Return to Tiraboschi: On Italian Literary Canon

Modern Language Quarterly
Return to Tiraboschi:
On Italian Literary Canon Formation
and National Identity
Giuseppe Gazzola
Abstract This essay traces the interrelationship between Italian literary canon formation and
constructions of national identity in the literary histories of Girolamo Tiraboschi and Francesco
De Sanctis. It examines both the ruptures and the continuities between eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury literary historiography, analyzing the political, teleological agenda of De Sanctis’s Storia
della letteratura italiana (1870–71) while revealing the equally powerful theoretical underpinnings
of Tiraboschi’s vision of the Italian canon. Tiraboschi’s own Storia della letteratura italiana (1772–
82; rev. and exp. 1789–94), because of its precise geographic grounding of literary phenomena,
its conceptual proximity to what is now considered cultural studies, and its attention to minority
writers, represents a more compelling model for contemporary Italian literary historiography than
De Sanctis’s, which was developed for and in a different nationalist context.
Keywords literary canon formation, literary historiography, Italian canon, Girolamo Tiraboschi,
Francesco De Sanctis
R
eviewing a new English translation of Herodotus’s Histories, Daniel
Mendelsohn recalls that not more than twenty-five years ago the
appreciation of Herodotus in North American classics departments was
decidedly lacking, compared to the favorable attention enjoyed by
Thucydides. The subject of the Histories—the Persian Wars, “in which a
wobbly coalition of squabbling Greek city-states twice repulsed the
greatest expeditionary force the world had ever seen” (Mendelsohn
2008: 72)1 —did not resonate with the sensibility of the period’s scholars,
1 This is the recollection of events in Mendelsohn’s (2008: 72) good-humored
prose: “To us graduate students in the mid-nineteen-eighties the word ‘father’ seemed to
reflect something hopelessly parental and passé about Herodotus, and about the sepiatoned ‘good war’ that was his subject. These were, after all, the last years of the Cold War,
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DOI 10.1215/00267929-2920033
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entrenched as they were in Cold War concerns, and Herodotus’s style,
overly dependent on free association, overly curious and prone to
digression, lacked the methodological precision associated with the
“serious” study of classics and history. Thucydides was another story:
his History, written barely a generation after the work of Herodotus,
describes the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, a war in
which he had personally participated as an Athenian general. His
experience made him an ideal figure to recount the events, bringing to
bear greater procedural rigor.
In a time of multiple regional wars and the rhizomatic organization
of knowledge, however, the relationship between the two fathers of
history has been inverted, and Herodotus now has the upper hand.2
Indeed, this reversal of fortunes, this return to favor of the plural Histories
over the monolithic History, strikes a familiar chord for historians of
Italian literature: we too have seen the singular unity of Francesco De
Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana increasingly under attack, replaced
by a return to the Herodotus of Italian literary historiography, Girolamo
Tiraboschi, with his own inclusive, heterogeneous Storia della letteratura
italiana.
Since the 1980s De Sanctis’s influence as the leading model of Italian
literary historiography has waned in favor of Tiraboschi’s.3 Asor Rosa’s
and the terse, skeptical manner of another Greek historian—Thucydides . . . —seemed
far more congenial. To be an admirer of Thucydides’ History, with its deep cynicism
about political, rhetorical, and ideological hypocrisy, with its all too recognizable protagonists—a liberal yet imperialistic democracy and an authoritarian oligarchy,
engaged in a war of attrition fought by proxy at the remote fringes of empire—was to
advertise yourself as a hardheaded connoisseur of global Realpolitik.”
2 “A major theme of the Histories is the way in which time can effect surprising
changes in the fortunes and reputations of empires, cities, and men; all the more
appropriate, then, that Herodotus’ reputation has once again been riding very high”
(Mendelsohn 2008: 72).
3 Even Sergio Romagnoli (1993: 243), a staunch admirer of De Sanctis, writes:
“Today we remain perplexed in considering the revisionist force exerted by De
Sanctis. . . . We are convinced of the necessity of a more attentive geographic consideration of literary phenomena; we aim at as technical an interpretation as possible of
our poetical tradition, albeit in its unavoidable historical setting; and we are well aware
of the importance, sometimes decisive, of the institutions that fostered and foster artistic
production” (Noi oggi siamo perplessi di fronte alla geniale forzatura operata dal De
Sanctis. . . . Siamo persuasi della necessità di una più attenta considerazione geografica
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(1982) evident sympathy for Tiraboschi’s Storia, for instance, is shared by
the editors he chose to construct the ambitious Storia della letteratura
italiana Einaudi; by a provocative essay of Marziano Guglielminetti (1986)
that begins, in an obvious allusion to a Gramscian slogan, “Ritorno al
Tiraboschi;”4 by the introduction to the Atlante della letteratura italiana,
edited by Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà (2011, 1: xv), which
declares a crisis of De Sanctis’s historicism and calls Tiraboschi’s history
“an unsurpassed piece of work, in some ways” (un’opera in qualche
modo insuperata);5 and, more generally, by the revisionist movement in
literary history that started with a volume of essays by Carlo Dionisotti
(1999 [1967]).6 This paradigm change is independent of the texts
themselves; rather, like Mendelsohn’s (2008: 73) analysis of the classical
historians, it is rooted in the major transformations in information technology and geopolitics of recent years. The seemingly radical alternation
between the two models of Tiraboschi and De Sanctis is possible because
a literary canon is constructed in response to the political contingencies
of a given historical moment and encapsulates its particular cultural
needs. Like the canon wars in American universities, the struggles for
canonical redefinition in Italy derived in part from the movements for
civil liberties in the second half of the twentieth century and in part from
a new relationship between literary criticism and historical and geographic knowledge. Yet in the Italian case, since literary and national
dei fenomeni letterari, puntiamo ad una interpretazione il più possible tecnica del
nostro percorso poetico pur nell’ineludibile sua ambientazione storica e siamo ben
consci dell’importanza, a volte determinante, degli istituti che presiedettero e presiedono alla produzione artistica).
