ITALIAN LECTURE Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande and its Two Authors CARLO GINZBURG Fellow of the Academy I THE DEBATE OVER THE AUTHENTICITY, whether total or partial, of the Epistle to Cangrande traditionally ascribed to Dante has been going on for over a century. Less than twenty years ago the issue was thoroughly scrutinised by Henry Ansgar Kelly—who rejected the authenticity of the Epistle—and by Robert Hollander—who supported it.1 While I shall occasionally recall some of the conflicting arguments presented in the his- torical debate as background information, I shall concentrate mainly on the presentation of a new hypothesis of my own. All Dante’s letters are in Latin; the Epistle to Cangrande is no excep- tion.2We can divide it into three sections.In the first section (paragraphs 1–4), which is written in the first person, Dante tells Cangrande della Scala, lord of Verona, that he is dedicating to him the third part, or cantica, of his Commedia: the Paradiso, at that time (about 1316) still Read at the Italian Cultural Institute,London,3 November 2005. 1 H. A. Kelly, Tragedy and Comedy from Dante to Pseudo-Dante (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London,1989);R.Hollander,Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande (Ann Arbor,1993). 2 All quotations are from Dante Alighieri, Epistola a Cangrande, ed. E. Cecchini (Florence, 1995).See also G.Brugnoli’s detailed commentary in Dante Alighieri,Opere minori,2 (Milan and Naples,1979),pp.512–21,598–643 (the introduction is dated 1973).English translation:The Letter to Can Grande,in R.S.Haller (ed.),Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri(Lincoln and London,1977),pp.95–111.German translation:Dante Alighieri,Das Schreiben an Cangrande della Scala,ed.T.Ricklin,with an introduction by R.Imbach (Hamburg,1993) (with a helpful commentary). Proceedings ofthe British Academy139,195–216.© The British Academy 2006. 196 Carlo Ginzburg unfinished. The second section (paragraphs 5–16), written in the third person except for an isolated ‘ego’(either the author or a commentator), provides a general introduction,or accessus,to the Commedia.The third section (paragraphs 17–33),also in the third person,provides a commen- tary on the first twelve lines of the Paradiso,quoted in Latin.In a rather abrupt conclusion the first person surfaces again. Nine manuscripts of the Epistle to Cangrande have survived. The three oldest were copied in the fifteenth century (they are preserved at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan,at the Staatsbibliothek in Munich,and the Biblioteca Comunale, Bergamo): they include only the short first section of the Epistle.3 The remaining six manuscripts contain the full text. In 1943 Augusto Mancini argued that this bifurcated manuscript tra- dition rather neatly mirrors the distinction between a genuine,albeit trun- cated letter by Dante,preserved in paragraphs 1–4,and a lengthy addition by a commentator.4 According to Mancini, one can see the clumsy stitches between these two separate texts in a sentence at the end of the fourth paragraph: Itaque, formula consumata epistole, ad introductionem oblati operis aliquid sub lectoris officio compendiose aggrediar. (And so, having completed the formula for a letter,I shall undertake,in my capacity as commentator,to pres- ent a concise introduction to the work I offered to you.)5 Inhisdetailedanalysisof thecursusof theEpistletoCangrande,Peter Dronkenotedthatthefirstfourparagraphsfollowthecustomaryrhythmic patterns of Dante’s prose; the rest does not.6 Dronke’s analysis provides strong support for Mancini’s argument: but this converging evidence did not settle the debate. The reason for this seeming inconclusiveness is related tothepeculiarfeaturesof theEpistle’sreception. Tradition has assigned the earliest explicit reference to the Epistle approximately to 1400,or over eighty years after Dante is thought to have 3 Eight manuscripts are reproduced in F.Schneider,Die Handschriften des Briefes Dantes an Can Grandedella Scala(Zwickau i.Sa.,1933);for the ninth manuscript see A.Mancini,‘Un nuovo codice dell’Epistola a Can Grande’,Studi danteschi,24 (1939),111–22. 