VINCENZO MONTI. — Poet, born 19 Feb. 1754 at Alfonsine (Ravenna), died 13 Oct. 1828 at Milan. From 1778, for about 20 years, he resided in Rome (having completed his studies at the Seminary of Faenza) as secretary to the nephew of Pius VI, Duke Luigi Braschi. Immediately welcomed into the Accademia dell’Arcadia, he became its most steadfast supporter; to the myths of reason and nature, characteristic of the Enlightenment, he opposed those of the Parnassian grove, in poetry aimed at the learned, where the immediate emotion of the political-religious reality of his time was magically transported into the atmosphere of ancient fable.
As an abbot he held the title and benefice of a canonry at St Peter’s. His religious poetry after the Visione d’Eschiello (1776), modelled on the examples of Minzoni and Varano, and the sestinas Sopra i dolori di Maria Vergine and the fine distichs De Christo nato, is represented in the Roman period by the sonnets Sulla morte di Giuda and by some admirable passages in the Bellezza dell’universo. As a courtier he wrote the sonnet against Alfieri in defence of the Papal State, celebrated in the Pellegrino Apostolico the mission and journey of Pius VI to Vienna, glorified his love for classical antiquity in the Prospopea di Pericle and, in the Feroniade, in memory of the draining of the Pontine Marshes, his work of government. Finally, he expressed his horror of revolutionary Paris and the execution of Louis XVI in the terzines of the Basvilliana (1793), the most celebrated of his little poems, which earned him the title of “gentler Dante.” Yet the work had served Monti as a temporary defence of his liberal ideas; having moved to Milan in 1797 with Colonel Marmont and become the citizen M., he abandoned that ideology, openly exposing his civic and religious sentiments in an anti-papal vein in Fanatismo, Superstizione, Pericolo, and in the ode Per il congresso di Udine he hailed the triumph of reason under the “immortal Triangle” of Freemasonry, to which the poet belonged, even composing an anthem for the inauguration of the Royal Lodge “Eugenio” in Milan. Having found “a free fatherland” in the Cisalpine Republic and been appointed poet of the Italian government and advisory assessor at the Ministry, Monti (described by De Sanctis, for these changes, as “secretary of the dominant opinion”) composed under Napoleonic patronage, in praise of Bonaparte, Il Prometeo, Il Benefizio, La Spada di Federico, Il Bardo della Selva Nera. In Paris in 1800 he wrote the little 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 when Lombardy fell under the Austrians (Ugo Foscolo departed into voluntary exile), Monti composed for the new rulers the Mistico omaggio and Il ritorno di Astra.
In his final years he devoted himself to philological studies, collected in the seven volumes of Proposte di correzioni e aggiunte al vocabolario della Crusca, against the purist rigour of the Cesari. Having returned to the faith, he wished to burn his translation of Voltaire’s La Pucelle d’Orléans, which is however known through copies made by some of his friends. Monti remains, as Carducci said, “prince of the art of an entire and most ingenious generation, reviver of classical feeling in its finest expressions”; “poet of imagination and of the ear,” according to Leopardi; an artist rather than a poet, a re-creator of myths like Canova and a defender against the Romantics of the neo-classical school in the Sermone sulla mitologia. None of his contemporaries could escape the spell of his hendecasyllables, which defined the true pathos of the century, later inherited by the Romantics, in his tragedies (Aristodemo, Galeotto Manfredi, Caio Gracco), but chiefly in his most refined work: the Feroniade. It was to this imaginative and vivid pathetic sense, already a Romantic yearning, that he entrusted his masterpiece: the translation of the Iliad (1810).