Luigi Pirandello engaged in a “battle of ideas” with two key figures of early twentieth-century Italian philosophical culture, Benedetto Croce and Adriano Tilgher. Pirandello criticized Croce’s separation of art and science, arguing that they form an interconnected unity. He also criticized Croce’s aesthetics and the separation of intuition from thought, which for Pirandello were both essential to the making of any work of art. Consequently, Croce provided disparaging remarks on Pirandello’s theatre that became very influential among contemporary literary critics. In contrast, Tilgher was one of the first critics to analyze Pirandello’s work with hermeneutical attention and is credited with creating the term pirandellismo. Influenced by Simmel and Bergson, and rejecting all types of metaphysics, Tilgher defended the autonomy of art while also acknowledging its capacity to interpret and reflect cultural contexts. However, Tilgher gradually took a critical stance in respect to Pirandello, both for political reasons and for a controversy over the famous “life/form” critical formulation, which Tilgher claimed as his own invention, while evidence shows that it was extrapolated from Pirandello’s writing.

This chapter treats Pirandello’s relationship with his good friend, fellow writer, and collaborator on the Teatro d’Arte, Massimo Bontempelli. It addresses the aesthetic and political views and life experiences that united them and reframes the dominant notion of early twentieth-century Italian playwrights as lesser pirandellisti. Describing their influence as mutual, the chapter explores both authors’ treatment of myth and the modern masses in works including The Festival of Our Lord of the Ship, The Mountain Giants, Nostra Dea, and Valòria. Finally, it covers Bontempelli’s magisterial analysis of his friend’s writing in the eulogy Pirandello, o del candore.