Dante Alighieri

Dante in a fresco series of famous men by Andrea del Castagno, ca. 1450 (Uffizi Gallery)

Durante degli Alighieri, better known as Dante, (c. June 1 1265 – September 14, 1321) was an Italian, Florentine poet. His greatest work, the epic poem The Divine Comedy, is considered the greatest literary statement produced in medieval Europe. Much like Chaucer in England, Dante is credited not only with creating a magnificent poetry; he is also considered to be the father of the modern Italian language itself. The very language of The Divine Comedy would become so widespread that it would form the ground from which the Italian language would emerge. However, it is important to note that this is somewhat of an exaggeration. Although Dante is far and away the most popular and timeless poet of his century, he was by no means alone in ushering in Italian poetry; he was a contemporary (and in some cases, a friend) of such luminaries as Cavalcanti and Petrarch and to properly understand the emergence of Renaissance literature one must understand not only Dante's poetry but his contribution to the literary movement of his times at large.

Dante is sometimes considered to be the most important poet of the Renaissance. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that the Renaissance begins with Dante, and that first steps out of the ancient world and into the modern world are found in him. Often ranked alongside Homer and Virgil as being one of the great epic poets for all times, Dante is certainly the most modern. While the epic poets of ancient times tended to celebrate the greatness and heroism of their respective nations (for Homer, Greece; for Virgil, Rome) Dante's objective in his epic is decidedly different: to explore Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven and, in so doing, reconcile Europe's past with its Christian future.

Dante's epic has no epic battles, nor any towering heroes; its protagonist is Dante himself, a plain and (by his own admission) somewhat reserved Florentine. Its action consists, primarily, of Dante's encounters and conversations with the dead. In so doing, Dante establishes a dialogue with the past in a way never before realized, and leads the way into a future that would become the Renaissance—literally, the rebirth—of European culture.

From Birth to Death

Early history and family

Dante was born in 1265 and he tells us he was born under the sign of Gemini, placing his birthday between May 18th and June 17th. As an infant, Dante may have been originally christened 'Durante' in Florence's Baptistery, and the name Dante could be a shortened version of that name.

He was born into the prominent Alighieri family of Florence, with loyalties to the Guelfs, a political alliance that supported the Papacy, involved in complex opposition to the Ghibellines, who were backed by the Holy Roman Emperor.

After the defeat of the Ghibellines by the Guelfs in 1289, the Guelfs themselves were divided into White Guelfs, who were wary of Papal influence, and Black Guelfs who continued to support the Papacy. Dante (a White Guelf) pretended that his family descended from the ancient Romans (Inferno, XV, 76), but the earliest relative he can mention by name is Cacciaguida degli Elisei (Paradiso, XV, 135), of no earlier than about 1100.

His father, Alighiero de Bellincione, was a White Guelf, but suffered no reprisals after the Ghibellines won the Battle of Montaperti, and this safety reveals a certain personal or family prestige.

Dante's mother was Donna Bella degli Abati; "Bella" stands for Gabriella, but also means "beautiful", while Abati (the name of a powerful family) means "abbot". She died when Dante was 5 or 6 years old, and Alighiero soon married Miss Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi. (It is uncertain whether he really married her, as widowers had social limitations in these matters.) This woman definitely bore two children, Dante's brother Francesco and sister Tana (Gaetana).

When Dante was 12, in 1277, he was promised in marriage to Gemma di Manetto Donati, daughter of Messer Manetto Donati. Contracting marriages at this early age was quite common, and was an important ceremony, requiring formal deeds signed before a notary. Dante had several sons with Gemma. As often happens with famous people, many children pretended to be Dante's offspring; however, it is likely that four of them, Jacopo, Pietro, Gabrielle, and Antonia Alighieri were truly his children.

Education and poetry

Not much is known about Dante's education, and it is presumed he studied at home. We know he studied Tuscan poetry, at a time when the Sicilian School (Scuola poetica siciliana), a cultural group from Sicily, was becoming known in Tuscany. His interests brought him to discover Provençal minstrels and poets, and Latin culture (with an obvious particular devotion to Virgil).

It should be underlined that during the "Secoli Bui" (Dark Ages), Italy had become a mosaic of small states, so Sicily was as far (culturally and politically) from Tuscany as Provence was: the regions did not share a language, culture, or easy communications. Nevertheless, we can assume that Dante was a keen up-to-date intellectual with international interests.

When 18, he met Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia, and soon after Brunetto Latini; together they became the leaders of Dolce Stil Nuovo (The Sweet New Style), which would become one of the leading literary movements of medieval Italy. Brunetto later received a special mention in the Divine Comedy (Inferno, XV, 82), for what he had taught Dante. Other studies are reported, or deduced from Vita Nuova or the Divine Comedy, regarding painting and music.

When he was nine years old he met Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of Folco Portinari, with whom he fell in love "at first sight", and apparently without even having spoken to her. He saw her frequently after age 18, often exchanging greetings in the street, but he never knew her well. It is hard to decipher of what this love consisted, but something extremely important for Italian culture was happening: Dante, along with the rest of the Stil Nuevo poets, would lead the writers of the Renaissance to discover the themes of romantic Love (Amore), which had never been so emphasized before. Love for Beatrice (as in a different manner Petrarch would show for his Laura) would become Dante's reason for poetry and for living.

When Beatrice died in 1290, Dante tried to find a refuge in Latin literature. From the Convivio we know that he had read Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae and Cicero's De amicitia. He then dedicated himself to philosophical studies at religious schools like the Dominican one in Santa Maria Novella. He took part in the disputes that the two principal mendicant orders (Franciscan and Dominican) publicly or indirectly held in Florence, the former explaining the doctrine of the mystics and of San Bonaventura, the latter presenting Saint Thomas Aquinas' theories. Dante's "excessive" passion for philosophy would later be criticized by the character Beatrice, in the second book of The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio.

Political Contexts

Dante, like many Florentines of his day, became embroiled in the Guelf-Ghibelline conflict. He fought in the battle of Campaldino (June 11, 1289), with Florentine Guelf knights against Arezzo Ghibellines, then in 1294 he was among those knights who escorted Carlo Martello d'Anjou (son of Charles of Anjou) while he was in Florence.

To further his political career, he became a doctor and a pharmacist; he did not intend to take up those professions, but a law issued in 1295 required that nobles who wanted to assume public office had to be enrolled in one of the merchant guilds, so Dante obtained quick admission to the apothecaries' guild. The profession he chose was not entirely inapt, since at the time books were sold from apothecaries' shops. As a politician, he accomplished little of relevance, but he held various offices over a number of years in a city undergoing some political agitation.

Being engaged in politics was not easy when Pope Boniface VIII was planning a military occupation of Florence, because this involved issues which transcended the city, and were beyond the scope of a local official. In 1301, Charles de Valois, brother of King Philip IV of France, was expected to visit Florence because the Pope had appointed him peacemaker for Tuscany. But the city's government had already treated the Pope's ambassadors badly a few weeks before, seeking independence from papal influences. It was thought wise to consider the hypothesis that Charles de Valois could eventually have received other unofficial orders. So the council sent a delegation to Rome, in order to ascertain the Pope's intentions. Dante was the chief of this delegation.

Exile and death

Boniface quickly sent away the other representatives and asked Dante alone to remain in Rome. At the same time (November 1, 1301) Charles de Valois was entering Florence with Black Guelfs, who in the next six days destroyed everything and killed most of their enemies. A new government was installed of Black Guelfs, and Messer Cante dei Gabrielli di Gubbio was appointed mayor of Florence. The poet was still in Rome, where the Pope had "suggested" he stay, and was therefore considered an absconder. As a result, Dante was exiled from his native city and required to pay a substantive sum to atone for his not being present at the battle. He could not pay his fine and was finally condemned to perpetual exile. If he were ever caught by Florentine soldiers, he would have been summarily executed.

The poet took part in several attempts by the White Guelfs to regain the power they had lost, but these failed due to treachery. Dante, bitter at the treatment he had received at the hands of his enemies, also grew disgusted with the infighting and ineffectiveness of his erstwhile allies, and vowed to become a party of one. At this point he began sketching the foundations for the Divine Comedy as a work in 100 cantos divided into three books of thirty-three cantos each, with a single introductory canto.

Dante went to Verona as a guest of Bartolomeo Della Scala, then moved to Sarzana, and after this he is supposed to have lived for some time in Lucca with Madame Gentucca, who made his stay comfortable (and was later gratefully mentioned in Purgatorio XXIV,37). Some speculative sources say that he was in Paris, too, between 1308 and 1310. Other sources, even less trustworthy, take him to Oxford.

In 1310 the German King Henry VII of Luxembourg, was invading Italy; Dante saw in him the chance of revenge, so he wrote to him (and to other Italian princes) several public letters violently inciting them to destroy the Black Guelfs. Mixing religion and private concerns, he invoked the worst anger of God against his town, suggesting several particular targets that coincided with his personal enemies.

In 1312, Henry VII assaulted Florence and defeated the Black Guelfs, but there is no evidence that Dante was involved. Some say he refused to participate in the assault on his city by a foreigner; others suggest that his name had become unpleasant for White Guelfs too and that any trace of his passage had carefully been removed. In 1313 Henry VII died, and with him any residual hope for Dante to see Florence again. He returned to Verona, where a patron allowed him to live in a certain security and, presumably, in a fair amount of prosperity. Coincidentally, this patron would be, in Dante's poem, admitted to Paradise (Paradiso XVII, 76).

In 1315, Florence was forced by a military officer to grant an amnesty to people in exile. Dante too was in the list of citizens to be pardoned. But Florence required that, apart from paying a sum of money, these citizens agreed to be treated as public offenders in a religious ceremony. Dante refused this outrageous formula, and preferred to remain in exile.

Dante still hoped late in life that he might be invited back to Florence on honourable terms. For Dante, exile was nearly a form of death, stripping him of much of his identity. Dante addresses the pain of exile in Canto XVII (55-60) of Paradiso, where Cacciaguida, his great-great-grandfather, warns him what to expect:

. . . Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta

più caramente; e questo è quello strale

che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta.

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale

lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle

lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale . . .

". . . You shall leave everything you love most:

this is the arrow that the bow of exile

shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste

of others' bread, how salt it is, and know

how hard a path it is for one who goes

ascending and descending others' stairs . . ."

As for the hope of returning to Florence, he describes it wistfully, as if he had already accepted its impossibility, in Canto XXV of Paradiso (1-9):

Se mai continga che 'l poema sacro

al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra,

sì che m'ha fatto per molti anni macro,

vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra

del bello ovile ov'io dormi' agnello,

nimico ai lupi che li danno guerra;

con altra voce omai, con altro vello

ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte

del mio battesmo prenderò 'l cappello . . .

If it ever come to pass that the sacred poem

to which both heaven and earth have set their hand

so as to have made me lean for many years

should overcome the cruelty that bars me

from the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb,

an enemy to the wolves that make war on it,

with another voice now and other fleece

I shall return a poet and at the font

of my baptism take the laurel crown...

Of course it never happened. Prince Guido Novello da Polenta invited him to Ravenna in 1318, and he accepted, where he finished his epic poem and finally died in 1321 at the age of 56 while on the way back to Ravenna from a diplomatic mission in Venice, perhaps of malaria. Dante was buried in the Church of San Pier Maggiore (later called San Francesco). Bernardo Bembo, praetor of Venice, in 1483 took care of his remains by organizing a better tomb.

On the grave are inscribed some verses of Bernardo Canaccio, a friend of Dante, dedicated to Florence:

parvi Florentia mater amoris

"Florence, mother of little love"

Eventually, Florence came to regret Dante's exile. In 1829, a tomb was built for him in Florence in the basilica of Santa Croce. That tomb has been empty ever since, with Dante's body still remaining in its tomb in Ravenna, far from the land he loved so dearly, but which never let him home.

Works

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman epic poet Virgil and then by his beloved Beatrice. While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological nuances presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and scholarship to understand. Purgatorio, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most beautiful and ecstatic mystic passages, in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey.

Dante wrote the Comedy in his regional dialect. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression, and simultaneously established the Tuscan dialect as the standard for Italian. In French, Italian is nicknamed la langue de Dante. It often confuses readers that such a serious work would be called a "Comedy". In Dante's time, all serious scholarly works were written in Latin (a tradition that would persist for many hundreds of years more, until the waning years of the Enlightenment,) and works written in any other language were assumed to be comedic in nature.

The Divine Comedy is notable not just for its content, although that in itself is revolutionary. Dante is the first major poet to write an epic in the Christian tradition, and in so doing he demonstrated the durability of Biblical figures (such as Heaven and Hell, Satan and God) for telling stories of great drama and intrigue. Moreover, he is one of the first poets, major or otherwise, to tell a story not of heroes and battles but of personal crisis and introspection. Dante's ideal guide through Purgatory and Heaven is his true love, Beatrice; and in many ways it was through Dante that the ideal of a true, romantic love would come to permeate Western culture.

The Divine Comedy is also notable, however, for its poetic techniques. For the poem, Dante invented a very simple but extremely powerful rhyme scheme called terza rima, where the poem is broken up into three-line tersets which rhyme as follows:

a

b

a

b

c

b

c

d

c

And so on. The rhyme scheme of the Divine Comedy (which is, sadly, difficult to reproduce in English without sounding forced) gives the reader a sense of onward movement—each terset introduces a new rhyme—while at the same time continuing with rhymes seen in the terset prior, creating a sense of gradual progress much like Dante's description of his gradual ascent through the worlds of the afterlife. Terza rima has become so closely associated with Dante that the mere use of it is often enough to indicate that a poet is alluding to Dante's works.

Other works of Dante include Convivio ("The Banquet"), a collection of poems and interpretive commentary; Monarchia, which sets out Dante's ideas on global political organization; De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), on vernacular literature; and La Vita Nuova ("The New Life"), the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, who also served as the ultimate symbol of salvation in the Comedy. The book contains love poems in Tuscan, not a new thing; the vernacular had been used for lyric works before. But it also contains Dante's learned comments on his own work, and these too are in the vernacular, instead of the Latin that was almost universally used.

Note: References to Divina Commedia are in the format (book, canto, verse), i.e. (Inferno, XV, 76).

See also

• Asteroid 2999 Dante, named after the poet
• The Divine Comedy
• For potential allusions to Dante in Bob Dylan's oeuvre, see "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" ("I saw a black branch with blood that kept dripping . . .", cf. Inferno XIII) and "Tangled Up in Blue" ("then she opened up a book of poems and handed it to me, written by an Italian poet from the thirteenth century . . .").

Published Resources

• Bonghi, Giuseppe. Glossario de Italiano Medioevale.
• Riccardo, Merlante. Dizionario della Divina Commedia. A dictionary of words used by Dante. Medieval Italian and Modern Italian.
• Gustarelli, Andrea. Dizionario Dantesco, per lo studio della Divina Commedia. Casa Editrice Malfasi, 1946. A dictionary of those words in the Divine Comedywhose meaning in Medieval Italians differs from that in Modern Italian.

External links

• "Digital Dante" – A resource page dedicated to Dante and his works.
• The Princeton Dante Project
• The Dartmouth Dante Project
• Danteworlds at UT Austin
• Read Dante Alighieri's works on Read Print – Free books for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast.
• Henry Holiday's 'Dante and Beatrice'
• "Dante Alighieri on the Web", about his life, time, and (complete) work.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• English translation of The Comedy by Anthony LaPorta
• Società Dantesca Italiana (bilingual site) contains among other info a database of all the earliest manuscripts of Dante's works, with (for some) transcription of the text and page images
• Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles.
• Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy
• Dante Ravenna Tomb
• Dante Cenotaph Tomb

Dante Societies around the World

• Head Office - Rome Dante Alighieri Society
• Sydney Dante Alighieri Society
• Massachusetts Dante Alighieri Society
• Paris Dante Alighieri Society
• Vienna Dante Alighieri Society
• Berlin Dante Alighieri Society

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