Dante the Book Glutton, Or, Food for Thought from Italian Poets

Boccaccio's Little Treatise in Praise of Dante (ca. 1350) documents his subject's love of learning with a story about how he went to Siena to see a book, then sat reading it all day with such absorption outside a shop on the piazza that he failed to notice the noise from Palio festivities going on all around him. In mid-fifteenth century, the humanist Manetti repeats this anecdote in his Vita of Dante, adding that like Cicero's Cato, the poet could be called "a book glutton" ("helluo libri"). The image of Dante as a book gobbler belongs to a rich western tradition that runs from Ezechiel, St. John on Patmos, and Plato's Symposium via Augustine, Macrobius, Petrarch, and Dante himself, down into modern Italian fiction by Umberto Eco. The idea has visual counterparts in the typology of the author portrait, which depicts writers with their books from late antique models to medieval Gospels and secular Renaissance manuscripts. Most literary speak only of reading and "digesting" without pushing the metaphor to its logical conclusion. Martianus Capella (5th c.), however, imagines Lady Philology vomiting up books before her apotheosis as Mercury's bride. Commemorative statuary of a type known humorously in Italian as the "caccalibri" book pooper] completes the intellectual food cycle in another way, showing books streaming from behind Niccolo Tommaseo in Piazza Santo Stefano at Venice, and Benjamin Franklin on College Green at the University of Pennsylvania. John Crowe Ransome's amusing poem, "Survey of Literature," caps this illustrated history of literature as food for thought.