4 A.Mancini,‘Nuovi dubbi ed ipotesi sulla epistola a Can Grande’,Rendiconti della classe di scienze morali e storiche della R.Accademia d’Italia,s.7,4 (1942–3),227–42. 5 Haller (ed.),The Letter,p.98,slightly modified. 6 P.Dronke,Dante and Medieval Latin Traditions(Cambridge,1986),pp.103–11.See also Kelly, Tragedy,pp.79–111;R.G.Hall and M.U.Sowell,‘Cursus in the Can Grande Epistle:A Forger Shows His Hand?’,Lectura Dantis,5 (1989),89–104. DANTE’S EPISTLE TO CANGRANDEAND ITS TWO AUTHORS 197 composed the text, in a passage from Filippo Villani’s incomplete com- mentary on the Commedia. (Villani had been appointed to succeed Boccaccio to the Dante chair set up by the Florentine commune, but he died before assuming his duties.)7 I shall discuss later two references that would permit us to push back the date to the mid-fourteenth century. Why are there no explicit references to the Epistle to Cangrandein the earlier commentaries? Why did Guido da Pisa, Pietro di Dante, Jacopo della Lana and others all fail to mention it? Their silence is particularly surprising since,as Luiso noted in 1902 in a ground-breaking essay,some passages from those commentaries are identical to passages from the Epistle to Cangrande. On the basis of these convergences, Luiso argued that (a) the commentators were not familiar with the Epistle, otherwise they would have assigned those passages to Dante; and (b) the Epistle itself was a forgery pieced together before 1400 from fragments of earlier commentaries on the Commedia.8 Some have objected that earlier com- mentators might have had access to a version of the Epistle lacking the first section,where Dante’s name appeared.While such an imaginary text is conceivable, the presence of the first, properly epistolary part of the Epistle in all of the surviving manuscripts weakens such an argument.But a further argument against Luiso’s hypothesis was offered, compellingly articulated,by Luis Jenaro-MacLennan in his book on the Trecento com- mentaries on the Commedia.The forgery hypothesis,Jenaro-MacLennan wrote, would imply that the impeccable sequence of ideas which the epistle exhibits, with a perfect agreement between content and logical expression, is nothing buttheresultof itsauthor’shavingputtogetheraseriesof scrappysentences, collectedfromdifferentportionsof slavishcommentariesof differentperiods, and yet taking from these latter only certain unimportant and dissociated pointsinordertoreproducetheminthecohesiveunityof histext.Thatsuch a hypothesis is absurd becomes clear in the light of the arguments I have so fardeveloped.9 Jenaro-MacLennan’s reconstruction of the intricate relationship among the Trecento commentaries on the Commedia is an admirable piece of scholarship; but his conclusion is in my view unfounded. I will 7 F.Villani,Expositio seu comentum super Comedia Dantis Allegherii,ed.S.Bellomo (Florence, 1989),p.32. 8 F.P.Luiso,‘Per la varia fortuna di Dante nel secolo XIV’,in Giornale dantesco,10 (1902), 83–97 and 11 (1903),20–6,60–9. 9 L.Jenaro-MacLennan,The Trecento Commentaries on the Divina Commediaand the Epistle to Cangrande(Oxford,1974),pp.67–8. 