In a famous passage from the dedicatory letter to the Principe, Machiavelli paradoxically authorizes himself as an expert concerning the high and the mighty by claiming to speak with “the voice of the people”. On the face of it the Principe contains one lesson after another in how a “virtuous” leader can manipulate and control the populace to his own ends. On the other hand, from shortly after the composition of the treatise, readers have asserted that Machiavelli is secretly, ironically, allegorically, expressing opinions that place him on the side of the “popolo” against the repressive regimes of such as Cesare Borgia and Julius II. Rather than taking sides in this still unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, debate, I argue that the Principe, in the letter to Lorenzo and throughout, delineates the problematic nature of Machiavelli’s relationship to the “people”—and with it the unstable contours of his “subject position” as opinionated commentator on politics and history—posing questions which will continue to haunt his writings from the near contemporary Discorsi, particularly in the remarkable chapter 59 of book 1, up through his final masterpiece, the Istorie fiorentine.  Indeed I will claim that Machiavelli’s treatment of the categories of the “popolo” and “opinione” in relation to his own discursive stance may be said to anticipate, mutatis mutandis, features later associated with what Habermass has called “the public sphere” in which private citizens express opinions about public matters.

“The Italian Poetic Triumvirate Realized: Visualizing the ‘Trionfi’ of the ‘tre corone’,” is the first study to analyze the mostly unexplored fifteenth-century visualizations of Francesco Petrarca’s unfinished poem, I Trionfi (1351-1374), through an intermedial lens. While the intertextual references to two prior works, namely Dante Alighieri’s Commedia (1321) and Giovanni Boccaccio’s l’Amorosa visione (c.1342), have been studied in some detail, my project is the first to locate the intermedial ties between Boccaccio and Petrarch. Additionally, I am the first to explore the imagery for the Trionfi and its tie to both literary and visual elements in the Commedia. I develop a new reading of these canonical works by tracing various macchine, or ‘machines,’ such as God’s chariot located in the Book of Ezekiel, medieval French literary automata, and civic-sacred public pageantry, that intertextually appear in Dante’s and Boccaccio’s poems. I further examine how contemporary visual examples, such as Buonamico Buffalmacco’s Triumph of Death in the Pisa Camposanto (c.1336-1340) and Giotto di Bondone’s Triumph of Vainglory, originally depicted in Azzo Visconti’s palace in Milan (c.1336), similarly portray these macchine and serve as artistic interlocutors for Boccaccio’s “triumphs.” It is only through Petrarch’s mediation of these mechanisms from Dante, Boccaccio, and contemporary visual artists that his readers, and those who later attempt to depict his poem visually, acquire an image of the Trionfi.

It is apparent that this intermedial triumphal discourse does not cease with fifteenth-century Italian visualizations of Petrarch’s text. As a further point of comparison, I conclude by demonstrating how the “triumph of the tre corone” extends and is re-integrated into other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poems, artworks, and public festivals on a broader European scale. My methodology brings the textual and visual Trionfi in conversation with works that implicitly adhere to the same composite triumphal dialogue, allowing us to reconsider and enhance our reading of later texts. Though I offer the case study of the visual reworking of “Petrarch’s” Triumph of Chastity in Queen Elizabeth I’s Sieve Portrait (c.1583) by Quentin Metsys the Younger, my dissertation invites audiences to regard other examples, including Angelo Poliziano’s re-writing of the hybrid “Trionfi” in Part II of his Stanze per la giostra (1478), Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (1477-1482) and triumphal entrees at least as far away in time and space as those of Henri II into Rouen (1550), along similar lines.

The broader implication of this project is that it explores what happens when there is no longer a one-to-one correspondence between textual model and visual representation or between visual model and successor text. My project underscores the intermedial value of equal parts text and image from another source. Through distinct, yet complimentary approaches, each chapter questions the dominant discourses of transmission and reception as direct models for representation to uncover the multi-layered dimensions embedded within a singular textual or discursive example. This critical analysis complicates conventional methodologies for literary and visual analysis which may take for granted the inherent meaning of a particular text or material object. By proposing new angles through which to consider the relationship between literary and visual histories, this research accentuates their interconnectedness as part of a broader, sociopolitical and cultural history. Such mutual dialogues of exchange bolster opportunities for analytical evaluations of the role of intermediality across numerous disciplines, in both early modern and contemporary contexts.