4 Antonio Gramsci (1975: 2185–88) launched the slogan “Ritorno a De Sanctis,” by
which he meant that the Italian nation needed to develop a sense of literature and
culture centered in the praxis of the Italian people, in opposition to the philosophy of
Benedetto Croce.
5 On what Tiraboschi and De Sanctis mean for a new generation of Italian literary
scholars, see also Pedullà 2012.
6 I do not intend to minimize the goals and results of recent Italian criticism by
reducing it to a binary opposition of great figures of the past: the reasons for new critical
positions are various, from the increased attention paid, beginning with Dionisotti, to
the relationship between literary criticism and historical and geographic understanding
to the global crisis of historicism (in both Hegelian and Gramscian terms); from a
changing technological environment to the shifting definitions of cultural events and
textual transmission; and so on.
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identity have been intertwined from Italy’s inception, it is hardly surprising that a shifting sense of national values has precipitated a radical
rethinking of literary canonicity, and vice versa.
De Sanctis and his post-Risorgimento followers needed to construct
a canon that reflected the ideal composition of the newborn Italian
nation as a territorial and linguistic unity. Accordingly, De Sanctis
selected only major figures he considered worthy to represent Italian
culture and, among these, most valued those who retrospectively could
be said to have better envisioned and expressed the patriotic need for a
common nation for Italians. Most famously, Dante was definitively
established as the founding father of the nation, and Petrarch was
demoted to a mere love poet, his Latin works written out of the national
canon. Ariosto, though deemed a capable craftsman, was seen to have
squandered his talent on the empty subject of chivalry, as well as to have
been an antipatriot for his complaints as governor of the region of
Garfagnana on behalf of the Estense family. By contrast, Machiavelli,
who in the Discorsi had first located the main obstacle to a unified nation
in the temporal power of the papacy, became the epitome of Italian
literary valor, the councillor who dreamed and wrote of Italian unity in
the last chapter of The Prince.
Against such slim, exclusive canon of literary greats, the sprawling
history of literature composed by Tiraboschi a century before De Sanctis’s nationalist treatise is notable for including every writer who could be
considered relevant in celebrating any aspect of the Italian cultural
tradition. Tiraboschi was not constrained by the desire to foster the
national unities of language, territory, and state organization, since in
1772 no such national idea could be envisioned; instead, for him, the
greatness of Italian cultural identity lay in its breadth, from the literary
and cultural artifacts produced by the Etruscans to those of the generation of writers preceding his own. Most strikingly, Tiraboschi included
in his roster those who would now be thought minority writers, such as
dialect authors, and a significant number of women. Feeling no need to
extol patriotic virtues in the service of the nation, Tiraboschi lauded
writers for their literary accomplishments without insisting on their
political contributions.
“Italian literature” thus bore different meanings for Tiraboschi and
De Sanctis: Tiraboschi produced a broad cultural history, De Sanctis a
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selective paean to national greatness. This might, on the surface, explain
why, like the classics scholars who currently prefer Herodotus, the compilers of the most avant-garde Italian literary histories prefer Tiraboschi.
His Storia sought to establish an Italian culture in a pan-European milieu;
today’s historians of literature, also working in an increasingly transnational context, are consequently forced to rethink matters of national
cultural identity. Tiraboschi’s encyclopedism can be seen as a forerunner of cultural studies; his inclusion of dialect writers prophesies the
study, resuscitated by Dionisotti, of Italian literature by region or locality;
his inclusion of women writers makes his work appealing to feminist
criticism; and his understanding of literature as a tool for shaping cultural identity reflects our concerns with what Italian literature will
mean within a new European political, economic, and ultimately cultural unification.
To recover the processes and priorities that led to reconceptions of
the Italian literary canon, this essay traces the interrelationship between
Italian literary canon formation and constructions of national identity in
the literary histories of Tiraboschi and De Sanctis. In doing so, it suggests
that the nationalist ideal was born in the unlikeliest of places—the Jesuit
convents of Milan and Ferrara—and was later transformed into an
official doctrine by De Sanctis. I examine both the ruptures and the
continuities between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary historiographies, analyzing the political, teleological agenda of De Sanctis’s
Storia while revealing the equally powerful theoretical underpinnings of
Tiraboschi’s vision of the Italian canon. This analysis also challenges
traditional nineteenth-century reconstructions of the eighteenth-century historians, showing how the nationalist propaganda of the Risorgimento concealed a genealogy whose revival is now reshaping the Italian
literary canon.
