The reception of Dante in the Renaissance is a complex story. Today, when Dante is universally recognized as the greatest poet of the medieval centuries and perhaps of all European literature, it may be difficult fully to grasp what a contentious cultural site his legacy was in the two centuries following his death, when humanism and its cult of Latinity and antiquity established new literary standards that made the Divine Comedy a seemingly outmoded classic. Dante's fate in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was not unlike that of Aquinas: the reputations of both suffered over the next two centuries from a dramatic redefinition of cultural and philosophical assumptions and both had a multitude of critics and defenders. In this engaging and valuable survey of Dante criticism in Florence from the mid- fourteenth to the late-fifteenth century, Simon Gilson shows the many different roads taken by readers of Dante in the Renaissance and the imprint of contemporary cultural developments on their approaches to his poetry.
Gilson follows the evolution of widely varying and often polemical views of Dante from Petrarch and Boccaccio in the mid-fourteenth century, through the classicizing and civic humanisms of the late- fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, to the revalorization of the vernacular in the 1460s and 1470s, and finally to Cristoforo Landino's landmark 1481 Comento on the Comedy . He synthesizes a great deal of specialized scholarship on many more and less prominent poets, humanists, chroniclers, and commentators to fashion the first comprehensive overview in English of this vital thread in Florentine cultural and literary history in the Renaissance. His interpretation of the many twists and turns in the reception of the Comedy should be of great interest to specialists on Dante and the commentary tradition, as well as to scholars of both Latinizing humanism and the Florentine contribution to the emergence of literary vernaculars in Italy. Informed readers may take issue with this or that local argument about an author, text, or context, but they will find the overall architecture of Gilson's reconstruction compelling even when disagreeing with parts of it. Historians, like this reviewer, who are specialists in none of the aforementioned areas of literary study but nonetheless have a lively interest in integrating cultural and literary with social and political history, can learn much from this book.
Central to Gilson's story is the tension between defenders of Dante, who lauded him for having raised the vernacular to the heights of ancient Latin, and classicizing humanists who looked askance at Dante's decision to write in what they considered the inferior vernacular, thought the language of his Latin works woefully inadequate, and were often appalled at the apparent historical inaccuracies and "failures" of political judgment in Dante's representation of antiquity. In an excellent first chapter, Gilson presents Boccaccio and Petrarch as the points of departure for these two approaches. Boccaccio, who collected, edited, and copied manuscripts of Dante's works and later gave public, government- sponsored lectures on the Comedy , claimed in the Trattatello in laude di Dante that Dante stood at the center of a modern literary revival and was to the Florentine vernacular what Virgil was to Latin poetry. A more skeptical and aloof Petrarch reacted with scarcely concealed contempt to Dante's popularity and to his having written in a language understood by merchants and artisans who (according to some stories) even recited his verses. Gilson's intriguing analysis of the dialogue between Boccaccio and Petrarch over Dante and the vernacular reveals the growing influence on Boccaccio of Petrarch's more critical stance.
In the second chapter, covering the two generations from the 1370s to the 1430s, Gilson's analysis connects the debates on Dante to contemporary political questions. He reprises a famous chapter of Renaissance intellectual history, first given prominence by Hans Baron, in which humanists debated the justice of Dante's condemnation of Brutus and Cassius to the lowest point of Hell for the murder of Caesar. Breaking with the tradition, accepted by Dante, that saw the empire as the divinely ordained sole source of legitimate political authority, some humanists considered Caesar and the emperors as tyrants who destroyed Roman liberty and Caesar's assassins as heroes attempting to save the republic. From their point of view, Dante's judgment of Caesar and his assailants was irremediably flawed. As Gilson also shows, others, like Coluccio Salutati in the De Tyranno , argued that Caesar was not a tyrant, but a lawful ruler, and that Dante was therefore not wrong to condemn Brutus and Cassius. But Gilson's analysis of Salutati's contribution is marred by two strangely coinciding errors. When he says that, of the four main theses Salutati defends in De Tyranno , the most important is that "Dante unjustly [sic ] condemned Brutus and Cassius" (66), he surely meant to say "justly". This would obviously seem to be a slip of the pen if it were not for the fact that three pages later he inexplicably refers to "Dante's anti-Caesarism". (69) The effect is to generate confusion on a key point of Salutati's defense of Dante and the latter's reputation among classicizing humanists in the next generation.
