Esposizioni sopra la Commedia or Considerations upon the Divine Comedy

On 23 October 1373 Boccaccio inaugurated public readings of Dante’s Divine Comedy, at the church of Santo Stefano a Badia. The task, bestowed upon him by the Municipality of Florence, was never carried through to its planned end. The worsening of the poet’s health forced him to stop his commentary  at the seventeenth verse of  canto XVII. It is however not to be excluded that other reasons may have led Boccaccio to suspend the readings. Sonnets CXXII-CXXV of the Rhymes make allusion to polemics over Boccaccio’s exposition, which it was said aimed too much at the work’s divulgation, thus detracting from the sacred aspect of the work. Probably embittered by these polemics, Boccaccio chose to retire to the otium of Certaldo, from the isolation of which spring his considerations on Dante. It was indeed there that Boccaccio had prepared for the public readings, meticulously annotating the Commedia and collecting a mass of notes, without a particular order, through which we have the benefit of his considerations as noted alongside Dante’s verses.

His erudite inclinations led him to give a new interpretation of the rhetorical style and dwell upon detailed explanations of historic and mythological episodes. The basic plan, chosen as the guiding structure for the exegesis, however conforms to the dichotomy between literary exposition and allegorical exposition. Following this double track it is possible to transcend from the signification of the narrative of the journey beyond the world so to discover the truths in the scripture. Dante confirms himself to be poet-prophet, the bearer of an eschatological message, and, at the same time, he is a man of great knowledge, sublime artificer of the vernacular and depositary of a literary wisdom which recalls the classical antecedents of Greece and Rome.