198 Carlo Ginzburg argue that the text of the Epistle to Cangrande which is available to us includes sections that are not by Dante;therefore we may consider it as a partial forgery. II Let me start from a piece of evidence that gained scholarly prominence after the publication of Jenaro-MacLennan’s book. In an essay that appeared in 1979, Carlo Paolazzi scrutinised a passage from a commen- tary on the Commediapublished in the late nineteenth century under the name of Stefano Talice da Ricaldone.10 As Michele Barbi had demon- strated,Talice da Ricaldone was not an author but a scribe,and the work to which his name became attached when he copied it in 1475 was a set of notes taken one hundred years earlier by an anonymous witness to the earliest series of lectures that Benvenuto da Imola gave on Dante in Bologna.11 Here is the passage from Benvenuto’s commentary that Paolazzi studied: Sed est dubium, que est causa quod homo tantus [i.e. Dante] deduxit se ad describendum vulgariter. Ratio prima est ista, que habetur in sua epistula, ut faceret fructum et delectationem pluribus gentibus,tam literatis quam illitter- atis:unde si descripsisset literaliter,tunc ipsum vulgares non intellexissent;unde novum stilum voluit capere,et etiam ut faceret fructum Italicis.12(A question has been raised:why did such a great man decide to write in the vernacular? The first reason,which can be found in his epistle,was to write something useful and pleasant for a larger audience,including both those able to read Latin [literatis] and those unable to read it [illiteratis]; if he had written in Latin, the latter would have been unable to understand.Therefore he decided to use a new style, to benefit the Italians.) Paolazzi interpreted the words ‘in sua epistula,’ or in his epistle (a phrase absent from later versions of Benvenuto’s commentary), as an allusion to the Epistleto Cangrande.This would make Benvenuto’s com- ment, which he made in 1375, the earliest reference to the Epistle, since 10 C.Paolazzi,‘Le letture dantesche di Benvenuto da Imola a Bologna e a Ferrara e le redazioni del suo Comentum’,Italia medioevale e umanistica,22 (1979),319–66. 11 M.Barbi,‘Benvenuto da Imola e non Stefano Talice da Ricaldone’[1908],in idem,Problemi di critica dantesca,1st series,repr.(Florence,1965),pp.429–53. 12 La Commedia di Dante Alighieri col commento inedito di Stefano Talice di Ricaldone, eds. V.PromisandC.Negroni,3vols.(Milan,1888)(1stedn.,1886),p.5.SeealsoPaolazzi,‘Le letture’,323. DANTE’S EPISTLE TO CANGRANDEAND ITS TWO AUTHORS 199 the lecture was given twenty-five years before the appearance of Filippo Villani’s commentary.Paolazzi rightly noted that no other letter ascribed to Dante refers to the Commedia. To support his interpretation, he then cited the following passage from the Epistle to Cangrande (15): Finis totius et partis est removere viventes in hac vita de statu miserie et per- ducere ad statum felicitatis ... (The end of the whole and of the part is to remove those living in this life from the state of misery and to lead them to the state of happiness ...)13 The comparison is entirely unconvincing.Much closer to Benvenuto’s talk of utility and benefit,as Paolazzi admitted,is a passage from the first version of Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante. Some wise men, Boccaccio wrote, had raised the following question: why had a profound thinker like Dante chosen to write a poem dealing with sublime matters in the Florentine vernacular rather than in Latin, as earlier poets had? Boccaccio’s answer intersected at one point with Benvenuto’s: ‘per fare utilità più comune a’suoi cittadini e agli altri Italiani’(to be beneficial to the majority of his fellow citizens and the other Italians).14 No reference is made to Dante’s epistle.It may be helpful to remember that in Convivio I, vii, 12, Dante had put forward a similar argument: in commenting on his poems (canzoni), which were of course written in Italian, the vernac- ular was more appropriate than Latin because ‘lo latino non l’avrebbe esposte se non a’litterati, ché li altri non l’averebbero inteso’(the use of Latin would have rendered it accessible only to those