daughter and two sons. He was buried at Santa Maria
Maggiore, Florence.
In both Trésor and Tesoretto, Brunetto strove for a
compendium of diverse technical information, but any
closer association that he may have intended for these
works remains unclear. Since he decided to write in the
vernacular, both works are aimed at a secular readership,
although in different ways: in Trésor he transposes Latin
learning into a fl ourishing Romance koine for popular
use, whereas Tesoretto fosters Italian as a vulgaris illus-
tris (refi ned vernacular). Brunetto followed the example
of the Roman de la Rose (c. 1225–1230) of Guillaume
de Lorris—predating the continuation of the Roman
by Jean de Meun (Jean Chopinel, Jean de Meung, c.
1269–1278) and beginning an interest in this great al-
legory of love that would absorb four or fi ve generations
of Italian poets. This early italianization of the Roman
de la Rose proved to be rough going: the narrator of
Tesoretto repeatedly interrupts himself to lament that
its heptasyllabic couplets impose constrictions on his
burgeoning material.
Tesoretto opens with an adulatory dedication to an
anonymous valente segnore (skillful lord), a man peer-
less in all the arts of peace and war, surpassing even the
respective virtues of such fi gures as Solomon, Alexan-
der, and Cicero. The narrative introduces the political
turmoil that occasioned Brunetto’s embassy to Alfonso
the Wise; but then the student’s calamitous news and his
own exile cause his thoughts to turn inward, he loses
his way in a forest, and the historic-biographical scene
modulates into a visionary landscape. There his thoughts
revive, and he observes the vast spectacle of Nature,
a personifi cation closely akin to fi gures in two other
infl uential models for Tesoretto: Boethius’s Consolatio
philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy) and Alanus
de Insulis’s De planctu naturae (Lament of Nature).
Nature instructs Brunetto in the history and metaphys-
ics of creation, in human psychology and physiognomy,
and in astronomy and geography. Carrying Nature’s
insegna (banner) to guard against evil, Brunetto moves
from cosmology to ethics: he proceeds to the court of
the empress Virtue, who, with her four daughter-queens,
is encircled by magnates and scholars. He overhears
the practical advice—mostly concerning interrelations
of honor and fi nance—given to a knight by Larghezza
(Largesse), Cortesia (Courtesy), and Prodeçça (Prowess,
who counsels the knight to hire a lawyer before opting
to avenge a tort bodily). The narrator then decides to
seek Fortune, parting from the knight and going to the
right along a forking road to arrive at a fair meadow,
the Kingdom of Love. There follows an excursus on the
psychology of pleasure until the narrator, exasperatingly,
falls subject to Cupid’s power; suddenly, however, he
sees Ovid, who teaches him self-mastery in matters of
love. He next journeys to the friars at Montpellier, where
Tesoretto closes on a note of penitent introspection and
reopens (verse 2427) in the modus dicendi (style) of a
personal letter. Now acutely conscious of the ambigu-
ity of this world, and of its characteristically slippery
language, Brunetto is disposed to ask his fi no amico
caro (dear friend): Non sai tu ke lo mondo/Si dovria dir
“non mondo”? (2457–2458, “Don’t you know that the
world/Itself should be called impure?”). The glorious
personages invoked in the dedication are now seen to
have been vanquished by death, and Brunetto’s previous
investment in fame is retracted through an exposition
of the seven deadly sins, with pride foremost. Brunetto
is then suffi ciently penitent to take up his journey to
the seven liberal arts, forgoing his search for Fortune.
Finally he fi nds himself on Mount Olympus, where he
meets Ptolemy; the poem breaks off (2944) just as Ptol-
emy is about to respond to a question on the interlinking
of the four elements.
Tesoretto has recently been characterized as an Ovid-
ian “art and remedy of fame”; be that as it may, Dante
Alighieri evidently found Brunetto himself in need of
therapy. The hunger for knowledge that inspired Trésor
and impels Brunetto through Tesoretto informs—more
or less directly—the controversial depiction in Canto
15 in Dante’s Inferno, where Brunetto appears among
the sodomites, bitterly cursing the Florentines for not
overcoming their savage origins. Dante’s Brunetto be-
lieves that the published treasure of his learning (mio
Te s o ro) can effect a kind of worldly immortality, and
Dante honors him for teaching come l’uom s’etterna
(“how man makes himself immortal,” 85). However, it
remains to be answered why Dante damned his Brunetto,
his former teacher, to this part of hell. The grammar
teacher as pederast was, often, little more than a com-
mon trope; thus critics have been skeptical about the
idea that Dante was imputing homosexuality to Bru-
netto—either they deny the notion (for which, in fact,
there is no evidence) or they contextualize it, correctly
identifying the medieval use of “sodomy” as connoting
various forms of behavior, sexual or not, that signify
violence done to nature. In this sense, Dante could
also be implying that Brunetto betrayed his heritage by
seeking renown through his French writings and thereby
committing an unnatural act against his mother tongue
(cf. Convivio, 1:10–13).
Tesoretto survives in sixteen manuscripts. Its infl u-
ence, though considerable, was confi ned mostly to
Trecento Italy. Boccaccio was suffi ciently inspired by it
to extend its general enterprise in his Amorosa visione,
adapting French narrative models to Italian conditions
for expressly didactic purposes.See also Alain de Lille; Alfonso X, El Sabio,
King of Castile and León; Dante Alighieri;
Guillaume de LorrisBRUNETTO LATINI