SOURCE: “Creator of Poetic Myths,” in Ugo Foscolo, Twayne Publishers, 1970, pp. 107-24.

[In the following essay, Radcliff-Umstead traces the various evolutionary stages of Foscolo's unfinished poem The Graces, and discusses how the fragments illustrate the poet's views on artistic expression and contemporary events and figures, as well as how it fuses modern and mythic elements.]

After completing Of Tombs, Foscolo considered composing several ambitious verse projects. A letter to Monti of December 12, 1808, lists the subjects of his proposed series of Italian hymns. In a poem to be entitled Alceus (Alceo), he intended to trace the history of Italian literature since the fall of the Byzantine Empire; a fragment of this work became the Hymn to the Ship of the Muses. Nothing remains of the projected composition “To the Eponian Goddess,” where Foscolo planned to celebrate the glory of equestrian arts in time of war and peace. The author sketched a detailed prose summary for another projected work, “To the Ocean,” on maritime enterprises and mercantile exploits; unfortunately, he never made a verse transcription. Inspired by Gray's Hymn to Adversity, the Italian author also wished to write a poem called To the Goddess Misfortune, which was to stress the value of adverse fortune and the heavenly virtue of compassion. All of these compositions were to be in blank verse. In addition, Foscolo had designed a complex hymn to Pindar, to be versified in rhymed Greek strophes and antistrophes. But of all the projects mentioned in the Monti letter, the only one which was realized in great part (though not fully) was a poem to The Graces, where Foscolo hoped to canonize metaphysical ideas on true Beauty. His sensitive and meticulous method of versifying made rapid progress on any project quite impossible. Eventually scattered fragments from the abandoned compositions were incorporated into The Graces.

This episodic poem exemplifies Foscolo's quest for an ever elusive sense of Harmony. Since the Graces were among the lesser divinities whose cult appeared only late in antiquity, the poet felt free of any fixed tradition, so that he could animate those mythic figures with his own sentiments. He envisioned the three goddesses as kindly mediators between troubled mankind and the all-powerful deities of Olympus. The theme of the Graces, inspirers of hospitality and the fine arts, had occurred first in Foscolo's adolescent verses. Later the opening lines of the ode to Luigia Pallavicini referred to the three gentle goddesses as the solicitous hand-maidens of Venus; and in the poem to Antonietta Arese the author begged the Graces to withdraw their smiling glance from anyone who would disturb his beloved's serenity with dreadful thoughts of fleeting beauty and death. In the letter of May 15, 1798 in Last Letters; the hero reflects how the ancients used to entreat the Graces to compensate for mortal imperfections. Throughout his life the poet saw the Graces as the mythical embodiment of man's noblest and most civilized aspirations.

Foscolo never succeeded in bringing his poem to a definitive stage. Despite his careful labor on its various sections and the numerous prose summaries which he wrote to elucidate the work's allegorical implications, he was unable to find the ideal modality that would have permitted him to finish the poem. Under the guise of a translation from an ancient Greek hymn, Foscolo had first inserted sixty-seven verses into his commentary to Berenice's Lock (1803) with the subject matter of the Graces. Ten years later he received official approval to publish the Rite of the Graces, which commemorates the military prowess of the Italian viceroy and the conjugal devotion of his wife, Amalia Augusta. Then, during the period of his exile, a few passages of the poem were printed in the Biblioteca Italiana of 1818. The most significant publication in the author's lifetime was the dissertation On an Ancient Hymn to the Graces (1822), which appeared in the text, Outline engravings and descriptions of the Woburn Abbey marbles. This dissertation, which explains in great detail the allegory of the major sections in the poem, was occasioned by the replica of Canova's statue group, “The Three Graces,” in the collection of the Duke of Bedford. After Foscolo's death, Quirina Magiotti attempted in vain to piece together the poem in its entirety, working from the author's manuscripts. Finally in 1848 the critic Orlandini, after years of labor, published The Graces as a supposedly integral work without lacunae. For over thirty years Orlandini's arbitrary reconstruction was accepted as corresponding to the poet's original intentions. But in the late nineteenth century, serious methodical examination of the variant poetic manuscripts and prose summaries proved how distorted and abortive had been Orlandini's version of fifteen hundred lines. Even today, the task of producing a critical edition of The Graces remains problematic.¹

From his letters and summaries it is obvious that Foscolo first conceived of a single hymn to the beneficent influence of the Graces on human life. While working on the poem at Bellosguardo, the author decided to extend the composition to three hymns; one for each of the lovely ladies who were to figure as priestesses of the fine arts: Eleonora Nencini for music, Cornelia Martinetti for eloquence, and Madalena Bignami for the dance. Shortly afterward he modified the general design so that according to the final division there are three hymns each named for a major Olympian deity: Venus (celestial Beauty), Vesta (virginal Virtue), and Pallas (heavenly Wisdom). The three priestesses all appear in the second hymn. One structural feature is prominent throughout the various reworkings: a desire for architectonic symmetry based on the number three. Groupings in three prevail throughout the poem. The Graces are of course a pagan triad: Aglaia (Brilliance), Euphrosyne (Joy), and Thalia (Bloom). It is the function of the Graces to dispense the three heavenly gifts of beauty, virtue, and wisdom to deserving mortals. Foscolo also meant for his work to be interpreted on three levels—poetic, historical, and metaphysical. Poetically, the composition reveals how the Graces intercede on humanity's behalf before the gods of Olympus. Historically, the poem is to narrate the transfer of civilizing arts from Greece to Renaissance Italy. On a metaphysical level, grace appears as a delicate harmony which arises from beauty of body, goodness of soul, and depth of intelligence. The poet's faith in the moral perfectibility of mankind determines the allegorical system of the three hymns.

