Cristoforo Landino Research Articles

TRADITION AND INNOVATION IN CRISTOFORO LANDINO'S GLOSSES ON ASTROLOGY IN HIS COMENTO SOPRA LA COMEDIA (1481)

First printed in late August 1481, Cristoforo Landino's Comento on Dante's Comedy marks a pivotal moment in the Florentine cult of Dante, in commentary literature upon his poem, and in the book market for printed 'Dantes'. It is not surprising therefore that, in recent years, Landino's commentary has been studied in some depth and from a variety of points of view. Critical attention has been focused most closely upon the lengthy and ideologically charged proemio to the Comento as well as upon individual topics of interest such as the commentary's socio-political context, its allegorizing readings, its treatment of linguistic matters and relationship to vernacular humanism, and its Platonizing and Neoplatonizing preoccupations.

From Purgatory to the "Primavera": Some Observations on Botticelli and Dante

Botticelli's Primavera has been studied by more eminent art historians than perhaps any other work of Renaissance art. The chronicle of these readings would make for a representative anthology of 20th-century art historical methodologies, and yet no consensus about the painting's meaning has emerged. In this article, the Primavera is discussed in the context of what we know and what we can surmise about the artist's own literary and intellectual culture and especially his lifelong engagement with Dante's Divina Commedia. The painting is studied as an attempt on the artist's part to translate into his own medium the thematics surrounding Dante's Earthly Paradise episode at the end of the Purgatorio. These thematics are explored in the context of Cristoforo Landino's 1481 commentary on Dante, with which Botticelli, who devoted many years to illustrating Landino's edition, was intimately familiar. Landino saw in Dante's Earthy Paradise episode an allegory of the soul's moral and spiritual pilgrimage from the vita voluptuosa through the vita activa to the vita contemplativa, a passage occurring, like Dante's pilgrimage as a whole, under the influence of Celestial Venus. The Primavera is discussed as a visual variation on the same theme, presented all'antica in a manner that resonates with Dante's classical allusions, especially as interpreted by Landino. In addition to reflecting Botticelli's own artistic and intellectual interests and aspirations, as well as those of his presumed patron, the Primavera echoes still with a rivalry that brought Botticelli into competition with such other close students of Dante as Leonardo and Michelangelo. This paragone awaits further study.

Archaizing Tendencies: Ornato and Rilievo in Italian Renaissance Art

ARCHAIZING TENDENCIES: ORNATO AND RILIEVO IN ITALIAN RENAISSANCE ART by Frederick Liers Hellmut Wohl, The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999) xii + 376 pp., 54 illustrations, 8 plates. Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000) xvi + 303 pp., 105 b/w illustrations. Hellmut Wohl’s The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art and Alexander Nagel’s Michelangelo and the Reform of Art address the relation of the antique to the development of style in Renaissance art. Whereas Nagel focuses on archaic elements in several works of Michelangelo, Wohl considers key concepts that broadly characterize art in Renaissance Italy. Wohl organizes the stylistic history of Italian Renaissance art under the rubric of ornato, a term inherited from the vocabulary of art in the Middle Ages and from classical rhetorical texts (ornatus in Cicero and Quintilian). Although he admits that as a principle of style ornato is not unique to the Italian Renaissance and had great significance in Byzantine and medieval art as well as in the Baroque and Rococo, he confines his examination to the decades 1480–1520 as it applies to what he terms the “ornate classical style.” Wohl’s interest in this style stems from questions initially raised by the perpetuation of pictorial elements from a century earlier found in frescoes executed in 1506–1507 by the Bolognese painter Jacopo Ripanda and his assistants in the apse of the church of S. Onofrio in Rome. For Wohl, ornato means or implies ornate, ornateness, the ornamental , opulence, polish, embellishment, grace, refinement, sophistication , the imitation of nature, idealization away from nature, and beauty. Although it is difficult to conceive of style in Italian Renaissance art as falling within the scope of a single concept, even one so broadly defined , Wohl’s work proves instructive. While the focus of the work remains ornato, he clarifies his conception of other relevant terms. In addition to ornato, for example, he identifies classicism and realism as fundamental principles bearing on style. Yet, among the many terms involved in this work, of particular interest is the term rilievo (relief). My interest in Wohl’s use of rilievo lies in its relationship to ornato. FREDERICK LIERS 142 In the introduction, Wohl notes that ornato is closely related to rilievo (2). He traces the origins of controversy over the term ornato to the early fifteenth century, when the “principle of ornateness encountered the rise of the potentially incompatible phenomenon of realism and of the quest for visual truth to nature” (6). This incompatibility arose from the differences between strict likeness (similitudinem) and beauty (pulchritudinem). The ancients recognized this incompatibility. For example, in Book 12 of the Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian relates that the painter Demetrius failed to win the highest praise because he more faithfully rendered natural likeness than beauty. According to Wohl, Renaissance artists solved this problem either by investing realism with ornateness (creating an ornate image of nature) or by moderating ornateness through the use of rilievo—thus representing objects as “fictive three-dimensional solids” (7). He agues that as artists gained greater sensitivity to the fact that the rendering of objects as they are actually seen (in light and space) is independent of the visual description of observable particulars in nature (Wohl’s two criteria of realism), they came to realize that “ornateness can be an impediment to the imitation of nature, because it is not compatible with the truth of optical vision” (9). Noting that both elements operate in most Renaissance paintings, he contrasts Masaccio (e.g., Crucifixion of St. Peter), who suitably renders objects as three-dimensional solids but does not represent them as they exist in nature, with Pisanello (e.g., Vision of St. Eustace ), who visually describes factual particulars of objects but does not represent them as they exist in light and space. Wohl asserts that the knowledge that ornato could impede the imitation of nature led artists to recognize various advantages of an unornamented pictorial style—a style Cristoforo Landino characterized as “puro senza ornato” in the preface to his edition of Dante’s Commedia (1481). Thus, he distinguishes rilievo (one aspect of realism) from ornato (better accommodated to the realism of...

