Gianfranco Contini

Gianfranco Contini (1912-1990), professor of Romance philology first at Fribourg, then Florence and later at the Scuola Normale of Pisa, was president of the Società Dantesca Italiana from 1956 to 1968, and was also editor of the periodical Studi danteschi for several decades. Among his many scholarly studies is his important contribution to Dante scholarship in the form of commentaries and criticism. To mention just a few of his publications: an edition with commentary of the Rime in 1939; a critical edition with commentary of the Fiore and Detto d’Amore in 1984; his collected essays, Un’idea di Dante, published in 1976. Contini’s interpretation of Dante, together with those of Auerbach and Singleton, is considered essential for anyone wishing to tackle Dante’s works today. Indeed, it is perhaps true to say that the most accredited image today, at least in Italy, is the one openly favoured by Contini, of a “Dante of reality and continuous experimentation”[1]. A key feature in Contini’s reading of Dante is his frequently reiterated observation concerning the poet’s “total lack of prejudice towards the real”[2], whose formal correlative is literary experimentalism and linguistic variety, of which the Commedia, a definitive “encyclopaedia of styles”, is the loftiest outcome. Secondly, Contini also recognizes Dante’s dual identity, as poet and critic - summed up in the successful formula of poet-protagonist – or rather, “first critic, and not only by date, of Italian letters”, so if by some absurd reason “we had our fill of his poetry, his intelligence could nourish us for a long time”[3]. Finally, Contini’s work on Dante’s internal memory points out subtle and perhaps preterintentional mechanisms of self-citation, a symptom of deep memory acting “under the very threshold of consciousness”[4], on the level of signifiers rather than the signified, rhythmic-phonic junctures rather than lexical recurrence. And it is mainly on his keen ear for these internal echoes that authorship of the Fiore and the Detto d’Amore has been attributed to Dante.

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[1] G. Contini, Un’interpretazione di Dante (1965), in Id., Un’idea di Dante. Saggi danteschi, Torino, Einaudi, 1976, p. 110.

[2] G. Contini, Dante oggi, in Id., Un’idea di Dante, cit., p. 68.

[3] Ivi, p. 67.

[4] G. Contini, s.v. Fiore, in Enciclopedia Dantesca, Roma, Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970, vol. II p. 900.