LEONTIOS VANANDETZI, saint, martyr. – An Armenian priest, one of the greatest disciples of Sts. Mesrop and Sahak, sent by them to Byzantium with other companions for sacred studies in the period 431–434.
Upon his return to his homeland, he devoted himself to translating Sacred Scripture and the works of the Fathers. L. was the driving force behind the Armenian people’s uprising against the decree
a religious conformity, perhaps weakly convinced, as is evident in the epilogue of the *Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi*, in the *Approssimamento della morte* in terza rima, and in the sermons delivered in Recanati in the chapel of the Congregation of Nobles (one might say the same of the circumstance of the tonsure he received at the hands of Msgr. Bellini and the ecclesiastical habit he wore until the age of twenty), but the principal significance lies instead in the notes for the *Sacred Hymns* and all the attempts included in the *Zibaldone* to prove that his ideology did not oppose Christianity. This ideology is not a philosophy, as Croce observes, since it consists of “scattered observations that are neither deep nor systematic.”
The indescribable days dreamed by L. in the garden of *Ricordanze* were shattered when harsh truth, namely reason, unhinged the illusory paradise of his hopes and made him feel an irreparable gap between the sweetness first conceived and the new reality, which was decisively hostile to him, and made the arrival of youth appear almost as a betrayal of his enchanted adolescence. With the collapse of the certainties of faith—Giordani contributed to this, according to Leopardi’s own testimony to Gioberti—he continued Foscolian inquiry, imagining being and the world as creations of the self and action as the ultimate fruit of illusion. Following the sensist philosophy of the 18th century and accepting the denial of the spirit, L. saw before him and within himself a pitiless and solitary nature. This phase of his thought is represented in the *Zibaldone* up to 1823. Thus, every possible happiness in existence vanished from his eyes: his dying Italy lay beneath foreign servitude—in the *Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia* he accentuates his irony toward contemporary political movements—; love is a phantom, unattainable and fascinating only in memory and dream—the admonition of Silvia and Nerina—; virtue is a shadow without foundation (Brutus the Younger), and with the waning of youth, man is inevitably driven toward the hated threshold of old age (The Solitary Lark). The myths disappear: what remains for him is the vague refuge of the Infinite, the metaphysical yearning for the universal and—
after a stay in Florence from 1830 to 1833, he finally embraced the idea of companionship with Ranieri, traveling to Naples, where, despite care and rest in the area around Vesuvius, his “daily and incurable physical sufferings” increased. Death overtook him in this city.
His contacts with the men of his time were notable but not decisive, apart from his friendship with Giordani: Mai, Niebuhr, Vieusseux, Capponi, Colletta, Manzoni, Gioberti. He had no political fortune: acclaimed as a deputy in 1831 for the Assembly of the United Provinces, he barely had time to refuse before the Austrians were in Bologna. Apart from Bunsen’s offer of the Dante chair at Bonn or Berlin, few were the contemporary recognitions of his fame: in Italy, he was offered the chair of natural sciences in Parma in 1829, and he received only an honorable mention from the Accademia della Crusca for the *Operette morali* (the five-year prize had been awarded to Carlo Botta). In the time of pleasant illusions, with “seven years of mad and desperate study,” he ruined his body forever: the hunchback from rickets, the extreme weakness of his sight, which led him to abandon philology definitively by sending his manuscripts to De Sinner, reduced him in his final year (cataract of the right eye and hydropericarditis) to “a trunk that feels and thinks.”
These details are necessary prologues to understanding how the external appearance of things gradually darkened, in his pathetic imaginative vision, into a tragic and somber view of history and the world, which he reached through a slow process of ideas and analysis of his own reflected sentiment in things. It is easy to distinguish the points and passages of this inner development. The autobiographical novel *Storia di un’anima*, written by Giulio Rivalla, of which L. left only notes, might well serve as the exact title for his entire work. While for a spiritual biography the early steps within
LEOPARDI, GIACOMO – Autograph of the canzone *Sul monumento di Dante che si prepara in Firenze* – Recanati, Casa Leopardi.
