1799/1899: Heroic Memory in the Centennial of the Neapolitan Republic

12
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE This article was downloaded by: [University of Michigan] On: 11 January 2010 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 908308456] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37- 41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Modern Italian Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713699215 The Neapolitan revolution of 1799 Thomas Willette a a University of Michigan, To cite this Article Willette, Thomas(1999) 'The Neapolitan revolution of 1799', Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 4: 3, 369 — 379 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13545719908455018 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545719908455018 Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Transcript of 1799/1899: Heroic Memory in the Centennial of the Neapolitan Republic

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

This article was downloaded by: [University of Michigan]On: 11 January 2010Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 908308456]Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Modern Italian StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713699215

The Neapolitan revolution of 1799Thomas Willette a

a University of Michigan,

To cite this Article Willette, Thomas(1999) 'The Neapolitan revolution of 1799', Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 4: 3, 369— 379To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13545719908455018URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545719908455018

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial orsystematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug dosesshould be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directlyor indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

The Neapolitan revolution of 1799

21 ibid., vol. 2, pp. 1509-11.22 11 Monitore Napoletano, pp. 103-5.23 ibid.', pp. 155-6, 312.24 ibid., pp. 311-12.25 ibid., pp. 155-6.26 'Giornale patriottico', in Battaglini, Atti, leggi proclami, vol. 2, p. 885.27 See Man-Antoinejullien Segretario Generale, p. 357.28 II Monitore Napoletano, pp. 311-12.29 Corriere ài Napoli e Sicilia, n. 5, 13 ventoso anno 7 della libertà (3 marzo 1799), in

Napoli 1199. I giornali giacobini, ed. M. Battaglini (Rome: Libreria Alfredo Borei,1988), p. 223.

30 Corriere di Napoli e Sicilia, n. 11, 6 germile anno 7 della libertà (26 marzo 1799), inNapoli 1799. I giornali giacobini, pp. 269-70.

31 See Marc-Antoinejullien Segretario Generale, p. 357.32 In Battaglini, Atti, leggi proclami, voi. 3, pp. 1617-18.33 Veditore repubblicano, 30 germile anno primo della Repubblica napoletana (19 aprile

1799), in Napoli 1799.1 giornali giacobini, pp. 51-4.34 Battaglini, Atti, leggi proclami, voi. 2, p. 898.35 Abrial, Paris le 21 thermidor an 7, au Ministre des Relations extérieures, in Archives du

Ministbe des Affaires Etrangères, Correspondance Politique, Naples, 126, e. 222v.36 JI Monitore Napoletano, p. 569.37 Giornale Estemporaneo, Napoli 2 pratile anno 7 della libertà (21 maggio 1799), in

Napoli 1799.1giornali giacobini, p. 172.38 Costituzione della Società Patriottica sotto il titolo degli amici della legge, in

Battaglini, Atti, leggi proclami, voi. 2, pp. 894—7.39 For the history of the republic, see A. M. Rao and P. Villani, Napoli 1799-1815.

Dalla Repubblica atta monarchia amministrativa (Naples: Edizioni del Sole, 1995); A. M.Rao, La Repubblica napoletana del 1799 (Rome: Newton Compton, 1997).

40 II Monitore Napoletano, p. 624.41 C. De Nicola, Diario napoletano, dicembre 1798-dicembre 1860 (Milan: Giordano,

1963), p . 188.42 II Monitore Napoletano, p. 626.43 ibid., p . 638.44 ibid., p. 656.45 ibid., p. 596.46 ibid., p. 656.47 Battaglini, Atti, leggi proclami, voi. 2, p . 899.48 Cuoco, Saggio storico, pp. 163—7.

