ANTONIO DA FIRENZE

ANTONIO da FIRENZE. - Of the Order of Friars Minor; he lectured on the Divina Commedia in Firenze toward the end of the fourteenth century (not in the first half of the following one); a contemporary informs us that he induced a painter (according to some, erroneously identified as Andrea Orcagna) to paint on a wall of S. Maria del Fiore the image of Dante between Firenze and Hell, as a warning to his fellow citizens. Nothing else is known about him. He may perhaps be identified with the Florentine A. to whom Sacchetti dedicated a sonnet, praising him as an “excellent Dantist and reader of Dante himself” in 1381 (S. Quadrio, Della storia e ragione d'ogni poesia, II, Milano 1741, p. 192). He cannot, however, be confused (as M. Bibl., in DHG, III, col. 773, would have it) either with A. della Marca, a Friar Minor who translated the Divina Commedia into elegant Latin verse, or with A. della Marca, likewise a Friar Minor, who translated Boccaccio’s De Feminis illustribus into Italian, whether or not they were the same person, as Sbaraglia maintains. Indeed, both of these two students of Dante lived a century later.