice seems nothing, every pain seems supportable for the pleasure of remaining two years in Paris.” (M, 362– ­63 and 367)

Goldoni feels disoriented by the erasure of his efforts, in a passage that brings the reader back to the first lines of Il teatro comico, the metatheatrical introduction to the sixteen plays in which Goldoni staged the prise de conscience of his equally recalcitrant Italian actors. At this juncture in the Mémoires, Goldoni confesses: “I no longer knew what I was, what I wished for, or what I was becoming.” He “saw the necessity to return to himself,” but wondered, by what “means”? We might notice that Goldoni is back to that place where, as a youth, he had sought advice from a malade imaginaire attended to by his father. On that occasion, he was handed Machiavelli’s Mandragola and found his way into reform. This time, he experiences a parallel epiphany upon seeing a production of Molière’s Le Misanthrope, which he attends despite his still shaky French. While he admits to not catching every nuance, he absorbs enough to exit the Comédie-­Française with a clear set of options in his mind: “Either to be able to compose pieces for French actors, or to see my countrymen capable of imitating them. Which would be the most difficult to realize?” (M, 369). In fact, Goldoni would go on to burn the candle at both ends, laboring over an impressive number of traditional canovacci, while at the same time he resolved to stake his “reputation” on a single French play. “The word ‘temerity’ is not too strong on this occasion,” Goldoni recalls in his old age, still rattled by the experience. “[F]or must it not be regarded in this light that I, a stranger, who had never set foot in France till the age of fifty-­three, with merely a confused and superficial knowledge of that language, should venture, after a lapse of nine years, to compose a piece for the principal theater of the nation?” (413). But dare he did, with Le Bourru bienfaisant/The Benevolent Curmudgeon staged to great acclaim at the Comédie-­Française and at Fontainebleau in quick succession in 1771.8 8. Carlo Goldoni, Le bourru bienfaisant/Il burbero di buon cuore, ed. Paola Luciani (Venice: Marsilio, 2003).

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This would seem to be an apt ending, if we viewed Goldoni’s life as a journey back to Molière—­but that would be to miss the point altogether. Referring to the title character of his Bourru, Goldoni states: “I had been fortunate enough to find in nature a character to be met with every day, which, however, had escaped the vigilance of ancient and modern authors” (M, 415). In other words, the oxymoronic title of Goldoni’s French play is meant to testify to the author’s mastery of reconciliation: Goldoni finally found a way to reunite low and high, good and bad, or, indeed, comedic dualisms of any kind, into a coherent, existentially nuanced, and realistic whole that had never before been seen, not in Plautus, nor in the one-­flaw-­catch-­all characters of  Molière. But this is the least of the matter. What we have learned is that Goldoni’s real achievement was not in the product but in the process, and what he really rejoiced about was that he had attained a kind of naturalization, imitation’s true opposite. “I not only composed my piece in French, but I thought in the French manner when engaged in it. [Bourru] has the stamp of its origin in the thoughts, in the imagery, in the manner, and in the style” (M, 417). Written for a French audience, in the French language, without resort to cultural and linguistic translation, Le Bourru bienfaisant afforded Goldoni the possibility of reliving the experience of reform as a Frenchman, and as a contemporary Frenchman no less, without anachronistic appeals to a bygone past. We might celebrate this achievement with Goldoni by recalling Bourru’s immediate success (Goldoni’s greatest at the European level), the play’s induction into the repertoire of the French national theater, its lucrative box office returns, and its many translations. But one accolade in particular stands out: the production of the play in Venice in 1772, translated into Italian by none other than Elisabetta Caminer, the writer who sought to popularize French theater in Italy contra, mainly, Gozzi, but also Goldoni. Not only did Goldoni succeed in becoming a French author, but through Caminer we see him turn into a French author worthy of translation into Italian for the betterment of  Italian theater! This incongruous yet fitting outcome is matched by the serendipitous coherence of Goldoni’s demise, for he died just two weeks after the beheading of  King Louis XVI on 21 January 1793, and just hours after the Committee for Public Education of the newly established National Convention had deemed him worthy of the same pension guaranteed to him by the king. The messenger would find him dead, so the legend goes, his corpse still warm in his bed: Goldoni was a man of reforms, not of revolutions! I began this chapter with the tale of Goldoni’s physical and spiritual transmigration into France, because, taken together as a story full of forebodings

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and allegories, it stands in tropological relation to a series of  intellectual events worthy of reconnection in nineteenth-­century France. I am referring to Jules Michelet’s rediscovery of Giambattista Vico as a viable source for a critical review of modernity’s task, to Michelet’s subsequent invention of the “Renaissance” as a periodizing term, and, finally, to the scholarly, artistic, and moral accreditation of commedia dell’arte that was launched by George and Maurice Sand in their landmark 1860 volume, Masques et Bouffons. Together, I contend, these events mark turning points in the Romantic revision of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment legacies. Because my account of  French Romanticism’s self-­definition is distinctively Vichian—­as Vichian, in fact, as the intellectual Risorgimento spearheaded by Francesco De Sanctis—­this chapter begins with an overdue acknowledgment of Vico, and specifically, not his major works, but rather, given the topic at hand, his less well-­known views on laughter. I relied heavily on Vico to expose the apparatus of Goldoni’s and De Sanctis’s reform. At this point, then, we ask ourselves: what would Vico have made of his association with Goldoni and comedy? The chapter then examines Michelet’s Vichian obsession, which has so often been studied in isolation, so that we may note the hybridized form that it took, as a specific brand of  Italian Vichism imported to France by Risorgimento expatriates. This connection to Vico reveals, in the last part of the chapter, that the Sands’ recuperation of commedia dell’arte, another important part of Italy’s early modern legacy, is itself a Vichian event mediated by Michelet’s historiography. Eugène Scribe, the codifier of the so-­called “well-­made play,” once concluded an account of the emergence of modern theater, with its origins in Machiavelli and its apotheosis in Molière, by suggesting that Italy and France, “two nations for too long divided, and for so long at odds with each other, finally found themselves reconciled and reunited, forming, as it were, an alliance, in one single man, the author of Bourru bienfaisant!”9 What follows is the story of  how this reunification in Goldoni led to a redefinition of modernity on a historical and spiritual level. And what is doubly ironic and most striking about this story is that it does not involve an appreciation of Goldoni. Instead, although it relies on Vico to a high degree, the French confrontation with early modernity ends up in a completely different place than the Italian ones we have been studying.

9. Goldoni, Le bourru bienfaisant, 328.

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Vico’s Laughter Francesco De Sanctis showed just how intricate is the relationship between the modern Italian intellectual and the Italian comic tradition. Combing through his History in the previous chapter, we rediscovered a comedic legacy whose development mirrors the development of the Italian spirit as it unfurls recklessly to its demise; with Goldoni’s reform, a deus ex machina, swooping in to alter the course of a set destiny. De Sanctis’s rapport with commedia dell’arte is ambivalent as he, too, “exaggerated” its bad traits in service to his story.10 For his part, Benedetto Croce, De Sanctis’s self-­avowed heir and most devoted student of the Italian seventeenth century and its theatrical tradition, was totally unambiguous.11 Croce witnessed firsthand a renewal of  interest in commedia dell’arte, and he had little patience for scholarly attempts to trace “commedia” to a popular tradition originating in the Roman Atellan farces. This “legend” surrounding commedia dell’arte was just a legend, and as the name “commedia dell’arte” suggested, the form represented a professional/technical achievement worthy of sociological, but not literary, interest.12 Of course, Croce could not deny that, thanks to commedia dell’arte, Italy could pride itself on having spawned modern theater in all of its apparatus, but taking a more inward-­looking, Italian point of view, he saw little else to brag about. Building on De Sanctis’s model, Croce says bluntly: As I have said, commedia dell’arte rose during the mid-­1500s—­that is, precisely when the poetic and creative spirit of Italians was about to be depleted—­and therefore the growth and development of that theater took place during the full literary and spiritual decadence of the second half of the 1500s and through the 10. In De Sanctis’s assessment: “[Commedia dell’arte] was accused of being old and exhausted, of being stale in its repertory, of being nothing now but an outworn mechanism, of being a school of immorality and scurrility, of  being ‘awkward buffoonery and indecent foulness in an enlightened century.’ Undoubtedly the charges were exaggerated, but all the same there was truth in them. The Italian improvised comedy, the comedy of art or a soggetto, had ceased to be fertile, together with the old literature in general” (HIL, 2:873). 11. I allude here to Benedetto Croce, Storia dell’età barocca in Italia (Milan: Adelphi, 1993); and Croce, I teatri di Napoli (Milan: Adelphi, 1992). See also Roberto Gigliucci, Croce e il ba­ rocco (Rome: Lithos, 2011). 12. Benedetto Croce, “Intorno alla ‘commedia dell’arte,’ ” in Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte. Studi sulla poesia italiana dal Tre al Cinquecento (Bari: Laterza, 1933), 503. See also Croce’s preface to Emilio del Cerro, Nel regno delle maschere. Dalla commedia dell’arte a Carlo Goldoni (Naples: Perrella, 1914), v–­vii.

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1600s. At that time, talented actors were being born everywhere even as genial poets dwindled, and Italy abnegated its feelings and volition, its imagination and thoughts, in the mechanization brought about by the Counter Reformation and by Absolutism.13

This explains why in Italy there was no tragedy and no Shakespeare, while its comedy—­excepting of course the so-­called erudite comedies of Ariosto, Bibbiena, and Machiavelli—­was nothing more than “buffoonery” served to a base and complacent audience. At the same time—­and here Croce is again following De Sanctis—­true Italian culture grew increasingly mannered, “hypercultured” and “academic.”14 Croce’s dismissal of commedia dell’arte as a mere figment of the nineteenth-­ century Romantic imagination and as a phenomenon associated with France and with Molière, who rescued it, was lamentably influential. Of interest to us is that he could find support for his point of view in Vico, a common intellectual father he shared with De Sanctis. Indeed, if it were not for Croce, who recovered Vico’s “digression on human ingenuity, acute and argute remarks, and laughter,” we would not have known Vico’s thoughts on the matter.15 Vico’s “digression” was published in 1729 as part of a pamphlet known as Vici vindiciae, and it was literally Vico’s attempt to vindicate himself against the anonymous reviewer of the first edition of  his New Science. Eager to introduce himself to Europe and seeking readers beyond the confines of a hostile Naples, Vico had dispatched the 1725 version of his magnum opus to, among others, Isaac Newton,  Jean Le Clerc, and the Leipzig acta eruditorum, the prestigious journal then edited by Johann Burkhard Mencken, the author of The Char­ latanry of the Learned (1715) and thus, too, like Vico, a scourge of conceited scholars. Despite this affiliation, it was in this journal that a pithy and malevolent review of  Vico’s book appeared, which reached him in Naples two years later.16 13. Croce, “Intorno alla ‘commedia dell’arte,’ ” 505. 14. Croce, “Intorno alla ‘commedia dell’arte,’ ” 506. 15. Croce, otherwise persuaded that any theory of laughter is at best “a scientific curiosity,” reserves a special place for Vico among modern attempts to theorize laughter between Hobbes and Kant. See Benedetto Croce, “La dottrina del riso e dell’ironia in Giambattista Vico,” in Sag­ gio sullo Hegel (Bari: Laterza, 1913), 285–­86. 16. On the history of  Vico’s text, see Gustavo Costa, “Vico,  Johann Burkhard Mencken e Christian Gottlieb Jöcker,” Bollettino degli studi vichiani 4 (1974): 143–­48; Giuseppe Landolfi Petrone, “Von Leipzig nach Weimar. Vicos ‘deutsche Reise,’ ” in Peter König, ed., Vico in Europa zwischen 1800 und 1950 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013), 25–­46; and Donald P.

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Vico’s digression on laughter was elicited by the reviewer’s denigration of “ingenium” (“ [Vico] indulges more in ingenuity, than in truth”), as the very cornerstone of all of  Vico’s philosophy, to be understood in antithesis to truth, and thus, the reviewer suggests, a faculty that can produce only fabrication and falsehood. In reply, Vico argued forcefully for the indissoluble relationship between ingenuity and truth. If most are unable to see ingenuity as the faculty that can relate different and disparate things, and hold multiple steps of thought in a “harmonious bond,” efficiently imparting truth to the common people, it is because they fail to distinguish between “argute” and “acute remarks.” Vico explains: [A]rgute remarks are the product of a feeble and narrow imagination which either compares mere names of things, regarding only their external appearances (and not all of them), or presents some of them absurdly or unsuitably to an unthinking mind which, while expecting convenient and suitable ones, is deluded and frustrated in its expectation. Therefore, when the brain fibers, focused on a convenient and suitable object, are disturbed by an unexpected one, they become disordered. Being agitated, they transmit their restless motion to all branches of the nervous system. This shakes the whole body and removes man from his normal state. Animals are deprived of  laughter because they have one sense only, which enables them to pay attention to but one object at a time. Hence, any one object is continuously expelled and deleted by the subsequent one. It is thus perfectly obvious that since animals have been denied by nature the ability to laugh, they are also deprived of all reason. At this point, I must mention that those who laugh at a serious thing are secretly impelled to do so, even if they do not realize it. Precisely because laughter is a human prerogative, they feel that by laughing they are experiencing that they are men. But laughter comes from our feeble human nature which “deceives us by the semblance of right.” And, in fact, from this interpretation of  laughter, laughing men [ridiculi] are halfway between austere, serious men and the animals.17

Vico’s approach to laughter is surprisingly rigid and conservative, especially in that it allows for a moralistic hierarchization of the human species. If  laughter, insofar as it signals the recognition of a discrepancy between res and verba, is a

Verene’s translation of “Vico’s Reply to the False Book Notice: The Vici Vindiciae,” New Vico Studies 24 (2006): 129–­45. 17. Giambattista Vico, “Vindication of  Vico,” New Vico Studies 24 (2006): 157.

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gift granted by God to human beings to recognize themselves as such, then to indulge in laughter is a marker of  bestiality.18 Lest we think there could not be anything worse than letting ourselves emit a peal of  laughter (“Serious people [simply] do not laugh because they pay attention to one thing only”), Vico distinguishes the ridiculi (“laughing men,” or those who “laugh immoderately and without reason”) and risores (“cacklers”) from the derisores (the mockers “who make others laugh”). The latter truly are the farthest removed “from the serious man and the nearest to the animals”; it is they who “corrupt the very nature of truth,” who “pervert” it, in fact—­almost professionally, we might say—­and who are “deprived of divine truth” and “forever precluded from the treasures of truth.”19 It is on these premises that Vico, who is said to have at one point worked as a theatrical censor, founds his opinion of contemporary theater: Because this instability of mind is the principal cause of foolishness, philosophy dedicates itself to overcoming this instability above all else and principally aims at reinforcing the wise; from this same fact it can be understood how different is the pleasure that spectators procure from plays in which the characters are morally well delineated than from those that the Latins called Oscan or Atellan and are now by us called “commedie burlesche” [commedia dell’arte]. In effect, the former produce a delight worthy of the wise, whose minds tend always toward the uniform, suitable, and appropriate; this delight is in intensity the same as that which pervades the spectator at a game, as, for example, when he sees the trajectory of a ball finish exactly where the player had directed it and to where the ball should go. Because of the difficulty of properly representing characters, only those who engage in the study of moral philosophy can compose representations in which characters are properly delineated; farcical representations produce instead a type of excessive dissolute pleasure and can

18. Accordingly, in his New Science, Vico placed “irony” in an advanced age of  human maturity, for the perversion of truth could not be known to the earliest, childlike man: “Irony certainly could not have begun until the period of reflection, because it is fashioned of falsehood by dint of a reflection which wears the mask of truth. Here emerges a great principle of  human institutions, confirming the origin of poetry disclosed in this work: that since the first men of the gentile world had the simplicity of children, who are truthful by nature, the first fables could not feign anything false; they must therefore have been, as they have been defined above, true narrations” (NS, §408). 19. Vico, “Vindication of  Vico,” 157–­58.

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reduce even the sane to the insane, in whom by means of  laughter all powers of right reasoning are annulled.20

Theater, which, abandoned to its comic degeneration, may foster anarchy and social discord—­indeed, sap the world of its reason and witness—­is to be saved by philosophy. It necessitates a Terentian moralization—­or a Goldonian reform, for that matter—­that may lead it back within the boundaries of decorum and into adherence with reality as expressed by the famous Ciceronian definition, articulated by Aelius Donatus: comedy as “imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis.”21 Certainly, Vico, whose description of the products of argute wit and the pathological mind that attends to it recalls the composite nature of the Horatian monster, partakes of the Arcadian and anti-­Baroque tendencies of his age.22 Comedians, especially, are to be deplored for their shamelessness in systematically, it seems, perverting truth and damaging the common well-­being. Vico’s derisores, or “comedians,” remind us of those parasitical and plague-­ ridden cerretani, or “charlatans,” whose origins the Baroque mind, epitomized by Tommaso Garzoni (1549–­89), had relegated to the mountainous periphery of the city, or, as Vico would put it, the inhabitants of the feral and liminal “primordial forest” “uncleared” by Hercules’s civilizing labors.23 It was his castigation of the comedian, which retrospectively reinforced De Sanctis’s own indictment, which granted Vico a special place in the heart of Croce. The latter, who clearly built on and continued what De Sanctis had 20. Vico, “Vindication of  Vico,” 159. 21. On this point, see Salvatore Cerasuolo, “Le fonti classiche della dottrina del riso e del comico nelle ‘Vici Vindiciae,’ ” Bollettino del centro di studi vichiani 12–­13 (1982–­83): 329. Vico’s “ideological” stance was widespread, Cerasuolo points out, citing an illustrative passage from Ludovico Muratori: “Consiste oggidí non poca parte di queste commedie in atti buffoneschi e in insconci intrecci, anzi viluppi di azioni ridicole, in cui non troviamo un briciolo di quel verisimile, che è tanto necessario alla favola. Essendosi dato il teatro in mano di gente ignorante, questa pone tutta la sua cura in far ridere; ed altra maniera [ . . . ] non han costoro per ciò conseguire, che l’usar equivochi laidi e poco onesti; il far degli atteggiamenti giocosi, delle beffe, de’ travestimenti, e somiglianti buffonerie, Lazzi da lor nominati, le quali [ . . . ] per lo piú sono improbabili, slegati, e tali, che non potrebbero mai avvenir daddovero” (330). See also Salvatore Cesaruolo, “Vico esegeta dell’Arte Poetica oraziana,” Bollettino degli studi vichiani 8 (1978): 82–­97. 22. Cerasuolo, “Le fonti classiche,” 323. 23. For the famous description of the cerretani’s invasion of the Baroque city, see Tomaso Garzoni, Opere, ed. Paolo Cherchi (Ravenna: Longo, 1993), 638–­47.

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done to recover and even beget through example the idea of a serious Italian man, felt that Vico’s “judgment perfectly fulfills his physiognomy as both man and writer: a melancholic and stern figure, with a face that, as I have already said elsewhere, ‘never laughed,’ with a face even sterner than that of Dante.”24 De Sanctis had shown that from Giordano Bruno to Giuseppe Parini, the Italian man struggled to suppress his sardonic smile. The fact is that life, or, better, national life, is a most serious thing, and Vico, a modern Dante according to Croce, was the only who saw to it with an impassive expression. Setting aside whether we can take seriously this Italian aspiration to sternness, is it a paradox that Vico, of all thinkers, would elect himself the scourge of what he calls the “commedie burlesche”? After all, he was the one who dared to theorize the mute and all physical origins of language. How could the same thinker have helped forge a patriotic existentialism that centered on expunging the bodily expression form that is commedia dell’arte? As is well known, Vico’s anti-­Cartesianism was founded in opposition to Descartes’s divide between mind and body. “I who think,” Vico stated peremptorily, “am mind and body,” because if thought alone were the cause of being, it would also be the cause of the body, which is clearly not the case.25 This axiom, in Vico, is corroborated by the realization that language originated before its articulation in speech. Understanding of that which was prespoken was denied to us until Vico because we were unable to think before words, we lacked that corporeal empathy which was aptly called “carnal hermeneutics.”26 In the self-­ contained language of myth the “poetic characters” are mute symbols, gestures and actions able to reproduce reality, visibly rather than audibly. It is in the arts—­in mimicry, dance, sculpture, and painting—­that the world was first communicated.27

24. Croce, “La dottrina del riso e dell’ironia in Giambattista Vico,” 288. 25. Giambattista Vico, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Unearthed from the Ori­ gins of the Latin Language, trans. L. M. Palmer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 56, emphasis added. 26. See Hwa Yol Jung, Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 27: “From the standpoint of Vico’s carnal hermeneutics, Descartes is wrong-­ headed when he thinks that he is only a mind and has a body. Vico overcomes the Cartesian binary opposition between res cogitans and res extensa. Against Descartes’ conundrum of disembodiment, the body is for Vico the ‘inseparable, dancing party’ of the mind.” 27. For an informative collection on Vico’s approach to the notion of “body,” see Il corpo e le sue facoltà. Giambattista Vico, ed. Giuseppe Cacciatore et al., available online: http://www .ispf-­lab.cnr.it/content/atti-­del-­convegno-­internazionale-­il-­corpo-­e-­le-­sue-­f acoltà-­gb-­vico

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Vico, whose ears perked to the ancient corporeal language in contrast to his time’s intellectualism as well as the common contempt for the body (corpo), which he places between mind (mente) and language ( favella) as the three elements that constitute man, theorized man’s creation, the factum, as necessarily corporeal: For God, in his purest intelligence [ purissimo intendimento], knows things, and, by knowing them, creates them; but they [“men of the gentile nations”], in their robust ignorance, did it by virtue of a wholly corporeal imagination [corpolentissima fantasia]. And because it was quite corporeal, they did it with marvelous sublimity; a sublimity such and so great that it excessively perturbed the very persons who by imagining did the creating, for which they were called “poets,” which is Greek for “creators.” (NS §376)

This is why the history of  human ideas began with the human contemplation of the sky with their “bodily eyes.” In such a framework, “acts of meaning are connected to mute acts of bodily gestures.”28 The mind thus never adheres (aedequatio) to the world; rather, our understanding is always primarily an interpretation, as in the case of the communication between God and man, which first occurred through man’s understanding of the sky as an “animated body.” One need only look at the current language to see the vestiges of this utterly corporeal intercourse. “It is noteworthy,” says Vico, that in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and from the human senses and passions. Thus, head for top or beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles and of potatoes; mouth for any opening; the lip of a cup or pitcher; the teeth of a rake, a saw, a comb; the beard of wheat; the tongue of a shoe [and so on]. (129)

In Vico’s universe, men are subjected to language.29 Language is embodied because nature is animated and speaks. Communication between men and -­napoli-­3-­6-­novembre-­2004-­. See also Gianfranco Cantelli, Mente, corpo, linguaggio. Saggio sull’interpretazione vichiana del mito (Florence: Sansoni, 1986). 28. On this point see Donald P. Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 86. 29. See Ernesto Grassi, “The Beginning of Modern Thought: On the Passion and Experience of the Primordial,” in RIP, 171–­99.

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the surrounding world is literally a corpo a corpo, or “hand to hand,” roughhouse in which language is physically experienced in the literal weight of its significance. Perhaps if they had possessed this Vichian apparatus, the apologetical efforts of a Flamino Scala (1552–­1624), Giovan Battista Andreini (1576–­1654), Niccolò Barbieri (1576–­1641), and other learned comedians who defended their primitive art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would have been stronger and more convincing. The fact is that Vico himself seems to have been oblivious to the possibility of putting his philosophy to such service. Equally oblivious, because absorbed in their patriotic concerns, were most of his notable Italian followers, themselves weary to reconnect things Italian to feral origins. Instead, this reconnection, a Vichian resurrection of commedia dell’arte, occurred in France, where, over the span of forty years or so, the convoluted new science of Vico was translated into a universal language and explained by  Jules Michelet; through such a restitution, the mute language of the zanni himself was decoded and, through George Sand, presented as the art of a truly de-­intellectualized theater of the future.

Giving and Receiving Modernity: A Shared Vichism What used to be and for all practical purposes still is the official story of Vichism was well summarized by Arnaldo Momigliano: “One of the difficulties in the interpretation of Vico,” he succinctly stated, “is that his direct influence on European thought was minimal before Benedetto Croce.”30 For Vico, it is often overstated, came to the international forefront of intellectual history only once before the twentieth century: in the 1820s and 1830s, when, in the aftermath of the revolution, French liberal culture set out to affirm “a new historiographical science.”31 This was a generational effort, spearheaded by Augustin Thierry (1795–­1856), Pierre-­Simon Ballanche (1776–­1847), François Guizot (1787–­1874), Adolphe Thiers (1797–­1877), and François Mignet

30. Arnaldo Momigliano, “La nuova storia romana di Vico,” Rivista storica italiana 77 (1965): 789. For a concise characterization of Vico’s legacy, see Peter König, “Verschlungene Rezeptionslinien. Vico in Europa 1800–­1950,” in König, ed., Vico in Europa, 1–­24. 31. See Carmelo D’Amato, Il mito di Vico e la filosofia della storia in Francia nella prima metà dell’Ottocento (Naples: Morano, 1977), 31.

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(1796–­1884), among others.32 The intense but ephemeral cult of Vico that exploded in France (before eventually making its way back to Italy with renewed intensity) can also be attributed, in part, to those shared Romantic European feelings toward the Neapolitan thinker’s land of origin. In fact, Italy (and Southern Italy, especially) retained a mythical aura at that time as a place in which political and social structures from a bygone past seemed to survive intact.33 While, of course, recent scholarship has demonstrated that Vico’s reception was quite uninterrupted and, moreover, strong, although perhaps not fully international, since the philosopher’s death, the idea that Vico bolstered a new historicist rationalism as criticism and self-­criticism of  Jacobin rationalism holds true in Italy as well as in France.34 For example, two very different works, the already cited Vincenzo Cuoco’s Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799 (1801) and Ballanche’s Essays on Social Palingenesis (1827), were instrumental in the emergence of Vichism in Italy and France, respectively, and both employed Vico to soften the excesses of revolution.35 Once again, the reception in Italy would take an anomalous path, as a belated Neo-­Hegelianism early in the twentieth century renewed the battle against a purportedly antihistoricist Enlightenment. Croce, who captained this movement, appropriated Vico to his side as precursor of his “absolute historicism.” However, he did so not just through scholarship on Vico or by 32. The same is maintained by Antonio Verri in Vico e Herder nella Francia della Restaura­ zione (Ravenna: Longo, 1984), 14. 33. D’Amato, Il mito di Vico, 47–­48. 34. See Eugenio Garin, Storia della filosofia italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: Einaudi,1966), 3:1021. For a qualification of the nineteenth century as “Vico’s century,” see Eugenio Garin, “Vico and the Heritage of Renaissance Thought,” in Giorgio Tagliacozzo, ed., Vico: Past and Present, 2 vols. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), 1:99–­116. For a study of early Italian Vichism, see Giuseppe Cospito, Il “gran Vico.” Presenza, immagini e suggestioni vichiane nei testi della cultura italiana pre-­risorgimentale (1799–­1839) (Genoa: Name, 2002). 35. Cuoco’s monograph was translated into French in 1807, while only two of Ballanche’s essays were published during his lifetime: Prolégomènes (1827) and Orphée (1829). On Cuoco, see Bruce Haddock and Filippo Sabetti, introduction to Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, by Vincenzo Cuoco (Toronto: University of  Toronto Press, 2014), xi–­xxxiii; and OR, 38–­47. On Ballanche, see Arthur McCalla, “Pierre Simon Ballanche as Reader of  Vico,” New Vico Studies 9 (1991): 43–­59; and, more extensively, Arthur McCalla, A Romantic Histo­ riosophy: The Philosophy of History of Pierre-­Simon Ballanche (Leiden: Brill, 1998). See also Maurizio Martirano, “Vico e la filosofia francese nell’interpretazione del giovane Giuseppe Ferrari,” in Manuela Sanna and Alessandro Stile, eds., Vico tra l’Italia e la Francia (Naples: Guida, 2000), 67–­92.

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some general claim of affiliation (as most nineteenth-­century thinkers were wont to do), but through the exhaustive and still unsurpassed history of  Vichism that he put forth in collaboration with Fausto Nicolini. This work, the Vichian Bibliography, is no standard, sterile bibliography: it amounts to an experiment in applied Vichism. Nicolini acknowledges as much when, producing the definitive edition under Croce’s supervision during World War II, he admits to having “emphasized that which in the history of  Vico’s reception naturally configure themselves as epochs.”36 In the first part of  the work the reader is introduced to Vico’s work and contemporary reception, while in the second part, the later reception is divided in Vichian fashion: first, the “apogee of  Vico’s fortune” (1827–­60), when Vico became “fashionable” thanks to the conjoined “propagandas” of  Michelet in France and of  Giuseppe Ferrari and Vincenzo Gioberti in Italy; second, the “decline of  Vico’s fortune” (1860–­ 1900) brought about by the “positivistic barbarism” of  late nineteenth-­century academic culture in Italy; and third, the “rebirth” of  Vichism spearheaded by Croce at the beginning of the twentieth century: The inglorious end of  positivism and the rebirth of idealism, especially in the form of  absolute historicism, could not fail to bring along the reemergence and the spread of  Vico’s cult. And the philosopher to whom we are mostly indebted for such a “return” or “ricorso,” had to be, for reasons of  internal logic, he who with greater intelligence and greater culture, greater tenacity and thus greater fortune, has been working for half a century now toward the victory of absolute historicism. Needless to say, I am referring to Benedetto Croce.37

Grafting a Vichian cyclical framework onto a Hegelian progressive one, this schema presents Croce as the legitimate heir and, what is most important, as the official custodian of Vico’s legacy—­even if Croce must concede begrudgingly that the French preempted him. Croce’s schema is so disarmingly self-­serving that it hardly warrants refutation. Indeed, the question seems to be whether it should be tampered with at all, given that it is such a metacritical feat: a bibliography that reflects on itself as such in accordance with the very philosophy whose story it tells, all the while advancing the cause of its compiler, Vico’s true heir. Such a qualm, while perhaps incomprehensible to the general scholar, is less so to the scholar 36. Benedetto Croce and Fausto Nicolini, Bibliografia vichiana, 2 vols. (Naples: Ricciardi, 1947–­48), 1:4–­5. 37. Croce and Nicolini, Bibliografia vichiana, 2:741.

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of  Vico and his self-­avowed heirs, who cannot fail to realize that Croce simply played the game of Vichism better than anyone else and, crucial to the purpose, last: a refined game of references and cross-­references in which Vico, invariably a precursor, was equally invariably appropriated as if for the first time by every successive thinker. Yet Vico, who in the words of Ferdinand Denis from 1840 “ne peut maintenant se passer de citer,” was often mentioned but never cited.38 His strategy succeeded in that the Vichism he predisposed would be invariably heterodox rather than orthodox, forever hermeneutical and, thus, oxymoronic: a “participatory detachment” or a “shared memory.”39 The metacritical dimension of Vico’s lesson was well understood, too, by Hayden White, who described the New Science as a predecessor of those few rare texts that are “primarily concerned with ‘interpretation itself,’ and thus ‘serve as repositories of interpretive strategies by which to make sense of texts in general, themselves included.’ ”40 This holds true for many of the works of Vico’s strong followers, including Croce and, as we shall see, some who were acknowledged by Croce himself as precursors in the hermeneutical practice we call Vichism. The first was Michelet, who in 1827 made it his mission to unearth Vico in his first publication, a loose French translation of the 1744 New Science, illustratively titled Principles of the Philosophy of History. This work, which was first announced in Le Globe on 2 September 1826 as an “exposé of the system and doctrines” of  Vico, was self-­consciously an adaptation rather than a translation, intended to popularize Vico in France and, thus, internationally.41 The introduction that accompanied it, moreover, the Discourse on the System and the Life of Vico, ended by providing a formal model for scholarship on the neglected Italian thinker, establishing a pattern whereby Vico would forever need to be introduced and reintroduced to a new readership.42 In fact, the 38. Croce and Nicolini, Bibliografia vichiana, 2:548. 39. Eugenio Garin, La filosofia come sapere storico. Con un saggio autobiografico (Rome: Laterza, 1990), 73. On Garin’s Vichism, see Enrico Nuzzo, “Gli studi vichiani di Eugenio Garin,” Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 38.1 (2008), 9–­61; and, part two, Enrico Nuzzo, “Gli studi vichiani di Eugenio Garin,” Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 39.1 (2009), 7–­68; and OR, 343–­54. 40. Cited in  Joseph Mali, The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History: From Jules Michelet to Isaiah Berlin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 33. 41. For the context and background of the emergence of French Vichism, see Salvo Mastellone, Victor Cousin e il Risorgimento italiano (Florence: Le Monnier, 1955). 42. This continued well into the twentieth century. For example, Max H. Fisch’s vast introduction to the first English translation of Vico’s autobiography spurred interest in Vico in the

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merit of Michelet’s Discourse—­and what granted it long-­lasting resonance—­ was that it congealed the myth already widely current of Vico’s “prophetic genius,” his status as eternal precursor, and, thus, in the terms developed in this study, his posteritism. Vico’s New Science, Michelet stated at the outset in his Discourse, “was neglected so much during the last century because it addressed our own.”43 Again, as with Croce, what we notice is the strategy attending to Michelet’s advertisement of what he invariably described as his “furious infatuation” for Vico and “unbelievable intoxication” for his thought.44 Upon reading Vico’s protreptic address, De mente heroica/On the Heroic Mind, as a young man in 1824, Michelet immediately saw Vico as a standard-­bearer. He understood that there was a virtue to being open about one’s intellectual indebtedness, especially to someone as unclaimed and unappreciated as Vico—­namely, that such acknowledgment, if properly handled, would be a reiteration, an application, even, of  Vico’s own understanding of self through other.45 In other words, elective affinities, or congeniality, are a Vichian practice. Furthermore, in concluding his Discourse by citing Vico’s plea for a congenial posterity, Michelet (like Croce, eventually) appears to have understood that the hermeneutical recuperation of  Vico was best recast as a vindication. And yet, such fellow feeling and like-­mindedness, and the task of perpetuating old ideas in new form, do not come easily, and it is a task that deserves to be approached humbly. This much was acknowledged by Michelet in the Discourse, where, describing the grip with which Cartesian thinking held Europe hostage in Vico’s time, he claims that it is “natural” that a “protest” would arise in Italy and not elsewhere. Michelet advanced that anti-­Cartesianism was second nature to the (Southern) Italian mind because it reconnected to the “taste for universality that had characterized the genius of  Magna Grecia”; the penchant of the Pythagorean school for allying “metaphysics and geometry, United States. See The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max H. Fisch and Thomas G. Bergin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944), 1–­107. 43. I cite from Jules Michelet, “A Discourse on the System and the Life of Vico,” trans. Ashraf  Noor, New Vico Studies 26 (2008): 21. 44. Cited in Mali, The Legacy of Vico, 16. 45. In this Michelet was unlike, for example, Ballanche, a Vichian who eventually claimed not to have been inspired by Vico but merely to have found in him confirmation of what he had been thinking all along, and better. Ballanche defended himself against the accusation that he had plagiarized Vico’s New Science. See McCalla, “Pierre-­Simon Ballanche as Reader of  Vico,” 43–­44. See also Arthur McCalla, “Romantic Vicos: Vico and Providence in Michelet and Ballanche,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 19, no. 3 (1993): 389–­408.

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ethics and politics, music and poetry”; and scholasticism’s struggles to find “accord between the doctrines of Aristotle and those of the Church.” In short, only in Italy had “science” remained whole: “scientia rerum divinarum et humanarum [the science of divine and numan matters].”46 For this reason, the Italian perspective or difference, in that it was an indigenous phenomenon, could be comprehended only via adaptation rather than straightforward translation. As Michelet himself would later put it: “Translation is an imitation in which one invents, it is an invention in which one imitates.”47 With regard to Vico, specifically, the notably synthetic 1744 edition of the New Science had to be recast into the more analytic (and therefore more congenial to the French mind) form and language of its earlier versions (1725, 1730).48 And yet, Vico’s principal merit was that he resisted conformity and stuck unwaveringly to the Italian way. In Michelet’s words: [P]eoples cannot divest themselves of their originality with impunity any more than individuals can. The Italian genius wanted to follow the philosophical impulses of  France and England and in doing so it cancelled itself out. A truly Italian spirit could not submit to this other invasion of Italy by foreigners. While the whole century turned its eyes avidly toward the future and precipitated itself along the new paths that philosophy opened for it, Vico had the courage to go back toward that antiquity that was so strongly disdained and to identify himself with it. He quitted the commentators and the critics and set himself to studying the originals, as was done in the renaissance of  humanistic learning.49

In Italy, a country long subject to foreign rule, Vico had, in his solitary fashion, resisted colonization of the mind, and in doing so he preserved the possibility of building the future on the past according to the example provided by Renaissance humanism, another autochthonous Italian product, according to Michelet. The challenge for Michelet was to prove that by disdaining the France of the past, Vico’s genius was “prophetic” in that it might be seen to herald the France of the future, the very one Michelet set out to narrate and

46. Michelet, “A Discourse,” 22–­23. 47. Cited in Maria Donzelli, “La conception de l’histoire de J.-­B. Vico et son interprétation par J. Michelet,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 53 (1981): 652–­53. 48. Michelet, “A Discourse,” 26. 49. Michelet, “A Discourse,” 23–­24.

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thereby create, in accordance with his favorite of Vico’s dictums: “And history cannot be more certain than when he who creates the things also narrates them” (NS §349). It is well known that Michelet embraced this motto with the fervor of a true demiurge, especially in what he rightly considered the magnum opus of a very prolific career, the seventeen-­volume History of France. In his autobiographical introduction, penned in 1869, Michelet presents the History as being born out of the “lightning flash of the July Revolution.”50 It was only then, first and alone among his illustrious and generally respected colleagues, that he began perceiving France “as a soul and as a person.” This epiphany was no mere metaphor. It allowed Michelet to understand history according to the biological meter of  life, which has but “one supreme and very exacting condition. It is genuinely life only when complete. All its organs are interdependent and work only as a whole.”51 Michelet is here pointing to an insight with respect to the corporeal hermeneutics encountered in many guises in the present study. In the words of Roland Barthes, who rightly made a big deal of  Michelet’s uniquely “sensual” historiography: It is the example of the body which unifies [Michelet’s] entire oeuvre, from the medieval body—­that body which tasted of tears—­to the delicate body of the Witch: Nature itself—­sea, mountain, animality—­is never anything but the human body in expansion and, one might say, in contact. [ . . . ] This way of handling what is historically intelligible remains very odd, for it contradicts the belief which continues to tell us that in order to understand we must abstract, and, in some sense, disembody knowledge.52

This embodied historiography, at once Vichian and anti-­Cartesian, calls for a hermeneutical imperative: his “supreme undertaking,” Michelet avows, will be the “resurrection of life in its integrity.” Indeed, as Michelet stated in The People, if Thierry called history “narration,” and Guizot called it “analysis,” 50. I cite from Jules Michelet, “Preface to the History of France (1869),” trans. Edward K. Kaplan, in Jules Michelet, On History, ed. Lionel Gossman et al. (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2013), 139. 51. Michelet, “Preface,” 140. 52. Roland Barthes, “Michelet’s Modernity,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1986), 208–­9.

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then he, Michelet, would name his empathetic historiographical method “resurrection,” a name he was confident would last.53 If a nation is a living organ, then it follows that the book that narrates its history should be likewise. The book creates what it narrates, in turn begetting the life of the author himself. “My life was in this book,” says Michelet, again in the 1869 preface: it has been transformed into it. This book has been my life’s only outcome. But is this identity of the book with its author not dangerous? Is not the book colored with the feelings, the times of the person who produced it? [ . . . ] My book has created me. It is I who became its handiwork. [ . . . ] If my work resembles me, that is good. The traits which it shares with me are in a large part those which I owe to it, which I took from it. [ . . . ] My only master was Vico. His principle of the living force, of a humanity that creates itself, made both my book and my teaching.54

Michelet’s statement points to that dynamic consubstantiality between author and book which this study has traced back to Petrarch; it even alludes to Vico’s own identification with his New Science, the very claim Michelet cited at the end of the Discourse that inaugurated his career. Michelet believed that to reinvent his discipline, history needed to be incarnate together with the nation whose self-­determination is recounted. The transmutation, critics have argued, is necessarily absolute: “History exists because someone tells the story. How you tell the story is the story in Michelet’s unique staging and performance of the past. His self-­representation as the ‘I’ of  history (‘moi-­histoire’) takes form as a rhetorical personification of  France.”55 Michelet’s self-­ordaining Discourse and testamentary Preface illustrate once again the futural coherence that we call Petrarchism (or Vichism) and that is attainable only through the medium of the corpus or collective (auto-­)biography. In this framework, knowledge is achievable only retrospectively and communicable only through congeniality. What one knows is what one remakes, that is, through the “naming” act of “resurrection.” “Let it be my part in the future,” 53. Jules Michelet, The People, trans. John P. McKay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 19. 54. Michelet, “Preface,” 143–­44. 55. Vivian Kogan, The “I” of History: Self-­Fashioning and National Consciousness in Jules Michelet (Chapel Hill: University of  North Carolina Department of  Romance Languages, 2006), 12.

