FOGAZZARO, Antonio. — Writer, born in Venice on 25 March 1842, died there on 5 March 1911. In 1863 he published his first, weak poetic experiments in the magazine *Universo*. In 1864 he graduated in law at Turin and briefly practiced law. From 1865 he made occasional stays in Milan, frequenting the *Scapigliatura* group and forming a close friendship especially with Arrigo Boito. In 1866, having returned to Vicenza, he married Countess Margherita di Valmarana, by whom he had three children. He devoted himself to charitable and cultural works, but above all to literary and scientific studies, in his desire to reconcile science and faith, particularly on the subject of evolutionism, which he sought to interpret as a demonstration of the ascent of all creation from the greatness of matter to that of the spirit. Yet he remained, perhaps, somewhat estranged from the sense of the toil of the poor, soaring instead in dreams of idealizing romanticism; this did not prevent him from having a keen eye for the moving or ridiculous aspects of psychological limits and weaknesses, which he powerfully portrayed in the character sketches that circulate throughout his prose.
His youth was tormented by religious unrest: as a sensual temperament, he felt its temptations strongly; to this was added the loss of faith between 1864 and 1873, under the influence of positivist culture. His spiritual journey is marked by an attempt to overcome sensualism in the name of a spiritualism centered on an excess of love, which would be a path to God, while the woman, physically unattainable, was the object of his yearning for spiritual union beyond death.
He returned to the faith in 1873, especially struck by reading *Philosophie du Credo* by A. J. A. Gratry; a few years later, a more vivid sense of commitment to an "apostolate" matured in him, understood as elevating souls from sensual love to ideal love, and developing a higher sense of faith and religious life in opposition to the facile conformism and clericalism of his environment, against which he directed, with varying degrees of vehemence, his polemic as a liberal Catholic, reproaching his adversaries for their lack of charity.
In 1896, after the publication of *Piccolo mondo antico*, he was appointed senator; but his political life was not prominent. Greater importance, however, attaches to his activity in the Modernist movement: he was a friend and sympathizer with many Modernists, and an avid reader of G. Tyrrell, though always conscious of the need for discipline; his spiritual testament on the subject is *La porta di d. Giuseppe Flores*, which he left unpublished to his young friend T. Gallarati Scotti, who later published it in *Vita di A. P.* His liberalism, certain studies on the life to come (in his youth he had felt a strong fascination for spiritualism and a spiritualism that made countless distinctions between natural and supernatural life), and his openness to Modernist theories led to his novel *Il santo* (1906) being placed on the Index (decree of 3 April 1906). This was emphasized, but in the following novel (*Leila*, 1911), published on the eve of his death, he insisted on similar Modernist positions; and this too was placed on the Index (decree of 8 May 1911).
Author of poetry, essays, and dramas, F. is great only as a novelist, though his novels are steeped in moral questions: on the one hand, probity of manners and the problems of spiritual perfection, on the other, the allure of mysterious passion and of a love humanly unattainable, which he yearned for as a means to the love of God.
As early as 1872, with the lecture *Dell'avvenire del romanzo in Italia*, delivered at the Accademia Olimpica, he demonstrated his commitment to making the novel a field of struggle against realistic sensualism; this lecture is complemented by the much later *Un'opinione di A. Mannoni* (1887), in which he argues, not without inner torment, for the utility of representing passionate love in art (cf. later, the poem *Eva* [1891], in which he laments the effects that reading *Daniele* may have had on weak souls).
His notable artistic output begins with the short poem *Miranda* (1874), a painful drama and idyll constructed from the diaries of an ideal gentlewoman and a mediocre poet, Enrico, who abandons her for the lure of a fanciful and voluptuous life, only to return to her too late, when her health, undermined by long suffering, cannot withstand the sudden happiness, of which she dies. From an artistic standpoint, *Miranda*, which also has some fine poetic cadences, is a compromise between his initial intentions of verse poetry and his vocation for the analytical realism of the novel; all of F.’s artistic activity would then oscillate always between the appeal of an exalted, magical, passionate, sublimating romanticism and that of the firm Christian realism of Manzoni.
In 1876 he published a volume of verse, *Valsolda*, in which are the landscape-based, hallucinatory, fairy-tale, idyllic premises with pathetic tendencies of the novels that followed; but F.’s poetic production is not, in itself, of notable significance.
The theme of the young poet who sacrifices love and goodness to the egoism of "genius" (a Romantic theme from Goethe and others) also appears in his first prose novel, *Malombra* (1881), which has a rather arbitrary general invention but perfect prose that assimilates the lessons of Chateaubriand, and is rich in problems and nuances. In this novel the great F. already appears, torn between the theme of sensual passion and the attempt to oppose it with a pure and domestic love that remains impossible. Dominating everything is an arcane mystical magic: the premonitory dream of destiny and the search for souls are presented on the margins of madness or even in full madness, but always with a tenuous connection to mysterious reality. The influence of *Volupté* by Sainte-Beuve is evident in the taste for representing the contrast between sensuality, sublime passionate love, and simple, profound love. But alongside this is already developed the taste for precise, everyday, suffering reality, embodied in the figure of old Steinegg, a masterpiece of suffering humor.