As a protasis to the whole poem, Foscolo placed nine verses in rhyming tercet groups; the first line is a septenary while the following two are hendecasyllables. Otherwise, the entire composition is in hendecasyllabic blank verse. In the protasis the author consecrates to the Graces an altar in his villa at Bellosguardo. The first hymn opens with an invocation to the three charming goddesses, whose aid the poet requests. Then the author invites Canova—sculptor of the Graces and inspirer of the poem—to come and worship at the hillside shrine. All at once, without transition, there is a temporal switch to the imperfect tense, which re-creates a fabled age of savage passions when cannibals roamed the untamed forests of prehistoric Greece. At that time the Graces had not yet arrived to refine the fierce instincts of the earth's earliest inhabitants and to introduce agriculture. One day, however, Venus—the sovereign force behind Nature's perennial fertility—looked with compassion upon the world's barbarian races and resolved to call forth her daughters the Graces from their birthplace in the Ionian Sea. Foscolo departed from the standard mythic identification of Eurynone (daughter of Oceanus) as the mother of the three divinities. The thought that Venus and the Graces were born in the depths of Grecian seas fills the poet with pride because of his own birth on Zante, and he breaks the narrative in eighteen ardent verses which evoke his homeland. Unlike the sonnet to Zante and the strophe in his second ode that speaks of the island, here focus is one of exterior admiration of the isle's woods, serene skies, and sacred temples. Originally these verses, with their religious intensity, were to appear in the hymn Alceus, but in their new context they add a picturesque quality to the tale.

A vividly animated scene resumes the narrative thread as Venus and the Graces sail atop a seashell to the shore where an infinite number of Nereids rush forth to pay homage to the supreme ethereal goddess and her divine daughters by Jove. To reproduce mimetically the excitement of the Nereids in the presence of the deity, Foscolo experiments with the rhythm by employing limping sdrucciolo lines of twelve syllables. He also introduces a simile (a rare image in his other poetic compositions) which compares the joyful commotion of the sea-nymphs as they crowd around the divinity to the buzzing of bees about springtime flowers full of nectar. Although the author had sources in the Iliad, Aeneid, and especially Catullus' Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, the imagery of the Nereid verses displays a voluptuous exultation which expresses Foscolo's personal participation in the delighted excitement of the sea-nymphs.

Suddenly violets, emblematic of feminine modesty, sprout at the foot of a cypress tree, while red roses turn to white in order to symbolize the purity and innocence of the Graces. These three goddesses immediately assume their duties as handmaidens to their mother and garb her in a sacred robe, which the poet designates with the archaic term peplo so as to summon forth an ancient ritualistic ceremony of devotion to the Olympian personification of Beauty. Now that Venus is about to begin a triumphal journey across the wildlands of the Laconian peninsula, two hinds voluntarily leave the service of the huntress Diana and submit to the gentle Cytherean goddess by drawing her chariot. Iris (the rainbow) serves as charioteer for the procession through the savage landscape which leads to the dark forest of the Laconian isthmus. When ferocious warriors prepare to attack the cortege, Venus solemnly decrees that the land be submerged along with its brutal inhabitants. An atmosphere of marvel hovers over the author's representation of primeval Hellas.

At this point, the text becomes a chaotic succession of variant passages, digressions, and partially completed verses. The poet interrupts the narration of the goddess's cortege to sketch an historical picture of the internecine violence in the world before the coming of the Graces. In describing the Hellenic landscape he relies heavily on ancient place names so as to evoke a remote prehistoric age. During that uncivilized period, Amor, Venus' impulsive son, reigned supreme with his three assistants—Fear, Envy, and Boredom. The author prophesies that Amor will briefly agree to a truce with his chaste sisters the Graces in order for the aboriginal races to learn the rudiments of agriculture. A peaceful reign of legal and religious institutions and Spartan discipline will thrive until Amor grows envious of Hymen (god of weddings) and brings about the Trojan War. Throughout these rather confusing passages, Foscolo borrows frequently from his translation of Book II in the Iliad.

