Brunetto Latino

Scholarship on the 13th-century Florentine Brunetto Latino, usually cited by modern writers as “Brunetto Latini,” has been impeded by Dante’s assignment of him to Inferno, by the Victorian editions of the Tesoro wrongly ascribing the work to Bono Giamboni on the basis of a late Venetian manuscript, Carrer 1839, (cited under Il Tesoro), etc., and by Imbriani 1878 (cited under Biography), claiming that Latino was too busy a man to teach Dante. But primary research of archival documents and manuscripts in libraries reveals Latino’s Pan-European politics at the same time that he taught statesmanship through dictating encyclopedias to students in his legal chambers, in exile, or abroad on diplomacy or home in Florence. Latino wrote in Latin, French, and Italian, influenced by the education of notarial families in Roman history and oratory, particularly Sallust, Lucan, and Cicero. From his 1260 embassy to Alfonso X the Wise, he added to these Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Ptolemy/Alfraganus’s astronomy, and, from his exile in France, the Roman de la Rose. There are a hundred documents in archives referencing Brunetto Latino, of which eleven are written in his own beautiful chancery hand, including pages in the Libro di Montaperti, his signature and notarial sign of a column and fountain given thirteen times. He writes of Cicero as “quasi per una mia sichura cholonna, sicchome una fontana che non è istagna” (as if for me a secure column, as an unstagnant fountain). Latino had his French and Italian manuscripts copied in Bolognan libraria using the efficient Arabic book production methods he observed at the court of King Alfonso X the Wise in Spain. He likely dedicated the Rettorica to a fellow Florentine in exile, the Tesoretto to Alfonso the Wise, and Li Livres dou Tresor, usually in Picardan French, and its translation back into Tuscan Italian, as Il Tesoro, to Charles of Anjou. Between 1282 and 1292 his students were Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, and Francesco da Barberino, the latter continuing publishing the texts of his master, Brunetto, and his colleague, Dante, through 1347.