The Polemics of National Literary History: The Settecento Context
At the beginning of the eighteenth century Italy’s prestige as a cultural
beacon was rapidly declining. Jeremy Black (2003: 7) describes how, in
the eyes of Grand Tourists, Italy seemed untouched by the modernization transforming the rest of Europe: “Whatever its artistic treasures,
compared to the seventeenth century, Italy became more obviously a
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theme-park of the past, a country de-civilised by a decadent society and,
eventually, culture.” This characterization of Italian society and culture
as mere vestiges of a prestigious past, while shared by foreign visitors and
scholars alike, provoked a reaction among Italian partisans. By the late
eighteenth century a profound amor patriae animated the historical
research, marked by imitation, pride, and consciousness of the dignity of
Italian cultural history. Libraries and archives were scavenged by a new
generation of scholars who branded themselves Italian (even though
Italy was not even a “nation” and hence was not their “patria”) and
scanned the available data for traces of a glorious tradition in order to
rewrite it into an idealized form that inspired pride when compared to
foreign cultures. These scholars interpreted the past so as to mount a
compelling defense of the present.
As Vittore Branca (1945: 201–2) noted, the so-called eruditi of the
eighteenth century were already boiling over with national pride. Their
compilations arose from a desire to protect Italian culture from the
assaults of foreign scholars:
By the early decades of the eighteenth century, the timid reawakening and
gradual reinvigoration of our intellectual life were stung by the consciousness that, in the sky of European civilization, after centuries of light,
the sun of our culture was setting, giving way to those of France and
England. If in the seventeenth century the usual delayed motion in the
dissemination of culture, the echo of the fecund spring of our Renaissance, had still been able to conceal the poverty of Italian literary life, in
the eighteenth century the decay into which it had fallen not only seemed
obvious to foreigners but became a pretext among yesterday’s disciples for
an anti-Italian polemic.
[Verso i primi decenni del Secolo XVIII, il timido ridestarsi e il lento
rinvigorirsi della nostra vita intellettuale è dominato dalla pungente coscienza che nel cielo della civiltà europea, dopo secoli di luce solare, la
nostra cultura piegava ormai al tramonto, per lasciare il posto a quelle di
Francia e di Inghilterra. Se nel Seicento, per il consueto ritardato moto di
divulgazione della cultura, l’eco della feconda primavera della nostra
rinascenza aveva ancora potuto coprire col suo estremo prolungarsi la
povertà della vita letteraria italiana, nel Settecento invece la decadenza in
cui essa era piombata non solo appare chiara agli stranieri, ma diviene
naturale motivo ai discepoli di ieri per una polemica antiitaliana.]7
7 In order not to end the paragraph on a negative note (this first issue of Il ponte was
printed immediately after the armistice, and the article is emblematically titled), Branca
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From Bari to Bergamo, arcadi or barocchi, Benedictines or Jesuit scholars
suddenly found themselves transformed into Italians by virtue of the
French, English, and German criticisms levied against them. Thus the
controversy between Italian and foreign cultures (particularly with
regard to the French) did not exhaust itself in the narrow terms of a
querelle des anciens et des modernes but became the stimulus to interrogate
the identity of Italian culture and the elements that rendered it peculiar
and (following the spirit of the times) superior. The systematic devaluation by Italian writers of cultures they perceived as foreign explains the
resentful tone of certain patriotic affirmations that unexpectedly burst
forth from the prefaces of so many learned works of the period.8 Their
authors, such as Giacinto Gimma, felt that they were joined in a common
cause, defending and reinvigorating the most precious part of their
patrimony: cultural identity.9
These writers likewise pursued a position of patriotic edification,
developed in opposition to French claims of cultural primacy. Giovanni
Mario Crescimbeni wrote his major works, Istoria della volgar poesia (1698)
and La bellezza della volgar poesia (1700), explicitly to vindicate Italian
poetry from the censure of the French. The same task is proclaimed by
Giusto Fontanini (1737)10 and by Francesco Saverio Quadrio (1739),
who, in the Storia e ragione d’ogni poesia, located Italian literature at the
center of every possible literary investigation, declaring that his intention
(1945: 202) continues: “All this, when our culture is regaining its upward movement in
the awakening of a newly felt national conscience” (Questo, proprio mentre la nostra
cultura riprende il suo ritmo ascendente nel risveglio di una risentita coscienza nazionale).
8 Corrado Viola (2001) shows how the French querelle des anciens et des modernes was
reimagined by Italians not as a conflict between ancient and modern cultures but as a
competition between Italians and the French for cultural superiority.