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says Michelet, a self-­proclaimed “worshipper of the future,” “to have not attained, but marked, the aim of  history, to have called it by a name that nobody has given it.”56 But what did Michelet in fact name? And, how, furthermore, could his national epic, his incarnated fusion of personal and collective French identity, be made so foundationally to rest on Vico? After all, this was a philosopher Michelet insistently presented to the world as being essentially foreign—­ unassimilable to his times and Michelet’s, and to the French mind most of all, due to his primordial italianità. It is perhaps in attempting to answer this riddle that Michelet pulled off one of his deftest moves—­a detailed, and not just generally proclaimed, alignment between his personal life path and that of the France his historiographical corpus aspired to embody. If  Vico’s Italian thought led directly to his personal rebirth as an intellectual and as a clairvoyant with respect to his legacy (“My Vico, my July, my heroic principle,” as he once wrote in a note from 1854), then the same had to be true for France as a whole, and now France’s modern legacy and the revolution it wrought had to be retraced to a precursory event, indeed, an all-­Italian achievement, which, like Vico’s philosophy, still awaited deciphering and vindication. This event, of course, was the Italian Renaissance. It is well known that the “Renaissance” was successively invented, that is, etymologically, gradually drawn out and shaped from a chaotic heap of sources, by some of the most prominent historiographers of the nineteenth century. If, among them,  Jacob Burckhardt is usually understood as having singlehandedly founded the field of Renaissance studies with his portrait of the epoch, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), and if, as I have argued elsewhere as well as in this study, Francesco De Sanctis attempted to correct that enthusiastic portrait in his History of Italian Literature, credit is still due to Michelet. It was he who capitalized the r in “l’aimable mot de Renaissance” in the first line of the seventh volume, Renaissance (1855), of his monumental History of France.57 While the “myth” of the Renaissance predated this maneuver, it still remains a “turning point” since it effectively reversed “the hitherto powerful denigration of the period by its critics.”58 Michelet’s Renaissance was arguably the first unconditionally “triumphant” Renaissance, one “revised in the lurid glow of the 1848 Revolution” and perhaps the “equivalent of his inner erotic revival”: Michelet’s France, his biographers advance, rose from its 56. Michelet, The People, 19. 57. On De Sanctis as reader and critic of  Burckhardt, see OR, 73 and following. 58. J. B. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-­Century Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 156–­57.

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medieval slumber just as Michelet himself trod, after mourning the death of his wife, into a vita nuova in his private life alongside a new partner.59 For Michelet, in fact, Vico was not a fleeting youthful infatuation, but a touchstone to which he would return again and again during a life riddled with personal crises, most notably in 1824, 1830, and 1854.60 The last of these, of course, was the year leading up to the publication of the seventh volume of his History, when the project, which originally intended to erect a monument to medieval France, was threatening to remain woefully incomplete. While there is no denying that personal autobiographical circumstances may have played a role in that creative rebirth which the seventh volume of the History represents, I would also argue that Michelet’s feat—­namely, his invention or, better, his Vichian resurrection of the Renaissance—­was a more collaborative event than is usually acknowledged. What the resurrected Vico inspired was a shared, self-­referential, and transnational devotion to historiography, not just in France but in Italy, too. Specifically, I would suggest that Michelet’s Renaissance was to a certain extent informed by a larger conversation (direct and indirect) between French intellectuals and a group of Italian Vichians who were forced to relocate to France in the early nineteenth century: Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–­72), Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso (1808–­71), and, especially, Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–­52) and Giuseppe Ferrari (1811–­76), to name just a few. The official Italian response to Michelet’s early Vichian enterprise—­which includes the aforementioned translation of the 1744 New Science, the introductory Discourse, and, later, an edition of Vico’s Oeuvres choisies (1834)—­is usually attributed to Vincenzo Gioberti. Gioberti, the author of The Moral and Political Primacy of the Italians (1843), often understood to be the philosophical manifesto of the Risorgimento, was the most outspoken supporter of Italy’s national glories, especially those native, that is, primordial (Pythagorian or Pelasgic), achievements of the Italian mind that Gioberti wanted sheltered and cultivated in Italy by the Church during the medieval period (Gioberti supported a Neo-­Guelphism, a return to premodern values in modern Italy).61 The ultra-­Catholic Gioberti, whose immigration to France was supported by Victor Cousin, Michelet’s mentor and the original commissioner of his translation of  Vico’s New Science, could not countenance Michelet’s efforts.62 59. Bullen, The Myth of the Renaissance, 160 and note 18. 60. For the significance of these dates, see Mali, The Legacy of Vico, 26. 61. On Gioberti’s nationalism, see OR, 47–­61 62. On Gioberti’s move to France, see Mastellone, Victor Cousin, 41–­64.

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Michelet’s adaptation was a “travesty” that “Gallicized” Vico’s thought in both content and style.63 In a letter from 1846, Gioberti gave voice to German intellectuals’ gloating appropriation of Vico through Michelet: Harm having been done, we wisely remedied it by entrusting a brother of ours, our great Michelet, to give you a Vico redone and fitted in French fashion, the very one you endeavored to place before your genuine compatriot.64

Gioberti, who prided himself on having resisted the beguiling lure of French intellectual “filth” and on having, alone with Vico among modern Italians, continued thinking with a purely Italian mind, emblematized those fiercely nationalistic sentiments eschewed by more complex patriots like Michelet and some of his Italian interlocutors. In fact, it is only through these Vichian conversations that we may glimpse the complexity of what is best defined as their cosmopolitan patriotism. Croce rightly described Gioberti’s comments as the product of  his nationalistic “delusion,” yet they were unwarranted.65 As we have seen, Michelet emphasized Vico’s anti-­Cartesianism and affinity with ancient Italian lore, and therefore his “Vico” was in many respects the very one Gioberti supported. We can understand Gioberti’s reaction, given that Vico’s early reception (including Michelet’s reading, to some extent) was often founded on the more easily accessible and almost nationalistic On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (a work republished in France by Ballanche in the preface to the first edition only of his Orphée [1829]), rather than the antinationalistic (yet not antinational) New Science.66 In other words, everyone agreed on Vico’s quintessential Italian spirit, but the problem was one of reception, and whether Vico and, it is implied, the difference of Italian thought could be shared for the benefit of all.  Joining forces with Michelet in this enterprise was an as yet less well-­known protagonist of the Italian Risorgimento, Giuseppe Ferrari.

63. The polemic against Michelet’s translation continued until recent times. See Guido Fassò, “Un presunto discepolo del Vico: Giulio Michelet,” in Omaggio a Vico (Naples: Morano, 1968), 483–­550. 64. Cited in Teresa Di Scanno, Bibliographie de Michelet en Italie (Florence: Sansoni, 1969), 175. See also Croce and Nicolini, Bibliografia vichiana, 2:613–­17. 65. On these characterizations, see Croce and Nicolini, Bibliografia vichiana, 2:615. 66. I borrow from Croce for the differently nationalistic characterization of Vico’s texts. The “Vichian” edition of Ballanche’s Orphée appeared in volume 2 of his Essays on Social Palingenesis.

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Ferrari, the author of The Philosophy of Revolution (1851), came to the attention of Michelet, the historian of the French Revolution, as the first editor of the complete works of  Vico (1835–­37) and as the author of a lengthy introduction to the same, The Mind of Giambattista Vico (1837). The latter, in addition to being clearly modeled after Michelet’s Discourse, was translated and adapted for a French audience soon after Ferrari immigrated to Paris in 1838. 67 What matters here is that Vico et l’Italie (1839), as the work was titled in French, attempted to contextualize Vico’s contribution within the Italian tradition of thought since the sixteenth century, thus amounting to a rare sustained attempt at a characterization of the Renaissance as a whole. Is it possible that Ferrari, indebted to Michelet for his Vichism, returned the favor by providing inspiration for Michelet’s Renaissance? Ferrari, an infraciosato, a “Frenchy,” a betrayer of  his patria in the eyes of many of  his fellow émigrés (including, of course, Gioberti), was in truth an astute go-­between, a sophisticated mediator between Italy and France.68 Equally 67. For bio-­bibliographical facts, I largely rely here on Silvia Rota Ghibaudi, Giuseppe Fer­ rari. L’evoluzione del suo pensiero (1838–­1860) (Florence: Olschki, 1969); and Maurizio Martirano, Giuseppe Ferrari. Editore e interprete di Vico (Naples: Guida, 2001). 68. Ferrari’s supposed lack of patriotism drew comment from his fair-­minded partner in arms, Carlo Cattaneo: “Avremmo però desiderato in lui meno stoica inflessibilità di giudicii; poiché non crediamo che un cittadino possa parlare della sua patria con certa crudezza di forme, che applicata alle patrie altrui, potrebbe forse sembrare giustizia. La patria è come la madre, della quale un figlio non può parlare come d’altra donna. E questo diciamo tanto più aperto, perché crediamo che col sacrificio di poche frasi qua e là sparse, il libro di Ferrari sarebbe parso altra cosa; e mentre lo avrebbe reso più accetto alli stessi stranieri, avanti ai quali pure nobilmente rappresenta il pensiero italiano, gli avrebbe adunato intorno l’amore della nostra gioventù. Intorno a che gli diremo sempre, che, quando voglia conciliarsi meglio li animi, li scritti suoi nulla vi perderanno dell’intrinseco valore. E al cospetto delli stranieri non si rinoverà l’esempio di quel vizio tutto italiano, di dir male del suo paese quasi per un’escandescenza d’amor patrio; vizio di cui tutta la nostra letteratura è contaminata, a cominciare dalla serva Italia del padre Dante, fino al ringraziando accetta del sommo Alfieri. A noi pare che l’Italia, in confronto di qualsiasi altra terra del globo, sia tal patria, che non sia lecito vilipenderla, nemmeno ad Alfieri e nemmeno a Dante.” I cite from Carlo Cattaneo, “Su la Scienza Nuova di Vico,” in Ernesto Sestan, ed., Opere di Giandomenico Romagnosi, Carlo Cattaneo, Giuseppe Ferrari (Milan: Ricciardi, 1957), 357. There is no doubt that, to an extent at least, Ferrari considered himself an unofficial ambassador of  Italian culture in France. His ambition to advance his career is evident from the outset from his contributions to some of  France’s most prestigious journals. See Luigi Compagna, “Giuseppe Ferrari collaboratore della ‘Revue des deux mondes,’ ” in Silvia Rota Ghibaudi and Robertino Ghiringhelli, eds., Giuseppe Ferrari e il nuovo stato italiano (Milan: Cisalpino, 1992), 453–­61.

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persuaded of the need for a cultural renewal in Italy, Ferrari put Vico—­a notably “solitary” thinker, even within the Italian camp—­to particular use: he intended his study to be an opportunity for introspection, one that would lead to the realization that unshared genius, geniality without con-­geniality, had been the cause of Italian troubles. In this light, to pander to French Vichism was not to sacrifice one’s greatest national resource but to make a long-­term investment that would ultimately yield high returns. Ferrari’s approach to Vico was largely informed by the “civil philosophy” of his teacher, Giandomenico Romagnosi (1761–­1835). This was a philosophy dedicated, through a Vichian revision of Enlightenment concerns, to the notion of human perfectibility or, as Romagnosi conceived it, incivilimento. This was the study of the dynamic processes (economic, moral, and political) rather than the static conditions of “civilization.” Central to this science, a concern Romagnosi shared with Victor Cousin, was the study of genius or individual mind as a heuristic technique by which to approach the nature of collective man and, once this relation was established, the comparative study of people. Romagnosi’s celebrated treatise, On the Nature and Causes of Civilization (1832), which included a second part dedicated specifically to the “resurgence” of civilization in Italy, wavered between affirming individual nations’ self-­sufficiency in their progressive paths and emphasizing their reliance or codependency on those of other nations—­in Romagnosi’s terms, on the interplay between the “native” and “dative” factors of incivilimento.69 This distinction rested on the complexities of the notion of  “civilization,” itself too often confused with the notion of  “perfectibility”: It’s one thing to say perfectibility [perfettibilità] and another to say civilization [incivilimento]. Perfectibility is nothing else than a purely factual capability inherent to various degrees in human nature, and which needs nothing more

69. On Romagnosi’s notion of incivilimento, see Giorgio Spanu, Il pensiero di G. D. Ro­ magnosi. Un’interpretazione politico-­giuridica (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2008), 56–­67, especially 65. See also Ettore A. Albertoni, La vita degli stati e l’incivilimento dei popoli nel pensiero politico di Gian Domenico Romagnosi (Milan: Giuffrè, 1979); Italo Mereu, L’antropologia dell’incivilimento in G. D. Romagnosi e C. Cattaneo (Piacenza: Banca di Piacenza, 2001); Romolo Alecci, La dottrina di G. D. Romagnosi intorno alla civiltà (Padua: Cedam, 1966); and Carla De Pascale, Filosofia e politica nel pensiero italiano fra Sette e Ottocento. Francesco Mario Pagano e Gian Domenico Romagnosi (Naples: Guida, 2007), 185–­96. For an examination of  Romagnosi’s wavering with regard to native and dative incivilimento, see Sergio Moravia, Filosofia e scienze umane nell’età dei lumi (Florence: Sansoni, 1982), 346–­52.

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than special guiding means or reasons to act in one way rather than another. On the contrary, civilization is a complex of functions pertaining to the human consortia in given places, under certain climates and with given means through which the conditions for an accommodating and satisfying coexistence are developed.70

Here Romagnosi is in fact recasting the fundamental Vichian distinction between God-­begotten and manmade achievements in sociological terms. Take the example of unplowed land: though, like individual power, bare land can be expected to “perfect” itself to some degree, it is only through agriculture and interassociation that civilization is achieved. Romagnosi was a reluctant Vichian. He played an instrumental role in promoting the study of Vico, but in a late autobiographical and self-­consciously retrospective consideration of his intellectual debts, he revealed that he thought of  his work as supplementing Vico’s, and perhaps rather incidentally at that, while at the same time his students wanted to associate him with Vico.71 Vico, in Romagnosi’s view, “wants to provide the principles of the common nature of nations, and yet it is precisely those principles that he lacks most.”72 Born of an unsystematic and confused mind, Vico’s thought relied on ancient fables, eschewed positive research on those true stories that were actually available to him, and, despite having introduced the analogy between national and individual progress, was unable to intersect history at the different stages of  its progress: youth, maturity, and old age. What Romagnosi found especially uncongenial was Vico’s treatment of  the feral man, or bestione, a too solitary animal: Delving deeper into our considerations, [Vico] is totally self-­indulgent as to the question of origins. His having children grow tall and strong from shit, creating giants that never existed [ . . . ]; his having men running back and forth through the wilderness chasing after bashful women, as if women did not feel love and, moreover, the need to find companionship [ . . . ]; his having men fall again into a bestial state, as if the achievements necessary to life and coexstence were 70. I cite from Giandomenico Romagnosi, Dell’indole e dei fattori dell’incivilimento con es­ empio del suo Risorgimento in Italia, in Sestan, ed., Opere, 140–­41. 71. Romagnosi’s role in furthering the study of  Vico among his students mirrors that of  Victor Cousin among his own. See Martirano, Giuseppe Ferrari, 57n118. 72. Giandomenico Romagnosi, “Osservazioni su la Scienza Nuova di Vico,” in Scritti filoso­ fici, ed. Sergio Moravia, 2 vols. (Milan: Ceschina, 1974), 2:19.

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not sustained by the same, ever reviving desires. These and other hypotheses are not even material for a comedy. This goes to show, furthermore, that Vico lacked those principles from which a true theory regarding national civilization was to emerge.73

Romagnosi is clearly chipping hard at the cornerstones of Vico’s ideology: man is invariably a social animal, and history is unremittingly progressive rather than circular; “decadence” and “resurgence” are not to be intended literally as moral and political “deaths” and “rebirths,” but as organic stages in a historical “metamorphosis” that resembles that of the caterpillar. Nothing in history, no “tradition,” ever begins anew; rather, everything accrues as the past and the future grow apart and prima facie unrecognizable to each other. “In every generation,” Romagnosi states, “the individual is invested with a new and different power of, how should I say it, tradition, so that the man belonging to an advanced posterity cannot consider himself morally and politically the same as that of antiquity.”74 The same, of course, goes for societies as a whole. Similar thoughts went into Romagnosi’s “Considerations on the Limits and on the Direction of Historical Studies,” an essay written to introduce a volume, published in 1832, that included the Italian translation of Michelet’s 1827 Discourse, a text through which “Vico finally became known in France, and thus, placed by learned society among the roster of first-­order minds.”75 Here Romagnosi insists on the study of “positive civilization” (positivo in­ civilimento) and, as far as beginnings are concerned, on the “positive origin” (origine positiva) of things, those for which concrete, observable proofs can be furnished either by nature or by tradition. To those interested in walking a Vichian path he recommends relinquishing abstract principles and axioms, as well as the search for unfathomable origins, in favor of patent continuities. For example, he calls for the study of  “colonies, conquests, and of  those companies of  Thesmophoroi,” or ancient legislators and go-­betweens, whose connecting and mediating efforts between nations led to the progress of civilizations. Concluding his introduction, Romagnosi writes, “Consulting history, one realizes in fact that the progress of the life of people could for a while proceed with 73. Romagnosi, “Osservazioni su la Scienza Nuova di Vico,” 26. 74. Cited in Moravia, Filosofia e scienze umane, 348. 75. Romagnosi’s preface, “Cenni su i limiti e su la direzione degli studi storici,” was first published in Cataldo Jannelli, Cenni sulla natura e necessità della scienza delle cose e delle storie umane (Milan: Fontana, 1832), xxi–­xci. I cite from the recent reprint, in Romagnosi, Scritti filosofici, 2:51–­53.

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the aid of certain institutions derived from the first Thesmophoroi, and that it was necessary for further progress that they intersect the destiny of other people, one able to bring things to another stage of development and to a much wider diffusion of the same.”76 Romagnosi’s comments, which in effect stress the importance of what is dative or shared between populations rather than what is native and self-­ determined in the civilizing process, are of particular interest. They are repeated verbatim from a section of On the Nature and Causes of Civilization that discusses the Italian resurgence in ancient as well as in modern times—­that is, in the Renaissance, an era that Romagnosi approaches differently, focusing not on its cultural flourish but on its technical and industrial achievements.77 In Romagnosi’s account, Italian resurgence can be divided roughly into three major epochs: the sixth to the eleventh centuries, when the “vital unity” of the ancient “Italic civilization” was safeguarded with respect to the French dominations; the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, a period marked by that unresolved “struggle between the genius of civilization [culture] and that of political barbarism,” resulting in repeated invasions, starting with the French; and the sixteenth century to the present, which witnessed the reawaking of a “dative civilization” at times thwarted and at other times favored by the study of the past.78 Only with difficulty did Italians finally become aware of the need for a social art, “a science that teaches the essence of the true power of political Governments.”79 A blueprint for this was provided by Vico, a thinker who “is now known in France only through the work of  Prof. Michelet.”80 At the end of Romagnosi’s survey of the to-­be-­continued story of  Western civilization rises a European republic of  letters, founded on social science that is yet inchoate, and which, when achieved, will not belong to any one country 76. Romagnosi, Scritti filosofici, 2:59. 77. Interestingly, for all his resistance to being associated with Vico, Romagnosi’s description of Italian gradual progress in the path of incivilimento is distinctly Vichian: “Tutte queste circostanze, si verificarono in questo primo periodo dell’italico movimento, nel quale si trattò di riassumere l’opera dell’interrotto incivilimento e di riassumerla passando graduatamente dall’Era dell’istinto confuso a quella della ragione illuminata; dall’Era della nuda autorità a quella del ragionamento, dall’Era delle inconsiderate passioni a quella di un calcolato interesse” (Dell’indole e dei fattori dell’incivilimento, 201). On Romagnosi’s particular take on the Renaissance, see Michele Ciliberto, “Balbo e Romagnosi interpreti del Rinascimento,” in Figure in chiaroscuro. Filosofia e storiografia nel Novecento (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2001), 63–­90. 78. Romagnosi, Dell’indole e dei fattori dell’incivilimento, 184–­86, 233, and 247. 79. Romagnosi, Dell’indole e dei fattori dell’incivilimento, 257. 80. Romagnosi, Dell’indole e dei fattori dell’incivilimento, 275.

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or culture: “[f ]or which reason,” Romagnosi writes, “all that I have written so far, if I am not mistaken, is but an introduction, rather, the mere outline of an introduction, to the history of European civilization that will have to support the civil universal philosophy that we are still lacking.”81 In this new, enlarged context, what the study of Italian culture will contribute amounts to a clearer understanding of the distant origins of a shared culture. Writing on the eve of the Risorgimento, Romagnosi recommended the following to his compatriots: [I]t is vain and inconvenient to mention past glories. Contemporaries judge their contemporaries on their present merits. And with this very sanction nature punishes whoever does not advance and, being able to, further what he has inherited from his ancestors. So that the individual trajectories of civilizations, as bestowed upon different nations, inspire emulation among different minds: on the one hand, they are spurred to avail themselves even of foreign discoveries, and, on the other hand, they cannot lag behind without shame and disadvantage. Let this be a word to the wise, even to the most celebrated nations, lest they yield to a national arrogance that makes them neglect foreign knowledge, sending them backward. [ . . . ] Let us be grateful that, far from being a blind, prideful despiser of others or from having a misconstrued disesteem for itself, the latter nation now walks a middle ground, an excellent sign of an elevated civilization. May some privileged soul be born in this nation, who may ponder and develop the theme proposed in this study, which I recommend as a bequest to my motherland.82

This appeal, which expresses the enlightened, positivistic, secular, politically federalist alternative that would eventually succumb during the Risorgimento to the nationalistic, centralist, and Catholic appeal associated with Vincenzo Gioberti, would be kept alive, at least as a methodologically viable option, by Romagnosi’s students. First among them was Carlo Cattaneo (1801–­69), whose works, collectively, sought to establish a “comparative philosophy” of people, and also Ferrari, who put Romagnosi’s lessons to the service of a thoroughly “dative” confrontation with France through Vico.83 81. Romagnosi, Dell’indole e dei fattori dell’incivilimento, 285. 82. Romagnosi, Dell’indole e dei fattori dell’incivilimento, 285–­86. 83. For works by Cattaneo, see at the very least “La città considerate come principio ideale delle istorie italiane,” which, by suggesting that urban life is the fundamental unifying principle of the sought-­after universal history of  Italy, argues for the “immanence” of federalism in Italian history (in Sestan, ed., Opere, 997–­1040).

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Ferrari immediately delved into the civil philosophy (or psychology) of  his teacher, turning Romagnosi into a test case in his first publication, The Mind of Giandomenico Romagnosi (1835). This work, which rehearses The Mind of Giambattista Vico, was intended to bridge the chasm between the science of individual genius and the science of civilization, a feat that in Ferrari’s opinion necessitated a specific genre, the philosophical biography. In effect, Ferrari may be assumed to have translated into scholarly terms what he had learned from Vico’s autobiography: that the life narrative of exceptional men may mirror the intellectual history of many centuries. First among Ferrari’s concerns was to contextualize and, thereby, correct Romagnosi’s harsh criticism of  Vico, who was in fact a kindred mind and undoubtedly a precursor in that social science which aims to “mold the chaos of wild men.”84 In effect, what Romagnosi had done was translate into modern terms and make relevant Vico’s “sublime somnambulism of genius,” the essential anachronism he represented.85 In the spirit of relating his teacher to Vico, Ferrari devoted a doctoral thesis (1840) to the dialectic inherent to congenial traditions. Error, he asserted, is inherent to truth. This was a theory that made peace with past philosophy: it rebranded old universals into ideas that were forerunners of the new, a continuity embodied by both Vico, the solitary thinker, and Romagnosi the thinker of  “dative” and associated life. We see the application and confirmation of these principles in Vico’s reception. If individual genius is seen as the apt expression of collective exigencies of its time, then the neglect of Vico signals a collective shift, causing this impertinence: “[g]enius without a people amounts to an aimless energy, lacks a mission, and represents nothing.”86 In other words, in France, albeit only in retrospect, as elsewhere, a translated or naturalized Vico could finally confront a new collectivity and discover his popularity. Thus, Vico’s obscurity should not be understood simply as unfashionable, but rather as “a historical problem whose solution involves the fate of  Vico’s own science.” “Vico is dead,” and yet his “fate” could amount to a “word to the wise” for Italians ready to learn from history’s lesson (“la sorte di Vico sia un avvertimento per ogni italiano”). As Ferrari clarified, to his Italian readers’ chagrin: 84. On Ferrari’s attempt to bridge the gap between Vico and Romagnosi, see Carlo G. Lacaita, “Il problema della storia in Ferrari giovane,” in Ghibaudi and Ghiringhelli, eds., Giu­ seppe Ferrari, 131–­66; and Robertino Ghiringhelli, “Romagnosi e Ferrari,” in Ghibaudi and Ghiringhelli, eds., Giuseppe Ferrari, 209–­23. 85. The expression, often mistakenly attributed to Ferrari, was actually Ballanche’s. 86. I cite from Giuseppe Ferrari, Il genio di Vico (Lanciano: R. Carabba, 2009), 124.

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Italian-­born genius has two paths ahead for itself: it will either have to follow France, study its authors, rely on the logical power of its masses, its situation, its parties, and forsake the tradition and the character of its own country; or, it will have to defend itself against foreign ideas, immerse itself in national traditions, gain strength through the solitary power of the Italian character, and launch itself to the heights achievable by the individuality of a Campanella or a Vico [ . . . ]; either France or Italy, this is the ultimatum: one must choose between the two lest one lose oneself, a mediocrity in the pale degradations between these two extremes.87

Ferrari had no doubt as to which path was to be taken. In a rare yet coherent act of existentially applied Vichism, he immediately left for Paris, presenting himself at the court of Cousin with his Italian Vico in hand—­an action that delivered Vico (and Ferrari himself ) from a grim, necessarily isolated Italian destiny. Ferrari’s move proved to be advantageous for his career, as Cousin’s influence eventually won him a teaching position at Strasbourg.88 Until that point, he worked on the translation of his introduction to Vico’s collected works while attending lectures by Michelet and Claude Fauriel. Vico et l’Italie amounts to a French version of the Italian original; significantly, it embellished the Renaissance section with a whole new emphasis on “invasions” intended to make sense of the mix of  “novelties” and “monstrous aberrations” in Vico’s work. “The New Science is in fact a resulting product,” Ferrari states in the preface, and it must be read in its historiographical context. “[C]onsidered in isolation, it is by and large incomprehensible; if detached from its antecedents, it is nothing more than an obscure and inexplicable anomaly in the history of human spirit.”89 Here too, as always, seeking to establish continuity, Ferrari immediately theorizes anachronism. With seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Italy being a “land of exception” and very “uneventful” intellectually, Vico’s work, he asserts, “draws its lifeblood and existence from among Machiavelli’s contemporaries.” “[E]verything in Vico recalls the man of the sixteenth century.” “Vico is the last product of the epoch of Leo X.”90

87. Giuseppe Ferrari, Il genio di Vico, 100–­101. 88. Ferrari’s career abroad did not go smoothly and came to a close with an anti-­Cousinian harangue titled Les philosophes salariés (1849). See Ghibaudi, Giuseppe Ferrari, chaps. 1, 2, and 4. 89. Giuseppe Ferrari, Vico et l’Italie (Paris: Éveillard, 1839), ix. 90. Ferrari, Vico et l’Italie, 10.

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It would seem that by the late 1830s, everyone in Italy and France who was interested in Vico had made him a proleptic anachronism, had already lifted him out of  his century and made him a contemporary, or, as it were, a precursor to their own thought. Ferrari differed in that he attempted to contextualize Vico within a precedent Italian tradition and thereby made him the last Renaissance man, an analeptic anachronism. The possibilities were twofold: (1) by disseminating Vico one might transmit the Italian Renaissance legacy in its entirety; and (2) if  Vico was the last genuine Italian genius, then Italy in the early nineteenth century was essentially only early modern—­and this was no compliment. In Ferrari’s remarkably imaginative account the Renaissance was incomplete, “magnificently disordered,” perhaps, but nurturing decadence in its bosom, and everywhere inconsistent and presenting “unequal velocities,” anachronisms, among its political, linguistic, and intellectual parts. The epoch was redeemed to some extent by its geniuses, but while no one could dispute the greatness of the likes of Bruno, Telesio, and Pomponazzi, no one could trace continuity between Italian thinkers. Furthermore, no Italian thinker seemed capable of envisioning that political unity that had flashed in Machiavelli’s mind (and then, only as a result of Charles VIII’s descent into Italy). The themes that dominate Ferrari’s version of the Renaissance are, first, invasion and, second, the Italian inability to deal with invaders’ interference (and by “invaders” he means France). By the seventeenth century, while “the problems pertaining to civilization are solved in the rest of Europe, Italians let themselves be carried along by a movement that they no longer comprehend.”91 Ferrari’s bitter reflections on Italy’s stunted development seem to be informed by Romagnosi’s tenet regarding the “datità,” or “givingness” (as opposed to “nativeness”) of incivilimento, the give-­and-­take that occurs in the encounter between two or more people. In other words, Ferrari blames the Italian problem on the reactive (or native) entrenchment of Italian thought—­in this case, the purely intellectual resistance Italians offered in the face of territorial invasion. This allows us to see Vico et l’Italie as offering a strategically provincial Vico, and likewise a strategically provincial Renaissance. It is a call for a dative, proactive reinterpretation of the Italian legacy and for a second chance at a fusion of horizons—­one that will bear fruit this time. Ferrari literally carries an all-­too-­Italian Vico across the borders and thus, like the figure of the “Thesmophoros” described by Romagnosi, proposes, instead, a shared modernity and civilization. At this point we may ask, what did Michelet make of Ferrari’s interpretation of the Renaissance? After all, Ferrari had audited Michelet’s courses, and his 91. Ferrari, Vico et l’Italie, 75.

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interpretation drew on Romagnosi, who had sponsored the Italian translation of Michelet’s Discourse (in the very same year his On the Nature and Causes of Civi­ lization was published), as Michelet must have known. Was it a coincidence that in 1840–­41, on the heels of  his encounter with Ferrari and the publication of Vico et l’Italie, Michelet turned more to the Renaissance in his lectures? Michelet’s Renaissance volume stands as strong evidence for the hypothesis that Ferrari played an important, albeit not exclusive role. And when we examine Michelet’s famous characterization of the Renaissance through the lens of  Ferrari, we realize that Michelet turned the epoch into a thoroughly dative, energizing event. If we examine Michelet’s notes, recently published, for the lectures that he gave at the Collège de France in 1840–­41—­lectures that Ferrari may have attended and that followed the publication of Vico et l’Italie by a few months—­we may see these dative elements. Michelet inaugurates his course of lectures (lesson 1) with a claim about the “solidarity” of the modern world and with a call to transcend national histories. He follows this by identifying the start of modernity with the French “discovery” of  Italy in the fifteenth century, which amounts to a bigger “revelation,” he says, than the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, for what the French recovered on the other side of the Alps was none other than “freedom,” “because Italy believed in freedom and in man, and not so much in God” (CCF, 1:351–­52). In lesson 2, he claims that as a consequence of this humanism, nations came to a better understanding of their individuality in contrast to the “false unity” of the religious Middle Ages (355). In the third lesson, Michelet argues that understanding the Renaissance is fundamental to understanding the present, as that moment is intimately connected to the “French revolution, [which] began much earlier than one believes, well in advance of Voltaire and Rousseau, who are not the only ones responsible for it” (357). Michelet, then, dedicates lessons 4 and 5 to introducing his “vital method” in historiography, a method intended to revitalize history through the intimate knowledge of great individuals. This method finds perfect validation in Napoleon, who is introduced at this point as the living embodiment of a double-­natured modernity: “There are many men within the life of each men. Napoleon is an Italian man who became French. In the first accounts he is all-­Italian, in the latest he is more French than the French. Civilization can suppress the races” (360). This claim, already present in Michelet’s 1831 Introduction to Universal History, is a bold statement of a congenial Italo-­French profile of the modern epoch.92 92. See also Jules Michelet, “Introduction to World History,” in On History, 44, and: “The foremost captain of antiquity, Caesar, belongs to Italy; the foremost of modern times was a man

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Accordingly, anyone who wants to delve into “the destiny of human genre” will have to study the geniuses of Italy and France, and in the second part of the course (lessons 10–­15) Michelet introduces his students to the varied “genius of nations” (German, Austrian, Spanish, and Italian): “For the more nations are different, the more they feel the need to complement each other” (CCF, 1:374). This is especially true of Italy in relation to the northern nations, who are helplessly attracted to it (“Nous, hommes du Nord, avons tendance à céder à l’attraction de l’Italie” [373]). What Michelet apprehended personally through his love for Italy becomes a Delphic dictum: “Know thyself,” not only as a man, but as humanity; not only as a citizen, but as part of the worldly city; “Know thyself,” not only as an ephemeral being, bounded to a point in space and time, but in your relationship with faraway people and bygone generations. We are not after a solitary knowledge, like that of the priests in their sanctuaries, or of the kind the philosophers can achieve in their retreats. We are after a social knowledge, a science of society dictated by society itself. (399)

In a companion course of 1841, titled “Eternal Renaissance,” Michelet describes Italy and France as “complementing” each other, and as having done so perennially, from Caesar’s “discovery” of Gaul to the French “donation” of scholasticism to the Italians who, with Thomas Aquinas, returned it in perfect form (420). And yet, despite some reciprocity, Michelet cannot deny that ultimately France gained at the expense of  Italy. The characteristic “comédie-­ italienne,” or laughable political event—­“looking for the stranger” and his support—­ended up in a last, unprofitable barter: the exchange of Leonardo da Vinci, “the most complete of spirits,” for Charles VIII, the “most incapable one” (424). Still it is the destiny of  “superior people” to be “swallowed up,” for “the human genre is nurtured on their substance” (434). If Michelet, joining Charles’s regenerated army on its way home, takes leave of his beloved Italy with a cold comfort—­that through its Renaissance men and Vico, it nourished a new modernity—­then it is still not clear how Michelet took leave of his old, medieval self. As Jacques Le Goff points out, seeing off that “bizarre, monstrous, and prodigiously artificial epoch that was

of the Italian race adopted by France. If we knew nothing of  Napoleon’s origins, would not the character of his genius, poetic and practical at once, the austere beauty of his profile make us recognize the compatriot of  Machiavelli and of  Dante?”

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the Middle Ages” amounted to an “about-­face” for Michelet.93 But did it? Michelet once again resorts to the biographical hermeneutics studied in this work—­in Michelet’s own terms the “biographization” of history or, better, its “autobiographization” (“[b]iographer l’histoire, comme d’un homme, comme de moi”)—­to transform an abrupt rupture into an organic and psychological continuity. Specifically, he must recover the central organ of the Middle Ages, “this terrible moribund that could neither die nor live,” for a “rebirth.” Historical novelty, the effacement of the old, occurs through “revivification” and not “homicide” (“[p]our être tué, il faut vivre”). And this organ was not art or literature, but scholasticism, namely, those “schools of emptiness” in which “pretentious vanity filled its mouth with words and nourished itself on wind,” producing, in turn, “a world of idiots.”94 It was no surprise, then, that the intellectual revival would be triggered by men of action, the unphilosophical “explorers” who made up the French “army [ . . . ], who, in total ignorance of themselves and of the enemy, galloped down through Italy, stopped but for a moment at the Straits, then no less rapidly, without doing a thing [ . . . ] came back home to tell the story to the ladies.”95 The Alps had been crossed many times before, but until this point no one had taken the time to experience Italy and to return with insight that was revelation. In the seventh volume of the History of France, Michelet famously describes the encounter between France and Italy, at the time of Charles VIII’s Italian campaign at the end of the fifteenth century, as a “shock” between two incom­ mensurable “races,” two “civilizations.” A historical palingenesis has occurred in the collision of two different epochs, the French Middle Ages and Italian modernity: Rare and singular phenomenon! France, behind the times in everything save for one thing, the materials of war; France, less advanced in the arts of peace than it had been in the fourteenth century. Italy, on the other hand, fundamentally matured by its very sufferings, by its factions, its revolutions, was already well into the sixteenth century and even, by its prophets—­da Vinci, 93. Jacques Le Goff, Un autre Moyen âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 30. On Michelet’s medievalism, see also Jo Tollebeek, “ ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Fossilization’: Michelet, Burckhardt, and Huizinga,” Renaissance Studies 15, no. 3 (2001): 354–­66. 94. Jules Michelet, Histoire de France: La Renaissance, ed. Paul Viallaneix and Paule Petitier (Paris: Équateurs, 2008), 13, 27. 95. I cite from Denys Hay, ed., The Renaissance Debate (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965), 26.

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Michelangelo—­beyond. Thus one morning blundering barbarity clashed with high civilization; the clash of two worlds and, even more, of two ages that seemed so far from one another. A clash and a spark, and, from that spark, the column of fire termed the Renaissance.96

Michelet avowed that his volume on the Renaissance was written more from an Italian than a French perspective. Lucien Febvre notes that this was, perhaps, “paradoxical” for a history of  France, but is it truly the case that Michelet’s Renaissance was, as Febvre puts it, “first of all an Italian Renaissance”?97 Surely, it was an instance of “givingness,” Italy becoming French. Yet if this had not happened—­if France had not become a “living organ” (as Michelet puts it), a voice for that incommensurably foreign civilization—­the Renaissance legacy might have died, choked in the airless confines of the Italian peninsula. And as the official “resuscitator” of Vico, Michelet was entitled, with Ferrari’s blessing if he needed it, to resurrect—­or, to put it another way, translate or carry across—­that version of the Italian Renaissance which allowed the French to rediscover “something of its own original nature,” and to reassume “by this contact a capacity for greatness.”98 Michelet’s translatio of the Renaissance, his carrying-­over of the Italian Renaissance into France, which we now realize was intimately linked with his translation of  Vico, was long in the making (ten years according to Michelet), and it followed his disillusionment with the Middle Ages, which he had once so cherished. Michelet’s “invention” of the Renaissance was not just a historiographical feat but quite consciously an overdue service rendered to Italy, France’s greatest creditor. In a way, then, “Michelet, traducteur de Vico,” as he used to sign himself, followed Vico’s heroic myth of collective self-­creation in his staging of the Renaissance. At the same time, we see how a personal debt, the one that a young Michelet incurred with Vico, influenced this mixed, “native” and “dative,” reading of Western incivilimento and made possible the creation of a resurrective hermeneutics that could now be employed to reveal, in mutual enlightenment, France and Italy to themselves. While De Sanctis’s Vichism was employed in an introspective redefinition of  “comedy” in Italy, it just so happens that in France, Michelet’s Vichism found one of its most immediate and formidable applications in the realm of theater.

96. Hay, The Renaissance Debate, 26–­27. 97. Lucien Febvre, Michelet et la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), 130. 98. Hay, The Renaissance Debate, 26–­27.

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“ À q u o i b o n l e t h é â t r e i ta l i e n ? ” In attempting to recount the history of commedia dell’arte, Roberto Cuppone ventures a self-­consciously bold claim: that it never actually existed “as a historical fact.” Commedia dell’arte is an “abstraction,” continually the subject of  “nostalgic” sentiments and “utopian” aspirations. It is an “invention,” he argues, or—­what is much the same etymologically, a recovery—­that can be attributed to the collective “Romantic dream” that in nineteenth-­century France “transfigured” a vile profession into a “metaphor of Art.” This metaphor, in turn, contributed to the establishment of a modern “European” theater.99 Cuppone narrates how tormented this dream was, on and off the stage. It survived the closing in 1783 of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, which hosted the Comédie-­ Italienne; it relocated to the Théâtre de Funambules in 1816; it managed, just barely, to survive the revolutions of 1798 and 1848; it eventually capitulated to the concrete project of Georges-­Eugène Haussmann, whose renovation of Paris included the demolition of its “Broadway,” the Boulevard du Temple (or “du Crime,” as it was also known). In the second part of the nineteenth century, commedia dell’arte no longer had a patria of its own to return to (paradoxically, given the recent unification of Italy) and was forced to find refuge in literature: in Théophile Gautier’s Le Capitaine Fracasse (1863), to mention one famous example. In its old age commedia dell’arte partook of the grand history of nineteenth-­ century France, yet it was very much the product of a private vision shared by the literary icon George Sand (1804–­76) and her son, Maurice (1823–­89), while living at Nohant, a country estate they are said to have purchased to be a shelter from historical turmoil.100 Here, in 1843, selected family members and close friends, including Frédéric Chopin, began to spend their evenings playing games of charades. Given the family’s financial resources and artistic leanings, these soon developed into a full-­fledged experimental theater, a way

99. Roberto Cuppone, CDA. Il mito della commedia dell’arte nell’Ottocento francese (Rome: Bulzoni, 1999), 25 and following. 100. See George Sand, “Le théâtre et l’acteur,” in Oeuvres autobiographiques, ed. Georges Lubin, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1970–­71), 2:1240: “La grande préoccupation des personnes, que le nouvel état des choses effrayait, était alors de fuir Paris et de se réfugier dans quelque province où le choc social vînt s’amortir dans le calme des habitudes et la douceur des relations. Sous ce rapport, le Berry, et surtout la partie que nous appelons la Vallée-­Noir, est une sorte d’oasis, où, en bien comme en mal, le changement arrive sans grandes secousses, et cela de temps immémorial.”