Supplementing theAeneid in early modern England: Translation, imitation, commentary

Analysing the translators’ representations of their ‘object’—purpose and text—as well as their translation practices this paper undertakes to examine the only two complete translations of Virgil’sAeneid available in sixteeth-century England—by Gavin Douglas, and by Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne—focusing especially on their intertextual relations to mediations of the source text in circulation. Particular attention is paid to the inclusion by both Douglas and Twyne of a translation of theSupplementum, a thirteenth book in imitation of Virgil by Maffeo Vegio, whose importance for sixteenth-century English readers’ reception of theAeneid is underscored. More specifically, both translators point up the structure of moral/spiritual significance which theSupplenentum shares with the important extended moral commentary on theAeneid by Cristoforo Landino. It is, moreover, in terms of this binary structure that Gavin Douglas represents his own ambivalence as a Christian translator of the pagan Virgil.

GIOVANNI RUCELLAI'S COMMENTS ON ART AND ARCHITECTURE

<disp-quote>O felix hominum genus si vestros animos amor quo caelum regitur regit.</disp-quote>In recent years attention has been paid to the study of relatively minor texts of the fifteenth century which reveal how their authors responded to and described contemporary and near contemporary art and architecture. Of particular interest has been the terminology they use, for this can provide useful insights into the critical tenor of the time. For example, if the terminology to describe the style of individual painters used by the humanist Alamanno Rinuccini in his Preface to Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana, written in 1473 for the court at Urbino is compared with that used around the same time by an agent of the Sforza family in Florence to find a suitable painter for Ludovico in Milan, it is clear that the underlying critical assumptions differ. As would be expected, Rinuccini uses Latin terms familiar to rhetoricians such as ornatus and artificiosus, whereas the Sforza agent relies on vernacular terms to describe style, such as, angelica, virile and dolce. In 1481, the scholar Cristoforo Landino in the Preface to his Italian commentary on Dante's Divine Comedy, adapts Latin terms such as those used by Rinuccini to the vernacular so that they read ornato and artificioso. But he also uses terms which were perhaps more familiar to his Florentine audience such as prompto and divoto to characterize the individual styles of different artists. In its turn this is unlike the general eulogizing tenor of the anonymous writer of the Uomini singhularii in firenze whose critical vocabulary seems to be limited to the single term, maraviglioso. For this reason, it has become a matter of some interest to scholars to discuss variations in linguistic usage to attempt to assess the underlying critical assumptions of the period so as to shed light on how the work of contemporary artists was received and what expectations governed its production. In this article I should like to look at someone not trained as either a critic or a scholar but who nevertheless took an interest in art and architecture to the extent of commissioning works from a leading architect and collecting paintings and other artefacts from prominent artists of his day. From his written legacy it is possible to deduce how new ideas on art and architecture developed and spread around the mid-fifteenth century from the domain of the learned artist and professional scholar to that of the interested and sensitive layman.