who could read Latin [litterati];the others would not have understood it). Paolazzi’s thesis has not won universal support. Robert Hollander accepted it; Zygmunt Baran´ski did not.15 But even Hollander admitted thatBenvenuto’srecapitulationoftheunnamedepistledidnotsquarewith theEpistletoCangrande,thoughheinsistedthatitwas‘nonethelesstobe takenasBenvenuto’sversionof it’:asomewhatcircularargument.Inmy view, the quotations from Dante and Boccaccio provided by Paolazzi undermine his identification of the epistle mentioned by Benvenuto: but the latter’s allusion to an epistle in which Dante commented on the 13 Haller (ed.),The Letter,pp.103–4. 14 G.Boccaccio,Trattatello in laude di Dante,ed.P.G.Ricci,in Opere,ed.V.Branca (Milan, 1974),3,486. 15 Hollander, Dante’s Epistle, pp. 78–80; Z. Baran´ski, ‘Benvenuto da Imola e la tradizione dantesca della “Comedia”: appunti per una descrizione del Comentum’, in R. Palmieri and C. Paolazzi (eds.), Benvenuto da Imola lettore degli antichi e dei moderni: Atti del convegno internazionale,Imola26e 27maggio1989(Ravenna,1991),215–30. 200 Carlo Ginzburg Commedia is intriguing. In my study of this question I followKelly,who providedadetaileddiscussionof Paolazzi’sremarks;butmyconclusions willdivergefrombothPaolazzi’sandKelly’s.16 Between 1373 and the early months of 1374 Boccaccio delivered a series of public lectures on Dante in Florence. Benvenuto da Imola attended them and relied extensively upon them in his commentary. One may presume that Boccaccio said something about an epistle by Dante in these lectures. In 1375 Benvenuto defended Dante’s decision to write the Commediain Florentine vernacular for three reasons,all of them inspired by Boccaccio,either implicitly or explicitly.Paolazzi quoted only the first of them,which we have just examined.17Here is the second. Seconda ratio est,quoniam ipse consideravit quod reges et principes,qui olim delectabantur, et quibus opera poetarum intitulabantur, nunc ipsam poesim neglexerunt, et viciis dediti sunt: ideo se reduxit ad istum stilum. Primo enim noster incepit literaliter sic: Ultima regna canam fluvido contermina mundo.18 (The second reason is that he [i.e.Dante] thought that kings and princes,who in the past used to take delight in poetry and have poetical works dedicated to them,nowadays disregard poetry and give themselves over to vices:therefore he decided to use this style [i.e.,the Florentine vernacular].In fact our poet had begun by writing in Latin, to wit: ‘Ultima regna canam fluvido contermina mundo’[I shall sing the most remote kingdoms,close to the boundaries of the corruptible world]). Benvenuto’s second point echoes ConvivioI,ix,5:since sovereigns do not support poetry as they did in the past,Dante chose the vernacular in order to make his poems available to a larger audience.But the Latin lines he identifies as an early attempt at the Commedia come from a different source:the notorious Ilaro letter preserved in a single manuscript known as the Zibaldone Laurenzianoand written in Boccaccio’s own hand (Laur. XXIX,8,c.67 r).The letter was allegedly written by a monk named Ilaro who had lived in a monastery near Sarzana. Addressing himself to Uguccione della Faggiola, lord of Pisa, Ilaro explains that on his way towards the Alps an unknown poet had made a stop at the monastery and shown to Ilaro the first part of a poem he was composing. Upon exam- ining the document, Ilaro had been amazed to discover that the highly ambitious work was written in the vernacular:this was no mean feat.The poet had admitted that the task he had set himself was extremely daunt- 16 Kelly,Tragedy,pp.48–55. 