Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity: From the Scapigliatura to the Futurist Movement, 1857-1912 3030920186, 9783030920180

Table of contents :
Series Editors’ Preface
Note on Translations
Contents
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introducing Modernity: French, Italian, and Comparative Perspectives
Baudelaire: The First Poet of Modernity?
Realism and Decadence: The Modernity of the Scapigliatura
Futurism for/against the Scapigliatura
References
Chapter 2: Unpoetic Poetry and the Rise of Modernity: Science and Medicine in the Scapigliatura
Stylistic Irregularity and Scientific Polemic in Arrigo Boito’s Il libro dei versi
Oxymora and Juxtapositions in Boito’s Realism
The Aesthetics of Baudelaire’s Modern Beauty and Boito’s Quasimodos
Decadence, Progress, and the Irregular Forms of Modernity
The Poet Against the Physician: ‘Lezione d’anatomia’
A Poetry of (Organic) Matter and Spirit: Emilio Praga
Anatomical Examination and Idealistic Representation
‘Suicidio’: Between Scientific Observation and Artistic Celebration
Against Medicine, Against Religion: ‘A un feto’
References
Chapter 3: Allegory and Modernity in the Scapigliatura
An Allegory of Excess: Boito’s Re Orso
The Allegorical Menagerie of ‘Antiche storie’
Gluttony, Putrefaction, and the Worm
A Modern Fairy Tale for Monomaniacs: Apparitions or Hallucinations?
Sepulchral Allegories and Existential Anguish in the Poetry of Giovanni Camerana
From Allegorical Figures to Allegorical Landscapes
The Beauty of the Grave
References
Chapter 4: Sensual Sacredness and Sacred Sensuality: Love, Sex, and Religion in the Scapigliatura
Boito: Sadistic Serpents and Angelic Prostitutes
Praga: Spiritual Intercourse and Carnal Worship
Camerana: The Sensuality and Sexuality of the Virgin Mary
References
Chapter 5: Writing Analogy, Writing Modernity: The Scapigliatura and Baudelaire’s Correspondances
Synaesthesia and Intoxicating Visions: Praga’s Analogical Correspondences
Poetry, Music as Sensory Union: Boito’s Derangement of the Senses
Camerana and the Analogical Features of the Natural Landscape
References
Chapter 6: From Organic to Inorganic Matter, From Spirit to Speed: Early Futurist Poetry and the Scapigliatura’s Legacy
Making the ‘Ugly’ in Literature
(Un)Poetic Morgues, Dissected Bodies, Necrophilia
Urban Hymns: Orchestras of Hammers and Odes to the Lime
The Lyre Is the Machine: The Inorganic Poetry of the ‘Mechanical Man’
References
Chapter 7: Concluding Modernity: Writing Analogy, Writing Avant-Garde
References
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity From the Scapigliatura to the Futurist Movement, 1857–1912 Alessandro Cabiati

Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature Series Editors Ben Hutchinson Centre for Modern European Literature University of Kent Canterbury, UK Shane Weller School of European Culture and Languages University of Kent Canterbury, UK

Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements of the modern period have traversed national, linguistic and disciplinary borders. The principal aim of the Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature book series is to create a forum for work that problematizes these borders, and that seeks to question, through comparative methodologies, the very nature of the modern, the European, and the literary. Specific areas of research that the series supports include European romanticism, realism, the avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism, literary theory, the international reception of European writers, the relations between modern European literature and the other arts, and the impact of other discourses (philosophical, political, psychoanalytic, and scientific) upon that literature. In addition to studies of works written in the major modern European languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish), the series also includes volumes on the literature of Central and Eastern Europe, and on the relation between European and other literatures. Editorial Board: Rachel Bowlby (University College London) Karen Leeder (University of Oxford) William Marx (Collège de France) Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University) Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania) Dirk Van Hulle (University of Oxford) More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14610

Alessandro Cabiati

Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity From the Scapigliatura to the Futurist Movement, 1857–1912

Alessandro Cabiati Ca’ Foscari University of Venice Venice, Italy

ISSN 2634-6478     ISSN 2634-6486 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature ISBN 978-3-030-92017-3    ISBN 978-3-030-92018-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92018-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Ambra, who has had to learn how to embrace the chaos

Series Editors’ Preface

Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements in the modern period have traversed national, linguistic, and disciplinary borders. The principal aim of the Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature series is to create a forum for work that takes account of these border crossings, and that engages with individual writers, genres, topoi, and literary movements in a manner that does justice to their location within European artistic, political, and philosophical contexts. Of course, the title of this series immediately raises a number of questions, at once historical, geo-political, and literary-philosophical: What are the parameters of the modern? What is to be understood as European, both politically and culturally? And what distinguishes literature within these historical and geo-political limits from other forms of discourse? These three questions are interrelated. Not only does the very idea of the modern vary depending on the European national tradition within which its definition is attempted, but the concept of literature in the modern sense is also intimately connected to the emergence and consolidation of the European nation-states, to increasing secularisation, urbanisation, industrialisation, and bureaucratisation, to the Enlightenment project and its promise of emancipation from nature through reason and science, to capitalism and imperialism, to the liberal-democratic model of government, to the separation of the private and public spheres, to the new form taken by the university, and to changing conceptions of both space and time as a result of technological innovations in the fields of travel and communication. vii

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Taking first the question of when the modern may be said to commence within a European context, if one looks to a certain Germanic tradition shaped by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), then it might be said to commence with the first ‘theoretical man’, namely Socrates. According to this view, the modern would include everything that comes after the pre-Socratics and the first two great Attic tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles, with Euripides being the first modern writer. A rather more limited sense of the modern, also derived from the Germanic world, sees the Neuzeit as originating in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Jakob Burckhardt, Nietzsche’s colleague at the University of Basel, identified the states of Renaissance Italy as prototypes for both modern European politics and modern European cultural production. However, Italian literary modernity might also be seen as having commenced 200 years earlier, with the programmatic adoption of the vernacular by its foremost representatives, Dante and Petrarch. In France, the modern might either be seen as beginning at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, with the so-called Querelle des anciens et des modernes in the 1690s, or later still, with the French Revolution of 1789, while the Romantic generation of the 1830s might equally be identified as an origin, given that Chateaubriand is often credited with having coined the term modernité, in 1833. Across the Channel, meanwhile, the origins of literary modernity might seem different again. With the Renaissance being seen as ‘Early Modern’, everything thereafter might seem to fall within the category of the modern, although in fact the term ‘modern’ within a literary context is generally reserved for the literature that comes after mid-nineteenth-century European realism. This latter sense of the modern is also present in the early work of Roland Barthes, who in Writing Degree Zero (1953) asserts that modern literature commences in the 1850s, when the literary becomes explicitly self-reflexive, not only addressing its own status as literature but also concerning itself with the nature of language and the possibilities of representation. In adopting a view of the modern as it pertains to literature that is more or less in line with Barthes’s periodisation, while also acknowledging that this periodisation is liable to exceptions and limitations, the present series does not wish to conflate the modern with, nor to limit it to, modernism and postmodernism. Rather, the aim is to encourage work that highlights differences in the conception of the modern—differences that emerge out of distinct linguistic, national, and cultural spheres within Europe—and to prompt further reflection on why it should be that the very concept of the

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modern has become such a critical issue in ‘modern’ European culture, be it aligned with Enlightenment progress, with the critique of Enlightenment thinking, with decadence, with radical renewal or with a sense of belatedness. Turning to the question of the European, the very idea of modern literature arises in conjunction with the establishment of the European nation-states. When European literatures are studied at university, they are generally taught within national and linguistic parameters: English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Slavic and Eastern European, and Spanish literature. Even if such disciplinary distinctions have their pedagogical justifications, they render more difficult an appreciation of the ways in which modern European literature is shaped in no small part by intellectual and artistic traffic across national and linguistic borders: to grasp the nature of the European avant-gardes or of high modernism, for instance, one has to consider the relationship between distinct national or linguistic traditions. While not limiting itself to one methodological approach, the present series is designed precisely to encourage the study of individual writers and literary movements within their European context. Furthermore, it seeks to promote research that engages with the very definition of the European in its relation to literature, including changing conceptions of centre and periphery, of Eastern and Western Europe, and how these might bear upon questions of literary translation, dissemination, and reception. As for the third key term in the series title—literature—the formation of this concept is intimately related both to the European and to the modern. While Sir Philip Sidney in the late sixteenth century, Martin Opitz in the seventeenth, and Shelley in the early nineteenth produce their apologies for, or defences of, ‘poetry’, it is within the general category of ‘literature’ that the genres of poetry, drama, and prose fiction have come to be contained in the modern period. Since the Humboldtian reconfiguration of the university in the nineteenth century, the fate of literature has been closely bound up with that particular institution, as well as with emerging ideas of the canon and tradition. However one defines it, modernity has both propagated and problematised the historical legacy of the Western literary tradition. While, as Jacques Derrida argues, it may be that in all European languages the history and theorisation of the literary necessarily emerges out of a common Latinate legacy—the very word ‘literature’ deriving from the Latin littera (letter)—it is nonetheless the case that within a modern European context the literary has taken on an

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extraordinarily diverse range of forms. Traditional modes of representation have been subverted through parody and pastiche, or abandoned altogether; genres have been mixed; the limits of language have been tested; indeed, the concept of literature itself has been placed in question. With all of the above in mind, the present series wishes to promote work that engages with any aspect of modern European literature (be it a literary movement, an individual writer, a genre, a particular topos) within its European context; that addresses questions of translation, dissemination, and reception (both within Europe and beyond); that considers the relations between modern European literature and the other arts; that analyses the impact of other discourses (philosophical, political, scientific) upon that literature; and, above all, that takes each of those three terms— modern, European, and literature—not as givens, but as invitations, even provocations, to further reflection. Canterbury, UK Canterbury, UK 

Ben Hutchinson Shane Weller

Note on Translations

Unless specified otherwise, all the translations in this study are by the author. It would have been impractical to translate into English every quotation in French and Italian due to the comparative nature of the book, so a decision has been made to provide a translation only for texts that cannot be found, or are difficult to find, in English. These comprise, for instance, all the poems of the Scapigliatura discussed in this book, as well as most of those from the anthology I poeti futuristi. On the contrary, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal are widely available in English translation, including on the internet. While translations of Baudelaire’s Fleurs are not included, the commentaries analysing and discussing the poems should help those who are not fluent in French. For the sake of clarity of analysis and close comparative reading, the English translations of longer extracts of poetry, indented in the text, follow the original structure and division in lines.

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Contents

1 Introducing Modernity: French, Italian, and Comparative Perspectives  1 Baudelaire: The First Poet of Modernity?   3 Realism and Decadence: The Modernity of the Scapigliatura  13 Futurism for/against the Scapigliatura  25 References  30 2 Unpoetic Poetry and the Rise of Modernity: Science and Medicine in the Scapigliatura 35 Stylistic Irregularity and Scientific Polemic in Arrigo Boito’s Il libro dei versi  35 Oxymora and Juxtapositions in Boito’s Realism  35 The Aesthetics of Baudelaire’s Modern Beauty and Boito’s Quasimodos  43 Decadence, Progress, and the Irregular Forms of Modernity  47 The Poet Against the Physician: ‘Lezione d’anatomia’  58 A Poetry of (Organic) Matter and Spirit: Emilio Praga  65 Anatomical Examination and Idealistic Representation  65 ‘Suicidio’: Between Scientific Observation and Artistic Celebration  70 Against Medicine, Against Religion: ‘A un feto’  77 References  89

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3 Allegory and Modernity in the Scapigliatura 91 An Allegory of Excess: Boito’s Re Orso  91 The Allegorical Menagerie of ‘Antiche storie’  96 Gluttony, Putrefaction, and the Worm 100 A Modern Fairy Tale for Monomaniacs: Apparitions or Hallucinations? 111 Sepulchral Allegories and Existential Anguish in the Poetry of Giovanni Camerana 117 From Allegorical Figures to Allegorical Landscapes 118 The Beauty of the Grave 130 References 136 4 Sensual Sacredness and Sacred Sensuality: Love, Sex, and Religion in the Scapigliatura139 Boito: Sadistic Serpents and Angelic Prostitutes 139 Praga: Spiritual Intercourse and Carnal Worship 155 Camerana: The Sensuality and Sexuality of the Virgin Mary 169 References 177 5 Writing Analogy, Writing Modernity: The Scapigliatura and Baudelaire’s Correspondances179 Synaesthesia and Intoxicating Visions: Praga’s Analogical Correspondences 179 Poetry, Music as Sensory Union: Boito’s Derangement of the Senses 197 Camerana and the Analogical Features of the Natural Landscape 203 References 219 6 From Organic to Inorganic Matter, From Spirit to Speed: Early Futurist Poetry and the Scapigliatura’s Legacy221 Making the ‘Ugly’ in Literature 221 (Un)Poetic Morgues, Dissected Bodies, Necrophilia 237 Urban Hymns: Orchestras of Hammers and Odes to the Lime 248 The Lyre Is the Machine: The Inorganic Poetry of the ‘Mechanical Man’ 257 References 269

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7 Concluding Modernity: Writing Analogy, Writing Avant-Garde271 References 277 Index279

Abbreviations

Charles Baudelaire Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1975 OC II Œuvres complètes, vol. II, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1976 Corr. I Correspondance, vol. I: 1832–1860, ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1973 NHE Edgar Allan Poe. Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, trans. Charles Baudelaire, ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Gallimard, 2006 PML The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon, 1964 OC I

Arrigo Boito OL TS

Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/Novecento, 2009 Tutti gli scritti, ed. Piero Nardi. Verona: Mondadori, 1942

Emilio Praga PP

Poesie, ed. Mario Petrucciani. Bari: Laterza, 1969

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Giovanni Camerana CP

Poesie, ed. Gilberto Finzi. Turin: Einaudi, 1968

Futurism PF

I poeti futuristi, ed. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Milan: Edizioni futuriste di ‘Poesia’, 1912 TIF Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria. Milan: Mondadori, ‘I Meridiani’, 1983

CHAPTER 1

Introducing Modernity: French, Italian, and Comparative Perspectives

In literary scholarship, ‘modernity’ is a term often used when discussing the poetry of French author Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867). In the last one-and-a-half century since the publication of his first verse collection, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857, 1st ed.), many have designated Baudelaire as the leading poet of modernity, who not only wrote about themes considered modern, such as the hustling and bustling of city life, but most importantly wrote with a lyrical sensibility seen as fundamentally modern. Statements about Baudelaire’s modernity are innumerable, spanning centuries, languages, and literary traditions, including by some of the most prominent writers and critics of recent times, such as T. S. Eliot. In 1930, Eliot (1972, 426) famously said that Baudelaire ‘is indeed the greater exemplar in modern poetry in any language’, not only because of his imagery of modern, everyday life, but also because ‘his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced’, including a radical renovation of the poet’s ‘attitude towards life’. Critical definitions of Baudelaire as the archetypal poet of modernity started to circulate in the literary milieu long before Eliot’s essay on Baudelaire, around the time of the publication of the second edition (1861) of the Fleurs du Mal. Symbolist-Decadent poet Paul Verlaine, a contemporary to Baudelaire, would have agreed with Eliot’s description of the modernity of Baudelaire’s poetry. In his essay on Baudelaire published on 16 November 1865 in the journal L’Art, Verlaine presents Baudelaire as the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Cabiati, Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92018-0_1

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quintessential ‘modern man’, and Baudelaire’s capacity to represent modern consciousness as the most innovative aspect of his poetry. Verlaine (1972, 599–600) argues that ‘la profonde originalité de Charles Baudelaire, c’est, à mon sens, de représenter puissamment et essentiellement l’homme moderne’ [‘the profound originality of Charles Baudelaire is, in my opinion, to represent powerfully and essentially modern man’]. Verlaine (1972, 600) then clarifies that ‘modern’, in the connotation he gives to the word, does not mean the modern man well versed in political, moral, and social issues for the advancement of humanity, thus excluding from his idea of modernity socially engaged poets of the time such as Victor Hugo. On the contrary, Verlaine (1972, 600) describes ‘l’homme physique moderne, tel que l’ont fait les raffinements d’une civilisation excessive, l’homme moderne, avec ses sens aiguisés et vibrants, son esprit douloureusement subtil’ [‘modern man, made so by the refinements of excessive civilisation, modern man, with his sharpened and vibrant senses, his painfully subtle mind’]. Relating the notion of modernity to refinement and exaggerated sensory and psychological sensitivity, Verlaine equates Baudelaire’s poetry with the corporality, excess, and agitation characteristic of modern experience, involving a direct connection between the body of the poet and his poetry. Three years after Verlaine’s article, in his introduction to the third and posthumous edition of the Fleurs (1868), French writer Théophile Gautier expands on Verlaine’s conception of Baudelaire as the representative of modern sensibility. Using a medical vocabulary and imagery of cultural, stylistic, and linguistic decadence, Gautier turns Baudelaire’s lyrical nervousness as described by Verlaine into an illustration of a full-blown psychological illness, neurosis, translated into poetry: Le poète des Fleurs du mal aimait ce qu’on appelle improprement le style de décadence, et qui n’est autre chose que l’art arrivé à ce point de maturité extrême que déterminent à leurs soleils obliques les civilisations qui vieillissent: style ingénieux, compliqué, savant, […] écoutant pour les traduire les confidences subtiles de la névrose, les aveux de la passion vieillissante qui se déprave et les hallucinations bizarres de l’idée fixe tournant à la folie. Ce style de décadence est le dernier mot du Verbe sommé de tout exprimer et poussé à l’extrême outrance. (Gautier 1991, 45–46) [The poet of Les Fleurs du Mal loved what is improperly called the style of decadence, which is nothing more than art arrived at that point of extreme maturity determined by the oblique suns of ageing civilisations: an ingenious, complicated, savant style, […] listening to translate the subtle confi-

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dences of neurosis, confessions of ageing passions becoming depraved and the bizarre hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness. This style of decadence is the last word of the Word, summoned to express everything and taken to the extreme.]

In the same decade in Italy, a group of writers known as the Scapigliatura was also celebrating Baudelaire as the foremost poet of modernity. In a similar manner to Gautier and Verlaine, the Scapigliatura associated literary modernity, and Baudelaire’s poetry, with notions of medical and socio-­ cultural ‘decadence’, ‘illness’, and ‘excess’. These concepts are profoundly interwoven in the literary theories and in the poetry of the Scapigliatura, which are the focus of this book. In the Scapigliatura’s poetry, the theme of modernity has various facets related to both the portrayal of contemporary subjects and the lyrical modes of representation of modern consciousness and sensibility. Fast-forward fifty years and, in the Italy of the 1910s, the idea of Baudelaire as an epitome of the modern poet and of the modern man is challenged by a group of writers widely considered to be the first major avant-garde movement, Futurism, officially founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) in 1909. In the great divide that the Futurists placed between themselves and previous authors, Baudelaire falls within the category of ‘passéist’ (traditionalist) writers devoted to glorifying the past at the expense of the future, who could not be deemed precursors to Futurism but only ‘masters’ to be ultimately ‘abjured’, together with (most) past literature.1 How could Baudelaire therefore have ‘made’ Italian modernity, as the title of this book argues, if the Scapigliatura’s and Futurism’s interpretations of Baudelaire’s poetry—and consequentially of poetic modernity—were so dissimilar?

Baudelaire: The First Poet of Modernity? Many have been the claims of innovation and novelty addressed to Baudelaire, occasionally very similar in tone and content yet dissimilar in the label attached to his poetry, such as ‘modernity’ and ‘Decadence’. But if we analyse Baudelaire’s work synchronically, we can see that in French and European literary history Baudelaire is at the crossroads between different tendencies. The first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal appeared on the shelves of Paris bookshops in June 1857, although Baudelaire had already published a few poems in various journals since 1844–1845.2 In 1886, historian Ernest Prarond, a friend of Baudelaire’s, stated that the majority

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of the poems included in the first edition of the Fleurs were composed in the 1840s (see Robb 1993, 18–19, 21), that is, in a period still dominated by Romantic ideals and by poets of the Romantic school such as Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, and Gautier, all of whom were Baudelaire’s acquaintances (as well as early poetic models). In the 1840s, when he dedicates most of his critical articles to Romantic writers and painters, Baudelaire maintains an ambivalent relationship with the movement. He collaborates with the journal Corsaire-Satan directed by Pétrus Borel, who was an exponent of the ‘Frénétiques’ (or ‘Bousingots’), a Bohemian group of Romantic writers famous for artistic and aesthetic eccentricities. In some of his poems of that time, such as ‘L’Irrémédiable’, ‘Le Vampire’, or ‘Les Litanies de Satan’, Baudelaire strives to revitalise the bizarre and gothic imagery of ‘Frénétisme’ that was relatively popular in the previous decade: vampires, corpses, Satan, tombs, and so forth. Not only in the 1840s, when the Romantic inspiration was already fading away, but also in the 1850s Baudelaire could appear as an outmoded writer to contemporary readers, for the prevailing literary fashion of the time was not the usage of themes of ‘Frénétisme’, but the imitation of well-known Romantic poets such as Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Alfred de Musset. Baudelaire outlines his thoughts on Romanticism in the chapter ‘Qu’est-ce que le romantisme?’ of the Salon de 1846: Qu’on se rappelle les troubles de ces derniers temps, et l’on verra que, s’il est resté peu de romantiques, c’est que peu d’entre eux ont trouvé le romantisme […]. Quelques-uns ne se sont appliqués qu’au choix des sujets; ils n’avaient pas le tempérament de leurs sujets.—D’autres, croyant encore à une société catholique, ont cherché à refléter le catholicisme dans leurs œuvres.—S’appeler romantique et regarder systématiquement le passé, c’est se contredire. (OC II, 420) [Let us remember the troubles of recent times, and we will see that, if there are few Romantics left, it is because few of them have found Romanticism […]. Some focused only on the choice of subjects; they did not have the temperament of their subjects.—Others, still believing in a Catholic society, sought to reflect Catholicism in their works.—To call yourself Romantic and to look systematically at the past, is a contradiction.]

Baudelaire distances himself from what he considers an old and obsolete conception of Romanticism, which gave prevalence to the choice of historical subjects of the past or to the celebration of religious feelings. Baudelaire then illustrates his own definition of Romanticism:

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Le romantisme n’est précisément ni dans le choix des sujets ni dans la vérité exacte, mais dans la manière de sentir. […] Pour moi, le romantisme est l’expression la plus récente, la plus actuelle du beau. […] Le romantisme ne consistera pas dans une exécution parfaite, mais dans une conception analogue à la morale du siècle. […] Qui dit romantisme dit art moderne,—c’est-à-dire intimité, spiritualité, couleur, aspiration vers l’infini, exprimées par tous les moyens que contiennent les arts. Il suit de là qu’il y a une contradiction évidente entre le romantisme et les œuvres de ses principaux sectaires. (OC II, 420–421) [Romanticism is neither in the choice of subjects nor in the exact truth, but in the way of feeling. […] For me, Romanticism is the most recent, the most contemporary expression of beauty. […] Romanticism does not consist in a perfect execution, but in a conception analogous to the morality of the century. […] Who says Romanticism says modern art—namely intimacy, spirituality, colour, aspiration towards infinity, expressed by all the means contained in the arts. From this it follows that there is an obvious contradiction between Romanticism and the works of its main partisans.]

Romanticism is not about subjects or the search for truth, it is instead a manner of feeling, it is ‘modern art’—its principal aim is the expression of the spiritual and moral attitudes of contemporaneous society. In the last chapter of the Salon, entitled ‘De l’héroïsme de la vie moderne’, Baudelaire explains where the Romantic artist should look to find the beauty that best represents modern culture: on peut affirmer que puisque tous les siècles et tous les peuples ont eu leur beauté, nous avons inévitablement la nôtre. […] Le spectacle de la vie élégante et des milliers d’existences flottantes qui circulent dans les souterrains d’une grande ville,—criminels et filles entretenues […] nous prouvent que nous n’avons qu’à ouvrir les yeux pour connaître notre héroïsme. […] Il y a donc une beauté et un héroïsme moderne! (OC II, 493, 495) [we can assert that since all centuries and all peoples have had their beauty, we inevitably have ours. […] The spectacle of fashionable life and of the thousands of floating existences that circulate in the undergrounds of a big city—criminals and prostitutes […] prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to learn about our heroism. […] So there are such things as modern beauty and modern heroism!]

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By unifying the concepts of Romanticism and modern beauty, Baudelaire coins his definition of modern art, which must be an expression of ‘heroic’ present-day life. According to him, artists needed to focus on subjects of their own time, such as the dangerous life of criminals and prostitutes in the metropolis, thereby conveying modern beauty. Baudelaire essentially reformulates the Romantic aesthetics to make it adequate to modern times: the key features of this new Romanticism, namely ‘intimacy, spirituality, colour, aspiration towards infinity’, were, after all, major characteristics of the first generation of German and English Romantics.3 His re-configuration of Romanticism, together with his poems written in the 1840s, were thus a ‘déclaration de guerre contre la poésie romantique’ (Robb 1993, 164) [‘declaration of war against Romantic poetry’], against sentimental Romantic poets like Musset and Lamartine (see OC II, 51, 54, 110, 274), called by Baudelaire the ‘fausse école romantique en poésie’ (OC II, 409) [‘false Romantic school in poetry’]. They were, in brief, an explicit attempt to establish a new Romanticism rooted in modernity. Baudelaire explains his ideas on art and modern life in Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863), dedicated to artist C. G., later identified as illustrator and painter Constantin Guys. In ‘Éloge du maquillage’, a section of the essay, Baudelaire condemns a philosophical notion that, first advanced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century, had later become part of the Romantic conception of beauty: the natural goodness of the human being, and with that the view of nature as the sign of the divine and the only source of beauty. Baudelaire declares that ‘la plupart des erreurs relatives au beau naissent de la fausse conception du XVIIIe siècle relative à la morale’ (OC II, 715) [‘the majority of errors in the field of aesthetics spring from the eighteenth century’s false premiss in the field of ethics’ (PML, 31)]. Here Baudelaire subverts Rousseau’s renowned idea of human nature as good, and claims that people had mistakenly repudiated the theory of original sin. On the contrary, according to Baudelaire crime and evil are innate in the human being: ‘le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalité’ (OC II, 715) [‘evil happens without effort, naturally, fatally’ (PML, 32)]. Baudelaire contrasts the natural and spontaneous capacity of humans to do evil to the artificiality of good, claiming that ‘le bien est toujours le produit d’un art’ (OC II, 715) [‘good is always the product of some art’ (PML, 32)]. As a result, good and beauty are not natural, but artificial, and fashion must be considered as a manifestation of art, precisely a ‘symptôme du goût de l’idéal surnageant dans le cerveau humain […], comme une déformation sublime de la nature, ou plutôt

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comme un essai permanent et successif de réformation de la nature’ (OC II, 716) [‘symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface […] of the human brain: as a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather a permanent and repeated attempt at her reformation’ (PML, 33)]. This idea of the superiority of the artificial beauty of art over the natural one is central to Baudelaire’s later thought, particularly from the 1850s onwards; his opinions on nature, however, were ultimately rather conflicting, always maintaining a link with the Romantic tradition and shifting from a youthful confidence displayed in the 1840s to the denunciation (which was never quite the utter rejection asserted by certain scholarship) of its wickedness in the 1860s, as we will see in Chap. 5. The other subject that is pivotal in Baudelaire’s imagery of the modern artist/poet is the necessity for the latter to investigate ‘modernité’, ‘modernity’. Baudelaire develops his most complete definition of ‘modernity’ in ‘La Modernité’, the fourth chapter of Le Peintre de la vie moderne. There, he asserts that the modern artist must search for modernity in his quest for beauty—the aim for the artist should be ‘de dégager de la mode ce qu’elle peut contenir de poétique dans l’historique, de tirer l’éternel du transitoire’ (OC II, 694) [‘to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory’ (PML, 12)]. By delving deeper into topics already examined in the Salon de 1846, particularly the issue of the subjects chosen by contemporaneous artists, Baudelaire reaffirms that the modern writer and painter should not clothe subjects in the dress of the past. On the contrary, it would be better if they applied themselves to the task of extracting the ‘beauté mystérieuse qui y peut être contenue [dans l’habit d’une époque]’ (OC II, 695) [‘mysterious element of beauty that it [the garb of an age] may contain’ (PML, 13)]. In other words, they should focus on finding beauty that lies within the spectacle of la vie moderne, modern life. According to Baudelaire, modernity is ‘le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable’ (OC II, 695) [‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’ (PML, 13)]. Baudelaire employs the neologism ‘modernité’ to refer to the qualities of an artist to convey the contemporary and transitory features of their own times: unlike other Romantic writers, Baudelaire searched for beauty in the subjects of his present day. In verse, one of the most significant examples of Baudelaire’s modernity is the section ‘Tableaux parisiens’ of the second edition (1861) of the

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Fleurs, in which Paris and the characters of the modern metropolis become poetic subjects, with all their moral and physical ugliness and contradictions, stylistically represented by figures of speech such as oxymora and antitheses. Numerous elements of Baudelaire’s poetry were regarded by fin-de-siècle critics and authors alike—among whom Verlaine and Gautier, as discussed previously—as fundamentally modern and ‘decadent’: shocking images of everyday urban life; the juxtaposition of a colloquial register with a highly refined language, and the use of bizarre and technical-­ medical terminology; references to lust, sadism, and perversion; the anguish and lyrical depersonalisation derived from the impossibility of the sublimation of death and decomposition; the idea of synaesthetic correspondances between different senses. In late nineteenth-century France there were contrasting opinions regarding the quality of Baudelaire’s decadent features.  Prominent conservative critic Ferdinand Brunetière, for instance, despised what Paul Bourget had called the ‘theory of decadence’ in his Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883), which considered Baudelaire as a ‘theorist of decadence’ and the most important representative of modern sensibility with his glorification of solipsism and morbid visions (see Brunetière 1906, 231–236; Bourget 1931, 19–26). As Ward (2001, ix) affirms, Baudelaire’s modernity ‘became for some synonymous with decadence, with poetry of the city, with the poet as flâneur, and with the sense of the anonymity of nineteenth-century crowds’. As well as being associated with the birth of poetic modernity, Baudelaire has been considered to be the father or forerunner of literary Decadence by many, a characterisation that continues to these days. In 1906 Frank Pearce Sturm, one of the first translators of Baudelaire’s work into English, asserted that ‘Baudelaire is decadence; his art is not a mere literary affectation, a mask of sorrow to be thrown aside when the curtain falls, but the voice of an imagination plunged into the contemplation of all the perverse and fallen loveliness of the world’ (quoted by Desmarais and Baldick 2012, 6). Three decades later, Italian scholar of Decadence Walter Binni affirmed that Baudelaire had to be deemed one of the ‘fathers of Decadentism’, and that ‘l’importanza di Baudelaire per il decadentismo è massiccia’ (Binni 1977, 23, 26) [‘Baudelaire’s importance for Decadentism is massive’]. Similarly, Gioanola (1991, 29) described Baudelaire as an anticipator and cornerstone of the new Decadent sensibility. More recently, Weir (1995, xv) went as far as declaring Baudelaire ‘the archetypal decadent figure’. Other critics and writers, however, resolved to detach Baudelaire’s modernity from the notion of decadence. Since the publication of Walter

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Benjamin’s influential essays on Baudelaire, particularly those taken from his unfinished study Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus (1969), the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘modern’ have been frequently linked to a fundamentally socio-historical reading of Baudelaire. Benjamin (2006, 163) underlines Baudelaire’s constant use of allegory, originating from the anonymity and dejection of the self in an industrial capitalist society, and his representation of the city of Paris (and its inhabitants) during the Second French Empire. For Benjamin, Baudelaire was the first major modern poet. Benjamin (2006, 167) sees the Fleurs du Mal as ‘an arsenal: Baudelaire wrote certain of his poems in order to destroy others written before his own’. Hugo Friedrich in his equally influential Die Struktur der Modernen Lyrik (1967) shares the idea of Baudelaire as the first poet of modernity. Friedrich justifies his definition of Baudelaire as ‘the poet of modernity’ by arguing that ‘the subject matter found in civilized reality’, namely the contrasting imagery of evil, poverty, and progress discovered in the modern city, ‘becomes poetically viable. This new outlook touched off modern poetry, creating its corrosive but magical substance’ (Friedrich 1974, 19–20). Labarthe (1999, 616) similarly sees the Fleurs as the ‘first work of poetic modernity’ and allegory as the key factor of this modernity, since Baudelaire’s poetic conscience ‘confie à l’allégorie le soin de tracer le chemin, toujours autre, d’une saisie du réel qui prenne en compte […] la double dimension de perte et de fragmentation qui caractérise l’âge moderne’ [‘entrusts allegory with the task of tracing the path, always other, to grasp reality which takes into account […] the double dimension of loss and fragmentation characterising the modern age’]. Labarthe’s analysis highlights Baudelaire’s original use of allegory in modern times and with modern subjects, eventually claiming that ‘Baudelaire est le premier poète de la modernité, dans la mesure peut-être où il est le dernier grand poète allégorique’ (Labarthe 1999, 616) [‘Baudelaire is the first poet of modernity, perhaps insofar as he is the last great allegorical poet’]. According to Culler (2008, xxv), Baudelaire is ‘modern’ because he ‘produces dissonant combinations, which can be seen as reflecting the dissociated character of modern experience’. Culler (2008, xxviii) argues that ‘a major aspect of Baudelaire’s modernity’ is ‘the repudiation of sentimental themes’, which he juxtaposes to the kind-heartedness and compassion shown by Hugo in creating sympathetic characters. Baudelaire is, thus, ‘the prophet of modernity’, since ‘his lyrics can be read as asking how one can experience or come to terms with the modern world and as offering poetic consciousness as a solution—albeit a desperate one, requiring a

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passage through negativity’ (Culler 2008, xxxi). In her Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity (2011), Françoise Meltzer links Baudelaire’s treatment of modernity to the notion of ‘double vision: one of the world as it was, and one as it is’, arguing that this is ‘a vision in which the past has not yet caught up with the present, and in which the future seems threatening. Baudelaire records his encounter with modernity as an unintelligible morass of contradictions that he cannot resolve’ (Meltzer 2011, 6). Whether ‘modern’ or ‘Decadent’, and occasionally both, the innovative aspects of Baudelaire’s poetry are centred around notions of urbanity, evil and perversion, fragmentation of the self, contradiction and dissonance, and morbidity. And yet in the French literary context of the 1850s, when the first edition of the Fleurs was published and before Verlaine’s and Gautier’s aforementioned essays, the concept of ‘decadence’ used to describe Baudelaire’s poetry did not possess a positive connotation, nor one linked to the idea of modernity as advancement of the literary arts. This was arguably because, in the 1850s, Baudelaire’s work was deemed ‘réaliste’, ‘realist’— and ‘realist’ synonymous with offensiveness and immorality. The French Romantic movement conventionally finished with the 1848 Révolution de février, and the 1850s saw the birth of new tendencies in literature and visual arts. One of those trends was the so-called réalisme (‘realism’), a term that had been at first used by art critics to put under sharp criticism Gustave Courbet’s realistic depiction of contemporaneous subjects, and was subsequently embraced positively by the latter and by writer Champfleury, who defined the principles of the école réaliste in his various writings, such as the collection Le Réalisme (1857) and the articles published in the short-lived periodical Le Réalisme (1856–1857). Baudelaire frequented realist milieus in the 1850s and came to be included by some critics in the école réaliste. He was a good friend of Champfleury, Courbet, Nadar, and, as Gautier claimed in his preface to the Fleurs, Baudelaire ‘se laissa un peu aller à ces avances [de l’école réaliste]’ [‘indulged a little in these advances [from the realist school]’], visiting ateliers of realist painters (Gautier 1991, 91). In 1847–1848, Courbet painted the Portrait de Charles Baudelaire, and in 1864 Henri Fantin-Latour featured Baudelaire in his Hommage à Delacroix, which Edmond de Goncourt (1891, 29) described as ‘une apothéose réaliste de Baudelaire’ [‘a realist apotheosis of Baudelaire’]. As Guyaux asserts (2007, 35), quoting a public adversary of realism, Charles de Montalembert, ‘Les Fleurs du mal passaient, dans certains milieux, pour la “dernière production du réalisme”’ [‘Les Fleurs du

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mal passed, in certain milieus, for the “latest production of realism”’]. There is indeed a side of Baudelaire’s poetry that can be easily associated with Champfleury and Courbet’s ‘réalisme’: the Bohemian, compassionate, and societal—and indeed Socialist—atmosphere of such poems as those of the section of the Fleurs entitled ‘Le Vin’, which focus on the depiction of the lower classes and of the life of the underdogs, and highlight the comforting properties of wine and intoxication. The epithet ‘realist’ remained stuck to Baudelaire for years, although he attempted to detach himself from it from the very beginning: as he reports in the project for an article that was eventually discarded, entitled ‘Puisque réalisme il y a’, ‘on m’a dit qu’on m’avait fait l’honneur…..bien que je me sois toujours appliqué à le démériter’ (OC II, 58) [‘I was told that they honoured me…..although I have always made every effort to prove unworthy of it’]. It is easy to understand why Baudelaire did not want to associate his work with the label realism. In 1850s France, the adjective ‘réaliste’ and the noun ‘réalisme’ were largely pejorative terms used to indicate the vulgarity and immorality of a work of art. They were principally employed by critics and journalists as denigrating terms related to contemporaneous subjects often belonging to the working class and the rustic world, or to scenes of sexual nature, debauchery, and decomposition, rather than as referring to a school, or a movement, or even a set of artistic or literary techniques. The accusations of ‘realism’ directed towards Baudelaire’s poetry did not come only from the literary and artistic world. In August of 1857, six erotic poems of the Fleurs were condemned and censured by a civil tribunal in Paris, the Tribunal de la Seine, for ‘réalisme grossier et offensant pour la pudeur’ [‘vulgar realism offensive to decency’].4 This judgement aimed to describe Baudelaire’s supposed offense to public morality, instead of implying any relations to any movement or school. The month before the ruling of the tribunal, in his sardonic review of the Fleurs published in the Journal de Bruxelles on 15 July 1857 and signed Z.  Z. Z., conservative Catholic critic Armand de Pontmartin (2007, 174)  harshly criticised Baudelaire’s poetry, in particular ‘Une charogne, qui dépasse tous les chefs-d’œuvre du genre’ [‘Une charogne, which surpasses all masterpieces of the genre’], describing it as ‘littérature de charnier, d’abattoir et de mauvais lieu’ [‘literature of graveyard, slaughterhouse, and brothel’] and associating it with ideas of ‘decadence’ and ‘orgy’. In a letter to his friend Nadar of 14 May 1859, Baudelaire himself lamented the fact that the latter, by creating a caricature of him alongside the carcass of an animal, was making of him the ‘Prince des Charognes’ (Corr. I, 573)

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[‘Prince of Carcasses’]. ‘Une charogne’ had gained much publicity in literary circles, to the extent that in 1861 Charles Valette affirmed that ‘tout le monde connaît sa trop célèbre pièce intitulée: Une charogne’ [‘everyone knows his all-too-famous composition entitled: Une charogne’], and in 1859 Alphonse Duchesne considered Baudelaire as the inventor of ‘carcass literature’ (see Guyaux 2007, 44–45). The accusations of realism, vulgarity, and obscenity were not only directed against Baudelaire. In March 1857, Baudelaire’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires were published, a few months before the Fleurs. Once again, de Pontmartin (1933, 315) wrote a condemnatory article against Baudelaire, considering him and Poe as adepts of the ‘school’ of ‘decadence’, the main characteristics of which were ‘realism’ and the ‘Bohême’. Similarly, in August 1857 in the journal Le Correspondant (1933, 314) an anonymous critic denounced the representations of moral and physical ugliness in the Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, criticising Poe’s ‘realism’ and ‘materialist genius’. Baudelaire was certainly aware of these accusations, hence his mistrust and refutation of the term ‘realism’ as reproachfully employed by criticism. However, in his 1855 unpublished essay ‘Puisque réalisme il y a’, Baudelaire attempted to cleanse the term ‘realism’ from its negative contemporary meanings, giving his own definition focused, significantly, on a specific oxymoronic connotation. Baudelaire affirms that ‘tout bon poète fut toujours réaliste’ [‘every good poet has always been a realist’], by means of sincerity and of the ‘équation entre l’impression et l’expression’ (OC II, 58) [‘equation between impression and expression’]. He then distances himself from Champfleury’s idea of realism as ‘villageois, grossier, et même rustre, malhonnête’ [‘villager, vulgar, and even boorish, dishonest’], by claiming that poetry ‘est ce qu’il y a de plus réel, c’est ce qui n’est complètement vrai que dans un autre monde’ (OC II, 58–59) [‘is what is most real, it is what is completely true only in another world’]. Baudelaire’s realism opens up to another realm, whether spiritual, moral, emotional, or simply aesthetic it is not specified in this occasion; most importantly, it is not solely linked to the mimetic representation of contemporaneous reality and of the modern world. Yet there is, clearly, a strong realistic component in Baudelaire’s poetry. As Guyaux (2007, 44) has argued, ‘le “réalisme” de Champfleury s’attache à la vie plus qu’à la mort, celui de Baudelaire à la mort plutôt qu’à la vie’ [‘Champfleury’s “realism” is more attached to life than to death, that of Baudelaire to death rather than to life’]. In fact, Baudelaire’s most realistic portrayals—which, as it shall be demonstrated,

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are most of the time aesthetically re-elaborated and ultimately transcended to signify something ‘other’—are of macabre and morbid scenes. Considering the entirety of Baudelaire’s production, the importance of realistic elements in his poetry can certainly be stressed; however, following Guyaux (2007, 44), I believe that ‘Baudelaire n’est certes pas un “réaliste”, mais il n’est aucun sens du réel que sa poésie exclue’ [‘Baudelaire is certainly not a “realist”, but there is no sense of the real that his poetry excludes’]. It is this capacity to incorporate the real in all its shapes, forms, and meanings and in all its contradictions that, first and foremost, captivated the poets of the Scapigliatura in 1860s Italy, deeply interested in Baudelaire’s capacity to valorise the unpoetic found in reality and elevate it to the status of poetic material. In its rebellion against contemporaneous Italian literature, the Scapigliatura embraced Baudelaire’s modernity as part of its own blending and blurring of notions of realism, Romanticism, and decadence.

Realism and Decadence: The Modernity of the Scapigliatura In his ‘Presentation’ of the group of artists and intellectuals called ‘Scapigliatura Milanese’, published in 1857 in the journal Almanacco del Pungolo, novelist and journalist Cletto Arrighi, pseudonym of Carlo Righetti, explains the linguistic origins as well as the specific sense he wants to give to the noun ‘scapigliatura’. While dismissing the inaccurate meanings derived from a literal interpretation of the term, namely ‘l’atto dello scapigliarsi’ (‘the act of dishevelling one’s hair’), ‘una chioma arruffata’ (‘ruffled hair’), or ‘una vita da débauché’ (‘debauched living’), Arrighi presents his own definition of ‘scapigliatura’, considered as ‘una certa razza di gente’ (‘a certain breed of people’):5 Questa casta o classe […] vero pandemonio del secolo, personificazione della storditaggine e della follia, serbatoio del disordine, dello spirito d’indipendenza e di opposizione agli ordini stabiliti, questa classe, ripeto, che a Milano ha più che altrove una ragione e una scusa di esistere, io, con una bella e pretta parola italiana, l’ho battezzata appunto: la Scapigliatura Milanese.6 [This caste or class […] true pandemonium of the century, personification of stupidity and madness, reservoir of disorder, of the spirit of independence and opposition to established orders, this class, I repeat, which in Milan has

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more than elsewhere a reason and an excuse to exist, with a beautiful and pure Italian word I have baptised it as follows: the Scapigliatura Milanese.]

When in 1862 Arrighi transforms this article—the first literary manifesto of the Scapigliatura—into the introduction to his novel La Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio, he drops the adjective ‘Milanese’ in order to indicate that the movement was no longer restricted to the city of Milan.7 In the 1880 introduction to this novel, reworked and retitled ‘Prologo’, Arrighi adds a reference that signals the movement’s ties with the French cultural and literary world of the time: the caste or class referred to as the Scapigliatura, ‘i francesi la chiamano già da un pezzo la bohème’ [‘the French have long called it the Bohème’].8 It is plain that with ‘scapigliatura’ Arrighi aims at coining the Italian equivalent of the French ‘bohème’, by means of a word that already existed in the Italian language but with different connotations. The terms ‘bohème’ and ‘bohême’ were used in nineteenth-century France by such authors as Honoré de Balzac, Henry Murger, and Gérard de Nerval to celebrate the rebellious and non-conformist lifestyle sustained by certain artists; but it was also employed as a derogatory term by conservative critics, as seen above in de Pontmartin’s review of Baudelaire’s translations of Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires. The names of these and other French authors—but also painters, journalists, literary schools— were a constant presence in the articles of the time that revolved around the Scapigliatura. The Scapigliatura was a movement that spanned around twenty years of literary, journalistic, musical, and artistic history. According to the chronology established by recent scholarship, it developed between 1856, the year of publication of Giuseppe Rovani’s ‘Preludio’ of his historical novel Cento anni, as well as of the founding of the journal L’Uomo di Pietra, and 1880, when the second edition of Arrighi’s La Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio appeared in the bookshops (see Farinelli 2003, 56). Like Futurism and other twentieth-century avant-gardes, several authors of the Scapigliatura devoted themselves to the practice of various arts, such as prose, poetry, theatre, painting, instrumental music, opera, and journalism. Yet unlike Futurism, the Scapigliatura was not a well-organised movement. There were different schools within the Scapigliatura and various manifestos independently published by its leading authors, and this is certainly one of the reasons why late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century critics struggled to recognise the Scapigliatura as a movement. Today its historical importance and aesthetic quality are finally being acknowledged by

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Italian scholars. Studies carried out in the last few decades on journalism in the years 1860–1880 (see Farinelli 1984) have shown the depth and breadth of the relationships between the various authors, establishing that the Scapigliatura has the right to be called a ‘movement’ and not only an accidental ‘moment’ in literary history (Farinelli 2003, 64), reacting to the crisis of Italian Romanticism and traditional cultural values and anticipating successive literary sensibilities. Nevertheless, Anglophone scholarship lags far behind, especially as regards the study of the poetry of the Scapigliatura. To date, only one monograph on the Scapigliatura has been published in English (Del Principe 1996), which focuses almost exclusively on the Scapigliatura’s fiction and novelistic works, and no anthology of the poetry of the Scapigliatura is available in translation. This book, the first written in English to extensively study the poetry of the Scapigliatura, strives to remedy this lack. In Italian literary history, the poets of the Scapigliatura have suffered from having lived between two very significant literary and cultural movements, namely Romanticism on the one hand and Decadence—mainly referred to as ‘Decadentism’ by Italian scholarship9—on the other. For many years, literary criticism in Italy tended to divide the nineteenth-­ century poetic scene in Italy into Romanticism and Decadentism, and this interpretation led scholars to bring the poets of the Scapigliatura close to one or the other of these movements, but especially to Romanticism. Various expressions such as ‘Lombardy’s second Romanticism’ (Romanò 1958) have been employed to describe the Scapigliatura and to assess it negatively, to underline the supposed provincialism of its authors, as well as, in the case of Binni (1977, 61), to highlight what he believed to be the low literary value of their works. Indeed, the first monographic studies on the Scapigliatura, including Piero Nardi’s influential Scapigliatura (1924),10 mostly associated the poets of the movement with Romanticism. Starting from the second half of the twentieth century, some scholars attempted more vigorously to link some features of the Scapigliatura to literary Decadence and Decadentism. This focus on the Scapigliatura’s Decadent traits is part of studies that highlight its ‘modern’ and ‘innovative’ characteristics as opposed to ‘traditional’ and ‘Romantic’ ones: it is not a coincidence that the emphasis on the Scapigliatura’s Decadent characteristics coincides with the first efforts at re-evaluating the Scapigliatura’s literary works and place in literary history. Over the last few decades, critical analyses aimed at retrieving and reassessing the texts of the Scapigliatura, among which Mariani’s fundamental work, Storia della Scapigliatura

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(1967), have progressively underlined its connections to Decadentism and modernity. These also include Del Principe’s The Demons of Scapigliatura (1996), which argues that ‘decadent elements in Scapigliatura are less evidence of romantic decay than of the creative vitality of modernism’ (Del Principe 1996, 110). Scapigliatura’s authors shared ‘a common aesthetic with writers of the Decadent period’, namely the principle of the autonomy of art or ‘pure’ poetry linked to the investigation of the unconscious (Del Principe 1996, 112–113). In Del Principe’s view, the authors of the Scapigliatura are the precursors of modernism and the avant-gardes, and as such worthy of being considered part of Decadence: ‘Scapigliatura’s “decadence” propels it toward the fin de siècle and to the brink of the twentieth-century avant-garde’ (Del Principe 1996, 110). Despite the frequent use of the expressions ‘Decadent’ and ‘Decadentism’, however, scholars have had difficulties in critically defining what the Scapigliatura’s Decadent characteristics would be. This has probably been due to the fact that the expression Decadentism—and indeed its supposed English equivalent, ‘Decadence’—is problematic to define in a literary context, principally because according to the country—and its related historical criticism—the term acquires different meanings. In France, for instance, ‘Décadence’, occasionally referred to as ‘Décadentisme’ or even ‘Décadisme’, was a minor poetic movement in the 1880s, the exponents of which established journals such as  Le Décadent, and it is generally considered to be an anticipation of Symbolism, at best a first phase of it, although in fact the two movements did coexist for a period (see McGuinness 2000, 6–8). In the Anglophone world, Decadence is commonly associated with Aestheticism and particularly with the work of Oscar Wilde, who ‘cultivated a continental and decadent persona, deliberately to clash with the prevailing nationalistic ideal in British culture’ (Desmarais and Baldick 2012, 8). In Italy, ‘Decadentism’ constitutes one of the most important historical categories in literary scholarship, and generally indicates the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-­century poetry of Gabriele D’Annunzio and Giovanni Pascoli. For the sake of clarity of critical analysis, this study proposes to abandon labels attempting to define the Scapigliatura’s modernity by placing it within earlier or later literary tendencies. Comparisons with other authors are of course necessary to discuss the Scapigliatura’s place in European literary history—after all, this book is itself a comparative and transcultural work on the interaction between texts published across a fifty-year time frame, 1857–1912. But the definition of modernity advanced here has less

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to do with literary innovation with respect to previous and successive movements than with Baudelaire’s own interpretation of modernity as a contemporaneous sensibility specific to that period, as artists and writers focusing on subjects of their own times in search for a modern aesthetics. In the context of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, this sensibility is characterised primarily by a forceful intrusion of science and positivist philosophy in literature. Imagery of medicine and technological progress related to the birth of modern psychiatry, studies on human anatomy, theories of hereditary degeneration, and Darwinism influenced literary forms and techniques, with the result that writers started to adapt literature to the principles of the scientific method and objectivity, or to question the very function of poetry in an industrialised, modern world. As Alberto Carli argues in his study of the relationship between the Scapigliatura and the medical sciences, referring specifically to the situation of post-unification (post-1861) Italy: Letteratura e scienza si muovevano, allora, tra indecisioni e forze dirompenti, alla scoperta del nuovo, trovando tra loro corrispondenze e distanze in un percorso comune. La suggestione, quasi mai rassicurante, che molte scoperte e tecniche mediche innovative dovettero esercitare sulla letteratura dell’Italia appena unificata fu senz’altro molto forte. (Carli 2004, 12) [At that time, between indecisions and disruptive forces, literature and science moved on a similar path towards the discovery of the new, finding correspondences and differences. The suggestion, almost never reassuring, that many innovative medical discoveries and techniques had to exert on the literature of the newly unified Italy was certainly very strong.]

Our definition of modernity, however, also involves poetry’s creative response to this intrusion of science and medicine, which is a reaction against the loss of the religious, aesthetic, and sentimental values of Romanticism brought about by scientific and medical progress, as well as against the resulting sense of alienation and fragmentation of the poet’s consciousness derived from that loss. Only by recontextualising terms such as ‘decadence’, ‘Romanticism’, ‘realism’, and ‘modernity’, analysing their contemporaneous use and meanings given to them by Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura, can we have a better understanding of the intertextuality between the Italian movement and Baudelaire in the 1860s—and their combined influence on Futurist poetry five decades later.

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The main focus of this book is on the most important poets of the Scapigliatura: Arrigo Boito (1842–1918), Emilio Praga (1839–1875), and Giovanni Camerana (1845–1905). Several other writers revolved around the three authors considered here. Gaetano Leonello Patuzzi, Bernardino Zendrini, Vittorio Betteloni and, later, Luigi Gualdo, to name only a few, shared similar artistic principles with Boito, Praga, and Camerana, but ultimately their relationships with the latter were full of misunderstandings and disagreements over the direction to take, and in particular over the nature of the Scapigliatura’s poetic art (see Villa 2009, 21–30). In the 1860s, Boito, Praga, and Camerana exchanged letters, dedicated poems to each other in which they expressed a communality of poetic ideals,11 and deeply influenced each other. To maintain an emphasis on the close network of relations and influences among them, I will place a focus mainly on the works they produced in the 1860s, before they grew apart from one another and put a stop to their artistic collaboration. It could be argued that also Igino Ugo Tarchetti, another key figure of the Scapigliatura, should be included in this book; after all, his poems, which started to appear in periodicals in 1867 and would be gathered after his death in the volume  Disjecta (1879), can be easily compared, in tone, structure, and images, to those of Boito, Praga, and Camerana. See, for instance, in ‘Memento!’, the theme of macabre sensuality serving as a constant reminder of the proximity of death, which resembles Camerana’s sepulchral imagery that will be analysed in Chap. 3: Quando bacio il tuo labbro profumato, Cara fanciulla, non posso obbliare Che un bianco teschio v’è sotto celato. Quando a me stringo il tuo corpo vezzoso, Obbliar non poss’io, cara fanciulla, Che vi è sotto uno scheletro nascoso. E nell’orrenda visione assorto, Dovunque o tocchi, o baci, o la man posi … Sento sporger le fredda ossa di morto! (Tarchetti 1967, 459) [When I kiss your perfumed lip Dear girl, I cannot forget That a white skull is hidden beneath it. When I hold your lovely body close to mine, I cannot forget, dear girl, That a skeleton is hidden beneath it.

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And absorbed in that horrendous vision, Wherever I touch, or kiss, or lay my hand … I feel protruding the cold bones of the dead!]

This is a preponderant topic in Tarchetti’s poetry and is unquestionably central in the work of the other poets of the Scapigliatura as well, but it is ultimately only one of the many themes treated by Boito, Praga, and Camerana, which are discussed in the following pages outlining the various aspects of the poetic modernity of the Scapigliatura. Tarchetti was primarily a novelist and a writer of short stories and novellas. He was much more influential and innovative in fiction than in poetry, and even though he was acquainted with Praga, Boito, and Camerana,12 theirs was not an intimate friendship nor a close collaborative relationship. In fact, as Mariani (1971, 37) explains, the names of these three poets ‘non spunta[no] mai a proposito dell’autore di Fosca [Tarchetti], né per quel che riguarda la sua opera, né per quel che tocca la sua biografia: si tratta di due mondi estranei o per lo meno lontani’ [‘never appear regarding the author of Fosca [Tarchetti], neither with regard to his work, nor for what concerns his biography: they are two separate worlds or at least distant’]. In a very significant letter sent by Boito to his friend and colleague Praga in April 1866, which will be analysed in Chap. 2, Boito gloomily reports the (false) news of Baudelaire’s death. Boito represents Baudelaire as the leading author of ‘realism’, and his death as the miserable death of realism’s veritable ‘soul’ and ‘body’ (letter reproduced by Nardi 1942, 349). It is probable, Boito concludes, that he himself would die now that Baudelaire (and, with him, realism) is deceased. Praga’s answer is equally significant. He describes Boito’s news as ‘un colpo di pugnale’ [‘a stab’], declaring that he loved Baudelaire ‘come una amante’ [‘like a mistress’], before telling Boito: ‘prepariamoci a seguirlo. Per me, avrò poche miglia da fare’ [‘let us get ready to follow him. I will only have few miles to go’], and ultimately suggesting they drown together in the wake of Baudelaire’s death (letter reproduced by Nardi 1942, 350). The hyperbolic (and figurative?) language suggesting death and suicide was probably due to the sorrowful and tragic news of the passing of one of their principal poetic models; we must take into account, however, that since 1864 they, as co-­ editors of the periodical Figaro, had made ‘realism’ the emblem of their artistic revolution. In the 1864 article ‘Polemica letteraria’, long considered to be one of the two manifestos of the Scapigliatura’s poetry, Boito and Praga define their idea of art as ‘un’arte malata, vaneggiante, al dire

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di molti, un’arte di decadenza, di barocchismo, di razionalismo, di realismo ed ecco finalmente la parola sputata’ (OL, 329) [‘an ill, delirious art, according to many, an art of decadence, of baroqueism, of rationalism, of realism and here is finally the word spat out’]. As we have seen above with the reviews of Baudelaire’s poetry in France in the 1850s and ‘60s, where medical terms related to illness, decadence, and realism were largely employed, Boito and Praga describe their art as ‘malata’, ‘di decadenza’, ‘di realismo’. Yet these three terms coexist, in a manner that may at first seem paradoxical, with such expressions as ‘vaneggiante’ and ‘barocchismo’, which stress a tendency towards wonder and dazzle characteristic of the Italian Baroque, as well as towards the imaginary, the bizarre, and the fantastic of a metaphorical delirium. This union of contrasting concepts to define the Scapigliatura’s ‘realist’ art reflects the content of what has been deemed the second manifesto of the Scapigliatura’s poetry, which shall also be thoroughly examined in Chap. 2. In the letter that Boito sent to Cletto Arrighi as introduction to the poem ‘Ballatella’, published in Cronaca Grigia on 1 January 1865, Boito states the preference that they, the group of ‘scapigliati romantici in ira’ [‘enraged Romantic Scapigliati’], had for the ‘fantasticherie’ (OL, 11) [‘fantasies’]. The amalgamation of tendencies as different as realism and Romanticism in the definition of the Scapigliatura’s new art, devoted to both ‘fantasies’ and ‘rationalism’, certainly appears implausible. We have to consider, however, that le terme flou de ‘réalisme’, lorsqu’il se généralise au milieu du XIXe siècle, porte sur le choix des sujets et non sur la manière de voir ou de décrire le réel. Il n’y a pas vraiment d’opposition entre la fantaisie post-romantique et le réalisme naissant. C’est une même mise en scène d’excentriques ou de marginaux, une même esthétique moderne anti-bourgeoise. (Berthelot 2003, 209) [the vague term ‘realism’, when it became widespread in the mid-nineteenth century, relates to the choice of subjects and not to the way of seeing or describing reality. There is no real opposition between post-Romantic fantasy and nascent realism. It is the same representation of eccentrics or misfits, the same modern anti-bourgeois aesthetics.]

Although it describes French post-Romantic literature, this statement holds true also for the post-Romantic poetry of the Scapigliatura. Boito, Praga, and Camerana interpreted realism in the above signification, as a choice of determined subjects that were traditionally not treated in poetry and as a ‘modern’ display of anti-bourgeois lifestyle. As well as

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non-­conformist and controversial topics such as anticlericalism, physical decomposition, and sexual intercourse represented through a mixture of realistic and fantastic elements, the poetry of the Scapigliatura criticised various branches of modern science for degrading the human body to an object solely to be studied and/or commercialised for profit. Reduced to an ugly mummy, a grotesque torso of a statue, a mutilated corpse of a young girl, or a horrible foetus of twins, the human body put on display for and observed by the modern audience in both artistic and scientific places—present-day museums, hospitals, dissection rooms—has lost any traditional beauty and regularity of forms, as will be shown in Chap. 2. And yet, this is the type of body not only represented, but most importantly fully embraced artistically and elevated to an aesthetic symbol of modernity by the Scapigliatura. Although the practical application of ‘realism’, eventually, would not be exactly the same by Boito, Praga, and Camerana, their theoretical notion and ideal function of the term can be summarised by means of Folco Portinari’s definition of literary realism as a ‘demitizzazione dei topoi assimilati nella tradizione e quindi […] un recupero degli oggetti genericamente ritenuti inadeguati e rifiutati’ (Portinari 1976, 10) [‘demythologisation of the topoi assimilated by tradition and therefore […] a recovery of objects generally considered inadequate and rejected’]. This view of realism is a key aspect of the modernity of the Scapigliatura, one that links the poetry of the three above authors, despite their differences—and, occasionally, different interpretations of Baudelaire’s poetry and of his modernity. But Baudelaire’s Fleurs are, indeed, the great catalyst of Boito’s, Praga’s, and Camerana’s respective poetic experimentations with subject matter, language, and structures not usually included in the poetic domain. This volume posits that Baudelaire’s influence on the Scapigliatura’s poetry is more substantial and complex than scholarship has heretofore recognised. The pages that follow demonstrate a vast and wide-ranging influence—on a conceptual, lexical, and stylistic level—on the three major poets of the Scapigliatura, which can be traced back to the very beginning of their careers in the early 1860s. Far from being simply an element of youthful rebellion, aesthetic and moral, the ‘Baudelairism’ of the Scapigliatura introduced a thematic and formal modernity into Italian literature, paving the way for Futurism and the twentieth-century avant-­ garde. The investigation of Baudelaire’s influence on the poets of the Scapigliatura is conducted both individually—searching for Baudelairian features in their work—and comparatively, contrasting differences and

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aiming to locate patterns of similarity. On a methodological level, this study analyses the material from two different yet complementary points of view: on the one hand, it examines the textual, lexical, and stylistic borrowings, juxtaposing them to the source text and establishing their significance and role within the individual poem; on the other hand, it focuses on the appropriation of Baudelaire’s poetry on a deeper lever, which entails the extrapolation, adaptation, and re-elaboration of this material into the various themes and topics of the Scapigliatura. Indeed, Baudelaire’s influence on the Scapigliatura has already been studied, insofar as Sozzi Casanova (1979, 24) stated that ‘lo scrittore che più influenzò la Scapigliatura fu Baudelaire; una influenza che varcò i limiti letterari e si estese al costume di vita’ [‘the writer who most influenced the Scapigliatura was Baudelaire; an influence that crossed the confines of literature and extended to the way of life’]. Previous examinations of the relationship between the poetry of the Scapigliatura and Baudelaire, however, have been generally undertaken within essays devoted to the individual authors or to single thematic relations, such as the interplay of beauty with ugliness in the Scapigliatura’s aesthetic theories (see Bettella 2000). Being restricted in scope, they have not focused on drawing a detailed and systematic picture that portrays the connections not only between Baudelaire and the poets of the Scapigliatura, but also among Boito, Praga, and Camerana themselves as part of their process of development of an aesthetics of modernity. Essays that discuss Baudelaire and Boito, for instance, have mentioned the significant influence of the French poet on Boito’s technical use of antitheses and contrasts (Maurino 1987; Pomilio 1994, 63–64), or have pointed out analogies between single poems, in particular Boito’s ‘Case nuove’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Le Cygne’ (Dell’Aquila 1981, 61; Di Benedetto 1994, 30–33). More complex are the cases of Praga and Camerana. There is hardly any scholar who has not mentioned Baudelaire’s impact on Praga’s poetry, especially on his second collection,  Penombre (1864). Scholars are generally agreed on the assessment of the evolution of Praga’s Baudelairian characteristics, circumscribed to a very limited presence of macabre and blasphemous themes in Tavolozza (1862), Praga’s first book of poetry, but preponderant in Penombre, to the extent that the latter work has been defined as one of the most Baudelairian volumes in Italian literature (Petrucciani 1962, 72). Nonetheless, scholarship has also maintained that, despite the apparent profundity of Baudelaire’s influence, in Penombre Praga did not fully comprehend the complexity and novelty of Baudelaire’s

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poetic world due to his own artistic limits and the backwardness of the Italian literary situation at the time. The influence of Baudelaire on Penombre would thus be mostly aesthetic, centred upon the most shocking and graphic aspects of Baudelaire’s macabre and erotic imagery and lacking the sensitivity, metaphysical insights, and symbolism of Baudelaire’s Fleurs (Petrucciani 1962, 34, 126; Mariani 1971, 229–230; Carnazzi 1981, 30–32; Crotti and Ricorda 1997, 1505). Only occasionally in Penombre did Praga manage to overcome this superficial influence by delving deeper into the investigation of Baudelaire’s dramatic representation of the modern experience in which external reality is interiorised, becoming an intimate symbol of the poet’s dejected emotional state, transfigured into surreal images by means of analogies and unrealistic descriptions. Significantly, these sporadic instances in Penombre are deemed closer to Baudelaire’s own sensibility and therefore not part of the Scapigliatura’s aesthetics, which is very clearly outlined as a controversial display of ugliness for the sake of it; they are seen, on the contrary, as the first timid illustration of Decadentism in Italian literature (Petrucciani 1962, 102–103; Mariani 1971, 234, 245–250; Carnazzi 1981, 36–40). Assessments of Camerana’s poetry at the time of the Scapigliatura put forward similar arguments. In terms of Baudelaire’s influence on Camerana’s poetic work of his Scapigliatura years 1864–1870, scholars have discussed it while examining the impact of the other writers of the Scapigliatura, particularly Praga and Boito, therefore speaking, for the most part, of an indirect Baudelairian influence mediated by the works and guidance of the above authors. It does not help that Camerana’s time in the Scapigliatura is principally considered to have been formative, transitory, and of little quality or originality (Petrocchi 1965, 22, 24; Finzi 1968, ix), as a sort of preparation for the more mature post-Scapigliatura phase that would only begin around 1870 (Giannangeli 1978, 4, 124–125). That is why it is commonly argued that Baudelaire’s most profound and unadulterated influence on Camerana occurred after 1870 when Camerana gradually detached himself from the Scapigliatura’s poetry, identified with the ‘Decadent’ process of symbolisation of nature in which the landscape reflects the mood of the poet (Giannangeli 1978, 149; Petrocchi 1965, 26–28; Dell’Aquila 1968, 59–60; Moretti 2005, 71). Even critical works that highlight the Scapigliatura’s modernity not simply as an anticipation of successive literary tendencies, but more as an exploration of present-day subjects and of the consciousness and sensibility of the contemporaneous human being, do not approach a definition of

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modernity characteristic of, and specific to, the Scapigliatura. Running counter to previous appraisals of the Scapigliatura’s supposed literary limitations, in his insightful introduction to the Mondadori edition of Boito’s Poesie e racconti Rodolfo Quadrelli indicates the Scapigliatura’s encounter with Baudelaire’s Fleurs as the starting point of modern poetry in Italy, ‘non tanto perché [i poeti della Scapigliatura] siano stati i primi ad accogliere elementi della moderna poesia europea, ma perché per primi essi affrontarono in poesia la realtà del moderno’ (Quadrelli 1981, 5) [‘not so much because they [the poets of the Scapigliatura] were the first to incorporate elements of modern European poetry, but because they were the first to deal with the reality of the modern in poetry’]. Modernity is described as the literary rediscovery of evil, evil that cannot be eradicated by religion or modern science, but which must be portrayed in poetry (Quadrelli 1981, 7, 10; see also Spera 1994, 2). However, after describing evil as the underlying aspect of the Scapigliatura’s modernity, Quadrelli separates Boito’s literary output from Praga’s and Camerana’s. First, Quadrelli underlines Praga’s shortcomings with respect to Baudelaire’s poetry, arguing that ‘mancò a Praga non soltanto la profondità teologica e morale di Baudelaire ma anche la capacità di penetrare la realtà del moderno’ (Quadrelli 1981, 11) [‘Praga lacked not only Baudelaire’s theological and moral depth but also the ability to penetrate the reality of the modern’]. Quadrelli (1981, 25) subsequently declares Boito the greatest—and, implicitly, the most modern—of the authors of the Scapigliatura. In recent times, Angela Ida Villa has expressed a similar opinion, attributing Praga’s and Camerana’s experiments with the horrid and blasphemous subject matter of the Scapigliatura in the 1860s to Boito’s creative ascendency, recognising a fundamental ideological gap in the theoretical notions of ‘realism’ of the three poets (Villa 2009, 21–25, 30–31). Consequently, Boito’s modernity would be dissimilar to Praga’s and Camerana’s, marked by a substantial use of esoteric symbolism in his poetry that would anticipate early twentieth-century neoidealism and the Latin renaissance (Villa 2009, 37–38). Building on the existing critical ideas discussed above and acknowledging the differences in Boito’s, Praga’s, and Camerana’s poetic views and implementations, this book proposes a radically new interpretation of the Scapigliatura’s poetry, one rooted in their readings of Baudelaire’s Fleurs and revealing individual illustrations of modernity that are distinctive to the three poets, but which are also coherent, cohesive, and interconnected. Instead of discussing their flaws and failings in relation to

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Baudelaire or to one another—whether qualitative, stylistic, or conceptual—this monograph puts Boito, Praga, and Camerana on the same literary level as Baudelaire. Only then is it possible to entirely comprehend the complexity and heterogeneity—but also the originality and modernity—of the Scapigliatura’s poetry. Accordingly, the investigation of the Scapigliatura’s modernity in this monograph is divided into chapters that discuss its different features. Chapter 2 explores the introduction of ‘unpoetic’ and prosaic imagery into mid-nineteenth-century Italian poetry to depict the paradoxical nature of present-day reality and of modern consciousness, dualistically split into the celebration of the residual beauty of art in modernity and the fascination for ugly, irregular bodies desecrated by science and medicine. Chapter 3 discusses allegorical narratives of death and decomposition used to represent excess, depravity, and mental illness—mirroring the decadence of the contemporaneous world through fairy-tale imagery combined with the clinical tools of nineteenthcentury psychology—as well as to express the poet’s emotional distress. Chapter 4 examines the blasphemous merging of sexual intercourse and spiritual yearning to demystify affection as previously depicted in religious terms by Italian Romanticism, substituted by a more ambiguous conception of love that blends spiritual devotion with sexual longing, occasionally violent, sadistic, even necrophiliac. Chapter 5 investigates the adaptation of Baudelaire’s theory and practice of analogical correspondances, which resulted in the Scapigliatura’s experimentation with literary synaesthesia and the technique of analogy to convey the poet’s ecstatic feelings, intermixing sensory modalities, the woman’s physical features, and natural imagery.

