'La cara e buona imagine paterna di voi': Ideal images of Patriarchs and Patrons as Models for the Right Ordering of Renaissance Florence

Abstract

In the circle of Hell set aside in the Divine comedy for the violent against nature, the sodomites, Dante was dismayed to encounter ser Brunetto Latini, the late thirteenth-century Florentine master of rhetoric and philosophy whose teaching and treatises, the Tresor and Tesoretto, helped to shape the civic ethos of the Florentine commune in its golden age.