FOGAZZARO, ANTONIO. — Writer, born at Vicenza on 25 March 1842, died there on 5 March 1911. In 1863 he published his first, weak poetic experiments in the journal Universo. In 1864 he took a degree in law at Turin and briefly practiced as a lawyer. From 1865 onward he spent some periods in Milan, where he frequented the group of the « scapigliati » and formed a particularly close friendship with Arrigo Boito. In 1866, having returned to Vicenza, he married there the 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 the desire to reconcile science and faith, especially with regard to evolutionism, which he wished to interpret as a demonstration of the ascent of all creation from the levels of matter to those of the spirit. Nevertheless, he perhaps remained somewhat estranged from the sense of the laborious life of the poor, soaring in dreams of idealizing romanticism; this did not deprive him of his powers of observation regarding the moving or ridiculous aspects of the limitations and psychological miseries that he powerfully portrayed in the character sketches circulating throughout all his prose.
His youth was tormented by religious unrest: a sensual temperament, he felt its temptations intensely; together with this came the loss of faith between 1864 and 1873, under the influence of positivist culture. His spiritual itinerary is marked by the attempt to overcome sensualism in the name of a spiritualism centered on an exceptional love, which would be a path to God through a woman not to be physically attained, but with whom he might dream of a spiritual marriage beyond death.
He returned to the faith in 1873, particularly struck by his reading of the Philosophie du Credo by A. J. A. Gratry; a few years later, a livelier sense of the commitment of « apostolate » matured in him, directed toward raising souls from sensual love to ideal love, and toward developing a higher sense of faith and religious life in opposition to the easy « clerical » conformism of his milieu, against which he continually directed his more or less veiled polemic as a liberal Catholic, reproaching his opponents for a lack of charity.
In 1896, after the publication of Piccolo mondo antico, he was appointed senator; but his political life was of no importance. Of greater significance, however, was his activity in the Modernist movement: he was a friend and sympathizer of many Modernists, and an avid reader of G. Tyrrel, but always conscious of the need for discipline; his spiritual testament on the subject is La parola di d. Giuseppe Flores, which he left unpublished to his young friend T. Gallarati Scotti, who later published it in the Vita di A. F. His liberalism, certain daring hypotheses concerning the future life (as a young man he had felt strongly the attraction of spiritism and of a spiritualism unmindful of the distinctions between natural and supernatural life), and his clear and open support for the theories of Modernism caused his novel Il santo (1906) to be placed on the Index (decree of 5 April 1906). He submitted. But in the following novel (Leila, 1911),
published on the eve of his death, he insisted on analogous Modernist positions; this work too was placed on the Index (decree of 8 May 1911).
The author of poems, lectures, and dramas, F. is great only for his novels, which are nevertheless permeated by moral questions: on the one hand, moral integrity and the problems of spiritual perfection; on the other, the fascination of mysterious passion and of a humanly unattainable love, dreamed of as an intermediary to the love of God.
As early as 1872, with the address Dell'avvenire del romanzo in Italia, delivered at the Accademia Olimpica, he showed that he was committed to envisioning the novel as the field of a struggle against veristic sensualism; this address is supplemented by the much later Un'opinione di A. Manzoni (1887), in which he maintains, not without inward torment, the usefulness of representing amorous passion in art (cf. later, the poem Eva [1891], in which he laments the effects that the reading of Daniele may have produced in weak souls).
His significant artistic production begins with the poem Miranda (1874), a painful drama and idyll, constructed from the diaries of a most gracious ideal young woman and of a mediocre poet. Enrico, who abandons her in response to the call of a fantastic and voluptuous life, returns to her only too late, when her health, undermined by prolonged suffering, cannot withstand the sudden happiness, of which she dies. From the artistic point of view, Miranda, which also contains some beautiful poetic cadences, is a compromise between the initial intentions of poetry in verse and the vocation to the analytical realism of the novel: all F.’s artistic activity would thereafter always oscillate between the appeal of an exalted, magical, passionate, sublimating romanticism and that of Manzoni’s steadfast Christian realism.
A volume of verse, Valsolda, dates from 1876; it contains the scenic, hallucinated, fairy-tale, idyllic, and pantheistically inclined premises of the novels that followed. F.’s poetic production, however, is not in itself of notable importance.
The theme of the young poet who sacrifices love and goodness to the egoism of « genius »—a Romantic theme found in Goethe and others—also returns in the first novel in prose, Malombra (1881), whose general invention is rather arbitrary, but whose perfect prose assimilates the lessons of Chateaubriand and is rich in problems and nuances. In this novel the great F. already appears, seduced by the theme of sensual passion and at the same time by the attempt to oppose it with a pure and domestic love that nevertheless remains impossible. An arcane magical mysticism dominates everything: the premonitory dream of destiny and the reincarnation of souls are presented on the margins of madness, or even in the midst of complete madness, but always with a
(fol. Exc. Cels.)
FOGAZZARO, ANTONIO - Portrait (ca. 1880) - Rome, Library of the Institute of Archaeology and Art History.
an intimation of a mysterious reality. The influence of Valopte by Saint-Bouve is evident in the taste for representing the contrast between sensuality, sublime passionate love, and simple, profound love. Alongside this, however, the taste for a precise, everyday, suffering reality is already developed, embodied in the figure of the old Steinegge, a masterpiece of painful humour.