Futurism for/against the Scapigliatura This book also maps the evolution of paradigms of modernity in Italy from the Scapigliatura to the first anthology of Futurist poetry, I poeti futuristi (1912). Chapter 6 demonstrates not simply that, notwithstanding Futurism’s denial of influence and proclamation of a complete break from past authors seen at the beginning of this chapter, Baudelaire was still a key figure for the movement, but most notably that the Scapigliatura’s literary modernity often acted as a mediator between early Futurist poetry and Baudelaire’s work. This chapter explores the ways in which tropes, language, and stylistic devices of the Scapigliatura that have their roots in

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Baudelaire’s Fleurs, served as a foundation upon which Futurist poets built their own imagery of modernity. Although scholarship has long advanced the idea of the Scapigliatura as a first embryonic avant-garde movement that anticipated the experimentations of Futurism (see Tessari 1975; Grana 1986), systematic and detailed analyses of the literary relationship between the two movements have been rarely carried out. Most of them, moreover, tend to involve only individual poets, especially F.  T. Marinetti and Boito (Daly 2012, 2016), or Marinetti, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Boito (Finotti 1994). The few studies that discuss the impact of the Scapigliatura on the 1912 anthology of Futurist poetry, as we shall see in Chap. 6, reduce it to a generic influence of a sensibility and an atmosphere that are deemed to be typical of the Scapigliatura, without mentioning, however, any poets or poems of the latter movement. The situation of the studies on Futurism and Baudelaire is different; there has certainly been more work devoted to this topic, but it is mostly examined within the context of the (extensive) influence of French and Belgian Symbolism on Marinetti (see Cescutti 2009; Vinall 2000; Conti 2012). Furthermore, I poeti futuristi has received little critical attention compared to other Futurist works—were it not for the first publication in volume of the famous ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista’ as introduction to the anthology, it would have probably attracted even less scholarly interest. But this anthology is historically and literarily significant because it is the first to have been published as a collection of Futurist poetry, including poems by authors that would later be remembered and celebrated in Italian literary history, such as Palazzeschi and Corrado Govoni, as well as writers that have been entirely forgotten by scholarship—the majority of those in the anthology. Even though, as shown in Chap. 6, the main poetic form employed throughout the anthology—free verse—would soon be replaced by the literary technique called words-in-freedom, I poeti futuristi is a key publication in the early phase of Futurist literature since ‘the thirteen poets were brought together neither casually nor to give birth to a diachronic sequence, but to illustrate Futurism and its principles. Marinetti himself, the conceiver of the anthology, welcomed an organic and coherent reading of this work’ (Podavini 2012, 33). In terms of content, the majority of these thirteen poets represent themes and topics that could be considered as characteristically Futurist, glorifying speed, war, and violence; the modernity of technological and mechanical marvels such as aeroplanes, electricity, and racing automobiles;

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dynamic life in the modern city; or condemning and deriding Romantic tropes including love and the moon employed as a symbol of sentimentality. Nevertheless, Chap. 6 also demonstrates that the Futurists’ polemical rejection of canonical literature and Romantic imagery led them to rediscover Baudelaire’s and the Scapigliatura’s scenes of modernity, revealing a similar preference for grotesque and macabre depictions of contemporaneous subjects used to demystify literary tradition but also, in stark contrast to Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura, to promote technological progress. Futurist poets turned to the works of Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura for inspiration on topics and themes that were considered as distinctly unpoetic and unromantic—and therefore modern—such as medical-anatomical examination, technological transformation, urban renovation, and abnormal sensuality and necrophiliac desire. Their interest in Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura was not only related to aesthetic and moral controversy, but rooted in a broader concern for lyrical and linguistic innovation that led the Futurists to develop literary techniques based on sensory and analogical experimentation, such as wireless imagination and words-in-freedom. Focusing on drawing a direct connection between the Scapigliatura and Futurism, this monograph voluntarily bypasses the debate on the influence of Italian Decadentism on the formation of Futurist poetry, which is a topic extensively studied by scholarship, especially as regards Marinetti and D’Annunzio (see Mariani 1970; Antonello 1999; Conti 2012). The premise for a discussion on the Scapigliatura and Futurism is based not only on the close comparative reading carried out in Chap. 6, but also on the examination of the literary milieu of early twentieth-century Italy, which shows links and interactions between authors of the two movements. Daly (2012, 192–194), for example, has demonstrated not only that Marinetti translated into French a poem by Boito, ‘Le foglie’, in 1899 for the Anthologie des poètes italiens contemporains and dedicated to him (‘au maître Arrigo Boito’ [‘to Master Arrigo Boito’]) the poem ‘Le Désespoir du faune’ (1900), but that the two poets exchanged letters and thank you notes as well. Marinetti was, therefore, an enthusiastic admirer of Boito’s poetry in his pre-Futurist (pre-1909) years. Daly also mentions meetings at Savini restaurant in Milan, possibly in the years 1909–1915, between the Futurists and a ‘scapigliato group’ that includes Boito, polemically considered by the former—after the formation of Futurism in 1909—as ‘antiquati tradizionalisti’ (Daly 2012, 195) [‘old-fashioned traditionalists’]. But the most obvious link between the two movements is

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Gian Pietro Lucini, a writer who at the beginning of the twentieth century considered himself as a successor to the Scapigliatura and was seen, in turn, as one of the very few precursors of Futurism by the Futurists themselves. As Mariani (1971, 47–49) has noted, in 1908 and 1911 Lucini published two essays,  Ragion poetica e Programma del verso libero and L’ora topica di Carlo Dossi, in which he embraces and repurposes the Scapigliatura’s ‘realism’ while discussing both its prose and poetry, ‘mescola[ndo] la Scapigliatura con le esigenze d’arte nuova avanzate dei futuristi’ (48) [‘mixing the Scapigliatura with the needs of the new art advanced by the Futurists’]. Although Lucini did not associate himself with Futurism, he collaborated with Marinetti on numerous occasions. Ragion poetica e Programma del verso libero was published by Marinetti’s press ‘Edizioni di “Poesia”’ in 1908; moreover, Marinetti edited and published Lucini’s verse collection Revolverate in the following year. Marinetti wrote a ‘Prefazione futurista’ to Revolverate, where he affirms that Futurism reclaims Lucini because of the similarities in their fights against traditional forms and subjects of both past and recent literature: Del Futurismo, G.P. Lucini è il suo più strano avversario, ma anche, involontariamente, il più strenuo difensore. […] Egli ha dichiarato di non essere un settatore del Futurismo. E sia. Ma se non tali i suoi amori, tutti i suoi odî sono i nostri. La intera sua mirabile azione letteraria si risolve in un’avversione implacabile delle formule cieche ed impure onde così spesso la Poesia italiana, anche celebratissima, è andata rivestendosi, specie in questi ultimi anni di equivoca fortuna […]. Le nostre affinità sono grandissime. S’egli le nega ha torto: noi abbiamo ragione. (TIF, 29–30) [Of Futurism, G.P. Lucini is its strangest opponent, but also, unintentionally, the most strenuous defender. […] He has declared that he is not a partisan of Futurism. So be it. But if his loves are not such, all his hatreds are ours. His entire admirable literary action is resolved in an implacable aversion to the blind and impure formulas with which so often Italian Poetry, even when highly celebrated, has clothed itself, especially in recent years of equivocal fortune […]. Our affinities are very great. If he denies them, he is wrong: we are right.]

Understandably, given his ambiguous position towards the movement, Lucini would not be included in the 1912 anthology I poeti futuristi. His poetry and critical writings on the Scapigliatura, however, build a bridge between the two movements, juxtaposing their rebellious yearning for and

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non-conformist struggle to innovate literature in a period which saw the (re)publication of key poetic works of the Scapigliatura: the second edition of Boito’s Il libro dei versi. Re Orso (1902); the fourth editions of Praga’s Tavolozza (1911) and Penombre (1913); and the first (posthumous) collection of Camerana’s poetry, Versi (1907). Ultimately, this book strives to answer the following questions: how did poetic modernity evolve in Italy from the 1860s to the 1910s, from the Scapigliatura to the Futurist movement? Did the poets of the Scapigliatura and Futurism have a similar understanding of what literary modernity entailed? And what role had Baudelaire’s poetry in ‘making’ Italian modernity?

Notes 1. See the Futurist manifesto ‘Noi rinneghiamo i nostri maestri simbolisti ultimi amanti della luna’ (TIF, 302–306), published in 1911. The term ‘passéist’ (‘passatista’) to describe Baudelaire’s poetry is used by Marinetti in Guerra sola igiene del mondo (1915), in TIF, 334. 2. Even though Baudelaire officially published his first poem, ‘À une Créole’, in the periodical L’Artiste on 25 May 1845, according to Arsène Houssaye, director of the journal, Baudelaire published four sonnets in L’Artiste in December 1844 under the name of his friend Alexandre Privat d’Anglemont. See Pichois (1975, 1259–1260). 3. For these artistic features in German and English Romanticism, see Nemoianu (1984, 26–27). 4. Judgement of the 6e Chambre de Police Correctionnelle du Tribunal de la Seine. La Gazette des tribunaux, no. 9483, 21 August 1857, 829. Repr. in Guyaux (2007, 247). 5. ‘Presentazione’. Almanacco del Pungolo, I (1857). Repr. in Farinelli (2003, 211). 6. Ibid. 7. ‘Introduzione’. In La Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio. Milan: Redaelli, 1862. Repr. in Farinelli (2003, 214). 8. ‘Prologo’. In La Scapigliatura. Rome: Stabilimento Tipografico Italiano, 1880. Repr. in Farinelli (2003, 214). 9. Henceforth I will use the term ‘Decadentism’ to indicate specifically the Italian movement, and the more neutral ‘Decadence’ to refer to the literary tendency that developed in fin-de-siècle Europe.

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10. Scapigliatura: da Giuseppe Rovani a Carlo Dossi. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1924. This volume has been republished, with some modifications, with Mondadori (Nardi 1968). Henceforth, I will use this last edition as reference. 11. See Boito’s ‘A Emilio Praga’ and ‘A Giovanni Camerana’; Praga’s ‘All’amico’, ‘Versi scritti in un giorno buio’, ‘Monaci e cavalieri’, dedicated to Boito, and the collection Fiabe e leggende, dedicated to Camerana; Camerana’s ‘A Emilio Praga’ and ‘Ad Arrigo Boito’. 12. See Praga’s poem ‘Sulla tomba di I.U. Tarchetti’ (PP, 306–307), written in September 1871 and posthumously published in Praga’s fourth and last verse collection, Trasparenze (1878).

References Antonello, Pierpaolo. 1999. On an Airfield in Montichiari, Near Brescia. Staging Rivalry Through Technology: Marinetti and D’Annunzio. Stanford Humanities Review 7 (1): 88–100. Arrighi, Cletto. 1857. Presentazione. Almanacco del Pungolo, I. Repr. in Giuseppe Farinelli, La Scapigliatura: profilo storico, protagonisti, documenti, 210–213. Rome: Carocci, 2003. ———. 1862. Introduzione. In La Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio. Milan: Redaelli. Repr. in Giuseppe Farinelli, La Scapigliatura: profilo storico, protagonisti, documenti, 213–218. Rome: Carocci, 2003. ———. 1880. Prologo. In La Scapigliatura. Rome: Stabilimento Tipografico Italiano. Repr. in Giuseppe Farinelli, La Scapigliatura: profilo storico, protagonisti, documenti, 213–218. Rome: Carocci, 2003. Baudelaire, Charles. 1964. PML. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon. ———. 1973. Corr. I. Correspondance, vol. I: 1832–1860, ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. ———. 1976. OC II. Œuvres complètes, vol. II, ed. Claude Pichois.  Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. Central Park. In The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W.  Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland, et  al., 134–169. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Berthelot, Sandrine. 2003. Bohème et fantaisie chez Murger. In La Fantaisie post-­ romantique, ed. Jean-Louis Cabanès and Jean-Pierre Saïdah, 207–223. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail. Bettella, Patrizia. 2000. The Debate on Beauty and Ugliness in Italian Scapigliatura and Baudelaire. Rivista di studi italiani 1: 68–85. Binni, Walter. 1977. La poetica del decadentismo. Florence: Sansoni.

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Boito, Arrigo. 2009. OL. Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/ Novecento. Bourget, Paul. 1931. Essais de psychologie contemporaine, vol. I. Paris: Plon. Brunetière, Ferdinand. 1906. L’Évolution de la poésie lyrique en France au dix-­ neuvième siècle, vol. II. Paris: Hachette. Carli, Alberto. 2004. Anatomie scapigliate: l’estetica della morte tra letteratura, arte e scienza. Novara: Interlinea. Carnazzi, Giulio. 1981. Les Fleurs du mal e la poesia di Emilio Praga: un primo capitolo nella storia della fortuna italiana di Baudelaire. In Baudelaire, poeta e critico, 23–44. Bologna: Pàtron. Cescutti, Titiana. 2009. Les origines mythiques du futurisme: F.T. Marinetti, poète symboliste français (1902–1908). Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. Conti, Eleonora. 2012. Marinetti in France between Symbolism and Futurism: Vers et Prose and Les Guêpes. In The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies, ed. Geert Buelens, Harald Hendrix, and Monica Jansen, 53–80. Lanham and Plymouth: Lexington Books. Crotti, Ilaria, and Ricciarda Ricorda. 1997. Scapigliatura e dintorni. In Storia letteraria d’Italia: l’Ottocento, vol. III, ed. Armando Balduino, 1471–1566. Padua and Milan: Vallardi-Piccin Nuova Libraria. Culler, Jonathan. 2008. Introduction. In Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan, xiii–xxxvii. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Daly, Selena. 2012. Arrigo Boito e Filippo Tommaso Marinetti tra il Reale e l’Ideale. Otto/Novecento 3: 191–201. ———. 2016. Arrigo Boito’s Legacy to Futurism: Re Orso and its Influence on Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Le Roi Bombance. Romance Studies 34 (2): 101–113. De Goncourt, Edmond. 1891. Journal des Goncourt: mémoires de la vie littéraire, vol. V. Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier. De Pontmartin, Armand. 2007. Cette littérature de charnier…. Journal de Bruxelles, 15 July 1857. Repr. in Baudelaire: un demi-siècle de lectures des ‘Fleurs du mal’ (1855–1905), ed. André Guyaux, 173–174. Paris: PUPS. ———. 1933. Le Spectateur, 19 September 1857. Repr. in Œuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire, ed. Jacques Crépet, vol. VII, Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires par Edgar Poe, 315–316. Paris: Conard. Del Principe, David. 1996. Rebellion, Death, and Aesthetics in Italy: The Demons of Scapigliatura. Madison and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses. Dell’Aquila, Michele. 1968. La poesia di Camerana. Bari: Adriatica. ———. 1981. La lacerazione delle forme e l’allegoria della morte nel Libro dei versi di Arrigo Boito. Otto/Novecento 5 (1): 55–79. Desmarais, Jane, and Chris Baldick. 2012. Introduction. In Decadence: An Annotated Anthology, 1–11. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Di Benedetto, Arnaldo. 1994. “Case nuove” o le rovine di Milano. In Arrigo Boito, ed. Giovanni Morelli, 15–33. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. 1972. Baudelaire. In Selected Essays, 419–430. London: Faber and Faber. Farinelli, Giuseppe, ed. 1984. La pubblicistica nel periodo della Scapigliatura. Regesto per soggetti dei giornali e delle riviste esistenti a Milano e relativi al primo ventennio dello Stato unitario: 1860–1880. Milan: IPL. ———, ed. 2003. La Scapigliatura: profilo storico, protagonisti, documenti. Rome: Carocci. Finotti, Fabio. 1994. Il démone dello stile. In Arrigo Boito, ed. Giovanni Morelli, 35–60. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. Finzi, Gilberto. 1968. Biografia. In Giovanni Camerana, Poesie, ed. Gilberto Finzi, xxiii–xxvii. Turin: Einaudi. Friedrich, Hugo. 1974. The Structure of Modern Poetry: From the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century, trans. Joachim Neugroschel. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Gautier, Théophile. 1991. Baudelaire, ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz. Bordeaux: Le Castor Astral. Giannangeli, Ottaviano. 1978. La bruna armonia di Camerana. Rome: Lacarini. Gioanola, Elio. 1991. Il Decadentismo. Rome: Studium. Grana, Gianni. 1986. Le avanguardie letterarie: cultura e politica, scienza e arte dalla Scapigliatura alla Neo-avanguardia attraverso il Fascismo, vol. I. Milan: Marzorati. Guyaux, André. 2007. Préface. In Baudelaire: un demi-siècle de lectures des ‘Fleurs du mal’ (1855–1905), ed. André Guyaux, 11–139. Paris: PUPS. Judgement of the 6e Chambre de Police Correctionnelle du Tribunal de la Seine. 1857. In La Gazette des tribunaux, no. 9483, August 21. Repr. in Baudelaire: un demi-siècle de lectures des ‘Fleurs du mal’ (1855–1905), ed. André Guyaux, 247–248. Paris: PUPS, 2007. Labarthe, Patrick. 1999. Baudelaire et la tradition de l’allégorie. Geneva: Droz. Le Correspondant. 1933. August 1857. Repr. in Œuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire, ed. Jacques Crépet, vol. VII, Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires par Edgar Poe, 314. Paris: Conard. Mariani, Gaetano. 1970. Il primo Marinetti. Florence: Le Monnier. ———. 1971. Storia della Scapigliatura. Caltanissetta: Sciascia. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 1983. TIF. Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria. Milan: Mondadori, ‘I Meridiani’. Maurino, Ferdinando D. 1987. Boito and Baudelaire. Forum Italicum 21 (1): 88–94. McGuinness, Patrick. 2000. Introduction. In Symbolism, Decadence and the ‘fin de siècle’: French and European Perspectives, ed. Patrick McGuinness, 1–18. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

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Meltzer, Françoise. 2011. Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Moretti, Vincenzo. 2005. Giovanni Camerana: la donna, la madonna, l’idolo. In Scapigliatura e dintorni: ottocentisti minori e minimi verso il Novecento, 55–65. Milan: Lampi di stampa. Nardi, Piero. 1942. Vita di Arrigo Boito. Verona: Mondadori. ———. 1968. Scapigliatura: da Giuseppe Rovani a Carlo Dossi. Milan: Mondadori. Nemoianu, Virgil. 1984. The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Petrocchi, Giorgio. 1965. Sulla poesia di Giovanni Camerana. In Poesia e tecnica narrativa, 16–33. Milan: Mursia. Petrucciani, Mario. 1962. Emilio Praga. Turin: Einaudi. Pichois, Claude. 1975. Notices, notes et variantes. In Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Podavini, Davide. 2012. The Anthology Poeti futuristi: Poetry of Transition. In The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies, ed. Geert Buelens, Harald Hendrix, and Monica Jansen, 33–52. Lanham and Plymouth: Lexington Books. Pomilio, Tommaso. 1994. Le asimmetrie della sfera. In Arrigo Boito, ed. Giovanni Morelli, 61–78. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. Portinari, Folco. 1976. Un’idea di realismo. Naples: Guida. Praga, Emilio. 1969. PP. Poesie, ed. Mario Petrucciani. Bari: Laterza. Quadrelli, Rodolfo. 1981. Poesia e verità nel primo Boito. In Arrigo Boito, Poesie e racconti, ed. Rodolfo Quadrelli, 5–25. Milan: Mondadori. Robb, Graham. 1993. La Poésie de Baudelaire et la poésie française: 1838–1852. Paris: Aubier. Romanò, Angelo. 1958. Il secondo romanticismo lombardo e altri saggi sull’ottocento italiano. Milan: Fabbri. Sozzi Casanova, Adelaide. 1979. La Scapigliatura. Milan: Cooperativa libraria i.u.l.m. Spera, Francesco. 1994. Le sperimentazioni poetiche di Boito. In Arrigo Boito, ed. Giovanni Morelli, 1–13. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. Tarchetti, Igino Ugo. 1967. Tutte le opere, vol. II, ed. Enrico Ghidetti. Bologna: Cappelli. Tessari, Roberto. 1975. La Scapigliatura: un’avanguardia artistica nella società industriale. Turin: Paravia. Verlaine, Paul. 1972. Charles Baudelaire. In Œuvres en prose complètes, ed. Jacques Borel, 599–612. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Villa, Angela Ida. 2009. Introduzione. In Arrigo Boito, Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa, 7–38. Milan: Otto/Novecento.

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Vinall, Shirley W. 2000. Marinetti, Soffici, and French Literature. In International Futurism in Arts and Literature, ed. Günter Berghaus, 15–38. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. Ward, Patricia A. 2001. Preface. In Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity, ed. Patricia A. Ward, ix–x. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Weir, David. 1995. Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

CHAPTER 2

Unpoetic Poetry and the Rise of Modernity: Science and Medicine in the Scapigliatura

Stylistic Irregularity and Scientific Polemic in Arrigo Boito’s Il libro dei versi Oxymora and Juxtapositions in Boito’s Realism In the past century, many an adjective has been used by scholars to describe writer, composer, and librettist Arrigo Boito, among which one of the most colourful is certainly the military term ‘transfuga’ (Mariani 1971, 43), translatable into English as defector. This adjective is now frequently employed when discussing Boito’s departure from the milieu of the Scapigliatura, which according to Villa (2009a, 36) occurred in the early 1870s, hence even before the premature death of his friend, colleague, and fellow poet of the Scapigliatura Emilio Praga in December 1875. This is, however, only partially accurate: Boito’s interest in his own poems written during the 1860s, most of which had already been published in various journals, continued throughout his life, inasmuch as he gathered these poems in Il libro dei versi. This is Boito’s only collection of poetry, published for the first time in 1877 and subsequently in 1902 with some variants. After his Scapigliatura period, Boito received many honours and awards particularly for the second version (1875) of his opera Mefistofele, for which he composed both the music and the libretto, as well as for his work © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Cabiati, Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92018-0_2

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as librettist for other composers, most notably for Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893). At the beginning of the twentieth century, Boito had become one of the most important personalities in Italian culture. During that time, Boito occasionally recalled his youthful years with the Scapigliatura in his correspondence with friends, as in the letter sent to French musicologist Camille Bellaigue in March 1908. Before describing a brief experience with drugs, Boito affirms: Quand j’étais jeune et Baudelairien, j’avais dressé mes nerfs aux joies du haschisch. (Letter reproduced by Nardi 1942, 229) [When I was young and Baudelairian, I had trained my nerves for the joys of hashish.]

Boito describes himself in his youth, during his 1860s phase in the Scapigliatura, as Baudelairian. Another document delineates more clearly what he might mean with the expression ‘Baudelairien’, namely the missive that a young Boito sent to Praga in April 1866. Boito reports the news of Baudelaire’s death, which later would be proven false, in the following manner: Non vedremo più Baudelaire. Ti mando la funebre notizia che ho letta con tetra commozione in questo momento. Il Realismo muore, fratello, muore nella doppia morte dell’anima e del corpo. I realisti agonizzano senza prete al capezzale e vanno senza gloria. […] Tastiamoci il polso scambievolmente e, se batte ancora, Dio e Victor Hugo ci aiutino! J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans! (Letter reproduced by Nardi 1942, 349) [We will not see Baudelaire again. I send you the funereal news which I have read with grim emotion at this moment. Realism dies, brother, it dies in the double death of the soul and the body. Realists agonise without a priest at the bedside and go without glory. […] Let us feel our pulse reciprocally and, if it still beats, may God and Victor Hugo help us! J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans!]

What is evident in this passionate letter is a double devotion: firstly towards Baudelaire, who is considered here as the foremost advocate of a literary tendency described as ‘Realismo’, insofar as this trend—including Boito and Praga themselves—could not survive after the death of Baudelaire the ‘realist’; and secondly towards this very same ‘Realism’. It is thus safe to say that with the adjective ‘Baudelairien’, which he employs to describe his

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youthful years with the Scapigliatura in the above letter to Bellaigue, Boito means realist. Boito was not the first to describe Baudelaire as a ‘realist’. In Chap. 1 we have seen that in August 1857 the Tribunal de la Seine condemned six erotic poems of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, speaking of crude and offensive realism. With the term ‘Realism’, however, Boito does not intend to describe the lyrical treatment of offensive and obscene material, or at least not only. As he explains in the article ‘Polemica letteraria’, realists must indeed take into account the most disgusting facets of reality, but they also must not forget to portray its positive aspects. The ‘Polemica letteraria’, the first of the two manifestos of the poetry of the Scapigliatura, was published in the Milanese journal Figaro in February 1864, co-edited by Boito and Praga. Boito, who most likely co-authored the article together with Praga, describes the Scapigliatura as follows:1 E sarà un’arte malata, vaneggiante, al dire di molti, un’arte di decadenza, di barocchismo, di razionalismo, di realismo ed ecco finalmente la parola sputata. […] Realismo! […] E tanto sgomento in questa parola! Questi idealisti candidi e beati devono avere una assai triste idea di ciò che di reale v’ha sulla terra per schifarsene tanto (eppure v’hanno delle dolci realtà). (OL, 329–330) [And it will be an ill, delirious art, according to many, an art of decadence, of baroqueism, of rationalism, of realism and here is finally the word spat out. […] Realism! […] And so much dismay about this word! These candid and blissful idealists must have a very sad idea of what is real on earth to be so disgusted with it (yet there are sweet realities).]

In this section of the ‘Polemica letteraria’ it is possible to notice one of the stylistic techniques preferred by Boito, the oxymoronic juxtaposition of two concepts: the realism of the Scapigliatura has to represent the real in its entirety, and not only the negative and unpleasant elements that would certainly be well depicted by an art considered, with medical terms, as ill and delirious. Boito also takes into account the ‘sweet realities’, in an attempt to merge the contrasting aspects of reality into a single art. This vision of dualistic reality is also present in the letter concerning Baudelaire’s death that Boito sent to Praga. The whole epistle is a veritable homage to Baudelaire: the use of the oxymoron to express a contrasting emotion, difficult to categorise (‘tetra commozione’); the description of the death of realism in dualistic terms (‘doppia morte dell’anima e del corpo’); the

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concluding sentence, ‘J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans!’ taken from a poem of the Fleurs, namely ‘Spleen’ (LXXVI), which discusses the torments caused by ennui. Baudelaire influenced Boito’s dualistic and oxymoronic theories both stylistically and thematically. As we read in his introduction to Charles Asselineau’s La Double vie, published in 1858, since childhood Baudelaire had deemed himself a ‘homo duplex […] toujours double, action et intention, rêve et réalité; toujours l’un nuisant à l’autre, l’un usurpant la part de l’autre’ (OC II, 87) [‘homo duplex […] always double, action and intention, dream and reality; one always harming the other, one usurping the other’s share’]. He considered reality to be ambiguous and ambivalent, as we can understand from the section entitled ‘Spleen et Idéal’ in the Fleurs; in his compositions, the subjects have in most cases contradictory features, and his poetry has been described as ‘oxymoronic’ by many a scholar.2 In the third of his ‘Projets de préfaces’, Baudelaire himself explains the use of the oxymoron in the Fleurs as follows: la poésie se rattache aux arts de la peinture, de la cuisine et du cosmétique par la possibilité d’exprimer toute sensation de suavité ou d’amertume, de béatitude ou d’horreur, par l’accouplement de tel substantif avec tel adjectif, analogue ou contraire. (OC I, 183) [poetry is linked to the arts of painting, cooking, and cosmetics by the possibility of expressing any sensation of sweetness or bitterness, of beatitude or horror, by the coupling of a certain noun with a certain adjective, either analogous or contrary.]

The oxymoron is one of Baudelaire’s preferred figures of speech. It is frequently employed throughout his work, as part of titles of collections (Les Fleurs du Mal) or poems (‘Horreur sympathique’), as well as within his poetry. It is safe to say that according to Baudelaire contemporary reality, in its paradoxical duplicity, could be fully expressed only through the irregularity of the oxymoron, which acquires an ontological value in his work (Labarthe 1999, 572) in his attempt to unite contradictory elements to communicate the ineffable. An example of this can be found in the image of the swan portrayed in the poem ‘Le Cygne’. In order to describe the sense of alienation of a swan that has escaped from a cage and is flapping its wings on a dusty pavement of Paris looking for the water of its native lake, Baudelaire describes the animal as ‘ridicule et sublime’, comparing it to exiles from their own countries (OC I, 86). This last simile

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reveals the significance that Baudelaire accords to the image of the swan, veritable allegory of exile by means of which the poet expresses his own alienation in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, at a time when the city was being utterly transformed by Baron Haussmann’s urban renovations. Another illustration of Baudelaire’s attempt to convey the inexpressible is the subject of the poem ‘Les Petites vieilles’, namely the elderly women that live in the ‘vieilles capitales’, where ‘tout, même l’horreur, tourne aux enchantements’ (OC I, 89). In order to express his fascination for these irregular ‘monstres disloqués’, the poet describes them as ‘décrépits et charmants’ (OC I, 89). The illogicality of contemporary times and the duality of the human being are also treated by Boito in several poems of the collection Il libro dei versi. In ‘Dualismo’ (1863), the speaker describes himself as ‘luce ed ombra; angelica / Farfalla o verme immondo’ [‘light and darkness; angelic / Butterfly or disgusting worm’],3 and numerous oxymora convey a moral situation otherwise inexpressible, as during his reflections the speaker hears ‘La bestemmia dell’angelo’ [‘The blasphemy of the angel’] or ‘l’umile orazione / Dell’esule dimone / Che riede a Dio, fedel’ (OL, 53) [‘the humble prayer / Of the exiled demon / Who returns to God, faithful’]. The poet describes modern life as absurd and ‘idiotic’ (OL, 55), because he feels simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by it: ‘Lenta che pare un secolo, / Breve che pare un’ora’ (ibid.) [‘Slow that seems like a century, / Short that seems like an hour’]. Oxymora formed by the juxtaposition of single words or constructs, which bring together opposite ideas such as good/evil, attraction/repulsion, or beauty/ugliness, can be found in ‘A una mummia’, written in 1862. The main source for this poem is, I would argue, Edgar Allan Poe’s satirical short story ‘Some Words with a Mummy’, translated by Baudelaire as ‘Petite discussion avec une momie’ along with the other  Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, first published in 1857. Together with Carla Apollonio (1981, 110–112), we can assume that Boito—fluent in French but not in English—read Poe’s work through Baudelaire’s translations, which were very popular at the time. ‘Petite discussion avec une momie’ influenced ‘A una mummia’ on multiple levels: the aesthetic characterisation of the mummy, whose bandages are unusually made of papyrus, and not linen, in both works (NHE, 257; OL, 59); the mummy being ironically given a (possibly wrong) name both in ‘A una mummia’ (‘t’han chiamata a nome’, OL, 60 [‘they gave you a name’]) and in ‘Petite discussion avec une momie’ (‘Allamistakeo’, NHE, 256); the mummy experiencing cold (NHE, 264) in a country north of ancient

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Egypt (Boito writes ‘Nel gel d’un aer piorno’, OL, 60 [‘In the cold of a rainy day’]); the fantastic resurrection of the mummy, which if in Poe’s story is the focal point, in Boito’s occurs in the last stanza (OL, 61); and, above all, the polemic towards scientific progress and what Boito described as the restless and rapacious ‘Scïenza curïosa’ (OL, 59) [‘Curious science’] that stole the mummy from its resting place, which is now at the mercy of ignorant people that misuse (and abuse) the anthropological artefact in the nineteenth century. In the ‘Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe’, the preface to the Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, Baudelaire refers to Poe’s mummy while lashing out at scientific progress for having lost what was once considered important knowledge: je crois que la momie Allamistakeo n’aurait pas manqué de demander, avec le ton doux et discret de la supériorité, si c’était aussi grâce au progrès incessant,— à la loi fatale, irrésistible, du progrès,—que ce fameux secret avait été perdu. (OC II, 324) [I believe that the mummy Allamistakeo would not have failed to ask, with the soft and discreet tone of superiority, if it was also thanks to incessant progress,—to the fatal, irresistible law of progress,—that this famous secret had been lost.]

‘A una mummia’ is addressed to a mummy in an 1860s Egyptian museum in Turin, Italy, prisoner of a display cabinet among tourists, scholars, and greedy guides that are only interested in its commercial exploitation, in a world mockingly called ‘civilised’ (OL, 59). The poet’s condemnation of what he calls ‘curious science’—the emerging field of archaeology or, more precisely, of Western Egyptology—which promotes the profanation not only of tombs but also of Ancient Egyptian language and history for public entertainment, is plain in the following stanza: E venne il paleologo, Divinator de’ segni, A ordir sul tuo sarcofago Cifre di stirpi e regni; Fu vïolato intero Della tomba il mistero; T’han lisciate le chiome E t’han chiamata a nome. (OL, 59–60)

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[And the palaeologist came, Diviner of signs, To interpret from your sarcophagus Figures of dynasties and kingdoms; Entirely violated Was the mystery of the tomb; They smoothed your hair And gave you a name.]

The estrangement of the anthropological artefact is represented as an ‘eternal corpse’, described by the oxymoron ‘frale eterno’ (OL, 59); locked in a present-day museum, the mummy, born under the dazzling desert sun, is as alienated as Baudelaire’s swan is in contemporary Paris. The mummy is ‘fasciata in logori / Papiri sontuösi’ (OL, 59) [‘wrapped in worn-out, / Sumptuous papyri’], and the oxymoron between the adjectives ‘logori’ and ‘sontuösi’ defines an attempt to aesthetically characterise the mummy, to describe its charm. The fourth stanza introduces a further contradiction in the portrayal of this anthropological artefact. The crowd’s disgust at the sight of the mummy is conveyed by the following aesthetic analogy between dead, putrid mud and the mummy: ‘come appar su putrido / Brago una morta bolla / Tu comparisti ai cupidi / Stupori della folla’ (OL, 59) [‘as a dead bubble / Appears on putrid mud / You appeared to the greedy / Astonishment of the crowd’]. Yet, in opposition to the previous four lines, the mummy is subsequently considered as a ‘beautiful’ and ‘precious’ piece of refuse, worthy of display in a museum and, accordingly, of conversion into a lucrative object of mass consumption: Dal mondo incivilito Fosti segnata a dito Qual prezïoso e pulcro Rifiuto del sepulcro. (OL, 59) [The civilised world Declared you to be Precious and beautiful Refuse from the sepulchre.]

The juxtaposition between words belonging to different registers, namely between ‘Rifiuto’, a term of everyday language, and ‘pulcro’, a noble

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word, enhances the intensity of this third oxymoron, at least as much as the semantic clash of the rhyme ‘pulcro’/‘sepulcro’ does. Unlike the visitors of the museum who consider the mummy monstrous and ridiculous, since it inspires in them either horror or laughter, and who do not treat the anthropological artefact respectfully as a body that was once a living person (OL, 60), the poet is sympathetic to the life of the mummy when it was alive and possessed a ‘soul’, condemning its objectification brought about by its commercialisation and endorsed by modern science: Eppur chiudesti un’anima In quella sorda testa, Lo sento, e n’è riverbero Quella tua fronte mesta, Eppur sentisti il core Balzarti per amore, Eppur provasti il morso Del pianto e del rimorso. (OL, 60) [Yet you concealed a soul In that deaf head, I feel it, it is reflected On that sad brow of yours, Yet you felt the heart Leap for love, Yet you experienced the bite Of tears and remorse.]

Expressing commiseration—not devoid of a certain ironic tone—towards a grotesque subject only judged by its external appearance, this passage is close to Baudelaire’s compassionate portrayal of the old women in ‘Les Petites vieilles’,4 cruelly seen by the people of Paris simply as human refuse, ironically trapped in an elderly body for eternity—‘Débris d’humanité pour l’éternité mûrs’ (OC I, 91, my emphases)—but represented by the poet as monstrous yet sensitive beings who still possess ‘souls’: ‘Ces monstres disloqués furent jadis des femmes, / Éponine ou Laïs! Monstres brisés, bossus / Ou tordus, aimons-les! ce sont encor des âmes’ (OC I, 89). In ‘A una mummia’, oxymora and juxtapositions are employed to describe the paradoxical situation of an eternal mummified corpse of a human locked in a nineteenth-century museum, considered at the same time both horrible and charming, and this oxymoronic portrayal itself serves to convey Boito’s own fascination for this ugly poetic subject.

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The Aesthetics of Baudelaire’s Modern Beauty and Boito’s Quasimodos Aside from the representation of the duality of the modern world, the objective of Baudelaire’s oxymora and juxtapositions was to create Flowers of Evil, as the title of the collection suggests, that is to verbally transmute the hideous contemporary reality into beauty through his poetic art. Baudelaire firmly believed that ‘le beau est toujours bizarre. […] Je dis qu’il contient toujours un peu de bizarrerie, […] et que c’est cette bizarrerie qui le fait être particulièrement le Beau’ (‘Exposition universelle, 1855’, OC II, 578) [‘beauty is always bizarre. […] I mean that it always contains a certain amount of strangeness, […] and that it is this strangeness which makes it particularly the Beautiful’]. He also deemed ‘irregularity’ to be part of beauty: ‘ce qui n’est pas légèrement difforme a l’air insensible;—d’où il suit que l’irrégularité […] [est] une partie essentielle et la caractéristique de la beauté’  (Fusées, OC I, 656) [‘what is not slightly misshapen looks insensible;—whence it follows that irregularity […] [is] an essential part and characteristic of beauty’]. Baudelaire contemplated passion and feelings, even the most terrible ones, as characteristics of beauty, and this as dualistically formed of ‘un élément éternel, invariable […] et d’un élément relatif, circonstanciel, qui sera […] l’époque, la mode, la morale, la passion’ (Le Peintre de la vie moderne, OC II, 685) [‘an eternal, invariable element […] and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be […] the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions’ (PML, 3)]. This definition of beauty relative to its times derives from the notion of ‘modernity’ as discussed in Chap. 1, in which it was shown that for Baudelaire the aim of the artist must be ‘to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory’ (PML, 12). Contemporary Paris and the various characters of the modern metropolis, with all their aesthetic and moral ugliness, thereby become some of Baudelaire’s favourite subjects, particularly from the 1861 edition of the Fleurs, as the section ‘Tableaux parisiens’ demonstrates. Even though Baudelaire, like Boito, does discuss the opposition between contemporary reality and antiquity in poems such as ‘La Muse malade’ and ‘J’aime le souvenir…’, for the most part his poetic subjects are characters living in present times. The city becomes the expression of modernity with its grotesque and monstrous inhabitants (courtesans, elderly, blind people, and so forth). In addition to representing the duplicity of modern life, the oxymoron becomes the rhetorical figure of the

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duplicity of beauty that is no longer seen as absolute (as in Platonic and idealistic aesthetic theories), but relative and subjective, thus permitting the poetic transmutation of ugliness into beauty and of the ‘relative’ and transitory element of the contemporary world into eternal art. Baudelaire indeed retained some elements of Platonism in his poetics, such as the notion of spiritual elevation by means of beauty displayed in ‘Élévation’ (OC I, 10), but his conception of relative beauty is evident in the opening of ‘Hymne à la Beauté’: Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme, Ô Beauté? ton regard, infernal et divin, Verse confusément le bienfait et le crime, Et l’on peut pour cela te comparer au vin. (OC I, 24)

According to Baudelaire, the road to beauty and the ideal passes through the reassembling of the double and mostly contrasting aspects of reality. As well as exploiting the capacity of the oxymoron to unite opposites, however, Baudelaire makes use of dualistic structures to debunk and subvert conventional poetic conceits, in particular about beauty and love. In ‘Une charogne’, which strongly influenced Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’, Praga’s ‘A un feto’, and Giovanni Camerana’s ‘Ad Sepultam’ (II), as well as various poems included in I poeti futuristi, as will be shown later on, the contrast between the real and the ideal of the various sections is resolved in a macabre and demystifying ending. This ‘taste for the horrible’ (‘Choix de maximes consolantes sur l’amour’, OC I, 548–549) and for disharmonic forms that is characteristic of Baudelaire, is also present in Boito’s work. In the 1865 letter that he sent to Cletto Arrighi as introduction to the poem ‘Ballatella’, Boito writes: Noi scapigliati romantici in ira, alle regolari leggi del Bello, prediligiamo i Quasimodi nelle nostre fantasticherie. (OL, 11) [We, the enraged Romantic Scapigliati, to the regular laws of Beauty, prefer the Quasimodos in our fantasies.]

This choice of the irregular ‘Quasimodos’, with the explicit reference to the ugly and grotesque hunchback of Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, over the ‘regular laws of Beauty’ characterises most of the poems of Il libro dei versi. After all, as shown in the letter written to Praga concerning

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Baudelaire’s death, Boito makes a plea to Hugo for his help (‘may God and Victor Hugo help us!’); Hugo’s name does not appear here by chance, nor in order to invoke Romantic idealism now that its supposed opposite, realism, is dead with Baudelaire, as Nardi (1942, 350) has suggested. In Boito’s view, Hugo’s Romanticism is to be considered as part of ‘Realismo’, of the idea of realism that pertains to the Scapigliatura. In the well-known ‘Préface’ to his drama  Cromwell  (1827), Hugo discussed the grotesque elements that, however fanciful and bizarre, are necessary to depict reality and, therefore, the true nature of the human being: La poésie née du christianisme, la poésie de notre temps est donc le drame; le caractère du drame est le réel; le réel résulte de la combinaison toute naturelle de deux types, le sublime et le grotesque, qui se croisent dans le drame, comme ils se croisent dans la vie et dans la création. (Hugo 1964, 425) [The poetry born of Christianity, the poetry of our time, is therefore the drama; the character of the drama is the real; the real results from the perfectly natural combination of two types, the sublime and the grotesque, which intersect in the drama, as they intersect in life and in creation.]

Boito’s statement regarding the use of the ‘Quasimodos’ and ‘fantasies’ as sources of poetry highlights the preference for a treatment of the subject matter rooted in fantasy, including unrealistic and hyperbolic elements instead of being a mere mimetic copy of reality. One of Boito’s ‘Quasimodos’ is certainly the aforementioned mummy, representative of the aesthetic and moral ugliness in modern times yet represented with both a positive and a negative terminology. It is surely worth investigating if Boito himself was trying to create his Fleurs du Mal in Il libro dei versi, namely to illustrate the beauty of the most horrendous elements of the real. The first thing to notice in the introduction to ‘Ballatella’ is that the departure from the ‘regular laws of Beauty’ does not lead to a theoretical foundation of a new aesthetic category and to the conception of a relative beauty inherent in the ‘ugly’ nineteenth century. In his representation of the charms of the horrible artefact, in ‘A una mummia’ Boito either praises the splendid elements of the past at odds with what remains of the mummy in the present day, such as the antique and ‘worn-out, / Sumptuous papyri’, or conveys the contrasting feelings of desire, revulsion, and amusement of nineteenth-century people in front of the anthropological artefact, thus only indirectly stating his liking of—and sympathy for—the

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mummy. By choosing to treat poetically unpleasant and irregular subjects, during his Scapigliatura period Boito refused the Platonic notion of absolute, regular, and proportioned beauty, considered too abstract. He admits this in ‘Dualismo’ with the following stanza: E sogno un’Arte eterea Che forse in cielo ha norma, Franca dai rudi vincoli Del metro e della forma, Piena dell’Ideale Che mi fa batter l’ale E che seguir non so. (OL, 54–55) [And I dream of an ethereal Art That perhaps in heaven is regulated, Free from the harsh constraints Of metre and form, Full of the Ideal That makes my wings beat And I do not know how to follow.]

The traditional notion of the ideal, which still remains part of Boito’s conception of a ‘Realism’ capable of conveying the whole human experience characterised by instability and vicissitudes between ‘heaven and hell’ or ‘sin’ and ‘virtue’ (OL, 55), is felt as being unreachable, hence the distinctive preference for the ‘Arte reproba / Che smaga il mio pensiero / Dietro le basse immagini / D’un ver che mente al Vero’ (OL, 55) [‘Reprobate art / That corrupts my thought / Behind the low images / Of a truth that lies to the Truth’]. Despite some revolutionary statements that hint at the possible relativity of beauty which could have been uttered by Baudelaire, such as ‘il Bello può incarnarsi con tutte le varietà della forma, le più bizzarre, le più molteplici, le più disparate’5 [‘Beauty can be embodied in all the varieties of the form, the most bizarre, the most varied, the most disparate ones’], however, in his poetic compositions and in his articles Boito tends to maintain the traditional opposition between ugliness and absolute, conventional beauty. Therefore, the ‘regular laws of Beauty’ are occasionally placed in sharp contrast with grotesque and monstrous figures, and when these combine by means of oxymora and juxtapositions, as often happens in Boito, it is to comprehensively portray a paradoxical reality and, consequently, to parody those very same ‘regular laws of Beauty’.

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Accordingly, in Il libro dei versi the juxtapositions serve not to represent the duality of beauty, but to depict the dualisms of life: the definition of Baudelaire as the leading author of ‘Realism’ has to be considered in this manner. Boito’s realism aims not so much to transform aesthetic ugliness or moral desperation into poetic material by showing their relative beauty, as to represent them in poetry with an evident fondness and sympathy as products of the loss of a traditional and antiquated idea of beauty. This loss involves the refusal of notions of religious truth and morality, and gave Boito the possibility to deal with any kind of material without any moralistic purposes (see Villa 2009a, 7–8). The choice of certain poetic subjects entailed a specific aesthetic selection: as Boito affirms in ‘A Giovanni Camerana’ (1865), ‘E non trovando il Bello / Ci abbranchiamo all’Orrendo’ (OL, 80) [‘And not finding Beauty / We grab hold of the Hideous’]. Claiming with a belligerent and proto-avant-garde vocabulary that in order to lead art to the future it was necessary to ‘pungere, di piagare, di crivellare’ [‘puncture, to wound, to perforate’], and that pessimism was ‘l’angolo acuto dell’intelletto’ (‘Polemica letteraria’, OL, 330) [‘the acute angle of the intellect’], Boito resolves to create poetry that deals with ugly and irregular subjects, and to write about the decadence of modern times. In the next sections, we will see that for Boito writing about the decadence of modern times entails a focus on the ‘decadence’ that is modern science, and that, paradoxically, his lyrical fascination for science and medicine provided him with the tools to develop his poetics of modernity, experimenting with impersonal language, focusing on organic and inorganic matter, and consequently expanding the range of (un)poetic subjects and forms of representation. Decadence, Progress, and the Irregular Forms of Modernity As already shown, Boito described his art as ‘malata, vaneggiante, al dire di molti, un’arte di decadenza’, thus converting a medical terminology that critics and detractors might have used as insult (‘al dire di molti’), such as ‘ill’, ‘delirious’, and ‘decadence’, into positive expressions. In the 1840s and 1850s, alongside Gautier, Baudelaire had already redefined the word ‘décadence’, attaching different meanings to it, linking it to a medical imagery of nervous and physical malady, and identifying it ‘with a new and modern poetic movement’ (McGuinness 2000, 3). In the ‘Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe’, for example, Baudelaire strips the idea of decadence

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of its negative connotations. There, Baudelaire first sarcastically criticises the existing conception of ‘decadence’ in nineteenth-century France as used by contemporary critics following a traditional idea of beauty: ‘littérature de décadence!—Paroles vides que nous entendons souvent tomber, avec la sonorité d’un bâillement emphatique, de la bouche de ces sphinx sans énigme qui veillent devant les portes saintes de l’Esthétique classique’ (OC II, 319) [‘decadent literature!—Empty words which we often hear fall, with the sonority of a deep yawn, from the mouths of those unenigmatic sphinxes who keep watch before the sacred doors of classical Aesthetics’ (Baudelaire 1964, 117)]. Baudelaire then exposes his idea of literature of decadence and declares that themes involving illness and decay, as symbolised by the figure of the setting sun, are preferred by certain poets: ‘dans les jeux de ce soleil agonisant, certains esprits poétiques trouveront des délices nouvelles […]. Et le coucher du soleil leur apparaîtra en effet comme la merveilleuse allégorie d’une âme chargée de vie’ (OC II, 320) [‘in the play of light of the dying sun certain poetic spirits will find new delights […]. And indeed the sunset will appear to them like the marvelous allegory of a soul filled with life’ (Baudelaire 1964, 118)]. Subsequently, he discusses the concept of decline in contemporary times, and the notion that writers are obliged to work in a world dominated by the obsessive idea of scientific and technological progress, described as veritable decadence and ‘cette grande hérésie de la décrépitude’ (OC II, 324) [‘the great heresy of decay’ (Baudelaire 1964, 122)]. According to Baudelaire, since the new ‘decadent literature’ transmutes the ugly products of the decline of Western civilisation into poetry, this must be considered as the art of modernity, which can be qualitatively comparable to Classical literature and aesthetics. This essay was well known to Praga, who co-signed the ‘Polemica letteraria’ with Boito in 1864  in which the realism of the Scapigliatura is described as an ‘art of decadence’. In 1871, Praga explicitly quoted Baudelaire’s ‘Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe’ in the fourth article entitled ‘L’esposizione di Belle Arti: lettere e divagazioni’, published on 27 September in the journal Il Pungolo, paraphrasing from ‘Notes nouvelles’ the idea that the aesthetic process itself, and not morality or moralism, had therapeutic properties and could accordingly ‘cure’ any kind of ‘ill’ material: ‘l’arte basta a se stessa […]; quando il suo soffio, passa sano e robusto, ciò che resta dietro di lei è innalzato alla sua dignità’ (Praga 1984, 1053) [‘art is self-sufficient […]; when her breath passes healthy and robust, what remains behind her is raised to her dignity’].

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It is possible to observe Baudelaire’s disgust towards materialistic progress in various writings, among which is an article dedicated to the modern notion of progress applied to art, part of his report on the 1855 Exposition universelle. Baudelaire writes that ‘l’idée du progrès […] jette des ténèbres sur tous les objets de la connaissance; la liberté s’évanouit, le châtiment disparaît’ (OC II, 580) [‘the idea of progress […] casts darkness over all objects of knowledge; freedom vanishes, discipline disappears’]. This vision of progress as a restriction of individual and artistic liberty is very close to Boito’s ideas as expressed in the novella-essay ‘La musica in piazza’ (1870–1871), in which he declares that ‘uno dei risultati del progresso è l’ammansamento, l’ingabbiamento volontario di tutte le cose e di tutti gli animali, compreso l’uomo. […] Non v’è gabbia senza circoscrizione di spazio e di libertà […] Dunque fuor dalla gabbia!’ (OL, 200) [‘one of the results of progress is taming, the voluntary caging of all things and all animals, including humans. […] There is no cage without a circumscription of space and of freedom […]. So out of the cage!’]. It is therefore understandable why in several poems of the Libro dei versi Boito condemns the products of modern science and technological progress: photography, in ‘Madrigale’; archeology that for purely commercial purposes conserves the mummy in a museum, in ‘A una mummia’; medicine that immodestly dissects the body of a young girl, in ‘Lezione d’anatomia’; architecture, with its fierce demolition of old buildings and the even fiercer construction of new, in ‘Case nuove’; the restoration of an Ancient Greek statue of Venus, in ‘Un torso’. In Boito’s poetic compositions, scientific progress is not treated as a positive subject, or as a possibility of advancement for humanity. On the contrary, its negative aspects serve as source material for the new art of the Scapigliatura, which represents an aesthetic and moral correlative of the degeneration of contemporary times. The association between poetry and modern forms is evident in the poem ‘Case nuove’, in which the city, far from being a mere subject of the poem, becomes an active agent of modernity in the process of poetic creation. Boito composes a bitter, sarcastic, and cacophonous ‘ode to the lime and the level’ (OL, 58), which are both inorganic materials used in construction, and emphasises the equivalence between the disharmonic form of the poem and the irregularity of the gloomy city with its new buildings in the following manner, in what can be considered to be an experimental anticipation of free verse:

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Zappe, scuri, scarpelli. Arïeti, martelli, Istrumenti di strage e di ruina, L’impero è vostro! O tempi irrequïeti! […] Sorge ogni giorno qualche casa bianca Grave di fregi vieti Scuri, zappe, arïeti. Smantellate, abbattete e gaia e franca Suoni l’ode alla calce e al rettifilo! Piangan pure i poeti. La progenie dei lupi e delle scrofe Oggi è sovrana e intanto le pareti Della vecchia cittade hanno un profilo Scomposto e tetro,—simigliante al metro Di questa strofe. (OL, 58) [Hoes, axes, chisels. Battering rams, hammers, Instruments of carnage and destruction, The empire is yours! O troubled times! […] Every day new white houses appear Full of old friezes Axes, hoes, Battering rams. Dismantle, tear down and let The ode to the lime and the level play merry And frank! Let the poets weep. The descendants of wolves and sows Today rule, meanwhile the walls Of the old city have a profile Irregular and gloomy,—similar to the metre Of this stanza.]

The internal rhyme ‘tetro’/‘metro’ expresses the poet’s moral dejection, which becomes part of the formal structure of the composition alongside the irregular outline of the city, and recalls the lines ‘con tetro / Tedio, avvicendo il metro’ [‘with gloomy / Boredom, I alternate the metre’] from ‘Dualismo’ (OL, 53) that convey the speaker’s emotional distress. The incorporation of the features of the modern city into the poem entails the choice of an asymmetrical and varied metrical scheme. It also requires the poet to introduce a new category of unpoetic words,

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such as ‘hammers’, ‘lime’, ‘axes’, ‘battering rams’, whose repetition simulates the cacophonous sounds and rhythms of the demolition and construction of houses; dissonant rhymes, such as ‘poeti’/‘pareti’; and verses that are able to stress even more the analogy between poetry and the city, as Baudelaire had already claimed in ‘Le Soleil’: Je vais m’exercer seul à ma fantasque escrime, Flairant dans tous les coins les hasards de la rime, Trébuchant sur les mots comme sur les pavés, Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés. (OC I, 83)

Boito’s experimental rhyming technique in ‘Case nuove’ had already been used in a similar manner by Baudelaire in some poems of the Fleurs. ‘Case nuove’ involves the bizarre association in rhyme position of words belonging to different registers and categories, bringing together poetic expressions and vulgar or technical images of everyday life such as ‘poeti’/‘pareti’, ‘scrofe’/‘strofe’, ‘fregi vieti’/‘arïeti’, ‘fogna’/‘sogna’ (‘sewer’/‘[a man who] dreams’) (OL, 58). Baudelaire had discussed Poe’s strange and peculiar rhyme associations in ‘Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe’, claiming that Poe tried to ‘rajeunir, à redoubler le plaisir de la rime en y ajoutant cet élément inattendu, l’étrangeté’ (OC II, 336) [‘renew, to redouble the pleasure derived from rhyme by adding to it an unexpected element, the strange’ (Baudelaire 1964, 134)]. In the famous poem ‘Une charogne’, Baudelaire certainly introduced this ‘strangeness’ into his own poetry by rhyming the following words, belonging to either a most Romantic or a vulgar/medical register: ‘mon âme’ and ‘infâme’; ‘pourriture’ and ‘grande Nature’; ‘infection’ and ‘passion’; ‘grâces’ and ‘grasses’; ‘vermine’ and ‘divine’ (OC I, 31–32). In ‘Le Soleil’, Baudelaire employs a parallel method, and illustrates the ‘chance of a rhyme’ that the poet finds in the city with the rhyme ‘pavés’/‘rêvés’ (OC I, 83), similar to Boito’s ‘poeti’/‘pareti’ and ‘fogna’/‘sogna’. In ‘Case nuove’, Boito himself explicitly acknowledges that the uncontrolled construction of new buildings, the ‘new houses’ of the title, is the expression of the decadence of humanity in contemporary times: ‘L’umanità cammina / Ratta così che par sovra una china’ (OL, 58) [‘Humanity walks / quickly so that it appears on a slope’]. Considering the many metapoetic references present in ‘Case nuove’ and in other poems of the Libro dei versi, such as ‘Let the poets weep’, it is certainly possible to speak of the decadence of an art that struggles to cope with modernity, and that gradually loses importance in

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modern society, as Spera (1994, 2–3), Finotti (1994, 48), and Dell’Aquila (1981, 65), among others, have pointed out. It has to be taken into account, however, that in Il libro dei versi Boito proudly shows his many wreckages of decadence, science, and medicine to be the only possible subjects of present times, inasmuch as in ‘A Giovanni Camerana’ they are described—and in particular the ‘aborted foetus’ (OL, 80) that appears in poems such as Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ and Praga’s ‘A un feto’—as a ‘trophy’ of the Scapigliatura’s ‘Art’ (OL, 80), and in ‘A Emilio Praga’ as ‘il segno della nostra gloria’ (OL, 77) [‘the sign of our glory’]. In these two poems dedicated to his fellow poets of the Scapigliatura, Praga and Camerana, Boito announces their common ideals and status as veritable poètes maudits and misfits in a hostile society, while, admittedly, also ostentatiously posing as one of the (if not the) most accursed of them all. In ‘A Emilio Praga’ Boito defines the Scapigliatura’s art as futuristic, an ‘Arte dell’avvenire’ [‘Art of the future’], and speaks of an antagonistic crowd who mocks them and ‘intuona per le piazze / La fanfara dell’ire’ (OL, 77) [‘across squares starts to play / The fanfare of rage’]. In ‘A Giovanni Camerana’, Boito announces his ‘mad revolt’ and proclaims himself as one of the first in the Scapigliatura to shout ‘il canto anatemico e macabro’ [‘the cursed and macabre chant’], also employing the oxymoron ‘bestemmia / Sublime e strana’ [‘sublime and strange / Blasphemy’] to describe the contrasting features of Praga’s poetry (OL, 80). In ‘A Emilio Praga’, Boito figuratively depicts the unfortunate yet honourable condition of the poets of the Scapigliatura by means of metaphors involving images of illness, fall, and decadence, emphasising the sense of loss of traditional values and the subsequent focus on miserable poetic subjects of modernity with expressions such as ‘salute’ (‘health’), ‘smorti’ (‘pale’), ‘cadute’ (‘falls’), (OL, 77) and, most notably, with the following passage: Or sul suol piombiam verso il fatale Peso che a’ pesi è somma, Or balziam nel ciel dell’Ideale, Vuote palle di gomma. (OL, 77) [Now on the ground we fall towards the fatal Weight which is the sum of weights, Now we leap into the heaven of the Ideal, Empty rubber balls.]

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The dejected tone of the whole composition, where the poet ‘Rifec[e] il voto a una [su]a forte mèta / E cento volte e mille’ [‘Renewed his vow to one of his strong goals / A hundred times and a thousand’] and yet his poetry is described as ‘Vanità! Vanità! glorie sognate! / Perdute illusïoni!’ (OL, 76) [‘Vanity! Vanity! glories dreamed of! / Lost illusions!’], shares many similarities with the description of the paradoxical situation of the human being who is always optimistic, ‘dont jamais l’espérance n’est lasse’, but whose ‘Amour…gloire…bonheur!’ are in fact solely a dangerous ‘reef’ (OC I, 130) against which a ship can crash, recounted in the second section of Baudelaire’s ‘Le Voyage’. Most significantly, the prosaic and everyday image of the rubber ball that leaps into the sky, which in ‘A Emilio Praga’ is used to represent a constant yet futile—and burdensome—search for the artistic ideal, is plainly taken from the first quatrain of that second section of ‘Le Voyage’, namely from the following lines that, in an analogous fashion to ‘A Emilio Praga’, are narrated in the first-­person plural: ‘Nous imitions, horreur! La toupie et la boule / Dans leur valse et leurs bonds’ (OC I, 130). This unambiguously emphasises the importance that—in a similar manner to Baudelaire—Boito, Praga, and Camerana gave to poetic material taken from the negative aspects of modern life, either aesthetic or psychological, which were the preferred choice of the Scapigliatura’s poets. The composition ‘Un torso’, written in 1862, represents one of Boito’s most significant wreckages of illness and contemporary decadence. The poem portrays the degradation of an ancient Greek statue of Venus, from the time when it was only a block of marble on the top of a mountain to its present state in the form of a grotesque torso without limbs or head, which allegorically represents the change of aesthetic principles since the Classical period (see Villa 2009b, 414). Even though there may still be a place for the Platonic conception of beauty in the juxtaposition of the block of marble (representing the abstract ideal) and the statue (representing the creation of the artist), in ‘Un torso’ Boito is more interested in the relationship between past and present, and in the opposition between Classical forms and the deformations of modern times. The poetic sources and muses of the Scapigliatura are not regular and healthy anymore, rather they are mutilated and ill, and represent their choice of an alternative aesthetic model compared to that present in the Greek-Roman world: Quel torso era una Venere Che un arcaico scalpello Creò ne’ suoi più fervidi

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Morsi d’amor col Bello; Oggi, marmoreo enigma Dall’olimpico stigma, Di tant’arte non resta Che un busto senza testa. Pur nelle tronche viscere La Dea non è ancor morta, Un’agonia di secoli La fece fredda e smorta, Ma nella nuda fibra Palpita, guizza, vibra, Quasi monco serpente, L’Eginetica mente. Così le fece il genio Le piaghe sue più grame, E le eternò il martirio Di Mosca e di Bertrame. Pur colle rotte braccia Quel torso ancor m’allaccia, E al secolo che raglia Sembra cercar battaglia. (OL, 62) [That torso was a Venus Which an archaic chisel Created in his most fervent Love bites with Beauty; Today, marble enigma With an Olympic style, Of all that art is left Only a headless bust. Even in her broken bowels The Goddess is not dead yet, An agony of centuries Made her cold and pale, But in the bare fibre The mind from Aegina Throbs, leaps, vibrates, Almost a maimed snake.

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Thus the genius made Her most miserable wounds And eternalised the martyrdom Of Mosca and Bertrame. Even with broken arms I am still drawn to that torso And against the century that brays It seems to be seeking battle.]

The Greek sculptor created the statue of the goddess of beauty in their most passionate ‘Love bites with Beauty’, and all that is left in the present is a grotesque torso. The torso still retains some charm and appeal, although in a contradictory manner is deformed, since the goddess (that is, beauty) is still present in the statue (‘non è ancor morta’), but she is described with a medical terminology as ill and moribund (‘Un’agonia di secoli / La fece fredda e smorta’), possessing human physical features, such as bowels and wounds, that make the statue resemble a genuine mutilated corpse (‘tronche viscere’; ‘nuda fibra’; ‘piaghe’). The simile between ‘l’Eginetica mente’, the remnant of Classical beauty that still pulsates in the sculpture, and the horrible, maimed serpent that springs up serves as another oxymoronic juxtaposition between beauty and ugliness, describing the fascinating irregular form of the torso in modernity. The analogy between the shape of the snake and a mutilated female body was already made by Baudelaire in ‘Une martyre’, a poem that is more thoroughly analysed further in this chapter in conjunction with Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’. ‘Une martyre’, subtitled ‘Drawing by an Unknown Master’ (OC I, 111), is a verbal transposition of a (supposedly fictional) work of visual art, or ekphrasis. This poem minutely describes the decapitated corpse of a woman lying on a bed, whose ‘tronc nu’ shows her ‘beauté fatale’ as well as her youth (OC I, 112). The comparison between the image of the springing ‘reptile’—used as a synonym for snake—and the features of the maimed corpse is similar to that employed by Boito in ‘Un torso’, albeit even more realistically described: ‘La hanche un peu pointue et la taille fringante / Ainsi qu’un reptile irrité’ (OC I, 112). As a matter of fact, Boito’s poem can also be considered as an example of ekphrasis since both authors portray a mutilated female body that is already a work of art. They both also refer to this mutilation as a martyrdom— Baudelaire in the title of his composition, and Boito by means of the following lines: ‘E le eternò il martirio’.

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In ‘Un torso’, the speaker’s fondness for the current mutilated features of the statue is explicit in the lines ‘Pur colle rotte braccia / Quel torso ancor m’allaccia’; with a belligerent image, the last line of the third stanza explains how the bust ‘seems to be seeking battle’ in the nineteenth century, which is an epoch that is as ignorant as a donkey (‘raglia’) towards the new aesthetic theories of the Scapigliatura. Boito indeed seems to declare that aesthetic ideals have deteriorated since the Classical Golden Age. Yet despite the apparent sentimentalism towards Greece and the Roman world (in which there is also a reference to the debauched Latin decadence experienced by the statue),6 the main poetic subject is still the mutilated torso of contemporary times. Despite the Parnassian, or better proto-Parnassian7 influence that Mariani,8 among others, has pointed out and that are mainly in the broad idea of a poem addressed to a statue of Venus, ‘Un torso’ does not deal with the nostalgic evocations of a remote past precisely because of Boito’s conscious and proud choice of the ugly torso as a model for the Scapigliatura’s art, and as a new aesthetic paradigm of modern times. This predilection for the present over the past is clear in the ironic conclusion of the poem, which stands in opposition to the celebration of Classical beauty of (proto)Parnassian poems such as Théodore de Banville’s ‘À Vénus de Milo’ (1842), where the poet strives to reconstruct the original shape of the statue (‘si vous retrouviez un jour vos bras perdus […]’, Banville 2000, 225 [‘if one day you found your lost arms’]). The last stanza denounces attempts to restore artistic ideals that were certainly noble but by then obsolete, and is a straightforward polemic against progress and the modern science of restoration: Ma no! questa prosaïca Gente ch’or ti raccolse, Adoratrice instabile D’arti sfrenate o bolse, Oggi forse minaccia Quelle tue monche braccia Di più fiero dolore: Il restäuratore. (OL, 64) [But no! these prosaic People who have picked you up now, Unstable lovers Of excessive or ostentatious arts,

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Today perhaps threaten Those maimed arms of yours With fiercer pain: The restorer.]

According to Boito, it is preferable that the torso remains as such, even if it is mutilated and deformed, instead of trying to repair it in an age so distant from when it was created. Rather than Parnassian or proto-­ Parnassian texts, therefore, a more appropriate comparison would be with contemporary compositions which were also influenced by Baudelaire’s aesthetic ideas and ironically deformed the physical appearance of the goddess of beauty, such as Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Venus Anadyomène’, written in 1870. Rimbaud similarly subverts a Classical notion of beauty, controversially representing Venus as a modern-day woman with a hideous body (Rimbaud 2009, 65). A parallel analysis of the contrast between Classical beauty and irregular, ill forms of modernity is, after all, present in Baudelaire’s poetry, most notably in ‘J’aime le souvenir …’. In the first section of this poem, Baudelaire describes the physical appearance of the human being in the Classical Golden Age, when Phoebus used to ‘dorer les statues’ (OC I, 11). Men and women were vigorous and thus a perfect model for the poet. The beauty of their bodies and their ‘chair lisse et ferme appelait les morsures’ (OC I, 11). The second section of the poem introduces the discourse of the decadence of present times, which is characterised by decrepit bodies: human beings are transformed into ‘monstrosities’ and ironic torsos, ‘ridicules troncs! torses dignes des masques!’ (OC I, 12). Baudelaire also criticises progress and the materialist mentality, given that the degradation of the body has been caused by the ‘dieu de l’Utile, implacable et serein’ (OC I, 12). Consequently, in the nineteenth century the modern, corrupted, and ‘unhealthy races’ have a new kind of beauty, which is represented by the ‘femmes […] pâles comme des cierges, / Que ronge et que nourrit la débauche’ (OC I, 12). Analogously to ‘Un torso’, in Baudelaire’s composition there is a stark juxtaposition of Classical beauty with the ill and irregular images of modernity. By employing a proto-Parnassian imagery alongside a typical Baudelairian theme, Boito substitutes Baudelaire’s ‘corps de la Beauté antique [qui] se fragmente en autant de “troncs” et de “torses” caricaturaux’ (Labarthe 1999, 323) [‘body of ancient Beauty [which] breaks up into as many caricatural “trunks” and “torsos”’] with a marble torso equally

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grotesque. In Boito’s poem there is little place for the erotic double entendres present in ‘J’aime le souvenir…’, but he still strives to convey the sensuality of the aesthetic forms of antiquity. In actuality, if in Baudelaire’s composition the beauty of the human body in the Golden Age was, like a fruit, a carnal invitation to the bites of love (‘la chair lisse et ferme appelait les morsures’), in ‘Un torso’ Boito writes that the Greek sculptor created the statue ‘ne’ suoi più fervidi / Morsi d’amor col Bello’ [‘in his most fervent / Love bites with Beauty’]. The Poet Against the Physician: ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ (1865), is one of Boito’s most famous and controversial compositions of Il libro dei versi. In 1936, Binni (1977, 58) already noticed Baudelaire’s influence on the poem, but he did not define it and dismissed the matter quickly by claiming that Boito ‘wanted to be Baudelairian’ but was actually closer to Giacomo Leopardi’s Romantic poem ‘Nella morte di una donna fatta trucidare col suo portato …’. What Binni probably did not perceive is the subtle irony present in the last part of the poem that demystifies its seemingly Romantic idealisation. In ‘Lezione d’anatomia’, the strident juxtaposition of beautiful/sentimental and horrendous/medical elements marks the impossible sublimation of the lacerated cadaver of an adolescent girl. The poem is composed of stanzas that oppose the physician’s anatomical dissection of the corpse to the flights of fancy of the poet, who strives to idealise the horrible scene under his eyes. The poem reaches its climax with the contrasting encounter between the following stanzas, which juxtapose the abstract image of the religiously pure heart of the young girl and the unpoetically concrete heart that the anatomist violently tears from her chest during his lesson: Pur quella vergine Senza sudario Sperò, nell’ore Più melanconiche Come un santuario Chiuse il suo cuore, Ed ora il clinico Che glielo svelle Grida ed esorta: ‘Ecco le valvole,’

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‘Ecco le celle,’ ‘Ecco l’aòrta.’ (OL, 75) [Yet that virgin Without a shroud Had hopes, in the Most melancholic hours Like a sanctuary She closed her heart, And now the clinician Who tears it open Screams and encourages: ‘Here are the valves,’ ‘Here are the cells,’ ‘Here is the aorta.’]

With its scientific-anatomical vocabulary, the realistic stanza appears to block any attempt at Romantic sentimental daydreaming on the beautiful adolescent. However, when the poem approaches its conclusion, the speaker seems to idealise the cadaver of the girl, who is imaged in a Petrarchan fashion as a ‘Fanciulla pia, / Dolce, purissima, / Fiore languente, / Di poësia!’ (OL, 76) [‘Pious girl, / Sweet, most pure, / Languid flower, / Of poetry!’]. The contrast between the sublime and the horrendous or, in other words, between the poetic and the medical returns in the last stanza, where the speaker finally resolves this conflict by ending the poem with an image of deformity: E mentre suscito Nel mio segreto Quei sogni adorni, … In quel cadavere Si scopre un feto Di trenta giorni. (OL, 76) [And while I rouse Those adorned dreams In my mind, … In that corpse A foetus of thirty days Is discovered.]

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The demystifying ending, with the foetus found in the body of the girl, serves not only to demonstrate that the real always exists alongside (and inside) the ideal but, I think, also to represent the wholeness of reality with all its ironies according to Boito’s idea of realism, thus describing the poetic subject in a contradictory manner. The adolescent that before the last stanza was depicted with only positive adjectives related to her chastity such as ‘vergine’, ‘pia’, and ‘purissima’ is discovered pregnant, which is to say that she is not as virginal, ‘pious’, or ‘most pure’ as was believed. On the contrary, the speaker shows that she has already experienced sexual intercourse resulting in her pregnancy, and inside her a dead foetus is present, namely what Boito calls the aesthetic ‘hideous’ in ‘A Giovanni Camerana’. This overturning allows Boito to illustrate—while not moralistically condemning—the duality of the woman: the Petrarchan or Stilnovistic idealised lady also possesses profound dark features; she is, or can be, a sinful being inclined to lust. In Baudelaire’s work, the poem in which the opposition between the real and the ideal is most pronounced is the famous ‘Une charogne’. On a thematic level, in ‘Une charogne’ the juxtapositions focus on the relationship between a revolting carcass of an animal and two different subjects, the speaker’s mistress and nature, both Romantically represented in their most idealistic aspects. The opening is disconcerting in its contrast between sublime/poetic and repugnant/prosaic elements: Rappelez-vous l’objet que nous vîmes, mon âme, Ce beau matin d’été si doux: Au détour d’un sentier une charogne infâme Sur un lit semé de cailloux. (OC I, 31)

Even more so than in ‘Lezione d’anatomia’, with the oxymoronic juxtapositions of the words ‘mon âme’ and ‘infâme’ in rhyme position, Baudelaire conveys the shock caused by the intrusion of reality in a scene depicted with idyllic and sentimental tones. The poem continues with the dissonant analogy between the putrescence of the carrion and the powers of nature: the sky contemplates the carcass ‘Comme une fleur s’épanouir’; and the noise caused by the air that inflates and deflates the carrion becomes rather ironically an ‘étrange musique, / Comme l’eau courante et le vent’ (OC I, 31). The mistress is described, in a similar fashion to Boito’s poem, with terms typical of the Romantic idealistic tradition, and the clash between the real and the ideal reaches its culmination in the last section of the

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composition through the opposition of words belonging to very different registers in rhyme position, including the medical term ‘infection’, as well as through the comparison between the deceased lady and the carcass: —Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure, À cette horrible infection Étoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature, Vous, mon ange et ma passion! (OC I, 32)

With its sarcastic tone, the conclusion can only be considered as a demystification of the positive stances on the idealisation and romanticisation of a dead body,9 which will dissolve by means of worms. Regarding the following ending of the poem, Labarthe (2002, 18) speaks of debunking the ‘mensonge idéalisant qui habite la rhétorique de l’amour courtois, ou pétrarquiste, ici subvertie’ [‘idealising lie that inhabits the rhetoric of courtly, or Petrarchan, love, here subverted’]:10 Alors, ô ma beauté! dites à la vermine Qui vous mangera de baisers, Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine De mes amours décomposés! (OC I, 32)

Certainly, in ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ Boito is more schematic and keeps the sublime and repulsive elements separated in order to charge the demystifying ending with meaning, and he does not attain the expressive force of Baudelaire’s vocabulary and oppositions. Furthermore, in Baudelaire’s poem the juxtapositions are employed as an attempt to transfigure reality, to create immortal poetry that can withstand illness, death, and decomposition, as well as to extract beauty from everyday subjects. Testimony to this effort is once again the oxymoron, such as ‘carcasse superbe’ (OC I, 31). The different purpose of Boito’s and Baudelaire’s oxymora is evident in their dissimilar use in ‘Une charogne’ and ‘Lezione d’anatomia’. With the expression ‘superb carcass’, and its association with a blossoming flower, Baudelaire represents a ‘flower of evil’ that is poetically born out of a disgusting and repugnant image. Boito instead describes the ‘Scïenza umana’ [‘Human science’], medicine, as ‘Steril connubio! / Sapienza insana!’ (OL, 74) [‘Sterile marriage! Insane wisdom!’], showing its paradoxical nature: when dissecting the body of a beautiful girl, medicine does not lead to knowledge but casts only more doubts in the speaker, probably in terms of metaphysical suppositions concerning death. However, Boito’s

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extensive poetic use of precise medical vocabulary and formulae, including ‘huic sanguinis / Circulationi …’ (OL, 75), is ultimately necessary to counterbalance the idealistic stanzas and create a realistic picture, going as far as to include historic medical figures: Mentre urla il medico La sua lezione E cita ad hoc: Vesalio, Ippocrate, Harvey, Bacone, Sprengel e Koch. (OL, 74) [While the physician screams His lesson And quotes ad hoc: Vesalius, Hippocrates, Harvey, Bacon, Sprengel and Koch.]