Once again the narrative returns to the divine procession. Upon the pinnacle of Mount Ida, Venus bids farewell to her daughters since she must assume her place among the gods in Olympus. The deity explains that the sublime task of the Graces is to remain on earth and placate the wrath of Olympian divinities toward sinful mortals. Those three sisters are to console the world's neglected poets, enlightened rulers, tender mothers, faithful maidens, and patriotic youths. Then in the rose-golden light of the dawn Venus ascends to the celestial spheres while throughout the universe there resounds a wondrous harmony which gives birth to painting, architecture, and sculpture. This first hymn closes with an epilogue where Foscolo relates how the Graces have had to flee Greece and seek asylum in Italy. In his own day their cult is almost forgotten, but the poet vows that his sylvan temple at Bellosguardo will be forever dedicated to their civilizing mission. Foscolo has recaptured in the opening hymn all the vigor and harshness of a primitive myth.

Neopagan ritualism characterizes the second hymn with its setting in contemporary Italy. The author summons to the altar of the Graces the three fairest ladies of the country: Nencini from Florence, Martinetti from Bologna, and Bignami from Milan. This hymn celebrates those beautiful women whose graciousness awakens in the hearts of men an appreciation for the fine arts. About these charming ladies the poet imagines he has gathered maidens and youths to participate in the sacraments of the Graces. These maidens bear roses, doves, and three chalices of the whitest milk as their chaste offerings before the altar. A hushed silence falls over the worshipers when Eleonora Nencini, in her role as priestess of music, plays a harp. Here the language recalls the ode to Antonietta Arese; even the archaic word, bisso, is employed again. Musical fervor and refined sensuality are simultaneously linked in the harp-playing sequence. The melody which soars from the chords of the instrument produces a series of harmonious visions, such as Socrates listening enraptured to the song of the hetaira Aspasia along the shores of the Ilissus. From his ecstatic absorption in the music the Grecian philosopher came to view man's fate as a frenetic pursuit of capricious Fortune that exalts individuals only to debase them later; virtue, as inspired by harmony of soul, provides the one protection and solace for mankind's sufferings. After the harp's concord fades away, Foscolo entreats the youthful throng to express their admiration for the Florentine priestess by fetching alabaster vases to water the multicolored flowers which she has planted on the slopes of Bellosguardo and in the gardens of her own villa.

Part II of the second hymn is by far the most unsuccessful section in the entire poem. As her sacrifice to the Graces, Cornelia Martinetti places on the altar a honeycomb which represents the gift of poetry that Italy received from ancient Greece. Bees since ancient times have been associated with eloquence. Foscolo alludes to the myth of the bees that nurtured the infant Jove in a Cretan cavern; later the supreme god made the bees immortal and consecrated them to Vesta.² The divine sweetness of their honey symbolizes the poetic eloquence which the Graces transported to the Italian peninsula to produce first the glory of Latin letters and then the splendor of the Renaissance. A lengthy and tedious literary history follows (doubtlessly derived from the abandoned Alceus), which prosaically details how Mars expelled the eloquent bees of Phoebus from Constantinople and drove them to the humanistic centers of Italy. Some of the bees alighted by the Po and inspired such poets as Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso in their attempts to write chivalric epics. Foscolo's fragile survey of the transition from Greek to Latin literature also relates how the arrival of angelic bees in Tuscany had made possible the arising of a rhymed poetic tradition in the vernacular with Dante and Petrarch. This schematic résumé comes to life only in the passage which recaptures the charm of the valley of the ladies from Boccaccio's Decameron. Rather comically, Foscolo pictures the Boccaccian character Dioneo in lustful pursuit of the lovely Fiammetta. In his desire to seduce the maiden, Dioneo drives guardian doves away from the entrance to a grotto where he surprises a nymph who has surrendered to the enticements of a faun. This lascivious youth, who figures as the king of the Decameron's seventh day with its salacious tales, represented for Foscolo the exact opposite of the chaste virtues which the Graces incarnated. He sincerely felt that the Decameron was not proper reading material for innocent young ladies. After the evocation of Boccaccio's work, the second section concludes with the formal dedication of the honeycomb and Cornelia Martinetti's prayer for the gods to grant continued eloquence in speech and literature. The inherent weakness of this literary history in verse is common to almost every effort at writing an ars poetica; it becomes an unhappy mixture of didacticism and criticism which smother the author's genuine poetic personality.

In the second hymn's final division Madalena Bignami arrives at the shrine to present a swan as a votive gift from the vice-regina of the Italian Kingdom. According to the poet's fiction, the vice-regina Amalia Augusta vowed that if her consort returned home safe from the Napoleonic Wars, she would express her gratitude to the Graces by offering up a swan from her Milanese palace. Just as a harp and bees served as symbols in the two preceding sections, here the swan is emblematic of supple grace and regal beauty. During the First Empire, all three symbols appeared as ornamentation on objects d'art and elegantly appointed furniture. The swan especially represented imperial pomp because of its association with Jove. Foscolo's source for the description of the swan's floating along the stream by the temple of the Graces is the Natural History of Georges Buffon (1707-88). Pictorially, a snowy whiteness suffuses the whole swan sequence: its white feathers are contrasted to Madalena's black tresses as the bird tenderly caresses the lady's neck; its chain is made of pearls; and the attendant maidens decorate the bird with lilies. The reminiscence to Leda and the swan are obvious except that here the swan's whiteness truly signifies purity and not the seductive disguise of a god.

