Dante alter Homerus nel Rinascimento

The article studies the history of the comparison between Dante and Homer, starting from Petrarch and Boccaccio up to the beginning of the 1600s. There are brief notes on subsequent developments in order to show that this humanistic and academic formula of the Dantesque exegesis of Florentine tradition assumes the militant function of negotiating forms and limits in the literary re-use of the Commedia. Those who prefer Dante to Homer want to make the Commedia contemporary to the Renaissance; thus one asks on which criteria can the irrepressible semantic charge of a work the Renaissance itself called “divine”, its vitality enduring as it is passed down, be based? The question of the pre-eminence of one or the other of the poets becomes secondary to the definition of a global poetics, finally suggesting several powerful themes in 16th century scholarship.