Giuseppe Baretti – Wikipedia

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“It costs less effort to be said, that not judging everything with one’s own judgment. (from there Literary whisk ,, N. ° XVIII, 15 June 1764) ”

Giuseppe Baretti .
Portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1773, oil on canvas
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Giuseppe Marco Antonio Baretti , also known by the pseudonym of Aristarco Scannabue (Turin, April 24, 1719 – London, May 5, 1789), was a literary critic, translator, poet, journalist, playwright, Italian lexicographer and linguist.

Marc’Antonio Giuseppe Baretti, eldest son of Luca and Anna Caterina Tesio, was born in Turin, the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia governed by Casa Savoia. In 1733, to finance his formation, his father, employed at court as a military architect, claimed the income of a chaplainnìa remained vacant to the death of a distant relative. [first] The fourteen year old Baretti was thus ordered cherry thunder and, presumably, was enrolled in the metropolitan seminary.
Piedmont was perhaps not on par with other culturally richer and advanced Italian regions, but Turin was certainly recognized as the government of one of the most ancient reign dynasties and one of the main European political powers. By hosting a large number of foreign diplomats and a real academy of excellent reputation, frequented both by local subjects as by individuals from other Italian states and abroad, the city could certainly be said to be cosmopolitan. [2] In addition, the University of Turin, recently modernized and secularized, had also become a model institution, attracting illustrious scholars and teachers such as Girolamo Tagliazucchi, professor of Eloquency and Greek, to whose circle of Baretti students occasionally joined , as a teenager already passionate about literature.
In 1735 he died Caterina, mother of Giuseppe, Filippo, Giovanni and Amedeo Baretti. A month after his death, the widower Luca married Genoveffa Astrua, of a wealthy and important family, who introduced his Cicisbeo or Cavalier servant to Baretti in the Baretti house. [3] This family situation and the nascent literary vocation, strongly advened by the father, led to a breakage of the young Baretti with the aforementioned and induced him to abandon his habit and religious benefit and to leave Turin at the end of Lent in 1737. [4] He found refuge with his father’s younger brother, Giovanni Battista, secretary to the court of the Duchess of Guastalla, and his uncle procured him at a Guastallese merchant who served as a ducal treasurer. The poet Carlo Cantoni also worked at this merchant, who supported and led Baretti’s literary studies and was considered by him, together with Tagliazucchi, as a teacher. [5] The young man then began to write verses modeled on those of great authors of the Italian poetic tradition, Burlesca and satirical, such as Luigi Pulci, Francesco Berni, Ludovico Ariosto, Niccolò Machiavelli, Anton Francesco Grazzini and Lorenzo Lippi. [6] This type of poetry – intended to counter the melliflua and frivolous lyrical production of the numerous members of the Academy of Arcadia active throughout Italy – was practiced by Vittore Vettori, a doctor -poet of Mantua with which Baretti corresponded in those years [7] And from many other writers that he had the opportunity to get to know and attend once I left Guastalla to live in Venice (where he made friends with Gasparo and Carlo Gozzi and Luisa Bergalli) and then in Milan (where he entered the Academy of the transformed).
Reconciled with his father in 1742, Baretti spent the two years following Cuneo, holding the assignment of custodian of the Erigenda Cittadella and published the Rooms to Father Serafino Bianchi from Novara (1744). At the same time an unpublished song dates back to the Liberation of Cuneo from the siege of Franco-Ispane troops during the Austrian succession war. [8] Upon the death of his father in June 1744, Baretti returned to Turin, however, soon part of it for Milan and then for Genoa looking for job opportunities. In the spring of 1747 he was again in Venice, where he resumed attending the Gozzi literary circle, the Academy of the Grancelleschi, and gave the first test of his talent as a controversy by publishing a letter in which he ridiculed Biagio Schiavo, fervent as much as sophisticated defender of Petrarch. In Venice Baretti also expected to the translation of the tragedies of Pierre Corneille into loose Italian verses. He accepted the assignment out of need, and he would always have to denigrate the mediocre quality of his translation. [9] However, the preface to Piervelio tragedies (1747-48) – In which, while recognizing the high caliber of the French tragic theater, he assigned the merit of the best epic poetry to Italy, and reproached the arrogance of French critics and their ignorance of the Italian language – they were rightly Considered precursors of the ferociously polemical but also modern and engaging style of Baretti.
Back in Turin in 1750, in time to compose a dramatic action for music to celebrate the wedding of Duke Vittorio Amedeo (future Vittorio Amedeo III of Savoy) with the Spanish Infanta (Maria Antonia of Borbone-Spain), Baretti attempted in vain of ensure stable employment in the capital Sabauda: the publication of its poetic collection ( The pleasant poems , Turin, Campana, 1750) did not earn the negative opinion that the Turin academic Senate had formed him to the previous appearance of a libel in which Baretti ruthlessly attacked the pedantic erudition of Giuseppe Bartoli, successor of the Tagliazucchi. He therefore decided to leave Italy and seek fortune in England, following the recommendation of James Caufeild, count of Charlemont, which would remain one of his most faithful supporters in Great Britain.
