Simon A. Gilson. Dante and Renaissance Florence.

Simon A. Gilson. Dante and Renaissance Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Pp. 324.

A study of the reception of Dante in Florence from 1350 to 1481, Simon Gilson's Dante and Renaissance Florence tracks how and to what purposes Dante's supporters and denigrators responded to their city's most famous vernacular poet. This is an original study, a clearly written, thorough, and important book that illustrates for the first time Dante's centrality to Florentine culture and thought in the Renaissance. Reception, in this book, is given a compendious application, as it embraces the diverse social and cultural links, in Latin or vernacular, with "humanists, scientists, philosophers, theologians, artists, and poets" (1). Dante, in these diverse circles, becomes "patriotic emblem, politically committed citizen, moralist, philosopher, theologian, Neoplatonist, and prophet" (1). Gilson thus addresses how Dante's vernacular poem was used politically to promote the vernacular and to support a variety of political positions in the one hundred and thirty years on which the book focuses, and Dante's fate amidst the increasingly important rediscovery of classical Latin.

The book is divided into three sections: "Competing Cults: The Legacy of the Trecento and the Impact of Humanism, 1350-1430"; "New Directions and the Rise of the Vernacular, 1430-1481"; and "Cristoforo Landino and his Comento sopra la Comedia (1481)." It includes discussions of Boccaccio and Petrarch, Salutati, Villani, and Bruni, Giovanni Gherardi da Prato and Cino Rinuccini, Domenico da Prato, Francesco Filelfo, Matteo Palmieri, Lorenzo de' Medici, and Cristoforo Landino, among others.

Dante's position in the cultural ideals of the Renaissance, and in the revival of classical learning and poetry, contributes to his important place in defining the new relationship that Renaissance writers strove to establish with the past, Gilson argues. In Boccaccio's "cult of Dante" (22), Gilson documents that Boccaccio produced three manuscript copies of the Commedia in his own hand, dating from the early 1350s to the 1370s, incorporated references to Dante's works in both his Latin and vernacular works, and, of course, wrote the Trattatello in laude di Dante. Engaging with Dante's poem in many diverse ways, Boccaccio became Dante's copyist and biographer, and as literary artist, he directly responded by remaking Dante in his own works; finally, he was one of the first and most important exegetes of Dante's poem (22). Boccaccio's complex reception of Dante, both a response to Dante's work and to the concerns about Dante's "vernacular" expressed by his fellow humanist, Petrarch, to some degree set the direction for Renaissance receptions of Florence's greatest poet. Petrarch's response to Dante is famously less generous than his friend Boccaccio's, and Gilson shows how Petrarch tried to demonstrate his lack of animosity towards the earlier famous Florentine poet (32-40). Petrarch was less than enthusiastic about Dante's popularity than Boccaccio; indeed, he seems to scorn the whole idea of popularity--public recitations of Dante's poetry, for example. But Boccaccio's investment in Dante's place in Florentine letters is made explicit in his lectures on Dante in the 1370s, lectures that became central to later commentaries, including that by Benvenuto da Imola, who heard Boccaccio's Esposizioni (53).

The first section elaborates on Dante's place in this emerging "Renaissance." In the second, Gilson evaluates Dante's place in the Florentine vernacular culture as more and more classical texts surface and Latin emerges as the pinnacle of humanist culture. Salutati, for instance, whose classicism ties him to Petrarch and the relationship between the ancient Roman world and moral and religious issues, nonetheless was a staunch defender of Dante, despite his fellow Florentine's use of the vernacular. Some writers, like Bruni, could criticize Dante for his weak Latin, over-attachment to scholastic thought, and shallow knowledge of classics; others, like Salutati, who dislikes Dante's politics, or Villani, still laud him as "a moral teacher, Florentine citizen, cultivator of the city's native idiom, and authoritative writer, especially in matters of ethics, natural philosophy, and theology" (92).

In "Dante as a Civic and Linguistic Model," Gilson elaborates on how Dante became a tool in the hands of the Medicis to promote the status of the vernacular. In Bruni's Vita di Dante however, the poet is presented as the "ideal Florentine citizen--learned, politically active, and conscious of how all spheres of human activity may best serve the city" (123). Here Dante becomes a prototype of the civic humanist, almost, Gilson suggests, as a form of defiance to the Medici regime (123). In "Dante and Florentine Vernacular Humanism," Gilson explores how Dante's Commedia and his other writings are received in Florence in the 1460s and 1470s to argue that the recovery of earlier vernacular Florentine texts laid the groundwork for Landino's Comento of the following decade.

The final section explores the 1481 Comento di Christophoro Landino Fiorentino sopra la Comedia di Danthe Alighieri poeta fiorentino. Landino's Comento remains the most important commentary on the Comedy from the sixteenth century, since it saw fifteen reprints from its publication date in 1481 to the end of the sixteenth century. In fact, given that the first press run was 1200 copies, its popularity far exceeds most books on Dante written since the advent of modern literary studies in the twentieth century. Representing a landmark, not just in Renaissance Italy but in book publishing itself, the commentary was illustrated by one of Florence's most renowned artists, Sandro Botticelli. Gilson goes on to show how Landino's Comento gives Dante all the civic virtues epitomized by the Laurentian Florence of his own times. Dante, unjustly exiled, is the epitome of Florentine humanism, the upholder of the Tuscan vernacular, a language he helped establish almost ex nihilo as literary (in contrast to Homer and Virgil), the writer of the "divine poem of our city" (170), whose remains should be returned from Ravenna to the city that deserves to honor them.

In the conclusion, Gilson situates his review of the Renaissance reception of Dante in light of contemporary critical discussions of Dante's own efforts to establish himself as an "auctor" who sets out to train and direct his readers. Here he maintains that Dante's own efforts proved to have little influence on his later Florentine receivers, who seem determined to use him for their own purposes. Gilson's argument is persuasive, and he uses his primary texts well to prove his point; but I can't resist suggesting that Dante's poetry, in the final analysis, may prove to have been more rhetorically persuasive in itself than all these apparent efforts to bend him into a moralist, a political theorist, a theologian, a philosopher, a republican, etc. etc. Petrarch's scorn for his predecessor's popularity may tell us more about how Dante was received than all the learned responses to his poem in the Renaissance. Indeed, perhaps the poem's seven-hundred-year popularity across languages and cultures and politics surpasses the more narrowly defined interests we find in its learned reception.

Brenda Deen Schildgen, University of California, Davis

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Author:	Schildgen, Brenda Deen
Publication:	Annali d'Italianistica
Date:	Jan 1, 2006
Words:	1138
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