The cult of Dante

Certaldo was a safe place for Boccaccio in 1361, when, following the failure of a political conspiracy thought up by friends of his, he was removed from office for several years. It was the peaceful atmosphere of the Val d’Elsa that he chose for his abode after the Naples trip in 1370. At Certaldo, in the last months of his life, he meticulously prepared himself annotating Dante’s Divine Comedy for public readings in the Church of Santo Stefano a Badia, a task he was petitioned to undertake by the Municipality of Florence. The Esposizioni or Expositions broke off at canto XVII of the Inferno due to Boccaccio’s death on 21 December 1375. This was a last tribute to the cult for Dante, conceived at the end of life by an author who was by then tired and sickly.

Celebrated in highfaluting tones in the biographical narration the Trattatello or Brief Treatise, where he oscillates between documentary preoccupation and apologetic inclination, Dante is a subject of constant commitment on the part of Boccaccio the copyist. The Chigi Vatican Codes LV 176 and LVI 213, the original unity of which has been demonstrated by De Robertis[1], bring to posterity a unique autographic miscellany that includes Vita Nova, 15 of Dante’s canzoni, the Divine Comedy, the Canzoniere (Chigi form), Donna me prega with Dino del Garbo’s comment, the Trattatello and the ode Ytalie iam certus honos, betraying, in the choice of works, the intention of promoting Tuscan letters. A similar wish to divulge and affirm, circumscribed to Dante’s works, can be found in the editorial activity  carried out by Boccaccio the copyist for the Divine Comedy. The three autographic copies of the poem, Toledo 104.6, Riccardi 1035 and the aforementioned Chigi L VI 213, show how Boccaccio meddled with the text, something which led to its contamination. If Boccaccio’s “Dante” met with praise from readers, becoming a fortunate vehicle for the promulgation  of the Divine Comedy, from a philological point of view later publishers were obliged to use sources prior to Boccaccio so as to reconstruct Dante’s texts[2].

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[1] D. De Robertis, Il “Dante e Petrarca” di Giovanni Boccaccio, in Il Codice Chigiano L.V.176 autografo di Giovanni Boccaccio, Rome 1974, pp. 7-72.

[2]Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, written text established by G. Petrocchi, Turin 1975.