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Dante as Piagnone Prophet: Girolamo Benivienis "Cantico in laude di Dante" (1506)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Abstract
If imitation is the highest form of praise, then Girolamo Benivienis canto describing his otherworldly encounter with Dante's spirit is certainly a tribute to the author of the Divine Comedy. Despite its title, however, Benivieni's project is not simply epideictic. In it, Benivieni represents Dante in a highly anachronistic way, as a kind of spokesman for the piagnoni, the ardent supporters of Girolamo Savonarola's program of moral austerity and Florentine republican politics between the 1490s and the first decades of the Cinquecento. This study argues that Benivieni articulates his controversial, ideological vision in a necessarily prudent way by appropriating Dante as a safe and authoritative cultural icon and adopting a deliberately ambiguous symbolic language, which lauds himself and his politics as much as it does Dante.
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- Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2002
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