In ‘Une charogne’, the forced juxtapositions of images belonging to opposite categories, sentimental and macabre-realistic, the traditional Romantic vocabulary, and the clash between disparate registers, reveal Baudelaire’s sarcastic and debunking intentions towards both a Classical conception of beauty and a Romantic idealisation of the woman, which is probably what most influenced Boito. The conclusions of ‘Une charogne’ and ‘Lezione d’anatomia’, the first centred upon the ‘decomposed loves’ and the second on the ‘foetus of thirty days’, both reveal an impersonal focus on organic matter rather than a subjective sublimation of the feminine body, showing a ‘de-idealisation’ of the muse which disregards any easy sentimentalism and excludes any religious transcendence, an antitraditional and unconventional conceit that, as we will see in Chap. 6, would later be used also by Futurist poets. On a more thematic level, ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ is closer to another poem of the Fleurs, namely ‘Une martyre’. I would argue that in terms of the specific idea of using the gruesome portrayal of a mutilated corpse of a young girl as a realistic subject of poetry, for ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ Boito drew on ‘Une martyre’. Despite the supposed realism of the poetic subject, however, in both poems the corpse undergoes a lyrical, transformative process: it is, unrealistically and unscientifically, still bleeding copiously after death, creating a more dramatic and sensational, and therefore artistic, effect. If in Baudelaire’s poem ‘Un cadavre sans tête épanche, comme un

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fleuve, / Sur l’oreiller désaltéré / Un sang rouge et vivant’ (OC I, 112), in Boito’s ‘sanguina / Per piaga immonda / Il petto a quella!’ (OL, 74) [‘for / A disgusting wound / Her chest bleeds!]. Boito even makes use of expressions previously employed by Baudelaire: ‘Elle est bien jeune encor!’ (OC I, 113), writes Baudelaire, and Boito follows with ‘Ed era giovane!’ (OL, 74) [‘And she was young!’]. In both ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ and ‘Une martyre’, there is space for the analysis of the feelings of the young girl. Boito focuses the description of the adolescent on her pious and devout aspects, and states that ‘in the / Most melancholic hours / Like a sanctuary / She closed her heart’. Baudelaire’s speaker, on the other hand, wonders what the girl used to do in the very same melancholic hours: […] Son âme exaspérée Et ses sens par l’ennui mordus S’étaient-ils entr’ouverts à la meute altérée Des désirs errants et perdus? (OC I, 113)

This difference between the subject of Baudelaire’s poem, who opens (if not completely ‘entr’ouverts’) her soul to sinful desires, and Boito’s, who religiously shuts her heart in the very same situation, sanctions the apparent dissimilarity between the two characters. The young woman of ‘Une martyre’, guilty of having indulged in a ‘unhealthy love’ (OC I, 112), has been murdered by her husband, probably because she could not satisfy ‘L’immensité de son désir’ (OC I, 113), indubitably an erotic desire. Since Boito intended to surprise the reader with the final dramatic twist, in ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ there are none of the sadistic, erotic, and perverse features that are very much present in ‘Une martyre’, although these form an important part of the themes that constitute Boito’s  long poem Re Orso, as we shall see in Chap. 3. Towards the end, however, the two poems show a distinct resemblance: inside the cadaver of Boito’s adolescent, who is not at all ‘most pure’ as the speaker believed, there is a foetus that reveals her licentious past, and the young lady of Baudelaire’s composition is a ‘cadavre impur’ (OC I, 113) because she used to attend ‘fêtes étranges / Pleines de baisers infernaux’ (OC I, 112). In an analogous manner to the other works already examined, in ‘Une martyre’ Baudelaire strives to convert a gruesome scene into his own personal notion of modern beauty by means of poetry. The poem thus becomes another veritable flower of evil, particularly in the passage in which the severed head of the corpse is compared to a flower: ‘La tête […] | Sur la table de nuit, comme une renoncule, / Repose’ (OC I, 112). The last stanza of the poem, however, rejects any

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thoughts of redemption for the murderous husband or any religious idealisation of the young girl. By referring to the demystifying ending of ‘Une charogne’ (‘la forme et l’essence divine / De mes amours décomposés’), I think that the spiritual image of the ‘immortal form’ of the wife that the husband brings with him should be interpreted as the dreadful and obsessive memory of her mutilated body, which will always follow and haunt him everywhere he goes: Ton époux court le monde, et ta forme immortelle     Veille près de lui quand il dort; Autant que toi sans doute il te sera fidèle,       Et constant jusques à la mort. (OC I, 113)

In this section we have examined the many types of irregularity present in Il libro dei versi based on the dualisms and ambivalence of what are considered by Boito as the ‘decadent’ aspects of modernity: from the relationship between a degraded present and a lost past, to the rejection of traditional beauty and the aesthetic preference for the grotesque, hideous, in other words unpoetic forms of scientific progress and medicine. Notwithstanding the predilection for the irregular and the deformed, such as cadavers and maimed bodies, the traditional Platonic and Romantic conception of beauty is still employed by Boito as an element of contrast, even though it is ironically challenged and ultimately debunked. In Il libro dei versi Boito does apply in poetry his theoretical formulation of ‘Realism’ as a new art composed of seemingly irreducible elements, as explicated in ‘Dualismo’, but, unlike Baudelaire, he does not search for a new notion of subjective beauty, of a relative and personal ideal. Considering its stylistic and thematic influence on Il libro dei versi, Baudelaire’s poetry was undoubtedly seen by Boito as an excellent example of a ‘realist’ art rooted in the ugliness of modernity and in the poet’s fascination for it, illustrating the possibilities of a new poetic language that incorporated subjects, images, and a terminology previously excluded from the poetic domain. Boito ultimately incorporated modernity into his poetry, which is to say he created poetry that reflects the transitory aspects of his time both conceptually and stylistically. However, instead of extracting like Baudelaire the ‘mysterious element of beauty’ contained in present-day subjects, Boito focused on expressing poetically the aesthetic and moral paradoxes of modern times linked to scientific advance, medical examination, cultural decadence, and commercialisation.

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A Poetry of (Organic) Matter and Spirit: Emilio Praga Anatomical Examination and Idealistic Representation Writer and painter Emilio Praga published his first collection of poetry, Tavolozza, in 1862. Particularly in his youthful years, Praga divided his time between poetry and painting, to which the title Tavolozza is a direct reference. Painting is often treated as a meta-artistic subject in Praga’s poems and had a clear influence on his poetic techniques. It is not a coincidence that some poems of Tavolozza share motifs with the paintings he completed during those years: marine and countryside landscapes, and scenes of the contemporary life of the working class, such as fishermen and sailors, depicted with an impressionistic touch characterised by a distinctive attention to detail. In Tavolozza Praga poetically translates, and at the same time expands, his taste for the pictorial bozzetto (sketch) by using scenes from seaside villages and other subjects taken from everyday life, such as the elderly standing outside hospices (‘Vecchierelli al sole’, PP, 58–59); a funeral of a poor and ugly girl in a village (‘La morta del villaggio’, PP, 23); or the city streets with their wealthy inhabitants and lower-class workers (‘Il corso all’alba’, PP, 10–14). Many of these pictorial scenes act as setting for a brief story related to the characters’ feelings and beliefs, stylistically depicted with prosaic language and dialogical structures that express Praga’s moral predisposition towards the poor and the underprivileged, whose simple, honest, and hard-working life is occasionally compared to that of the rich bourgeoisie solely devoted to wealth (‘Per cominciare’, PP, 8), laziness (‘Il corso all’alba’, PP, 11), and deceit (‘I superstiti’, PP, 59–61). With the poem ‘Nella tomba’ (1862), Praga experiments with themes and rhetorical devices that would later be customary in his second verse collection, Penombre (1864), including the thematic juxtaposition between anatomical examination and Romantic sentimental representation. The macabre images of the worms, the tomb, and the bones described with a prosaic-scientific vocabulary, as well as the topic of medical research, appear all together for the first time in Praga’s work: Preda dei vermi languidi, sarà vendetta mia, per entro all’ossa putride studiando anatomia,

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nuda veder l’origine d’ogni mia pena, il cor! E la ragion richiedergli di tanto e tanto amor … Poi, bardo estinto, un ultimo sospiro accoglierò, per ringraziar l’artefice che la cassa inchiodò. (PP, 57–58) [My revenge will be to be prey to languid worms, for within the putrid bones studying anatomy, I will see the bare origin of my every suffering, my heart! And ask it the reason for so much love … Then, extinct bard, one last sigh I will welcome, to thank the manufacturer who nailed down the coffin.]

Marinari (1969, 57) has rightly associated ‘Nella tomba’ with Baudelaire’s poetry, asserting that this poem’s source of inspiration was probably ‘Le Mort joyeux’. More precisely, Marinari compares the similar terminology that emphasises violent decomposition, characterised by precise expressions such as ‘languid worms’ and ‘within the putrid bones / studying anatomy’ in Praga, and Baudelaire’s ‘vieux os’ as well as ‘Ô vers! […] / Philosophes viveurs, fils de la pourriture, | À travers ma ruine allez donc sans remords’ (OC I, 70). Marinari also juxtaposes these representations of the rotting body with the opposite feeling of happiness of the poet, who becomes a ‘mort libre et joyeux’ (OC I, 70) in Baudelaire, and similarly ‘thank[s] the manufacturer / who nailed down the coffin’ in Praga. While the two certainly involve an analogous contrast between the macabre firstperson depiction of the speaker’s corpse and his longing for happiness and freedom in death, I believe the similarities to go significantly deeper, demonstrating Baudelaire’s influence on Praga’s—but also, more generally, the Scapigliatura’s—distinctive practice of the stylistic and thematic

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opposition between medical-scientific investigation and idealistic representation. As usually happens in sonnets, in ‘Le Mort joyeux’ the closing tercet summarises the central theme of the three preceding stanzas, also offering a metaphysical insight on the poetic subject: Ô vers! noirs compagnons sans oreille et sans yeux, […] À travers ma ruine allez donc sans remords, Et dites-moi s’il est encor quelque torture Pour ce vieux corps sans âme et mort parmi les morts! (OC I, 70)

This last stanza explains why the speaker is, oxymoronically, a ‘joyful dead’: having suffered many torments when he was alive that caused him to become figuratively ‘ruin’ and ‘dead among the dead’, the poet happily welcomes physical death. He also rhetorically interrogates the worms, which in his solitude become his ‘companions’, to discover if his dead body can experience tortures that he did not know in life, that is to say, greater than what he has  already suffered. This imperative request made to the worms—which, in the 1857 edition of the Fleurs, was a direct question (see OC I, 971)—is indeed rhetorical, implying that corporeal death and physical pain caused by the worms on a decomposing body cannot be compared to the more painful type of death, spiritual and emotional, which left the protagonist soulless (‘vieux corps sans âme’), hence his  willingness to ‘dormir dans l’oubli’ in ‘une fosse profonde’ (OC I, 70) and joy of being dead. This very same joy, or appreciation, is present in Praga’s ‘Nella tomba’, and for reasons similar to ‘Le Mort joyeux’. If Baudelaire’s poet, in a rebellious manner, does not want to ‘implorer une larme du monde’ (OC I, 70) while alive, as that ‘world’ caused him only ‘torture’, in ‘Nella tomba’ the speaker’s grudge is not against the world but, rather more masochistically, against himself: his corpse would suffer a ‘revenge’ and be gnawed by the worms in order to discover the origin of all his suffering in life, namely to (physically) see his (metaphorical) heart, and interrogate it on the reason for all his love and passion. In the two poems the boundaries between matter and spirit, between the physical and the emotional, between anatomical examination and fantastic interpretation are constantly put into question, and the poet is assumed to be both alive and dead at the same time, as if he were buried and eaten alive by worms while still demanding information about his torments. Finally, in ‘Nella tomba’

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the poet, who is already dead, wants to ‘thank the manufacturer / who nailed down the coffin’, probably because, as in Baudelaire’s sonnet, he has suffered too much in life and is now glad to be dead. Unlike ‘Le Mort joyeux’, however, he is not left without a soul; his agony derived from having loved too much: ‘ask it [his heart] the reason / for so much love.’ Praga also appropriates Baudelaire’s rebellious stance against religious burial practices (‘Je hais les testaments et je hais les tombeaux’, OC I, 70), turning it into an anti-clerical criticism of funerals: e alla chiesa cattolica perdonar, nella quiete, il puzzo delle esequie, e il brontolìo del prete! (PP, 58) [and to the Catholic Church forgive, in the quiet, the stench of the funeral, and the grumbling of the priest!]

In a similar manner to Baudelaire’s ‘Le Mort joyeux’, but also to ‘Une charogne’, in ‘Nella tomba’ Praga’s aim to shock and disorient the reader with gruesome imagery is obvious, as it would be obvious in Praga’s later work and especially in the poem that will be shortly analysed, ‘A un feto’. Nevertheless, beyond its controversial subject, in ‘Nella tomba’ Baudelaire’s stylistic and thematic impact can be notably seen in the juxtaposition of macabre-medical terms that denote decomposition of organic matter (‘vermi languidi’; ‘ossa putride / studiando anatomia’) and conventional poetic—and especially Romantic—images and rhymes (‘l’origine / d’ogni mia pena, il cor’; ‘amor’), which the crude realism charges with further emotional meaning. This contrasting passage from a medical-anatomical examination of the physical heart, ‘studying anatomy’ like a student of medicine, to the abstract investigation of its feelings also features in one of Boito’s most Baudelairian poems, his ‘Anatomy Lesson’, ‘Lezione d’anatomia’, as we have seen previously. Many poems by Baudelaire display these two different levels, macabre-­ realistic and abstract-poetic, which are juxtaposed to create a fantastic, picturesque scene, as well as to emphasise the idea or feeling that lies behind this very scene. Other than ‘Le Mort joyeux’, another example of this method can be found in the sonnet ‘Remords posthume’ addressed to a mistress who is imagined, in a similar fashion to ‘Le Mort joyeux’ and

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‘Nella tomba’, as being alive and dead at the same time (or buried alive) in a grave, as the expression ‘Lorsque tu dormiras […] / Au fond d’un monument construit en marbre noir’ (OC I, 34) suggests. The whole poem is structured upon the interplay between the physical and the metaphysical: the stone that will impede the mistress’ heart from both biologically ‘beating’ and emotionally ‘wanting’ (OC I, 35); the anthropomorphised image of the tomb, symbol of physical decomposition, asking the lyrical subject what is the benefit ‘De n’avoir pas connu ce que pleurent les morts’ (OC I, 35), namely love; and, in the concluding line, the unusual association of the worm that concretely gnaws the mistress’s corpse with the feeling of remorse: ‘Et le ver rongera ta peau comme un remords’ (OC I, 35). It is not the link between the bite of the worm and remorse per se that is unusual, but the inversion of roles: in this case, the simile entails a forced—and entirely intentional—passage from a material to an abstract image, hence oddly comparing the pain caused by the bite of the worm to the emotional suffering caused by remorse, and not the other way round. ‘Remords posthume’ would later be the obvious model for Praga’s ‘Vendetta postuma’, the thirty-seventh poem of Penombre (1864). ‘Vendetta postuma’ shares the same borderline situation between life and death as ‘Nella tomba’, ‘Remords posthume’, and ‘Le Mort joyeux’, and a similar contrast between macabre images of decomposition and sentimental-­abstract ones. In ‘Vendetta postuma’, it is the poet’s mistress who simultaneously is ‘immobile e stecchita’ [‘motionless and stiff’] and yet might still feel emotions and sensations previously experienced during her life, have ‘nel cranio un sentimento / di questa vita’ (PP, 179) [‘in her skull a feeling / of this life’]. Praga employs analogous expressions to ‘Nella tomba’, highlighting the contrast between a former life of passion, love, and betrayal and a future tomb where, reminiscing about (the end of) her relationship with the poet, the mistress will experience feelings of posthumous guilt and remorse like in ‘Remords posthume’. These feelings are conveyed through—and hyperbolically intensified by—the image of the heart, which is employed both figuratively, as a Romantic symbol of past love for the poet and future emotional suffering, as well as concretely, gnawed by languid worms: E allora sentirai l’onda dei vermi salir nel tenebrore, e colla gioia di affamati infermi morderti il cuore. (PP, 180)

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[And then you will feel the wave of worms climb up in darkness, and with the joy of hungry invalids bite your heart.]

‘Suicidio’: Between Scientific Observation and Artistic Celebration Praga’s first collection, Tavolozza (1862), offers other examples of compositions centred upon the juxtaposition of realistic and unpoetic subjects, on the one hand, and poetic and sentimental images on the other. The tale of the unfortunate painter narrated in ‘Suicidio’ opens with the first two stanzas that create a lyrical atmosphere of pathos, richness, and luxury through the description of jewellery and the triple repetition of the emotional expression ‘Oh’: Oh tesor negli scrigni giacenti, oh dovizie all’azzardo diffuse, e cui spesso sbadata profuse una man che ignorava il dolor! Oh metallo alle belle indolenti tramutato in tessuti e in gioielli, mentre intorno mieteva fratelli la miseria soffusa d’onor! (PP, 32) [Oh treasure in abandoned chests, oh wealth randomly spread, which often a hand that ignored suffering carelessly squandered! Oh metal given to indolent beauties turned into fabrics and jewels, while around poverty suffused with honour killed brothers!]

The terms ‘tesor’, ‘scrigni’, ‘dovizie’, ‘metallo’, ‘belle indolenti’, ‘tessuti’, and ‘gioielli’ are used to represent a world characterised by beauty, opulence, and extravagant squandering, and serve as means of contrast to the gloomy story of the poor artist narrated in the composition. The third stanza suddenly and unexpectedly switches the attention of the poem to

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the cadaver of an adolescent, which starkly clashes with the precious items previously described in terms of visual imagery, vocabulary, and style, entailing a change of pace opting for a shorter and faster—and therefore sharper—metre: Ecco un cadavere d’adolescente; guardate, è un pallido volto soffrente. (PP, 32) [Behold the corpse of an adolescent; look, he is a pale suffering face.]

A similar contrast between beautiful, refined objects and the dead body of a young person is the focus of the opening of Baudelaire’s ‘Une martyre’, which, as seen above, is a poetic transposition of a painting. The first stanza describes the variety of precious and expensive items decorating a room that acts as background to the painting (and, indeed, to the poem itself): Au milieu des flacons, des étoffes lamées Et des meubles voluptueux, Des marbres, des tableaux, des robes parfumées Qui traînent à plis somptueux. (OC I, 111)

Amid these rich objects, lying down on a bed, is the mutilated ‘headless corpse’ of a young woman. The poem progresses with the juxtaposition of the gruesome anatomical features of the corpse with the luxurious jewels and clothing that the cadaver is still wearing: firstly, there is the severed head with the ‘yeux révulsés’, which is adorned by ‘ses bijoux précieux’ (OC I, 112); then the ‘tronc nu sans scrupules’ is described (ibid.); and finally there is the fine ‘bas rosâtre, orné de coins d’or, à la jambe’ (ibid.). The juxtaposition of, on the one hand, the decapitated corpse, which includes terms such as ‘cadavre impur’ and ‘tête effrayante’ (OC I, 113), and on the other the sumptuous room and the jewellery on her body, is part of a greater contrast not only in terms of imagery, but involving lexicon and syntax as well in a manner not dissimilar to Praga’s ‘Suicidio’. As Jackson (2002, 165) writes, in ‘Une martyre’ ‘le contraste lexical s’accompagne

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d’une mise en évidence syntaxique manifeste: le cadavre, terme macabre, contrast[e] avec le vocabulaire beaucoup plus retenu de la description [de la chambre]’ [‘the lexical contrast is accompanied by an evident syntactic highlighting: the corpse, a macabre term, contrasts with the much more restrained vocabulary of the description of the room’]. All this serves to structure, and at the same time to highlight, the opposition between the natural features of the corpse and the other biological entities within the poem (such as the ‘bouquets mourants’, OC I, 112) that are subject to death and decay, and the beauty of precious artificial objects made of cloth, metal, mineral, or wood. This preference for (and superiority of) the artificial over the natural features in various poems and critical writings by Baudelaire, as already seen in Chap. 1, but it does not simply entail a contrast between the two. By means of the juxtaposition of natural and artificial elements, and the insertion of direct references to painting, Baudelaire strives to embellish the horrible characteristics of nature; in other words, to transmute repugnant and finite reality into immortal and dynamic poetic beauty. Hence, similes are used to compare the dead body to energetic—and very much vital—natural forces, which in turn are depicted as part of an artificial painting: Un cadavre sans tête épanche, comme un fleuve, Sur l’oreiller désaltéré Un sang rouge et vivant, dont la toile s’abreuve Avec l’avidité d’un pré. (OC I, 112)

Not unlike his ‘Une charogne’, in ‘Une martyre’ the image of the corpse is artistically transfigured and is represented, at least in the first half of the poem, as a beautiful painting, as a ‘grand portrait langoureux’ (OC I, 112). Despite the similar openings and the juxtaposition of macabre and precious elements, however, ‘Suicidio’ and ‘Une martyre’ have pronounced differences on a more conceptual level. As in many other compositions of Tavolozza, the subject of Praga’s poem is a painter, a poor and desperate artist who has eventually decided to commit suicide because of abject poverty and hunger. The opposition in Baudelaire between the beauty of artificial objects and the ugliness of (and simultaneous appeal for) dreadful reality becomes in Praga a different contrast between beauty-richness and ugliness-poverty, or, in other words, between an indifferent bourgeoisie and the shattered dreams of a poor artist who has experienced the cruel

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side of reality. Baudelaire’s subject, on the other hand, is a young girl who experienced a terrible love relationship, attended ‘des fêtes étranges / Pleines de baisers infernaux’ (OC I, 112), and was eventually murdered and mutilated by her husband, a man emphatically defined as ‘vindicative’ (113). Baudelaire highlights the depraved experiences made by the female subject, and juxtaposes the description of the decapitated corpse with that of her soul while alive, which is portrayed, as seen above, as dramatically overcome by ennui: Et cependant, à voir la maigreur élégante De l’épaule au contour heurté, […] Elle est bien jeune encor!—Son âme exaspérée Et ses sens par l’ennui mordus S’étaient-ils entr’ouverts à la meute altérée Des désirs errants et perdus? (OCI, 112–113)

Although the contrast between the depiction of the macabre cadaver and immaterial soul is retained by Praga, in his poem the corpse’s soul has not been stained by boredom, sin, and immoral desires—on the contrary, it was lively and unadulterated when the artist died: Ecco un cadavere d’adolescente; guardate, è un pallido volto soffrente: vi brillò un’anima fervida, pura … la spense il turbine della sciagura. (PP, 32) [Behold the corpse of an adolescent; look, he is a pale suffering face: a soul shone there fervent, pure … the whirlwind of the disaster extinguished it.]

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Praga’s choice of a gentle-hearted yet poor artist, whose noble features are put into contrast with the realistic description of his corpse, emphasises even more the desperate situation behind his suicide. Praga’s representation of this grim subject matter is, undoubtedly, different to Baudelaire’s. The core image and the principal juxtapositions of ‘Une martyre’, however, are also present in ‘Suicidio’, and the more thoroughly the latter is analysed, the more well-defined Baudelaire’s stylistic and thematic influence appears. Baudelaire draws on Christian imagery for the definition of his subject as a ‘martyr’, but she is no religious martyr—she is a martyr of love, who despite her affection for her husband could not satisfy ‘The immensity of his desire’. Similarly, Praga’s artist is addressed as ‘O martire!’ (PP, 32) [‘Oh martyr!’], but he is not a religious martyr either, he is instead a martyr of art or of his desperate love for art: ‘addio dell’arte amori / coronati di fiori’ (PP, 33) [‘farewell to art’s loves / crowned with flowers’]. The two closing stanzas of ‘Suicidio’, the seventh and eighth, highlight Praga’s debt to ‘Une martyre’ even more. Both poems end with the image of the spirit of the protagonist who, in opposition to the previous vivid depiction of the corpse, has finally found a sort of peace, thus escaping the offensive judgement of the sordid yet condemnatory world. Baudelaire writes: —Loin du monde railleur, loin de la foule impure, Loin des magistrats curieux, Dors en paix, dors en paix, étrange créature, Dans ton tombeau mystérieux; Ton époux court le monde, et ta forme immortelle Veille près de lui quand il dort. (OC I, 113)

Praga’s lines, in comparison, are the following: O fuggito alle infamie del mondo, vola, vola, ti bea nel sereno, […] Or, dal cielo, tu, artista giocondo, alle tele incompiute sorridi, e dell’arte degli uomini ridi, dipingendo coi raggi del sol! (PP, 33) [O fled from the vileness of the world, fly, fly, be happy in the serene, […]

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Now, from heaven, you, playful artist, smile at the unfinished canvases, and laugh at the art of men, painting with the rays of the sun!]

Both Baudelaire and Praga represent their final scenes with a compassionate tone towards the protagonist. If Baudelaire employs the adjective ‘Loin’, which implies a well-deserved escape from life and reality, Praga uses the past participle with the adjectival function ‘fuggito’, and substitutes Baudelaire’s ‘monde railleur’ and ‘foule impure’ with an expression that cleverly combines these two phrases, therefore emphasising the vulgarity and bigotry of the contemporary world: ‘infamie del mondo’. Praga also takes up the immediate repetition of a phrase directly addressed to the subject, which while in Baudelaire’s poem defines the peaceful sleep of the protagonist (‘Dors en paix, dors en paix’)—and only of the protagonist, there is not rest for the tormented husband, as seen above—in ‘Suicidio’ refers to the artist’s final liberation in death and fantastic, spiritual union with nature (‘vola, vola’). The relation between realistic and poetic elements in ‘Suicidio’ and ‘Une martyre’ can also be analysed from a formal and stylistic point of view, in what I would argue is the interaction between two opposing approaches, artistic and scientific, to the act of observation of a corpse and to the representation of violent and distressing events, such as the murder of a woman (‘Une martyre’) and the suicide of a young man (‘Suicidio’). All references to painting in ‘Suicidio’ are not employed only as subject matter of the poem, as part of the narration of the story of the ill-fated painter, but they also show the aesthetic and technical influence of panting on Praga’s poetry. Although its pictorial portrayal is less conspicuous, the structure of ‘Suicidio’ and the lyrical methodology behind it bear many similarities with ‘Une martyre’ that, as already specified, is a poetic transposition of a painting. As a matter of fact, ‘il n’est pas difficile de voir comment le poème [Une martyre] vise à la mise en place d’un effet plastique ou pictural, que soulignent d’ailleurs certains termes empruntés au lexique de la peinture’ (Jackson 2002, 165) [‘it is not difficult to see how the poem [Une martyre] aims at the implementation of a plastic or pictorial effect, which is after all underlined by certain terms borrowed from the lexicon of painting’], which influenced the composition of Praga’s ‘Suicidio’. Both poems move from a third-person description of the physical appearance (in the present tense) to the previous life (in the past tense) of the corpse. This also involves verbs and nouns related to displaying, looking, and

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viewing, which help to paint a voyeuristic scene dedicated to hypothetical observers who appear to look at a work of visual art: ‘Un cadavre sans tête épanche’, ‘La tête […] / Repose’, ‘Le singulier aspect de cette solitude / […] Révèle’, ‘à voir la maigreur élégante’ (OC I, 112, my emphases), in ‘Une martyre’; and ‘Ecco un cadavere d’adolescente; / guardate, è un pallido / volto soffrente’ (my emphases), in ‘Suicidio’. Yet it could easily be argued that this indiscreet observation by viewers external to the scene is presented in a similar manner to the intrusive medical-­scientific examination of a cadaver, where the physician shows the visual findings of his investigation to other observers, like in Boito’s anatomy lesson: Ed ora il clinico Che glielo svelle Grida ed esorta: ‘Ecco le valvole,’ ‘Ecco le celle,’ ‘Ecco l’aòrta.’

The title of Praga’s composition, ‘Suicide’, would also be more suitable for a medical assessment of a violent death rather than a poem or a painting, which adds to its unpoetic aspects seen above. After all, the relationship of the visual arts with anatomical dissection, and more broadly of art with science, was profound in the second half of the nineteenth century: artistic anatomy and anatomical practice shared techniques, materials, and human or human-like models; and literary texts of the times, such as ‘Un corpo’ (1870), a novella by Camillo Boito, Arrigo’s brother, built on this connection by imagining a competition between the artist and the anatomist in the study—and reproduction—of female beauty (see Carli 2004, 56–70). The link between anatomical investigation and artistic representation is also portrayed poetically by Baudelaire in ‘Le Squelette laboureur’: Dans les planches d’anatomie Qui traînent sur ces quais poudreux Où maint livre cadavéreux Dort comme une antique momie, Dessins auxquels la gravité Et le savoir d’un vieil artiste, Bien que le sujet en soit triste, Ont communiqué la Beauté. (OC I, 93)

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Finally addressing the poetic subject directly in the second-person singular with expressions such as ‘ton tombeau’, ‘ta forme’, and ‘ti bea’, ‘tu, artista’, in a sort of silent conversation with the corpse, the last two stanzas of ‘Une martyre’ and ‘Suicidio’ similarly conclude the poems with a lyrical and intimate tone, highlighting the speakers’ empathy with the tragic situations of the two characters: the intimacy and empathy of the artist, overcoming the scientific detachment of the anatomist. Against Medicine, Against Religion: ‘A un feto’ The interplay between medical-anatomical examination and poetic idealisation is the subject of ‘A un feto’, part of the 1864 collection Penombre. This poem treats a similar topic to Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’, written after ‘A un feto’ (in June 1865) and involving medical images of cadavers and foetuses that represent the hideous side of contemporaneous reality, juxtaposing them with idealistic—and traditionally Romantic—elements in a manner analogous to ‘Une charogne’. The artistic significance for the Scapigliatura of Baudelaire’s aesthetic model of ‘Une charogne’ should not be underestimated, since it influenced Praga’s ‘A un feto’ as much as Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’. In ‘A un feto’, Praga’s debt towards ‘Une charogne’ can be divided into three different categories, which are interrelated: semantic, stylistic, and thematic. The affinities between the two poems comprise various aspects belonging to the three categories just mentioned. Firstly, a specific macabre and medical register alternated with an idealistic terminology concerning the beauty of nature. Secondly, oxymora that combine contrasting feelings of affection and revulsion. Thirdly, the portrayal of a love relationship and correlated amorous gestures by means of morbid imagery representing, ironically and antiphrastically, the impossible idealisation of illness and death and their eventual inevitability, notwithstanding the love and care demonstrated. The last two points are intrinsically connected, in ‘Une charogne’, whereby the peculiar unity of love and death—and the related concurrence of a highly poetic and a macabre vocabulary—is represented in the concluding stanza by the image of the graveyard worm that will gruesomely ‘devour with kisses’ the poet’s mistress, leaving him with only the very visual memory of his ‘decomposed loves’; and in ‘A un feto’. In the latter, Praga takes Baudelaire’s idea of decomposed loves and love-death union further, depicting an image which can be considered as belonging to both the artistic and scientific fields. Analogously to ‘Suicidio’, this image is portrayed with verbs related

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to looking and viewing, such as the imperative ‘Guarda’ repeated twice to an unknown observer, identifiable as the reader of the poem or a visitor to the museum of anatomy, where the narrative is set. The image is that of a foetus of a twin brother and sister preserved with acid in a jar, who died while embraced in a loving yet macabre kiss: Questo, ironia satanica, due cuori ha chiusi in petto, e accanto a lui, crisalide di non terreno affetto, un corpicin di femmina, stipato di mammelle, perde la lunga pelle che l’acido succhiò. Guarda: son due putredini ed eran due gemelli, concetti insieme al gaudio di chiamarsi fratelli; guarda: un orrendo bacio nell’almo sen li strinse, e colla morte avvinse gli sventurati amor …. (PP, 156–157) [This, satanic irony, has two hearts hidden in the chest, and next to him, chrysalis of no earthly affection, a little body of a female, full of nipples, loses the long skin sucked by the acid. Look: they are two rotten bodies and they were twins, conceived together with the joy to be called siblings; look: a hideous kiss held them close in the womb, and with death it bound their unfortunate love forever …]

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Throughout ‘A un feto’, it is certainly easy to point out the prosaic medical and scientific images that belong to the horrible and the hideous, the role of which appears to be, at first blush, to scandalise the reader, namely the ‘poveri / avanzi imbalsamati’ (PP, 152) [‘poor / embalmed remains’] of the cadavers taken from hospitals and placed in this museum of anatomy, among which the severed hand of a girl who died of tuberculosis and the foetus to which the poem is dedicated. The shocking properties of this poem are undeniable—as are those of ‘Une charogne’ and ‘Lezione d’anatomia’—and were probably aimed at scandalising a certain audience, but they are hardly the sole purpose of ‘A un feto’. Another focus of this composition is the vehement polemic against two symmetrically opposed forces: the ‘scïenza feroce’ (PP, 152) [‘ferocious science’] which keeps these foetuses and the other ‘orride / burle della natura’ (PP, 156) [‘hideous / pranks of nature’] on display for posterity, giving no solace to parents and loved ones, calling into mind Boito’s own polemic against scientific progress and medicine seen above; and God, who appears to have neither real design nor control over the process of birth of the human being, especially when malformed foetuses are born, being childbirth based on pure chance (PP, 154). This harsh polemic is enclosed between two sections that denote the poet’s attempts to antithetically oppose an idealistic chant, characterised by references to nature and intimate domestic life, to the controversial and gruesome imagery. The idyllic chant is not devoid of Baudelairian elements: the focal section of the idyll, namely the celebration of the sun of lines 17–34, bears many resemblances with Baudelaire’s ‘Le Soleil’, a veritable ‘hymn to the sun’ (Leakey 1969, 14). The sun is the affectionate and caring presence behind the serene picture portrayed in the following lines from ‘A un feto’: Era un bel dì di luglio; dagli ampii finestroni piovean cadenze e balsami di fiori e di canzoni; brillavano le mummie nelle corteccie frolle, e dalle vecchie ampolle frangea scintille il sol. Il sol che le miriadi dei vermi e degli insetti, giù, nell’orto botanico, scalda ai fecondi affetti,

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e in un bacio affamiglia il ciel, lo stagno, il sasso, e il giovin granchio al passo aiuta, e il nibbio al vol. (PP, 153) [It was a beautiful day in July; from the large windows cadences and fragrances of flowers and songs rained down; mummies shone in their crumbly skin, and through old ampoules the sun glimmered and sparkled. The sun that warms the myriads of worms and insects, down in the botanical garden, to fertile affection, and in a kiss joins the sky, the pond, the stone, and helps the young crab to walk and the kite to fly.]

We can certainly compare this loving and paternal figure that indiscriminately warms and invigorates vile and noble creatures alike—as different as earthworms and birds—in the botanical garden, to the ‘père nourricier’ that ‘Éveille dans les champs les vers comme les roses’ of Baudelaire’s poem, the sun that fills ‘les ruches de miel’ and ‘commande aux moissons de croître et de mûrir’ (OC I, 83). Praga retains from ‘Le Soleil’ the Romantic idea of unity of the natural world and the related love register employed to depict nature. If in ‘Le Soleil’ the sun ‘fait s’évaporer les soucis vers le ciel’ and nature is ‘le cœur immortel qui toujours veut fleurir’ (OC I, 83), in ‘A un feto’ the sun ‘warms / […] to fertile affection, / and in a kiss joins / the sky, the pond, the stone’. With the same words that Leakey (1969, 14) used to describe ‘Le Soleil’, we could argue that in ‘A un feto’ the sun ‘acts as a unifying, as well as a “nutritive” and recuperative force’. The idea that the sun possesses restorative qualities is a central one in this idyllic section of ‘A un feto’, and not only for the creatures living outdoor in the botanical garden. The sun also enters, through large windows, the museum of anatomy, thus making hideous items, such as decayed mummies and jars containing foetuses, shine and sparkle (PP, 153). This

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is the idealistic core of the poem, which also recurs as the second to last stanza. The process of beautification—and indeed of aesthetic idealisation—of those ugly subjects derives, most notably, from two sources. One is Boito’s oxymoronic representation of the horrible yet simultaneously charming mummy in ‘A una mummia’ and marble torso in ‘Un torso’. The second one is Baudelaire’s transmutation of ugly contemporary reality into beauty as variously displayed in his ‘flowers of evil’, including the third and concluding stanza of ‘Le Soleil’, in which the sun penetrates hospitals and ennobles dreadful things, utterly transforming the hideous aspects of the city: Quand, ainsi qu’un poète, il descend dans les villes, II ennoblit le sort des choses les plus viles, Et s’introduit en roi, sans bruit et sans valets, Dans tous les hôpitaux et dans tous les palais. (OC I, 83)

However, Praga’s and Baudelaire’s idyllic sections also have pronounced differences. It is revealing in itself that while in the last quatrain of ‘Le Soleil’ Baudelaire speaks of a broad beautification of the city, including the inhabitants of hospitals, by means of a sun that is likened to the figure of the poet thereby drawing a parallel between the natural and the artistic processes of aestheticisation, Praga is far more specific, describing solely the natural ‘aesthetic’ power of the sun and confining the sublime transformation to mummified bodies and jars containing foetuses. The reason Praga’s brief attempt to transmute ugliness into beauty is confined exclusively to these two is that in ‘A un feto’, as well as in the other poems of Penombre, he does not participate in Baudelaire’s effort ‘de “pastoralisation” de la ville’ (Labarthe 1999, 452) [‘to “pastoralise” the city’], to turn the urban landscape into the idyllic scenery of happiness and ecstasy represented in ‘Le Soleil’. In ‘A un feto’, Praga keeps sublime elements (belonging to nature) and horrible ones (belonging to science and medicine) for the most part separated, and when they are merged it is either to underline the restorative abilities of nature or to be polemically ironic about the potential Romantic sublimation of cadavers, as with the aforementioned union of love and death and the related oxymoron ‘hideous kiss’. On a purely aesthetic note, Praga essentially maintains the contrast between conventional beauty and ugliness. This was, without doubt, due to Boito’s aesthetic and artistic influence. Both Praga and Boito employ figures of speech such as oxymora and antitheses in a similar fashion, to

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portray comprehensively a dualistic, and sometimes paradoxical, reality. But while Boito rejects a Classical notion of beauty and relies heavily on irony in order to cope with this loss, it is evident that, on the one hand, Praga discards and derides conventional poetic idealisations and sentimental discourses, preferring instead to juxtapose images of love and passion with contrasting imagery of ugliness and violence, as already seen in ‘Nella tomba’, ‘Suicidio’, and ‘Vendetta postuma’. On the other hand, however, he retains a certain faith in, and attraction to, traditional beauty, associating it, predominantly, with nature. The power (and the right) to transmute things, to ‘ennoble’ them belongs, therefore, more to nature itself than to the artistic qualities of the poet. Even though Praga describes foetuses as horrendous ‘pranks of nature’, he never accuses nature directly of cruelty, preferring, as we shall see below, to blame medicine for conserving foetuses for anatomical examination and God for their ruthless malformation. After all, Praga voluntarily chose to ignore Baudelaire’s ambivalent stance towards the sun (and indirectly towards nature) that emerges when comparing the second and third stanzas of ‘Le Soleil’ to the first, where Baudelaire discusses the cruelty of the sun in a setting that is both urban and pastoral: ‘le soleil cruel frappe à traits redoublés / Sur la ville et les champs’ (OC I, 83). Equally symptomatic of Praga’s and Baudelaire’s different positions on the capability of poetry to beautify the hideous subjects of modernity is the fact that, in the conclusion of ‘Le Soleil’, Baudelaire associates the sun with the figure of the wandering poet, a sun that with its flâneur-like features is ‘vaguely god-like in his ministration to the careworn and crippled’ (Leakey 1969, 14). Baudelaire presents this association—which implicitly entails, I would argue, the transfer of aesthetic powers from the poet to the sun, namely from the artist to nature, as if nature copied the actions of the artist, and not the other way round—in a wholly positive manner. In the seventh stanza of ‘A un feto’, in an almost opposite fashion, Praga links the figure of the poet to the heartless God, speaking of the ‘celestial poet’ who has erroneously created ugliness, namely the foetus (PP, 157). Praga takes his cue from the image of the poet in ‘Le Soleil’ who, whilst exploring the modern city, discovers ‘les hasards de la rime, / Trébuchant sur les mots’ and ‘Heurtant parfois des vers depuis longtemps rêvés’ (OC I, 83). Yet Praga turns this cue of the poet stumbling on unexpected words and rhymes in the city into the negative metaphor of God as a poet who, in the process of conceiving of the human being, ‘Incespica a una rima’ (PP, 154) [‘Stumbles over a rhyme’], hence creating a deformed foetus.

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In the central section of ‘A un feto’, the speaker’s acrimonious accusations towards medicine and God are dotted with what can be considered a genuine longing for respite in nature. However, unlike the initial idealistic and hopeful chant of lines 17–34, nature at this stage cannot give relief or consolation, in a situation where the poet is overwhelmed by the surrounding ugliness, cruelty, and death (‘la mano infanticida’, PP, 154, [‘the infanticide hand’]) caused by the actions of an uncaring God. God seems to use nature in a deceptive manner to divert the human being’s attention from the grim aspects of life that, according to the poet, are of God’s making, misleadingly claiming that ‘raggi il sol diluvia, / che immensa è la natura’ (PP, 155) [‘the sun pours down rays, / that nature is immense’]. Although there appears to be a hint of controversy with nature, what Praga actually argues is that although God turns a blind eye on the horrid foetuses, products of modernity insensitively preserved by science for medical research and for future display to humanity (PP, 156), the poet must portray them in his dualistic art at the opposite spectrum of beauty and lyrical sentimentalism, lowering the register so as to include impersonal and unpoetic technical-medical terms: E chiederem l’Ippocrate che insanguinò le mani, palpando nelle viscere i patimenti umani; e ascolterem vocaboli di desinenza achea, e la superna Idea al fango aggiogherem. […] E ha già segnato il numero il povero bambino, e un bel nome scientifico, e il cippo cristallino, prima ancor che sul lugubre letto la madre frema, e che nell’ansia estrema se ne insudici il sen. (PP, 156) [And we will ask Hippocrates who bloodied his hands, palpating in the bowels

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the sufferings of the human being; and we will listen to words of Achaean ending and we will subjugate the supernal Idea to the mud. […] And he has already been given a number the poor child, and a beautiful scientific name, and the crystalline memorial, even before that the mother trembles on the gloomy bed, and that in her extreme anxiety she makes her breast dirty.]

Since God does not care about the birth (and death) of malformed foetuses, the poet turns to medicine—personified by Hippocrates—for answers, but medicine’s reply is as obscure as that of religion, if not even more incomprehensible: ‘Tutto un sistema eressero, / Tutta una legge oscura’ (PP, 156) [‘They erected a whole system, / a whole set of obscure laws’]. Furthermore, the impersonality and insensitivity of the scientific method entails that the stillborn infant is put in a jar and given a reference number and a scientific name, losing its human features—and status— right after birth. This is analogous to Boito’s mummy that, placed in a museum, is solely seen as a weirdly fascinating archaeological object for mass consumption and enjoyment, and not as a human body. In other words, science dehumanises the human body, considering it simply as inhuman organic material for study, display, and commercialisation. Praga’s argument here is with science and God, not nature, redirecting Baudelaire’s polemic that in ‘Une charogne’ is unmistakeably towards nature, or, in other words, towards the Romantic and idealistic representation of nature as the exclusive source of beauty. Baudelaire’s polemic is voiced by means of the ironic juxtaposition of the revolting rotten carcass and the forces of nature, depicted through the medium of poetic expressions similar to ‘A un feto’ such as, in the third stanza, ‘Le soleil rayonnait’ and ‘la grande Nature’ (OC I, 31). While Baudelaire subtly and figuratively demystifies nature, Classical beauty, and the Romantic representation of the mistress, Praga is openly argumentative: the Baudelairian contrast of natural beauty and animal/human ugliness is incorporated into a broader polemic against both anatomical investigation and religion,

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directing irony—the ‘Satanic irony’ as described by the speaker (PP, 156)— principally towards Catholicism11 and the debunking of easy sentimentalism and the Romantic illusion of immortal love. As if he did not want to conclude the poem on a macabre and ironic note, however, Praga eventually overturns the demystifying ending that characterises not only ‘Une charogne’ but also ‘Lezione d’anatomia’. Baudelaire’s sarcastic spiritual sublimation of death—in a poem that features a different sort of poetic idealisation, not sentimentally Romantic or religious but purely artistic and aesthetic—namely the ‘divine essence’ of the decomposing body of the mistress that the poet keeps with him once she is dead, is taken literally by Praga. In the conclusion, the latter reiterates the natural beautification of mummified corpses and jars that occurs in the third stanza, ending the composition with the spiritual and emotional image of the souls of deceased children, flying like birds: Come una freccia argentea, dalla mesta vetrina, la man sottile e candida dell’etica bambina parea segnar nell’aria qualche invisibil cosa: spirti color di rosa, ali spiegate al vol! (PP, 157–158) [From the miserable display cabinet, the thin and white hand of a consumptive child seemed to point in the air, like a silver arrow, at some invisible things: rose-coloured spirits, wings spread in flight!]

This demonstrates the restorative role given to the spiritual power of nature to counterbalance the most repugnant aspects of contemporaneous  reality, represented by the macabre human remains conserved by ‘ferocious science’ but, conversely, forgotten and abandoned by religion. Religion is seen by Praga as powerless in modernity and, when confronted with the unrelenting progress of science and medicine, is unable to offer a credible alternative explanation for the ugliness and sufferings of the

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human body. This view is echoed in another poem from Penombre, ‘Spes unica’, which discusses the historical dogmatic shift from religion to science that was occurring at the time through the bizarre image of a clinical autopsy on the Virgin Mary, which can finally, yet ironically, demonstrate her virginity through violent—and undoubtedly sexual—desecration.12 Being able to provide some, if sarcastic, answers, the medical sciences are revered and adored by people in place of—or as a new—religion, thus becoming the addressee of Christian invocations:   Bella commedia!… e trassero in clinica Maria, e alle genti bandirono, dogmatica autopsia: ‘Olà, madama è vergine!’ Essi l’avean violata, e la folla beata osanna al ciel mugghiò. (PP, 181–182)

  [A nice comedy!... and they brought the Virgin Mary to the clinic, and announced to the people a dogmatic autopsy: ‘Behold, madam is a virgin!’ They had violated her, and the blissful crowd bellowed hosannas to heaven.]

The ending of ‘A un feto’ signals the necessity for Praga to find an alternative to both science and religion in the compassionate lyrical representation of the flying spirits of children, depicted with expressions referring to natural objects such as ‘rose-coloured’ and ‘wings spread in flight’. The term ‘vol’, moreover, recalls the emancipation from earthly sorrows of the painter’s spirit, and its pantheistic union with a natural landscape, of ‘Suicidio’. As seen in this chapter, Praga’s faith in the soothing powers of nature can be associated with Baudelaire’s poetry, but only partially. Baudelaire is entirely ambivalent towards nature, as we will see more thoroughly in Chap. 5, celebrating its capacity to beautify and heal (‘Le Soleil’) while also concurrently mocking its customary portrayal as a spiritual and idealistic force and preferring the beauty and artificial qualities of art to it (‘Une charogne’; ‘Une martyre’). Nevertheless, Baudelaire’s practice of

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juxtaposition of two categories of imagery and terminology, anatomicalrealistic and poetic-idealistic, is an important feature of Praga’s poetry as well, which encompasses the contrast between medical examination and poetic idealisation, between organic matter and spiritual yearning, in the context of his personal polemics against both the present-day medical sciences and religion (‘A un feto’). These oppositions are occasionally employed lyrically by Praga in a similar manner to Baudelaire to present the interplay between two different levels of meaning, literal and figurative, and between two types of representation, realistic and fantastic. This serves to express hyperbolically, and therefore to highlight, the strength of the feelings and emotions felt by the poet or his mistress such as passion and remorse, as seen above in ‘Le Mort joyeux’, ‘Remords posthume’, ‘Nella tomba’, and ‘Vendetta postuma’.

Notes 1. The article is signed by ‘La Direzione’. Recent studies, however, tend to consider the ‘Polemica letteraria’ as being written primarily by Boito. See Villa 2009a, 23. 2. See, among others, Cellier 1977, 188–201; De Dobay Rifelj 1987, 71–72; Labarthe 1999, 572. 3. The first two versions of this poem, published respectively in 1864 and 1872, stressed even more the coexistence of the opposites, since there Boito employed the conjunction ‘and’: ‘angelica / Farfalla e vermo immondo’. See Villa 2009b, 396. 4. Proust (1971, 625) speaks of Baudelaire’s peculiar writing tone in ‘Les Petites vieilles’ as a ‘pitié qui prend des accents d’ironie’ [‘pity that takes on ironic overtones’]. 5. ‘Esperimenti della Società del Quartetto: secondo esperimento’ (7 May 1865), TS, 1171. 6. See OL, 64. 7. The term ‘Parnasse’, which is used to indicate the poetic trend associated with the anthology Le Parnasse contemporain, was employed for the first time in March 1866 with the publication of the first of the eighteen issues of the anthology (see Mortelette 2005, 169–223). Speaking of Parnassian influence on ‘Un torso’, which bears the date ‘1862’, would thus be an anachronism. 8. According to Mariani (1971, 314–315), the sources for the poem have to be found specifically in Théodore de Banville’s ‘À Vénus de Milo’ and in Gautier’s ‘Niobé’.

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9. The emotional and sentimental attachment to the lover’s corpse was, after all, a common theme in Romantic literature. See, for instance, John Keats’s poem ‘Isabella, or The Pot of Basil’, written in 1818. 10. This view is shared, among others, by Olmsted (1997, 70), who speaks of Baudelaire’s ‘antiidealism’. 11. The Latin epigraph to the poem taken from the Gospel of John (PP, 152), by means of which Praga wants us to consider the deformed foetus as a manifestation of God’s work, is undoubtedly sarcastic. 12. The connection between religious violation and rape is clear in the first version of ‘Spes unica’, published on 31 March 1864 in Figaro: ‘L’avevano stuprata [Maria]’ (PP, 405) [‘They had raped her [Maria]’].

References Apollonio, Carla. 1981. La presenza di E.A.  Poe in alcuni scapigliati lombardi. Otto/Novecento 5 (1): 107–144. Banville, Théodore de. 2000. Œuvres poétiques complètes, vol. I, ed. Peter J. Edwards. Paris: Honoré Champion. Baudelaire, Charles. 1964. New Notes on Edgar Poe. In Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, ed. Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E.  Hyslop Jr., 117–135. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 1964. PML. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon. ———. 1975. OC I. Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. ———. 1976. OC II. Œuvres complètes,  vol. II, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Binni, Walter. 1977. La poetica del decadentismo. Florence: Sansoni. Boito, Arrigo. 1942. TS. Tutti gli scritti, ed. Piero Nardi. Verona: Mondadori. ———. 2009. OL. Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/Novecento. Carli, Alberto. 2004. Anatomie scapigliate: l’estetica della morte tra letteratura, arte e scienza. Novara: Interlinea. Cellier, Léon. 1977. D’une rhétorique profonde: Baudelaire et l’oxymoron. In Parcours initiatiques, 188–201. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière. De Dobay Rifelj, Carol. 1987. Baudelaire: de quelle boue? In Word and Figure: The Language of Nineteenth-Century French Poetry, 68–99. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Dell’Aquila, Michele. 1981. La lacerazione delle forme e l’allegoria della morte nel Libro dei versi di Arrigo Boito. Otto/Novecento 5 (1): 55–79. Finotti, Fabio. 1994. Il démone dello stile. In Arrigo Boito, ed. Giovanni Morelli, 35–60. Florence: Leo S. Olschki.

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Hugo, Victor. 1964. Théâtre complet, vol. I, ed. Josette Mélèze and Jean-Jacques Thierry. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Jackson, John E. 2002. La Dialectique des images. In Lectures de Baudelaire: ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’, ed. Steve Murphy, 159–170. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Labarthe, Patrick. 1999. Baudelaire et la tradition de l’allégorie. Geneva: Droz. ———. 2002. La “mise en crise” de la relation amoureuse dans Les Fleurs du Mal. In Lectures de Baudelaire: ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’, ed. Steve Murphy, 115–126. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Leakey, F.W. 1969. Baudelaire and Nature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mariani, Gaetano. 1971. Storia della Scapigliatura. Caltanissetta: Sciascia. Marinari, Attilio. 1969. Emilio Praga, poeta di una crisi. Naples: Guida. McGuinness, Patrick. 2000. Introduction. In Symbolism, Decadence and the ‘fin de siècle’: French and European Perspectives, ed. Patrick McGuinness, 1–18. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Mortelette, Yann. 2005. Histoire du Parnasse. Paris: Fayard. Nardi, Piero. 1942. Vita di Arrigo Boito. Verona: Mondadori. Olmsted, William. 1997. Immortal Rot: A Reading of “Une Charogne”. In Understanding ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’: Critical Readings, ed. William J. Thompson, 60–71. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Poe, Edgar Allan. 2006. NHE. Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, trans. Charles Baudelaire, ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Gallimard. Praga, Emilio. 1969. PP. Poesie, ed. Mario Petrucciani. Bari: Laterza. ———. 1984. L’esposizione di Belle Arti: lettere e divagazioni. Il Pungolo, 27 September 1871. Repr. in La pubblicistica nel periodo della Scapigliatura. Regesto per soggetti dei giornali e delle riviste esistenti a Milano e relativi al primo ventennio dello Stato unitario: 1860–1880, ed. Giuseppe Farinelli, 1050–1053. Milan: IPL. Proust, Marcel. 1971. À propos de Baudelaire. In Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre, 618–639. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Rimbaud, Arthur. 2009. Œuvres Complètes, ed. André Guyaux and Aurélia Cervoni. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Spera, Francesco. 1994. Le sperimentazioni poetiche di Boito. In Arrigo Boito, ed. Giovanni Morelli, 1–13. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. Villa, Angela Ida. 2009a. Introduzione. In Arrigo Boito. Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa, 7–38. Milan: Otto/Novecento. ———. 2009b. Introduzioni e note. In Arrigo Boito. Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/Novecento.

CHAPTER 3

Allegory and Modernity in the Scapigliatura

An Allegory of Excess: Boito’s Re Orso In the almost 160 years since its first publication in 1864, Boito’s allegorical fairy tale Re Orso has elicited numerous interpretations. This dark and surreal long poem set in the Middle Ages, published in four different editions in Boito’s lifetime (1864, 1873, 1877, and 1902—the last two together with Il libro dei versi), tells the story of a wicked and sadistic despot of Crete, Re Orso, who is tormented by a refrain concerning the bite of worms. Boito’s depiction of excess and perversity in the macabre fairy tale is an escalating ride towards self-destruction, which is focused on the protagonist’s various vices and feelings of terror and obsession in the form of the following refrain: Re Orso Ti schermi Dal morso De’ vermi. (OL, 95) [Re Orso You shield yourself From the bite Of the worms.]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Cabiati, Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92018-0_3

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The division of the fairy tale into two main segments, namely ‘Leggenda prima: Orso vivo’ and ‘Leggenda seconda: Orso morto’, in the typical dualism dear to Boito, defines the journeys of Re Orso and of his antagonist, the worm. While the first section pertains to the king’s moral journey to eternal  damnation focused on his sinful behaviour, the second is an allegorical one portraying an immortal worm, which symbolises corruption of both body and soul, that slowly makes its way to the grave of Re Orso, finally biting and thus condemning him to an eternity of suffering for all the sins committed during his depraved life. Boito concludes the poem with the section ‘Morale della fiaba’, in which he ironically contradicts the didactic goals of fairy tales by claiming that readers should use Re Orso for playing the lottery and not search for a hidden moralistic message in it (OL, 143). Various and occasionally contrasting interpretations have been given to the text, oscillating from a nonsensical literary joke (Galletti 1921, 7–34) to a portrayal of the coming of the Antichrist (Villa 2009, 441). In between these readings, the allegorical story has been described as representing: death that extinguishes everything, even the inexplicable evil in nature (Croce 1956, 262); the evil caused by Re Orso, which returns as the worm that represents a destructive force and as the voice of remorse, in the form of the refrain, that haunts the protagonist (Nardi 1942, 171–172); or it has been described as denoting ‘alcune fondamentali verità, eterne vicende ed eterni sentimenti del cuore umano: l’odio, la vendetta, il rimorso, la solitudine e anche l’amore’ (Mariani 1971, 350) [‘some fundamental truths, eternal events and eternal feelings of the human heart: hatred, revenge, remorse, loneliness, and even love’]. Critics are agreed on the prominence of an experimental operatic or ‘librettistic’ structure and on the ironic features of Re Orso—according to some aimed at deriding the sentimental, medieval-focused subjects and religious ideals of nineteenth-century Italian Romanticism (see Villa 2009, 440)—as well as on the seriousness of the allegorical substrate that has been considered of primary importance. Re Orso is written in the Romantic genre of the fairy tale, and the main source for this poem was, I would argue, the work of the much admired Victor Hugo, yet not the Hugo of ‘L’Épopée du ver’ that, together with Poe’s ‘The Conqueror Worm’, has repeatedly been associated with Re Orso (see Viagrante 2008, 98). I am referring to the tale ‘Légende du beau Pécopin et de la belle Bauldour’ included in Le Rhin, a little-known collection of travel stories first published in 1842. Boito declares his debt to

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this tale in the first of the four letters sent to Hugo, the one dated 23 December 1864, with which he also sent Re Orso: ‘Quando per generosità […] leggerete [Re Orso] fate di non ricordarvi quel incantato conte bleu che ideaste sotto le rovine del Falkenburg in quel bell’agosto del 1838’ (Boito 1958, 39) [‘When out of generosity […] you read [Re Orso], pretend not to remember that enchanted conte bleu that you conceived under the ruins of Falkenburg in that beautiful August of 1838’]. This can only be the ‘conte-bleu’ that Hugo (1987, 164) claimed to have written under the ‘sombres ruines du Falkenburg’ [‘sombre ruins of Falkenburg’], that is to say, the ‘Légende du beau Pécopin et de la belle Bauldour’. Primarily, Re Orso shares with the latter the imaginary medieval setting, the use of historical facts within a fairy tale, the theme of travel,1 and creatures belonging to both mythical and religious lore, such as giants and, more prominently, Satan and his demons.2 However, if the two works similarly combine a supernatural and sinister world, which belonged to the dark strain of Romanticism, with elements from fairy tales and fables, they significantly diverge in the treatment of this material. As Gaudon (1962, 30) affirmed, ‘“Pécopin” is no place for the horrible or mysterious’, since in ‘Pécopin’ Hugo follows ‘the gentler path of fantasy’. Hugo does not deal with metaphysical subjects clothed in allegory or concealed by symbols, unlike Boito; in ‘Pécopin’, the Devil does not represent the terrible yet irresistible forces of evil but is a character with vices and weaknesses for whom the reader might even feel compassion.3 In spite of the unpleasant ending of the story, Hugo’s educational and edifying intent is evident in the philosophical words of the birds that conclude the tale (Hugo 1987, 280), which stand in opposition to Boito’s moral detachment in ‘Morale della fiaba’. Hugo’s characteristic morality and pity towards the outcasts, described by Baudelaire as an ‘esprit de justice et de charité’ [‘spirit of justice and charity’] and as an obsession with the ‘goût de la réhabilitation’ (‘Les Misérables par Victor Hugo’, OC II, 218–219) [‘taste for rehabilitation’], is also present in ‘Pécopin’. Without discussing the complex feelings Baudelaire had for Hugo’s work or the dichotomy between ‘art for art’s sake’ and utilitarian poetry, we have to take into account that, in the ‘Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe’, which Boito and Praga probably had in mind when defining the Scapigliatura as an ‘art of decadence’, Baudelaire passionately opposes the idea of didactic and moralistic poetry and discusses Hugo’s faults and mistakes as regards this notion. Baudelaire paraphrases from Poe’s essay ‘The Poetic Principle’, and describes what he considers as the ‘heresy of

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teaching a lesson’: poetry should be written with the only aim of enjoying the act of writing (OC II, 333), and Hugo ‘n’a pu se faire pardonner son génie lyrique qu’en introduisant de force et brutalement dans sa poésie ce qu’Edgar Poe considérait comme l’hérésie moderne capitale,— l’enseignement’ (OC II, 337) [‘has succeeded in having all his lyric genius forgiven only by introducing forcibly and brutally into his poetry what Edgar Poe considered the major modern heresy—the teaching of a lesson’. (Baudelaire 1964, 135)]. This idea of ‘pure poetry’ (OC II, 337) and the criticism of Hugo’s didacticism are taken up by Praga in the article ‘L’esposizione di Belle Arti:  lettere e divagazioni’, already discussed in Chap. 2, where Praga (1984, 1053) appropriates Baudelaire’s artistic principles, turning them into ‘dissertazioni scapigliate sull’arte’ [‘Scapigliate lectures in art’], and affirms: lo scopo, il profitto, l’insegnamento, sono le camiciuole di forza a cui vorrebbero condannarla [l’arte] i pedanti. Baudelaire […] giunge a dire che Hugo non ha potuto farsi perdonare il suo lirismo che soggiogandolo alla missione dell’ammaestramento; ciò che, secondo il poeta dei Fiori del male, è la sovrana pecca del grande maestro. [purpose, profit, and teaching a lesson are the straitjackets to which pedants would like to condemn it [art]. Baudelaire […] goes as far as to say that Hugo could only be forgiven for his lyricism by subjugating it to the mission of teaching a lesson; this, according to the poet of the Flowers of Evil, is the capital fault of the great master.]

That is why Quadrelli (1981, 7) declared Hugo, with his progressive and educational purposes in literature, as only an apparent—that is, a superficial—model for the poets of the Scapigliatura, despite his evident influence. On the contrary, Baudelaire’s freedom towards morality entailed the possibility of dealing with any kind of material, even the most indecent and vulgar, without the limits imposed by moral messages. Baudelaire, in fact, described his Fleurs du Mal as a ‘misérable dictionnaire de mélancolie et de crime’ (‘Première version de la dédicace’, OC I, 187) [‘miserable dictionary of dejection and crime’] and a ‘livre saturnien, / Orgiaque et mélancolique’ (‘Épigraphe pour un livre condamné’, OC I, 137) [‘Saturnian book, / Of orgies and dejection’]. The conclusion of Re Orso excludes any easy moralism, particularly regarding the life of the degenerate protagonist, and can be seen as a

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polemical statement against the didactic and redemptive endings of many Romantic works, especially of the Italian tradition. These are characterised by a well-defined religious or patriotic morality that influences the story as well as the behaviour of the characters, who strive for an ultimate sublimation through religion or an idealised idea of motherland. The most significant work of this kind in nineteenth-century Italy is, undoubtedly, Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, first published in 1827. Many of the authors of the Scapigliatura, including Boito and Praga, were, at least in their period with the Scapigliatura, ‘antimanzoniani’, refusing Manzoni’s moralistic and religious lesson (see Negri 1978). Against this conception of moralistic art, Boito’s definition of ‘Realismo’, as discussed in Chap. 2, entails an utter detachment from morality in order to portray the totality of reality without discrimination. That Boito considered Baudelaire to be the leading representative of what he defined as realism has already been noted, and below I will demonstrate how the peculiar treatment of themes linked to the notion of excess in the Fleurs du Mal influenced Re Orso. Baudelaire’s Fleurs provided Boito with an unprecedented source of poetic material for his aesthetic portrayal of various types of excess related to overconsumption, intoxication, debauchery, ennui, rebelliousness towards religion, eroticism, and moral and physical corruption; in other words, the perpetual and inescapable presence of evil, represented not from the point of view of religious condemnation and/or moralistic teaching, but solely from that of artistic experimentation. Baudelaire’s poetry, moreover, not only demonstrated the possibility of new aesthetic and moral subjects, but also reintroduced into poetry a substantial use of Baroque allegories centred upon animality, inhumanity, and bodily decomposition, marked by the ‘monstrueuse copulation du grotesque et de l’horrible’ (Labarthe 1999, 34; see also Jackson 1982, 30) [‘monstruous copulation of the grotesque and the horrible’]. Finally, this chapter will also establish that the modernity of certain themes such as obsession, ­monomania, and hallucinations—lyrically portrayed with a profound awareness of their contemporaneous medical and psychological significations—which characterises Re Orso and opens up the interpretation of the poem beyond its fairy-tale and medieval setting, can also be traced back to Baudelaire’s Fleurs.

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The Allegorical Menagerie of ‘Antiche storie’ The infernal and vicious scenery of ‘Antiche storie’, the opening chapter of Re Orso, portrays Crete as a rotten realm of violence and debauchery. In its amalgamation of noble and prosaic language, mixture of fantastic and realistic descriptions, combination of grotesque and gruesome images, and presence of Christian—in particular, Satanic—allegories in the form of various beasts, ‘Antiche storie’ finds its direct precedent in ‘Au lecteur’, the opening poem that acts as preface to the Fleurs du Mal. ‘Au lecteur’ sets the tone for the whole collection, and describes an epicurean, violent, and depraved world: La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine, Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps, Et nous alimentons nos aimables remords, Comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine. […] Sur l’oreiller du mal c’est Satan Trismégiste Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté, Et le riche métal de notre volonté Est tout vaporisé par ce savant chimiste. […] Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l’incendie, N’ont pas encor brodé de leurs plaisants dessins Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins, C’est que notre âme, hélas! n’est pas assez hardie. Mais parmi les chacals, les panthères, les lices, Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents, Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants, Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices […]. (OC I, 5–6)

Here Baudelaire highlights the human being’s utter submission to Satan, pointing out the tight connections between pleasure, violence, and the natural disposition to sin, to the extent that rape and other types of violence seem to be the likely next step, if someone is audacious enough, in the wake of a constant practice of vice. As Labarthe (1999, 508–509) has

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remarked, the panthers, serpents, vultures, and the other ‘monsters’ of the menagerie mentioned in ‘Au lecteur’, which are seven like the cardinal sins, have to be considered as ‘la “corporification” des vices humains’ [‘the “embodiment” of human vices’], with the panthers that, for instance, symbolise lust. The connection between Satan and the animal side of the human being is also underlined by Baudelaire in other writings, such as in Mon cœur mis à nu, where he writes that ‘il y a dans tout homme, à toute heure, deux postulations simultanées, l’une vers Dieu, l’autre vers Satan. L’invocation à Dieu, ou spiritualité, est un désir de monter en grade; celle de Satan, ou animalité, est une joie de descendre’ (OC I, 682–683) [‘there is in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous postulations, one towards God, the other towards Satan. The invocation to God, or spirituality, is a desire to rise in rank; that to Satan, or animality, is a joy of descent’]. The bestiary of the Fleurs, theologically derived from Christian lore though devoid of that tradition’s notion of Redemption (Labarthe 1999, 469), allegorically represents the animalistic features of the human being and occasionally makes use of elements that commonly belong to fairy tales and fables, such as anthropomorphic animals. The menagerie of ‘Au lecteur’ is analogous to that described by Boito in ‘Antiche storie’, in which the king enjoys spending time: Un serraglio di belve ed un di donne Nudrìa nella sua reggia ed ei nell’uno Passava i giorni, nell’altro le notti. (OL, 93) [One menagerie of wild beasts and one of women Was fed in his palace and he spent His days in one, his nights in the other.]

Re Orso is the king of a ‘Terra di mostri e di delitti’ [‘Land of monsters and murders’], Crete, the ‘maledetta / Per l’amor di Pasìfe isola infame’ (OL, 93) [‘infamous / Island, cursed for Pasiphae’s love’]. According to Greek mythology Pasiphae, the wife of King Minos of Crete, copulated with a bull in order to satisfy her lust hence giving birth to the Minotaur, and the reference to her name at the beginning of Re Orso is a first indication of the animality and bestiality of the king’s domain, taking also into account that Re Orso is called ‘Minotaur’ in a later section of the fairy tale (see OL, 111). In ‘Antiche storie’, Re Orso divides his time between wild beasts and women, both embodying carnal vice:

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Alle jene venìa col crin spruzzato D’olio di nardo e co’ lascivi odori Del suo letto d’avorio ed alle donne Redìa col leppo delle sozze jene E lordo il volto pe’ sanguigni baci Della pantera […]. (OL, 93) [To the hyenas he came with his hair sprayed With nard oil and with the lewd smells Of his ivory bed, and to the women He returned with the stench of the filthy hyenas And his face dirty for the bloody kisses Of the panther […].]

The oxymoronic juxtaposition of perfumes and stenches, or more precisely of the two situations in which one clearly mirrors the other, implies a combination of pleasure, lechery, and bestiality with hyenas and panthers representing lust and sexual perversion. Furthermore, the vulture that steals lambs, gold, and gems for the enjoyment of the monarch (OL, 93), plainly symbolises Re Orso’s greed. In the fairy tale, a significant place is given to the serpent, the despot’s favourite animal which assists him in the rape of his second wife Oliba and is notoriously the embodiment of Satanic temptation and original sin. The name ‘Re Orso’, King Bear in Italian, refers to an animal that, in Christianity, is associated with wrath and violence (see Feuillet 2007, 81), and adds another capital sin to those already attributed to the king. Even though Re Orso’s actions become progressively crueller and more violent, at the beginning of the fairy tale he is already a relentless sinner living in a vicious world, devoted to the excess of what Baudelaire calls the ‘repugnant menagerie of our vices’ represented by exotic and dangerous beasts. In ‘Antiche storie’, Boito describes Re Orso as a heavy and compulsive drinker as well. This is consistent with the prelude to the story, the ‘Esordio’, where the narrator warns the immoral ‘frati godenti’ (OL, 89)—gluttonous and slothful monks who relish a materialistic lifestyle— to be afraid of reading the fairy tale. In the ‘Esordio’, by specifically (and, indeed, sarcastically) addressing the  readers who might be disturbed by the contents of Re Orso, the speaker previews two of the main topics of the story, namely evil in the form of the ‘eternal Adversary’ (OL, 89), Satan, and corporal vices, particularly gluttony and sloth:

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O cherci, o canonaci—o frati godenti, Attoniti al libero—volar degli eventi, Se il desco v’inebria—se il chilo vi piace, Se odiate le chiacchiere—che turban la pace, Temete di leggere—la pagina orrenda Di questa leggenda! (OL, 89) [O clerics, O ecclesiastics—O hedonistic monks, Stunned at the free—running of events, If the table inebriates you—if you like to put on weight, If you hate small talks—that disturb the peace, Be afraid to read—the dreadful page Of this legend!]