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to relive or reexperience firsthand the creative mystery of  Italian-­style com­­ edy. According to Sand’s own late recollection: During the long winter evenings, it must now be some thirty years ago, I came up with the idea of creating for my family a theater reinvented on that ancient Italian model known as commedia dell’arte. That is, on plays whose improvised dialogue was drawn from a written scenario hanging backstage. They were reminiscent of those charades that one plays in society and that more or less develop according to the group’s talent. That’s how we made our debut. Little by little, words disappeared from the charades, and we enacted some crazy sketches, then comedies of intrigue and adventure, and, finally, event-­ packed and passionate tragedies. It all began with pantomime, and this all owing to Chopin. He improvised at the piano while the children mimed the scenes and danced clownishly. I will let you imagine how these admirable and delightful improvisations went to the players’ heads and freed their legs. He conducted them freely, and, according to his whim made them go from something amusing to something serious, from burlesque to solemn, from gracious to passionate. We then improvised costumes in order to play different roles, such that on seeing them appear the artist would adapt his music to the character. This went on for three nights, and then, once the maestro returned to Paris, we were all left excited, eager not to let go of the spark that had electrified us.101 101. George Sand, “Le théâtre des marionnettes de Nohant,” in Oeuvres autobiographiques, 2:1249–­50. Compare to Sand, “Le théâtre et l’acteur,” 1240–­41: Il y a une douzaine d’années que nous trouvant ici en famille durant l’hiver, nous imaginâmes de jouer une charade, sans mot à deviner, laquelle charade devint une saynète, et, rencontrant au hasard de l’inspiration une sorte de sujet, finit par ne pouvoir pas finir, tant elle nous semblait divertissante. Elle ne l’était peut-­être pas du tout, nous n’en savons plus rien, il nous serait impossible de nous le rappeler; nous n’avions d’autre public qu’une grande glace qui nous renvoyait nos propres images confuses dans une faible lumière, et un petit chien à qui nos costumes étranges faisaient pousser des cris lamentables; tandis que la brise gémissait au dehors et que la neige, entassée sur le toit, tombait devant les fenêtres en bruyantes avalanches. C’était une de ces nuits fantastiques comme il y en a à la campagne, une nuit de dégel assez douce avec une lune effarouchée dans des nuages fous. [ . . . ] [I]l est vrai qu’il y avait là un délicieux piano dont je ne sais pas jouer, mais qui se mit à improviser tout seul sous mes doigts je ne sais quoi de fantasque. Un grillon chanta dans la cheminée, on ouvrit la persienne pour faire entrer le clair de lune. À deux heures du matin, mon frère, craignant d’inquiéter sa famille, alla lui-­même atteler sa carriole pour rejoindre ses pénates, à une demi-­lieue de chez nous. [ . . . ]

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This form of diversion would remain a jealously guarded secret until 1860, when, not unlike the members of the legendary seventeenth-­century theatrical companies whom they emulated and whose secrets they believed they had tapped, the Sands yielded to the temptation to fix their art on paper. The result, Masques et bouffons, published in two volumes, is at once a pioneering work of theater historiography and an artist’s handbook. It is not quite comparable to anything that preceded it, but in it the student of commedia dell’arte finds traces of every form of  literature that seventeenth-­century comedians wrote about their art. Like Flaminio Scala’s Il teatro delle favole rappre­ sentative (1611), for example, Masques et bouffons offers a sample of canovacci or scenarios. Like Pier Maria Cecchini’s Discorsi (1614), it can be read as an apology. Like Francesco Andreini’s tributes to his wife, Isabella, it offers biographical insights about the men and women whose life was on stage. Masques et bouffons can also be read as a more sophisticated version of the metatheatrical representations by third-­and fourth-­generation comedians, from Niccolò Barbieri’s L’inavertito (1629) to Goldoni’s Teatro comico (1750), who sought to reintroduce and standardize the nature of their art.102 The extra dimension provided by Masques et bouffons is to be found in the twenty-­three maschere (characters), drawn by Maurice and etched by Alexandre Manceau (1817–­65), that ornament these volumes. There is some truth to the claim that George and Maurice Sand reinvented commedia dell’arte as a historical myth at the same time that, by transplanting their experience into paper, they conceded they could not revive it as a living art form. Yet we should pay closer attention to the metacritical qualities of their feat. If George Sand rightly foresaw that the “secret fun” of her “crazy family” would one day be worthy of a “conte fantastique,” or fantastic tale, it is somewhat surprising that no one has yet attempted to demythologize, as it [ . . . ] Il partit ainsi en chantant, au galop de son petit cheval blanc, à travers le vent et la neige. S’il eût été rencontré, il eût été pris pour le diable, mais on ne rencontre personne à pareille heure dans nos chemins. Compare MeB, 1–­2: “Il y a une douzaine d’années, il arriva qu’une famille réunie à la campagne avec quelques amis, prit fantaisie, par un soir d’hiver, de se costumer bizarrement pour jouer des charades. On recommença le lendemain. Le surlendemain, on éprouva le besoin de développer les types que la fantaisie avait produits. Il s’agissait de jouer quelque chose qui ressemblât à une comédie, et qui n’en fût pas une, car on n’avait ni le temps ni le goût d’apprendre quoi que ce soit pour le réciter. On avait improvisé dans les charades pendant dix minutes, on s’imagina pouvoir improviser pendant une heure.” 102. For a good selection of  these apologetic defenses by comedians, see Cuppone, CDA.

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were, this doubly mythopoeic endeavor, inventive of  both a genre and a family legend. More specifically, it is surprising that more has not been done to reconnect it to the French experience of  Vico and to what Michelet called “the little pandemonium of The New Science,” the text that offered, in Michelet’s words, the “golden bough” for a descent into the shadowy world of the past.103 Scholars have thoroughly plumbed the Italian sources, experiences, and passions attending Sand’s works, but seem to have missed the influence of  Vico. George Sand did not conceal her enthusiasm for the Orphée, the work that Ballanche wanted to be prefaced by Vico’s On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. Likewise, she was familiar with a host of renegade risorgimentalisti, many of them Vichians, who at some point or other passed through her famed salon.104 Among them, for example, was Giuseppe Mazzini, a “Vicophile” in his own right, whom George Sand had recommended to Michelet when a historian was sought in Italy to tell the story of an Italian war hero. It may be impossible to ascertain or define the extent to which George Sand knew Vico’s work directly, let alone the extent to which she understood the New Science, a work that, we learn from her journal, kept her up on many sleepless nights; but it does not matter. As we have seen, nowhere more than in France at that time—­thanks to Michelet’s translatio—­was Vico immediately a Vichism, that is, a hermeneutics to be espoused against the epoch’s positivism and intellectualism, and applied to grasp France in its infancy, that shared past we call “Italy.” As if to show that she has thoroughly absorbed the lesson, Sand writes, “Classic Italy has been turned inside-­out and upside-­down. And this will occur again and again and forever: her past is inexhaustible in sublime and charming monuments” (MeB, 1:vi). Vico (and Michelet) had made possible an empathic confrontation with the formative, and shared, Italian past, and Sand self-­consciously wanted to extend this confrontation to Italy’s “farcical side” (“côté burlesque”), which would obviate the “shortcomings of our century,” an era that Sand felt was steeped in, and thwarted in its progress by, “classification” and “compilations.” With her work, George Sand sought quite directly 103. See Jules Michelet, History of the Roman Republic, trans. William Hazlitt (New York: C. M. Saxton, 1859), 4. 104. Sand’s passion for Italy has been thoroughly studied and documented by Annarosa Poli. See her L’Italie dans la vie et dans l’oeuvre de George Sand (Moncalieri: Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur le Voyage en Italie, 2000); Alla riscoperta di George Sand, viaggiatrice in Ita­ lia (Moncalieri: Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur le Voyage en Italie, 2010); Présences de l’Italie dans l’oeuvre de George Sand (Moncalieri: Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur le Voyage en Italie, 2004), and George Sand vue par les italiens. Essai de bibliographie critique (Florence: Sansoni, 1965).

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what she called an “intelligent compilation,” the mark of a new modernity heralded by a “true criticism.” Right away we see Sand’s “true criticism,” or secondhand Vichism, in the preface she reluctantly composed for Masques et bouffons, an “intelligent compilation” that she had hoped would be attributed uniquely to her son: One might even say that the author [Maurice], faced with the unknown, did not back down: he tried to seize a world of imagination whose tangible trace had, for the most part, disappeared. Improvisation, this fleeting spark of the Italian genius, had bestowed its brilliant spontaneity and held high for centuries the banner of satire, through all the vicissitudes of political and religious history, without anybody taking care to transmit the text from one century to the next, whether in the writing of the history of merry things or the history of rich Italy, whose well, let it be stated once and for all, will never dry up. But if it is true that nothing is ever fully consumed, it is also evident that everything is used: what is transformed becomes at times something new, a transformation so complete apparently that one would be tempted to believe them totally separate. But this is not the case. And study always reinforces the conviction that nothing is absolutely new under the sun. (MeB, 1:v–­vi)

For the Sand family, experiencing commedia dell’arte personally, viscerally, amounted to an encounter with a primordial world of the past, at once mythical and real—­a world that, being for the most part Italian, could only be accessed through “Italian genius” or mind. In the avant-­propos of Masques et bouffons, we see evidence that the Sands, mother and son, were aware that their work elaborated on an illustrious precedent. Here, Maurice, after giving his account of the origins of the family charades, offers a clarifying gloss on his mother’s account: So then, each character produced instinctively, without being conscious of it, a kind of dialogue that was, as to form, a resurrection [résurrection], but one could very well say an exhumation [exhumation], of the primitive models of antiquity. It was once again the dialogue without rules of the first Atellan farces, the only difference being the presence of the public, because we were utterly alone. (MeB, 1:2)

With regard to actors, those who embodied the subject of their research, the Sands’ method was an “exhumation,” a corollary of Michelet’s resurrective historiographical principle. Whether they realized it or not, “exhumation”

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brought them closer, etymologically, to Vico, who derived the “humanity” of man from his grave-­digging activity (humanare) and who founded his hermeneutics or humanism on the “unearthing” that is the study of language: “ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda,” as he puts it in the subtitle of On the Most Ancient Wisdom (emphasis added). In his preface Maurice Sand goes on to explain that the game soon developed into an activity that required competence. The comedies were composed a soggetto, during dessert, while the dramatis personae and plots were drawn from the few books available: two mismatched volumes of the Opéra Co­mique and the short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann. The first mise-­en-­scène was entitled “The ill-­mannered Druid,” which features a sleeping dog. The piece begins with a young lover singing his poems to the feigned music of a stringless guitar. Suddenly, the dog leaps on stage, irritated. The Druid, who has been waiting for an altogether different cue, is seized by “innate inspiration” and begins sacrificing the “wild beast” on a large stone. At this point the lover leaps to the defense of nature’s representative. The blows are all too real, as a third character, a female Druid, also jumps into the brawl. Chaos ensues. What has just occurred? Maurice attempts an explanation in his recollections: What happens to the script? One forgets about it, one transforms it, incidents add up, scenes accrue interminably with a strict logic of their own, but without restraint so as to render a conclusion impossible. One after the other we all gave in to exhaustion and vacated the stage: there the silence of the forest reigns, dust accumulates, lights dim, and the little dog dozes off to the notes of a piano fading under the fingers of the dreamy musician. Now, at dinner, the actors of this incomprehensible oeuvre confess to each other to have found themselves enraptured in a pleasantly overexcited state of mind. I was possessed by the Druid’s absurd exasperation to the point of being transported, imagina­ tively, to a world that never existed, as if I, too, had been subjected to the need that forces a primitive man to express symbolically all of his impressions. (MeB, 1:3, emphasis added)

Rephrasing Maurice’s experience in Vichian terms, one could say that the unrecorded history of some aspect of  human culture—­in this case, the raw power of Atellan farces and its Renaissance imitation—­is intuited, or better, sensually perceived before being studied and intellectually grasped. The actual practice of theater, like the unmediated experience Vico had of myth, positively guards

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against the end result of a priori rationalism, or what Vico calls the scholar’s conceit—­a conceit that reduces the unknown to the known, the unfamiliar to the familiar, always bypassing, in its locked circle, the stage of philosophical wonder in which revelation is first sensed. Poetry and its derivates, including theater, represent a “love of wisdom” that precedes and founds—­both chronologically in history and cognitively in the formation of each individual—­the disembodied and atemporal first principles of systematic poetics and philosophy. The dog’s response to the lover’s song interrupts the texture of a premeditated artifact, allowing for the reintroduction of nature’s spontaneity. It was this experience that led Maurice to conclude that theater’s involution occurred when it began to be based on scripted dialogues. These passages reveal that the truest essence, the embodied spirit, of commedia dell’arte remains its well-­documented Wirkungsgeschichte, or, to put it another way, the history of its effects on self-­witnessing practitioners. The history of commedia dell’arte is coterminous with a slow awakening to its epistemological status or potential on behalf of successive generations of teatranti (players, performers) who attempted to come to terms with their burgeoning profession. The Sands were thinking actors, and if their programmatic claims show allegiance to the “mythistory” produced in the encounter of Vico and Michelet, it is also true that they begin to wrest the rediscovery of commedia dell’arte away from the province of anecdote.105 In this case, too, as with Michelet’s Vichism, the Sandian Vichian experiment can be seen in the context of the Italo-­French conversations of the period. More precisely, the work of George and Maurice Sand furthered the comparative psychologism sought for by the likes of Cousin and Romagnosi, and their students, Michelet and Ferrari. In fact, in her preface to Masques et bouffons, Sand specifies that the study of commedia dell’arte does not, or at least not uniquely, pertain to art history; it has more to do with the comparative study of the “psychology of two nations: that of Italy, where it was born, and that of France, which received it.” France, after playing around for a while with the Italian maschere, refashions them to fit the mold of  “the graces and ridiculousness, the passions and the fantasies, the qualities and the peculiarities of its people,” to the extent that 105. Joseph Mali, Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85–­86. See also Joseph Mali, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s New Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). On George Sand’s relationship to myth, but without a single mention of  Vico, see Isabelle Hoog Naginski, George Sand mythog­ raphe (Clermont-­Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2007).

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this need to personify the various naïve or distorted instincts of humanity in types that have been called Harlequin, Pulcinella, Cassandre, the Captain, Pierrot, etc., did at one point become so common in both nations that one could have called, and indeed did call, it Italian-­French Comedy [comédie italienne-­ française]. But we should never forget that the precedent of this ingenious and zesty model belongs to Italy, without which rich and curious precedent Molière would not have been able to create the true French comedy. (MeB, vi–­vii)

We shall soon see how it was crucial to Sand’s project to recast Molière from originator of modern theater to, at best, its perfecter, a term that implies corruption, too. What merits emphasis here is that, like Michelet’s Renaissance, which appeared in 1855, in the very midst of the Sands’ experimentalism, the Baroque genre par excellence that is commedia dell’arte was redefined as a dative genre—­something handed down from Italy to France and, as such, connecting one to the other as infancy and maturity are connected in the same individual. In this way, then, the Sands’ comedic legacy was part and parcel of the transcultural epoch envisaged by Michelet. But it was also, as we have discussed, a redemption, in the midst of the Risorgimento, of an Italian legacy that, according to many articles in the Revue des deux mondes, for example, was a moment of “decadence” weighing on Western consciousness, French included, and thus a period in need of posthumous redemption.106 If the “comédie Italienne,” is a fil rouge connecting modern French theater to the ancient form, then it can be traced genealogically to the beginning of history before Christianity, and through the Middle Ages, by following the history of its ideal types as they were carried over “on the coaches of the charlatans and the tractors of the saltimbanques.” “We see them mature, perfect themselves, and transform,” says George Sand, “together with those very nations that rejoice in their gibes and their lazzis.”107 In other words, by studying comedy, which is at once universal and perennial, and reflective of the genius of specific nations, we can investigate what Vico called the “ideal eternal history traversed in time by the history of every nation in its rise, development, maturity, decline, and fall” (NS §349). For example, Sand points us to Pulcinella, arguably oldest 106. For Sand’s collaboration with this magazine, see M. Thomas Loué, “George Sand fut-­ elle un ‘auteur Revue des deux mondes’? Quelques remarques sur un auteur en institution (1858–­ 1875),” in George Sand journaliste (Saint-­Etienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-­Etienne, 2011). 107. George Sand, “La Comédie italienne,” in Questions d’art et de littérature (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1878), 250.

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of all the maschere, who derives from the figure of Thersites, that first rebel and scourge of  “the oppression of slavery and vileness” whom Vico himself took as emblem, as a “poetic character of the socii or famuli” who first fought for democracy in history (see NS §425). It is well known that George Sand felt that the arts in general and theater in particular bore a social responsibility. On behalf of theater, she composed a forceful cry on the occasion of the death of  Jean-­Gaspard Deburau (1796–­ 1846), that last genius of pantomime and a famed Pierrot, whose demise in 1846 left Parisians, aristocrats and plebeians alike, bereft. At the same time, the theater of the Funambules was facing closure, which Sand took to be a cataclysmic presage: “Is this rumor well founded, and can one believe the eclipse of Pierrot? Isn’t this one of those sinister omens similar to the many that have come regarding the end of the world?”108 Since their earliest infancy she had dressed her children “en Deburau” and taken them to the pantomime, noting the attentive seriousness (for “they did not laugh much at all”) with which they, together with the other “gamins” of Paris, “examined, studied, and perceived the finesse, the sobriety, and apt delivery” of that “physiognomy so delicately outlined under its plaster masque.” She believed theater to be necessary to a healthy society: [E]ach night, a great part of the population dedicates many hours to living in fiction. Each night, a certain number of theaters open their doors to whoever feels the need to forget real life, and this need is so common, that often all of these theaters are full to capacity. This has occurred since the earliest times, and this will always be the case. Man will never pass on dreams; his real life, the one he makes for himself [celle qu’il se fait à lui même] is not sufficient for him. He needs to forget it and participate in a sort of impersonal life, a representation of a tragic or comic life that forcefully wrests him from his individual preoccupations.109

Theater, one must remember, is not just evasion. It quenches, rather, the “thirst for illusion inherent in human life,” reconnecting human beings ever more tightly to the real through the ideal. Myth or “illusion” is for Sand, as for Vico, a “true narration” (vera narratio) that illuminates the truth of the “real world,” the world that man “makes for himself.”

108. George Sand, “Deburau,” in Questions d’art et de littérature, 216. 109. Sand, “Mon théâtre,” in Oeuvres complètes, 10:173.

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When George Sand claims that the study of commedia dell’arte is not the study of “certain pleasant types,” but the study of those “real characters” that can be hunted down into the most distant recesses of time, she is aware that their “reality” is indebted to the creative power of a humanity that, in Michelet’s words, makes itself (“L’humanité est son oeuvre à elle-­même”), and in making itself is best suited to tell the tale of its achievement. Actors, in Sand’s account, are perfect examples of these “original makers.” Indeed, in actors, in the recovery of their “mind,” the necessary discrepancy between making and telling, poiesis and diegesis, is bridged. This realization gave her insight into the nature of commedia dell’arte, which “must have been an art completely different from our own, in which the actor was really a creator, because he drew his role out of his own intelligence and created his type by himself.”110 It will not do to search for the true versions of these stories in the modern world, a world that according to Sand has lost its “wild originality and naïve emotions.” If the “primitive truth” is lost, it is because of the loss of a particular artistic unity: I am not advancing the idea that the actors are generally superior to the writers who work for them. I am saying that there are some who are. By the same token there are authors who are often very unfortunate and who complain justifiably about not finding intelligent interpreters for all of their roles. What I am saying, above all, is that theater will not be complete until the two professions are but one—­that is to say, until the man able to create a good role will be able to really create it, drawing inspiration from his own emotions and finding within himself the right and prompt expression of the dramatic situation.111

This is why George Sand set out to recover in the past, in a past more distant than that represented by Molière, the hint of a theater that would be realized in the future (“J’ai pourtant acquis et je garderai toujours la conviction qu’il y a, dans le passé, l’ébauche d’un théâtre que l’avenir réalisera”).112 Her study of commedia dell’arte would prepare the way for an “epoch [ . . . ] in which the Shakespeares of the future will be the greatest actors of their century.”113 There are echoes of both Jean-­Jacques Rousseau and Vico in George Sand’s comments, but it is Vico who seems to prevail as bitter comments on a too “blasée,” “perfectionné,” and “mouttonnier” modern civilization give way 110. Sand, “Le théâtre et l’acteur,” 1241–­42. 111. Sand, “Le théâtre et l’acteur,” 1243. 112. Sand, “Le théâtre et l’acteur,” 1242. 113. Sand, “Le théâtre et l’acteur,” 1243–­44.

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to the concrete hope for a ricorso. Fueling this hope was Sand’s rediscovery of the only achievement she reserved for herself: a perfect artist who could be an example for the future, namely, Ruzante: Thanks be unto you, good Ruzante, a great dead man that we found lay hidden in the dust of oblivion. His work, rare in Italy, and utterly unknown in France allowed us, finally, to contemplate commedia dell’arte as a healthy Muse comparable in grandeur to that of Shakespeare and Molière. (MeB, 2:77)

And Sand’s “resurrection” of Ruzante in the mid-­nineteenth century was, indeed, a feat if we consider that, efforts to trace the origins of commedia dell’arte to Roman farce having been discredited, it is only just recently that the quest for such origins, long abandoned, has been picked up again and refocused on Ruzante and the sixteenth-­century Venetian compagnie of buffoni.114 It is not hard to guess why Ruzante, treated at length in Masques et bouffons, between “la chanteuse” and Stenterello, earns a prominent place in the Sands’ resurrection of commedia dell’arte. After all, Ruzante, alone among the seventeen masks, was once an actual man named Angelo Beolco (1496–­1542). The so-­called Homeric question, so exemplarily introduced by Vico in his New Sci­ ence, comes to mind when we consider the Sands’ Euhemeric approach to this living mask. Less is known about his life than even Shakespeare’s, but Ruzante was considered by his contemporaries to equal Plautus as an author and Roscius, the famed Roman actor, as a performer (MeB, 2:77–­78). Without having to venture transhistorical comparisons, it can be argued that he surpassed 114. Peter Jordan, The Venetian Origins of the Commedia dell’Arte (New York: Routledge, 2014). The Italian prejudice against commedia dell’arte has long kept scholars from relating, let alone assimilating, Ruzante to the movement. See, for example, Ludovico Zorzi’s comments introducing his magisterial anthological translation of Angelo Beolco’s theater: “Dopo la duplice prova, la via dell’imitazione latina è come già percorsa in anticipo, e il Ruzante si avvede di non avere alcun interesse a proseguirla. I modi dell’Arte sono ancora di là da venire, e non è detto che l’autore dell’Anconitana, precursore di un loro tipico schema, avrebbe potuto provare per essi una rinnovata attrazione. Dal quarto decennio del secolo si assiste nel teatro a una svolta manieristica, imperniata sulla imitazione dei classici e sulla discussione delle regole più o meno arbitrariamente da essi ricavate, che metterà capo alla precettistica pseudoaristotelica della com­ media erudita e al tecnicismo del pari conservativo della Commedia dell’Arte, entrambi pre­ ludenti al ‘salto’ barocco. In questo panorama radicalmente mutato, il Ruzante poco o nulla ha da dire: alla sua produzione, concentrata nell’arco di poco più che un decennio, succede un decennio di inerzia, interrotto soltanto dalla Lettera all’Alvarotto, patetico documento della crisi che lo ha ridotto al silenzio.” In Ruzante, Teatro, ed. Ludovico Zorzi (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), lvii–­lviii.

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the three towering figures of Renaissance erudite theater. Whereas Ariosto, Machiavelli, and Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena “exhumed” rather than created a genre, in their imitation of classical models, Ruzante “creates the comedy of reality amid countryside idylls” (78–­79). If he had applied himself more, and sooner, to writing plays, then he would have merited the title of “Italian Molière,” not Gozzi or Goldoni, those “ungrateful successors who didn’t even so much as mention him and who, perhaps, never even read” him (114). What Ruzante, or rather, Beolco, provided the Sands was a concrete oeuvre waiting for resurrection. His plays gave them a bone to chew on, and a meaty one at that, amid those hearsays and often undecipherable relics that make up the mute history of commedia dell’arte. The task of the Sands became philological, all the more so because this babelic, plurilingualist author who disdained Tuscanized high culture availed himself of every esoteric patois his country and surroundings could provide. For love of him, George Sand writes in a letter, “I broke my head to translate on my own some dreadful dialects, delightful ones at the end of the day.”115 George Sand, however, was not the type to dally in philological endeavors for their own sake. She apprehended Ruzante’s language(s) with the intrusiveness of an anthropologist eager to infiltrate a newly discovered tribe. The “Ruzante dictionary” she is said to have created with so much difficulty afforded her restricted access into naturalité itself, into that blessed state of nature which modernity and the France she inhabited had lost: “What was lacking was what in theatrical language we call natural. The natural is an imitation of nature. Our young improvisers were more than natural, they were nature itself.”116 In this, too, Ruzante was a guide, not himself a primitive but an early scourge of the dispassionate refinement of his times, against which he raised the banner of a new poetics that he (precocious counter-­Enlightenment figure that he was) named snaturalité.117

115. Compare: “Mais ce poète-­prosateur, écrit dans une langue impossible. Tous ses personnages parlent un dialecte différent: l’un le vénitien, l’autre le bolonais, un autre le padouan, un autre le bergamasque, un autre l’ancônais. Et tout cela, non comme on le parle maintenant, mais comme on le parlait en 1520. Jugez quel éblouissement quand nous avons vu arriver ces vieux bouquins tant cherchés! Eh bien, la patience triomphe de tout; avec notre peu d’italien et mes vagues souvenirs de vénitien nous avons tant lu et relu, tant réfléchi et tant comparé, que nous sommes arrivés à comprendre et à traduire. D’autre part, des Italiens consultés ne pouvaient pourtant déchiffrer une phrase.” Cited in Poli, L’Italie, 326. 116. Sand, “Le théâtre et l’acteur,” 1241. 117. On Beolco’s poetics, see Ronnie Ferguson, The Theater of Angelo Beolco: Text, Context, and Performance (Ravenna: Longo, 2000).

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Seeking any and all help in translating Ruzante’s “impossible language,” Sand says she turned again and again to histories of the Renaissance, including Michelet’s, no doubt.118 It can be surmised that what she looked for there was congeniality, the right frame of mind by which to approach her subject, her own Renaissance man. But then, faced with a challenge of translation and adaptation of her own (“If I make a peasant speak the way he normally speaks, then a translation is required for the educated reader, and if I make him speak the way we do, then I create an impossible being, to whom we must attribute an order of ideas that he does not actually possess”),119 she must have attended to the debate surrounding Vico’s language as well. This was a debate that still resonated, and it had been given new wind recently, as Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso, who some biographies want to suggest was Sand’s lover at some point, but who was certainly a rival salonnière, put forth her own “true” translation of  Vico’s New Science in 1844, rivaling in this case Michelet.120 Vico, we recall, gave French Romantics more than just a full-­fledged Counter-­Enlightenment primitivism. By grounding his philosophy on an imaginary conversation or, to be more precise, brawl with Descartes, he had at once embodied and staged the conflict between rivaling minds, the French and the Italian. Like Michelet or Madame de Staël before her, Sand favored reconciliation and marriage between these two national spirits and knew that this could not be achieved without favoring intimate recollection of shared Italian origins. This is exactly what she calls for in the preface to Les vacances de Pandolphe, which begins with the programmatic and not at all rhetorical question: “À quoi bon le théâtre italien?” (What is the use, then, of Italian theater?). She goes on, noting that everyone knows that the transition from an “Italian” to “a French school” of theater was due to the remodeling efforts of Molière. The genius of the French playwright is unquestionable, yet something can and should be said of the “oblivion” he inadvertently brought about,

118. See Poli, L’Italie, 326. 119. “Si je fais parler l’homme des champs comme il parle, il faut une traduction en regard pour le lecteur civilisé, et si je le fais parler comme nous parlons,  j’en fais un être impossible, auquel il faut supposer un ordre d’idées qu’il n’a pas.” George Sand, François le Champi (Grenoble: Glénat: 1998), 45. See also Sand’s introduction to the theatrical rendition of the play, François le Champi in Oeuvres complètes. Théâtre, ed. Annie Brudo, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 2014), 2:221–­24. 120. On this heroine of the Italian Risorgimento, see Mariachiara Fugazza and Karoline Rörig, eds., La prima donna d’Italia. Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso tra politica e giornalismo (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2010).

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an oblivion that in his imitators amounts to a loss of awareness. In effect, Sand puts this transmutation on stage and analyzes it as a theater critic: Italians improvised in their language at the Italian court of Mazarin. Under Louis XIV, the French language became so beautiful that one would not want to hear any other on the stage. Italian comedians were forced to learn French as well as they could. But as soon as they were versed enough to amuse their spectators, along came authorities to forbid them to infringe on the rights of the new French comedy. It is known that they proceeded to fight this for a long time, performing mangled scenes in which a character would respond in French to his Italian interlocutor, adroitly translating as it came out what the audience could not understand. They also tried to avail themselves of an Italian so Gallicized that one would have had to make an effort to not understand it. Then they came to the point of  just sprinkling their French dialogue with some Italian phrases, and the day came when, with the permission of the king, Harlequin retained no more of  his language than some interjections: Oimé! Diavolo! Per Dio! etc. Boloardo, the doctor, and Cinthio became difficult to represent, while Fiorelli-­Scaramouche was never represented willingly, and would remain an inimitable mute more than anything else.121

The story of commedia dell’arte is one of diminishing returns. It began with perfectly understood improvisers bantering in their own language, and it ends with their forced silence—­mute, animated bodies—­at a point when, in truth, what was once essentially Italian perhaps “no longer belonged to anyone inasmuch as it belonged to everyone”: a talent, a spark readily recoverable in the Roman Atellans as much as in the French improvisations of Pont Neuf. But was this indeed the case? Sand is not entirely sure. Granted that Molière’s reform was important and perhaps necessary, there remained something unassimilable, forever foreign, that no French playwright, not even “the divine Molière,” could carry over. When Sand wrote her preface to Les vacances de Pandolphe, in 1852, she could describe the certain something that her compatriots had been deprived of as the “turns of that singular, fanciful, and nevertheless clear and naïve reasoning that characterizes Italian facetiousness.”122 In contrast, Pierrot, the quintessential French mask, is already a “raisonneur,” he “advances by questions,” he is a “logician” “pushing his logic to the absurd,” to the “verge of 121. George Sand, Les vacances de Pandolphe, in Oeuvres complètes. Théâtre, 2:730. 122. Sand, Les vacances de Pandolphe, 732.

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the impossible.” In Pierrot, an “âme rustique” comparable to Ruzante, and perhaps in Molière, the Italian-­French comedic legacy finds its perfect poise, but only for a fleeting moment. Sand does not venture any hypothesis as to when and where exactly the esprit de finesse of the Italian school gave way to the esprit de géométrie of the French school. What is certain, however again, is that nothing is owed to those late, self-­styled reformers of commedia dell’arte who came to the fore in Italy in the eighteenth century—­namely, Gozzi and Goldoni, to whom the Sands dedicate a paltry few pages, almost a digression, at the conclusion of their work. If little or nothing remains of Gozzi’s aristocratic fables, those “wet-­nurses’ tales” for “infant-­poets” that do not deserve to enter the archives of commedia dell’arte, it was Goldoni who was the true “assassin” of the genre (MeB, 2:356). Goldoni brought a “death sentence” (“arrêt de mort”) against commedia dell’arte by substituting his personality for that of his actors, whom he turned into mere mouthpieces of an authorial personality that had yielded to an unpatriotic tone inimical to theater: Success forsook him to the degree that he distorted the national expression in the mouth of his characters, who, thanks to him, went as far as dialogue à la française, that is to say in the language of the lackeys and maids of the imitators of our masters. He abandoned the side, made himself  French, and put forth in France the Bourru bienfaisant. This was truly his genre. (MeB, 2:368)

Goldoni’s murder of commedia dell’arte was sanctioned by his French conversion. No, reiterate the Sands at the conclusion of Masques et bouffons, it was not Goldoni who deserved the title of  “Italian Molière.” “If ever any Italian genius deserves such comparison, it is Ruzante, who, at once an actor and an author, like our great Poquelin, nourished himself on Plautus and Terence, and, like him, greatly surpassed them” (368). What remains to be seen is whether George and Maurice Sand understood the import of their claims, not just for the history of theater and for Romantic aestheticism, but in political terms. Composed in the era of the Italian Risorgimento, Masques et bouffons was published in 1860, like Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, on the eve of  Italy’s long-­awaited unification. A copy of the work was dispatched to Camillo Benso, count of  Cavour, the architect of that feat, and, through Prince Jérôme Napoléon, to Vittorio Emanuele II, king of  Italy. In her letter to Jérôme, George wrote: Your Imperial Highness, here is an exemplar of my son’s work, which you so kindly offered to allow to be remitted to the re galantuomo. [ . . . ] Curse the

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hero! He has forced me of all people to abjure the Italian republican idea! Faced with so much patriotism, bravery, loyalty, and simplicity (a trait of true greatness), theories flounder, the heart is seized. . . . This book is a tribute to the Italian genius and, among more humble rights, it has that of being placed at the feet of the liberator of  Italy.123

It appears that the gift was appreciated, as Maurice went on to receive the Légion d’Honneur in France, while the king of Italy would bestow upon him, a champion of Italian genius, the Order of Sardinia.

Conclusion What, then, is the point of Italian theater? In this chapter I have outlined how the Italian theatrical tradition, inasmuch as it was identified with the largely anonymous commedia dell’arte, could hold a most insightful mirror to the Italian consciousness, echoing what De Sanctis said ten years after the publication of Masques et bouffons. One wonders if  De Sanctis had it in mind to correct the Sandian apology for Italian theater as much as he wished to correct Burckhardt’s contemporaneous fascination for Italian “individualism” when he asserted, in his History, that Italian spiritual salvation hinged on suppressing the Renaissance heritage and, at the same time, vanquishing its “comic” degeneration. De Sanctis’s carefully wrought plan and injunctions lend an ironic, if not “comic,” spin to the use of Italian sources by the French Romantic enterprise. For if what we call De Sanctis’s Italian “Renaissance shame” and correlated “comic complex” were of  Vichian origins through and through, then it would seem paradoxical that by the time De Sanctis wrote his History, Vico himself had already attended in France not only to the “invention” of the Renaissance but, to an important extent, to the decriminalization of commedia dell’arte as well. But is this intellectual history really paradoxical? A deeper grasp of his legacy confirms that Vico’s appeal was mainly hermeneutical rather than literal, and, thus, futural in its ability to elucidate on the viability of the past. Consequently, then, applying Vico could have varied results depending on the discrete past experiences and future aspirations of  his readers, and, in the case of  Vichians of the caliber of  Michelet and De Sanctis, of the people or nations they felt they were representing. If it is illuminating to compare the ways Vico was interpreted in France and Italy in the nineteenth century, it is because it 123. Cited in Poli, L’Italie, 340–­41.

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illustrates the incommensurability of the two nations—­not of their “minds” or “geniuses” as the contemporary literature averred, but of their historical development and self-­awareness (or sense of agency) during the transitional epoch that was the nineteenth century. If  Italy, at historical, literary, and philosophical levels, had continuously expressed a complex with respect to the French at least since Petrarch, than it was the merit of the French to not have dismissed the Italian criticism point blank. In due time, post-­1789, an awareness of Italian difference would prove edifying, as an outward look always is, and would be employed to enhance an experience of modernity that the French risked enlivening too solitarily. The French, unlike the Italians, saw in Vico not a way to develop a Counter-­Enlightenment but a way to integrate the French moment into the continuum of history and thus disseminate it. With regard to theater, Masques et bouffons is a work that succeeded totally in its impossible mission: to bring to its pinnacle, despite the large historical remove, the vicissitudinous history of commedia dell’arte, a profession that suffered from national platitudes and stereotypes. A recently recovered prologue spoken by Mathieu Lefebvre de La Porte in Bourges in 1607, four years before Flaminio Scala inaugurated the apologetic literature of the Italian comedians with his famous anthology of scenarios, illustrates and dates the predicament. “Indeed,” says La Porte in defense of his theater against the Jesuits’ attacks, I truly confess and will stubbornly maintain against those who would argue otherwise that one should place the worship of God not only above the drama but above all other works, however useful and necessary they may be. But as there are twelve hours in the day, they can be so divided that we can both pray to God and enjoy some honest pastime, among which I know none that compares to drama, or rather to tragedy, since it is in these poems alone that we have placed our grave and serious subjects, leaving comedy (that cesspool of filth) in the state to which foreigners have reduced it, to those who would watch or practice it.124

La Porte’s “foreigners,” of course, were the Italians, to whom, in a prematurely desperate attempt to salvage theater through a patriotic division of labor, he entrusted comedy wholesale, as long as the French could have tragedy.

124. I am indebted to François Lecercle for this citation and translation. The original text is available online: http://obvil.paris-­sorbonne.fr/corpus/haine-­theatre/la-­porte_prologue_1607 /body-­1.

Chapter 5

Remembering Is Not Thinking: Croce, Gramsci, and Italian Intellectual Autobiography There are then others who, benevolent in their own way, celebrate the return of Hegelianism for a curious reason, which deserves explanation. Since they fantasize about an Italian philosophical society modeled on the example of the comic companies of commedia dell’arte, with its full cast of characters: Pantalone, Brighella, Harlequin, Doctor Balanzon, Coviello, Giangurgolo, Frittellino, Mezzettino, or: neocriticism, positivism, materialism, spiritualism, pluralism, parallelism, mysticism, mathematism, and so on. For some time now one lamented the absence of one of the most amusing masks: Pulcinella. Here it comes again. Make way for Pulcinella—­that is, Neapolitan Hegelianism. Benedetto Croce [H]ow can one explain how such a conception [of the reality of the external world], which is certainly not pure futility, even for a philosophy of praxis, should today, when exposed to the public, provoke only laughter and mockery? This seems to me the most typical cause of the distance that has grown up between science and life, between certain groups of intellectuals—­who are however in “central” positions of command in high culture—­on the one hand, and the great popular masses on the other; and a cause also of the way in which the language of philosophy has become a jargon which produces the same effect as that of Harlequin. But if common sense finds it funny, the philosopher of praxis should all the same look for an explanation both of the real meaning which the conception has and of the reason why it was born and became diffused among the intellectuals, and also of the reason why it is found laughable by common sense. Antonio Gramsci

Introduction In these two epigraphs, Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci, whose relationship is the focus of this chapter, rely on the same theatrical metaphor to disapprove of contemporary philosophical life in Italy. Croce uses the figure

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of Pulcinella, the Neapolitan or southern version of Harlequin, to deny the utility of labels in philosophy, which is never concerned with the “revivification of corpses” or with “patching old fabrics” (indeed, in Harlequinesque fashion)—­and, in a word, is not like a stale repertory, prone to taxonomy or self-­ perpetuation.1 And Gramsci, building on Croce, recalls philosophers to the preliminary task of accounting genealogically for the self-­referentiality that Croce discerns—­and dismisses—­among Italian thinkers, an attitude so engrained as to have engendered its own “jargon,” or insular stock speech (Q11§17; SPN, 442). We may assume that Croce and Gramsci are addressing a universal and timeworn issue, the self-­alienation of professional thinkers, but when we examine their references to commedia dell’arte more closely, they seem to betray some self-­consciousness and personal involvement. “In Italian political and historical language,” says Gramsci, “one notices a whole series of expressions closely tied to a traditional way of conceiving the history of the nation and Italian culture that are difficult and sometimes impossible to translate in a foreign language” (Q26§11, 2306). Specifically, and interestingly for this study, which was dedicated to relating two epoch-­making figures such as Petrarch and De Sanctis, Gramsci is referring to the use of the terms “renaissance” (rinascimento) and “resurgence” (risorgimento), notions that in the Italian literary and cultural tradition of the nineteenth century supported the idea of an “essential continuity of history” in Italy since Roman times and in so doing posited the nation’s future aspirations on the recovery of a nobler past. Gramsci argues that similarly to the Renaissance, the Risorgimento called for a “restoration” (restaurazione) of a mythical nation that never was, which, unlike a “reform” or “reformation” (riforma) does not grow organically out of a recent past but affirms itself redemptively against a still enduring phase of decadence: hence, we get the Renaissance contra the Middle Ages, and the Risorgimento contra the Renaissance itself and its Baroque aftermath. This goes to show just how “difficult” it may be “to understand an Italian in conversation” and an Italian’s “ironic” references, Gramsci elaborates ever more self-­consciously in a passage that relates to this chapter’s epigraphs: “The ‘finesse’ seemingly required in such conversations is not a matter of normal intelligence, but of having to know the intellectual minutiae and attitudes of a ‘jargon’ peculiar to literati or indeed to specific groups of literati” (Q15§37; SCW, 297). While it is commonplace to point to the intellectuals’ aloofness, what Gramsci is suggesting is that the situation is worse in Italy, 1. Benedetto Croce, “Siamo noi hegeliani?” in Cultura e vita morale. Intermezzi polemici (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993), 47–­48.