1799/1899: Heroic Memory in the Centennial of the Repubblica

Napoletana

Thomas Willette

University of Michigan

This article examines the centennial commemoration of the Repubblica napole-tana of 1799 with a view to understanding how the historical events and their

369

Downloaded By: [University of Michigan] At: 21:47 11 January 2010

willette
Cross-Out

Perspectives and debates

principal actors were memorialized for the political education of citizens in post-Unification Naples. The principal surviving document of the centennial is theAlbo illustrativo della rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 prepared by the youngBenedetto Croce and his friends Giuseppe Ceci, Michelangelo D'Ayala andSalvatore Di Giacomo.1 The visual testimony collected in the album is chiefly oftwo kinds. The greater part consists of 167 photographic reproductions of oldprints, watercolors, drawings, oil paintings, written documents, signatures,medals and coins, as well as painted and sculpted portraits and views of historicalsites. Due to the destruction and dispersal of revolutionary materials in theviolent reaction that followed, this little-studied collection remains the essentialcompilation of visual evidence for the brief life of the republic.2 The other kindof visual evidence reproduced in the Albo illustrativo consists of seven nine-teenth-century 'fine art' paintings and sculptures of famous martin of therevolution. The whole body of this material is carefully arranged in chronologi-cal order and accompanied by numbered catalogue entries explaining thesignificance of each item. At the front of the Albo illustrativo, following thePrefazione signed by the four authors, is Croce's annotated translation of anoriginally French pamphlet by Francesco Pignatelli, prince of Strongoli (1775—1853), containing the young General's memoir Intorno alla guerra tra la Repubblica

francese e il Re di Napoli ed alla rivoluzione che ne fu conseguenza.3

The combining of period documents with later 'artistic' representations ofthe past is indeed one of the ways the centennial Albo illustrativo introducesconcrete facts of 1799 into the consciousness of the present. This didacticprocess of translating raw period artifacts into present historical context isdemonstrated in the album's allegorical cover page, where we find a circularEmblema della Repubblica from a piece of revolutionary government stationeryreinscribed in a fashionable neo-Rococo setting designed by the magazineillustrator Vincenzo La Bella (Figure I).4 The appropriated emblem, with itsmotto Libertà Eguaglianza and personification of the republic, is supported at leftand right by youthful geniuses of Military Victory and History. The memoir ofFrancesco Pignatelli that serves as a documentary historical introduction to theAlbo illustrativo may erect a complementary bridge between past and present, inview of the General's long subsequent engagement with military and politicalevents of the Risorgimento. In a brief biographical note to the memoir Croceacknowledged 'il mio egregio amico', the present Pignatelli prince of Strongoli,also named Francesco, who provided access to family papers.5

While the municipal government of Naples was struggling to commemoratethe centennial with a monument to be raised in the Piazza del Mercato, Crocehelped to organize a counter-initiative in March 1899 called the Comitatocittadino or 'Citizens Committee' for honoring the martyrs of the revolution.6

Senator Enrico Pessina officially presided over the Committee, but it is morethan likely that Croce was the shaping force behind the goals outlined in thePreface to the Albo illustrativo. These were — in addition to the assembly andpublication of the present volume — to organize a series of popular lectures, with

370

Downloaded By: [University of Michigan] At: 21:47 11 January 2010

The Neapolitan revolution of 1799

OLUZJONIC NAPOLUTAISA *>

DEL 1700

CON JUTBATTI VKDUTS AUTOOBAW

KD AWII1 EOCDHEMl nCUKAllV] C OBA1IC1 OKI, ICHrO

i

Rgure / Allegorical title-page of the A/bo i/fustratiVo de//o rivo/uz/one nopo/etono de/ / 799(Naples: A. Morano & Figlio, 1899). Photo by author

a plan for later publication, to coin a commemorative centennial medal, and toraise funds for the completion of an already proposed monument to the greatAdmiral of the revolution Francesco Caracciolo, to be erected on a site preparedmany years earlier at the beginning of Via Caracciolo.

