ABSTRACT
Byrons Parisina draws on the history of the House of Este in Ferrara in the fifteenth century to explore the themes of adultery, madness and violence. Parisina and Ugo dEste go to the executioner almost as willing subjects, reifying their aesthetic and dramatic place, together with their sexual bond, in this ceremonial structure. In Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault suggests that death plays a crucial role in the democratization of sovereignty. Both poem and opera use the background of Renaissance history to explore the contradictions within the modern sovereign state. They use the paradigm of the absolutist, despotic Renaissance state to comment on the politicization of death at different periods in the formation of Italian nationalism. Writing in 1860, Burckhardt projects the Romantic cult of individual personality onto the Renaissance state; the Italian despotic state becomes an alternative to the biopolitical drive of the democratic modern nineteenth-century state in which aesthetics no longer plays any significant part.
