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The Commentary on Dante's Comedy

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The Commentary on Dante's Comedy Chapter 8 The Commentary on Dante’s Comedy Landino’s commentary on Dante’s Commedia was published in Florence on August, 1481, and presented to the Florentine Signoria with great ceremony. It had the title Comento di Christophoro Landino Fiorentino sopra la Comedia di Danthe Alighieri Poeta Fiorentino.1 One thousand two hundred copies were printed by Nicolò della Magna with illustrations by Sandro Botticelli. Dante’s Comedy accompanied by Landino’s commentary was reprinted seven times by 1500 and nine more times by 1600, plus three more times in condensed versions.2 To write the commentary Landino clearly pulled together years of lecture notes on Dante dating back to his first Dante lectures in the Studio in 1456.3 While we do not have notes from his courses on Dante as we do with his Virgil courses, nonetheless the Dante commentary has the same lecture characteristics as does the Virgil commentary of 1488. It reflects his mature thoughts on Dante and many other subjects such as poetry, philosophy, theol- ogy, and politics, representing the culmination of his career. The commentary, written in the vernacular, covers the entire Commedia. It is dedicated to the Medici; and the opening Proem celebrates Florence, the ac- complishments of its citizens, and the return of Dante to his patria from exile.4 Landino begins each canticle with a separate proem summing up the main points he will make; and then he works his way through the poem line by line, giving both grammatical and allegorical comments.5 This method is the same 1 Cristoforo Landino, Comento Sopra La Comedia, ed. Paolo Procaccioli, 4 vols. (Roma: Salerno, 2001). All translations here are mine. 2 Deborah Parker, Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance (Durham: Duke Univer- sity Press, 1993), 133–34. The 1487 edition was the first fully illustrated Dante printed. 3 Arthur Field, “Cristoforo Landino’s First Lectures on Dante,” Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986): 16–48. 4 Parker, Commentary, 76, refers to it as “a monument to Florentine nationalism and Neoplatonism.” 5 Paolo Procaccioli, Filologia ed esegesi dantesca nel Quattrocento: L’“Inferno” nel “Comento sopra la Comedia” di Cristoforo Landino, Archivum Romanicum, 1.222 (Florence: Olschki, 1989), is a very thorough study of the text of Dante in published editions of Landino’s com- mentary, and of Landino’s defense of the vernacular. It compares Landino with previous commentators, especially on the Inferno. Frank la Brasca, “Du prototpe à l’archétype: Lec- ture allégorique et réécriture de Dante dans et par le commentaire de Cristoforo Landino,” in Scritture di scritture: Testi, generi, modelli nel Rinascimento, ed. by Giancarlo Mazzacurati © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004389526_009 The Commentary on Dante’s Comedy 167 as he used in his Virgil lectures and commentary, except there the allegorical interpretations ceased halfway through the Aeneid. Here he continues both the grammatical and allegorical interpretations to the end of the Commedia. Most recently Simon Gilson has studied how Dante was used and interpret- ed in Renaissance Florence.6 As part of his study he examined how Landino’s commentary incorporated interpretive traditions adapted to late fifteenth- century Florentine political and cultural interests. Gilson writes, “It is without doubt the most celebrated and widely influential commentary on the Comedy to be printed in Renaissance Italy.”7 He points out that early Quattrocento hu- manists from the time of Bruni down to the 1450s were critical of Dante be- cause of his use of the vernacular and scholasticism; but in the 1460s and 1470s, the Medici began to use Tuscan as a symbol of Florentine power in Italy; and Landino represents this interest. Gilson thoroughly examined the Proem to the commentary, showing how the chiose reveal Landino’s Platonism, interests in natural science, and use of classical models. He argues that Dante’s defenders such as Landino promoted Dante as a patriotic Florentine, a moral teacher, and a great vernacular author embodying Florentine traditions and interests.8 Craig Kallendorf examined the question of whether Landino was a support- er of republicanism or of Dante’s imperialism.9 He concluded that Landino accommodates himself to the Medici control of Florence by reinforcing values not limited to one political context and by emphasizing a turning away from political concerns to a Platonic search for the highest good. In a fairly recent study Deborah Parker considered Landino’s commentary in the context of late Quattrocento Florence and the wider publishing history of Renaissance Dante commentaries. She sees Landino as “an eloquent and and Michel Plaisance (Rome: Bulzoni, 1987): 69–107, analyzes the different types of allegori- cal interpretations Landino uses for Virgil and Dante. It locates Landino’s place amid other interpreters of Dante, arguing that Landino tries to make the Comedy in language and teach- ing of trans-cultural significance. See also la Brasca’s “L’Humanisme vulgaire et la genèse de la critique littéraire italienne: Etude descriptive du commentaire dantesque de Cristoforo Landino,” Chroniques Italiennes 6 (1986): 5–96. 6 Simon Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 7 Ibid., 164. 8 Roberto Cardini, “Landino e Dante,” Rinascimento 30 (1990): 175–90, discusses Landino’s prin- ciple that Dante is both the central figure in the development of the Florentine language and the culmination of the linguistic transference from Greek to Latin to Tuscan. Cardini also contrasts Landino’s methods with the philological work of Poliziano and others. 9 Craig Kallendorf, “Virgil, Dante, and Empire in Italian Thought, 1300–1500,” Vergilius 34 (1988): 44–69..
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