He arrived in London in March 1751 and probably went to stay at his countryman, the famous violinist and composer Felice Giardini, then director of the London theater orchestra orchestra. The composition of two interludes for music ( Don Quixote in Venice It is The triumphant Filippa ), however unpublished, and the publication of two brochures on opera and musical topics in 1753, [ten] They convinced many scholars that Baretti was hired as a librettist poet from that theater. However, there is no official documentation of its use, even temporary, at the King’s Theater. We know, however, that, applying to the study of the English language, Baretti rapidly master quickly and was able to know, briefly, the writer and justice of peace Henry Fielding and get in touch with the novelists Charlotte Lennox and Samuel Richardson, with L ‘Shakespearean actor David Garrick, the painter Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Samuel Johnson, thus ensuring a place in the most important artistic and literary circles of the British capital. Baretti put his remarkable knowledge and linguistic skills at the service of his English friends and students whom they obtained him, and embarked on the role of promoter of the Italian language and literature, writing texts aimed at making them accessible to a wide variety of British readers .
Among the works of the first ten -year English living room of Baretti must be mentioned The Italian Library (1757), a bio-bibliographic repertoire to be considered as the first crestomacy of Italian literature in English. In this work, among other things, for the first time, the quotation of the phrase “and although it moves!” attributed to Galileo but not registered in any previous document. [11] At the beginning of 1760, Baretti finished filling out and published A Dictionary of the English and Italian Languages , a job that fried him a lot of fame and a good profit. [twelfth] Baretti then agreed to accompany a young English gentleman in his Grand Tour on the continent. The two sailed for Lisbon in August 1760 and led a long journey by land, through Portugal, Spain and France, a journey of which Baretti stipulated a detailed account in epistolary form ( Family letters to his three brothers , Tomo I, Milan, Malatesta, 1762; Volume II, Venice, Pasquali, 1763). [13] Arrived in Italy at the end of that year, and spent some time with his family, Baretti ended up settling in Milan, where Antonio Greppi intercede for him at the plenipotentiary minister Carlo Giuseppe di Firmian so that he would get a job in the Lombard administration- Habsburg. In the autumn of 1762, when it was still waiting for this position to materialize, the Portuguese diplomats – offended that are flaming for observations on the Portugal contained in the first volume of Baretti’s travel letters – showed their discontent obtaining the suspension of the press and circulation of the ‘Opera. [14] Discounts, discouraged and without more means of sustenance, Baretti left for Venice in the hope of resuming the publication of his travel letters in the Serenissima. Meanwhile, the Milanese authorities reported it to the Venetian government, as a potentially subversive individual and to be kept under control, obtaining the result that the rest of the manuscript remained for a long time in the hands of the censors and the second of the expected four tomes saw the light only in October of the 1763. [15] Finally, Baretti renounced the printing of the travel letters and, creating the fictitious character of Aristarco Scannabue, a ex-soldier taken editor, launched the innovative and desecrating magazine The literary whisk (1763-1765), unfortunately also destined to incur the Venetian censorship: the first twenty-five numbers came out in Venice and the last eight in Ancona, in the Papal State. The Baretti had taken refuge to continue the publication of the periodical when the Venetian government He had suspended it in his territory, largely for the pressures of his father Appiano Buonofade, a particular target of the famous attacks by Aristarco. The whip However, a crucial link to the experiences of the first twenty -five years of career of Baretti and those of the last twenty -three, from his definitive return to England in [1766] until his death, which occurred almost on the eve of the French Revolution, was located. [16] Returning to London, Baretti began attending The Literary Club, founded by Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds during his absence, strengthening old relationships and establishing new and important (with the writer Oliver Goldsmith and the politician Edmund Burke, among others). The late sixties and the beginning of the seventies marked a period of intense activity and recorded a growth of the fame (and notoriety) of Baretti. An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (1768), written to refute the many Italian stereotypes present in the diaries of foreign travelers (and in particular that of Samuel Sharp), was read and appreciated by King Giorgio III/Giorgio III of the United Kingdom, and aroused heated debates among his own readers, enjoying great commercial success. In June 1769, Baretti was appointed secretary of foreign correspondence at the newborn Royal Academy of Arts, a mostly honorary but rather prestigious position, for which he would have been late in a small annual pension in the last part of the
his life. In the autumn of the same year, he was tried by murder, having hit one of the three pursuers who had attacked him in a road near Haymarket with a stiletto with a stiletto for having roughly rejected a prostitute. Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and other important personalities testified in his favor, so that his process, which ended with the acquittal in full formula, dealt with all the British newspapers. [17] A second trip to Spain, made not long before Haymarket’s accident, provided Baretti further material for A Journey from London to Genoa (1770), or the full English version of the travel letters only partially published in Italy: the success of this work proved to be even greater than that of the Account . The publication of a complete edition of the works of Machiavelli and an anthology containing texts by various authors in English, French, Italian and Spanish with translation against them, followed in 1772, after what would be the last visit of Baretti to Parenti And friends in Italy.
In 1773 Baretti became a private teacher of Italian (and then also of Spanish) by Hetty Thrale, daughter
Of the rich owner of one of the greatest British breweries, Henry Thrale, and his wife Hester Lynch Thrale, who were very close friends of Johnson and often hosted him and the members of his club in their home in Streatham Park. The refusal of Baretti of a chair of Italians, offered to him in 1774 by the Trinity College in Dublin, was in all probability due to the sense of safety and satisfaction that he derived from feeling part of the family of this dear student. [18] For her, Baretti wrote the whimsical dialogues of the Easy Phraseology , published in Italian and English in 1775. [19]