My research examines Dante's engagement with the traditions regarding collective memory in medieval Florence. In particular, it investigates the ways in which Dante responds to public and private attempts at forging both individual and collective identity in Florence. Selecting key chronicles, inscriptions and visual sources alluded to in the Commedia, the implications of Dante's representation in terms of his ideological response are then extensively discussed.

After introducing the central passages from the Commedia relevant to my project and a review of selected secondary literature on Dante and history, the dissertation introduces the Medieval Latin Chronica de origine civitatis florentiae as Dante's most important source regarding his city's foundation. In so doing, the textual readings are informed by the formation and control of memory, history and identity in historical context. Building on Dante's reliance on the Chronica, the dissertation reveals the continuity of civic historiography up to Dante's time and argues that Dante's engagement with the medieval Florentine collective memory tradition can be better understood through a close look at the shifting account of Florence's foundation from the Chronica to Brunetto Latini's Tesoro to the Commedia. In such a way, there is a development of the multifaceted problem of engagement with the ideologically charged materials that built collective memory in medieval Florence.

The agents responsible for producing publicly displayed visual representations to legitimize their own perspective are then discussed. Building on the complex relationships between the Chronica, the Tesoro and the Commedia, the dissertation discusses the integration of two well-known visual productions with this textually mediated tradition: the statue of Mars and the primo popolo inscription on the Palazzo del Podestà. Thus, Dante's critical response to the politically charged construction of collective memory is further analyzed through the lens of the chronicle tradition in the Cacciaguida episode. An internal tension emerges between the allusions to the ethical perversion of the self-justifying political purpose of the chronicles' role, and the direct reference to the chronicle tradition in Cacciaguida's episode which is constructed over the exaltation of Florentine's moral virtues before the city's commercial and political expansion. In so doing, Dante seems to disconnect the foundational myths fabricated by the early chroniclers from any justification of an expansionist project, proposing instead a conservative political and social vision shaped by the traumas of the experience, both of the factionalized city and of his own exile.

Abstract

Authorizing the Reader: Dante and the Ends of the Decameron

by Natalie Ann Cleaver

Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Albert Ascoli, Chair

We now speak easily of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch as the tre corone of Italian literature, the three great foundational authors of the tradition, but there is no question who stands first among them. Not just for his historical primacy of place, or his commanding self–presentation, but also for his truly daunting range of influence, Dante Alighieri is the Italian poet with whom all others must reckon. He influenced the development of virtually every aspect of Italian culture, from literature and the Italian language itself, to theology, political philosophy, historical memory, and even constructions of national identity. Though this influence has been long–lasting, it was every bit as pervasive in his own age.

Few felt Dante’s shadow more than Giovanni Boccaccio, one of the first in subsequent generations of writers in the vernacular who had to negotiate his relationship to his illustrious predecessor. Boccaccio was a great Dantista in his own right; in addition to giving the first set of public lectures on the Commedia, he also composed the Trattatello in laude di Dante, in which he is the first to apply the epithet divina to the Commedia. Boccaccio obviously respected and admired Dante as a poet deeply. His minor works in particular demonstrate a profound engagement with the Commedia, and this relationship has been the subject of much recent scholarship.

The most puzzling case of Boccaccio’s debts to Dante is his own great vernacular masterpiece: the Decameron. On the one hand, the Decameron signals its relationship to the Commedia in some very obvious ways: the structure of the 100 stories, its title, and the appearance of many of the same characters who populate the Commedia. On the other, past these obvious signs, the relationship begins to break down, or to seem merely superficial upon further investigation. Any analysis of this relationship is additionally complicated by the seemingly antithetical nature and tone of the two works.