9 Cf. the intentions in the foreword (and in the title itself) of Gimma 1723.
10 The book opens with a “Lettera al Signor Marchese Giangiuseppe Orsi,” in
which Fontanini (1737: xvi) praises the Marchese for showing French scholars that (as
Petrarch said, and Machiavelli repeated) “the ancient valor/is not yet dead in Italian
hearts” (l’antico valore/Negl’Italici cor non è ancor morto). Fontanini’s strong opposition to French language, literature, and culture was later revived by Vittorio Alfieri
in the Misogallo (1799) and in the Vita (1804). Yet Alfieri’s polemics were rooted
in his Jacobin sympathies: in 1799, disappointed by the outcomes of the French Revolution, he too lambasted the French, but his motives were distant from the clerical
antiquarian’s.
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was “the celebration of [Italian] vernacular poetry, which nowadays has
reached such illustrious heights that in all of Europe, not just in Italy,
every person of letters and learning would like to participate in it”
(d’illustrare principalmente la volgar poesia, ad oggi a tanta altezza di
gloria salita, che non ci ha nell’Europa tutta, nonché nell’Italia, persona
di lettere e d’erudizione informata, la quale in essa meschiar non si
voglia).11
In this impassioned patriotic commitment we see an emergent sense
of Italian national unity. Thus Giammaria Mazzuchelli (1753), author of
the encyclopedic Gli scrittori d’Italia, after stating that “my thought was
none other than to recount the writers who are Italian by birth” (pensier
mio altro non fu che di dar contezza degli scrittori per patria italiani),
added: “I deemed appropriate to include in the number of Italian writers
also those whom some do not consider such, including Sicilians, Sardinians, Corsicans, and Triestini” (m’è sembrato opportuno non escludere
dal numero degli Scrittori italiani quelli che da alcuni non si vorrebbero
tali, come i Siciliani, i Sardi, i Corsi, i Triestini).12 The consciousness of
national unity most clearly revealed itself in this inclusive literary-historical vision of Italian civilization. The cultural ideology of Fontanini
(1737: xvii) created a linguistic unity, erasing, thanks to an apparent
doubt of the pen—“Italian language, or Tuscan, as we want to call it”
(Italiano, o Toscano, come vogliam dire)—regional differences in favor
of recuperating a fifteenth-century theory of the Italian language that
could be opposed to the predominance of French, which through historical contingency had become the language of communication among
Europe’s learned communities.
While this combative and vigorous civic consciousness is present in
all the histories, it becomes more accurately distilled in those of literature. The main authors of the period (Ludovico Antonio Muratori,
Gimma, Quadrio, and their most illustrious follower, Tiraboschi) were
extremely learned both in historical texts and in critical and literary
historical writings, but while their historical works took as their subject
11 The quotation comes from the recto of the third page of Quadrio’s “Introduzione generale dell’opera.”
12 The quotations come from the recto of the second, unnumbered page of
Mazzuchelli’s “Introduzione.”
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studies limited in space and time, their manuals of literary history are
more broadly conceived and not confined to a single state or dialect, to a
single town or city, but instead are greatly expanded to include Etruscan,
Latin, and Greek authors in an eager effort toward cultural revival.13
Precisely because they did not think of their “nation” in geographic and
territorial terms, eighteenth-century scholars were powerfully aware of
the vast cultural patrimony in which they participated.
Defining a Nation: Tiraboschi’s Campaign
Tiraboschi, one generation later, earned a great literary reputation as a
consequence of his vast Storia, printed in a first edition between 1772 and
1782 and then reprinted from 1789 to 1794 in an expanded nine-volume
version.14 Succeeding Muratori as librarian at the Este library in Modena,
Tiraboschi also adopted his predecessor’s historiographical method,
which gave preeminence to verifying the reported facts, anticipating
what would be later called philology. From the previous generation
Tiraboschi inherited, moreover, an ample definition of literature and of
what could be considered Italian. The governing principle was the
peninsula’s geographic unity, independent of political or linguistic unity.
Thus the Storia begins with Etruscan letters, continues with the populations within Magna Graecia and the Roman Republic and Empire, and
only in the fourth volume chronicles the emergence of an Italian vernacular. The word letteratura, according to the usage of the time, indicates
everything put into writing, and Tiraboschi’s work could properly be
13
Quadrio (1739) wrote four volumes dedicated to a history of world poetry, but
his historical effort was narrowly local (Quadrio 1755). Similarly, Tiraboschi wrote a
sesquipedalian Storia della letteratura italiana, but his historical works are much more
circumscribed (e.g., Tiraboschi 1784). Of course, there were also literary histories
dedicated to the existing and circumscribed political realities. Tiraboschi (1781) himself, shortly after beginning the Storia, had published a six-volume Biblioteca modenese.
14 A scholarly consensus about which edition of the Storia to use for purposes of
citation has not been reached. After examining the different editions, I decided to
quote from the 1823 Venetian edition, published by Tipografia Molinari (“a spese di G.
Antonelli”), which reproduces the text last authorized by Tiraboschi and collects the
best-known sources of biographical information about him, the “Elogio del Cavaliere
Ab. Girolamo Tiraboschi scritto dall’Ab. Antonio Lombardi” and the “Lettera dell’Ab.
