In the short span of a few decades, a macabre and cemetery poetic current appeared in eighteenth-century Italy that wanted to sing the disintegration of the bodies and the charm of the tombs, the pits, the gloomy visions of death, the funeral rites and the wonder of decomposition: a poetic current that anticipated the later scapigliate provocations, but which has been forgotten and discredited as a mere imitation of foreign fashions (those of Edward Young and James Macpherson). It was certainly to a gloomy and melancholic European taste that the poets gathered in this illustrated anthology seemed to look at, but the simple imitations or style exercises for their own sake are very different. It is, rather, a distancing from Arcadian poetics and an experimentation around hitherto unmentionable topics, such as the disintegration of the corpse, the darkness of the pit and, more generally, on that phenomenon immanent to life that is death.
This anthology, illustrated by the darkest and most melancholic works of Böcklin, Friedrich, Catel, Carus, Oehme, Vafflard, Schikaneder, Rottmann Dahl, Paletta, collects the cemetery and macabre poems of Ubertino Landi, Alfonso Varano, Prospero Manara, Andrea Rubbi, Salomone Fiorentino, Aurelio Bertola, Giovanni Fantoni, Ambrogio Viale (Il Solitario dell'Alpi), Diodata Saluzzo.
A quote:
"He who laid in this filthy grave
that skull hub and that bare impure?
!... what a filthy, alas, covers filth
the smashed flesh, and the air bones!
What ever from sleep horribly shaken
or m'ha universal supreme fear!
Ouch! after life that so little lasts
I will fall! flee from here there is no one who can!
This woman was pure! gracefulness
where is it? where is that flattering smile?
and that ugly lip is that of pria?
Oh crazy! that in heaven you move eternal war
for he did not give thee a wonderful face;
Watch! that was beauty, and now it is earth."
[Diodata Saluzzo, The Corpse]
Graphic and editorial project: ex umbris
Print: BDprint
Features of the edition: paperback sewn thread refe; coated interior paper and marked Fedrigoni cover paper; colour illustrations
Pages: 112
Dimensions: 170x235