Codes at hand. The two sons of Iorio in aesthetic-judiciary contentious

Abstract

The nineteenth-century underworld of trans-parody – sexual reversals on a comical taste, with en travesti characters representing, for counterpoint, mythic figures of the novel and melodramatic imaginary – couldn’t be comprehended if we forget that some charismatic figures of modern individualism have already been completely evirated (from The Female Quichotte onwards). There is, also, a pioneer work in the copyright history which has been inspired by this ‘family’ of texts: Il Figlio di Iorio (1904) written by Eduardo Scarpetta, parody of La figlia di Iorio by Gabriele D’Annunzio (1904). The “commedia presepiana” – halfway from a belle epoque “opera buffa”, to a homemade parody – provoked a small juidicial ‘earthquake’: a request of consent, a caution, a legal action against plagiarism and, finally, a process based on phenomenal evidences and marked by the whole cultural-social community divided into two parts: scholars vs players, crying vs smiling, high culture vs plebeian culture, etc. – and some prestigious scholars that attended as assessors. Very interesting case of Sociology of Art, the D’Annunzio-Scarpetta process is also a crucial episode in the history of culture: during the process it took place an amateurish and heated brainstorming of “Forensic Comparativism”.