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Giorgio Vasari's Ritratto di sei poeti toscani, a painting rich in literary implications, illustrates six of Tuscany's most distinguished poets engaged in animated discussions, surrounded by books and instruments of learning (fig. 1). While earlier studies have stressed the importance of viewing the painting's significance in terms of sixteenthcentury cultural debates, the delineation of the issues involved has tended to be rather general. This essay seeks to clarify and further illuminate the complex of literary and cultural issues reflected in Vasari's painting. In the choice of sitters and their arrangement, Vasari and his patron collaborated upon an invenzione that offers a remarkably sophisticated and self-conscious account of literary preeminence and genealogy.
The subject or invenzione of the painting was likely suggested by Luca Martini, a distinguished figure in the court of Cosimo I. Martini commissioned the painting from Vasari on 10 July 1543, and the work was completed by September of 1544. Martini was one of the most active promoters of intellectual and cultural exchange between artists and writers in Florence: he helped Benedetto Varchi procure contributions for the Due lezzioni, a treatise on the paragone between sculpture and painting, and he was a well-known patron of the arts. Martini commissioned the first artistic work on a single episode from the Commedia, Pierino da Vinci's 1548 relief of the death of Ugolino della Gherardesca and his sons. Martini's interest in Dante was not confined to commissioning works based on the Commedia; he was also a keen student of the poem. In 1546, along with Benedetto Varchi and three other Florentine letterati, Martini compared the 1515 Aldine edition of the poem to seven early manuscripts of the Commedia. Many of their findings are recorded in the marginal annotations of a 1515 Aldine now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense in Milan. Dante's prominence in Vasari's painting doubtless reflects the high estimation with which Martini and his circle regarded the poet.
The Ritratto di sei poeti toscani emerges at a pivotal moment in the history of Dante's reception-in the mid-sixteenth century when Petrarch's reputation was on the ascent. We can best place the differ- ent literary relations depicted in the painting in context by recalling some of the most pungent comments made by Pietro Bembo-the leading arbiter of...