In the same year, he accompanied Hetty, his parents and Johnson on a journey to France who had meticulously organized for them. However, not long after their return to England the relationship with Mrs. Thrale began to deteriorate and in July 1776 Baretti left this use to resume critic and lexicographer activity. The following year he saw the publication of the Speech on Shakespeare , a short but important dissertation in which Baretti took the defenses of William Shakespeare – the subject of a recent attack on Voltaire in a public letter to the Académie Française – enhancing the irregularities and dramatic strength of passions, signs, in his opinion , of that ‘inventive genius’ that manifests itself spontaneously in the real artists (position that would seem to anticipate romantic theories).
Baretti had long been dedicated to the study and teaching of the Spanish language and literature, but he did not manage to publish in England, as his desire was, an edition of the history of Fray Gerundio de Campasas, satirical work of the Jesuit José Francisco De Isla, known by him and expressly consulted during his last trip to Italy. Although he could not in that attempt, nor could he ever finish a translation of Don Quixote, promised to the publisher Thomas Davies, in 1778, in addition to preparing the Italian translation of Seven Discourses on Art of Reynolds, he published an existing Spanish-English dictionary in a revised and expanded edition.
The staging, in 1779, of Song for secular Di Orazio, result from the collaboration of Baretti with the composer François-André Danich Philidor, was successful, but the Frenchman left the city after only three performances, taking a large part of the proceeds. Fortunately, Baretti could then count on the proceeds of the publication of an anthology of his letters ( Choice of family letters ) conceived for the use of Italian students: an epistolographic manual that however shows its opinions on a large amount of cultural and social topics.
At this point, in his private correspondence, Baretti began to complain about the political crisis
That Great Britain was crossing because of the American war of independence, and that, committing the British public almost exclusively in political debates, he was costing him the loss of students and many friends.
In June 1780, while he was probably engaged in the drafting of A Guide through the Royal Academy (1781), received, after a three -year -old silence, a letter from Piedmont who announced very roughly the death of his brother Amedeo: our then wrote a long and very loving answer, his last letter from Filippo and Giovanni. [20] With the half -brother Paolo, son of the second bed of his father Luca, known in person only in 1766 in Livorno, where he served as Console Sabaudo, Baretti continued to stay in touch.

Upon Johnson’s death in December 1784, Baretti had now come to the end of his career as a writer, and you cannot help but regret that he chose to vent sorrows and disappointments, even legitimate, of his last years by committing herself in further diatribes: In 1786 he published Tolondron , a series of discursive and satirical essays written to highlight the deficiencies of the commented edition of the Don Quixote prepared by the Englishman John Bowle; In 1788, irritated and distressed by the recent publication of a couple of books on Johnson who were out of it – not only in his opinion – the memory and here and there they attacked Baretti personally, he directed to the author, the widow Thrale or Hester Lynch Piozzi, Three invectives in the European Magazine. [21] While the speeches on the edition of John Bowle, despite the across the satirical tone and the groundlessness of several judgments that Baretti formulated you, still contained many valid and useful information on the Spanish language and literature, the invectives against Hester Lynch Piozzi were generally considered Too free malignant and misogynistic for some contemporary to appreciate the narrative verve and the masterful use that the Piedmontese writer made you of the English language (his third after the Italian and the French). [22] In May 1789, with the backward retirement of several months, Baretti died of complications probably due to a strong Gotta attack, in a modest accommodation for rent, in the MaryLebone district where he lived and held a workshop one of his most faithful friends and Furr, the sculptor Joseph Wilton.