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where philosophy, following in the footsteps of its comic tradition, has pidgin-­ talked itself into a solitary dumb-­show. Much like the inimitable art of im­ provisation, Italian intellectual life is untranslatable, and thus unknowable, outside a small circle of inbred virtuosi. There seems to be little doubt that Gramsci is issuing a call to action and that his sustained concern with the issue of Italian philosophical gergo ( jargon) is meant to be self-­critical. Croce’s and Gramsci’s references to the same theatrical tradition are indeed further illuminated by a deeper understanding of the Italian “intellectual minutiae and attitudes” that were explored in earlier chapters of this study, starting with Francesco De Sanctis and his legacy, where I argued that “comedy” (as in commedia dell’arte) serves as a metonymic stand­in for an intellectual illness that Risorgimento Italians felt they had contracted from a profoundly elitist Renaissance. As self-­declared devotees of  De Sanctis, Croce and Gramsci are therefore also to different degrees speaking in tongues, as it were, channeling the idiom of a tradition that Gramsci now acknowledges to be in need of cultural contextualization. How, then, did Gramsci gain clarity for himself and for his Italian readers more generally? Is it through the notebooks that we can unpack the jargon of Italian intellectuals and penetrate the otherwise inaccessible Italian experience of modernity? What are some of the central yet very local stories, narratives, and anecdotes that inform his methodology, and what literary form or intrinsic genre, finally, allowed Gramsci to disseminate this wealth of experience without disrespecting a revered past? What follows is a Gramscian or empathic account of Gramsci’s close observation of Croce’s methods and practices, and the development of his own. In a minute account of the rapport between Croce and Gramsci as they themselves experienced it, we find a Rosetta Stone by which we can begin to decipher the argot that defined how Italian intellectuals related to each other and how they related to their Renaissance birthright. As part of the process of discovery, I shall first probe the comic trope further to expose Croce’s and Gramsci’s commensurate and competitive devotion for De Sanctis and, in light of  De Sanctis, how Gramsci may be said to have characterized his own reformative agenda in a Goldonian spirit, and thus as arguably truer to De Sanctis. Second, we shall investigate Croce’s autobiographical works, as preferred by Gramsci, to account for Croce’s successful cannibalization of a nascent Marxism in Italy. Before Gramsci gained stature, Croce had already ably boycotted Marxism in order to give his own form of Hegelian idealism a second burst; he thus forced Gramsci into pursuing a lifelong deconstructive work of his predecessor’s hegemonic force. This was a discursive agenda that Gramsci eventually defined

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as the “Anti-­Croce,” and in the latter part of the chapter we will see how this discourse required an intensification of the potentialities available to autobiographical narrative and a magnification of the probing powers of  hermeneutical exegesis—­both of which, it had to be admitted, had been masterfully deployed by Croce. The chapter concludes with a look at Gramsci’s practical theorization—­his improvement on Petrarch, Vico, Goldoni, De Sanctis, and, lately, Croce—­through the notion of the “molecular,” the closest of close readings available for the detection and rendering of intellectual movements, shifts, and developments. As in previous chapters (where I read Petrarch through Petrarchan humanism, De Sanctis through his own brand of “criticism,” and so on), my method in what follows is experimental insofar as it pursues a molecular reading of Gramsci’s molecular reading of Croce: his alter ego.

Beyond Laughter: For a “Reform” o f I ta l i a n T h o u g h t Unpacking the comic trope on which both Croce and Gramsci rely requires a closer look at this chapter’s epigraphs. Gramsci’s statement seems to gloss Croce’s, providing a first correction and a key to its translation. It reveals Croce to be taking philosophy’s ascendancy for granted, and to be leveraging his pedigree as the last reformer of German idealism, proud heir to a long line of Neapolitan Hegelians headed by De Sanctis, who may be saved by default, in order to fend off a mocking characterization. But Croce’s strategy is faulty, he makes an “ironic” use of a comic reference and thus, in Gramsci’s understanding of the trope, remains “detached” or superciliously ineffective because derision will always rebound, leaving common sense unscathed. Holding fast to a “pure” understanding of philosophy, Croce may, after all, be affecting a Pulcinella’s or Harlequin’s conceit, provoking an even louder roar from the groundlings, the audience of commoners one cannot refuse to address, the more it takes its lazzi, or “intellectual routines,” seriously. Hence the alternative approach proffered by Gramsci, who, a linguist by formation, calls for a humble etiology of Italian philosophers’ mental and lin­ guistic drift through the therapy provided by a philosophy of praxis. He does not wish to authoritatively define the latter, but, to eschew its classification, he openly rehearses it in front of his readers, even in the passage under consider­ ation. Read with an eye to jargon, Gramsci’s reference to commedia dell’arte is in fact coupled with a veiled allusion to De Sanctis—­only this time the reference is not to the capocomico of a philosophical ensemble, commanding respect, but to the source of that critical awareness that is indispensable to

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honing a new philosophical agenda: namely, the awareness of the growing gap between “science and life,” which, as we have seen in chapter 2, was programmatically elaborated by De Sanctis in a late essay of the same title. Gramsci carried this essay into prison together with De Sanctis’s History of Italian Literature, the magnum opus that grounded that same awareness historically and in doing so represented a possible model for the philosophy that Gramsci performs in his Prison Notebooks. But Gramsci replicates and extends De Sanctis more profoundly by merging what we saw in De Sanctis—­the intimate or autobiographical account of the emergence of a new (literary) criticism—­ with what Gramsci himself is spearheading: the equally intimate and autobiographical emergence of a new philosophy (of praxis). The close affiliation that Gramsci wishes to establish between his philosophy and De Sanctis’s criticism is most evident in Gramsci’s embrace of De Sanctis’s democratic aesthetics, which, as we have seen, called for a reciprocal integration of content and form in view of an effortless accommodation of author and (any)reader against Petrarchan or other intellectual Purisms. “The immediate contact between the reader and the writer,” Gramsci writes, internalizing De Sanctis, “occurs when the unity of form and content in the reader is premised upon a unity of the poetic and sentimental world,” when a reader is not forced to translate “the ‘language’ of the content into his own language” (Q6§62; PN, 3:46). The transparent and unhindered communication that De Sanctis prefigured in a still ambiguous “realism” becomes, in Gramsci, a “national-­popular” aspiration, an aspiration that, again agreeing with De Sanctis, Italian letters lacked. But then, so also did the accompanying critical or philosophical discourse, despite and beyond De Sanctis and Gramsci, necessitating a similar demotic rendition. Gramsci’s identification with De Sanctis allows us to define more precisely one of the most often hijacked of Gramscian notions: “translatability,” which is first and foremost an intranational and cross-­class concern and only later, building on such solidarity, possibly international. Concluding his observations on translatability in the passage just cited, Gramsci quips that at present Italian readers relate to Italian authors with the estrangement of someone who, with just a smattering of  English acquired “in an accelerated course at the Berlitz school,” tries to tackle Shakespeare “through constant reliance on some mediocre dictionary” (Q6§62; PN, 3:46). Again, Gramsci is being idiomatic and traditionally self-­referential, for didn’t Italian Hegelianism—­Gramsci’s immediate intellectual background, via Croce—­sprout from the autodidactic turn taken by De Sanctis when, imprisoned after the events of 1848, he taught himself German by translating Goethe’s Faust and Hegel with the aid of a

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dictionary? And isn’t this exactly Gramsci’s experience, too? Imprisoned and isolated, with grammar books and dictionaries of  his own?2 Gramsci differs from Croce in that he is asking for a different perception and reception of  De Sanctis: throughout his notebooks, he is delivering him to himself, a more congenial progeny than Crocean philosophy. Perhaps De Sanctis (and Gramsci) are not (or not yet) the conduits of foreign philosophies that are never fully translatable, but it may be high time for them to be appropriated in tandem and made to serve Italian national (-­popular) exigencies, leading to an age of effective and edifying communication within Italian society. The hermeneutical tact with which Gramsci makes De Sanctis relevant to his own work begins to illustrate and allows us to experience something that he demanded of intellectual evolution: a reformative or “organic” unfolding from the past. Gramsci’s moral and epistemological agenda, in keeping with—­ and finally bringing home—­the theatrical metaphor with which we began, may be characterized as a desire for Italian science to undergo a Goldonian reform. Gramsci, who, interestingly in the context of what we saw in chapter 4, commended George and Maurice Sand for discovering Ruzante as a true “revolutionary” and proclaiming “him [ . . . ] a precursor of  Molière and modern French naturalism” (Q5§104; PN, 2:354–­55), described Carlo Goldoni in terms that voided George and Maurice’s denigration and purified De Sanctis’s appreciation of Goldoni of any remaining reservation: “almost unique in the Italian literary tradition,” “a democrat before he had read Rousseau and before the French Revolution,” “popular” in “content” and “language,” and the agent of a “biting criticism of the corrupt and putrefied aristocracy” (Q6§153; PN, 3:116). Goldoni did not allow for the nonchalant suppression of stock characters; rather, as argued in chapter 3, he conducted a social(-­ist) experiment on his ensemble casts, which were already a microcosm of wider society. Gramsci seems to realize that Goldoni’s reform was educational and civic rather than merely literary in the way that he abetted the living impersonators of those trite 2. Gramsci scolded his sister-­in-­law Tatiana in a letter of 10 March 1930 for sending him manuals for the study of English, German, and Russian: “I’m already much more advanced in all three languages than the Berlitz manuals” (LP, 1:318). Scholars have long lamented the lack of attention to Gramsci’s interest in and practice of translation (Gramsci’s translation exercises were not included in the 1975 standard edition of  his prison notebooks). Appropriately, the national edition of Gramsci’s complete works began with the publication of  his so-­called “Quaderni di traduzioni.” See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni di traduzioni (1929–­1932), ed. Giuseppe Cospito and Gianni Francioni, 2 vols. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2007). See also Gramsci, Language, and Translation, ed. Peter Ives and Rocco Lacorte (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010).

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stock characters, encouraging their maturation into well-­rounded personalities (and citizens!) capable, because fully human, of communicating across the spectrum of a varied and cross-­class audience. An uncompromising theater critic in his youth, Gramsci bestowed rare approbation on Goldoni-­esque “revealers and teachers” who were able to replicate that “intense humanistic collaboration, from which flows the infinite world of  beauty of the Renaissance,” in which “traditions endure in disciples” or living men, as opposed to texts, and who have attained the “spiritual unity of the individual.”3 Goldoni tried to ferry Italian theater and characters from the commedia a soggetto to the commedia di carattere, from the private jokes of a canovaccio to a fully scripted play, written per disteso, with every intricacy of its plotline and dialogues spelled out and therefore translatable or differently adaptable to the public of different nations. In these efforts we recover a viable master plan and a model for Gramsci’s overall project in the Prison Notebooks: to strip Italian intellectual life of its inside jargon, translate it culturally, and prepare it for the world stage. And yet, for this to come about, his philosophy will have to be synchronically plurilingual, like the plays of Goldoni as well as those of Luigi Pirandello, who was discovered and hailed by Gramsci as another Goldoni-­like reformer, at once “ ‘Sicilian,’ ‘Italian’, and ‘European.’ ” It will have to display the inherent dialectic of, and achieve full transparency between, the local, national, and international (or cosmopolitan) levels (Q14§15; SCW, 142).4 3. Gramsci is referring specifically to the innovative work of  little-­known theater impresario and critic Virgilio Talli (1858–­1928): “L’attività sua di rivelatore, di maestro, diventa vita degli altri, dei discepoli. Talli ha fatto rivivere, con mirabile precisione, le famiglie artistiche del quattrocento, in cui c’erano il maestro e i discenti, e il maestro svolgeva l’opera sua pedagogica, educativa in un fitto lavoro di collaborazione umanistica, dalla quale scaturí l’infinito mondo di bellezza del Rinascimento. Questi maestri sono spesso nulla fuori della loro scuola, della tradizione che creano e sviluppano: la loro natura non è tanto di creatori individuali quanto di educatori e rivelatori. La loro grandezza e perfezione è nei discenti, i quali rapidamente assurgono alla completezza, perché il maestro ha loro risparmiato ogni dispersione di energia in tentativi arbitrari, in esperienze inutili” (Antonio Gramsci, Letteratura e vita nazionale [Turin: Einaudi, 1950], 328–­29). 4. For Gramsci’s specific rapprochement of  Pirandello and Goldoni, see Q9§134 (SCW, 139): “In other words, Pirandello’s plays are closely tied to the physical personality of the writer and not only to their ‘written’ artistic-­literary values. When Pirandello dies (that is, if Pirandello ceases to be active, not only as a writer but as an actor-­manager and director), what will remain of his plays? A vague ‘plot-­outline’ that can be compared in a sense to the scenarios of pre-­ Goldoni theater and theatrical ‘pre-­texts,’ not that of eternal ‘poetry.’ ” Gramsci proudly considered himself the earliest talent scout of Luigi Pirandello, in competition with Adriano Tilgher

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Significantly, one of Gramsci’s most eloquent definitions of  what “national” might mean occurs in a note titled “national characters,” where he contrasts “national” with the notion of “folkloric,” which is synonymous with “provincial” or “particular, both in the sense of anachronistic and in the sense of proper to a class devoid of universal features.” If “folkloric” suggests a time lag or delay of sorts, “one can then affirm that a character is ‘national’ when it is contemporaneous with a worldly (or European) standard of culture and has achieved (of course) this particular standard.” Gramsci’s definition of “national” is counterintuitive. Whereas in another country it might denote something internal, perennial, and achieved, in a backward country like Italy it connotes, rather, an ongoing effort to catch up to and synchronize with progress achieved elsewhere. De Sanctis’s literary criticism, Gramsci specifies, was also “national” in this sense because, in accordance with Gramsci’s note on the subject, it tried to keep the Italian character in step by emancipating it from the “folkloric provincialism” that Italians possessed in the eyes of  foreigners, typified as “Italian histrionism, an Italian theatricality, something dramatically amateurish [  filodrammatico] in their way of overplaying even the most common statement” (Q14§7, 1660–­61). Gramsci does not seem to be acquainted with De Sanctis’s Critical Essay on Petrarch, and thus with De Sanctis’s desire to overcome German prejudice regarding Italian histrionism when first conceiving his original take on the Italian Renaissance during his stint in Zurich. And yet, stitching together various notes and penetrating Gramsci’s own esoteric intertextual exchange with past Italian culture, we see that “national” emerges in Gramsci’s work as a deliberate distancing from the idiosyncratic legacy of the Renaissance or—­what is the same thing in Goldoni’s and De Sanctis’s terms—­from comedy and its stifling epistemological ramifications. For his part, Gramsci avers, Croce had relied on “irony,” a form of overbearing assertiveness, well summarized “by the affirmation,” “to be above the passions and sentiments one feels,” in conformity with the enduring Renaissance tradition rebuked by De Sanctis (Q26§5, 2299). But Gramsci turns to “sarcasm,” which is properly the trope of transition, when he describes his reaction to Croce’s demand that political (= intellectual) leaders be impassive

(1887–­1941), another early appreciator of the Sicilian playwright and a caustic critic of the Italian idealistic tradition as well as of Goldoni, against whom he at one point planned a critical pamphlet. Gramsci’s and Tilgher’s Pirandello-­renaissance can now be read side by side in Antonio Gramsci and Adriano Tilgher, Pirandello (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2015).

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in wielding the passions of the masses they direct. In a note on the circular reciprocity of knowledge, understanding, and feeling, Gramsci writes: The popular element “feels” but does not understand or know; the intellectual element “knows” but does not understand and, above all, does not feel. [ . . . ] The error of the intellectual consists in believing that one can know without understanding and, above all, without feeling or being impassioned: in other words, that the intellectual can be an intellectual if  he is distinct and detached from the people. One cannot make history-­politics without passion, that is, without being emotionally tied to the people, without feeling the rudimentary passions of the people, understanding them, and hence explaining (and justifying) them in the specific historical situation and linking them dialectically to the laws of  history, that is, to a scientifically elaborated superior conception of the world: namely, “knowledge.” If the intellectual does not understand and does not feel, his relations with the people-­masses are—­or, are reduced to—­purely bureaucratic, formal relations; the intellectuals become a caste or a priesthood. (Q4§33; PN, 2:173)

This explains why a “political leader” cannot display the “ironic attitude” suitable only for intellectuals “without immediate responsibilities in the construction of a cultural world.” The ironic attitude that manifests itself in literature in the “detachment of the artist from the sentimental content of  his creation” manifests itself in “historical [or intellectual] action” as a form of  “skepticism” that betrays “disillusion, weariness or even a ‘superman complex’ ” (Q1§29; PN, 1:117; compare Q26§5). At the same time, we find that once again the meaning of the passage is communicated most fully to the initiated, since it includes an elaborate, yet unacknowledged, play on one of Giambattista Vico’s most famous axioms: “Men at first feel without perceiving, then they perceive with a troubled and agitated spirit, finally they reflect with a clear mind” (NS §218). In alluding to Vico and his sentimental personification of the ricorso of  history—­divided into the divine, heroic, and human ages—­we see Gramsci forsaking Croce’s (or the philosopher’s) stance of clear-­minded reflection, in favor of the heroic middle phase of supervised transition.5

5. Vico’s for the most part “indirect,” but one should better say, inexplicit, influence on Gramsci could use more attention. See Eugenio Garin, “Vico in Gramsci,” Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 6 (1976) : 187–­89 ; and Pierre Girard, “De Vico à Gramsci. Éléments

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Indeed, understanding the Vichian context is necessary to grasp fully Gramsci’s comparative appraisal of his Italian predecessors and his place among them: De Sanctis’s criticism is militant, not “frigidly” aesthetic; it belongs to a period of cultural struggles and contrasts between antagonistic conceptions of life. [ . . . ] The profound humanity and humanism of De Sanctis, which even today make this critic so congenial, would seem to consist precisely in this. It is good to feel in him the impassioned fervor of one who is committed, one who has strong moral and political convictions, and does not hide them nor even attempt to. Croce succeeds in distinguishing these various aspects of the critic, which in De Sanctis were organically united and fused. Croce has the same cultural motives as De Sanctis, but at a time when these are in a period of expansion and triumph. The struggle continues; but it is a struggle for a refinement of culture (a certain type of culture) and not for its right to live: romantic fervor and passion have subsided into a superior serenity and an indulgence full of bonhomie. [ . . . ] In short, the type of  literary criticism suitable to the philosophy of praxis is offered by De Sanctis, not by Croce or by anyone else [ . . . ]. It must fuse the struggle for a new culture (that is, for a new humanism) and criticism of social life, feelings and conceptions of the world with aesthetic or purely artistic criticism, and it must do so with heat and passion, even if it takes the form of sarcasm. (Q23§3; SCW, 94–­95)

In this passage, Gramsci wields Italian jargon to full, masterful effect. In doing so, he achieves something unprecedented: he splits Croce off from De Sanctis, an authority whom Croce had long treated as his exclusive possession with six-­hundred-­odd pages worth of publications throughout his career.6 Vico—­ the one other source whom Croce had “rediscovered” after Jules Michelet with a famous, albeit contested monograph of 1911 and had scrupulously co-­ opted—­is the catalyst for the fission.7 We see how Vico inspired De Sanctis’s pour une confrontation,” Laboratoire italien 18 (2016), https://journals.openedition.org /laboratoireitalien/1067. 6. The innumerable works Croce dedicated to De Sanctis throughout his immensely prolific career are now usefully collected in one volume. See Benedetto Croce, Scritti su Francesco De Sanctis, ed. Teodoro Tagliaferri and Fulvio Tessitore, 2 vols. (Naples: Giannini, 2007). 7. First published in 1911, the study was immediately translated into English and published by none other than R. G. Collingwood in 1913. See now the critical edition, Benedetto Croce, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1997).

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interpretation of the Renaissance as the peak of cultural refinement and thus at the edge of an incipient decadence, and by contrast how Croce, unaware and heedless in Gramsci’s view of both Vico and De Sanctis, is the agent of the Renaissance’s perseverance in our day and age. As we shall explore in due time, Croce’s “superior serenity” and “bonhomie” will reveal him as, indeed, a Renaissance man redivivus. Vico also informs Gramsci’s understanding of  “sarcasm”—­or better, “pas­sion­­ ate sarcasm”—­as a form of “detached comprehension” (distacco-­comprensione), something neither here nor there, perhaps, but truly “progressive.” De Sanctis attests as much, as do two figures whom Gramsci closely relates to the Italian literary critic: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The latter pair took a similarly respectful approach to popular “illusions and beliefs,” with the wish to “innovate” rather than “destroy.” Gramsci’s definition of sarcasm draws on Italian and German sources equally: In its original form, sarcasm should be understood as an expression that highlights the contradictions of a period of transition; one seeks to stay in touch with the subaltern human expressions of old conceptions while at the same time emphasizing one’s detachment from those which are dominant and commanding, while waiting for the new conceptions to gain strength through historical development and to become so dominant as to acquire the force of “popular beliefs” (Q26§5, 2301).

Shepherds lead by sarcasm, Gramsci elaborates in the same note, and should train themselves to share their knowledge “polemically” at first, rather than in an “apodictic or sermonic” form, lest their truths be dismissed as “utopias” or “personal whims.” Sarcasm’s persuasiveness rests on its “passion,” “an “essential element” that vouches for the thinker’s “sincerity” and “profound conviction.” Thus Gramsci affirms that intellectual progress necessitates careful maneuvering between the opposing tendencies of  “pedantry,” or extreme reason, and “fanaticism,” or extreme passion; elsewhere he renders this instructively by pairing “calligraphism,” the opportunistic and merely formal “assertion” of ideas that one is unable to reexperience personally (Q15§20; SCW, 117–­19), and “neolalism,” the disjointed and “pathological” hunt for originality (Q23§7; SCW, 122–­23). In these discussions we cannot fail to see an attempt to correlate past and present in a renewed humanistic discourse aimed at a minute or, as Gramsci would have it, molecular accounting of its maturation from a selected model.

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On the one hand, by following the metaphor of commedia dell’arte, we are able to see how Gramsci marshals the jargon of the Renaissance/Risorgimento “tradition”: “not in the passive sense of the term, obviously,” he says, “but in an active sense, as continuity in constant development, but ‘organic development’ ” (Q6§84; PN, 3:69). On the other hand, his choice to hold his thought in constant tension with Croce’s reflects a realization that if  “originality” builds on an already present substratum of otherwise “inert” and therefore “worthless” discoveries “by making them available to society,” the effectiveness of the “new humanism” or worldview he envisions will be directly proportional to the depth of the traditional material it attempts to reconfigure (Q6§77; PN, 3:58). In other words, it is a priviledge to stand on the shoulders of giants, whenever possible.This was a methodological and deontological lesson he learned from what he perceived to be the flaws of  Soviet Marxist revisionism, a realm in which thinkers were less prone than in Italy to adulate their predecessors. Enough engaging with lesser thinkers and seeking polemical victories, says Gramsci of the work of   Nikolai Bukharin. “A new science is proven worthy when it takes on the great champions of the opposing tendency” (Q11§22, 1423). And for Gramsci there could be only one Leviathan with whom to engage in a palingenetic titanomachy: Benedetto Croce, “the greatest European thinker of our times,” a “leader of world culture” whose works represent “the current climax of classic German philosophy,” as Gramsci represents his predecessor throughout the notebooks. It should be evident by now that Gramsci assimilates Croce to his work heuristically, as it were, casting him as the Philosopher or Wise Man, a cosmopolitan (and, thus, more than Italian) counterpoint to the voice of the Everyman, a role that Gramsci, unable to delegate, assumes himself as a self-­described insular Sardinian (therefore less than Italian) throughout his notebooks, a folkloric stock character on his way to acquiring a national character. Reflecting on the autobiographical form that the representation of his own intellectual evolution ought to take, Gramsci states: In many respects, such a form of writing [like Guicciardini’s ricordi politici e civili: political and civic recollections] may be more useful than autobiography strictly speaking, especially if it concerns vital processes that are characterized by the ongoing attempt to overcome an outdated way of  life and a frame of mind as was the one befitting a Sardinian at the beginning of the century striving to attain a way of life and of thinking that is no longer regional or “villagelike” but national, and all the more national (rather, national precisely) because it attempted to partake of European ways of life and frames of mind, or at

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least confronted the national way with European cultural exigencies and cur­ rents [ . . . ]. If it is true that what Italian culture most needed was deprovincialization, even in the most advanced and modern urban centers, then this process should appear all the more evident when undergone by a “three-­and fourfold provincial” man [triplice o quadruplice provinciale] as, certainly, a young Sardinian was at the turn of the century. (Q15§19, 1776)

“In true history [nella storia che sia storia],” Croce wrote in a passage that glosses this Gramscian citation, “characters act like dramatis personae and represent moral attitudes, intellectual attitudes, aesthetic attitudes, religious attitudes, [ . . . ] to which sometimes one gives the name of a person, who are not the authors of all of these things, but their symbol.”8 Gramsci’s third-­ person self-­portrait recasts the cosmopolitan Croce and the provincial Gramsci as allegorical figurae in the journey of the Italian mind toward a national dimension, as yet unachieved, and post-­Renaissance modernity. The Boethian internal dialogue Gramsci establishes between himself and Croce allows for participation in a hitherto unachieved intellectual reform that Gramsci wishes to unmute for the public at large. With due caution, therefore, one might say that the Prison Notebooks are the inspirational parable of the reconnection of science and life in the life and science of a single individual. In terms provided by Gramsci himself, the Notebooks show “the way in which one has succeeded in freeing oneself  from a given provincial or corporate environment, as a result of what external impulses and with what internal conflicts, so as to achieve a historically superior personality,” and thus “suggest, in living form, an intellectual and moral course, besides being a document of cultural development in given epochs” (Q24§3; SCW, 415). But in order to achieve his goals and find his place in history, Gramsci needs Croce, “a great part of whose philosophical work may be said to represent an attempt to reabsorb philosophy of praxis as ancillary to traditional culture”; that is, idealism (Q11§27, 1435). In so doing, Croce inverted the vectors of dialectical progress, leaving it to Gramsci to restore chronological consequentiality to the rhythm of  Italian and European thought. First, tradition—­that is, in Italy, Hegelianism—­then, philosophy of praxis . . . first Hegel, then Marx. . . . Then we come to Croce, and then, and only “organically,” to Gramsci, or to a “new humanism” whose main contribution in Italy will be to restore “a national starting point,” that “unique and original combination” without whose mastery true “internationalism” will never be achieved (Q14§68, 1729). But, as 8. Benedetto Croce, Filosofia e storiografia (Bari: Laterza, 1949), 120–­21.

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Gramsci makes clear, this feat hinges on one prerequisite: that Croce’s theories “be precisely known and cited scrupulously” (Q15§20, 1778). We, too, must abide by this rule in order to read fully Gramsci’s vernacular and determine its contribution to the resolution/dissolution of the perennial renaissance of Italian intellectual life. Who, then, among the many Croces available, merits to be “scrupulously” or autobiographically known? And how did that Croce pull off the feat of preemptively reabsorbing the philosophy of  praxis—­and thereby his own successors, including Gramsci? The next section explores how Croce imposed his storytelling talent on the events surrounding the advent of  Marxism in Italy, degrading it from a revolutionary movement to a parenthetical phase in the intellectual development of a single thinker: Croce himself. As we shall see, Croce avers that Marxism served no other purpose in Italy than to emancipate him from his youthful philological absorption and to allow for his mature philosophical self to shine through. In Croce’s account, Marxism in Italy heralds its past, paradoxically: the return of philosophical idealism, historical materialism’s defeated counterpart in the rest of Europe. As Gramsci noted, such a retrospective return was stronger, for it was nourished by a refutation of Marxists’ own confutation of  Hegelianism. But again, this is a story about forms as much if not more than about contents. If Gramsci’s dissolution of Croce is autobiographical, then it behooves us to pay particular attention to the fact that Croce’s dissipation of Marxism was equally autobiographical. After all, this is the point that Gramsci has been making all along: idealism and historical materialism are consubstantial, as are Croce and Gramsci, the former’s absolute historicism and the latter’s molecularism, an even more absolute historicism. It is not enough that one diverge from Croce; rather, Croce must be beaten at his own game! This is why knowing Croce is a prerequisite form of Gramscian self-­knowledge. As we saw with De Sanctis, who came to conceive his History as an anti-­Canzoniere only by dint of a Puristic identification with Petrarch, so Gramsci’s mission becomes a self-­avowed Anti-­Croce only after he has thoroughly basked in the latter’s hege­ monic presence.

“ A ta l l a n d b l o n d M a r x ” : A n t o n i o Labriola and Benedetto Croce In his late twenties and early thirties Croce was briefly, yet fully, engrossed in Marx and his legacy—­a legacy that was sweeping but, in Croce’s opinion, disorderly. In the history of modern Italian thought this intellectual affair is

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central to any understanding of the Italian experience of Marxism—­belated and highly idiosyncratic. Cracking it open requires some literary finesse, as the facts were immediately reworked by Croce mythopoetically in Contribution to the Criticism of Myself, a narration of his intellectual path. In this intellectual autobiography, which Croce chose to compose while in the middle of his life journey (at the age of forty), Marxism comes as an epiphany to a young man marked by an original diluvian catastrophe.9 In 1883, when Croce was seventeen, he and his brother were miraculously pulled alive from the rubble of a deadly earthquake that struck the island of Ischia and took the lives of their parents and sister. Croce, orphaned, was taken in by a previously estranged paternal cousin in Rome. This was none other than Silvio Spaventa (1822–­93), whose brother, Bertrando (1817–­83), was the founding father of Italian Hegelianism alongside De Sanctis, and who, like both of those figures, was a foremost hero of the Italian Risorgimento. In Croce’s recollection: Stunned by the domestic tragedy that had overtaken me, ailing in body and, though suffering from no one definite disease, appearing to suffer from all at once, perplexed as to myself and the path I ought to take, racked by doubts concerning the purpose and meaning of life and similar problems of youth, I lost all lightness of heart and faith in the future, and was tempted to think myself faded before I had flowered, old before I had been young. [ . . . ] I often ardently wished that I might not awake in the morning, and even formed thoughts of suicide. (A, 39–­40)10

This disconsolate unbosoming is rare if not unique for Croce, who was notoriously private. In the same pages, he confesses to having secretly experienced a “religious crisis” that characterized his encounter with Marxism in spiritually salvific terms. Seeking consolation, Croce attended one of the last lectures of Bertrando Spaventa at the University of Rome; drawing nothing from it, he 9. Reappraisals of Croce’s “Marxism” have hardly been concerned with the explicit autobiographical form it took. See the otherwise informative essays collected in Maurizio Griffo, ed., Croce e il marxismo un secolo dopo (Naples: Editoriale Scientifica, 2004). For some attention to form in Italian Marxism, see the studies collected in Lea Durante and Pasquale Voza, eds., La prosa del comunismo critico. Labriola e Gramsci (Bari: Palomar, 2006). 10. Jaume Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives on Historians’ Autobiographies: From Documentation to Intervention (New York: Routledge, 2015), 36 and following, offers a novel and instructive contextualization for this text. See also Michele Ciliberto, “Filosofia e autobiografia in Croce,” in Croce e Gentile. Fra tradizione nazionale e filosofia europea, ed. Michele Ciliberto et al. (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1993), 15–­36.

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stumbled by chance into the class of Antonio Labriola (1843–­1904), a dissatisfied student of Bertrando who was on his way to becoming the founder of theoretical Marxism in Italy. His lectures, Croce writes, “came as the answer to my urgent longing for a new and rational faith concerning life and its purposes and duties. I had lost the guidance of religious doctrines” (41). With Petrarch, Goldoni, Vico, De Sanctis, and now Gramsci and Croce, we have seen in this study how Italian men of letters bolstered their intellectual innovation with a paratextual autobiographism meant to establish solidarity through empathic participation. We notice how Croce continues this Italian tradition when he reveals his flesh-­and-­blood connection to a Hegelian heritage—­to which he is practically ordained by birthright—­and a reversal of fortune so consequential that it resembles the intervention of the divine. More accurately, given his sources, Croce’s survival was an act of Providence: the force that alters the historical trajectory of men and nations, as Vico had it in New Science. Reflecting on this vestige of medieval transcendence in Vichian philosophy, Croce corrects Vico with Hegel. In Croce’s interpretation, Vichian Providence was a critical stepping-­stone in the slow but successful effort on behalf of humankind to come to terms with the intrinsic rationality of history, which “is the work neither of Fate nor of Chance but of the necessity which is not determination and the liberty which is not chance.”11 Croce’s life will be determined by his ability to steer into and capitalize on the opportunity that a familiar connection to Hegelianism affords. In fact, some of Croce’s most penetrating insights into the art of self-­representation follow from this realization. Croce states that it is only by accepting history’s rationality that individual thinkers, at first “in the dark as to the real tendencies of their own thought” and given to “compose imaginary histories of themselves,” eventually learn to deal with their lives “in the critical spirit of historical narration.” He adds: In fact this proved difficulty of understanding one’s actions while acting is one motive of the wise advice to speak of oneself as little as possible and of the suspicion with which autobiographies and memories are regarded. Such works are interesting and possibly even valuable; but they never present the strict historical truth of the facts they narrate.12

11. Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, trans. R. G. Collingwood (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 116. 12. Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 114.

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If Croce believes that only great historiography can eventually flow into autobiography, this is to be credited to Vico, who applied the methodology and insights honed in his New Science to his own life narrative, allowing for a closer (though by no means fully glimpsed) reconnection of lived life (Erlebnis) and its understanding (Verstehen), thus providing Croce with a model. To different degrees, both Vico and Croce eschew the retrospective vantage of a vita peracta (accomplished life) by composing autobiographies while in the midst of their intellectual careers. The results are therefore necessarily in the making and left unaccomplished, to be integrated by future congenial readers.13 This compositional strategy—­which seems to have been intended to give thought, not life, the last word—­allows the author to insert integrative chapters (two in both Vico and Croce) offering live updates on his intellectual progress. These permit a more concrete measure of each phase of  life and an interpretation that is congruent, intellectually, to the here and now, rather than viewed through a catchall, definitive lens. Such was Vico’s feat in training himself to think with the infant mind of primitive men in New Science, and with his child-­ self in the autobiography. We see something similar in Croce: feeling “faded” before he had “flowered,” or “old” before he had been “young”—­in other words, accounting at the outset of his Contribution for what in retrospect he perceived as a period of untimely senescence—­he, too, like Goldoni and De Sanctis before him, resorts to a Vichian form of poetic imagination in order to tap into his boyhood, restoring youth in his transition into a world of reason. It could be argued, anachronistically, that the unacknowledged Vichian framework informing the Contribution’s first chapter reveals Croce’s autobiographical impulses to be Gramscian. In other words, his concern is not telos or the end goal of spiritual conversion, as is the case with typical confessional authors. He seeks to parse out and dramatize, in metacritical detail, every aspect of a personal metanoia understood in strictly secular and intellectual terms. What Croce is transitioning into, we may well guess, is philosophy. What he is specifically leaving behind is revealed in the third chapter of the Contribution, which recounts his early and prolific career as an antiquarian devoted to 13. Benedetto Croce, “History as Autobiography and Vice Versa,” in Philosophy, Poetry, History: An Anthology of Essays, trans. Cecil Sprigge (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 540: “In truth, the autobiographer does rise above his own mind of the past in virtue of his mind of the present. He looks upon his own work from the vantage-­point of the new situation in which he stands, just like any other historian. And his new point of view will in the future be further superseded by himself in the future, or by others, from a still higher and more commanding point of vantage.”

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nitpicking philological minutiae and to the retelling of minor narratives and “anecdotes” associated with local chronicles. Again, in retrospect, Croce’s first awakening occurs in terms so “Gramscian” as to allow us to appreciate Croce’s profound influence on Gramsci as an autobiographer—­and restore chronological precedence to our analysis. When Croce overcame the “philological” phase of  his life and had dispatched the last of  his “sound works” to the press, he finally began to conceive of “a new work which should break through the narrow and trivial limits of municipal history and rise to the height of national history. This I planned to treat not as political history but [ . . . ] as moral history, understood not as a chronicle of events but as the history of the feelings and spiritual life of Italy from the Renaissance onwards. Thinking that such a history could not be written without special knowledge of the relations between Italy and other countries and an inquiry into their mutual ‘influences’ ” (A, 51–­52), he suggests that with this new undertaking, which resulted in History of Italy, 1871–­1915 (1928), History of the Baroque in Italy (1929), and History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century (1931), he will be transformed from a pedantic “student,” as he viewed himself in retrospect, to an engaged “citizen” capable of personally redirecting the course of his nation (71). Gramsci, as a “three-­or fourfold-­provincial,” expressed in terms of geo­ graphical localism what Croce expresses in terms of intellectual self-­ confinement. For both thinkers the aspiration is to elevate themselves and the nation they represent to a hitherto unachieved (inter-­)national standard. For Gramsci, as for Croce, this vocation is honed with respect to De Sanctis, who had himself painstakingly converted out of his Puristic or rhetorical self. In fact, Croce dedicates the Contribution’s third chapter to De Sanctis in an attempt to clarify the workings of the relay race that is a living tradition for himself and his readers: To these difficulties and complications, which beset the course of every real development, is due the fact that an ardent reader of De Sanctis like myself, who ought to have known by heart every word of his doctrine that erudition without philosophy is neither criticism nor history but mere formless mat­ter [ . . . ], could spend so long in the pursuit of erudition without philosophy, in mere antiquarianism. [ . . . ] Yet, if I had not done this, I could never have thoroughly and firmly understood De Sanctis’s central thought, the transcending of mere erudition; for such an understanding is inseparable from the experience of that which is to be transcended, which must first have been lived in one’s own person [ . . . ]. Again and again, as I laid bare the weaknesses of “eruditism” or “philologism,” its inner contradictions, its laughable illusions [comiche

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illusioni], I have said to myself, “Many readers will fancy that in framing this psychological type, in drawing this caricature, I have derived my material from one or another of the philologists I criticize; but my real material I have found within myself; the real type is my own person, remembering as I do what I once believed [ . . . ], when I was working as a mere scholar and antiquary.” (A, 82–­84)

“The general problem at which I can now see myself to have been working for many years,” Croce concludes, “may be stated as the problem of the appropriating and assimilating De Sanctis’s thought by a mind very differently disposed from his own” (80). Within an idealistic framework, we can view Croce and De Sanctis not as two individuals but as representatives of two distinct phases in the development of the same Spirit, a process that, we cannot fail to appreciate, is rendered here in terms that are as distinctively Goldonian as they are Hegelian. Croce, once a stock character, a blathering Doctor Balanzon flaunting his macaronic Latin, acquires psychological depth through self-­(de-­)caricaturization. With this umpteenth Goldonian allusion, we see the influence of Vico’s autobiographical narrative make way for that of De Sanctis, whose La giovinezza, while also replete with Vichian overtones, distinguished itself by maintaining a complementary relationship of mutual enlightenment with his scholarly work. Indeed, we have seen how it uses specific scholarly essays for a delayed—­and thus more compelling—­disclosure of the allegory attending to his life narration. We may thus recall that De Sanctis’s autobiography acquired its full significance as a cautionary tale—­instructing the reader on how to avoid or overcome the allure of (Petrarchan) Purism and its fustian rhetoric—­only when read in light of  his commemorative essay, “The Last of the Purists,” in which De Sanctis revealed himself as the “last” of a kind. Likewise, for the Contribution to assume its full meaning as a tale of redemption from a youth squandered in matters of sterile erudition, the reader must turn to Croce’s similarly construed commemorative essay with the similarly self-­explanatory title, “How Theoretical Marxism was Born and Died in Italy (1895–­1900).” Croce eventually published this essay, which was originally written in the summer of 1937, as an afterword to a republication of his works on Marx, definitively collected and, in his words, finally laid to rest as if  “in a coffin.” “A time will come when Marxism will remove itself on its own,” Croce prophesied, setting the example. “But that will occur when it has been well digested; hence one can foresee that it will

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continue to be discussed for some time longer.”14 It is an eerie choice of words and metaphor, if we consider that Gramsci, who was granted compassionate release from prison due to health complications, had just met his untimely end that spring in a Roman hospital. Like De Sanctis, who in “The Last of the Purists” sought to settle accounts with his mentor, Basilio Puoti, Croce uses “How Theoretical Marxism was Born and Died in Italy” to collect and comment on his correspondence with “his old teacher at the University of Rome.” He begins with a letter dated 27 April 1895, in which Labriola, writing from Paris, announces his resolution to descend into the agon of socialist militancy by contributing to the newly founded journal Devenir social. If he were to do so, would Croce be interested in reviewing and commenting on his contribution? This request, Croce comments immodestly, “marks the birthdate of theoretical Marxism in Italy.” And he jumps at the chance to be cast in a leading role in the drama of the Italian reception of  Marxism, a passion play that a trinity of thinkers—­Labriola, Croce, and Gramsci, each in his own way and in differing relations to each other—­ endowed with a gospellike quality of death and resurrection.15 The ghost of Gramsci began haunting Croce just when he thought he had buried Marxism: selected letters in which Gramsci criticizes Croce were leaked to the press in 1937, ten years before their collected publication!16 But it was Labriola who had set a portentous tone with his contribution to the Devenir social. This was an unconventional piece, titled “In Memory of the Communist Manifesto,” whose only overt aim was to commemorate the unheeded advent of a regenerative intellectual apocalypse. “In three years,” Labriola declaimed, we [socialists] can celebrate our jubilee. The memorable date of the publication of the Communist Manifesto (February, 1848) marks our first unquestioned entrance into history. [ . . . ] All those in our ranks who have a desire or an occasion to possess a better understanding of their own work should bring to mind 14. Benedetto Croce, “Marxismo ed economia pura,” in Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, ed. Maria Rascaglia e Silvia Zoppi Garampi, 2 vols. (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2001), 1:174–­75. 15. Croce, “Come nacque e come morí il marxismo teorico in Italia (1895–­1900),” in Materialismo storico, 1:265. 16. The small sample of Gramsci’s letters was published as “Benedetto Croce giudicato da Antonio Gramsci,” Lo stato operaio (May–­June 1937): 290–­97.

