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Patrizia Bettella 68 the DEBATE on BEAUTY and UGLINESS in ITALIAN SCAPIGLIATURA and BAUDELAIRE the Process of Aesthetic Change W

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Patrizia Bettella 68 the DEBATE on BEAUTY and UGLINESS in ITALIAN SCAPIGLIATURA and BAUDELAIRE the Process of Aesthetic Change W Patrizia Bettella 68 THE DEBATE ON BEAUTY AND UGLINESS IN ITALIAN SCAPIGLIATURA AND BAUDELAIRE he process of aesthetic change which takes place in European culture during the middle of the nineteenth century, leads from idealistic to modern forms of art. The literary speculations of TVictor Hugo, the post-idealistic philosophy of Karl Rosenkranz, and the critical work of Charles Baudelaire mark the unprecedented success of the ugly as autonomous category of artistic creation. In Italian culture, where literature is still fully governed by the idealistic canon, it is the rebel and unconventional group of the Scapigliati which first enter the debate on beauty and ugliness. The poems of Arrigo Boito, Emilio Praga, Giovanni Camerana and Giulio Pinchetti, albeit not resulting in a successful and organic plan of new poetic, mark the opening of Italian literature to the European discourse of modern aesthetics. In this paper I shall first briefly examine the importance of the category of the ugly in nineteenth century aesthetic discourse and then see how the Scapigliati attempt to incorporate the ugly in their formulation of a new poetics, particularly in relation to Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. The Scapigliati articulate their views of new art in the form of dualismo; the categories of beauty and ugliness, identifiable also in the terms Ideal and Real, are at the centre of their search for ars nova. A series of common metaphors of ascent and fall, heaven and earth, recur and interconnect their poems, but ultimately the two terms of the dualismo remain separate and do not lead, like in Baudelaire, to the formulation of a new form of art. Despite the impossibility to overcome the oppositions between beauty and ugliness, the Scapigliati challenged the traditional aesthetic canon, in which the ugly did not have adequate space of representation, and contributed to the opening Italian Scapigliatura and Baudelaire 69 of Italian literature to the most current aesthetic trends in European culture. The rise of the category of the ugly In classical aesthetics, from the Middle Ages until the eighteeenth century, the category of the ugly occupies a subordinate position in literature and other arts. Ugliness is confined to the comic or morally reprehensible, it enters the artistic scene only to highlight by contrast the beautiful and good, therefore ugliness does not exist as autonomous aesthetic category. During the nineteenth century the ugly is represented in serious contexts and comes to the foreground as an independent aesthetic entity. Victor Hugo in his Préface de Cromwell (1827) reverses the system of traditional aesthetic values by acknowledging the role of the grotesque and the ugly in modern literature as essential components of romantic and modern drama. For its critical impact on the canon of classical beauty the Préface is considered a true manifesto of French romanticism and of new poetics. A re-evaluation of the Christian message leads to the representation of those aspects of life which are less attractive, so that art can better portray the variety of reality, composed of beauty and ugliness, good and evil: Le christianisme amène la poésie à la vérité. Comme lui, la muse moderne verra les choses d'un coup d'oeil plus haut et plus large. Elle sentira que tout dans la création n'est pas humainement beau, que le laid y existe à côté du beau, le difforme près du gracieux, le grotesque au reverse du sublime, le mal avec le bien, l'ombre avec la lumière1. (11) For Hugo art should imitate nature, not the ideal, and nature is composed of multiplicity and variety. In modern life the grotesque is crucial because it allows us to portray those aspects of reality which are deformed, horrible, comic and droll. While in classical art the ugly is depicted only to create a contrast with the beautiful, in modern art Hugo identifies the ugly as an autonomous category, whose function is not 1 Victor Hugo, Préface de Cromwell, Oxford: Clarendon, 1925. Unless otherwise stated, translations are mine. "Christianity leads poetry to truth. The modern muse shall see things from a higher and wider perspective. It shall feel that everything in the creation is not humanly beautiful, that the ugly exists beside the beautiful, the deformed beside the graceful, the grotesque as an implication of the sublime, the evil with the good, the shadow with the light". Patrizia Bettella 70 merely subordinate and oppositional. Hugo's aesthetics plays a central role in the nineteenth century discourse of beauty and ugliness in art. In its attempt to account for all aspects of reality, modern art must abandon idealistic views of perfection and concede that beauty and ugliness co-exist. The debate on ugliness reaches its peak with the publication in Germany in 1853 of Karl Rosenkranz's Aesthetik des Hässlichen (Aesthetics of the Ugly), the first philosophical treatise