BARTOLI, DANIELLO. - Born in Ferrara on 12 February 1608, died in Rome, at the Gesù, on 13 January 1685. Not yet sixteen, on 10 December 1623 he entered the Jesuits, who, seeing him most frail in constitution but of keen intellect and gentle disposition, set about making of him one of their most distinguished members both for his apostolic virtues and for his exquisite art in treating history and Italian prose. Barely received into the novitiate of Novellara, he longed, as we read in one of his letters of 5 February 1627, to consecrate himself "to the labors of the Indies and to the desired end of divine glory in martyrdom." Thus for thirteen years, once or more a year, he begged the general Vitelleschi to send him to spread the faith, writing thus, "where there were greater dangers and greater occasion to suffer and die in hardship or to be killed, there, feeling himself more with divine grace, he was moved to go." Having completed his philosophical and theological studies at Parma, and been ordained priest in Bologna in 1636, instead of the longed-for Indies he had Italy as the field of his apostolate.
He first taught philosophy, but for a very brief time, in Parma; then, a need having arisen for a capable Lenten preacher, he was made to leave the chair for the pulpit. For thirteen years he continued preaching Lenten and Advent courses, one and sometimes more, in Ferrara, Genoa, Lucca, Florence, Rome, Naples, Messina, Palermo, Malta, with a reputation as an excellent orator and abundant spiritual fruit in his hearers, until in 1649 the new general Vincenzo Carafa wanted him as historiographer of the Order. Thus at forty-two, having left the pulpit, where Paolo Segneri was about to succeed him, he undertook the apostolate of the pen with certainty of the happiest success. For even if the Saggio di poesie morali, published in Bologna in 1642 under the name of Giov. Battista Bartoli, was not his, L'uomo di lettere, published in 1645 to draw young people away from reading novels, gave well-founded conjecture that his living word, heard from the pulpit with such applause, would prove no less welcome and fruitful when read in books.
The Society, whose universal history he was preparing to write, then counted a century and a decade of life; time enough to offer the historian copious and varied material. To elaborate it with order and clarity he wished, as he himself informs us, to adopt the very 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 it with a majestic vestibule or, as he called it, "foundation of the whole work," which were the five books Della vita e dell'istituto di s. Ignazio fondatore della Compagnia di Gesù, published in Rome by Manelfi in 1650. They were followed in the years 1653, 1660, 1663, 1667, 1673 by five other folio volumes, like the first, three for Asia (India, Japan, China), two for Europe (England, Italy). From this it is seen that the Historia universale, as he had announced it, remained largely unfinished, despite the fact that for fully thirty-five years, except for the three years as rector of the Roman College (1671-73), he always kept his pen in hand. True it is that in this long time he treated not a few subjects even within the same historical field.
Such were the five works, not so much biographies as histories of the lives of distinguished confreres of his, namely: of Fr.
Vincenzo Carafa (1651), of St. Stanislaus Kostka (1670), of St. Francis Borgia (1671), of Niccolò Zucchi (1672), of St. Robert Bellarmine (1678). To these must be added the five volumes Degli uomini e dei fatti della Compagnia di Gesù, composed in the last years of his life in the manner of annals, for the years from 1540 to 1590, in which he narrated in abbreviated form the vicissitudes of the Order, inserting faithful profiles of several Jesuits highly deserving of the Church. Thus he was able to describe compendiously how much his religion had accomplished in the Congo, in Monomotapa, in Ethiopia, in Brazil, in Florida, in Spain and in Germany, subjects not touched upon in the five volumes of the Historia universale.
His long and copious work in the historical field did not exhaust in Bartoli the exuberant vein of his genius.
From philosophy too, from ascetics, from physics, from philology, he drew useful subjects which he knew how to treat with nobility of sentiment, with keenness of reflection, with cogent argumentation and with a wonderful variety of phrases and elegant turns of speech almost always far from the oddities of the turgid seventeenth century. No fewer than 12 volumes he published in the aforementioned disciplines; among which, to recall the principal ones: 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); Dei simboli trasportati al morale (1677); all reprinted several times down to 1850. Into these works he poured, adapting it for reading, no small part of the Lenten sermons lost in the shipwreck he suffered on the coasts of Capri in 1649 when he was on his way to preach in Palermo.
After his death Bartoli had 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 raised to the skies; one need only recall the epithet "terrible" given him by Giordani, and with this the praises paid him by Monti, Leopardi, Galesni Napione, Gargallo, Tommaseo, and others of their contemporaries.
However, once the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, perhaps on account of political passions, people passed from one extreme to the other. For a De Sanctis, a Settembrini, and a whole batch of critics of Italian literature, with the exception of Carducci and a few others, Bartoli was (as De Sanctis defined him) "a rhetorician and abstract moralist of the seventeenth century," and Bonghi did not hesitate to call him "a null writer, lacking thought, life and truth, jumbled, farraginous, without coherence, without order, of a patchwork and artificial style, of a language copious indeed, but mixed and thrown together without discernment" (Lettere critiche, Naples 1884, p. 157).
This is as regards style and language; with respect to the historical value of his works, these would be nothing but, as they now say, fictionalized histories, on the model of the Recits de l'histoire romaine du Ve siècle, by Amédée Thierry. Now this judgment can be accepted only by one who never compared Bartoli's pages with the sources from which the author derived them. Whoever, on the other hand, before asserting undertakes such a necessary comparison, will have to convince himself that Bartoli was not only an excellent prose writer, but also a historian in the strict sense of the word, that is, he faithfully set forth what the sources, critically sifted, attested to him. But let us be clear, he narrated and described as an artist, because such God had made him.
Wherefore Antonio Belloni rightly observed (B. [Collezione scrittori italiani], Turin 1931, p. 7): "the representations, the descriptions, the narratives of Bartoli are to be judged as one judges portraits executed by able painters, who, while rendering on canvas as faithfully as they can the features of the person posing before them, at the same time idealize them in order to reveal the soul, the character, the hidden senses of the mind and heart." It seems therefore that twentieth-century criticism is today beating a retreat for the Ferrarese, admitting in him indeed the imperfections inevitable in every work of man, but at bottom feeling about this supreme seventeenth-century writer as Giacomo Leopardi felt when he wrote: "Ovid describes, Virgil paints, Dante (and proportionally so in prose our Bartoli), to speak properly, not only paints like a master in two strokes, and makes you a figure with one stroke of the brush, not only paints without describing (as Virgil and Homer also do), but carves and sculpts before the reader's eyes his own ideas, concepts, images, sentiments" (Zibaldone, IV, 289).
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