John of Prato

JOHN OF PRATO. - Writer, b. at Prato ca. 1367, d. at Florence between 1442 and 1446. His real name is G. Gherardi. An administrator of Dante, he read his Commedia in S. Maria del Fiore.

Dantean reminiscences and Boccaccio's manner are found in the Philomena (ed. by C. del Balzo in Poesie di mille autori intorno a Dante, III, Rome 1891), a poem in terzine in which the poet, guided by seven women (cardinal and theological virtues), passes from the wood of error to the hill of theology. A naive mysticism breathes from the Trattato d'una angelica cosa mostrata per una divatissima visione (in Wesselofski, p. 885 ff.). Under the artistic influence of Boccaccio, but marked by a sense of noble religiosity, is his principal work, which has come down to us with a frontispiece and mutilated (the first four books with gaps, and only the beginning of the fifth), which A. Wesselofsky entitled Il Paradiso degli Alberti, from the name of the Florentine villa of Antonio Alberti in which he, Coluccio Salutati, Luigi Marsili and other humanists discourse on history and philosophy. The erudite heaviness of the narrative is, at times, enlivened by the representation of Florentine customs of the time and by nine nimble novellas.

Italiano Marchetti