ABSTRACT
Intent on finding a scapegoat for the assorted ills that delayed Italy’s transition into modernity, nationalist historians of the Risorgimento attributed decadence to foreign invasions and Spanish domination. What began as an explanation quickly solidified into a preconception, one that was buttressed by the authority of the great literary historian and critic Francesco De Sanctis (1817-1883) and of the philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce (18 6 6 -1 9 5 2 ), who produced the first major edition of De Sanctis’ writings. For De Sanctis, culture could only flourish within the confines of an independent and democratic national state, and so when Italy succumbed to Spanish domination in the early sixteenth century its vibrant cultural and moral life fell into decay. He characterized the Baroque as nothing more than a degeneration of the Renaissance.1 Cochrane observed, ‘the enormous prestige enjoyed by De Sanctis’ work during the half-century after national unification and its canonization in the Gentile educational reform of the 1920s as the
official textbook of Italian literature in the schools of Italy assured for the “decadence” thesis a prosperous future’.2 From the mid-sixteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, Croce accordingly pronounced, Italy ‘was bereft of all political life and national sentiment, freedom of thought was extinguished, culture impoverished, literature became mannered and ponderous, the figurative arts and architecture became extravagant and grotesque [imbaroccbironoY.3 In his masterful History of the Age of the Baroque in Italy, he also indicted the Counter-Reformation Church, to which the Italian spirit meekly submitted, for the loss of artistic and intellectual leadership and the moral and spiritual torpor of the age.4 If, on empirical grounds, the works of De Sanctis and Croce are now outdated, their influence on the framing of questions has continued to thrive: it can be detected both in studies that dismiss the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a dreary interlude in Italian history5 and in revisionist works like Cochrane’s, which treat the period as an age of authentic cultural creativity and religious renewal, an age demanding our respect.
