Brunetto Latini - Wikipedia Brunetto Latini From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigation Jump to search Dante and Virgil interview Brunetto among the sodomites, from Guido da Pisa's commentary on the Commedia, c. 1345 Brunetto Latini (who signed his name Burnectus Latinus in Latin and Burnecto Latino in Italian; c. 1220–1294) was an Italian philosopher, scholar, notary, and statesman. Contents 1 Life 2 Works 3 The Divine Comedy 3.1 Canto XV 4 Notes 5 References 6 Sources 7 External links Life[edit] Brunetto Latini was born in Florence in 1220 to a Tuscan noble family, the son of Buonaccorso Latini. He belonged to the Guelph party. He was a notary and a man of learning, much respected by his fellow citizens and famed for his skill as an orator. He expounded the writings of Cicero as guidance in public affairs. He was of sufficient stature to be sent to Seville on an embassy to Alfonso el Sabio of Castile to seek help for Florence against the Sienese; the mission was unsuccessful. On his return from Spain, travelling along the Pass of Roncesvalles, he describes meeting a student from Bologna astride a bay mule, who told him of the defeat of the Guelphs at the Battle of Montaperti. As a result, Latini was exiled from his native city. He took refuge in France from 1261 to 1268 while working as a notary in Montpellier, Arras, Bar-sur-Aube, and Paris. In 1269, when the political situation allowed, he returned to Tuscany and for some twenty years held successive high offices.[1] In 1273 he was appointed as Secretary to the Council of the Republic of Florence. In 1280, he contributed to the temporary reconciliation between the Guelph and Ghibelline parties, and in 1284 presided over the conference in which an attack on Pisa was agreed. Finally, in 1287, he was elevated to the dignity of "prior" as one of 12 magistrates established through the constitution of 1282. 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". He was the author of various works in prose and verse.[1] He died in 1294, leaving behind a daughter, Bianca Latini, who had married Guido Di Filippo De' Castiglionchi in 1284. His tomb can be found in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Florence, to the left of the high altar. Works[edit] Livres dou Tresor While in France, he wrote his Italian Tesoretto and in French his prose Li Livres dou Trésor, both summaries of the encyclopaedic knowledge of the day.[1] The latter is regarded as the first encyclopedia in a modern European language. The Italian 13th-century translation known as Tesoro was misattributed to Bono Giamboni. He also translated into Italian the Rettorica and three Orations by Cicero. The Italian translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is often misattributed to Brunetto Latini: it is a work of Taddeo Alderotti instead. The Divine Comedy[edit] Latini was Dante’s guardian after the death of his father. Early Dante commentators spoke of Brunetto as his teacher, as does Dante himself. Vittorio Imbriani took issue with that concept, saying Brunetto was far too busy a man to have been a mere teacher. Dante immortalized him in the Divine Comedy (see Inferno, XV.82-87). It is also believed that there was an intellectual and affectionate bond between the elderly man and the young poet. It was perhaps Latini who induced Dante to read Cicero and Boethius, after the death of Beatrice. Many of the characters in Dante's Inferno are also mentioned in the legal and diplomatic documents Brunetto Latini wrote in Latin. There is a portrait of Latini in the Bargello in Florence, once reputed to be by Giotto, next but one to the side of Dante (between them is Corso Donati). In a wood engraving, Gustave Doré envisages the same scene from Inferno XV, 1861. Canto XV[edit] Dante places Latini within the third ring of the Seventh Circle, the Circle of the Violent against God, nature and art, with the sodomites, blasphemers, and profligates. Dante writes of the "clerks and great and famous scholars, defiled in the world by one and the same sin". Dante's treatment of Latini, however, is commendatory beyond almost any other figure in the 'Inferno'. He calls the poet a radiance among men and speaks with gratitude of that sweet image, gentle and paternal, / you were to me in the world when hour by hour / you taught me how man makes himself eternal. Dante addresses Latini with the respectful pronoun voi; Latini uses the informal tu, as perhaps was their custom when they spoke together in Florence. The portrait is drawn with love, pathos and a dignity that is more compelling given the squalor of the punishment. Latini asks first, humbly, if he may keep Dante company, letting his group run on. Dante offers to sit down with him but that would only increase Latini’s penalty; he and the other souls are doomed to keep moving aimlessly around the arena. Latini proceeds in obscure imagery to foretell Dante's future. The malicious ingrates who of old descended from Fiesole, will be his enemies. They are reputed blind, avaricious, envious and proud. Let him beware, he warns, not to be stained by them. Mark Musa suggests that in this speech between the two there is sexual imagery indicative of the act of sodomy .[2] According to John D. Sinclair, Dante respected Latini immensely but nonetheless felt it necessary to place him with the sodomites since, according to Sinclair, such behaviour by Latini was well known in Florence at the time. The squalor of Latini’s sin and penalty is nevertheless painful for Dante to visualize.