Italian Literary History in a Single Image: Vasari’s ‘Six Tuscan Poets’

What would great poets, philosophers, and artists of different centuries say to one another if they could meet? How would Aristotle reply to Kant? What would Bach tell Mozart? What words of wisdom would Homer proffer to Virgil?
From left to right, the figures are Cristoforo Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Francesco Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante Alighieri, and Guido Cavalcanti. The intriguing image communicates a lot about the connection between these great artists, their influence on one another, and the interconnectedness of great art, including the symbiotic relationship between painting and literature.
The painting hangs within the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where its impressive size, rich colors, detailed symbolism, and literary subject matter draws viewers.
His placement within the company of five other great poets is both an allusion to and a variation on a passage in “The Divine Comedy,” where Dante visits limbo and converses with the five greatest poets of the ancient world: Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Horace. The painting “modernizes” the scene by replacing the ancient masters with five 14th- and 15th-century Italian masters.
Before Dante stands a table covered with a glistening emerald tablecloth. Objects on the table, like a gleaming globe and an inkwell, symbolize the various arts that these six poets (and Dante in particular) were masters of: astronomy, astrology, geography, geometry, grammar, and rhetoric.
The second most prominent figure is Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), a leading light of the Italian Renaissance and an early humanist. He leans toward Dante, fingers outstretched, as though trying to hear the conversation about Virgil that is occurring between Dante and his friend, Guido Cavalcanti, who stands in the background to the right of Dante.
The placard next to the painting explains that Dante’s orientation toward Cavalcanti (circa 1255–1300), while holding up Virgil, suggests that he is advising Cavalcanti to learn from the great Latin master, which is a point he makes in “The Divine Comedy” as well.
There is symbolism in the book Petrarch is holding, too. It bears the cameo of a woman named Laura, who was Petrarch’s muse, allowing us to identify the book as his collection of love poems about Laura called “Scattered Rhymes.” Most of these poems are sonnets, a poetic form first popularized by Petrarch. (To this day, one of the primary types of sonnets is called a “Petrarchan sonnet.”)
As Parker notes that, Boccaccio (1313–1375), author of “The Decameron,” is placed between Dante and Petrarch, showing that he is influenced by both of them, though he gazes toward Dante, who is his friend. He and Calvacanti occupy a secondary plane, behind Dante and Petrarch, to symbolize their lesser status. Still, they both wear the same laurel wreath that crowns Dante and Petrarch.
The final two figures, Landino and Ficino, who were both important Italian humanists and lived a century after the others, do not receive this distinction. They wear typical headgear of the time. Landino looks toward the group of 14th-century poets, while Ficino looks at his contemporary, indicating how the 15th-century poets are in dialogue both with one another and their poetic forebears.
Commenting on the careful overall composition of the painting, Ms. Parker writes, “One would be hard pressed to conceive of a more eloquent representation of one of the ways in which great poetry is produced, namely through the vigilant study, discussion, and imitation of other poets’ work.”
This decline was  due in part to the influence of literary theorist Pietro Bembo. He held up the poetry of Petrarch and prose of Boccaccio as the pinnacle of Italian literary achievement and a fitting model for linguistic imitation. At the same time, he criticized Dante’s style as inferior, noting his Latinisms and “vulgar terms.” As Ms. Parker and Mr. Omissi relate, Bembo famously said Dante’s mixture of high and low expressions was “like a wide and beautiful field of grain which is all over mixed with oats and chaff and harmful weeds.”
As the consensus of the ages has shown, Bembo was wrong, of course: Dante is considered the greatest Italian poet, and possibly the greatest poet of any nationality. But his status as such was still batted back and forth by commentators in the 16th century. Martini and Vasari’s decision to give Dante such a clear place of preeminence was a direct riposte to Bembo’s degradation of Dante and elevation of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and one step, perhaps, in the solidifying Dante’s legacy.
Ms. Parker writes, “Just as Vasari suggests in the ‘Vite’ that art culminates in the art of Michelangelo, so he implies that poetry reaches its apex in Dante’s achievement.”
Similarly, Mr. Omissi says, “Vasari’s painting was thus art acting as intellectual history. Made in dialogue with the scholarship of its day, the image was a vignette that gave Vasari’s history of Italian literature in a single glance.” And Vasari’s version of Italian literary history gives Dante—the brilliant poet of both earthly and heavenly things—the place of highest honor.