Commentary as Social Act: Trifone Gabriele's Critique of Landino

In his prefatory letter to Cristoforo Landino's commentary to theComedy, Marsilio Ficino presents a dramatic encounter between Dante and Florence. The city's lament over Dante's long absence moves Apollo to command Mercury to possess the “pious“ mind of the “divine poet” Cristoforo Landino. Mercury then assumes Landino's countenance, arouses Dante from his sleep with a life-giving wand, and transports him to Florence. There, Dante is gloriously crowned as he prophesied inParadiso25.1-12. The significance of this elaborate mythological sequence is obvious: through the merits of Landino's commentary, Dante is honorably restored to Florence after an exile of almost two centuries.Ficino's high expectations of the commentary's favorable reception were not unfounded. Presented to the Florentine Signoria on 30 August, 1481 in a sumptuous edition with engravings now attributed to Botticelli, Landino's commentary rapidly won the esteem and admiration of his contemporaries.

Cosimo de' Medici and the 'Platonic Academy'

HE MOST FAMOUS of all stories about the Platonic Academy of Florence is the story of its founding. According to the traditional account, Cosimo de' Medici, during the Council of Florence in 1439, repeatedly heard the neopagan philosopher Gemistus Pletho delivering lectures on Plato and was inspired by his contact with the Byzantine to refound the Platonic Academy in his own city of Florence, the new Athens of Italy. Recognizing, however, that the time was not yet ripe for such an undertaking, he bided his time-for almost a quarter of a century-until he recognized in the young Marsilio Ficino the instrument through which his design might be accomplished. Noticing his attraction to Platonic philosophy, Cosimo arranged for the young man to learn Greek. In due course Cosimo gave Ficino a manuscript of the complete works of Plato, a house in Florence, and a house (in some versions a villa) near his own villa at Careggi which was to be the centre of the new Platonic Academy. These gifts were bestowed in 1462, the year which is usually taken to be the precise foundation date of the Florentine Academy. Under Cosimo's patronage-continued by his descendants Piero di Cosimo, Lorenzo and Piero di Lorenzo-the 'Academia Caregiana' flourished and became the spiritual home of the Florentine Renaissance in the later Quattrocento, numbering among its membership such luminaries as Angelo Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola, Cristoforo Landino, and Lorenzo il Magnifico himself.

The Chaucer Review: A Volume of Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen (1932–85) ed. by R. A. Shoaf

