The body
Attention to the “body” has always been strong in Leopardi, for sure due to his materialism (whereby also thought is “organic” activity), but, it cannot be denied, also for autobiographical reasons. His own miserable physical condition, which he wrote about repeatedly (in the “autoritratti/Self Portraits” and in many letters, full of details about his illnesses) and to which he also alludes in several Canti, as the cause of the impossibility of being loved (indirectly, as in the Saffo, or explicitly, as in the Sera del dì di festa), made him particularly concerned with this theme.
On the other hand, Leopardi found himself having to contest the consolatory consideration by which his pessimism would seem to be derived not so much of his philosophical research as his unhappy condition of life: for example in the Palinodia and in an important letter of 24 May 1832 to Louis de Sinner.
In the Zibaldone the theme is addressed particularly in relation to antiquity:
“the vigour of the body damages the intellectual faculties, and favours imaginativeness, and in contrast the imbecility of the body is most favourable to reflection” [115, 3921-7] – great was the importance (and consideration) for the body with the ancient [125, 628] – as compared with antiquity, it is today enfeebled [163-4, 830, 1597-602, 2413, 4289, 4291] – “The man of imagination and sentiment and enthusiasm, deprived of the beauty of the body, is toward nature more or less that which he is toward his beloved, a most ardent and sincere lover unrequited in love” [718-20] – due to civilisation, corporal imperfection grows, and it is far greater in men than in any other species [1775-6, 3179-82] – “In other words if our body is all in the hands of fortune, and subject for every part to the action of things exterior, it is a dangerous thing to say that the mind, the which is always entirely subject to the body, may be independent from things external and from fortune” [2800-3, 3202-3] – differences in the bodies of northerners and southerners [3247-8].
