Dante, Giotto, Piero, Bramante

Bramante spent the cold evenings of December 1510, during the preparations for the siege of Mirandola, which Pope Julius II had the pleasure of conducting personally, commenting on Dante. Withdrawing into his quarters, the aging Giuliano della Rovere, “with a beard that looked like a bear,” had his equally elderly architect read the Comedy to him. An entry in Isabella d’Este’s chancellery reads: Our Lord is feeling better and it seems he wishes to become learned in Dante, as every evening he has Dante read and explained to him by Bramante, architect and most erudite mason. This is not the only testimony to Bramante’s literary preferences: Gaspare Visconti noted that one of his particularly Petrarchesque sonnets had been written to provoke Bramante, “ardent champion of Dante.” In Rome and in Milan, at a distance of decades, in peacetime and in war, someone took the trouble to note Bramante’s devotion to Dante and his expertise on the subject. This apparently irrelevant information (the literary tastes of an architect, and thus an “illiterate” ) must have been of some significance if authors from such different times and contexts thought it worth mentioning. Bramante’s “ardent championing” of Dante raises a question that may help us gain a greater understanding of his work in general. This championing can in fact only be explained by a recognition of the cultural project to which Bramante chose to give his ardent support.