Alfieri

Now we are living with emperors
again, we can see that Alfieri’s
Filippo makes for an exemplary
feed-back loop. A peer-to-peer merry -

go-round is centrifugal for us,
and centripedal for them, so Capri
or the Escorial are POTUS’,
the neo-Tsar’s or Party Secretary’s

magnet mountains. Yet a Promethean
figure is put up on the mountain.
Philip II gave Bohemia
watchtower coasts, and kept the fountain

and garden, bedside, of earthly delights.
Alfieri kept Philip as a fright.

Woodford Halse - 5 February 2025

Few plays are as original and daring and transformative as Vittorio Alfieri’s Filippo of 1775. Philip II owned Brueghel’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, which he kept by his bed in the Escorial.

Count Vittorio Alfieri ( 1749 - 1803) was a great Italian poet and playwright from Asti, Piedmont, in the Kingdom of Sardinia.

Nicholas Boyle argued in Goethe - The Poet and the Age v. I (1992) that a limitation to the Anglosphere is that we had nothing comparable to Sturm und Drang in Britain and America, nor any emancipated secularity, such as was possble for Germans, and I would add to that, French philosophes and Italians such as Alfieri as well. He said that there was no metaphysics of the self such as Leibniz provided, to carry out the possibility Shaftesbury envisaged of Promethean individuals in the Arts, Sciences etc.

I would suggest dread of Oliver Cromwell inhibited the British. They realised it would quickly get politcal. John Milton became a caged bird, a clipped figure, or maybe the raven in Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge. Freemasonry produced modest collegial selves in Britain, in almost a Venetian scheme guarding against a repeat usurper Marin Faliero. On the Continent, it produced more titanesque individuals like Alfieri. Anyhow we are back living in an Age of Emperors like in 1914.