371

Downloaded By: [University of Michigan] At: 21:47 11 January 2010

Perspectives and debates

A modello for the commemorative medal was commissioned from the artistFrancesco Ierace and accordingly reproduced with an explanatory text in theAlbo illustrativo.7 As the most recent work of contemporary art dedicated torevolutionary subjects, it appears last in the catalogue, after Giuseppe Sciuti'spainting of La madre della Patria (1870), Francesco Ierace's sculpture of the priestAntonio Toscano (1899), Rafiàele Tancredi's painting of the Arresto dell'ammiraglioCaracdolo per tradimento di un suo servo (1872), Ettore Cercone's painting of IIcadavere del Caracdolo ricompare innanzi a re Ferdinando (1889) and GioacchinoToma's two paintings of Luisa Sanfelice (1874 and 1884).8 The obverse side ofthe medal (Figure 2) depicts the figure of the Republic, fallen and chained,

174. Modello delln Mptlngli.! ronnnomnraliva

dol Ccntenario ilei 1700.

Oj>er* rtl Pmhcoitoo Jerneo.

Figure 2 Francesco Ierace, Modello for the medal commemorating the revolution of1799 (obverse). Albo illustrativo (Stila rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 (Naples: A. Morano &Figlio, 1899), cat no. 174. Photo by author

372

Downloaded By: [University of Michigan] At: 21:47 11 January 2010

The Neapolitan revolution of 1799

leaning heavily upon the arm of Liberty, who stands near the broken Tree ofLiberty and gazes at the gallows from which hang the bodies of Neapolitanpatriots, and below them the drunken mob of sanfedisti, the popular anti-revolutionary army led by Cardinal Ruffo, on whose banner is written VIVADIO VIVA IL RE. On the reverse of the medal is a smoking altar inscribed AINAPOLETANIDEL 1799 VINTI SUL PATIBOLO VINCITORI NELLASTORIA. The conceit of the commemorative medal — patriots vanquished onthe scaffold are victorious in history — accords with the argument of the album'sallegorical tide-page: the true victory of the republican revolution is borne outin history, in the realization of the still very young national republican state.

"What was the force of this argument in Naples in 1899? Why did it take thisdidactic form combining critical historiography with an allegorical framework?It is instructive to look more closely at the genesis of the Albo illustrativo project.

When the Preface to the album was reprinted in the second edition ofCroce's Pagine sparse a new footnote revealed that he had not only written thetext himself but had practically everything to do with the research, writing andorganization of the Albo illustrativo? That Croce was in charge of the projectmay also be inferred from a letter of 16 April 1899 which he wrote to the Corrieredi Napoli publicizing the recently formed Citizens Committee and the as yetunrealized commemorative album.10 In both this letter and in the Preface to theAlbo illustrativo Croce emphasized that the project was historical in character andwould not be the usual artistic appreciation that typically served to commemor-ate historicahevents with fanciful words and pictures invented for the occasion.As a model for his alternative approach, in which fashionable aesthetic appealwould be discounted, Croce cited a recent French publication in which graphicimages of period materials had been used to document the revolution of 1830.n

Visual evidence of the period, he argued, was as yet little known but 'Cosìfarebbe cosa da interessar vivamente il pubblico ed utile, al tempo stesso, aglistudi storici'.12

The bringing together of public and scholarly interests was of course the greatgoal of'cultural organizers' of the Risorgimento movement. During the 1890sCroce and a circle of friends sought to emulate the intellectual activism ofFrancesco De Sanctis by taking the results of their erudite researches in thelibraries and archives out into the public sphere, where they might have somepurchase on civic, that is political, life in promoting a sense of common culturebased on shared historical memory. One project of this kind was the monthlyjournal Napoli Nobilissima, founded in 1891 by Croce and Salvatore Di Giacomoalong with Riccardo Carafa, Giuseppe Ceci, Luigi Conforti, MichelangeloSchipa and Vittorio Spinazzola, all men of high bourgeois or aristocratic origin.All were born in the 1850s or 1860s, were variously devoted to the arts, letters orerudition, but united behind Croce's effort to forge a historical culturalpatrimony out of the neglected art and topography of la vecchia Napoli. Thedecorative front cover employed a neo-Rococo framework, similar in style tothat of the Albo illustrativo, as the setting for an historical artifact, in this case a

373

Downloaded By: [University of Michigan] At: 21:47 11 January 2010

Perspectives and debates

medieval tomb. Like the scholarly but relatively accessible articles within, theiconography and cover design of Napoli Nobilissima represented a concession tothe tastes of more general readers. In the second year of the journal this fancifuldesign was replaced by a more austere neo-Renaissance cover illustration, and atthe same time Croce redrafted the editorial statement of purpose to eliminate DiGiacomo's florid prose and give the journal a more serious public demeanor.