Taking into account this warning, it should not surprise that in ‘Antiche storie’ Re Orso’s behaviour appears to be the result of an indolent and hedonistic lifestyle, dedicated to nothing else but intoxication, excessive eating, and lust. In ‘Antiche storie’ there is also place for a representation of boredom that bears a certain resemblance to Baudelaire’s characterisation of ennui in ‘Au lecteur’. Baudelaire describes boredom as the father of all vices in ‘Au lecteur’, capable of causing death and devastation: Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices, II en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde! Quoiqu’il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris, Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde; C’est l’Ennui!—L’œil chargé d’un pleur involontaire, II rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka. (OC I, 6)

Boito also gives ennui an important role in ‘Antiche storie’, linked to Re Orso’s many depravities and violent acts. The king, while intoxicated, ‘afferra, / Mosso da noia o da delirio, il crine / Di Mirra sua, söave amor, […] / […] e col pugnale / Orribilmente le schianta la testa’ (OL, 94) [‘grabs, / Moved by boredom or delirium, the hair / Of Mirra, sweet love, […] / […] and with the dagger / He horribly smashes her head’]. The murder of Mirra, his first wife, is the first to be shown in the story, and the narrator considers either boredom or madness as the possible cause of

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Re Orso’s brutal action, thereby implicitly placing them on the same level of danger and subtly emphasising the destructive powers of ennui, which in Re Orso has a strong connection with violence and death. The day after Mirra’s murder, Re Orso is momentarily anguished and remorseful for having killed her (OL, 94). Re Orso starts hearing the obsessive refrain ‘Re Orso / Ti schermi / Dal morso / De’ vermi’ in the first of the three sections entitled ‘Incubo’, which depicts the king’s terror of being bitten by worms and comes after Mirra’s murder in ‘Antiche storie’. Therefore, it could be argued that the refrain, if interpreted as the ever-present voice of remorse that haunts the protagonist, is specifically intertwined with— and originates from—this last cruel act, perpetrated by Re Orso while intoxicated and caused by ‘boredom or delirium’. In ‘I sette peccati mortali (Quadro di Ernesto Ewald)’, one of the very few art reviews written by Boito and published a few months after completing Re Orso, he discusses the seven deadly sins and connects sloth, closely related to boredom, to the image of the scaffold, hence highlighting its lethal powers in a similar manner to Baudelaire’s ‘Au lecteur’. In his review, Boito asserts that sloth is the cause of all other sins, and ‘porta perciò con se la condanna e la vergogna di tutti, ed è personificato in un ribaldo ladrone o assassino che cammina al supplizio; […] il carnefice lo precede’ (TS, 1280) [‘therefore carries with it the condemnation and shame of them all, and is personified in a rogue thief or murderer who walks to the scaffold; […] the executioner precedes him’]. Gluttony, Putrefaction, and the Worm In his article on ‘I sette peccati mortali’, Boito seems to place gluttony, characterised by excessive indulgence in food and alcohol, alongside sloth as the worst cardinal sins by indenting and thus emphasising the following phrase: ‘il dannoso peccato della gola’ (TS, 1280) [‘the harmful sin of gluttony’]. By highlighting the dangers of gluttony and sloth, in this review Boito expresses the same thought as the one behind the warning to the immoral monks of the section ‘Esordio’ in Re Orso. In the fairy tale there are numerous references to food and drink, particularly to their excessive consumption, depicted by means of Boito’s poetic technique involving the combination of terms belonging to different registers, as seen previously in the poems ‘A una mummia’ and ‘Case nuove’ of Il libro dei versi. The section ‘La cena’, which describes the feast following the marriage between Re Orso and Oliba, his second wife, is not only the grotesque and

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gruesome climax of the fairy tale, but also a representation of the sordidness of Re Orso’s domain, expressed by means of the nouns, adjectives, and verbs that refer to eating and drinking. Alongside archaic terms such as ‘mappe’ (in its Latin signification, meaning ‘napkins’), ‘ciati / Murrini’, ‘gobbole’, ‘ramora’, ‘cervogia’, ‘lagène’, ‘loriche’, there is place for everyday words related to feasting such as ‘pasticcio’, ‘succhia’, ‘rode’, ‘divorar’, ‘tracanna’, ‘morso’, ‘trincia’, ‘mascelle’ (OL, 110–111). The juxtaposition of archaic and prosaic words creates, often in the same line, a bizarre association between unpleasant and highly lyrical images, such as ‘Le immonde labbra stillano—il miel sulle loriche’ (OL, 111) [‘The filthy lips drip—honey on the suits of armour’] or ‘e sulle curve forme / Dell’aurea tazza ei specchiasi—più orribile e deforme’ (OL, 110) [‘and on the curved shape / Of the golden cup he is reflected—more horrible and deformed’]. This stylistic technique, employed to enhance the force of the semantic oppositions and to experiment with prosaic language in a poetic context, is also present in Baudelaire’s work. In ‘Au lecteur’, for instance, Baudelaire writes: ‘Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas’ (OC I, 5). The noun ‘appas’, charms, clashes with the word repugnant, and the dissonance is enhanced by the fact that ‘appas’ is a term belonging to the literary register, and ‘répugnants’ is a prosaic adjective that denotes unpleasantness. In a similar manner to ‘La cena’, in order to portray a world characterised by gluttony and materialism, in ‘Au lecteur’ Baudelaire depicts vice with a vocabulary related to food, a ‘semantic field marked as distinctly unpoetic’ (De Dobay Rifelj 1987, 71–72). Placed next to an archaic and exotic lexicon containing rare words such as ‘lésine’, ‘Trismégiste’, ‘appas’, ‘helminthes’, ‘lices’, ‘houka’, are ordinary terms connected to eating such as ‘alimentons’, ‘nourrissent’, ‘grassement’ (derived from ‘gras’), ‘mange’, ‘vieille orange’, ‘ribote’ (which denotes excessive consumption of food and drinks), ‘avalerait’, and ‘délicat’ (OC I, 5–6). ‘Au lecteur’ is only one of the many poems of the Fleurs in which Baudelaire employs a vocabulary that refers to eating and drinking: in ‘Le Reniement de Saint Pierre’, for example, the poet represents God as a gluttonous tyrant, ‘Comme un tyran gorgé de viande et de vins’ (OC I, 121); the same image is used in ‘Le Voyage’ to depict the tragic situation of man, described as a ‘tyran goulu’ (OC I, 132). In Re Orso, gluttony, like boredom, has a strong connection to death: Trol the executioner is a ‘lurco gigante’ (OL, 96) [‘gluttonous giant’], both ‘cuoco e boja / Strangola e scuoja; […] / Dà vita e morte’ (OL, 107) [‘cook and executioner, / He strangles and skins; […] / He gives life and

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death’]. This link is also visible in a scene of ‘La cena’ where Papiol the court jester must, and most certainly wants to, eat a ‘pasticcio’ (‘pie’) which, however, ultimately becomes the instrument of his death (OL, 114). In this section, numerous are the references to excessive consumption and voracity, such as in the following scenes: ‘Re Orso empie e tracanna—tre tazze e poi tre tazze’ (OL, 111) [‘Re Orso fills up and gulps down—three cups and then three cups again.’]; ‘Ciarlano i Conti e rodono;—sì rozza è in lor la fame / Ch’essi alternano il morso—del dente a quel dell’ugna’ (ibid.) [‘The Counts chat and gnaw;—so loutish is their hunger / That they alternate the bite—of the tooth and the fingernail’]. Alongside constant reference to Re Orso’s drinking and intoxication, Boito includes four different odes to wine recited by the king, who tries to convince Oliba to drink by declaiming the properties of various wines which can make the drinker experience guilt or desire oblivion and death, among other things. As we will see in Chap. 5, in Tavolozza and Penombre Praga dedicates various poems to wine and drunkenness too, drawing primarily on Baudelaire’s ‘Le Vin’, a section of the Fleurs where the latter describes the effects of overconsumption of wine on people that use it for different purposes—including fighting ennui and looking for ecstasy or death (see OC I, 105–110). Baudelaire’s influence is also clearly present in Boito’s odes to wine, particularly in the passage where Re Orso associates wine with pride in a Satanic attempt to become like God. Discussing the powers of wine, in ‘Le Vin du solitaire’ Baudelaire writes: ‘Tu lui verses […] / […] l’orgueil, […] / Qui nous rend triomphants et semblables aux Dieux!’ (OC I, 109). Boito’s verses, on the other hand, are the following: ‘Vin di Scio! vin di Scio! vin di Scio! / […] / Questo è un vin che fa simili a Dio!’ (OL, 112) [‘Wine of Chios! wine of Chios! wine of Chios! / […] / This is a wine that makes you equal to God!’]. Re Orso recites this verse just before (seemingly) killing the worm—his true enemy—hence while feeling triumphant and proud that he finally managed to slay it. Pride, like the other sins, is a means of self-destruction. In the chapter ‘Confessione’, entirely dedicated to Re Orso’s confession to a Satanic monk on his deathbed, after having murdered all the banqueters at his wedding feast as well as all the people in his kingdom—and the narrator again blames drunkenness, together with the mysterious voice, for that (see OL, 121; 123)—the king claims that he remained alone like a ‘Dio decaduto’ (OL, 124) [‘fallen God’], a prideful God that has lost everything. Allusions to gluttony are scattered throughout the fairy tale and are occasionally accompanied by a strong anti-clerical and anti-Catholic

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feeling. Besides the ‘Esordio’, where monks are described as gluttons and epicureans, the poet associates Catholic ministers with gluttony in the chapter ‘Viaggio d’un verme’. During its journey to Re Orso’s tomb, in order to cross the sea the worm hides in the pocket of an obese priest, which ‘sapea di salsiccia’ (OL, 134) [‘tasted like sausage’]. In Re Orso, gluttony not only has ties with anti-clericalism but is also represented by means of a symbolism that draws heavily on Christian lore. Without taking into account the esoteric and Gnostic symbolism that, according to Villa (2009, 441–442), is supposedly displayed in the fairy tale and ultimately defines Re Orso, the presence of references to Christian culture and tradition is undeniable. Beelzebub, the prince of devils from the Gospel of Matthew, considered by Dante Alighieri as simply another name to refer to Lucifer in the Divina Commedia,4 is a recurring character in the fairy tale, disguised first as a confessional monk and then as a knight. In these two different passages of Re Orso, Boito describes the disappearance of Beelzebub, from the dress of the monk and the armour of the knight, in the following manner: Rimase il guscio Della castagna, E Belzebù Mangiò il marron, Ch’era un dimon. (OL, 128; 131) [The shell remained Of the chestnut, And Beelzebub Ate the chestnut, Which was a demon.]

The two references, one to eating and food and the other to the ‘demon’ Beelzebub, are put together here for a specific reason: Beelzebub was commonly considered to be the demon representing gluttony in medieval Christian demonology.5 The final chapter of the fairy tale, entitled ‘Lo spettro’, where Re Orso has eventually become a ghost who oxymoronically is also a corpse, possessing both incorporeal and corporeal features, seems to confirm the prominence of this cardinal sin in Re Orso. This characterisation of Re Orso as simultaneously a ghost and a corpse implicates a double corruption, on a moral and a physical level:

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Son sette secoli,—che a mezzanotte, Appena scoccano—dodici botte            Sull’orïuol, Passa un fantasima […] Gli rode un vermine—palato e lingua; Pur sul suo scheletro—par non s’estingua         La carne ancor. (OL, 139) [It has been seven centuries,—that at midnight, As soon as the clock—chimes            Twelve times, A ghost passes by […] A worm gnaws—at his palate and tongue; Yet on his skeleton—it seems that the flesh Never ends.]

The depiction of this macabre scene with terms related to both putrefaction and feeding, such as ‘rode’ and ‘carne’ and, more importantly, the image of the worm—already employed in ‘Dualismo’ to depict the material and corruptible side of the human being6—which gnaws at Re Orso’s tongue and palate, namely the main symbols of the sense of taste, define Re Orso’s grotesque posthumous punishment. Now a ghost in the nineteenth century, the king has been enduring this punishment for the past seven centuries, in a sort of Dantean infernal contrappasso that delineates his sufferings for having devoted his life to excessive eating and drinking and to the pleasures of carnal vices, without listening to the voice of remorse that continually threatened him for his moral corruption: ‘Re Orso / Ti schermi / Dal morso / De’ vermi.’ The role of gluttony and lust as Re Orso’s main vices is confirmed in the chapter ‘Litania’, a Satanic litany recited by the aforementioned monk in the wake of the king’s death, where alongside the names of several demons Boito lists the following sins, including wrath: Gula. Luxuria. Ira. (OL, 127)

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[Gluttony. Lust. Wrath.]

Just before stating these sins, in ‘Litania’ three different types of illnesses are also invoked, defining Re Orso’s vices further: ‘Delirium tremens’, which is related to gluttony, caused by a habitual excessive consumption of alcohol; and ‘Infirmitas nefanda’ as well as ‘Sacra lues’ (OL, 127), which are connected to lust, since they are both venereal diseases. By interpreting the recurring refrain about the bite of worms as the voice of remorse, to which Re Orso does not listen, we can see that the association between remorse and the symbol of the worm is utterly intentional in Re Orso. It is not by chance that a line in the chapter ‘Viaggio d’un verme’ identifies the animal as the infernal worm of the Book of Isaiah (‘Vermis non morietur. / Il verme non morrà’ OL, 132) [‘Vermis non morietur. / The worm will not die’]. In 66.24, Isaiah defines the mark of eternal damnation in hell as the worm of the corpses of men that have continuously committed mortal sins, and this worm ‘shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh’ (Carroll and Prickett 2008, 826). Isaiah’s worm has been interpreted as the ‘worm of conscience’ by some of the most important scholars of Christianity, including Origen, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin (Schinkel 2007, 114–115). I would therefore argue that the ‘bite of the worms’ ironically represents posthumous remorse for Re Orso’s sins, which finally reaches him and is used as a means of grotesque suffering not by God, who is completely absent from the fairy tale, but by the character that confesses Re Orso before his death and recites for him a Satanic litany disguised as a monk: Beelzebub. This idea of posthumous remorse, represented by the bite of the worm as ironic after-death punishment, is the key subject of Baudelaire’s poem ‘Remords posthume’. Baudelaire portrays a worm that gnaws on the corpse of his mistress like remorse: ‘Et le ver rongera ta peau comme un remords’ (OC I, 35). As seen in Chap. 2, in the same year as Re Orso Praga wrote ‘Vendetta postuma’, which was plainly based on ‘Remords posthume’, hence we cannot rule out a probable influence on Boito’s fairy tale as well. Not only in Re Orso, but also in several compositions of Baudelaire’s Fleurs expressions that typically describe feeding are used alongside the macabre image of the worm that chews on cadavers, although not so much in theological as in subjective allegories in order to enhance the effect of

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continuous distressing feelings, as already shown in Chap. 2. In ‘L’Irréparable’, Baudelaire describes the poet’s feeling of hopelessness, originating in remorse for having caused something irredeemable, in the following fashion: Pouvons-nous étouffer le vieux, le long Remords, Qui vit, s’agite et se tortille, Et se nourrit de nous comme le ver des morts, Comme du chêne la chenille? Pouvons-nous étouffer l’implacable Remords? Dans quel philtre, dans quel vin, dans quelle tisane, Noierons-nous ce vieil ennemi, Destructeur et gourmand comme la courtisane, Patient comme la fourmi? Dans quel philtre?—dans quel vin?—dans quelle tisane? […] L’Irréparable ronge avec sa dent maudite Notre âme, piteux monument, Et souvent il attaque, ainsi que le termite, Par la base le bâtiment. L’Irréparable ronge avec sa dent maudite! (OC I, 54–55)

This allegorical discourse focuses on the destructive and ignoble sensation of remorse, unusually caused by Satan, and not God, who has put the speaker in a desperate mood (‘L’Espérance qui brille aux carreaux de l’Auberge / […] est morte à jamais! / […] / Le Diable a tout éteint aux carreaux de l’Auberge!’, OC I, 55). The poet is an anguished ‘spirit’, and this anguish is the punishment for the speaker’s moral corruption linked to the Christian notion of the ‘irremissible’ that condemns him to be one of the ‘damned’ (OC I, 55). The discourse is sustained by a vocabulary that stresses this moral dissolution with realistic expressions related to animalistic gluttony and putrefaction, such as ‘se nourrit’, ‘ver des morts’, ‘chenille’, ‘Destructeur’, ‘gourmand’, ‘ronge’, ‘dent maudite’, and ‘termite’, which recall Boito’s own terminology. As we can see from this poem, as well as from the line ‘Et le ver rongera ta peau comme un remords’ (‘Remords posthume’), ‘ronger’ (to gnaw) is one of Baudelaire’s preferred verbs correlated to both an imagery of eating and the symbol of the worm.

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‘Rodere’ (to gnaw) is also one of Boito’s most-employed verbs associated with feeding—it appears six times in Re Orso, predominantly to describe the actions of the worm, yet also in a figurative sense to describe the strength of certain feelings, such as when Re Orso is deemed a wrathful ‘dimon / cui rodea / Bestial ferocia’ (OL, 113) [‘demon / gnawed by / Bestial ferocity’]. ‘Rodere’ is used to subtly introduce envy (another cardinal sin), which is the feeling that best describes Papiol, when the latter declares the following: Il tarlo rode il trono,—l’ostrica rode l’arca, L’insetto succhia il pampino—gigante e picciol gnomo Rosica il monte altissimo,—l’invidia strugge l’uomo— E divorar io posso,—Messeri, in simil guisa Il mio pasticcio. (OL, 110) [The woodworm gnaws at the throne,—the oyster gnaws at the coffer, The insect sucks the vine leave—giants and small gnomes Gnaw at the highest mountain,—envy consumes man— And I can devour,—in a similar way, Messeri My pie.]

The analogy between envy and the biting of the woodworm and of the oyster emphasises the power and the bestiality of this feeling, according to Papiol. The reference to envy is not accidental in Papiol’s speech. Papiol is a scrawny and grotesque jester who persistently deceives and mocks Re Orso, has murdered many kings and counts for his personal gain, and continuously tries to impress Re Orso and his ministers, such as in the scene of ‘La cena’ just mentioned, where he claims that he is able to eat an entire ‘pie’ bigger than him, the prize gained for having (falsely) told Re Orso where the refrain came from. As a matter of fact, the description of envy in the article dedicated to ‘I sette peccati mortali’ could be applied to Papiol: there, ‘l’Invidia’ (‘Envy’) is portrayed as ‘un buffone il quale ballonzola arcignamente e si morde il dito’ (TS, 1279) [‘a court jester who bounces grimly and bites his finger’]. Alongside metaphorical representations of anguished feelings, in Baudelaire’s Fleurs the image of the worm is employed when portraying human corpses and animal carcasses. In ‘Une charogne’, a carrion is vividly and realistically described in its putridness, which entails material dissolution into nature:

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Les mouches bourdonnaient sur ce ventre putride, D’où sortaient de noirs bataillons De larves, qui coulaient comme un épais liquide Le long de ces vivants haillons. (OC I, 31)

The violence of death, which is depicted in the poem in its sheer bestiality excluding any religious transcendence or redemption (Labarthe 1999, 160), becomes even clearer in the last two stanzas with the comparison between the carcass of an animal and the speaker’s mistress, as well as with a terminology that associates rottenness with feeding, where the ‘vermine / […] mangera de baisers’ her corpse that will ‘Moisir parmi les ossements’ (OC I, 32). Boito certainly remembered this image when he described the putrid charogne of a dead cat, with a worm that feasts on it, in ‘Viaggio d’un verme’: […] sul lido In groppa al verde carolar de’ fiotti Approda un gatto morto; è la carogna Un paradiso al verme. Il verme corre, […] e sale Sulla carogna […] […] e il bruco rode Su quel carcame ch’è merenda e barca. (OL, 134, my emphases) [ […] Riding the green dance of waves, On the beach A dead cat lands; it is the carrion A paradise for the worm. The worm runs, […] and climbs On the carrion. […] […] and the caterpillar gnaws On that carcass that is a snack and a boat.]

The bizarre association of words such as ‘carogna’, ‘rode’, ‘carcame’, and ‘merenda’ underlines the baseness of the symbol of the worm, which in this scene takes on the role of violent agent of death and bodily decomposition through the connection between eating and decay. In Re Orso, the grotesque and occasionally comic treatment of scenes involving violence, death, and decomposition, which feature either hyperbolic or nonsensical elements, serves to create a dreamlike and bizarre

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atmosphere, and to ‘strutturare il fiabesco e l’orrido, a dare una fisionomia più lieve alla stessa simbologia che domina—e talora pesantemente—la fiaba’ (Mariani 1971, 351) [‘structure the fairy-tale and the horrid, to give a lighter appearance to the very symbolism that dominates—sometimes heavily—the fairy tale’]. Murder and other violent deeds, grotesquely depicted, are always connected to Re Orso’s deadly sins and in particular to gluttony, lust, and wrath, as well as to the frightening and obsessively recurring refrain heard by the king. That is why all the most gruesome acts are performed by the king, without any apparent motive or reason besides his fear of the refrain (and indeed of the bite of worms), in the context of alcohol abuse, debauchery, and hedonistic feasting. Macabre and violent scenes are used as an aesthetic tool to portray picturesquely a rotten world in which the worm and the other animals—and especially the serpent, as we will see in Chap. 4—allegorically represent moral and physical corruption as the other side of pleasure and decadent excess, which upon a thorough analysis appears as the pivotal theme of the fairy tale. In the literary article ‘Riviste drammatiche’, Boito himself declared the need to use artificial artistic devices to portray the deplorable features of certain characters, in a manner that recalls Baudelaire’s artistic—and not moralistic or religious—idealisation of the most repulsive aspects of reality. The hyperbolic, comic, grotesque, macabre, unrealistic, in one word ‘artistic’ elements of Re Orso are, therefore, all part of this aesthetic idealisation: ‘quando la crudeltà o la viltà del carattere non è, per così dire, idealizzata da qualche lato artistico o pittoresco, quello non è carattere degno della scena’ (TS, 1198) [‘when the cruelty or cowardice of the character is not, so to speak, idealised by some artistic or picturesque elements, that is not a character worthy of the scene’]. This allegorical poetics of excess aimed at representing such a depraved character as Re Orso finds its specific precursor in Baudelaire’s poetry, although the use of a fairy tale set in the distant Middle Ages as literary genre, narrated in the third person, and the preferred choice of allegories linked to a theological tradition, entail a detachment from the subject matter both on an emotional and on a sympathetic level. Unlike Baudelaire’s ‘Au lecteur’, Boito’s purpose was not to declare the similarity and communality between the hypocrisy of the poet and that of the reader when dealing with immoral topics such as vice and ennui (‘Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!’, OC I, 6); it was rather to be able to treat those very same topics without any moral or religious prejudice, discarding any possible idealistic salvation or Romantic redemption for the poetic subject.

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And yet it would be limitative to restrict the meanings of the fairy tale solely to its artistic qualities and medieval allegorical setting. Re Orso has well-defined ties to modernity, in terms of both direct references to the nineteenth century and deliberate anachronistic use of items and medical definitions that did not exist at the turn of the eleventh century, when the story is set. The medical condition called ‘Delirium tremens’ mentioned in ‘Litania’, for instance, was ‘first recognized as a disorder attributed to excessive alcohol abuse in 1813’ (Rahman and Paul 2020). In his Satanic ‘Litania’, the monk also invokes gunpowder, a modern object used to cause violence and harm, to intercede for Re Orso, uttering: Nitrum. Carbo. Sulphur. (OL, 127) [Nitre. Charcoal. Sulphur.]

These are the chemical elements necessary for the production of gunpowder. A few years before Boito’s blasphemous inversion of the Christian ‘Litany of the Saints’ in ‘Litania’, Baudelaire had written ‘Les Litanies de Satan’, a Satanic litany based on the ‘Kyrie Eleison’, where the poet praises Satan for having given man gunpowder, made of a mixture of nitre and sulphur: Toi qui, pour consoler l’homme frêle qui souffre, Nous appris à mêler le salpêtre et le soufre. (OC I, 125)

These elements are the same as those quoted by Boito in his litany with the exception of charcoal, which Baudelaire omitted but is in fact essential for the manufacture of gunpowder. Besides the direct textual reference, what we see here is that in Re Orso Boito employs Baudelaire’s poetry not simply as a source of Romantic Satanic imagery and allegories appropriate for the fairy tale’s supernatural setting, namely what has been described by T. S. Eliot (1972, 423) as Baudelaire’s ‘romantic detritus’ and, in a curiously similar manner, by Croce (1956, 254) as Boito’s ‘ciarpame romantico’ (‘romantic rubbish’). On the contrary, the anachronistic mentions of gunpowder and of the medical disorder called delirium tremens create an intentional bridge between Romantic medievalism and nineteenth-­century

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modernity, opening the story up beyond its fairy-tale subject matter. The last chapter, ‘Lo spettro’, builds on this connection by describing Re Orso’s cadaveric ghost that terrifies people in the nineteenth century, with the worm chewing on his tongue and palate, a symbol, as seen above, of Re Orso’s gluttony and excess. I believe that it is not the ghost itself that frightens Christian people (‘Ogni cristian’, OL, 139) in the nineteenth century, but what it and the worm represent, which is to say unchristian and diabolical intemperance and moral as well as physical corruption. Considering that the modern world is repetitively described as materialistic, greedy, decadent, gluttonous, lecherous, and only superficially and deceptively religious by Boito throughout Il libro dei versi, as seen in Chap. 2, this conclusion to the fairy tale must therefore be interpreted as ironic and irreverent, serving as a further sarcastic remark on contemporaneous society. The link between the similarity of Re Orso’s moral behaviour and that of supposedly Christian people in the nineteenth century is further revealed by the definition of Re Orso as an apparent Christian in various parts of the poem, such as in ‘Confessione’, where the king believes that he is being confessed by a Christian monk and tries to have his sins forgiven, and to buy a place in heaven, by leaving all his wealth to the monk and the Church (OL, 123–125); and in ‘Viaggio d’un verme’, where Re Orso, now dead and buried in a tomb, is repeatedly described as sleeping ‘come un buon cristiano’ (OL, 132–133, 135) [‘like a good Christian’]. The role of modernity in Re Orso, however, would not be discussed in all its significance if we did not examine the obsessive and monomaniacal properties of the frightening refrain. These blur the boundaries between psychological and supernatural domains, hallucinations and apparitions; in other words, between a modern medical and a religious-paranormal understanding of ghosts, demons, and spirits of the dead. As a result, this psychological interpretation rooted in a nineteenth-century clinical notion of monomania puts into question the authenticity and validity of the medieval, fantastic, and magical world of Re Orso, as we will see next. A Modern Fairy Tale for Monomaniacs: Apparitions or Hallucinations? In Re Orso, the recurrent refrain ‘Re Orso / Ti schermi / Dal morso / De’ vermi’ conveys the titular character’s idée fixe concerning the bite of worms. In the fairy tale, Boito experiments with a conception of idée fixe that is both aesthetic, employing the refrain as a lyrical repetition of a

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cyclical motif, and psychological, with the refrain that dictates the constant return of Re Orso’s terrifying obsession. The notions of idée fixe and obsession are central in Boito’s work: one of the titles that he considered for a possible collection of his five novellas published in periodicals between 1867 and 1874 was, in fact, Idee Fisse (see Villa 2009, 477–481), revealing the common thread underlying the novellas. The expression ‘idea fissa’, derived from the French idée fixe, was used in nineteenth-century psychiatry together with—or as a synonym for—the clinical term monomania to describe a pathological obsession with a specific thought, idea, or object. Monomania was theorised in the 1810s by French alienist Étienne Esquirol, who illustrated this alleged mental disorder in his various essays including the monumental work in three volumes Des maladies mentales considérées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal (1838). There, Esquirol explains that according to him insanity is characterised, amongst other things, by distorted sensations and perceptions which he divides into illusions and hallucinations. Esquirol describes in detail the clinical features of monomania and the idée fixe: l’attention s’exerce avec tant d’énergie, qu’elle est exclusive sur un seul objet: constamment attachée à cet objet, rien ne peut l’en distraire; tous les ­raisonnements, toutes les déterminations dérivent de cette idée fixe. La monomanie offre mille exemples de ce délire. (Esquirol 1838, 9) [attention is exerted with so much energy that is exclusively on a single object or subject: constantly attached to this, nothing can distract it. All reasonings, all determinations are derived from this fixed idea. Monomania offers a thousand examples of this delirium.]

From the 1820s onwards, the term monomania became part of the everyday language, both in France and in Europe and North America, and was employed in different fields to describe various types of idée fixe, from morbid obsessions to what was interpreted as violent and homicidal monomania (see Van Zuylen 2005, 3). In nineteenth-century literature, two of the authors that experimented aesthetically with a clinical notion of idée fixe, encompassing connotations of compulsive obsession and monomania, were Poe and Baudelaire. In fiction, Poe discusses the relationship between murderous instincts and obsessional feelings in numerous short stories, including ‘Berenice’ (1835) and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (1843). In the former, the speaker’s fixed idea

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is appropriately defined a ‘monomania, if I must so term it’, because, as in Esquirol’s definition, it is a ‘disease’ that forcibly takes over the attention of the protagonist, ‘a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive’ (Poe 1984, 227). In a similar fashion, Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘Mademoiselle Bistouri’ (1869) focuses on the mentally disturbed titular character who is morbidly obsessed with doctors, compulsively collecting portraits of them and repeating, throughout the poem, the following ‘unintelligible refrain’ (OC I, 354) to strangers accidentally met in a Parisian street, whom she then invites to her house: ‘Tu es médecin?’ (ibid.). Refrains and repetitions are a key element of Poe’s and Baudelaire’s representations of monomania, especially in verse. In ‘Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe’, Baudelaire himself describes Poe’s characteristic use of poetic refrains as ‘retours obstinés de phrases qui simulent les obsessions […] de l’idée fixe’ (OC II, 336) [‘insistent reiterations of phrases which simulate the obsessions […] of a fixed idea’ (Baudelaire 1964, 134)]. This can be seen in poems such as ‘Ulalume’, ‘Lenore’, ‘Annabel Lee’, and above all in ‘The Raven’ (1845), where the word ‘nevermore’ repeated in the last line of a series of stanzas by a black raven—or so believed by the speaker who is gradually losing his mind— conveys the monomania of the poet, who is desperate because he will no longer be able to see his dead mistress (Poe 1984, 81–86). Baudelaire’s refrains were analogously seen by his contemporaries as expressing the poet’s idée fixe and manic fixations: Verlaine (1972, 611) writes that Baudelaire was without equal in his poetic use of repetition with the aim of ‘painting obsession’; and as seen in Chap. 1 Gautier describes, with medical-psychiatric terminology, the ‘decadent’ style that Baudelaire employs in the Fleurs to translate lyrically the ‘the subtle confidences of neurosis’ and the ‘bizarre hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness’. One of the poems of the Fleurs seemingly representing an hallucination is ‘Les Sept vieillards’, where the poet sees six exact copies of a sinister old man walking in the street. Unable to give sense to the apparitions (‘Blessé par le mystère et par l’absurdité’, OC I, 88) the speaker is torn between a supernatural interpretation, ‘ces spectres baroques’ (ibid.), and a medical explanation of the event, being ‘Malade et morfondu, l’esprit fiévreux et trouble’ (ibid.), ending the poem with expressions underlying his uncertainty and mental derangement, such as the following: ‘Vainement ma raison voulait prendre la barre’ (ibid.). Some of Baudelaire’s compositions from the Fleurs that feature refrains are ‘Les Litanies de Satan’, ‘L’Horloge’, ‘Le Balcon’, ‘Harmonie du soir’; in his poetry, repetitions often convey

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recurrent obsessive and tormenting thoughts and feelings, including remorse that, as seen above in ‘L’Irréparable’, is compared to the gnawing of worms: Pouvons-nous étouffer le vieux, le long Remords, Qui vit, s’agite et se tortille, Et se nourrit de nous comme le ver des morts, Comme du chêne la chenille? Pouvons-nous étouffer l’implacable Remords?

The interplay between psychopathological and aesthetic aspects of the idée fixe is also central in some of the novellas of Boito’s planned collection Idee fisse. Here, there is a focus on the ambiguity—or, to recall Todorov’s (1970, 37) critical definition of fantastic literature, the ‘hesitation’—between the spheres of the real and of the imaginary, a sensory uncertainty that leaves the characters and/or the reader of the novella undecided between a hallucinatory and a supernatural interpretation of voices, visions, and physical sensations. In ‘Il pugno chiuso’ (1870) this sensory ambiguity, which is especially tactile with the infernal coin supposedly held in their clenched fists by Levy and Paw but described as a ‘fissazione maniaca’ (OL, 236) [‘maniacal fixation’] by the narrator, is a key theme. Similarly, in ‘L’Alfier nero’ (1867) the protagonist’s hallucinations caused by his ‘idea fissa: l’alfiere segnato’ (OL, 174) [‘fixed idea: the marked bishop’] involve visions that are interpreted by Tom, the protagonist, to be of a supernatural kind, thus providing the story with a sense of mystery and uncertainty.; Tom’s supposed monomania also includes an auditory feature, an expression that he keeps hearing incessantly, like a refrain: ‘Se si potesse riattaccare così la testa ad un uomo!’ (OL, 177) [If only we could reattach a man’s head as easily!’]. The auditory aspect of the idée fixe is best represented by Re Orso’s recurrent refrain, a veritable nightmare constantly heard by the king during the night that serves as a leitmotiv for the fairy tale. In the first half of Re Orso, ‘Leggenda prima. Orso vivo’, the refrain appears four times and exclusively in the three different sections all entitled ‘Incubo’, nightmare (OL, 95, 99, 103). These sections show the ways in which Boito mingles and blurs the domains of the supernatural and the psychological to depict a nightmarish atmosphere of mystery, obsession, and fear, in an analogous manner to the aforementioned novellas of the planned collection Idee Fisse for which Boito also considered, in point of fact, Incubi as a title (Villa 2009,

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477–481). In the three nightmares of Re Orso, it is not clear whether the refrain is a dreadful ‘lagno—di morto’ (OL, 95) [‘lamentation—of the dead’], or the yelp of a seal or a magpie (OL, 96, 100), or if the voice belongs, on the other hand, to a poet who sings and plays (OL, 104). It is not clear, moreover, whether the other characters of the fairy tale can hear the mysterious voice, or if, more simply perhaps, the king is having a frightful nightmare—like the title of the sections would suggest—or, possibly, he is hallucinating, imagines to be hearing the refrain. The last seems to be the opinion of Papiol, the jester at Re Orso’s court who mocks the king by fabricating a different story regarding the source of the refrain every time, but who concurrently also suggests that it could be the ‘Fear’, the ‘delirium’ (OL, 96), the ‘vertigini / D’un’ora pazza’ [‘derangement / of a crazy hour’] which have obsessively occupied Re Orso’s attention (‘Lo spirto assorto’, OL, 100). In other words, Papiol claims that it is Re Orso’s monomania that makes him believe he is hearing the refrain. Despite the fantasy setting, terms such as ‘Incubo’, ‘dimòne’ (OL, 99, ‘demon’), ‘ombre’, ‘fantasimi’ [sic] are mainly employed in their figurative connotations, as synonyms for terror and anguish: Paura ammanta Di buio il fulgido Raggio del sol. L’alma inquïeta È un pittor fosco D’ombre e fantasimi. (OL, 103) [Fear mantles In darkness the radiant Ray of the sun. The worried soul Is a gloomy painter Of shadows and ghosts.]

These ghosts are not supernatural apparitions or spirits, but appearances, shadows, phantoms of the mind; images or sounds that Re Orso’s fear transforms and makes terrifying. In fact, in the first ‘Incubo’ the narrator declares that ‘Né mostro, né fantasima / Appare in quella stanza’ (OL, 95) [‘Neither monster nor ghost / Appears in that room’]. There are no frightening unnatural beings in Re Orso’s bedroom, therefore, or spirits of the dead, as suggested at first. The obsessive idée fixe, the looming

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presence of remorse and guilt in the constantly recurring refrain, the nocturnal scenery, an unrestrained imagination all contribute to turn things that in broad daylight would appear innocuous into disquieting demonic figures: ‘Il cielo è di cenere,—il suol di carbone / E par che ogni platano— annidi un dimòne’ (OL, 99) [‘The sky is made of ash,—the soil of coal / And it seems that every plane tree—hides a demon’]. In the version published in 1864, the first section entitled ‘Incubo’ had for title the Latin ‘Spectrum’ (OL, 282), translatable into English as either illusory image or supernatural ghost. This further shows the interaction between the supernatural and the monomaniacal in the figurative meaning of ‘spectre’ as a threat, a tormenting nightmare in Re Orso. The chapter ‘Confessione’ eventually reveals that Re Orso did in fact go insane; the voice repeating the refrain would appear to be an auditory hallucination which followed him as he travelled the world trying to escape from it, as in his deathbed Re Orso affirms: ‘or la sento [la voce] ancora strepitar nel cerèbro’ (OL, 124) [‘now I hear it [the voice] still clamouring in my brain’]. The refrain, however, returns two more times after Re Orso’s death, in the conclusion that resolves the ambiguity between the real and the imaginary displayed in the three sections ‘Incubo’. If the first half of the fairy tale is already populated by characters hyperbolically described, such as Trol the giant executioner and Papiol the dwarf jester, the second, ‘Leggenda seconda. Orso morto’, introduces disconcerting and marvellous events, such as the aforementioned infernal monk and knight that disappear into thin air or Re Orso’s (actual) ghost that frightens people in the nineteenth century. The supernatural thus, finally, prevails at the end. Nevertheless, this does not dispel the sense of uncertainty and hesitation, for Re Orso as well as for the reader, regarding the origin of the refrain in the first half of the poem, where a contemporary and indeed modern psychological representation of the theme of obsession is employed in a literary context that is Romantic, namely that of fairy tales and fantasy. And it is in this very (dissonant) juxtaposition where, I think, truly lie the experimental and innovative nature of Boito’s Re Orso and the modernity of its ‘realism’.

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Sepulchral Allegories and Existential Anguish in the Poetry of Giovanni Camerana Unlike Boito and Praga, during his lifetime Giovanni Camerana never published a collected edition of the numerous poems he wrote. This was probably due to the fact that he, privately a poet and publicly a magistrate, thought that publishing a volume of poetry was ill-suited to a magistrate, supposedly going as far as to say that ‘magistrato e poeta sono due termini incompatibili’ [‘magistrate and poet are two incompatible terms’], as Corrado Corradino reported in his post-mortem homage to Camerana written in July 1905.7 And yet Camerana considered poetry as much more than just a hobby, or a pastime: he believed that he ‘was born a poet’ (‘A Giuseppe Giacosa’, CP, 125) and because of his profession the love for poetry was an illicit one: ‘i miei amori con la poesia sono amori illegittimi’ (quoted by Finzi 1968a, xxv) [‘my love for poetry is an illegitimate one’]. Born into a family of magistrates and soldiers, his professional path was already chosen for him, which he reluctantly accepted. Camerana voiced his indisposition towards his job, alongside an unconcealed preference for poetry and painting, in several instances,8 and these profound issues are generally considered to have been a major factor in his decision to commit suicide in 1905. It is not known precisely when Camerana began mingling with Boito and Praga and frequenting the artistic circle of the Scapigliatura—the first actual evidence of their intellectual and literary association is Camerana’s poem ‘A Emilio Praga’, written in June 1865 in Milan before moving to Turin later that year. Camerana, whose family was from Piedmont, had been living in Milan since 1860, visiting various cultural institutions and literary cafés of the city (see Farinelli 2003, 167). What we know for sure is that in 1863 Boito and Praga joined forces to write the theatrical play Le madri galanti, first (and only) performance in Turin in March of the same year. According to Contini (1974, 87–88), the ‘Dante Alighieri’, a literary and cultural cenacle that would later be the nucleus of the Piedmont offshoot of the Scapigliatura, was created in 1863 in conjunction with the production of Le madri galanti in Turin; and Salvatore Farina, a friend of Camerana, claimed that the latter was one of the founders of the ‘Dante Alighieri’ (see Finzi 1968a, xxiii–xxiv). Can we assume, then, that Camerana had already met Boito and Praga in Milan in 1863, possibly also being one of the members of the ‘Dante Alighieri’ that helped to organise the performance of Le madri galanti in Turin? This is indeed possible.

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There are, however, different opinions on the matter: Nardi (1968, 207) maintains that the ‘Dante Alighieri’ was not constituted before 1867–1868, and De Rienzo (1972, 17–18, 147), despite arguing that it was definitely established in 1863, claims that Camerana joined the ‘Dante Alighieri’ only much later, between 1867 and 1868. From Allegorical Figures to Allegorical Landscapes Regardless of when exactly Camerana was introduced to Boito and Praga, after composing a poem dedicated to Praga in the summer of 1865, in January 1866 Camerana writes ‘Ad Arrigo Boito’. In this poem-epistle composed in response to Boito’s ‘A Giovanni Camerana’, previously analysed in Chap. 2, Camerana ‘si compiace di ricalcare non soltanto i temi di quella lirica ma anche il lessico, le locuzioni, le indicazioni stilisticamente più impegnate’ [‘is eager to follow not only the themes of that poem but also the lexicon, the phrases, the most complex stylistic indications’], as Mariani (1971, 71) affirms. In a similar fashion to Boito, Camerana proudly and defiantly describes the three poets of the Scapigliatura, Boito, Praga, and himself, as sinful (‘colle nostre peccata’) and morally and physically corrupted human beings, part of a veritable ‘Stirpe fosca e malata’ (CP, 83) [‘Gloomy and ill race’]. The poem’s figurative language, encompassing images of vice, decadence, illness, and death, serves to delineate the existential feelings of anguish and dejection for the present that Camerana declares as characteristic of the Scapigliatura, as displayed in stanza 5: Appena, Arrigo, il sol meridïano Per noi scintilla: e già invochiamo la sera. L’oggi ci opprime come un peso arcano, Come un genio cattivo: Come l’angoscia de la tomba nera Sovra un povero vivo. (CP, 83) [The midday sun, Arrigo, Has just started to sparkle for us: and we already invoke the evening. Today oppresses us like an arcane weight, Like a bad temperament: Like the anguish of the black tomb Over a poor man buried alive.]

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The poetry of the Scapigliatura, here associated with the decadent trope of the night and the setting sun, is later described as a ‘fior di duolo’ (CP, 84) [‘flower of suffering’], which cannot but recall Baudelaire’s definition of his poems as flowers of evil. The above representation of the poet’s anguish in figurative terms involving: a great weight and a related sense of burden and claustrophobia; death and the tomb; and the colour black, can also be compared to Baudelaire’s portrayals of the violent and deadly power of ennui and splenetic feelings in the four poems of the Fleurs entitled ‘Spleen’. Most notably, the first stanza of ‘Spleen’ (LXXVIII) expresses analogous sensations of oppression and claustrophobia due to a metaphorical weight and an enclosed place. In ‘Ad Arrigo Boito’, these sensations originate from the image of ‘today’ that, depicted in the previous verses as a beautiful day characterised by a shining midday sun—a probable metaphor for the young age of the poets of the Scapigliatura—in the last three lines of the fifth stanza unexpectedly burdens them like a weight and a black tomb over someone buried alive. The Scapigliatura’s poets, in other words, reject the midday sun, which represents the present, preferring evening and darkness instead, stark symbols of evil, grief, decadence, and death. In Baudelaire’s poem, it is contrarily the cloudy and heavy sky of a bleak and ‘black’ day that weighs down like a lid upon the distressed poet, figuratively creating an enclosed and deadly place: ‘Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle / Sur l’esprit gémissant en proie aux longs ennuis’ (OC I, 74). Camerana essentially builds on the theme depicted in ‘Spleen’ (LXXVIII), maintaining a parallel use of similes (‘come’/’comme’) to convey claustrophobic feelings but changing the key climatic aspect from a foggy to a sunny day. The similarities become even more meaningful when considering that Baudelaire’s prosaic image of the metaphorical lid formed by the atmospheric conditions of the day’s weather, which causes the poet’s suffering, would be employed by Camerana nearly forty years after ‘Ad Arrigo Boito’, in ‘Canicola’ (1904). The following lines from this poem focus on a sweltering summer day, depicting a very similar sepulchral scene of anguish and death to the poem dedicated to Boito: ‘Tempo di morte, sepolcral coperchio / Di angoscia e d’afa nella cupa estate’ (CP, 45) [‘Deadly weather, sepulchral lid / Of anguish and heat in the gloomy summer’]. There is thus a sense of death associated with the notions of ‘today’ and ‘anguish’ in ‘Ad Arrigo Boito’, expressed by the sepulchral image of the black tomb. Analogous imagery of death and suffering is represented in ‘Spleen’ (LXXVIII), embodied by the funereal ‘hearses’ that ‘Défilent

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lentement dans mon âme’ and by the allegory of ‘atrocious Anguish’, with a capital letter, which ‘plainte son drapeau noir’ on the poet’s skull (OC I, 75). Anguish is only one of the several allegorical figures featured in ‘Spleen’ (LXXVIII), which are concrete representations of the speaker’s violent and intense feelings turned into living characters through the medium of an allegorising capital letter: others include a vanishing ‘Espérance’, likened to a helpless bat constantly trying in vain to escape from a dungeon; and a personified ‘Espoir’ that being finally ‘defeated, weeps’ (OC I, 75). This technique is taken up by Camerana in ‘Ad Arrigo Boito’, where similar dominating and menacing feelings, from ‘la Lussuria [che] incombe / Colla sua faccia scialba’ (CP, 83) [‘Lust [that] looms / With her pallid face’] to ‘la pallida Inerzia e la Tristezza, / […] [che] stanno a la mia porta’ (CP, 85) [‘pale Inertia and Sorrow, / […] [that] are at my door’], possess organic and animate features and are further allegorised by means of a capital letter. These last two allegorical personifications, ‘Inertia’ and ‘Sorrow’, not only are an important presence in Boito’s poetry, as already seen, for instance, in Re Orso—hence probably why they are mentioned in this poem dedicated to him—but mentioned together they also come close to the personification of threatening ‘Ennui’ in Baudelaire’s ‘Au lecteur’ that, as seen above, ‘dreams of scaffolds while smoking his houka’. This process of allegorisation is, after all, one of the most distinctive and recurrent methodological features of Baudelaire’s poetry. Labarthe (1999, 42), who has devoted an entire volume to Baudelaire and the tradition of allegory, underlines the critical importance of the capital letter in the Fleurs, and its links to allegorical practice, arguing that ‘la prédilection de Baudelaire pour la majuscule est incontestable, et va croissant avec les années. Cette allégorie initiale, présente dans le titre même [Les Fleurs du Mal], constitue la figure de proue d’un recueil des plus riches en majuscules allégorisantes’ [‘Baudelaire’s predilection for the capital letter is undeniable, and it grows with the years. This initial allegory, present in the title itself [Les Fleurs du Mal], constitutes the figurehead of one of the richest collections in allegorising capitals’]. In the Fleurs, the capital letter is employed to emphasise powerful emotions such as anguish, ennui, and despair—as shown above in ‘Spleen’ (LXXVIII)—accentuating their presence within the poem, and consequently their power over the poet, by giving them an active role and animate features. In Camerana’s poetry, too, the capital letter serves not only to define a figure as allegorical, but also to mark its centrality within a poem as well as within the life of the poet, as we can see in ‘Ad un amico’, written just one

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month after ‘Ad Arrigo Boito’, with which it shares a similar use of allegory. In stanza 2 of ‘Ad un amico’, Camerana stresses the constant and perpetual presence of sorrow in his life by making, once again, an allegory of it, describing ‘Tristezza’ (‘Sorrow’), with a capital letter, as a black-­ haired girl (‘bruna fanciulla’) who has been alongside the speaker ever since his birth (CP, 86). This allegorical presence is the subject of the second stanza that depicts the poet’s feeling of unhappiness as deeply linked to death as well as to the colour black, systematically used by Camerana in his poetry. After declaring that this personification of sorrow is his daily companion, the poet affirms that ‘Essa [la Tristezza] in velo di lutto un dì avvolse il mio cuore’ (CP, 86) [‘She [Sorrow] one day wrapped my heart in a funeral veil’]. For this image of the poet’s heart that is metaphorically portrayed as enveloped in a funeral veil—implicitly, although unquestionably, black—Camerana reworks three lines from Baudelaire’s ‘Brumes et pluies’. In this composition, Baudelaire claims that he praises wintry weather ‘D’envelopper ainsi [s]on cœur […] / D’un linceul vaporeux et d’un vague tombeau’ (OC I, 100). The poet’s heart is ‘plein de choses funèbres’, overwhelmed by the figurative ‘frost’ that symbolises his grief (OC I, 101). Camerana substitutes Baudelaire’s shroud with an analogous image, the funeral veil, thereby maintaining the poem’s funereal connotations related to the suffering heart, shrouded in an object plainly associated with death and grief and therefore seen as the emblem of the poet’s moral dejection. Although in ‘Ad un amico’ Camerana does not depict imagery of wintriness to the same extent as Baudelaire’s ‘Brumes at pluies’, where chill winds and freezing fog reflect the poet’s inner suffering, he does link the notion of sorrow to that of cold months, allegorically speaking, in the conclusive stanza, of ‘Novembre omai sol regna’ (CP, 87) [‘Now, only November reigns’]. Taking into account that the poem was composed in February, this reference to an ominous November that reigns like a despot must be considered allegorically and not literally, as an expression of the speaker’s existential anguish that pervades the poem. Furthermore, Camerana directly references Baudelaire’s foggy weather, mentioning a ‘sponda nebbiosa’ [‘foggy shore’] which the personification of sorrow points him to (CP, 86). This foggy shore is another metaphor for death: it is the ‘sponda ove nel nulla tutto alfin si riposa’ [‘shore where everything at last rests in nothingness’], towards which the poet eagerly hastens his journey as it will eventually provide him with rest and peace (CP, 86). In ‘Ad un amico’, death is not considered solely in association with grief, but also has reassuring and comforting connotations for the

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poet, being seen as an end to his existential suffering. Similarly, sorrow too has somewhat cathartic qualities in the poem: this female allegorical figure is ‘bella, è casta, è santa’ (CP, 86) [‘beautiful, chaste, holy’], a description that expresses both physical attraction and religious reverence; she is the one who gives the poet the lyre, a symbol of poetry, urging him to ‘weep’ and write thus bestowing him with poetic subject matter, albeit distressing. This is oxymoronically deemed a ‘dono funesto’ (CP, 86) [‘baleful gift’] by the speaker, as his poetry is closely connected with such ambiguous things as sorrow and death which, as seen, offer both solace and suffering to the poet. An analogous double and contrasting interpretation of anguish and death constitutes Baudelaire’s representation of ‘spleen’, which as Jackson (1982, 62) argues ‘procède à la fois d’un sentiment quasi religieux de l’ennui’ [‘proceeds from both an almost religious feeling of boredom’], at the same time greatly loathed and religiously worshipped as a source of poetic material, ‘et d’une conscience très aiguë de la mort’ [‘and a very keen awareness of death’]. Baudelaire’s ambiguous depiction of his splenetic feelings is most evident in ‘Brumes et pluies’, where alongside the representation of wintriness that mirrors the poet’s inner suffering is a concurrent celebration of this same frosty and grim weather. Unlike the hopeless depiction of fog and rain in ‘Spleen’ (LXXVIII), reproducing his funereal mood this landscape now unexpectedly provides the poet with a sort of relief and consolation, lulling him to a sleep that bears many similarities with death: ‘Endormeuses saisons! je vous aime et vous loue / […] | Rien n’est plus doux au cœur plein de choses funèbres, / […] | Que l’aspect permanent de vos pâles ténèbres’ (OC I, 100–101). In a similar manner to  Baudelaire’s conception of ‘spleen’, in Camerana’s poetry existential anguish is often coupled with sensations of permanent apathy and boredom. These feelings are expressed by means of figurative imagery that incorporates, significantly, evenings or dusks as opposed to dawns or middays; autumnal or wintry landscapes; and death together with various sepulchral objects representing it. Above we have analysed the association between ‘Inertia’ and ‘Sorrow’ in ‘Ad Arrigo Boito’—allegorical figures described as always accompanying Camerana’s poet. The connection between evening, boredom, unhappiness, and death is directly stated in the opening of ‘Fra le Alpi’, composed in August 1866. In this poem, Camerana once again employs allegorical personifications to designate distressing feelings which are the speaker’s perpetual companions in poetry as well as in life, turning youth into old age, day into night:

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Squallide amiche de la mia carriera, Noia e tristezza, Che mi pingete del color di sera La giovinezza. (CP, 89) [Squalid friends of my career, Boredom and sorrow, Who paint in the evening colour My youth.]

Allegorically portrayed, ennui and sorrow bring a sense of darkness, decadence, and oldness to the young speaker, analogous to the one felt by Baudelaire’s poet in ‘Spleen’ (LXXVI) and expressed by the lines ‘J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans’ and ‘Un vieux sphinx […] / […] dont l’humeur farouche / Ne chante qu’aux rayons du soleil qui se couche’ (OC I, 73). These two ‘squalid friends’ of Camerana’s poet are slowly leading him to death, for the poet tells them: ‘m’avvolgete nel sudario bianco / A poco a poco’ (CP, 89) [‘you wrap me in the white shroud / Little by little’], a sentence that is a direct reference to the phrase ‘D’envelopper ainsi mon cœur […] / D’un linceul vaporeux et d’un vague tombeau’ seen above when analysing ‘Brumes et pluies’ and ‘Ad un amico’. In ‘Fra le Alpi’, the poet would like to write about his life of despair, but being overwhelmed by unhappiness and boredom, he eventually gives up on both poetry and joy by emphasising his status as a dejected poet and, consequently, as a dead man: ‘Vano pregar. La mia condanna ho in fronte: / “Morto alla gioia”’ (CP, 89) [‘It is useless to pray. My sentence is in front of me: / “Dead to joy”’]. This poem stands in stark opposition to the praise to the artistic potential of sorrow previously described in ‘Ad un amico’. Together, boredom, apathy, and sorrow form Camerana’s existential anguish that features in several of his works at the time of the Scapigliatura, occasionally portrayed by means of unpoetic and gruesome imagery that stresses its deadly powers, intensity, and ferocity. The opening of ‘Grido intimo’ (September 1865) is exemplary in this instance, with its focus on bestiality, cannibalism, and the act of gnawing: Io passo nella vita a capo chino Piena l’alma d’affanno e di squallor; Il tedio, bieco tarlo, atro Ugolino, Mi rode il cranio e il cor. (CP, 214)

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[I go through life with my head down My soul full of worry and squalor; Boredom, sinister woodworm, horrid Ugolino, Gnaws at my skull and heart.]

Chewing at the poet’s skull and heart, tedium undergoes an allegorical process: as a result, it becomes both a sinister woodworm and a historical figure, the Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, who was thought to have eaten the bodies of his children to avoid starvation and is represented in Dante’s Canto 33 of the Inferno as gnawing at the Archbishop Ruggeri degli Ubaldini’s skull (1975, 133–135). This action of animalistic gluttony marked by the noun ‘tarlo’ and the verb ‘rodere’ finds a precise antecedent in Boito’s Re Orso, where a similar terminology is used both literally to describe physical decomposition and allegorically to depict gluttony, remorse, and moral corruption. However, Camerana’s allegorical illustration of violent and brutal boredom is also conceptually akin to Baudelaire’s allegorical treatment of personal feelings that possess bestial and ferocious characteristics, including spleen and, as seen above in ‘L’Irréparable’, remorse compared to gnawing worms and termites. Unlike Boito’s Re Orso, however, in Baudelaire’s and Camerana’s poetry this type of allegory and prosaic language serves to paint an intimate picture that can accurately convey painful and destructive feelings, directly felt by the poet and thus mostly narrated in the first person. A description of remorse that is comparable to Baudelaire’s ‘L’Irréparable’, for instance, can be found in Camerana’s 1880 composition ‘Spes unica’, where an allegorising capital ‘R’ enhances the intensity of the sensations caused by remorse: ‘il foco / Della tanaglia Rimorso’ (CP, 134) [‘the fire / Of the pincers Remorse’]. It is difficult not to compare Camerana’s feeling of boredom that gnaws at the skull and the heart of the poet like a woodworm in ‘Grido intimo’ with Baudelaire’s all-consuming splenetic sensations, poetically represented by the ‘figures “dévorées” d’ennui et “dévorantes” de l’œuvre baudelairienne’ (Labarthe 1999, 131) [‘figures “devoured” by boredom and “devouring” of Baudelaire’s work’]. The following image, extrapolated from ‘Spleen’ (LXXVI), is representative of this practice: —Je suis un cimetière abhorré de la lune, Où comme des remords se traînent de longs vers Qui s’acharnent toujours sur mes morts les plus chers. (OC I, 73)

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These types of characterisations of destructive feelings reveal why Baudelaire’s spleen is not the same as Romantic ennui and melancholy, as it ‘rompt avec l’expérience romantique d’une inertie colorée de langueur, pour imposer le visage d’un mal dévorateur, d’une sécession ténébreuse dont l’expression extrême est celle d’une tragique “dépersonnalisation”’ (Labarthe 1999, 603) [‘breaks away from the Romantic experience of inertia coloured with languor to impose the face of a devouring evil, of a gloomy secession whose extreme expression is that of a tragic “depersonalisation”’]. This definition can also be applied to Camerana’s existential anguish which, as seen above, shares parallel features with Baudelaire’s spleen. In Baudelaire’s poetry, this depersonalisation entails that the objects and non-human elements that constitute the landscape of modern life and the modern city become the expression of the fragmentation of the self, ultimately embodying the emotions and moods, especially the spleen, of the speaker. In opposition to the extreme personalisation and subjectivism of Romantic poetry, Baudelaire’s first-person poems ‘soumettent le locuteur à tant de comparaisons, avec le monde des objets ou avec des concepts allégorisés, que son statut devient de plus en plus virtuel’ (Jackson 1982, 85) [‘subject the speaker to so many comparisons, with the world of objects or with allegorised concepts, that his status becomes more and more virtual’]. Baudelaire’s depersonalisation is, in other words, a disintegration of the lyrical self into the urban landscape of the city of Paris, where the ‘I’ of the poet is explicitly or implicitly identified with the objects or the allegorical figures that compose it. The city and its objects become the material to allegorise, to use as expression of the poet’s feelings of spleen and alienation, as shown in ‘Le Cygne’: Paris change! mais rien dans ma mélancolie N’a bougé! palais neufs, échafaudages, blocs, Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allégorie Et mes chers souvenirs sont plus lourds que des rocs. (OC I, 86)

Baudelaire’s allegorical urban scenery, often described with cemeterial imagery in order to stress the connections between spleen and death, left a profound mark on Camerana’s poetic landscapes which portray not so much the modern city, barely mentioned in his poetry,9 as the non-human objects part of a natural setting that mirror the poet’s feelings of anguish and death. Indeed, it is Camerana’s mature poetry that best shows its debt to Baudelaire’s allegorical and figurative method of the portrayal of

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landscapes. Written in November 1882 and one of Camerana’s most celebrated and anthologised poems, ‘Note morenti’—literally ‘dying notes’— shares, for instance, numerous analogies with ‘Le Crépuscule du matin’, the last poem of the urban section of the Fleurs entitled ‘Tableaux parisiens’. Despite the fact that Camerana’s is a natural scenery and Baudelaire’s is an urban one, similarities are on a conceptual as well as a methodological level, involving: juxtapositions between elements of the landscape and the dejected features of a human figure (‘Comme un visage en pleurs […] / L’air est plein du frisson […]’ (OC I, 103); ‘Come una grande affranta la campagna sospira’, CP, 22) [‘The countryside sighs like a sorrowful woman’]; the double repetition of ‘C’était l’heure’ in Baudelaire’s composition (OC I, 103–104) and of ‘È l’ora’ [‘It is the hour’] in Camerana’s (CP, 22), which serves to depict daybreak in the former, nightfall in the latter; and the list of distressing feelings and immoral actions that Baudelaire associates with the modern city and the night, and Camerana with the countryside and the day. These are internal conflicts within the poet’s soul that Baudelaire describes as ‘C’était l’heure où […] / l’âme […] / Imite les combats de la lampe et du jour’ [OC I, 103] and Camerana as ‘È l’ora che si acquetan gli ardenti / Uragani dell’anima’ (CP, 22) [‘It is the hour when the ardent / Hurricanes of the soul quieten down’]. The roots of this process of fragmentation and depersonalisation of the lyrical self in Camerana’s poetry, however, are to be found in his poems written during the time with the Scapigliatura— more precisely, in the projection of the poet’s feelings of existential anguish upon other objects or subjects by means of a figurative, and especially allegorical, language. This marks Camerana’s recognition of the fracture that exists in a modern world characterised not solely by the paradoxes, dualisms, and ambiguities resulted from the progress of science and medicine and the loss of religious ideals, as it is mostly—yet not exclusively— represented in Boito’s and Praga’s poetry, but also by a consciousness that, in modernity, shatters and multiplies, dispersing into the images that compose Camerana’s poetic landscapes. This, of course, does not mean that Boito and Praga do not represent, in a similar figurative and macabre manner, the struggles of modern consciousness, the psychological sufferings of the human being—and especially of the poet/artist—faced with mental distress or emotional alienation, as seen in the poems that Boito dedicated to Praga and Camerana, in ‘Dualismo’, Re Orso, and in Praga’s ‘Nella tomba’, ‘Suicidio’, and ‘Vendetta postuma’; but for Camerana, it is a key and omnipresent feature of his poetics. Thus far we have seen that, in the

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1860s, Camerana’s figurative language comprises in particular animal and human allegories of personal sensations, such as boredom, as displayed in ‘Grido intimo’; personifications of the poet’s emotions, occasionally by means of an allegorising capital letter, which become animate and menacing subjects, including lust, inertia, and sorrow; and juxtapositions between the poet’s feeling of anguish caused by the weather and sepulchral imagery, as in ‘Ad Arrigo Boito’. Climate and cemeterial imageries are, in fact, central in Camerana’s poetry at the time, linked to allegorical identifications between distressing feelings and natural landscapes that characterise Camerana’s process of lyrical depersonalisation. The line ‘Un’ironia son dei vent’anni, un tetro / Cipresso in zolla florida e gentil’ [‘I am an irony of my twenty years of age, a gloomy / Cypress in a florid and gentle clod’] from ‘Grido intimo’ (CP, 214), for example, reveals a direct identification of the poet with a gloomy cypress, a tree that has been associated with death and mourning and planted in cemeteries since ancient times (see Ragon 1986, 119–120), thereby conveying the young poet’s anguish combined with a sense of existential oldness, as already seen above in ‘Fra le Alpi’. The technique here employed by Camerana, in which the poet suggests an emotional equivalence between himself and what can be deemed a veritable splenetic landscape, is related to the one used by Baudelaire in ‘Spleen’ (LXXVI) with the expression ‘I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon’. This literary device would also be repurposed by Camerana in the 1896 sonnet ‘Autunnale’, where the speaker, experiencing funereal feelings, throughout the whole poem identifies himself with a solitary tree in gloomy autumnal weather: ‘Io son l’albero strano, […] / L’albero maledetto’ [‘I am the strange tree, […] / the cursed tree’]; ‘io son lo scheletro’ [‘I am the skeleton’]; ‘A me i tramonti / Del funereo novembre’ (CP, 38) [‘To me the sunsets / Of funereal November’]. A similar allegorical conception of autumn, expressing the poet’s distressing emotions and feelings of death, constitutes the natural landscape of ‘Lilium’. This poem is dated ‘29 November 1867’, so Camerana could indeed be describing literally a visual autumn scene. Yet for Camerana the autumnal picture carries a more profound signification, bearing well-defined psychological connotations. Camerana describes a dark and ominous scenery characterised on the one hand by autumn, mist, and wind, and on the other hand by boredom, suffering, and death:

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Or langue autunno, regnano Le brume, è cupo il vento. L’antica noia in lento Martir mi ripiombò. (CP, 95) [Now autumn languishes, the mists Reign, the wind is gloomy. Old boredom in slow Martyrdom sinks into me.]

The phrase ‘regnano / Le brume’ plainly recalls the expression ‘Novembre omai sol regna’ as well as the foggy shore portrayed in ‘Ad un amico’, linked to notions of sorrow and death. When this picture of a sombre autumnal landscape, coupled with the familiar figure of boredom that leads the poet to martyrdom, is juxtaposed with the celebration of figurative springtime and happiness discussed in the previous stanzas of this poem, the allegorical qualities of Camerana’s portrayal of autumn are fully disclosed. The first half of ‘Lilium’ is set in a distant past when the poet likened the breasts of his mistress to spring, ‘il maggio / D’ogni profonda ebbrezza’ [‘May / of profound intoxication’], and described the ‘auspicious days’ that have faded away in the miserable present time (CP, 94). Although the starting point was, most likely, a real scene, the autumnal picture eventually transcends its visual premises, and the natural components of the landscape—mists and gloomy wind—become signs of the depersonalisation of the lyrical discourse and, consequently, emblems of the poet’s present condition marked by boredom and death. A comparable picture is painted in the opening stanzas of ‘Ad Sepultam’ (I), written in 1869, where the autumnal landscape is another allegory of anguish and death: Poiché la vita sempre più s’imbruna […] Poiché la brezza diventò aquilone E il cielo grigio si fe’ cielo tetro, […] Poiché del duolo questo mar funèbre, Frugai gli abissi ed ho toccato il fondo; E poi che ancora dalle mie tenèbre, Qual moribondo,

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[…] Poi che giunto è l’autunno, e in bieche forme Nella nebbia ulular sembran le piante; Poiché possiede una tristezza enorme Le zolle sante. (CP, 99) [Since life is getting darker and darker […] Since the breeze became a strong wind And the grey sky turned gloomy, […] Since of suffering, this funereal sea, I searched the abyss and touched the bottom; And then again from my darkness, As a dying man, […] Since autumn has come, and in sinister shapes The trees seem to howl in the fog; Since the cemetery conveys an enormous sadness.]

Even more so than in ‘Lilium’, the figurative quality of the images gathered here to represent the autumnal setting—blackness, strong wind, gloomy sky, funereal sea, abyss, moribund man, fog, howling trees, and finally the cemetery—is evident, being fragments of the consciousness of the poet who expresses his suffering and vast sorrow precisely through the medium of those images. Autumn’s bleak climate is, for Camerana, a favoured manner of conveying the poet’s funereal mood. Camerana’s treatment of autumnal and wintry landscapes can be compared with that of Baudelaire in ‘Brumes et pluies’ and ‘Spleen’ (LXXVIII) seen above, but also to compositions where autumn or winter sceneries are more figuratively interiorised, losing all their connections to the external picture and hence becoming allegories of the poet’s spleen and moral dejection, such as ‘La Cloche fêlée’, ‘Chant d’automne’, or the following passage, taken from ‘De profundis clamavi’:

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Un soleil sans chaleur plane au-dessus six mois, Et les six autres mois la nuit couvre la terre; C’est un pays plus nu que la terre polaire; —Ni bêtes, ni ruisseaux, ni verdure, ni bois! Or il n’est pas d’horreur au monde qui surpasse La froide cruauté de ce soleil de glace Et cette immense nuit semblable au vieux Chaos. (OC I, 32)

The Beauty of the Grave Alongside urban and frosty landscapes of spleen and modern alienation, Walter Benjamin saw Baudelaire’s repurposing of Baroque allegory of death and bodily decomposition as one of the most significant aspects of his modernity. Benjamin (2006, 163) argues that Baudelaire shifted focus from an external depiction of corpses typical of the Baroque to an internal reinterpretation of its imagery that conveys the poet’s subjectivity: ‘Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from outside. Baudelaire sees it also from within.’ This is shown most notably in poems such as ‘Le Mort joyeux’, where, as seen in Chap. 2 in conjunction with Praga’s ‘Nella tomba’, the speaker subverts the common conception of death as associated with grief—and related symbols including the grave and worms—transforming it into a joyous event that liberates the poet from a life of suffering. The poet’s attraction for death and sepulchral objects, used to express his rejection of the contemporary world that causes him anguish, is also a crucial subject in Camerana’s poetry. We have seen a similar celebration and welcoming of death already in Baudelaire’s ‘Brumes et pluies’ and Camerana’s ‘Ad un amico’; bearing thematic and stylistic similarities with ‘Le Mort joyeux’, Camerana’s ‘Pax’, written in July 1867, is a philosophical reflection on the benefits of the unavoidable nature of death, welcomed and cherished after a life characterised by anguish and ennui. The textual correspondences, in terms of sepulchral imagery and macabre language of violent physical decomposition, are indeed remarkable: Ô vers! noirs compagnons sans oreille et sans yeux, Voyez venir à vous un mort libre et joyeux; Philosophes viveurs, fils de la pourriture,

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À travers ma ruine allez donc sans remords, Et dites-moi s’il est encor quelque torture Pour ce vieux corps sans âme et mort parmi les morts! (OC I, 70) […] svaniti in eterno anche i tormenti Dell’affanno e del tedio; In quel gelido oblío soli compagni Aver gli orrendi lombrici; Ma non più nelle viscere i grifagni Strazi patir dell’odio; A poco a poco diventar l’informe Orgia della putredine. (CP, 91–92) [[…] vanished forever are also the torments Of suffering and boredom; In that icy oblivion having as only companions The hideous earthworms; But no longer suffering in my gut The rapacious torture of hatred; Gradually becoming the shapeless Orgy of putrefaction.]

Even more significant is the analogous juxtaposition of physical and emotional suffering in both poems, wherein the action of putrefaction carried out by worms on the poet’s dead body is considered as less ferocious, intrusive, and destructive than the psychological torments experienced in life by the poet. This interplay between a concrete-anatomical and an abstract-emotional representation of cadaverous images is typical of the Scapigliatura and its dualisms, being at the core of Praga’s ‘Nella tomba’ and ‘Vendetta postuma’ as well as Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’. But in ‘Pax’ Camerana also overturns assumed socio-cultural ideas and aesthetic notions ordinarily associated with death and material decay, in a similar fashion not only to ‘Le Mort joyeux’ but also to ‘Une charogne’ and other poems where Baudelaire describes the beauty of, and the poet’s morbid fascination for, death and imagery of rottenness. For instance, in ‘Danse macabre’ the speaker’s macabre attraction for a dancing allegorical

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personification of death, handsomely adorned with flowers and lavishly perfumed, is expressed in the following manner: Les charmes de l’horreur n’enivrent que les forts! Le gouffre de tes yeux, plein d’horribles pensées, Exhale le vertige, et les danseurs prudents Ne contempleront pas sans d’amères nausées Le sourire éternel de tes trente-deux dents. Pourtant, qui n’a serré dans ses bras un squelette, Et qui ne s’est nourri des choses du tombeau? (OC I, 97–98)

In ‘Pax’, Camerana closely follows with a parallel use of terminology and juxtapositions, describing the unexpected charms of the cemetery, the irresistible attraction for the abyss of the grave, turning sepulchral odours into fragrant scents. These are preferred to the poetic image of a sunny and azure sky, the meaning of which is in turn reversed and substituted to that of the grave, oxymoronically causing displeasure and an exhausting sense of vertigo to the poet, as if he were looking downwards to an abyss, and not upwards to the sky: Sento attirarmi nella sua malía Quella chiostra funerea, Come se intenta la pupilla mia Guardasse una voragine Sento alle nari ascendermi soavi Gli effluvi sotterranei […] Al fastidio del sole, alla stanchezza Che l’azzurra vertigine Mi spiove, sento sottentrar l’ebbrezza Strana del fuoco fatuo. (CP, 91) [I feel drawn into its charm That funeral cloister, As if my focused pupil Looked at an abyss

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I feel rising to my nostrils The fragrant subterranean scents […] Against my annoyance at the sun, against the weariness That the azure vertigo Is raining down on me, I feel the strange intoxication Of the will-o’-the-wisp taking over.]

This paradoxical representation of the allures of death and concomitant rejection of conventional lyrical imagery has specific ties to the description of the appeals of unpoetic decayed bodies in Boito’s ‘A una mummia’ and ‘Un torso’ and Praga’s ‘A un feto’. Camerana’s distinctive choice to focus on the feelings of the speaker towards his subject matter instead of medical-­ scientific, religious, or aesthetic discussion, however, marks the poet’s subjective transmutation of ugliness and death into poetic beauty. In ‘Pax’, the images of the cemetery, grave, and sepulchral odours are not represented by the poet as a hideous alternative to a traditional notion of beauty that is lost in modernity, but as attractive, intoxicating, beautiful in themselves. In turn, the traditional poetic beauty of a sunny and azure sky is subverted and overturned, conveying aversion and weariness instead.10 The post-mortem decomposition of his body, thus, becomes for the poet his desired lyrical dream, ‘il sogno mio’ (CP, 92). This dream includes the merging of descriptions of sexual intercourse with a woman and of imagery of funerals which expresses the poet’s morbid attraction for rottenness, already implied in the above phrase ‘orgy of putrefaction’ and evident in the following necrophiliac characterisation of the act of death of the poet, which is transmuted into an ecstatic feeling: ‘E tu m’appresta […] / L’amplesso tuo più splendido’; ‘Voglio […] / Morire in braccio all’estasi!’ (CP, 92) [‘And you will offer me […] / Your most splendid embrace’; ‘I want to […] / Die in the arms of ecstasy!’]. Camerana’s transformation of death, decomposition, and cemeterial imagery into what is deemed to be the poet’s ‘dream’ can also be seen in the second of the three poems entitled ‘Ad Sepultam’, written in November 1869. In ‘Ad Sepultam’ (II), Camerana strives to ‘extract’ beauty from a sepulchral scene in a passage that recalls the conclusion of ‘Une charogne’, already seen many times in this book. Similar to this last Baudelairian image of the poet who keeps, in a very visual manner, the memory of the putrefied corpse of his mistress described as ‘the form and the divine

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essence’, oxymoronically combining decaying matter and eternal spirit, in stanzas 9–10 of ‘Ad Sepultam’ (II) Camerana creates his own fleur du mal. Camerana’s poet writes that he would like to see, one final time, the decomposed corpse of the mistress in order  to transfigure her macabre ‘forms’ into his poetic and mystical dream, merging materiality and spirituality, drawing beauty from a disgusting image (the ‘horror’ that the poet is feeling, CP, 231), with the aim of keeping the eternal memory (‘per sempre’, CP, 231) of the lover’s corpse with him: S’io potessi stampar nella mia mente Le tue forme spettrali e la tua piccola Bara squallente; Farne il bianco mio sogno, il mondo ascoso In mezzo al mondo, la mia luce mistica, Il mio riposo. (CP, 231) [If I could imprint in my mind Your ghostly forms and your small And squalid coffin; Make it my white dream, my hidden world In the middle of the world, my mystical light, My rest.]

