Cristoforo Landino'sAeneidand the Humanist Critical Tradition^*

Abstract

There is little question that the Virgil criticism of early Italian humanism reached its zenith in the Disputationes Camaldulenses of Cristoforo Landino. Professor of rhetoric and poetry at the Florentine Studium from 1457 to 1497, Landino was active in the circle of philosophers, poets, and scholars associated with Marsilio Ficino and often referred to now as the “Platonic Academy of Florence.” The dialogue, written in 1472 and set a few years earlier in the monastery at Camaldoli, begins as an examination of the active and contemplative lives and the nature of the summum bonum (Books I and II). Since Landino believed that Virgil also described the summum bonum and the path by which we reach it, Books III and IV of the Disputationes turn to the Aeneid as a parallel source of philosophical truth.

Drunkenness, War and Sovereignty: Three Stucco Panels from the Palazzo Scala in Florence

“…Aeneas' journey from Troy to Carthage to Italy represented 'man's' journey from natural pleasures, to the perilous active or civic life, to a life of perfect contemplation. 63 Landino wrote in the Proemio to the Comento that he would offer a similar reading of the Comedy. 64 The conclusions of the former work might, then, shed light on the latter.…”

From Purgatory to the "Primavera": Some Observations on Botticelli and Dante

“…37 In his several extensive commentaries on the poets, Landino adopted two distinct but overlapping interpretive models. 38 As a humanist, he excelled in philological, linguistic, rhetorical, and stylistic analysis, an approach that characterizes his commentaries on Persius (1462), Juvenal (1462), Horace (1482), and Virgil (1488). In other works, however, and most especially in his Dante commentary, Landino sought, above all, to elucidate for his fellow Florentines the esoteric, philosophical sense of the text, by means of an allegorical method deeply indebted to Florentine Renaissance Neoplatonism.…”

Cristoforo Landino and Coluccio Salutati on the Best Life

“…. " For Landino's Dispulationes in the Epideictic tradition, see Kallendorf, 1983, and1989, 129-69. "Landino, Disputationes, 181: "Carthaginem vero e loco superiore cernunt, quoniam, ut nudius quoque tertius disputatum est, nunquam optimis institutis et legibus temperata erit res publica, nisi qui illi praesunt cuncta, quae aut praecipiunt aut prohibent, ad eorum, quae per rerum magnarum speculationem viderint, regulam ac normam sapientissime dirigant."…”