This dissertation examines one of the crucial ways in which the Decameron seems to be antithetical to the Commedia: Boccaccio's construction of authorship. I argue that Boccaccio creates an authorial persona who intentionally represents his Decameron as flawed, contradictory, and full of error. This persona in turn claims a distinctly un–authoritative authorship, disavowing his control over meaning and insisting that readers alone are responsible for how the Decameron is interpreted. This construction of authorship is not merely dissimilar to Dante’s; I suggest instead that it is a conscious response to Dante's own masterful self–presentation as author that reflects a deep engagement with the Commedia. Where Dante demonstrates anxiety over possible misinterpretation, working to control and constrain modes of reading, Boccaccio’s authorial persona emphasizes moments in which the Decameron is most open to multiple and conflicting interpretations.

The Decameron has long been understood to contain various structural and narrative ambivalences, apparent gaps in its creative and literary coherence. My dissertation reframes these seeming flaws as the “staging of failure” by Boccaccio, arguing that they are part of the same construction of the errant authorial persona. In the Decameron, Boccaccio creates structures of expectation, makes programmatic declarations of intent, only later to draw attention to the text's failure to live up to those promises. (Thus, the simultaneously obvious and seemingly insubstantial references to the Commedia — the first of the great “failures” of the Decameron, is its failure to be Dantean.) Boccaccio’s true authorial project in staging these failures is to train astute readers capable of understanding how texts produce meaning and generate authority.

“Tasso among the Muses: Reading and Writing Women in Early Modern Italy” is the first study to address the dynamics of reciprocity and collaboration between Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) and women writers, performers, and patrons. This dissertation situates Tasso’s literary and cultural activities with women within social and historical contexts, especially those informed by the disputes regarding women’s status of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, commonly known as the querelle des femmes. Among the lines of inquiry I pursue in this study is how the fiction of “Tasso, the errant madman” is a broadly popular literary-artistic construct, a product of the Romantic imagination that lionized the poet’s documented history of disquieting paranoia. While localized episodes from Tasso’s biography—including his seven years of detention in Ferrara for his public displays of defiance against the Este court—lend some credibility to this sorely isolating depiction of the poet, the story I tell attends to other considerations.

By studying Tasso through the lens of early modern sociability, this research raises awareness of the poet’s activities coordinating literary-intellectual networks. Emphasized herein is how Tasso’s socialized literary production—his nearly 4,000 letters and lyric poems sent to friends and potential patrons, dialogues with contemporary interlocutors, and epic poems about mobility and community building—reflects the cultural communities in which he participated. Essential collaborators in these settings are contemporary women writers, performers, and patrons, socially marginalized figures who shared in Tasso’s need to secure sponsorship from institutional authorities. In careful analysis of Tasso’s writings and women’s active reception of them, I demonstrate how the male poet’s sympathetic representation of fictional female characters yielded positive responses among historical female readers: professional singers and actresses designed performance programs based on the Gerusalemme liberata’s women, while female poets disseminated Tasso’s thematic and conceptual principles. The thesis this dissertation advances is that Tasso’s multifaceted connections with women shaped the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century expansion of cultural networks—literary, musical, theatrical, and scientific—in which opportunities for women and men to collaborate as intellectual protagonists increased due to developments in the notion of collective identity.

More broadly, this study underscores the collaborative networks within which early modern poets circulated, and situates questions of group identity at the forefront of the study of literary history. My findings reveal that the literary-intellectual exchanges between Tasso and women model multi-authored transmission, more than they indicate a linear process of reception. Tasso learned from women as much as women learned from Tasso. In different, though interconnected ways, each chapter challenges the dominant discourses of reception as a narrow form of imitation by shifting the critical focus from constructions of canonicity to modes of reciprocity. This attention complicates the conservative approaches to literary history that assert the dominant influence of one canonical (typically male) author. In this respect, the comparative work conducted herein avoids conveying any sense of hierarchy between Tasso’s constructed “canonical” voice and women’s marginalized “other” voices. This study further indicates how early modern women’s integration in poetic production—as makers and muses—complements the history of women’s one-sided efforts to “transcend their sex.” By offering new perspectives onto the relationship between literary and performance histories, this research brings into relief their interrelation as part of a broader, sociopolitical cultural history. Such emphases expand opportunities for critical investigation into ideas of collective authorship and audience, in both early modern and contemporary contexts.