PARINI, GIUSEPPE. - Poet, b. at Bosisio (Brianza) on 23 May 1729, d. at Milan on 15 Aug. 1799. He studied at Milan in the Arcimboldi Schools, run by the Barnabites. In 1752 he published Alcune poesie di Ripano Eupilino (that is, Parino of the Eupili, or Lake Pusiano), which earned him admission to the Accademia dei Trasformati. Driven by necessity rather than vocation to the ecclesiastical life, he was ordained priest on 14 June 1734.
From that year until 1752 he was a tutor in the house of Duke Gabrio Serbelloni. Living in that household and frequenting other noble houses, P. studied with a moralist's severity that frivolous and pompous world and prepared himself to become its judge. A certain notoriety came to him from two famous polemics: with the Servite Alessandro Bandiera and with the Barnabite Paolo Onofrio Branda. To the years spent at the Serbellonis' may be ascribed certain writings that prepared Il giorno: short poems in which he trained himself to wield blank verse like a master; the first three odes (La vita rustica, La salubrità dell'aria, L'Impostura); the Lettere del conte N. N. ad una falsa devota, a satire of false devotion under the veil of a continuous ironic instruction; the Discorso sopra le caricature, that is, on the absurdities of fashionable society; a group of satires in terza rima (Il trionfo della Spilorceria, La maschera, La studio, Il teatro); the Dialogo sopra la nobiltà, between two recently deceased men, a nobleman and a poet of plebeian birth, who discuss the origin and the merits of nobility.
Count Imbonati, head of the Trasformati, entrusted him in 1763 or 1764 with his son Carlo, to whom P. dedicated the ode L'educazione, which may be considered the intermezzo between Il mattino and Il mezzogiorno, published in the summer of 1765. In 1768 P. accepted the post of poet of the royal ducal theatre. Throughout the year 1769 he attended, at the wish of Count Carlo di Firmian, plenipotentiary minister of Austria in Lombardy, to the compilation of the Gazzetta di Milano. In Nov. of the same year Firmian appointed him royal professor of belles-lettres in the public Palatine Schools; and in July 1773 the chair was reconfirmed to him in those schools, which shortly afterwards were established, under the name of the R. Ginnasio, in the Palazzo di Brera. Even outside the school P. had duties from the government: in 1771, for the marriage of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria with Archduchess Maria Beatrice d'Este, he wrote a melodrama (Ascanio in Alba), set to music by the fifteen-year-old A. W. Mozart; he prepared the statutes of the Academy of Fine Arts and of the Academy of Agriculture. But above all he occupied himself with the school, in whose service he collected, before 1777, his lectures: Dei principi generali e particolari delle belle lettere applicati alle belle arti: in the first part, a treatise on classicist aesthetics; in the second, a historical survey of Italian writers. When the Academy of Fine Arts was inaugurated in Brera (1776), P., while remaining professor of eloquence in the R. Ginnasio, welcomed into his school the youths enrolled in the fine arts courses. Master of all the arts, friend and adviser of Andrea Appiani and of his colleagues at Brera and of other younger artists, he dictated programmes for paintings and sculptures, supplied subjects for ballets and stage productions; he was one of the leaders of Neoclassicism in that Milan which, not without merit on his part, became the stronghold of neoclassical art.
In Oct. 1791 he was also assigned the office of superior superintendent of the public schools in Brera (in that year a pupil of his had edited the first edition of the Odi). Out of a desire to make himself useful to his country, he entered the new municipality established in Milan in the first days after the coming of the French (May 1796). Having laboured in vain to vindicate for the municipality the right to give a constitution to the Cisalpine Republic without awaiting orders from Paris, he took his leave, after three months in office, secretly having his parish priest distribute to the poor the remuneration he had received for it. He found peace of soul again in thoughts of the eternal and in the serenity of his studies. His last meditations were on Leonardo's Cenacolo.
