Brunetto Latini was born in Florence in the 1220s. A militant Guelf, he was a notary by profession from 1254 onwards. From 1260 to 1266, he was forced into exile in France for political reasons. Upon his return to Florence, he held important positions of office in the city government until his death in 1294. He wrote a number of works: two poems in rhyming septenary couplets; his Favolello on the theme of friendship; the unfinished Tesoretto, conceived as an allegorical and encyclopaedic prosimetrum; a short canzone resembling those of the Sicilian School, S’eo son distretto inamoratamente; and most importantly of all, the Trésor, a large encyclopaedia in the language of oïl with which he pursued a secular goal of spreading culture to the people. He also produced the Rettorica, a vernacular translation of and lengthy commentary on the first seventeen chapters of Cicero’s De inventione, where he insists on the bond between rhetoric and politics, offering an image of himself as an intellectual committed to the life of the community and convinced of the didactic vocation of literature. This image comes across well in Giovanni Villani description of him: “the beginner and master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well and how to guide and rule our republic according to policy”[1]. Dante alludes to Brunetto’s occasional teaching, and places him among the violent against nature, in Inf., XV 83-85: la cara e buona imagine paterna / di voi quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora / m’insegnavate come l’uom s’etterna (“the dear and kindly paternal image of you when now and then in the world you taught me how man makes himself eternal”). Brunetto’s lesson did not only relate to civics and morality, however, for he also reproposed an intellectual and ideological model which reaches fulfilment in the Convivio. Moreover, his stylistic-rhetorical influence is testified by numerous echoes of his work in Dante’s works, from the early Rime to the Commedia, whose incipit recalls the opening of the Tesoretto, with its protagonist lost in a wood. Imitation of Brunetto is explicit in the Fiore and especially in the Detto d’Amore, whose metrical structure is modelled on Brunetto’s vernacular poems.

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[1] G. Villani, Cronica, VIII 10.

Manuscript illumination depicting Dante’s meeting with Brunetto Latini in the round of the sodomites.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms. Holkham misc. 48, p. 22.