Ruskin, Dante e l’Europa romantica
abstract
My paper aims to show how Ruskin, through Dante’s work, looks for an alternative to romantic aesthetics. In Ruskin’s view, Dante is Medieval Italy (his knowledge of the poet being parallel to his discovery of Italian cities such as Lucca and Verona). Gothic art is the source of Europe: so Dante is «the central man of the world» (The Stones of Venice) and the fulcrum of an aesthetic based on sharpness and allegory, the two attributes that are typical of the architecture of a gothic cathedral. Ruskin’s ideas are then compared to those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, but also to the view of nature of other protagonists of the romantic age in Europe, such as Chateaubriand and Leopardi.
Keywords: François-René de Chateaubriand • John Ruskin • William Wordsworth • Giacomo Leopardi • Dante Alighieri • Samuel Taylor Coleridge