Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES)

by Lewis, R. W. B.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ONE - Dante the Florentine

  TWO - Neighborhood Presences: The Early Years

  THREE - Love, Poetry, and War: The 1280s

  FOUR - The Death of Beatrice and a New Life: 1288-1295

  FIVE - The Way of Politics: 1295-1302

  SIX - The Poet in Exile, 1302-1310: The Comedy Is Begun

  SEVEN - The Middle of the Journey: 1310-1319

  EIGHT - Ravenna, 1318-1321: The Comedy Is Finished

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for Dante

  "[A] loving and unassumingly learned biography ... Lewis accomplishes this complex exposition lucidly, artfully and unobtrusively. The author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Edith Wharton and a splendid book on Florence, he deploys his learning with an expert’s grace. ... Lewis’s engaging, subtle life of Dante reminds us that the Divine Comedy is the supreme work imagining that question.”

  —Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

  “A luminous gem, this short biography gives us the greatest medieval poet through the eyes of one of our most acute modern critics.... The ideal commentary for readers discovering Dante for the first time.”

  —Booklist

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  DANTE

  R. W. B. Lewis (1917-2002), former professor of English and American studies at Yale University, received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bancroft Prize for his Edith Wharton: A Biography. His other books include The American Adam, The City of Florence, TheJameses,and American Characters. He was honored with an award for lifetime achievement as a biographer by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 EglintonAvenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 2001 Published in Penguin Books 2009

  Copyright © R. W. B. Lewis, 2001 All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from Vita Nuova by

  Dante Alighieri, Italian text with facing English translation by Dino S. Cervigni and

  Edward Vacta. Copyright © 1995 by University of Notre Dame Press.

  Used by permission of University of Notre Dame Press.

  Map illustration by Peter W. Johnson

  eISBN : 978-1-101-16298-9

  1. Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. 2. Authors, Italian—To 1500—Biography.

  I. Title. II. Penguin lives series

  PQ4335.L49 2001

  851’.1—dc21

  [B] 00-043600

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  For

  Fausto, Rita, and Francesca Meiners

  with gratitude and love

  SPECIAL SOURCES

  1. Cover Portrait of Dante

  The painting shows Dante during his final years, in exile in Ravenna, 1319-1321. It was done, probably in the early 1860s, by Domenico Petarlini (sometimes spelled “Peterlin”), who was born in 1822 in Bagnolo di Longo in northeastern Italy and who studied and composed in Venice, Rome, Torino, and Florence before settling in Vicenza in 1865. He died in Vicenza in 1898. The influence upon him of European Romantic art seems evident in the pervasive sadness of the poet’s figure and the inwardness of expression.

  Petarlini was drawn especially to biblical and historical subjects. One of his better known paintings is a portrait of Savonarola, now in Berlin’s Gemaldegalerie. Our portrait belongs to the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

  2. Map of Dante’s Italy

  The map was prepared by Peter W Johnson, design director of RIS, a section of Yale University. From the outset, Peter Johnson showed himself zestful and courteous as well as highly skilled. In addition, he put us in touch with his son Benjamin, who was in Florence at the time, studying at the British Institute. Thereafter, Benjamin Johnson did invaluable research for us, making his way through the Florentine bureaucracy with admirable adroitness. All this comprises one of the most enjoyable episodes in the entire enterprise, and I am grateful beyond measure.

  ONE

  Dante the Florentine

  As YOU WALK across the Ponte Vecchio in Florence today, you come upon a plaque bearing a passage from Dante’s Divine Comedy. The lines are spoken by Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida, whom the poet encounters in one of the higher spheres of heaven, among the warrior saints. They reflect grimly on an event that took place on that very spot in 1216, almost fifty years before Dante’s birth, and plunged the city into decades of turmoil. The event was the murder of Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti, a feckless nobleman who had abruptly abandoned his betrothed, a maiden of the Amidei clan, for the richer and more beautiful daughter of the clever Madonna Donati. The Amidei were joined in vengeful outrage by their Uberti relatives; a group of them lay in wait for Buondelmonte on Easter morning, when he rode across the bridge on his white palfrey, himself suitably clad in gleaming white, and cut him to pieces.

  This, Cacciaguida says, was the city’s last day of peace, and he thought it fitting that the assassination should be carried out near an ancient statue thought to be of Mars, the god of war. For civil warfare immediately ensued, in a ferocious battle for power between competing groups of Florentine families.

