Canzone in four verses of various length (heavily rhymed and containing a lot of assonances), composed in Naples perhaps in 1834-35 and first published in the Naples 1835 edition. The title means Upon the portrait of a beautiful woman sculpted upon her tomb.

It is the second “sepolcrale” or sepulchral poem, after Sopra un basso rilievo antico sepolcrale, with which it forms an evident diptych, even though it also recalls the Aspasia: in the comparison between beauty and music (second and third verses), and in particular in the strong sensual component that characterises the description of the woman’s body:

... Quel dolce sguardo,

che tremar fe’, se, come or sembra, immoto

in altrui s’affisò; quel labbro, ond’alto

par, come d’urna piena,

traboccare il piacer; quel collo, cinto

già di desio; quell’amorosa mano,

che spesso, ove fu porta,

sentì gelida far la man che strinse;

e il seno, onde la gente

visibilmente di pallor si tinse, (vv. 7-16)

Here however the insistence on the woman’s past beauty has a disruptive effect because it is immediately compared to the destruction of her remains: “thus you were: now underground / dust and skeleton you are” (vv. 1-2), “once you were: now mud / and bones you are: the sight of you, / shameful and sad, a stone now hides” (vv. 17-9).

Leopardi’s reflections, thoroughly materialistic, here invest the anguishing (and “philosophically” insoluble: “Eternal mystery / of our being”, vv. 22-3) theme of the contrast between most vile matter of “Human Nature” and the loftiness of the sensations and the ideas that it is albeit capable of expressing – and which are however immediately extinguished by death:

Natura umana, or come,

se frale (= “fragile”) in tutto e vile,

se polve ed ombra sei, tant’alto senti?

Se in parte anco gentile,

come i più degni tuoi moti e pensieri

son così di leggeri

da sì basse cagioni e desti e spenti? (vv. 50-6)