ZANELLA, GIACOMO

ZANELLA, GIACOMO. - Priest, poet, and critic, born at Chiampo (Vicenza) on Sept. 7, 1820, died in Vicenza on May 17, 1888. In Vicenza he completed his early studies at the municipal Gymnasium and in 1831 entered the

«Cinque giornate» of Milan. He also composed a collection of patriotic poems. This made him unpopular with Austria. In 1853 he was forced to give up teaching in the Seminary, having «expressed principles and sentiments adverse to the government». This suspension was lifted only in 1857, when Archduke Maximilian sought to inaugurate a new system of government with conciliatory intentions. Having obtained his qualification to teach literary subjects in Padua, Z. held the position of professor in the Lyceums of Venice and Vicenza and, in 1863, of headmaster of the Lyceum of Padua. After the annexation of the Veneto to Italy in 1866, he was appointed professor-in-ordinary of Italian literature at the University of Padua by Minister Domenico Berti. In 1868 he published his poems (Versi, Florence 1868), which immediately brought him widespread popularity. He was later appointed rector magnifico, member of various national and foreign academies, and full member of the Royal Venetian Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts. Without turning the school into «exercises in moral and religious preaching», he wished and hoped that greater place would be given to spiritual values, in opposition to the positivism and determinism then in vogue. Following his mother's death (1872), he fell into a melancholy that lasted three years: a form of «depressive neurosis». He had already suffered from it in 1850 and was struck by it again in 1870. Meanwhile, in 1875, he requested and obtained from Minister Bonghi his retirement, and from 1879 he began to reside in the small villa he had built near Cavazzale, along the Astichello. There he wrote poetry on simple rural life and devoted himself to the composition of the Storia della letter. ital. dalla metà del '700 ai giorni nostri (Milan 1880) and the Paralleli letterari (Verona 1885).

Z.'s poetic activity unfolded during the first twenty-five years of the new Kingdom of Italy and, literary-wise, occupies the period known as «second romanticism». Nevertheless, he was a classicist in the traditional sense of the term. He shaped his artistic education on the long and loving study of Greek, Latin, and Italian classics; with classical rigor he used the meters of Italian poetry and also shared the aesthetics of the classics («Art must always be an end, not a means»), even though his poetry often turned toward moral and practical purposes (the first complete edition of the Poesie was edited by A. Graf [Florence 1928, repr. ibid. 1933]).

He sang of the homeland moving toward new destinies (Il grido di Venezia, I cavalli di S. Marco, A Camillo Cavour, Ossari di S. Martino e Solferino), but above all of science. The impetus of the new scientific conquests, with which the 19th century was rich, was understood by Z. in all the ideality of the torment that drives humanity to renew itself. While, through the work of Darwinian doctrines, science placed itself in contrast with faith, Z. denied the conflict and poetically attempted to compose the harmony that, uniting faith and science, heaven and earth, would comfort men to feel, beyond «discovered truths», the immutable certitudes of «revealed truths». From this sprang his best poems: the ode Sopra una conchiglia fossile, his masterpiece, which asserts the duties incumbent upon man by the will of God, and the one entitled La veglia, where the poet retraces in thought the ages of humanity and reaffirms his belief in the perfection of every created thing and in the existence of an afterlife. Inspired by the same ideal, with historical and moral references, are L'Industria, Pel taglio dell'istmo di Suez, Microcosmo e telescopio, and the short poem Milton e Galilei. Other poems are inspired by faith (Voci secrete, Alla Madonna di Monte Berico, Assisi, Dopo una lettura dell'Imitazione di Cristo): they lie at the center of Z.'s spiritual world, illuminating and reflecting his Christian soul.

From his final years is L'Astichello, a collection of 91 sonnets, Virgilianly clear, composed between 1880 and 1887. The collection can be linked to those, slightly earlier, of José-Maria de Heredia (Les Trophées) and Prati (Psiche), but while the formal decorum reveals a Parnassian taste for form, Z. distances himself from the Parnassians through his Christian sentiment of nature. That tendency to establish a relationship between the natural spectacle and moral meaning stems not only from a cautious prudence, but above all from the revelation of that sense of the soul of things, already so full in the lesson of the Gospel parables and episodes.

Particular mention is deserved by his translations from ancient and modern languages (Versioni poetiche di G. Z., with a preface by E. Romagnoli, Florence 1921).