The Artist as a Dantista: Francesco da Sangallo’s Dantism in Mid-Cinquecento Florence

During the Italian Renaissance, a great many artists exhibited a remarkable devotion to Dante. Documentary evidence, such as inventories of the possessions of painters and sculptors, reveals the Commedia, or less frequently the Convivio or the Vita Nuova, to be a recurring presence in the personal libraries of the practitioners of the visual arts.¹ And if the architect and amateur poet Donato Bramante from Urbino was known at the Milanese court of Ludovico il Moro as a “sviscerato partigiano di Dante,”² it was above all the Florentine artistic milieu that was imbued with Dantean enthusiasms. Giorgio Vasari’s Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (1550 and 1568) is an important source in this regard. Vasari’s biographies of Andrea and Bernardo Orcagna, Taddeo Bartoli, Filippo Brunelleschi, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Bronzino provide details of how assiduously these figures studied the Commedia.³ In many cases, the author stressed how the artists’ profound familiarity with the poem intersected with their figurative production. He devoted considerable attention, for instance, to Botticelli’s illustrations to the Commedia, and to the subjects in the Sistine Last Judgement that Buonarroti derived from the poet he loved so much.

On the basis of Vasari’s testimony, numerous studies have investigated the ways in which major artistic personalities developed in their work a systematic dialogue with Dante.⁴ Far less consideration has been given to the forms Dantism could take in artists who were less well established than someone of the caliber of Botticelli or Michelangelo, even though such minor figures likely felt a greater need to proclaim their intellectual credentials. In fact, some of these practitioners of the visual arts set up a relationship with the auctoritas of Dante that was no less articulated, lasting, and fruitful than that of their more illustrious colleagues. An especially significant case, from this point of view, is that of the Florentine sculptor, architect, military engineer, medallist, and amateur rhymester Francesco Giamberti, known as da Sangallo (1494–1576).

The son of Giuliano da Sangallo (1443 or 1445–1516) and scion of one of the leading artistic dynasties of Renaissance Italy, Francesco held a prominent place in the cultural world of Ducal Florence. In that setting he distinguished himself as a devoted cultivator of family memories, as a master of an architectural and sculptural language that combined experimentation with an appeal to local tradition, and as an artist who tenaciously pursued a strategy of intellectual self-promotion.⁵ And it is within the framework of such a strategy that we can best understand the nature, scope, and significance of Sangallo’s lengthy and multivalent engagement with Dantism.

The most thorough study of Francesco’s multifaceted profile has taken the artist’s explicit references to Dante to argue that these should be understood within the general pattern of Dantean interests that characterize Florentine culture of the age.⁶ Yet so far there is no investigation of the specific meanings and functions of Dantism in Sangallo’s intellectual and artistic persona. By analyzing, framing, and critically evaluating a series of documents and literary sources, based on new archival research and in part previously unknown texts, this article sets out to illuminate how the artist managed to exploit his familiarity with Dante as a decisive element in the construction of his own cultural identity, and how foremost literati of the age responded to his public persona as a Dantista. At the same time, the present contribution aims to provide the first sustained study of the manifold processes of cross-fertilization between Francesco’s exhibited Dantean cult and his professional activity.

Dantism as (Perhaps) a Family Question and the Relation with the Convivio

The beginning of Sangallo’s career as a Dantista is connected with the mystery that surrounds the paternity of one of the most extraordinary sets of illustrations to the Commedia produced during the Italian Renaissance. In a long article from 1955, Bernhard Degenhart did in fact identify Giuliano and Francesco da Sangallo as the main authors of a series of almost 250 drawings in pencil or...