"Pascersi in Elicona, sognare sul Parnaso". Sul mito ambiguo dell'eremitaggio creativo

For the great authors of eighteenth-century aesthetics - from Gerard to Reid, from Diderot to Kant - exile in Arcadia, the realm of beauty inaccessible to the common man, is considered a kind of destiny of genius. The notion of the creative hermitage is therefore reconsidered in this essay from two perspectives: that of the marginalisation imposed on the artist as an eccentric figure and Saturnine personality, and that of the solitude consciously sought and pursued by the genius for creative purposes. This essay aims to examine the theoretical assumptions of the ambiguous myth of creative solitude and its relationship to the metaphysical themes that dominated philosophical reflection between the 17th and 18th centuries.