Foscolo composed the third section of the second Hymn at the time when the Napoleonic regime in Italy was crumbling. As usual, the poet's admiration is for a fallen hero like Eugène de Beauharnais, who had valorously led the remnants of the Grande Armée across Poland and Prussia in the disastrous winter retreat from Moscow. Verses from Foscolo's drama, Ajax, are inserted here to draw a parallel between the viceroy and the ancient Greek warrior, both of whom displayed undaunted spirit in time of defeat. A heroic tone, recalling the final section in Of Tombs, prevails as the poet depicts the courage of Amalia Augusta in the absence of her husband. Her prayer to the gods to aid her husband in the Battle of Lützen (May 1, 1813) brings to mind Cassandra's lament in Of Tombs, with its noble resolve before inexorable fate. Foscolo's apotheosis of the regal couple may seem surprising on account of his anti-Napoleonic sentiments, but he recognized the bravery of the viceroy at Lützen when Beauharnais stood almost alone with his tattered troops before the united forces of the European coalition. The poet also esteemed Amalia Augusta as the mother of Italian sons and of three lovely daughters who were, in truth, majestic Graces.

Since Madalena Bignami is the priestess of the dance, the hymn to Vesta closes with an enchanting scene of a feminine body moving in harmonious rhythm:

Often for other ages, if the language
          of Italy is to run pure for our descendants, …
I shall attempt to portray in my verses the sacred
dancer, less fair when she sits,
less fair than you, o noble harpist;
less lovable than you when you speak,
o nurse of the bees. But if she dances,
Behold her! All the harmony of sound
emanates from her beautiful body, and from the smile
on her lips; and a move, an action, a charming gesture
sends forth unexpected loveliness to gazing onlookers.
And who can depict her? While I attentively fix my
          gaze
in order to portray her, look how she slips away from
          me,
and the dance patterns that she slowly traces
very rapidly quicken, and she flies off
running across the flowers; I hardly see
her fleeting veil vanish in a white flash amidst the
          myrtles.

Here is the elusive beauty which Foscolo hoped to immortalize in the plastic imagery of his poetry. These verses flow like the fast steps of the dance. Spiritual and physical motion are one as Madalena is the incarnation of Hebe, goddess of youth. Whereas Cornelia Martinetti is banally described as “a beautiful woman” and relegated to the background of the second division, here the poet tries to depict the lady of Milan in the plenitude of her charms. He deliberately placed Madalena third in a rank of honor among the priestesses, for during the chaotic months which marked the fall of Napoleonic Italy she signified for him physical beauty enhanced by personal misfortune. In the entire second hymn, Foscolo has presented idealized portraits of the three ladies whose individual loveliness inspired that fire of Vestal virtue which burns eternal in noble hearts.

Since the third hymn is to transport the reader to a mythic pre-Hellenic age, the author invokes three ancient poets—Amphion, Pindar, and Catullus—to assist him in adapting the eloquence of Greek and Latin letters to the Tuscan tradition. Although the actions of this hymn are to take place in an atemporal realm, Foscolo appeals to Clio, muse of history, to help him discern the truth hidden behind myth. In a simile, he compares the flight of the terrified Graces from the relentless persecution of their brother Amor to the dismay of turtledoves escaping in a forest from a rapacious owl. Fortunately Pallas-Minerva, the deity of arts which console life's afflictions, intervenes and promises the Graces a gift that will protect them from Amor's violent passions. Then Pallas' chariot, drawn by young lionesses, conveys the goddesses to a kingdom beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Foscolo refers here to the fabled lost island of Atlantis, which Plato first introduced in the Timaeus and the Critias. The ancients thought of Atlantis as an antediluvian paradise lost on account of man's greed for power. For Foscolo the legendary island seemed an ideal refuge from the oppressive atmosphere of a world caught up in revolutionary upheavals. The Italian poet relates how Pallas exiled the isle's original inhabitants to Asia because of their ingratitude toward the gods who had given them a land of perennial springtime and self-renewing harvests. Ever since that time, navigators have studied in vain their charts in an effort to locate Atlantis, which remains accessible only to the divinities of Olympus. The isle appears as an unattainable mirage, except in the imagination of a poet like Foscolo who possessed the magical ability to suggest the vast expanses of ocean and the rush of marine winds about the lost continent; among his contemporaries only Shelley, in works like Ode to the West Wind, revealed a similar lyrical sensitivity. On Foscolo's Atlantis dwell Pallas and the lesser feminine deities.