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the causes and the moving forces which determined the genesis of the Manifesto, the circumstances under which it appeared on the eve of the Revolution which burst forth from Paris to Vienna, from Palermo to Berlin. Only in this way will it be possible for us to find in the present social form the explanation of the tendency toward socialism, thus showing by its present necessity the inevitability of its triumph.17

A young and (in recollection) very impressionable Croce was immediately converted. Labriola’s “fondness in harkening back imaginatively to that February of 1848, when the Communist Manifesto was read and endorsed in London, had something sacred about it, as if recollecting the foundation of a church, its master and his first apostles.”18 Indeed, “[f ]or a few months, if not for an entire year,” Croce writes elsewhere, I had the feeling of having stepped on a road that was the “royal road” of humanity; I had caught the glimpse of a palingensis that was supposed to take place at the beginning of or along the course of the twentieth century. I experienced the sweetness of one who is initiated to the mysteries of a religion, when Antonio Labriola lent me (and only to me) some then very rare pamphlets and the book, The Holy Family, and shared with me the letters Engels wrote to him, up to the telegram that tersely announced “General [as Engels was referred to] is died” [in English, sic], or he put me in touch with some of those Germans who, students and workers of 1848, had attended the sermon on the mount, the first reading of the Communist Manifesto.19

When Labriola first reached out from Paris, Croce could not possibly have envisioned the specific evangelical role he would be given to play for a philosophy that was to him yet unknown. By the time Labriola commemoratively recast his intervention as a second coming of Marx in Italy (he eventually accompanied his commemoration with a translation of the Manifesto into Italian)

17. Antonio Labriola, “In memoria del Manifesto dei Comunisti,” in Tutti gli scritti filosofici e di teoria dell’educazione, ed. Luca Basile and Lorenzo Steardo (Milan: Bompiani, 2014), 1147. I cite from Antonio Labriola, Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History (Chicago: C. H. Kerr & Co., 1908), 9–­10. 18. Croce, “Il marxismo teorico in Italia,” 1:272. 19. Croce, “La morte del socialismo,” in Cultura e vita morale, 152.

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Croce indeed elaborated on it like an apostle—­and not just any apostle but, as we shall see, like a back-­stabbing  Judas Iscariot.20 In what came to be known as the three Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, Labriola expresses the wish to introduce historical materialism as a panacea for the stifling “myth and superstition of words” ailing thought in the West and in Italy in particular. Labriola’s first essay points to the kerygma of the Marxist gospel, its unmediated and original proclamation. The second essay develops the first, affirming the need to demythologize the ideological construct of most philosophy, including socialist literature.21 Labriola opens the second essay with this statement about historical materialism: This class of studies, like many others, but this more than any other, is confronted with a great difficulty, indeed an irksome hindrance, in that vice of minds educated by literary methods alone which is ordinarily called verbalism. This bad habit creeps into and spreads itself through all domains of knowledge; but in studies which relate to the so-­called moral world, that is to say, to the historico-­social complexus, it very often happens that the cult and the dominion of words succeed in corrupting and blotting out the real and living sense of things. [ . . . ] Verbalism tends always to shut itself up in purely formal definitions; it gives rise in the minds to this erroneous belief, that it is an easy thing to reduce into terms and into simple and palpable expressions the agitated and immense complexus of nature and history and that it is easy to picture the multiform and complicated interlacings of causes and effects; in clearer 20. Croce, “Il marxismo teorico in Italia,” 1:293–­94: “In verità [ . . . ] la scienza e la filosofia di sola apparenza e ‘ideologia di classe’ il Marx non avrebbe dovuto andarle a cercare presso Cartesio e Spinoza, Kant e Hegel, ma presso di sé medesimo: la qual cosa non toglie , anzi fonda, la sua importanza storica di creatore di un nuovo evangelo e di apostolo delle genti o dei proletari: evangelo distruttore di tutta l’idealità della vita umana, e che per ciò stesso dà una forza terribile in mano all’apostolo. Né qui sono da dimenticare quelle che potrebbero chiamarsi le origini religiose del materialismo storico e del comunismo dialettico, non ascose a chi conosca le vicende della sinistra hegeliana, la quale, avendo con la sua critica radicale distrutto il cristianesimo e la persistente idea teistica e affermato l’ateismo, non trovava innanzi a sé altro elemento religioso che l’ ‘umanità,’ e questa le sembrava offesa nella sua purezza e impedita nella sua libera espansione dalle divisioni e dai contrasti di classi (cioè della storia), donde l’esigenza del comunismo che avrebbe attuato la vera libertà, il vero mondo dell’umanità (sciolto dalla storia).” 21. For the notions of  “kerygma” and “demythologization,” see Rudolf Bultmann, The New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989), 1–­43.

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terms, it obliterates the meaning of the problems because it sees in them nothing but questions of nomenclature.22

To “replace the mirage of uncritical conceptions” and trounce the “effects of literary artifice,” “this is the revolutionary enterprise and the scientific aim” of historical materialism, itself  heralding and abetting the long overdue victory of realistic prose.23 This statement, of course, realigned Labriola with the well-­ established antirhetorical doctrine of De Sanctis. Labriola was a scourge of academic and institutional culture and a reluctant professional scholar; in a long career he completed only one book-­length study, a monograph significantly devoted to Socratic maieutic. He found in historical materialism an entry into a pre-­or postmetaphysical era of unwritten and unwritable truths of  human consciousness.24 The scattered and dislocated nature of  Marx’s and Engels’s works called not for a systematic translation—­as their would-­be disciples all over Europe seemed to think. Rather, they inspired Labriola to attempt a return to a peripatetic and oral experience of philosophy. Labriola put these tenets into practice by composing his essay during long walks with Croce through the streets of  Naples and by imagining the third and last section in this grouping, “Conversing about Socialism and Philosophy,” as a series of collected letters “intended to carry on a conversation in writing” with Georges Sorel (1847–­1922), who, like Croce, was also for some time a critical sponsor of his works.25 Collecting Labriola’s essays into a volume for a French audience, Sorel introduced the publication as “a date in the history of socialism,” and as the first in which a “Romance language author” studied Marxism in a consciously didactic form.26 And yet, in publishing Labriola’s works, Sorel might have missed the point altogether. Labriola eventually reproached both Croce and 22. Labriola, “Del materialismo storico,” in Tutti gli scritti, 1273–­74. I cite from Labriola, Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, 95–­96. 23. Labriola, “Del materialismo storico,” 1277–­78. I cite from Labriola, Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, 102–­3. 24. See Labriola, “La dottrina di Socrate secondo Senofonte, Platone ed Aristotele,” in Tutti gli scritti, 535–­662. 25. Labriola, “Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia,” in Tutti gli scritti, 1393. I cite from Antonio Labriola, Socialism and Philosophy, trans. Ernest Untermann (Chicago: C. H. Kerr & Co., 1907), 5. Note that the English title elides “discorrendo” (conversing), hence disrespecting Labriola’s interest in the form he wanted to give to his intellectual contribution. 26. Labriola, “Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia,” 1537. I cite from Labriola, Socialism and Philosophy, 194.

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Sorel for wanting to reintellectualize what he had so painstakingly deconstructed. “Conversing about Socialism and Philosophy” opens with a letter to Sorel that sounds like a disclaimer: It is entirely due to you that my two essays on historical materialism, which are but rough sketches, circulate in France in book-­form. You placed them before the public in this shape. It has never been in my mind to write a standard book [  faire le livre], in the sense in which you French, who admire and cultivate classic methods in literature, use this term. I am of those who regard this persistent devotion to the cult of classic style as rather inconvenient for those who wish to express the results of strictly scientific thought in an original, adequate, and easy manner. To me it is as inconvenient as a badly fitting coat.27

Labriola knew that the affirmation of a truly novel form of thought requires formal innovations of expression attuned to its contents, and that such innovations were not an ancillary preoccupation but of utmost importance to the renovation of  habits of mind. This was especially the case in Italy, where “a stupid blend of cracker-­ barrel doctrinairism and alleged Harlequin irony results in socialism being confounded with sciosciammocchismo,” as Labriola put it in a letter to Croce, making reference to Sciosciammocca, a late and crass degeneration of the character of Pulcinella.28 Indeed, nobody could deny that Italian socialism was nearing rock bottom when Achille Loria (1857–­1943), Labriola’s presumed predecessor in the Italian popularization of Marxism, was eventually forced to plead guilty to a wholesale plagiarization of Marx’s works and, thus, was unmasked as a master Truffaldino or Pulcinella! Only in Italy, where Marxism continues to be known by hearsay, Croce notes sarcastically in reference to the legendary (but obviously untrue) story that Marx had attended a meeting of the Comintern, would everyone swear to have been in the presence of a true German, a “very tall and very blond” man!29 These details contextualize the methodologically informal school in which Croce and Gramsci were raised: both saw in Labriola an advancement and update of De Sanctis, and each in his own way refined and perpetuated the satire of Italian arlecchinate, quackery and charlatanism. Such was the mood 27. Labriola, “Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia,” 1393. I cite from Labriola, Socialism and Philosophy, 5. 28. Croce, “Il marxismo teorico in Italia,” 1:281. 29. Croce, “Le teorie storiche del Prof. Loria,” in Materialismo storico, 1:65.

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and, one might say, the intellectual habitus that Labriola impressed on Italian socialism. Still, there was at least one all-­important principle that inspired and depended upon this (in-­)formal revolution, namely, that for theoretical socialism to take root in a non-­“autochthonous” country like Italy, what was required was not a mere importation or translation, but a thorough cultural adaptation that accorded with what Labriola refers to as the “visual angle” of the national mind.30 Labriola’s insistence on an Italian naturalization of Marx was a direct corollary of his attempt to deprive current scientific socialism of any point of reference, its purported internationalism as well as its lingering utopian millenarianism. As he saw it, socialist literature persistently thrived on a crucial misunderstanding: “[t]he foresight indicated by the Manifesto was not chro­ nological, it was not a prophecy nor a promise, but a morphological prevision.”31 Marxism was not an umpteenth philosophy of history or a teleological construct; rather, its task, as historical materialism, was to point to and describe the general validity of historical laws and their orientation and tendencies, while demonstrating how to deal with contingency and unpredictability through the art of narration. In a letter to Engels dated 16 August 1894, Labriola insisted on this point. “There is the rub, that history is just that, Darstellung and narration, not simply morphological theory. What behooves us then is to narrate history according to the materialistic conception, but truly narrate it, lest one get stuck as usual with the dualism of history and explanation.”32 “Graphic narration” is the “aesthetic and artistic occasion” that precedes “abstractions” and “generalizations,” the necessarily partial “visual angle” with which the past and the present ought to be appraised.33 The derhetoricization of Western thought requires a philology of presence or a “philosophy immanent to the things it thinks” in order to achieve “a complete, transparent and integral narrative.”34 Gramsci’s approbation of Labriola was unwavering and incisive though scant and less detailed than one might expect given his obvious indebtedness 30. Labriola, “Da un secolo all’altro,” in Tutti gli scritti, 1684. 31. Labriola, “In memoria del Manifesto dei Comunisti,” 1169. I cite from Labriola, Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, 45. 32. Antonio Labriola, Epistolario, ed. Delia Dugini et al., 3 vols. (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1983), 2:508. 33. Labriola, “Del materialismo storico,” 1304. I cite from Labriola, Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, 102–­3. 34. Labriola, “Del materialismo storico,” 1354. I cite from Labriola, Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, 223.

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on issues like socialism’s national translatability or the literary form of its popularization. Much of what we know of Labriola’s thought, he says, has “come down to us by way of his friends and pupils (for his fame is that of having been an exceptionally gifted ‘talker’)” and must be gleaned apocryphally from Croce’s works (Q11§1; FSPN, 157). Yet no one can doubt, Gramsci argues, that it was he who “affirms that the philosophy of praxis is independent of any other philosophical current” and “self-­sufficient,” and that he was the “only man who has attempted to build up the philosophy of praxis scientifically” (Q11§70; SPN, 386–­87). Gramsci was intent on defending Labriola against Russian intellectuals—­namely, Leon Trotsky—­who accused him of incompetence, but the truth is that such accusations were implicit in all of the studies Croce dedicated to Marx while he was under Labriola’s wing. On reflection, it seems that Croce credited Marxism with nothing more than educational appeal. He found that through Marxism he was allowed to “experience once again the charm of the great historical philosophy of the Romantic period,” and he discovered “a Hegelianism far more concrete and alive than that which I was accustomed to finding among scholars and commentators.” With regard to political concepts, he averred that Marx, the “Machiavelli of the proletariat,” reconnected him to “the best traditions of Italian political science,” with its emphasis on power and struggle, and its “satirical and caustic opposition” to any abstract ideals like “justice” or “humanity.”35 But besides this, he saw nothing scientific in Labriola’s so-­called scientific socialism or, to use Labriola’s preferred term, “critical communism.” Certainly, we observe some overcompensation in Croce’s hairsplitting studies on Marxism, which include mathematically informed objections to Marx’s theory on the “rate of profit,” fine logical arguments against his “equivalence between value and labor,” erudite attempts to subtract classical utopian literature, from Campanella to More, from the heritage of Marxism, and his fiery accusation that Marx had elaborated his economic theories on the basis of a “hypothetical” and “typified” society never seen in world history. This said, Croce had dealt his coup de grâce as early as 1896, in a piece titled “Concerning the Scientific Form of Historical Materialism.” Published the same year as Labriola’s essays, it was dedicated to the vexed question of historical materialism’s overcoming of the philosophy of history. This would be a break with the Hegelian paradigm, Croce is ready to admit, but not necessarily as an advancement, let alone as something to be celebrated as a new

35. Croce, Materialismo storico, 1:13 and 1:118.

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and independent philosophy, which Gramsci will call for in the near future. In Croce’s caustic put-­down: I think then that better homage would be rendered to the materialistic view of history, not by calling it the final and definite philosophy of history but rather by declaring that properly speaking it is not a philosophy of history. This intrinsic nature which is evident to those who understand it properly, explains the difficulty which exists in finding for it a satisfactory theoretical statement; and why to Labriola it appears to be only in its beginnings and yet to need much development. It explains also why Engels said (and Labriola accepts the remark), that it is nothing more than a new method; which means a denial that it is a new theory. But is it indeed a new method? I must acknowledge that this name method does not seem to me altogether accurate. When the philosophical idealists tried to arrive at the facts of history by inference, this was truly a new method; and there may still exist some fossil of those blessed times, who makes such attempts at history. But the historians of the materialistic school employ the same intellectual weapons and follow the same paths as, let us say, the philological historians. They only introduce into their work some new data, some new experiences. The content is different, not the nature of the method.36

Historical materialism is no philosophy of history, no philosophy, full stop. It has no theoretical claim whatsoever, and—­here is the blow—­it does not even amount to a viable historiographical method. For all of the enthusiasm it has generated, its only contribution is to have unearthed or to have focused our attention on a “mass of new data and experiences,” of an exclusively economic variety, thus totally and dangerously omitting the entire moral sphere of man, now emptied out as strictly homo oeconomicus. Labriola deluded himself for some time into thinking that he had found in Croce a “successor” to whom he could entrust the “genuine tradition of Marxism.”37 At first he was stimulated by his student’s “instinct for literary 36. Croce, “Sulla forma scientifica del materialismo storico,” in Materialismo storico, 1:24. I cite from Benedetto Croce, Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx, trans. C. M. Meredith (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1981), 11–­12. 37. Croce, “Il marxismo teorico in Italia,” 1:286: “Né a lui [Labriola] la scienza era indifferente, né a me, in verità, l’azione pratica; ma l’accento che ponevamo sull’attività nostra era diverso e quasi opposto: la natura ci aveva addetti a un diverso lavoro. Egli s’illuse per alcun tempo di aver trovato in me il suo collega e successore nella custodia e nella difesa della genuina tradizione marxistica, che era la forza del socialismo; ma io non mi feci alcuna illusione in

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prolixity.”38 But eventually he was forced to reckon with Croce’s personality: that of a disciple, yes, but one he eventually framed as an inveterate “intellectual” and “man of  letters,” “indifferent to the struggles of  life,” and “a contemplative Epicurean” devoted to solitary “disputation” rather than narrative “exposition.”39 In conclusion, one can argue that Croce was more loyal to Labriola in his autobiographical and parabolic rendition of Marxism’s advent in Italy—­where his only concern was to narrate and thus to understand—­than he was in his scholarly work, where, shedding the clothes of an apostle, he chose to relate to his Socratic teacher as a Plato or Aristotle did, explaining and thus teaching, fully spelling out his elder’s oral teachings beyond recognition. In something of a novelistic twist, he did so just as Labriola was struck by deadly throat cancer and lost the means of promulgating Marxism the only way he saw fit, through conversation. By the time Labriola wrote a preface to the French edition of his essays in 1898—­that is, a mere three years after he announced to Croce his intention to elaborate a “critical communism”—­he was forced to admit that his disciples, Croce and Sorel, had betrayed him. They had gone rogue, and he now publicly disowned them, feeding what everyone already referred to as the “crisis of Marxism.” Labriola, a Socratic pedagogue by vocation, was no match for their outsized egos and intellectual ambitions, with international scholarly careers in their sights. Proud and piqued, he announced that he would not lower himself to their level and yield to the “temptation” to write an “Anti-­Sorel” or Anti-­ Croce after having developed his philosophy in conversation “avec” or with them!40 Although Labriola would not (and did not) resort to such tactics, these words seem to have resonated with Gramsci, who did, in due time, call for an “Anti-­Croce” in response to the Hegelian reform that Croce proclaimed the most influential if not official philosophy of the nation. The success of Gramsci’s Anti-­Croce depended not just on rereading Labriola but on understanding why Labriola’s “way of posing the philosophical problem has enjoyed such a limited fortune” (Q11§70; SPN, 387).

proposito e quella che egli chiamava pigrizia di letterato, era in realtà travaglio di pensatore, a suo modo politico nella cerchia sua propria.” 38. Labriola, “Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia,” 1495. I cite from Labriola, Socialism and Philosophy, 148. 39. Croce, “Il marxismo teorico in Italia,” 1:285. 40. Labriola, “Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia,” 1519. I cite from Labriola, Socialism and Philosophy, 179.

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The answer to this question, it seems, was bad timing. Philosophy of praxis emerged fully fledged and precociously between Marx and Labriola in a historical phase when “tactical problems” in politics and “minor cultural problems” in philosophy were laying the groundwork for the “birth” of an inchoate “new intellectual and moral order”: This is why it is necessary to bring Labriola back into circulation and to make his way of posing the philosophical problem predominant. One can thus open the struggle for an autonomous and superior culture, the positive part of the struggle whose negative and polemical manifestations bear names with “a-­” privative and “anti-­”—­a-­theism, anti-­clericalism, etc. One thus gives a modern and contemporary form to the traditional secular humanism which must be the ethical basis of the new type of State. (Q11§70; SPN, 388)

Where does Gramsci fit, then, in this asynchronous, nonlinear story of the Italian reception of Marxism? It is misleading to appraise Gramsci’s contribution to the Labriola/Croce affair from the vantage of these mature notes, and indeed one would be led astray seeing in Gramsci a continuation of Labriola despite Croce’s interference. With respect to Croce, we have seen, Gramsci placed himself in a “sarcastic” period of transition and thus in the preparatory and constructively polemical phase of  “anti-­” criticism. This was all the more true in Italy and at the time that Gramsci was writing, when “to be the heirs of classical German Philosophy means [to be] the heirs to Crocean philosophy,” a circumstance with which “a reckoning [ . . . ] has to take place in the widest-­ranging and most thoroughgoing way possible” (Q10I§11; FSPN, 356). In other words, Gramsci was self-­consciously working from the posthumous and temporally misaligned vantage of reception rather than production, and he situated his intervention as that of a double successor. He was post-­Croce, as a descendant devoted to unraveling Italian idealism’s prevaricating and often disingenuously “implicit and unacknowledged absorption” of the philosophy of praxis. He was at the same time post-­Labriola (or pre-­Croce), as someone who could inoculate Labriola’s Marxism with the antibodies necessary to withstand the renewed and rampant “Machiavellism” of traditional philosophers. For just as “Jesuits contested Machiavelli in theory while remaining in practice his best disciples,” so Croce and idealists came to fight the philosophy of praxis with the latter’s own weapons and insights in political science (Q16§9; SPN, 391). The debate became so complex by the time Gramsci entered the fray that he doubted he alone would be able to resolve an issue “worth the trouble of a whole group of

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people dedicating ten years of their life to a work of this type, an Anti-­Croce that in today’s cultural climate could have the same significance that the Anti-­ Dühring had for the pre-­war generation” (Q10I§11; FSPN, 356). Of course, Gramsci is referring to Friedrich Engels’s Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, better known as the “Anti-­Dühring.” Published in 1878, this work, which immediately came to represent the most didactically clear and systematic exposition of the fundamental proposition of Marxism and its claim to scientific integrity, distinguished itself formally as a tract written in polemical opposition to the mystification to which Marxism seems to have lent itself—­as this project demonstrates. It is unsurprising that this text, with its intrinsic dialogism and training in critical confrontation, was recommended by Labriola to be circulated as “medicina mentis,” for its healing properties for younger intellectuals. Writing to Sorel, and still largely unaware of  how things would turn out with him and Croce, Labriola called each and every reader to diligent study: Now, this book was not written for a thesis, but rather for an anti-­thesis. With the exception of some detachable portions [ . . . ], this book has for its guiding thread the criticism of Eugene Dühring, who had invented a philosophy and a socialism of his own. [ . . . ] Well, unfortunately every nation has too many Dührings. Who knows what book against some other know-­it-­all an Engels of some other nationality might have written, or might still write? The effect of this work on the socialists of other countries should be, in my opinion, to supply them with those critical aptitudes which are required for writing all other Anti-­Somethings needed for the rebuttal of those who try to thwart or infest the socialist movement in the name of so many confused notions in sociology. The weapons and methods of critique will, of course, vary from country to country according to the requirements of  local adaptation. The point is to cure the patient, not the disease. That is the method of modern medicine.41

For Labriola, the phrase “Anti-­Dühring” denotes less a specific book, and the doctrine exposed therein, than an edifying “illustration of ability in teaching.”42 And it is in this sense that Gramsci eventually took the task of an Anti-­ Croce upon himself, reinforcing the idea that he is most “advanced” who understands that the adversary should be “incorporated.” “To understand and 41. Labriola, “Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia,” 1428–­29. I cite from Labriola, Socialism and Philosophy, 53–­54. 42. Labriola, “Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia,” 1498. I cite from Labriola, Socialism and Philosophy, 152.

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to evaluate realistically one’s adversary’s positions and his reasons (and sometimes one’s adversary’s is the whole of past thought),” says Gramsci, thinking of his relationship to Croce, “means precisely to be liberated from the prison of ideologies [ . . . ]. It means taking up a point of view that is ‘critical,’ which for the purpose of scientific research is the only fertile one” (Q10II§17; SPN, 344) The point of an “Anti-­Something,” Labriola had emphasized, is to cure the “patient,” but this patient, Gramsci realizes, is none other than himself and all of those who in Italy were raised in the hegemony of Croce’s idealism. For them, the Anti-­Croce is a “cathartic” exercise in self-­healing that will mark the “passage from ‘objective to subjective’ and from ‘necessity to freedom.’ ” “To establish the ‘cathartic’ moment becomes therefore [ . . . ] the starting-­point for all the philosophy of praxis” (Q10II§6; SPN, 366–­67). It should be evident by now that to be successful, Gramsci’s Anti-­Croce will have to reach back past Croce and reassimilate Marxism as Labriola intended it, as a spiritual exercise. Yet, given that this task in Italy cannot be accomplished without also autobiographically reabsorbing the Crocean autobiographical experience of Marxism, Gramsci will have to prove to be a better successor to Croce than Croce was to Labriola. For that matter, Gramsci will have to improve upon the tone of Engels’s “Anti-­Dühring,” which often pursued its purpose by offending rather than incorporating its antagonist.43 All in all, this revision amounted to a historical second chance. If Hegel had stated “that in history all events occur twice,” Marx responded by specifying “that the first time the event occurs as tragedy and the second time as farce.” “Why this course of history? So that humanity should part with its past cheerfully” (Q3§51; PN, 2:53–­54). In keeping with the Italian comic penchant, the Anti-­Croce will amount to the cheerful second dispatching of (Italian Neo-­)Hegelianism, for it will bring along the “consciousness of  being part of a particular hegemonic force,” and such consciousness “is the first stage towards a further progressive self-­consciousness in which theory and practice will finally be one” (Q11§12; SPN, 333). When at the beginning of this chapter we explored Gramsci’s use of the comic trope with respect to both Croce and De Sanctis, we came to understand 43. One doesn’t have to read far into Engels’s “Anti-­Dühring” to come across an attitude that is alien to Gramsci: “Herr Dühring [ . . . ] is one of the most characteristic types of this bumptious pseudo-­science which in Germany nowadays is forcing its way to the front everywhere and is drowning everything with its resounding—­sublime nonsense” (Friedrich Engels, Anti-­ Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, trans. Emile Burns, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, 50 vols. [New York: International Publishers, 1975–­2004], 25:6–­7).

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Gramsci’s famous notion of  “translatability” as something distinct from literal “translation,” of course, but also as something more existential than just cultural translation or the possibility of reliable communication between nations. In our analysis, translatability pointed to the soul-­searching intranational ability within groups of people or even within a single person to advance and communicate through the local, national, and cosmopolitan, without ever losing sight of what is overcome. It is “sticking to one’s roots,” as it were, and practicing self-­listening, in order to be the masses or the recipient of a message one is delivering as an intellectual. Here we take a fresh look at one of Gramsci’s most famous notions, “hegemony,” and in Gramsci’s confrontation with Croce we see that the idea of  hegemony points to something more primordial than its accepted political definition as the paradigm regulating the interaction between social classes. Again, what we find is more existential: hegemony is something personally experienced by Gramsci before it is ever theorized or observed on the field. It amounts to the necessary reckoning with one’s intellectual pieties. Indeed, there is little that is extrinsic about it; hegemony points, rather, to an inward rite of passage, to a part of us that develops unconsciously at first, but that we regain as our own in critical self-­analysis. The Gramsci we meet is a man mature enough for such undertaking. But then we might ask, on what terms did Gramsci first participate in Croceanism? How did Gramsci and his post–­World War I generation come to be colonized by Croce in the first place? This is where Croce’s story ends and Gramsci’s begins.

R e h e a r s i n g t h e A n t i - C­ r o c e In 1948, just as the important Turin press, Einaudi, began releasing Gramsci’s notebooks, some Italian intellectuals entertained the possibility of a smooth succession from an aging Croce to a posthumous Gramsci, as reflected in this romantic image: [Croce] escorted us through a long path, up to a closed door, behind which we know lies a different world [ . . . ] tomorrow’s world [ . . . ]. In front of that closed door we are joined by the frail figure of Antonio Gramsci, who, handing over the bundle of his disorderly papers, penned in the solitude of his detention, gave us to understand with a glance that they contained a key to proceed further.44 44. Cited in Guido Liguori, Gramsci conteso. Interpretazioni, dibattiti, e polemiche (1922–­ 2012) (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2012), 86. For some of the information that follows I am also

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Croce, like a Dantesque Virgil, guides Italians to the threshold of an Elysium he is forbidden to enter, and Gramsci, like Saint Peter at the pearly gates, rattles the keys to a postwar kingdom to be rebuilt according to his vision. This passage shows the excitement with which the first installments of Gramsci’s works were received. A rich (though incomplete) selection of Gramsci’s correspondence appeared first, in 1947, deliberately intended to precede the six projected volumes that would follow between 1948 and 1951, in lieu of an introduction. The six volumes contained the practically unabridged contents of the Prison Notebooks, albeit not chronologically sequenced as written (the latter philological feat was achieved only in 1975). Instead they were ordered in thematic clusters, starting with a volume titled Historical Materialism and Benedetto Croce’s Philosophy that includes some of the most systematic measure of Gramsci’s output and is centered, as we have come to expect, upon the figure beyond but only through whom Gramsci, himself a grateful antagonist, thought that a new intellectual program could be established. It is safe to assume that few among Gramsci’s first general readers understood that the publishing plan was guided by inimical feelings. In fact, only at the last minute was it decided that the volume on Croce, slated as second, would be released first. The intent was to ensure that Gramsci’s criticism would intercept the lingering influence of an octogenarian Croce, who, as it happened, lived to offer his increasingly disgruntled comments on the published installments as a last act of resistance before meeting his end in 1952, just as the multivolume project came to completion. The arbiter of this editorial strategy was Palmiro Togliatti (1893–­1964), a onetime partner-­in-­arms of a young Gramsci and subsequently, in the forced absence of the latter, the leader of the Italian communist party from 1927 until his death in 1964.45 Throughout his long career, Togliatti equaled Croce in cantankerousness, and so he accompanied the unearthing of a gentler Gramsci with programmatic pieces of his own, denouncing what he saw as Croce’s arrogant autobiographical assimilation of the birth and death of theoretical Marxism and, more controversially, exacerbating Gramsci’s insinuations regarding Croce’s passive and therefore more deplorable tolerance of the fascist regime. indebted to Togliatti editore di Gramsci, ed. Chiara Daniele (Rome: Carocci, 2005); and Fran­ cesca Chiarotto, Operazione Gramsci. Alla conquista degli intellettuali nell’Italia del dopoguerra (Milan: Mondadori, 2011). 45. The true nature of the relationship between Gramsci and Togliatti has been debated. See Paolo Spriano, Gramsci in carcere e il partito (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1977); and Chiara Daniele, ed., Gramsci a Roma, Togliatti a Mosca. Il carteggio del 1926 (Turin: Einaudi, 1999).

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Evidently, the feeling in the Gramscian camp was that these two intellectual giants, one a champion of communism and one of liberalism, could not be made to coexist. Togliatti’s publications also sought to chip away at the De Sanctis–­Labriola–­Croce legacy—­not only by substituting Gramsci for Croce in this powerful intellectual lineage but by adding Gramsci’s name to the long tradition of  Italian martyrs of thought, from Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, and Galileo Galilei, at the dawn of modernity, to Giacomo Matteotti (1885–­1924), Giovanni Amendola (1882–­1926), and Piero Gobetti (1901–­1926), in our era. Indeed, the latter three were victims of the same regime that at its leader’s direct command had Gramsci “dragged from one jail to the next, in shackles, weighed down with chains, in the filthy police wagons where men are buried alive.”46 In a piece never readied for publication, a characteristically uninhibited Togliatti expresses himself most inventively: [A]nd Antonio Gramsci, how did he work? What a glaring contrast, for whoever cares to develop it! Croce, wealthy, placed from the start in an environment close to the high spheres of culture, free from any material constriction, and this for his entire existence, without any inconvenience, able to lay claim to libraries of rare and precious books, patrons, and a family. And Gramsci! Poor, but poor in the sense of being completely deprived of any good and material possibility, must make himself, must, before thought, fight for the very conditions in which thought can occur, etc., etc. and despite this! thought is in him one with action, and action leads him to incarceration, etc., etc. (This reference to Gramsci may seem unpleasant. Leave it? Take it out?).47

In this passage, Togliatti wrests Croce and Gramsci from the heavenly spheres where some readers have placed them and makes them symbols of the eternal social conflict between the rich and the poor. Yet, for all of its appealing contrasts—­the trust fund kid and the underprivileged child, the henchman and the subaltern—­Togliatti’s colorful contraposition attempts to drive a wedge between what is in fact indivisible. Togliatti’s agenda does not allow him to acknowledge Gramsci’s repeated confessions of his existential overlap with Croce. He omits, for example, a 46. Palmiro Togliatti, “Antonio Gramsci capo della classe operaia italiana,” in La politica nel pensiero e nell’azione. Scritti e discorsi (1917–­1964), ed. Michele Ciliberto and Giuseppe Vacca (Milan: Bompiani, 2014), 964. 47. Palmiro Togliatti, “Appunti per un saggio su Croce,” in La politica nel pensiero e nell’azione, 1328.

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famous passage in the letters in which Gramsci affirms that “like many other intellectuals of the time (that is to say, during the first fifteen years of the century) [we] found ourselves on a common ground that was as follows: we [felt] we were participating wholly or in part in the movement of moral and intellectual reform initiated in Italy by Benedetto Croce, whose first point was this, that modern man can and must live without religion, and that means without religion, revealed, positive, mythological, or whatever else you want to call it. This point seems to me even today the major contribution to world culture made by modern Italian intellectuals” (LP, 2:56). Reflecting on his youth, Gramsci expresses a sense of  belonging that Croce willingly reciprocates when, reviewing the letters, he points to the communist thinker as “one of us,” despite his politics, one “of those who in the first decades of the century in Italy attempted to form for themselves a philosophical and historical mind adequate to the problems of the present, and among whom I, too, was, as an older man among younger men.”48 Croce’s references to Gramsci in the postwar period focus exclusively on the philosophical: Gramsci’s “renewed understanding of philosophy in its speculative and dialectical as opposed to positivistic tradition,” his “wide vision of  history,” “the unity of erudition and philosophy,” and so on. They gloss over, that is, Gramsci’s religious relationship to whom he referred to as “pope” Croce, that same paradigm of secularized religiousness that Croce employed in describing his relationship to De Sanctis and more specifically to Labriola in his autobiography in order to represent his gradual intellectual emancipation.49 Togliatti seems to acknowledge this facet of Gramsci when he compares Labriola and Gramsci, and finds the latter superior as a thinker, not just because he brought about an Italian “translation” of the Russian intellectual and political experience, but because he brought about its “conversion” in Italian spiritual terms—­although in Gramsci’s case the conversion amounts to something more resembling a phoenixlike regeneration from Croce’s ashes.50 Attending to moments of conversion spiritualizes the “civil achievement” that Gramsci attributed to Italian thinkers: a secularization of the mind that 48. Benedetto Croce, Review of Antonio Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere (Turin: Einaudi, 1947), Quaderni della “critica” 3, no. 8 (1947): 86. 49. Gramsci often refers to Croce as a “secular pope” for his influence on Italian history and indeed as someone who “has sometimes known how to conduct himself more ably than the pope” himself (Q10II§41iv; FSPN, 469–­70). 50. Cited in Liguori, Gramsci conteso, 134.

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was never fully consummated, however, not even after Croce. It is an Italian prerogative to attend to an achievement in constant need of being rekindled. We may recall the way in which Croce, an idealist, pursued this undertaking solipsistically, seeing himself as a new Hegel and seeing De Sanctis’s and Labriola’s contributions as phases of a universal development finally brought to fruition in his own works. For Gramsci, the achievement is not only perennial, but also to be perpetually carried out, collectively and collaboratively, among a generation of peers. Here it is useful to turn back to those early decades of the twentieth century that feature heavily in everyone’s reminiscences, when, having moved from rural Sardinia to industrial Turin, Gramsci founded the “Club of Moral Life.” This association promoted intellectual debates meant to “accustom the young people who join the Socialist political and economic movement to the disinterested discussion of ethical and social problems,” and the syllabus Gramsci put together for the occasion is of interest to us, as it spans from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, an original source for autobiographism and any subsequent conversion narrative, to excerpts from the Communist Manifesto, which might have been read kerygmatically or like Ignatian exercises, in the wake of Labriola. The syllabus also included selections from the many and more accessible writings in which Croce circulated his idealism, as Gramsci put it, “intimately, unhindered by scholastic pedantry” (Q10I§4; FSPN, 338). Provided with these materials, Gramsci says: The student reads, takes notes and then presents the results of his researches and reflections at a meeting. Then someone—­a member of the audience, if someone has prepared, or myself—­intervenes to make objections, suggest alternative solutions and perhaps explore the broader implications of a given idea or argument. In this way, a discussion opens up, which ideally continues until all those present have been enabled to understand and absorb the most important results of this collective work. Beyond this, the Club has among its objectives a full acceptance of reciprocal control by the members over each person’s daily activity—­family life, work and social interaction. We want each member to have the courage and the moral energy to make a public confession and to accept the advice and guidance of his friends. We want to create a reciprocal bond of trust: an intellectual and moral communion, uniting us all.51 51. Antonio Gramsci, Pre-­Prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy, trans. Virginia Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 52.

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Gramsci, who may have structured his seminars according to pedagogical ideas that De Sanctis picked up during his experience at the school of Puoti (see Q12§1), understood his club as a cultural fellowship, where “culture” amounts to “self-­awareness” and which is at the same time self-­consciously anti-­idealistic, an activity carried out convivially (all or none!) rather than in solitude or in interiore homine as the Augustinian and idealistic traditions impose. One of the debate topics that may have survived the club and made it into the notebooks is Gramsci’s wonder at “the relative popularity of Croce’s thought, a popularity the more notable in that there is nothing in Croce that might capture the imagination and excite strong passions or give rise to movements of a romantic character.” Gramsci finds some truth in the idea that Croce might be considered one of Italy’s greatest writers after Alessandro Manzoni and his oeuvre a worthy heir to Galileo’s scientific prose. Yet, the reason for his renown, especially among younger readers, is “to be sought in the greater adherence to real life of Crocean as compared with other speculative philosophies” (Q10I§4; FSPN, 337). By the time Gramsci established his club, this thirst for life or for existentialism on the part of young intellectuals had already found a champion in Renato Serra (1884–­1915), whose terse works had attracted Gramsci and, we may assume, landed a spot on the club’s reading list alongside Labriola’s translation of Marx’s Manifesto and Croce’s dinner pieces. Serra, who was seven years Gramsci’s senior and was known (and sometimes too readily dismissed) in his day as an “irrationalist,” was arguably the coiner of the Anti-­Croce genre and definitely a model for Gramsci in that pursuit.52 By 1915, two years before the club was established, Serra had already ascended to the status of martyr among Gramsci and his generation with the publication of A Literary Man’s Examination of Conscience. This spiritual reckoning offered an unfiltered glance into a young man’s inner turmoil with respect to the great war and its opportunities. In Serra’s account, the war was an event that transcended the clear-­cut dichotomy of neutralism and voluntarism debated by the nation’s old and wise leaders, including Croce. But, as Serra scolds at the outset of his pamphlet, Croce, too, like all of literature 52. See Gianfranco Contini, “Serra e l’irrazionale,” in Scritti in onore di Renato Serra (Milan: Garzanti, 1948), 81–­113. On Gramsci and Serra, see Massimo Lollini, “ ‘La luce che si è spenta.’ Gramsci interprete di Renato Serra,” Italian Culture 10 (1992): 97–­114; and Niva Lorenzini, “Gramsci, Serra e l’‘uomo nuovo,’ ” in Antonio Gramsci e le tradizioni politiche dell’Emilia-­ Romagna (Bologna: Clueb, 1999), 67–­78.

