FOGAZZARO, ANTONIO. - Writer, b. at Vicenza on 25 March 1842, d. there on 5 March 1911. In 1863 he published his first, weak poetic experiments in the journal Universo. In 1864 he graduated in law at Turin and did a brief apprenticeship in the legal profession. From 1865 he made several stays in Milan, frequenting there the group of the "scapigliati" and forming a friendship especially with Arrigo Boito. In 1866, having returned to Vicenza, he married there the Countess Margherita di Valmarana, by whom he had three children. He occupied himself with charitable and cultural works, but above all with literary and scientific studies, in the desire to reconcile science and faith, especially on the subject of evolutionism, which he wished to interpret as a demonstration of the ascent of all creation from the degrees of matter to those of spirit. He nevertheless remained, perhaps, somewhat a stranger to the sense of the toilsome life of the poor, soaring in dreams of idealizing romanticism: which did not deprive him of a spirit of observation for the moving or ridiculous aspects of the psychological limitations and miseries that he portrayed powerfully in the little caricatures that circulate throughout all his prose.
His youth was tormented by religious restlessness: a sensual temperament, he felt its temptations strongly; with this was joined 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 might be a path to God through woman, not to be attained physically but with whom to dream of spiritual nuptials beyond death.
He returned to the faith in 1873, especially struck by reading the Philosophie du Credo of A. J. A. Gratry; some years later there matured in him a more vivid sense of the commitment of an "apostolate," aimed at elevating souls from sensual love to ideal love, and at developing a higher sense of faith and of religious life in opposition to the facile "clerical" conformism of his milieu, against which he continually directed his more or less veiled polemic as a liberal Catholic, reproaching his adversaries for a lack of charity.
In 1896, after the publication of Piccolo mondo antico, he was appointed senator; but his political life had no prominence. Of greater importance, on the other hand, is his activity in the modernist movement: he was a friend and in agreement with many modernists, and an impassioned reader of G. Tyrrell, but always conscious of the necessity of 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, and which the latter later published in the Vita di A. F. His liberalism, certain bold hypotheses about the future life (as a young man he had felt vividly the fascination of spiritism and of a spiritualism innocent of distinctions between the natural and the supernatural life) and his clear and open alignment with the theories of modernism, brought it about that his novel Il santo (1906) was 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: and this too was placed on the Index (decree of 8 May 1911).
An author of poems, lectures, and dramas, F. is great only for his novels, which are nevertheless permeated with moral questions: on the one hand the honesty of morals and the problems of spiritual perfection, on the other the fascination of a mysterious passionateness and of a love humanly unattainable, yearned for as a means to the love of God.
Already in 1872, with the discourse Dell'avvenire del romanzo in Italia, delivered at the Accademia Olimpica, he showed that he was committed to envisioning in the novel the field of a struggle against veristic sensualism; this discourse is complemented by the other, much later one, Un'opinione di A. Manzoni (1887), in which he maintains, not without inner 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 notable artistic production begins with the short poem Miranda (1874), a drama and a sorrowful idyll, constructed from the diaries of a most gentle ideal maiden and of a mediocre poet, Enrico, who abandons her at the call of a fantastic and voluptuous life, to torture her and himself too late, when her health, compromised by long sorrow, cannot withstand the sudden happiness, of which she dies. From the artistic point of view Miranda, which also has some beautiful poetic cadences, is a compromise between the initial intentions of poetry in verse and the vocation to the analytic realism of the novel: all of F.'s artistic activity will thereafter always oscillate between the call of an exalted, magical, passionate, sublimating romanticism and that of the firm Christian realism of Manzoni.
Of 1876 is a volume of verse, Valsolda, in which are the landscape presuppositions, hallucinated, fable-like, idyllic, with a pantheistic tendency, of the following novels: but F.'s poetic production 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 of Goethe and others) returns also in his first novel in prose, Malombra (1881), of a general invention rather arbitrary, but of perfect prose that assimilates the teachings of Chateaubriand, and rich in problems and nuances. In this novel the great F. already appears, seduced by the theme of sensual passionateness and at the same time by the attempt to counter it with a pure and domestic love that nevertheless remains impossible. Over everything dominates an arcane, magical mysticism: the premonitory dream of destiny and the reincarnation of souls are presented on the margins of madness or even in full madness, but still always with a
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FOGAZZARO, ANTONIO - Portrait (age 1880) - Rome, Library of the Institute of Archaeology and History of Art.
interlocking of mysterious reality. For the taste of representing the contrast between sensuality, sublime passionate love, and simple and profound love, the influence of Valopte by Saint-Beuve is evident. But alongside this, the taste for a precise, everyday, suffering reality is already developed, in the figure of old Steinegge, a masterpiece of suffering humor.
