These are exciting years for scholarship on the Florentine humanist Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459), and with the publication of this detailed study of his two ambassadorial deployments in La Serenissima, we are for the first time well positioned to understand his political and literary activities during this significant phase of his diplomatic career. Not every reader will seek or require the level of detail offered by this volume (for example, pages 46–52 feature a calendar of Manetti’s first ambassadorship between September 1448 and January 1449), but clear organization and substantial subdivision together make for a very user-friendly text.

The substantial and wide-ranging introduction addresses such topics as the political context of Manetti’s stint in Venice, ceremony and life in the Venetian court, the manuscript sources treated in this volume, the nature of the postal system at the time (including some fascinating details concerning how mail was treated, in particular how Manetti processed and dated his letters), Manetti’s private life in Venice (thanks especially to the diary maintained by his secretary Griso Griselli), and the literary context of Manetti’s Dialogus in Symposio, composed in Venice in late 1448. Thereafter follows the ambassadorial correspondence between Manetti and the Florentine Signoria and Dieci di Balia, edited by Figliuolo, and an edition of the Dialogus (prefaced by an extensive discussion of its manuscript tradition), edited by Albanese. Numerous indexes round out the volume.

Giannozzo Manetti a Venezia is especially illuminating regarding the literary backdrop and significance of the Dialogus, a hitherto rather neglected text published here for the first time. This work, the first part of which constitutes a rewriting of Leonardo Bruni’s “Tancredi and Seleuco” and the second a philosophical examination of the question which animal is the most useful for man, purports to record a discussion held during Manetti’s stay in Venice. Because Bruni’s text is itself largely based on the Decameron, the Dialogus has a great deal to teach us about Quattrocento Boccaccio reception. Intriguingly, as in the case of the Decameron, the Dialogus’s very composition may have been inspired by the Plague, in this case by an outbreak that ravaged Venice in October 1448 (42), against which the work is presented as an “antidote” (67). This was the hundredth anniversary of the pest that inspired Boccaccio’s masterpiece, and Manetti had, after all, composed a biography of the distinguished Florentine. But Boccaccio’s influence is by no means absolute: Manetti transformed his novelistic style through reference to the “authorities of scientific doctrine and of ancient and medieval philosophy” (65), thus integrating it into the classical genre of the learned symposium (77). Put otherwise (and as Albanese stresses), in Manetti’s hands the pleasure of the well-told story is largely overshadowed by that of fervent discussion of the ethical dimensions of that story. The dual frame-novella structure of the Decameron is thus destabilized, with the former element substantially overtaking the latter.

Also emphasized here is the significance of the Dialogus for understanding contemporary attitudes toward music, including those of Manetti himself. In his depictions of the musical interludes at the symposium, we are offered some rare descriptions of secular music and popular taste at the time, for example in the indication that the Sicilian melodies on offer were much preferred to their French and Venetian counterparts. The Dialogus, in fact, represents “one of the most important literary testimonies” concerning music in the Renaissance (126). It also reveals a great deal concerning Manetti’s life in Venice and his relationship with his son Bernardo, and can be profitably placed in dialogue with such near-contemporary Manettiana as the De Dignitate Hominis and the Contra Iudeos et Gentes.

Finally, one minor correction is in order: whereas it is simply assumed here that the Hebrew annotations found in Manetti’s Bible (Pal. lat. 18) are in his own hand, Nurit Pasternak has convincingly attributed them to his son Agnolo. In conclusion, Giannozzo Manetti a Venezia features scholarship of the highest order and makes an important contribution to Manetti studies that will also be of particular interest to scholars of Renaissance humanism, Florentine and Venetian history, musicology, and diplomatic history.