In his publicity for the centennial Albo illustrativo, Croce pointedly criticizedworks of public history that were badly done or done in bad faith. He pouredparticular scorn on the municipal government's plan for the commemorativemonument to be raised in the Piazza del Mercato. This project — for an obeliskinscribed with the names of the martiri of 1799 — was destined to cause scandaland recrimination, Croce asserted, since the officials involved had no means ofcompiling the names accurately and no provision for submitting their list tocritical discussion by knowledgeable historians.14 The Albo illustrativo is thuspresented, in Croce's polemical fashion, as a better kind of public history,accessible and interesting, but also proven by the evidential standards of criticalhistoriography — instructive to the public and useful to studiosi at the same time.The Albo illustrativo, in other words, was designed to correct popular historicalconsciousness, in a way that is comparable to the erudite biographical studiesCroce had already dedicated to some of the principal actors of 1799 and recentlyrepublished in his Studii storia sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 (1897). Theseefforts, he wrote in the Preface to this collection, were conceived as remedies tothe popular biographies written by politically correct but poorly informed andunscholarly authors — 'come una specie di reazione alle biografie rettoriche emonotone, e spesso vuote, degli scrittori patriottici e liberali'.15

And what of the modern history paintings and other 'fine art' objectsincluded in the Albo illustrativo! Would not these artistic representations be asobjectionable as the popular histories of which Croce complained, thoseillustrated stories now in vogue, with pictures made by 'artisti che lavoravanodi invenzione e di fantasia', unwilling to sacrifice 'l'effetto che si dice estetico' tothe rough facts of concrete history.16 Would they not, as historical fictions, beprecisely what Croce called pseudohistories? Croce's explanation for includingthe nineteenth-century paintings and sculptures, given in the Preface to thealbum, does not, in fact, confront the question of their historical truth valuehead on. They are included, he wrote, because

abbiamo voluto che alla voce della storia si unisse la voce dell'arte (la quale haanch'essa narrato più volte gli episodi di quella rivoluzione napoletana) con leriproduzioni che offriamo delle tele e delle sculture del Toma, del Tancredi,dello Sciuti, del Cercone e del Jerace, che mettono una nota gentile tra idocumenti, spesso crudi e spiacenti, da noi presentati.17

It is clear that images made with aesthetic intentions, long after the events theypurport to depict, lack the objective status of either visual or verbal historical

374

Downloaded By: [University of Michigan] At: 21:47 11 January 2010

The Neapolitan revolution of 1799

documents in Croce's view, but what is the nature of their claim to historicaltruth?

It is possible that the particular selection of nineteenth-century works of artwas not entirely in Croce's hands. However, one can imagine why certain onesmight have been important to him, notably those representing the heroines ofthe revolution. Tito Angelini's clay relief sculpture depicting La morte di EleonoraFonseca, thought to date from about 1860, was not incorporated into thecatalogue of the album but was given a conspicuous symbolic role as theheadpiece of the Preface.18 Perhaps even closer to Croce's heart than Fonsecawas Luisa Sanfelice, the subject of two paintings by Toma — one depicting hertransfer from Naples to Palermo (La Sanfelice che sbarca a Napoli per esser condotta amorte), the other, much more famous, depicting Luisa Sanfelice nel carcere (Figure3).19