The poet expresses his oxymoronic feelings of ‘amor […] e l’estasi / Piena di lutto’ (CP, 230) [‘love […] and ecstasy / Full of grief’] for the dead lover, once again not without a necrophiliac connotation (‘sulle bionde treccie / Ancor baciarti’, CP, 230 [‘on your blonde braids / Kissing you again’]) that is also present in ‘Une charogne’ (‘the worm / Who will devour you with kisses’, OC I, 32). This discourse on the poetic dream of the speaker anticipates Camerana’s figurative description of his poetic art in what can be considered as a lyrical manifesto of his later work, ‘Cerco la strofa …’, written in 1886 and illustrating the poet’s cemeterial dream, his ‘fascinante sogno sepolcrale’ (CP, 31) [‘fascinating sepulchral dream’]. Whether allegorically represented as part of an autumnal landscape to express the poet’s existential anguish or portrayed as a comforting and consoling final destination after a life of emotional suffering, death is an ever-present figure in Camerana’s poetry from the very beginning of his career. Drawing on Baudelaire’s funereal allegories and allegorical

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depiction of splenetic urban sceneries, in Camerana’s poetry death transcends its visual connotation as a mere agent of bodily putrefaction and decomposition. On the contrary, it takes on psychological and emotional meanings intimately connected to the speaker, while also becoming part of Camerana’s personal and subjective conception of beauty that is able to transform sepulchral images into the lyrical dream of the poet.

Notes 1. ‘Pécopin’ is focused on the protagonist’s one-hundred-year journey around the world in his attempt to return to his betrothed, Bauldour. Cf. chapter 8 of ‘Pécopin’ (Hugo 1987, 178–180) and Boito’s description of Re Orso’s one-hundred-year journey in ‘Confessione’ (OL, 124), as well as the ‘Viaggio d’un verme’ (OL, 132–136). 2. Some resemblances between characters in Re Orso and ‘Pécopin’ are striking, such as those between the seemingly infernal jester Papiol, a ‘nano / Gobbo, rossiccio e strano […] / Dalle gambette storte’ [‘dwarf / Hunchbacked, reddish and strange […] / With crooked legs’] who ‘Parve surger dal suol’ (OL, 95–96) [‘Seemed to rise from the ground’], and the Devil disguised as a ‘petit homme bossu, boiteux et fort laid’ [‘hunchbacked, wobbly, and very ugly little man’] with a ‘jambe difforme’ [‘misshapen leg’], whom Pécopin see ‘s’enfoncer en terre comme une vrille’ (Hugo 1987, 196–197) [‘sink into the ground like a gimlet’]. 3. See, for instance, the compassionate depiction of the Devil in Chapter 6, in which Hugo (1987, 175) claims that ‘Le diable a des vices; […] Il est gourmand’ [‘The devil has vices; […] He is greedy’]. 4. In Canto 34 of the Inferno, Dante (1975, 141) uses the name ‘Belzubù’ [‘Beelzebub’] to indicate Lucifer. 5. See ‘Demon’ in Doniger 1999, 287. See also Robbins 1959, 127. 6. The opposition between spirituality and materiality is clear in the opening lines ‘Son luce ed ombra; angelica / Farfalla o verme immondo’ (OL, 53) [‘I am light and darkness; angelic / Butterfly or disgusting worm’)]. 7. Quoted by Finzi 1968a, xxiv–xxv. Originally published in Il Campo, 9 July 1905. 8. See, for instance, the two letters written to his friend Giovanni Faldella reproduced by Finzi 1968b, x–xi, note 1. 9. Significant is the fact that, in the very few cases where Camerana represents the modern city in his poetry, he openly draws from Baudelaire’s Fleurs. See, for example, the poem ‘Piranesi’ (CP, 15), written in 1881, the source of which is undoubtedly Baudelaire’s ‘Rêve parisien’ (OC I, 101–103).

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10. A parallel feeling of irritation towards the clear blue sky is expressed in Baudelaire’s prose poem ‘Le Confiteor de l’artiste’, first published in August 1862 in La Presse: ‘la profondeur du ciel me consterne; sa limpidité m’exaspère’ (OC I, 278) [‘the depth of the sky dismays me; its clarity exasperates me’].

References Baudelaire, Charles. 1964. New Notes on Edgar Poe. In Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, trans. Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr., 117–135. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 1975. OC I. Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. ———. 1976. OC II. Œuvres complètes, vol. II, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. Central Park. In The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W.  Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland et  al., 134–169. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Boito, Arrigo. 1942. TS. Tutti gli scritti, ed. Piero Nardi. Verona: Mondadori. ———. 1958. Letter to Victor Hugo of 23 December 1864. Repr. in Remo Giazotto. ‘Hugo, Boito e gli scapigliati’. L’Approdo letterario 3: 39–40. ———. 2009. OL. Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/Novecento. Camerana, Giovanni. 1968. CP. Poesie, ed. Gilberto Finzi. Turin: Einaudi. Carroll, Robert, and Stephen Prickett, eds. 2008. The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Contini, Gianfranco. 1974. Introduzione ai narratori della scapigliatura piemontese. In La letteratura italiana: Otto-Novecento, 85–112. Florence: Sansoni; Milan: Accademia. Croce, Benedetto. 1956. La letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. I. Bari: Laterza. Dante, Alighieri. 1975. La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi. Turin: Einaudi. De Dobay Rifelj, Carol. 1987. Baudelaire: de quelle boue? In Word and Figure: The Language of Nineteenth-Century French Poetry, 68–99. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. De Rienzo, Giorgio. 1972. Camerana, Cena e altri studi piemontesi. Bologna: Cappelli. Doniger, Wendy, ed. 1999. Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of World Religions. Springfield: Merriam-Webster. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. 1972. Baudelaire. In Selected Essays, 419–430. London: Faber and Faber.

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Esquirol, Étienne. 1838. Des maladies mentales considérées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal, vol. I. Paris: J.-B. Baillière. Farinelli, Giuseppe. 2003. La Scapigliatura: profilo storico, protagonisti, documenti. Rome: Carocci. Feuillet, Michel. 2007. Lessico dei simboli cristiani, trans. Livia Pietrantoni. Rome: Arkeios. Finzi, Gilberto. 1968a. Biografia. In Giovanni Camerana. Poesie, ed. Gilberto Finzi, xxiii–xxvii. Turin: Einaudi. ———. 1968b. Introduzione. In Giovanni Camerana. Poesie, ed. Gilberto Finzi, vi–xxi. Turin: Einaudi. Galletti, Alfredo. 1921. Introduzione. In Arrigo Boito, Re Orso. Milan: Caddeo. Gaudon, Jean. 1962. Introduction. In Victor Hugo. Le Rhin, ed. Jean Gaudon and Sheila Gaudon, 11–36. London: Harrap. Hugo, Victor. 1987. Le Rhin. In Œuvres complètes: Voyages, ed. Jacques Seebacher and Guy Rosa, 3–451. Paris: Laffront. Jackson, John E. 1982. La Mort Baudelaire: essai sur ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’. Neuchâtel: La Baconnière. Labarthe, Patrick. 1999. Baudelaire et la tradition de l’allégorie. Geneva: Droz. Mariani, Gaetano. 1971. Storia della Scapigliatura. Caltanissetta: Sciascia. Nardi, Piero. 1942. Vita di Arrigo Boito. Verona: Mondadori. ———. 1968. Scapigliatura: da Giuseppe Rovani a Carlo Dossi. Milan: Mondadori. Negri, Renzo, ed. 1978. Il ‘Vegliardo’ e gli ‘Antecristi’: studi su Manzoni e la Scapigliatura. Milan: Vita e Pensiero. Poe, Edgar Allan. 1984. Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: The Library of America. Praga, Emilio. 1984. L’esposizione di Belle Arti: lettere e divagazioni. Il Pungolo (27 September 1871). Repr. in La pubblicistica nel periodo della Scapigliatura. Regesto per soggetti dei giornali e delle riviste esistenti a Milano e relativi al primo ventennio dello Stato unitario: 1860–1880, ed. Giuseppe Farinelli, 1050–1053. Milan: IPL. Quadrelli, Rodolfo. 1981. Poesia e verità nel primo Boito. In Arrigo Boito. Poesie e racconti, ed. Rodolfo Quadrelli, 5–25. Milan: Mondadori. Ragon, Michel. 1986. Lo spazio della morte: saggio sull’architettura, la decorazione e l’urbanistica funeraria, trans. Gabriella Prisco. Naples: Guida. Rahman, Abdul, and Manju Paul. 2020. Delirium Tremens [Updated 2020 Aug 29]. In StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL). StatPearls Publishing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482134/, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Robbins, Rossell Hope. 1959. The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology. London: Nevill. Schinkel, Anders. 2007. Conscience and Conscientious Objections. Amsterdam: Pallas.

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Todorov, Tzvetan. 1970. Introduction à la littérature fantastique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Van Zuylen, Marina. 2005. Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Verlaine, Paul. 1972. Charles Baudelaire. In Œuvres en prose complètes, ed. Jacques Borel. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 599–612. Paris: Gallimard. Viagrante, Riccardo. 2008. Arrigo Boito: ‘un caduto chèrubo’ poeta e musicista. Palermo: L’Epos. Villa, Angela Ida. 2009. Introduzioni e note. In Arrigo Boito. Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/Novecento.

CHAPTER 4

Sensual Sacredness and Sacred Sensuality: Love, Sex, and Religion in the Scapigliatura

Boito: Sadistic Serpents and Angelic Prostitutes In Boito’s Re Orso, first published in 1864, together with gluttony lust is represented as one of the king’s main vices, as previously seen in Chap. 3. Re Orso’s sexual desires and perversions are discussed in various passages of the fairy tale. ‘Constrictor’ is a chapter dedicated to the depiction of Re Orso’s erotic impulses, wherein the king tries to convince his wife-to-be, Oliba, to have sexual intercourse and he eventually summons Ligula, his serpent, to help him in her rape. The serpent, the guardian of Re Orso’s harem in ‘Antiche storie’ (OL, 94), is evidently the incarnation of Satanic erotic temptation and of the king’s carnal desires; more precisely, it is another embodiment of Beelzebub, in the same manner as the worm is, since the two animals share many similarities. The association of the worm with the Devil is obvious when a gluttonous priest discovers the ‘horrid and black’ worm in his pocket and exclaims: ‘È il diavolo! è il diavolo […] quel verme!’ (OL, 134) [‘It is the Devil! It is the Devil […] that worm!’]. Both the worm and the serpent have the same mark on the face, a ‘marchio qual di teschio umano’ (see OL, 93, 112) [‘mark similar to a human skull’] that symbolises moral and physical corruption, as well as being described as slithering, black, slimy, and swollen animals. The correlation between the two is even more obvious when analysing the journey of the worm that ‘slithers’ (OL, 134) towards Re Orso’s tomb, in which the worm is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Cabiati, Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92018-0_4

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portrayed in the following fashion, by means of a very musical series of triple senari with internal and tail rhyme: Sul grifo ha tre branche—e al ventre tre zanche—col viscido umor Del corpo velluto—ei sparge uno sputo—di rabbia e livor. Si gonfia e rappiglia—s’allunga e assottiglia—quel vil vïator. (OL, 132, my emphases) [On the snout it has three claws—and on the belly three legs—with the slimy fluid Of its velvet body—it spreads a spit—of anger and hatred. It swells and shrivels—stretches and thins—that vile traveller.]

The terms ‘spit’, ‘hatred’, and ‘swollen’ were employed together by Baudelaire to describe the allegorical ‘Serpent’ that represents eternal temptation, Satanic corruption, and the speaker’s erotic cravings in ‘À une Madone’, where the serpent is ‘Ce monstre tout gonflé de haine et de crachats’ (OC I, 58). In ‘Antiche storie’, Boito’s portrayal of Ligula the snake is similar to his description of the worm just quoted, as well as to Baudelaire’s serpent in ‘À une Madone’: there, it is considered as a ‘mostro’ (OL, 94) [‘monster’] ‘maligno […] / Immane e gonfio e nero, simigliante / Nel viscoso strisciar a incatramata / Gòmena’ (OL, 93) [‘malicious […] / Huge and swollen and black, similar / In its viscid slithering to a tarred / Hawser’]. Baudelaire employs the image of the serpent in the Fleurs to represent concepts linked to the Christian theological tradition, particularly sin and sexual desire, such as in ‘Les Métamorphoses du vampire’, one of the censured poems of the 1857 edition. ‘Les Métamorphoses du vampire’ is focused on the sensuality of the Satanic vampire-woman, at the same time attractive and dangerous. She is, paradoxically, both ‘Timide et libertine, et fragile et robuste’, who knows ‘la science / De perdre au fond d’un lit l’antique conscience’ and, however, equally an horrendous ‘outre aux flancs gluants, toute pleine de pus’ with a malicious sexual desire (OC I, 159). The equivalence between the speaker’s mistress, who is in the grip of erotic passion, and the twisting movements of the serpent is explicit in the medias-res opening of the poem: La femme cependant, de sa bouche de fraise, En se tordant ainsi qu’un serpent sur la braise. (OC I, 159)

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The same image is employed by Boito in ‘Constrictor’, who shifts the characterisation of the demonic figure from the terrible woman to the wicked monarch. Shortly before summoning the serpent, which later would bind him and Oliba together in a sadistically squeezing—and unambiguously sexual—embrace, Re Orso is sexually aroused and twists like a snake: E il Re maledetto S’attorce sul letto. (OL, 97) [And the cursed King Twists on the bed.]

The analogy between the slithering of the serpent and the movements of a human being subject to carnal desire is also featured in the medias-res opening of Praga’s ‘Tentazioni’, a poem from Penombre (1864), where the poet depicts his sexual appetite in the following manner: Vorrei, fanciulla, esser nel tuo corsetto, e, come un serpe ai dì di luglio, in giri voluttüosi errarti intorno al petto. (PP, 124) [I would like, girl, to be in your corset, and, like a serpent in the days of July, in voluptuous circles wander around your breast.]

Boito’s emphasis on the expression of Re Orso’s erotic desires through the image of the serpent in ‘Constrictor’ has been underlined by various scholars. Finotti (1994, 49) writes that ‘il desiderio che “s’attorce” esce da Re Orso e si materializza, avvolgendo e conquistando la fanciulla’ [‘the desire that “twists” comes out of Re Orso and materialises itself, enveloping and conquering the girl’], as regards the following scene: ‘A me Lìgula!’ repente Urla il Duca, ed un serpente Già dall’ombra ecco sbucò; Sul terren le ondose anella Negre, viscide, lucenti, Già distese e si drizzò; Già sui piè d’Oliba bella

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Pone il grifo e già co’ denti L’ampio velo ne strappò … Già la cinghia e già la serra, Già l’avvince e già l’atterra Strascinandola sul suol! Roteante—striscïante Già depon la smorta amante Sovra il tepido lenzuol! Oh spavento! in stretto morso Su d’Oliba e su Re Orso Si ringroppa il mostro ancor, Già i due corpi in un serrati, Trucemente soffocati Urlan rantoli d’amor! (OL, 98) [‘To me Lìgula!’ the Duke Suddenly screams, and a snake Has already emerged from the shadows; It has already extended Its wavy coils on the ground, Black, slimy, shiny, and then it straightens up; It has already put its snout on the feet Of beautiful Oliba, and already with its teeth Has torn her wide veil off … Already it envelops her and squeezes her, Already it intertwines itself with her And knocks her down, dragging her on the floor! Spinning—slithering Already it lays the pale lover down On the warm sheet! How frightening! with a tight grip The monster once again holds Onto Oliba and Re Orso, Already the two bodies, entangled in one, Cruelly suffocated, Scream moans of love!]

In this surreal scene, Re Orso’s abstract sexual longings and the concrete figure of the serpent are one and the same thing, and his violent passion is

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rhythmically conveyed in the poem through stylistic devices such as an ingenious use of punctuation; sibilance, which refers to the slithering movement of the serpent (‘Strascinandola sul suol’); and the visual silhouette of the snake formed by the different length of the lines, all ottonari, in the stanza. In ‘Le Serpent qui danse’, Baudelaire had already employed a specific metrical scheme, outlining the shape of a serpent, to portray the sensual dance of the poet’s lover who undulates and moves her body like a snake. The alternation of octosyllables with feminine rhyme and pentasyllabic verses with masculine rhyme illustrates visually the captivating serpentine dance, and gives form and rhythm to the musicality of the scene with a formal structure that conveys the arousal of the poet and, contrastingly, the sensuality of the frigid woman, as cold as minerals: Que j’aime voir, chère indolente, De ton corps si beau, Comme une étoffe vacillante, Miroiter la peau! […] Comme un navire qui s’éveille Au vent du matin, Mon âme rêveuse appareille Pour un ciel lointain. Tes yeux, où rien ne se révèle De doux ni d’amer, Sont deux bijoux froids où se mêle L’or avec le fer. À te voir marcher en cadence, Belle d’abandon, On dirait un serpent qui danse Au bout d’un bâton. (OC I, 29–30)

The serpent-woman, concurrently indolent and seductive, excites the poet whose soul happily sets off ‘For a distant sky’. The image of the spirit that flies towards a distant sky, which denotes a moral status of in-­betweenness, or, in other words, a combination of transcendence (‘âme rêveuse’) and

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immanence (‘ciel lointain’), would also be used by Boito in two of his works to underline the ecstatic act of spiritual elevation. I am referring to ‘Dualismo’ (1863), where the speaker considers himself as a ‘demone che sale, / Affaticando l’ale, / Verso un lontano ciel’ (OL, 53) [‘demon who ascends, / Flapping his weary wings, / Towards a distant sky’]; and the ‘Prologo in cielo’ of his opera Mefistofele (1868), in which the song and dance of the seraphim recall the poet of ‘Dualismo’, who strived to reach a far-away sky: ‘Fanciulli, teniamci [sic] per mano, / Fin l’ultimo cielo lontano / Noi sempre dobbiamo danzar’ (TS, 108) [‘Children, let us hold hands, / Until the last distant sky / We must always dance’]. This imagery of elevation and mysticism in a natural setting, characteristic of both Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura, will be analysed more thoroughly in Chap. 5. It is safe to say that Boito associates the symbol of the snake predominantly with Re Orso’s sinful and malicious eroticism, and Baudelaire employs the same animal to depict the woman’s sensuality, which most of the time is as wicked as Re Orso’s whilst simultaneously fascinating and tempting to the poet. In ‘Avec ses vêtements …’, which precedes ‘Le Serpent qui danse’ in both the 1857 and the 1861 editions of the Fleurs, Baudelaire again describes the charming movements of the serpent-woman: Avec ses vêtements ondoyants et nacrés, Même quand elle marche on croirait qu’elle danse, Comme ces longs serpents que les jongleurs sacrés Au bout de leurs bâtons agitent en cadence. (OC I, 29)

In this poem, however, the analogy between serpent and mistress does not introduce a joyful and carefree atmosphere expressed by means of a musical tone, unlike ‘Le Serpent qui danse’. On the contrary, it serves to underline the dangers of the cold mistress. As usual in Baudelaire’s poetry, frigidity is displayed with a vocabulary stressing the analogy between the look of the woman and minerals. As in ‘Le Serpent qui danse’, her eyes are similar to rock and metal: her indifference towards ‘human suffering’ (OC I, 29) is such that in her ‘Medusa-like’ gaze (Lawler 1997, 66) ‘tout n’est qu’or, acier, lumière et diamants’ (OC I, 29). The comparison between minerals, light, and the mistress’ eyes, as well as her double characterisation as a chaste ‘ange inviolé’ and a mysterious ‘sphinx antique’ (OC I, 29), serve to illustrate her ‘satanic sterility’ (Lawler 1997, 66) together

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with her dualistic nature of innocent and, at the same time, sinister woman. This oxymoronic representation of the feminine subject, and her portrayal as a statue-like mistress who yet possesses a very explicit sensuality, is typical in Baudelaire’s work. In ‘Je te donne ces vers …’, the lover is deemed an ‘Être maudit’ (OC I, 41) who is also an angelic and undersexed woman made of gemstone and bronze: —Ô toi qui, comme une ombre à la trace éphémère, Foules d’un pied léger et d’un regard serein Les stupides mortels qui t’ont jugée amère, Statue aux yeux de jais, grand ange au front d’airain! (OC I, 41)

This conception of the mistress as an impassive statue is taken up by Boito in ‘Constrictor’, who, in a similar fashion to Baudelaire, employs archaic literary words defining jewels and stones to depict Oliba’s frigidity, deaf to Re Orso’s sensual—and indeed sexual—calls: she is a ‘fanciulla dal sen di cammèo, / Dal crin di basalte’ [‘girl with cameo breasts, / With basalt hair’] who ‘non muove né voce né passo, / Par fatta di sasso’ (OL, 98) [‘moves neither voice nor foot, / She seems to be made of stone’]. The expression of her face, which as in Baudelaire’s poem is described by means of a synecdoche that substitutes the noun face with ‘forehead’, conveys metallic light and coldness, since Re Orso asks Oliba, addressed as ‘Medusa’, to ‘Discopri[re] la luce freddissima e mesta / Di quella tua fronte ch’io voglio mirar’ (OL, 97) [‘Uncover the very cold and melancholy light / Of that brow of yours that I want to see’], recalling the mistress’ gaze made of ‘gold, steel, light, and diamonds’ of Baudelaire’s poem ‘Avec ses vêtements …’. Furthermore, Boito inverts the metaphorical action of painfully trampling upon the lover, shifting it, once again, from the Baudelairian femme fatale to the cruel and violent king: if in ‘Je te donne ces vers …’ Baudelaire’s courtesan like a god ‘[Foule] d’un pied léger’ her foolish mortal lovers who have not appreciated her, in ‘Constrictor’ Re Orso tells Oliba to ‘Non far ch’io demente ti schiacci col piè!’ (OL, 98) [‘Do not let me, demented, crush you with my foot!’].1 In the Fleurs, the poet’s mistress is depicted with remarkable ‘richness and variety’ (Lloyd 2002, 105); depending on the poem, and occasionally in the very same poem, she is represented as differently as an innocent angel that might act as the speaker’s saviour and as a demonic being who condemns him to terrible sufferings. On the one hand, the poet’s lover is deemed, among other things, a ‘Bizarre déité’, a cold and at the same time

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sexually aroused ‘Mégère libertine’ to whom the speaker is both attracted and repulsed, as in ‘Sed non satiata’ (OC I, 28). On the other hand, the salvific feminine figure of various poems of the Fleurs is described in Catholic terms which stress her divine nature and spiritual love, such as the pious ‘Ange gardien, la Muse et la Madone’ of the composition ‘Que diras­tu ce soir …’ (OC I, 43). Occasionally, this heavenly presence becomes the recipient of the poet’s genuine liturgical invocations, such as in ‘Réversibilité’ (‘Ange plein de gaieté, connaissez-vous l’angoisse’, OC I, 44). At other times, the poet addresses her with religious-like praise that blasphemously mixes sacredness and spirituality with sadistic desire and violence, such as in ‘À une Madone’. In this poem, the mistress is worshipped as a statue-like Virgin Mary before being barbarically stabbed in her heart by the poet with seven daggers, which allegorically represent the speaker’s seven cardinal sins (OC I, 58–59). Baudelaire also blends sacredness with sensuality, such as in the Latin poem ‘Franciscae meae laudes’ (‘Praises for My Francisca’), which is modelled on the Christian composition ‘Dies irae’ and bears the amusing subtitle ‘Vers composés pour une modiste érudite et dévote’ (see OC I, 940): Esto sertis implicata, Ô femina delicata Per quam solvuntur peccata! Sicut beneficum Lethe, Hauriam oscula de te, Quae imbuta es magnete. […] Meos circa lumbos mica, O castitatis lorica, Aqua tincta seraphica; Patera gemmis corusca, Panis salsus, mollis esca, Divinum vinum, Francisca! (OC I, 61—62) [Be into a garland woven, O my captivating woman Through whom sins are all absolved!

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As I would obliging Lethe, Let me freely sip your kisses, So magnetically imbued. […] Gleam around my loins and guard them O thou corselet of virtue Made of water angel-dyed; Drinking bowl that gleams with gemstones, Salted bread and tender morsel, My Francisca, heaven’s wine!] (Baudelaire 2008, 125, 127)

Religiosity and promiscuity, sexual and chaste acts are here juxtaposed in order to playfully experiment with the religious and mystical language of the Latin decadence, which according to Baudelaire best expressed the sentimental feelings of the modern poet, the paradoxical mixture of spiritual devotion and unrestrained—and often violent—erotic desire for the lover, being ‘singulièrement propre à exprimer la passion telle que l’a comprise et sentie le monde poétique moderne’ (OC I, 940) [‘singularly suited to expressing passion as understood and felt by the modern poetic world’]. This dualistic representation of the woman and of male passion is also very much present in Re Orso. Even though at first glance Oliba, Re Orso’s bride, appears to be the stereotypical damsel in distress, upon a thorough analysis this interpretation does not seem acceptable anymore. Oliba certainly looks innocent and at the mercy of Re Orso’s depraved behaviour, but in Boito’s Crete, the ‘infamous / Island, cursed for Pasiphae’s love’, as seen in Chap. 3, no character is free from sin, vice, and corruption. Oliba’s double nature is depicted from the very beginning, in the scene from ‘Antiche storie’ where the king writes a message to the Doge of Venice to ask for a new bride: Ove chiedea la più formosa donna Delle lagune e la più casta. Il Doge Trovò la Dea da un usurier sul lido Della Giudecca, che vendea per oro Le figlie sue […]. (OL, 94)

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[Where he asked for the most curvaceous woman Of the lagoon and the most chaste. The Doge Found the Goddess from a usurer on the shores Of the Giudecca, who sold his daughters For gold […].]

The first thing to notice is the vocabulary that evokes sensuality (‘la più formosa donna’) as well as virginity (‘la più casta’), employed to portray Re Orso’s paradoxical request for a woman that must be both the most voluptuous and the most chaste. The contradiction continues with the juxtaposition of the definition of Oliba as a heavenly goddess with the fact that, rather antiphrastically, she has been sold to Re Orso as a slave by a usurer who sells his daughters for gold. This opposite representation is elaborated further in ‘Constrictor’, where Re Orso tries to convince an indifferent Oliba to have sex, and declaims an ode dedicated to her in which she is portrayed in a contradictory fashion. At first, Oliba epitomises the beautiful yet wicked femme fatale: ‘Oliba! sirena dell’adrie lagune, Oliba! vezzosa conchiglia di mar! Disciogli le chiome foltissime e brune, Medusa fatale dal fosco raggiar. L’oscuro zendado ti togli da testa, Discopri la luce freddissima e mesta Di quella tua fronte ch’io voglio mirar. Disfama le ardenti pupille digiune. (OL, 97) [‘Oliba! siren of the Adriatic lagoons, Oliba! charming seashell! Loosen your thick and dark hair, Fatal Medusa with a gloomy radiance. Remove the dark veil from your head, Uncover the very cold and melancholy light Of that brow of yours that I want to see. Feed your ardent and starving pupils.]

Re Orso compares Oliba to well-known symbols of dangerous, and sexually voracious, women such as sirens and lethal (‘fatale’) Medusa, who could bewitch men and turn them into stone by means of her gaze, which is described in this passage with an oxymoron that unites the king’s

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feelings of attraction and repulsion, desire and danger, darkness (‘fosco’) and light (‘raggiar’). Medusa’s gaze is reprised in the next lines, where Re Orso asks Oliba to remove her veil and show her facial expression, which is believed to convey an enchanting and very cold light that recalls Medusa’s stone gaze. The juxtaposition between the ‘very cold […] light’ of her look and the desiring ‘ardent and starving pupils’ of her eyes that must be fed with the sexual act reveals the combination of the woman’s coldness and sexual desire, of her external frigidity and internal passion, that is typically presented by the male speaker in Baudelaire’s poetry, with a clear reference also to the ‘prunelles ardentes’ of the prophetic tribe who has ‘fiers appétits’ of Baudelaire’s ‘Bohémiens en voyage’ (OC I, 18).2 Oliba, however, remains still like a stone and Re Orso decides to change the tone of his persuasion. If at first this seems to be very different compared to the aforementioned stanza, it is in fact similarly composed of opposite depictions, in this case related to chastity and eroticism, which express Re Orso’s conflicting desire for a woman that should be both virginal and lustful: ‘Oliba! per l’aure del lido natale, Oliba! pei canti del tuo gondolier! T’appressa alla coltre del letto regale, Mia vergine muta dai bianchi pensier. L’amore dell’uomo, fanciulla, è più bello Che quel del lïone, che quel del torello, Che quel dell’ardente puledro leggier. (OL, 97) [‘Oliba! for the winds of the native shores, Oliba! for the songs of your gondolier! Approach the blanket of the royal bed, My silent virgin with white thoughts. Man’s love, girl, is more beautiful That that of the lion, that that of the bull, Than that of the ardent light foal.]

Utterly inverting the characterisation of the female subject, now Re Orso appeals to the sweet love songs of the Venetian gondolier, describing Oliba as a pious virgin with innocent thoughts. This portrayal of Oliba does not last long: once more, the subsequent verses introduce a sexual element

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that clashes starkly with the image of Oliba just described. Re Orso tells Oliba that the love that comes from men is ‘more beautiful’ than that of the lion, the bull, and the ‘ardente puledro leggier’, thereby implicating bestiality and suggesting that Oliba already knows animalistic love, with the adjective ‘ardente’ that recalls her ‘ardenti pupille digiune’ of the previous stanza. Moreover, the reference to the animals, particularly the bull, evokes both the lust of Pasiphae, who gave birth to the Minotaur, half man and half bull, as described in ‘Antiche storie’ with the expression ‘Pasiphae’s love’, and Re Orso’s erotic menagerie of the same section. Oliba’s sexuality as represented in Re Orso is consistent with the biblical origin of her name, which is taken from the Book of Ezekiel, where ‘Ooliba’ is a lustful courtesan cursed by God (Villa 2009, 446). Boito also associates Oliba with the biblical Eve in ‘La cena’, when during the wedding feast Oliba gives Re Orso an apple ‘muta e col gesto d’Eva’ (OL, 112) [‘silent and with Eve’s gesture’], with the ‘swollen’ worm hidden in it: E colla destra inerme [Re Orso] Spacca quel frutto … orrore! …—orrore! orrore! un verme!! Un verme irsuto e gonfio—gli cadde sulla mano! (OL, 112) And with the right hand unarmed [Re Orso] Smashes that fruit … horror! …—horror! horror! a worm!! A swollen, hirsute worm—fell on his hand!

In this scene, Boito again makes a straightforward connection between the worm and the Satanic serpent of Eden that tempted Eve, even though the substitution of the serpent with the worm, and the association worm-­ apple, stresses even more the idea of corruption—material as well as moral—and gluttony that lies behind the original Fall. The narrator depicts Oliba as the woman that gave Adam the apple, the primordial symbol of temptation, and, as such, as the veritable source of Re Orso’s sins. While reviewing Émile Augier’s La Contagion in ‘Riviste drammatiche’ of Politecnico, Boito wrote that ‘Per Adamo il castigo fu una mela’ (TS, 1192) [‘Adam’s damnation was an apple’]; when a woman commits a sin, Boito continues, it is more evil than the man’s: quando il peccato s’incarna in Eva è più maligno che quando s’incarna in Adamo: lady Macbeth è peggiore di Macbeth’ (TS, 1194) [‘when sin is incarnated in Eve it is more evil than when it is incarnated in Adam: Lady Macbeth is worse than Macbeth’].

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The above characterisation of Oliba stands in opposition to her representation as an angelic woman by the Provencal minstrel in the chapter ‘Ago e arpa’, who dedicates to her a love song dotted with religious vocabulary: Tu m’apparisti, angelicata donna, Tutta piena di grazia e di virtù. Certo salì la prece alla Madonna Ed a Gesù. (OL, 105) [You appeared to me, angelic woman, Full of grace and virtue. Surely, my prayer ascended to the Virgin Mary And to Jesus.]

The definition of slave-prostitute Oliba as a virtuous ‘angelic woman’, hence using an expression typical of the Stilnovistic tradition, is certainly not devoid of an ironic and polemical tone against the Petrarchan themes employed by Italian Romanticism, which in the nineteenth century still described the poet’s love for the female subject in religious terms (see Villa 2009, 448). However, I think that Boito portrayed Oliba as such also because he wanted to represent the duality of woman, part angelic/virtuous and part sinful being, in the same way as he had described the duality of man in ‘Dualismo’. The characterisation of woman as a divine creature, after all, was not a prerogative of the Dolce Stil Novo at the end of the thirteenth century, or of the sentimental poetry of the Italian Romantics in the first half of the nineteenth century. As seen above, Baudelaire also employed the image of the angel-like woman, and in ‘Réversibilité’ he had called his mistress an ‘Ange plein de bonheur, de joie et de lumières’ to whom he ‘n’implore […] que [s]es prières’ (OC I, 45), a line which Boito might have recalled when defining, with analogous expressions, Oliba as an ‘angelic woman, / Full of grace and virtue. / Surely, my prayer ascended to the Virgin Mary’. In Tavolozza and Penombre, Praga also depicts women with a vocabulary that draws on Baudelaire’s Fleurs and combines sacredness with licentiousness. In the third of the four poems that bear the title ‘Dama elegante’ in Penombre, for example, the poet first characterises, in a sexual context, the alluring lady to whom the composition is dedicated as lethally dangerous and having serpent-like features, stating: ‘uscîr di vita / sotto le spire del tuo corpo anelo’ (PP, 145) [‘I yearn to die / under

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the coils of your body’]. Then, adopting a contrary terminology he describes her as a ‘donna piena di gioie e di luci’ [‘woman full of joys and lights’] with an eye ‘d’angelo e di sfinge’ (PP, 145) [‘of an angel and a sphinx’] and a ‘mistico labbro’ (PP, 146) [‘mystical lip’]. In the first ‘Dama elegante’, the woman becomes ‘l’angelo, il santo e la madonna’ (PP, 143) [‘the angel, the saint, and the Madonna’], and here Praga quotes almost literally the ‘guardian Angel, the Muse, and the Madonna’ of Baudelaire’s ‘Que diras-tu ce soir …’. This topic is similarly treated also by Camerana, who uses precise references to Baudelaire’s Fleurs, as will be shown later in this chapter. This double representation of the feminine subject and the juxtaposition of erotic and religious elements are a constant feature of Boito’s work, including his operas and most notably  Mefistofele in which of the two female characters loved by Faust, Margherita and Helen of Troy, ‘Margherita è l’innocenza, quasi l’ignoranza cristiana. Elena è la sensualità pagana […] voluttuosa come una Dea’ [‘Margherita is innocence, almost Christian ignorance. Helen is pagan sensuality […] voluptuous like a Goddess’], as disclosed by Boito in his instructions for the scenography of the second version (1875) of Mefistofele (Ricordi 1877, 3). In the final act of Mefistofele, this dualistic definition of woman, as well as of art, life, and reality in general, returns, when a moribund Faust exclaims: ‘Tutto conobbi: il Real, l’Ideale, / L’Amore della vergine e l’Amore / della Dea’ (TS, 177) [‘I experienced everything: the Real, the Ideal, / The Love of the virgin and the Love / of the Goddess’]. In Re Orso, Oliba is not the sole female character portrayed with opposite and contrasting features: although the king’s first wife, Mirra, is innocently described as ‘söave amor’ (OL, 94) [‘sweet love’] at the beginning of the fairy tale, the name ‘Mirra’ refers to the ancient Greek myth of Myrrha, taken up among others by Ovid in the erotic elegy ‘Myrrha’ of the tenth book of the Metamorphoses, in which Myrrha is an incestuous woman who loved her father and gave birth to Adonis (Ovid 1986, 234–241). Of course, both the names ‘Mirra’ and ‘Oliba’ might also have derived from ‘À une Madone’, where Baudelaire sacrilegiously combines the image of the incense used to worship the Virgin Mary and the poet’s erotic cravings: ‘Tout se fera […] Oliban, Myrrhe, / Et sans cesse vers toi […] / En Vapeurs montera mon Esprit orageux’ (OC I, 59, my emphases). In his poetry and novellas, Boito focuses particularly on the irreverent and provocative characteristics of the relationship between sensuality and purity, or, in other words, between sexual desire and sacredness. Apart

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from Re Orso, one of the most inspired moments related to this subject in Boito’s work is certainly Israhel van Meckenen’s engravings depicting the Virgin Mary that, in a church, blasphemously tempt to carnal sin the wicked monk of ‘Georg Pfecher’: Talora intorno all’abside Dalle dorate pale, Le madonne di Mèckenen Ti tentavano al male E allor la prece pia Sul labbro tuo languìa, Smagata dagl’incanti Rei di quei volti santi. (OL, 72) [Sometimes, around the apse With a golden altarpiece, Mèckenen’s Madonnas Tempted you to do evil And so the pious prayer Faded from your lips, Corrupted by the evil Spells of those holy faces.]

Noteworthy is the use of the expression ‘incanti / Rei’, literally ‘evil spells’, to characterise the monk’s sexual attraction for the Virgin, which in ‘Dualismo’ describes—in the singular, ‘incanto reo’—Circe’s erotic seduction (OL, 55, see also note 2 of this chapter). Another example of this is the combination of incest, religiosity, and sensuality that defines the toxic atmosphere of the novella ‘Iberia’, in which ambiguous phrases such as ‘baciavansi col bacio religioso e casto che si dà agli amuleti’ (OL, 193) [‘they kissed with the religious and chaste kiss that is given to amulets’] come close to Baudelaire’s combination of mysticism and carnality of lines such as ‘Je t’adore […] / Avec la dévotion / Du prêtre pour son idole’ (‘Chanson d’après-midi’, OC I, 59). Boito’s willingness to depict a dualistic reality without moral prejudice, as also seen in our discussion of ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ in Chap. 2 where the apparently chaste girl was in fact neither pious nor virginal, is combined with a firm disposition to debunk the conception of woman as solely angelic typical of Italian Romantic poetry, which did not take into account her sexuality and capacity to experience erotic feelings. In Re Orso, Oliba and Mirra must

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therefore be considered as two of the deceptively virtuous and divine female  characters in Boito’s work who are revealed, in conclusion, to be sinful and immoral (Villa 2009, 426). As seen thus far in this Chapter, Baudelaire’s dualistic treatment of feminine subjects had a significant influence on Re Orso. These are represented in Baudelaire’s poetry by a male speaker who displays complex and contrasting feelings of religious-like adoration for a virginal woman and powerful and occasionally violent erotic desires for a sexualised, and therefore dangerous, mistress—often blending and blurring these two characterisations. While on the surface it appears that only Re Orso is associated with biblical imagery related to sin and sexual desire, and that the female characters are romantically described as being virtuous and chaste, a deeper analysis reveals a more complex picture in which Mirra, and above all Oliba, ultimately embody erotic  temptation, sexual danger, and lustful bestiality. A similar sadistic relationship to that between Re Orso and Oliba would be later portrayed by Boito in his last opera Nerone, the libretto of which would be published in 1901 as a freestanding book. The violent relationship between Nerone and Asteria is dotted with expressions combining religiosity, eroticism, and bestiality that come close to Baudelaire’s scrutiny of terrible and consuming loves that simultaneously attract and repel, to be found in poems such as ‘À une Madone’ and ‘Sed non satiata’. These include Asteria’s ‘È il mio Nume e lo adoro! […] / […] Egli è l’Angelo crudel’ [‘He is my God and I love him! […] / […] He is the cruel Angel’], ‘L’orror m’attira / Come un amante’ (TS, 196–197) [‘Horror attracts me / Like a lover’]; or Nerone’s ‘Sul volto ho il tuo pallor, son la tua preda, / Estreme infliggi angosce a me! Mia Dea / […] mio pallid’incubo, / […] / Dammi il tuo morso! estatico l’attendo / E t’offro il labro!!’ (TS, 240) [‘On my face I have your pallor, I am your prey, / Extreme anguish inflict on me! / My Goddess / […] my pale nightmare, / […] / give me your bite! ecstatic, I am waiting for it / And I offer you my lip!!’]. Re Orso can thus be considered as a first poetic experimentation with the kind of malicious relationship, dangerous female sensuality, and sadistic eroticism later portrayed in Boito’s grandest—yet instrumentally uncompleted—opera, Nerone, as well as in many Decadent works—musical, artistic, literary—in fin-de-siècle Europe.

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Praga: Spiritual Intercourse and Carnal Worship Dualistic and contrasting representations of female subjects and of the poet’s relationship with them are also characteristic of Praga’s poetry. In Tavolozza (1862), Praga draws on Baudelaire’s description of the sensual woman as sexually frigid, indifferent to the male speaker’s erotic interest in her and therefore depicted, in ‘Le Serpent qui danse’, as ‘chère indolente’ (OC I, 29) and associated with the coldness of jewels, metals, and precious clothing. Her dancing body is compared with ‘une étoffe vacillante’ (ibid.) and her eyes to ‘deux bijoux froids où se mêle / L’or avec le fer’ (OC I, 30). Repurposing Baudelaire’s imagery and vocabulary of the ‘dear indolent’ as depicted in ‘Le Serpent qui danse’, in ‘Suicidio’ Praga represents the ‘belle indolenti’ [‘indolent beauties’] turning ‘metallo’, coins, into beautiful ‘tessuti e […] gioielli’ (PP, 32) [‘fabrics and […] jewels’]; the association between indolence and precious metals, stones, and cloths serves to convey the woman’s indifference towards the suicide of the young and poor artist later narrated in the poem. The sensuality of dancing female bodies is the subject of ‘Larve eleganti’, another poem from Praga’s first collection, where the ‘elegant ghosts’ of the title are recollections of youthful sexual desires (‘palpiti strani’, PP, 45) of the poet who remembers the ‘seducenti forme’ [‘seductive forms’] of dancing girls that now reside in his blurred ‘memory’, compared to a foggy forest (ibid.). The speaker’s sexual craving at the present time is so powerful that these attractive female ghosts, although part of a past happy memory, become alive in front of him, to the extent that their physical features are described in the present tense: ‘e veggo omeri bianchi e bianchi denti / […] e occhi mesti e pupille accese e nere’ (PP, 45) [‘and I see white humerus and white teeth / […] and sad eyes and bright black pupils’]. The dancers wear jewels and precious stones, ‘gemme e perle e corone immortali / di fiori artificiali’ (PP, 45) [‘gems and pearls and immortal crowns / of artificial flowers’], and, in a similar fashion to ‘Suicidio’, their sensual beauty enhanced by jewellery is associated with frigidity and indifference for the male narrator: ‘non una ne sortì, […] / a offrirmi i baci, a offrirmi il santo affetto / sognato al loro aspetto’ (ibid.) [‘not one of them came out, […] / to offer me kisses, to offer me the holy affection / that I had dreamt, dreaming of their appearance’]. The poet’s frustration with the dancers’ coldness is underpinned by a vocabulary combining eroticism and holiness, where a terminology of physical love, ‘kisses’, is juxtaposed with the religious expression ‘holy affection’ that is

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in turn unexpectedly associated with the body (‘aspetto’) of the female dancers; the rhyme ‘santo affetto’/‘loro aspetto’ conveys both the poet’s sense of sacredness for physical love and his simultaneous unfulfilled (‘sognato’) sexual desire. A similar subject to this is treated by Baudelaire in the series of sonnets that compose ‘Un fantôme’. In these four poems, all the main elements of ‘Larve eleganti’ are present: the sensual ghost of a female ‘beautiful visitor’ (OC I, 38) that comes out of the poet’s dim memory and becomes alive, and the contrast between present desires and the joyful memories of the past; the tenderness and concurrent intensity of the ghost’s eyes, ‘yeux si fervents et si tendres’ (OC I, 40), and the oxymoronic description of the blackness of the spectre, defined as ‘bright’, ‘noire et pourtant lumineuse’ (OC I, 38); and finally, the jewellery worn by the ghost in the poet’s memory. The following description of the erotic qualities of the mistress’ spectre, in which the jewels and fine clothing on her body complement and enrich her beauty, serves to express the poet’s sexual desire that is now impossible to fulfil. The only thing that can be done in the present is to narrate—that is, to remember—the lover’s powerful ‘kisses’ (OC I, 40) and the sensuality of her naked body: Ainsi bijoux, meubles, métaux, dorure S’adaptaient juste à sa rare beauté; Rien n’offusquait sa parfaite clarté, Et tout semblait lui servir de bordure. […] elle noyait Sa nudité voluptueusement Dans les baisers du satin et du linge Et, lente ou brusque, à chaque mouvement Montrait la grâce enfantine du singe. (OC I, 39–40)

This suggestive portrayal of the mistress’ sensuous act of clothing her nude body that moves as if dancing would later influence Praga’s ‘La festa e l’alcova’ (1864). This poem begins with a very similar image of the naked woman getting dressed in clothes and jewellery for a ball, ‘Ella era

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nuda come un fior d’Iddio / […] / però pel ballo si adornava’ (PP, 121) [She was naked like a flower of God / […] / but she was adorning herself for the ball’], which also recalls the opening of another composition where Baudelaire displays the nudity of the female subject in erotic terms, namely ‘Les Bijoux’: ‘La très chère était nue, et […] / n’avait gardé que ses bijoux sonores’ (OC I, 158). Praga again combines images of holiness and spirituality with physical expressions of affection to represent the poet’s conflicting feelings of religious-like worship and sexual attraction for the mistress. If the shirt worn by the lover over her naked breasts is juxtaposed with a stole, the religious garment worn by Catholic priests, ‘la bianca camiciuola, / […] si adagiò sul profumato petto / come una stola’ (PP, 121) [‘the white shirt, / […] laid itself down on the perfumed breasts / like a stole’], the act of putting on her jewellery is, conversely, described with sensory— and more precisely tactile—language as if it were the kisses of the poet on her body: ‘[vidi] le perle arrivâr, tremule faci, / a lambir mollemente il suo candore, / come i miei baci’ (PP, 122) [‘[I saw] the pearls arrive, flickering torches, / softly touching her whiteness, / like my kisses’]. Similarly, the woman herself is portrayed with opposite terminology, encompassing divinity as well as dangerous carnal temptation. She is indeed nude like ‘a flower of God’, but her sensuality is also what makes her resemble the biblical Eve, with jewels and clothes that amplify her eroticism and, therefore, her capacity to tempt and sexually arouse men, in this instance those that will be present at the ball: if angels weep, Praga writes, is when ‘nei tessuti e nei gioielli / Eva scorg[ono]’ (PP, 121) [‘[they] see Eve / adorned with fabrics and jewels’]. That is why the sight of the naked mistress dressing up for the dance causes mixed feelings in the speaker, ‘estasi e incùbi’ (PP, 121) [‘ecstasies and nightmares’], a combination of sexual desire and nightmarish jealousy that serves as a backdrop to the poet’s successive aesthetic reflection on female beauty. This is dotted with macabre imagery that equates the clothes and accessories worn by the mistress with cemeterial objects. The white artificial flower on her hair is compared to a funeral candle and her cloak to a coffin, imagining the female subject in a sepulchral context, as if she were buried in a grave: Penso, guardando il tuo largo mantello, a quello dei morti gonnellin di legno fatto a pennello,

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gonnellino di moda eternamente! … (PP, 122) [Looking at your large cloak, I think of that of the dead, wooden skirt custom-made, a skirt fashionable for eternity! …]

The aforementioned amalgamation of sexual longing and intense jealousy, which constitutes the emotional theme of the second half of the poem, is what triggers the poet’s gruesome fantasy, where desire is violently and morbidly expressed through the explicit characterisation of the sensual clothes and accessories of the lover as funeral items, and her implicit representation as a dead woman. Female eroticism and death are also juxtaposed in ‘Un fantôme’, especially in the fourth sonnet ‘Le Portrait’ (see OC I, 40); expressions of macabre desire similar to Praga’s ‘La festa e l’alcova’, however, are more directly described in other poems by Baudelaire, such as ‘Je t’adore à l’égal …’. Here, images of assault and decomposition are put together to convey the poet’s sexual feelings for the cold and cruel mistress, forming a picture of his violent longings that arguably look very much like necrophilia: ‘Je m’avance à l’attaque, et je grimpe aux assauts, / Comme après un cadavre un chœur de vermisseaux’ (OC I, 27). Necrophiliac and morbid desires in Baudelaire’s and the Scapigliatura’s work will be investigated more thoroughly in Chap. 6, in relation to Futurism. In Praga’s love poetry, the woman is not simply represented as the object of the poet’s sexual desire. Following Boito’s and Baudelaire’s dualistic portrayal of the female subject, Praga also describes the mistress in religious and spiritual terms as a virginal and salvific figure, deified by the speaker. In ‘Brianza’ from Penombre, this representation of the woman is part of a sublimation of a past memory of a carefree time that concerns projects of mutual love and prospective fame for the poet. This is not a sexual relationship as previously seen in ‘La festa e l’alcova’ and ‘Larve eleganti’, but a celebration of past sentimental love that acts as a restoring and comforting memory in a gloomy present. This kind of representation of an idyllic and romantic relationship has been deemed very distant from Baudelaire’s conception of erotic passion and lascivious subjects. Although scholars have pointed out Baudelaire’s influence on ‘Brianza’, this has been considered mainly in terms of a similar musical use of strophe encadrée to ‘Le Balcon’, and the representation, in both poems, of a joyful memory

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of intimate moments that the poet shared with his mistress in front of the hearth, and the hope that these moments would eventually return in the future. These analogies are rightly highlighted by Bouffard (1971, 166–167), who, however, is also quick to remark the differences in the tone and atmosphere that serve to portray the poet’s relationship with his lover: sensually erotic in ‘Le Balcon’; sentimentally platonic in ‘Brianza’. According to Bouffard (1971, 169), when in Penombre Praga ‘adopte une certaine forme de sensibilité baudelairienne, c’est avant tout en vue de scandaliser le lecteur’ [‘adopts a certain form of Baudelairian sensibility, it is above all in order to scandalise the reader’]; that is why, Bouffard argues (167), the sentimental and idyllic qualities of ‘Brianza’ are not relatable to ‘Le Balcon’. Bouffard (1971, 166–167) highlights Praga’s rejection of Baudelaire’s eroticism and of the couple’s carnal love, and Praga’s preference for sentimentalism and tenderness when portraying an ecstatic memory of a past relationship, which would reflect his true nature as an ‘idyllic’ poet not corrupted, in this instance, by Baudelaire’s depiction of sexual and immoral themes. Bouffard (1971, 166) affirms that, despite Baudelaire’s influence as mentioned above, ‘à peine évoquée l’ombre de Baudelaire est comme exorcisée. Praga refuse l’alliance de l’acte charnel et des ténèbres. L’idillismo reprend ses droits’ [‘barely mentioned, the shadow of Baudelaire is as if exorcised. Praga refuses the alliance of the carnal act and darkness. L’idillismo [Idillism] takes back its rights’]. The idealisation of domestic life and of the poet’s love for his mistress is indeed the subject of Praga’s ‘Brianza’, marked by religious and spiritual vocabulary that conveys past youthful innocence, hope, and happiness: ‘puri’, ‘beati’, ‘affetto’, ‘paradiso’, ‘sante gioie’, ‘speranze divine’, ‘dagli angeli protetta’, ‘buona’, ‘preghi il Signore’ (PP, 85–86). But we should also consider that, far from being Baudelaire’s most sexually explicit poem, ‘Le Balcon’ expresses a love that is sentimental as it is physical, where expressions of intense eroticism or desire typical of Baudelaire’s licentious compositions are substituted by more indefinite and allusive images (‘ô baisers infinis’, OC I, 37) or by gentle demonstrations of fraternal and romantic love (‘que ton cœur m’était bon!’; ‘mes mains fraternelles’; ‘ton cœur si doux’, ibid.). ‘Le Balcon’ is devoid of the sadism, violence, and wickedness typically associated with Baudelaire’s love poetry. In this poem, ‘passion is infused with tenderness’, as Lloyd (2002, 98) has claimed. This is a representation of all-encompassing love, one of the various moments of ecstatic happiness of the Fleurs, where the woman is variously described as ‘the mother and the mistress, the sister and the queen’ (Lloyd 2002,

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100), and where Baudelaire celebrates the pleasures of a committed relationship and of family life in a fashion not dissimilar to ‘Brianza’. The phrase ‘La douceur du foyer’ (OC I, 36), after all, is an image of comfortable domestic life, which Baudelaire often uses in his poetry ‘to summon up all the attractions of a calm and stable home life’ (Lloyd 2002, 101). Solemnly proclaiming the feminine subject to be ‘tous mes devoirs’ (OC I, 36) and making for her vows of eternal love and commitment (‘Ces serments’; ‘impérissables choses’, OC I, 37), in ‘Le Balcon’ the poet stands in opposition to the figure of the ‘sinister poet’ as described in ‘Les Deux Bonnes Sœurs’, the ‘ennemi des familles / […] courtesan mal renté’ (OC I, 114). As has often occurred in scholarship on Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura, on this occasion Bouffard focused only on the aspect of Baudelaire’s poetry pertaining to the ‘sinister’ poet as ‘enemy of families’ and habitué of brothels, and on Praga’s alleged predilection for the controversial and shocking subjects of the Fleurs du Mal. Bouffard does not take into account the characteristics of ‘Le Balcon’ that openly praise a peaceful domestic life solely devoted to the care of a mistress; nor the themes treated in the poems that, as seen in the previous section of this chapter, are devoted to redeeming spiritual love and a virginal woman, such as ‘Que diras-tu ce soir …’; nor, finally, compositions that celebrate a light-hearted memory of youthful and innocent love that the speaker attempts to restore in a similar manner to ‘Brianza’, such as ‘Mœsta et errabunda’. The most evident resemblance between ‘Brianza’ and ‘Mœsta et errabunda’ is in their poetic structure, being both in strophe encadrée form, where the first line of a stanza recurs as the last line of the very same stanza. But the two poems also share the use of religious expressions that emphasise the purity of a past recollection of love, which the poet strives to recreate in the present. We have already examined the spiritual terminology of ‘Brianza’; similarly, ‘Mœsta et errabunda’ features terms including ‘cœur’, ‘splendeur’, ‘clair’, ‘virginité’, ‘orgue’, ‘sublime’, ‘paradis parfumé’, ‘joie’, ‘volupté pure’, ‘vert paradis des amours enfantines’, ‘innocent paradis’ (OC I, 63–64). Praga takes up Baudelaire’s juxtaposition between the sadness of the present, embodied by the ‘mesta giovinetta’ [‘melancholic girl’] in ‘Brianza’—who recalls the ‘Mœsta et errabunda’ [‘Melancholic and Wandering’] of Baudelaire’s title—and the distant happiness of the past: ‘Che ce ne resta, o mia donna, a quest’ora?’ (PP, 86) [‘What is left of it, O my woman, at this time?’]. The phrase ‘io per te meditavo un paradiso’ (PP, 85) [‘I envisaged a paradise for you’] linked to the

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romantic plans of the couple, moreover, finds its correspondence in the noun ‘paradis’, repeated six times and symbolising the past uncorrupted relationship portrayed in ‘Mœsta et errabunda’. Most significantly, Baudelaire’s poem contains a representation of a scene of bucolic love that could easily be considered as an expression of the so-called idyllic and sentimental trait of Praga’s poetry, had it been written in Italian: Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines, Les courses, les chansons, les baisers, les bouquets, Les violons vibrant derrière les collines, Avec les brocs de vin, le soir, dans les bosquets. —Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines. (OC I, 64)

This stanza, and in particular the phrase ‘the evening, in the woods’, is the most likely source for the opening of ‘Brianza’. Note the similarity with the Edenic and pastoral picture of the two lovers painted in the first stanza of Praga’s poem, especially with the twice repeated ‘la sera in mezzo ai monti’: Come è bella la sera in mezzo ai monti! Te ne ricordi? … ti ricordi quando si vagheggiava i rapidi tramonti, e tornavamo a braccio, e sussurrando: come è bella la sera in mezzo ai monti? (PP, 85) [How beautiful is the evening in the mountains! Do you remember it? … do you remember when we longed for the rapid sunsets, and we returned arm in arm, whispering: how beautiful is the evening in the mountains?]

In ‘Mœsta et errabunda’, Baudelaire juxtaposes the poet’s ecstatic memory of the bucolic past, which might already be, chronologically as well as spatially, ‘plus loin que l’Inde et que la Chine’ (OC I, 64), with the miserable present times in the ‘disgusting city’ (OC I, 63), Paris, hence casting doubt on the possible re-creation of a similar paradisiac state with his lover. On the other hand, while preserving Baudelaire’s sense of loss of happiness in the present, Praga’s poet is more hopeful on the approaching future: ‘Ma non è tutto, non è tutto spine / l’oggi’ (PP, 86) [‘But everything is not, everything is not thorns / today’].

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Baudelaire’s opposition between despondent feelings caused by life in the modern city and the longing for an elsewhere, an unadulterated and idyllic place—represented by locations distant in space and time, as seen in ‘Mœsta et errabunda’, vaguely depicted—can also be found in Praga’s poetry, where the escape from the gloomy everyday reality translates instead into a return to the serenity of familiar places. The escape from the sorrowful city is the subject of Praga’s ‘Noli’ (1864). The poet finds himself in a peaceful maritime village in Liguria, defined as a ‘balsamo sospirato un anno intiero’ (PP, 99) [‘balm longed for a whole year’]. The speaker is accompanied by his mistress, who is depicted in a paradoxical fashion, with contrasting terms: Come sei tutta buona e tutta bella, o ammaliatrice, o santa, o cortigiana! La tristezza, tua pallida sorella, è la mezzana; e io ti stringo, ti mordo, amante offeso da cento mali, e tu m’intendi e taci: le tue carezze sono unguento steso, nettare i baci. (PP, 99) [How good and beautiful you are, O enchantress, O saint, O courtesan! Sorrow, your pale sister, is the procuress; and I hold you, I bite you, lover offended by a hundred evils, and you understand and keep quiet: your caresses are spread ointment, your kisses nectar.]

This broad and apparently conflicting illustration of the feminine subject combines expressions taken from the diverse representation of the woman in the Fleurs: ‘tutta buona e tutta bella’ very much resembles ‘À la très belle, à la très bonne’ from ‘Que diras-tu ce soir …’ (OC I, 43); ‘ammaliatrice’ calls into mind the numerous times in which Baudelaire has compared the lover to a sorceress, praising her seductive powers and calling her ‘enchanteresse’, as in ‘Le Beau navire’ (OC I, 51); ‘santa’ is akin to the idolisation of the mistress’ restorative powers by means of religious terms,

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such as the ‘Ange gardien’ and ‘Madone’ of ‘Que diras-tu ce soir …’ (OC I, 43); ‘cortigiana’ recalls, finally, the many cases in which Baudelaire has employed the noun ‘courtisane’ to refer to the mistress’ lust and erotic passion, including ‘Remords posthume’ (OC I, 35). Besides these textual borrowings, however, what is significant is that Praga strives to represent the duality of woman, her various and sometimes contrasting roles in a love relationship as both a ‘saint’, a caring mother and sister capable to soothe the poet’s sorrow, as well as a ‘courtesan’, a sensual lover displaying seduction and eroticism. The poet affirms that he carries with him an allegorical ‘convoy of sufferings’ from the city (PP, 100), and only the serene atmosphere of the maritime village during daytime, together with his lover, can temporarily relieve them. But Praga does not use erotic and immoral imagery, such as the enchantress, the courtesan, the caresses and kisses, as a negative counterpoint to the idyllic and comforting setting of the village; I do not think that this peaceful scene is ‘mis en péril par l’évocation inattendue de la prostituée et de son amant’ (Bouffard 1971, 170) [‘endangered by the unexpected apparition of the prostitute and her lover’]. Praga does not employ the noun ‘cortigiana’ as a reference to an actual prostitute, at least not in this poem,3 but in figurative terms to express the sensuality and erotic qualities of the poet’s lover. Merging sacredness and impiety, tenderness and eroticism, caresses and kisses, the mistress is a key element of the comforting atmosphere of the village that the poet is desperately looking for, embodying (temporary) happiness as opposed to ‘her pallid sister’, sorrow, associated with life in the city. Praga’s imagery can, therefore, be likened to such poems as the aforementioned ‘Le Balcon’, where Baudelaire represents, with a rich variety of images, the complexity and contradictory traits of the woman and of the love relationship. The sentimental celebration of, or aspiration to, tender love and a caring woman is occasionally portrayed in a very similar way by Praga and Baudelaire. In the closing stanza of ‘Nevicata’, from Penombre, Praga praises the beauties of ‘Domus et placens uxor’ [‘Home and a pleasing wife’] during a cold winter day, as Horace’s quotation used as the epigraph to the poem suggests (PP, 91). The company of the loving and gentle female subject modifies the poet’s perception of the bleak January landscape, introducing a mild spring breeze—metaphorically originating from the woman and her love—in the winter scenery, which her presence and warmth transform into a veritable picture of spring:

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Della mia donna nel fervido cuore aleggia sempre una brezza gentile, e quando ricco il poeta è d’amore anche il gennaio somiglia all’aprile. (PP, 92) [In the fervent heart of my woman always blows a gentle breeze, and when the poet is rich in love January also resembles April.]

In Baudelaire’s ‘Chant d’automne’, the poet similarly seeks the gentleness and love of the woman, defined as differently as ‘mother’, ‘mistress’, and ‘sister’, as well as the pleasures of a domestic life, in order to escape the thought of the cold impending winter. Since the desired natural scenery featuring ‘le soleil rayonnant sur la mer’ (OC I, 57) is inaccessible, the speaker substitutes it with the tender love of the woman that warms and comforts him, as if it were the rays of a late autumnal sun before winter begins: Et pourtant aimez-moi, tendre cœur! soyez mère, Même pour un ingrat, même pour un méchant; Amante ou sœur, soyez la douceur éphémère D’un glorieux automne ou d’un soleil couchant. (OC I, 57)

In certain poems from Penombre, images of gentle and innocent female subjects are put into contrast with explicit representations of debauchery and corruption. ‘Profanazioni’ (1864) depicts the cheerful atmosphere of an orgy of wine and kisses (‘l’ultimo bacio, coll’ultima tazza’, PP, 186 [‘my last kiss, with my last cup’]), with three different women (‘Lisa’, ‘Emma’, ‘Nina’, PP, 185), that the poet is enjoying. Inverting the characterisation of the female ghosts previously seen in ‘Larve eleganti’, in this poem the ‘larve leggiere che andavano a volo’ (PP, 186) [‘light ghosts that were flying’] are not memories of adolescent carnal desires but, contrarily, of uncorrupted images from the past that, compared to the present, possess a completely different kind of pleasure, related to youthful innocence and joy. These memories are all represented by female figures symbolising things of the past as different as people, objects, feelings, and places:

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—Rammenti? Rammenti?—dicevano insieme, poi tutte mutavano le sillabe estreme: —Io sono la coltrice del letto infantile … —E noi siam le gioie dei giorni d’aprile … —Son io la locanda dei queti villaggi … —Io son la valigia dei garruli viaggi … […] —E noi, noi le vergini dal cielo invocate! (PP, 186) [—Do you remember? Do you remember?—they were saying together, then they all changed their last syllables: —I am the mattress of your childhood bed … —And we are the joys of April days … —I am the inn of the peaceful villages … —I am the suitcase of the boisterous journeys … […] —And we, we the virgins invoked by heaven!]

The ‘profanations’ referenced in the title seem, at first glance, to be the idea that these female ghosts of pure and chaste memories, occasionally represented with a religious register underlying their spiritual nature, appear during an orgy of carnal passion and depravity occurring with real women. Confronted with this immoral subject matter, the memories are somehow desecrated and, as a result, they cannot be sustained, eventually vanishing: ‘Oh angosce, oh trasporti dell’anima mia! / E i sogni sfumavano, la nenia svania …’ (PP, 186) [‘Oh anguish, oh ardours of my soul! / And the dreams faded, the chant disappeared …’]. It could be argued that these ghosts personify the poet’s anguish for an innocent state that he realises to have now lost and substituted with vice and corruption; voluntarily mentioned in a non-finite fashion and liberally placed one next to the other, they become symbols of his longing for purity in the midst of debauchery. In an analogous manner, Baudelaire’s ‘L’Aube spirituelle’ is structured around the juxtaposition of purity and debauchery, spirituality and carnality. This composition features the poet who, described as one of the lost ‘debauchees’ that dream and suffer, in the wake of ‘stupid orgies’ sees the female ghost of the ‘Déesse, Être lucide et pur’ (OC I, 46). This is, in actuality, the memory of a mistress and, at the same time, the symbol of the poet’s search for purity, encompassing spiritual love as well as the poetic ‘Ideal’, after sin and depravity (OC I, 46). Noteworthy is the fact that while in ‘Profanazioni’ the vision of innocence appears during the

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orgy, and because of that can only be ephemeral and put into sheer contrast with the dissolute acts that continue after the vision, in ‘L’Aube spirituelle’ it happens after and as a result of the orgy, which entails that the poet, being finally capable of sustaining the comparison between spirituality and lasciviousness, can appreciate even more the ‘Cieux Spirituels’ that constantly attract him, however ‘inaccessible’ (OC I, 46). But the differences between the two poems also highlight the fact that, in terms of the interaction between religious and impious imagery, Praga is not so much interested in the spiritual celebration of the memory of angelic women born out of a scene of carnal depravity, as in the subversion of the traditional conception of ‘profanation’ that is usually reserved to religious items or places. In ‘Profanazioni’, with its title in the plural, it is the sinful orgy that is desecrated by the sequential appearance of the female ghosts representing purity, and not the other way round. As a result of this reversal, corruption and depravity end up taking on sacred characteristics and are ‘profaned’, having now substituted innocence and virtue as the poet’s moral values, which can only exist as ghosts, as feeble memories of the past. There is certainly a strong element of provocation and irreverence towards Catholic subjects and themes in Praga’s juxtaposition of sexuality/sensuality and sacredness, but this is hardly Praga’s sole objective. When the poet proclaims, with impertinent irony, ‘Sarò il padre prior de’ miei peccati’ (PP, 191) [‘I will be the father prior of my sins’] in ‘Covento ideale’ (1864), it is not merely to mock the lack of temperance and related moral hypocrisy of some clerics, inverting the role and responsibility of a Catholic minister to include vice in a sort of sacrilegious litany of sins along the lines of Baudelaire’s and Boito’s Satanic poems; Baudelaire and Boito, moreover, also feature wicked and immoral monks in their poetry (Baudelaire in ‘Le Mauvais moine’, see OC I, 15–16). More importantly, the description of the poet as a debauched prior who is the head of his seven cardinal sins, allegorically depicted as monks and other religious figures, is part of the representation of an ‘ideal monastery’ where the poet can devotedly cultivate his vices, both corporal and moral, as if they were virtues, in the same—and yet, concurrently, opposite—way monks nurture and enrich their souls. Corruption is not employed here as a literary device, as a negative point of contrast in the poetic idealisation or sublimation of a character, of their Christian virtues and spiritual qualities. The poet’s devotion and commitment to sinful practices can be seen in the stanza dedicated to lust, which seamlessly merges religious objects with sexual

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desires, spirituality with carnality. This closely recalls Baudelaire’s ‘À une Madone’, and in particular the description of the gown of the imagined Madonna as allegorically made of the poet’s erotic cravings, ‘mon Désir, frémissant, / Onduleux, mon Désir qui monte et qui descend’ (OC I, 58): Poi la Lussuria: le darò un altare tutto per lei, tutto profumi ed or! Sera e mattina, senza mai posare, dovrà cantarmi l’Angelus nel cuor. (PP, 192) [Then Lust: I will give her an altar all for her, all perfumes and gold! Evenings and mornings, without ever rest, she will have to sing the Angelus in my heart.]

Praga’s representation of lust and sexual cravings as something sacred, to be worshiped and venerated in his poetry, is part of a larger discussion aimed at providing sexual intercourse with new aesthetic and moral meanings. That is why the conclusion of ‘Seraphina’, from the collection Penombre, should not only be analysed from the point of view of Praga’s irreverent anticlericalism and polemic against Catholicism, but also be put into a broader context concerning the subversion of traditional restrictive significations of the sexual act and physical pleasure. The poet dreams that Jesus is welcoming Seraphina (also spelled ‘Serafina’ in the poem, PP, 148), a prostitute who has recently died of typhus fever, in heaven; ironically, however, she mistakenly confuses Jesus with one of her clients: Vieni, fanciulla, di palor soffusa, vieni all’amplesso dell’eterna ebbrezza!’. Ed ella rispondea tutta confusa: ‘Vuoi ch’io ti doni un bacio, o una carezza?’ (PP, 152) [‘Come, girl, suffused with pallor, come to the embrace of eternal intoxication!’. And she replied all confused: ‘Do you want me to give you a kiss, or a caress?’]

The anti-idealistic use of antiphrasis in the last line juxtaposes the prostitute’s expressions of physical love, ‘kiss’ and ‘caress’, with Jesus’s opposite description of ‘amplesso’ in mystical terms, an ironic conclusion that entails

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a preference for the corporeal domain over the spiritual of the kind seen in Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Une charogne’. This deidealisation and irreverent distortion of an image of Christian heaven follows a similar description of paradise earlier in the poem, in the ‘truthful’ song (PP, 149) of stanzas 10–17 that the poet dedicates to Seraphina and the sexual pleasures she used to offer her clients. After equating Seraphina with a teacher of theology who speaks of heaven through ‘love and poetry’ (PP, 149), the poet defines paradise ‘una stupida cosa’ [‘a stupid thing’], which cannot be found in the prostitute’s bedroom (PP, 150). Rejecting the Christian notion of heaven as solely spiritual and therefore too idealistic and inaccessible (‘di talpe un sogno’, PP, 150 [‘a dream of a blind man’]), Praga substitutes it with pleasure; his conception of pleasure, however, transcends its hedonistic and carnal basis, taking on unexpected metaphysical features. Through his description of sexual intercourse as an all-encompassing act merging contrasting images belonging to religion, spirituality, erotic desire, matter and the senses, Praga redefines it as heaven on earth and, thus, as the only attainable paradise. Sex, in other words, is where spirit and matter combine, overcoming their dualistic divide as established by Christianity, and where, consequently, the poetic Ideal and reality can combine as well. It is ‘il delirio, è l’oblìo […] | d’ogni bisogno, d’ogni legge umana’ [‘delirium, it is the oblivion […] | of every need, of every human law’], and where ‘desiderii oscuri e sterminati’ [‘endless and obscure desires’] can be satisfied; it is both the lyrical ‘sacro Ver per cui l’idea s’inciela’ [‘sacred Truth for which the idea ascends to heaven’] and the prosaic yet god-like ‘Materia, la divina antica’ (PP, 150) [‘Matter, the ancient goddess’], allegorised through a capital letter. It is, finally, everything, all that is physical and metaphysical, material and spiritual, present and historical, thereby containing infinite meanings: è il nettare che i numi han preferito, è la fé d’ogni razza e d’ogni data, è la vita, è la morte, è l’Infinito! (PP, 150) [is the nectar that the gods have preferred, it is the faith of every race and every age, it is life, it is death, it is Infinity!]

In our analysis of ‘A un feto’ in Chap. 2, we have seen that Praga reacts to the loss of a Romantic notion of beauty as idealism, spirituality, and

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nature in a contradictory manner: on the one hand, emotionally, expressing his lyrical longing for the restorative power of spiritual and natural themes; and on the other, through an unpoetic display of the ugliness of dead bodies and organic matter, used as a more ‘realistic’ aesthetic counterbalance to the former. It is therefore curious to note Praga’s different approach to the beauty of casual sexual intercourse with a prostitute, which is not defined in Romantic terms as part of a sentimental and committed love relationship between her and the poet. She is, on the contrary, one of the poet’s ‘trastulli’, a fun and entertaining activity shared with the other clients that go to Seraphina to satisfy their ‘voglie ardenti’ (PP, 148) [‘burning desires’], and thus seemingly on the opposite end of the moral and aesthetic spectrum from virtue, spirituality, and idealism. Seraphina/ Serafina, however, is described as one of the ‘angeli’ [‘angels’] with a ‘corpo divino’ (PP, 148) [‘divine body’]—her name also unequivocally recalling the seraphim, the order of angels in Christian angelology, ‘serafini’ in Italian. This kind of lyrical representations of prostitutes and of sexual intercourse signals a different interpretation of beauty that abandons the theological and moral dualities of Christian heritage, blurring the boundaries between spirit and matter, virtue and vice, the poetic Ideal and reality, a technique that anticipates later experimentations with the intermixing of sex, sensuality, and spirituality in the poetry of Decadence and Decadentism, and especially of D’Annunzio. Praga’s depiction of the dual and opposite features of woman as seen in ‘La festa e l’alcova’ and ‘Noli’ is combined in ‘Seraphina’ with the subversion of moral beliefs concerning sex and desire of ‘Profanazioni’ and ‘Convento ideale’. ‘Seraphina’, ultimately, finds its lyrical antecedent in the intermixing of sacredness and lasciviousness, as well as of feelings of religious adoration and sexual longing for the female subject, which characterises such Baudelaire’s poems as ‘L’Aube spirituelle’ and ‘À une Madone’.

