In addition, the volume was planned to include illustrations throughout: one for every canto of the poem. Dante’s text had been commentated from the time of its creation, very much like holy scripture yet Landino’s explanatory notes expanded on the page, almost to the point of swallowing up Dante’s verses altogether. As the title already announced, the book foregrounded the annotator even before the poem’s original author. The driving force behind this new edition of the Comedy, Cristoforo Landino, was a humanist scholar who had recently established himself under the powerful patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Yet the inaugural Florentine printing was one of the most ambitious undertakings in the entire history of the printed book.
The first printed edition of the work had appeared in Foligno in 1472. The Comedy at this date was no longer a novelty, having been completed by Dante shortly before his death in 1321. The late summer of 1481 saw the publication, in Florence, of an extraordinary book: Commentary of Cristoforo Landino, Florentine, on the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine Poet.
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