The F.'s capacity for portraying real people is already being exercised (his best figures all have a living model), with a taste for the characteristic, which also manifests itself in the need to reproduce dialectal phrases; although more often the F. chose to reproduce the popular syntax not materially but ideally (cf. Verga). While on the other hand the vice of the time (cf. D'Annunzio) of giving importance to precious details of exotic plants or of artistic references is already noticeable.
In the second novel, Daniele Cortis (1883), the F. develops the theme of ideal love forbidden by honesty yet an instrument of spiritual elevation, uniting it with the representation of the political ideals of a young liberal Catholic who goes to Parliament to champion a new Italian life both 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 backstory of the mistaken marriage of the protagonist, Elena, who married a vulgar pleasure-seeker in a moment of exasperation to escape living with her mother, coarsely good but of less than limpid morals, even in her outward conformity with the religious and clerical world. To the figures of Daniele and Elena are somewhat forcibly counterposed those of Elena's vulgar husband and of Daniele's squalid and heedless adulterous mother. But to the figure of the latter, new that touch of exaltedly programmatic quality which is joined with his lyrically autobiographical traits.
Il mistero del poeta (1888) marks a pause in the F.'s artistic itinerary toward the masterpiece (Piccolo mondo antico), which is rather to be inscribed in Manzonian Christian realism. Instead, for now, there is a return to the theme of the prophetic sign and its punctual fulfillment (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 cannot be such except on condition of remaining unfulfilled. But even this novel has beautiful realistic pages only slightly dimmed by a naive taste for exoticism that seeks exaltation and beauty in foreign countries and characters, which on the other hand are often reduced to the humanistic tone of the caricature.
Already previously, however, the F. had been conceiving (with the significant title of Storia quieta, in contrast with the preceding passionate themes) the novel Piccolo mondo antico, which was published in 1895.
Here all the F.'s best gifts find full realization: the F. concentrates his attention on the contrast between the active and rationalistic moralism of Luisa, skeptical and disdainful of eternal rewards for good works, and the aestheticizing, dreaming, soft religiosity of her husband Franco. The background of the story is the small world contemporary with the Risorgimento, and the catastrophe is marked by the death of the couple's only little girl, the so vivid Ombretta, a high romantic ideal of a tender and proud child. But the catastrophe here does not mark the impossibility of the ideal descending into the real world, but rather the rediscovery of an active and real commitment in daily life for Franco and of religious faith for Luisa; so that the ideal is realized even within the limits and the toil of reality. Here the ascesis is not dreaming and grandly theatrical, but humble and suffering. Therefore it seems possible to place this novel in the Manzonian tradition, without denying anything of its originality: indeed this placement gives it greater prominence of originality insofar as it makes its own characteristics stand out: a more nuanced and tremulous emotion, a more expansive fusion between landscapes and states of mind (a characteristic aspect of the F.'s art), a more unripe dramatic quality steeped in tears, a most refined sensibility (even if sometimes, in the best sense, sensual) and almost musicality of notations. While, then, in the F.'s earlier and later novels the caricatural realism often dries up in an openly satirical function, here the caricatures themselves always attain a vivid and human emotion, blending without dissonance with the high ideal inspiration. Nor does any fact of the story appear arbitrary or programmatic, but it closes in an evident circle of poetic necessity.
With Piccolo mondo moderno (1901), which is, structurally, a continuation of the previous one, and with which the other two following will form a "cycle" of four novels in however tenuous continuation, the political theme and the contrast between marital honesty and romantic love return instead. The heroic solution appears somewhat forcibly programmatic (Piero, now free through the death of his wife, who was mad, renounces romantic love to flee and become a hermit), and seems to respond rather to the romantic schema of love which, in order to be ideal, must remain unfulfilled. The taste for the figure of the passionate and mysterious woman, Jeanne, returns as dominant, although a large part is also given to an often witty and lively realism.
Il santo (1905) is, structurally, a close continuation of the previous one: here too action dominates: Jeanne who seeks out Piero, who has become a hermit, while he pursues his mission of reforming the Church through the obscure sacrifice of his own life, of converting the world, and even the pope, to a more "high" Christianity, that is, rejuvenated, purified, adapted, because everything, hierarchy, clergy, worship, tradition, rites, formulas, was by now corrupted and going badly. Here too the ideal center is Piero's sacrifice so that Jeanne's passionate love may be transformed into spiritual love and Jeanne may rediscover the faith.
Leila (1911) continues the polemic against the clerical world in the name of a nobler realization of Christian life, poorly succeeding in joining a sentimental story with this theme; but, except for a few beautiful descriptive scenes (the F.'s storms are passages of a contained and essential lyric), it is a limp and weakly constructed novel.
The short stories (Fedele e altri racconti, 1887; Racconti brevi, 1895; Idilli spezzati, 1901) almost never stand comparison with the narrative and descriptive qualities of the novels.
For the theater the F. wrote: El garofolo rosso (1901) in 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).
Bibliography8 works
Fausto Montanari