FRANCISCO IMPERIAL. - Spanish poet of Italian origin, born in Genoa around 1360, died between the first and second decades of the 15th century in Seville, where his father, a jeweler, had moved for commercial reasons.
Among the most notable poets of the *Cancionero de Baena* (ed. F. Michel, I, Leipzig 1860), he introduced the hendecasyllable into Spanish poetry, thus initiating the Italianizing trend, and pursued stylistic elegance and, often, didactic aims. Sensitive to the charm of Dante’s poetry, he was the first imitator of Dante in Spain, and he chose him as his guide in the *Decir a las siete virtudes* (no. 250 of the aforementioned *Cancionero*), an allegorical vision modeled on passages from the last two canticles of Dante’s *Divine Comedy*.