Carlo Ciocchi al dottissimo signor abate Antonio Zaccaria.”
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regarded as a history of Italian culture, since it concerns jurisprudence,
philosophy, mathematics, medicine, natural sciences, theology, and even
figurative arts, not to mention several accounts of schools, academies,
libraries, and other cultural institutions.
The amplitude of Tiraboschi’s work emerged from a confrontation
with French conceptions of national cultural history, an intellectual
posture he inherited from the preceding generation. From the very
outset Tiraboschi repeatedly attacked the Histoire littéraire de la France,
compiled by Antoine Rivet de la Grange of the Congrégation Bénédictine de Saint-Maur (Rivet de la Grange, Clément, and Clémencet
1733–63).15 The Maurists had undertaken the Histoire littéraire in 1733,
beginning with their ancestors the Gauls, whom they aimed to rescue
from the label of a barbarian population that the Romans had assigned
them: “When we speak of the barbarity of the Gauls, we should not
imagine that they were really barbarians, or wanderers and nomads, like
the ancient Scythians, or as crude as the American savages are in the
present day” (Quand nous parlons de la barbarie des Gaulois, il ne faut
pas s’imaginer qu’ils fuissent des barbares, ou errants et vagabonds,
comme l’étoient les anciens Scythes, ou aussi grossiers que le sont à
présent les Sauvages de l’Amerique) (ibid., 1: 4). According to the
learned Benedictine monks, who justified each argument with plenty of
citations and with the evidence of miscellaneous authorities, the Gauls
were well versed in philosophy and the sciences, to the extent that
Pythagoras took lessons from them. And if the Greeks had taken lessons
in philosophy from the ancient French, it was only a short step for the
Romans to take lessons in rhetoric from them. This is how the Gauls
founded Latin literature, when they committed to travel to Rome:
Rome, the capital of the world, . . . did not care about the arts of literature,
ignoring even their existence, while they were publicly cultivated in several cities of Gaul. . . . [Rome] must in particular be grateful to the Gauls
15 Volumes 1–12, edited mainly by Rivet de la Grange, with the help of François
Clément and Charles Clémencet, were printed by the Congrégation. Volumes 13–15
were compiled by a committee of the Classe d’Histoire et de la Littérature Ancienne in
Paris (1814–20). From volume 16 on the task was performed by the Académie des
Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris with the collaboration of various publishers (vols.
16–26, Didot, 1824–73; v. 27–, Imprimerie Nationale, 1877–). At present work is under
way on volume 43, covering the second half of the fifteenth century.
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for its initiation to literature. Lucius Plotius, a Gaul by birth, was the first to
teach rhetoric there; some time later another Gaul, Marc Antoine Gnyphon, began teaching grammar, which is, according to Suetonius, what
Latins and Greeks called the arts of literature. At the same time Valerius
Cato, a Gaul like the other two, gave lessons of grammar and poetics. Soon
letters in Rome were so extolled that one could count more than twenty
famous schools, and the most illustrious people publicly professed it.
We could take as examples Cicero and Julius Caesar, both disciples of
Gnyphon.
[Rome, cette Capitale du monde, . . . ne fasoit nul cas des Belles-Letres, et
en ignorait même l’usage, lorsq’on les professoit publiquement dans
plusieurs villes des Gaules. . . . C’est aux Galois en particulier qu’elle est
redevable du premier goût qu’elle prit pour les belles études. Lucius
Plotius, Gaulois de Naissance, fut le premier qui y einsegna la Rhétorique;
quelque tems après lui Marc Antoine Gnyphon autre Gaulois, y professa la
Grammaire, c’ést-à-dire, selon l’explication de Suetone, ce que les Grecs
et les Latins entendoient par les Belles-Letres. Presqu’en même-tems
Valerius Cato, Gaulois comme les deux autres, y donna aussi des leçons de
Grammaire et de Poëtique. Bientôt les Letres furent en un tel honneur à
Rome, que l’on y vit plus de vingt écoles célebres, et que les personnes les
plus illustres en firent profession ouverte. On peut juger des autres par
Ciceron et Jules César, l’un et l’autre disciples de Gnyphon.] (ibid., 1: 53)
Tiraboschi particularly resented the appropriation of Latin antiquity by
the Benedictine scholars. According to their writings, since northern
Italy was named Gallia Cisalpina by Caesar, among others, all authors
born there were legitimately Gauls, that is, French. Tiraboschi (1823, 1:
xci) vehemently opposed the idea: “What wealth of excellent writers,
[the Maurists] say, could we count? A Statius, a Virgil, a Catullus, two
Plinys, and many others equally famous. . . . Yet we Italians, for some
reason of haughtiness, merely want what is ours, and ours we claim to be
all mentioned writers from the Cisalpine Gaul” (E qual copia, dicon essi,
di valorosi scrittori potremmo noi rammentare? Un Cecilio Stazio, un
Virgilio, un Catullo, i due Plinj, e tanti altri uomini sì famosi. . . . Ma noi
Italiani per una non so qual alterigia non vogliam ricevere se non ciò
ch’è nostro, e nostri pretendiamo che siano tutti i suddetti scrittori della
Gallia cisalpina). To a reader familiar with the canon of Italian literature
as we know it today, this may seem no more than an absurd rant. In fact,
even as discerning a reader as Giovanni Getto (1969: 82) describes this
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passage with some embarrassment as “a strange polemic with a racist
cast” (una strana polemica d’intonazione razzistica). The fight over
Statius’s and Virgil’s passport seems preposterous to a scholar writing
in the 1960s, since he conceives of the nation-state as an indissoluble combination of state apparatus, territorial integrity, and linguistic
homogeneity—a concept ripened in the nineteenth century from
Romantic theories of the nation, clearly anachronistic with respect to
Tiraboschi’s vision. The querelle des anciens et des modernes, however, provides a means of examining how the idea of re-creating a literary past by
appropriating significant authors became one of the most potent symbols in the rise of nationalisms in the eighteenth century and afterward.
