Telemaco Signorini, Mercato Vecchio a Firenze, 1881-3
Kenneth Clarke


In the second half of the fourteenth, and first years of the fifteenth century, Florence underwent profound changes and transitions. In doing so it accommodated many voices. The Black Death arrived in Florence in April 1348 and forms the powerful backdrop for Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of one hundred tales told by a group of seven men and three women, escaping the pestilential city for the neighbouring countryside. This collection would have a major influence on the subsequent development of vernacular narrative prose. Though much of Boccaccio’s later work was dedicated to Latin, he did lecture in the vernacular on Dante’s Comedìa and wrote an ostensibly misogynist prose work entitled Corbaccio. Born in Arezzo, Petrarch spent almost no time in Florence, though he did sign himself as fiorentinus. The supreme master of Latin Letters, he dedicated much time to compiling a collection of vernacular lyrics which eventually became the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and which would widely influence the development of the European lyric. One of his last works, a Latin translation of the final tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the story of Gualtieri and Griselda, would also widely circulate.

By 1375 both Petrarch and Boccaccio were dead. Benedetto Croce marked this year as the beginning of a ‘secolo senza poesia’ (century without poetry), and looking at vernacular poetry during the period it is true that few poets emerge of the skill or innovation of a Boccaccio or a Petrarch. But the city is a complex organism and to dismiss its vast and highly variegated literary production on the grounds of there being no major poets is to ignore a lively and fascinating crucible of poetry in fieri. If Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406) occupied an influential and important political position and was skilled in the arts of rhetoric used for political ends, he was also at an interface of literary interests. He spent impressive sums of money collecting a vast personal library and is also at the forefront of new ways of representing poetry and prose graphically on the page with an incipient humanist script. It is no exaggeration to say that he fuelled new ways of thinking about books, of making books, and reading them.

This interface between politics and poetry is very much what drives the work of Antonio Pucci (c. 1350-1416). As approvatore and banditore (a town crier), he represented a means by which laws were rendered publicly accessible to the city. His subsequent post as ‘Guardiano degli Atti’ made him responsible for the correct archiving of merchant contracts and credit agreements. For the greater part of his working life, then, he was performing the city’s laws as well as his own poetry to the public. His Centiloquio contains a famous canto dedicated to Dante and the work ends with a description of the beauty of Florence. His large output includes cantari (romance narrative poems), many lyrics, as well as a wonderful poem set in the centre of the Mercato Vecchio in Florence. Franco Sacchetti (c. 1335-1400) is similarly prolific. His two major works are a collection of poetry in an autograph anthology and the Trecentonovelle, a large (though fragmentary) collection of narrative tales. A fascinating poem, ‘La lingua nova’, explores some of the unusual words used by Florentines, clearly suggesting his sense of the linguistic difference in which he worked and lived. This linguistic difference is nowhere in evidence in Leonardo Bruni’s famous Latin panegyric to the city of Florence, written c.1403-4. The first section of this work praises the beauty and harmony of the city and the ardour of its praise is matched only by the lack of specific detail. Indeed, to write such a section, its author need never have set foot in Florence despite his assurances that in order to truly appreciate the beauty of the city one has to have been away from it. Bruni does go on to describe the political workings of the city, but largely in the absence of a physically present place. The great Latin humanist project of the end of the fourteenth and first years of the fifteenth century, with its recuperation of Classical learning, was elaborated in a mental space of past greatness rather than in the context of the local, vernacular here and now of Florence.