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and its representatives, is destined to remain the same, unchanged if not untouched, by a traumatic but ultimately gratuitous and inconsequential event, as Serra came to see the war: Or would you rather talk about Croce, who appears dwarfed, removed, seized by the kind of pedagogue’s acrimony that is at once unctuous and spiteful, who deigns to comfort our anxieties from the height of  his philosophy, himself certain that everything in the end will be fine and to the advantage of progress even in this war, nor could it be otherwise. And in the meantime, he does not miss the chance with respect to our impassioned partiality to lecture us on the merits of Germanic culture, correcting blunders with a grin on his face that is at once a punch to and a taunting of all our political tendencies, democratic and Masonic, and if he can crack a whip at some insolent youngster, among those who are to be blamed for having contradicted him too often, all the better.53

And Croce’s whip does come cracking, first in a private letter, in which he accuses Serra—­whom he had for some time treated as an unofficial pupil—­of engaging in literary “onanism.” And later, publicly, in terms just slightly subdued by Serra’s death at the age of thirty-­one in the trenches of a war he had finally joined for lack of better options, Croce labeled Serra the guileless victim of the Italian modernist movement that goes by the name of Decadentism.54

53. Renato Serra, Esame di coscienza di un letterato, ed. Marino Biondi and Roberto Greggi (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2015), 128. 54. Benedetto Croce, A History of Italy: 1871–­1915, trans. Cecilia M. Ady (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963) 281–­82: “Decadentism was rife, and widespread in its effects, especially among the young men. One of these, highly gifted and a gallant soldier, who was among the first to fall in the war, wrote an article entitled Esame di coscienza di un letterato (The self-­examination of a man of  letters), in which he confessed with complete sincerity his attitude towards the war and towards the intervention of Italy. He refused to admit that he was actuated by any noble ideal, any hope of increased power or moral elevation, or even of mere change; yet he decided that war was desirable, and that he personally desired it, at the dictates of a ‘passion,’ a feeling which possessed him that if the war did not take place, he and those who felt with him would lose the ‘supreme moment’ which can never return, and of which the memory fills the prosaic years which must needs be lived through. Thus he reduced war in his country’s cause to something not far removed from the transient thrill of a voluptuary’s pleasure.” See also Benedetto Croce and Renato Serra, Polemica sulla storia (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2012); Eugenio Garin, “Serra e Croce,” in Antonio Brasini, ed., Scritti in onore di Renato Serra: Per il cinquantenario della morte (Florence: le Monnier, 1974), 73–­92.

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But Serra’s critical introjection of Croce was more nuanced than what can be gathered from these last hours of passion, and Gramsci drew much from Serra’s earlier pieces. In a 1910 review of a projected series to be curated by Croce with the aim of revisiting the canon of Italian literature, Serra acknowledged the complexity of a reckoning with Croce. “It is not my wish to overcome anybody,” a twenty-­six-­year-­old Serra states, offering himself as a generational test subject for a necessary and long overdue “introspection.” What is dead can be overcome, not that which is alive, and Croce is alive as a “river in flood.”55 Indeed, Serra notes, Croce had “taken hold” of  his thoughts, “little by little,” like a symbiotic partner at first, but then more like a parasite, and had gained a “slow and growing dominion” over him: My experience of [Croce] began, as for many others, with the figure of the exact and honest erudite man that emerged one day through his reviews in the Giornale storico; and it grew then without suspicion, by dint of additions and subsequent tweaks, accepting the clarity of  his argumentation first on one point than on another concerning specific literary questions, and ultimately lingering on his ideas in comparison with those of other, apparently more interesting, thinkers, with a curiosity that imperceptibly turned into complaisant agreement and finally intellectual joy. So that I feel more inclined toward him, not like a genuine student or like those who appear to exist for him and to swear by his name, nor like those who have not been able to follow him, not at all or just to a point, in the development of his thought, and who lash out at him because he walked further.56

Serra is describing something akin to a demonic possession in which what is “living” cannot be easily distinguished from what is “dead,” to recall Croce’s own catchwords and his selective approach in reviewing the Hegelian legacy.57 Croce, a “living dead” in Serra’s caustic appreciation, may not be reduced to a set of doctrines, discoveries, and principles; he is rather an “activity” of the mind, the agent informing and guiding a younger generation’s intellectual endeavors.58 A “new classicism,” if ever there will be one in which the past does

55. Renato Serra, “Per un catalogo,” in Scritti di Renato Serra, ed. Giuseppe De Robertis and Alfredo Grilli, 2 vols. (Florence: Le Monnier, 1938), 1:87. 56. Serra, “Per un catalogo,” 1:87–­88. 57. Reference is to Benedetto Croce, What Is Living and What Is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, trans. Douglas Ainslie (London: Macmillan, 1915). 58. Serra, “Le lettere,” in Scritti di Renato Serra, 1:353–­54.

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not take over the present, will have to learn how to manage the overbearing presence of Croce’s vampiric “impersonality.”59 Serra allows us to grasp more readily what remains partially hidden in Gramsci—­namely, that the Anti-­Croce, the institutionalization of a necessary confrontation with Croce, the greatest Italian thinker of his time, amounts again in the history of Italian letters to the existential introjection of that anti­ rhetorical, anti-­intellectualist, or anti-­Petrarchan stance De Sanctis programmatically illustrated in his works.60 Serra, who in fact staunchly and repeatedly rejected any affiliation with De Sanctis, surely, as part of  his efforts to disassociate himself from Croce, attracted Gramsci as a monument of antirhetoric and as a phenomenological literary critic. He exercised the latter skill most visibly on a shared literary passion: Rudyard Kipling. According to Serra, Kipling’s literature “spares us from any of the efforts typical of a reader, any exertion to adapt mentally, he does it all by himself on the page and in our soul, so that we can yield to him with our hands and feet bound.”61 Yet here and there, in metacritical asides, we see Serra jolted out of his serene surrender: “The grammarian would note here . . .” or “the critic would say there . . .” that everywhere Kipling relies on “preterition.”62 In other words, boisterous critics may question Kipling’s artlessness, adducing that he is calling attention to something through omission, as the standard understanding of preterition goes. And, it is implied, the same type of intellectual might question, too, whether Serra, while praising Kipling, is not in fact indirectly critiquing Croce and other figures associated with lofty Italianate rhetoric. If so, however, Serra is leveraging the theological acceptance of preterition—­that is, divine reprobation or rejection of the unworthy of  heaven and unelect—­something that applies equally to the motley society of pariahs so exemplarily described by Kipling as well as to the plethora of destitute children, a whole generation of younger Italian intellectuals in metaphorical extension, whom Croce refuses to acknowledge and pave the way for. We may well guess that Gramsci came to love Kipling through Serra, as attested by one of his earliest prison letters to Tatiana, his sister-­in-­law and his main if not sole interlocutor during the long years of his incarceration. At first, when Gramsci was brought to Ustica in early December 1926, he was 59. Serra, “Le lettere,” in Scritti di Renato Serra, 1:259. 60. Compare Renato Serra, “Intorno al modo di leggere i Greci,” in Scritti di Renato Serra, 2:467–­98. 61. Renato Serra, “Rudyard Kipling,” in Scritti di Renato Serra, 2:222. 62. Serra, “Rudyard Kipling,” 2:197–­98.

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at a loss for words, but this tiny prison island in the Tyrrhenian Sea afforded him direct experience of the coatti, or “common detainees,” and therefore of a cross-­section of society. To Tatiana he wrote that the microcosm of human rabble he encountered reminded him of Kipling’s short story “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes,” a tale in which the namesake character precipitates his horse into a sandy ditch and is transported into a parallel world populated by cackling “loathsome fakirs” and “Hindu mendicants” feeding on crows. This demi-­monde or “republic of wild beasts,” “where the Dead who did not die, but may not live, have established their headquarters,” represents the limen in which Gramsci will be operating from now on, the otherworld whence he will come to exercise his influence.63 In fact, Gramsci, while still firmly among the living, had made reference to Kipling eleven years before his imprisonment—­to commemorate Serra’s death. The title of his obituary, “The Light That Turned Off,” alludes to Kip­ ing’s 1891 novel, The Light That Failed, in which the main character is killed, like Serra, by a stray bullet to the head on the battlefield. Given what we have come to understand about Gramsci’s intellectual affiliations, we can appreciate this early piece as a declaration of future intents that Gramsci himself could not have been fully aware of. The obituary begins with an autobiographical reference to a “miserable lad” who was kept away from formal schooling by health issues but who nonetheless brought his “frail self ” before a professor who proceeded to interrogate him on the eighty-­four articles of the Statuto, or Constitution, that was enforced in Italy from 1848 to 1948. This episode exemplifies the traumatic experience that informed Gramsci’s keen and lifelong interest in a reform of Italian pedagogy; it was also the trauma for which Serra’s “lesson in humanity” proved to be the cure—­a lesson that in a young Gramsci’s view updated the lesson of Francesco De Sanctis, “the greatest critic that Europe ever had,” for modern times.64 A twenty-­four-­year-­old Gramsci celebrated the combined influence on him of De Sanctis and Serra by comparing the revolution they started to the advent of the Franciscan movement in the Middle Ages at a time when “egghead reflection had smothered the impetus of faith.”65 Together, De Sanctis and Serra reveal to the world that what scholarship has rendered impenetrable is in fact 63. Rudyard Kipling, “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes,” in The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3. 64. Antonio Gramsci, “La luce che si è spenta,” in Cronache torinesi (1913–­1917), ed. Sergio Caprioglio (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 23. 65. Gramsci, “La luce che si è spenta,” 23.

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accessible and for everyone to enjoy. “These two men,” says Gramsci, unwittingly sketching his future intellectual program, have been true teachers in the Greek understanding of the term, that is, mystagogues, but in initiating us to the mysteries they have shown that these mysteries are vain constructions of  literary men, and that everything is plain and clear for those who have a pure eye and perceive light as color and not as vibrations of ions and electrons. They are collaborators of poetry, readers of poetry. Each essay of theirs is a new light that switches on for us. We feel as if absorbed into an enchantment. The world that surrounds us no longer reaches our senses, does not stimulate a reaction in the senses. Nothing else exists but the work of art, us, and the teacher who guides us. [ . . . ] A word is no longer a grammatical element to be categorized according to rules and bookish systems; it is a sound, a note in a bar of music that unfurls, picks up again, expands in light airy volutes that conquer our spirit and make it vibrate in unison with that of the author. [ . . . ] We vibrate in all the fibers of our being, we feel purified by this fusion with another being that has shaken us, that has made us partake of his own life, that has given us the illusion of being ourselves creators of those harmonies, given that we perceive them as ours and feel that they will never cease to be part of our spirit.66

Time-­honored “values are overturned” and “idols shattered” in Serra’s work, yet Serra was unable to differentiate De Sanctis from his self-­avowed heir, Croce, and thus he operated throughout his short life in cheerless and dismal intellectual solitude. But Gramsci alters Serra’s posthumous reception. He supplies him with the one predecessor, De Sanctis, who can offer a controversial validation for Serra’s anti-­Crocean efforts, and he pledges himself as Serra’s heir. This transaction restores all parties to tradition understood rightly, as organic. A passage from that section of the notebooks known as The Modern Prince helps illuminate what Gramsci is doing. Reflecting on the expression of  “State spirit,” a concept that “presupposes ‘continuity,’ either with the past, or with tradition, or with the future,” Gramsci realizes that in order to overcome “individualism,” any given action, political or intellectual, should be understood as always “already begun” and, for that matter, “continued” after our intervention, in “solidarity” with forces that we may or may not be fully aware of. The “duration” of such action cannot be grasped in abstract reference to an 66. Gramsci, “La luce che si è spenta,” 24–­25.

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eternal past or an equally eternal future, but rather should be experienced according to our delimited perception of abstruse temporal coordinates, where past, present, and future are embodied by the three generations who interact at any given moment in history. “[W]e feel ourselves linked to men who are now extremely old,” Gramsci clarifies, “and who represent for us the past which still lives among us, which we need to know and to settle our accounts with, which is one of the elements of the present and one of the premises of the future. We also feel ourselves linked to our children, to the generations which are being born and growing up, and for which we are responsible” (Q15§4; SPN, 146–­47). Only by permeating time’s passing with filial piety or gratitude and parental scruple or care can one avoid the pitfalls of a “cultish” experience of tradition; a tradition employed to affirm “ideology” rather than to make provisions for one’s “successors.” The latter is a necessary achievement for “victory” rightly understood, a common victory. In fact, “the preparation of one’s own successors is as important as what one does for victory” (Q14§70; SPN, 153). This, then, is how people finally manage to subtract themselves from ideology or hegemony—­by finding their place in history, as followers and beneficiaries, to be sure, but also, it is implied, as precursors and harbingers. Or, as Petrarch would put it, as at once primi and ultimi, first and last. Thus does Gramsci reiterate Petrarch, who humanized temporal coordinates in order to understand the future as posterity, as an interaction between distant men. Petrarch’s Familiares and Seniles were dedicated to preparing one’s successors, and Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are engaged in the obverse labor of setting straight one’s precursors. In both efforts, Croce seems to have failed. He put too much effort into superseding his predecessors, De Sanctis and Labriola alike, while neglecting to structure his legacy in anticipation of an inevitable future. In a show of muscle intended to reciprocate Croce’s premature cannibalization of  Marxism, Gramsci finally realizes that his task is to assert himself as Croce’s rightful successor, over and against what Croce himself might want. So far I have investigated the origins and refinement of Gramsci’s purpose. In the final section of this chapter, I examine the literary form and hermeneutical method of Gramscian agency. Its literary form is autobiographical, as we have seen. And as we have seen, too, with the other congenial thinkers analyzed in this study, the challenge before Gramsci is to reconfigure a personal and self-­serving construct, whose aims are at best exemplary, into a collective will whose iteration is the basis of tradition. And for Gramsci as for others, such a legacy will retain its Italian specificity only as long as it keeps up its exclusive concern for practice. This Italian metacritical obsession, which Gramsci

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finally names “molecular,” is far from being a notion and thus something theorizable, as is commonly maintained, but is a methodology observable only in practice. “Molecular” is in effect the ne plus ultra instantiation of a hermeneutics that pushes a cultural/traditional/national inclination to its limits, to a point of no return: more than absolute historicity and narrativity. As we saw with De Sanctis, then, we shall see that in Gramsci a healthy recovery follows only upon exacerbation.

T h e ( A u t o - ­) b i o g r a p h y o f a N a t i o n Gramsci’s historiographical illustration, highlighting generational family ties through reference to parents and children, is a lesson for intellectual history. It points to what is too often lost in retrospective examination of the reciprocal influences or perceived continuities and contrasts between related thinkers. To clarify its relevance to our object of study: it is one thing to explore the legacy of  Italian modern thought sequentially, by comparing and contrasting a mature Croce to a mature Gramsci, and comparing both of these to an equally definitive De Sanctis—­which is a bibliographical feat that draws on their publications exclusively. It is quite another thing to explore this legacy chronoscopically, as it were, according to the fine existential pace in which an intellectual continuum is experienced and willed into existence by the figures involved. To put it even more concretely, the fact that Croce was fostered by Silvio Spaventa and his family upon losing his parents and sister in the earthquake of 26 July 1883 can be understood, yes, as a telling anecdote regarding Croce’s factual familiarity with the Neapolitan tradition of Hegelianism he came to represent. Yet only by paying closer, empathic attention to such a relocation does one come to appreciate some crucial details—­that, for example, the deeply traumatized orphan was welcomed into a family that was continuously grieving, first for Bertrando Spaventa, who died on 20 September, and shortly thereafter, for De Sanctis, who died on 29 December of the year Croce was taken in, thus upsetting his first holidays away from home. Using a compassionate microscope, or what Gramsci would refer to as a “molecular” reading, reality often exceeds fantasy, spiritualizing the literalness of life and pointing in this case to an immediate, as opposed to retrospectively construed, tropological interconnection between the simultaneous death of the forefathers of Italian Hegelianism (who were also coincidentally born in the same year!) and Croce’s resurrection from under the rubble of the earthquake. The interment of Italian Hegelianism amounts to a prophetic admonition for a young Croce, at once an opportunity and a mission. Provided that

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his intellectual life lives up to expectations, one event will prefigure the other and will forever after relate Spaventa’s and De Sanctis’s coterminous lives and Croce’s, like the old and new testaments of the modern Italian intellectual legacy. It is not farfetched to view this history through an allegorical or biblical lens, when we consider that Gramsci also used apostolic references when he was first coming to terms with the notion of intellectual familiarity. “Books and magazines only offer general ideas, sketches (more or less successful) of general currents in the world’s life,” he wrote to his wife, Julia, in 1928, “but they cannot give the immediate, direct, vivid impression of the lives of Peter, Paul, and John, of single, real individuals, and unless one understands them one cannot understand what is being universalized and generalized” (LP, 1:233). And immediately following this passage, which points to the idiosyncrasies of evangelic life with its surplus or plenitude of meaning, and inspired by feelings of desperate alienation, Gramsci debuts the notion of “molecular sensation,” a sensation lost to him in his bookish solitude yet indispensable, he realizes, to grasp “the life of the complex whole” that his wife and children represent—­a wife who has become increasingly estranged, and children, Delio and Giuliano, who are practically unknown, the latter having been born after his imprisonment. By 1933, his feelings have arrived at a personal breaking point, and Gramsci perceives a “split” in his personality, his old, free self being “completely absorbed” into the convicted felon he has become. This time, writing to Tania, he elaborates the notion of “molecular” into a psychopathic hermeneutical category and wonders to what extent castaways can bring awareness to the metamorphosis brought upon them by the instinct to survive, which eventually turns them into cannibals: But are they [the civilized men and the cannibals they became] in reality the same people? Between the two moments, that in which the alternative presented itself as a purely theoretical hypothesis and that in which the alternative presents itself with all the force of immediate necessity, there has been a process of  “molecular” transformation, rapid though it may have been, due to which the people of before no longer are the people of afterward, and one can no longer say except from the point of view of the state records office and the law [ . . . ] that they are the same people. (LP, 2:278–­79)

“Molecular” thus relates to what Gramsci elsewhere calls “living philology,” or an active and conscious “ ‘co-­participation,’ through ‘compassionality,’ ”

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“through experience of immediate particulars” of lived and intellectual life observed in an absolute historicist framework that makes clear the consecution observed between quantitative (or material) and qualitative (or spiritual) changes (Q7§6; PN, 3:159).67 Only through such capillary self-­observation, from within and without, is “ ‘critical’ comprehension” of ourselves achieved, a comprehension honed in turn by a faculty that Gramsci, again in his letters, defines oxymoronically as “concrete imagination,” or “the faculty of  being able to relive the life of others, such as it is really determined, with its needs, its requirements, etc., not to represent it artistically, but to understand it and come into intimate contact with it; and also so as not to be harmful” (LP, 2:371). Through the molecular insight afforded by concrete imagination, Gramsci strives to grasp the “fully fledged personality” of his children despite “knowing nothing of their intellectual development and concrete life.” And—­here is the point—­these same tools, gleaned from grim personal experience rather than, say, a systematic review of nineteenth-­century German Historismus (Croce’s sources), are the tools that define him as an intellectual historian.68 What we notice in the meantime is that the question of how one fathers the future or is fathered by the past is concretized beyond metaphor in both Croce and Gramsci, for it turns out that no matter how far back or how far forward in time we reach, we may discover a relation, by just a few degrees of separation. In 1930, as he was fine-­tuning his mind to a molecular apperception of time’s passing, Gramsci wrote a letter to Tania in which he again laments that his family does not comprehend his state of mind, while enthusiastically sharing with her his discovery of an unexpected source of compassion. This, an anthology that Croce edited in 1898 to commemorate his foster parent, contained Silvio Spaventa’s youthful writings, prison letters, and proceedings from the trial that sentenced him to death, life in prison, and finally perpetual exile, after the events of 1848. Gramsci is struck by how, in his prison letters to his brother Bertrando, Silvio “perfectly expresses states of mind that resemble those that I often experience.” But there is more: Gramsci identifies with the old Hegelian, for Silvio Spaventa “was certainly not a weak character, a whiner like 67. For this connection, see Eleonora Forenza’s informative entry on the rather slippery notion of  “molecolare” in Guido Liguori and Pasquale Voza, eds., Dizionario gramsciano (1926–­ 1937) (Rome: Carocci, 2009), 551–­55. 68. It could perhaps be useful to look into the similarities between Gramsci’s molecularism and Dilthey’s notion of Verstehen, itself not cited by Gramsci but of great importance to Croce. See Fulvio Tessitore, “Croce e Dilthey,” in Filosofia e storiografia (Naples: Morano, 1985), 287–­ 308; and Giuseppe Cacciatore, Filosofia pratica e filosofia civile nel pensiero di Benedetto Croce (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2005), chap. 2.

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others” and, more important, was among the few who “always refused to apply for clemency to the King of  Naples; nor did he turn to religion, but on the contrary as he often writes, he became more and more convinced that Hegel’s philosophy was the only system and the only conception of the world that was rational and worthy of the thought of those times” (LP, 1:305). Since Gramsci also staunchly resisted his family’s repeated entreaties to appeal to the fascist regime for mercy, and likewise was by this time fully persuaded of the need to dedicate all of his efforts to Hegelianism in a way befitting his day and age—­in other words, as a revision of Crocean idealism—­this letter marks an important turning point in his evolution. Arguably for the first time, Gramsci seems to recognize the possibility that he will also one day be publicly collected and read. If so, will he appear as “funny” and “comically anachronistic” as the “romantic” Silvio? At the same time, as an avid reader of Croce, especially of his Contribution and other autobiographical writings, Gramsci may well have seized on the experimental nature of Croce’s edition of Spaventa’s works. The latter was no mere chronological assemblage of  hitherto unpublished documents, but rather, as Croce avers in the prologue, an attempt to provide the first “biography” of Silvio Spaventa by “stitching” archival papers with introductions, comments, reports, family anecdotes, and other narrative paratextual fillers. Only Croce, a scholarly expert, a first-­person witness, and a family member, to boot, could bring this kind of involvement to the project.69 Croce’s volume is therefore as much a posthumous biography of Silvio as it is Croce’s own prenatal autobiography, the story of  his implied existence. In the very first lines, Croce seems to be playing with this confounding ambiguity, as he quotes from a letter that Silvio wrote to his father at the age of twenty-­one while residing in Naples: “You wanted to know from me [ . . . ] how I managed to stay [in Naples] without any help. I will tell you, then, in brief, that in regards to my future prospects, I owe everything to uncle Benedetto [Croce], who invested me with an affection that you could hardly have imagined.”70 Spaventa owes his future to Croce . . . which makes sense in view of the present edition. But wait . . . isn’t Croce here quoting directly from Spaventa?! Croce is intentionally disorienting his readers in the very opening of his (auto)biography, putting their attention to the test and forcing them to peruse the page more closely, to mark the exact opening and closing of quotation marks—­forcing 69. Silvio Spaventa, Dal 1848 al 1861. Lettere, scritti, documenti, ed. Benedetto Croce (Naples: Libreria Editrice Italiana, 1898), vii. 70. Spaventa, Dal 1848 al 1861, 2.

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readers to realize, in short, that, yes, astonishingly, Silvio, in his youth, at just about the same age as Croce at the time of his relocation, was entrusted to the care of an uncle whose name was Benedetto Croce, who saw him through his studies and gained his eternal gratitude. The world-­renowned Croce thus gives us a palindromic story in which a distant, homonymous (and namesake?) relative fathered Silvio Spaventa, who will father Croce in turn—­to Croce’s amusement and, we may gather from what follows, inspiring emulation in Gramsci as well. In his letter to Tania, in which Gramsci dwells, as mentioned, on the subject of the collapse of family ties among convicts, Gramsci opts not to repeat himself but to cite at length from one of Silvio’s letters. This letter, like the one singled out by Croce, is addressed to Silvio’s father, but it is written many years later, during the years of incarceration: It has been two months now that I have had no news from you; more than four and perhaps even more since I have had news from my sisters; and for some time from Bertrando. Do you believe that for a man like me, who is proud of having an affectionate and very youthful heart, this deprivation does not prove to be immeasurably distressing? I do not think that I am now less loved than I ever was by my family; but misfortune habitually has two effects—­it often extinguishes [all affection for who is unfortunate and just as often extinguishes] in the unfortunate all affection for everyone. I am not as much afraid of the first of these two effects in you as of the second in me; for, sequestered as I am here from all human and loving intercourse, the great tedium, the long imprisonment, the suspicion of having been forgotten by everyone, slowly embitters and sterilizes my heart. (LP, 1:305, bracketed words omitted by translator, supplied from original text)

Readers well versed in the Gramscian correspondence will notice that Gramsci here indirectly addresses a father figure, if not his father, who is notoriously absent from the list of those addressed in his prison letters.71 More interesting for us is that, given Gramsci’s own assessment that Silvio’s words “perfectly” represent him, and by embedding the passage into the fabric of his own letter, Gramsci achieves a disorienting effect similar to what we find in Croce’s 71. His father, however, figures prominently in his preprison correspondence, where he is continuously reproached by Gramsci for lack of attention when studying in Turin. See Antonio Gramsci, A Great and Terrible World: The Pre-­Prison Letters (1908–­1926), ed. and trans. Derek Boothman (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2014).

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edition. In the process, he also points to an autobiographical overlap with Silvio, only to deny it, it seems, by following with this clarification: “Three generations have passed and progress has been made in all fields. What was possible for the grandparents is not possible for the grandchildren.” Does it hold true, though? The turbulent political summer of 1848 may be as personally relevant to him as it was to Croce, for in concluding the letter, Gramsci parenthetically confesses to Tania: “([M]y grandfather, I never told you this, was in fact a colonel in the Bourbon gendarmerie and probably was among those who arrested Spaventa [ . . . ])” (305). What Gramsci suggests in this letter, a review of Croce’s own intimate tribute to his foster-­father, is intellectual mingling, if not actual crossbreeding, with Croce’s own genealogy. In Gramsci’s case the story does not circle back on itself as it did with the two Benedettos, a circularity that may remind us that Bertrando Spaventa had appealed for the re-­“circulation” of idealism from Germany back to Italy, where it had originated in the Renaissance, to ensure its fulfillment.72 Rather, it points to a reversal of fortune: a grandfather who was a henchman of an incipient revolutionary Hegelianism and a grandchild forced to atone for that act of violence by suffering a spiritual captivity to idealism (through Croce’s hegemony) and actual captivity, inflicted by the allied forces of fascism. The upshot is that Gramsci, until now an outsider, finds a way to infiltrate the grand history of Italian Hegelianism in a way comparable to Croce, and to have its demise prefigure his destiny and his role as a casualty and in due time as a posthumous reformer, if not perpetrator, of the Italian philosophical tradition. When considering, retrospectively, past intellectual life and its influences on us, the question of one’s own rational/physical proximity (or collusion) with the object of study perpetually comes up, as do opportunities for disenfranchisement. Philological intimacy is something to be sought with one’s soul and that of others, so as to circumvent the allure of originality: “It is too easy to be original by doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing: this is just mechanical.” If based in opposition, the originality that results is “to have a personality on the cheap,” Gramsci affirms in his notebooks. Much harder to “distinguish oneself,” that is, to differentiate oneself in apposition (Q14§61; SCW, 124). Whether one is grappling with the question of molecular change 72. For a contextualization of  Bertrando Spaventa’s notion regarding the supposed “circulation” of  European thought from the Italian Renaissance to German idealism and, through him, back to Italy, see OR, chap. 1 (at 61–­84); and Bertrando Spaventa’s lectures collected in RIP, chaps.1 and 2.

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hypothetically, with reference to stranded men turned cannibals, or concretely, with reference to one’s personal family history, as in the letter on Silvio, the question is the same: how can one be oneself and yet different at any given time, and how can such minutely shifting conformity with oneself be represented or narrativized at the autobiographical/historiographical level? This question was first formulated by Giambattista Vico, whom, we know, Croce identified as the founder of Italian thought. Vico’s intellectual autobiography was the model, also, for Croce’s Contribution—­a text, we can now confidently state, that proved instrumental to Gramsci as a means to molecularly access Croce’s mind, and significantly his own mind as well, given the serendipitous and real ties that reinforce his obsessive admiration for his predecessor. If we read Vico through Gramscian eyes and terms, that is, empathically, we are able to see that Vico intended his entire corpus as an Anti-­Descartes, an implosion from within the epochal and pervasive Cartesian hegemony into which he was born and to which he was in thrall, for a while. And Vico, unlike Croce but like Gramsci, sought to construe his “anti-­” discourse in direct confrontation with the living man (Descartes) behind an intellectual monopoly (Cartesianism), a monopoly created philosophically, through the conscious suppression of precursors and heirs rather than their acknowledgment. In fact, few people before Vico, if anyone, seemed to have realized that the principles Descartes put forth in the Discourse on the Method relied on a preemptive dismissal of the Renaissance tradition, or its notable figures (who go unmentioned), and their humanistic values: travel, reading, knowledge of languages and of antiquity, and so on.73 In a passage already quoted in chapter 3 to illustrate Goldoni’s autobiographism, one that deserves to be recalled here, Vico takes a jab: [Vico] shall not here feign what René Descartes craftily feigned as to the method of his studies [of not being indebted to anyone and anything] simply in order to exalt his own philosophy and mathematics and degrade all the other studies included in divine and human erudition. Rather, with the candor proper to a historian, he shall narrate plainly and step by step [  fil filo] the entire series of Vico’s studies, in order that the proper and natural causes of 73. Reference is to the first, autobiographical chapter of the Discourse. See The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–­85), 1:111–­16. On this point see Donald Pillip Verene, The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 100, 182, and 224.

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his particular development [tale e non altra riuscita] as a man of letters may be known.74

The best way to counter Descartes is to fill in what is missing, to account genealogically for what he strategically omitted. While Descartes and Vico are two different individuals, they are not incommensurable: their training and reading overlap as far as the pre-­Cartesian corpus is concerned. Therefore, the real gain of a molecular or fil filo (literally, “thread by thread”) observation of the tapestry of one’s self hood is to arrive at a sense of the infinite possibilities regarding who we could have become, alongside knowledge of the person we actually became. In other words, following Vico’s example, we come to know ourselves, tali e non altri, such as we are and not otherwise—­that is, equally intimately for what we are not. Vico’s autobiographical stance does away with the prescriptive ought to be of philosophers in favor of the revisionary could be of  historians; it redirects attention from necessity to possibility and in so doing to the recovery of heretofore untold histories or stories. If his circumstances or temperament had been even slightly different from what they were, Vico might very well have joined the list of Cartesians, but the point is that he did not, incidentally. And what intellectual history gained in the process was an alternative to a seemingly ineluctable Cartesianism. True: a life understood in its absolute precariousness loses exemplarity, but when the passions and vicissitudes that directed it are embedded in its narration, it gains rather than loses in inspirational power.75 When Gramsci makes his attempt to redefine the goals and aims of autobiographical writing and thus, we can now say for sure, of his Prison Notebooks, we can see that he is reiterating Vico to a notable extent: One justification [of autobiography] can be this: to help others develop in certain ways and towards certain openings. Autobiographies are often an act of pride: one believes one’s own life is worth being narrated because it is “original,” different from others, etc. Autobiography can be conceived “politically.” 74. Giambattista Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max H. Fisch and Thomas G. Bergin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944), 113. 75. My interpretation is indebted to some interrelated studies by Nancy S. Struever. See her Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); “Rhetoric: Time, Memory, Memoir,” in Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted, eds., A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 425–­41; and Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chap. 8 (“Purity as Danger: Gramsci’s Machiavelli, and Croce’s Vico”).

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One knows that one’s life is similar to that of a thousand others, but through “chance” it has had opportunities that the thousand others in reality could not or did not have. By narrating it, one creates this possibility, suggests the process, indicates the opening. Autobiography therefore replaces the “political’ ” or “philosophical essay”: it describes in action what otherwise is deduced logically. Autobiography certainly has a great historical value in that it shows life in action and not just as written laws or dominant moral principles say it should be. (Q14§59; SCW, 132)

Here we must understand Gramsci’s reference to “autobiography” as not referring to a particular literary genre in which an author creates a “pact” with his readers regarding the veracity of  his account.76 Gramsci never wrote such a work, nor, strictly speaking did Petrarch, Vico or Croce. What is at stake here, rather, is the notion of autobiographism understood phenomenologically. Very much like De Sanctis in referring to the “situation” of a literary work, Gramsci is pointing to that residue of life or consciousness which adheres more or less evidently to any product of the intellect. This is an added ingredient that functions as anticoagulant. It loosens the sludge of overly theoretical disquisition, allowing for alternate possibilities to shine through alongside what is overtly affirmed. With the notion of “political” (as opposed to “philosophical”) autobiography, Gramsci, like Vico, seems to be aiming for a literary form unabashedly devoted to parsing the existential antecedents of clear and distinct ideas, a form that relays the imperceptible passage from man to cannibal, from thesis to antithesis, and in so doing focuses exclusively on process rather than goal. New ideas, qualitatively different thinking, need a befitting and equally new genre. In this case, that new genre could be political autobiography, a capacious container that describes the Prison Notebooks as the literary means by which Gramsci represented his meiotic split from Croce, and, given that Gramsci and Croce stand for interrelated worldviews, a means to show that the philosophy of praxis was not an antagonist but rather an organic outgrowth of Italian Hegelianism. 76. Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press, 1989), 3–­30. A much more comprehensive and congenial understanding of autobiographical writings throughout the ages is in the multivolume work of Georg Misch, Wilhlem Dilthey’s foremost student, of which the first part is translated as A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, trans. E. W. Dickes, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1950).

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Gramsci is well aware that he may be expecting too much: it is extremely demanding, perhaps even impossible, he says, to scrutinize the development of a collective movement, or any kind of development for that matter, “in all its molecular phases” (Q8§195; PN, 3:346). And yet one revelation is that such comprehensiveness might not be necessary, for at the atomic level, reduced to mere movement or transience, all facts of history resemble each other. What may be lost in amplitude is regained in detail, and as Gramsci intends it, in this sense autobiography can take on the task of historiography: The importance of details is that much greater the more actual reality in a country differs from appearances, deeds from words, the people who act from the intellectuals who interpret these actions. I have already pointed out elsewhere that in certain countries the constitutions are modified by laws, the laws by rulings, the application of the rulings by their written form. The person who executes the “law” (the ruling) is enrolled in a certain social class, of a certain cultural level, selected through a certain salary, etc. In fact the law resides in this executor, the way in which it—­the law—­is executed, especially because there are no organs of control and sanction. Now, only through autobiography does one see the mechanism at work, in the way it actually functions which very often does not correspond at all to the written law. Yet history, in its broad outlines, is based on written law: and when new facts arise, which overturn the situation, a lot of vacuous questions get thrown up, or at least documentation is found to be lacking on the “molecular” way in which the change was prepared up to the moment when it actually exploded. Certain countries are especially “hypocritical;” that is, in certain countries what one sees and what one does not see (because one does not want to see, or because whenever one does see it it seems an exception or “picturesque”) are particularly contrasting. And it is precisely in these countries that memoir writers are few in number or autobiographies are “stylized,” strictly personal and individual. (Q14§64; SCW, 132–­33)

Clearly, for Gramsci, autobiography is a historiographical genre, more akin to biography than literature. History, molecularly recounted, would be a mosaic of interconnected autobiographical accounts, revealing the otherwise invisible and unwritten inner workings of  historical progress, an essentially human affair. And there is no doubt that when prescribing the molecular approach to certain “hypocritical” or hyperrhetorical countries, Gramsci is thinking of Italy, whose history would be better off if commandeered autobiographically (through Gramsci himself, we can assume) for the nation’s sake.

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With these considerations in mind, we can better make sense of Gramsci’s accusation that nineteenth-­century Italian historiography is a form of “national ‘biography’ ” in which Italy is “conceived as something abstract, like the beautiful women in paintings” (Q3§159; PN, 2:129). This kind of  “oleographic history” is “antihistorical” insofar as it takes Italy as having always existed as a nation, a view that not only patently “contradicts history,” but worse, downplays the efforts of those living men of the Risorgimento who brought about the unification of the country. France in the same period seemed to have a better understanding of what was at stake, in that Napoleon was named king of the “French” and not France, restoring precedence to “people” over “land” and thus to praxis over theory (Q19§50, 2070). These considerations reconnect to the young Gramsci’s frustration for the notion of “culture” supported by Angelo Tasca, with whom he founded the political publication L’Ordine nuovo in 1919. “By culture,” says Gramsci of  Tasca in a remark that inspired the title to this chapter, “he meant remembering, not thinking, he meant remembering old relics from the past.”77 Remembering is not thinking! Such considerations, in a more mature Gramsci, point to an urgent historiographical project definable counterintuitively as a national autobiography. In fact, the expression is not farfetched. A young antifascist and exemplary victim of the regime, Piero Gobetti, had influentially introduced in 1922 the idea that fascism was a natural consequence of the Italians’ moral flaws, spiritual deficiencies that derived, as De Sanctis argued, from Italy’s inability to “reform” out of Renaissance individualism. For this reason, in his view, fascism amounted to the “autobiography of the nation”; it was an event, that is, which an entire society had colluded in making.78 As for Croce, he reacted to this pervasive view with the equally debated notion that fascism was in fact a “parenthesis” or digression in Italian history, something essentially extraneous to the nation’s essence; he also insisted, however, that in the realm of historiographical method “all true history is always autobiographical” and that “it is the greater or lesser intimacy or autobiographical insight into works or 77. Antonio Gramsci, L’Ordine nuovo (1919–­1920), ed. Valentino Gerratana and Antonio Santucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1957), 620–­21. 78. Piero Gobetti, “In Praise of the Guillotine,” in On Liberal Revolution, ed. Nadia Urbinati and trans. William MacCuaig (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 213. For context and further analysis of the far-­reaching influence of Gobetti’s characterization of fascism as the “autobiography of the nation,” see Silvana Patriarca, Italianità. La costruzione del carattere nazionale (Rome: Laterza, 2010), chap. 6. On Gobetti and Gramsci, see Paolo Spriano, Gramsci e Gobetti. Introduzione alla vita e alle opere (Turin: Einaudi, 1977).

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historical events that gives us the measure of the excellence of a historical view or study.”79 That the notebooks might fulfill that role, though Gramsci never said so explicitly, should be apparent from the discussion so far. And we find further corroboration in the way that Gramsci originally formulated his project of study and research, as he described it in a letter to Tania dated 19 March 1927. Here, beginning to accept his sequestered fate, Gramsci famously announces the existential need to be involved in a “disinterested” intellectual project. “Für ewig,” he says, meaning a research plan that can continuously occupy him and by which he will be able to resist or at least retard his molecular, physical, and spiritual involution as a prisoner (LP, 1:83–­84). Moreover, given the inevitability of his abjection, such a project will constructively assure him of a modicum of spiritual “immortality [ . . . ] in a realistic and historicist sense,” an immortality that in turn guarantees the “survival of our useful and necessary actions and their becoming incorporated, beyond our will, with the universal historical process, etc.” (2:314).80 These words announce the posthumous turn of Gramsci’s intellectual battle, something actionable, albeit only in the future. And here too comes the stipulation, often unattended to by his readers, to understand his work as “a study of the formation of the public spirit in Italy during the past century; in other words, a study of Italian intellectuals, their origins, their groupings, in accordance with cultural currents, and their various ways of thinking, etc., etc.” This, he notes, would be in line with what he had begun doing in the “essay on southern Italy and on the importance of B. Croce” (1:83). Gramsci is of course referring here to Some Aspects of the Southern Question, which he wrote and published shortly before he was imprisoned in 1926, a work in which he first describes Croce as the “central figure of the Italian reaction,” as the one who ensured the status quo by steering peasants’ passions away from any “revolutionary” outcome.81 We can now finally understand the Prison Notebooks as a model for an (auto-­) biographical intellectual history of Italy, a history not of modern Italian ideas 79. Croce, “History as Autobiography,” 541. See also Croce, Filosofia e storiografia, 121: “La biografia stessa, la seria, la grande biografia, quando assurge a storia, s’idealizza e coincide con la storia dell’opera della quale l’individuo è stato il rappresentante e il simbolo; e quando resta mera biografia, decade a cronaca o si converte in una tipizzazione psicologica alla quale collabora l’immaginazione come si dice (e la parola suona quasi ironia), integratrice.” 80. For this connection, see Eleonora Forenza’s entry for “für ewig” in Dizionario gramsciano, 338–­39. 81. Antonio Gramsci, “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” in Pre-­Prison Writings, 333–­34.

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but—­and the difference is crucial—­of modern Italian thinkers, starting with an exploration of Croce’s comprehensive corpus and influence and inevitably, as his foremost reader, Gramsci himself. Yet, it is clear that for the project to be fully and effectively autobiographical, the author himself must be involved, as both topic and practitioner of the story being told. In this sense the Prison Notebooks are a continuation of the collective autobiography of the nation’s intellectuals written by De Sanctis, but also an integration, via the account of Croce’s transmutation into Gramsci, and the reconception of a shared past as a set of as yet unrealized possibilities.

