Dante Alighieri

Painters & Sculptors

Poets & Philosophers

Faithful to Love  

Dante Alighieri

(Florence 1265–Ravenna 1321)

His life

The son of Alaghiero degli Alaghieri (the form Alighieri, usual since Boccaccio, is without doubt incorrect) and Bella (the daughter of Durante degli Abati?), Dante belonged, financially, to Florence’s minor nobility, though his family, of ancient Guelph tradition, was undoubtedly descended, via his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, from the illustrious Elisei family, whom legend has it went back to the Romans, the mythical founders of Florence.
Virtually nothing is known about Dante’s youth and early studies. He seems to have studied music and drawing, but claims to have learnt the art of verse all by himself. It is possible that he spent some time at the celebrated Bologna University in 1287. In Canto XV of Hell, he pays tribute to his first master, Brunetto Latini, the encyclopædic author of the Treasure, but the formative experiences of his adolescence were much more about friendship and love. Friendship with Guido Cavalcanti, to whom he dedicated the Vita nuova and with Lapo Gianni, as well as with the principal Florentine poets of his generation, within the poetic avant-garde of the “dolce stil nuovo” that they founded together; and later with Cino da Pistoia. Love for Beatrice, whose historical existence, above and beyond any allegorical transfiguration, is confirmed by the testimony of contemporaries: the woman whom Dante celebrates, from the Vita nuova to the Divine Comedy, under the name of Beatrice, was the daughter of Folco Portinari and the wife of Simone dei Bardi (courtly love, whose tradition Dante followed within the ‘Faithful of Love’, in effect rules out the notion that amorous ties should be coincident with those of marriage, which are governed by dynastic economy and politics); she died in 1290.
An aristocratic conception of poetry and an adherence to the precepts of courtly love are evidence of the fascination that the ideal and rites of chivalry held for Dante at this time. Florence’s conflicts with Arezzo and the other Ghibelline cities in Tuscany would soon offer the perfect knight he dreamed of being the opportunity for his first feats of arms: the Battle of Campaldino and the taking of the Pisan fortress of Caprona (1289).
After the death of Beatrice, he devoted himself intensely to philosophy (Cicero, Boetius) and spent time at the theological schools of the Dominicans in Santa Maria Novella (readings of Aristotle commentated by Albert the Great and St Thomas Aquinas) and the Franciscans in Santa Croce (St Bonaventure). For all this, he continued to be just as involved in the official life of the ruling aristocracy: in 1294, he was among the knights in Florence responsible for entertaining the young Capetian prince Charles Martel, with whom he made friends.
In the meantime, he had married Gemma Donati, who gave him three children, possibly four: Pietro and Iacopo, who were amongst the earliest commentators of the Divine Comedy, Antonia (Sister Beatrice, whom Boccaccio came to honour in Ravenna in 1350, as Ambassador of Florence?) and, perhaps, Giovanni.
After 1295, Dante took an active part in the political life of Florence, in particularly critical circumstances that earned him life exile. He joined one of the city’s Guilds (Arti), the one for doctors and apothecaries — a required condition for gaining access to public office ever since the “justice orders” of the democrat Giano della Bella (1293), originally intended to exclude the great families from political power, then revised in 1295, after Giano’s exile, so as to allow all citizens (hence, including the nobles) to gain access to the communal magistratures, provided they were members of the ‘Arti’. Above all, what was at stake in this constitutional procedure was the struggle of the social classes and the political factions within the commune of Florence. Three classes: the former feudal nobility, advocating violence against legality; the new industrial and commercial middle classes, or ‘popolo grasso’, represented by the Arti Maggiori; and lastly, the artisans, or ‘popolo minuto’, represented by the Arti Minori and inclined to ally themselves with the most democratic movements within the ‘popolo grasso’ in order to resist the abuses of power by the great families. Two factions that, from 1295 onwards, organized themselves respectively around the Cerchi and Donati families: the Whites, on the one hand, combining part of the feudal aristocracy, the members of the middle-classes in favour of a democratic government, and the artisans; the Blacks, on the other, comprising the majority of the great families and the anti-democratic part of the popolo grasso. When Pope Boniface VIII intervened on the side of the Blacks, hoping to impose his power over the whole of Tuscany, for fear of being excommunicated, which would have spelt ruin for them, the majority of the popolo grasso gradually abandoned the cause of the Cerchi — they themselves undecided as to how to proceed. It was precisely this interference by the Pope in Florence’s affairs that ended by bringing Dante closer to the Whites, having sought for some time to stay aloof from the factions. In respect of the aristocratic party, he was divided between nostalgia for the feudal world and his horror of illegal violence. From that point on, his actions were increasingly aimed at defending, on the one hand, the principle of the political power’s independence from the spiritual (and as a corollary to that, the ideal of a clergy reconverted to evangelical poverty), and on the other, that of a ruling class drawing its nobility not from birth, but from its learning and qualities. He was first part of the Special Council of the Captain of the People (1295–1296), then the Council of the Hundred (1296) and one of the two Councils of the Captain (1297). Ambassador to San Gimignano in May 1300, he was immediately afterwards (15th June–14^th August) appointed to the Council of Priors, the commune’s supreme magistrature. Then he and his colleagues entered into open conflict with Boniface VIII, by refusing to annul the sentence pronounced by their predecessors on three Florentine bankers suspected of seeking to hand Florence over to the Pope.
Within the Council of the Hundred, he pursued his intransigent policy towards pontifical interference when in 1301 he was sent to Rome with two other ambassadors to sound out Boniface VIII’s intentions concerning Charles de Valois, whom the Pope had just called to his aid to reconquer Sicily, lost by the Anjous, and resolve the conflict between him and Florence. The Pope sent the other two ambassadors away with vague promises, but used various stratagems to keep Dante in Rome. A fatal delay: hardly had he arrived in Florence, in violation of his undertakings, but Charles de Valois set about letting back in the banished main leaders of the Blacks, who took over power using violence and exiled their opponents by their hundreds. Special proceedings allowed them to reopen the enquiry, legally concluded at the end of each term in office, on the Priors’ management over the previous two years. Dante was unjustly accused of embezzlement of public funds, excluded for life from any magistrature, and condemned to two years exile and a fine; as he failed to come forward to pay it, on 10th March 1302 he was condemned ‘in absentia’ to be burned at the stake. He would never go back to Florence.

