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Secondary sourceBook1436

Vita di Dante by Leonardo Bruni

Leonardo Bruni · 1436

A 1436 biography of Dante by the humanist Leonardo Bruni, drawing on Dante's own lost letters.

This early biography of Dante preserves quotations from his now-lost letters and shapes his historical image.

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An open bound manuscript on red fabric showing handwritten Latin-script text in dark brown ink on aged parchment or paper. The left page is blank, the right page is densely written in columns, with a round library stamp near the bottom and page number 22 visible.
Leonardo Bruni, Vita di Dante, manuscript copy, 1436. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.

About this source

What it is

This is a biography of Dante written in 1436 by the humanist scholar Leonardo Bruni. The page shown is a manuscript copy held at the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, with dense handwritten Latin-script text.

Why it matters

Bruni wrote his life of Dante partly as a response to an earlier biography by Giovanni Boccaccio, which he felt focused too much on love stories and too little on Dante's serious achievements. Bruni's version quotes from letters of Dante that no longer survive, including an account of Dante fighting at the battle of Campaldino, and presents him as a civic humanist engaged in public life rather than only a poet of love. This shows how early biographers shaped, and sometimes competed over, the image of Dante passed down to later generations.

  • Why might Bruni have disagreed with Boccaccio's portrayal of Dante?
  • What is gained, and what is risked, when a biographer quotes from letters that no longer survive?
  • What does this biography suggest about what qualities Bruni admired in Dante?

This book is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Dante Alighieri on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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