P.'s masterpiece is Il giorno, of which the first two parts, Il mattino and Il mezzogiorno, were published in 1763 and 1765; the last two, Il vespro (unfinished) and La notte, appeared posthumously in 1801. It is a poem in blank hendecasyllables, unique of its kind: satirically didactic, in that the poet pretends to write a sort of book of etiquette for the « giovin signore »; epically satirical, in that he gives to satire the proportions of a poem. In it P. contrasts the working people with a class that has completed its historical mission; and he seeks to vindicate the Italian character of custom, language, thought and culture, tainted by the foreign importations welcomed by the nobles of his time. The poet knows how to bring the material to life, to give variety to the representation of a world that would have wished to be the world of Pleasure and was instead the world of Ennui: not only through the much-praised episodes, but through the continuous social antithesis, through the comparison of the nobles of that time with the « incitti avi », through the painting of natural scenes, through inspirations drawn from classical art, from mythology, from chivalric epic, with pictures and little pictures exo-
and pre-Romantic exotic pieces, with lyrical effusions, which at times pleasantly interrupt the irony. Such a variety of motifs is unified by the personality of the poet, who becomes an actor, in the capacity of tutor, in the social comedy of his time, and, as a poet-seer, becomes a judge of that society. The true protagonist of Il Giorno is the poet himself. The nobility of Parini's style is such that, from Foscolo onward, it has been compared to that of Virgil.
P. wrote several excellent sonnets, easy and cheerful canzonettas, witty "scherzi"; he left short poems, epistles, fragments of idylls: but his greatest claim to glory, after Il giorno, are the 19 Odi (1st complete ed., 1795). The ironic "precettor d'amabil rito" here becomes a teacher of civilization and of life: he sets the freedom of country life against corrupt city life (La vita rustica); he extols civil progress (L'innesto del vaiuolo, La laurea); he combats the ills of society (La salubrità dell'aria, L'Impostura, Il bisogno, La evirazione); he creates a Christian Achilles in Educazione; he expresses a very lofty conception of art (La recita de' versi, In morte di A. Sacchini, Alla Musa); he pricks the frivolity of those who cannot see in immodest dress the symbol of corrupt morals (A. Silvia). Entirely intimate and subjective are La caduta and the three gallant odes (Il pericolo, Il dono, Il messaggio). Carducci distinguishes two periods in Parini's lyrical development: the first, from 1757 or 1758 (La vita rustica) to 1777 (La laurea), is not lacking in vigor, but neither in unevenness and hesitancy; the second, from 1783 (La recita de' versi) to 1795 (Alla Musa), is that of the Horatian manner, that is, more properly Parinian. P. creates the neoclassical ode, which he would leave as a legacy to Monti and Foscolo. It must be acknowledged that the ideal and sentimental world of the Odi is less vast than the one that, through the veil of irony, is glimpsed in Il Giorno: but it can be integrated with the thoughts and feelings expressed in other lyrics of P., of lesser artistic value but historically important; and one comes to the conclusion that the Italian renewal, reconciling new ideas with tradition, not devoid of historical sense, respectful of religious feeling, had in him, among poets, its greatest representative.
Religious feeling was in P. more alive than it appears in the Odi. He combated false devotion (Lettere a una falsa devota) and considered religion the only curb on the impetuosity of the passions, a bond of love among men, a yearning toward heaven (Mezzogiorno, vv. 975-79). Among the religious lyrics, mention should be made of the terzinas Nel dì di s. Bernardino sanese, the canzone Per s. Ambrogio, the sonnet Suonami in sulle labbra dedicated to the Virgin, those Per Girolamo Miani and Per Caterina di Pallanza, and the discourse Sopra la carità. Since in the edition of Parini's works (Milan 1801-1804) F. Reina substituted in the prose works the word "nature" for the word God and "the laws" for the word Providence, and changed into praise an unfavorable judgment on Machiavelli (cf. G. Mazzoni's introduction to the edition of Tutte le opere edite e inedite di G. P., Florence 1925, p. xci), P. could by some be considered an Enlightenment thinker and a Jacobin. He rejected the philosophy of Voltaire, "soft Aristippus of our century," and of Rousseau, "new Diogenes"; of the Catholic cult he felt, as Carducci noted, "more sympathetically what is best in relation to social life... by virtue of his temperament, more civil than mystical."