The rest of the chapter illuminates the polarization of attitudes toward Dante between critics who took him to task for his pro - imperial views (and thus his treatment of Brutus and Cassius), and defenders, including Filippo Villani (Giovanni Villani's nephew, not grandson [p. 75]), Giovanni Gherardi da Prato, Cino Rinuccini, and Domenico da Prato, who all saw Dante as having shaped, enriched, and perhaps even created, Florence's distinctive vernacular culture. For them (and despite his political views) he was a source of civic pride. Gilson includes a reading of the crucial text of this generation's debate over Dante, Leonardo Bruni's Dialogi , which dramatizes the conflict between critics, who are represented in Dialogue I by the arch-classicist Niccolo Niccoli, and what Gilson sees, in the partial recantation spoken by Niccoli himself in Dialogue II, as "a humanist's desire for reconciliation with supporters of the vernacular tradition, a rear-guard action aimed at recuperating a Dante who stands for the best traditions of the city". Even so, he argues, Bruni "does not bestow upon [Dante] the cultural centrality that had been stressed by Salutati, Villani, and Rinuccini". (88)
The least persuasive aspect of Gilson's analysis is the attempt in chapter three to see the different views of Dante in narrowly political terms as serving the ideological aims of opposing Florentine factions. Gilson argues that defenders of Dante and the vernacular were mainly associated with the oligarchy that governed Florence between 1382 and 1434, whereas classicizing critics who disparaged the vernacular tended to be allies of the Medici whose regime succeeded the oligarchy. There are several problems with this thesis. First, it presupposes that the Medici and anti-Medici factions were well-defined long before they actually took shape around 1430. Moreover, many humanists who had discussed Dante under the "oligarchy" continued their careers across the divide of 1434 without apparent difficulty. And most writers of this generation combined a view of Dante (in Gilson's term) as a "civic model" with echoes of the old classicizing doubts about the vernacular. Gilson shows that the antipathy toward the Medici of the (non-Florentine) humanist Francesco Filelfo was evident in lectures on Dante in the early 1430s. But Matteo Palmieri, who was "closely associated with the Medici", both criticized Dante for the alleged obscurity of his poetry and also "presented [him] as Florence's supreme poet and an ardent servant of his beloved republic". (108) Leonardo Bruni became chancellor with the connivance of the Medici in 1427 and, whatever misgivings he may have had about their regime, continued in that post until his death in 1444. Although close to leading figures of the pre-1434 oligarchy, he did not lack connections to the Medici and even dedicated a translation to Cosimo. Early in his career, during the rule of the oligarchy, he had given expression in the Dialogi to the most notorious of the criticisms against Dante (through the voice of Niccoli), whereas in the early years of the Medici regime he wrote the popular little biography in which the idealized portrait of Dante as dutiful citizen but rancorous exile, far from being anti-Medicean, may have been a warning to the exiles of 1434 to accept their fate with stoic resignation (as Dante had not). In short, it is not clear how Palmieri and Bruni fit the rigid dichotomy presented by Gilson between pro-Medici critics and pro-oligarchic defenders of Dante. Both made the transition to the new regime, and both displayed ambivalence about Dante. Gilson admits as much in the book's conclusion when he remarks that "the 1430s is a decade which provides a good example of the difficulties in assessing Dante's reception in terms of ideological divisions", that "Palmieri reveals how pro-Dante allegiances can co- exist with pro-Medici tendencies", and that, although Bruni's view of Dante "is the most ideologically charged of all..., it is not completely clear whether this is aimed at supporting or opposing the Medici". (234) Indeed, any overly schematic association of opinions about Dante with factional groupings is bound to produce such contradictions and difficulties.
