Breve elogio de Dante (Acantilado, 2025) by Giovanni Boccaccio is a unique text within the Western critical and biographical tradition. It is not only one of the first systematic attempts to consider the figure of Dante Alighieri from a historical and literary perspective, but also an exceptional document: the testimony of a poet laureate writing about another contemporary poet, whom he recognizes as a founder and a master. Written between 1351 and 1355, the book can be considered one of the first biographies of Dante in the modern sense, and it is at this intersection—biography, early criticism, and homage—that much of its importance lies, translated from Italian with remarkable precision by Marilena de Chiara.
Boccaccio approaches the life and work of the author of the Commedia with a clear intention: to preserve his figure in the face of misunderstanding, exile, and the dispersion of his legacy. Although he never personally knew Dante, whom he considered a victim of the moral baseness of 14th-century Florence, Boccaccio relied on direct testimonies from those who did know him, as well as episodes transmitted by oral tradition, constructing a portrait imbued with rigorous moral judgment and subtle irony. His admiration is explicit, but not blind; his praise is based on specific episodes, historical data, and reflections on the poet’s intellectual character. In this sense, the book functions as a foundational piece of Italian literary criticism, far from being a mere academic exegesis, such as those that, throughout the 20th century—suffice it to think of the works of Paul Renucci or Pierre Gauthiez—ended up saturating the reading with an excessively flattering view.
One of the most moving aspects of the Brief Eulogy lies in the passages dedicated to Dante’s childhood, particularly the opening episode in which the boy meets Bice—Beatrice—Folco’s daughter, for the first time. Boccaccio narrates this moment with a delicacy that goes beyond biographical anecdote: it marks the origin of a vocation, a sensibility, and, ultimately, a work. The encounter is not presented as a simple sentimental memory, but as a formative, almost foundational event that catalyzes a conception of love, language, and meaning.
From a contemporary reading, it is difficult not to recognize in this scene an archetype that runs through the history of literature and art: the figure of the muse as an early and persistent revelation. Beatrice—Bice—is not only the driving force behind the Vita nuova or the transcendent guide of the Commedia; she is also a model that reappears, transformed, in other creators and eras. Simonetta Vespucci in Botticelli’s painting can be read as a later visual incarnation of that same idea, just as Rose La Touche in John Ruskin’s work, or Alice Liddell in Lewis Carroll’s literary imagination, prolong that figure of real presence transfigured by art as the organizing principle of a work.
The value of Boccaccio’s book lies, then, as much in what he says as in where he says it. He is not a distant scholar, but a writer who recognizes in another writer the magnitude of an unprecedented literary undertaking. Dante appears here as a man deeply concerned with the reality of his time and, at the same time, as the creator of a work that Boccaccio does not hesitate to describe as “divine,” capable of embracing both sacred and profane literature and of safeguarding not only theological knowledge but also the values of humanitas.
This closeness makes Breve elogio de Dante a doubly precious book: for what it preserves of Dante and for what it reveals of Boccaccio himself, aware that he is witnessing the birth of a work destined to define Italian literature and, by extension, a substantial part of the Western literary tradition.
