Italian Æsthetic.
In Italy, where neither Parini nor Foscolo[12] had been able to shake off the fetters of the old doctrines (although the latter, in his later writings, was in several ways an innovator in literary criticism), many treatises and essays on Æsthetic were published during the earlier decades of the century, the greater part showing the influence of Condillac's sensationalism, which had a great vogue in Italy. Such authors as Delfico, Malaspina, Cicognara, Talia, Pasquali, Visconti and Bonacci belong more exclusively to the special, or rather, the anecdotal, history of Italian philosophy. Now and then, however, one comes across remarks that are not wholly contemptible, as in Melchiorre Delfico (1818) who, after wandering aimlessly hither and thither, fixes on the principle of expression, observing, "If it were possible to establish that expression is always an element in the beautiful, it would be a legitimate inference to regard it as the real characteristic of beauty, i.e. a condition without which the beautiful could not exist, and the pleasing modification which arouses the sentiment of beauty could not take place in us"; he tries to develop this principle by asserting that all other characters (order, harmony, proportion, symmetry, simplicity, unity and variety) have significance only by their subordination to the principle of expression.[13] In opposition to Malaspina's definition of beauty as "pleasure born of a representation"; and in opposition to the then fashionable threefold division of beauty into sensible, moral and intellectual, a critic of Malaspina observed that if beauty be representation, it is inconceivable that there should be intellectual beauty, which would be intelligible but not presentable.[14] Nor must Pasquale Balestrieri be forgotten; he was a student of medicine who in 1847 tried to construct an Æsthetic of an exact or mathematical kind, with neither better nor worse result than many famous authors in other countries. He noticed, while turning his algebraical expressions into numerals, that such general formulæ "fulfil their object with an infinite number of systems of different ciphers"; and that in art there is an element "not arbitrary, but unknown."[15] Works by German authors were frequently translated at this time, some of them, for example the writings of the two Schlegels, being reprinted several times; the Æsthetic of Bouterweck, deriving from Kant and Schiller,[16] was read and discussed; Colecchi gave an excellent statement of the æsthetic doctrines of Kant;[17] and in 1831 a certain Lichtenthal adapted the Æsthetic of Franz Ficker[18] to the use of Italian readers; later the same book was fully translated by another hand; some of Schelling's writings were translated, e.g. his discourses on the relation between figurative art and nature.
Rosmini and Gioberti.
It must be admitted that in Italy Æsthetic received but inadequate treatment in the revival of philosophical speculation effected by the work of Galluppi, Rosmini and Gioberti. It is treated in a merely incidental and popular manner by the first named.[19] Rosmini devotes a section of his philosophical system to the deontological sciences, which "treat of the perfection of being, and the method of acquiring or producing such perfection or losing it"; among these sciences is that of "beauty in the universal" under the name of Callology, of which a special part is Æsthetic, the science of "beauty in the sensible," establishing the "archetypes of beings."[20] In his longest literary work, considered by him as his Æsthetic,[21] his essay on The Idyl,[22] Rosmini declares the aim of art to be neither imitation of nature nor direct intuition of the archetypes, but the reduction of natural things to their archetypes, which are arranged in a hierarchy of three ideals, natural, intellectual and moral. Gioberti[23] is clearly under the influence of German idealism, especially of Schelling's; for him the beautiful is "the individual union of an intelligible type with an imaginative element called into being by fancy"; the phantasm gives material, while the intelligible type (concept) gives form, in the Aristotelian sense,[24] and since the ideal element predominates over the sensible or fantastic, art is a propædeutic to the true and the good. Gioberti is of opinion that Hegel was wrong in detaching natural beauty from Æsthetic, for perfect beauty of nature is "the full correspondence of sensible reality with the Idea which informs and represents it," and as such "makes its appearance in the sensible universe during the second period of the primordial age described in detail by Moses in the six days of creation"; it is only through original sin that imperfection and ugliness arose in nature.[25] Art is nothing but a supplement to natural beauty, whose decadence it presupposes, and thus art is at once record and prophecy, referring to the first and last ages of the world. The Last Judgement will reintroduce perfect beauty: "organic restitution, by empowering the faculties to contemplate the intelligible in the sensible, and by refining their capabilities, will greatly intensify and purify æsthetic enjoyment. The contemplation of perfect beauty will be the beatitude of imagination, of which Christ gave an ineffable foretaste by appearing to his disciples visibly transfigured and shining with celestial radiance."[26] Gioberti agrees with Schelling's division of art into pagan and Christian, a "heterodox beauty" (Oriental and Græco-Italian art), imperfect when compared with "orthodox beauty"; and between the two, a "semi-orthodox" beauty,[27] transitional to Christian art; he also attempted a doctrine of modifications of the beautiful, wherein he held the sublime to be creator of the beautiful. Beauty is the relative intelligibility of created things apprehended by fancy: the sublime is the absolute intelligibility of time, space and infinite power as presented to itself by the faculty of imagination: "The ideal formula: the Being creates the Existing, translated into æsthetic language, gives the following formula: by means of the dynamical sublime Being creates the beautiful; and by means of the mathematical sublime contains it: this shows the ontological and psychological connexions of Æsthetic in First Science." Ugliness enters into the beautiful either as relief and counterpoise, or to open a way to the comic, or to depict the struggle between good and evil. The Christian ideal of artistic beauty is the figure of the God-Man, absolute union of the two forms of beauty, the sublime and the beautiful, a transfigured and divinely illuminated expression of man.[28] However carefully we sift the thoughts of Gioberti from their mythological Judaico-Christian husk, we find nothing of the least value to science.
Italian Romantics. Dependence of Art.
On the other hand, if Italian literature of the day chose to revive and refurbish certain antiquated critical ideas, a much wider field was opened by social and political upheavals which tended to make use of literature as a practical instrument for spreading abroad the truths of history, science, religion and morality. In 1816 Giovanni Berchet wrote that "poetry ... is intended to improve the habits of man and satisfy the cravings of his imagination and heart, since the tendency towards poetry, like every other desire, awakens in us moral needs";[29] and Ermes Visconti in his Conciliatore of 1818 says that æsthetic aims must be subordinated "to the improvement of mankind and public and private weal, the eminent aim of all studies." Manzoni, who subsequently took to philosophizing on art on the principles of Rosmini, declared in his letter on Romanticism (1823) that "poetry or literature in general should have utility as its objective, truth as its subject and interest as its means";[30] and though noticing the vagueness of the concept of truth in poetry, he inclined always (as is seen also in his discourse on the historical novel) to its identification with historical and scientific truth.[31] Pietro Maroncelli proposed as a substitute for the classic formula of art, "founded on imitation of the real and having pleasure as its object," a formula of art as "founded on inspiration, having the beautiful as means and good as end"; this doctrine he baptized "cormentalism," contrasting it with the doctrine of art for art's sake found in the writings of August Wilhelm Schlegel and Victor Hugo.[32] Tommaseo defined beauty as "the union of many truths in one concept" effected by the power of feeling.[33] Giuseppe Mazzini, too, always conceived literature as the mediator of the universal idea or intellectual concept.[34] Attempting to restore serious content to a literature grown weak and frivolous, the Italian Romantics found themselves forced on the theoretical side, by a natural reaction, into constant and perpetual opposition to every tendency of thought likely to affirm the independence of art.
[1] Émeric-David, Recherches sur l'art du statuaire chez les anciens, Paris, 1805 (Ital. trans., Florence, 1857).
[2] Quatremère de Quincy, Essai sur l'imitation dans les beaux arts, 1823.
[3] Recherches sur la nature et les lois de l'imagination, 1807.