MONTI, VINCENZO. – Poet, born on 19 February 1754 at Alfonsine (Ravenna), died in Milan on 13 October 1828. From 1778, for approximately 20 years, he lived in Rome (he had completed his studies at the Seminary of Faenza) as secretary to Pius VI’s nephew, Duke Luigi Braschi. Immediately admitted to the Arcadia, he became its most constant supporter; he opposed to the myths of reason and nature characteristic of the Enlightenment those of the Parrasian grove, in a poetry for men of letters, where the immediate emotion aroused by the political and religious reality of his time is magically transported into the climate of the ancient fable.
As an abbot, he held the title and benefice of a canonry in St Peter’s. His religious poetry after the Visione d'Ezechiello (1776), modelled on the examples of Minzoni and Varano, and the sestinas Sopra i dolori di Maria Vergine and the fine couplets De Christo nato, is represented during the Roman period by the sonnets Sulla morte di Giuda and by several admirable passages of the Bellezza dell'universo. As a court poet he wrote the sonnet against Alfieri in defence of the Papal States, celebrated in the Pellegrino Apostolico the mission and journey of Pius VI to Vienna, glorified his love of classical antiquity in the Prosopopera di Pericle and, in the Feroniade, commemorated his governmental work in draining the Pontine Marshes. Finally, he denounced his horror of revolutionary Paris and the decapitation of Louis XVI in the terzine of the Bassillana (1793), the most celebrated of his short poems, which earned him the title of “the refined Dante.” But the work had served M. as a provisional defence of his liberal ideas; having gone to Milan in the wake of Colonel Marmont in 1797 and become citizen M., he disavowed that ideology, openly expressing his civil and religious sentiments, which were anti-papal, in Fanatismo, Superstizione, and Pericolo, and hoping in the canzone Per il congresso di Udine for the triumph of reason beneath the “immortal Triangle” of Freemasonry, to which the poet belonged, also composing a hymn for the inauguration of the Resle “Eugenio” Lodge in Milan. Having found “the homeland free” in the Cisalpine Republic and having been appointed poet of the Italian government and consulting assessor at the Ministry, M. (defined by De Sanctis, in view of these changes, as the secretary of the prevailing opinion) composed under Napoleonic protection, in praise of Bonaparte, Il Prometeo, Il Benefizio, La Spada di Federico, and Il Bardo della Selva Nera. In Paris, in 1800, he wrote the short poem In morte di Lorenzo Mascheroni, an example of civic poetry. Returning to Italy in 1802, he taught for two years at the University of Pavia; but after Lombardy fell under the Austrians (Foscolo went into voluntary exile), M. composed for the new rulers the Mistico omaggio and Il ritorno di Astrea.
In his final years he devoted himself to philological studies, which he collected in the 7 volumes of the Proposte di correzioni e aggiunte al vocabolario della Fara, directed against the purist severity of the Cesari. Having returned to the faith, he wished to burn his translation of Voltaire’s Pucella d'Orléans, which is nevertheless known through the transcription made by some of his friends. As Carducci said, M. remains “the prince of the art of an entire and most ingenious generation, reviver of the classical sentiment in its finest expressions”; “poet of the imagination and of the ear,” according to Leopardi’s judgment; an artist more than a poet, a reviver of myths like Canova, and a defender of the neoclassical school against the Romantics in the Sermone sulla mitologia. None of his contemporaries could escape the spell of his hendecasyllable, which defined the true pathos of the century, later inherited by the Romantics, in the tragedies (Aristodemo, Galeotto Manfredi, Caio Gracco), but chiefly in his work of most exquisite craftsmanship: La Feroniade. It was precisely to this imaginative and vibrant sense of pathos, already a romantic yearning, that he entrusted his masterpiece: the version of the Iliad (1810).