The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Shelley (Palgrave Literary Dictionaries) by M. Garrett

Author:M. Garrett [Garrett, M.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Published: 2013-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

P

Pacchiani, Francesco

(1771–1835)

Professor of metaphysics, logic and physical chemistry at the university of *Pisa from 1801. He met the Shelleys, in November 1820, possibly through *Reveley (Angeli [1911], p. 173), and he introduced them to *Sgricci. According to Medwin 277–9 Pacchiani also introduced Shelley and *Medwin to Teresa *Viviani. At first Shelley was impressed by his conversational eloquence but he was swiftly disenchanted by his cynicism. ‘He disgusted S – by telling a dirty story’ (MWSL i.169).

Padua

Italian city. Formerly a possession of *Venice, it was under Austrian rule, with the rest of the Veneto, from 1814. In ‘Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills’, ‘Many-domèd Padua proud / Stands, a peopled solitude’ (215–16) in a plain harvested for the benefit of the Austrian foe; in the once famous university ‘the lamp of learning, / ... now no more is burning’ (256–7). Shelley visited the city briefly in August and September 1818.

Paestum

Southern Italian site known for its Greek temples. Shelley visited ‘the sublime & massy colonnades’, which he believed to be Etruscan, on 24 February 1819. He admired ‘the architecture exceedingly unornamented & simple’ and the ‘perfect proportions’ and was led to think about the relation between symmetry and apparent size (L ii.79–80).

Paine, Thomas

(1737–1809)

Radical writer. His work, particularly The Rights of Man (1791) and the deist apology The Age of Reason (1794–1807), influenced Shelley in QM and other early poems and prose pieces including his Declaration of Rights. The Age of Reason has ‘defects as a piece of argument’ but is the work of a ‘great & good man’ and ‘has the solemn sincerity ... of a voice from the bed of death’ (L ii.143) – Paine wrote the first Part just before his arrest and narrow escape from execution in revolutionary Paris.

See also: Carlile, Richard.

Painting and sculpture

Soon after arriving in *Florence in October 1819 Shelley told Maria *Gisborne that a main aim of his coming to *Italy was ‘the observing in statuary & painting the degree in which, and the rules according to which, that ideal beauty of which we have so intense yet so obscure an apprehension is realized in external forms’ (L ii.126). More specifically he was interested in work by Guido Reni and Correggio in Bologna (L ii.49–51); in the preface to Cenci he describes the portrait then believed to be Guido Reni’s Beatrice Cenci (PS ii.735). He responded especially to the ‘inspired and ideal’ quality of ‘the finest painter’ Raphael, preferring him to the more ‘mechanical’, less beautiful Michelangelo (L ii.51, 112). There has been some debate about whether he also saw Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi and, if so, whether it is an influence on the account of the birth of Asia in PU II.v.20–32: see PS ii.570.

Shelley’s responses to sculpture in the Uffizi form the bulk of ‘Notes on Sculptures in Rome and Florence’ of 1819. (Most of the notes were first published by *Medwin in 1833–4 and, probably from a transcription by Claire *Clairmont, by *Forman in 1879: see Murray [1983], pp. 150–1.

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