DE SANCTIS, FRANCESCO. - Literary critic and politician, b. at Morra Irpina (Avellino) on 28 March 1817, d. at Naples on 19 Dec. 1883. Having been set to the study of jurisprudence in Naples, he instead ardently attended the private literary school of Basilio Puoti, and later broke away from it, passing from lexical purism to livelier methods, in which words counted as living "things" situated in their own history: with this orientation he opened a school of his own and taught at the Military College.
Meanwhile he grew passionate about the new political ideas, following in the French press the parliamentary events of that country. In 1848 he took part in the insurrection of Naples, urging on his pupils with the famous cry: "Are we an Arcadia? Literature is life." Arrested in Calabria after the Bourbon restoration, in Dec. 1850, he was held in prison until 1853, in Naples, in the Castel dell'Ovo. Here he devoted himself to the study of German, especially in order to be able to read the Romantics and the works of Hegel in the original text; he also translated Rosenkranz's manual of the universal history of poetry, in which Hegelian aesthetic theories were applied and popularized. From this moment De Sanctis, while maintaining an originality of his own in the face of the German philosopher's rigid aesthetic system, oriented himself resolutely toward idealistic historicism. In
1853, exiled from Malta, he took refuge in Turin, where he taught in a girls' college and wrote articles for the Turin press. In 1855 he wrote ardently against the Murattian projects in the Kingdom of Naples as contrary to Italian ideals and interests. From 1856 to 1859 he taught Italian literature at the polytechnic of Zurich and was in direct contact with German-language culture. In 1860, following the political upheavals, he was governor of Avellino; then director of public instruction in the lieutenancy of Naples, and subsequently minister of public instruction (22 March 1861-5 March 1862) of the new Kingdom.
He then devoted himself intensely to journalism. For the proper constitutional functioning of the State he believed a strong opposition to be necessary in the face of the governing party, and, having left the majority of the Cavourian tradition, he passed over to the left.
From 1871 he was professor of comparative literature at the University of Naples. After the left came to power (26 March-14 Dec. 1878; 25 Nov. 1879-1 Jan. 1881), he was twice more a minister.
He felt the fascination of Machiavelli's "verità effettuale" and interpreted Vico's historical teaching along the lines of Hegelian immanentist schemas. Religious problems were in him completely absorbed into an earthly morality, and the Church, as for many other men of the Italian Risorgimento, appeared to him predominantly under the aspect of a political institution in conflict with Italian unity.
De Sanctis is considered the head of Italian aesthetic criticism, as opposed both to the earlier classical, rhetorical and content-based criticism and to the contemporary historical criticism, whose head was considered to be Carducci, inspired by positivistic philological rigor: developing the method of Foscolo, who investigates the poetic biography of the author as the raison d'être of the work, De Sanctis studies the work as a "living individual," as a "whole" in which the universe is organically summed up, so that all the values of the universe appear in the work insofar as they have become organically internal to it. On the other hand he was responsive to the Risorgimento demand for literary history as civil history, and it is to this demand that his Storia della letteratura italiana (1870) is inspired, which has been defined a history of Italian culture.
This history too simplistically counterposes to a Middle Ages conceived in Enlightenment fashion as a cultural period dominated by the tendency toward an abstract afterlife, the Renaissance as the reacquisition of a sense of the world here below but with hypertrophy of the intellect to the detriment of the will and of moral commitment in life. In the seventeenth century and in the Arcadia he therefore sees poetry dissolving into generic musicality, whereas from Parini onward he sees human ideals reviving, ideals that in Manzoni are perfectly "immersed in the real." A Romantic prejudice remains in De Sanctis: a certain taste for "passion"; this prejudice leads him into characteristic errors, such as his failure to understand the poetry of Manzoni's Lucia and the confusion, in the case of Segneri, between psychological sincerity and artistic sincerity.
De Sanctis nevertheless remains the greatest Romantic critic: his teaching is civil education and at the same time education in autonomous artistic contemplation: the two demands are reconciled in the conviction that there can be no great poetry where there is not at the same time an intense moral life. In his last years, however, De Sanctis felt the fascination of evolutionist positivism, as some of his last essays on Zola and on Darwinism in art (1877-83) testify. The whole of his critical itinerary is therefore far more complex than it appears from the simplification of it made by Croce.
Alongside the critical works (Saggi critici, Saggio sul Petrarca, Storia della letteratura italiana, Storia della letteratura italiana nel XIX sec., Studio sul Leopardi, etc.), a notable prominence of fresh writing belongs to the autobiographical writings (La giovinezza, Lettere a Virginia, Un viaggio elettorale) and the Scritti politici.
Bibliography5 works
Fausto Montanari