In accord with popular legend still in circulation when Toma exhibited thepainting in Naples in 1874, Sanfelice is shown heavy with child, sewing clothesfor the baby whose birth will announce the time for her execution. The veil ofstillness Toma threw over the composition, the isolation of the woman's head,

172. J.uisn Sanfelico nel carceroDipinto di Mionccliino Ton».

figure 3 Gioacchino Toma, Lo/so Sanfelice nel carcere, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.Albo illustrativo della rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 (Naples: A. Morano & Figlio, 1899),cat. no. 172. Photo by author

375

Downloaded By: [University of Michigan] At: 21:47 11 January 2010

Perspectives and debates

projected (as if already shrouded) in shadow on the wall of her cell, drawsdiscomforting attention to the passage of time and to the tragically mixedblessing of her child's imminent birth. Although Toma was not the mostcelebrated southern painter of his generation, contemporary critics all insistedupon the power of this painting to move the viewer's sympathies.20 It wasCroce himself who disproved the legend of Sanfelice's pregnancy by demon-strating that it was in feet a ruse, vouched for by her physicians. ' Yet he did notscorn Toma's painting. On the contrary, in the documentary context of the Alboillustrativo Croce was able to 'correct' the defective evidence of-the paintingwhile allowing its emotional truth to stand.

In his previous writings on the revolution Croce affirmed that 'L'episodio diLuisa Sanfelice e dei Baccher [conspiracy] è l'esempio più terribile e scandalosodella feroce reazione [of the Bourbon government] e insieme una storiacommovente, che sembra un romanzo'.22 The short essay that accompaniesthe painting in the Albo illustrativo affirms that the central anecdote of Toma'swork does not conform to 'la verità storica', but the description of the painting isevocative and conveys respect for the sentiment it is meant to provoke. Crocefurther redeemed the painting with an account of the artist's political credentials:Toma was a garibaldino, who as a youth around 1860 had been suspected andpersecuted by the Bourbon government; he was a painter given to subjectsinspired by love of liberty and hatred of tyranny; he was the author of a sensitiveautobiography.24 Croce's admiration for Toma's two paintings of Sanfelice'sinnocent tragedy apparently defeated his ambivalence about artistic represen-tations of history, evidently because they embodied a salutary and correctemotional response to the concrete historical event.

To turn once more to the question of Croce's work as an activist in publichistory during the 1890s I will propose, in conclusion, that the purpose of theCitizens Committee for honoring the martyrs of 1799, and of the Albo illustrativoin particular, was to fill an important lacuna in public historical consciousness —namely, that the republican revolution had really happened.

Croce's letter to the Corriere di Napoli publicizing the Citizens Committeeand thè project of the commemorative album mentions other civic-mindedcultural organizations to which he belonged that were also engaged in scholarlyand public history projects geared around the centennial: the Società per ladiffusione della coltura (co-founded by Croce), the Circolo filologico (orig-inally founded by De Sanctis), and the Società di storia patria.25 The member-ship of these organizations overlapped a good deal and overlapped also withCroce's journal Napoli Nobilissima. There was apparently a very energeticnetwork of serious research and education efforts in place, disseminating know-ledge of the activists and institutions of the republican revolution, and Croce hada hand in each of them. What was the motivation for all this construction workwithin the political culture of Naples? The liberal scholars of Croce's circlewished to confirm the idea that 1799 was the true beginning of liberal pro-Unification tradition in the south. This was surely the larger context of their

376

Downloaded By: [University of Michigan] At: 21:47 11 January 2010

The Neapolitan revolution of 1799

campaign to work the concrete details of the revolutionary period into a fabricof civic memory. The counter-pressure was the continuing validity of VincenzoCuoco's famous criticism that 1799 had been a 'passive' revolution, thatfundamental changes had not been accomplished. Croce's scholarly civicactivism of the 1890s, and the commemorations of 179-9 in particular, ought tobe seen in relation to the larger contemporary preoccupation with revolutionstemming from what Raymond Grew has called the 'myth of the missingrevolution'.26 The idea of la rivoluzione mancata as the central problem of liberalItaly's national political culture gave purpose to Neapolitan 'cultural organizers'who made the centennial of 1799 the occasion for asserting the reality of theirrevolution through public enactment of its civic ideals. The centennial Alboillustrativo consolidated the material evidence of this reality and thereby gaveretrospective testimony to the spiritual unity of liberal elites.

