Un'epistola 'dantesca' di Albertino Mussato

The article studies an epistle in verse written by Albertino Mussato to Fra Benedetto of the Dominican convent of Saint Augustine of Padua: the topic of correspondence of the poet and the religious man (whose carmen has been lost) is the nature of a comet, which prompts a larger reflection on the movement of the planets and on the configuration of the eighth sphere. Asked to attempt a treatise on celestial matter, Mussato says he means to aim his poetry at less exalted topics, lamenting his incapacity to elevate his rhetorical intruments to the doctrinal level that astronomy would exact of him. Having demurred from the invitation to compose celestial verses, he then professes disinterest in the topic of hell, as he is no Hercules and no Aeneas. The metaliterary implications of what Mussato says, and the fact that the most immediate example of “poetry of the hereafter” must have been the coeval Commedia, suggest that we consider the epistle with respect to that poem, so as both to specify the ideological fulcra in the presumed intellectual rivalry of Dante and Mussato, and to note the ways and the context in which the earliest reception of the Commedia in northern Italy seems to have propagated.