Platone, l'antagonista. Tracce della presenza e forme della rielaborazione di Platone nell'opera di Giacomo Leopardi

The work aims at investigating the presence of Plato in Giacomo Leopardi’s works, in order to understand the influence of the philosopher’s dialogues on the genesis of the “Operette morali”. While maintaining the focus on the “Operette”, however, the research also explores many other areas of Leopardi’s production, in order to offer the widest and most exhaustive overview of the different sources and filters through which Leopardi became acquainted with Plato’s doctrines, even before reading his dialogues comprehensively. The first section explores the reception of Plato in Italy before Leopardi, by examining the attempts at translating his works and the various interpretations of his dialogues proposed throughout the eighteenth century up to the first decade of the nineteenth century. If placed in this context, the failure of Leopardi’s project to translate all of Plato’s dialogues, as proposed by the publisher De Romanis, can no longer be interpreted just as the result of a private matter, but also as a stage in a historical path that has never been outlined in its entirety until now. The rest of the work, articulated in other three sections, is entirely dedicated to Giacomo Leopardi’s work.Firstly, the thesis focuses on Leopardi’s earliest production, mapping the occurrences of the name “Plato”, as well as all the quotes either related to the philosopher or taken from his dialogues, in Leopardi’s “Puerilia” (1809-1810), “Dissertazioni filosofiche” (1811-1812), “Dialogo filosofico” (1812), “Storia dell’Astronomia” (1813) and, finally, in his “Saggio sopra errori popolari degli antichi” (1815). Research shows that Leopardi had been reading Ficino’s edition of Plato’s complete works (Lugduni, 1590) (which was present in the family library) since writing the first drafts of his erudite writings; therefore, Leopardi’s direct knowledge of Plato’s texts, even if partial, must be backdated compared to what has been noted so far. Furthermore, extending the research on Leopardi’s knowledge of Plato not only to his first stay in Rome but also to the following years confirms that it’s not possible to have Leopardi’s Plato coincide with Ast’s Plato: there is evidence of the fact that Leopardi knew and had read or consulted several other editions of Plato’s dialogues and that therefore his knowledge of the philosopher was quite extensive, although conditioned by different interpretative perspectives. The research then focuses on the “Zibaldone” and on the “Operette” in order to reconstruct the profile of Leopardi’s Plato, as it emerges from the “scartafaccio”, as well as the methods of re-elaboration of the dialogues found within Leopardi’s moral book. The last two chapters of the thesis are dedicated to the latter objective. Starting from an analysis of the genesis of only two operettas, the “Elogio degli uccelli “ and the “Dialogo di Plotino e di Porfirio”, the aim is to demonstrate how the “Plato function” is expressed not only through form, as critics have long believed, but also in terms of philosophical elaboration. This study ultimately proves that Plato, acting both as a model and an anti-model for the “Operette morali”, had a profound effect on the genesis of this book which, according to Leopardi’s own declaration, was intended to be “entirely philosophical and metaphysical”.