The Palace and Park by Phillips, Forbes, Latham, Owen, Scharf, and Shenton

[Born at Asti, in Piedmont, 1749. Died at Florence, 1803. Aged 54.] He was of noble origin, and acceded, at the age of 14, to large hereditary estates. His passions were strong, ardent, and irregular: his education was neglected. He travelled much,--rapidly and impatiently, like a man fleeing from himself, or seeking, without finding, objects to satisfy the capacity of a mind, large but unstored. He was first drawn with passion to literature by Plutarch’s Lives; and his first tragedy, “Cleopatra,” was acted at Turin in 1775, when he was 26 years old. Thenceforward he was devoted to the study of his art. The subjects of his tragedies, which follow the simplicity of the Greek model, are chiefly from ancient mythology, or history. They are distinguished by intense absorption of the poet in his dramatic action and persons, by the austere exclusion from the plot of everything accidental or inoperative to the main purpose and catastrophe, and by the rejection of all accessory ornament from his sedulously laboured style. In his hands the flowing and languishing Italian speech becomes abrupt, concentrated, darted, fiery; harsh, often, until it is dilated into harmony by the swelling and emphatic intonations of the actual theatre. He raised at once the prostrate Italian tragedy to the rank of an art, and to a competition with the nations. He was a passionate lover of horses, licentious in his attachments, and an ardent partisan of liberty. [Alfieri was buried in Santa Croce. Canova, commissioned by the Countess of Albany, sculptured his tomb and the medallion of him which is upon it. This bust is by Domenica Manera, and no doubt is a good likeness, having been executed under Canova’s eye.]