F.ʼs ability to portray real persons is already being exercised (all his finest figures have a living model), together with a taste for the characteristic, which is also manifested in the need to reproduce dialect phrases; although more often F. sought not to reproduce popular syntax materially but rather ideally (cf. Verga). On the other hand, one can already discern the period’s vice (cf. D'Annunzio) of assigning importance to precious details of exotic plants or artistic references.
In his second novel, Daniele Cortis (1883), F. develops the theme of ideal love forbidden by honour yet serving as an instrument of spiritual elevation, joining it to the representation of the political ideals of a young Catholic liberal who goes to Parliament to advocate a new Italian life that is at once Christian and patriotic.
The most complete love is sacrificed to this latter ideal and remains within the limits of spiritual adultery, romantically justified by the protagonist Elena’s unfortunate marriage: she has married a vulgar pleasure-seeker in a moment of exasperation, in order to escape living with her mother, grossly kind-hearted but of dubious morals, despite her outward conformity with the religious and clerical world. The figures of Daniele and Elena are somewhat forcibly set against those of Elena’s vulgar husband and Daniele’s squalid, unconscious adulterous mother. But the former’s figure acquires that measure of exalted programmatism which is joined to his lyrically autobiographical traits.
Il mistero del poeta (1888) marks a pause in F.ʼs artistic journey toward his masterpiece (Piccolo mondo antico), which may instead be placed within Manzonian Christian realism. For the present, the theme of the prophetic sign and its exact fulfilment returns (the theme of falsity); and the story ends with the imminent happiness of conjugal love, which is instead cut short by death (cf. Miranda): a reworking of the Romantic theme of ideal love, which can be ideal only on condition that it remain incomplete. This novel too, however, contains fine realistic pages, only slightly clouded by a naïve taste for exoticism that seeks exaltation and beauty in foreign countries and characters; these, moreover, are often brought back to the humanistic tone of the caricature.
Even earlier, however, F. had begun conceiving (under the significant title Storia quieta, in contrast with the preceding passionate themes) the novel Piccolo mondo antico, which was published in 1895.
Here all F.ʼs finest gifts find full expression: F. concentrates his attention on the contrast between Luisa’s active and rationalistic moralism—she is sceptical and scorns eternal rewards for good works—and her husband Franco’s aestheticizing, dreamy, gentle religiosity. The setting of the story is the small world contemporary with the Risorgimento, and the catastrophe is marked by the death of the spouses’ only child, the so lively Ombretta, a lofty Romantic ideal of a tender and proud little girl. But here the catastrophe does not signify the impossibility of the ideal descending into the real world; rather, it signifies Franco’s discovery of an active and real commitment in everyday life and Luisa’s discovery of religious faith, so that the ideal may be realized within the limits and labours of reality. Here asceticism is not dreamy and grandly theatrical, but humble and suffering. For this reason the novel seems capable of being placed within the Manzonian tradition, without denying anything of its originality; indeed, this placement gives it greater prominence as an original work, since it brings out its distinctive features: a more nuanced and tremulous emotion, a more relaxed fusion of landscapes and states of mind (a characteristic aspect of F.ʼs art), a more raw and tear-soaked dramatic quality, a very refined sensitivity (even if at times sensual, in the best sense), and an almost musical quality in its notations. Moreover, whereas in F.ʼs earlier and later novels caricatural realism often withers in an openly satirical function, here the caricatures themselves always attain a lively and human emotion, blending without discord with the lofty ideal inspiration. Nor does any event in the story appear arbitrary or programmatic; rather, the story closes within an evident circle of poetic necessity.
With Piccolo mondo moderno (1901), which is structurally a continuation of the preceding work, and with which the next two novels would form a “cycle” of four novels in a tenuous continuity, the political theme returns, together with the contrast between marital fidelity and Romantic love. The heroic solution appears somewhat forcibly programmatic (Piero, now free through the death of his wife, who has gone mad, renounces Romantic love in order to flee and become a hermit), and seems instead to correspond to the Romantic pattern according to which love, in order to be ideal, must remain incomplete. The taste for the figure of the passionate and mysterious woman, Jeanne, again becomes dominant, although considerable space is also given to an often amusing and lively realism.
Il santo (1905) is structurally a close continuation of the preceding work: here too action dominates—Jeanne searches for Piero, who has become a hermit, while he pursues his mission of reforming the Church through the obscure sacrifice of his own life, converting the world, and even the pope, to a more “lofty” Christianity—that is, one rejuvenated, purified, and adapted, since everything—hierarchy, clergy, worship, tradition, rites, formulas—had by then become corrupt and was going badly. Here too the ideal centre is Piero’s sacrifice, so that Jeanne’s passionate love may be transformed into spiritual love and Jeanne may recover her faith.
Leila (1911) continues the polemic against the clerical world in the name of a nobler realization of Christian life, but it does not succeed in joining a sentimental plot to this theme. Apart from some fine descriptive scenes (F.ʼs storms are passages of restrained and essential lyricism), it is a feeble and weakly constructed novel.
The short stories (Fedele e altri racconti, 1887; Racconti brevi, 1895; Idilli spezzati, 1901) almost never bear comparison with the narrative and descriptive qualities of the novels.
For the theatre F. wrote: El garofolo rosso (1901), in the Venetian dialect; Il ritratto mascherato a Nadeglia (1902).
The speeches and essays are collected in five volumes: Atrentioni umane (1890); Discorsi (1898); Sonatine bizarre (1899); Minime (1901 and 1908); Ultime (1913, posthumous).