7 - Cosmopolitanism and the Creation of Patriotic Identities in the European Enlightenment

Summary

This chapter focuses on the life and writings of Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731–1815) and provides one way through which to map out the shifts and transformation of the cosmopolitan ideal in an age of growing patriotism. Napoli Signorelli wrote and lived between the intellectual and political worlds of two connected peripheries of Europe, Italy and Spain, and one of its intellectual centres, France. The Bourbon courts in Madrid and Naples provided the political thread for these debates and the Neoclassical tradition the background for them. The querelle between the ancients and moderns remained central, as writers searched within and outside of the Neoclassical tradition to stake their claims. Knowledge of the shared ground of the Neoclassical canon bound enlightenment writers together but also provided the fodder to drive them apart. Napoli Signorelli’s work and life illuminates a crisis or reconfiguration of cosmopolitanism, specifically at the end of the eighteenth century, when the Neoclassical underpinnings of cosmopolitanism were unsettled by emerging patriotic identities within Europe.