Italy has made innumerable contributions to world history and culture, but few rank higher than the “Tre Corone,” or Three Crowns: Dante, Petrarch, and Bocaccio. Italy's Three Crowns offers a groundbreaking examination that investigates the massive impact of these three artists and the evolution of their legacy over the centuries.
Dante looms largest of the three, as his Divine Comedy infiltrated every aspect of Renaissance life, from the university classroom to the pulpit to daily street conversations. Petrarch and Bocaccio worked, meanwhile, in the shadow of Dante’s legacy, Baranski and McLaughlin reveal, even as they forged their own monumental contributions to poetry and the arts. The volume concludes by examining how British scholars and artists have dealt with the legacies of the Three Crowns over the last two hundred years.
The authors focus in particular on Dante’s influence on British scholarship and art, which runs from his role in nineteenth-century aesthetic and religious debates to his influence on the creations of contemporary artist Tom Phillips. The book also discusses the efforts of key scholars in disseminating Dante’s oeuvre, including the Rossetti family and Paget Toynbee, the leading Dante scholar of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A uniquely comprehensive study, Italy's Three Crowns will be of interest to all scholars of Renaissance literature and art.
