Il Commentario della vita di Giannozzo Manetti di Vespasiano da Bisticci (con un’edizione critica e commentata del testo)

This work consists in a critical edition and a historical and cultural analysis of the Commentario della vita di Giannozzo Manetti (henceforth Commentario), a work written by Vespasiano da Bisticci (1422-1498). We propose a rereading of it, ascribing the Commentario to an environment of opposition to the Medici’s regime, and we suppose a date of composition in the afterwards of the Pazzi conspiracy. The Commentario has already been published twice: a first time by Pietro Fanfani in 1862 and a second time by Aulo Greco in 1976. However, both publications are somewhat imprecise from the philological point of view, and limited insofar as they are only based on one version of the Commentario: in reality there are six witnesses with numerous authorial variants, the analysis of which enriches the interpretation of the work. In our dissertation, we highlight that the Commentario is not a mere literary exercise by the author but conveys in fact contents of protest towards the gradual establishment of a Medici lordship in Florence, in contrast to what has hitherto been assumed. Such contents are however cautiously expressed by the author through recourse to Giannozzo Manetti’s biography. Manetti was indeed an important character of Fifteenth Century Florentine public life who showed his reluctance to submit to the centralization of state power in Cosimo the Elder’s hands.