ANTONIO DA FIRENZE

ANTONIO da FIRENZE. - Of the Order of Friars Minor; he read the *Divine Comedy* in Florence towards the end of the 14th century (not in the first half of the following century); a contemporary informs us that he would have induced a painter (according to some, erroneously, Andrea Orcagna) to paint above a part of Santa Maria del Fiore the image of Dante between Florence and Hell, as a warning to his fellow citizens. Nothing else is known of him. Perhaps he is to be identified with the Florentine A., to whom Sacchetti dedicated a sonnet in 1381, praising him as «an excellent Dante scholar and reader of Dante» (S. Quadrio, *Della storia e ragione d’ogni poesia*, II, Milan 1741, p. 192). He cannot, however, be confused (as M. Bihl would have it, in DHG, III, col. 773) with A. della Marca, a Franciscan friar who translated the *Divine Comedy* into elegant Latin verse, nor with A. della Marca, also a Franciscan friar, who translated into Italian Boccaccio’s *De Feminis illustribus*, whether they be the same person or not, as Sbraglia believes. Indeed, both of these Dante scholars lived a century later.