Tiraboschi wanted to articulate a notion of a national Italian canon in
order to contribute to a cultural climate that opposed French claims to
literary primacy, and thus he celebrated everything in the tradition that
might be considered—historically or geographically—Italian.
Tiraboschi’s Storia broke decisively with previous histories of Italian
literatures because, despite his fiercely adversarial stance, he also appropriated the Maurists’ project of literary and cultural unification. He used
this new modus operandi to supersede the traditional history of genres
(such as Crescimbeni’s Istoria della volgar poesia) and the compilation of
literary biographies (such as Mazzuchelli’s Gli scrittori d’Italia) and invent,
through all genres and epochs, a unity of Italian culture. While rebuking
the attacks of the Maurists, Tiraboschi translated their idea of national
cultural unity.
Despite what the two contenders have in common, however, it is
important to consider how different the geographies of power were in
the eighteenth century: while the French scholars wrote to support the
cultural hegemony of a kingdom with imperial ambitions, Tiraboschi
wrote from Modena, undoubtedly from a position of prestige, but in a
marginal city, capital of a marginal duchy, without a political apparatus to
sustain the idea of nation he was to celebrate. An Italian political apparatus would not be fully functional until 1870, when, in a turn of events
that the Jesuit abbott would probably have disapproved, the Piedmontese troops delivered the city of Rome from the temporal power of Pope
Pius IX, making it the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.
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After the Risorgimento: De Sanctis’s Legacy
After the Risorgimento and the Italian unification, almost a century after
Tiraboschi’s death, intellectuals of the newly born kingdom in turn
appropriated and modified the general concept of cultural tradition that
he had envisioned. The new idea of Italy as a politically unified nation
required a new idea of its literary history. Dionisotti (1999 [1967]: 30),
while commenting on this transition, laments how the new literary historiography refused the best its predecessor had to offer:
A new history of Italian literature arose, partly accepting, partly reforming
and overcoming, partly simply rejecting Tiraboschi’s results. As is often
the case, it rejected the very best: the relentless and tireless pursuit of every
verifiable detail, the direct and wide-ranging contact with the sources, the
luminous structure in the work of a history conceived and conducted with
philological method.
[Una nuova storia della letteratura italiana sorgeva, parte accettando,
parte riformando e superando, parte semplicemente rifiutando i risultati
di quella del Tiraboschi. Fu, come spesso accade, rifiutato il meglio: l’inflessibile ed infaticabile ricerca del particolare vero ed esatto, l’amplissima
e diretta conoscenza delle fonti, la struttura che in quell’opera traluce di
una storia concepita e condotta con metodo filologico.]
Speaking of “a new history of Italian literature,” Dionisotti refers both to
a shift in the general idea of Italian literature during the Romantic
period and to the emergence of a text soon considered the epitome of
nineteenth-century historiography, as Tiraboschi’s Storia was unanimously considered the epitome in the eighteenth century: De Sanctis’s
Storia (1870–71).
The two historiographers had many differences but also some things
in common. Both wrote with the idea of transforming the old libraries
into a new political weapon. Both wrote with an educational purpose,
reacting to the histories of literature that preceded their own. De Sanctis
in particular was dissatisfied with the heavily ideological textbooks
compiled by the Catholic Cesare Cantù (1865), on the one hand, and by
the anticlerical Luigi Settembrini (1898), on the other. De Sanctis (1869,
1902) considered the existing school texts disappointing and undertook
his own history, also directed toward students.
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In what René Wellek (1957a, 1957b) describes as the most beautiful
of the European Romantic literary histories, De Sanctis examined the
period between the Sicilian school and his own contemporaries,
designing an evolutionary curve based on two fundamental principles:
the idea of progress and the idea of form. One embraced the entire
development of Italian literature, while the other is used to interpret the
single work of art and is the inextricable embodiment of its content. Above all, however, stood the dominant principle of equivalence
between literary and spiritual values, where the adjective spiritual, far
from assuming any Christian resonance, referred to the national spirit.
