Brunetto Latini

Background

He was was born in Florence, Italy about 1220 to a Tuscan noble family, the son of Buonaccorso Latini.

Career

Returning from an embassy for his commune to the court of Alphonse X of Castile, he chose exile in France when he received news of the defeat of the Guelphs at the battle of Montaperti in 1260. His exile in France, probably spent largely in Paris, lasted until after 1268, when a Guelph victory made it possible for him to return to Florence.

The rest of his life was spent in his native city in a series of professional and public posts. Both of the works to which Latini owes his literary fame were composed during the exile in France. The Tesoretto, an allegory consisting of 22 books of rhymed couplets of seven-syllable verse, was written about 1262, based on Guillaume de Lorris' Roman de la Rose; it is the first didactic-allegorical poem in Italian literature. This allegory portrays a trip through the realms of nature, the chivalric virtues, and love, symbolic of the life of the senses. Once confessed, he deplores the vanities of the world and describes the seven deadly sins. On top of Olympus (symbolic of the contemplative life), he meets Ptolemy, whom he questions about the four elements. The poem breaks off before Ptolemy answers. Dante drew upon this work, as well as Latini's subsequent Treasury, in the Divine Comedy.

Latini, for the sake of tradition and popular appeal, chose Old French as the language for his Treasury (Li Livres dou Tresor), about 1266, an unmoralized encyclopedia, one of the first composed by a layman for bourgeois edification, based on Latin and Old French models - Honorius of Autun's Imago mundi, Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum universalis, and Gossouin's Image du monde. The book is in three parts. After a definition of philosophy and its divisions, the first gives a survey of world history beginning with the creation. It also surveys the natural sciences, drawing on Latini's Paris lecture notes based on Seneca, Bede, and Honorius. The second part treats the vices and virtues, drawing in part on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Rhetoric (based on Cicero's De inventione), politics, and the institution of the podesta (city manager) are discussed in the third part.

Achievements

• An active Guelph, teacher of Dante, who immortalizes him in the Divine Comedy for teaching him "how man can win eternal fame" (Inferno XV, 85), a proud son of mercantile Florence, he became during the flowering of her culture one of her priors.
  
  With his training in traditional rhetoric, pride in ancient Rome, he aspired as a layman to popularize in a modern, scientific, and dispassionate presentation the knowledge he had set down in his lecture notes at Paris, knowledge which until then had been handed down in the Latin and French works of French clerics.

Politics

He belonged to the Guelph party.

Personality

He had a profound feeling of nationalism, and refined taste. He was a notary and a man of learning, much respected by his fellow citizens.

Quotes from others about the person

• Giovanni Villani says that "he was a great philosopher and a consummate master of rhetoric, not only in knowing how to speak well, but how to write well. "

Connections

Latini was Dante’s guardian after the death of Dante's father. Dante immortalized him in the Divine Comedy (see Inferno, XV. 82-87). Dante places Latini within the third ring of the Seventh Circle, the Circle of the Violent, with the sodomites.

Father:

Buonaccorso Latini

Daughter:

Bianca Latini

References

• Brunetto Latini: an analytic bibliography (Research Bibliographies and Checklists)