I percorsi divergenti del dialogo d'amore: la Deifira di L.B. Alberti e i suoi "doppi"

Abstract

In Alberti's Deifira (the first dialogue on love ever written in the Italian vernacular) there are two distinct and contrasting treatments of the love discourse: the erotic and the anti-erotic one. The dialogue blends together poetic and prosastic modes in a dual generic allegiance to both the exhortative tradition of suasoria and the pathetic tone of elegy. Within the literary panorama of the fifteenth century, Alberti's dialogue was seen as an avant-garde initiation of a genre at the borderline between poetry and prose. Its charming ambiguity was understood by fifteenth-century readers in terms of other generic categories, and thus the responses of different audiences provide clues about the evolving definitions and perceptions of love discourse. The article charts the inherent instability of the Albertian text through the polarized appropriation of Deifira either as a romance, as exemplified by Antonio di ser Guido de' Magnoli’s remake of the dialogue (with excerpts taken from Boccaccio's Fiammetta and the Consolatoria a Pino de' Rossi), or as a misogynistic treatise against love, as in Corio’s Utile dialogo amoroso (with excerpts taken from Boccaccio's Corbaccio).