Orlando furioso: secondo la princeps del 1516 (review)
experience narrated in La bella mano focuses on the poet’s progressive and resentful detachment from his Isabetta, whose unjustified jealousy leads her to marry another man. Although some of Conti’s sources are Boccaccio’s Filostrato and the Latin lyric poets, Pantani sees a direct connection between Conti’s bitter stance against his woman and the misogynist views of Leon Battista Alberti’s Sofrona, De amore, and Deifira. In La bella mano the poet does not grant his beloved any “educative or salvific function” (102). More than the actual woman, the poet seems to direct his poetry to her “hand,” seen as his primary muse (97). This central synecdoche emphasizes the lack of any real encounter between lover and beloved in Conti’s canzoniere. Her hand has the paradoxical role of allowing the poet to expose his woman’s rejection. Pantani correctly perceives an intensification of Platonic motifs in the last six poems added in the second version of Conti’s canzoniere, which reflects the significant growth of Platonic and Neoplatonic presence in the Italian contemporary philosophical debate. Pantani offers an engaging examination of the ternario 150, the conclusive poem of Conti’s canzoniere. From the outset (“Se con l’ale amorose del pensero,” 156) Conti underscores its strongly Neoplatonic character. Commenting on verse 18 (“mi scorse e spinse infin al terzo cielo”), the Italian scholar highlights the difference between the image of the beloved woman in the first canto of Dante’s Paradiso and Conti’s interpretation of his Isabetta. According to Pantani, the originality of Conti’s representation lies in his appropriation of the Platonic concept of idea, although unlike the Platonic idea Isabetta is at once a living human being and a celestial abstraction. This poetic invention, writes Pantani, is Conti’s “personal and characteristic myth” (167). The final section of Pantani’s book addresses the complex editorial history of La bella mano. The author identifies three stages in the transmission of Conti’s canzoniere. After the editio princeps in 1472, the Parisian edition in 1589 reestablishes the original structure of the text almost perfectly. The third and “most pernicious” (201) phase corresponds to the twentieth-century manipulation and betrayal of this canzoniere, which is also responsible for the decline of critical interest in Conti’s work. Pantani’s thorough monograph represents an essential step toward a correct appreciation of this important representative of the first moment of the Italian Renaissance. ARMANDO MAGGI The University of Chicago