On the pseudo-poetry of Arcadia and its (partial) right to existence

Like ‘sparkling, many-coloured glass baubles’ that attract ‘barbarians’ accustomed to ‘piling themselves high with ornaments’—in just such terms does Benedetto Croce definitively characterize the Baroque poetic excesses of the irrational Italy of the Counter-Reformation. These trinkets shimmer away, illusory and bereft of any true value, representing the final stage of a trajectory that has ‘in one continuous line gone from troubadour lyric and Petrarchism to the showy poetry of Marino and the Baroque’. Within this critical perspective, it is precisely by virtue of its strenuous resistance to the dazzling, empty glitter of seventeenth-century literature that the eighteenth-century Accademia dell’Arcadia deserves such prominence. It has the merit of promoting an ‘ordered’ and ‘limpid’ model of literature, inspired by the principles of Cartesian rationality that had already taken root in the rest of Europe. Although Croce had little time for the aesthetic ideals of either the supporters of Arcadia or its detractors, he nonetheless helped to ensure that eighteenth-century Arcadian literature and Baroque literature would be seen as antithetical: a position that continues to condition our vision of both movements right down to the present day.