Arteaga, Esteban de

ARTEAGA, ESTEBAN de. - Born at Turolio in Aragon in 1747, died in Paris on 3 October 1799. A Jesuit, expelled under the reign of Charles III, he found hospitality in Italy, as did other confreres of his.

He lived for a long time in Bologna at the house of Cardinal Albergati, was in contact with G. B. Bodoni, to whom he addressed some letters in defense of his own edition of the Curmi oraziani; he printed various of his works in Italy; he wrote essays on Metastasio, on Cesarotti, on Alfieri, on Italian literary taste in the eighteenth century. As a music critic, his output occupies an eminent place within that kindred, though highly significant, production of other Spanish Jesuits who immigrated to Italy, such as Andrés, Eximeno, and Requeno. In this field, besides Memoria para servir a la historia de la música española, and Disertaciones sobre el ritmo sonoro y el ritmo mudo en la música de los antiguos, one should recall above all his two-book work on Le Rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano dalla sua origine fino al presente (Bologna-Venice 1783-85), written in Italian, but later translated into German (Leipzig 1789) and abridged in French (London 1802), which may be defined as a history of our musical drama, and which suffices to earn A. the title of the foremost music critic of his time.

He appears as an original systematizer of the aesthetic ideas of the age especially in the work that gave him European fame, entitled Investigaciones filosóficas sobre la beleza ideal, considerada como objeto de todas las artes de imitación (Madrid 1789), the fruit of profound knowledge and meditation on what had been written on the subject by the major thinkers of the age (Voltaire, Diderot, Adam Smith, Mendelssohn, Winckelmann and certainly also, although he is not named there, Lessing) and, at the same time, the result of decidedly innovative tendencies and intuitions. Discussions concerning the aesthetic canons formulated by classical antiquity now give way to the concrete examination of the artistic work: what was a mechanical application of general principles becomes the formulation of judgments and appraisals as to how the artist has surmounted and overcome the difficulties intrinsic to the subject proposed. Such ideas make this work one of the most complete treatises on aesthetics that Europe possessed before Baumgarten; nor are there lacking in it, as is natural, acute judgments concerning literature. In the field of A.'s literary activity, it will be useful to recall an essay of his, written in Italian, entitled Dell'influenza degli Arabi sull'origine della poesia moderna (Rome 1791), in which such influence, contrary to the opinions already expressed by Father Andrés and by Tiraboschi, is denied.

Ruggero Ruggieri