Dante

Italian poet

• Born: May or June, 1265
• Birthplace: Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: September 13 or 14, 1321
• Place of death: Ravenna (now in Italy)

Dante’s The Divine Comedy, written in vernacular Italian terza rima, synthesizes classical and medieval thought in a confessional format that is at once universal and intensely personal.

Early Life

A welter of legend surrounds the life of Dante (DAHN-tay), author of the tripartite masterpiece La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). Still, certain facts are clear. His neighbor Giovanni Villani wrote a brief sketch, and Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a eulogy that appeared sometime after Dante’s death. These accounts agree on a birth date in May of 1265. His family had noble origins at least several generations before Dante’s birth, and their surname was originally Alagherius or Alaghieri. Dante’s own name is a shortened form of Durante. His mother died during his childhood, and his father, who remarried, died in 1283. Dante had two sisters (one a half sister named Tana from his father’s second marriage) and a half brother named Francesco. Although his family was nominally ennobled, it was neither rich nor especially prominent.

By all accounts, Dante’s early life was a happy one. His family recognized the value of education and sent him to an elementary school run by the Dominicans and subsequently to the school of Santa Croce. He read both Provençal and Italian poets during these early years and acquired a knowledge of metrics entirely on his own. His readings gave him vivid impressions of country as well as city life; he also enjoyed art and practiced drawing.

Florence was the center of the literary and artistic world in the late Middle Ages, and the city continued to flourish during the Renaissance. It was during these transitional years that the young Dante and those with whom he associated lived there. The poet Guido Cavalcanti, although Dante’s senior, became “the first among [his] friends,” as Dante records in La vita nuova (c. 1292; Vita nuova, 1861; better known as The New Life), and his literary adviser. In the Inferno’s circle of Epicureans, Guido’s father Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti learns of his son’s death in one of the canticle’s most poignant scenes. Guido was a man of his times in every sense; he disliked classical verse in general and Vergil’s poetry in particular, primarily because of its imperialism and religious piety.

Brunetto Latini, a scholar and author of a French prose encyclopedia called Li Livres dou tresor (1266; the books of treasure), was another important influence on Dante. Much conjecture surrounds Dante’s placing his mentor among the Sodomites of the Inferno. The best explanation, cogently argued by John Freccero, is that Dante came to recognize the pridefulness a comprehensive encyclopedia of knowledge implies and realized, as had Saint Augustine, that one could be seduced by glib language.

Practically nothing is known about the musician Mario Casella aside from Dante’s affection for him and that he serenades the Pilgrim Dante and the penitents in the Purgatorio and shaped Dante’s love of music. Casella died sometime before 1300, the year in which The Divine Comedy is set. Not much more can be said of Dante’s contemporaries the poets Lapo Gianni and Cino da Pistoia, except that they saw themselves as the vanguard of new poets who would change the character of Italian verse.

Life’s Work

The literary ferment of Dante’s time was matched and exceeded by political instability and violence, and Dante found himself thrust into this atmosphere. Florence was an essentially independent municipality controlled by its trade unions and intense partisan interests. In 1289, Dante, a young poet married for several years to Gemma Donati, participated in the Battle of Campaldino, fighting against the rival town of Arezzo. His wife was a fourth cousin of Corso and Forese Donati, perhaps of the same family as the Buoso degli Abati of the Inferno; certainly, however, Corso Donati was an infamous leader of the Florentine political faction known as the Blacks. Dante and his wife had at least three, possibly four, children during the period they lived together: two sons, named Pietro and Jacopo, and one or two daughters, Antonia and, less certainly, Beatrice. Dante’s was an arranged marriage (with the dowry set in 1277), but it was not necessarily an unhappy one, as some contend. His wife did not follow Dante into exile in 1302, probably because her family ties to Florence were so strong.