Literary history was transformed, in De Sanctis’s pages, into the history
of the national spirit in its becoming (in Hegelian terms), in its selfconsciousness or self-recognition.
The amount of national spirit detected by De Sanctis in different
epochs of Italian literature is not constant: it begins with a high point that
springs from the grand civic consciousness and powerful poetry of
Dante; it then descends with Petrarch, reaching its nadir with Ariosto
and the hedonistic literature of chivalry cultivated for pleasure in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This decline corresponded to the
political decadence of Italy, deprived of liberty and dominated by foreign
powers—pope or emperor. In De Sanctis’s evaluation, Italian literature
began to ascend once again in the second half of the eighteenth century,
thanks to Giuseppe Parini and Vittorio Alfieri; it continued to rise
through the Romantics, to Giacomo Leopardi and Alessandro Manzoni,
alongside the resurgence of Italian political consciousness.
It has been said that De Sanctis’s history has a precise, simple design,
based on a Hegelian interpretation of the Aristotelian syllogism: Italian
literature presents a thesis (the Middle Ages), an antithesis (the Renaissance), and, after a hiatus not worthy of mention, a synthesis (the contemporary age, capable of connecting the real with the ideal). The history
of literature thus assumes a direction and a rationale: a direction because
De Sanctis presents the works in an order validated by succession along
chronological lines, and a rationale because authors and their texts
eventually attain the concretization of the ideal, the realization of the
nation-state (Bertone and Surdich 1990: 889). De Sanctis offered a
critical synthesis of Romantic and Risorgimental Italian culture; he did
not invent, but received from his scholarly predecessors, the idea of a
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“militant” use of literary criticism, filtering it through Hegelian theories
of history and funneling it into a perspective that took the nation-state as
the only possible point of arrival. With De Sanctis, the history of Italian
literature became a historical novel celebrating the Risorgimento, not
unlike Giovanni Ruffini’s Lorenzo Benoni or Giulio Cesare Abba’s Dal
Quarto al Volturno. This particular novel ends well, with its heroes
rewarded (literary glory) and its villains punished (literary oblivion).
The heroes from the previous centuries had contributed to the idea of
the revolution; the villains had the misfortune of writing in the wrong
language, being born in a town outside the current borders of Italy, or
adopting the wrong register.
To be sure, De Sanctis was asked by the publisher Morano to prepare
a manual for high schools and was therefore not writing for the same
audience as Tiraboschi, who had different ambitions and points of reference. De Sanctis replaced erudite and encyclopedic ambitions with a
desire for historical (re)interpretation: by storia he meant the accessible
reconstruction of the trajectory of Italian letters as a spiritual and
national parable.
Yet, even if the size of the Storia of 1870–71 was imposed by the
publisher, and by and large by the necessities of a public educational
apparatus beginning to unfold, the stringent criteria for the inclusion of
authors constitute the genetic code of the work as a whole. Dividing
writers into “minor” or “major” figures, as Tiraboschi had done, De
Sanctis further determined whether a work was appropriato or inappropriato. A scholar of literature could lawfully judge his material: De Sanctis
appointed himself a literary critic in the complete and etymological
sense of the word; that is, he discriminated the worthy from the
unworthy. De Sanctis finalized the Romantic idea of a selective criticism:
the critic’s personal position in history allowed him to be judgmental,
very likely exclusive or negative. De Sanctis was often both.
For Tiraboschi, it did not matter whether Petrarch wrote in the
vernacular or in Latin: all his works were an expression of his genius. For
De Sanctis, the distinction was fundamental: writings in the Italian vernacular belonged to the canon; others did not. Obviously, Petrarch,
notwithstanding the two canzoni all’Italia (which could be interpreted ex
post facto as extolling the Italian national cause), could not compete
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with the civic engagement of Dante, whose political passion came to be
interpreted as prophesying the new nation (cf. Bologna 1993; Quondam
2004; see also Quondam 2005). Similarly, Francesco Guicciardini, theorist of the particulare, is considered inferior to Machiavelli, since Guicciardini, whose primary teaching is synthesized in the motto “To live is to
learn about the world, and to bend it to your advantage” (Vivere è
conoscere il mondo e voltarlo a benefizio tuo), was the bearer of an
ethical defect: individualism (De Sanctis 1996: 518).16 Furthermore,
Guicciardini was not a combatant; Machiavelli instead “combats the
Italian corruption, and does not despair of his country. . . . He belongs to
that generation of Florentine patriots who looked for remedies in the
general ruin, did not give up, and glorified Italy with their fall” (combatte la corruttela italiana, e non dispera del suo paese. . . . Appartiene a
quella generazione di patrioti fiorentini, che in tanta rovina cercavano i
rimedi, e non si rassegnavano, e illustrarono l’Italia con la loro caduta)
(ibid.: 516). Guicciardini did not fall and therefore did not glorify “Italy”;
he was never tortured and never felt the pangs of starvation. With these
credentials, how could he be used to forge the ideals of the citizens who
would constitute the new nation? Guicciardini, according to De Sanctis
(ibid.), “has no illusions. And since he does not see a remedy to corruption, he participates in it” (non ha illusioni. E perché non vede
rimedio a quella corruttela, vi si avvolge egli pure). The accusation of
corruption was Guicciardini’s undoing: being spiritually corrupt, he
could hardly judge the unfolding of events that he himself recounted in
the Storia d’Italia. The death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Italian Wars,
the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and
16 A few paragraphs earlier De Sanctis (1996: 514) condemns in Guicciardini the
hiatus between intention and action, again comparing him unfavorably with Machiavelli: “Even if Francesco Guicciardini is merely a few years younger than Machiavelli and
Michelangelo, he does not seem to belong to the same generation. You can see in him
the antecedent of a sluggish and corrupted generation, for which he had written the
gospel in his Ricordi. He has the same [political] aspirations as Machiavelli. . . . But in him
[Guicciardini] these are only desires, and he would not lift a finger to make them real”
(Francesco Guicciardini, ancorche di pochi anni più giovane di Machiavelli e di
Michelangiolo, già non sembra della stessa generazione. Senti in lui il precursore di una
generazione più fiacca e più corrotta, della quale egli ha scritto il vangelo ne’ suoi
Ricordi. // Ha le stesse aspirazioni del Machiavelli. . . . Ma sono semplici desideri, e non
metterebbe un dito a realizzarli).
