BARTOLI, Daniello. — Born in Ferrara on 12 February 1608, died in Rome at the Gesù on 13 January 1685. Not yet sixteen years old, on 10 December 1623 he entered the Jesuits, who, recognizing in him a frail constitution but a keen mind and gentle disposition, came to regard him as one of their most distinguished members for his apostolic virtues and for having cultivated the writing of history and Italian prose. Having just entered the novitiate in Novellara, he expressed in one of his letters of 2 February 1627 his desire to dedicate himself “to the labors of the Indies and to the desired end of divine glory in martyrdom.” Thus, for thirteen years, once or even several times a year, he begged the General Vitelleschi to send him to propagate the faith, writing in this regard, “where there are greater dangers and greater occasion to suffer and die in hardships or be killed, there I feel myself more animated by divine grace to go.” After completing his philosophical and theological studies in Parma and being ordained a priest in Bologna in 1636, instead of the longed-for Indies, Italy became his field of apostolate.
He first taught philosophy, though for a very short time, in Parma; then, when the need arose for a skilled preacher during Lent, he was asked to leave the chair for the pulpit. For thirty years he continued to preach Lenten sermons and Advent discourses, once and sometimes more than once, in Ferrara, Genoa, Lucca, Florence, Rome, Naples, Messina, Palermo, and Malta, earning a reputation as an excellent orator and bringing abundant spiritual fruit to his listeners, until in 1649 the new General Vincenzo Carafa appointed him historian of the Order. Thus, at the age of forty-two, leaving the pulpit—where Paolo Segneri was about to succeed him—he began his apostolate of the pen, confident of even greater success. For even if the *Saggio di poesie morali*, published in Bologna in 1642 under the name of Giov. Battista Bartoli, was not his, the work *L’uomo di lettere*, published in 1645 to dissuade young people from reading novels, gave good reason to believe that the lively word so applauded from the pulpit would be no less welcome and fruitful when read in books.
The Society, whose universal history he was preparing to write, had then been in existence for a century and a decade; a period long enough to provide the historian with abundant and varied material. To elaborate it with order and clarity, he himself informs us, he chose to follow the most common division of the four parts of the world, subdivided into the regions where the Order had labored most for the salvation of souls. He began with a majestic vestibule, or as he called it, the “foundation of the entire work,” which consisted of the five books on the life and institute of St. Ignatius, founder of the Society of Jesus, published in Rome by Manelfi in 1650. These were followed in the years 1653, 1660, 1663, 1667, and 1673 by five more folio volumes, like the first, three on Asia (India, Japan, China) and two on Europe (England, Italy). From this it is clear that the *Historia universalis*, as he had announced it, remained largely unfinished, despite his having held a pen in hand for thirty-five years, except for the three years he served as rector of the Roman College (1671–73). It is true that during this long period he also treated numerous subjects in the same historical field.
Among these were five works, not so much biographies as histories of the lives of distinguished fellow members of the Order: namely, of Fr. Vincenzo Carafa (1651), St. Stanislaus Kostka (1670), St. Francis Borgia (1671), Niccolò Zucchi (1672), and St. Robert Bellarmine (1678). To these must be added the five volumes *Degli uomini e dei fatti della Compagnia di Gesù*, composed in the final years of his life in the manner of annals, covering the years from 1540 to 1590, in which he narrated the events of the Order while inserting faithful portraits of several Jesuits who had rendered outstanding service to the Church. Thus he was able to describe succinctly what his religious order had accomplished in the Congo, Monomotapa, Ethiopia, Brazil, Florida, Spain, and Germany—topics not addressed in the five volumes of the *Historia universalis*.
His long and copious historical work did not exhaust the abundant vein of his genius.
From philosophy, ascetics, physics, and philology, he also drew useful subjects, which he treated with nobility of sentiment, acuteness of reflection, and arguments of feeling, marked by a marvelous variety of elegant phrases and modes of expression, almost always free from the extravagances of the swollen seventeenth century. Altogether, he published twelve volumes in the aforementioned disciplines; among the principal ones may be mentioned: *La povertà contenta* (1650), *L’uomo al punto* (1667), *Dell’ultimo e beato fine dell’uomo* (1670), *Delle due eternità* (1675), *Delle grandezze di Cristo* (1675), and *Dei simboli trasformati al morale* (1677); all of these were reprinted many times until 1850. In these works he poured forth, adapted for reading, not a small part of the Lenten sermons lost when the ship carrying him to Palermo to preach was wrecked off the coast of Capri in 1649.
After his death, Bartoli enjoyed a fate, if not unique, certainly rare. For more than a century and a half, until the second half of the nineteenth century, he was unanimously extolled; one need only recall the epithet “terrible” coined by Giordani, along with the praise heaped upon him by Monti, Leopardi, Galeani Napione, Gargallo, Tommaseo, and other contemporaries.
Yet, with the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, perhaps owing to political passions, opinion swung from one extreme to the other. For a De Sanctis, a Settembrini, and a host of critics of Italian literature—with the exception of Carducci and a few others—Bartoli was (as De Sanctis defined him) “an abstract rhetorician and moralist of the seventeenth century,” and Bonghi did not hesitate to call him “a worthless writer, lacking in thought, life, and truth, a jumble of disjointed, rambling, incoherent material, with an artificial and contrived style, a copious but indiscriminately mixed and cobbled-together language” (*Lettere critiche*, Naples 1884, p. 157).
This was the judgment regarding his style and language; as for the historical value of his works, they were said to be nothing more than “romanticized” histories, in the manner of Amedee Thierry’s *Recits de l’histoire romaine du Ve siècle*. Now, this verdict can only be accepted by those who have never compared Bartoli’s pages with the sources from which he drew. Anyone who, before making such an assertion, undertakes the necessary comparison will have to admit that Bartoli was not only an excellent prose writer but also a historian in the strict sense of the word, faithfully recounting what the critically examined sources attested to him. Yet, let it be understood, he narrated and described as an artist, for such was the gift God had bestowed upon him.
Thus did Antonio Belloni rightly observe (B. [Collezione scrittori italiani], Turin 1931, p. 7): “the representations, descriptions, and narratives of B. must be judged as one judges portraits painted by skilled artists, who, while rendering on canvas as faithfully as possible the features of the person before them, at the same time idealize them so as to reveal the soul, character, and hidden depths of mind and heart.” It seems, therefore, that twentieth-century criticism has lately taken a step backward regarding the Ferrarese writer, admitting as it does the inevitable imperfections in any human work, yet fundamentally sensing of this great Seicento master what Giacomo Leopardi sensed when he wrote:
“Ovid describes, Virgil paints, Dante (and proportionately in prose our B.)—to speak properly—does not merely paint masterfully at a stroke and create a figure with a single brushstroke, does not merely paint without describing (as Virgil and Homer also do), but carves and sculpts before the reader’s eyes his own ideas, concepts, images, and feelings” (Zibaldone, IV, 289).