Camerana: The Sensuality and Sexuality of the Virgin Mary In the poetry of the Scapigliatura, the juxtaposition of Catholic spirituality and iconography with the pleasures of the flesh is not exclusive to Boito and Praga: it is, in fact, a customary trait of Camerana’s work as well. Camerana’s ‘Io sognai. Fu il mio sogno …’, written in October 1865, depicts a dead girl in a coffin, defined as ‘La mia Musa’ (CP, 82, ‘My

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Muse’), with a capital and allegorising ‘M’. Represented with a harp with a broken string lying at her feet, symbol of disturbed poetic creativity, the muse is a personification of the poet’s despondent frame of mind and macabre lyrical imagination. A vocabulary of physical love is introduced in the third stanza where the muse, previously deemed a ‘virgin’ (CP, 82), is sensually described as having a ‘bel seno’ [‘beautiful breast’] and blonde curls that are ‘kissed’ (ibid.) by the light of a star in the sky, the planet Venus, conveying the poet’s necrophiliac desire for the dead girl similar to that displayed by Camerana in ‘Ad Sepultam’ (II), seen in Chap. 3. Ambiguous expressions in the physical portrayal of the muse continue in stanza four, when Camerana writes: ‘Ed ancora l’amplesso dell’edera / Avvolgea quella fronte da santa’ (CP, 82) [‘And still the embrace of the ivy / Enveloped that saint-like brow’]. The poet here refers to the wreath of ivy that the muse is wearing. Ivy was commonly associated with the muses of poetry in Greek and Latin times, but, together with the grapevine, it was also a plant notoriously linked to the cult of Dionysus. More specifically, the wreath of ivy is an object frequently represented in literary and visual depictions of Dionysian frenzy and orgies (Però 2016, 100–102). By juxtaposing the two contrasting expressions ‘amplesso dell’edera’, with the sexual connotation of the word ‘amplesso’ and the connections with both poetry and Dionysian ecstasy, and ‘fronte da santa’, emphasising instead the sacredness of the muse with Catholic terminology, Camerana strives to challenge irreverently traditional moral and poetic values in a similar manner to Boito and Praga. A few months before ‘Io sognai. Fu il mio sogno …’, in ‘Vorrei …’ (April 1865) Camerana had already intermingled elements belonging to the spheres of the carnal-erotic and of the religious-sacred. The speaker dedicates the poem to a loved woman, declaiming all the things that he would like to do with—and to—her: Vorrei coprirti di vezzi e di baci; Di baci ardenti, profondi, tenaci, Coprirti il crine, la guancia, la man. Siccome un angelo ai piè dell’altissimo, Vorrei gl’incensi offerirti d’amore; Un idol farmi vorrei del tuo cuore, E me levita del nume gentil. (CP, 208)

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[I would like to cover you with caresses and kisses; With passionate, intense, tenacious kisses, Cover your hair, your cheek, your hand. Like an angel at the feet of the highest, I would like to offer you love’s incenses; I would like to make me an idol out of your heart, And I would be the priest of the gentle god.]

These two stanzas display two very different pictures of love. The first one expresses the poet’s longing for a physical and passionate relationship, characterised by the triple repetitions of the adjectives and nouns in lines 2–3 that simulate lyrically the intense and persistent kisses with which he would like to cover the mistress’ body. The second stanza overturns the preceding image, introducing religious and Christian terms which define the speaker’s love as spiritual and chaste, like that of an angel for God, with the mistress’s heart that is worshipped by the poet-priest (‘levita’) as if it were a sacred idol. It is safe to say that this love, incorporating carnal infatuation for the feminine subject as well as various examples of religious devotion, takes on sacrilegious connotations. The representation of such a relationship, and particularly the concomitant focus on the speaker’s sexual desire and on the religious objects—the incense and the idol—that the poet-priest would like to use to venerate the god-like woman, most closely evoke the mixture of eroticism and mysticism of Baudelaire’s ‘Chanson d’après-midi’, where the poet tells his mistress: Je t’adore, ô ma frivole, Ma terrible passion! Avec la dévotion Du prêtre pour son idole. […] Sur ta chair le parfum rôde Comme autour d’un encensoir. (OC I, 59, my emphases)

The words highlighted here above, such as ‘idol’, ‘priest’, and ‘incense’ also employed by Camerana in ‘Vorrei …’, describe the poet’s love in a spiritual fashion; this love is, however, not exactly chaste or merely platonic, for the image of the incense is compared to the sensual scent of the

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woman’s flesh. In the sixth stanza, in fact, Baudelaire vividly represents the naked body of the woman, caught in erotic poses: Tes hanches sont amoureuses De ton dos et de tes seins, Et tu ravis les coussins Par tes poses langoureuses. (OC I, 60)

The pious devotion that Baudelaire’s poet shows to the woman-­goddess is part of a complex and contradictory representation of love in which the mistress is described as a ‘terrible passion’, unifying sensations of dread, attraction, and commitment. The relationship portrayed in Camerana’s ‘Vorrei …’ is not idyllic either: while on the surface it seems that the combination of carnality and religious veneration serves to characterise the beauty of passionate love for a divine woman, the poem actually discusses, through the insistent repetition of the verb ‘Vorrei’ and the use of the conditional tense, the poet’s unremitting and unfulfilled desires, also including the dangers associated with a constant search for romance and happiness. In the sixth stanza of ‘Vorrei …’, the poet realises that negative aspects can be found within things that should, on the contrary, provide pleasure and joy—in other words, that if the dream of love is obsessive and incessant, it can become menacing while still maintaining appealing qualities, being a ‘sogno incessabile / Funesto sogno e pur caro al mortale’ (CP, 208) [‘incessant dream / Baleful dream and yet dear to mortals’]. The loss of romantic innocence related to the topic of love is best exemplified in ‘Ad Arrigo Boito’, partly examined in Chap. 3. Amongst a series of allegorical figures, evoked in a poem significantly marked by a persistent use of figurative language employed to depict the dejected state of mind of the three poets of the Scapigliatura, is the personification of lust in stanza 4. This image proclaims the supremacy of carnal desire over pure, spiritual love: E in mezzo ai claustri taciti del cuore Non più ci scherzan le bianche colombe, Le colombe del santo e primo amore. Sfumò il riso dell’alba: Sui nostri letti or la Lussuria incombe Colla sua faccia scialba. (CP, 83)

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[And amid the silent cloisters of the heart The white doves joke no more, The doves of the holy first love. The laughter of the dawn faded: Over our beds now Lust looms With her pale face.]

The metaphorical representation of the silent monasteries found within the poet’s heart symbolises chaste and carefree love of youth that has now disappeared, and is thematically connected to the first line of stanza 3, ‘Dentro la chiesa de la nostra mente’ (CP, 83) [‘Inside the church of our mind’]. An analogous figurative association between the immoral feelings of the poet and the image of the monastery as a place of virtuous spiritual cultivation can be found in the following excerpt from Baudelaire’s ‘Le Mauvais moine’: —Mon âme est un tombeau que, mauvais cénobite, Depuis l’éternité je parcours et j’habite; Rien n’embellit les murs de ce cloître odieux. (OC I, 16)

In this third stanza of ‘Le Mauvais moine’, Baudelaire metaphorically equates the poet’s soul with an enclosed monastery, presenting himself as a bad and lazy monk overcome by sorrow and sloth. In ‘Le Mauvais moine’ as well as in ‘Ad Arrigo Boito’, the Christian symbol of the monastery as a place of virtue and moral integrity is subverted and overturned; other poems that use a similar imagery are Boito’s ‘Georg Pfecher’ and Praga’s ‘Convento ideale’. Comparable to the latter compositions is the personification of lust in ‘Ad Arrigo Boito’, which looms over the beds of the ‘silent cloisters of the heart’ and, with its combination of lewdness and religiosity, bears profane significations. In ‘Nella sua nicchia …’, composed in September 1865, the idea of sensual sacredness is taken literally and, indeed, transposed poetically. The subject of this composition is a statue of the Virgin Mary that lies in a church by the lake, which the speaker watches intensely ‘all’ora mistica / Dell’alba’ (CP, 216) [‘at the mystical hour / Of dawn’]. If it appears, at first, that the Madonna manages to stimulate a spiritual awakening in the poet that he has not experienced since childhood (‘E intanto de la casta infanzia mia / Risuscitar tentava / L’estasi pia’, CP, 216 [‘And in the meantime she tried to resurrect / The pious ecstasy / Of my chaste

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childhood’]), in reality the statue produces in the speaker an utterly different sensation. The poet feels what can only be explained as sexual arousal, triggered by the feminine appearance of the statue: Ma d’improvviso ridere Udir mi parve dall’augusta sede La santa, e blanda sussurrarmi al core: ‘Se invece de la fede Ti dessi amore? …’ (CP, 216) [But suddenly I seemed to hear The Holy Virgin laughing from the sacred Niche, and delicately whispering to my heart: ‘If instead of faith I gave you love? …’]

The unexpected ironic conclusion, with the laugh that comes out of the statue, cannot but recall the irreverent and debunking ending of Praga’s ‘Seraphina’. And yet similarly, the Virgin’s offer of physical love, as opposed to the spiritual love of religious faith, must be seen as only partially ironic, as it also conclusively declares the supremacy of carnal sentiments. The conventional romantic rhyme ‘core’/‘amore’ is not employed to describe a traditional love relationship between a man and a woman, but to mark the shift from Catholic faith to an expression of the poet’s physical attraction. The carnal temptation that the speaker feels for the Madonna is comparable to that of Boito’s monk in ‘Georg Pfecher’ seen above. Baudelaire’s ‘À une Madone’, which is based upon the juxtaposition of the poet’s lover and a Marian statue, also features a mixture of sacredness, sensuality, and sexual desire embodied in the figure of the Virgin. The similarities between ‘À une Madone’ and ‘Nella sua nicchia …’ are conspicuous, both in terms of the visual characterisation of the statue and in terms of the poet’s feelings. Baudelaire’s Madonna is described as being put in ‘Une niche, d’azur et d’or tout émaillée, / Où te dresseras, Statue émerveillée’ (OC I, 58), and Camerana’s presentation of the statue is analogous: ‘Nella sua nicchia argentea, / […] / Stassi la sculta imago / D’una madonna’ (CP, 216) [‘In its silver niche, / […] / Stood a sculpted image / Of the Virgin Mary’]. While Baudelaire’s poet openly declares his carnal desire for the lady/ Virgin, however, Camerana’s indirectly conveys his erotic arousal. Camerana gives voice and sexuality to the Virgin, showing her human

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capacity to feel sexual excitement, which is a reflection of the poet’s. Actively taking charge of the situation, she offers her love to the speaker with an expression that could be interpreted as prostitution, ‘Se […] Ti dessi amore?’, which is in fact a similar question to the prostitute’s carnal offer to Jesus in Praga’s ‘Seraphina’ (‘Vuoi ch’io ti doni un bacio, o una carezza?’), but inverting the religious/sexual roles. The portrayal of the poet’s physical attraction for Catholic icons would continue to be a key literary trope in Camerana’s poetry beyond the 1860s, as the various poems dedicated to the Black Virgin of the Sanctuary of Oropa attest. These include ‘Oropa, a la statua’ (1894), which is characterised by the obsessive recurrence of the phrase ‘Tu sei mia’ [‘You are mine’], repeated four times in the sonnet and expressing the poet’s all-encompassing desire for the physical features of the statue, described as ‘nera e arcana e bella’ (CP, 262) [‘black and arcane and beautiful’], as well as for the purity and inaccessibility of the Holy Virgin, for what the statue symbolises spiritually. In ‘Memorie’, another composition written in 1865, Camerana makes use of religious imagery to describe the lust and sexual desire of the poet not indirectly like in ‘Nella sua nicchia …’, but openly. The poet represents himself as an ‘old hermit’ who is descending into a valley, before stopping close to the room of a ‘bellissima donna’ [‘very beautiful woman’] in order to observe ‘con occhio ardente e immoto’ [‘with a burning and motionless eye’] the window of her room (CP, 211). His implacable and unsatisfied passion is such that he projects it outwards, onto the world that surrounds him, interpreting the rays of the sun that shine on the woman’s window as kisses and caresses, ‘Siccome baci tremuli e carezze’ (CP, 211). Secluded in her room, the female subject is described as distant and unapproachable to the poet, although she likes to participate in sinful practices, ‘faticose ebbrezze’ [‘tiring intoxications’] and ‘peccati’ (CP, 211) [‘sins’], which she exploits to seduce and enthral men, bewitched by her sensuality: ‘al vago tuo carro incatenati / Nell’imminente verno / Prigionieri novelli’ (ibid.) [‘new prisoners / In the coming winter / Chained to your wandering cart’]. This representation of the woman as a divine and dangerously enchanting femme fatale continues in the conclusion of the poem, where the speaker conveys his painful and intense desire by means of expressions related to religious worship in front of an altar, hoping that the female subject would be as compassionate as a god and reciprocate the poet’s passion: ‘A te salisse il desiderio mio / Siccome innanzi ad ara / Piena del genio d’un pietoso Iddio’ (CP, 211) [‘To you my desire would ascend / As before an altar / Full of the genius of a merciful God’]. The poet’s longing for

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the woman-goddess makes him stare intensely at her room, to the extent that he likens his carnal cravings to the severe hunger of a poor man overwhelmed by a devastating and lethal anguish: ‘il povero che langue / Per fame, e a cui l’angoscia / Macera l’ossa ed avvelena il sangue’ (CP, 212) [‘the poor man who languishes / For hunger, and whose anguish / Macerates the bones and poisons the blood’]. In a similar manner to the depiction of the poet’s carnal temptation for the Madonna, the deification of the sensual aspects of the woman, which give her authoritative power and control over the infatuated poet, would continue to be a constant topic in Camerana’s poetic career. This can be seen, for instance, in the 1890s cycle of sonnets ‘La Femme’, with expressions uttered by the divine yet dangerous woman that recall those employed in ‘Memorie’, such as ‘Negli abissi del tuo desir’, ‘con l’anima schiava’, ‘io son la tua malìa’ (CP, 181) [‘In the abyss of your desire’, ‘with your soul enslaved’, ‘I am your spell’]; or ‘voi schiavi / Ai piedi miei’ [‘you slaves / At my feet’] and ‘Io son la estatica / Superba Iddia’ (CP, 182) [‘I am the ecstatic / Haughty Goddess’]. Sacred sensuality, concerning the worship of the physical appearance and erotic qualities of the woman-goddess, and sensual sacredness, entailing sexual desire for Catholic iconography and symbolism, in particular for the Virgin Mary, are important recurring themes in Camerana’s poetry, but constitute prominent motifs in Boito’s and Praga’s respective work as well. The Scapigliatura’s amalgamation of sacredness and sensuality/sexuality finds its origin in Baudelaire’s practice of combination and blurring of a dualistic interpretation of the woman: as religiously chaste and divine, taking on the role of the Virgin Mary in her capacity to care for and give spiritual love and hope to the poet; and as a sexualised being conscious of her powers of seduction and capability to provide men with pleasure, and therefore seen as concurrently attractive and dangerous. Although there is a significant element of mockery and sexual profanity in the Scapigliatura’s poetry, as there is also in Baudelaire’s, religious irreverence is rarely employed for its own sake. For Boito, it serves to debunk and subvert the one-dimensional representation of the angel-like, pious, and virtuous woman, customary of Italian Romantic poetry. While also longing for the purity of lost youthful love, Praga challenges and undermines the moral values of Catholicism, such as virtue and chastity, and the legitimacy of spiritual heaven, promoting pleasure and sex as a more realistic alternative, as a way to attain paradise on earth. Camerana, finally, represents the poet’s disillusionment with innocent and chaste love substituted by

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passion and carnal desire, unreciprocated and thus frustratingly unfulfilled; these are part of a portrayal of contrasting feelings of sexual attraction and spiritual longing for both the woman and the Virgin Mary, which would be a key characteristic of his mature work. Female sensuality as represented by the Scapigliatura possesses, moreover, an abnormal and seemingly pathological quality linked to death and physical decomposition—that is, often discussed in the context of medical or medical-like examination of the female body. Having already touched upon this aspect of sex and sensuality various times in the book, necrophilia will constitute one of the main subjects later examined in Chap. 6.

Notes 1. This image is employed by Boito also in ‘Dualismo’, where he substitutes the sadistic love scene in Re Orso with a situation in which God ‘un dì a distrar la noia / Della sua lunga gioia / Ci schiaccerà col piè’ (OL, 54) [‘one day to distract the boredom / Of his long-lasting joy / He will crush us with his foot’], using Baudelaire’s characteristic association between ennui and death as well as the rhyme between two opposite nouns (‘noia’/‘gioia’). 2. For the poet’s simultaneous feelings of attraction and repulsion towards dangerous women who have a blinding Medusa-like gaze, see also Boito’s ‘Madrigale’ (1866), which is focused on the combination of light/love and darkness/poison (OL, 65), as well as the stanza of ‘Dualismo’ dedicated to the hypnotic ‘evil spell’ of modern Circes (OL, 55). 3. And even when he openly refers to prostitutes, Praga does not describe the carnal act as something immoral, but beautiful, paradisiacal, carrying physical as well as metaphysical significations, as we will see in ‘Seraphina’.

References Baudelaire, Charles. 1975. OC I. Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. ———. 2008. The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boito, Arrigo. TS. 1942. Tutti gli scritti, ed. Piero Nardi. Verona: Mondadori. ———. 2009. OL. Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/Novecento. Bouffard, Jean-Claude. 1971. Un disciple de Baudelaire: Emilio Praga. Revue de Littérature Comparée 45 (2): 159–179. Camerana, Giovanni. 1968. CP. Poesie, ed. Gilberto Finzi. Turin: Einaudi.

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Finotti, Fabio. 1994. Il démone dello stile. In Arrigo Boito, ed. Giovanni Morelli, 35–60. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. Lawler, James R. 1997. Poetry and Moral Dialectic: Baudelaire’s ‘Secret Architecture’. Madison and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and Associated University Presses. Lloyd, Rosemary. 2002. Baudelaire’s World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ovid. 1986. Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Però, Anna. 2016. Un Efesto dionisiaco coronato di edera. In Gli dei in giardino: due convegni su mito, natura e paesaggio nel mondo antico, ed. Gemma Sena Chiesa and Federica Giacobello, 99–104. Florence: All’Insegna del Giglio. Praga, Emilio. 1969. PP. Poesie, ed. Mario Petrucciani. Bari: Laterza. Ricordi, Giulio. 1877. Disposizione scenica per l’opera ‘Mefistofele’ di Arrigo Boito compilata e regolata secondo le istruzioni dell’autore. Milan: Ricordi. Villa, Angela Ida. 2009. Introduzioni e note. In Arrigo Boito, Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/Novecento.

CHAPTER 5

Writing Analogy, Writing Modernity: The Scapigliatura and Baudelaire’s Correspondances

Synaesthesia and Intoxicating Visions: Praga’s Analogical Correspondences In an article about the 1865 annual art exhibition at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, Praga enthusiastically reviews Alessandro Durini’s watercolour ‘La gioventù del pittore ed incisore Giacomo Callot’, which portrays the artist Jacques Callot intent on drawing a sketch of a young Gypsy girl. Praga (1865, 9) writes: ‘chi non si è arrestato estatico davanti a quel giovane Callot, a quella leggiadrissima zingara di cui il divino artista ritrae le sembianze, in mezzo al bizzarro accampamento dei bohémiens viaggiatori?’ [‘who has not stopped ecstatically in front of that young Callot, of that graceful Gypsy woman whose likeness the divine artist is portraying, in the middle of the bizarre camp of the travelling bohémiens [Bohemians]?]. The French noun ‘bohémiens’ and the adjective ‘viaggiatori’ are carefully chosen by Praga for a specific reason. Immediately after this, Praga quotes the first stanza from Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘Bohémiens en voyage’. Praga (1865, 9) explains his use of Baudelaire’s quotation in this context thus: ‘quando l’artista mi fa pensare a un poeta e i colori e le linee mi risuscitano nella memoria i versi e le strofe, le armi della critica mi si spuntano nelle mani’ [‘when the artist makes me think of a poet and the colours and lines resurrect the verses and the stanzas in my memory, the weapons of criticism lose all their powers in my hands’]. A painter as well © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Cabiati, Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92018-0_5

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as a poet, in his work Praga treasured and promoted a close relationship between poetry and painting, with Baudelaire as a key presence in his characterisation of this relationship. In terms of the link between different arts, Baudelaire’s influence is not limited to the theoretical conception of the correlation between poetry and painting, as described in Praga’s critical writing, or the poetic techniques employed to depict images in a pictorial fashion, as seen in the comparative analysis of ‘Suicidio’ and ‘Une martyre’ carried out in Chap. 2. Praga also experimented with the combination of different sensory characteristics, attempting to set down images verbally based on the interaction between the senses and, simultaneously, between different arts, following a synaesthetic process that, at the time of Tavolozza (1862), is circumscribed to few yet central sections of some compositions, most notably ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’. This poem is a celebration of cheerful Bohemianism that involves music, singing, dancing, the inspirational power of intoxication and, most importantly, what Rimbaud (2009, 344) would describe, a decade later, as the ‘dérèglement de tous les sens’ [‘derangement of all the senses’] in order to create poetry.1 Setting aside the common poetic trope of intoxicating debauchery that features heavily in Praga’s and Baudelaire’s work, as in that of other mid-­nineteenth-­ century poets,2 in the following pages I will argue that the sources for the lyrical representation of sensory derangement in ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’ are to be found in Baudelaire’s ‘Harmonie du soir’ and, more generally, in the synaesthetic ideas displayed in the sonnet ‘Correspondances’. ‘Harmonie du soir’ was probably one of Praga’s favourite poems, as it is often referenced in his private and public writings. The pictorial verse ‘Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige’, for instance, is passionately cited by Praga in his reply to Boito’s missive announcing Baudelaire’s death, already discussed in Chap. 1 (reproduced by Nardi 1942, 350, emphasis in original). The harmony represented in ‘Harmonie du soir’ is that of scents of flowers and music played by a violin, which combine to create a multi-sensory waltz that comprises the recurring and dance-like tunes of instrumental music, and the various natural fragrances. In ‘Harmonie du soir’, it is plain why Baudelaire has been defined as ‘le plus grand poète olfactif de la littérature française’ (Pichois 1975, 846) [‘the greatest olfactory poet in French literature’]: Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir; Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir; Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!

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Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir; Le violon frémit comme un cœur qu’on afflige; Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige! Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir. (OC I, 47)

The repetitive and dual ‘harmony’ that is both olfactory and musical is rendered poetically with a symmetrical pantoum form, where the second and fourth lines of a stanza are employed as the first and third of the succeeding one, and the only two rhymes utilised are ‘-ige’ and ‘-oir’. Moreover, the terminology follows the formal structure in its circularity, with words such as ‘tournent’, ‘Valse’, and ‘vertige’ that verbally translate the constant recurrence, and continuous spinning, of music and scents. As Leakey (1969, 83) suggests, sounds and fragrances seem to be dancing a waltz themselves: ‘the main concern […] is with the imagined fusion of these scents and sounds, in a “dance” that is not merely pictured for us […], but can be heard also in the lilt—assuming almost, at times, the slow yet strongly accented rhythms of the “melancholy waltz” itself—of certain metrical phrases.’ The fusion of natural fragrances, in particular flowers, and music, or, in other words, the use of poetry as a vehicle to express this fusion, is the objective of ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’. In the following opening of the poem, the ‘drunken poet’ of the title states that he is about to record in poetry what his deranged and hyper-excited senses see, hear, and smell: Datemi un nappo, datemi dei versi; le imposte aprite, entrino i venti e il sole: quanti fantasmi nel cervel dispersi! Che musica di forme, e di parole! Sento un odor di grandine e di rose, e il vo’ scrivere in versi alessandrini: Come fanciulle flebili e amorose Cantin le cetre dai sonori crini. (PP, 46) [Give me a cup, give me verses; open the shutters, let the winds and the sun in: so many ghosts escape from the brain! What a music of shapes, and of words!

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I smell an odour of hail and of roses, and I want to write it in Alexandrine verses: Like feeble and loving girls Let the citharas with sonorous hair sing.]

This ‘music of shapes, and of words’ is a combination of natural scents, sounds, rhythms, and dances that the poet attempts to represent, or better to translate, verbally (‘il vo’ scrivere’) and vocally (‘cantin le cetre’), in an all-encompassing poetic form that can convey smells (‘odor’, ‘imbalsamate’, ‘fragranze’, PP, 47, [‘perfumed’, ‘fragrances’]), sounds and music (‘musica’, ‘cantin’, ‘cetre’, ‘sonori’), and images of dance (‘danzatemi intorno’, ‘balletto’, PP, 47, [‘dance around me’, ‘ballet’]). Particularly, there is an attempt to unite floral fragrances with the musical rhythm of dance, thus recalling Baudelaire’s ‘Harmonie du soir’ in which the smell of flowers fills the air, mixing and rotating with music: ‘Volete le cadenze imbalsamate / di fragranze di rosa e gelsomino’ (PP, 47) [‘Do you want the cadences scented / with fragrances of rose and jasmine’]. Most curious is the poet’s statement about writing ‘in versi alessandrini’. The Alexandrine that Praga chooses is not an Italian Alexandrine, which is to say a compound verse formed by two distinctive settenari. On the contrary, Praga describes as ‘alessandrini’ verses that for the Italian metrical rules would simply be endecasillabi, but the repetitions and the frequent mid-line caesura mainly marked by commas, conjunctions, or prepositions provide them with a musical lilt similar to that of the traditional French Alexandrine. The idea that a musical rhythm can express a natural fragrance, and that it is the poet who sets down verbally this association of the senses, comes from Baudelaire’s analogical theory as explained in ‘Correspondances’. In this sonnet, poetry is used as a means to break down the barrier between human sensory perceptions: ‘Les parfums, les couleurs et le sons se répondent’ (OC I, 11). If in ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’ Praga represents verbal and vocal music that strives to convey, in its rhythmical lilt, natural scents, in ‘Correspondances’ Baudelaire had already made natural scents sing with a human voice by means of synaesthesia: ‘Il est des parfums […] / […] / Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens’ (OC I, 11). Amongst Baudelaire’s other poems promoting the fusion of different sensory elements, especially natural fragrances and sounds, most notable is ‘Parfum exotique’ where, in a similar way to ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’, the charming perfume of plants and vocal music—the song of the sailors—are merged:

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‘le parfum des verts tamariniers, / Qui circule dans l’air et m’enfle la narine, / Se mêle dans mon âme au chant des mariniers’ (OC I, 26). In ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’, Praga also takes up the dynamic image of the continuous spinning of the Baudelairian waltz, turning the figurative dance of ‘Harmonie du soir’ into the physical act of people rotating at a musical rhythm: ‘turbine’ (PP, 47) [‘whirl’]; ‘Volete in giro rotear sul prato’ (ibid.) [‘Do you want to spin around on the grass’]; ‘Roteamo’ (PP, 48) [‘Let us spin around’]. This concretisation of the metaphorical and allegorical images of ‘Harmonie du soir’ can be found throughout ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’, and in particular in the first five stanzas. If Baudelaire writes that ‘Le violon frémit comme un cœur qu’on afflige’, Praga employs an analogous simile that entails the association of the sound of a musical instrument with the lamenting voice of a human being: ‘Come fanciulle flebili e amorose / Cantin le cetre dai sonori crini.’ Praga converts Baudelaire’s metaphorical image of the heart that moans, compared to the music of violins, into the more tangible and joyful, yet still lamenting (‘flebili’), voices of young girls in love, and although he uses the noun ‘cetre’ primarily as a symbol of melodious poetry, the reference to the musical properties of the cithara is plain. Praga represents citharas that sing; in his poetry, the moaning sound of a musical instrument is often compared to the singing, or more generally to the voice, of a human being, as we can see, for instance, in the following lines from ‘Nox’, a poem from Penombre (1864): ‘come note di cembalo / che canta, o stride, o geme’ (PP, 128) [‘like the notes of a harpsichord / singing, or screeching, or moaning’]. This is a customary feature of the Fleurs as well, where in several compositions Baudelaire gives a human voice, singing and/or grieving, to musical instruments and to other non-human figures, such as the ‘chant des instruments’ in ‘L’Amour du mensonge’ (OC I, 98). In the Fleurs, poetry ‘becomes idealised as a “chant-instrument”, different from vocal music, different from instrumental music, different from music altogether, and yet still beholden to it’ (Abbott 2009, 9). There is, however, a significant difference in the use of this literary device in ‘Harmonie du soir’ and ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’. In Praga’s poem, the proposition of turning natural scents into a musical poem is not met with a lyrical application of this concept, and the peculiar intention of verbally unifying perfumes and music by means of the poetic word remains, ultimately, only theoretical, hence appearing, compared to the rest of the poem, as the occasional drunken statement of a (sensory) deranged poet. The source of the musicality of ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’ is, by the speaker’s admission, words and representations

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of dancing figures (‘What a music of shapes, and of words!’), yet words are mostly employed to describe, in a very visual fashion, songs and dances that already exist in the world (e.g. ‘il canto che intuonò Maometto’, PP, 47 [‘the song that Mohammed sang’]). Words do not create verbal music themselves, which is to say they do not become music to the ear of the reader or listener. Baudelaire’s choice of a harmony composed primarily of scents and instrumental music (yet linked to the human voice) and Praga’s that instead chiefly involves fragrances and vocal music (yet associated with instruments) entails a subtle but pivotal difference. At this early stage of his career, in Tavolozza, Praga’s poetic word is linked more to the idea of mimetic representation rather than symbolic interpretation; only when, following Baudelaire, his language aims to set down the overlapping of different sensory impressions and sensations, as in the above instances from in ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’, does his poetry liberate itself from referentiality and meaning through the synaesthetic metaphor. As Abbott (2009, 191–192) writes, ‘since vocal music or song would traditionally remain beholden to words—and therefore to meaning—Baudelaire […] begin[s] to explore a poetic song that is devoid of over-laden semantics’, and Praga’s focus on vocal songs instead of instrumental, and his concretisation of Baudelaire’s figurative language, means that his approach mostly precludes the suggestive musicality of a poem like ‘Harmonie du soir’, despite a similar use of refrains and repetitions and the general songlike features of ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’. Baudelaire’s ‘Harmonie du soir’ evokes, rather than depicts, images that are only loosely connected by the feelings of the poet, hence creating an emotive and non-mimetic atmosphere that supports, and does not impede, the combination of natural scents and instrumental music through the poetic medium. As Baudelaire wrote in a letter to Alphonse Toussenel on 21 January 1856, the poet interprets and sets down lyrically the mystical and analogical language of nature, with its various sensory characteristics, by means of imagination and figures of speech: ‘l’imagination est la plus scientifique des facultés, parce que seule elle comprend l’analogie universelle, ou ce qu’une religion mystique appelle la correspondance’ (Corr. I, 336) [‘imagination is the most scientific of faculties, because it alone understands the universal analogy, or what a mystical religion calls correspondence’]. In some poems of the Fleurs, especially those written in the 1840s such as ‘Bohémiens en voyage’, ‘Harmonie du soir’, and ‘Correspondances’, Baudelaire displays what has been defined by Leakey (1969, 311) as an

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optimistic ‘“cult” or “religion” of Nature’. Leakey (1969, 318) clarifies his definition of Baudelaire as ‘Nature-poet’ thus: [Baudelaire] could, for instance, find no place—except by contradiction—in any history of ‘Nature-feeling’ pure and simple. […] more often than not, the natural scene is invoked for some ulterior imaginative purpose—as an ‘elsewhere’, a vague, dream-like antithesis to immediate reality, or, again, as a symbol or ‘correspondence’ for the poet’s mood or ideas.

Far from being a poet of nature in the wake of Romantic poets such as Hugo or Lamartine, Baudelaire employs nature aesthetically as a reflection of his own feelings or sensations, and in particular sensory impressions. Baudelaire’s relationship with nature is complex and ultimately ambivalent,3 notably when comparing the poems of the Fleurs written in the 1840s to his poetic and critical writings of the 1850s and 1860s. In the ‘Éloge du maquillage’ already seen in the Introduction, in the art essay ‘Exposition universelle, 1855’ (OC II, 596), and in the prose poem ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ (OC I, 302), all written in the 1850s and 1860s, Baudelaire presents his ideas about what he deems  surnaturalisme. He argues that art is superior to nature and that nature, occasionally representing the wicked and ugly aspects of reality—as in such poems as ‘Une charogne’ and ‘Une martyre’—can be artificially embellished, improved, and idealised by means of the work of art, through which the poet/artist transcends the natural and human domains and their limitations. In another prose poem from that period, ‘Le Confiteor de l’artiste’, however, Baudelaire contradicts this view, declaring nature the ‘rivale toujours victorieuse’ [‘always victorious rival’] with which the artist loses the duel about the ‘study of beauty’, thereby implying the aesthetic supremacy of nature (OC I, 278–279). It is plain, instead, that for Praga artistic beauty, essentially human, cannot be superior to a divine natural beauty, with the result that a work of art cannot be more beautiful than the original subject, and the artist’s brush or the writer’s pen can only expect to channel, through the medium of their personal skills and individual sensibility, the poetic beauty found within nature. Praga asserts this in his article dedicated to ‘L’esposizione di Belle Arti’  (1865) in which he also cites Baudelaire’s ‘Bohémiens en voyage’. While defending the progress made in landscape painting in the past decade by artists that managed to convey the beauty of the natural subject as a whole, including its different sensory characteristics such as

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the scents and sounds of nature, Praga (1865, 9) lashes out at those painters who, in previous years, embellished and exaggerated nature, making it more beautiful or elaborate than it actually was. Praga (1865, 9) criticises ‘quest’arte pretensiosa, e meschinella che pettina e lecca ed unge e abbellisce la natura, come se la fosse una povera damuccia invecchiata ed inferma’ [‘this pretentious and petty art that combs and licks and greases and embellishes nature, as if it were a poor lady, aged and infirm.’]. Praga’s moral and conceptual attitude to nature does not fluctuate much in his poetic work; it is straightforward and never ambiguous. Whether as a subjective memory, a sensory impression, or an actual landscape, in Praga’s work nature denotes the place that the poet invokes or evokes in his search for tranquillity, purity, and the divine (occasionally one and the same thing). The idea of divinity that Praga seeks in nature is not that of a Christian God, but it is related to a pantheistic interpretation. Praga often associates a pantheistic religious vocabulary with his depiction of nature, for instance, in ‘Imbiancatura’ (1864), where he declares that posterity will reject Catholicism, its rites and its churches, in order to worship nature outdoor; people will hence be considered as ‘priests of nature’ and ‘apostles of eternal beauty’ (PP, 141). What changes significantly is the manner in which nature is represented by Praga in his poetry. This change can be seen particularly from Tavolozza to Penombre, where the poet depicts nature not merely from a mimetic/ realistic or spiritual viewpoint, but also from the perspective of a more intimate interaction mediated by his sensory perceptions and feelings. In Penombre, Praga experiments with specific poetic devices and techniques linked to the personal experience of the poet, notably impressions originating from various sensory domains. In other words, if in Tavolozza with ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’ Praga begins his synaesthetic experimentations with the intermingling of music and natural fragrances, it is in Penombre that Praga truly broadens his lyrical interpretation of nature embracing the Baudelairian practice of analogical correspondence. From Penombre onwards, Praga exploits the artistic potential of a more profound connection between nature and the artist; following Baudelaire, Praga approaches the relations between human being, nature, and beauty from a different point of view. Starting from Penombre, it is not difficult to spot terms and expressions depicting the poet as the interpreter of nature, as the decipherer and translator of its deepest secrets, including its obscure mystical language, which are strikingly similar to Baudelaire’s symbolic vision of nature as expressed in the following two quatrains from the sonnet ‘Correspondances’:

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La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers. Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. (OC I, 11)

In the Fleurs, ‘Correspondances’ is preceded by ‘Élévation’, whereby Baudelaire describes the special abilities that the poet has to understand the ‘confused words’ and symbols of nature depicted in ‘Correspondances’, affirming that the poet, as opposed to the everyman (‘L’homme’), ‘comprend sans effort / Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes’ (OC I, 10). The subject, imagery, and tone underlying the ten poems that constitute ‘Paesaggi’, the last section of Fiabe e leggende, Praga’s third poetry collection published in 1869, can be likened to Baudelaire’s representation of nature in ‘Correspondances’ and ‘Élévation’. These include the image of the human being that passes through ‘immense forests’ (PP, 263), not listening nor observing and hence not understanding whether the ‘sound’, the ‘sovrumano eloquio / della natura queta’ [‘superhuman eloquence / of quiet nature’] that the anthropomorphic trees ‘espandono / sia rantolo o sospiro’ (PP, 269–270) [‘emanate / is a wheeze or a sigh’]; this is the ‘eloquenza inenarrabile / […] filo arcano, incomprensibile, / che lega l’aria al loto’ (PP, 270) [‘unutterable eloquence / […] the arcane, incomprehensible thread / that binds the air to the lotus’] and that, therefore, ultimately unifies the various components of the natural picture. In the final image of ‘Paesaggi’, the poet is defined as the ‘interprete […] / di quel verde mister’ (PP, 275) [‘interpreter […] / of that green mistery’], as capable of comprehending the unintelligible and mystical language of nature in an analogous manner to ‘Élévation’. The similarities between ‘Paesaggi’ and ‘Correspondances’ have been pointed out before, amongst others by Mariani (1971, 276–281), Nardi (1968, 130–138), and Carnazzi (1981, 40), who have linked them to Praga’s supposed poetic evolution from the Scapigliatura to a Decadent sensibility that takes place, however partially and restricted to ‘Paesaggi’, in Fiabe e leggende. There has thus been a critical interest in the influence of Baudelaire’s symbolic representation of nature on ‘Paesaggi’, but

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Praga’s treatment of topics correlated to a similar unifying vision of nature in Penombre, on the other hand, has largely been neglected. While in ‘Paesaggi’ Praga appears to apply the theory of ‘Correspondances’ comprehensively, using precise references to the idea of the ‘universal analogy’ as defined by Baudelaire (Corr. I, 336) and represented in this poem, I would argue that Praga remains bound to the abstract and theoretical principles presented in the first two stanzas of ‘Correspondances’, disregarding the synaesthetic process displayed in the following two tercets of this sonnet. Contrarily, in Penombre Praga not only portrays a profound connection between the poet and nature, but also experiments with rhetorical figures that convey Baudelaire’s idea of analogical nature as ‘Perfumes, colours, and sounds correspond’. In ‘Correspondances’, the theoretical formulation that characterises the first two quatrains is subsequently put into practice in the two concluding tercets, by means of figures of speech emphasising inter-sensory transfer: II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d’enfants, Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies, —Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants, Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies, Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens, Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens. (OC I, 11)

Scents, according to Baudelaire, can have qualities normally perceived by other senses, which is to say they can also be ‘fresh’, ‘sweet’, and ‘green’, as well as being able to ‘sing’. These analogies between ‘Parfums, colours, and sounds’ are to be considered as entirely subjective, for they are interpreted as such by the poet: although Baudelaire is discussing natural fragrances that represent nature’s—as well as sensory—unity, these scents have a strong connection with things that are not natural but human or human-made, such as the coolness of the flesh of babies or the melodiousness of oboes. Natural perfumes can be employed to express aesthetically the ecstatic sensations perceived by the poet’s ‘soul’ and ‘senses’, in which nature reflects, through the synaesthetic analogy, the experience of the human being. Penombre demonstrates that the intermingling of sounds and scents is particularly valued by Praga. In ‘Canzoniere del bimbo’, the poet wishes to write about the birth of his son; this joyous and blissful moment, which

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the poet wants to translate poetically into a thought ‘bello e leggero’ (‘beautiful and light’), can be depicted only by the muse (namely, poetry) that verbally expresses vegetal ‘notes’ and ‘scents’ of flowers: ‘la musa non dica / che note di spica / che effluvii di fior’ (PP, 109) [‘the muse must only say / the notes of the ear of wheat / and the scents of flower’]. Noteworthy is the choice of the term ‘notes’ instead, for example, of the more neutral ‘sounds’, as though the ear of wheat is considered as a sort of musical instrument. In Penombre, Praga also associates scents and colours, such as in the opening of ‘Esequie’, in which in the poet’s vision a sensory impression can directly evoke one belonging to a different sensory domain, and a basket of scented flowers can stimulate the poet’s aesthetic palette of colours, as if his purpose were to use the colours on his poetic palette as a painter does: ‘O mio canestro di olezzanti fiori, / tavolozza di forme e di colori’ (PP, 204) [‘O my basket of fragrant flowers, / palette of shapes and colour’]. In Praga’s representation of the interplay between different sensory features, flowers are amongst his preferred natural objects. This imagery can be found, amongst others, in the opening of ‘Monasterium’: Quando il mesto tramonto empie di lunghe striscie d’oro il cielo e la campagna di confusi suoni; quando la danza del leggiadro stelo, sommessamente, dice di aprirsi al fiorellin notturno. (PP, 135) [When the melancholic sunset fills the sky with long stripes of gold and the countryside with confused sounds; when the dance of the graceful stem, quietly, says to the nocturnal flower to open up.]

In this stanza, the poet draws a direct connection between sunset and a strong human emotion, sorrow, by means of the definition of the sunset itself as ‘melancholic’ due to the colours of the sky and the sounds of the countryside, in a similar manner to the following excerpt from ‘Harmonie du soir’, partly quoted by Praga in his letter to Boito to convey his grief for Baudelaire’s death: ‘Valse mélancolique […] | Le ciel est triste et beau […] | Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige’ (OC I, 47).4 Another

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analogy between the two poems lies in the broad portrayal of a sunset that involves different senses—Baudelaire’s dusk comprises melancholic sounds, perfumes, as well as the red colours of the setting sun and, similarly, Praga fills the pastoral scene with golden colours and obscure sounds. The unusual image of the dance of the flower stem, moreover, is comparable to the ‘flower’ in ‘Harmonie du soir’ that, ‘quivering on its stem’, emanates its odours that participate in the multi-sensory waltz, which in Praga’s poem becomes a talking (or maybe even singing?), and not an aromatic, flower. The idea of talking flowers leads us back to the principles expressed in ‘Correspondances’ and ‘Élévation’. The image of the ‘confused sounds’ coming from the countryside is unmistakably similar to the ‘confused words’ of the symbolic forests in ‘Correspondances’. In ‘Monasterium’, the enigmatic natural sounds are, in fact, also a language: the flower stem speaks quietly (‘sommessamente / dice’), through its dance (‘la danza’), to another flower, and this monologue is evidently understood by the poet (‘says to the nocturnal flower to open up’). It seems to me that this floral dance, alongside the other obscure sounds of nature, was considered by Praga in the same way as Baudelaire’s ‘language of flowers and silent things’ that the poet deciphers and interprets. It is hardly difficult, moreover, to compare these ‘confused sounds’ in ‘Monasterium’ with the muffled language of nature, interpreted by the poet, of ‘Paesaggi’. The influence of ‘Correspondances’ and, above all, ‘Élévation’, is evident also in the fantastic seventh stanza of ‘Monasterium’, more specifically in the surreal conceit that vocal melodies sung by female spirits (‘le melodìe dei postumi lamenti’, PP, 137) drink rays of light and winds (‘escono, forse a bever raggi e venti’, ibid.), thus merging (post)human sounds and the colours of nature in a single image. In ‘Élévation’, Baudelaire had analogously portrayed the poet’s ecstatic spirit that drinks (‘Et bois’, OC I, 10) sunrays and pure air (‘Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides’, ibid.). This image is frequently used in the Fleurs, for instance, in ‘Le Balcon’, where the poet recounts the joyful time when he used to drink his mistress’ breath (‘je buvais ton souffle’, OC I, 37), and in a synaesthetic passage from ‘La Chevelure’, where the poet’s soul can happily ‘boire / À grands flots le parfum, le son et la couleur’ (OC I, 26). One of the best examples of Praga’s lyrical application of Baudelaire’s analogical theory in Penombre is ‘E teco errando …’. Natural and religious images and objects are freely associated not through a mimetic or descriptive or narrative process, but through their sensory interaction, expressing the euphoric state of the poet while wandering around with his mistress:

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E teco errando, pallida Sofia, come una chiesa, era piena di squilli l’anima mia; come una selva era piena di trilli l’anima sacra alla malinconia! Errando teco, pallida Sofia. Vi cantava la messa un cherubino, e vi nascean colombe ed usignuoli: oh il bel cammino, fra le intatte bianchezze e i dolci voli! Oh effluvii, oh grazie del pane e del vino, quando canta la messa un cherubino! (PP, 92) [And wandering with you, pallid Sofia, like a church, my soul was full of trills; like a forest it was full of trills the soul sacred to melancholy! Wandering with you, pallid Sofia. A cherub sang mass there, and doves and nightingales were born: oh the beautiful stroll, among the intact whiteness and the sweet flights! Oh fragrances, oh graces of the bread and the wine, when a cherub sings mass!]

The ways in which this love relationship is represented, with the use of Christian imagery and corresponding sensory impressions creatively imagined by the poet, namely sounds (‘squilli’; ‘trilli’; ‘cantava’), colours (‘bianchezze’), and scents (‘effluvii’) that serve to convey the ecstatic feelings caused by the feminine subject, can be likened to the intermixing of sensory perceptions, nature, and religious objects (‘encensoir’; ‘reposoir’) of ‘Harmonie du soir’. These analogies between sounds, colours, perfumes, and natural/spiritual images can also be found, of course, in ‘Correspondances’, where the poet’s mystical interpretation of sensory correspondences entails the merging of the spirit and the senses of the poet (‘de l’esprit et des sens’) and the description of nature and the forest as a religious temple (‘La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers […]’).

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Analogously, in ‘E teco errando …’ the poet’s soul (‘l’anima mia’) and senses are combined in a unifying picture, and the spiritual image of the church is juxtaposed to the natural conceit of the forest (‘come una chiesa’; ‘come una selva’). Praga writes that the jubilant soul of the poet is full of figurative sounds, which are described as both religious hymns sung in churches and chirping birds in woods. The peculiar musical analogy between the sounds of the church and those of the forest also features in Baudelaire’s ‘Obsession’, although employed to express a different feeling compared to Praga’s poem. The poet likens the sound of woods to religious music in cathedrals, with their organs and choruses of psalms that frighten him and resonate in his cell-like heart: Grands bois, vous m’effrayez comme des cathédrales; Vous hurlez comme l’orgue; et dans nos cœurs maudits, Chambres d’éternel deuil où vibrent de vieux râles, Répondent les échos de vos De profundis. (OC I, 75)

The howling of the wind is transformed into the anthropomorphic image of forests that ‘scream’ like church organs, playing and singing religious psalms and thus mixing vocal and instrumental music. Besides ‘E teco errando …’, this passage also influenced Praga’s ‘Ancora un canto alla luna’, which follows ‘E teco errando …’ in Penombre. In ‘Ancora un canto alla luna’, the poet perceives the sound of the wind passing through woodland as if it were a musical ‘concert’ of various trees that sing, in fact, with a human voice: ‘Betulla e salice, / olmo ed ulivo, / […] / il tempo è adesso / di dondolare / e di cantare: / il segno è certo, / fuori al concerto!’ (PP, 93) [‘Birch and willow, / elm and olive tree, / […] / the time is now / to swing / and to sing: / the sign is certain, / out to the concert!’]. The poet employs very short verses and internal and end rhymes to reproduce, rhythmically and verbally, his lyrical interpretation of the sound of the trees as vocal and instrumental music. Arguably, the musical terminology and rhythm of certain stanzas, such as the following, anticipate the ‘parole più nuove’ (‘newer words’) of the vegetal symphony of D’Annunzio’s ‘La pioggia nel pineto’ (1966, 210), written in 1902, which, incidentally, is also rhythmically composed of very short lines that simulate the musical sounds of a forest:

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oh senti i cori nei sicomori, giù per le chine che cavatine! Di re venuta—no, non saluta musica tale! (PP, 94) [oh hear the choirs in the sycamores, down the slopes what cavatinas! Coming in re [D note]—no, such music does not say hello!]

The interplay between the human, the musical, and the natural is a significant aspect of Praga’s synaesthetic imagery in Penombre. In ‘Dolor di denti’, Praga puts into contrast the poet-painter’s sensory interpretation of a natural scenery with distinctive human and auditory features, to his failure to reproduce artistically nature’s beautiful colours (‘Dio! d’argento son le nuvole … / io non l’ho sul mio pennello’, PP, 178 [‘God! the clouds are silver … / I do not have it on my brush’]). As usual in Praga’s poetry, nature is considered as having anaesthetic properties, as acting as an analgesic for the poet’s suffering that, in this poem, is not solely psychological but also deeply linked to physical pain, the ‘Toothache’ of the title. Reminding him of his creative sterility (‘il mio fango mi rammenta’), physical suffering serves as a springboard for the poet’s insight into his downcast emotional state in which he describes himself as a ‘verme putrido d’amor’ (PP, 178) [‘worm putrid for love’], an oxymoronic expression that, merging ugliness with beauty and love, conveys the poet’s unattainable longing for the ideal and consequent inability to transform natural subjects into art. In a manner not dissimilar to the hopeful spiritual and natural ending of ‘A un feto’, seen in Chap. 2, the repetition of the following first stanza of the poem as its conclusion conveys the speaker’s remnants of hope in natural beautification and potential happiness. In this instance, however, the stanza that is repeated is related not to the spiritual power of nature, but to the poet’s analogical interpretation of the sensory aspects of the natural landscape: Nelle eterne solitudini ride il sole come un pazzo, e le fervide risate

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son di raggi immense ondate; per le selve e i precipizii, lungo i solchi e nelle ville, tutto è fremiti e scintille, tutto è palpiti e splendor. (PP, 177, 178) [In his eternal solitudes the sun laughs like a madman, and his burning laughs are immense waves of rays; across the woods and the precipices, along the furrows and in the cities, everything trembles and sparks, everything throbs and shines.]

Bizarrely personified by means of a simile that likens it to a lonely madman, the sun ‘laughs’ happily. Praga uses synaesthesia to describe the sun’s ‘fervide risate’, which must be interpreted in a literal manner to mean ‘burning laughs’, given that they are transmuted from sound (‘risate’) into heat and colour (‘son di raggi immense ondate’). In other words, the poet perceives the hot and bright sunbeams as if they were the intense laughs of a madman. The combination of natural, auditory, and human images is recapitulated in the ending of the stanza that simultaneously portrays the sounds and colours of nature, of forests and precipices, and the joyful mood of the people who live ‘in the cities’, drawing a parallel between the two that expresses the poet’s envy, and longing, for the happiness that surrounds him: ‘everything trembles and sparks, / everything throbs and shines.’ The cross-sensory features of the human laugh are extensively depicted in another poem from Penombre, ‘Profanazioni’, some passages of which have been discussed in Chap. 4. The theme of laughter is what connects the different anthropomorphic objects represented in the first stanza, gathered in a multi-sensory image that defines laughter as variously constituted of colours, perfumes, and sounds: Rideva la lampada, dai candidi ceri specchiando l’orpello nei lunghi bicchieri; la tavola, piena di trilli argentini, ridea col profumo dei fiori e dei vini; le gonne di seta, nell’ombra compresse, con lunghi bisbigli ridevano anch’esse. (PP, 185)

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[The lamp laughed, with its white candles, mirroring its decoration in the long glasses; the table, full of silvery trills, laughed with the perfume of flowers and wines; the silk skirts, compressed in the shadow, with long whispers they too laughed.]

Depending on the object, the poet interprets laughter in a different manner: the laughter of the lamp is coloured, being composed of the light of the white candles; the combination of silvery sounds (in itself another synaesthesia) and scents of flowers and wines make up the laughter of the table; the silk skirts, hiding in the shadow, emit laughs that are in fact the sounds that they produce while moving around. Synaesthetic analogies are here employed as part of a scene of intoxicated debauchery and seem, at first, deranged perceptions of the kind set down in ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’. However, there are significant differences between the two poems. In ‘Profanazioni’, it is not clear whether the poet is inebriated, or at least it is not overtly stated: it is, at times, vaguely suggested, with expressions such as ‘l’ultimo bacio, coll’ultima tazza, / versato sul crine di un’ebra ragazza’ (PP, 186) [‘with the last cup, the last kiss / spilled on the hair of a drunken girl’]. These vague and indefinite expressions, together with the bizarre sensory atmosphere that synaesthesia creates, provide the poem with a figurative signification and an unrealistic quality, not representing directly or mimetically scenes of intoxication and depravity as in ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’, but indirectly evoking what the poet perceives through his senses. From what we have seen thus far, in Penombre cross-sensory analogies, including natural objects or elements, are used as part of the poet’s search for a conception of beauty that can represent both his desire for spiritual love and happiness, as in ‘E teco errando …’, as well as his enjoyment of physical love, intoxication, and vice (‘Profanazioni’). This investigation continues with ‘Se tu fossi seduta …’, where the speaker metaphorically describes the mistress’ voice as a musical fanfare, which in turn triggers a synaesthetic analogy between sounds and scents, an image that transforms her voice-instrument into floral fragrances: se la fanfara delle tue parole mi profumasse di giranii e viole questo povero petto che sospira all’odor del cataletto … (PP, 193)

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[if the fanfare of your words perfumed me with geraniums and violets this poor chest, which sighs at the smell of the coffin …]

The fragrances of flowers and instrumental music that characterise the lover’s voice have a twofold symbolic meaning: portray the beauty of her voice; and express the pleasure and ecstasy that the poet would feel if she were with him during his darkest hours (‘quando pesa su me l’irrevocabile / odio d’Iddio’, PP, 193 [‘when the irrevocable hatred of God / weighs on me’]). These floral scents are subsequently juxtaposed with the smell of the coffin which, conversely, symbolises the ugliness of the poet’s present sorrow and moral anguish without his lover. The poet’s analogical interpretation of the woman’s musical voice as natural fragrances builds on a similar multi-sensory image from ‘Tout entière’, whereby Baudelaire puts into practice, through the medium of synaesthesia, the theories expressed in the first two stanzas of ‘Correspondances’: Ô métamorphose mystique De tous mes sens fondus en un! Son haleine fait la musique, Comme sa voix fait le parfum! (OC I, 42)

In the passages analysed in this first section on Praga, we have seen that cross-sensory analogies are widely employed by the poet in his search for a poetic medium that goes beyond the representation of natural beauty as solely spiritual or mimetic, but that also includes the interaction and intermixing of the poet’s visual, olfactory, and auditory sensations. Following Baudelaire’s analogical theory of ‘Correspondances’ as variously applied in the poems of the Fleurs, Praga’s lyrical combination of spiritual and sensory images, as well as of natural and human imagery, serves to illustrate the poet’s range of emotions, most often euphoric feelings associated with the mistress or intoxication (‘E teco errando …’; ‘Profanazioni’; ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’), a desire for happiness and love in a gloomy present (‘Se tu fossi seduta …’; ‘Dolor di denti’), or the sorrowful beauty of a pastoral sunset (‘Monasterium’).

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Poetry, Music as Sensory Union: Boito’s Derangement of the Senses In Boito’s poetry, there is arguably little mention of the beauty of nature that is not portrayed sarcastically, or with debunking purposes. Exceptions can be found in his librettistic work, such as in the following stanza, from ‘Prologo in cielo’ of his opera Mefistofele (1868), sung by the seraphim in heaven: Sui venti, sugli astri, sui mondi, Sui liquidi azzurri profondi, Sui raggi tepenti del sol, Sugli echi, sui fiumi, sui fiori, Sui rosei candenti vapori, Scorriamo con agile vol. (TS, 107) [Over the winds, over the stars, over the worlds, Over the deep blue seas, Over the warm rays of the sun, Over the echoes, over the rivers, over the flowers, Over the rosy shining vapours, We move with agile flight.]

The figurative imagery of the poet’s vertical flight towards the sky in pursuit of the ideal, seen previously in such poems as ‘Dualismo’ and ‘A Emilio Praga’, serves as foundation for this scene where the seraphim soar ‘with agile flight’ above various natural objects and places introduced by the prepositions ‘sui’ and ‘sugli’. As Baudelaire’s lyrical representation of the poet’s metaphorical flight influenced ‘Dualismo’ and ‘A Emilio Praga’, as demonstrated in Chaps. 2 and 3, this passage from ‘Prologo in cielo’ is remarkably similar to what is arguably Baudelaire’s most comprehensive depiction of the act of flying, that is to say ‘Élévation’. With its references to natural elements and the ‘spirit’ of the poet that soars swiftly above them, the following opening of ‘Élévation’ plays an important part, together with ‘Correspondances’ and ‘Harmonie du soir’, in Baudelaire’s conception of nature as a symbolic, mystical language for the poet to understand: Au-dessus des étangs, au-dessus des vallées, Des montagnes, des bois, des nuages, des mers, Par-delà le soleil, par delà les éthers, Par-delà les confins des sphères étoilées, Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité. (OC I, 10)

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It should not be surprising, therefore, that when in his libretto for Iràm, written around 1873, Boito composed a song intoned by the eponymous intoxicated protagonist featuring descriptions of nature, he made use of language, imagery, and techniques that bear a strong resemblance to ‘Élévation’, ‘Correspondances’, and ‘Harmonie du soir’. Inebriated, Iràm perceives the shapes, sounds, colours, and odours of the world around him, including those of natural objects such as flowers and trees, as music, as a ‘trill’. The opening of this song, with its emphasis on the images of the flight over the sea, the ether, the sun, and the green fields, is plainly analogous to both ‘Prologo in cielo’ and ‘Élévation’: Il mondo è un trillo Per l’uomo brillo, Un trillo enorme […] Che scorre a vol Dall’onda all’etere, Dai prati al sol. (TS, 824) [The world is a trill For the tipsy man, A huge trill […] Which moves in flight From the wave to the ether, From the meadows to the sun.]

The colour of beer is also interpreted as a musical sound (‘Trilla nel calice / La birra bionda’, TS, 825) [‘The blonde beer / Trills in the glass’]. The trill of the flowers that sway and seem to dissolve in the breeze, ‘Trillando tremolano / L’aure sui fior’ (TS, 825) [‘The air over the flowers / Quivers while trilling’], is described in a manner similar to the waltz of instrumental music played by a violin and scents of flowers in ‘Harmonie du soir’: Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir; Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir; Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!

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Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir; Le violon frémit comme un cœur qu’on afflige. (OC I, 47)

Baudelaire’s representation of the smoke-like flowers that, quivering, evaporate in the wind like a censer is also transformed by Boito, in the successive stanza, into the synaesthetic image of the trilling sound of the smoke emitted by a chimney: ‘Vedo trillar […] / Il fumaiol’ (TS, 825) [‘I see the chimney […] / Trilling’]. Although odours are not openly mentioned in the verses from Iràm just discussed, it could be argued that they are implicitly represented in the image of the trembling and seemingly dissolving flowers in the air, given also the similarities with ‘Harmonie du soir’. There is, however, another reason for this, related to the analogical description of sounds and scents in a scene from Re Orso that paints a similar picture to Iràm, but also to ‘Harmonie du soir’. With its portrayal of the trilling sounds of the smoky chimney and of the trembling flowers, Iràm’s song recalls the intermixing of colours, perfumes, and instrumental music of the following passage from Re Orso, which in turn, with its representation of air scented by a censer (and by flowers) that merges with music, can be compared to ‘Harmonie du soir’: La reggia è un gaio incendio—par che vi nasca il sole, Lumiere e faci irradiano—l’aere che fulge ed ole, I frutti, i fior s’insertono—nei vividi corimbi, Gli ardenti ceri esalano—come un vapor di nimbi; […] E spesso la fantastica—nube dell’incensiere Filtra pe’ cavi cranii—dell’ampie cervelliere. Cetre, vïole, fläuti—spiran suoni soavi. (OL, 109) [The palace is a joyous fire—the sun seems to be born there, Lights and torches illuminate—the shining and fragrant air, The fruits, the flowers are put—in vivid bouquets, The burning candles exhale—vapour like rainclouds; […] And often the fantastic—cloud of the censer Filters through the hollow skulls—of the large helmets. Citharas, violas, flutes—exhale sweet sounds.]

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Experimenting with the overlapping of the senses, Boito depicts torches that illuminate the fragrant air; colourful fruits and flowers; candles and censers that ‘exhale’ perfume and smoke; and most notably, musical instruments, including the viola, which ‘exhale’ sweet sounds as if these were scents, just like candles and censers. Another interesting aspect of this scene is that if in ‘Correspondances’ Baudelaire made perfumes sing, ‘Il est des parfums […] / […] / Qui chantent’, Boito overturns this conceit, letting music spread like a smell in the air. Taking into account the contexts of Iràm’s song and of the above extract from Re Orso, taken from the section ‘La cena’ which features lyrical celebrations of intoxication such as Re Orso’s odes to wine, it would be reasonable to assume that, in a similar manner to Praga, Boito mostly associates the practice of cross-sensory analogy with inebriation and the deranged senses of the speaker. As a matter of fact, this is a connection that Baudelaire also makes and discusses in his writings. In his study of hashish intoxication, ‘Le Poème du hachisch’ from Les Paradis artificiels, Baudelaire draws a link between the psychoactive effects of hashish, synaesthesia, poetry, and the imagery of the flying poet of ‘Élévation’. When representing the hallucinations experienced by the hashish-taker that involve a merging of their personality with the natural objects and animals that they are observing, Baudelaire employs images and techniques that refer to his poetry, and in particular to the poet’s longing to soar above the human and natural world seen in ‘Élévation’: ‘l’oiseau qui plane au fond de l’azur représente d’abord l’immortelle envie de planer au-dessus des choses humaines; mais déjà vous êtes l’oiseau lui-même’ (OC I, 420) [‘the bird which soars in the depths of azure represents at first the immortal desire to soar above things human; but now you have become the bird itself.’]. Moreover, Baudelaire compares the analogies across the senses perceived when under the influence of hashish, for which sounds transform into colours and colours turn into music, to literary synaesthesia, describing the similarities between an altered state of consciousness caused by intoxicants and the poet’s imagination: ‘Les sons se revêtent de couleurs, et les couleurs contiennent une musique. Cela, dira-t-on, n’a rien que de fort naturel, et tout cerveau poétique, dans son état sain et normal, conçoit facilement ces analogies’ (OC I, 419) [‘Sounds are cloaked in colour, and colours contain music. That, you will say, is nothing but natural, and any poetic brain, in its healthy and normal state, easily conceives these analogies’]. For Baudelaire, synaesthesia and analogical correspondences can thereby result from either intoxication or poetic practice. This was well

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understood by Boito and Praga, who substitute Baudelaire’s drug inebriation with drunkenness; in their poetry, inter-sensory transfer is often represented, yet not solely, in the context of the lyrical treatment of alcohol consumption and the deranged senses of the speaker. However, artistic synaesthesia is not exclusively linked to the representation of intoxication in Boito’s work. This is plain when analysing his writings about the relations between music and painting and the possible correspondence of musical tones and colours in the context of the scenic representation of his operas, a topic thoroughly and meticulously studied by d’Angelo (2010, 176–184). Boito directly relates colours to instrumental music in a letter he wrote on 18 November 1878 to Giovanni Bottesini, where he gives a specific colour to individual instruments and groups of instruments which, he claims, can create a particular atmosphere associated with that colour. Oboes and bassoons can be used to evoke the colour green and, thus, reproduce a pastoral setting: ‘Il verde dagli oboi, dai fagotti nel creare un ambiente pastorale’ (Boito 2004, 123). Noteworthy is the fact that when in the following line from ‘Correspondances’ Baudelaire portrays the synaesthetic properties of perfumes that, as seen above, ‘sing’, he similarly combines oboes, the colour green, and the pastoral image of the meadows: ‘Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies.’ It is indeed interesting to observe, as we have done in this chapter, the influence of Baudelaire’s synaesthetic and natural theory of ‘Correspondances’ on Boito’s musical and librettistic work. This influence is not restricted, however, to his operas and librettos; not only does it include the passage from Re Orso seen above, but I think that Baudelaire’s idea of sensory union achievable through poetry also constitutes the thematic and stylistic basis of ‘Poesia e prosa’, a poem from Il libro dei versi. The apparent simplicity and lighthearted tone of this poem have long perplexed scholars, especially when compared with other compositions in the collection, with the result that ‘Poesia e prosa’ has not elicited many commentaries over the years. Indeed, Villa (2009, 417) has described it ‘uno dei componimenti artisticamente meno riusciti del Libro dei versi’ [‘one of the artistically least successful compositions of the Libro dei versi’]. On the surface, the allegorical meaning of the poem seems plain and straightforward, revealed by the poet himself in the conclusion:

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Ora di questi versi Resta ancora a vedersi La lieta allegoria Ch’è palese e nascosa: Siete la Poësia Ed io sono la prosa. (OL, 66) [Now of these verses It still remains to be seen The cheerful allegory Which is clear and hidden: You are Poetry And I am prose.]

The poet allegorically represents himself as prose and the woman to which the poem is dedicated as poetry, with a dualistic method that juxtaposes the different and concurrent complementary characteristics of women and men and, by extension, of poetry and prose, such as beauty/idealism (poetry) and vulgarity/practicality (prose). The poem figuratively outlines the close relations between poetry and prose in Boito’s art, but also describes, on a literal level, the love relationship between the poet and the female subject with sexual undertones. What is most relevant to the present analysis is the representation of the woman—and, consequently, of poetry—as composed of various sensory impressions, encompassing colours, perfumes, sounds, and flavours. To illustrate these multi-sensory characteristics, Boito employs natural, spiritual, and musical imagery, including flowers, incense, and organs which as seen in this chapter typically recur in Baudelaire’s analogical practice of ‘Correspondances’. The first four stanzas are each devoted to the depiction of the mistress as sensations that belong to one of the five sensory domains. If the woman were a ‘colour’ (‘color’, OL, 66), the poet states in the first stanza, it would be that of a flower, the ‘geranio fiorito’ (ibid.) [‘geranium in bloom’]. Subsequently, the poet describes her as a ‘perfume’ (‘olezzo’), that of the ‘incenso degli Dei’ [‘incense of the Gods’], and then as a ‘flavour’ (‘sapor’), ‘stupendo / Pizzicor di rosoli’ (OL, 66) [‘wonderful / Tingling of rosolio’]. Finally, she is portrayed as a sound, as a religious love poem set to music, the ‘Song of Songs’ of the Old Testament, for which ‘gli organi guidei / Suonerebbero a festa’ (OL, 66) [‘Jewish organs / Would play in celebration’]. The fifth stanza focuses on an analogy which appears, at first, to be unrelated to the previous descriptions of sensory impressions, namely that between the woman and ‘wind’ (OL, 66). Nonetheless, the following

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representation, in the same stanza, of the mistress as ‘soffio arcano, bollente’ (OL, 66) [‘arcane, boiling breath’], introduces the fifth sense, touch, into the poetic picture of the woman-poetry. The female subject is allegorically represented as five different sensory perceptions that, as the poet affirms in the conclusive stanza of the poem, together form ‘Poetry’. In other words, in ‘Poesia e prosa’ Boito expands on Baudelaire’s conception of poetry as sensory union, also including sensations derived from the senses of taste and touch. The type of metaphorical correspondence of the woman and natural objects, in the case of ‘Poesia e prosa’ wind as displayed in stanza 5, is also customary of Baudelaire’s poetry, as will be demonstrated next as part of our analysis of the analogical qualities of Camerana’s poetry.

Camerana and the Analogical Features of the Natural Landscape In his article ‘Società promotrice in Torino’ on the 1869 fine art exhibition in Turin, published in the journal L’arte in Italia in the same year, Camerana advances an idea of art that recalls Baudelaire’s vision of nature, and of external reality more generally, as a creative springboard into the artist’s own imagination, impressions, and feelings. Camerana (1869, 77) first lashes out at contemporary art, literary, and music critics who, not understanding the innovations brough about by authors such as Baudelaire, denigrate them: ‘critica sciagurata, che […] sputa sul cranio di Baudelaire’ [‘deplorable critics, who […] spits on Baudelaire’s skull’]. Within this discourse about artistic novelty and originality, Camerana (1869, 77) subsequently proposes to shelve the controversial term ‘realism’ that by the end of the 1860s had become muddled and confusing, substituting it with a new expression, ‘interpretazione della realtà, a seconda delle vedute di ognuno’ [‘interpretation of reality, depending on the view of each person’]. Camerana (1869, 78) argues that art should not strive to replicate objectively nature and external reality, but that it is contrarily the artist’s subjective interpretation and depiction of the subject that makes a work of art poetically beautiful: ‘arte vera senza poesia non può essere, non è anzi; e la poesia emana tutta dalla interpretazione, ove il pensiero dell’artista si stringe in gagliardo connubio colla realtà, e fugge dalla imitazione in cui il pensiero non aleggia, non comanda, non brilla’ [‘true art without poetry cannot be, indeed it is not; and poetry emanates entirely from

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interpretation, where the artist’s thought is tightly coupled with reality, and escapes imitation in which the thought does not linger, does not command, does not shine’]. This focus on the artist’s ‘interpretation of reality’ should not be considered in opposition to Boito and Praga’s notion of realism discussed many times in this book, as a rejection of the Scapigliatura’s principles at a time when Camerana was about to begin a new artistic phase, that of the natural Bozzetti, as some critics have argued (see, e.g., De Rienzo 1972, 21, 61–62). Given the malleability of and controversies around the term ‘realismo’, in his discourse on artistic innovation Camerana replaces it with a new definition that, in my opinion, does not exclude the Scapigliatura. On the contrary, it illustrates precisely his idea of what the Scapigliatura’s poetry was about, which was not simply a mimetic portrayal of reality and nature but also included figurative interpretations and grotesque, surreal, and fantastic transfigurations. Otherwise, it would be hard to explain the presence in the very same 1869 issue of L’arte in Italia of Camerana’s ‘Emancipazione’, a veritable poetic declaration of the Scapigliatura’s artistic principles, together with Praga’s ‘I due poeti’ and Boito’s ‘Un torso’, two compositions based upon dualistic juxtapositions that also put into practice the Scapigliatura’s ‘realism’ and conception of art. ‘Emancipazione’ represents lyrically what are described as the novel and revolutionary characteristics of the Scapigliatura’s art (‘Il novo ideale’; ‘Le cupe Bastiglie / Distrugga’ [‘The new ideal’; ‘Let it destroy / The gloomy Bastilles’]), the aim of which is to emancipate itself (‘Sia libera l’Arte’) and proclaim ‘l’impero / Del giusto e del vero’ [‘the empire / of the right and the true’] by depicting the various and contrasting aspects of reality, also including fairy-tale characters such as the ‘owl’ and the ‘dwarf’ (Camerana 1869, 27–28). What is theoretically discussed in ‘Società promotrice in Torino’ is applied in his poems composed in the 1860s that feature a comparable representation of the poet’s personal relationship with nature to Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’. In the opening of ‘A Emilio Praga’, dated June 1865, Camerana presents the sounds of a natural landscape in the following manner: Quand’escono dagli stagni e da la fonda Pace de le boscaglie L’alte voci notturne: Quando una bella e strana moribonda Appar la terra, e in sospir lunghi e fiochi

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E mistiche parole, Sembra che invochi Ancor l’innamorante occhio del sole: Quando in tremule danze ed azzurrine Vagano sopra i tumuli Le fatue fiammelle, Come un allegro stuolo di sgualdrine Che folleggino in faccia alla sventura. (CP, 78) [When from the ponds and from the deep Peace of the woods The high nocturnal voices come out: When the earth appears a beautiful and strange Moribund woman, and in long and feeble sighs And mystical words, It seems to be still invoking The enchanting eye of the sun: When pale blue and in trembling dances The will-o’-the-wisp Wanders over the graves, Like a cheerful group of whores Who have a good time in the face of misfortune.]

