«Peignez donc une métaphore qui fournit un tableau a un peintre». Le postille letterarie di Manzoni a Voltaire

Voltaire’s Commentaires sur Corneille (included in the Œuvres completes de Voltaire, Kehl, Société Littéraire-typographique, 1785-1789, 92 vols.) are a point of reference for dramatic criticism in France throughout the second half of the eighteenth century: we want to demonstrate here that they are an object of study of the young Manzoni already during his stay in Paris in the early nineteenth century, when the romantically inspired theater begins to rediscover Corneille and to overshadow Voltaire’s criticisms. Manzoni’s marginal notes to the Commentaires would then be a sign of a first concrete approach to the works of the French Enlightenment thinker by a young poet in those years in search of an original way and of images that speak to the sensitivity and to intellect of the user; a poet already committed to reflecting on the problem of the national language, of which the theater is a test bench. Through the analysis of the annotations and their contextualization among the author’s works, the contribution aims to investigate the first surfacing of Manzoni’s reflection on rhetorical figures, the original premise of the subsequent and more mature conquests of the treatise Della lingua italiana