Emblema di un’emozione. L’agente storico della rivoluzione in Alessandro Manzoni

This paper focuses on the iconological pattern of the theory of Revolution, which Manzoni’s work is imbued with : it is Renzo’s raised fist as he runs untidily away, a gesture described in Chapter xii of Promessi sposi that, in a famous essay, Primo Levi points out to readers and critics as totally unlikely. That cliché turns out to be shaped on the Jacobin emblem of Brutus, borrowed from the history of the Roman Republic. Such association shifts the focus from the Revolution as a people’s phenomenon to the passions the human gesture becomes the visual counterpart of, in keeping with the methodological approach of political iconography and the history of emotions.