This anthropomorphic representation of nature allows lakes and woods to speak with a human voice, uttering ‘long and feeble sighs’ and ‘mystical words’, which cannot but recall the temple-like woods of ‘Correspondances’ that let out ‘confused words’ and ‘long echoes’ for the human being to comprehend. Noteworthy is that a poem dedicated to Praga begins with such a blatant homage to Baudelaire’s analogical and anthropomorphic interpretation of nature. And yet upon a closer look we can see that those ‘mystical words’ and feeble sighs of nature that can be heard just after nightfall are analogous not only to Baudelaire’s ‘confused words’, but also to the flowers that speak softly at sundown by means of ‘confused sounds’ in Praga’s ‘Monasterium’. Similarities can also be found between Camerana’s ‘A Emilio Praga’ and ‘Paesaggi’, which would only be published by Praga in 1869  in Fiabe e leggende but was most likely written years before.5 In terms of choice of vocabulary and focus on the spiritual and barely perceptible language of nature, the ‘sospiri lunghi e fiochi’ and

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‘mistiche parole’ of Camerana’s ‘A Emilio Praga’ bear a remarkable resemblance with the ‘rantolo o sospiro’ and ‘sovrumano eloquio / della natura queta’ of ‘Paesaggi’. Furthermore, for the image of the ‘trembling dances’ of the will-o’-the-wisp at the beginning of the second stanza, Camerana puts together two expressions, one written by Praga and the other by Baudelaire. Grasping the link between the two lyrical images of flowers that at dusk sway in the breeze as if dancing, Camerana’s depiction of the ‘tremule danze’ that occur shortly after sundown merges the ‘danza del leggiadro stelo’ of ‘Monasterium’ and the flower ‘vibrant sur sa tige’ that introduces the waltz of sounds and natural scents of ‘Harmonie du soir’. Ultimately, in ‘A Emilio Praga’ Camerana strove to demonstrate to his friend that the two of them shared a common poetic vision, which involved a Baudelairian understanding of nature with its mystical language and analogical properties, in a similar manner to what he would do a few months later with respect to Boito in the poem dedicated to him, as demonstrated in Chap. 3. One of the analogies most featured in Camerana’s poetry is that of natural objects and human figures. In the passage from ‘A Emilio Praga’ quoted above, the first comparison of this type serves to build a scene that is figuratively sexual, and openly necrophiliac: the earth is likened to a moribund yet strangely ‘beautiful’ woman who sighs, speaks, and implores the sun, considered as the charming eye of her lover, to return. A similar macabre-erotic image depicting a natural landscape with human features would reoccur in the following lines from the 1882 poem ‘Note morenti’, literally ‘Dying notes’: ‘Come una grande affranta la campagna sospira. / Bacian le nebbie il prato, le nebbie il prato attira / Voluttuoso’ (CP, 22) [‘The countryside sighs like a sorrowful woman. / The mists kiss the meadow, the meadow attracts the mists / Voluptuous’]. This sensually macabre atmosphere continues in the second stanza of ‘A Emilio Praga’, with the characterisation of the dances over graves of the will-o’-the-wisp as a vibrant group of cheerful prostitutes, another image which, together with the first, can be interpreted as indirectly conveying the speaker’s erotic desire. The references to flames (‘fatue fiammelle’) and prostitutes mirror the opening of the subsequent third stanza, where Camerana describes the arousing of sexual cravings for the inhabitants of the modern city, juxtaposed with the turning on of the city’s lights at nightfall: ‘tutta di faci e di voglie / In altra parte accendesi / La città peccatrice’ (CP, 78) [‘all of torches and desires / Elsewhere, the sinful city / is lighting up’]. Together with the above representation of nature, the themes and

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vocabulary of prostitution, sexual longing, and the sinful city, frequently portrayed in Praga’s poetry, are employed by Camerana to express a commonality of lyrical subjects and artistic ideals between himself and Praga, involving a notion of poetry based on contrasting juxtapositions. However, these images of prostitutes, desire, the action of turning on lights, and the modern city at dusk in stanzas 2–3 of ‘A Emilio Praga’ find once again their origin in a poem of the Fleurs, more precisely in the passage from literal to figurative meaning of the lines ‘À travers les lueurs que tourmente le vent / La Prostitution s’allume dans les rues’ of Baudelaire’s ‘Le Crépuscule du soir’ (OC I, 95). This once again demonstrates the significance of Baudelaire’s imagery in the context of the lyrical characterisation of Camerana and Praga’s artistic relationship. Another composition that portrays a natural setting akin to Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’ is ‘Ad un amico’, written in February 1866. The conclusion to the first stanza is the following: Amo le mille voci che a noi manda Natura Dai sepolcri, dai fiori, dall’acque e da la pura Volta del ciel: canzone che a languidi frammenti Il poeta raccoglie ne’ suoi più sacri accenti. (CP, 86) [I love the thousand voices that Nature sends us From the tombs, from the flowers, from the waters and from the pure Vault of heaven: a song that in languid fragments The poet collects in his most sacred words.]

It is difficult not to compare this image of ‘Nature’ with Baudelaire’s enigmatic voices and mystical language of ‘Nature’, with a personifying capital ‘N’, of ‘Correspondances’; as well as with ‘A Emilio Praga’. What these ‘thousand voices’ are is explained in the third stanza, where there is a dualistic depiction of nature that entails a subjective analogical association of various sounds of natural elements with the voice of the human being. The poet’s depiction of nature unifies the natural and the human through the medium of analogy, introducing personal emotions such as sorrow and rage to the natural picture: the ‘vortici superbi’ [‘magnificent whirlpools’] of a mountain stream are, to the speaker’s ear, ‘un urlo terribile, com’ira di potente’ (CP, 86–87) [‘a terrible scream, like the anger of a powerful man’]; the dove, a bird traditionally the symbol of innocence and purity, emits a lamenting sigh (CP, 87); and the thunder has a ‘grande voce’

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[‘great voice’] which ‘Precipita dal nembo’ (CP, 87), [‘Falls from the cloud’]. Even non-natural sounds, such as the warlike tune of the Roman tuba and the music of the minstrel’s harp, take on anthropomorphic features—and a human or pseudo-human voice: ‘Voce de la battaglia è de le tube il suono’ (CP, 87) [‘The sound of the tuba is the voice of the battle’]; ‘Qual sospir di fantasma, l’arpa del menestrello / Odo fremere ancora’ (ibid.) [‘Like the sigh of a ghost, I can still hear quiver / the minstrel’s harp’]. In the above section on Praga, it was shown that Baudelaire often gives a human voice to natural and artificial objects, particularly to forests (concerning the natural) and musical instruments (regarding the artificial), occasionally putting them together such as in ‘Obsession’, where he writes: ‘Great forests, […] / you scream like the organ.’ This practice is also employed by Camerana in the lines from ‘Ad un amico’ just quoted. Several of Camerana’s later poems, moreover, would feature natural and human-made objects portrayed as having a human voice with images that are easily comparable to those included in ‘Ad un amico’ as well as Baudelaire’s ‘Obsession’. These comprise, for instance, ‘L’immane organo urlante’ [‘The enormous screaming organ’] in ‘Basilea’ (CP, 21), written in 1882, or the ‘urla di duol’ [screams of suffering’] uttered by streams and woods and the ‘selve mugghianti come un organo’ [‘forests roaring like an organ’] of the 1900 poem ‘Strofe all’Idolo’ (CP, 191–192). Indeed, at this later stage of Camerana’s career nature would be entirely broken down to its bare elements, leaving only vague forms, sounds, and colours analogically associated with the poet’s mood and emotional state. As part of Camerana’s process of interiorisation and transfiguration of nature that also involves the allegorical representation of wintry and autumnal landscapes seen in Chap. 3, this analogical portrayal of nature focuses on the juxtaposition between the natural and the human. However, while allegorical landscapes mostly convey the poet’s feelings of anguish and death, one of the analogies most present in Camerana’s 1860s poems is that between the natural landscape or objects and the physical or emotional features of the woman, through which the poet expresses his love and desire for her. This literary technique is also characteristic of Baudelaire’s poetry. In the prose poem ‘L’Invitation au voyage’, Baudelaire first describes the female subject as a ‘Fleur incomparable’ (OC I, 303) [‘unrivalled Flower’], and then frames this comparison within the context of analogy and mystical correspondance with the landscape: ‘Ne serais-tu pas encadrée dans ton analogie, et ne pourrais-tu pas te mirer, pour parler comme les mystiques, dans ta propre correspondance?’ (ibid.) [‘Would you

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not be framed in your analogy, and would you not be mirrored, to speak like the mystics, in your own correspondence?’]. As Leakey (1969, 245) has argued, ‘the notion of correspondences […] is in fact exploited by Baudelaire mainly for amorous and sentimental purposes’. In an article on Pierre Dupont published in 1861, writing about a poem by this author, ‘La Promenade sur l’eau’, Baudelaire seems to justify the many instances of his own poetry in which there is an analogy between the mistress and the landscape: Grâce à une opération d’esprit toute particulière aux amoureux quand ils sont poètes, ou aux poètes quand ils sont amoureux, la femme s’embellit de toutes les grâces du paysage, et le paysage profite occasionnellement des grâces que la femme aimée verse à son insu sur le ciel, sur la terre et sur les flots. (OC II, 174) [Thanks to a mental operation very particular to lovers when they are poets, or to poets when they are in love, the woman is embellished with all the graces of the landscape. In turn, the landscape occasionally benefits from the graces that the beloved woman unknowingly transfers to the sky, to the earth, and to the waves.]

Baudelaire portrays two lyrical processes: one in which the woman benefits from the beauties of the landscape, and a second that, in opposition to the first, defines the landscape as benefitting from the beauties of the woman. Of the two processes, the one most used by Baudelaire and, as I  will demonstrate  in the following pages, by Camerana is the former, although both take into account the description of nature with womanlike features too, as seen in Camerana’s lines from ‘A Emilio Praga’: ‘When the earth appears a beautiful and strange / Moribund woman.’ In Baudelaire’s and Camerana’s respective poetic work, the process involving the juxtaposition of feminine subject and natural scenery comprises in particular the mistress’ eyes and face likened to various components of a natural landscape, most notably the colours of the sky and variations on the fog imagery—including mist, vapour, and clouds. Camerana’s ‘Noi c’incontrammo …’, dated November 1865, is structured around the juxtaposition of natural elements with two different human features, one linked to the feminine subject’s physical appearance and the other to the figurative interpretation of those natural elements as positive or negative events that occurred in her life. These comprise the flower ‘Del tuo blando avvenire’ [‘of your gentle future’] that she was looking for in a valley, symbolising hope for the future, and the ‘ginepro e l’irto cardo’ [‘juniper and the bristly cardoon’] which represent the misfortunes she

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eventually found instead (CP, 218). The poem opens with the description of the mistress’ beauty as ‘un sogno d’amore in Orïente’ (CP, 218) [‘a dream of love in the East’], which recalls the peculiar fashion in which Baudelaire discusses the dreamy and Oriental aspects of the lover’s appearance in the line ‘sa rêveuse allure orientale’ from ‘Un fantôme’ (OC I, 38). The image of the Oriental appeal of the woman returns in the verses from ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ where Baudelaire portrays ‘La splendeur oriental’ (OC I, 53) of the land that, according to the poet’s interpretation, resembles the grace of the mistress’ eyes: […] Au pays qui te ressemble! Les soleils mouillés De ces ciels brouillés Pour mon esprit ont les charmes Si mystérieux De tes traîtres yeux, Brillant à travers leurs larmes. (OC I, 53)

The analogy between the sun and the fascinating eyes of the lover calls into mind the ‘enchanting eye of the sun’ seen above when examining ‘A Emilio Praga’. This passage from ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ also shares a similar technique as well as human and natural imagery with the following second quatrain from Camerana’s ‘Noi c’incontrammo …’: Noi c’incontrammo. L’azzurro del cielo Pareva un velo, Nebbia pareva presso il tuo languente Occhio pieno di speranze; occhio divin. (CP, 218) [We met. The azure of the sky Looked like a veil, Fog seemed to linger in your languishing Eye full of hope; a divine eye.]

Both poems draw a parallel between a misty sky and the expressive eyes of the mistress, described as treacherous by Baudelaire, hopeful by Camerana. If in Baudelaire’s poem the woman’s eyes are full of tears and thus compared to the foggy skies, the lover’s eye in Camerana’s is characterised by the metaphorical presence of fog, which helps to portray the physical image of an indolent and watery eye. Moreover, the unusual image of the

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azure sky that looks like a veil, most likely the one worn by the mistress, entails the influence of an object linked to her attractiveness and mood— the woman was previously described as ‘serena’, meaning ‘serene mood’ but also ‘clear sky’, and ‘bella’ (CP, 218) [‘beautiful’]—on the natural element, in a similar manner to Baudelaire, who relates the charms of suns and skies to the lover’s features. Analogous images involving the colour of the sky and the mistress’ physical appearance would be employed by Camerana elsewhere: in the 1867 composition ‘O bella dama …’, as we will see shortly; and almost twenty years later in ‘Il velo nero’ (1884), which is centred upon the image of the woman’s veil. Alongside the sensuality of the black veil that gives title to the poem, Camerana discusses the hair of the desired feminine subject inverting the process that in ‘Noi c’incontrammo …’ compared the azure of the sky to the mistress’ veil (‘Pareva un velo’, my emphasis), imaginatively turning her black hair into the cerulean colour of the sky: ‘Negri cotanto da parer cerulei!’ (CP, 139, my emphasis) [‘As black as to seem cerulean!’]. Baudelaire writes about the vagueness of the mistress’ gaze through the association between fog, mist, or vapour and the woman’s eyes in various poems. While not strictly about a real feminine figure, in ‘La Géante’ the poet claims that he would like to guess about the giantess’ sentiments by looking at her ‘humides brouillards qui nagent dans ses yeux’ (OC I, 22). ‘Ciel brouillé’ maintains the rhyme mouillés/brouillés seen in ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ to describe both the blurred and impressionistic landscape and the languid eyes of the mistress, changing it slightly (‘paysage mouillé’/‘ciel brouillé’) (OC I, 49). This poem paints an indefinite picture that is very close to Camerana’s inclusion of fog within the description of the lover’s languorous eye in ‘Noi c’incontrammo …’: On dirait ton regard d’une vapeur couvert; Ton œil mystérieux (est-il bleu, gris ou vert?) Alternativement tendre, rêveur, cruel, Réfléchit l’indolence et la pâleur du ciel. (OC I, 49, my emphases)

As well as ‘Noi c’incontrammo …’, the intermingling of the physical features of the woman and components of the natural landscape into a single poetic image is characteristic of ‘Lilium’, written in November 1867. In addition to the metaphorical characterisation of the feminine subject as the flower lilium, this composition features her analogical representation by means of the following simile:

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Come la tenue nuvola Dai candidi splendori, Avea sul volto i mistici Riflessi del mattin. (CP, 93, my emphases) [Like the faint cloud With white splendours, She had on her face the mystical Reflections of the morning.]

The expressions ‘tenue nuvola’, ‘candidi’, ‘volto’, and ‘Riflessi’ can be likened to the lover’s face veiled with mist and her eye that reflects the whiteness of the sky as illustrated by Baudelaire in ‘Ciel brouillé’. Baudelaire also uses the device of the simile to make an analogy between the sky imagery and the woman’s face in an analogous manner to ‘Lilium’, in ‘À celle qui est trop gaie’: Ta tête, ton geste, ton air Sont beaux comme un beau paysage; Le rire joue en ton visage Comme un vent frais dans un ciel clair. (OC I, 156)

The comparison of the face and eyes of the mistress with a landscape that is considered as beautiful as she can also be found in the first stanza of ‘O bella dama …’, another poem that Camerana composed in 1867. Once again employing a simile, Camerana juxtaposes the eyes and face of the woman with a natural scenery at nightfall: O bella dama dalla chioma nera La tua faccia è tranquilla Come campagna quando vien la sera; E nel cobalto della tua pupilla, O bella dama dalla chioma bruna Par che nasca la luna. (CP, 229) [O beautiful lady with black hair Your face is as tranquil As the countryside when the evening comes; And in the cobalt of your pupil, O beautiful lady with dark hair The moon seems to be born.]

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Particularly noteworthy is the description of the colour of the mistress’ pupil, normally black, as the same as that of the evening sky, namely cobalt blue. Of course, this could simply be seen as a synecdoche, where a part (the pupil) substitutes for the whole (the eye), meaning that Camerana is, in fact, talking about the colour of the eye—or, more accurately, of the iris—and not of the pupil itself. Two remarks must be made concerning this passage, however. Firstly, when in 1901 Camerana reprises the image of the rising of the moon to define the dangerous charms of the powerful woman in the second quatrain of ‘Salammbô’ (‘Fascini vaghi avrai d’alba lunare’, CP, 40 [‘You will have the vague charms of the moonrise’]), he would speak specifically of her black eyes associating them with the sea, which is, naturally, blue and not black (‘Dai neri occhi usciran […] / alterezze d’inconturbato mare’, CP, 40 [‘From your black eyes will emerge […] / the haughtiness of an unperturbed sea’]). I think that the poet’s interpretation of the woman’s black eyes as blue is employed as a literary device to express his fascination for the colour black—often linked, in Camerana’s poetry, to the beauty and the dangers of the woman and the grave alike. This is similar to when in ‘Il velo nero’ the speaker creatively transfigures the blackness of the mistress’ hair into the alluring cerulean colour of the sky: ‘Negri cotanto da parer cerulei!’ Therefore, we cannot rule out that Camerana is literally referring to the mistress’ pupil in ‘O bella dama …’, transforming its colour from black to cobalt blue to denote its captivating features—after all, represented with black hair and a pale face, the woman is rather akin to the feminine subject of ‘Il velo nero’. This technique also appears, overturned, at the beginning of the 1870s in ‘Sul cretoso declivio …’, where it is on the contrary the clear sky at midday that is ‘Tanto azzurrino […] / Che lo diresti nero’ [‘So azure […] / You would call it black’], perceived as an intimidating and abyss-like ‘ampia vertigine’ (CP, 114) [‘wide vertigo’]. Visually changing from azure into black, the sky expresses the poet’s note of sorrow and menace while immersed in a beautiful natural scenery, a description that recalls another poem of his, ‘Pax’, previously analysed in Chap. 3. It is curious that, in those years in France, Rimbaud represented lyrically the conceit of the clear sky in the very same manner, overturning its traditional aesthetic and symbolic meanings, finding blackness in the colour blue while claiming, in  Une saison en enfer (1873), ‘j’écartai du ciel l’azur, qui est du noir’ (Rimbaud 2009, 267) [‘I removed from the sky the azure, which is blackness’]. It is likely that Camerana and Rimbaud were both influenced by Baudelaire’s depiction in ‘Le Voyage’ of ‘le ciel et la mer [qui] sont noirs comme de

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l’encre’ and of the surreal image of the poet’s plunge into the abyss of heaven (‘Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?’, OC I, 134). The comparison between the human pupil and the rising moon of the first stanza of ‘O bella dama …’ is also strikingly similar to the closing quatrain of the poem that Boito dedicated to Camerana in 1866, where the former conveys the poet’s funereal mood associated with a vocabulary of death and the sky at dusk: A me calma più piena e più profonda; Quella che splende nell’orbita d’una Pupilla moribonda, Mite alba di luna. (OL, 80) [To me a fuller and deeper calm; The one that shines in the orbit of a Moribund pupil, Gentle moonrise.]

Even though the expressions related to the pupil and the dawn of the moon of Boito’s and Camerana’s compositions paint an analogous picture, the specific references to the feminine subject in ‘O bella dama …’, absent in Boito’s ‘A Giovanni Camerana’, reveal a direct link to Baudelaire’s practice of juxtaposition of the woman and the landscape, used by Baudelaire to represent the vague and indefinite traits of the natural scenery and, consequently, of the mistress’ gaze. In some cases, in Camerana’s poetry the analogy between woman and landscape is such that for the poet nature fantastically transmutes into a girl, such as in ‘Bel tempo’, dated January 1867. The anthropomorphic shadow of a forest in female semblances speaks with a human voice, luring the speaker into resting in her lap to find peace and inspiration: L’ombra del bosco mutasi In gentile fanciulla, E piano pian mi mormora: ‘Nel grembo mio ti culla. Nel grembo mio riposati, Canta le mie dolcezze, E del tuo canto in premio Ti verserò carezze. (CP, 224)

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[The shadow of the forest turns Into a kind girl, And softly she whispers to me: ‘Lull yourself in my lap. Take a rest in my lap, Sing about my sweetness, And for your song as a reward I will offer you my caresses.]

The transformation of the shadow into a kind girl who offers the poet shelter in her lap, thereby in the shade of the forest, to find solace in nature provides the poem with a fairy-tale atmosphere and quality. This is not at all dissimilar to the young giantess of Baudelaire’s ‘La Géante’ who, being a ‘monstrous’ yet fascinating child of vigorous ‘Nature’ (OC I, 22), offers the shade produced by her breast as tranquil refuge for the poet, in the same fashion as a mountain gives shelter to a village: ‘Comme un hameau paisible au pied d’une montagne’ (OC I, 23). Both Camerana and Baudelaire follow a procedure of allegorising nature, personified by a human-like yet fantastical figure. Indeed, in his poem Baudelaire structures the interplay of natural elements with the female allegorical figure in a different manner to Camerana, striving to maintain a constant tension between the imaginary and the real to the extent that the poet becomes a participating character in that fairy-tale world, unlike Camerana’s speaker who never joins the female personification of nature. I have to disagree, however, with Giannangeli (1978, 171) when, discussing not ‘Bel tempo’ but ‘A Emilio Praga’, he claims that the sort of allegory of nature found in ‘La Géante’ never occurs in Camerana’s poetry. ‘Bel tempo’ demonstrates quite the opposite, namely that, following Baudelaire, Camerana does represent nature through an allegorical process, as already established, moreover, during our examination of Camerana’s allegorical landscapes in Chap. 3. As a matter of fact, in a composition of the early 1870s, ‘Guarda lo stagno …’, Camerana presents a fairy-tale characterisation of a landscape that resembles ‘Bel tempo’ but also ‘La Géante’, in which natural objects are personified by monstrous figures, conveying a sinister and fantastic atmosphere: the dark profile of the forest is interpreted by the poet as resembling a group of giants, ‘Sembra un concilio di giganti, un’orgia / Di cose strane’ [‘It looks like a council of giants, an orgy / Of strange things’]; and the fog talks and stretches ‘Like ghosts’ (CP, 115).

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That Camerana considered nature ambiguously, not only as soothing and inspiring but also as a presence that could be ominous and dangerous, can be seen in the ending of ‘Bel tempo’. In spite of the ‘Beautiful weather’ that gives title to the poem, the speaker is finally overcome by sorrow and pain, refusing nature’s—and consequently, the woman’s—consolatory presence. The poet’s rejection of the relief offered by the forest, the beauty of which instead only exacerbates his anguish expressed through the comparison between himself and a moribund man, is displayed in the last two stanzas: Così l’ombrìa mi mormora, Gentil fanciulla; e invano. Il piè ritraggo; tacito, E cupo m’allontano, Ché il sereno tripudio Mi piange nella mente, Come una gaia musica Nel cuore d’un morente. (CP, 224) [Thus the shadow whispers to me, Gentle girl; and in vain. I withdraw the foot; silent And gloomy I move away, Since the serene jubilation Weeps in my mind, Like joyful music In the heart of a dying man.]

The natural scene not only cannot placate the poet’s sufferings, but, more significantly, greatly worsens his condition. Camerana takes an ambiguous stance towards the comforting capacity of the beauty of nature and the woman that is analogous to Baudelaire’s, as opposed to Boito’s refusal and demystification of the Romantic ideal, with one exception being the multi-sensory poetry of ‘Poesia e prosa’, or Praga’s constant search for hope, even in the darkest situations similar to that described by Camerana in ‘Bel tempo’, in the powers of beautification held by nature, as shown in ‘A un feto’ and ‘Dolor di denti’.

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Occasionally, Camerana exploits the idea of analogical ‘Correspondances’ in its sensory meaning and interpretation, always linked to the poet’s representation of the feminine subject. In the first of the three compositions entitled ‘Ad Sepultam’ (1869), the poet dedicates a poem to a deceased woman, who has been buried and now rests in a tomb. In the eighth stanza, the speaker variously describes her beauty by means of a series of analogies with his sensory impressions of natural and human-made sounds, colours, and odours. She is portrayed as ‘al par d’una musica / Lontana’, ‘Baglior di crepuscolo’, and ‘Effluvio d’april’ (CP, 100) [‘like far away / Music’, ‘Twilight glow’, and ‘April’s scent’], with a process that unifies different sensory perceptions, namely sounds (‘musica’), the colours of the sky at sundown (‘Baglior’), and natural fragrances (‘Effluvio’). Stanzas 21 and 25, moreover, feature similar techniques and terms to those that Baudelaire employs in ‘Ciel brouillé’, such as the juxtaposition of the physical and emotional characteristics of the lover to the visual aspects of the landscape. The description of the mistress as a ‘nuvola lieve’ [‘faint cloud’] and ‘vapor’ [‘vapour’] in stanza 25 (CP, 102) and the question that the speaker asks her at the beginning of stanza 21, ‘Perché sei nata come nasce l’alba, / Vaga, pensosa e candida?’ (CP, 102) [‘Why were you born as dawn is born, / Vague, thoughtful, and pure?’], with its three consecutive adjectives combining abstract and visual qualities, echo the following series of repetitions of three adjectives in a row and expressions referring to both the female subject and the sky in ‘Ciel brouillé’: On dirait ton regard d’une vapeur couvert; Ton œil mystérieux (est-il bleu, gris ou vert?) Alternativement tendre, rêveur, cruel, Réfléchit l’indolence et la pâleur du ciel. Tu rappelles ces jours blancs, tièdes et voilés. (OC I, 49, my emphases)

In ‘A Emilio Praga’, Camerana announced a commonality of views between himself and Praga involving the lyrical treatment of nature, seen in Baudelairian terms as a way for the poet to translate its mystical language through the analogical method of ‘Correspondances’. In spite of a similar focus on the use of the analogy between nature and the human being, however, the interpretation of these correspondences differs in the three poets of the Scapigliatura, approaching Baudelaire’s analogical theory and practice from different angles. Praga and Boito are mostly interested in the merging of the senses and the semantic transposition of

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impressions from one sensory domain to another. Lyrically transfigured through synaesthesia, physical sensations of natural and human-made odours, colours, and sounds—and occasionally also of flavours and objects linked to the sense of touch—convey ecstatic states which can derive from the poet’s love/desire for the woman, but equally also from alcohol intoxication. On the other hand, aside from a few isolated cases in which Camerana describes the mistress with natural elements associated with the sensory sphere, the specific correspondence between the natural landscape and the somatic or emotional features of the feminine figure entails a transmutation of nature that is almost exclusively associated with the beauty of the woman and with the poet’s sentimental or carnal feelings. For Camerana, the analogical overlapping of the woman and the landscape corresponds to a similar embodiment of the poet’s euphoric emotions and attractions, but nature and the female subject can also symbolise the limits of sublimation of the poet’s existential anguish and his consequent rejection of their beauties. Regardless of their differences, the above representations of the analogical world of nature by Praga, Boito, and Camerana based on Baudelaire’s correspondences between different sensory modalities and artistic expressions—poetry, painting, and music—serve to characterise language and imagery that strive to vaguely suggest, rather than mimetically describe, the emotions, sensations, and impressions of the speaker. Their poetry must therefore be seen as anticipating subsequent experimentations with poetic language that, from French Symbolism and Decadence to Futurism—passing though Italian Decadentism—would gradually emancipate the word from the burden of referentiality and meaning.

Notes 1. Starting from Baudelairian ideas, in the 1870s Rimbaud would approach ‘sensory derangement’ in a systematic manner, making literary synaesthesia and the intermingling of the senses the very essence of his poetry. For an examination of Rimbaud’s synaesthesia, interrelation between the arts, and intoxication, see Cabiati 2015, 97–107. 2. Besides ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’, see, for instance, Praga’s ‘L’anima del vino’ from Penombre (PP, 132–134), which borrows from Baudelaire’s ‘L’Âme du vin’, part of the section of the Fleurs ‘Le Vin’, the singing and musical atmosphere associated with wine drinking and, most noticeably, its full title. The act of singing in relation to wine intoxication in Banville’s ‘Chanson à

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boire’ and ‘La Chanson du vin’ from Les Stalactites (1846) also has many elements in common with Praga’s representations of cheerful intoxication, ‘La Chanson du vin’, moreover, bearing as epigraph a quotation from Baudelaire’s ‘L’Âme du vin’ (Banville 1996, 14–16, 25–29). 3. Baudelaire’s contradictory approach to nature perplexed, for instance, Walter Benjamin, who stated in ‘Central Park’: ‘The contradiction between the theory of natural correspondences and the repudiation of nature. How is this to be resolved?’ (Benjamin 2006, 136). 4. In the 1860s, this decadent image would be picked up also by Verlaine (1962, 69) when depicting, in the 1866 poem ‘Soleils couchants’, ‘La mélancolie / Des soleils couchants’ [‘The melancholy / Of setting suns’]. 5. As Petrucciani (1969, 383) has demonstrated, the forthcoming publication of Fiabe e leggende was announced by the press as early as 1866, but was somehow delayed until 1869.

References Abbott, Helen. 2009. Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé: Voice, Conversation and Music. Farnham: Ashgate. Baudelaire, Charles. 1973. Corr. I. Correspondance, vol. I: 1832–1860, ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Baudelaire, Charles. 1975. OC I. Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Baudelaire, Charles. 1976. OC II. Œuvres complètes, vol. II, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. Central Park. In The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W.  Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland et  al., 134–169. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Boito, Arrigo. 1942. TS. Tutti gli scritti, ed. Piero Nardi. Verona: Mondadori. ———. 2004. Lettere, ed. Raffaello de Rensis. Milan: Lampi di stampa. ———. 2009. OL. Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/Novecento. Cabiati, Alessandro. 2015. Fabulous Operas, Rock’n’Roll Shows: The Intoxication and Poetic Experimentation of Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. In Literature and Intoxication: Writing, Politics and the Experience of Excess, ed. Eugene Brennan and Russell Williams, 97–116. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Camerana, Giovanni. 1869. Società promotrice in Torino. L’arte in Italia, 77–78. Camerana, Giovanni. 1968. CP. Poesie, ed. Gilberto Finzi. Turin: Einaudi. Carnazzi, Giulio. 1981. Les Fleurs du mal e la poesia di Emilio Praga: un primo capitolo nella storia della fortuna italiana di Baudelaire. In Baudelaire, poeta e critico, 23–44. Bologna: Pàtron. D’Angelo, Emanuele. 2010. Arrigo Boito drammaturgo per musica: idee, visioni, forma e battaglie. Venice: Marsilio.

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D’Annunzio, Gabriele. 1966. Poesie, teatro, prose, ed. Mario Praz and Ferdinando Gerra. Milan: Ricciardi. Banville, Théodore de. 1996. Œuvres poétiques complètes, vol. 2, ed. Peter J. Edwards. Paris: Honoré Champion. De Rienzo, Giorgio. 1972. Camerana, Cena e altri studi piemontesi. Bologna: Cappelli. Giannangeli, Ottaviano. 1978. La bruna armonia di Camerana. Rome: Lacarini. Leakey, F.W. 1969. Baudelaire and Nature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mariani, Gaetano. 1971. Storia della Scapigliatura. Caltanissetta: Sciascia. Nardi, Piero. 1942. Vita di Arrigo Boito. Verona: Mondadori. ———. 1968. Scapigliatura: da Giuseppe Rovani a Carlo Dossi. Milan: Mondadori. Petrucciani, Mario. 1969. Nota filologica. In Emilio Praga. Poesie, ed. Mario Petrucciani. Bari: Laterza. Pichois, Claude. 1975. Notices, notes et variantes. In Charles Baudelaire. Œuvres complètes, vol. I, ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Praga, Emilio. 1865. L’esposizione di Belle Arti. Il sole, 22 September, 9. ———. 1969. PP. Poesie, ed. Mario Petrucciani. Bari: Laterza. Rimbaud, Arthur. 2009. Œuvres Complètes, ed. André Guyaux. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Verlaine, Paul. 1962. In Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Y.-G.  Le Dantec and Jacques Borel. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Villa, Angela Ida. 2009. Introduzioni e note. In Arrigo Boito, Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/Novecento.

CHAPTER 6

From Organic to Inorganic Matter, From Spirit to Speed: Early Futurist Poetry and the Scapigliatura’s Legacy

Making the ‘Ugly’ in Literature The article-manifesto ‘Polemica letteraria’, published in February 1864, contains key statements about Boito and Praga’s artistic vision for the Scapigliatura. As part of their discussion of a ‘decadent’ and ‘realist’ art of the future, aptly described as ‘Arte dell’avvenire’ in Boito’s ‘A Emilio Praga’ (OL, 77), the two poets represent the Scapigliatura as a youthful rising force in an old, decaying century: ‘il vecchio secolo che scende, la pallida gioventù che sale’ (OL, 329) [‘the old century that goes down, the pale youth that comes up’]. Embodying youth and dynamism against an idea of art associated with the nineteenth century and old age, in order to break through to the future and bring about the ‘Arte dell’avvenire’, the authors of the Scapigliatura are encouraged to demolish the literary, musical, and artistic foundations of the past: per far breccia nell’avvenire c’è gran bisogno di pungere, di piagare, di crivellare. Sì, l’avvenire ecco il gran problema per cui tutto si può calpestare; giacché v’è un gigante che, dobbiamo credere, sarà più grande d’Omero, di Shakespeare, di Beethoven, di Cornelius, di Manzoni: il ventesimo secolo. (OL, 330) [to break through to the future there is a great need to puncture, to wound, to perforate. Yes, the future is the great problem for which everything can be trampled on; since there is a giant that, we must believe, will be bigger © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Cabiati, Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92018-0_6

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than Homer, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Cornelius, Manzoni: the twentieth century.]

Boito and Praga see their art as the first stage of a radical and violent transformation that they envisage would occur in the twentieth century, innovating the arts and, as a result, trampling upon all the great authors that came before. Besides their capacity to predict the revolutionary changes that would happen in twentieth-century literature and music, noteworthy is the use of expressions of belligerence and destruction emphasising the conflict between youth and old age, the new and the historical, the future and the past which anticipate avant-garde proclamations made fifty years later by Futurist authors in their manifestoes. As Daly (2012, 192) has claimed, while the role of the literary Scapigliatura as forerunner of Futurism has been repeatedly pointed out in scholarship, it has not been studied systematically. Particularly neglected has been the Scapigliatura’s influence on the poems included in first anthology of Futurist poetry, I poeti futuristi (1912). Published three years after the founding manifesto of Futurism, this collection has been deemed ‘poetry of transition’ between late nineteenth-century poetic models, including the Scapigliatura and French Symbolism/Decadence, and avant-garde experimentation with thematic material that is characteristically Futurist, which paved the way for the subsequent formal and syntactic development of Futurist literary methods such as words-in-freedom (Podavini 2012; Giammarco 1977, 18; Rainey et al. 2009, 568). Given that the anthology has been analysed exclusively by scholars of Futurism, however, the definitions of what would be typical imagery and techniques of the Scapigliatura are, for the most part, vague and ambiguous, relying more on generic discussions on a lyrical atmosphere that is ‘scapigliata’ as opposed to ‘Futurist’ (Giammarco 1977, 18), rather than on close comparative textual analysis. Giammarco (1977, 18–19), for instance, broadly describes the celebration of eroticism and sensuality in the Futurist anthology as close to that of the Scapigliatura. Similarly, Podavini (2012, 39–42) speaks of some of the poems in the anthology innovating themes of the Scapigliatura, including deformity, evil, and rebellion against convention; after all, according to Podavini, unlike the Futurists the authors of the Scapigliatura were ultimately unable to ‘break off the previous themes and traditional language’ of Romanticism (40). An opposite assessment of the relationship between the Scapigliatura and Futurism is given by Daly (2012, 2016) in her two thought-provoking essays on Marinetti and

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Boito. Although these are devoted to Marinetti’s pre-Futurist work and do not discuss I poeti futuristi, many of the themes examined by Daly as evidence of Boito’s significant influence on Marinetti, such as the dualistic conflict between the real and the ideal, the combination of grotesque/ macabre representations and fairy-tale settings, and experimental language, techniques, and literary forms, are characteristic of the 1912 anthology as well; interestingly, Daly (2012, 195) also describes Boito’s dualistic poetry as Marinetti’s ‘intermediary’ with Baudelaire’s conception of the opposition between Spleen and Idéal. As part of his proclamation that serves as introduction to the anthology, Marinetti includes the ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista’, written in May 1912. In this manifesto detailing the stylistic and methodological features of Futurist literature, Marinetti declares the ugliness, violence, and irreverence of modern life central to Futurism, as opposed to beauty and harmony which are associated with a past tradition: Ci gridano: ‘La vostra letteratura non sarà bella! Non avremo più la sinfonia verbale, dagli armoniosi dondolii e dalle cadenze tranquillizzanti!’ Ciò è ben inteso! E che fortuna! Noi utilizziamo, invece, tutti i suoni brutali, tutti i gridi espressivi della vita violenta che ci circonda. Facciamo coraggiosamente il ‘brutto’ in letteratura, e uccidiamo dovunque la solennità. Via! non prendete di queste arie da grandi sacerdoti, nell’ascoltarmi! Bisogna sputare ogni giorno sull’Altare dell’Arte!’ (PF, 22, emphases in original) [They scream at us: ‘Your literature will not be beautiful! We’ll no longer have a verbal symphony that is composed of harmonious rhythms and tranquilising cadences.’ We understand that quite well! And how lucky! We, instead, make use of all the ugly sounds, the expressive screams of the violent life that surrounds us. Let us boldly make ‘the ugly’ in literature, and let us everywhere murder solemnity. Go on! don’t assume those grand priestly airs when listening to me. Every day we must spit on the Altar of Art! (Marinetti 2009a, 124, emphases in original)]

Marinetti announces that, by introducing sounds and expressions that best represent the intensity and dynamicity of life in the early twentieth century, Futurism will overcome traditional binary oppositions, aesthetic as well as moral, that would hinder that representation, opening literature up to novel imagery and subjects. He writes: ‘non vi sono categorie d’immagini, nobili o grossolane, eleganti o volgari, eccentriche o naturali. L’intuizione che le percepisce non ha né preferenze né partiti-presi’ (PF, 15,

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emphasis in original) [‘there are no categories of images, noble or gross or popular, eccentric or natural. The intuition that perceives them has no preferences or partis pris’ (Marinetti 2009a, 121, emphasis in original)]. This removal of the preference conventionally granted to a noble register and vocabulary in literature, with a view to depicting the ugly aspects of modern times, can be compared to the Scapigliatura’s and Baudelaire’s oxymoronic combination of lyrical and grotesque images of everyday life without any moral partiality or purpose, merging opposite aesthetic concepts as previously seen in Chaps. 2 and 3. Marinetti’s theoretical discourse around the centrality of ugliness in Futurist literature, discarding conventional literary beauty and forms, also recalls the various expressions celebrating the critical role of the ugly and irregularity—in opposition to traditional beauty—in the Scapigliatura’s literature, written by Boito in the 1860s: Noi scapigliati romantici in ira, alle regolari leggi del Bello, prediligiamo i Quasimodi nelle nostre fantasticherie. (‘Introduction to “Ballatella”’, OL, 11) [We, the enraged Romantic Scapigliati, to the regular laws of Beauty, prefer the Quasimodos in our fantasies.] E il mondo ancor più sterile, o fratello, Ci fa quel vol di poësia stupendo, E non trovando il Bello Ci abbranchiamo all’Orrendo. (‘A Giovanni Camerana’, OL, 80) [And the world even more sterile, O brother, Is made by that stupendous flight of poetry, And not finding Beauty We grab hold of the Hideous.]

Similar is also the emphasis placed by both the Scapigliatura and Futurism on the novelty of their choice of ugliness as a key literary trait, which entails a hypothetical clash with detractors shocked by their announcement of rejection of beauty, as well as a resulting aggressive stance in defence of their art. This involves, moreover, the use of prosaic words to mark their impertinent and disrespectful refusal of a past tradition seen as too formal and serious, including ‘spit’, both in Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto tecnico’ (‘Ci gridano’; ‘Facciamo coraggiosamente il “brutto”’; ‘arie da

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grandi sacerdoti’; ‘Bisogna sputare ogni giorno sull’Altare dell’Arte’) and in Boito and Praga’s ‘Polemica letteraria’. Boito and Praga write: E sarà un’arte malata, vaneggiante, al dire di molti, un’arte di decadenza, di barocchismo, di razionalismo, di realismo ed ecco finalmente la parola sputata. […] Realismo! […] E tanto sgomento in questa parola! Questi idealisti candidi e beati devono avere una assai triste idea di ciò che di reale v’ha sulla terra per schifarsene tanto. (OL, 329–330) [And it will be an ill, delirious art, according to many, an art of decadence, of baroqueism, of rationalism, of realism and here is finally the word spat out. […] Realism! […] And so much dismay about this word! These candid and blissful idealists must have a very sad idea of what is real on earth to be so disgusted with it.]

These juxtapositions of the Scapigliatura’s and Futurism’s artistic proclamations reveal an equal urge to break away from the past, in terms of subject matter, vocabulary, and literary models, and focus instead on the ugliness and irregular forms of the present. The literary parallels between the two movements at the time of I poeti futuristi concern not only theoretical statements on their aesthetics and a hostile relationship with tradition, but also a meticulous reworking, in the Futurist anthology, of the Scapigliatura’s images, themes, and techniques which can in turn be frequently traced back to Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal. Furthermore, poems of the anthology that feature a repurposing of the Scapigliatura’s imagery are interspersed, most of the times, with tropes and stylistic devices drawn directly from Baudelaire’s work. This chapter demonstrates a similar reading and use of the Scapigliatura’s and Baudelaire’s poetry, considered equally innovative in terms of subject matter and forms of representation, by various Futurist poets in their search for a new poetic expression. The treatment of ugliness in the anthology, for instance, is comparable to that of the Scapigliatura and Baudelaire in terms of the combination of figurative/fantastic and literal/realistic representations of ugly subjects to characterise the mental distress and derangement of the poet. Libero Altomare’s ‘Insonnia fantastica’ is an apt example of this, employing the psychological exhaustion and resulting dread caused by a sleepless night as a starting point for the poet’s lyrical transmutation of objects, sounds, and sensations into sinister, fantastic beings. The poem’s setting and its depiction have been influenced by Praga’s ‘Nox’,

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the Latin for ‘Night’, from Penombre (1864), itself a description of the speaker’s insomnia during a fearful and restless night gripped by doubts about the existence of God, with certain bizarre images in ‘Insonnia fantastica’ akin to those in ‘Nox’ and other poems from Penombre, as well as from Baudelaire’s Fleurs. The nocturnal scene that opens ‘Insonnia fantastica’ is centred upon stillness and silence, lack of light, movement, and sound which is perceived not as part of a peaceful atmosphere but, on the contrary, as menacing and frightening: Chi volle incatenare le campane, chi evirò tutti i galli dei dintorni, ed ammantò di nero fumo il Sole? Ecco … il Terrore con la mano adunca mi afferra per le chiome inviperite, mi soffia in viso un alito di tomba, mi fa tremare come un paralitico … (PF, 64) [Who decided to enchain the bells, who castrated all the cocks in the surroundings, and cloaked the Sun in black smoke? Behold … Terror with his hooked hand grabs me by my furious hair, blows on my face the breath of the tomb, makes me tremble like a paralytic …]

Terror is one of the various personifications in the poem, repulsive, threatening figures symbolising the poet’s despondency and fear that include doubt, ‘il Dubbio’, which violently attacks the poet, ‘mi conficca il pungiglione / nel cuore’ (PF, 65) [‘sticks its stinger / into my heart’]. The beginning of Praga’s ‘Nox’ paints an analogous picture, focused on the immobility and quietness of the city streets at night where ominous shadows are lurking: sol qualche muro squallido di campanil biancheggia, non batton fronda i platani per le deserte vie, sparse di strane ombrìe. (PP, 126)

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[only some squalid walls of a bell tower are turning white, the plane trees do not move their branches through the deserted streets, scattered with strange shadows].

This opening sets the scene for the subsequent introduction of doubt by means of personification, a human-like, menacing creature described with expressions that can be compared with the illustrations of the blackness of the nightly landscape (‘ammantò di nero fumo il sole’) and of the anthropomorphic figures, including doubt, of Altomare’s ‘Insonnia fantastica’: sparve dal ciel degli angeli la tinta porporina, e innanzi a un muro orribile torvo piantassi e altiero il dubbio, in manto nero.   E da quel dì mi seguita, mi seguita indefesso: da lungi or or guatavami, mi sta sul collo adesso. (PP, 127–128) [from heaven the angels’ purple colour disappeared, and in front of a horrible wall, threatening and haughty, doubt stood, in a black cloak.   And from that day he has followed me, followed me tirelessly: he looked at me from afar a moment ago, he sits on my neck now.]

Being horrid and terrifying (‘un fremito d’orrore’, PP, 128) and preventing him to sleep (‘io veglio / col mio negro compagno’, PP, 130 [‘I stay awake / with my black companion’]), doubt sits on the neck of Praga’s poet like an emotional burden. This figurative image emphasising the weight of doubt is taken up by Altomare in ‘Insonnia fantastica’ to express the poet’s mental anguish, mixed with the sense of claustrophobia in a confined space, darkness, and heaviness of the first stanza of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ (LXXVIII):

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Pare che sul petto mi graviti una soma di carbone infernale. È un barattolo suggellato la mia stanza, abbandonato ne le profonde tasche del Silenzio. (‘Insonnia fantastica’, PF, 64) [It seems that a burden of hellish coal weighs on my chest. It is a sealed jar my room, abandoned in the deep pockets of Silence.] Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle Sur l’esprit gémissant en proie aux longs ennuis, Et que de l’horizon embrassant tout le cercle II nous verse un jour noir plus triste que les nuits. (OC I, 74)

‘Insonnia fantastica’ and ‘Spleen’ (LXXVIII) also share an extensive use of allegorising capital letters that transform negative abstract feelings into antagonistic and violent characters, such as the aforementioned ‘Terror’ and ‘Doubt’, and Baudelaire’s ‘Anguish’, which ‘plants her black flag’ into the poet’s skull (OC I, 75). Some of the fantastic figures that appear in Altomare’s poem belong to fairy-tale or mythical lore, such as the witch and the vampire represented in the following stanza: Forse qualche strega nascosta sotto il letto mi salterà sul ventre per costringermi ad un amplesso lubrico … Il vampiro, che vuol succhiarmi l’ultimo vigore, oscilla e freme sovra il capezzale. (PF, 66) [Maybe some witch hiding under the bed will jump on my belly to force me into a lewd embrace … The vampire, who wants to suck my last vigour, swings and quivers over the bed.]

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Altomare again combines specific images drawn from Praga’s ‘Nox’, in this occasion doubt portrayed as a witch, ‘furbo come una strega’ (PP, 128) [‘as cunning as a witch’], and Baudelaire’s poetry, more precisely the sexual act with the hideous and frightening vampire-woman who sucks the poet’s marrow, described in ‘Les Métamorphoses du vampire’: Quand elle eut de mes os sucé toute la moelle, Et que languissamment je me tournai vers elle Pour lui rendre un baiser d’amour, je ne vis plus Qu’une outre aux flancs gluants, toute pleine de pus! Je fermai les deux yeux, dans ma froide épouvante […]. (OC I, 159)

More realistic representations of ugliness and psychological torment in ‘Insonnia fantastica’ can also be juxtaposed with Praga’s ‘Nox’ as well as with Baudelaire’s Fleurs. The peculiar metaphorical characterisation of the clock as a hornet and the focus on the bad odours of the room, ‘Ronza l’orologio, calabrone / nell’aria stagnante gravida d’effluvi’ (PF, 65) [‘The clock buzzes, hornet / in the stagnant air pregnant with odours’], reveal Altomare’s reworking of the third stanza of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ (LXXV). Altomare (re)interprets the French noun ‘bourdon’ as a humming ‘bumblebee’, one of its possible meanings, instead of ‘great bell’ which is probably the connotation that Baudelaire gave to the noun: Le bourdon se lamente, et la bûche enfumée Accompagne en fausset la pendule enrhumée, Cependant qu’en un jeu plein de sales parfums […]. (OC I, 72)

Together with the hornet, in ‘Insonnia fantastica’ there are other animals associated with mundane imagery of everyday life, including illustrations of eating, death, and despondent feelings. These include the ‘worms’ that, in his sensory hallucination, the poet believes are trying to dig into the flesh to find his entrails (PF, 65)—a key aesthetic conceit of ugliness in both the Scapigliatura and Baudelaire, but also of psychological derangement in Boito’s Re Orso, as seen in Chap. 3. There are also the woodworms that, similarly, dig the grave for the final figurative burial of sleep, now lost, before the arrival of dawn, ‘I tarli adesso scavano la fossa / per qualcosa che più non tornerà’ (PF, 66) [‘Woodworms now dig the grave / for something that will never come back’]. In Praga’s ‘Nox’, the image of the woodworm is also employed both to convey emotional distress derived from sleeplessness, and as a symbol of baseness and squalor:

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  Qui il tarlo, occulto e vigile come le noie umane, solo negli alti stipiti morde il suo vecchio pane; solo nelle mie tenebre […]. (PP, 126)   [Here the woodworm, hidden and alert like human troubles, alone in the high jambs bites its old bread; alone in my darkness […].]

What we have seen in ‘Insonnia fantastica’ is an extensive adaptation of Praga’s and Baudelaire’s method of the use of a realistic setting of insomnia or mental anguish as a springboard into the figurative representation of ugly, unrealistic figures, which in turn convey the poet’s emotional state. ‘Insonnia fantastica’ shares various similarities with the poems discussed above, including images and literary techniques that in the early twentieth century were still perceived as innovative, modern, and irreverent of tradition. These comprise bizarre personifications such as ‘ghignano le stelle’ (PF, 65), which, in its description of the stars that sneer derisively at the poet’s distress, recalls the sun that laughs like a madman at the emotional and physical sufferings of the poet-painter in Praga’s ‘Dolor di denti’ (1864), ‘ride il sole come un pazzo’ (PP, 177). Altomare’s use of poetic material drawn from Praga’s and Baudelaire’s work, combined with images of technology that can be considered as more properly Futurist including the telegraphist, robots, the cinematograph, and the steam train (PF, 65), provides a first glimpse into the important role played by the Scapigliatura and Baudelaire in the development of literary modernity in Futurism. The fusion of fantastic and realistic depictions of ugliness and mental derangement can be seen in other poems of the anthology, most notably in Mario Bètuda’s ‘Re Alcool’. This composition is a surreal sequence of loosely connected visions narrated by an intoxicated poet, alternating between a dark fairy-tale atmosphere of blood, drunkenness, and sensuality with prosaic images and dialogues taken from the everyday life of the speaker. This figurative land ruled by ‘King Alcohol’, which is an allegory of the poet’s alcohol intoxication, features grotesque characters such as gnomes, a constant presence in the poem; in its lyrical representation of

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these fairy-tale subjects and provocative celebration of topics such as intoxication, ‘Re Alcool’ ought to be considered as a Futurist offspring of Boito’s Re Orso.1 Analogies can be seen in their playful and irreverent use of everyday language in poetry, unrealistic and bizarre imagery, violence, and drunkenness, which all come together in the following stanza of ‘Re Alcool’: La testa mi si spicca dal busto, come un frutto maturo dal fusto, e cade, e si spacca e schizza via in mille strani piccoletti gnometti, lucenti, saltanti, stridenti. (PF, 92) [My head detaches from my chest, like a ripe fruit from the trunk, and falls, and splits and shoots away in a thousand strange little gnomes, shiny, jumping, shrilling.]

The comical conceit of the head of the drunken poet that comes off his body like fruit from a tree is strikingly similar to one of the most surreal similes in Re Orso, where the ‘intoxicated’ heads of the guests at Re Orso’s wedding, macabrely cut off by Trol the giant executioner, are likened by the narrator to walnuts falling from a tree: Che verso l’alba si vedean brïache Le capocchie cascar dei convitati, Distaccate dal torso, a quattro a quattro, Come noci abbacchiate. (OL, 121) [Around dawn you could see the drunken Heads of the guests fall, Detached from the torso, four by four, Like walnuts knocked down.]

The characterisation of the small gnomes as strange, jumping, and shiny beings in ‘Re Alcool’ also finds an antecedent in Boito’s grotesque portrayal of Papiol the jester as a very small dwarf (OL, 101), an odd and lively creature, ‘Gobbo, rossiccio e strano, / [che] Parve surger dal suol’ (OL, 95) [‘Hunchbacked, reddish and strange, / [who] Seemed to rise from the ground’]. The main focus of ‘Re Alcool’ is, as the title suggests, drunkenness, which is praised and at the same time feared by the speaker.

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Alcohol, and more precisely absinthe, is defined both as a ‘friend’ and as an ‘enemy’ (PF, 94). It is described with a dualistic terminology as capable of leading the poet to a divine state of consciousness and providing him with the fantastic visions displayed in the poem, ‘portarmi / nel vasto paese divino’ (PF, 95) [‘take me / to the vast divine land’], or bringing about a welcomed unconsciousness, which is equated to death: […] col caro mio amico nemico il verde alcool mortale, il sire del grande paese che chiamano l’Oblio. (PF, 94) [[…] with my dear enemy friend the deadly green alcohol, the king of the great land that they call Oblivion.]

These contrasting properties of alcohol had been portrayed in poetry long before Bètuda’s ‘Re Alcool’. In the section of the Fleurs entitled ‘Le Vin’, Baudelaire represents the paradoxical beauty of being either unconscious, ‘dead drunk’ (‘Le Vin de l’assassin’, OC I, 108), or ‘equal to the Gods’ (‘Le Vin du solitaire’, OC I, 109) while intoxicated, departing sober consciousness on a metaphorical ‘cheval sur le vin / Pour un ciel féerique et divin’ (‘Le Vin des amants’, OC I, 109). Influenced by Baudelaire’s wine poems, in one of the four odes to wine of the section ‘La cena’ from Re Orso, Boito analogously expresses the king’s contradictory celebration of inebriation that provides oblivion comparable to death or sensations of divine power: Questo è un vin che dà morte ed obblio! Questo è un vin che fa simili a Dio! (OL, 112) [This is a wine that gives death and oblivion! This is a wine that makes you equal to God!]

In ‘Re Alcool’, this view of drunkenness is filtered through a sensibility that, in its sequence of dreamlike visions that put together disparate human, animal, and celestial images, colours, and sounds (see PF, 94), calls into mind Rimbaud’s wide-ranging analogies and practice of sensory derangement displayed in ‘Voyelles’ and ‘Le Bateau ivre’ (Rimbaud 2009,

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162–164, 167). Indeed, the representation of the ‘barca bicchiere’ [‘boat glass’] sailing in the green lake of absinthe, ‘sull’acque verdastre’ (PF, 94–95), cannot but recall the ‘drunken boat’ inundated by ‘green water’ (‘L’eau verte’), an allegory of intoxication, of ‘Le Bateau ivre’ (Rimbaud 2009, 162). The more prosaic section of Bètuda’s poem, focusing on the speaker’s unattainable poetic and sentimental dreams in an antagonistic and money-­ centred world, serves both to place the poet in opposition to his contemporaneous society and to reject impossible Romantic aspirations, preferring drunkenness instead. The first opposition represented is that between the poet and a beloved woman, who refuses his offer of poetry with a mundane matter-of-factness that highlights her desire for another type of gift, namely money: —Canti?… Poesia?… È roba che si spende dal sarto, dall’orefice, dalla modista, all’albergo? No…? È moneta che non corre?… Allora, mio caro, non ha palpiti il cuore per te. (PF, 93) [—Verses? … Poetry? … Is it stuff that can be spent at the tailor’s, the jeweller’s, the milliner’s, the hotel? No…? It is not a currency?… Then, my dear, my heart does not beat for you.]

The woman goes on to claim that she would like, as a demonstration of love, money, sarcastically considered as the kind of love poetry that she favours, ‘il poema d’amore / in metrica di scudi, di sterline lucenti’ [‘the love poem / in the metre of money, of shiny sterling’]. The second, broader, opposition concerns the poet and society, represented by a hostile crowd who ridicules the speaker devoted to promoting love and fraternity through his poetry—his ‘gran sogno d’amore universale’ (PF, 93) [‘great dream of universal love’]—accusing him of madness: Declamai alle turbe i miei canti: dissi pace, uguaglianza, fraternità. M’accolse un lungo scroscio d’ilarità. Mille voci s’alzarono, urlarono: —È matto… è matto… (PF, 93)

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[I recited my verses to the crowds: I said peace, equality, fraternity. A long roar of hilarity greeted me. A thousand voices rose, shouted: —He is crazy… he is crazy…]

The antagonism between the poet and a materialistic society, and the former’s resulting rebellious pose as a poète maudit excluded from that society, is a subject extensively explored by the Scapigliatura with parallel imagery and language that include everyday unpoetic terms referring to money and commerce. One example of this is Praga’s ‘Per cominciare’, the opening poem from Tavolozza, which details the poet’s struggles to spread the love for poetry in a society that severely mistreats him for being a poet. The speaker wants to declaim his poetry to the crowd, sentimentally defined as ‘l’inno del primo amore’ (PP, 7) [‘the hymn of my first love’]. Contemporaneous society, however, is solely dedicated to industry and wealth and deaf to the poet’s calls for beauty; the mob mocks him, symbolically responding to his poetry by showing him banknotes: Guarda la folla, o giovane! È una stoltezza o un fallo là, fra i curvi che incensano l’ara del dio metallo, ogni altro culto; e copresi di sogghigni immortali chi, col fango battendosi, tenta di metter l’ali. […] se canti i palpiti di un’alma ardente o stanca, costor dinnanzi spièganti un biglietto di banca! (PP, 8) [Look at the crowd, young man! There, among those who worship the altar of the god of money, any other creed is a folly or a mistake; and they cover with immortal sneers those who, fighting against mud, try to spread their wings.

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[…] if you sing about the emotions of a passionate or tired soul, these people unfold in front of you a banknote!]

The topic of the unappreciated poet despised by the contemporary world was, of course, widely present in nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, and retains a central role in Baudelaire’s Fleurs as well (Robb 1993, 128). It is the subject of ‘Bénédiction’, the first composition of the opening section of the Fleurs, ‘Spleen et Idéal’, where the poet is depicted as a Christ-like figure disseminating love and affection through his poetry and for this reason is hated and violently attacked by the mob, in a manner similar to ‘Re Alcool’ and ‘Per cominciare’. But another interesting feature shared by Bètuda’s and Praga’s poems, besides this Romantic theme, is the use of colloquial language to emphasise society’s vulgarity and attachment to wealth. ‘Re Alcool’ includes dialogical forms that reproduce conversational Italian, such as ‘—Canti? … Poesia? … È roba che si spende / dal sarto, dall’orefice, dalla modista, all’albergo? / No?’, and ‘—È matto … è matto …’. While these types of dialogues are not present in ‘Per cominciare’, they make up a significant part of the series of sonnets from Praga’s Tavolozza entitled ‘Pittori sul vero’, which portrays scenes of the everyday life of the working class, in particular fishermen, with a prosaic style and a distinctive attention to detail. The first sonnet of this series focuses on the inability of people of various social classes, from small-town fishermen to the wealthy inhabitants of the city, to understand the function of art in a modern capitalist world, and the difficulties faced by the poet, who is also a painter, to survive in it. This is conveyed in the sonnet through a conversation that, in its colloquialism, recurring questions, emphasis on the commercialisation of art, and accusations of madness addressed to the poet-painter ostracised by society, can be likened to the above section from ‘Re Alcool’: —Eh, che mai fa?—Dipingo.—Oh bello, oh bello! … —Ma come?—Come posso.—E cosa?—L’onda. —L’onda del mar? … ci metta anche un battello. —Il tuo, no, il mio che azzurri ha remi e sponda. —Ma del quadro che fa, lassù a Milano? —Al prossimo di buona volontà lo vendo come l’ostriche e il merlano.—

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La gente crolla il capo e se ne va, dicendo:—È un pazzo—ed io soggiungo piano: —V’ha chi tali ci crede anche in città.— (PP, 76) [—Eh, what are you doing?—I paint.—How beautiful, how beautiful! … —But how?—How I can.—And what?—The wave. —The wave of the sea? … Put a boat in it, too. —Yours, no, mine whose oars and sides are blue. —But what are you going to do with the painting, up there in Milan? —To a person of good will I will sell it like oysters and whiting.— People shake their heads and leave, saying:—He is crazy—and I add softly: —There are those who believe so even in the city.—]

As well as being characteristic of ‘Re Alcool’, but also of crepuscolari poets contemporary to the Futurists such as Guido Gozzano,2 these dialogical structures and colloquial register play a critical role in the poetry of Aldo Palazzeschi as displayed in many of his poems included in the anthology, most notably ‘L’incendiario’ (see PF, 381–383). Ugliness, broadly conceived to include fantastic and realistic representations of psychological distress, sensory derangement, and prosaic structures and language that reproduce life in a materialistic, modern world, is a theme constantly recurring in I poeti futuristi, where it shares various analogies with the Scapigliatura’s and Baudelaire’s imaginaries and lyrical features. From an aesthetic perspective, parallel depictions of ugliness can also be found in macabre scenes of anatomical dissection and medical examination, which as discussed in Chap. 2 constitute a key topic in the Scapigliatura but are also present, and similarly portrayed, in the Futurist anthology. Unlike mechanical images of science and technology that are mostly celebrated by the Futurists for their speed and inorganic beauty, medicine is criticised for showing the organic horrors of the human body that was once praised in poetry for its attractiveness, wholeness, and regularity of forms. Despite this intrusion of medical images into poetry, however, male desire for the female subject is still very much present, conveyed through dissected and mutilated bodies and involving a different type of eroticism, morbid and abnormal; in other words, necrophilia, as we will see next.

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(Un)Poetic Morgues, Dissected Bodies, Necrophilia Cadavers in the process of being examined by anatomists in a dissection room are the central focus of Gesualdo Manzella Frontini’s Futurist poem ‘Sala anatomica’. The title alone would already suggest a connection with Boito’s anatomy lesson, ‘Lezione d’anatomia’, written in 1865, and indeed the two poems share numerous similarities in their treatments of this gruesome subject matter. The opening of ‘Sala anatomica’, however, also reveals a link with Praga’s ‘A un feto’ (1864) and Baudelaire’s ‘Une charogne’: Un profumato autunno di tuberose un acre odore d’acido fenico … La sala anatomica avvampata dalle ultime fiamme d’un vespro di viola e di croco. I tesi cadaveri squarciati su le tavole chiazzate di sangue e di grumi. (PF, 291) [A fragrant autumn of tuberoses an acrid smell of carbolic acid … The anatomy room flared up in the last flames of a violet and crocus yellow evening. The stretched corpses, ripped open on the tables stained with blood and clots.]

Manzella Frontini introduces his scene of anatomical dissection by means of a series of dissonant oppositions between natural and medical images. Pleasing scents and colours of nature associated with a specific season (autumn) and described with poetic and floral vocabulary, are juxtaposed with the unpleasant odours and figures found in the morgue that belong to medical imagery, such as the smell of a disinfectant, phenol (‘acido fenico’), and the corpses that lay on tables smeared with blood. Symbolising the beauty of Romantic poetry and idealism that cannot survive in the modern unpoetic context of a dissecting  room, nature serves only as a means of contrast to enhance the ugliness of the bodies dismembered for medical research. This contrast recalls the dualistic opposition between nature, romantically seen in its seasonal splendour as full of sweet, floral scents and colours, and imagery of bodily decomposition of the opening sections from ‘A un feto’ and ‘Une charogne’:

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Là nel Museo, fra i poveri avanzi imbalsamati che all’ospedal dal medico a lungo corteggiati, e agli abbietti cadaveri rapiti ed alla croce, la scïenza feroce ai posteri serbò; […] vidi una cosa orribile vidi di un uomo il feto; quella tomba d’aceto un canto mi cercò. Era un bel dì di luglio; dagli ampii finestroni piovean cadenze e balsami di fiori e di canzoni. (PP, 152–153) [There, in the museum, among the poor embalmed remains long desired from the physician at the hospital, and stolen from the wretched corpses and from the cross, and kept for posterity by ferocious science; […] I saw a horrible thing I saw the foetus of a man; that vinegar tomb inspired me for this poem. It was a beautiful day in July; from the large windows cadences and fragrances of flowers and songs rained down.]

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Rappelez-vous l’objet que nous vîmes, mon âme, Ce beau matin d’été si doux: Au détour d’un sentier une charogne infâme Sur un lit semé de cailloux, Les jambes en l’air, comme une femme lubrique, Brûlante et suant les poisons, Ouvrait d’une façon nonchalante et cynique Son ventre plein d’exhalaisons. Le soleil rayonnait sur cette pourriture, Comme afin de la cuire à point, Et de rendre au centuple à la grande Nature Tout ce qu’ensemble elle avait joint. (OC I, 31)

The beginning of Manzella Frontini’s ‘Sala anatomica’ can also be likened to that of Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’. Particularly comparable are their descriptions of natural light at a specific time of the day—sunset in Manzella Frontini’s poem, sunrise in Boito’s—that illuminates the cadavers in the dissection room, a poetic device used to direct the reader’s attention from the room to the mutilated corpses, emphasising their grotesque and unnatural appearance. Manzella Frontini’s ‘Sala anatomica’ is ‘flared up’ by the last lights of the day, which reveal—and introduce visually—the cadavers ‘ripped open’ on the tables. Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ begins in a similar manner: La sala è lùgubre; Dal negro tetto Discende l’alba, Che si riverbera Sul freddo letto Con luce scialba. Chi dorme? … Un’etica Defunta ieri All’ospedale; […] Delitto! e sanguina Per piaga immonda Il petto a quella! …

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[…] Ed era bella! […] Ed ora il clinico Che glielo svelle [il cuore] Grida ed esorta: ‘Ecco le valvole,’ ‘Ecco le celle,’ ‘Ecco l’aòrta.’ (OL, 74–75) [The room is lugubrious; Dawn climbs down From the black roof And reverberates On the cold bed With dim light. Who sleeps? … A consumptive girl Who died yesterday At the hospital; […] Murder! and for A disgusting wound Her chest bleeds! … […] And she was beautiful! […] And now the clinician Who tears it open [her heart] Screams and encourages: ‘Here are the valves,’ ‘Here are the cells,’ ‘Here is the aorta.’]

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This dehumanising, and figuratively sexual, violation of a beautiful female body, objectified and desecrated by the hands of the anatomist who sees it only—and presents it visually to the reader/spectator, ‘Ecco’—in its individual organic components—blood, flesh, veins, and organs—is retained by Manzella Frontini in his poem. ‘Sala anatomica’ depicts the visual horrors of female anatomy, a cadaver of a woman torn open and profaned by the hands of the physician (‘l’esperta traccia di un bisturì’, PF, 291 [‘the expert trace of a scalpel’]), with organic matter trickling down from it: Sull’ultimo tavolo nella penombra una donna dalle anche spiccate, dai flosci seni rattrappiti avea il ventre colante materia. (PF, 291) [On the last table in the dim light there was a woman with pronounced hips, with flaccid and shrivelled breasts, and from her belly organic matter trickled down.]

The thinness of the cadaver that is sexualised by the poet, who focuses his description on erotic parts of the body such as her breasts and pronounced hips, makes it resemble another maimed female corpse in poetry, one which has influenced Boito’s medical representation of a female cadaver in ‘Lezione d’anatomia’, as seen in Chap. 2, namely Baudelaire’s ‘Une martyre’. In this composition, the mutilated body of a thin woman, a bleeding ‘headless corpse’, similarly has ‘La hanche un peu pointue’ (OC I, 112); Baudelaire’s poem, moreover, openly represents necrophilia, as the woman is asked whether her murderer gratified his sexual appetite on her corpse, her ‘chair inerte et complaisante’ (OC I, 113). But I think that the most evident connections with the poetry of Boito and Baudelaire are displayed in the closing passage of ‘Sala anatomica’, which ultimately reveals Manzella Frontini’s irreverent purpose against poetic tradition and the Romantic idealisation of the woman: O perché, perché mai, divina creatura, l’imagine vostra improvvisa balzommi dinanzi nella bianchezza molle delle carni,

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disvelando improvvisa la freschezza della tua vana pudica bellezza? (PF, 292) [O why, why on earth, divine creature, your sudden image jumped in front of me in the flaccid whiteness of the flesh, suddenly disclosing the freshness of your pointlessly timid beauty?]

Starting with the emotional expression ‘O’, this passage seems to convey, at first, the anguish of the poet, suggesting that the image of the beautiful and ‘divine’ woman cut open by the anatomist, and therefore reduced to mere materiality and devoid of any sentimental and spiritual meaning, is disturbing to him. The fact that, in the previous line, this ‘divine creature’ was grotesquely represented as having organic ‘matter’ dripping down her belly, however, calls into question the authenticity of the speaker’s emotions and lyrical assertions, leading to a sarcastic interpretation of this passage. Moreover, the three rhyming words ‘bianchezza’, ‘freschezza’, ‘bellezza’ and the definition of her beauty as fresh, are ironic puns on customary poetic representations of youthful female beauty, and of paleness as a characteristic of that beauty. The ‘freshness’ that is suddenly revealed (‘disvelando improvvisa la freschezza’) is, in fact, that of the white ‘flesh’ of a woman who has recently died and whose corpse is still fresh, which, far from being beautiful in its traditional aesthetic sense, has been butchered as if it were the fresh carcass—in other words, the meat—of an animal. If the body of the woman still has some attraction for the poet, therefore, his desire is a necrophiliac one. This demystifying conclusion brings the poem close to the ironic endings of Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Une charogne’. As already shown, the two poems debunk the Romantic fantasy of the woman’s beauty as divine and angelic, opposing to this the ugly realities of illness, death, and decomposition: Perdona o pallida Adolescente! Fanciulla pia, Dolce, purissima, Fiore languente Di poësia!

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E mentre suscito Nel mio segreto Quei sogni adorni, … In quel cadavere Si scopre un feto Di trenta giorni. (OL, 75–76) [Forgive me, O pale Adolescent! Pious girl, Sweet, most pure, Languid flower, Of poetry! And while I rouse Those adorned dreams In my soul, … In that corpse A foetus of thirty days Is discovered’.] —Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure, À cette horrible infection Étoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature, Vous, mon ange et ma passion! […] Alors, ô ma beauté! dites à la vermine Qui vous mangera de baisers, Que j’ai gardé la forme et l’essence divine De mes amours décomposés! (OC I, 32)

An analogous portrayal of a female cadaver in I poeti futuristi can be found in Corrado Govoni’s ‘Le capitali’, where, as part of a fantastic and hyperbolic description of capital cities and their bizarre inhabitants, Govoni includes the macabre representation of a morgue and of physicians performing anatomical dissections on dead bodies. Through the medium of the simile, the opening of that section combines the medical setting of the morgue with monstrous fairy-tale characters, thus transfiguring ugly realistic images—the cadavers of people who committed suicide—into more artistically grotesque—yet not more aesthetically pleasing—figures:

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Ecco la tetra morgue, l’esposizione della morte: ecco le fredde sale dalle lunghe tavole di zinco dove stanno allineati i verdi suicidi ignudi come un macabro e mostruoso pasto di cannibali giganti. (PF, 264) [Behold the gloomy morgue, the exhibition of death: behold the cold rooms with long zinc tables where the green naked suicides are lined up like a macabre and monstrous meal of giant cannibals.]

In this context of death and bodily mutilation, the references to food and cannibalism do not diminish but rather enhance the reader’s sense of aesthetic and moral revulsion towards the gruesome subject matter. The focus subsequently switches to a ‘povera vergine tumefatta’ (PF, 264) [‘poor swollen virgin’], recalling the above juxtaposition between the horrors of medical examination and an angelic young woman, which represents the disfigurement of the female body, and consequently of conventional poetic beauty, in modernity. In ‘Le capitali’, the speaker’s emphasis is all on the polemics against the clinical profanation of the human body by anatomists, introduced visually to the reader with the term ‘Ecco’—in the same manner as Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’, ‘Ecco le valvole’—and explicitly compared to necrophilia: Ecco i chirurghi tutti vestiti di bianco che con accette, seghe, trapani, coltelli straziano tutti quei poveri corpi come sacerdoti della putredine attenti ad olocausti di necrofilia. (PF, 264) [Behold the surgeons all dressed in white who tear apart all those poor bodies with hatchets, saws, drills, knives like priests of putrefaction devoted to holocausts of necrophilia.]

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This passage reveals Govoni’s sequential use of unpoetic words referring to the medical instruments of the surgeons (‘accette, seghe, trapani, coltelli’) to underline the inhumanity of their repeated violence (‘straziano’) on the human body, which resembles Boito’s repetition of technical terms regarding similar brutal instruments of destruction, ‘instrumenti di strage e di ruina’ (OL, 58), which tear houses apart (‘strazïati’), in ‘Case nuove’: ‘Zappe, scuri, scarpelli, / Arïeti, martelli’ (ibid.). The links with Boito’s macabre imagery and vocabulary of violence can be seen elsewhere in Govoni’s ‘Le capitali’, namely when the speaker depicts rivers found in these fictional ‘capital cities’ as full of bodies of suicides and aborted foetuses: ‘coi loro strani aborti / coi loro tristi suicidi’ (PF, 265). The use of these two images one next to the other is peculiar, but it evokes recurring subjects of the poetry of the Scapigliatura. For instance, in Boito’s ‘A Giovanni Camerana’ the conceits of the suicides and aborted foetuses are defined as central symbols of the Scapigliatura’s art, representing the moral and aesthetic ugliness of modern times:3 Torva è la Musa. Per l’Italia nostra Corre levando impetuösi gridi Una pallida giostra Di poeti suicidi. Alzan le pugna e mostrano a trofèo Dell’Arte loro un verme ed un aborto. (OL, 80) [Grim is the Muse. Around our Italy A pallid group of suicidal poets Runs while Shouting impetuously. They raise their fists and show as a trophy Of their Art a worm and an aborted foetus.]

