Of the four “fathers of the homeland” who were placed side by side in late nineteenth-century prints to commemorate the birth of the Italian state – Vittorio Emanuele II, Cavour, Garibaldi, Mazzini – the first two are now almost forgotten and the third, although very well known, ended up becoming above all a “pop icon” (as the title of a Turin exhibition from a couple of years ago sounded).
Today, it is above all Mazzini who remains to personify the Risorgimento, on the right as well as on the left: the Prime Minister has cited him several times Giorgia Melonibut a few months ago it was some deputies of the Democratic Party who asked for the beautiful portrait he dedicated to him Silvestro Lega, owned by a Rhode Island museum, was purchased by our country or at least could temporarily return to Italy. And it is precisely this portrait – dedicated to “The Last Moments of Giuseppe Mazzini” – that is the fulcrum of the exhibition that opens on May 31st in Rome, at the Vittoriano, curated by Edith Gabrielli: “The last portrait: Mazzini and Lega, parallel stories of the Risorgimento” (Electa catalogue).
As can be understood, this is an absolutely singular exhibition, which celebrates Mazzini by placing the moment of death at the centre, through the portrait which, of a man with an undoubtedly out of the ordinary existence, depicts the extreme phase of existence in which he becomes similar to any other human being. Also because Lega’s artistic choice was precisely to represent not the death of a heroic character, but on the contrary the fragility of a tired and ill person, on the eve of his passing. Precisely this choice meant that the painting was not liked at all by Mazzini’s followers and, not finding buyers in Italy, it was taken to England and finally landed in the United States.
Given the subject, Lega’s framework draws attention to a particular aspect: Mazzini’s relationship with death. The topic was addressed years ago, for the period following his death, by Sergio Luzzatto with a small and original book dedicated to the history of Mazzini’s body, that is, to the attempt of his followers to embalm his body through a new “petrification” technique, so that it could be exhibited to the public every year (which happened only once, in 1873, a year after his death when, having reopened the coffin, it was found that the embalming had not been successful and the initiative was desisted from being repeated). But what deserves to be investigated is above all the relationship between Mazzini in life and the theme of death. All his abundant production of writings and his torrential epistolary activity, for example, are characterized by presence of a mortuary lexicon, with frequent references to cemeteries and tombs, skeletons and ghosts, bones and corpses (even with “worms crawling on them”); he wrote countless times that the monarchy was a corpse, that Italy brought to unity under the sign of Savoy was nothing more than a lifeless skeleton and so on. Beyond this lexicon with Gothic features, dear to romantic sensibility, the reference, or rather the exaltation, of death then returned in the insistence with which Mazzini preached the need to sacrifice oneself for the homeland, defending the value and necessity of martyrdom .
Above all, his vision of death was characterized by a rock-solid faith in reincarnation which took shape in the mid-1930s in contact with the French democratic-republican culture (people well known to him such as Jules Michelet or George Sand believed in reincarnation). “Death does not exist,” Mazzini once wrote to Aurelio Saffi; he meant to say that the individual, endowed with an immortal soul, passes through successive existences, which take place in places other than the earth and allow him, if he has done well, to progressively get closer to God. In an 1870 pamphlet he reiterated his belief “in an indefinite series of reincarnations of the soul, from life to life, from world to world, each of which represents an improvement on the previous one”. The idea we have of death has an undoubted importance for everyone, ordinary individuals and great personalities, in determining the characteristics of existence. In Mazzini’s case it was also faith in reincarnation that contributed to instilling in him that extraordinary determination that his contemporaries had already noticed, that singular ability to not give up on anything and continue his battle after every failure.
And yet this aspect of Mazzini’s ideas has been generally ignored, first by his followers and then also by historians (but not by everyone: Salvemini dealt with it in a few but precise pages in one of his books from over a century ago). I believe this has a fairly simple explanation: the embarrassment of Mazzinians and various Mazzini scholars in the face of reincarnationist beliefs that contradicted the highly secular positions in which they recognized themselves. Thus, in the face of Mazzini who, even in a very widespread work such as On the Duties of Man, claimed to believe in reincarnation, we preferred to pretend nothing had happened, deciding – with some arbitrariness – that it was basically an aspect of little importance. important.