17 C.Paolazzi,‘Le letture dantesche’,325.But see also L.M.La Favia,‘Benvenuto da Imola’s Dependence on Boccaccio’s Studies on Dante’,Dante Studies,93 (1975),172ff. 18 La Commedia di Dante Alighieri col commento inedito di Stefano Talice di Ricaldone,p.5. DANTE’S EPISTLE TO CANGRANDEAND ITS TWO AUTHORS 201 ing,explaining that he had begun in Latin:reciting the first two and a half hexameters of this version, he had opened with the words ‘Ultima regna canam fluvido contermina mundo.’His decision to choose the vernacular, he had explained, had been driven by the conviction that the ‘generous men for whom such things had been written during a better age now left liberal arts,alas,to lesser folks’.19 In an essay that prompted a passionate defence by Edward Moore, Francesco D’Ovidio contemptuously wrote that the Epistle to Cangrande was a forgery ‘as blatant as the alleged letter by Ilaro’.20 But only fifty years later the identity of the pseudo-Ilaro was unmasked. On the basis of compelling stylistic analogies, Giuseppe Billanovich showed that the Ilaro letter had been written by the very individual who transcribed it: Giovanni Boccaccio.21 In his youth Boccaccio had reworked Dante’s let- ters to Moroello Malaspina and Cino da Pistoia in two letters addressed, respectively,to the duke of Durazzo and to Petrarch.At a later date,but in a similar vein, Boccaccio made up the pseudo-Ilaro’s letter as a rhetorical exercise. The Zibaldone Laurenziano, which includes all these texts, permits us to trace Boccaccio’s strenuous, relentless practice of ars dictandi.22 Billanovich’s hypothesis was not new. The possibility that Boccaccio might have made up Ilaro’s letter as a rhetorical exercise had been both proposed and rejected by Adolfo Bartoli; Francesco Macrì-Leone had put forward the same hypothesis with more conviction; but neither had provided a detailed proof.23 If I am not mistaken, Billanovich’s brilliant 19 I rely here on G.Billanovich,‘La leggenda dantesca del Boccaccio.Dalla lettera di Ilaro al Trattatello in laude di Dante’,Studi danteschi,28 (1949),45–144;the text ofIlaro’s letter appears on 141–4. 20 F.D’Ovidio,‘L’Epistola a Cangrande’,in idem,Studij sulla Divina Commedia(Palermo and Naples, 1901), pp. 448–85, especially p. 473; E. Moore, ‘The Genuineness of the Dedicatory Epistle to Can Grande (Epistle X in Oxford Dante)’, Studies in Dante. Third Series (Oxford, 1903),pp.284–369. 21 Billanovich,‘La leggenda’. 22 Ibid., p. 63; S. Zamponi, M. Pantarotto, A. Tomiello, ‘Stratigrafia dello Zibaldone e della Miscellanea Laurenziani’,in M.Picone and C.Cazalé Bérard (eds.),Gli Zibaldoni di Boccaccio. Memoria,scrittura,riscrittura.Atti del seminario internazionale di Firenze-Certaldo (26–28 aprile 1996) (Florence,1998) pp.181–258,especially pp.186–7;A.C.de la Mare,The Handwriting of Italian Humanists,1 (Oxford,1973),p.21. 23 See A.Bartoli,Storia della letteratura italiana,5 (Florence,1887),pp.208–9;G.Boccaccio, La vita di Dante,ed.F.Macrì-Leone.Introduction (Florence,1888),pp.CXII–CXIII.See also P.Rajna,‘La lettera di frate Ilario’,Studj romanzi a cura di E.Monaci,2 (1904),123–34;idem, ‘Testo della lettera di frate Ilario e osservazioni sul suo valore storico’,in Dante e la Lunigiana (Milan,1909),pp.235–85,especiallypp.248,273n.19.Billanovichwritesthatthesescholars (he does not mention Macrì-Leone) ‘si chiusero con ruvida ingenuità nel processo sterile sulla 202 Carlo Ginzburg demonstration paved the way for the much later methodological tour de force in which Gianfranco Contini contrasted Boccaccio’s Dantesque pastiches(‘paccotiglia’)withtheenormouscomplexityofDante’spoetical memory.24 What concerns me here are the far-reaching implications of Billanovich’s piece.Its subtitle—‘From the Ilaro Letter to the Trattatello in laude di Dante’—highlighted the profound ambivalence in Boccaccio’s attitude towards Dante.Boccaccio repeatedly transcribed Dante’s poems, imitated his letters,made up a fake letter about him,wrote an essay on his life, lectured about him. But imitation and competition are two