The role of Dante in the ‘quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy

Dante’s fortune throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy was based on the archaistic canon proposed by Pietro Bembo in the first half of the fifteenth century. This series of topics went on to be further developed by Dante’s critics over the course of the following century. Baroque literature, while pursuing the stigmatization of the Dantean Middle Ages, nonetheless shows some signs of debt toward them, and in particular toward the Dantean journey as a structural model.