FOSCOLO, UGO. - Poet, b. in Zante on 6 Feb. 1778, d. at Turnham Green on 10 Sept. 1827. His father, Andrea, was a physician of a Venetian family, his mother a Greek, Diamantina Spathis. His true name was Niccolò. Left fatherless at the age of 10, he spent his childhood and youth in a squalid house in Venice with his mother and brothers. A precociously alert mind, a temperament dominated by an expansive and overbearing "ego," he began his studies at the Seminary of Spalato and continued them in the Murano schools of S. Cipriano and at the University of Padua.
He felt himself called very early to the "miracle of versification" - as he himself defines poetry - and turned to it with all his soul.
In 1797, already known for the verses published in the Mercurio d'Italia and suspected by the government for his harshly liberal tones, he gave to the stage in Venice his first tragedy Tieste, dense with political allusions and inciting rebellion against the "ruinous old patrician rabble." On the fall of Venice (1797) he fled to Bologna, greeted Napoleon's descent into Italy with the ode A Bonaparte liberatore, and enlisted as a volunteer in the Cisalpine legion. Returning to Venice, he assumed the post of provisional secretary of the municipality, revealed himself as an orator in the assemblies of the Society of Public Instruction, and threw himself with ardor into the political struggle. But in Oct. 1797 Napoleon, by the Treaty of Campoformio, ceded Venice to Austria: out of the weeping of disappointment would come the epistolary novel Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (definitive ed., Milan 1802), echoing Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse.
An exile in Milan, there he met and admired Parini, became a friend of Monti and took over the editorship of the Monitore italiano. In 1799, seized again by the need for physical action, he took part in battles against the Austro-Russians, was wounded at Cento, followed Massena's division in defending Genoa (1800) and composing, amid arms, the ode A Luigia Pollavicini caduta da cavallo; he went to Tuscany with General Pino, returned to Milan and there wrote the ode All'amica risanata (1802). In 1803 he translated Callimachus's Lock of Berenice and published, dedicating it to G. B. Niccolini, the pamphlet Sollicitas oblicia vitae, which contains, among other things, the sonnet Alla sera. In 1804-1806 he was in France with the Italian division; on his return to Milan in 1806 he composed the Sepolcri; in 1807 he gave to the press some experiments in translation from the Iliad, according to the criteria he would set out in the dissertation Di Omero, del vero modo di tradurre e di portare (1824); in 1808 he left the army and assumed the chair of eloquence at the University of Pavia, where he delivered the celebrated prolusion Dell'origine e dell'ufficio della letteratura and gave the lectures published in 1809.
The suppression of the chair drove him back in 1809 to Milan, then to Venice, Bologna, Florence. From this period are the tragedies Ajace (1811) and Ricciardo (1813), the translation of Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and the unfinished lyrical poem Le Grazie, dedicated to the sculptor who was working on the celebrated group and composed, in blank hendecasyllables, in the three years 1813-15. In it F., drawing on pure classical beauty, sings in Venus the transforming force of men from the savage state to that of civilization. The three hymns, which have come down to us in fragments, are entitled to Venus, to Vesta and to Pallas: in them the didacticism and the abuse of allegory find compensation in the perfection of individual scenes, suffused with Hellenic grace.
In 1813 he took up arms again; in 1815, when the Austrians, returning to Milan, offered the former opponent the editorship of a newspaper, he refused and on the evening of 30 March, without a passport, took the road of exile: first to Switzerland, then, through Holland, reached London. His name, already of European fame, procured for him in that city friendships, collaborations and hospitable welcomes. It is the time of his critical reorientation: with the essays on Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio he founded modern literary criticism, directing it "along the paths of history" (Mazzini) and toward the spiritual deepening of individual writers. In 1816 he published the satire Dydymi Clerici prophetae minimi Hypercolipseos liber singularis. He died of dropsy and was buried in the cemetery of Chiswick through the efforts of an English friend. Since 1871 his mortal remains rest in the Florentine church of S. Croce. His inner portrait is entrusted especially to his work as a writer and to the Epistolario (3 vols., Florence 1859), in which, despite a certain emphasis, the passionate and sincere man pulsates.
What above all remains established of F. are the 295 hendecasyllables of the Sepolcri, composed in March-Sept. 1806 and published in Brescia in 1807. The whole soul and work of the poet gravitate, in fact, around this poem, inspired by English and French sepulchral poetry (Young, Hervey, Gray, Parnell, Delille, Fontanes, Chateaubriand) and written on the occasion of the ordinances of Saint-Cloud (12 June 1804, extended to Italy in 1806), which made the graves of the dead common by prescribing uniformity of cemeteries. F. rises up in the name of the right of the personality to survive ideally and sentimentally as a link between one age and another, as a propulsive force of progress, as a motive of comfort to heirs. The "joy of the urn" smiles on the disappointed in tears and on those overwhelmed by violence; that same tomb which terrifies the coward as the pulverization of what he believed to be life, which gives a shudder and dismay to the Sardanapalus "of blessed idleness and of viands," becomes a promise of sentimental survival for the creator of affections, for the scientist who contemplates the heavens, for the hero who is broken in battle fought without mercy. Yet the tombs thus become a school of a merely lay and civil morality, devoid of any connection with religion and Christian hope, which make a very different light and force spring from the tombs.
F. has on the Index: Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (decree of 19 Jan. 1824), because they set forth a pessimistic and skeptical epistolary novel, in which the lost homeland and a lost love inspire, like a slow but tenacious poison, an ever-growing desire for suicide, carried out at the end as a means of liberation and peace; La Commedia di Dante Alighieri illustrated (decree of 8 Aug. 1845), because the author uses Dante for a requisition against the Church, transforming the poet into an anti-Catholic dreamer, adhering to the new church of "I fedeli d'amore."
Bibliography12 works
Salvatore Lombardo Restivo