LEOPARDI, Giacomo – Letter to Angelo Mai (30 March 1821), in which he asks to be named “Professor of Latin Language” in the Vatican Library – Vatican Library, cod. lat. 12895.
the cosmic drop (The Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia) and the further conviction that nature, an indifferent spectator of human tragedy (The Broom), is the only enemy to be fought. To annihilate then the “proud fables” of an earlier time, in the *Operette morali* (1st ed., Milan 1827) L. sought to re-examine the themes already explored in the *Canti* (1st ed., Florence 1831), and in dialogues of exquisite literary craft he reasoned about the errors of men, customs and peoples, the vanity of glory (Parini), love (On Torquato Tasso and His Familiar Genius), philosophy (Memorable Sayings of Filippo Ottonieri), nature and death (Dialogue Between Nature and an Icelander, Dialogue of Frederick Ruysch and His Mummies), driving the characters, in whom his voice as supreme poet is present, to define the mortal sickness inherent in all things (The Wildcock’s Carol). Because life offers no reason for his hopes, man, according to L., falls into the most sublime human sentiment: boredom, that is, death in life: “the inability to be satisfied by any earthly thing or by the earth itself.”
Leopardi’s pessimism cannot be overcome by the idea of love that must bind human companionship in struggle against destiny in mutual solidarity—this is the positive idea of *The Broom*, which Pascoli wished to continue—but the secret charm of the Leopardi world lies in the fact that this pessimism, as De Sanctis keenly observed, “produces the opposite effect to that which it intends. He does not believe in progress and makes it desirable; he does not believe in freedom and makes it beloved. He calls love and glory and virtue illusions and kindles in the breast an inexhaustible desire for them.”
All this lives in the lyric poetry of the greatest perfection Italy has known since Dante and Petrarch, in a miraculous succession of images, in a chaste and sober language worthy of the ancient Greeks, in a measured richness of words rediscovered in their values and heightened with wonder and power—a discovery that seems to be recognized not only in the great idylls (*The Infinite*, *Recollections*, *Silvia*, *The Village Saturday*) but in the entire vast and equally rich and memorable zone of the other *Canti*, those of the elegiac, patriotic, classical moment, those of passionate philosophical or Lucretian lyric, according to Carducci’s classification.
The prose of the *Operette morali*, the *Pensieri*, the *Zibaldone*, and the *Epistolario* follows a line of Attic simplicity open to profoundly human visions, always tinged with a vague imaginative coloring.
Of the Christianity that L. thought “it agreed in many things with his system of nature”; in the *Nuovi Credenti* he declared himself a defender of Job and Solomon, and in cursing fate, instead of the name of God he substituted “unworthy deed,” “ugly power,” “Arimanes,” and wished to dedicate a hymn to this baleful power. But if we turn to the other hymn sketched to the Redeemer or to Mary or to the dialogue between Ranieri and L. cited by Brofferio (*I miei tempi*, III, Milan 1864, pp. 81-83), in which the poet reacts to the argument of the repugnance of faith to reason (“why was the reason of Leibniz, of Newton, of Columbus not as repugnant as ours?”), we must conclude that his negation was not definitive but wavering and tormented by doubts. Certainly in L. “that desire for purity, so extremely akin to love, was not something learned from the classics; it came to him from Christian upbringing; he had a sufficient knowledge of his own religion and sufficient clarity of thought to recognize that this alone could reconcile nature and religion, that is, in his own language, provide a rational foundation for the thirst for sacrifice proper to young and noble hearts. These place L. far above the 19th-century rationalism and positivism, and although he no longer adhered to a positive faith, the impression of the divine remained indelibly in his soul: he could not become frankly an atheist” (G. A. Levi). In L. the longing for the faith of others and for his own childhood faith was certainly very strong, and erudition, poetry, and thought in him were continually directed toward the deepest questions of human existence. This spiritual anxiety of the seeker (“and the eternal comes to mind...”) makes credible the account of his religious and Christian death. The *Operette morali* were placed on the Index “donec corrigantur” (decree of 19 April 1850).