First, he joined in the unfortunate attempts by the exiled Whites to re-enter Florence by force, and defends their cause beautifully in an epistle to Cardinal Niccolo da Prato, given the task of interceding in their behalf with the new Pope Benedict XI. But the failure of this mission and the final defeat of the Whites at La Lastra (1304), a battle in which he refused to take part, only served to confirm his growing contempt for his companions in exile and his decision to be “all alone in his party” (Paradise, XVII). He then led a wandering life; there is no exact information about where he went: undoubtedly successively to Verona, with Bartolomeo Della Scala, to other towns in Venetia, to Bologna, to Lunigiana (1306) with the Malaspinas, and to Lucca. We know he was in Paris in 1307, and it’s thought he was able to meet Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Order of Templars, just before his arrest; we don’t really know the reasons for this interview, but it certainly seems to have had something to do with Dante’s membership of the Order of the ‘Fedeli d’Amore’. His epistles to Cino da Pistoia and Moroello Malaspina date from this period, as well as the one (Popule meus, quid feci tibi?), now lost, in which Dante tried to win back the esteem of his fellow-citizens in the name of the moral and intellectual dignity of his work in progress (The Banquet and De vulgari eloquentia).

Although certain commentators date the writing of the first Cantos of Hell to 1306–1308, the vision at once prophetic and apocalyptic of history that makes itself felt in the Divine Comedy, and in Paradise in particular, originates from the decisive political experiment that Dante saw as the election as Emperor, then failure and death of Henry VII of Luxembourg, in whom he had placed all his hopes for the moral and political restoration of Florence, of Italy, and of all humanity. When he announced (1310) his intention of coming to Rome to be crowned, Dante, defying the pontifical authority and that of the French monarchy, both hostile to Henry VII, spared no effort in epistles of a rare energy, first to support his cause with the main Italian princes, then against the Florentines who were rebellious towards the Emperor. Lastly, he addressed himself to the Emperor himself, enjoining him to crush the Florentine resistance by arms; this got him excluded from the amnesty Florence granted to its exiles as the Imperial Armies approached. In 1313, Henry’s death abruptly shattered Dante’s grandiose dream. From that time on, he withdrew into the composition of his poem — though not without intervening once again, in 1314, with the Italian Cardinals meeting in conclave on the death of Clement V. In 1315, in his epistle To a Florentine friend, in the name of his dignity as a poet and as a citizen, he contemptuously dismisses a new offer of amnesty granted to him by Florence under certain conditions (a fine, and a public request for pardon). When a new amnesty came a few months later, he refused even to reply to the summons: his death sentence was renewed and extended to his children. He was living at this time in Verona, under the protection of Cangrande Della Scala. It is not known at what date he then moved on to the court of Guido Novello da Polenta in Ravenna. The first copies of Hell and Purgatory, now beginning to circulate throughout Italy, soon won him the highest esteem, as evidenced by the two Latin eclogues Giovanni Del Virgilio from Bologna University addressed to him around 1319. Dante declined his invitation to leave Ravenna and compose an immortal poem in Latin, claiming for his glory only the merits of his work in the vernacular tongue. In a Verona church in 1320, he read his treatise Quæstio de aqua et terra, which attests to the extent of his scientific and philosophical knowledge. After returning from an mission to Venice, he died in Ravenna on 14th September 1321.

