Alfieri, Vittorio

ALFIERI, VITTORIO. - Tragic poet, b. in Asti on 16 Jan. 1749, "of noble, well-to-do and honest parents," Antonio and Monica Maillard de Tournon, d. in Florence on 8 Oct. 1803. After his years at the college in the Academy of Turin (1758-66), he gave himself over to traveling, first for about a year in Italy, then throughout Europe, until 1772. In Jan. 1774, in Turin, one day for pastime he began to write some scenes of a tragedy, Cleopatra. He took it up again and finished it about a year later, and together with a farce, I Poeti, he had it performed in June 1775. Indulgently applauded, he formed the resolve to become a great tragic poet, and began to procure for himself the tools for it, applying himself first to the study of Italian, then also of Latin. In 1777 he definitively abandoned 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 Charles Edward Stuart, pretender to the throne of Scotland, who was thereafter his companion for as long as he lived. In 1778 he made a donation of his property, in exchange for the payment of an annuity, to his sister Giulia, for the purpose of "disvassallarsi," that is, freeing himself from every dependence on the king of Sardinia. He had various residences, in Rome, in Tuscany, in England, in Paris, in Alsace. In 1789 he was with d'Albany in Paris when the revolution broke out. At first he greeted it with joy but, having seen its horrors, he wrote the Misogallo. After the catastrophe of 10 Aug. 1792 he fled from Paris, not without difficulties and dangers; his horses, furniture, and books were confiscated, and his income sequestered. On 3 Nov. he returned to Florence, where he remained until his death.

Works. - The works to which he wished his fame entrusted 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 the Alcesti and the Abele, a "tramelogedia." A. rigorously observed the classical rules of the three unities, reduced tragedy to the utmost simplicity, suppressing secondary characters and every unnecessary episode; he did not shrink from appearing harsh, so long as he was brief and energetic. He wished that Italians might learn from his theater to be "free, strong, generous, carried away by true virtue, intolerant of every violence, lovers of the fatherland, true knowers of their own rights, and in all their passions ardent, upright and magnanimous." The most famous of his tragedies is the Saul. Of analogous inspiration is the Etruria vendicata, a short poem in ottava rima on the killing of Duke Alessandro dei Medici. An inventor, in these works, of heroic characters and passions, he was instead a bitter observer of reality in his comedies, four on allegorical-political subjects (L'uno, I pochi, I troppi, L'antidoto), two on social and moral subjects (Il divorzio and La finestrina), in the Satire in terza rima (sixteen, besides the Prologue), in the Epigrammi, and in the Misogallo. He expressed his private and public affections in the Rime, and in the dialogue La virtù sconosciuta; he narrated of himself in the very beautiful Vita, as well as in the letters and the youthful Giornali; he set forth his political and literary thought in the treatises Della tirannide and Del principe e delle lettere, and in the Panegirico a Traiano.

Thought. - A. wished to be a poet and prophet of liberty: he always inculcated that it is not obedience to the law, but the subjection of man to man that is deadly to every loftiness of feeling. He did not have faith, and showed himself averse to the Catholic religion: for this reason he deserved that some of his works be 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). Nevertheless there is no lack of testimonies and indications that his thought was drawing ever closer to it. In the treatise Della tirannide, written in 1777, one chapter treats Della religione: there the Christian religion in general is said to be "not in itself favorable to free living," and in particular the Catholic religion "almost incompatible with it,"

not as an effect of its doctrine, but of certain of its 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 L'antireligioneria, where he praises precisely the Christian sacrifice of the Mass, because it "instills devout reverence," and then with the famous sonnet that begins "Alto, devoto, mistico, ingegnoso... E' il nostro culto," a sonnet written in 1795, it is easy to conclude that at all times A. did not withdraw himself from that sense of reverence inspired in him by the forms and mysteries of the Catholic cult. Moreover, again in that chapter on religion, he does not fear to observe that belief in the tyrant, imposed in modern times with the force of militias, is "much more vile and far less consoling" than the ancient belief in God; and he acknowledges that the Christian religion has softened customs, and introduced "a certain urbanity into tyranny."

In the treatise Del principe e delle lettere, written between 1785 and 1786, partly contradicting what he had said in the treatise Della tirannide, he praises the liberating work of those whom he calls religious sect-leaders, Moses, Jesus Christ, Muhammad; he praises the sublimity of the Christian saints and martyrs, observes that the reformed Christian religion (not the Catholic) is compatible with free living. But in the sonnet recalled earlier he declares himself resolutely in favor of the Catholic religion: "Dell'uon gli arcani appien sol Roma intende"; while always wishing, even in this one, for a reform. In the same chapter of the treatise Del principe e delle lettere he expresses a judgment, bold for that time and profound, later repeated in the seventh satire and in the Misogallo, on the negating eighteenth-century philosophy, calling it a superficial and untrue semi-philosophy. The whole Satire VII is most violent against Voltaire, "disinventor or inventor of nothing," whose sallies "give no basis to virtue" as religions do, and unleash license and crime. In a letter of 1796 to Teresa Mocenni, to console her for the death of a mutual friend, he exhorts her to believe in the immortality of the soul, even if such a belief is repugnant to physics and to mathematical evidence: "The first merit of man is feeling, and the sciences teach one not to feel."

With these words A. places himself at the head of that host of men whom the thought of the century dragged along with it into unbelief, but who wept over it, and more or less clearly invoked the return to the faith or to something that, for good or ill, might take its place, illusions, poetry. Countess d'Albany told Capponi that, had A. lived longer, he would have died with the rosary in his hand. D'Azeglio relates that in his last years A. was seen one day in church taking Easter communion. Abbot Caluso attests that when he died the confessor was called, but did not arrive in time. Countess d'Albany, an impetuous unbeliever, was not a person to have such attentions if she had not known that such was A.'s desire.

Giulio Augusto Levi