ABSTRACT
By the time Cosimo came to power in 1537, Dante's Divine Comedy had suffered a considerable drop in popularity owing, for the most part, to the rise of Renaissance humanism, a movement that considered Dante's use of the vernacular as somewhat crude. While the late fifteenth century had produced a number of commentaries on the Comedy that included maps even of Dante's three realms - hell, purgatory, and paradise - such efforts were attributable more to the burgeoning field of cartography than to a genuine interest in the content of Dante's great poem. A number of cultural and political issues inherent in Cosimo's rise to power, however, caused Dante and his writing to enjoy a Renaissance of their own in the sixteenth century and, indeed, to be recast as the vanguard of Cosimo's cultural project.
