Dante Alighieri
In 1892, just as Willard Fiske was restoring the Villa Landor on the edge of Fiesole, he impulsively purchased a 1536 edition of the Divine Comedy and had it sent directly to Cornell. The Fiske Dante Collection grew from this first acquisition, at first in hesitant increments intended to strengthen the Cornell Library’s holdings in the works of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), the great Florentine poet, thinker and precursor of the early humanist Italians. However, as Fiske related, “my ambition shortly took a broader range; the charm of the chase got possession of me, and it was impossible to escape from its grasp.” Fiske’s greatest period of Dante collecting was from 1893 to 1896. During that time, he amassed what is widely considered today one of the finest collections of Dante literature.
The Dante Collection celebrates the printed works of the poet, including a remarkable group of editions from the Incunabula period (before about 1500). Highlights include a splendid copy of the first (Foligno) edition of the Divina Commedia, printed in 1472. Of the editions and translations of Dante Alighieri’s works—the Divina Commedia, the Vita Nuova, and other books of poetry and philosophy—there is far too much to suggest more than a few examples. In May 1894, Professor Thomas Frederick Crane was already able to say that the “American student of Dante must now . . . wend his way to Cornell, for the most important Dante library in the world, with the possible exception of the collection in the Biblioteca Nazionale at Florence, is now at Ithaca.”
Commedia (1472)
Dante Alighieri. La divina commedia. Foligno (Italy): Johann Neumeister, 1472.
The Divine Comedy, Dante’s description of his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, was written during the last thirteen years of the poet’s life. The Foligno edition, shown here, was printed by Johann Neumeister (fl. 1470-1495), and is one of the two first editions of the Divine Comedy ever published. Thus the Foligno edition was printed only twenty years after the Gutenberg Bible (ca. 1454), which was the first printed European book. This place in the early history of printing is a mark of the great poem’s importance and influence during the Renaissance.
Purgatorio leaf
This vellum manuscript leaf preserves much of the revelatory and crucial cantos XXXI and XXXII. Late in the Purgatory, Beatrice appears, initially rebuking the poet. Beatrice was the idealized love of Dante’s life.
Commedia (1506)
This early sixteenth-century edition of the Divine Comedy was printed by the celebrated Florentine printer, Filippo di Giunta, “together with a dialogue on the location, form, and dimensions of Hell.”
Commedia (1515)
Dante Alighieri. Dante col sito, et forma dell’inferno. Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1515.
This edition of Dante was printed by Aldus Manutius (fl. ca. 1450-1515) and his heirs, who were among the most important and influential printers of the Renaissance, publishing not only classical texts but also the vernacular works of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
Amoroso convivio
The engraved portrait on the title page is of Dante. The Amorous Banquet, written ca. 1304–07, is Dante’s second prosimetrum (compilation of prose and poetry). It sets forth the poet’s political and philosophical ideas, including advocacy for an imperial restoration under the spiritual authority of the Church. Dante also predicts a new age in which vernacular languages will supplant Latin as the primary medium of literary expression.
Vita nuova (1513)
This volume includes a selection of poems by Dante and several other authors as well as the Vita nuova, the poet’s first prosimetrum. The manuscript was copied in the first year of the papacy of Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici, 1475–1521), who, despite enhancing Rome as a center of Renaissance culture and the Papacy as a force in European politics, drained his treasury and helped provoke the Reformation.
Dante composed the Vita nuova (New Life), around 1293. It is his compendium of earlier poems, written in an ostensibly autobiographical prose framework. The Vita nuovo records Dante’s relationship with Beatrice, who later appears as his “guide” in the Paradiso, but whose historical identity has never been established.
Vita di Dante (1576)
This first Florentine edition of Boccaccio’s Life of Dante is bound together with the first printing of Dante’s own Vita nuova, also printed by the same press in 1576. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), best known as the author of the greatly influential (and often racy) Decameron, flourished a generation after the death of Dante and was a friend of Petrarch, whom he considered his mentor. The Vita di Dante is a somewhat apocryphal, although clearly reverential, biographical narrative.