Irreverent and rebellious, Baretti distinguished himself for his proud spirit of independence, for a choice of non -belonging (partly dictated by his personal circumstances and partly deliberate) and an autonomy of thought unequaled by the majority of Italian intellectuals of his time. Traveling extensively to Italy and Europe, and living and working for over thirty years in London, he lived an authentically cosmopolitan experience. His talent and interest in languages ​​- who studied and taught with great commitment and passion – allowed him to open up to other cultures, to penetrate them and feed their insatiable intellectual and human curiosity that can much greater than many of his contemporaries. Attentive to the agile discursive style and the fictional devices used by the English periodic press – by Spectator and the Flavors by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Johnsonian magazines The Rambler It is The Idler – Baretti assumed the ‘mask’ of Aristarco Scannabue and made his own Literary whisk An effective and original controversy against those who considered obstacles to the aging of Italian language and culture and to the accessibility and wider diffusion of culture in general. His targets were the cloying poetry of Arcadia, the imitators and defenders of Petrarch, the past practices of the Accademia della Crusca, the academic erudition, religious bigotry. A vehemely vein controversy and nonconformist is present in all the production of Baretti. This vein, combined with the fact that he made the language and style the privileged basis of his criticism – and this often led him to disqualify the contribution of great contemporary writers such as Carlo Goldoni, Cesare Beccaria and other collaborators of Il Caffè – made it It is difficult to place in the century of Enlightenment. For the original mediation that Baretti operated between tradition and modernity, he was not by chance defined, oxymorically, a “conservative rebel”. [23] The reactive and not so thoughtful or proactive method of his work, and therefore the apparent extraneousness to the most innovative currents of thought of his time, however, do not prevent an extraordinary controversy in Baretti, a great value writer, a great travel narrator And above all, an extraordinary witness of his times. These are undoubtedly the reasons why Piero Gobetti would have called Baretti His literary critical magazine, founded in 1924.

Giacomo Leopardi gave in Speech above the present state of Italian customs A substantially negative judgment of Baretti, “spirit in large part equally false and original, and diluted in saying badly, and little intent or certainly a little to benefit, and yes for the singularity of his way of thinking and seeing, although this nothing affected , yes for its decisive inclination to spread everything, and the sith harsh and angry character towards everything, most of the time alien from the truth ». [24]

