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  • Scholar Saints and Boccaccio's Trattatello in laude di Dante
  • Karen Elizabeth Gross

Boccaccio's biography of Dante has often been a bit of a disappointment to later readers. Composed between 1351 and 1355, the Trattatello in laude di Dante does not so much narrate a chronological history of Dante's life as provide several anecdotes describing Dante's character, punctuated by elaborations upon certain themes including the enmity between wives and scholarship, the castigation of Florence, and, most elaborately, the defense of poetry and the vernacular.1 Boccaccio's "little treatise" is rich in fantastic lore. It is from the Trattatello that we learn of the old women of Verona pointing to the grizzled beard of Dante as singed proof of his infernal journey, and of the unfinished state of the Paradiso upon Dante's death, only made complete when Dante's son received a vision of his father directing him to a secret hole in the bedchamber's wall, in which were stashed the last thirteen cantos. A prophetic dream accompanied Dante's birth: in a vision, his mother saw herself deliver a boy who immediately ate from a laurel tree, grew into a shepherd, and then transformed into a peacock.

It is because of these features, so fabulous in both the medieval and the modern senses, that readers looking for an account of Dante's lived experiences might feel let down by the Trattatello, especially as Boccaccio was in an ideal historic position to provide more factual [End Page 66] events. While Boccaccio never met Dante, he was an assiduous copyist and student of the older poet's works.2 Boccaccio himself transcribed the Commedia at least three times and was responsible for sending another manuscript of the poem to Petrarch while he was involved with the composition of the Trattatello.3 He also copied into his zibaldoni Dante's correspondence with Cino da Pistoia and Giovanni del Vergilio, among others, and edited Dante's pastoral poetry.4 Boccaccio interviewed those who had known Dante, including Cino, Dino Perini, and Giovanni Villani, as well as family members. In 1350 he even spoke with Dante's daughter Beatrice when, as an ambassador of the Florentine Guild of Orsanmichele, he traveled to Ravenna to offer her ten gold florins.5 When in 1373 a public lecture series on the Commedia was inaugurated in Florence—the first such honor accorded to any poet's works, ancient or modern—Boccaccio was the person chosen as best to expound upon the poem's significance; his notes from these presentations formed an incomplete but learned commentary, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia.6 It is not that Boccaccio was incapable of unembellished historical writing. Certainly he composed more staid accounts of the lives of Petrarch and Peter Damian, and in his encyclopedic biographies such as De mulieribus claris he tried to steer away from the fanciful, as when he provided the original history of Dido as chaste widow, thus refuting Virgil's invention of her [End Page 67] meeting with Aeneas.7 Similarly, in his Genealogiae deorum gentilium he often gave euhemeristic explanations for figures from mythology. Yet when it came to the life of the modern poet he studied most intently, Boccaccio relied upon wives' tales and dreams.

Readers often try to look beyond the Trattatello to a literary source or genre behind it that might explain its composition. Fifteenth-century humanist Leonardo Bruni traced Boccaccio's elaborations to his incorrigible story-telling about romantic love:

[M]i parve che il nostro Boccaccio, dolcissimo e soavissimo uomo, cosí scrivesse la vita e i costumi di tanto sublime poeta come se a scrivere avesse il Filocolo, o il Filostrato o la Fiammetta. Perocché tutto d'amore e di sospiri e di cocenti lagrime è pieno, come se l'uomo nascesse in questo mondo solamente per ritrovarsi in quelle dieci giornate amorose, le quali da donne innamorate e da giovani leggiadri raccontate furono nelle Cento Novelle.8

Giuseppe Billanovich was the first of several twentieth-century readers to have dubbed the Trattatello hagiography.9 Boccaccio's detailed description of Dante's features has been traced to physiognomy manuals: thus his aquiline nose signified "a proud soul, as...

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