Cristoforo Landino

Abstract

Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498) was a leading humanist in Medici Florence; he was known as an accomplished Latin poet and an enthusiastic proponent of the Italian vernacular. He lectured on Latin and Italian literature at the Florentine Studio from 1458 to 1497, numbering among his students Marsilio Ficino, the most important Renaissance translator, commentator, and promoter of Plato. Though not himself a professional philosopher, Landino took a keen interest in philosophy, especially – though not exclusively – Platonism. He produced three philosophical dialogues: De anima, Disputationes Camaldulenses, and De vera nobilitate. Largely derivative, not only of classical authors but also of medieval and Renaissance thinkers, these three works, written in elegant Ciceronian Latin, dealt with philosophical themes such as the immortality of the soul, the superiority of contemplation to action, the supreme good, and the primacy of virtue in determining nobility. In addition, he drew on various Platonic notions, mostly to do with ethics, in his allegorical interpretation of Virgil’s Aeneid and his commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy, both of which were highly influential; and in this way he contributed to the Renaissance revival of Platonism.

Cristoforo Landino was born in Florence in 1424; his family, originally from Pratovecchio in the Casentino, was of modest means. In his early youth, he pursued legal studies in Volterra, earning a doctorate at the age of 15; however, he disliked the law and returned in 1439 to Florence, where he attended lectures in the studia humanitatis given by Carlo Marsuppini (1398–1453) and also came under the influence of other prominent humanists such as Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444). After Marsuppini’s death, he sought to take over his chair in the Florentine Studio, but he had several rivals for the post, each supported by different factions within the city. In the end, the various disciplines covered by Marsuppini were divided between three scholars: the Byzantine John Argyropoulos (c. 1415–1487) taught philosophy; Francesco da Castiglione (c. 1420–1484) lectured on Greek; and Landino, who was a specialist neither in philosophy nor in Greek, gained the chair of rhetoric and poetry in 1458, with the powerful support of Piero de’ Medici (1416–1469). In his long and successful career at the Studio, which lasted until 1497, the year before his death, Landino lectured mainly on the Roman poets (Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Persius), and also on Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and Familiar Letters, and on the Divine Comedy of Dante and the Canzoniere of Petrarch. His lectures formed the basis of the line-by-line commentaries, which he published in Latin on Horace (1482) and Virgil (1488), and in Italian on Dante (1481); all three were frequently reprinted and influenced the later critical tradition of these authors. Landino took the view that the great poets – above all Virgil and Dante, and also Juvenal – included philosophical truths in their writings; however, they hid these under the veil of metaphors and allegories, which he thought was the task of learned commentators like him to uncover. These truths, which were usually closely connected to Platonism, centered on ethics, with the poet seen as deploying his art in order to inspire readers to seek virtue and shun vice.