Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

What appears to be one of the French cultural distinctions, neoclassicism, has deep origins in the Italian debates of the sixteenth century about what constitutes good, acceptable artistic representation. In his theoretical works on poetics, as well as in his poetic practice, Torquato Tasso asserted that poetry and theater must conform to the immutable rules he believed to be established once and for all in Aristotle’s Poetics. Tasso then applied them to his own time, arguing for their universality. In my paper, I argue and show through various historical documents, such as prefaces, that the French intellectuals who founded the French Academy in 1637 under the auspices of Richelieu used Tasso’s ideas as the ideological basis for what they understood to be the only acceptable way to make art in the broadest sense. French theorists such as Scudéry and Chapelain quoted Tasso in their debates and composed their own poems, presenting the Italian author as their moral warrant for imposing their beliefs on future generations of art theorists. Thus, the roots of the famous three unities of time, place, and action can be traced back to the Italian debates of the previous century.