Editing Vernacular Classics in the Early Sixteenth Century: Ancient Models and Modern Solutions*

Chapter 7 Editing Vernacular Classics in the Early Sixteenth Century: Ancient Models and Modern Solutions*

Carlo Caruso

The annals of literary history have accommodated innumerable canons of worthies over the centuries. Literary canons and values – like all things earthly – are ephemeral and subject to change, so that their validity has invariably proved short-lived or intermittent at best, as well as dependent on factors of an extrinsic and often unpredictable nature. In their constant adjustment to changing circumstances, literary canons are the equivalent of cultural ther- mometers measuring the vagaries of literary fame. A good case in point is offered by the canon of the so-called Three Crowns of Italian literature – Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio – as it developed across seven centuries of Italian literary history. Its origin can be confidently situ- ated in Florence in the 1420s. In Giovanni Gherardi da Prato’s Paradiso degli Alberti, written in 1425–6, the three authors are described as the “three Floren- tine crowns” (tre corone fiorentine).1 Gherardi’s praise was primarily inspired by their most famous vernacular works – Dante’s Commedia, Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and Boccaccio’s Decameron – and his view tallies with our perception of such works as the masterpieces of the Italian Trecento. This is, however, but a fortuitous coincidence, for no sense of continuity is perceiv- able between that distant statement and our current persuasion. Firstly, weight was never equally distributed among the three authors in question. In the course of the fifteenth century Dante and Petrarch were regularly mentioned together; Boccaccio, on the other hand, was tacitly un- derstood to stand on a lower pedestal, where he had modestly positioned himself in his lifetime. Moreover, for the majority of fifteenth-century readers, Boccaccio’s fame rested on his prose output and, more specifically, on such romantic or pastoral works as Filocolo, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta and the

* Research for this paper has benefited from a Major Leverhulme Fellowship and a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. 1 Giovanni Gherardi da Prato, Il Paradiso degli Alberti. Ed. Antonio Lanza (Rome: Salerno, 1975), 4. See Simon A. Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2005), 76, and, more generally, Part 1, significantly entitled ‘Competing Cults.’

Editing Vernacular Classics in the Early Sixteenth Century 127 prosimetrum Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, rather than on the Decameron, whereas the renown of Dante and Petrarch was firmly rooted in their superior art of verse-making. This state of affairs was confirmed at the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Aldo Manuzio selectively included Le cose volgari di Messer Francesco Petrarca (1501) and Le terze rime di Dante (1502) in his famous octavo series of pocket classics printed in italic – where the order of publica- tion also implied priority of status. Singled out as the only vernacular classics which could hold their own in the company of the ancient Latin and Greek authors, Petrarch’s Canzoniere and Trionfi and Dante’s Commedia were edited with stringent philological accuracy by Manuzio’s associate, Pietro Bembo. His unprecedented method generated a few perplexities at first (as will be seen presently), but the long-lasting authority Petrarch’s and Dante’s texts enjoyed on account of this operation automatically placed both authors in a special category. Yet Bembo would soon after propose an equally selective but different canon to support his newly developed doctrine of strict literary imitation, ac- cording to which vernacular authors were expected to write either Petrarchan verse or Boccaccian (this time Decameronian) prose.2 From then on, Petrarch was to rule unopposed for nearly three centuries as the supreme model for Italian poetry, whereas the notion of the Three Crowns, though still recognised as valid by sixteenth-century grammarians, vocabolaristi and members of the Accademia della Crusca, gradually declined into a local cult of which Tuscany became the acknowledged shrine. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that Dante once again came to the fore and gained that undisputed leadership which is still granted him today, and which is one of the endur- ing legacies of the Neoclassical and Romantic Age; yet, even then, one would struggle to find significant traces of the Three Crowns canon. Rather, a different set of worthies had emerged at the end of the eighteenth century – the canon of the so-called Four Poets, comprising Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso.3 As late as 1908 Luigi Pirandello could still refer to “the four evangelists of our

2 Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua 1. 19. Ed. Carlo Dionisotti (Turin: utet, 1966), 122: “e molto meglio faremo noi altresì, se con lo stile del Boccaccio e del Petrarca ragioneremo nelle nostre carte, che non faremo a ragionare col nostro, perciò che senza fallo alcuno molto meglio ragionarono essi che non ragioniamo noi.” 3 Cf. Vittorio Alfieri’s sonnet “Quattro gran vati, ed i maggior son questi,” in Rime. Ed. Francesco Maggini (Asti: Casa d’Alfieri, 1954), 364. See Arnaldo Di Benedetto, “I quattro poeti,” in Vittorio Alfieri aristocratico ribelle (1749–1803) (Milan: Electa, 2003), 41–42; also, by the same author, “Vittorio Alfieri e ‘i quattro poeti’,” Cuadernos de Filología Italiana 12 (2005): 189–194, with further reference to Benedetto Croce, “I ‘quattro poeti’ e l’edizione fattane in Germania da Adolfo Wagner,” in Aneddoti di varia letteratura, 4 vols (Bari: Laterza, 1954), 3: 465–472. In the early nineteenth century Tasso’s place would occasionally be taken by Metastasio – much to Alfieri’s disappointment, one would presume, had he lived long enough to witness the event.