The political conflict between Blacks and Whites had its origins in a continued class struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines. The emerging middle class (essentially Guelphs) was despised by the old military aristocracy (primarily Ghibellines), which built fortifications throughout and surrounding Florence. Although a battle fought at Benevento in 1266 brought a seemingly decisive defeat of the Ghibellines, two factions of the Guelphs reorganized around the Donati family and the Cerchi family. To assert aristocratic prerogative, the Blacks enlisted the aid of Pope Boniface VIII, who hoped to make Tuscany part of the Papal States. In 1302, Boniface sent an army into Tuscany under Charles de Valois (supposedly to establish order); the Whites, Dante among them, were driven from Florence. Dante would never return to his beloved city; he would also never forgive Boniface for what he saw as a perversion of papal authority. He alludes to Boniface with relentless bitterness in the Inferno.

Dante’s having held municipal office in the years following 1295 had made him a conspicuous figure embarrassing to his Guelph in-laws. His publication of The New Life had, by this time, attracted the attention of literary Florence as well. The work was noticed first as an anthology of sonnets in Italian rather than Latin. The influence of the young Cavalcanti is clear in Dante’s decision to break with tradition here. Curiosity surrounded (and continues to surround) the identity of Beatrice, a woman the poet had loved since their childhood. The New Life records Beatrice’s death, and, although Dante does not divulge her surname, she is generally considered to have been Beatrice dei Portinari, daughter of the prominent Florentine Folco dei Portinari and wife of the banker Simone dei Bardi. Her tragic early death and innocence make her a recurring figure of saintliness in Dante’s verse, and it is Beatrice who leads the Pilgrim Dante through Heaven in the Paradiso, the last canticle of The Divine Comedy.

By 1302, then, Dante was considered a brash young poet and a political troublemaker. He was separated from his wife and family, dispossessed of his property, and (cruelest of all for him) banished formally from his city under the threat of death by fire. The charges against him are vague, obliquely involving misappropriation of municipal funds left in his charge. The real reason for his expulsion involves his Guelph sympathies. He could have purchased a pardon in 1315, but he refused to do so.

For several years after the sentence of exile was imposed, Dante wandered from town to town, first consorting with exiles who appeared to have like political sympathies but ultimately, disgusted with their grandiose plans and incipient violence, going his own way and depending on his writing for his living. These were essentially rootless and wandering years. Around 1307, he wrote Il convivio (The Banquet, 1903), a popular exposition of philosophy that contains a commentary of fourteen of his own poems. Dante sought peace in its writing and probably adapted that volume from sets of lectures given in various university cities, Bologna and Paris possibly among them. He completed only four of the work’s projected fifteen treatises. Also incomplete and written during these years is a formal treatise in Latin, De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1306; English translation, 1890).

One can only guess how Dante lived during this period. The Scala family of Verona housed and supported him for a time, generously as it appears, until the death of his patron Bartolommeo (Alboino) della Scala in 1304. In 1306, Dante acted for the Malaspina family of Lunigiana in negotiating a peace with the bishop of Luni. By 1310, he was actively involved in supporting the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg, in an attempt to reunite church and state in Northern Italy. The emperor’s invasion attempt was foiled from the beginning and faced the united opposition of nearly all Tuscany. Dante’s outspoken encouragement of Henry VII in the form of three letters, probably written at Pisa from 1310 to 1311, did little to endear him to his fellow Florentines, and Henry VII’s inglorious death at Siena in 1313 ended Dante’s hope for return to his native city.

Fortunately, Dante was able to turn again to the Scala family of Verona, and Can Grande della Scala became his new champion. By the time of his return to Verona, in 1314 or 1315, Dante had completed the Inferno and probably a large part of the Purgatorio. It was relatively soon after this, possibly as early as 1316, that Guido da Polenta, a nephew of Francesca da Rimini whom Dante had immortalized in the Inferno, offered Dante permanent sanctuary at Ravenna. Dante accepted the offer, probably in part because two of his children, Pietro and Antonia (who had become a nun and taken “Beatrice” as her religious name) resided there.

It appears that these final years at Ravenna were happy. Dante found respect and peace there and took some sort of diplomatic mission to Venice during this period. He continued to enjoy the friendship and patronage of Can Grande and to work on the Paradiso, which would ultimately be published as the final canticle of The Divine Comedy. He died peacefully at Ravenna, never again seeing his beloved Florence, on September 13 or 14, 1321.