His œuvre

Dante’s juvenile Rime, of amorous inspiration, illustrate his poetic apprenticeship at the school of the principal literary trends of his time. Besides those pieces later collected in Vita nuova, they include thirty or so compositions, from two tensons with Dante da Maiano to the sonnet Un di si venne a me Malinconia. Here Dante pursues the chivalrous and courtly ideal of Provençal poetry, but transposed into the bourgeois structures of the ‘communale’ civilization, and filtered through the recent Italian literary tradition in the vernacular tongue: from the Sicilian School to Guittone d'Arezzo and the “dolce stil nuovo”. From a poetics of virtuosity to an aesthetic of grace, and from the song to the ballad and then the sonnet, Dante in effect gradually gets closer to the “dolce stil nuovo” by elaborating an aristocratic myth of love that first borrows tragic overtones from Cavalcanti (for example in E’m’incresce di me and Lo doloroso amor) to then end, albeit through the lesson from Guido Guinizelli, in a more personal and above all more narrative form.

A narrative structure that constitutes the greatest novelty in Vita nuova (The New Life) compared with the previous poems, assembled here and inserted ‘a posteriori’ (1292–1293) into the framework of a prose commentary that is, to the letter, a real amorous and poetic autobiography of Dante’s adolescence: love appears here as both an extended experience in time and space, a transcending spiritual adventure — and the very foundation of any poetical expression.

The amorous redemption celebrated in Vita nuova unfolds like a story, emphasized by the incessant temporal articulations of the account: ‘then’, ‘next’, ‘after’, etc. The work of time here is as decisive as it is irreversible, culminating in the death of Beatrice (XXIX), followed by the poet’s intellectual and emotional distraction. Places too have taken on a precise, stable figure, albeit by allusion (not Florence, but the city; not the Arno, but the river, etc.). But at each moment, the duration and the circumstances of the amorous adventure become, through the language and the numbers used to express them, the very signs of transcendence. Beatrice is a messenger of celestial beatitude, the salvation she addresses to the poet is the guarantee of the salvation of his soul; she appears to him for the first time at the age of nine, for the second time nine years later, etc.: “She is a nine, that is to say, a miracle, the square root of which, in other words the root of the miracle, is none other than the marvellous Trinity.” Lastly, beyond the stylistic experiments of his youth, in love Dante discovers, more even than a new inspiration, the very ‘raison d’être’ for his poetry. His happiness as a lover is properly a happiness of expression: “My beatitude lies in these words that praise my lady” (XVIII); the beatitude of praise coinciding with the praise of Beatitude (Beatrice). But, if Beatrice’s ascension into the heavens does nothing but accomplish her symbolic figure as a creature come down from heaven and destined to remain there, her earthly death diverts the poet from his divine message, distracted by pain and turned inwards on himself. In effect, the new female figure (the “donna gentile” or ‘noble lady’) who appears at the end of the Vita nuova is less a pale substitute for Beatrice (Beatrice is irreplaceable) than a consoling figure. The new love is first and foremost love of oneself, compassion for oneself; infidelity less to Beatrice than to the divine revelation of which she was the messenger, and of which Dante rediscovers the intuition in extremis. An intuition that is none other than that of the Divine Comedy, in which Dante sets out to say of Beatrice “that which has never been said of any woman”. Namely, that Beatrice’s love leads to contemplation of “the love that moves the sun and other stars”.

