Flyer layout by Giancarlo Cazzin

Alfieri was the first Italian writer to use his own self in a modern way, first with his writings (Life, his diaries, his sonnet/self-portrait Thou mirror of veracious sayings sublime, and other works) and after with a series of portraits: from those painted by Ludwig Guttenbrunn in 1782 to the complete series done by François-Xavier Fabre during the writer’s final years in Florence.

A few years after his death, however, his public image was transformed by the rhetoric of the Risorgimento into “father of the fatherland.” All major Italian cities have a Via Alfieri and the statues of him are too many to be numbered. Essentially he was transformed into a public monument, which had the effect of distancing him from his readers. Things went no better for him in the private domain: already at the beginning of the 20th century, Guido Gozzano famously includes a “bust of Alfieri” in the opening lines of his 1911 poem L'amica di nonna Speranza together with other kitsch objects generally found in a bourgeois drawing room: stuffed parrots, marble fruits, bell jars, coconut shells, cuckoo clocks, and so on.

Today he is considered remote, and not only because his linguistic explorations took him in a direction that ran counter to what the unification of Italy would later impose. The fact is that he is a writer with much to tell, but he was made into an obscure and monumental figure by the Risorgimento.

In order to rectify this situation and breathe new life into Alfieri's image without falling into the trap of merely updating “old things in bad taste,” in keeping with Gozzano, we asked an artist to rework Alfieri's iconography using the materials preserved in the archives of the Fondazione Centro di Studi Alfieriani. We chose New York artist Daniel Rineer, who has often created artwork from pre-existing images.

Enrico Mattioda

President of the Foundation Center for Alfierian Studies

Italian President Sergio Mattarella visits exhibition: