Vittorio Alfieri
Vittorio Alfieri played a key role in Foscolo's civil and literary development; his name appeared in the Piano di Studi and Foscolo gave him "rights over all those who write to the Italians" (“diritti su tutti coloro che scrivono agli Italiani”, Venice, April 22,1797, Ep. I, 42-3) when sending him a copy of Tieste with a dedication "To the Tragedian of Italy". Civil and patriotic reasons were a fundamental part of his admiration for the writer and Carlo Dionisotti, the author of a study on Foscolo's youth entitled Venezia e il noviziato poetico del Foscolo (Venice and the poetic apprenticeship of Foscolo, “Lettere italiane” 1966), formulated the hypothesis that the Alfieri model was Foscolo's polemical response to the prevalence of the French model theorized by the Padua school of Melchiorre Cesarotti.
Alfieri's influence over Foscolo was not limited to the theatrical genre, it also regarded lyric poetry and prose: Alfieri's impact is evident in Poesie in the presence of a certain degree of sententiousness, a strict register and carefully sought-after formal choices like the preference for the sonnet (this can be seen in two self-portrait sonnets, Foscolo's Solcata ho fronte, occhi incavati intenti (I have a furrowed brow, intense sunken eyes) which recalls Alfieri's Sublime specchio di veraci detti (Sublime reflection of spoken truths)); and the prose of Ortis also feels the influence of Alfieri in the broken, fragmented progression, in the tension and sublime expression, and in the language rich with exclamations and rhetorical questions.
Foscolo considered Alfieri's solitary, indignant position as the coherent result of his way of interpreting the condition of the literary figure: a pure, uncontaminated being that rejects all compromise. After the perplexities that emerged during his Jacobin activism over the anti-revolutionary positions adopted by Alfieri following the Revolution, Foscolo considered him, along with Parini, his only contemporary to have understood the political and civil role of literature, in Discorsi su Lucrezio; and in Dei Sepolcri he cites him as the model of a patriotic writer, praising his coherence and his ethical stature, represented while at Florence's Santa Croce Church seeking inspiration from the tombs of the greats.