But this sublime contemplation is yet to come, and, after Vita nuova, Dante’s poetry reflects, through its experimental tension, a profound moral and intellectual crisis. A period of emotional deviancy (“traviamento”), philosophical doubt, political commitments, and formal research, foreshadowing the wandering in exile. Dante’s poetic experimentation then moves in three directions: on the one hand, the allegorical and doctrinal Rime (from 1293), in which Dante goes beyond both the amorous ideology and the stylistic conventions of the “dolce stil nuovo”, through the myth of love for the “donna gentile” who had become the symbol of philosophy, a harmonious synthesis of beauty and truth; and on the other, the tenson with Forese Donati (1293–1296), an exchange of realistic insinuations and insults going as far as caricature (poverty, theft, conjugal inadequacy, etc.), attests to Dante’s desire to enlarge the field of his expression and the virtuosity with which he managed to renew the mediæval techniques of comic style; the “rime petrose” (from 1296) lastly, in the bitter tradition (prosodic complexity and tragic inspiration) of the great Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel, dramatize amorous anxiety in an icy, sidereal setting.

Dante’s last Rime (seven, maybe eight) date from the early years of his exile. An acknowledgement of bitterness and failure, they express sometimes the painful awareness of the fatality of passion removed from free will, and sometimes the powerlessness of the righteous man in exile in the face of the falseness and corruption of his time. Then, on the threshold of maturity, Dante temporarily abandons all poetic exercises to take moral (Il Convivio) and literary (De vulgari eloquentia) stock of his previous experiences, and to lay down the theoretical bases of his future masterwork.

Il Convivio (The Banquet), written from 1304–1307, was intended to have 15 books: the first, an introduction, and the other 14, commentaries on 14 songs of “virtue and love”. Only the first 4 were written. The work is dedicated to the “princes, barons, knights, and other noble persons, both men and women” invited to the ideal banquet of knowledge and virtue. A new Ethics to Nicomachus, Il Convivio sets out to construct ,alongside the clerical culture, a modern lay culture founded on philosophical speculation and intended to renovate political structures and action. Hence the importance Dante gives (Book I) to the fact of writing his treatise in the vernacular and not in Latin, as was the tradition for scholarly works. But, above and beyond his practical motives (the public he was addressing did not know Latin), Dante’s choice is dictated by his ambition to demonstrate the structural and expressive richness of the vernacular language by founding scholarly Italian prose. In Book II, after having allegorically retraced the spiritual journey that, from Beatrice to the “donna gentile”, has led him from the courtly ideal to the philosophical ideal, Dante sets out, according to the scholastic doctrine, the hierarchy of the heavens, the knowledges and virtues that rule both Man’s active and the contemplative lives. Book III, an enthusiastic eulogy of philosophy, demonstrates, not without sometimes infringing Thomist orthodoxy, the complementarity of reason and faith, of knowledge and revelation. Book IV sets out to define the concept of nobility: not as an hereditary privilege, but, theologically, as the perfection of each thing according to the nature God has assigned to it; thus Man’s nobility lies in the moral and intellectual virtues that take him to beatitude, through perfection in active and contemplative life. Dante also sketches out here the theory, developed later in the Monarchia, of the providential mission allotted to the imperial institution in the history of humanity.

De vulgari eloquentia, contemporary with Il Convivio, was also left unfinished. A treatise on eloquence in the vernacular language, it was meant to form (according to Dante’s own references to the overall plan for the work, which he interrupted before the end of Book II) a veritable rhetorical and stylistic, doctrinal and technical summing-up of poetic expression, according to the strict mediæval hierarchy of styles inherited from Greco-Latin rhetoric, from the illustrious or tragic style to the humble or comic style, via the middle or elegiac style; the treatise was doubtless also intended to deal with expression in prose. The first book is devoted to defining the “illustrious vernacular”. Dante starts by contrasting the vernacular language, as taught by nursemaids and typified by instability of usage, with the “grammar” learnt at school and codified by the literary art, as it happens: Latin. The vernacular language is more noble than grammar, inasmuch as it is more in accordance with nature. All that is needed to ensure its superiority once and for all is to codify it. But, to do so, it first has to be defined, given that since Babel the original language of Adam and Christ has been first split into three: Greek, Germanic, and Meridional, itself divided into the tongues of Oc, Oïl, and Italian, the latter in its turn broken down into 14 regional dialects, and innumerable local dialects, which Dante analyses in turn. Each of these dialects being both worthy and unworthy of being adopted as a model, Dante prefers the rationality and clarity, not this time of a grammar that is against nature, but of a linguistic system concretely founded by the recent Italian poetic tradition, from the Sicilians to the “stilnovisti” and Dante himself. In Book II, Dante details the field of stylistic relevance of the “illustrious vernacular” that he has just defined in this way, devoted to feats of arms, to the celebration of love and virtue, as well as his own techniques, in accordance with the rhetorical canons of the period.