To fulfill her promise to the Graces, the goddess of wisdom orders the weaving of a mystic veil which will provide defense from Amor's assaults. Every detail of the labor on the veil follows a grouping by threes. First, three nude Hours draw thin the sun's rays to stretch the warp on the divine loom. Then the three Fates, whose normal duty is to spin the thread of human destiny, fill the shuttles with a diamondlike yarn that will last forever. After Iris descends with heaven's many colors, Flora (goddess of flowers) employs the infinite hues in her needlework. Meanwhile, Psyche, though silently pondering over the grief that her lover Amor brought her, attends to tightening the varicolored threads with a sewing comb. In order to inspire the goddesses in their tasks, three of the nine muses perform around the loom: Thalia plucks a harp, Terpsichore dances, and Erato sings. The muse's song takes up five symmetrically arranged strophes that begin with the verb mesci (mix in, add) as Erato encourages Flora to add differently colored threads to the veil.

Onto the veil are woven images of every sentiment that is sacred and worthwhile in life. Optimistic rose-colored threads depict Youth as a girl dancing gaily to a tune played by Time's lyre; Youth disappears over a slope from which no one returns as Old Age comes to steal her blonde tresses. Snowy-white threads picture a pair of turtledoves that stand for conjugal love threatened by the profane emotions which a nightingale symbolizes. Filial devotion is shown in laurel-hued threads that portray a triumphant soldier dreaming toward dawn of his parents and then experiencing compassion for his prisoners of war. On the right-hand border of the veil there appears in golden strokes an embroidered tableau of a banquet that celebrates gracious hospitality. The other border bears in cerulean threads the image of a young mother attending her ill son through the late hours of the night; this scene of maternal love is rendered all the more touching by the poet's prophecy that the child will survive his illness only to lead a troubled life. When Erato's song and Flora's needlework come to an end, Aurora garlands the veil with heavenly roses which are unknown to mortals. After Hebe annoints the veil with ambrosia (a typical Foscolian motif), it is made eternal. Although the veil is transparent, it will work like an invisible shield to safeguard the Graces from the unholy fire of Amor's passions. As an act of formal consecration Pallas herself garbs the goddesses in the magical cloak. Then a strange melody rings out:

And the veil of the Goddesses suddenly sends forth
a sound, like that of a faraway harp, flying
sweetly on the wings of Zephyrs …

(Hymn III, vv. 231-33)

Just as when the Bacchantes slew Orpheus, and the lyre of that primeval poet diffused an arcane harmony throughout the Ionian and Aegean seas; there vibrates from the veil an ethereal music that betokens peace in heart for anyone who worships the Graces. Precedent for the painterly verses of the veil-weaving episode exist in tableaux on the shields of Achilles and Hercules in Homer and Hesiod, the frescoes of Juno's temple in Carthage as described in Book I of the Aeneid, and the reliefs on the gates of Venus' palace in Politian's Stanzas for the Joust. The closest parallel is the embroidered representation of the tale of Theseus and Ariadne upon a nuptial couch in Catullus' Marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Foscolo surpasses all of his models by not presenting a static description but dynamically reproducing the mobile process of weaving pictures on the veil. Even with the structural grouping in threes, there is no monotony, as each figure among the weavers is individually characterized in her task. The allegory of the veil affirms the virtues which ennoble human actions.

Now that the Graces no longer have to fear their brother Amor, the poet prepares his envoi to the three gentle goddesses. He promises that, when April returns, the lovely priestesses will once again sacrifice at the verdant shrine. April is the month chosen for those rites since it is the anniversary both of Petrarch's first meeting with Laura and of the lady's death. The hymn closes with the poet's prayer imploring the Graces to console Madalena Bignami for the deaths in her family. A sepulchral theme returns momentarily as Foscolo imagines how one day the Milanese lady will mourn at his tomb if Fate does not decree burial in a foreign land for him; the mood of earlier poems like “To Zante” and Of Tombs is not altogether alien to The Graces. Briefly, the poet relives happier days in the past when Madalena took part in dances with country girls on the hillside of Brianza. But with a painful switch to the present tense, the lady is shown grieving silently by the moonlit shores of Lake Pusiano. Foscolo's final request is for the Graces to restore the smiling gleam to Madalena's eyes. Human pathos, then, is the last note in this celestial poem.

Is there a theme which lends unity to the fragmentary passages of the three hymns in The Graces? Above all, the poem is a culmination of Foscolo's lifelong desire to attain Harmony. Through Harmony, violent passions are subdued; and virtue triumphs. Without Harmony between body and soul, there can be no lasting beauty. As a result of the poet's longing to see Harmony realized on earth, The Graces becomes a paean to music. The first hymn opens with the present participle, cantando (singing), and the third ends with the elegiac song of a nightingale that laments along with Madalena Bignami. All through the poem various forms of the word for “song” (canto) appear frequently; other common musical terms are armonia, melodia, suono, coro, voce, note, and concento. The verb udire (to listen) appears prominently to indicate enthralled attention. Music functions as a major motif in the hymns since it is the most sublime manifestation of Harmony.

