ALFIERI, VITTORIO. — Tragic poet, born in Asti on 16 January 1749, “of noble, wealthy, and honorable parents,” Antonio and Monica Maillard di Tournon, died in Florence on 8 October 1803. After his years at the Turin Academy (1758–66), he took to traveling, first for about a year in Italy, then throughout Europe, until 1772. In January 1774, in Turin, he began, as a pastime, to write a few scenes of a tragedy, *Cleopatra*. He resumed and completed it about a year later, and together with a farce, *The Poets*, had it performed in June 1775. Applauded with indulgence, he formed the resolve to become a great tragic poet and began to equip himself for it, first studying Italian, then Latin. In 1777 he definitively left Piedmont and settled in Tuscany, where in the autumn of that year, in Florence, he met Countess Luisa Stolberg d'Albany, the young wife of Carlo Edoardo Stuart, pretender to the throne of Scotland, who remained his companion until his death. In 1778 he made a donation of his estate, in exchange for an annuity, to his sister Giulia, in order to “free himself from every dependence on the Sardinian king.” He had various residences, in Rome, Tuscany, England, Paris, and Alsace. In 1789 he was with the d'Albany in Paris when the Revolution broke out. At first he greeted it with joy, but upon seeing its horrors, he wrote *The Misogallo*. After the catastrophe of 10 August 1792, he fled Paris not without difficulty and danger; his horses, furniture, books, and income were confiscated. On 3 November he returned to Florence, where he remained until his death.
**Works.** — The works on which he wished to stake his fame are the 19 tragedies: *Filippo*, *Polinice*, *Antigone*, *Virginia*, *Agamennone*, *Oreste*, *Rosmunda*, *Ottavia*, *Timoleone*, *Merope*, *Maria Stuarda*, *Agide*, *Sofonisba*, *La Congiura dei Pazzi*, *Don Garzia*, *Mirra*, *Bruto primo*, *Bruto secondo*, *Saul*, to which he later added *Alcesti* and *Abel* as “tramelogedies.” Alfieri rigorously observed the classical rules of the unities, reduced tragedy to the utmost simplicity, suppressing secondary characters and every unnecessary episode; he did not shrink from harshness, so long as he might be brief and energetic. He wished that Italians should learn from his theater to be “free, strong, generous, transported by true virtue, intolerant of every form of violence, lovers of their country, true knowers of their own rights, and in all their passions ardent, upright, and magnanimous.” The most famous of his tragedies is *Saul*. Of similar inspiration is the *Etruria vindicata*, a poem in ottava rima on the assassination of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici. In these works he invented heroic characters and passions, but in his comedies he was a keen observer of reality: four of allegorical-political subject (*L'uno*, *I pochi*, *I troppi*, *L'antidoto*), two of social and moral subject (*Il divorzio* and *La finestrina*), in the terza rima Satires (sixteen, besides the Prologue), in the Epigrams, and in *The Misogallo*. He expressed his private and public affections in the *Rhymes* and in the dialogue *La virtù sconosciuta*; he recounted his own life in the splendid *Life*, as well as in his letters and early *Journals*; he set forth his political and literary thought in the treatises *On Tyranny* and *On the Prince and Letters*, and in the *Panegyric to Trajan*.
and the Renaissance. He designed the façade of Vercelli Cathedral, inspired by that of St. John Lateran (v. GALILEA); in Novara he raised the bell tower of S. Gaudenzio; in Carignano he built the church
not by virtue of his learning, but of certain of his institutions. He expressly excludes from censure the cult of images and the dogma of the real presence in the Eucharist.
Comparing this reservation with a passage from the seventh satire *Anti-religionism*, where he praises precisely the Christian sacrifice of the Mass, because it “inspires devout reverence,” and then with the famous sonnet that begins “High, devout, mystical, ingenious... It is our cult,” a sonnet written in 1795, one easily concludes that at all times the A. did not escape that sense of reverence inspired in him by the forms and mysteries of Catholic worship. Moreover, in that same chapter on religion, he does not hesitate to observe that belief in the tyrant, imposed in modern times by the force of militias, is “far more vile and far less consoling than the ancient belief in God,” and he acknowledges that the Christian religion has softened morals and introduced “a certain urbanity into tyranny.”
In the treatise *On the Prince and Letters*, written between 1785 and 1786, partly contradicting what he had said in the treatise *On Tyranny*, he praises the liberating work of those whom he calls religious sect-leaders, Moses, Jesus Christ, Muhammad; he praises the sublimity of Christian saints and martyrs, observes that the reformed Christian religion (not the Catholic) is compatible with free living. But in the aforementioned sonnet he declares himself resolutely in favor of the Catholic religion: “Only Rome fully understands man’s deepest secrets”; though he always wished for a reform even within II. In the same chapter of the treatise *On the Prince and Letters* he expresses a judgment, bold for its time and profound, repeated later in the seventh satire and in *The Misogallo*, on the negating philosophy of the eighteenth century, calling it superficial half-philosophy and not true philosophy. Even now the Seventh Satire is violently opposed to Voltaire, “disinventor or inventor of nothing,” whose jests “provide no foundation for virtue” as religions do, and unleash license and crime. In a letter of 1796 to Teresa Mocenni, to console her on the death of a mutual friend, he urges her to believe in the immortality of the soul, even if such belief is repugnant to physics and mathematical evidence: “Man’s first virtue is feeling, and the sciences teach us not to feel.”
With these words the A. places himself at the head of that band of men whom the thought of the century swept along into unbelief, but whom it made to mourn, and more or less clearly invoked a return to faith or to something that, for better or worse, might hold its place—illusions, poetry. The Countess d’Albany told Capponi that, had the A. lived longer, he would have died with a rosary in his hand. D’Azeglio recounts that in his final years the A. was seen one day in church receiving Easter communion. Abbot Caluso attests that when he died a confessor was summoned but did not arrive in time. The Countess d’Albany, impetuously irreligious, was not a person to take such care unless she knew it was his desire.
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Thought. — The Author wished to be a poet and a prophet of freedom: he constantly inculcated that it is not obedience to the law, but man’s subjection to man, that is deadly at every height of feeling. He lacked faith and showed himself opposed to the Catholic religion; hence some of his works were deservedly condemned by the Church: *Le Satire*, *Della tirannide*, *Vita* (20 Jan. 1823), *Il panegirico di Plinio a Traiano*, *Del Principe e delle Lettere* (11 June 1827). Yet there do not fail to be testimonies and indications that his thought drew ever closer to II. In the treatise *Della tirannide*, written in 1777, a chapter deals with *Della religione*: there the Christian religion in general is described as “not in itself favourable to free living,” and in particular the Catholic religion as “almost incompatible with it.”
Medallion engraved by C. A. Porporati.