Inevitably, the courtly and ecclesiastical ascendance of the classical heritage was challenged by new ideas. After 1700, the classical tradition found itself under attack from two camps in particular. The rationalists of the Enlightenment reacted against the identification of Greco-Roman culture with the values of Catholic education and monarchism. And the avatars of Romanticism stridently decried classical rules as stifling the vital inspiration of Nature.
All the same, it is a commonplace that Italy never experienced a reformation or revolution; and the cultural offshoots of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, rather than taking root, were merely grafted onto the more liberal branches of society. In this context, the New Science of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) attempts to reconcile a devout affirmation of divine Providence with a recognition of the prerational impulses that inspired primitive poetry and civilization (Vico 2001).
Vico’s insights into primitive myth stripped classical mythology of its ideological trappings and suggested instead that poetic narratives derived their power from a darker, more universal force in the human mind. Nevertheless, neoclassical taste and style in Italy - fostered by conservative political hegemonies - weathered the Napoleonic storm. Indeed, Napoleon’s occupation of Rome, like that of Egypt, led to the development of systematic and state-run archaeology (Ridley 1992). The playwright Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803) translated works by Aristophanes and Terence, and based many of his tragedies on Greek myth (Agamemnon, Antigone, Merope, Orestes) or on ancient history (Brutus, Horatius, Philip, Regulus, Scaevola, Timoleon, Virginia). The virtuoso sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822), today celebrated for his neoclassical monuments representing various popes and potentates in idealized form, lived in Rome from 1781, where he served as museum director, superintendent of antiquities, and president of the Accademia di San Luca, Italy’s premier Academy of Fine Arts. Inspired by ancient works, Canova helped to shape the neoclassical movement in the arts; he was also granted the title of marquis for his role in restoring to Rome works such as the Apollo Belvedere (imitated in his own Perseus) and the Laocoon Group, which Napoleon had taken to Paris in 1799. And the fiery patriot Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827), born on the Greek island of Zakynthos, began his career in Venice with the tragedy Thyestes and ended it in London, translating parts of Homer and revising an unfinished Hymn to the Graces, which was inspired by Canova’s sculptures. Complete translations of the Homeric epics were made by Foscolo’s friends Vincenzo Monti (1754-1828; Iliad, 1811) and Ippolito Pindemonte (1743-1828; Odyssey, 1822), whose versions defined Greek epic for many generations of Italians.
In mid-century, a fortuitous discovery gave classical archaeology in Italy a major boost. Just four years after Vico’s death, workmen digging near the Sarno canal southeast of Naples discovered bronzes and marbles from the ancient town of Pompeii, which had been buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79 and which now became a sort of outdoor laboratory of practical archaeology. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the story of Pompeii’s destruction, recounted by Pliny the Younger, exercised a great fascination over educated Europeans like Goethe, who visited the ‘‘mummified city’’ in March of 1787. In the same period, the keen German interest in Italian antiquities was incarnated in the figure of Johann Winckelmann (1717-68), whose writings inaugurated modern scholarship on classical art and led to his appointment by Pope Clement XIII in 1763 as Commissioner of Antiquities in Rome. Archaeology in the Kingdom of Naples was at first sporadic, but eventually Italian scholars began to conduct more systematic excavations. During a long and illustrious career, Rodolfo Lanciani (1847-1929) discovered many antiquities at Rome, Tivoli, and Ostia and published a topographical survey of classical, medieval, and modern Rome titled Forma urbis Romae (Plan of the city of Rome, 1893-1901). By the second half of the nineteenth century, the study of Italian antiquities was being vigorously promoted by German, French, and Italian scholars (Moatti 1993).
Like Petrarch, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) contributed both to classical philology and to Italian lyric poetry, although he enjoyed none of the international celebrity of his humanist predecessor. During his lifetime he published critical observations on editions of the classics as well as a slim volume of lyric poems, or Canti, and a series of Operette morali (Little moral works) whose title intentionally echoes the canonic essays of Plutarch. In this collection, Leopardi often imitates Lucian by composing dialogues based on Greek mythology. Yet his sense of irony is more world-weary than cynical, and in the classical past he finds little of the sublime as celebrated by Vico. Leopardi also compiled a vast Zibaldone di pensieri (Miscellany of reflections), an intellectual diary of notes on his readings in classical and Italian literature, as a sort of reference work that he even provided with an index. This philosophical and philological miscellany reveals Leopardi in dialogue with German classical scholars like the historian Reinhold Niebuhr.
As a nationalist movement, the nineteenth-century Risorgimento had little use for the Hellenic enthusiasms of Foscolo or Byron. The poet Giosue Carducci (1835-1907), Italy’s first professor of Italian literature (1860) and her first Nobel laureate in literature (1903), sought to revive ‘‘classical’’ metrics in his Italian Odi barbare (Barbaric odes) of 1877, several of which celebrate the glories of the Roman past. At the same time, classical education prepared men of letters like Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) and Pope Leo XIII (Vincenzo Gioacchino Pecci, 1810-1903, pontiff from 1878) to craft Latin odes worthy of the Horatian tradition. Even the ‘‘decadent’’ poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) composed a lyrical evocation of the Hellenic world in his Maia (1903), a poem of some 8,400 lines inspired by a trip to Greece in 1895. The first half of the work commemorates a tour of Patras and the Peloponnese; but the poet never mentions Athens, and the poem concludes with a celebration of Rome, the Sistine Chapel, and Carducci’s patriotic odes on Italy’s greatness!
World History