Notes

1 La Rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 illustrata con ritratti, vedute, autografi ed altri documentifigurativi e grafici del tempo. Albo pubblicato nella ricorrenza del primo centenario dellaRepubblica napoletana, ed. Benedetto Croce, Giuseppe Ceci, Michelangelo D'Ayalaand Salvatore Di Giacomo (Naples: A. Morano, 1899); anastatic reprints in 1969(Naples: Società Editrice Meridionale) and in 1998 (Naples: Lions Club Napoli).Pagination varies, as there were at least two slightly different printings in 1899, butthe numeration of the catalogue is uniform in all examples. The album is best knownby the short title Albo illustrativo della rivoluzione napoletano del 1799 and it isaccordingly cited hereafter as Albo illustrativo.

2 Luisa Martorelli, 'La pittura dell'Ottocento nell'Italia meridionale (1799-1848)', inLa pittura in Italia: L'Ottocento, 2 vols (Milan: Electa, 1990), vol. 2, p. 469. For morerecent discussion of many items included in the Albo illustrativo see the exhibitioncatalogue Napoli e la repubblica del '99: Immagini della rivoluzione (Naples: Elio de Rosaeditore, 1989). See also Rosanna Cioffi, 'Aspetti e problemi dell'attività artistica aNapoli in relazione alle vicende rivoluzionarie del 1799', in Scritti di storia dell'arte inonore di Raffaello Causa (Naples: Electa Napoli, 1988), pp. 359-66; and Saverio Ricci,'Tra due secoli. La rivoluzione del 1799 nella memoria storica dell'Ottocento', inGiovanni Pugliese Carratelli (ed.) Storia e civiltà della Campania. L'Ottocento (Naples:Electa Napoli, 1995), pp. 15-26.

3 Albo illustrativo, pp. xv-xxviii.4 Compare the emblem incorporated into the title-page illustrated here with the

documentary example reproduced in the Albo illustrativo, no. 52.5 ibid., p. xiii.6 ibid., p. v.7 ibid., no. 174. An example of the medal in bronze is conserved in the Museo di San

Martino, Naples; see Napoli e la repubblica del '99: Immagini della rivoluzione, pp. 196-7,fig. 212 (obverse and reverse).

8 Albo illustrativo: Giuseppe Sciuti (no. 168), Francesco Ierace (no. 169), RaffaeleTancredi (no. 170), Ettore Cercone (no. 171), Gioacchino Toma (nos 172-3),Francesco Ierace (no. 174). Appended to the catalogue, without a cataloguenumber, is an additional entry for Tito Angelini's terracruda relief sculpture ofc. 1860, La morte di Eleonora Fonseca, reproduced as the headpiece to the 'Prefazione',p. v.

377

Downloaded By: [University of Michigan] At: 21:47 11 January 2010

Perspectives and debates

9 Benedetto Croce, 'Prefazione all'Albo illustrativo della Rivoluzione napoletana del1799', Pagine sparse, 2d edn, 3 vols (Naples: Ricciardi, 1943), vol. 2, p. 132, n. 1:

Il Croce raccolse e ordinò il materiale illustrativo, scrisse quasi tutte le 175 note,ricche di documenti e notizie inedite (salvo dodici fornitegli dal Ceri e tre dalD'Ayala), tradusse il rarissimo Aperçu historique del Pignatelli di Strongoli e vipremise una notizia sull'autore, ricavata dalle carte di lui esistenti presso il principedi Strongoli, e, infine, questa prefazione, che porta il nome dei quattro delComitato.