sides of the same coin.In his great book Erich Auerbach showed that Boccaccio’s work would have been impossible without Dante’s.25Boccaccio’s lifelong fascination with Dante led him to write a ‘Comédie Humaine’,a work of one hundred novelle rather than one hundred canti.26 The one-hundred- and-first novella, as it has been called, was the description of Paolo’s and Francesca’s death that Boccaccio included in his lectures on the Commedia, opposing the truth of his own account to Dante’s fictional description (fizione) of Paolo’s and Francesca’s falling in love.27 All this throws some light on Boccaccio’s use of the Ilaro letter in his late works on Dante. What had been conceived as a rhetorical exercise became a reservoir of pseudo-factual data: a forgery. But this was not Billanovich’s conclusion. He noted that while the ‘fable’ Boccaccio had fabricated about the triple dedication of the Commedia,still prominent in the Trattatello in laude di Dante,had disappeared from the lectures on the Commedia,Boccaccio had not abandoned the Latin version of the open- ing of Dante’s poem:he continued to treat it as an authentic piece of evi- dence, using it, as Billanovich said, ‘colla stessa franchezza sollecitata dagli stessi irti pregiudizi’ (with the same directness driven by the same harsh prejudices).28 My translation of this convoluted phrase is clearly autenticità della testimonianza’(‘La leggenda’, p. 135 n. 2): an inadequate (and ungenerous) evaluation. 24 G.Contini,‘Un’interpretazione di Dante’,in idem,Un’idea di Dante(Turin,2001),pp.69–111, especially p.80:‘La tipologia ripetitoria ordinaria,di parole e immagini,tocca al dantismo di modesta osservanza,non solo nella paccotiglia del peggior Boccaccio ...’. 25 E.Auerbach,Mimesis.The Representation ofReality in Western Literature(Princeton,1991), p.220. 26 R.Hollander,‘Boccaccio’s Dante:Imitative Distance (DecameronI,1 and VI,10)’,Studi sul Boccaccio,13 (1981–2),169–98,especially pp.169ff. 27 G.Boccaccio,Esposizioni sopra la Comedia,ed.G.Padoan (Milan,1965),Tutte le opere,ed. V.Branca,6,316. 28 G.Billanovich,‘La leggenda’,pp.107,129. DANTE’S EPISTLE TO CANGRANDEAND ITS TWO AUTHORS 203 inadequate:but Billanovich’s prose,which is often quite awkward,in this case betrays an obvious embarrassment.He seems to have refrained from accepting the consequences of his own demonstration. III Recently the very premises of Billanovich’s essay have been called into question. One scholar has suggested that Boccaccio himself had been the victim of a hoax, a conclusion I find unconvincing; another scholar has argued that the Ilaro letter itself is both authentic and a description of a real event, a conclusion I find grotesque.29 Both involve deliberate attempts to remove from Boccaccio the taint (and even the suspicion) of forgery. Giorgio Padoan has informed us that ‘Boccaccio did not have the mind of a forger’ (Il Boccaccio non ebbe animo di falsificatore).30 Saverio Bellomo’s conclusion is less radical: Boccaccio was not ‘given to deliberate forgery’ (avvezzo alla premeditata falsificazione).31 As I read these sentences I heard Boccaccio’s voice whispering in my ear: ‘Ser Ciappelletto, c’est moi.’But this is no counterargument. Let me go back to Benvenuto da Imola and his Bolognese lectures.As we have seen, Benvenuto, following in Boccaccio’s footsteps, quoted the line ‘Ultima regna canam fluvido contermina mundo’ to prove that Dante’s choice of the vernacular did not imply a lack of proficiency in Latin. Henry Kelly suggested that the person who recorded Benvenuto’s lectures in Bologna might have interpreted the reference to Ilaro’s epistle on Danteas an allusion to an epistle by Dante.This is very unlikely,since Benvenutomentionedboth.32AsIsaidbefore,hisreferencetoanunknown epistle—either genuine or fictitious—in which Dante defended his use of 