L'improvvisatore in genre scenes by foreign and Italian artists in the 19th Century

The famous Italian improviser Maria Maddalena Morelli, known as Corilla Olimpica, inspired Madame de Staël’s Corinne ou l’Italie, and other literary works focusing on the figure of the improviser, like Hans Cristian Andersen’s The Improvisatore or Life in Italy. These novels combine travel experiences with the celebration of Italian improvisers, some of them were famous all over Europe. A tradition of extemporaneus poetry existed also as a kind of folk music, not only to sing poems in ottava rima like Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata,but also to improvise duels on various topics.In the 19th century some genre paintings and engravings depict the improvvisatori from the foreigners’ point of view (ex. Charles Yriarte’s Improvvisatore), while popular drawings and engravings, like Bartolomeo Pinelli’s, allow the spread of the Italian counterpart of the cliché of the improviser. This paper compares these two figurative approaches, by putting images in relationship with travel accounts, novels and musical sources, as well as with the tradition of improvised poetry attested in the Italian peninsula by the ethomusicological research.