IMBRIANI, VITTORIO. — Writer, born in Naples on 27 October 1840, died at Pomigliano d'Arco on 1 January 1886. He was an art and literary critic, collector of popular songs and folktales, versifier, and writer of novellas.
Unable to attain a balanced view of moral interests, he conceived religion as a product of «the hallucinated imaginative power» (letter to De Meis in Critica, 5 [1936], pp. 380–85); his Libro di preghiere muliebri is a frigid stylistic exercise. An advocate of an Italian State with absolutist forms (cf. La croce sabanda ed altri scritti inediti, Bari 1938), he posited its reconciliation with the Church as one of the essential factors in its consolidation.
BIBL.: Works: Critica d'arte e prose narrative, edited by G. Doria (with bibliography), Bari 1937; review by E. Cione in Letteratura, 1 (1937), pp. 155–58, and by E. Carli in La critica d'arte, 3 (1938), pp. 38–39; F. Flora, V. I. in Taverna del Parnaso, Rome 1943, pp. 11–51. Lanfranco Fiore