Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro
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Book presentation
Gerardo Tocchini in conversation with Julien Zanetta
Was the eighteenth century truly a “libertine century”?
A persistent misunderstanding weighs upon philosophical libertinism—one that resembles a kind of curse: it has never been taken sufficiently seriously and has instead been dismissed as a trivial pretext for libertinage. As the volume reconstructs, this prejudice also affects Voltaire’s earliest philosophical apprenticeship, owing to a series of assumptions never demonstrated on documentary grounds and long taken for granted even in historical scholarship. A critical and journalistic provocation launched in the late nineteenth century by the writers of the petit-romantisme, the notion of the “libertine eighteenth century” still enjoys unquestioned yet unjustified authority among scholars of aesthetically grounded disciplines and continues to cause damage.
Free meeting, reservation mandatory.
Gerardo Tocchini
Gerardo Tocchini is Full Professor of Early Modern History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His publications include I Fratelli d’Orfeo (Florence, 1998), Minacciare con le immagini (Rome, 2010), Su Greuze e Rousseau (Pisa, 2016), and Arte e politica nella cultura dei Lumi (Rome, 2026; Oxford, 2023).
Julien Zanetta
After several years spent in the United States (Baltimore, Ann Arbor, New York) and Brussels (Université Saint-Louis), Julien Zanetta has been teaching at Ca' Foscari University since 2023. His work focuses on Charles Baudelaire – he’s the editor of Œuvres complètes for the Bibliothèque de 0la Pléiade – as well as on 19th-century art criticism and aesthetics, exploring the relationship between literature and painting and the work of Jean Starobinski.