  1. ^ Gian Luigi Rapetti Bovio della Torre, Baretti, Rivalta Bormida and family roots , in Giuseppe Baretti: Rivalta, the family roots, the work , edited by Carlo Prosperi, Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 1999, pp. 9-10.
  2. ^ Paola Bianchi, A gym of chivalrous arts and politics. Austro-German appearances at the Royal Academy of Turin in the eighteenth century , in Corti as a place of communication. Habsburgs and Italy (XVI-XIX centuries). Höfe Als Orte der Kommunikation. Die Habsburger und Italien (16. bis 19. JH.) , and Cura di M. Bellabarba a J.P. NOODE COUNTRY, BOOLGNNN-Berlin, Il Mulino / Dunker & Humblot, 2010, PP. 135-153; ead., Conservation and modernity: the Court-City Binomial through the prism of the Royal Academy of Turin , in The city in the eighteenth century. Knowledge and forms of representation , edited by M. Formica, A. Merlotti, A.M. Rao, Rome, Editions of History and Literature, 2014, pp. 107-125; Ead.,, The British at the Turin Royal Academy: Cosmopolitanism and Religious Pragmatism , in Turin and the British in the Age of the Grand Tour , edited by Paola Bianchi and Karin Wolfe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 91-107.
  3. ^ Norbert Jonard, Giuseppe Baretti (1719-1789). Man and work , Clevermont-Fer, G. The BussAC, 1963, PP. 21-23.
  4. ^ Bovio della Torre rapetti, Baretti, Rivalta Bormida and family roots , cit., p. 10.
  5. ^ William Spaggiari, Prehistory of Baretti: the pleasant poems and the school of Girolamo Tagliazucchi , in Giuseppe Baretti: Rivalta Bormida, the family roots, the work cit., Pp. 41-60.
  6. ^ William Spaggiari, Baretti and Burlesca poem , in 1782. Italian studies , Reggio Emilia, Diabasis, 2004, pp. 46-64.
  7. ^ Francesca Savoia, “Give me cards, pen, and calamaio”: letters by Giuseppe Baretti to Vittore Vettori Verona, quieted, 2019.
  8. ^ Giuseppe Baretti, “In bitumen, in fire, and in the objection”. Unpublished poems , A Cura Di F. Savoia, Canterano (RM), Aracne, 2017, pp. 22-31.
  9. ^ Giovanni Ponte, Giuseppe Baretti translator of the “Cid” by Pierre Corneille , in Giuseppe Baretti: Rivalta Bormida … , cit., pp. 61-73; Francesca Savoia, Between writers and gentlemen. News and unpublished of the first English baretti , Florence, SEF, 2010, PP. 120-129.
  10. ^ Giuseppe Baretti, Theatrical writings , edited by Franco Fido, Ravenna, Longo, 1977; Franco Fido, A libel of the early years of Baretti in London , in From one shore and on the other. Studies in honor of A. D’Andrea , edited by Dante della third, Florence, Cadmo, 1995, pp. 293-305.
  11. ^ Corrado Viola, English Baretti. In the margin (and inside) to “The Italian Library” , in Giuseppe Baretti three hundred years after his birth. Proceedings of the International Conference (Seravezza, 3-4 May 2019), edited by D. Marcheschi and F. Savoy, Pisa, Ets Editrice, 2020, pp. 101-131.
  12. ^ Giovanni Iiartino, The lexicographer as a biased witness: social, political, and religious criticism in Baretti’s «English-Italian Dictionary» “Age”, 64, 3 (1990), pp. 435-444.
  13. ^ Elvio Guagnini, A chaos of stuff: the family letters of Giuseppe Baretti between autobiography, fiction and travel writing , «Italies», 1, 1997, pp. 10:1 7-25; ID., Baretti and the Scriptures of (E) travel , «kayen’», 55, 2019, pp. 10:1 35-47; ID., Forms and ways of the travel story. Some consideration regarding the beginning of the “family letters” , in Giuseppe Baretti three hundred years after his birth cit., Pp. 257-266.
  14. ^ Luísa Marinho Antunes, Giuseppe Baretti traveling: a critical look at Portugal , Ives pp. 211-256: 226-230.
  15. ^ Between cultural mediation and diplomacy: the case of Giuseppe Baretti , in Diplomacy and literary communication in the eighteenth century (Proceedings of the International Conference of Modena, 21-23 May 2015), edited by D. Tongiorgi and F. Fedi, Rome, Editions of History and Literature, 2017, pp. 238-256: 248-249.
  16. ^ Francesca Savoia, The junction of the “literary whisk” , “Came” “, 54, 2019, pp. 35-45.
  17. ^ Franco Arato, Baretti at the bar. An Italian writer before an English court , in Giuseppe Baretti three hundred years after his birth cit., Pp. 49-62
  18. ^ Francesca Savoia, A forgotten letter to Mrs. Thrale: revisiting a chapter of Baretti’s career , «Bulletin of the John Rylands Library», 96, 1 (2020), pp. 60–76.
  19. ^ Iartino, Giovanni. Baretti Master of Italian in England and the Easy Phraseology , in The Italian passenger. Essays on literatures in English in honor of Sergio Rossi , edited by R. S. Crivelli and L. Sampietro, Rome, Bulzoni, 1994, pp. 383-419
  20. ^ Giuseppe Baretti, Epistolary , Murney of L. Pierons, Barents, 1936, 2 voll., II, pp. 245-247
  21. ^ Giuseppe Baretti, Invectives against an English lady , edited by Bartolo Anglani, Rome, Salerno, 2001.
  22. ^ Bartolo English, The profession of metaphor. Giuseppe Baretti Intellectual and writer , Modena, Mucchi, 1997, pp. 341-375
  23. ^ Luca Serianni, Italian in prose , Florence, Franco Cesati, 2012, p. 125.
  24. ^ Giacomo Leopardi, ” Speech above the present state of Italian customs , in G. L., All poems and all the prose , Newton & Compton Srl, 1997, p. 1012.
  1. ^ Copy archived ( PDF ), are comitatonazionalebaretti.it . URL consulted on January 8, 2021 (archived by URL Original January 10, 2021) .

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