[3] Other critics point to the fact that, outside of the Divine Comedy, there are no firm historical records suggesting Latini was accused of sodomy or homosexual relations—and indeed he seemingly condemns it himself in the Tesoretto. Some therefore have suggested perhaps that Latini is placed in Canto XV for being violent against art and against his vernacular (Latini wrote in French instead of Florentine, which Dante championed as a literary language in De Vulgari Eloquentia); or perhaps also to demonstrate and underline that even the greatest of men may be guilty of private sins. Neither objection rules out the possibility that he was guilty of the perceived sin himself; and given the setting and context, it is difficult to see that there can be any doubt, particularly following the discovery in recent years of a love poem, "S'eo son distretto inamoratamente" which Latini seems to have sent to another man, Bondie Dietaiuti.[4][5] Notes[edit] This article includes a list of general references, but it remains largely unverified because it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (January 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) ^ a b c Chisholm 1911. ^ Musa, Mark (1971), Dante's Inferno, Notes, Canto XV, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, p. 127, hardcover ^ John D. Sinclair, The Divine Comedy 1: Inferno: Inferno. Parallel Text Vol 1, 1961. ^ Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History from Antiquity to World War II. Routledge; London. 2002, p. 257. ISBN 0-415-15983-0 ^ Dante Encyclopedia. Routledge; London. 2010. ISBN 9780203834473 References[edit] Julia Bolton Holloway, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latino and Dante Alighieri, Berne: Peter Lang, 1993.  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain:  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Latini, Brunetto". Encyclopædia Britannica. 16 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 244.  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain:  Gardner, Edmund Garratt (1910). "Brunetto Latini". In Herbermann, Charles (ed.). Catholic Encyclopedia. 9. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Barbara Reynolds, Dante: The poet, the political thinker, the man, New York, 2006 Robert Aldrich; Garry Wotherspoon, eds. (2002). Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History from Antiquity to World War II. Routledge; London. ISBN 0-415-15983-0. Sources[edit] Napolitano, David (2013). "Brunetto Latini's Tesoro in print" (PDF). Ex Historia. 5: 19–47. ISSN 2041-0824. Turco, Jeffrey. "Restaging Sin in Medieval Florence: Augustine, Brunetto Latini, and the Streetscape of Dante's Vita nuova." Italian Studies 73 (2018): 15-21. External links[edit] Website on Brunetto Latino Authority control BNE: XX993966 BNF: cb11911236v (data) CiNii: DA01976100 GND: 118516108 ICCU: IT\ICCU\CFIV\060850 ISNI: 0000 0001 2122 946X LCCN: n81097516 NKC: jx20121018004 NTA: 070646430 PLWABN: 9810537908905606 SELIBR: 70175 SNAC: w6wh2vhw SUDOC: 026968088 Trove: 1309484 VcBA: 495/23856 VIAF: 19680057 WorldCat Identities: lccn-n81097516 v t e Social and political philosophy Ancient philosophers Aristotle Chanakya Cicero Confucius Han Fei Lactantius Laozi Mencius Mozi Origen Plato Polybius Shang Socrates Sun Tzu Tertullian Thucydides Valluvar Xenophon Xunzi Medieval philosophers Alpharabius Augustine Averroes Baldus Bartolus Bruni Dante Gelasius al-Ghazali Giles Hostiensis Ibn Khaldun John of Paris John of Salisbury Latini Maimonides Marsilius Nizam al-Mulk Photios Thomas Aquinas Wang William of Ockham Early modern philosophers Beza Bodin Bossuet Botero Buchanan Calvin Cumberland Duplessis-Mornay Erasmus Filmer Grotius Guicciardini Harrington Hayashi Hobbes Hotman Huang Leibniz Locke Luther Machiavelli Malebranche Mariana Milton Montaigne More Müntzer Naudé Pufendorf Rohan Sansovino Sidney Spinoza Suárez 18th–19th-century philosophers Bakunin Bentham Bonald Bosanquet Burke Comte Constant Emerson Engels Fichte Fourier Franklin Godwin Hamann Hegel Herder Hume Jefferson Justi Kant political philosophy Kierkegaard Le Bon Le Play Madison Maistre Marx Mazzini Mill Montesquieu Möser Nietzsche Novalis Paine Renan Rousseau Royce Sade Schiller Smith Spencer Stirner Taine Thoreau Tocqueville Vico Vivekananda Voltaire 20th–21st-century philosophers Adorno Ambedkar Arendt Aurobindo Aron Azurmendi Badiou Baudrillard Bauman Benoist Berlin Bernstein Butler Camus Chomsky De Beauvoir Debord Du Bois Durkheim Dworkin Foucault Gandhi Gauthier Gehlen Gentile Gramsci Habermas Hayek Heidegger Irigaray Kautsky Kirk Kropotkin Laclau Lenin Luxemburg Mao Mansfield Marcuse Maritain Michels Mises Mou Mouffe Negri Niebuhr Nozick Nursî Oakeshott Ortega Pareto Pettit Plamenatz Polanyi Popper Qutb Radhakrishnan Rand Rawls Rothbard Russell Santayana Sartre Scanlon Schmitt Searle Shariati Simmel Simonović Skinner Sombart Sorel Spann Spirito Strauss Sun Taylor Walzer Weber Žižek Social theories Anarchism Authoritarianism Collectivism Communism Communitarianism Conflict theories Confucianism Consensus theory Conservatism Contractualism Cosmopolitanism Culturalism Fascism Feminist political theory Gandhism Individualism Islam Islamism Legalism Liberalism Libertarianism Mohism National liberalism Republicanism Social constructionism Social constructivism Social Darwinism Social determinism Socialism Utilitarianism Concepts Civil disobedience Democracy Four occupations Justice Law Mandate of Heaven Peace Property Revolution Rights Social contract Society War more... 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