Conclusion This chapter began with Croce’s and Gramsci’s contentions over Francesco De Sanctis’s account of Italy’s enduring Renaissance and its comic intellectual degeneration. Their disagreement, Gramsci himself noted, was expressed in a hermetic or untranslatable jargon that required unpacking if it were to be communicated outside the inner circle of Italian literati. Paying close heed to De Sanctis, as Croce and Gramsci devotedly did, we have come to formulate their challenge as the need to deliver Italian letters from a stifling Renaissance paradigm via a reform or reformation. This reform failed at the political, or institutional, level, but Goldoni found a space for it in the linguistic/literary realm, conceiving something we might call a theater of praxis, a phrase that captures both the pervasive theatrical metaphor and Gramsci’s involvement. When read through a Vichian and Gramscian lens, Goldoni and De Sanctis summoned an autobiographical project in which theory and practice are metacritically reconciled, allowing Italian letters to be expressed in an interclass, international, and generally shareable language that is made possible not by suppressing its folklore and its provincial, idiomatic past, but by embracing them. Of course, a reform of this kind is not merely announced or asserted; it must be diachronically abetted and narratively elicited along the course of a varied and complete body of works, autobiographically construed to reveal one’s own organic derivation from an insuppressible past. As was the case for Petrarch, Goldoni and De Sanctis, furthermore, in Gramsci, too, intellectual history, molecularly conceived and autobiographically deployed, amounts to a contest of patience. He who succumbs to the temptation to raise his voice, to affirm himself peremptorily or, what is the same, to burn even the smallest of bridges will lose to the one who manages to show his predecessors—­and projected heirs, for that matter—­the same degree of empathy he would show himself. Gramsci’s keen observation of his own intellectual permutations, therefore, is

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honed through his equally fervent inspection of Croce’s. In the process, Gramsci inherits the mission to deintellectualize or dephilosophize Italian thought, a mission that was already differently Vico’s, Goldoni’s, De Sanctis’s, and, pace all of them, Petrarchan; hence constitutive of the Italian literary legacy. As for form, only by (over-­)zealously attending to Croce’s staged deliverance from Labriola (or Marxism) do we come to appreciate how Gramsci assimilates and extends Croce’s impactful yet constricted autobiographical account into an unlimited, cathartic counter-­discourse: the Anti-­Croce, a discourse in search of the only literary genre that is infinitely extendable. And that genre is, of course, the corpus. For what else is the Prison Notebooks, if not the entirety of its author’s thoughts? The latter question is rhetorical, of course. The real question we should be asking, one which I shall try to answer in conclusion to this study, is this: Does Gramsci finally usher Italian intellectual history into a post-­Renaissance phase?

Conclusion

The Last Renaissance Man [M]y culture is fundamentally Italian and this is my world. Antonio Gramsci

This study has sought to demonstrate that if we can reveal the links between Petrarch, Vico (however diffuse), Goldoni, De Sanctis, Croce, and Gramsci, while allowing ourselves a fruitful detour into reflections offered by the French Romantic incursion into the origins of modernity, we can uncover a vital current in the Italian modern intellectual tradition. As De Sanctis conceived it, by way of Goldoni and Vico, the Italian renewal depended on a refamiliarization with Italy’s Renaissance and on a tradition extending from humanism to commedia dell’arte, from Petrarca to Arlecchino: the lived highbrow and lowbrow ambits of Italian civic apathy. In this refamiliarization, the Renaissance affiliation is not downright rejected, but re-­owned with a question mark; it is relived from within, and, through hermeneutical therapy, tentatively and cathartically purged. An unceasing exercise in autobiographical (self-­)reading and (re-­)writing governs the evolution of a seemingly asymptotic task that relies on congenial transhistorical collaboration for its advancement. Thus the torch is passed, sometimes retrospectively, over and over again, until entrusted to the hands of Gramsci, who, as we are about to see in more detail, sprints to the finish line with all his might. In sum: De Sanctis traced all of Italy’s problems back to Petrarch, the first of the Purists, as it were, experiencing Petrarchism in himself as the last of the Purists in La giovinezza, a retrospective tale of redemption from social disengagement and rhetorical high-­mindedness. In his Contribution to the Criticism of Myself, written in mid-­life with the intent to reconnect his life and science more closely, Croce emulated and updated De Sanctis, replacing Basilio Puoti and Purism with a mentor figure and an ideology of  his own: Antonio Labriola

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and Marxism. Gramsci did something similar, electing Croce and Italian ide­ alism for the same purpose. Imprisonment, however, had one advantage: unlike his immediate predecessors, and more like Petrarch and Goldoni, Gramsci wrote neither from the vantage of a completed life, nor from the midpoint of a life he knew would be cut short, but continuously from within the organic and ever accruing palimpsestic container of his letters and notebooks. As today’s philologically astute scholars restore the chronology of the notebooks with ever more precision, readers are admonished to read them diachronically. This is great advice for the ultra-­specialist. But just as important for an empathic, if not as fully competent, appreciation of Gramsci’s work is that they be read wholly—­a mode of reading that was already available to Croce and to the general Italian reader, but to few others to date, starting with the first thematic publication of 1947–­51. In the apperception afforded by their totality, the letters-­plus-­notebooks are an endless work bookended only by the author’s death, a work in which the labors of the mind and existence are one, finally fusing life and science, content and form, “für ewig” and without residue. Of course, in the language of Dante and Petrarch, and in the wake of a literary tradition drenched in Augustinianism, autobiography in Italy inevitably takes on the garb of a narrative of conversion. De Sanctis, Croce, and Gramsci (or Goldoni, Vico, and Petrarch for that matter) do not depart from this well-­ established path.1 For De Sanctis, it is a matter of overcoming his Petrarchan or Purist self, and he leaves it to his corpus of published works, and to his readers’ assessment of it, to determine the extent to which he succeeded. Croce’s Contribution is meant to testify to his success at a similar existential endeavor: his metamorphosis from philologist to philosopher, catalyzed by Marxism. Gramsci disputes the latter’s accomplishment when he stages his own transition from Crocean philosophy to his theorization of praxis as a form of surrogate, or prolegomenon to, action. But the invalidation of Croce’s feat requires a return to De Sanctis and to an exact grasp of his terms and conditions, and it is here, in conclusion, that we turn. We may recall, specifically, that Croce places his conversion at the moment he begins to evolve from a stock character–­like pedant to a reformed Italian citizen through national and comparative historiographical projects, after having exhausted his interest in local chronicles and in Marxism. These projects included A History of Italy, 1871–­1915 (1928) and its companion, A History of 1. For Petrarch’s own conversion from worshipper of the ancients to independent thinker, see Rocco Rubini, “From Translation to Allusion: Petrarch’s Descent of  Mount Ventoux,” MLN 135 n.5 (2020): 1021–­34.

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Europe in the 19th Century (1931). Commenting on the first of these in his essay, “How Theoretical Marxism Was Born and Died in Italy,” Croce avers that he based it “less on books” than on “my recollections and experiences of that period,” conceiving a book drawn “uniquely from my vitality as a citizen.”2 Croce is reaffirming here the autobiographical bent of a national history that he prefaced with a dedication to the “years of peace” that nonetheless “present movement and dramatic interest to all those who recognize that such features are not solely to be found in noisy struggles and spectacular achievements and who, even in the face of wars and revolutions, find the true source of movement and dramatic interest in minds and in hearts.”3 In hindsight, Croce’s words—­written just as Gramsci (and Italy for that matter) entered the crucible of fascism—­seem to have been written in apprehension of Gramsci’s most telling reproach of him. Namely, as Gramsci repeatedly asks in his notebooks, was it by “chance” or “for some more tendentious reason” that Croce thought it plausible to frame his Italian history between the year 1871, when the unification of Italy was completed with the conquest of Rome, and the year 1915, when Italy belatedly entered World War I? In this way did Croce avoid dealing with “the struggle of the Risorgimento” and the struggles of the twentieth century? On second thought, Gramsci rules out “chance,” since A History of Europe, subtitled “in the 19th Century,” points to another significant omission—­in this case, the lack of  “an organic treatment of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.” In both cases, Croce produced “fragments of history” and illustrated the “ ‘passive’ aspect of the great revolution which began in France in 1789” (Q10I§9; FSPN, 348–­49). For this reason, Gramsci found these two historiographical projects especially revealing—­more so than anything Croce ever wrote for or against Marxism—­of Croce’s “Goethe-­like composure” and his “Olympian” “attitude to life,” an attitude that Croce’s pervasive writings seemed to spread to every stratum of Italian society: Not wanting to involve oneself to the hilt, the distinction between on one hand what an intellectual and on the other what a politician has to do (as if the 2. Bendetto Croce, “Come nacque e come morí il marxismo teorico in Italia (1895–­1900),” in Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, ed. Maria Rascaglia e Silvia Zoppi Garampi, 2 vols. (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2001), 1:285–­86. 3. Benedetto Croce, preface to A History of Italy (1871–­1915), trans. Cecilia M. Ady (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), i. On the importance and reception of Croce’s text, see Gennaro Sasso, La “Storia d’Italia” di Benedetto Croce. Cinquant’anni dopo (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1979).

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intellectual was not a politician too, and not only a politician of the . . . intellectual strata) and, fundamentally, the whole of the Crocean conception of  history lies at the origin of this currency. One sees that being a partisan of freedom in the abstract counts for nothing, it is just the position of someone sitting at a desk and studying the facts of the past, but not that of a real participant in the struggle of the times. (Q15§36; FSPN, 380)

Moreover, it is when discussing Croce’s historiographical projects that Gramsci, uncharacteristically, loses his composure, resorting to a barrage of epithets depicting Croce as a “pure intellectual” devoted to a “deleterious form of ‘Jacobinism,’ ” and as fomenting a “despicable ‘Pontius Pilatism’ ” (Q10I§1; FSPN, 334). What moves Croce is “a blind fear of  Jacobin movements, of any active intervention by the great popular masses as a factor of social progress” (Q10I§6; FSPN, 341). This is why he “leaves out the moment of struggle, in which the structure is formed and modified, and placidly assumes history to be the moment of cultural expansion” (FSPN, 330). And, in the final analysis, this is how Croce comes to omit the growing pains of Italy and Europe alike, and thus he fails in his autobiographical method and, ultimately, in his own conversion to idealism, which as we know is presented as having been abetted by an original act of Providence, his survival of the earthquake rather than as the end term of a prolonged and hard-­fought personal struggle. Gramsci coalesces with De Sanctis when he affirms that Italian Hegelianism is the Petrarchism or Purism that he and his generation are trying to outgrow. He points out in clear terms that the “greatest weakness” of Croce’s idealism “consists precisely in the fact that [it] had not been able to create an ideologi­ cal unity between the bottom and the top, between the ‘simple’ and the intellec­ tuals.” And through De Sanctis, Gramsci realizes that Croce’s shortcomings are a Renaissance heritage: In the history of Western civilization the fact [that is, the weakness of Idealism] is exemplified on a European scale, with the rapid collapse of the Renaissance and to a certain extent also the Reformation faced with the Roman church. Their weakness is demonstrated in the educational field, in that the immanentist [that is, idealist] philosophies have not even attempted to construct a conception which could take the place of religion in the education of children. Hence the pseudo-­historicist sophism whereby non-­religious, non-­ confessional, and in reality atheist, educationalists justify allowing the teaching of religion on the grounds that religion is the philosophy of the infancy of

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mankind renewed in every non-­metaphorical infancy. Idealism has also shown itself opposed to cultural movements which “go out to the people [ . . . ]” (Q11§12; SPN, 329)

“Going to the people” and their formation as children, we now know, though popularized by Gramsci, was De Sanctis’s expression. Deployed as it is here, in this passage, it backs up Gramsci’s complaint that Croce’s historiography (and philosophy) proved unable to tackle formation or “infancy” either nonmetaphorically, in the individual, or metaphorically, in the nation. Furthermore, the passage invokes the Renaissance, which points us to the third book in Croce’s historiographical trilogy of those years: A History of the Baroque in Italy. Published in 1929, between his histories of Italy and Europe, A History of the Baroque in Italy easily lent itself to the same kind of criticism in Gramsci’s view. In this instance, the title does not refer to specific temporal boundaries, but reveals its program by omission, by throwing a wet blanket over the Renaissance. As Croce himself admitted, he wrote the book intending to “restore positive significance to the notion of the Baroque” against its implied disparagement in the works of the likes of  Jacob Burckhardt, whose The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy came to promote an exclusive view of the merits and appeal of the Renaissance, internationally and for generations to come.4 Gramsci, however, doubts this was a sound approach, to leave the theorization of the Renaissance wholly in the hands of foreigners and to focus, instead, on a later epoch. After all, if Italy had a metaphorical “infancy,” it was the Renaissance. Is Croce’s avoidance another manifestation, really, of his inability to deal with struggle? In a 1939 essay, Croce scrambles to justify his resistance to theorizing the Renaissance—­perhaps self-­consciously realizing that the omission would not go unnoticed given his role as arguably Italy’s most prolific and assertive Italian thinker of all time. He writes, “[B]y transposing its loves and hatreds into the past, the passion of the Risorgimento contributed not only to placing a hiatus between the Renaissance and Risorgimento but above all to making the two ages mutually estranged.” What Croce implies is that it is unnecessary to stare into a seemingly incommensurable Renaissance in order to trace the features of the Italian modern being, for his study of the Baroque, which corrects the longstanding equation of the period with the moment of Italian decadence, restores continuities. So much so, Croce asserts, that what we learn, when we 4. Benedetto Croce, Storia dell’età barocca in Italia, ed. Giuseppe Galasso (Milan: Adelphi, 1993), 599.

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study this period, is that “the Risorgimento was substantially a reawakening of the Renaissance.”5 Of course, these conclusions were at odds with De Sanctis, almost defiantly so . . . and Gramsci took notice. Gramsci’s remarks on the Renaissance make little reference to Croce but are in fact integral to his Anti-­Croce. “[T]here is an interpretation of the Renaissance and of modern life that is attributed to Italy—­as if it had originated in Italy and were based on its history—­but it is only the interpretation of a German book on Italy,” Gramsci states, also referring, of course, to Burckhardt’s tome. Instead, “our [that is, the Italians’] idea of the Renaissance is determined” by “two fundamental works,” Burckhardt’s book and De Sanctis’s History of Italian Literature. Gramsci was one of the few—­and perhaps the only leading intellectual of his time and later times—­who understood that De Sanctis’s magnum opus, despite its sweep, was really a book about the Italian Renaissance from an Italian perspective. And the analyses of Burckhardt and De Sanctis were obversely complementary, as Gramsci points out: whereas Burckhardt “highlighted” “individualism and the formation of the modern mind,” De Sanctis “accentuates the dark colors of political and moral corruption in the Renaissance: despite all the merits that can be acknowledged in the Renaissance, it undid Italy and conveyed it in servitude into foreign hands.” “Thus,” Gramsci concludes, “Burckhardt sees the Renaissance as the starting point of a new progressive epoch of European civilization, the cradle of modern man. De Sanctis sees it from the point of view of  Italian history, and for Italy the Renaissance was the start of a regression” (Q17§3; SCW, 218). In these notes Gramsci seems to recover Labriola’s notion of the national “visual angle,” which determines the deployment of historical materialism as the method attending to the (re-­)narration of seemingly established facts of history. Finally, what matters is this: can one call oneself an Italian intellectual without taking De Sanctis’s admonition into account? Croce would agree, with Gramsci, that it is impermissible. And yet Croce seems to miss what such a compact would entail: to make it one’s mission as a post-­Risorgimento thinker to outgrow the Renaissance legacy through a reformative program achievable by none other than the harmonization of knowledge and passion, intellectuals and people. On this, De Sanctis was clear. While it is entirely possible that one 5. Benedetto Croce, “The Italian Crisis of the 1500s and the Link between the Renaissance and the Risorgimento,” trans. Michael Subialka, in RIP, 170. On Croce and the Renaissance, see Fulvio Tessitore, “Croce e il Rinascimento,” in Nuovi contributi alla storia e alla teoria dello storicismo (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2002), 325–­52; and Vincenzo Caputo, “Il Rinascimento ‘pieno’ e ‘tardo’ di Benedetto Croce,” Studi rinascimentali 8 (2010): 147–­52.

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might miss the point of the History by reading it in isolation, and with some effort miss the point, again, while reading the History together with the Critical Essay on Petrarch (as I did in this study, but as Gramsci did not), a misreading is impossible in light of De Sanctis’s essay, “The Man of Guicciardini,” published in 1869 as he was attending to his major work. With this essay, De Sanctis celebrated the publication of the complete works of  Francesco Guicciardini that appeared in ten volumes over the course of a decade, between 1857 and 1867, lauding the works as “such a discovery that they would suffice to generate the entire cycle of historical criticism single-­ handedly.” They throw light on an epoch “about which much has been written and little understood, an age of rebirth [risorgimento], they say, which was simultaneously the age of our decline [decadenza].” In De Sanctis’s view, Guicciardini’s writings elicited a novel historiographical problem, the very one that motivates his History: The problem is as follows. In that age Italy had risen to the height of power, wealth, and glory. In the arts, letters, and sciences it had already hit that mark which only a few fortunate nations are able to reach, while the others—­whom the Italians called “barbarians” with an air of Roman superiority—­lagged far behind. And yet, upon our first collision with these barbarians, Italy collapsed and was removed from the world stage as if precipitously ruined.6

So much has been differently acknowledged by numerous foreign historians and critics—­but their answers to the paradox leave something to be desired. Some attributed the Italian weakness to “internal [political] dissension,” others pointed their fingers to the corruption of Rome, but what several generations of international historians collectively miss is that the corruption is a “manifestation” of an evil and not “the evil itself.” Likewise, there is no denying that in the Renaissance “the speeches were keen,” “the writings [ . . . ] stupendous,” and indeed statecraft as artful as averred by Burckhardt (who goes unmentioned here, as everywhere in De Sanctis), yet nobody seems to realize that this artistry had no trickle-­down effect, no power to move.7 The phenomenon of this discrepancy is befuddling even for De Sanctis, who admits to having no ready answer himself besides a strong personal involvement. He states that the “corruption” of the 6. Francesco De Sanctis, “The Man of Guicciardini,” trans. Delia Casa and Marina Gag­ liardi, in RIP, 111. 7. De Sanctis, “The Man of Guicciardini,” 113 and 115.

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Renaissance, “which even today prevents us from moving forward,” might require another Machiavelli or Montesquieu, or no less than a “metaphysical eye” to be comprehended, but ultimately De Sanctis relies on Vico to help decode these opacities, with the insight that the splendor of the Renaissance was as blindingly intense as it was ephemeral, and in Italy, at least, an end point rather than a beginning. With this realization on De Sanctis’s part, jealously guarded scholarly as well as popular myths come tumbling down, including the one surrounding the “Renaissance man” or that epoch’s great individuals. A metaphysical eye observes that “Italy resembled the man who so overuses his mental powers that when his intelligence reaches maturity, he feels old before his time. It is not ingenuity and intelligence that save nations, but character, or fiber. And the fiber weakens when the conscience fades away, and men act only out of their own interests.”8 At this point, finally, we realize why De Sanctis may have found Guicciardini so enlightening. More specifically, he seems to have been drawn to Guicciardini’s original brand of autobiography, the maxims collected as Ricordi in which “the historian depicts himself with total abandon and under the guise of advice reveals to you his most intimate thoughts and feelings or—­to put it in modern terms—­his political and civil ideal of man.”9 In this pithy yet magnificent work, knowledge is epitomized to the detriment of action, and it is such divarication that best explains the Guicciardinian notion of particulare, self-­ interest and concern for reputation refined into an art form. But in the Ricordi, also, autobiography is collective, nationally representative: Italy was very similar to this man portrayed by Guicciardini: a man who has laid waste to the past and, left alone with his spirit, throws himself into life, filled with confidence in his genius, his erudition, his experience, and his perspicacious eye; who treats his fellow man as he does nature, almost like a servant of his, an instrument, born to be used to his benefit, and who observes everything with an expression that is half-­mocking, half-­compassionate, while the one most deserving of compassion is he.10

The Ricordi are a testament to the impotence of erudition; “an individual who behaves like our wise man might have a chance to survive, but not an entire 8. De Sanctis, “The Man of Guicciardini,” 117. 9. De Sanctis, “The Man of Guicciardini,” 117. 10. De Sanctis, “The Man of Guicciardini,” 120.

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society.”11 Guicciardini’s unmatched intellectual panache is a deterrent example, all the more so because it emerges in juxtaposition to Machiavelli and, as such, is more useful than a solitary Petrarch illustrating the caveats of the Renaissance man. And just so, De Sanctis came to formulate his manifesto, a moving call for introspective action: “The man of Guicciardini [a permutation of the Renaissasnce or Petrarchan man], ‘vivit, imo in senatum venit’ [lives on and comes into the Senate, too], and you run into him everywhere,” even in a unified Italy. “This fatal man will always block our way unless we find the strength to kill him in our consciousness.”12 De Sanctis’s alert is so dramatic that one begins to wonder with Gramsci not why Croce did not heed this advice, but whether he could have heeded it in the first place. Perhaps it is perfectly understandable that neither Croce, nor any other Italian intellectual in the same vein, was up to the challenge of writing and conceptualizing Italy away from the Renaissance, for such a narration implies a spiritual conversion attained within the narrator himself. Again, notes Gramsci: How does one explain the fact that the Italian Renaissance has attracted the interest of extremely large numbers of scholars and popular writers abroad while there is not a single comprehensive book on the subject written by an Italian? I think that the Renaissance is the modern high point of the “international function of Italian intellectuals,” and for this reason it has had no resonance in the national consciousness, which has been dominated and continues to be dominated by the Counter-­Reformation [Croce’s Baroque]. The Renaissance is alive [in people’s consciousness] where it has created new currents of culture and ways of  life, where it has been operative in a profound manner, but not where it has been totally smothered except for some rhetorical and verbal traces and where therefore it has become the object of “mere erudition,” that is, of irrelevant curiosity. (Q3§144; PN, 2:119)

According to Gramsci’s observations, which apply to past as well as present-­ day Renaissance scholars, Croce cannot theorize an epoch in which he is still engulfed as a pedant, an erudite. The Renaissance is necessarily invisible to a Renaissance or unreformed man, in much the same way that the present cannot be narrated historiographically, let alone autobiographically. 11. De Sanctis, “The Man of Guicciardini,” 124. 12. De Sanctis, “The Man of Guicciardini,” 125.

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Moreover, the passage suggests an all-­important corollary that becomes evident when we subscribe to De Sanctis’s notion of the Renaissance as regressively unpopular.13 The Renaissance pedant—­who, we now understand, is for De Sanctis and Gramsci combined the Italian intellectual from Petrarch to and including Croce—­operates within an international or cosmopolitan framework, a precociously advanced framework that bypasses the “national” and “popular” moment of social/intellectual evolution. Gramsci reminds us that “national” and “popular” mean much the same thing in every country but Italy.14 “As far as Italy is concerned,” he elaborates, “the central fact [regarding its intellectual evolution] is precisely the international or cosmopolitan function of its intellectuals, which is both cause and effect of the state of disintegration in which the peninsula remained from the fall of the Roman Empire up to 1870”—­up to Italy’s unification, of course, but also up to the publication of De Sanctis’s History (Q14§1.I; SPN, 17–­18). If we can go so far as to say that this state of disintegration extended all the way to Croce and Gramsci, it was surely even more inveterate than De Sanctis himself had conceived. In Gramsci’s view its origins are to be found well before the Renaissance, when Caesar and Augustus began “the process of denationalization” of the empire by investing an “imperial class” with an abstract and deterritorializing hegemony to the detriment of Italy and Rome, which were reduced to nothing more than “bureaucratic centers” (Q19§1,1959–­60). Gramsci’s claim—­that the problem of the Italian Renaissance may in fact be a problem of Roman antiquity—­shows how comprehensive a history of Italian intellectuals ought to be, and, frankly, how unattainable it might be, if 13. To be frank, Croce had paid lip service to the De Sanctian interpretive paradigm, without, however, citing De Sanctis directly. See Storia dell’età barocca, 27: “Il movimento della Rinascita era rimasto aristocratico, di circoli eletti, e nella stessa Italia, che ne fu madre e nutrice, non uscí dai circoli di corte, non penetrò fino al popolo, non divenne costume o ‘pregiudizio,’ ossia collettiva persuasione e fede.” 14. See Q21§5, 2116: “One should note that in many languages, ‘national’ and ‘popular’ are either synonymous or nearly so [ . . . ]. In Italy the term ‘national’ has an ideologically very restricted meaning, and does not in any case coincide with ‘popular’ because in Italy the intellectuals are distant from the people, i.e., from the ‘nation.’ They are tied instead to a caste tradition that has never been broken by a strong popular or national political movement from below. This tradition is abstract and ‘bookish,’ and the typical modern intellectual feels closer to Annibale Caro or Ippolito Pindemonte than to an Apulian or Sicilian peasant. The current term ‘national’ is connected in Italy to this intellectual and bookish tradition. Hence the foolish and ultimately dangerous facility of calling ‘anti-­national’ whoever does not have this archaeological and moth-­ eaten conception of the country’s interests.”

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approached molecularly. We have a better chance of success, then, if we stick with the Renaissance, conceived no longer as a historical period, but, in true Italian fashion, as an existential category. In a note titled “The Non-­national Popular Character of Italian Literature,” Gramsci rhetorically asks whether an artist should be more concerned with being understood by the “elect,” as he refers here to intellectuals, or by the “nation,” the people. His point is that both ambitions coexist dialogically: Every intellectual movement becomes or returns to being national if a “going to the people” has taken place, if there has been a phase of “Reformation” and not just a “Renaissance” phase, and the “Reformation-­Renaissance” phases follow one another organically and do not coincide with distinct historical phases [ . . . ]. [W]ithout a period of going to the people there can be no “Renaissance” and no national literature. (Q8§145; PN, 3:318–­19)

Gramsci’s insight allows the reader, finally, to begin to untangle the jargon of Italian thought. Following De Sanctis, Gramsci deploys “Renaissance” and “Reformation” as autobiographical categories that point to his own role as a reformer of Crocean idealism, itself an entrenched Renaissance. Without Gramsci, the true reformist, there will be no operative or effective Croce, and no Renaissance. And history has proven this to be so, Croce’s postmortem legacy having been tied to Gramsci’s reception. The terms “Renaissance” and “Reformation,” therefore, are like mythological categories that must be historicized back into the life of the real people whose intellectual attitudes they exemplify: “Croce’s position [with respect to the philosophy of praxis] is that of the Renaissance man with respect to the Protestant Reformation,” Gramsci repeats in various ways, exemplifying the process. “Renaissance man and the man created by the development of the Reformation have been fused together in the modern intellectual of the Crocean type.” Croce, truly the last of the Purists, is the modern equivalent of what De Sanctis had called the “Petrarchan type” or the “man of Guicciardini,” the archetype if no longer the prototype of the Italian Renaissance man: Croce has not “gone to the people,” has not wanted to become a national element [ . . . ], has not wanted to create a group of disciples who (given that he personally might have wanted to save his energy for the creation of a high culture) could popularize his philosophy in his place and try to make it into an educational element right from the primary school stage (and thus educational for the simple worker and peasant, that is to say for the simple man in the

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street). Perhaps this was not possible, but it was worth the trouble of trying to do it, and not having tried is also significant. (Q10II§41i; FSPN, 406–­8).

Years after announcing his program as a De Sanctis–­inflected Anti-­Croce (what then, but now no longer, sounds like a paradox) in the obituary titled “The Light That Turned Off,” Gramsci has fully vindicated Renato Serra, the first, rejected child of Croce’s legacy. Gramsci by now has forced himself organically into that legacy; by hook or by crook, he has become Croce’s foremost disciple, popularizing or, what is the same, dejargonizing his philosophy and in so doing exerting and reforming in an accessible way Croce’s Renaissance as all of Italy’s Renaissance, to the advantage of a mass audience. Again, we see proof that such “translation” has occurred in the modified and richer understanding that the reader now has of the “Renaissance.” And we see that Gramsci’s statement, “Croce is the last Renaissance man” (Q10II§41iv; FSPN, 469), is not the ne plus ultra compliment that one can pay a thinker. To the contrary, now engrossed in the Italian way of understanding things, we can appreciate this statement as the most devastating recrimination that Gramsci could have hurled at Italy’s philosopher king. In Italy and only in Italy is the epithet “Renaissance man” an insult. And when applied to Croce by Gramsci, and therefore his progeny, it also carries within it a disavowal by a common father, De Sanctis himself. The force of Gramsci’s achievement was not lost on Croce. In a note from 1950 titled, “A Joke That Has Gone Too Far,” Croce again attacked “communists” for attempting to “present Gramsci as the author of an intellectual revolution that supersedes the entirety of Italian thought,” including Croce. As if to defy everything he had read by Gramsci by now, Croce denied that Gramsci’s intent could be anything other than to form a political party in Italy, a far cry from “a dispassionate search for truth.” Nor did he grant Gramsci any credit for introducing Marxism into Italy, an achievement he claimed as belonging to himself and Labriola. “To commemorate Gramsci,” then, Italians had better stick to his “noble prison letters,” and nothing else.15 By 1952, however, with the publication of Gramsci’s notebooks complete, Croce adjusted his sights. At this point Gramsci’s relevance was undeniable, even for Croce, but as a last wish from his deathbed he asked that communists not replace the “dyad” “De Sanctis–­Croce” with “De Sanctis–­Gramsci.” With an affected nonchalance that seems a bit desperate, Croce writes: “Perusing the volumes of such 15. Benedetto Croce, “Un giuoco che ormai dura troppo,” Quaderni della “critica” 17–­18 (1950): 231–­32.

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a zealous reader as Gramsci, I do not see him to be particularly attracted to De Sanctis,” so why the effort to “turn De Sanctis into a Marxist”? “As for me,” he continues, “I would be saddened if Italy were to remove De Sanctis from me, someone with whom I have been conjoined throughout life and in the name of whom, my teacher and study companion, I hope to live further and die.”16 Incidentally, and here the circle really closes, in the preface to a new edition of De Sanctis’s Critical Essay on Petrarch, a work that Gramsci seems not to have known and yet brought to fruition in his Prison Notebooks, Croce warned past and future critics of De Sanctis: “[E]ven after my death, if anyone will dare offend [De Sanctis], I will rise out of my grave, den Kaiser, den Kaiser zu schützen! [to defend the Emperor, my Emperor!]”17 Certainly, Croce would not have to rise out of his grave on Gramsci’s account. If anything, Gramsci had tied a firmer knot among Croce, De Sanctis, and himself: an unbreakable troika. Just so, fifteen years after his own burial, with the publication of his notebooks complete, Gramsci posthumously finished Croce off—­or, one might say, he attended to the passing of the last Renaissance man with the respect that was due to him. What, then, lies beyond the Renaissance and its last scion? With a profound understanding of  De Sanctis, and a softening of that thinker’s most categorical commands, Gramsci urges us to realize that rebirth and reform are enmeshed; one does not overcome the other. An amended Renaissance is a rehabilitated Renaissance, one that is free, in Gramsci’s terms, to be “operative in a profound manner” on the “national consciousness,” provided it deintellectualizes and derhetoricizes itself all the way down to those wider audiences it had never before tapped. For the sake of the present study, it behooves us to make the most of this idea that a Renaissance reformed is not a Renaissance superseded but one made manifest. For what has become achingly obvious is that the Petrarch we met in chapter 1 is not De Sanctis’s Petrarch, the author of the storyless Canzoniere. To the contrary, the Petrarch who has been our lodestar as we have traced the evolution of homogeneous intentions and literary forms on the far side of Italy’s prolonged Renaissance has been the hermeneutical, autobiographical, and obsessively narrativizing Petrarch of the Familiares-­plus-­Seniles. After Gramsci’s specification and refinement of De Sanctis’s program, Petrarch need not 16. Benedetto Croce, “De Sanctis–­Gramsci,” in Scritti su Francesco De Sanctis, ed. Teodoro Tagliaferri and Fulvio Tessitore, 2 vols. (Naples: Giannini, 2007), 2:575–­76. 17. Benedetto Croce, “Prefazione al Saggio sul Petrarca,” in Scritti su Francesco De Sanctis, 2:202.

326  Conclusion

be an elephant in the room anymore. De Sanctis’s agenda, like any evacuation plan, stresses the negative. In the case of Petrarch, specifically, De Sanctis could not allow himself to see Petrarchism as already or potentially corrected by Petrarch himself; to do so would have turned Petrarch into an example worthy of sterile imitation. Furthermore, and more troubling to someone like De Sanctis who was intent on delineating a national literary tradition, Petrarch’s letters were written in Latin, the most un-­popular of  languages. But if we imag­ ine, for the sake of argument, that Petrarch had been ahead of his time in this respect and had written his letters in the vernacular, would De Sanctis and, through his influence, all of us, have found it any easier to acknowledge Petrarch’s repudiation of his poetic nugae (trifles) in favor of his prosaic humanism, as a concession to the very problem De Sanctis pointed out? Petrarch is not the type to “go to the people,” granted. Here it is not my intention to advance the idea that the problem of the Renaissance, as envisioned by De Sanctis and later Gramsci, was already solved in Petrarch. It was not solved by De Sanctis or Gramsci either, by the way! Rather, I argue for Petrarch’s precedence in being fully aware that the problem does not lend itself to facile (if any) solutions. This much we can grant Petrarch: he, too, realized that personal and epochal rebirths may not be theorized, announced, or effected, but are rather experienced, heralded, and prefigured autobiographically, through the most punctilious rendition of one’s intellectual transformations. From this perspective, which is as Petrarchan as it is Gramscian, the Italian Renaissance emerges as a relatable yet not imitable personal tale whose comprehensiveness and inclusiveness transcend any single work or any part of the whole we call the corpus, on which I relied as the intrinsic genre of  Italy’s enduring humanism. The corpus perpetually frustrates expectations, its tendency being to engage author and reader alike in a process of mutual empathic accommodation whereby original authorial intentions are never passively received and endorsed, but instead are critically valued and differently advanced. This is how the still rudimentary and defective humanism known as antiquarianism is exceeded, not negated, accepted as an essential part of one’s education and identity formation in whatever form it might take—­Ciceronianism, Petrarchism, Purism, or Croceanism—­but only if human familiarization with the original source is eventually attained. Gramsci’s anti-­idolatrous project, what he called the Anti-­Croce, has a distant model in the Anti-­Aristotle of Petrarch’s invectives as well as in Vico’s Anti-­Descartes. In the eyes of these three congenial Italians, Aristotle, Descartes, and Croce (and all other hard-­nosed philosophers in between) commit the same sin: they prefer truth to friendship,

The Last Renaissance Man  327

exemplified in the Aristotelian maxim, Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. Petrarch and Gramsci turn this maxim, which symbolizes the systematic turn in philosophy, on its head. For them, disembodied truth doesn’t stand a chance with respect to the congenial bond that ties us to predecessors and successors alike. Amica veritas, sed magis amicus Plato! As postmoderns, we have been too quick to extend to traditions our distrust and impatience for metanarratives. If traditions exist, we say, then it is only in retrospect, which is to say, artificially. But traditions, properly understood as a call for participation, were already an object of interest for thinkers anticipating, always originally sharing in, our dislike of grand theories. And as this study has shown, it is not the case that traditions are either passively received or nothing at all. Traditions etymologically worthy of that name are instead willed and created progressively; the individual stories, or better, the stories of individuals, that make up a tradition fall into place and find their maturation and coherence by dint of far-­reaching and time-­readied intellectual kinships, which themselves are often the result of outright misapprehensions. Petrarch’s scholarly and philosophical destiny is a case in point. In the introduction to this study, I stated that the close reading of Petrarch’s letters pursued in chapter 1 seeks to advance the hermeneutical turn of Petrarchan studies sparked by the 2004 anniversary. This turn, which compasses Petrarch’s Canzoniere as well as Latin writings such as the letters, was notably presaged in Mario Santagata’s I frammenti dell’anima. Storia e racconto nel Canzoniere di Petrarca, whose subtitle, the reader of the present work can now appreciate, pokes at De Sanctis’s misgivings regarding the Canzoniere’s ability to deliver such a racconto, or “story.”18 Although he does not mention De Sanctis or engage with him, Santagata introduces his study with an epigraph from the Critical Essay on Petrarch, the very passage in which De Sanctis recants his youthful belief regarding the possibility of recovering a “logical thread”—­post hoc ergo propter hoc—­in the Canzoniere. Thus we see Santagata contributing in his own way, nonpolemically, to a vindication of Petrarch with respect to De Sanctis,  just as scholars of Dante, Ariosto, or Tasso might do the same, in defense of those sources. However, as chance would have it, in Petrarch’s case, the same study that sought to recover a story and a method in the Canzoniere, pace De Sanctis, would eventually inspire the recovery of a similar story and a similar hermeneutics in the letters, which in turn has inspired me to explore 18. I frammenti dell’anima. Storia e racconto nel Canzoniere di Petrarca (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004 [1992]).

328  Conclusion

that work in juxtaposition to a recovery of  De Sanctis’s own story and method, demonstrating, I hope, an important degree of affinity between De Sanctis and the Latin Petrarch. This is one way of telling the story, for now . . . I grant that this attempt to insert the present study into the history of  Petrarch’s scholarly reception is trite and a bit shamefaced, but my larger point is that we can all, in our own little way, partake of  tradition. My true focus, of course, is the fascinating way in which Petrarchism or Petrarch’s intellectual legacy was further developed and extended, between De Sanctis and Gramsci. If conventional wisdom holds that Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis amounts to the Italian declension of historical materialism, then by extension Gramsci is the Italian Marx, as he is sometimes referred to. Yet I would argue that as we saw with Goldoni, the “Italian Molière,” we cannot understand the modifier as vaguely pointing to the cultural context in which Gramscian Marxism was formed. In other words, it asks us to excavate the self-­consciousness with which the label was born. If we perform that excavation, that is, if we delve molecularly into Gramsci’s affiliation with De Sanctis, an intellectual rapport that informs the Anti-­Croce and conjoins the latter to Gramsci’s approach to the Renaissance, then we realize that in De Sanctis the so-­called problem of the Renaissance was built on a (purposely, in its extent) misconstrued anti-­Petrarchism. From this Italian angle—­and with the understanding that all Anti-­Somethings are inseparable from that which they combat—­to state that Gramscianism is the Italian version of  historical materialism affirms that Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis is also a Petrarchism, among other things. This conclusion may seem historically far-­fetched, but I trust that these few hundred pages have made it plausible, and, more to the point, it reconciles our inveterate scholarly desire to uphold Petrarch as the father of humanism with Gramsci’s desire to label his brand of thought—­the thought that was required for a new age—­a “new humanism.” I can already hear the objection: that assertions of Gramsci’s Petrarchism only hold true within the internal jargon and perspective of Italian culture. If the objection has some validity, however, it is because an anthologized Gramsci has kept the international audience from appreciating how much of Gramsci is about the internal jargon and perspective of Italian culture. In Gramsci’s own words: “my culture is fundamentally Italian and this is my world” (LP, 2:87). And so, as I peruse recent works in search of a fitting way to conclude a study replete with autobiographical serendipities, I stumble upon an unexpected lucky break of my own. It turns out that I need not feel too self-­conscious, after all, about tackling Petrarch and Gramsci without mentioning Marx, or indeed, in discussing Gramsci extensively here, and in the courses that I teach on him,

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with exclusive reference to his Italian sources, for recent critics, attending to the literary form of Capital, have not only confirmed Marx’s great appreciation for Dante, but have shown how Marx’s major work amounted to a conscious, circle by circle, “rewriting [of ] Dante’s Inferno as a descent into the modern ‘social Hell’ of the capitalist mode of production.”19 According to this reading, the pilgrim and the proletarian alike must descend in order to ascend, in order to free themselves of a stifling structure. And so with this in mind, if we look past Italy and introduce Marx back into the equation alongside De Sanctis as Gramsci’s main sources of inspiration—­realizing that it cannot have escaped Gramsci that the two thinkers were exactly coeval, their births and deaths just months apart—­we must acknowledge that unknown to them, Marx scholars are also asking Gramsci to be Petrarch, a successor of Dante-­Marx. As scholars, of course, we lament the lack of conclusive evidence that Gramsci, having read Petrarch’s letters, would have rebuked De Sanctis in regard to the particular reading of Petrarch on which the entire edifice stands. But if the proof is nonextant, that may be for merely contingent reasons. For, knowing all that we know now, it seems that on a related point Gramsci is indeed defiant. Namely, in the passages, analyzed in the last chapter, where Gramsci defines political recollections as a more appropriate form to convey possibility than the political or philosophical essay, and as a means by which to expound one’s personal emancipation or deprovincialization, we recall that he refers particularly to the form of ricordi, the title Gucciardini gave to his autobiographical maxims. And so Gramsci seems to acknowledge Guicciardini, Petrarch’s surrogate in De Sanctis, as a man correct in form, if not in content. Be that as it may, De Sanctis played with fire. One wrong turn and his story might have caused irreparable damage. He always insisted that he debased Petrarch only to elevate him higher than anyone before, and, indeed, in reception, in De Sanctis’s own reception, Petrarch was not quashed, but was reformed and translated by Gramsci, whose notebooks, with some adjustments, followed the same recipe as Petrarch’s letters: hermeneutical congeniality, molecular parsing of one’s own intellectual development, submission to the corpus, and sacred respect of predecessors and successors—­what amounts to a renewed call to “know thyself,” one might say. Does any of  this mean that Gramsci ushered in a long overdue postcomedic or (what is the same thing) post-­Renaissance(/Risorgimento) phase in Italian intellectual history? No, because the Petrarchan and Gramscian argument is 19. William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 1.

