Italian Literary History in a Single Image

Vasari’s ‘Six Tuscan Poets’

“Six Tuscan Poets,” 1544, by Giorgio Vasari. Minneapolis Institute of Art. (Public Domain)

What would great poets, philosophers, and artists of different centuries say to one another if they could meet? How would Aristotle reply to Kant? What would Bach tell Mozart? What words of wisdom would Homer proffer to Virgil?

Those questions remain forever in the realm of speculation. Such a rendezvous has never taken place, unless you count the meeting of minds that occurs when a great thinker reads the works of another, as happened with Virgil, who in many ways modeled his work on Homer.

A Thought Experiment Made Visible

But in the world of art, we can gain a glimpse of what such a meeting would look like. A painting from the mid-1500s by Giorgio Vasari called “Six Tuscan Poets” depicts a parlay of poets, some of whom could never have met in real life, gathered around a table with books and astronomical paraphernalia.

From left to right, the figures are Cristoforo Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante Alighieri, and Guido Cavalcanti. The intriguing image communicates a lot about the connection between these great artists, their influence on one another, and the interconnectedness of great art, including the symbiotic relationship between painting and literature.

The painting hangs within the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where its impressive size, rich colors, detailed symbolism, and literary subject matter draws viewers.

The image revolves around the central, dominant, and majestic figure of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), author of “The Divine Comedy,” and one of the greatest poets of all time. The other poets are arrayed around Dante, who is the only sitting figure, as though enthroned, and whose robe sweeps dramatically across most of the canvas, aglow with soft light. Near his distinctive aquiline profile, Dante holds a volume by the Roman poet Virgil, his great model and inspiration; his head is bedecked with the laurel wreath that is the traditional symbol of great poetic achievement.

His placement within the company of five other great poets is both an allusion to and a variation on a passage in “The Divine Comedy,” where Dante visits limbo and converses with the five greatest poets of the ancient world: Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Horace. The painting “modernizes” the scene by replacing the ancient masters with five 14th- and 15th-century Italian masters.

Before Dante stands a table covered with a glistening emerald tablecloth. Objects on the table, like a gleaming globe and an inkwell, symbolize the various arts that these six poets (and Dante in particular) were masters of: astronomy, astrology, geography, geometry, grammar, and rhetoric.

In “Vasari’s ‘Portait of Six Tuscan Poets’: A Visible Literary History,” Deborah Parker writes “That it is Dante who is seated closest to the table, his hand poised over the various objects[. This] implies that it is the Commedia [“Divine Comedy”] rather than the works of the other poets which encompasses the heavens, the world, and all the arts.”

Indeed, “The Divine Comedy” has long been admired for its immense breadth and its attempt to synthesize a complete vision of reality, integrating theology, spirituality, poetry, mythology, geography, astronomy, natural sciences, and politics into a seamless, towering edifice. Literature professors Aldo Bernardo and Anthony Pellegrini compared it to an ocean into which the various streams of Christian and Greco-Roman literature, myth, and philosophy flow. It is a poem about everything.

The second most prominent figure is Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), a leading light of the Italian Renaissance and an early humanist. He leans toward Dante, fingers outstretched, as though trying to hear the conversation about Virgil that is occurring between Dante and his friend, Guido Cavalcanti, who stands in the background to the right of Dante.

There is symbolism in the book Petrarch is holding, too. It bears the cameo of a woman named Laura, who was Petrarch’s muse, allowing us to identify the book as his collection of love poems about Laura called “Scattered Rhymes.” Most of these poems are sonnets, a poetic form first popularized by Petrarch. (To this day, one of the primary types of sonnets is called a “Petrarchan sonnet.”)

Through its composition, the painting repeatedly emphasizes the connections and mutual influences between these poets of the Tuscan literary tradition. One such example is Petrarch’s orientation. As Ms. Parker writes, “Petrarch, the next figure in importance, looks intently toward Dante and Cavalcanti, a stance which suggests his debt to the earlier “stilnovista“ lyric tradition particularly in its idealized treatment of love, a subject symbolized by the book bearing Laura’s portrait.”

The stilnovista tradition was a school of poetry that included Dante and emphasized the praise of an idealized woman. Thus, Petrarch acknowledges his rootedness in an existing poetic tradition including Dante, just as Dante recognizes his debt to the classical Latin tradition of Virgil.

Blended Influences

All great art lives by this type of perpetual receiving and perpetual giving, and the Western tradition is a tapestry of interwoven artistic threads that sometimes bridges the gaps even between different mediums, such as painting and poetry. Great artists develop their style organically out of an existing heritage, blending the new and the old, and innovating without betraying the principles or visions of the past.

As Parker notes, Boccaccio (1313–1375), author of “The Decameron,” is placed between Dante and Petrarch, showing that he is influenced by both of them, though he gazes toward Petrarch, who is his friend. He and Calvacanti occupy a secondary plane, behind Dante and Petrarch, to symbolize their lesser status. Still, they both wear the same laurel wreath that crowns Dante and Petrarch.

The final two figures, Landino and Ficino, who were both important Italian humanists and lived a century after the others, do not receive this distinction. They wear typical headgear of the time. Landino looks toward the group of 14th-century poets, while Ficino looks at his contemporary, indicating how the 15th-century poets are in dialogue both with one another and their poetic forebears.

Vasari was “Europe’s first art historian” according to Oxford researcher Adrastos Omissi, and this painting was “art acting as intellectual history.” It was also a response to a literary debate occurring during Vasari’s time. A courtier named Luca Martini commissioned the work from Vasari in 1543. Martini was a patron of the arts particularly dedicated to Dante. However, during this time, Dante’s reputation outside his home city of Florence, Italy, was in decline.

This decline was  due in part to the influence of literary theorist Pietro Bembo. He held up the poetry of Petrarch and prose of Boccaccio as the pinnacle of Italian literary achievement and a fitting model for linguistic imitation. At the same time, he criticized Dante’s style as inferior, noting his Latinisms and “vulgar terms.” As Ms. Parker and Mr. Omissi relate, Bembo famously said Dante’s mixture of high and low expressions was “like a wide and beautiful field of grain which is all over mixed with oats and chaff and harmful weeds.”

As the consensus of the ages has shown, Bembo was wrong, of course: Dante is considered the greatest Italian poet, and possibly the greatest poet of any nationality. But his status as such was still batted back and forth by commentators in the 16th century. Martini and Vasari’s decision to give Dante such a clear place of preeminence was a direct riposte to Bembo’s degradation of Dante and elevation of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and one step, perhaps, in the solidifying Dante’s legacy.

Rightly so.