REVIEWS Against this, and for its transfiguration, Schnapp sets the Cross, which for him is the Commedia's great triumphal image, gathering to itselfall of the poem's positive forces. And here Schnapp's prose and perspective seem to rise andrespondto the universality andsweepofDante'spoeticvision. It is here that Schnapp brings in so profitably his analysis of the breath­ takingly beautiful Ravenna mosaics, especially those of Sant' Apollinare in Classe. (And yet, one wonders why, if Dante wished to develop all that Schnapp so sensitively perceives, the poet put his reference to Classe not here but in Purgatorio 28.) Certainly this discussion ofthe centrality ofthe Cross should be carefully considered by future critics. Almost as effective are Schnapp's analyses ofCacciaguida and ofVirgil. Yet here andelsewherethroughoutthe study'sdiscussionofthe transfigura­ tion of history, there is the assumption that, in effect, Paradiso 14-18 is Dante'sconciserewritingofbook 6 oftheAeneid. So long as we areawareof this assumption, and of its possible dangers in in vacuo analyses, we can greatly profit from the breadth of Schnapp's reading and thinking. Aqui­ nas is, of course, a strong primary source, but so too is Richard of Saint Victor, especially the Benjamin Minor. And the bibliography shows the sweep ofhis secondary reading; but, especially in this discussion ofhistory, one wishes-is it mere campamlismo?-that more use would have been made of Mazzeo and Ferrante, if only to relate the perceptions and approach of this study to theirs. The direct pertinence of this book for Chaucerians is admittedly slight (perhaps pp. 6, 9, 17, 13, 27, 67, e.g.), and yet it serves two other purposes: first, in its delineation of zeitgeist, and secondly (and not facetiously), in being another example of the difference between Dante and Chaucer. As always, one thanks Princeton University Press for a hand­ some, well-illustratedbook, though one wishes at times that the notes were not printed in six-point myopic. HOWARD H. SCHLESS Columbia University R. A. SHOAF, ed. The Chaucer Review: A Volume ofEssays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen (1932-85). University Park and London: Pennsyl­ vania State University Press, 1986. Pp. 309. $20.00. "The questions great scholars and critics ask are often more valuable than the answers they give." This observation is made byJohn V. Fleming in one 195 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER of the many fine essays in The Chaucer Review: A Volume of Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen (1932-85).Judson Boyce Allen's career was distinguished by the questions he asked and the answers he proposed for them. While some of the essays gathered here by R. A. Shoaf may not satisfy everyone in the answers they offer, all of them raise thoughtful questions. For this quality the volume most fittingly pays tribute to Allen's life and work. The collection opens with a memoir of Allen by R. A. Shoaf, V. A. Kolve, and John A. Alford. It both commemorates Allen's vision and enthusiasm as a scholar and attests to how much Allen's unique and provocative contributions to our field will be missed. The wide range of Allen's scholarly interests is documented in the bibliography included in this collection and mirrored in the fifteen essays by his friends and col­ leagues who contributed to the volume. Appropriately, many of the essays concern medieval poetics.John A. Alford sees the tension between the Wife of Bath and the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales as a clash not only of personalities and ideologies but also of historically opposed modes of discourse-the Wife representing rhetoric and the Clerk dialectic.John V. Fleming puzzles out the attitude toward women in Troilus and Criseyde by focusing on Deiphoebus, who in the Aeneid is betrayed by Helen but in Chaucer is betrayed not by a womanbut byPandarusandTroilus.MarioA. Di Cesare's reading of the Disputationes Camaldulenses of the quattro­ cento Florentine poet and critic Cristoforo Landino presents a strong case for reconsidering the role Landino and other Latin writers played in the developing poetics of the Renaissance. Shoaf considers patterns of petrifac­ tion and astonishment in The Franklin's Tale and interrogates the rhetoric of literalism that pervades the Franklin...

Cristoforo Landino's First Lectures on Dante*

Like many humanists of the late fifteenth century, Cristoforo Landino (1425-1498) came to consider himself not only a rhetorician but a speculative philosopher as well. Like many of these same humanists, Landino would not allow himself to peddle the merely fashionable: he pretended that he had been drinking from philosophical founts since his youth. In his dialogue De anima, completed about 1471, Landino suggested that from the early 1450s he not only was receiving systematic training in natural philosophy from Carlo Marsuppini but also was learning some Plato from the teenager Marsilio Ficino.

Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts: Comments on Some Commentaries

In autumn, 1465, two humanists agreed to have a battle. Lorenzo Guidetti was a disciple and friend of Cristoforo Landino, the most prominent teacher of rhetoric in the Florentine Studio. Buonaccorso Massari was a pupil of a less famous master, Giovanni Pietro of Lucca. Naturally, Massari began the fight, with all the pretended friendliness and genuine desire to insert knives in backs that characterize the intellectual at his deadliest. Massari had heard that Landino would lecture on Cicero's Epistolae ad Familiares during the academic year 1465-6. “I am an eager student,” he wrote to Guidetti on 14 September, “and I would be grateful to know what Landino said when he explained the first letter. For in my view it is quite hard because of the historical questions involved, and few have the ability to tackle so great an enterprise.“

Cristoforo Landino'sAeneidand the Humanist Critical Tradition*

There is little question that the Virgil criticism of early Italian humanism reached its zenith in theDisputationes Camaldulensesof Cristoforo Landino. Professor of rhetoric and poetry at the FlorentineStudiumfrom 1457 to 1497, Landino was active in the circle of philosophers, poets, and scholars associated with Marsilio Ficino and often referred to now as the “Platonic Academy of Florence.” The dialogue, written in 1472 and set a few years earlier in the monastery at Camaldoli, begins as an examination of the active and contemplative lives and the nature of thesummum bonum(Books I and II). Since Landino believed that Virgil also described thesummum bonumand the path by which we reach it, Books III and IV of theDisputationesturn to theAeneidas a parallel source of philosophical truth.

A Manuscript of Cristoforo Landino's First Lectures on Virgil, 1462-63 (Codex 1368, Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome)

In a prefatory oration in the Florentine Studium in 1462 Cristoforo Landino indicated that his lectures for the coming academic year would be a commentary on Virgil. Hitherto considered lost, this commentary is extant in a complete draft of the lectures, Codex 1368 of the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome. The manuscript is an important, new source both for Landino's earlier years and for the revival of philosophical studies in Florence in the 1460's: hence this announcement and brief description.The manuscript has the form of a word-by-word commentary on the first seven books of the Aeneid, although a title, added on the flyleaf by a later hand, promises a commentary on eight books.

Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style

Part 1 Conditions of trade: Introduction contracts and the client's control art and matter the value of skill perception of skill. Part 2 The period eye: Relative perception pictures and knowledge the cognitive style the function of images Istoria the body and its language figure patterns the value of colours volumes intervals and proportions the moral eye. Part 3 Pictures and categories: Words and pictures Giovanni Santi's twenty-five painters Cristoforo Landino categories, including nature, relief, purity, ease, perspective, grace, ornateness, variety, composition, colouring, design, difficulty, foreshortening, promptness, blitheness, devotion conclusion. Texts and references. Index.

Landino and Maximus of Tyre

The Disputationes Camaldulenses of Cristoforo Landino constitute an important document. Composed in the manner of Ciceronian dialogues, they present us with a group of speakers famous in the history of Florentine thought: among others, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Alberti, and Ficino of the ‘Platonic Academy’ at Careggi to which Landino belonged; Alamanno Rinuccini, the Acciaiuoli, and Marco Parenti of the other ‘academy', presided over by Argyropoulos. The first dialogue deals with the relative merits of the active and contemplative life, the second with the problem of the highest good—two topics dear to the Renaissance. The third and fourth give an allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid. It would be hard to find personages or themes more central to quattrocento intellectual history. Inevitably one looks to the Disputationes for the light they throw on these Florentine scholars and on their interests.

ALBERTI AND THE VERNACULAR ECLOGUE IN THE QUATTROCENTO

‘Scripsitque per ea tempora animi gratia complurima opuscula: Ephebiam, de Religione, Deiphiram, et pleraque huiusmodi soluta oratione; tum et versu, Elegias, Eclogasque; atque Conciones, et eiuscemodi amatoria ….‘ So runs the Vita Anonima of L. B. Alberti, by some scholars attributed to the author himself, though in my opinion erroneously. This is not, however, the problem which interests us here, but instead the affirmation that Alberti wrote Eclogues, a statement which is further supported by the praises of Cristoforo Landino who claims: ‘Ha scritto Batista Alberti egloghe et elegie tali, che in quelle molto bene osserva e pasturali costumi et in queste è maraviglioso in exprimere, anzi quasi dipigniere tutti gli affetti et perturbazioni amatorie.’ We possess two compositions, Agiletta and Mirzia, which correspond to the description of Elegies, both written in ‘terza rima’ and dealing with love complaints. In subject they are akin to others of his works in prose, particularly the Deijira. On the other hand, only one composition of Alberti has up to the present been known with the qualification of Eclogue, his Corimbo, to which some importance has been accorded by Carrara for its ‘intenzione pastorale.’ In its form, ‘terza rima’ with a ‘ballata’ in the middle, and theme, the love lament of the ‘giovinetto averniese’ followed by the consolations of Batista, this eclogue comes nearer to the pastoral than the Elegies, but scarce qualifies for Landino's praise cited above. Certainly there is nothing here of that Virgilian imitation, which Alberti claims elsewhere to have indulged in, and Carrara had some justification for letting this contribution to the history of the pastoral, and the vernacular eclogue in particular, go at half a page. The possibility of the composition by Alberti of more than one eclogue aroused Mancini's interest but seemed ‘assai tenue’ to Carrara. It is now proved correct at least to the extent of one more by the coming to light of a truly pastoral eclogue in Italian, which may well stand at the beginning of that phenomenal vogue of the pastoral in the vernacular, which from Florence, Ferrara and Naples passed in various forms to the whole of European literature.

Tasso's Holograph Annotations to Horace's ARS Poetica

Among the incunabula in the John Hay Library of Brown University are two quarto editions of Horace's Opera, with comment by Cristoforo Landino, one published in Florence in 1482 “per Antonium Miscominum,” the other in 1483 in Venice “per Joannem de Forlivio et socios,” the latter edition probably pirated from the former. Both volumes contain holograph annotations by Pomponio Leto, by Bernardo Tasso and by Torquato Tasso; and both volumes, so far as I can ascertain, have been overlooked by scholars both in Italy and in this country. I have, therefore, undertaken to study part, at least, of this material.