BETTINELLI, SAVERIO. - Jesuit, man of letters, b. at Mantua on 18 July 1718, d. there on 13 Sept. 1808. Having entered the Society in 1736, he taught literature in the colleges of Venice, Parma, and Verona; he made several journeys, on one of which he visited Voltaire on behalf of the Polish court of Nancy; when the Society was suppressed in 1773, he moved to Mantua, taking refuge however in Verona during the French occupation of 1796.
He wrote poems, dramas, and dissertations, some of them of value: but his name remains sadly linked to the ten Lettere di Virgilio ai legislatori della nuova Arcadia (Venice 1757), in which, while aiming to turn writers away from the slavish imitation of the classical authors, he falls into the opposite exaggeration, confusing the imitators with the authors taken as models, belittling and mercilessly demolishing the latter, Dante especially, whom he accuses of being "arid in invention, deliberately malicious, and crude in writing." Only a thousand verses or so are granted to be good; the rest are worth nothing (cf. Lettere 1-3). Naturally these rash, caustic judgments aroused a strong and at times even exaggerated reaction, beginning with C. Gozzi and continuing almost to our own day, and their effects were suffered not only by the author but also by the Jesuits, accused, among other things, of anti-Dantism. It is true that in criticizing Dante, B. does no more than give a more heated and insolent form to ideas common to many of his contemporaries (cf. Federico, op. cit., pp. 122-50), and that B. himself calls the Lettere virgiliane "a caprice, a madness, a joke made out of obligation" (cf. Marchesan, op. cit., p. 182); the fact remains, however, that the work is a deplorable error, substantially maintained also in the later Lettere inglesi (Venice 1766) and in the Dissertazione accademica sopra Dante (Alfieri, op. cit., pp. 257-96). This has caused the lasting literary and patriotic value of other works by B. to be forgotten, such as: Il Risorgimento d'Italia negli studi, nelle arti e nei costumi dopo il Mille (2 vols., Venice 1775) and Discorsi delle lettere e delle arti mantovane (Mantua 1774).
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