330  Conclusion

that such an achievement cannot be delegated. No one can overcome the past in our stead. The Renaissance is a starting point immanent within all of us and something for all of us to conquer according to our abilities. The past does not hold the solution, and neither will the future, but a solution does exist within the horizon of anyone who wishes to practice humanism. To the scholar who approaches the Renaissance with a predetermined notion of the epoch, the characters of the story just told say, You have been warned!

Index

absolute historicism (Croce), 269 Accademia degli Intronati, 172–­73 actor/author relations: Goldoni on, 174–­75, 179–­81, 262; Sand on, 248 agency, Gramscian, 298–­99 Alberti, Leon Battista, 151 Alfieri, Vittorio, 82, 114–­15 Amante, Enrico, 97–­98, 110 Amendola, Giovanni, 289 Andreini, Giovan Battista, 215 Anselmi, Gian Mario, 83n6 Anti-­Aristotle, Petrarch and, 326 anticaglie, of Italian theater, 187 anti-­Canzoniere, De Sanctis and, 137, 170, 176, 269 anti-­Cartesianism: De Sanctis and, 91, 109, 119, 159–­60; Michelet and, 219–­21, 225; Vico and, 2, 91, 109, 159, 213, 213n26, 225. See also Anti-­Descartes; Cartesianism; Descartes, René Anti-­Croce, Gramsci and/as, 259, 269, 283, 285–­87, 295, 312, 318, 326 Anti-­Descartes, Vico and, 305, 326 “Anti-­Dühring” (Engels), 285, 286n43 anti-­Frenchness, 166, 168; De Sanctis and, 139; Petrarch and, 25. See also Italy and France

antihumanism, 3–­4 anti-­Petrarch(ism): De Sanctis and, 24, 90–­91, 128–­37, 170, 201, 295, 326, 328–­29; Goldoni and, 191–­92 antiquarianism, 34–­35, 37, 52, 57, 77, 326 antiquity, rediscovery of, Petrarch and, 68–­69 anti-­rhetoric, De Sanctis and, 113, 278 anxiety of influence (Bloom), 5–­6, 63 anxiety of reception, 6; Petrarch and, 63 Apelles, 45 aposiopesis, 66 apriorism, 134 Aretino, Pietro, 150–­51 Ariosto, Ludovico, 120, 150, 150n1, 151, 171 Aristotle/Aristotelians, 68–­71, 73–­74 Arnaud, François d’, Fayel, 168 Arnauld, Antoine, 94, 107–­8, 109n48 Asinius Pollio, 54 audience, theatrical, Goldoni and, 191–­92 Augustine of Hippo, 41, 41n25; Confessions, 97–­98 Austin, J. L., 14–­15 author, death of, 10–­11, 11n18 author/actor relations: Goldoni on, 174–­75, 179–­81, 262; Sand on, 248

332  Index authorial awareness/intention, 1, 4, 9, 11, 15–­ 19, 22, 34, 36, 44, 65, 326; De Sanctis and, 91–­94, 106, 112–­13, 118, 120, 124–­25, 136, 144; Goldoni and, 158, 162, 177–­79, 186–­87, 194; Petrarch and, 20, 22, 33, 40–­41, 41n25, 43–­44, 65, 77 autobiographism, 25, 313–­14; Croce and, 269–­75, 272n13, 302–­3; De Sanctis and, 274–­75, 311; Goldoni and, 176, 177n22, 194, 197, 201–­2, 311; Gramsci and, 267–­69, 272–­73, 303–­8; Guicciardini and, 319–­21; Michelet and, 222–­23, 237; Petrarch and, 58; Vico and, 272, 305–­6 autobiography, national, 309–­11, 315 Ballanche, Pierre-­Simon, 215, 219n45, 225; Essays on Social Palingenesis, 216; Orfée, 225, 242 Barbato da Sulmona, 39 Barbieri, Niccolò, 215; L’inavertito, 241 Baron, Hans, 82n5 Baroque, 150, 317 Barthes, Roland, 11n18, 221 Beardsley, Monroe D., 11n18 beauty, De Sanctis on, 123–­24 Belgioioso, Cristina Trivulzio di, 224; translation of  Vico’s New Science, 251 Betti, Emilio, 12–­16, 20–­21; General Theory of Interpretation, 12; précis of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, 12n21 Bibbiena, Cardinal, Calandria, 171 Black Death, 61–­62; Petrarch and, 38 Bloom, Harold, 6n6 Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron, 99, 146–­48, 171; De Sanctis on, 146–­48; and Petrarch, 50, 57–­66, 148–­49 body, and/as corpus, 45–­49, 61, 72–­73. See also corpus, literary Boeckh, August, 16 Bouhours, Dominique, 110 Brecht, Bertolt, 184 Brighella (stock character), 173, 187, 189–­ 90

Bruni, Leonardo, Dialogues for Pier Paolo Vergerio, 82 Bruno, Giordano, 155, 289; Il Candelaio/The Candle-­bearer, 151, 155 Buffon, Comte de (Georges-­Louis Leclerc), 112 Bukharin, Nikolai, 267 Burckhardt,  Jacob, 28, 80, 318; The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 88, 223, 317 calligraphism, Gramsci and, 266 Caminer, Elisabetta, 166–­68, 206; Modern Theatrical Compositions in Translation, 188 Campanella, Tommaso, 155, 289 Cantú, Cesare, 118–­20; History of Italian Literature, 119–­20 Carducci, Giosuè, 82; eulogy for Petrarch, 84–­85 caricature, De Sanctis on, 147 Cartesianism, 20, 94, 107, 219, 305–­6; De Sanctis on, 107–­8, 119, 160 Casanova, Giacomo, 183 Cassirer, Ernst, 37n19 Cattaneo, Carlo, 226n68, 231 Cecchini, Pier Maria, Discorsi, 241 Cerasuolo, Salvatore, 212n21 character reformation, Goldoni and, 186–­91. See also stock characters Charles VIII, king of France, 236–­38 cholera epidemic in Naples, De Sanctis and, 98–­99, 102–­3, 134 Chopin, Frédéric, 239–­40 Cicero/Ciceronianism, 126; Petrarch and, 49–­54, 68–­70, 139 civil achievement, of Italian thinkers, 290–­91 civilization, “five moving words of ” (De Sanctis), 95–­96 civil philosophy, of Romagnosi, 227–­28 collaboration, transhistorical, 3–­4, 8, 18–­21, 27, 117, 174–­75; Betti and, 15; De Sanctis and, 107, 114, 125; Gramsci and, 262, 313; Petrarch and, 77–­78. See also congeniality; corpus, literary

Index  333 collected works. See corpus, literary Colonna, Giovanni, 46 Coluccio Salutati, 82 Comédie-­Française (Paris), 203–­5 Comédie-­Italienne (Paris), 203–­5, 239 comédie italienne-­française, 245–­46 comedy. See Italian comic complex commedia all’italiana, Mandragola as, 171–­72 commedia a soggetto, 151, 155, 177, 182, 200, 208n10, 244, 262 commedia dell’arte, 25, 145, 151–­53, 163, 179, 189, 193–­94, 207–­9, 246; Sand and, 239–­54 commedia di carattere, 177, 183, 186, 200, 262 commedia d’intreccio, 171 commissioned work, Goldoni and, 183–­84 concrete imagination (Gramsci), 301 congeniality, 2, 21, 232, 251; Betti and, 14–­ 15; De Sanctis and, 89–­90, 114, 141–­42; Goldoni and, 195; Gramsci and, 329; in hermeneutics, 14–­15; Michelet and, 219, 222–­23; Petrarch and, 5, 21–­22, 35–­36, 43–­ 44, 49–­50, 52, 54, 60, 65, 71, 76, 78; Vico and, 219 conversation, Labriola and, 278, 283 conversion experience, 314, 321; Croce and, 272, 314, 316; De Sanctis and, 91, 97–­98, 102–­3, 135, 146–­47; Goldoni and, 159, 179, 253; Gramsci and, 290; Leopardi and, 101; Petrarch and, 33–­34, 54, 75 Corneille, Pierre, Le menteur, 192 corpus, literary, 2, 6–­7, 22, 27, 43–­44, 55–­56, 69–­70, 326; Goldoni and, 161–­62, 176, 176n21, 186, 195, 203; Gramsci and, 312; Petrarch and, 5–­7, 22, 29–­39, 78. See also congeniality corpus analysis, 27 corpus reading, 177–­79, 185–­87, 195–­96 corruption/decadence, De Sanctis on, 170 Cousin, Victor, 224, 227 critical communism, Labriola and, 281 Croce, Benedetto, 2, 25–­27, 212–­13, 225, 274–­ 75; and autobiographism, 269–­75, 272n13, 302–­3; and commedia dell’arte, 208–­9;

conversion experience, 272, 314, 316; and De Sanctis, 90, 265–­66, 265n6, 325; and fascism, 309–­10; and futural perspective, 272, 272n13, 325; and Gramsci, 256–­69, 275, 287–­90, 292, 302, 310–­11, 315–­17, 323–­25; and Hegelianism, 2, 258, 271, 281, 299–­300; and Labriola, 276–­77, 282–­83; as last Renaissance man, 324; and Marxism, 258, 269–­71, 270n9, 274–­75, 281–­83, 288; narrow escape from death, 270–­71, 299; religious crisis, 270; and Renaissance, 317–­ 18, 321; as “secular pope,” 290n49; and Serra, 292–­95, 293n54; and Vichism, 215; and Vico’s theory of laughter, 209, 209n15 Croce, Benedetto, works: Bibliografia vichi­ana/Vichian Bibliography (with F. Nicolini), 216–­18; “Concerning the Scientific Form of Historical Materialism,” 281–­82; Contribution to the Criticism of Myself, 270–­75; History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 273, 314–­15; History of Italy, 1871–­1915, 273, 293n54, 314; History of the Baroque in Italy, 273, 317; “How Theoretical Marxism Was Born and Died in Italy,” 315; “A Joke That Has Gone Too Far” (note), 324 cult of antiquity, 68 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 126; Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, 111–­12, 111n53, 216 Dante Alighieri, 63, 68n52, 170; De Sanctis and, 94–­96, 147; Divine Comedy, 124, 124n82, 156; Leopardi and, 102; Petrarch and, 82, 86–­87, 89; Vita nova, 94–­95 “Dantesque synthesis,” De Sanctis on, 145 Dàrbes, Cesare, 179–­80, 204 Darwin, Charles, 123 daydreaming, De Sanctis and, 94–­96, 140 death: of author, 10, 11n18, 314; of commedia dell’arte, 253; and corpus reading, 195–­96; Croce’s narrow escape from, 270–­71, 299; of De Sanctis, 299; and fame, 48–­49; of

334  Index death (cont.) friends, 61–­62; of Goldoni, 206; Goldoni’s narrow escape from, 202; of Gramsci, 275; of La Vista, 113; of Leopardi, 103–­4; moment of, 66; premature, 113–­14; prospect of, 38, 38n20, 56, 61; of Serra, 293, 296; of Bertrando Spaventa, 299; and vivere vita peracta, 64–­65. See also survivor Deburau, Jean-­Gaspard, 247 Decadentism, 293 demasking, Goldoni and, 179–­80, 191, 193, 196 De Meis, Angelo Camillo, 126–­27, 140 Denis, Ferdinand, 218 derhetoricization: Goldoni and, 191–­92; Labriola and, 280 De Sanctis, Francesco, 2, 24–­25, 28, 311, 319; and anti-­Cartesianism, 91, 109, 119, 159–­60; and anti-­Petrarch(ism), 24, 90–­91, 128–­37, 170, 201, 295, 326, 328–­29; anti­ rhetorical doctrine, 113, 278; and authorial awareness/intention, 91–­94, 106, 112–­13, 118, 120, 124–­25, 136, 144; and autobiograph­ ism, 274–­75, 311; as autodidact, 94, 114–­ 16; on Cartesianism, 107–­8, 119, 160; and cholera epidemic, 98–­99, 102–­3, 134; and commedia dell’arte, 208, 208n10; and congeniality, 89–­90, 114, 141–­42; conversion experience, 91, 97–­98, 102–­3, 135, 146–­47; and Croce, 90, 265–­66, 265n6, 273–­74, 325; as daydreamer, 94–­96, 140; death of, 299; and death of sister Genoviefa, 94–­96; and death of uncle Carlo, 97; education, 96–­97, 104–­5; exile in Switzerland, 128–­29, 129n88; and friends, 97–­99, 104, 110, 159; and futural perspective, 114–­16, 133, 148, 158; and Gramsci, 90, 259–­66, 296–­97, 316–­17; and Hegelianism, 24, 92, 109, 113, 115, 122–­23, 155, 259; imprisonment, 113–­ 16; influence, 89–­90, 258–­66; as last Purist, 90, 139; military experience, 113; and patriotism, 93, 110, 113–­16, 137–­42, 159; and pedagogy, 94, 96–­97, 104–­5; and Petrarch,

79, 86–­91, 128–­42, 145–­46; “pilgrim’s prog­ ress” of, 103; teaching career, 91, 106–­23, 135–­37; and transhistorical collaboration, 107, 114, 125; and Vico/Vichism, 92–­94, 98, 100, 109–­12, 152, 154, 159 De Sanctis, Francesco, works: Critical Essay on Petrarch, 24–­25, 85, 91, 122, 143, 145–­46, 170, 176, 201, 263, 319, 325, 327; La giovi­ nezza/Youth, 90–­91, 93–­99, 102–­4, 112–­13, 159, 274; History of Italian Literature, 24–­25, 85–­91, 93, 96, 100, 112, 122, 124, 124n82, 141, 143–­60, 168–­72, 176, 184, 201, 223, 254, 260, 318–­19; “The Last of the Purists,” 104–­5, 109, 274–­75; “The Man of Guicciardini,” 319–­21; “Science and Life,” 91–­93; “The Starting Point for a History of Italian Literature,” 140; Studio su Giacomo Leopardi/Study on Giacomo Leopardi, 101 Descartes, René, 25; Discourse on the Method, 305–­6. See also Cartesianism Destouches, Philippe Néricault, L’irrésolu, 192 Devenir social, 275 dialogism, 9, 77, 285 Diderot, Denis, 192–­93; Le fils naturel, 192 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 12, 301n68 disputation, humanists and, 82 Donato degli Albanzani, 72 Donatus, Aelius, 212 Dühring, Eugene, 285 earthquake (Ischia, 1883), 270, 299 eclecticism, humanists and, 71 Eden, Kathy, 8–­9 effective world (De Sanctis), 124 Einfühlung, 7, 42 elective affinities, 15, 219 empathic understanding, 7, 9, 12 endurance art, Goldoni and, 196 Engels, Friedrich, 266; Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (the “Anti-­Dühring”), 285, 286n43 ethics of reading, De Sanctis and, 91 exempla, Petrarch’s use of, 46

Index  335 “exhumation” method (Sand), 243–­45 experimentalism, Petrarchan, 32 experimental theater, Sand and, 239–­41 fame, and death, 48–­49 fame plots, Petrarch and, 23 familiarity/familiaritas, 14; Gramsci and, 300; Petrarch and, 48–­50, 49n29, 53–­54, 60, 72. See also congeniality fascism, Italian, 304, 309, 315 Febvre, Lucien, 238 Fénelon, François, The Adventures of Telemachus, 94 Feo, Michele, 30–­31 Ferrari, Giuseppe, 224–­27, 226n68, 231; as infraciosato, 226, 226n68, 233n88; and Vichism, 217, 232–­33; The Mind of Giambattista Vico/Vico et l’Italie, 226, 233–­34; The Mind of Giandomenico Romagnosi, 232; Les philosophes salariés, 233n88; The Philosophy of Revolution, 226 Fiorentino, Francesco, 29 Fiorilli, Tiberio, 197 Fisch, Max H., 218n42 Florence, 203 florilegia, medieval genre of, 74 Folengo, Teofilo, 150 Foscolo, Ugo, 82, 114–­15 Fracassetti, Giuseppe, 85, 85n15, 129 fragmentariness, problem of, 54–­56 France. See anti-­Frenchness; Italy and France Frederick II, court of, 141 French aesthetics, De Sanctis on, 117–­18 French influence, Italian Purism and, 97 French theater, 174, 247; Caminer and, 166–­ 67; Goldoni and, 187–­88, 192–­93. See also Molière friends: death of, 38, 56, 61–­62; De Sanctis and, 97–­99, 104, 110, 159; Gramsci and, 291–­92; Labriola and, 281; Petrarch and, 35, 38–­40, 43, 43n26, 44, 48, 50, 56, 59–­60, 64–­65, 69, 72–­74, 76–­77. See also congeniality

futural perspective, 2, 7, 21; Croce and, 272, 272n13, 325; De Sanctis and, 114–­16, 133, 148, 158; Goldoni and, 177, 179, 186, 200; Gramsci and, 297–­98, 310; Michelet and, 220, 222–­23; Petrarch and, 21–­22, 35, 45, 48–­49, 52, 56–­58, 62–­63, 65–­66, 77–­78, 81, 84, 298; Sand and, 248–­49; Vico and, 254, 272. See also reception Gadamer, Hans-­Georg, 8–­12, 20–­21; Truth and Method, 9 Galileo Galilei, 100, 155, 289 Garrick, David, 182 Garzoni, Tommaso, 212 Gautier, Théophile, Le Capitaine Fracasse, 239 “G*** B*** V***,” identity of, 159, 161 Geisteswissenschaften, 70n54 genius: De Sanctis on, 120–­21, 129; individual, 227, 232–­34; and language, 110, 110n51 genius of nations, 87–­88, 254–­55; Goldoni and, 164, 198; Gozzi and, 168; Michelet and, 219–­20, 236; Sand and, 243, 246 Gentile, Giovanni, 90 Germans, De Sanctis on, 115–­16, 128–­29, 129n88 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 113–­14; History of the 19th Century, 114–­16 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 217, 224–­25, 231; The Moral and Political Primacy of the Italians, 224 Gobetti, Piero, 289, 309 “going to the people,” 317; De Sanctis and, 91, 106–­23, 130–­31, 158 Goldoni, Carlo, 2, 25, 144, 170–­71; and actor/ author relations, 174–­75, 179–­81, 262; and anti-­Petrarch(ism), 191–­92; and authorial awareness/intention, 158, 162, 177–­79, 186–­ 87, 194; and autobiographism, 176, 177n22, 194, 197, 201–­2, 311; conversion experience, 159, 179, 253; death of, 206; and death of commedia dell’arte, 253; and De Sanctis, 152; and Diderot, 192–­93; education of, 162–­64; as French author, 205–­6; and futural perspective, 177, 179, 186, 200;

336  Index Goldoni, Carlo (cont.) and Gramsci, 261–­62; introduction to the theater, 163–­64, 172–­76; as “Italian Molière,” 165, 202, 328; narrow escape from death, 202; and patriotism, 164, 166; relocation to France, 200–­206; self-­ imposed challenge of 1750–­51, 185–­87, 196; structuring of corpus, 161–­62, 176, 176n21, 186, 195, 203; and theatrical reform, 152–­53, 162–­66, 174–­96, 200, 261–­62, 311; travels in Italy, 172–­73; as tutor at French court, 194–­95; and Vico, 157–­59, 161–­62 Goldoni, Carlo, works: L’adulatore/The Flatterer, 189; L’avventuriere onorato/ The Honorable Adventurer, 194, 196; Belisario, 173–­74; La bottega del caff è/ The Coffee House, 190, 190n39; Le bourru bienfaisant/The Benevolent Curmud­ geon, 205–­6; Il Bugiardo/The Liar, 192; Il cavaliere di buon gusto/The Gentleman of Good Taste, 190; La dama prudente/The Prudent Lady, 191; La donna di garbo/ The Fashionable Woman, 181; La donna volubile/The Fickle Woman, 192; I due gemelli veneziani/The Venetian Twins, 180, 204; Le femmine puntigliose/The Obstinate Women, 188; La finta ammalata/The Imaginary Invalid Woman, 191; Il genio buono e il genio cattivo/The Good and Evil Genies, 204; Il giocatore/The Gambler, 191; L’incognita/The Unknown Woman, 191; Mémoires, 25, 158–­59, 162–­65, 168, 172–­96, 202–­5; Memorie italiane/Italian Recollections, 162, 176–­82, 177n22, 182; Il Moliere/Molière, 196–­98, 200, 202; Momolo Cortesan (L’uomo di mondo), 177; Momolo sul Brenta (Il prodigo), 177, 181; Pamela fanciulla, 193–­94; Pamela maritata/Married Pamela, 194; I pettegolezzi delle donne/ Women’s Gossip, 191; Il poeta fanatico/ The Fanatical Poet, 191; Il servitore di due padroni, 184–­85, 184n30; Il teatro comico/ The Comic Theater, 185n31, 186–­88, 205,

241; Una delle ultime sere di carnovale/One of the Last Carnival Evenings, 201–­2; Il vero amico/The True Friend, 192–­93 “goliardic” theater, 164n14 Golinetti (Francesco Bruna), 179–­81 Gozzi, Carlo, 153, 166–­68 Graf, Arturo, 89 Gramsci, Antonio, 2, 25–­26, 112; and/as Anti-­Croce, 259, 269, 283, 285–­87, 295, 312, 318, 326; and autobiographism, 267–­69, 272–­73, 303–­8; and “Club of Moral Life,” 290–­91; correspondence, 300–­304, 310; and Croce, 256–­69, 275, 284–­85, 287–­90, 292, 302, 310–­11, 315–­17, 323–­25; and De Sanctis, 90, 259–­66, 296–­97, 316–­17; experience of imprisonment, 295–­96, 310; and friends, 291–­92; and futural perspective, 297–­98, 310; and Hegelianism, 302, 304, 307, 316; as Italian Marx, 328; and Kipling, 295–­96; and Labriola, 280–­81, 290; and pedagogy, 296; as post-­(and pre-­) Croce, 284–­85; publication history, 288–­90; and Renaissance, 316–­ 19, 321; and Serra, 296–­97; and transhistorical collaboration, 262, 313; and translation, 261n2; and Vico/Vichism, 263–­66 Gramsci, Antonio, works: “The Light That Turned Off ” (obituary of Serra), 296, 324; Prison Notebooks, 27, 260, 262, 268, 288, 297–­98, 307, 310–­11; “Quaderni di tradu­ zioni,” 261n2; Some Aspects of the Southern Question, 310 Gramscianism, 26–­27, 328 graphic narration (Labriola), 280 Gravina, Gian Vincenzo, 158 Greene, Thomas M., 6n6, 17, 19 Grimarest, The Life of Molière, 197 Grimm, Friederich Melchior, 192 Guicciardini, Francesco, 319–­21; Ricordi, 320 Guizot, François, 215 Hankins, James, 31n6 Harlequin (stock character), 173, 177, 180, 185n30, 187–­90, 193–­94, 204; French, 197

Index  337 Hegelianism, 260–­61, 268, 270, 286; Croce and, 2, 258, 271, 281, 299–­300; De Sanctis and, 24, 92, 109, 113, 115, 122–­23, 155, 259; Gramsci and, 302, 304, 307, 316 hegemony (Gramsci), 287 Heidegger, Martin, 9–­10 hermeneutic circle, 33–­34 hermeneutics, 8–­20; carnal, 213, 213n26; corporeal, 221–­22; deontological, 91; empathic, 42; participatory, 195; Petrarchan, 31, 36–­37, 42–­57, 78 (see also Petrarchism); and Vichism, 254–­55 Hesdin, Jean d’, 73–­76 Hirsch, E. D., 10–­11, 16 historical materialism: Croce on, 281–­82; Labriola on, 277–­80 historiography, and autobiography, 160, 308 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 244 hostility/anger, Petrarch on, 66–­67 human being, feral (bestione), 228–­29 humanism, 3–­5, 8, 20–­28, 82n5, 123, 153; new, 265, 267–­69, 328; Petrarchan, 22, 25, 34, 48, 52–­54, 57–­58, 67–­68, 70n54, 74, 77–­78 (see also Petrarchism); Renaissance, 3–­5, 11, 21, 34–­35, 71, 80–­81, 220 idealism: Croce and, 217, 258–­59, 268, 316; De Sanctis and, 100, 122, 134, 140 “illustrious ancients,” Petrarch’s letters to, 50–­57 imitation: Goldoni and, 204; Petrarch and, 47; Renaissance humanists and, 11–­12 “implied reader,” 118, 118n66 improvisation: Goldoni and, 176–­82, 187, 205; Sand and, 240–­41 incivilimento (Romagnosi), 227–­28; dative vs. native, 230, 234–­35; positivo, 229 ingannati, Gl’, 172–­73 intention. See authorial awareness/intention intentional fallacy, 11, 11n18 intentional form, 17–­18 intentional world, 124 internal form (Betti), 16

intertextuality, internal, in Petrarch, 22 intimacy: Croce on, 309; Gramsci on, 304; Petrarch on, 48–­50, 52–­54, 60; transhistorical, 2. See also congeniality intrinsic genre (Hirsch), 16, 19, 36–­37, 71 invective, Petrarch and, 21, 66–­76, 67n51, 139 irony, Gramsci on, 263–­64 Italian comic complex, 145–­58, 258 Italian communist party, 288 Italian language, 97, 140–­41 Italian theater: De Sanctis on, 150–­52; Goldoni’s reform of, 152–­53, 162–­66, 174–­96, 200, 261–­62, 311. See also Goldoni, Carlo Italy and France, 25–­26, 110–­11, 110n51; and commedia dell’arte, 239–­54; competing for Petrarch, 83–­84; and concept of “Renaissance,” 233–­38; Cuoco and, 111–­12; Petrarch and, 73–­76, 81; Sand and, 251. See also Goldoni, Carlo; miso-­gallismo; Purism Jansenism, 94, 107–­8, 109n48, 112 jargon, philosophical, Croce and Gramsci on, 256–­59 Kennedy, William, 23 Kipling, Rudyard, 295–­96 Labriola, Antonio, 27, 271, 275–­87; and Croce, 276–­77, 282–­83; Essays on the Materialistic Conception of History, 277–­78; and Gramsci, 280–­81, 290; “In Memory of the Communist Manifesto,” 275–­76; letter to Engels (1894), 280; and Marxism, 279–­ 80; and Sorel, 278–­79, 285 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 117–­18 language origins: De Sanctis on, 108–­9; Vico on, 213–­15, 244 La Porte, Mathieu Lefebvre de, 255 laughter, Vico’s theory of, 207–­15 La Vista, Luigi, 113 Le Goff, Jacques, 236 Leipzig acta eruditorum, 209 Lelio (character), 187, 190–­91

338  Index Leonardo da Vinci, 236 Leopardi, Giacomo, 82, 91, 98–­104 letter-­writing, 9; and invective, 67, 67n51 liberty, De Sanctis on, 92–­93 limit, De Sanctis on, 92–­93 literary canonization, De Sanctis on, 130–­31 literary criticism, De Sanctis and, 106–­26 Livy, 54, 77 Loria, Achille, 279 Louis XIV, king of France, 197 Lozzi, Carlo, 90n20 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 83, 100, 151, 168–­72; Clizia, 171; Mandragola/The Mandrake, 165, 170–­72, 205 Maffei, Scipione, 158 magnum opus, 71 Malpaghini, Giovanni, 47 Manceau, Alexandre, 241 marathon theater, 195, 195n58 Marino, Giambattista, 150 Marx, Karl, 266, 286; and Dante, 329 Marxism, Italian: Croce and, 258, 269–­71, 270n9, 274–­75, 281–­83, 288; Labriola and, 279–­80; reception of, 275–­87 Matteotti, Giacomo, 289 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 224, 242 meaning-­full forms (sinnhaltige Formen; Betti), 12–­15 memory, De Sanctis on, 106–­7 Mencken, Johann Burkhard, 209 “Meslé, M.,” 203–­4 Metastasio, Pietro, 153, 154n4 Mézières, Alfred, Pétrarque, 129–­31 Michelet, Jules, 25–­26, 28, 80; anti-­ Cartesianism, 219–­21, 225; and autobio­ graphism, 222–­23, 237; and congeniality, 219, 222–­23; and futural perspective, 220, 222–­23; on Italo-­French modernity, 235–­ 36; and “Renaissance,” 207, 226, 234–­38; and Vichism, 207, 217–­25 Michelet, Jules, works: Discourse on the System and the Life of Vico, 218–­23, 229;

History of France, 221, 223; Introduction to Universal History, 235; On History, 235n92; The People, 221–­22; Preface, 222; Principles of the Philosophy of History, 218 Middle Ages, Michelet and, 236–­38 Milan, Piccolo Teatro, 184–­85 mirror, image of, 44, 44n27, 127 Misch, Georg, 307n76 miso-­gallismo, in Italian culture. See anti-­Frenchness Mitfühlen, 40, 40n24 molecularism (Gramsci), 27, 259, 266, 269, 299–­301, 301n68, 304–­6, 308, 310–­11, 323, 328–­29 Molière, 25, 153, 165–­66, 175, 246, 251–­52; Goldoni and, 191, 196–­99; The Impromptu at Versailles, 197; Le Misanthrope, 205; Tartuffe, 197 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 215 moralism, De Sanctis and, 119–­20 Moretti, Marcello, 185n30 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, 158, 212n21 Nacherleben, 7, 40, 40n24 Nachfühlen, 40, 40n24 national characters, Gramsci on, 263 national/popular, Gramsci on, 322–­23, 322n14 naturalité/snaturalité, 250 Nelli, Francesco (“Simonides”), 56, 62 Neo-­Guelphism, 224 Neo-­Hegelianism, 216, 286 neolalism, Gramsci and, 266 New Criticism, 11, 16 “new literature”: De Sanctis and, 155; Goldoni and, 172 Niccoli, Niccolò, 82 Nicole, Pierre, 94, 109n48 Nicolini, Fausto, 217 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, 142 novelization, Goldoni and, 194

Index  339 objectification: literary, 45–­47, 54; of spirit, 12, 21 opera omnia, 6. See also corpus, literary Ordine nuovo, L’, 309 Ottoboni, Maria Vittoria, 192 Pantalone (stock character), 179–­81, 186–­89, 204 pantomime, 247 Parini, Giuseppe, 153–­54, 154n3 participatory deliberation, Petrarch and, 44 parts and whole, 54–­56 “passive revolution,” Italy and, 111n53, 112–­13, 166, 315 patriotism: cosmopolitan, 225; De Sanctis and, 93, 110, 113–­16, 137–­42, 159; Ferrari and, 226n68; Goldoni and, 164, 166 pedagogy: De Sanctis and, 94, 96–­97, 104–­5; Gramsci and, 296 perfectibility (Romagnosi), 227–­28 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 2, 200–­201, 325–­26; address to posterity, 21, 58, 58n39, 65–­66; alleged lack of philosophy, 29, 37, 37n19; and authorial awareness/intention, 20, 22, 33, 40–­41, 41n25, 43–­44, 65, 77; and Boccaccio, 50, 57–­66, 148–­49; and Cicero/Ciceronianism, 49–­54, 68–­70, 139; and congeniality, 5, 21–­22, 35–­36, 43–­44, 49–­50, 52, 54, 60, 65, 71, 76, 78; conversion experience, 33–­34, 54, 75; and Dante, 82, 86–­87, 89; and De Sanctis, 79, 86–­91, 128–­42, 145–­46; and familiarity/familiaritas, 48–­50, 49n29, 53–­54, 60, 72; as “first modern man,” 80–­81, 138; as first Purist, 89, 139; and friends, 35, 38–­40, 43, 43n26, 44, 48, 50, 56, 59–­60, 64–­65, 69, 72–­74, 76–­77; and futural perspective, 21–­22, 35, 45, 48–­49, 52, 56–­58, 62–­63, 65–­66, 77–­78, 81, 84, 298; as guarantor, 20; hermeneutical conversion, 33–­34, 54, 75; invectives, 21, 66–­76, 67n51, 139; letter collections, 22, 78, 184; and literary executors, 39, 39n23; and plague year, 38, 61–­62; projected

national edition, 30–­31, 83; rediscovery of Cicero’s letters, 49, 68; son (Giovanni), 61; structuring of literary corpus, 5–­7, 22, 29–­39, 78; and transhistorical collaboration, 77–­78 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), works: Canzoniere, 23, 33, 129–­37; Contra Gallum, 73–­ 76; De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, 67–­74, 77; De viris illustribus, 75; De vita solitaria, 44, 56–­57, 61; Familiares, 21, 32, 38–­57, 60, 78; Invective contra medicum, 66; Rerum memorandarum libri, 77; Seniles, 21, 41, 57–­66, 78 Petrarchan anniversaries, 29–­33, 83–­84 Petrarchism, 1, 5, 22, 24, 27, 34–­35, 48, 57, 78–­79, 83, 150, 160; De Sanctis on, 128–­42, 170; double, 129; Gramsci and, 328; Leo­ pardi and, 102; of Petrarch, 132–­33, 200–­201; transmission of, 35–­36. See also posteritism Phidias, 45 philologism, 31, 273 philosophical biography, Ferrari and, 232 philosophy of praxis, Gramsci on, 259–­66, 281, 284 Pierrot (stock character), 247, 252–­53 Pirandello, Luigi, 262n4 plague year (1348), 38, 61–­62 Plato/Platonism, 126, 129, 160 Plautus, Menaechmi, 180 Pliny, 77 Port-­Royalists, 94, 107–­8, 109n48 posteritism, 2–­3, 21–­22, 219 posthumous perspective, 7, 70, 78, 104, 113, 246, 284, 297, 304, 310. See also futural perspective presentism, diachronic, 3–­4, 77–­78 Préville, 182 primi and ultimi, Petrarch and, 57, 61, 298 protonationalisms, 23 Provençal language, 140–­41 psychologism, 10, 15, 101, 129, 139, 156–­57, 245 Pulcinella (stock character), 246–­47, 256–­57, 279. See also Harlequin (stock character)

340  Index Pulice da Vicenza, 51–­52, 68 Puoti, Basilio, 96–­97, 106, 110, 112, 135, 275 Purism, 89–­90, 97, 105–­6, 110–­11, 143. See also Puoti, Basilio purpose, 16–­17, 92–­93, 115 Quillen, Carol E., 41n25 Quintilian, 126; Institutio oratoria, 55; Petrarch and, 54–­56 Ranalli, Ferdinando, 104 reader-­response criticism, 118n66 readers: affectus of, 42; congenial (see congeniality) realism: De Sanctis and, 122–­23, 260; Goldoni and, 154–­55 reception, assimilated to creative act, 7–­8, 42, 78, 117–­18 reception aesthetics, 118n66 Reinhardt, Max, 184 Renaissance, Italian: Burckhardt and, 88; Croce and, 317–­18, 321; De Sanctis and, 87–­88, 319; Ferrari and, 234–­35; Gramsci and, 257, 318, 321; “invention” of, 80; Michelet and, 26, 207, 223–­24, 226, 234–­ 38; problem of, 317–­30 “Renaissance man,” 88–­89, 324 representational forms ( forme rappresentative; Betti), 12 “resurgence,” Italian (risorgimento): Gramsci on, 257; Romagnosi on, 230 “resurrection” (Michelet), 222 Revue des deux mondes, 246 “rhetorical philology” (Carducci), 84–­85 Richardson, Samuel, Pamela, 192–­93 ricordi form, 329 Rimini, 203 Risorgimento, 23, 26, 224, 270; De Sanctis and, 104–­5; and Renaissance, 87, 138; and return to Petrarch, 82–­91 Romagnosi, Giandomenico, 227–­32; “Considerations on the Limits and . . . Direc-

tion of Historical Studies,” 229; On the Nature and Causes of Civilization, 227, 235 Roman antiquity, Gramsci on, 322 Romanticism, 156–­57, 207 romanzesco, Goldoni and, 194 Rome, “sacredness” of, 74–­75 Rosenkranz, Karl, Handbook of a General History of Poetry, 115 Rossi, Roberto, 82 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 248 Ruzante (Angelo Beolco), 249–­51, 249n114, 253, 261 Sacchi, Antonio, 182–­84 Sand, George: and commedia dell’arte, 239–­54; “Ruzante dictionary,” 250–­51; Les vacances de Pandolphe, 251–­52; and Vichism, 241–­44, 248–­49 Sand, George and Maurice, 261; Masques et Bouffons, 26, 207, 241–­55 Sand, Maurice, and commedia dell’arte, 239–­54 Santagata, Mario, 33; I frammenti dell’anima, 327 sarcasm, Gramsci on, 263–­64, 266 Sarpi, Paolo, 155 Scala, Flaminio, 215; Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, 241 Scheler, Max, 40n24 scholasticism/scholastics, 48–­49, 53, 70, 73–­ 76, 237; Goldoni and, 162–­63 scientific socialism, Labriola and, 281 Sciosciammocca (stock character), 279 Scribe, Eugène, 207 self-­alienation, 38–­39, 257–­59 Seneca, 54, 64 Serra, Renato, 292, 324; and Croce, 292–­95, 293n54; death of, 296; and De Sanctis, 295; on Kipling, 295–­96; A Literary Man’s Examination of Conscience, 292–­93 Settembrini, Luigi, 118, 120–­22; Lectures on Literature, 120–­21

Index  341 shared will, 15–­16 Siena, Goldoni in, 172–­73 “Simonides.” See Nelli, Francesco (“Simonides”) Socrates, 126 “Socrates.” See Van Kempen, Ludwig (“Socrates”) Soleri, Ferruccio, 185n30 sonnet form, 135 Sorel, Georges, and Labriola, 278–­79, 285 Spaventa, Bertrando, 270–­71, 299 Spaventa, Silvio, 270, 301–­2 state spirit (Gramsci), 297–­98 stock characters, 173–­74, 246–­48; in Masques et Bouffons (Sand and Sand), 241. See also Brighella (stock character); Harlequin (stock character); Pantalone (stock character); Pulcinella (stock character) Strehler, Giorgio, 184–­85, 184n29–­184n30 style, De Sanctis on, 112–­13 Suetonius, 72 survivor: De Sanctis as, 104, 113; friends as, 40; Petrarch as, 38, 61–­62 Tacitus, 126 Talli, Virgilio, 262n3 Tasca, Angelo, 309 Tasso, Torquato, 150 theater. See French theater; Italian theater Thersites, 247 Thierry, Augustin, 215 Thiers, Adolphe, 215 Thimig, Hermann, 184 Thimig, Hugo, 184 Tilgher, Adriano, 262n4 Togliatti, Palmiro, 288–­90 Tommaso da Messina, 48 traditions, 1, 4, 7, 14, 19, 22, 27, 327 tragedy, 154, 255 translatability (Gramsci), 260–­62, 287 Trotsky, Leon, 281 Truffaldino (stock character), 182

Turin, 83, 196, 198, 202, 291 “two peoples” theory (Cuoco), 126, 141 types, theatrical, 173–­74 typification, Hirsch and, 16–­17 Van Kempen, Ludwig (“Socrates”), 37, 39–­ 40, 49, 56, 76 verbalism, Labriola on, 277–­78 Verstehen, 7, 272, 301n68 Vichism, 111–­12, 224–­36, 254–­55; De Sanctis and, 98, 154; Ferrari and, 217, 232–­33; French, 26, 207, 217–­23, 226–­27, 242; Gramsci and, 263–­66; Italian, 216, 224–­25; Sand and, 241–­44, 248–­49; shared, 215–­38, 254–­55 Vicini, Giovanni Battista, 159 Vico, Giambattista, 2, 15, 21, 24–­25, 97–­98, 144, 155, 219; and anti-­Cartesianism, 2, 91, 109, 159, 213, 213n26, 225; and autobio­ graphism, 272, 305–­6; and De Sanctis, 92–­94, 100, 109–­12, 152, 159; and Goldoni, 157–­59, 161–­62; and Gramsci, 263–­66; as last Renaissance man, 234; theory of laughter, 207–­15 Vico, Giambattista, works: autobiography, 93, 160–­62, 218n42, 232; De antiquissima italorum sapientia/On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, 225, 242; De mente heroica/On the Heroic Mind, 219; De nostri temporis studiorum ratione/On the Study Methods of Our Time, 94, 101, 109–­10; Scienza nuova/New Science, 109, 156, 158, 211n18, 218–­19, 221, 225, 242, 272; Vici vindiciae, 209 Villari, Pasquale, 113 Virgil, 41 “visual angle” (Labriola), 280, 318 “vital method” of historiography (Michelet), 235 vita peracta (accomplished life), 64–­65, 272 Vittorio Emanuele II, king of Italy, 253–­54

342  Index Voigt, Georg, 80–­81; The Revival of Classical Antiquity, 129 Voltaire, Nanine, 192–­93 Wagner, Richard, 129n88 Wellek, René, 24, 123

White, Hayden, 218 wholeness, quest for, 54–­56 Wimsatt, W. K., 11n18 Witt, Ronald G., 34n15 Zola, Émile, 123