This preoccupation with musical harmony makes of the poem almost a symphonically orchestrated work. References to musical instruments like the harp, harpsichord, lyre, zither, and flute abound. For the poet, a musical instrument served to unlock a mysterious drama. The episode of the “solitary maiden” (Vergine romita), which occurs after Venus' departure for Olympus toward the end of the first hymn, illustrates music's magical power to stir human emotions. As the solitary maiden sits in her cloistered study, she ecstatically contemplates the vast expanses of the heavens. All at once, the divine spirit of Venus penetrates the girl's heart and takes expression in the fluid movement of her fingers across the keyboard of a harpsichord. As the tender modulations of the ivory keys begin to soar through the stellar silence of the skies, poignant memories of love cause the maiden's hands to move more slowly, so that the melody sweetly vibrates across the stillness of the night. What Foscolo has composed in this episode is a verse nocturne. The story of the solitary maiden also demonstrates how Foscolo's love of music did not reside solely in pure sound devoid of human implications.

The poet recognized in music the metaphysical principle which held the universe together. Nature for him depended on the harmonious reconciliation of opposing forces. The sound that flows from the chords of Eleonora Nencini's harp is a brilliant affirmation of the harmony which resolves dissonances:

Already with her foot, her fingers and wandering
          inspiration, and with her eyes intent on the strings;
          impassioned she hastens the notes
          which picture how Harmony gave motion
          to the stars, the ethereal wave, and the earth
          floating on the ocean; and how it broke
          uniform creation into a thousand kinds
          with light and shade and joined them again into one,
          and gave sounds to the air, and colors to the sun,
          and changing yet continuous course
          to restless fortune and time;
          so that dissonant things may together
          give out a concert of divine Harmony
          and exalt minds beyond the earth.

(Hymn II, vv. 102-20)

          In such a guise the harp's song wanders
          through our vale; and while the player
          rests, the hills are still listening.

(Hymn II, vv. 133-35)

Form and meaning fuse here in the forward flight of images that express awe and gather toward a concentration of effect built on a series of oxymoronic antitheses. Although time and fortune work for mutability, Harmony produces a continuity of physical events. Foscolo has returned to the Pythagorean concept of musical harmony to determine how variety and uniformity are both necessary to sustain a cosmic rhythm. While Eleonora plays the harp, the surrounding Tuscan landscape resounds with a corresponding melody. Those who listen spellbound to the concert participate in a transcendental experience.

In his attempt at a full orchestration of musical effects, the author fully utilized the auditory elements of his poetic language. Imagery arises through the absolute enchantment of sound. Alliteration and assonance are common devices, as in these lines that relate the arrival of the Fates garbed in regal purple and garlanded with oak leaves:

Venner le Parche di purpurei pepli
Velate e il crin di quercia …

(Hymn III, vv. 129-30)

Violinlike v's join with the piercingly explosive p's and mournful u's to accentuate the supreme authority of the three divinities who determine the duration of mortal existence. Although Foscolo wrote The Graces in blank verse, occasional final rhyme occurs as an emphatic repetition. Still more effective are the sonorous internal rhymes which can reproduce a wide range of tonalities. The echolike reverberations of internal rhyme are illustrated by a passage which evokes Echo's plaint for her disdainful lover Narcissus:

… invisibil Ninfa,
          che ognor delusa d'amorosa speme,
          pur geme per le quete aure diffusa,
          e il suo altero nemico ama e richiama.

(Hymn II, vv. 272-75)

Foscolo here mimes the wistful moans of the unfortunate nymph who was transformed into a rock. At times the auditory elements can work with visual and olfactory sensations to recreate a synaesthetic experience, as when a traveler (Hymn II, vv. 142-47) enters a brightly lit Florentine theater and is taken up in a voluptuous transport caused by the song of a soprano on stage and the fragrance of the perfumed ladies in the audience. Foscolo's experiments with musicality greatly anticipate the modernist use of musical analogies.³

In addition to music, this poem also celebrates the visual arts. Its dedication to Canova is much more than a friendly gesture, for many of the themes which Foscolo treats here also figure in the productions of the leading artists of the Napoleonic era. The statues of Canova and the paintings of Andrea Appiani also include versions of the Graces, Psyche, Hebe, Cupid, and the Muses. Because of his predilection for flowing rhythm, Canova often portrayed dancers. Foscolo shared the admiration of his contemporaries for Canova as the greatest Italian sculptor since Michelangelo; he saw beneath the superficial elegance of the statues the very soul of feminine life. Even those pieces which, to twentieth-century critics appear mannered and frigid copies of statuary from Pompei and Herculaneum, possessed for Foscolo a palpitating immobility that belonged to Olympian divinities. According to the poet, the creation of a nude statue resulted from the sublimation of an original erotic impulse. In the final section of the first hymn he explains the creative process:

you who first imaged your lady
in marble: Love first fired
your heart with the desire to see
her beauty unveiled and profaned
in the eyes of men. But the Graces came
to you and by coming diffused
such loveliness in her face and charm
through her body, that with a gentle harmony
they inspired tender affections
for the naked girl; and thus you worshiped
in marble not your beloved but the goddess Venus.

