• Buonconte was a son of Guido di Montefeltro, and lost his life in the battle of Campaldino in the Val d’Arno. His body was never found; Dante imagines its fate. Ruskin, Modern Painters , III 252, remarks:⁠— “Observe, Buonconte, as he dies, crosses his arms over his breast, pressing them together, partly in his pain, partly in prayer. His body thus lies by the river shore, as on a sepulchral monument, the arms folded into a cross. The rage of the river, under the influence of the evil demon, unlooses this cross , dashing the body supinely away, and rolling it over and over by bank and bottom. Nothing can be truer to the action of a stream in fury than these lines. And how desolate is it all! The lonely flight⁠—the grisly wound, ‘pierced in the throat,’⁠—the death, without help or pity⁠—only the name of Mary on the lips⁠—and the cross folded over the heart. Then the rage of the demon and the river⁠—the noteless grave⁠—and, at last, even she who had been most trusted forgetting him⁠— ‘Giovanna nor none else have care for me.’ “There is, I feel assured, nothing else like it in all the range of poetry; a faint and harsh echo of it, only, exists in one Scottish ballad, ‘The Twa Corbies.’ ” ↩
• The wife of Buonconte. ↩