«Non c'è argomento più nuovo d'una questione vecchia»: pregiudizi e paradossi intorno alla «Prefazione» al «Conte di Carmagnola»

The «Foreword» to the «Conte di Carmagnola» is a bright and synthetic outcome from the papers of «Materiali estetici» and «Sulla moralità delle opere tragiche» and is read here both in the sight of Manzoni’s dialogue with those who were his privileged interlocutors at the beginning of the 19th century, and also in the originality of his formal proposals. Here emerge the rigor and the incisiveness of a memorable declaration of poetics, which, despite the monothematic attack of contemporaries on the question of dramatic unity, gives the reader the cornerstones of the Manzonian aesthetic, with a sight at the European aesthetics: imagination, unity, verisimilitude, nature, universality of the judgment are affirmed as an inalienable conceptual background of the art of beauty and impose their selves to be received through a stringent and alienating logic of paradox, in which the author distinguishes the logical, linguistic and ontological levels of the discourse. The arguments supporting the autonomy of the artwork unmask the contradictions inside the conventional rules and guide the reflection along the nodes that bind the essence of the artwork – that means its truth, its nature – with its beauty and the category of bonum: poetic art is thus brought back to its own seriousness and to an inevitable comparison with the domain of morality.