entirely devoted to the subject of the ugly, an event which indicates an unprecedented relevance of this category in the aesthetic discourse. In his essay Rosenkranz, a disciple of Hegel, attempts to formulate systematic classification and categorization of ugliness in art2. The nineteenth century preoccupation with the ugly effects the full development of a new concept of art, in which ugliness is essential to the representation of modernity3. Through the ugly, modern aesthetics attempts to give new meaning to what otherwise has no artistic value, and seeks to rehabilitate "die nicht mehr schönen Kunsten" (the arts which are no longer beautiful), to quote the title of a series of essays edited by Hans Robert Jauss in 1968. Jauss' article on "The Classic and Christian Justification of the Ugly in Medieval Literature" underscores the revolutionary role of Hugo's Préface, where the ugly does not perform a merely antithetical, subordinate function, but is introduced as self-sufficient category in the realm of what is representable in art (146). Modern poets characteristically question the canonical distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly. According to Hugo Friedrich, Baudelaire's poetry is a paradigmatic example of critique to traditional aesthetic categories4. In the Fleurs du Mal Baudelaire 2 Despite Ronsenkranz's proclaimed disapproval of ugliness in its extreme forms, he articulates a structure of different intensity and degree of ugliness in art, which range from absence of form, to incorretedness, to deformity, to repugnance. This last reaches its highest intensity in the diabolic, which is to be avoided at all costs. The ugly which Rosenkranz finds entirely acceptable is the caricature, which he finds well represented in contemporary art. For a well informed introduction, see the "Presentazione" of the Italian edition by Remo Bodei (Estetica del brutto, Bologna: il Mulino, 1984, pp. 7-39) 3 Remo Bodei points out how in France, after the consolidation of Hugo's theories in the period between 1830-48, the Romantic socialist movement finds its expression in the motto "Le laid c'est le beau!" (The ugly is the beautiful). Deformed individuals such as Notre-Dame de Paris' Quasimodo are considered heroes of a new art, which welcomes the grotesque and the horrid (13). 4 Hugo Friedrich's essay on the structure of modern poetry (Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik, 1956, English translation by Joachim Neugroschel, Evanston: Italian Scapigliatura and Baudelaire 71 proposes a modern aesthetics, in which it is possible to perceive the beauty of evil, of the horrible and disgusting, together with the beautiful. Baudelaire is attracted to the grotesque, to the unconventional, all aspects that contribute to the portrayal of reality in its complexity and paradox. Baudelaire acknowledges the aesthetic value of the grotesque and proposes art which can widen its representational scope by including both the ugly and the beautiful5. According to Friedrich, Baudelaire's concept of modernity goes beyond that of the romantics: "It...turns the negative into something fascinating. Poverty, decay, evil, the nocturnal, and the artificial exert an attraction that has to be perceived poetically..., the repulsive is joined to the nobility of sound, acquiring the 'galvanic shudder' that Baudelaire praises in Poe" (25, 26). Baudelaire's aesthetic precepts are presented in some of his essays6. In "Réflexions sur quelques-uns de mes contemporains" (1861), he envisions a concept of art capable of embracing and including everything: the grotesque and the sublime. Baudelaire praises Hugo for his ability to represent universality in his poetry: "Ainsi Victor Hugo possède non-seulement la grandeur, mais l'universalité"7 (471). He also praises Gautier, who mastered the art of depicting beauty and managed to extract a mysterious and symbolic beauty even from grotesque and hideous objects (478). In Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863) Baudelaire formulates a new theory of the Beautiful (a rational and historical theory of the Beautiful), based on the Northwestern University Press, 1974) underscores the modernity of Baudelaire's poetry, which upsets traditional aesthetic categories of beauty and ugliness. 5 For a complete treatment of the grotesque in Baudelaire's aesthetic vision, see Yvonne Bargues Rollins' Baudelaire et le Grotesque, Washington: University of America Press, 1978. 6 For all quotations I referred to the edition Charles Baudelaire, Ouvres complètes, Paris: Seuil, 1968; unless otherwise stated traslations are my own. 7 According to Luciano Anceschi ("Il problema estetico di Charles Baudelaire", in Autonomia ed eteronimia dell'arte, Firenze: Vallecchi, 1959) Baudelaire could not accept a model of art which would not pose a rigorous distinction between art, philosophy and history. Nor could he accept that the only form of modern art is drama. Baudelaire strives to overcome a model of art whose final goal is moral and not simply artistic. The attitude of Baudelaire towards Hugo changed from almost hostile (Salon de 1846) to partly reverential, until 1858, when Baudelaire paid homage to Hugo in his essay on Gautier.
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