Page 42 - Mediterraneo e dintorni - nr 18

su teorici e interpreti, a vario tito- di Buffon, Albrecht von Haller, to più ragguardevole del saggio.
lo, del sublime: dal Seicento (con Erasmus Darwin, Charles-Louis Apprendiamo così che «immen-
Thomas Burnet, Paolo Segneri, de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques sità» apparve in un saggio di
Blaise Pascal, Philipp Peter Roos, Rousseau, Gianvincenzo Gravi- Burnet del 1681 e nell’Essay di
Joseph Addison, John Locke), na, Aurelio De’ Giorgi Bertola, Locke; che «questa siepe» è testi-
ai primi decenni dell’Ottocento Salomon Gessner, Edmund Bur- moniata nella traduzione italia-
(con Madame De Staël, Wolfgang ke, Hugh Blair, Vittorio Alfieri, na di Eurilla e Euridice di Gessner
Goethe, perfino Georg Wilhelm Edward Young). del 1817; che «torre», associata a
Friedrich Hegel), passando at- Il fitto reticolo delle fonti e delle «vastità», si legge (sempre nella
traverso il Settecento (con Save- occorrenze testuali appare, dun- traduzione italiana) in Philo-
rio Bettinelli, Giuseppe Parini, que, estremamente illuminante, sophical Enquiry into the Origin
Antony Shaftesbury, il conte costituendo peraltro il contribu- of our Ideas of the Sublime and

A sinistra: Leopardi e l’Infinito (Max Marra); a destra: Ritratto di Giacomo Leopardi (Carlo Mattioli). Illustrazioni tratte dal libro di Raffaele Gaetano
Leopardi e l’Infinito. Un breviario del sublime, Luigi Pellegrini editore, Cosenza, 2019

position with exemplary clarity, revealing its deep intertextual “semantic heritage” of the same becomes clearer, net of perhaps
links not only and not so much with classicistic poetry but also suggestive interpretations but arbitrary. The array of “precur-
and above all with works of theorists and poets of modernity (be- sors” traced, with great acumen, by Gaetano is truly impressive.
tween the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries) who made The dense network of sources and textual occurrences appears,
a stable point of reference of the sublime: there is no key word or therefore, extremely illuminating, constituting the most note-
image of the idyll that does not reveal itself as a tributary of texts worthy contribution of the essay. The author’s notation that the
that the omnivorous mind of man of Recanati absorbed. Leopardi Leopardian aesthetic of L’Infinito is “a practice, the result of the
is indeed a mediator of the best ancient and modern aesthetics, transfiguration of copious readings” is fully acceptable. The au-
but he is also a refined theorist able to filter a wealth of ideas that thor of this booklet retraced them briskly in an itinerary of discov-
thanks to him flourish again in the Italian culture of the time. The ery in the library that belonged to Monaldo, offering Leopardi’s
“paradigms of the sublime” are thus fixed once and for all, along portrait of clear philological coherence, of an elegant intellectual
which the poet moved in composing the idyll of 1819, while the sounding-line.

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