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the rise of the Inquisition all left his style unfazed, as if he had had no part
in them: “He seems a naturalist who studies and classifies herbs, plants,
and minerals, and investigates their internal structure and physiology, to
find what makes them the way they are” (Sembra un naturalista, che
studi e classifichi erbe, piante e minerali, e indaghi la loro struttura
interna e la loro fisiologia, che li fa essere così o così) (ibid.: 521).
De Sanctis, who on other occasions demonstrated a vivid interest in
the scientific approach, did not look for the scientist in the historian but
searched the man to find the patriot, and preferably the fighter. Guicciardini observed and enumerated, but he did not comprehend the
tragedy that consumed Italy with the descent of Charles VIII of France,
who conquered the peninsula with a piece of chalk; that was for De
Sanctis a political tragedy, and not simply the tragedy of many individuals
taken together.
Similarly, it is revealing how the women poets of the Renaissance,
who belonged comfortably in Tiraboschi’s pages, were sentenced to
oblivion in De Sanctis’s. Not only did Tiraboschi extensively discuss
Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, and Gaspara Stampa, but he also
highlighted the presence of female writers in every century, from Polla
Argentaria, Lucan’s wife, to Elena Cornaro. As a clergyman, he occasionally displayed a conservative attitude, for example condemning the
immodesty of the Neapolitan poet Margherita Sarrocchi,17 yet his censuring is less final than De Sanctis’s censoring.
The same fate of exclusion affects dialect authors: the Storia compiled in the eighteenth century proudly includes them. For example,
even though Carlo Maria Maggi wrote comedies (the lowest dramatic
genre), came from the lower classes, and used the Milanese vernacular,
Tiraboschi lauds the extraordinary grace of his works and his successful
satire of Milanese society. Conversely, in the Storia dialect authors lack
citizenship: the one major exception is Teofilo Folengo, to whom
chapter 14 is dedicated. Folengo wrote his Baldus in a mixture of Italian,
Mantuan dialect, and Latin, punctuating a refined literary language with
extremely vulgar twists. Folengo’s peculiar language is now considered
17 Tiraboschi (1823, 8.2: 647) once ridiculed Sarrocchi’s “costumes [as] not too
chaste, as Eritreus reports” (di cui non troppo onorevolmente, quanto a’ costumi,
ragiona l’Eritreo).
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an idiolect, rather than a dialect, largely because of De Sanctis’s critical
characterization.
De Sanctis conceived literary history as a revolutionary tool for
critical interpretation and viewed the interpretation of literary history as
a critical instrument in the revolution against foreign domination.
Because of De Sanctis’s writings, the ideology of nationalism sharply
defined the canon of Italian literature for a century and a half, and this
canon became the gold standard of education and cultural identity for
the Italian citizen after the unification. The reciprocal interaction
between nationalism and canon formation, between canonical text and
present context, was inescapable in 1870, as it is now and in any given
moment in history: in the past it led many to prefer Machiavelli to
Guicciardini; today it favors Herodotus over Thucydides, or the comprehensive and multilingual Tiraboschi over the teleological De Sanctis.
Tomorrow, under changed geopolitical and cultural circumstances, it
will bring forth different models according to what the French
Enlightenment called l’esprit du temps, G. W. F. Hegel der Geist seiner Zeit,
and Ugo Foscolo la qualità dei tempi. This moment, however, belongs to
Tiraboschi: it is his legacy that will—and must—shape the evolving
vision of Italian national and cultural identity today.
Giuseppe Gazzola is assistant professor of European literatures and fellow of the
Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University, where his research focuses on European
literature and the cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is editor
of Italy from Without (2013) and Versi e Prose: Marinetti traduce Mallarmé (forthcoming).
His current project is tentatively titled Montale, the Modernist.
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