Contemporary engravings of Dante, almost always idealized, portray him as a professorial-looking man of about fifty, his face unlined and seemingly untroubled by the political and personal turmoil of what would have been essentially homeless years of exile. He, like the Pilgrim Dante of Purgatorio and Paradiso, has eyes upraised toward a more sublime existence, found in some measure in the friendship of his Verona and Ravenna patrons.

Significance

Perhaps Dante always knew that his real contribution would be to pioneer the dolce stil nuovo (sweet new style) of vernacular Italian verse. Indeed, each canto of The Divine Comedy presents a technical challenge to the poet that matches the physical obstacles facing the Pilgrim. It is no accident, therefore, that Dante’s predecessor in poetry, Vergil, whom he calls Maestro (master), is left behind once the Pilgrim enters Paradiso. Vergil cannot guide the Pilgrim through Heaven because no poet has ever sought to describe the infinite nature of God in finite human language. Dante, who brought allegory from its classical associations with a sacred text to a secular poem paradoxically filled with the universal and individual search for a Divine Unity, clearly saw the struggles of his life against the difficulties of writing this sublime poem.

That is not to imply that Dante was so idealistic as to believe the wretchedness of Tuscan politics could be altered by a philosophy of poetry. Change needed an agent, and Dante looked hopefully to one earthly savior after the next. One always senses, however, despite his letters of encouragement to Henry VII, despite his prophecy of a Hound (Can Grande?) in the Inferno who will subdue the rapacious Wolf, that Dante knew the wait would be a long one.

Major Works by Dante

Date

• Work

c. 1292

• La vita nuova (The New Life)

c. 1300-1321

• Epistolae

c. 1306

• De vulgari eloquentia

c. 1307

• Il convivio (The Banquet)

c. 1313

• De monarchia (On World Government)

c. 1316

• Epistola X

1319

• Eclogae

c. 1320

• La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy)

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold. Dante Alighieri. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. A biography of Dante that also examines his works. Bibliography and index.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. Life of Dante. London: Hesperus, 2002. Boccaccio’s biography of Dante. An important early source.

Cachey, Theodore J., Jr. Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. A collection of papers presented at a conference at the University of Notre Dame in 1993. Mostly criticism and interpretation.

Freccero, John. Dante: The Poetics of Confession. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. This is a collection of Freccero’s major articles on Dante, a poet he sees as heir to the Augustinian tradition of confessional literature. Freccero concentrates on Dante’s ability to make his poem move beyond finite language at the same time as it reveals Dante as both Pilgrim and Poet.

Gallagher, Joseph. A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dante’“The Divine Comedy.” Liguori, Mo.: Liguori/Triumph, 1999. Criticism and analysis of Dante’s major work. Bibliography and index.

Iannucci, Amileare A., ed. Dante: Contemporary Perspectives. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1998. The essays in this volume contain everything from a scrutiny of Dante’s attitude toward poetic authority and language to examinations of his political thought and his views on gender.

Jacoff, Rachel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Dante. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. A collection of essays on Dante, touching on his life, his relationship to Florence, his theology, and his connection to the classic poets a well as providing an introduction to the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Index.

Lansing, Richard, ed. The Dante Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 2000. An encyclopedia devoted to Dante. Covers his life and works and contains numerous appendices. Index.

Lansing, Richard. Dante: The Critical Complex. 8 vols. New York: Routledge, 2003. A collection of criticism and analysis, with volumes looking at Dante’s relation to Beatrice, philosophy, theology, history, critical theory, and interpretation.

Lewis, R. W. B. Dante. New York: Lipper/Viking, 2001. A biography of Dante in the Penguin lives series. Bibliography.

Quinones, Ricardo J. Dante Alighieri. New York: Twayne, 1998. Part of the Twayne world author series, this biography of Dante looks at his life and works.

Singleton, Charles S., ed. and trans. Dante: The Divine Comedy. 6 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973-1975. This work is the classic translation and commentary on Dante’s magnum opus. It contains full Italian text and apparatus for the scholar and a readable translation on facing pages. The separate commentary volumes allow for easy reference, and the commentary itself, though scholarly, is never esoteric.