A foetus is, of course, also what is ultimately (and violently) exposed by the anatomist’s hands inside the cadaver of the young, and supposedly chaste, beautiful woman in Boito’s ‘Lezione d’anatomia’, introducing an overt sexual element that mixes morbidly the themes of death and intercourse, erotic desire and anatomical dissection, leading us back to the above necrophiliac passages of Govoni’s ‘Le capitali’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Une martyre’—but also to the ending of Manzella Frontini’s ‘Sala

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anatomica’. The combination of these themes occurs frequently in the Scapigliatura’s poetry, and is not limited to scenes of medical examination where the audience (and, implicitly, the reader) is invited to look at the violation of the naked body of a beautiful girl being performed by the physician. As Carli (2004, 138) has noted, ‘nell’anatomia che scompone e smembra la carne, nel simbolo del cadavere marcescente, lo scapigliato indica […] un preciso legame tra eros e thanatos’ [‘in the anatomy that breaks down and dismembers the flesh, in the symbol of the rotting corpse, the Scapigliato indicates […] a precise link between eros and thanatos’]. Besides ‘Lezione d’anatomia’ and ‘Une martyre’, we have seen at various points of this book necrophiliac desires represented in both the Scapigliatura’s and Baudelaire’s poetry. But in many other compositions the interaction between decomposition and the sexual act or erotic longing is illustrated. These include Praga’s specular representations, on the one hand, of Seraphina’s infirm body suffering from typhus while she is having intercourse with a customer, and on the other of her sexualised corpse, in the form of her ‘breasts’ and ‘face’, ravaged by worms: Morta: l’amante dell’ultima notte n’ebbe gli amplessi coll’odor del tifo, e, uscendo all’alba, avea coll’ossa rotte gli occhi di voluttà pieni e di schifo. […] Come due remi a un naufrago legati le stan distese e immobili le braccia; errano i vermi ciechi e spensierati sul bianco seno e sulla bianca faccia. (‘Seraphina’, PP, 148–149) [Dead: the lover of the last night was embraced with the smell of typhus, and, coming out at dawn, he had broken bones and eyes full of pleasure and disgust. […] Like two oars tied to a castaway her arms are stretched and motionless; the blind and carefree worms roam on her white breasts and white face.]

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After all, as Baudelaire writes in ‘Les Deux Bonnes Sœurs’: La Débauche et la Mort sont deux aimables filles, Prodigues de baisers et riches de santé, Dont le flanc toujours vierge et drapé de guenilles Sous l’éternel labeur n’a jamais enfanté. (OC I, 114)

Sex and death are described as ‘Two Good Sisters’ by Baudelaire, both offering ‘terrible pleasures’ to the poet (OC I, 115). This image influenced not only Praga’s and Boito’s representations of the connection between eroticism and putrefaction/mutilation of the female body, but also Camerana’s. As discussed in Chap. 3, in ‘Pax’ (1867) Camerana merges the act of death and physical decomposition of the poet with the love given to him by a woman addressed as ‘sister’ which, with the macabre and erotic reference to the Baudelairian ‘Two Good Sisters’ and the sexual connotation of the words ‘amplesso’ and ‘estasi’, can only be interpreted as carnal love: Dunque schiudasi l’urna. E tu m’appresta, Sorella, amica ed angelo, Coi fiori che orneran la bara a festa, L’amplesso tuo più splendido. […] Voglio morir nell’ocèano d’amore, Morire in braccio all’estasi! … (CP, 92) [So let the urn open. And you will offer me, Sister, friend, and angel, Together with the flowers that, in celebration, will adorn my coffin, Your most splendid embrace. […] I want to die in the ocean of love, Die in the arms of ecstasy! …]

In I poeti futuristi, medical imagery is employed not only in a literal manner in relation to death, the violence of modernity on the human body, and the expression of the macabre desires of the poet for the female cadaver. On the contrary, it is also part of the Futurist metaphorical representation of the decaying, Romantic city which needs a cure in the form of its modernisation.

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Urban Hymns: Orchestras of Hammers and Odes to the Lime The use of medical language of illness and death in the context of the poetic representation of a city is not restricted to Govoni’s ‘Le capitali’, but it also plays a significant role in Armando Mazza’s ‘A Venezia’, albeit in a different manner. This poem follows the main argument exposed in the Futurist manifesto ‘Contro Venezia passatista’ (see TIF, 33–38), published in 1910 and declaring the need for a modern architectural, technological, and industrial renovation of the city of Venice, considered as a moribund relic of a Romantic past. The meaning of Mazza’s ‘A Venezia’ is as figurative and literal as that of the manifesto: clearly, these calls for action are not solely about the modernisation of Venice but also of what the city signified artistically and poetically in the early twentieth century, which is to say Romanticism and sentimental love. On a literal level, the medical language of the opening section of the poem portrays the atmosphere of a decaying city, but from a metaphorical perspective it expresses a rejection of the Romantic remnants in traditional art that once charmed the poet, too. Venice has become a ‘sinister city’ for the Futurists, a place once loved (‘Anch’io ti amai’) for its decadent ‘hospital atmosphere’ against which the poet is now rebelling, ‘mi ribello con gioia / alle tue mani lugubri d’infermiera’ (PF, 365) [‘I rebel with joy / against your gloomy hands of a nurse’]. The Futurist polemics alternates between calls for the death and destruction of Venice and proposals for its cure and rejuvenation through modernisation. On the one hand, the city in its contemporaneous forms is depicted with images related to sorrow, boredom, violence, and devastation: Estuario di mota che al sol vapora, incensiere di tristezza e di noia, verrà, verrà il giorno che ti vedrem rosseggiare finalmente di sangue, nella ruina delle tue forme antiche! (PF, 366–367) [Estuary of mud which evaporates under the sun, censer of sadness and boredom, the day will come

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when we will see you redden finally with blood, in the ruin of your ancient forms!]

This prepares for the following proclamation of the necessity for a Futurist renovation of the city, which ‘rompe il dorso alle consuetudini, / ed alle tradizioni’ (PF, 367) [‘breaks the back of customs / and traditions’]. An interesting aspect of the above representation of Venice is that, despite the violent declaration of death for the city—and for the Romantic conventions that it symbolises—Mazza’s imagery is borrowed from a composition that conveys emotions traditionally represented in poetry, the sentimental feelings of the poet for his mistress. The image of Venice that under the sun ‘evaporates’ and fumes like a censer, before possibly one day turning blood red is taken from the pictorial scene depicted in Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘Harmonie du soir’, where the speaker expresses his sentimental sorrow (‘Le ciel est triste’, ‘Ton souvenir’, OC I, 47) through the symbols of the fuming censer, described as ‘evaporating’, and the blood red of the setting sun: ‘Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir’; ‘Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige’ (ibid.). Mazza repurposes Baudelaire’s poetry to fit his Futurist aims: namely, to denounce Venice’s decrepitude and monotony, and to wish for its (bloody) destruction. Mazza subsequently introduces the theme of Futurist renewal for the city of Venice: Ringiovanisci, se puoi, al soffiar del gran vento futurista […]. Ruggono i cantieri e li recinge l’ànsito del mare disfrenando ritmi possenti; […] il maglio vibra i suoi colpi secchi, con insistenza fatta Volere, […] la lima stride una canzone eterna di tagliente ironia; Sbuffano i mantici capaci; s’accorda l’orchestra dei martelli al sibilo delle sirene inebriate. (PF, 367)

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[Rejuvenate, if you can, while the great Futurist wind blows […]. Construction sites roar fenced by the swelling of the sea unleashing mighty rhythms; […] the hammer vibrates with every sharp blow, with persistence that becomes Will, […] the file squeaks an eternal song of sharp irony; The capacious bellows pant; the orchestra of hammers tunes to the hiss of the inebriated sirens.]

The cacophonous sounds of instruments and inorganic materials utilised in manufacturing and construction, such as hammers, the file, and bellows become here the source for Futurist poetry, where they are glorified as being part of the processes of urban renovation and industrial production. These sounds are described as ironic ‘songs’, irreverent towards poetic and musical tradition, and hammers are interpreted as an orchestra, ‘l’orchestra dei martelli’. The unpoetic and unmelodious properties of utensils such as hammers are also represented in a poem that, a few decades earlier, similarly discussed the modernisation of a city, Boito’s ‘Case nuove’, written in 1866. As seen in Chap. 2, Boito sarcastically calls the noises produced by hammers, axes, and battering rams, instruments employed to demolish old houses and build new ones, a musical ‘ode to the lime and the level’, ‘Suoni l’ode alla calce e al rettifilo!’ (OL, 58). The musical yet inharmonious qualities of Boito’s ‘ode’ are undeniable, as are those of Mazza’s ‘song’, and they both share an emphasis on the utensils and materials employed in the destruction and renovation of a city. These two poems, however, are also representative of the change in attitude towards technological progress that occurred in Futurist  poetry, where modernisation and industrialisation are praised and canonical literature and culture are condemned for being passéist, traditionalist, passatista. To be sure, Boito’s ‘Case Nuove’ cannot be dismissed as a nostalgic lamentation for past cultural and artistic values embodied by the demolished houses, as ‘è una polemica antipassatista […] quella condotta da Boito in “Case nuove”: una

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reazione contro il revival del passato nella realtà contemporanea, […] [contro] un percorso regressivo scivolante verso il passato simboleggiato, con definizione ossimorica, dai “fregi vieti” delle “case nuove”’ (Villa 2009, 409) [‘it is an anti-passéist polemic […] the one conducted by Boito in “Case nuove”: a reaction against the revival of the past in contemporary reality, […] [against] a regressive path sliding towards the past symbolised, with an oxymoronic definition, by the “old friezes” of the “new houses”’]. But Boito does not celebrate the seemingly chaotic process of modernisation either, unlike Mazza, instead standing witness to and representing in poetry the violent transformation of the city of Milan. This kind of technological and architectural progress is ultimately rejected and equated by Boito’s speaker with cultural decadence, as demonstrated in Chap. 2. The modern city as a poetic theme runs through the Futurist anthology, where it is mostly depicted at night to emphasise the innovations brought about by scientific discoveries such as electric light and electricity, as titles such as Altomare’s ‘Sinfonia luminosa’ attest. However, although the approach to this subject matter resulted largely in a Futurist acclamation of technology and the urban setting at night, the characters and places found in the modern city and their lyrical representations—most of the times shockingly grotesque, sexual, or violent—bear a distinct resemblance with those of the Scapigliatura and Baudelaire. One example of this is Govoni’s ‘Le capitali’ (PF, 262–266), where the poet characterises capitals as corrupt yet fascinating cities full of physically deformed men. Govoni focuses on places of illness and death such as morgues and hospitals, following the kind of sympathetic portrayal of vice and ugliness illustrated in the urban section of Baudelaire’s Fleurs entitled ‘Tableaux parisiens’, and especially in the two ‘Crépuscules’, ‘du soir’ (OC I, 94–95) and ‘du matin’ (103–104). Govoni’s mention of the military ‘rullanti tamburi’ [‘rolling drums’] resounding in the city, which ‘mettono nel cuore un desìo folle / di versare il proprio sangue / in un atto supremo d’eroismo’ (PF, 265) [‘put a mad desire in the heart / to shed one’s blood / in a supreme act of heroism’], is a Futurist take, incorporating patriotic desires and heroism, on the description of the unspecified martial sounds of the reveille reverberating among the barracks of the city that opens ‘Le Crépuscule du matin’, ‘La diane chantait dans les cours des casernes’ (OC I, 103). I believe, however, that Govoni’s reading of ‘Le Crépuscule du matin’, especially as regards the section just mentioned, was mediated by a poem that was itself influenced by ‘Le Crépuscule du matin’ and ‘du soir’, Praga’s ‘Armonie della sera’ (1864). Devoted to the portrayal of the sinful and dangerous

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city at night, ‘Armonie della sera’ continues in the same (urban) vein as Baudelaire’s ‘Crépuscule’ poems, focusing on the immoral behaviour of the inhabitants of the city—comprising themes such as gambling and prostitution—as well as on the presence of illness and mortality symbolised by the personification of ‘Death’, with an allegorising capital letter, wandering in hospitals (PP, 197–198). Most significantly, Praga represents a scene featuring music played by military drums in barracks, followed by a figurative representation of the ‘heart’ as the centre of human desire, which appears to be the link between Govoni’s ‘rullanti tamburi / che mettono nel cuore un desìo folle’ and Baudelaire’s reveille that ‘chantait dans les cours des casernes’: ‘Cantavan nell’ampie caserme i tamburi. / Nei vicoli oscuri,—coll’ansia nel cor | i giovani imberbi […]’ (PP, 197) [‘The drums sang in the large barracks. / In the dark alleys,—with a longing in their heart, | the inexperienced young men […]’]. Govoni occasionally employs the very same images and analogies first developed by Baudelaire, possibly because he considered them imaginative and original, including, for instance, the simile between cathedrals and forests: le cattedrali fresche come le foreste, dai grandi organi lucidi e rombanti come cascate d’argento, ampi e sonori come crepuscolari sereni, come arcobaleni. (PF, 263) [the cathedrals as fresh as forests, with great shiny and roaring organs like silver waterfalls, wide and sonorous like serene twilights, like rainbows.]

Centred upon sensory impressions, and especially the sound of organs compared to natural imagery, this passage inverts the analogy that opens Baudelaire’s ‘Obsession’, ‘Grands bois, vous m’effrayez comme des cathédrales; / Vous hurlez comme l’orgue’ (OC I, 75). It is interesting to note that, a few years before Govoni—who first published ‘Le capitali’ in his 1907 collection Gli aborti—the auditory, analogical, and ultimately innovative qualities of Baudelaire’s image of cathedrals and forests similarly influenced Camerana’s ‘Basilea’ (1882) and ‘Strofe all’Idolo’ (1900), as shown in Chap. 5.

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Occasionally, even the most daring and inventive analogies in the anthology, those introducing unusual images referring to prosaic, urban objects and modern technology, find their origin in the poetry of Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura. Exemplary of this is the juxtaposition between the eyes of the woman and the city’s buildings, which serves as a literary device to ‘de-idealise’ and modernise the poetic representation of female beauty. Compare, for instance, these two descriptions of the brightness of the woman’s eyes, from Govoni’s ‘Le capitali’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Tu mettrais l’univers entier …’, which is presented by means of a double simile in both poems: Là vanno belle femmine dalle pupille radiose come i brillanti, come reggie illuminate di bengala in serate di gala. (PF, 262) [Beautiful females go there with radiant pupils like diamonds, like palaces illuminated by fireworks on gala evenings.] Tes yeux, illuminés ainsi que des boutiques Et des ifs flamboyants dans les fêtes publiques. (OC I, 27–28)

The modernity of Baudelaire’s analogy between the ‘illuminated’ eyes of the woman and the light in shopwindows, introducing a reference to the mundane world of commerce, is transmuted by Govoni into that between the woman’s pupils and a ‘radiant’ product that, significantly, can be bought in shops: diamonds. Moreover, Baudelaire’s mention of the bright colour of blazing flames at public festivals is retained, turned into the more dynamic—and arguably more Futurist—image of flaming fireworks that, during festive galas, illuminate palaces. A similar analogical process likening human eyes and buildings can be seen in another Futurist composition that celebrates the artificial lights of the nightly city, Altomare’s ‘Sinfonia luminosa’. Here, this prosaic conceit involves the metaphorical interpretation of windows as eyes, and of shutters as eyelids:

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Ecco: le case socchiudono le palpebre stridule de le finestre da cui traspare e guizza qualche pupilla ostinata. (PF, 82) [The houses lower their window’s noisy eyelids where some stubborn pupil flashes and glimmers.] (Altomare 2005, 39)

The ‘window’s noisy eyelids’ are, in other words, the shutters of the house, an analogy that inverts a simile developed by Praga in ‘Seraphina’ (1864), where it is employed in a context that highlights its unpoetic qualities. Praga describes the horrible yet sexualised appearance of a prostitute who has just died of typhus, further characterising the de-sublimation of her ‘divine body’ (PP, 148) brought about by death through the juxtaposition of her eyelids with the shutters of a derelict house: ‘E le cascan le palpebre in frantumi / come imposte di casa inabitata’ (149) [‘And her shattered eyelids fall / like the shutters of a derelict house’]. On some of the compositions included in I poeti futuristi, Praga’s urban poetry had a very significant impact. In particular, the strange and occasionally shocking component of Praga’s wide-ranging analogies, joining disparate imagery and language features in the context of the description of the nocturnal city, was the most appealing factor to such Futurist poets as Altomare, Govoni, and Auro D’Alba. In the following excerpt from ‘Ricami d’ombra’, Altomare represents the sinister and distressing sounds of the city at night: Balza la pioggia con rumor di scudi, e spezza il sonno. […] Esce dagli angiporti sepolcrali l’acciabattar degli ebbri che spengono la loro ardente febbre sotto le docce sonore de le grondaie; mentre coppie di gatti sbucano dagli anfratti e s’azzuffano matti d’amore o rantolando vanno come bimbi sgozzati e con bramiti lunghi, disperati, invocano la luna come poeti amanti. (PF, 67–68, my emphases)

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[Rain leaps like the clashing of shields, breaks our sleep. […] From the sepulchral blind alleys emerge the footfalls of drunks quenching their ardent fever beneath the loud showers of the gutters; while cats creeping out of holes, skirmish, mad with love, or raucously gasp like throttled children, or with long, desperate wails invoke the moon like poets or lovers.] (Altomare 2009, 419, my emphases)

The association of the themes of love and poetry with a vocabulary of violence, death, suffering, and illness precludes any possible Romantic idealisation of the subject matter; re-contextualised, the meanings of love and poetry (and of the Romantic moon) are overturned, becoming part of the ironic depiction of the terrible and human-like cries of cats. The phrases highlighted in the extract, describing the rainy city at night, the screaming of cats in love, throttled children, and poets, rework images from the following poems by Praga, ‘Orgia’ and ‘La libreria’, both present in the collection Tavolozza:   Buia è la notte, e miagolan sui tetti come bimbi sgozzati i gatti amanti. (‘Orgia’, PP, 54)   [The night is dark, and on the roofs cats in love meow like throttled children.]   Cade la pioggia a torrenti, e risuonano come tasti di cembalo le tegole; un gatto nel cortil miagola ed urla, quasi di spento vate anima errante! (‘La libreria’, PP, 63)   [Rain falls in torrents, and the roof tiles resound like the keys of a harpsichord; a cat in the courtyard meows and screams, as if it was the wandering soul of a dead poet!]

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The scene as represented by Altomare does not change much compared to Praga’s; combining ‘Orgia’ and ‘La libreria’ in one single setting and reproducing certain expressions verbatim, such as ‘bimbi sgozzati’, with the aim to disgust the reader, Altomare pays homage to the unconventional qualities of Praga’s poetry and its capacity to debunk not only love, but also poetry itself. It is noteworthy that for his own portrayal of the voice of the cat likened to that of the dead poet in ‘La libreria’, in the gloomy scenery of a rainy city, Praga put together two separate images from the second stanza of Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ (LXXV): Pluviôse, irrité contre la ville entière, De son urne à grands flots verse un froid ténébreux […] Mon chat sur le carreau cherchant une litière Agite sans repos son corps maigre et galeux; L’âme d’un vieux poète erre dans la gouttière Avec la triste voix d’un fantôme frileux. (OC I, 72)

The verbal echoes between the two compositions are plain, and attest to the evolution of Baudelaire’s urban imagery of cats, rain, and nocturnal sounds, but also of his demystification of the meaning of poetry in modernity—here seen in the pitiful image of the ‘voice’ of the sorrowful poet reduced to inhabit the rain gutter of a building, like a ghost shivering in the cold—from the Scapigliatura to Futurism. And it is remarkable that, in another poem of the anthology, Govoni’s ‘Notte’, first published in his 1911 collection Poesie elettriche, images and analogies of the nightly city that resemble those in both ‘Orgia’ and ‘La libreria’ and  in ‘Spleen’ (LXXV) are displayed: […] un giardino che aspetta inutilmente una coppia di amanti; […] La sonnambula orchestra dei gatti elastici, sulle gronde, già incomincia ad accordare i suoi magri elettrici violini dalle corde fatte coi nervi dei più feroci suicidi. (PF, 268).

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[[…] a garden vainly awaiting a pair of lovers; […] On the eaves, the agile cats’ somnambular orchestra has already begun to tune its scrawny electric violins with strings made from the sinews of the fiercest suicides. (Govoni 2005, 29, 31)]

The figure of the ‘pair of lovers’ and the cries of the cats compared to those emitted by human beings experiencing an agonising death (‘nervi / dei più feroci suicidi’) exhibit a distinct likeness with the above descriptions by Praga of the sounds made by cats in love that are like the screams of children suffering a violent death (‘bimbi sgozzati’). Especially notable are the analogies with instrumental music, played by an ‘orchestra’ of ‘electric violins’ in Govoni’s poetry and by a harpsichord in Praga’s, both poems elevating an everyday and ordinary image—the noise of the rain on roofs in ‘La libreria’, the miaowing of cats in ‘Notte’—to a surreal inter-artistic conceit, poetic as well as musical, through the medium of analogy. Certain prosaic words in ‘Notte’ related to the thinness of cats (‘magri’) and the roof gutter (‘gronde’), however, come close to Baudelaire’s urban scenery in ‘Spleen’ (LXXV), characterised by the ‘thin body’ of the cat and the ‘gutter spouts’ of the building. The representation of the modernity of the contemporary city, or its renovation and rejuvenation through industrialisation, is, ultimately, a key theme in the anthology; one that bears many resemblances, particularly as regards unpoetic urban imagery as well as analogies between the cacophonous sounds of the modern city and poetic forms and techniques, with the Scapigliatura and Baudelaire. Others include the modernisation of traditional subjects such as fairy tales and myths by means of the inclusion of contemporaneous technological discoveries and the celebration of machines as a new poetic ideal of Futurism, as we shall see next.

The Lyre Is the Machine: The Inorganic Poetry of the ‘Mechanical Man’ In ‘Il piccolo re’, Auro D’Alba jokingly combines and blurs fairy-tale and mythical characters, monsters, electricity, and moonlight and starlight, in a scene that takes place in the early hours of the morning. Following the

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refusal of moonlight as lyrical subject and the metaphorical celebration of the ‘lune elettriche’ (TIF, 22) [‘electric moons’], electric lamps, of Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto ‘Uccidiamo il Chiaro di Luna!’ (1909, TIF, 14–26), the narrator of ‘Il piccolo re’ deprives moonlight of any Romantic and poetic connotations by mixing it with—and representing it as—electric light. Irreverent of religious and fairy-tale traditions, the anticlerical aspects of this unconventional fairy tale, aimed at debunking religious practices, are plain to see. Ironically, the ‘little king’ of the title is a short priest, with the church described as his tiny kingdom and the only female worshipper in the church as an old ‘Cinderella’: Bianca elettricità di luna nuova sulla chiesetta parrocchiale: i fanali iperemici—occhi gialli di streghe— attendono ai consueti spergiuri con la calma abituale. È l’ora della liturgia nella casa del piccolo prete, reuccio della chiesetta parrocchiale, la vecchia cenerentola—devota di Santa Prassede— apre il libro e sorveglia la monotona veglia. (PF, 231) [White electricity of a new moon on the little parish church: the hyperaemic lamps—yellow eyes of witches— await the usual perjuries with customary calm. It is the hour of the liturgy in the house of the small priest, little king of the little parish church, the old Cinderella—devotee of Saint Praxedes— opens the book and keeps an eye on the monotonous vigil.]

Interestingly, the opening of the seventh section of Praga’s ‘Domus-­ mundus’ (1864) paints a similar picture: it places an emphasis on the light coming from celestial objects just before dawn; it includes an anticlerical note in the blasphemous juxtaposition of the figure of the monk leaving

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his cell to begin his daily prayers and the brothel; and it illustrates a scene featuring a priest and a matronly woman. Praga writes: Come un mortale anelava il fuggente globo di Venere; e le montagne sotto il dì nascente parean di cenere. Era l’ora del sonno, del dolore, e dei patiboli; l’ora che il frate le celle, e l’amore lascia i postriboli. L’ora che, errando per la fredda chiesa, sbadiglia il chierico; e la matrona si dibatte, appesa a un sogno isterico. (PP, 172) [The fugitive globe of Venus gasped like a mortal; and the mountains under the rising day seemed the colour of ash. It was the hour of sleep, of suffering, and of the gallows; the hour when the monk leaves his cell, and love leaves the brothels. The hour when, wandering around the cold church, the priest yawns; and the matron struggles, hanging to a hysterical dream.]

The setting of the two poems is strikingly alike, with D’Alba even employing the same phrase indicating the time of the day as in ‘Domus-­mundus’ (‘È l’ora della’/‘Era l’ora del’). The two poems share further analogies in the subsequent stanzas, namely the images of the cocks, the colour yellow, and the artificial light from lanterns: Dalle cantine stridevano i galli col canto rauco;

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e le lanterne erano sgorbii gialli sul cielo glauco. (‘Domus-mundus’, PP, 173) [Cocks screeched from the cellars with their hoarse singing; and the lanterns were yellow scribbles on the glaucous sky.] Tre galli han cantato nel pollaio, tre suore hanno scosse le giallognole gote; erano troppo rosse le lanterne colorate! (‘Il piccolo re’, PF, 231) [Three cocks have sung in the henhouse, three nuns have shaken their yellowish cheeks; the coloured lanterns were too red!]

What is especially significant here, apart from their verbal parallels, is Praga’s characterisation of the gas lanterns superimposed on the brightening sky of approaching dawn as ‘sgorbii gialli’, as yellow gaslight that is slowly fading, merging with daylight and therefore losing its contour and shape. The amalgamation of natural and artificial light is also present in ‘Il piccolo re’, when the narrator juxtaposes moonlight and light produced by electricity, the ‘Bianca elettricità di luna nuova’ and the yellow ‘fanali iperemici’, as seen in the above extract; but it is perhaps most effectively represented in the following stanza: […] I fanali […] gettano i capelli d’oro lunghissimi sul gracile ossame e stanno, sentinelle avanzate, sulla piazza cinta d’assedio, dall’elettricità rossa della luna come in una fossa. (PF, 232)

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[[…] The lamps […] throw their very long golden hair on the frail pile of bones and stand, advanced sentinels, on the square besieged by the red electricity of the moon like in a ditch.]

Moonlight, now defined as ‘red electricity’, is portrayed with military language and imagery in the act of engaging in combat with the artificial light of the lamps (‘I fanali’) for the control of the square, besieging it. It is most remarkable that, in Baudelaire’s ‘Le Crépuscule du matin’, a poem that influenced ‘Domus-mundus’ and particularly Praga’s choice for the expression ‘Era l’ora’ and interplay between the waning light of the lanterns and the morning sky, an equivalent ‘combat’ rages between the red light of a gas streetlamp and daylight: C’était l’heure où l’essaim des rêves malfaisants Tord sur leurs oreillers les bruns adolescents; Où, comme un œil sanglant qui palpite et qui bouge, La lampe sur le jour fait une tache rouge; Où l’âme, sous le poids du corps revêche et lourd, Imite les combats de la lampe et du jour. (OC I, 103, my emphases)

D’Alba thus appears to have taken his cue from both Praga’s ‘Domus-­ mundus’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Le Crépuscule du matin’, recognising the existing connections between the two poems and building on their visual representations of the interaction, or battle, of gaslight with daylight4— but also on Praga’s irreverent anticlericalism—introducing the modern theme of electricity. D’Alba’s lyrical transformation of celestial light into electric light is part of Futurism’s repurposing of previous poetic rhetoric and imagery in its search for a modern and more tangible idea of the sublime in the poet’s wonder at technological progress and the speed of the machines, a recurrent feature of the anthology. The shift from the metaphorical and transcendental flight of the poet, associated with the creative process and representing feelings of ecstatic freedom, to the mechanical flight of

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aeroplanes, celebrating the beauty and speed of aircraft technology and the novel emotions experienced by the aviator, is another example of this concretisation of the poetic ideal. And yet in I poeti futuristi the poetic language and imagery employed to illustrate this new sublime is often based on those of previous poets, switching from a figurative to a literal (re)interpretation of the subject matter. Altomare’s ‘A un aviatore’, for instance, dedicated to an air pilot manoeuvring in the sky and to the exhilaration of the poet witnessing it, transmutes the spiritual-imaginative ‘elevation’ of the poet represented in Baudelaire’s ‘Élévation’ and, following the latter, in Praga’s ‘Elevazione’ (1864), into a real scene of flying. The opening is particularly interesting in its description of the aviator drinking the azure colour of the sky as if it was a liquid: Oh uomo che bevi a gran sorsi l’azzurro liquido del cielo, mentre t’avventi nel vuoto. (PF, 75) [Oh man who drinks in big gulps the liquid azure of the sky, while plunging into the void.]

It is not difficult to compare this to the underlying feelings of happiness and freedom that in Baudelaire’s ‘Élévation’ cause the speaker’s spirit to effortlessly elevate itself towards the sky in bird-like form and ‘drink’ air and rays of sunlight as if they were liquid; or to Praga’s corresponding poet who, when joyously speaking to his mistress, feels light like a bird flying in the ‘aura pura, fulgida, felice’ (PP, 198) [‘pure, bright, cheerful air’], drinking it. Baudelaire and Praga write: Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité, […] Envole-toi bien loin de ces miasmes morbides; Va te purifier dans l’air supérieur, Et bois, comme une pure et divine liqueur, Le feu clair qui remplit les espaces limpides. (OC I, 10) Quando ti parlo, come uno sparviero sono leggero;

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come l’augel che bee l’aure remote. (PP, 198) [When I speak to you, like a sparrowhawk I am light; like the bird that drinks remote airs.]

This unusual act of drinking air and colour while flying on an aeroplane, moving from Baudelaire and Praga’s spiritual-natural to an inorganic, mechanical imagery, is not exclusive of Altomare’s ‘A un aviatore’ in the anthology. Within the Futurist celebration of war, violence, and patriotism that is ‘Inno alla guerra’, Paolo Buzzi includes the following depiction of motorised flight and drinking of a ‘celestial’ substance akin to those seen above: ‘Io cerco di bere l’etereo incanto, l’elettro / del volo, dell’urto, del rombo che m’empia di musica i sensi!’ (PF, 112) [‘I try to drink the ethereal enchantment, the electricity / of the flight, of the collision, of the roar that fills my senses with music!’]. But in ‘A un aviatore’ Altomare also retains a more traditional representation of figurative ‘elevation’ to express the speaker’s spiritual and emotional delight: L’anima mia, canora come un’allodola, […] ti folleggia intorno [all’aviatore] sventolando bandiere di cobalto, cantando l’inno della tua vittoria! … (PF, 76) [My soul, singing like a skylark, […] frolics around you [the aviator] waving cobalt flags, singing the hymn of your victory! …]

Filled with joy, the poet’s soul flies alongside the aviator like a bird, a skylark, singing hymns to his glory and praising the success of his flight. The specific references to the speaker’s soul and the skylark, expressed by means of a simile, reveal a further connection with Baudelaire’s ‘Élévation’, whereas the musical aspects of the hymn sung by the speaker’s soul in the sky recall the melodic and celestial hymn heard by the bird flying close to heaven in Praga’s ‘Elevazione’:

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Mon esprit, tu te meus avec agilité, […] Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes, Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor. (OC I, 10) Quando ti parlo, come uno sparviero sono leggero; come l’augel che bee l’aure remote in cui le note vibran forse degli angioli d’Iddio! […] tu fai l’effetto di un bell’inno pensato in paradiso. (PP, 198) [When I speak to you, like a sparrowhawk I am light; like the bird that drinks remote airs where the vibrating notes are perhaps sung by God’s angels! […] you have the effect of a beautiful hymn conceived in heaven.]

As already seen several times in this chapter, and in the specific case of Altomare in his ‘Insonnia fantastica’, images, language features, and rhetorical devices characteristic of both Baudelaire’s and the Scapigliatura’s poetry are employed as a model, a blueprint upon which the Futurists build their lyrical treatment of modern subjects, including the flight of an aeroplane. This does not mean, however, that instances of flight are always described literally in I poeti futuristi. In the conclusion of Marinetti’s French poem ‘À l’automobile de course’, the sense of freedom felt by the poet while driving a racing automobile is conveyed through imagery of flight, as if the car’s speed gives the possibility to the poet to happily

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transcend both human and earthly restraints, taking (metaphorical) flight towards the stars: Hourrah! Plus de contact avec la terre immonde! … Enfin, je me détache et je vole en souplesse sur la grisante plénitude des Astres ruisselant dans le grand lit du ciel. (PF, 326) [Hurray! No more contact with this disgusting earth! I can finally detach myself and supply fly on the intoxicating fullness of the planets that swells forth in the great bed of the sky.] (Marinetti 2009b, 427)

In fact, parallels can also be drawn between ‘À l’automobile de course’ and Baudelaire’s ‘Élévation’, in their amalgamation of imagery of the cosmos and of water and liquidity while portraying the poet flying beyond the foulness of the world. The notion of flying smoothly above stars that flow like a river, leaving the ‘disgusting earth’ behind can be easily likened to Baudelaire’s poet who moves ‘avec agilité’ beyond ‘les confins des sphères étoilées’ like a swimmer in the sea, flying far away from the earth’s ‘miasmes morbides’ (OC I, 10). In the anthology, technological discoveries can serve not only as a means to glorify modernity but also as a figurative method of comparison for the expression of the speaker’s euphoric mood. Altomare’s ‘Sui monti’ depicts another type of elevation or ascension, the poet’s adventurous climb towards the top of a mountain. Upon reaching the summit, the speaker conveys his feelings of freedom and bliss by juxtaposing the lightness of his soul with the perceived weightlessness of a hot-air balloon: E inebriata d’etere, l’anima mia è leggera come una mongolfiera ferma fra la terra e cielo: le aquile la salutano! … (PF, 73) [And intoxicated with ether, my soul is light like a hot air balloon stationary between the earth and the sky: the eagles greet her! …]

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Although this passage bears some resemblance with ‘Élévation’ and ‘Elevazione’, I think that the main image of the hot-air balloon was in fact drawn from another poem by Praga, ‘Rivolta’ (1864). In the latter, the poet conveys the sense of lightness and wonder he feels in his soul through a comparison with the flight experience of an aeronaut, the pilot of a hot-­ air balloon: E a poco a poco mi sentìa nell’anima la leggerezza d’un ch’esce di guerra; la meraviglia che invade al punto di lasciar la terra l’areonauta. (PP, 203) [And little by little I felt in my soul the lightness of someone who lays down his arms; the wonder that invades the aeronaut when about to leave the earth.]

Science and technological wonders—and technical terminology, ‘aeronauta’— are thus also employed in Praga’s poetry as rhetorical devices to express comforting, pleasing emotions, and not just to condemn modernity and progress. But when approached and discussed directly in his poetry, contemporaneous technology is for the most part included in Praga’s polemics against the rapid and radical changes in society’s attitudes towards religion and science, such as in ‘Spes unica’ (1864). In an analogous manner to what we have seen in Chap. 2 with medical examination, science and modern technology are turned into lyrical images through which Praga denounces society’s hypocrisy when substituting Catholic worship with other, technological gods—for instance, the telegraph and the steam train: Tra i fili del telegrafo, col fischio del vapore, ti sparvero dal cuore l’ostia e il confessional! (PP, 181) [Between the wires of the telegraph, with the whistle of the steam train, the host and the confessional disappeared from your heart!]

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Unable to interest the ‘century of the machines’, the modern industrial and scientific world, in the beauty of art, the poet sarcastically ponders whether it would be better to write ‘practical’ poetry, composed in mechanical rhythms, about engineering feats including the drilling of the Mount Cenis tunnel between Italy and France, which was occurring at the time of writing of ‘Spes unica’: […] è solitaria, vana la nostra gioia, il nostro salmo il secolo delle macchine annoia; cantiamo in ritmo algebrico del Cenisio le porte, […].   Forse se ha senso pratico o di attualità, forse se, posto in musica, al volgo piacerà. (PP, 182–183) [[…] our joy is isolated, vain, our psalm bores the century of the machines; let us sing in algebraic rhythm the doors of the Mount Cenis, […].    Maybe if it has a practical or present-day meaning, maybe if adapted into music, the common people will like it.]

Futurism transformed this sarcastic and polemic poetic stance towards technology into a reservoir of imagery for their avant-garde, experimental poetry, although not with the aim to please the average reader but to find a new literary medium and aesthetics appropriate for modern sensibility and, in the process, shock the reader even further. The machine therefore becomes not only the symbol, but also the source for and expression of Futurist poetry, as Buzzi writes in a composition tellingly entitled ‘Inno

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alla Poesia nuova’: ‘La Lira è la Macchina, / oggi’ (PF, 107) [‘The Lyre is the Machine, / today’]. Buzzi applies in poetry what is advocated by Marinetti in the ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista’ as regards the novelty of themes and forms of representation brough about by Futurist literature, which focuses on mechanical subjects with the aim to write poetry not from a human perspective, but from that of inorganic matter, conveying ‘la respirazione, la sensibilità e gl’istinti dei metalli, delle pietre, del legno, ecc. Sostituire la psicologia dell’uomo, ormai esaurita, con l’ossessione della materia’ (PF, 18, emphasis in original) [‘the breath, the sensibility, and the instincts of metals, stones, woods, and so on […]. Substitute, for human psychology now exhausted, the lyrical obsession with matter’ (Marinetti 2009a, 122, emphasis in original)]. This shift in lyrical viewpoint also entails the psychological identification with the inorganic world, moving from the representation of organic subjects to the equivalence between man and machine: ‘dopo il regno animale, ecco iniziarsi il regno meccanico. Con la conoscenza e l’amicizia della materia, della quale gli scienziati non possono conoscere che le reazioni fisico-chimiche, noi prepariamo la creazione dell’uomo meccanico dalle parti cambiabili’ (PF, 23, emphasis in original) [‘after the reign of the animal, behold the beginning of the reign of the machine. Through growing familiarity and friendship with matter, which scientists can know only in its physical and chemical reactions, we are preparing the creation of the mechanical man with interchangeable parts’ (Marinetti 2009a, 124–125, emphasis in original)]. However, as seen in this chapter, despite Marinetti’s theoretical declarations Futurist poetry as included in I poeti futuristi was still very much rooted in human psychology and feelings, expressing the poet’s distress, derangement, pleasure, and excitement through fantastic and imaginative descriptions. Furthermore, the human body is also at the centre of some of the compositions which highlight medicine’s influence on the depiction of ugliness in poetry—and poetry’s unwillingness to return to a traditionally wholesome, uncorrupted, in other words Romantic image of female beauty. This loss of spirituality and idealism in favour of materiality in the anthology mostly results not in a condemnation but a celebration of scientific and technological progress, and in the search for a new sublime in the form of mechanical objects and speed. Above all, this chapter has demonstrated that, notwithstanding announcements of innovation and unreserved rejection of past literature, the impact of the Scapigliatura and Baudelaire on the first anthology of Futurist poetry not only is manifest,

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but extensive. This is certainly linked to the fact that all the poems included in the anthology, except Marinetti’s ‘Battaglia Peso + Odore’ (PF, 29–33), are written in free verse following, for the most part, traditional syntax. Written as introduction to I poeti futuristi and expressing Futurism’s ideal aim to represent objectively the life of matter through a union between the poet and the machine, Marinetti’s ‘Manifesto tecnico’ acted as a theoretical preview of a new kind of literary form that was considered by Marinetti to be the next development of Futurist literature, words-in-­ freedom, replacing free verse and abolishing conventional syntax and grammar: ‘Dopo il verso libero, ecco finalmente le parole in libertà!’ (PF, 22, emphasis in original) [‘After free verse, here at last are words in freedom!’ (Marinetti 2009a, 124, emphasis in original)].

Notes 1. For an understanding of the role of Boito’s Re Orso in the formation of Futurist literature, see also Daly 2016, which examines the influence of Boito’s fairy tale on Marinetti’s 1905 play Le Roi Bombance. 2. See, for instance, ‘Le due strade’ and ‘L’amica di nonna Speranza’ (Gozzano 2000, 135–140, 198–205), two poems included in Gozzano’s first collection, La via del rifugio (1907), and then reworked and republished in I colloqui (1911). 3. Indeed, literal and metaphorical imagery of suicide and abortion recurs frequently in Govoni’s early poetry as well, to the extent that his 1907 verse collection was entitled Gli aborti. 4. A similar battle between artificial light and moonlight is also portrayed in Praga’s ‘Terza rima’ (1864), where the speaker represents the fight between rays of light coming from a fireplace, a candle, and moonlight, ‘il suo raggio […] lottando col cero / e con la luna’ (PP, 115) [‘its ray […] fighting with the candle / and the moon’].

References Altomare, Libero. 2005. Luminous Symphony. In Italian Futurist Poetry, ed. and trans. Willard Bohn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2009. Shadowy Intricaces. In Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman. New Haven: Yale University Press. Baudelaire, Charles. 1975. OC I. Œuvres complètes, vol. I,  ed. Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’.

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Boito, Arrigo. 2009. OL. Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/ Novecento. Camerana, Giovanni. 1968. CP. Poesie, ed. Gilberto Finzi. Turin: Einaudi. Carli, Alberto. 2004. Anatomie scapigliate: l’estetica della morte tra letteratura, arte e scienza. Novara: Interlinea. Daly, Selena. 2012. Arrigo Boito e Filippo Tommaso Marinetti tra il Reale e l’Ideale. Otto/Novecento 3: 191–201. ———. 2016. Arrigo Boito’s Legacy to Futurism: Re Orso and Its Influence on Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Le Roi Bombance. Romance Studies 34 (2): 101–113. Giammarco, Anna M. Elena. 1977. Le forme poetiche nei futuristi tra preparazione e avanguardia: proposte di analisi formale. Rome: Edizioni dell’ateneo & bizzarri. Govoni, Corrado. 2005. Night. In Italian Futurist Poetry, ed. and trans. Willard Bohn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gozzano, Guido. 2000. Poesie, ed. Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti. Milan: Rizzoli. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ed. 1912. PF. I poeti futuristi. Milan: Edizioni futuriste di ‘Poesia’. ———. 1968. TIF. Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria. Milan: Mondadori, ‘I Meridiani’. ———. 2009a. Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature. In Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, 119–125. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2009b. To My Pegasus. In Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman. New Haven: Yale University Press. Podavini, Davide. 2012. The Anthology Poeti futuristi: Poetry of Transition. In The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies, ed. Geert Buelens, Harald Hendrix, and Monica Jansen, 33–52. Lanham and Plymouth: Lexington Books. Praga, Emilio. 1969. PP. Poesie, ed. Mario Petrucciani. Bari: Laterza. Rainey, Lawrence, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds. 2009. Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Rimbaud, Arthur. 2009. Œuvres Complètes, ed. André Guyaux and Aurélia Cervoni. Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’. Robb, Graham. 1993. La Poésie de Baudelaire et la poésie française: 1838–1852. Paris: Aubier. Villa, Angela Ida. 2009. Introduzioni e note. In Arrigo Boito. Opere letterarie, ed. Angela Ida Villa. Milan: Otto/Novecento.

CHAPTER 7

Concluding Modernity: Writing Analogy, Writing Avant-Garde

It is noteworthy that in the ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista’ Marinetti claims to be wanting to create a ‘mechanical man’ not through the limited knowledge of science, which can only study ‘le reazioni fisico-­ chimiche’ (PF, 23) [‘physical and chemical reactions’ (Marinetti 2009, 125)], but by expanding the investigation and understanding of matter in poetry. Starting from the destruction of traditional syntax, involving amongst other things the abolition of adjectives, adverbs, and punctuation (PF, 13–14), the next experimental stage of Futurist literature, words-in-­ freedom, would see the extension of the range of analogy, juxtaposing disparate images and thus forming analogical networks: ‘per avviluppare e cogliere tutto ciò che vi è di più fuggevole e di più inafferrabile nella materia, bisogna formare delle strette reti d’immagini o analogie’ (PF, 16, emphasis in original) [‘to catch and gather whatever is most evanescent and ineffable in matter, it is imperative to shape strict nets of images or analogies’ (Marinetti 2009, 121, emphasis in original)]. Favouring the poet’s intuition or ‘wireless imagination’ (PF, 21) over the poem’s logic and meaning, Futurist analogy merges the poet’s wide-ranging sensations of the surrounding world, discarding sentimentality and focusing instead on conveying sensory impressions: ‘solo per mezzo di analogie vastissime uno stile orchestrale, ad un tempo policromo, polifonico e polimorfo, può abbracciare la vita della materia’ (14) [‘the life of matter can be embraced only by an orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Cabiati, Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92018-0_7

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polymorphous, by means of the most extensive analogies’ (Marinetti 2009, 120)]. This search for an all-encompassing and multi-sensory poetic style by means of the analogy within and between colours (‘policromo’), sounds (‘polifonico’), and shapes (‘polimorfo’) is reflected in other manifestoes, such as the 1913 ‘Distruzione della sintassi—Immaginazione senza fili—Parole in libertà’, which expands on the ‘Manifesto tecnico’, published the previous year. In this manifesto, Marinetti claims that the (wireless) imagination of the poet relies on the collection and amalgamation of sensory data in a modern, dynamic world; the objective of Futurist wordsin-freedom is to assault the reader’s nerves with ‘sensazioni visive, auditive, olfattive’ (TIF, 70) [‘visual, auditory, olfactory sensations’]. In Marinetti’s ‘Battaglia Peso + Odore’, included in I poeti futuristi to illustrate Futurism’s new, avant-garde literary direction with words-in-freedom, the key role of the senses—sounds, colours, shapes, and odours—in the poet’s representation of a battleground is manifest: Tintinnìo zaini fucili zoccoli chiodi cannoni […] 50 profumi selciato materasso detriti sterco-di-cavallo carogne flic-flac ammassarsi cammelli asini frastuono cloaca Souk-degli-argentieri dedalo seta azzurro galabieh porpora aranci. (PF, 29) [Clanking backpacks rifles hoofs hobnails cannons […] 50 perfumes pavement mattress debris horse-manure carrion flic-flac piling camels donkeys racket sewer Souk-of-the-Silver-Smiths maze silk blue jellaba purple oranges. (Marinetti 2005, 13)]

In Marinetti’s theoretical description and practical application of words-­ in-­freedom, the centrality of the analogy between images loosely connected by their sensory characteristics, notwithstanding the abandonment of language’s referential function and meaning, reveals a link with Baudelaire’s analogical practice of ‘Correspondances’, analysed in Chap. 5. Indeed, this link has previously been investigated by scholars of Futurism. In her article on the evolution of synaesthesia from a medical condition to a literary metaphor employed by Symbolist poets in the late nineteenth century and later by Futurism, Meg Greenberg (2009) argues that the sources of Marinetti’s inter-sensory connectivity in ‘parole in ­libertà’ are to be found in Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’, filtered through the poetry of Rimbaud, René Ghil, Gustave Kahn, and Lucini. Futurist

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poetry, and especially words-in-freedom, would therefore be a representation of ‘the modern individual’s synesthetic experience of sensory overload’, mirroring the relationship between the poet and the city which derived from Symbolist aesthetics (Greenberg 2009,  381). While there has certainly been an evolution of literary synaesthesia from Baudelaire to Futurism, involving the influence of the above Symbolist poets and their depictions of the modern city, we should not forget that before Lucini’s Symbolism—but also, in a European context, before French and Belgian Symbolism—there was another movement that introduced Baudelaire’s paradigm of ‘Correspondances’ into Italian literature: the Scapigliatura. As shown in Chap. 4, Praga, Boito, and Camerana abandoned an oversentimental portrayal of the poet’s relationship with the feminine subject, typical of Romanticism, by focusing on the demystification of the woman’s supposedly angelic and virtuous nature, substituting it with expressions of overtly blasphemous, and occasionally macabre and sadistic, sexual longing for religious figures and divine bodies, mixing the sensual/erotic domain with the sacred and the spiritual. But in Chap. 5 it has been demonstrated that analogical correspondences also served to characterise the poet’s ecstatic feelings and desire for the lover, rooted in the interpretation of the woman and of the imagery of nature used to represent her not solely in spiritual but, most significantly, in sensory and physical terms as well. After debunking a Romantic vocabulary of oversentimental and idealistic love, to convey the poet’s joyful mood and idealistic yearning the Scapigliatura relied on analogies blending various and occasionally distant categories of images comprising the woman’s physical appearance, the overlapping of sensory impressions, musical instruments and singing, religious places and symbols, and natural landscapes and objects. Analogies and sensory correspondences are, however, not merely employed for sentimental purposes in the Scapigliatura. They also become the basis upon which the poets build their multi-sensory poetry combining elements from different artistic media, literature, music, and painting, as seen in Praga’s ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’, ‘Canzoniere del bimbo’, ‘E teco errando …’, ‘Se fossi seduta …’, ‘Esequie’, ‘Monasterium’, and Boito’s Re Orso, ‘Poesia e prosa’, Iràm. Indeed, these texts do not strive to establish a new form of poetic expression based on modern life and sensory excess, unlike Futurism, and, apart from ‘Poesia e prosa’ that can be considered as a statement of the kind of inter-sensory poetry—but also opera, as seen in

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Chap. 5—envisaged by Boito, and perhaps also from Praga’s ‘E teco errando …’, they are not developed around synaesthesia being the focal rhetorical device and imagery. But these compositions are nonetheless the first examples of modern Italian poetry representing the merging of the senses by means of the synaesthetic metaphor, experimenting with the mixing and blurring of sounds, perfumes, smells, and colours—but also taste and touch—modelled after Baudelaire’s theory of the ‘universal analogy’ and practice of ‘Correspondances’. The Scapigliatura searched for a new way of conveying sensations related to the poet’s emotional state, ecstasy, love, desire, but also sensory and mental derangement brought about by intoxication. In the case of Boito’s Iràm and Re Orso and Praga’s ‘Il poeta ubbriaco’ and ‘Profanazioni’, synaesthesia represents an altered state of consciousness that entails a transfiguration of reality by means of intoxication; perceived through the poet’s deranged senses, reality can only be portrayed lyrically in its synaesthetic form, translated into language that detaches itself from mimesis and referentiality, losing meaning and contour and becoming one with the poet’s (overlapping of) sensory perceptions. Camerana, on the other hand, interprets Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’ in a different manner. While retaining the association between natural elements or landscape and the feelings of the poet, unlike Praga and Boito he focuses his poetry written in the 1860s—which ought to be considered as a thematic blueprint for his successive poetic evolution, as demonstrated many times in this book—not on the combination of sensory impressions to express the poet’s deranged interiority, but on the analogy between the woman’s physical—and especially facial—appearance and nature, in particular the imagery of the sky. This can be considered as another one of the various facets of the Baudelairian analogy extensively employed by the French poet in the Fleurs, as discussed in Chap. 5. In the same manner as Praga and Boito, however, Camerana uses analogy as a figurative means to indirectly express the poet’s consciousness, his sensations and states of mind. We can thus safely draw a further connection between the Scapigliatura and Futurism originating in Baudelaire’s poetry, one that is not as explicit and evident as the textual similarities analysed in Chap. 6, but which warrants, and indeed deserves, future study. In Chap. 6, we have examined the Scapigliatura’s and Baudelaire’s combined influence on I poeti futuristi, which is not limited to the following remnants of more ‘traditional’ subjects in Futurist poetry: an emphasis on aesthetic and moral ugliness,

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mental distress, and fantastic transfiguration of reality; necrophiliac sensuality and the demystification of female beauty and the body through anatomical dissection; and the portrayal of the modern city, of its dangerous nature, its cacophonous and violent aspects, and its human and animal characters. On the contrary, Chap. 6 has also established the importance of poetic modes of representations that derived from the Scapigliatura and Baudelaire in Futurism’s treatment of subject matter related to scientific and technological progress. In some compositions  of the anthology, ‘Futurist’ topics such as electricity and aeronautical flight are based on previous depictions of the artificial light of gas streetlamps and lanterns, and of the metaphorical and lyrical flight of the poet’s spirit. There is, however, an evident change in attitude towards technology and science from the Scapigliatura to Futurism. Baudelaire and the Scapigliatura focus on what they consider to be organic or symbolic debris of the decadence of modern times identified in progress and commercialisation, turning the deformed and irregular bodies of modernity—human bodies, corpses, carrions, mummies, foetuses, but also statues, buildings, and city streets— into lyrical subjects, and occasionally, especially in the case of the Scapigliatura, polemically condemning science and medicine. On the other hand, Futurism celebrates technological advancement, to the extent that it becomes a new ideal which substitutes the traditional lyrical sublime of (human) beauty and sentimentality with the union between the poet— and poetry—and (non-human) inorganic matter: the beauty and the speed of the machine. Baudelaire was unquestionably a decisive and crucial discovery for the poetic production of Boito, Praga, and Camerana in the 1860s, at the time of the Scapigliatura. Very often, the three poets drew from the same poems of the Fleurs du Mal, or, at the very least, from compositions that similarly represent an analogous topic. ‘Correspondances’, ‘Élévation’, and ‘Harmonie du soir’ are three poems that have repeatedly appeared in this book, analysed in relation to the Scapigliatura’s analogical interpretation of nature. Others are ‘Une charogne’, ‘Une martyre’, ‘Le Mort joyeux’, ‘L’Irréparable’, and ‘Remords posthume’, which influenced the Scapigliatura’s portrayal of aesthetic ugliness, putrefaction, feeding, and scenes of physical decay and moral corruption. The shocking aspects of Baudelaire’s poetry directed, amongst other things, at disconcerting the average French bourgeois reader clearly appealed to Boito, Praga, and Camerana. Baudelaire, more systematically than any other poet before him, incorporated subjects and other features related to the most

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disgusting facets of contemporary reality that were not commonly included in the poetic domain. Yet, far from being a mere aesthetic provocation, the most realistic characteristics of Baudelaire’s Fleurs, entailing a focus on prosaic, exotic, and medical-anatomical language often juxtaposed with a lyrical and idealistic vocabulary, have a precise subverting and ultimately demystifying function against traditional Romantic conventions that were still commonplace in mid-nineteenth-century poetry, as seen several times in this study. From this point of view, this very function of Baudelaire’s realism—since there is another, figurative and metaphysical, function of Baudelaire’s realism—exerted a strong influence on the Scapigliatura. The Scapigliatura’s ‘realism’ aimed to depict reality in its totality, with its unresolvable contradictions, paradoxes, and excesses portrayed through oxymora and juxtapositions, while at the same time debunking the products and beliefs of modernity related to the advancement of science and medicine as well as religious and sentimental assumptions linked to an earlier Italian Romantic tradition, as shown in Chaps. 2 and 3. However, the Scapigliatura’s aesthetic idea of realism does not simply include a polemical use of realistic—and most of the time hideous—imagery. The subjects of the Scapigliatura are not treated as mimetic copies of reality but as a product of the poet’s imagination, including bizarre, hyperbolic, and surreal elements that open up their poetry to a figurative transfiguration of reality. This is due to their combination, as demonstrated in Chaps. 2 and 3, of Romantic fantasy and medical-realistic representations, blurring the boundaries between external reality and psychological or emotional exploration, overlapping fantastic and macabre-anatomical themes and, consequently, literal and metaphorical meanings. These aspects of the Scapigliatura’s poetry are indeed close to the more metaphysical side of Baudelaire’s poetry, where the poet’s despondent mood and the fragmentation of his poetic consciousness are conveyed by means of an allegorical identification with a modern urban and/or an autumnal-wintry landscape interspersed with sepulchral imagery, as seen in such poems as the series ‘Spleen’, ‘Le Cygne’, and ‘Brumes et pluies’. It could be argued that it is Camerana who is most influenced by Baudelaire’s allegorical landscapes, as demonstrated in Chap. 3 with ‘Ad Sepultam’ (I) and (II) and ‘Pax’, interpreting nature in allegorical terms as a reflection of the poet’s existential anguish, coupled with cemeterial conceits that express his contrasting feelings of disgust and fascination, but also of strong longing, for death. In Camerana’s poetry, the ugliness of bodily decomposition is questioned and ultimately overturned, becoming an integral part of the speaker’s

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lyrical—and spiritual—dream of death and therefore of his personal conception of beauty which transfigures the horrid appearance of cadavers, in a manner not dissimilar to Baudelaire’s transmutation of ugliness into the relative beauty of his Flowers of Evil. While Boito and Praga instead tend to keep the categories of aesthetic/moral ugliness and beauty separated, mixing them mainly when demystifying modern science and/or Catholicism, there are instances in which the distinction between such categories becomes muddy and unclear. We have seen this in Chap. 4 when, in Praga’s ‘Seraphina’, the sinful sexual act with a prostitute is deemed the only attainable paradisiacal state for the poet, a tangible paradise, unifying, through his re-evaluation of traditional moral, philosophical, and religious divides, the material and the spiritual, the sexual and the religious, the physical and the metaphysical. But it could also be argued that, following Baudelaire, the poet’s psychological introspection and investigation of distressful feelings play a role in Boito’s and Praga’s work, too, perhaps not as significant as in Camerana, but certainly relevant. Amongst the various examples that could be cited, in Chap. 3 I have shown Boito’s use of refrains and repetitions, and of the interaction between a traditional fairy-tale setting and the modern tools of nineteenth-­ century psychiatry, in the depiction of Re Orso’s obsessional thoughts and hallucinations; and in Chap. 6 we have examined Praga’s similar representation of psychological terror and paranoia, caused by insomnia, in ‘Nox’. Tracing the evolution of paradigms of modernity in Italy between 1857 and 1912, Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity has uncovered the crucial role of Baudelaire’s poetry in ‘making’ Italian poetic modernity, which, despite the chronological, ideological, and stylistic differences between the Scapigliatura and Futurism—but also among the poets of the Scapigliatura themselves—maintained a certain continuity of subjects and themes. Deeply influenced by Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, the poetry of the Scapigliatura—complex, heterogenous, often contradictory—ought thus to be considered, and indeed studied, as the first expression of modernity in Italy.

References Greenberg, Meg. 2009. Synesthesia and Literary Symbolism. Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies 43 (2): 362–384. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ed. 1912. PF. I poeti futuristi. Milan: Edizioni futuriste di ‘Poesia’.

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———. 2005. Battle: Weight + Odour. In Italian Futurist Poetry, ed. and trans. Willard Bohn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ———. 2009. Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature. In Futurism: An Anthology, ed. by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, 119–125. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1968. TIF. Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria. Milan: Mondadori, ‘I Meridiani’.

Index1

A Alighieri, Dante, 103, 124 Divina Commedia, 103, 124, 135n4 Allegory, 9, 91–135 allegorical landscapes, 127 The modernity of allegory, 9, 110–111, 125 Analogy, 179–218, 271–277 between nature and the woman, 208 synaesthesia and sensory union, 180, 182, 186, 199, 272 words-in-freedom, 269, 271 Anglophone scholarship on the Scapigliatura, 15 Arrighi, Cletto, 13 Introduzione, La Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio, 14, 29n7 Presentazione, 13, 29n5 Prologo, La Scapigliatura, 14, 29n8

B Banville, Théodore de, 56, 87n8, 218n2 Les Stalactites, 219n2; Chanson à boire, 218–219n2; La Chanson du vin, 219n2 À Vénus de Milo, 56 Baudelaire, Charles, 1 Choix de maximes consolantes sur l’amour, 44 Exposition universelle, 1855, 43, 49, 185 Fusées, 43 La Double vie, par Charles Asselineau, 38 Le Peintre de la vie moderne, 6, 43; Éloge du maquillage, 6, 185; La Modernité, 7 Les Fleurs du Mal, 1; Au lecteur, 96, 99, 101; Avec ses vêtements...,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Cabiati, Baudelaire and the Making of Italian Modernity, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92018-0

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INDEX

Baudelaire, Charles  (cont.) 144; Bénédiction, 235; Bohémiens en voyage, 149, 179; Brumes et pluies, 121, 122; À celle qui est trop gaie, 212; Chanson d’après-midi, 153, 171; Chant d’automne, 164; Correspondances, 182, 186, 191, 272; Danse macabre, 131; De profundis clamavi, 129; Élévation, 187, 190, 197, 262, 265; Épigraphe pour un livre condamné, 94; Franciscae meae laudes, 146; Harmonie du soir, 180, 198, 206, 249; Hymne à la Beauté, 44; J’aime le souvenir…, 57; Je t’adore à l’égal..., 158; Je te donne ces vers…, 145; La Chevelure, 190; La Géante, 211, 215; L’Âme du vin, 218n2; L’Amour du mensonge, 183; L’Aube spirituelle, 165; Le Balcon, 158, 190; Le Beau navire, 162; Le Crépuscule du matin, 126, 251, 261; Le Crépuscule du soir, 207; Le Cygne, 38, 125; Le Mauvais moine, 173; Le Mort joyeux, 66, 130; Les Bijoux, 157; Les Deux Bonnes Sœurs, 160, 247; Le Serpent qui danse, 143, 155; Les Litanies de Satan, 110; Les Métamorphoses du vampire, 140, 229; Le Soleil, 51, 79; Les Petites vieilles, 39, 42; Le Squelette laboureur, 76; Les Sept vieillards, 113; Le Vin de l’assassin, 232; Le Vin des amants, 232; Le Vin du solitaire, 102, 232; Le Voyage, 53; L’Invitation au voyage, 210; L’Irréparable, 106, 114; Mœsta et errabunda, 160;

Obsession, 192, 252; Parfum exotique, 182; Première version de la dédicace, 94; Projets de préfaces (III), 38; Que diras-tu ce soir…, 146, 162; Remords posthume, 68, 105, 163; Réversibilité, 146; Sed non satiata, 146; Spleen (LXXV), 229, 256; Spleen (LXXVI), 38, 124; Spleen (LXXVIII), 119, 227; Tout entière, 196; Tu mettrais l’univers entier…, 253; Un fantôme, 156, 210; Une charogne, 12, 51, 60, 107, 133, 237; À une Madone, 140, 146, 152, 167, 174; Une martyre, 55, 62, 71, 241 Les Misérables par Victor Hugo, 93 Les Paradis artificiels, 200; Le Poème du hachisch, 200 Le Spleen de Paris, 136n10; Le Confiteor de l’artiste, 136n10, 185; L’Invitation au voyage, 185, 208; Mademoiselle Bistouri, 113 letter to Alphonse Toussenel of 21 January 1856, 184 letter to Nadar of 14 May 1859, 11 Mon cœur mis à nu, 97 Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, 40, 47, 93 as the poet of modernity, 1 Puisque réalisme il y a, 11, 12 Salon de 1846, 4; De l’héroïsme de la vie moderne, 5; Qu’est-ce que le romantisme, 4 on surnaturalisme, 185 Beauty in modernity, 5, 43–47, 57, 130–135, 224, 245 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 130, 219n3 Bohemianism, bohème, and bohême, 12, 14, 180

 INDEX 

Boito, Arrigo, 18 Esperimenti della Società del Quartetto: secondo esperimento, 87n5 Iberia, 153 Il libro dei versi, 35; Case nuove, 49, 245, 250; Dualismo, 39, 46, 50, 87n3, 135n6, 144, 153, 177n2; A Emilio Praga, 52, 221; Georg Pfecher, 153; A Giovanni Camerana, 47, 52, 214, 224, 245; Lezione d’anatomia, 58, 239; Madrigale, 177n2; Poesia e prosa, 201; A una mummia, 39; Un torso, 53 Il pugno chiuso, 114 Introduction to ‘Ballatella,’ 20, 224 Iràm, 198 I sette peccati mortali (Quadro di Ernesto Ewald), 100, 107 L’Alfier nero, 114 La musica in piazza, 49 letter to Camille Bellaigue of March 1908, 36 letter to Emilio Praga of April 1866, 19, 36 letter to Giovanni Bottesini of 18 November 1878, 201 Mefistofele, 144, 152; Prologo in cielo, 144, 197 Nerone, 154 Re Orso, 91, 139, 199, 231; Ago e arpa, 151; Antiche storie, 96, 139, 147; Confessione, 102, 111, 116, 135n1; Constrictor, 141, 145, 148; Esordio, 98; Incubo, 114; La cena, 100, 150, 200, 232; Litania, 105, 110; Lo spettro, 103, 111; Morale della fiaba, 92; Viaggio d’un verme, 103, 105, 108, 111, 135n1 Riviste drammatiche, 109, 150

281

Boito, Camillo, 76 Book of Isaiah, 105 Borel, Pétrus, 4 Bousingots, 4 Corsaire-Satan, 4 Bourget, Paul, 8 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 8 C Callot, Jacques, see Durini, Alessandro Camerana, Giovanni, 18 Ad Arrigo Boito, 118, 172 Ad Sepultam (I), 128, 217 Ad Sepultam (II), 133 Ad un amico, 120, 207 Autunnale, 127 Basilea, 208, 252 Bel tempo, 214 Canicola, 119 Cerco la strofa..., 134 Emancipazione, 204 A Emilio Praga, 204 Fra le Alpi, 122 A Giuseppe Giacosa, 117 Grido intimo, 123, 127 Guarda lo stagno…, 215 Il velo nero, 213 Io sognai. Fu il mio sogno..., 169 La Femme, 176 Lilium, 127, 211 Memorie, 175 Nella sua nicchia..., 173 Noi c’incontrammo..., 209, 210 Note morenti, 126, 206 O bella dama..., 212 Oropa, a la statua, 175 Pax, 130, 213, 247 Società promotrice in Torino, 203 Spes unica, 124 Strofe all’Idolo, 208, 252 Sul cretoso declivio..., 213 Vorrei..., 170

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INDEX

Champfleury, 10 Courbet, Gustave, 10 Croce, Benedetto, 110 D D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 16, 169, 192 La pioggia nel pineto, 192 Dante Alighieri society, Turin, 117 Duchesne, Alphonse, 12 Durini, Alessandro, 179 La gioventù del pittore ed incisore Giacomo Callot, 179 E Eliot, T. S., 1, 110 Esquirol, Étienne, 112 Des maladies mentales considérées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal, 112 Excess, 91–116 gluttony, 100, 124; intoxication, 102, 179–196, 198, 230 moral and physical corruption, 96, 103, 139, 164 worm of conscience, 105 Existential anguish, 117–135, 227 ennui and boredom, 99, 119, 122 insomnia, 226 F Fantin-Latour, Henri, 10 Farina, Salvatore, 117 Figaro, periodical co-edited by Arrigo Boito and Emilio Praga, 19, 37 Polemica letteraria, 19, 37, 47, 87n1, 221 Flâneur, 8, 82 Frénétiques, see Borel, Pétrus, Bousingots

G Gautier, Théophile, 2, 87n8 on Baudelaire’s decadent style, 2 Goncourt, Edmond de, 10 Gospel of John, 88n11 Gozzano, Guido, 236, 269n2 H Houssaye, Arsène, 29n2 Hugo, Victor, 2, 44, 92 Cromwell, 45; Préface, 45 Le Rhin, 92; Légende du beau Pécopin et de la belle Bauldour, 92, 135n2 I Idée fixe, 2, 112 I poeti futuristi, 25, 222 Altomare, Libero, 225; Insonnia fantastica, 225; Ricami d’ombra, 254; Sinfonia luminosa, 253; Sui monti, 265; A un aviatore, 262 Bètuda, Mario, 230; Re Alcool, 230 Buzzi, Paolo, 263; Inno alla guerra, 263; Inno alla Poesia nuova, 267–268 D’Alba, Auro, 257; Il piccolo re, 257 Govoni, Corrado, 243; Le capitali, 243, 251; Notte, 256 Manzella Frontini, Gesualdo, 237; Sala anatomica, 237 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 26; À l’automobile de course, 264; Battaglia Peso + Odore, 272; Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista, 26, 223, 268, 271

 INDEX 

Mazza, Armando, 248; A Venezia, 248 Palazzeschi, Aldo, 236; L’incendiario, 236 Italian scholarship on the Scapigliatura, 15 K Keats, John, 88n9 L Le Correspondant, 12 Le madri galanti, 117 Leopardi, Giacomo, 58 Nella morte di una donna fatta trucidare col suo portato…, 58 Literary Decadence, 8 Aestheticism, 16 Baudelaire’s decadent features, 8, 47 Décadence, French Decadence and Symbolism, 16; Le Décadent, 16 Decadentism in Italy, 15 Love and tenderness, 159 Lucini, Gian Pietro, 28 Ragion poetica e Programma del verso libero, 28 Revolverate, 28 M Manzoni, Alessandro, 95 I promessi sposi, 95 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 3 Anthologie des poètes italiens contemporains, 27 Contro Venezia passatista, 248 Guerra sola igiene del mondo, 29n1

283

Le Désespoir du faune, 27 Noi rinneghiamo i nostri maestri simbolisti ultimi amanti della luna, 29n1 Preface to Gian Pietro Lucini’s Revolverate, 28 Uccidiamo il Chiaro di Luna!, 258 The modern city, 49, 250 P Parnassianism, Parnasse, 56, 87n7 Le Parnasse contemporain, 87n7 Pascoli, Giovanni, 16 Poe, Edgar Allan, 12, 39, 112 Berenice, 112 Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, 12, 39; Petite discussion avec une momie, 39 The Raven, 113 Some Words with a Mummy, 39 Pontmartin, Armand de, 11 Praga, Emilio, 18 Fiabe e leggende, 187; Paesaggi, 187, 205 L’esposizione di Belle Arti (1865), 179, 185 L’esposizione di Belle Arti: lettere e divagazioni, 48, 94 Penombre, 22; Ancora un canto alla luna, 192; Armonie della sera, 251; Brianza, 158; Canzoniere del bimbo, 188; Covento ideale, 166; Dama elegante (I), 152; Dama elegante (III), 151; Dolor di denti, 193, 230; Domus-mundus, 258; Elevazione, 262; Esequie, 189; E teco errando…, 190; Imbiancatura, 186; La festa e l’alcova, 156; L’anima del vino,

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INDEX

Praga, Emilio  (cont.) 218n2; Monasterium, 189, 205; Nevicata, 163; Noli, 162; Nox, 183, 225; Profanazioni, 164, 194; Rivolta, 266; Seraphina, 167, 246, 254; Se tu fossi seduta…, 195; Spes unica, 86, 88n12, 266; Tentazioni, 141; Terza rima, 269n4; A un feto, 77, 237; Vendetta postuma, 69 reply to Arrigo Boito’s letter of April 1866, 19 Tavolozza, 22; Il poeta ubbriaco, 181; La libreria, 255; Larve eleganti, 155; Nella tomba, 65; Orgia, 255; Per cominciare, 234; Pittori sul vero, 235; Suicidio, 70, 155 Trasparenze, 30n12; Sulla tomba di I.U. Tarchetti, 30n12 Prarond, Ernest, 3 Proust, Marcel, 87n4 R Realism, 10 Baudelaire’s realism, 12 in the nineteenth century, 10 The Scapigliatura’s realism, 20, 36, 47, 95, 116, 204 Religion, 139–177, 190 The angelic woman, 151, 158, 171 in modernity, 85, 266 and science, 77–87, 266 The Virgin Mary, 146, 152, 173 Rimbaud, Arthur, 57, 180, 213, 218n1, 232 Le Bateau ivre, 232 letter to Paul Demeny of 15 May 1871, 180

Une saison en enfer, 213 Venus Anadyomène, 57 Voyelles, 232 Romanticism, 4 and modern beauty, 6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6 Rovani, Giuseppe, 14 S Scholarship on Futurism and Baudelaire, 26 Scholarship on the Scapigliatura and Baudelaire, 22 Scholarship on the Scapigliatura and Futurism, 26 Science and medicine, 17, 35–87 anatomical dissection, 58, 65, 76, 237 Delirium tremens, 110 monomania (see Idée fixe) poetry against medicine, 58–64, 75, 83, 242 positivism, 17 progress, 47–58; applied to art, 49; as decadence, 48, 53 technology, 257; electricity, 257; engineering, 267; mechanical flight, 262; racing automobile, 264; union between the poet and the machine, 268, 271 Sex, 139–177 prostitution, 167, 175, 206 rape, 86, 88n12, 141 sexual desire, 139, 152, 167, 171, 174, 175 sexual deviance, 139; bestiality, 97–98, 150; necrophilia, 133, 158, 206, 241, 246

 INDEX 

285

T Tarchetti, Igino Ugo, 18 Disjecta, 18; Memento!, 18 Todorov, Tzvetan, 114 Tribunal de la Seine, 11, 37

Verdi, Giuseppe, 36 Verlaine, Paul, 1, 219n4 on Baudelaire as the quintessential modern man, 1–2 Soleils couchants, 219n4

V Valette, Charles, 12

W Wilde, Oscar, 16