(Hymn I, vv. 354-64)

For Foscolo, art involved ascending to the ideal from the particular; his odes had effected a similar transfiguration of beautiful women into goddesses. In the poet's opinion, Canova had discovered the sensual but then aspired to the spiritual. The chaste nudity in Canova's versions of the Graces was an emblem of naive pagan modesty, while the affectionate embrace of the goddesses remained touchingly human.

Since the author believed in the primacy of poetry over the figurative arts, he intended to provide in his composition new subject matter for painters and sculptors. He sincerely felt that artists had to depend on writers for inspirations:

I scorn the verse that sounds and does not create;
Because Phoebus told me: I first
guided Phidias and Apelles with my lyre.

(Hymn I, vv. 25-27)

For Foscolo, poetry invents, whereas painting and sculpture merely copy and embellish the images first fashioned in fables. In his judgment, neither Canova nor Appiani would have risen above careers as slavish portraitists had it not been for the mythological subject matter of their major works. Obviously, Foscolo's esthetic theories were not free of the ancient prejudice favoring literature over the other arts. Sculpture and painting were for him supremely imitative arts.

What Foscolo sought to create in his own works was not empty resounding verse but a form of poetry which would blend music and painting in vivid images. At the very start of the first hymn he makes this request of the Graces: “I beg of you the arcane / harmonious pictorial melody / of your beauty …” (vv. 4-6). The poet should be a painter and sculptor in musical verse; his task is not to describe but to stir the reader's imagination with a rapid series of pictorial impressions. Foscolo attempted to avoid the picturesque piling-up of descriptive elements. His evocation of Florence in the second hymn typified the painterly harmony of the style:

here Galileo used to sit and spy out the star
of their queen; and the distant water would distract
          him
with its nocturnal sound while it flew from
his gaze, furtive and silvery,
under the poplars on the banks of the Arno.
Here the dawn, the moon, and the sun displayed
for him, by rivaling each other's hues, now the severe
clouds sitting on the blue mountains,
now the plain which flees to the Tyrrhenian
Nereids, an immense scene of cities and forests
and temples and happy plowmen,
now a hundred hills, with which the Apennines
crown with olive trees and caves and marble villas
the elegant city, where with Flora
the Graces have garlands and a delightful language.

(Hymn II, vv. 12-26)

The scene opens with Galileo studying the star of Venus (queen of the Graces), but astronomy immediately gives way to the enchantment of the Tuscan landscape as viewed from a hillside villa. Through the audible flow of the Arno the observer's vision is carried along an everexpanding panoramic journey. Whereas Foscolo's sonnets are noticeably lacking in adjectives of color, here the fullness of ecstatic contemplation is clearly indicated by the vying play of colors at the hour of morning when the moon grows pale as the sun's first rays shine over the mist-capped mountains. The poet still sees the scene as charged with the presence of mythic creatures, for the Tyrrhenian Sea is designated as the dwelling place of Nereids. Not once does the poet attempt to describe the city of Florence, which in an early sonnet appeared as the austere background for a love affair and in Of Tombs figured as the repository of former Italian greatness. Foscolo merely indicates Florence by a periphrasis as the city of flowers and elegant speech. He melodiously reveals the setting as if he were viewing it from an astral height. His concept of poetry as musically plastic vision never lapses into a mechanical formula but results spontaneously from the author's enraptured contemplation of Nature.

Because of the supreme role which music and the visual arts play in The Graces, it is easy to overlook the poem's patriotic fervor. The theme of the afflicted fatherland pervades the composition but never with the dramatic urgency which characterizes Of Tombs. Through the cult of the Graces, Foscolo hoped to inspire love of country. Their altar at Bellosguardo figures as a symbol of Italian unity to which priestesses from three different regions come to appeal for the consolation of the peaceful goddesses during the warlike times. Since the poet completed the longest sustained passages of the hymns in 1813 and 1814—the period of Napoleon's Russian retreat and its catastrophic aftermath—he often pauses in the work to consider the pitiless spectacle of war: conscription of Italian youths into the ill-fated Grande Armée, the bones of fallen soldiers scattered across the countryside, the savage descent of invading forces. Usually, the author's sorrow is attenuated by a mytho-poetic process which distances a scene of contemporary tragedy to the remote past: Russia, for instance, is consistently called Scizia (Scythia), so that the horrible events of the Russian campaign seem to have occurred thousands of years before. Only once does the poem rise to a level of bitter antirevolutionary and anti-Napoleonic invective. In the third hymn the discussion of Atlantis' belligerent inhabitants turns into a scathing condemnation of the foreign tyrants who have perverted the name of divine liberty to enslave innocent nations; those despots are contrasted in typical Alfierian fashion to the “magnanimous heroes” who fight to defend the civilized institutions of laws and religion. Ordinarily, however, Foscolo's final poetic composition expresses melancholy lament rather than wrathful protest.