Though the Epistles contemporary with the Monarchia are evidence of the fervour of Dante’s political commitment and the passionate hope he felt at the election of Henry VII as Emperor, his treatise (written in Latin, like the Epistles) is entirely dominated by the rigour of theoretical speculation. Developing the theses sketched out in Il Convivio, he asserts, in the first book, the perfection of the institution of monarchy, indispensable to the peace and happiness of humankind, and demonstrates, in Book II, that the Roman Empire — the survivor of the Holy Germanic Empire — is the legitimate historical embodiment of the universal monarchy. Lastly, in Book III, he borrows from Averroës the idea of the independence of temporal power from spiritual power, which the Pope must exercise solely with view to leading the Church back to evangelical poverty.

The Divine Comedy

Appearing at the dawning of Italian vernacular poetry, the Comedy (which became the Divine Comedy [La Divina Commedia] in commentaries by the first exegetes) has constantly represented, throughout the whole history of Italian literature, the “original book” (which is lacking, for example, in French literature). Dante has conceived it no less, to the letter, as the “Book of books”, in the apocalyptic perspective of the end of history and at the prophetic threshold of a palingensy of humanity; in other words, as a rhetorical, poetical, moral, political, historical, philosophical, scientific and theological Summing-up. In this respect, the title itself of Comedy (traditionally justified by the ascending structure of the poem, from “negative” to “positive”, from Hell to Paradise) explains only imperfectly the “all-embracing” plan for the work, on the levels of both expression and invention, which splits asunder the strict categories of mediæval rhetoric. Besides, Dante prefers over this title the definition of “sacred poem” (Paradise, XXVI), i.e. the deciphering and revelation of a transcendental order through the contradictions of human history, and the accomplishment of the latter in eternity. In fact, much more than in this or that illustration of “comic” techniques, brilliant as they are, (cf. in particular the “Malebolge”, Hell, XVIII–XXX), it is in the Divine Comedy’s double structure, exegetic and poetic, and in its prodigious linguistic extension that Dante’s true “realism” is manifested — a point that Sanguineti has emphasized. And within this ambition of representing the totality of actuality and history in the light of transcendence, much more even than in the lesson (exclusively tragic or sublime) of Virgil — the imaginary guide of his journey beyond the grave — it is the Bible that Dante asks to inspire him, as he explains in an epistle to Cangrande Della Scala (1316–1317) when he sent him Paradise. His ideal is to achieve the considerable substance of Biblical writing, the polysemy of its letter. Whence the infinite richness in the articulation of the meaning in the Divine Comedy compared with Dante’s previous experiments, still subject to the mediæval poetics of allegory. Except for the very first cantos of Hell, representation is never reduced to the symbol, but it is precisely between the representation and the symbol, as if between two poles, that the specifically poetic “tension” of the writing is born, both narrative and metaphorical.

Consisting of 3 times 33 cantos (plus an introductory canto), the Divine Comedy recounts Dante’s imaginary journey through the other world, under the protection of three holy women, Mary, St Lucy, and Beatrice, in the jubilee year of 1300. The journey starts during the night of Maundy Thursday to Good Friday, and finishes in Purgatory on Holy Wednesday (in Paradise, time is eternal and no longer counts). After Æneas and St Paul, one going there to seek the providential proof of Rome’s imperial mission, the other going as a champion of the Christian faith, Dante is the third man to whom it has been given to travel beyond the grave, in order to remind corrupt humanity of the indissoluble unity of those two institutions, desired by God, the Church and the Empire.

Hell, an abyss caused by the fall of Lucifer, takes the form of a gigantic funnel, the widest part of it having at its centre Jerusalem (the location for Christ’s Passion) and whose lower tip is located at the centre of the Earth (a place whose total darkness is the negation of God, who is Light). It is divided into 9 concentric terraces, or circles. At the antipodes of Jerusalem rises the mountainous island of Purgatory, with the same mass as the Earth, displaced by the fall of Lucifer. The base of this mountain (or Ante-Purgatory) plunges into the atmosphere, above which rises the pinnacle of Purgatory proper, spread across 7 terraces, or levels, at the summit of which stretches the luxuriant plateau of Earthly Paradise, from where Dante and Beatrice in turn fly off through the 9 heavens of Paradise to the empyrean.