The Triumphs? Golden Age : a comparison between three European translations of Ilicino?s Commentary.

2020

During the last part of the fifteenth and the first decades of the sixteenth centuries, the dissemination of Petrarch’s Trionfi – the so-called ‘second wave’ of Petrarchism – was characterized by the extraordinary editorial success, in Italy as well as in the rest of Western Europe, of Bernardo Ilicino’s Commento on the Trionfi. By promoting an erudite, encyclopedic, and moralizing reading of Petrarch’s poem, Ilicino’s commentary effectively became a lens through which generations of European readers approached the text. Nonetheless, the dissemination of the commentary proved not to be immune from the influence of sixteenth-century lyrical Petrarchism, which started developing almost at the…