In chapter four, on the other hand, Gilson quite persuasively argues that the major turning point in attitudes toward Dante came in the 1460s and 1470s, when the old humanist aversion to the vernacular finally melted away. In the late 1460s, Cristoforo Landino lectured at the Studio (the university) on Petrarch's vernacular poetry- -the first time such lectures had been given on vernacular texts. Landino turned his inaugural lecture (prolusione ) into a spirited defense of the Florentine vernacular which, he said, could be raised to the heights of Latin by imitating its style and borrowing words. According to Landino, if "good writing is a matter of artistry and learning, and these things are only acquired through the Latin language, whoever wants to be a good writer of Tuscan must be a good Latinist". (137) This was a defense of the vernacular that still made Latin the unquestioned standard of literary excellence and, moreover, left Dante and his earthy un-Latinate poetry in a curious limbo. But Gilson agrees with other critics in affirming that Landino's "prolusione on Petrarch represents perhaps the most decisive text in the refounding of literature in Italian along humanist lines". (137) Greater appreciation of the riches of the vernacular soon led back to Dante. In 1477, with the support of Lorenzo de' Medici, Angelo Poliziano assembled the huge collection of 480 Tuscan vernacular poems known as the Raccolta Aragonese (because it was presented as a gift to Frederick of Aragon, son of the king of Naples)--the first attempt at an anthology, canon, and historical appreciation of Florentine vernacular poetry. Dante is "given pride of place insofar as he is the first poet whose works are included in the collection". (139) And from the late 1460s through the 1470s, poets as diverse as Matteo Palmieri, Poliziano, and Lorenzo began to echo and imitate Dante in their own poetry. Gilson attributes much of the inspiration for these developments to Lorenzo himself, asserting that, after assuming power in 1469, he played "a key role in intensifying efforts to promote Tuscan in what amounts to a cultural project that linked the volgare to the political standing and intellectual prestige of the Florentine state". (134) This is certainly plausible in view of Lorenzo's own poetic efforts and his close association with Poliziano and the Raccolta . But tastes were already changing: Palmieri wrote his Dantesque Citta di Dio in the 1460s and Marsilio Ficino translated Dante's Monarchia into the vernacular in 1468.
Growing taste for vernacular poetry and interest in Dante as a poetic model in the 1470s lead Gilson to Landino's commentary on the Comedy , which was printed in 1481 in no fewer than 1,200 copies illustrated with engravings based on drawings by Botticelli, presented to the chief executive committee of Florentine government in a ceremony with an oration by Landino, and reprinted six times by 1500 (and fifteen times by 1600). The last third of Gilson's book is devoted entirely to Landino's Comento . Chapter five analyzes the extensive prologue that reaffirms the parity and "structural homology" of the Comedy and the Aeneid that Landino had already asserted in the Disputationes Camaldulenses . Gilson claims that Landino resolves tensions that had persisted for 130 years between defenders of the vernacular and champions of Latinizing humanism and that he saved both Dante and Florence from the rough edges of their reciprocal condemnations. According to Landino, Dante was even more admirable and miraculous than Virgil and Homer because he created a work equal to theirs but in a language in which nothing similar had ever been attempted. He makes of Dante both a civic poet, and thus the founder of subsequent Florentine glories, and one inspired by Platonic divine fury (furor poeticus ) to unlock universal mysteries and truths. In chapter six on the commentary proper, Gilson highlights Landino's defense of Dante's classical learning and doctrinal orthodoxy and the new neo-platonic image of Dante that reflected the prevailing vogue of Plato and the influence of Ficino.
To read Landino's commentary in this way is to make it the happy outcome of the long, precarious wanderings of Dante's "fortuna", and one senses the appeal to the author of ending with this reconciliation of opposites that makes his story its own "commedia". But as Gilson notes in his conclusion, the story does not end here. The resolution and harmony that Landino brought to a century and a half of Dante debates soon gave way to new views and uses of Dante in both the prophetic politics of the Savonarolan movement and the "language question" of the sixteenth century, no longer confined to the relative merits of Latin and the vernacular. It might seem ungrateful to ask for more from a book that gives so much, but this reader would have been interested to see how Gilson, with his magisterial command of the preceding century and a half of Dante criticism, might interpret the still evolving images of Dante in the early sixteenth century, and in particular what he makes of the still mysterious "Discourse, or Dialogue on our Language"--with its sharp criticism of Dante for claiming that he wrote in "curiale" and not in "fiorentino"--whose attribution to Machiavelli has been so hotly asserted and contested.