Perhaps the most unique feature of this work is the effortless fusion of modern and mythic ages. Foscolo here exemplifies the intense yearning of the Napoleonic generation toward a rebirth of pagan splendor. The rhetoric and life-style of the neoclassical era were deliberately Greco-Roman. Napoleon seemed to be the reincarnation of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. In its clothes fashions and interior design, the First Empire attempted to revive antiquity, carefully copying the relics of Pompei and Herculaneum. Articles of furniture bore images of gods and goddesses; even clocks were decorated with little Graces or Cupids. Mirrors were actually called “Psyche.” Sensitive young ladies used to keep statuettes of Venus in their private chambers, as Foscolo himself mentions in the ode to Antonietta Arese. The Graces, then, does reflect the tastes of the era in which it was written. What raises the poem above contemporary chic is the author's ardent penetration of the mythological world in its most profoundly human implications. He reweaves ancient fables to discover an eternal truth, as in his reworking of the myth of Tiresias. Foscolo relates in the third hymn how the young hunter Tiresias surprised Pallas bathing. The gods punished the youth's impudent gaze by striking him blind for life. Not only does the Italian poet surpass in artistry his ancient source in Callimachus' Hymn to Pallas, with the portrayal of the naked goddess's rose-colored flesh and auburn hair as well as the hunter's free life in nature, but he also creates an allegory that there can be no direct and unobstructed vision of divine mysteries. Man may view celestial beauty only through the veil of tears. Human dimensions heighten Foscolo's novel interpretation of myths.⁴

Classicism in the three hymns is not ornament but religious sentiment expressed in ritualistic language. There exists no precedents for The Graces in Italian literature except The Globe of Venus by abbé Antonio Conti (1677-1749), a theorist on esthetics who attempted a blank-verse allegory on the arts. Foscolo's positive paganism seems on first examination to anticipate the poetry of the French Parnassian movement and the Italian Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907) during the second half of the nineteenth century. Like the Parnassians, Foscolo worshiped the serenity and discipline of Hellenic art, but he never felt that he had to resurrect Hellas in archaeological details. By contrast, the leading Parnassian Leconte de Lisle (1818-94) scrupulously employed original Grecian names of gods while Foscolo was content to use the common Latin names. The Parnassians were escapists from the drab materialistic world of the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism, seeking refuge in the dream of a lost Hellenic springtime or in violent tales of barbarian races. Foscolo, however, lived during a heroic age which—though at times it might have seemed prosaic—consciously assumed the attributes of ancient grandeur. Exoticism is completely alien to his poetry while it characterizes the work of the Parnassians with their evocations of Indian, Egyptian, Scandinavian, and Celtic legends. In the first hymn of The Graces, Foscolo angrily denounced the romantic cult of Nordic myths which he judged a menace to the Mediterranean tradition. Borrowing from Conti's Reflections on the Northern Lights, he imagined a Nordic Fury arising out of Iceland in a monstrous apparition of the aurora borealis to chase away Italy's charming pagan dryads and sylvan deities with nightmarish chimaeras. The gods of classical antiquity were familiar figures to Foscolo, and he thus rejected the exotic vogue for Germanic myths. His fondness for the classical did not involve either the opulent sensuality or the impersonal use of myths that were to distinguish the Parnassian movement.

Few poems could be as intimately personal and at the same time universal as this one. All that the author held dear has its place in the composition: his native isle, the Italian cities where he learned to adore feminine beauty, the persons who merited his affection, the ancient and modern authors who offered him models of excellence. And yet the three hymns present a sweeping panorama of human history from prehistoric barbarism to the waning of the Napoleonic era and then beyond to a translucent world of illusions. Although Foscolo never summoned forth that state of creative concentration which would have brought the poem to formal completion, an organic unity still exists in the musical-visual Harmony that pervades the apparently isolated fragments. Except where didacticism stifles lyrical impulse, the composition is superior to its structural defects. The author's longing to transcend the desires and fears of his generation and arrive at an experience of Harmony precludes a rigid and consistent pattern for the work. With its alternating tones of mythology and religious striving toward the eternal, The Graces represents the natural conclusion to Foscolo's poetic career.⁵

Notes

1. Giuseppe Chiarini deserves credit for the first genuine critical edition (Livorno, 1904) of the fragments in The Graces. We have followed Luigi Russo's edition in Ugo Foscolo, Prose e Poesie (Florence, 1963), pp. 160-262.

2. Sources for the myth of the bees are in the Iliad, The Works and the Days, and especially the Georgics. See Rosa Lida de Malkiel, “La Abeja: historia de un motivo poetico,” RP, XVII, No. 1 (August 1963), 75-86.

3. Fubini, [Ugo Foscolo Saggio Critico (Florence, 1962)] pp. 243-44; and Francesco Flora, Foscolo (Milan, 1940), p. 124, examine the musicality of the poem.

4. The reflection of neoclassical tastes in The Graces is studied by Mario Praz, Gusto Neoclassico (Naples, 1959), pp. 243-66 and 367-88.

5. Assertions about the underlying unity of inspiration are made by Caraccio, pp. 467-577; and Sante Marotta, Nuovo Studio sulle ‘Grazie’ di Ugo Foscolo (Padua, 1963), passim.