Giambattista Casti (1724-1803). l'Homme et l'oeuvre

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Summary of the present book

This book is not intended to whitewash a devil. Giambattista Casti, the spare, longnosed Voltairian abbé galant, who in his long wandering and wayward life and in his literary work was so roughly handled by the stern moralists, strict patriots and austere literary critics of his nation, and who ultimately seemed to have sunk into oblivion as an odd untouchable - that man is not put on a pedestal here. He is merely followed in his life and interpreted from his works.

The object is to demonstrate that his personality gains considerably by being seen, and interpreted, against the background of that Arcadian and at the same time stormy 18th Century in which he lived. Moreover, in this perspective, he begins to show aspects which, to the eyes of the following century, must have seemed, if not quite unintelligible, at least very unreal and of scant value.

A nearer acquaintance with the man and his writings compels a revaluation of his importance as a creative mind among the numerous remarkable figures of the latter half of the Italian Settecento. And this revaluation will give enhanced appreciation, especially of his comic dramas, intended to be set to music, of his Poema Tartaro, a satire of the Russia of Catharine II, and above all of his long satirical animal epic Gli Animali parlanti.

It is from Casti's Poema Tartaro that Byron derived the inspiration and to a certain extent also the material for the story of the good fortunes of his Don Juan at the Court of St. Petersburg (c. VII-VIII). In particular Gli Animali parlanti (The Speaking Beasts), Casti's last and prominent work, did not remain a sealed book to the English speaking public. In 1803 (only one year after the editio princeps) Lorenzo Da Ponte published a fine edition of it in London; in 1819 William Stewart Rose prepared a highly praised, though strongly abridged translation of it in verse, for John Murray's publishing firm, also in London. Even more significant are the words with which Ugo Foscolo, the poet-patriot, spending the last years of his exile (1816-1827) in and near London, hints at the great, and to him unwelcome, success of this work in Great Britain. It annoyed him to notice how English women-novelists would preface their works not with lines from their own great poets, but with a stanza of Casti's: ‘The admiration for literary products beautiful or hideous, provided they are foreign, is very fashionable in London, almost as much so as in Milan’.

This suffices to show what charm Casti's zoo-epic, that fierce satire of society and parody of the classic epic, exerted with its ideas and its form on the English literary world of the time.

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Besides this, much attention has been devoted here to Casti's ten comic dramas in short-lined verse, a genre he recalled to a new and artistically justified life, and which now seems to regain the interest of composers in search of cheerful librettos in an age of spiritual need and strain.

Principally, however, the author of the present book has had before his mind's eye the visionary outlook which the almost forgotten petit abbé proves to have had on political, social and human problems - problems which to this day have lost nothing of their actuality.

Whatever may be rightly said against his ‘art’ in the strictest sense of the word, it remains a fact that on his peregrinations through the Courts of Florence, Vienna, St. Petersburg and Naples, on his travels to the Iberian countries and to Constantinople, and not least during his last stay in Paris under the Directory and the Consulate, Giambattista Casti collected a wealth of well-considered experience. In his poetical creations he has, with the pessimism inherent in his character, given shape to this experience in a way which, seen in the light of time, takes on a sometimes hallucinating universality. In some respects the intellectual débris left by his often destructive mind may be seen as building material for a juster, although for that reason less realisable, human society.

A broad-minded, bold-hearted man of very great imaginative powers rather than a really great artist, yet too sceptic to think of himself as one who could reform the world, Casti possesses for the modern critic - in the opinion of the author of the present study - an importance that far surpasses that stock image of the irresponsible hedonist and parasite drawn of him by the period of bourgeois art, and by that of ‘l'Art pour l'art’.