Dante in the Age of «Good Taste»: a Dispute between Saverio Bettinelli and Gasparo Gozzi

The article considers the dispute between S. Bettinelli and G. Gozzi over Dante’s Comedy in the context of literary criticism and aesthetic theories of both the eighteenth and preceding centuries. It is shown that Bettinelli, who called for a renewal of Italian poetry, drew heavily on the points made in the debate on Dante in the sixteenth century, adapting them to his contemporary esthetics - above all to the concept of “good taste”. The traditionalist Gozzi, turning to the heritage of past epochs, reinterprets and combines it with new ideas to be developed in Italian criticism in the nineteenth century.