On Cino as Dante's detractor

Abstract

About ten years after the death of Dante, Giovanni di Meo Vitali, Bosone da Gubbio and a poet who might be Cino da Pistoia discuss the literary value of the Divine Comedy. The first two commend its style and didactic potential, the third assumes the role of the detractor. Cino questions the originality of the Divine Comedy, Dante’s judgement on the behaviour of the souls and the accuracy of the lyric canon established in Dante’s Purgatory. These criticisms contradict Cino’s encomiastic poem Su per la costa, the most well-known and heartfelt among the poems written for Dante’s death. This article attempts to verify the reliability of the text’s attribution to Cino, putting bibliographical information into question, in the belief that studies on the political climate of the 1330’s, considerations on Cino’s biography and the rhetorical impositions of the tenzone form do not have the same relevance.