Immagini della pagina
PDF
ePub

Rosmini and
Gioberti.

of medicine who in 1847 tried to construct an Esthetic of an exact or mathematical kind, with neither better nor worse result than many famous authors in other countries. He noticed, while turning his algebraical expressions into numerals, that such general formulæ “fulfil their object with an infinite number of systems of different ciphers"; and that in art there is an element "not arbitrary, but unknown." 1 Works by German authors were frequently translated at this time, some of them, for example the writings of the two Schlegels, being reprinted several times; the Esthetic of Bouterweck, deriving from Kant and Schiller,2 was read and discussed ; Colecchi gave an excellent statement of the æsthetic doctrines of Kant; and in 1831 a certain Lichtenthal adapted the Esthetic of Franz Ficker to the use of Italian readers; later the same book was fully translated by another hand; some of Schelling's writings were translated, e.g. his discourses on the relation between figurative art and nature.

3

It must be admitted that in Italy Esthetic received but inadequate treatment in the revival of philosophical speculation effected by the work of Galluppi, Rosmini and Gioberti. It is treated in a merely incidental and popular manner by the first named.5 Rosmini devotes a section of his philosophical system to the deontological sciences, which "treat of the perfection of being, and the method of acquiring or producing such perfection or losing it"; among these sciences is that of “beauty in the universal" under the name of Callology, of which a special part is Esthetic, the science of “beauty in the sensible," establishing the " archetypes of beings." In his longest literary work, considered by him as his Esthetic,?

1 P. Balestrieri, Fondamenti di estetica, Naples, 1847.

2 Friedrich Bouterweck, Ästhetik, 1806, 1815 (3rd ed., Göttingen, 1824-1825).

3 O. Colecchi, Questioni filosofiche, vol. iii., Naples, 1843.

P. Lichtenthal, Estetica ossia dottrina del bello e delle arti belle,

Milan, 1831.

↳ Elementi di filosofia (5th ed., Naples, 1846), vol. ii. pp. 427-476.

• Sistema filosofico, by A. Rosmini-Serbati, Turin, 1886, § 210.

7 Cf. Nuovo saggio sopra l' orig. delle idee, § v. part iv. ch. 5.

his essay on The Idyl,1 Rosmini declares the aim of art to be neither imitation of nature nor direct intuition of the archetypes, but the reduction of natural things to their archetypes, which are arranged in a hierarchy of three ideals, natural, intellectual and moral. Gioberti 2 is clearly under the influence of German idealism, especially of Schelling's; for him the beautiful is "the individual union of an intelligible type with an imaginative element called into being by fancy"; the phantasm gives material, while the intelligible type (concept) gives form, in the Aristotelian sense,3 and since the ideal element predominates over the sensible or fantastic, art is a propedeutic to the true and the good. Gioberti is of opinion that Hegel was wrong in detaching natural beauty from Esthetic, for perfect beauty of nature is "the full correspondence of sensible reality with the Idea which informs and represents it," and as such "makes its appearance in the sensible universe during the second period of the primordial age described in detail by Moses in the six days of creation"; it is only through original sin that imperfection and ugliness arose in nature.1 Art is nothing but a supplement to natural beauty, whose decadence it presupposes, and thus art is at once record and prophecy, referring to the first and last ages of the world. The Last Judgement will reintroduce perfect beauty: organic restitution, by empowering the faculties to contemplate the intelligible in the sensible, and by refining their capabilities, will greatly intensify and purify æsthetic enjoyment. The contemplation of perfect beauty will be the beatitude of imagination, of which Christ gave an ineffable foretaste by appearing to his disciples visibly transfigured and shining with celestial radiance." 5 Gioberti agrees with Schelling's division of art into pagan and Christian, a "heterodox beauty (Oriental and Græco-Italian art), imperfect when compared with "orthodox beauty"; and between the two,

1 Sull' idillio e sulla nuova letteratura italiana (opuscoli filosofici, vol. i.). 2 V. Gioberti, Del buono e del bello (Florence ed., 1857). 5 Op. cit. ch. 7.

3 Del bello, ch. 1.

Op. cit. ch. 7.

