To a former student like myself, to whom Kenelm’s conversation about the Italian Ottocento was as stimulating over the years as his teaching on the subject had been sure and authoritative in undergraduate and postgraduate days, it was always something of a shock to remember how relatively little he had published in this area of Italian literature. Two major essays, both of which started life as lectures, two invaluable translations, a scattering of lesser articles and reviews—these, combined with his presence as teacher and talker, were enough to ensure his status as an indispensable point of reference in any discussion of the early nineteenth century in Italy.
The two lecture-essays—on the idea of truth in Manzoni and Leopardi (1967) and in commemoration of Manzoni on the centenary of his death (1973)—are not so much the report of specific pieces of research as syntheses, dense and sometimes tense, of what Kenelm judged to be the most important things he had to say about the subject. And the subject mattered to him a lot. Manzoni was important because, as he put it in the centenary lecture, he was ‘that uncommon thing, a considerable Christian artist’—adding in pen to his own copy the word ‘very’ before ‘considerable’—and Leopardi was in some sense his antithesis. What Kenelm had in mind when he thought about Christian art is discussed elsewhere in this issue.
