MONTI, VINCENZO. - Poet, b. 19 Feb. 1754 at Alfonsine (Ravenna), d. in Milan 13 Oct. 1828. From 1778, for about 20 years, he lived in Rome (he had completed his studies at the Seminary of Faenza) as secretary to the nephew of Pius VI, Duke Luigi Braschi. Welcomed at once into the Arcadia, he became its most constant supporter; to the myths of reason and nature proper to the Enlightenment he opposed those of the Parrhasian grove, in a poetry for men of letters, where the immediate emotion of the political-religious reality of his time is transported as if by enchantment into the climate of ancient fable.
As an abbot he held the title and the benefice of a canonry at St. Peter's. His religious poetry after the Visione d'Ezechiello (1776), modulated 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 of the Bellezza dell'universo. As a courtier he wrote the sonnet against Alfieri in defense of the Papal State, celebrated in the Pellegrino Apostolico the mission and the journey of Pius VI to Vienna, glorified his love for classical antiquity in the Prosopopera di Pericle and, in the Feroniade, in memory of the draining of the Pontine Marshes, his work of government. Finally he denounced his horror of revolutionary Paris and the decapitation of Louis XVI in the tercets of the Bassillana (1793), the most celebrated of his short poems, which earned him the title of « Dante refined ». But the work had served Monti for a provisional defense of his liberal ideas; having moved to Milan, following Colonel Marmont in 1797, and having become citizen Monti, he disavowed that ideology, setting forth his civil and religious sentiments as openly anti-papal in the Fanatismo, the Superstizione, the Pericolo, and wishing in the canzone Per il congresso di Udine the triumph of reason under the « immortal Triangle » of Freemasonry, to which the poet belonged, composing also a hymn for the inauguration of the Resle « Eugenio » Lodge in Milan. Having found « the free fatherland » in the Cisalpine Republic and been appointed poet of the Italian government and consulting assessor at the Ministry, Monti (defined by De Sanctis, on account of these changes of his, secretary of the dominant opinion), composed under Napoleonic protection, in praise of Bonaparte, Il Prometeo, Il Benefizio, La Spada di Federico, Il Bardo della Selva Nera. In Paris, in the year 1800 he wrote the short poem In morte di Lorenzo Mascheroni, an example of civil poetry. Having returned to Italy in 1802, he taught for two years at the University of Pavia, but when Lombardy fell under the Austrians (Foscolo departed as a voluntary exile), Monti composed for the new rulers the Mistico omaggio, Il ritorno di Astrea. In his last years he devoted himself to philological studies, which he collected in the 7 volumes of the Proposte di correzioni e aggiunte al vocabolario della Crusca, against the purist rigor of the Cesari. Having returned to the faith, he wished to burn the translation of Voltaire's Pucelle d'Orléans, which is nevertheless known through the transcription 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 sentiment in its best expressions »; « poet of imagination and of the ear » according to the judgment of Leopardi; an artist more than a poet, an evoker 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 suggestion 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 principally in his work of most exquisite workmanship: La Feroniade. It was precisely to this fanciful and vivid pathetic sense, which is already a Romantic anxiety, that he entrusted his masterpiece: the version of the Iliad (1810).