F.’s ability to portray real people was already in evidence (his best characters all have a living model), with a taste for the characteristic, which also manifests itself in the need to reproduce dialectal phrases, though more often F. wished not to reproduce them materially but to idealize popular syntax (cf. Verga). At the same time, however, one notes the vice of the time (cf. D’Annunzio) of giving importance to precious details of exotic plants or artistic references.
In his second novel, *Daniele Cortis* (1885), F. develops the theme of ideal love forbidden by propriety and yet a means of spiritual elevation, uniting it with the representation of the political ideals of a young Catholic liberal who enters Parliament to advocate a new Italian life that is both Christian and patriotic.
The most complete love is sacrificed to this latter ideal and remains within the bounds of spiritual adultery, romantically justified by the annulment of the protagonist Elena’s unhappy marriage. She had married a coarse sensualist in a moment of exasperation to escape living with her mother, a woman of broadly good but not strictly limited morals, despite her immersion in the religious and clerical life of the world. The figures of Daniele and Elena are somewhat forcedly contrasted with those of Elena’s vulgar husband and Daniele’s wretched, thoughtless adulteress mother. Yet the figure of Daniele suffers from the overly programmatic exaltation that is joined to his lyrically autobiographical traits.
*Il mistero del poeta* (1888) marks a pause in F.’s artistic development toward the masterpiece (*Piccolo mondo antico*), which is more properly inscribed within Manzonian Christian realism. For now, however, the theme returns to that of the prophetic dream and its precise fulfillment (the theme of fate): the story ends with the imminent happiness of marital love, which is instead cut short by death (cf. *Miranda*), a reworking of the Romantic theme of ideal love that can only remain incomplete. Even this novel contains fine realistic pages, only slightly dimmed by a naive taste for exoticism that seeks exaltation and beauty in foreign lands and characters, who are often rendered in the humorous tone of caricature.
Earlier, however, F. had conceived (with the significant title *Storia giusta*, in contrast to his previous passionate themes) the novel *Piccolo mondo antico*, which was published in 1895.
Here all of F.’s finest qualities find full expression: he concentrates on the contrast between Luisa’s active and rationalistic moralism—skeptical and scornful of eternal rewards for good works—and Franco’s aesthetic, dreamy, soft religiosity. The backdrop of the story is the small world contemporary with the Risorgimento, and the catastrophe is marked by the death of the couple’s only child, the lively Ombretta, a high Romantic ideal of a tender and proud little girl. Yet here the catastrophe does not signify the impossibility of the ideal descending into the real world; rather, it leads to an active and real commitment in daily life for Franco and to religious faith for Luisa, so that the ideal is realized within the limits of the toil of reality. Here asceticism is not dreamy or grandly theatrical but humble and suffering. Thus it seems possible to place this novel within the Manzonian tradition without denying its originality; indeed, this placement lends it greater prominence in originality precisely because it does not highlight its own distinctive features: a more nuanced and trembling emotion, a more extended fusion of landscapes and states of mind (a characteristic aspect of F.’s art), a rawer and tear-soaked drama, and an exquisitely sensitive—even if, in the best sense, sensual—almost musical quality of observation. Whereas in F.’s earlier and later novels the caricatured realism often hardens into openly satirical function, here the very caricatures achieve a living and human emotion, blending without jarring with the lofty ideal inspiration. Nor does any event in the story appear arbitrary or programmatic; rather, it closes in an evident circle of poetic necessity.
With *Piccolo mondo moderno* (1901), which structurally continues the previous novel and with which the two following ones will form a cycle of four novels in a tenuous continuity, the political theme and the contrast between marital honesty and Romantic love return instead. The heroic solution appears somewhat forcedly programmatic (Piero, now free after his mad wife’s death, renounces Romantic love to flee and become a hermit), and it seems to respond rather to the Romantic schema of love that, to be ideal, must remain incomplete. The taste for the figure of the passionate and mysterious woman, Jeanne, again becomes dominant, though a lively and often witty realism is also given ample space.
*Il santo* (1905) structurally continues the previous novel closely: action again dominates, with Jeanne seeking Piero, who has become a hermit, while he pursues his mission to reform the Church through the obscure sacrifice of his own life, to convert the world—and even the pope—to a higher, purified, and adapted Christianity, for everything—hierarchy, clergy, worship, tradition, rites, formulas—was now corrupt and failing. Here too the central ideal is Piero’s sacrifice so that Jeanne’s passionate love may be transformed into spiritual love and she may rediscover faith.
*Leila* (1911) continues the polemic against the clerical world in the name of a nobler realization of Christian life, though it fails to unite this theme with a sentimental plot; apart from a few fine descriptive scenes (F.’s storms are passages of restrained and essential lyricism), it is a weak and poorly constructed novel.
The short stories (*Fedele e altri racconti*, 1887; *Racconti brevi*, 1894; *Idilli spezzati*, 1901) rarely stand comparison with the narrative and descriptive qualities of the novels.
For the theater, F. wrote: *El garofolo rosso* (1901) in Venetian dialect; *Il ritratto mascherato* (*Nadejda*, 1902).
His essays and speeches were collected in five volumes: *Accensioni umane* (1890); *Discorsi* (1898); *Sonatine bizzarre* (1899); *Minime* (1901–1905); *Ultime* (1913, 1905–1910).