Italian
Romantics.
Dependence
of Art.

a" semi-orthodox " beauty,1 transitional to Christian art;
he also attempted a doctrine of modifications of the
beautiful, wherein he held the sublime to be creator of the
beautiful. Beauty is the relative intelligibility of created
things apprehended by fancy: the sublime is the absolute
intelligibility of time, space and infinite power as pre-
sented to itself by the faculty of imagination:
ideal formula: the Being creates the Existing, translated
into æsthetic language, gives the following formula: by
means of the dynamical sublime Being creates the
beautiful; and by means of the mathematical sublime
contains it : this shows the ontological and psycho-
logical connexions of Esthetic in First Science." Ugli-
ness enters into the beautiful either as relief and counter-
poise, or to open a way to the comic, or to depict the
struggle between good and evil. The Christian ideal of
artistic beauty is the figure of the God-Man, absolute
union of the two forms of beauty, the sublime and the
beautiful, a transfigured and divinely illuminated ex-
pression of man.2 However carefully we sift the thoughts
of Gioberti from their mythological Judaico-Christian
husk, we find nothing of the least value to science.

On the other hand, if Italian literature of the day chose to revive and refurbish certain antiquated critical ideas, a much wider field was opened by social and political upheavals which tended to make use of literature as a practical instrument for spreading abroad the truths of history, science, religion and morality. In 1816 Giovanni Berchet wrote that "poetry . . . is intended to improve the habits of man and satisfy the cravings of his imagination and heart, since the tendency towards poetry, like every other desire, awakens in us moral needs 3 and Ermes Visconti in his Conciliatore of 1818 says that æsthetic aims must be subordinated "to the improvement of mankind and public and private weal, the eminent aim of all studies." Manzoni, who subsequently took to philosophizing on art on the principles

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[blocks in formation]

3 G. Berchet, Opere, ed. Cusani, Milan, 1863, p. 227.

of Rosmini, declared in his letter on Romanticism (1823) that "poetry or literature in general should have utility as its objective, truth as its subject and interest as its means";1 and though noticing the vagueness of the concept of truth in poetry, he inclined always (as is seen also in his discourse on the historical novel) to its identification with historical and scientific truth.2 Pietro Maroncelli proposed as a substitute for the classic formula of art, "founded on imitation of the real and having pleasure as its object," a formula of art as "founded on inspiration, having the beautiful as means and good as end"; this doctrine he baptized "cormentalism," contrasting it with the doctrine of art for art's sake found in the writings of August Wilhelm Schlegel and Victor Hugo.3 Tommaseo defined beauty as "the union of many truths in one concept" effected by the power of feeling. Giuseppe Mazzini, too, always conceived literature as the mediator of the universal idea or intellectual concept. Attempting to restore serious content to a literature grown weak and frivolous, the Italian Romantics found themselves forced on the theoretical side, by a natural reaction, into constant and perpetual opposition to every tendency of thought likely to affirm the independence of art.

1 Words suppressed in ed. of 1870.

2

Epistolario, ed. Sforza, i. pp. 285, 306, 308; Discorso sul romanzo storico, 1845; Dell' invenzione, dialogue.

3 Addizioni alle Miei Prigioni, 1831 (in Pellico, Prose, Florence, 1858); see pp. about the Conciliatore.

▲ Del bello e del sublime, 1827; Studî filosofici (Venice, 1840), vol. ii. part v.

Cf. De Sanctis, Lett. ital. nel s. XIX, ed. Croce, Naples 1896, PP. 427-431.

of his thought,

XV

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS

F. de Sanctis: ON the other hand, the autonomy of art found a strong development supporter in Italy in the critical work of Francesco de Sanctis, who held private classes in literature at Naples from 1838 to 1848, taught at Turin and Zürich from 1852 to 1860 and in 1870 became professor in the University of Naples. He expressed his doctrines in critical essays, in monographs on Italian writers and in his classic History of Italian Literature. Receiving his first elements of old Italian culture in Puoti's school, his natural bent towards speculation led him to investigate grammatical and rhetorical doctrines with the view of reducing them to a system; but he soon began to criticize and to grow out of this phase. He pronounced Fortunio, Alunno, Accarisio and Corso " empirics"; he had a slightly better opinion of Bembo, Varchi, Castelvetro and Salviati, who introduced "method" into grammar, a process completed subsequently by Buonmattei, Corticelli and Bartoli; and he proclaimed Francisco Sanchez, author of the Minerva, "the Descartes of grammarians." From these his admiration spread to the French writers of the eighteenth century and the philosophical grammars of Du Marsais, Beauzée, Condillac and Gérard; following in their wake and pursuing the ideal of Leibniz, he conceived a "logical grammar "; in this effort, however, he soon began to recognize the impossibility of reducing the differences of languages to fixed logical principles. If he found the French theorists admirable in their ability to reconstitute the simple and primitive forms; from

« IndietroContinua »