Beauty

The theme of beauty bringing consolation takes shape around 1798-1800, the same time in which Foscolo shows great interest in Lucretius, and it represents a reaction to the disillusionments linked to the end of his active political militancy and the recognition that it is impossible to play an active role in contemporary society and politics.

Some pages of Ortis explicitly expound the idea that beauty, along with art and nature, is an intense value, albeit an illusory one, which has the function of consoling man within a mechanistic conception of existence: "We manufacture reality in our own way: our desires multiply with our ideas; we sweat for that which, dressed differently, bores us; and, after all, our passions are nothing but effects of our illusions" (“Ci fabbrichiamo la realtà a nostro modo; i nostri desiderj si vanno moltiplicando con le nostre idee; sudiamo per quello che vestito diversamente ci annoja; e le nostre passioni non sono in fine del conto che gli effetti delle nostre illusioni”, letter of May 25). Therefore, the tragedy of human existence, without an eschatological outlook, can only be redeemed at an illusory level through passions, and beauty has a fundamental role in these.

The theme of beauty bringing consolation is united with that of beauty having the job of civilizing and transmitting values in Le Grazie. Foscolo's ambition in the incomplete poem is to establish the philosophical premises that refer to a mechanistic conception of human life with the myth of a palingenesis thanks to art and beauty; the undeniable power of beauty again faces the persistence of negative passions and irrational demands that threaten the precarious equilibrium created, in the fragments of the poem, through the mythology and grace of divine creatures.