10 Benedetto Croce, 'Pei martiri del '99', Corriere di Napoli (18 April 1899); reprinted inFausto Nicolini, L'Editio ne varietur: Delle opere di Benedetto Croce (Naples: Banco diNapoli, 1960), pp. 291-2 (letter written 16 April).

11 ibid., and Albo illustrativo, p. vi, with reference to other examples and suggestions forfuture documentary histories of the same kind.

12 Croce, 'Pei martiri del '99', in Nicolini, L'Editio ne varietur, p. 292.13 Thomas Willette, 'È stata opera di critica onesta, liberale, italiana: Croce and Napoli

nobilissima (1892-1906)', in Jack D'Amico, Dain A. Trafton and Massimo Verdicchio(eds) The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views (Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press, forthcoming).

14 The monument was eventually raised, without the inscriptions, in the Piazza deiMartiri; see Nicolini, L'Editio ne varietur, p. 292. For other examples of Croce'spolemics against both 'official' works public history and politically appointedguardians of public culture at this time see his letter 'Pei martiri del 1799' inNicolini, L'Editio ne varietur, p. 292; and Willette, 'È stata opera di critica onesta,liberale, italiana'.

15 Benedetto Croce, Studii storici sulla Rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 (Rome: ErmannoLoescher, 1897), pp. xxii-xxiii.

16 Albo illustrativo, p. vi.17 ibid., p. viii.18 See Note 8 above. The terracruda relief is one of a set of four, now in the Museo di San

Martino, Naples, representing the last moments of well-known revolutionary figures;for the whole group see Napoli e la repubblica del '99: Immagini della rivoluzione, pp.164-7, figs 99-102.

19 Albo illustrativo, nos 173 and 172, respectively. For the two paintings see also Napoli ela repubblica del '99: Immagini della rivoluzione, pp. 170-2, figs 104-5; and theexhibition catalogue Gioacchino Toma 1836-1891, ed. Bruno Mantura and NicolaSpinosa (Naples: Eletta Napoli, 1995), nos 19 and 47, illus. pp. 60 and 87. The primeversion of Luisa Sanfelice nel carcere is in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples; a secondversion (1874-5) is in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome. The femalemartiri of the revolution ought to have an important place in any future study offemale figures in Croce's historical and philosophical writings; cf. Giulio de Martino,'A proposito di Benedetto Croce e le donne', Croce Via 1(1) (1995): 29-35.

20 See the summary of critical opinions gathered by Elena di Majo in Gioacchino Toma1836-1891, pp. 28-33.

21 Croce, Studii storici sulla Rivoluzione napoletana, pp. 139-232, particularly his accountof Sanfelice's unwitting involvement in the Baccher conspiracy (first published as anarticle in 1888). See now Croce's La rivoluzione napoletana del 1799: Biografie, racconti,ricerche, 5th edn (Bari: Laterza, 1948), pp. 115-88, and p. 460 (bibliographical note).

22 Croce, Studii storici sulla Rivoluzione napoletana, pp. xxiii-xxiv.23 Albo illustrativo, no. 172. It is apparent elsewhere that Croce indeed admired Toma's

two paintings of Luisa Sanfelice very much; see his Studii storici sulla Rivoluzionenapoletana, p. 212; and La rivoluzione napoletana del 1799, p. 171, n. 2.

378

Downloaded By: [University of Michigan] At: 21:47 11 January 2010

The Neapolitan revolution of 1799

24 Albo illustrativo, no. 172.25 Croce, Tei martiri del 1799', in Nicolini, L'Editio ne varietur, pp. 290-1.26 Raymond Grew, 'The paradoxes of Italy's nineteenth-century political culture', in

Isser Woloch (ed.) Revolution and the Meanings of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 220. The old problem of Italy's'missing revolution' has some features in common with more recent liberalpreoccupations about the 'unfinished' French Revolution, for which see Robert T.Denommé and Robert H. Simon (eds) Unfinished Revolutions: Legacies of Upheaval inModern French Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).

379

Downloaded By: [University of Michigan] At: 21:47 11 January 2010