Antonio da Firenze

ANTONIO da FIRENZE. - Of the Order of Friars Minor; he was lecturing on the Divine Comedy in Florence toward the end of the 14th century (not in the first half of the following one); a contemporary informs us that he induced a painter (according to some, erroneously, Andrea Orcagna) to paint on a wall of S. Maria del Fiore the image of Dante between Florence and Hell, as a warning to his fellow citizens. Nothing else is known of him. He is perhaps to be identified with the Florentine A., to whom Sacchetti dedicated a sonnet, praising him as "an excellent Dante scholar and lecturer on that same Dante" in 1381 (S. Quadrio, Della storia e ragione d'ogni poesia, II, Milan 1741, p. 192). He cannot, however, be confused (as M. Bibl would have it, in DHG, III, col. 773) either with A. della Marca, a Friar Minor, who translated the Divine Comedy into elegant Latin verse, or with A. della Marca, also a Friar Minor, who translated Boccaccio's De Feminis illustribus into Italian, whether or not these are the same person, as Sbaraglia opines. In fact both of these two devotees of Dante lived a century later.

Luigi Berra