29 See, respectively, S. Bellomo, ‘Il sorriso di Ilaro e la prima redazione in latino della Commedia’,Studi sul Boccaccio,32 (2001),201–35;G.Padoan,‘Il progetto di poema paradisi- aco: “Vita nuova”, XLII (e l’epistola di Ilaro)’, in idem, Il lungo cammino del ‘poema sacro’ (Florence,1993),pp.5–23.G.Gorni refers to Ilaro’s letter as ‘contestatissima’,but seems to give some credit to it:Dante Alighieri,Vita nuova,ed.G.Gorni (Turin,1996),p.151 note. 30 G.Padoan,‘Il progetto’,p.10,followed by F.Bruni,Boccaccio.L’invenzione della letteratura mezzana (Bologna,1990),p.296 n.9. 31 S.Bellomo,‘Il sorriso di Ilaro’,216. 32 Kelly,Tragedy,pp.48ff.(Kelly mistakenly refers to Stefano Talice da Ricaldone as the man who recorded Benvenuto’s lectures; in fact he transcribed them, one century later). See also Hollander,Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande,p.79 (Hollander incorrectly ascribes to Kelly a second, hypothetical identification between the epistle mentioned by Benvenuto, and Petrarch’s letter, discussed below). 204 Carlo Ginzburg the vernacular was presumably an echo from Boccaccio’s lectures. Ilaro’s letter pointed in the same direction. Why did Boccaccio, followed by Benvenuto,insist so much on this issue? The question may seem preposterous:Boccaccio had been pondering this theme since his youth, as Ilaro’s letter clearly shows. But recently the topic had re-emerged, in a different, more threatening context. Benvenuto’s third point helps to clarify this: Alia ratio est, quia vidit stilum suum non esse sufficientem materie de qua inceperat;sed sic faciendo omnia vicit;et sic fuit.Unde dicens Petralca:magna opinio huius hominis ad omnia scivisset se optime applicare. Melius est scire pauca de nobilibus quam multa de rebus ignobilibus; Aristoteles XII Metaphisice.Dicitur pro tanto quantum hic interest tangere res substantiales et necessarias. (Another reason is this: because he realised that his own [Latin] style was not appropriate to the matter he had begun to write about; but in doing this he overcame all obstacles. Therefore Petrarch said: I have a high opinion of this man [i.e.,Dante]:he was able to excel in everything he did.It is better to know a bit about noble things than a great deal about ignoble things: Aristotle,Metaphysics,XII.I said this in order to stress that it is important to deal with matters that are necessary and of the essence.)33 IV Benvenuto’s reference to Petrarch points, once again, to Boccaccio. The sentence ‘I have a high opinion of this man:he was able to excel in every- thing he did’ is taken from Fam. XXI, 15, the letter Petrarch sent to Boccaccio in May 1359.34Eight years after the letter was sent,Boccaccio had written to Petrarch complaining that he had never received it;later he finally recovered a copy.35Benvenuto either saw the letter or heard about it from Boccaccio. But in the process of transmission the original mean- ing of Petrarch’s sentence was deliberately distorted, as a comparison with the full text of the famous letter will immediately show. 33 La Commedia di Dante Alighieri col commento inedito di Stefano Talice di Ricaldone,p.5. 34 F.Petrarca,Lefamiliari,ed.V.Rossi,U.Bosco (Florence,1942),pp.94–100,especially p.98: ‘Nam quod inter laudes dixisti,potuisse illum si voluisset alio stilo uti,credo edepol—magna enim michi de ingenio eius opinio est—potuisse eum omnia quibus intendisset; nunc quibus intenderit,palam est.’ 35 G.Boccaccio,Opere latine minori,ed.A.F.Massèra (Bari,1928),p.182:‘Et ego,iam fere annus est,eo quod michi ipsi plurime videantur epistole tue ad me,in volumen unum eo ordine quo misse seu scripte sunt redigere cepi:sed iam gradum figere coactus sum,cum deficiant alique quas numquam habui,etiam si a te misse sint,ut puta “Beasti me munere,etc.”et eam quam de Dante scripseras ad me et alias forsan plures.’