  Dante was the supreme poet-historian of Florence, its most passionate observer, its most bitter and frustrated product. Scattered around the contemporary city are thirty other plaques with passages from the Comedy, evoking a range of places Dante had known and moments and persons he had known or heard about in his thirty-five years of Florentine life: the Arno and Ponte Vecchio; the venerable Baptistery (mio bel San Giovanni, Dante called it); Via del Corso, a main thoroughfare in Dante’s neighborhood, with its cluster of rich and potent families; the church of San Miniato, perched high above the river on its south side; Brunetto Latini, the great humanist and Dante’s tutor in classical literature; Farinata, the most valiant among the Florentine Ghibellines; and, of course, Dante’s mythically beloved Beatrice. She is captured verbally in a passage near the end of the Purgatorio: a visionary presence who will escort Dante through the Christian heavens, here garbed in a green mantle that seems to glow like a living flame, wearing a snow-white veil crowned with olive. The plaque offering this image is attached to No. 4 Via del Corso, on the palazzo that once belonged to Beatrice’s father, Folco Portinari.

  Dante associated hi
mself with his native city to a degree almost incomprehensible in modern times. Florence was not merely his birthplace; it was the very context of his being. He was Dante Alighieri, a distinct individual with a classic profile and a sometimes tempestuous disposition. He had intimate friends, like his sportive neighbor Forese Donati; literary colleagues, like the older poet Guido Cavalcanti; and deadly enemies, like Forese’s brother Corso. He was the dedicated lover, from a distance, of Beatrice Portinari, until her death at an early age in 1290, and a few years later he composed in her memory his first major work, the Vita Nuova, the story in prose and poetry of his devotion to her from the age of nine. In the course of time, Dante became a married man (his wife was another and more sedate member of the Donati clan), with three children. But he was an ardent personality, and more than once, in pursuit of other Florentine maidens, he lost the straight way, to borrow his phrase at the opening of the Inferno. Even in his lifetime, as the first two canticles of the Divine Comedy began to circulate (around 1315), he was recognized as the greatest Italian poet, the sommo poeta, of his age. But he was first and last a Florentine, and indeed, on one level, his masterwork, the Comedy, is an expression of his passionate feelings about Florence, his rage against the conspirators who had driven him out, his longing to return.

  His entire life was entangled with the history of Florence, and that history in turn was in part the offspring of the old European struggle between the so-called Guelphs and the so-called Ghibellines. The two names are of German extraction—Welf and Weiblingen, respectively—and originally, in the twelfth century, referred to two combative noble German houses. As the controversy expanded in the early thirteenth century, the Ghibellines became the party supporting the claims of the Holy Roman emperor to absolute authority in Europe, and the Guelphs, the party backing the papacy in its rival claim. Guelphs and Ghibellines were next seen fighting it out within cities like Florence and Bologna; but by this time the two names referred not to the larger controversy but to warring local factions. In Florence, the Buondelmontes belonged to the Guelph party, and the Amidei and Uberti to the Ghibellines.

  Within Tuscany, the Guelph/Ghibelline fracas reached two climaxes in the half century after 1215. (There were lesser upheavals along the way; the Ghibellines, for example, battering down thirty-six Guelph towers in Florence in 1248, and the Guelphs, replying in kind two years later, filling the streets with the rubble of smashed Ghibelline domiciles.) In 1260, at Montaperti, a village on the Arbia, near Siena, the Ghibelline hordes won a decisive victory. The leading Guelph families were banished and the city very nearly came to an end. The Ghibelline commanders, meeting at Empoli, west of Florence, voted to raze Florence to the ground. Only Farinata degli Uberti stood out against them, declaring himself to be a Florentine first and a Ghibelline second, and vowing that he would defend his native city with his own sword. The Ghibellines thereupon took the lesser course of knocking down 103 palaces, 580 houses, and 85 towers.

  When the Guelphs regained control of the city in 1266, they expressed their gratitude to Farinata by destroying every building belonging to the Uberti clan, in what is now Piazza della Signoria, decreeing as well that no building should ever again be erected in that accursed space. (This is why Palazzo Vecchio, begun in the 1290s, is not in the center of the piazza, as one might expect, but squeezed over to one side.) Dante comes upon Farinata in the sixth circle of the Inferno, reserved for heretics, and hears the Ghibelline chieftain, motionless within his fiery tomb, asking about the harsh reprisals against his family. It was, Dante tells him,the havoc and the great slaughter that dyed the Arbia red

  that had so roused the Florentine Guelph enmity. But in all of that, Farinata says, “I was not alone”—

  Yet I was alone when everyone else voted to destroy Florence,I alone with open face defended her.

  In 1266, in any case, the Guelphs, under the leadership of Charles of Anjou (summoned to Italy by the crafty Pope Clement IV), utterly routed the Ghibelline forces at Benevento, northeast of Naples. The Ghibelline imperialists had at their head Manfredi, an illegitimate son of the Emperor Frederick II and a man Dante rather admired, placing him in Purgatory, among the excommunicated, with a chance yet for salvation—“while hope still blossoms,” in Manfredi’s wistful saying. But for Dante’s family and their friends, the victory at Benevento was the restoration of their lives and the making of their city. All the Guelph exiles returned; the Ghibellines never again occupied any corner of Florence, though they posed intermittent threats, as will be seen, in other parts of Tuscany.

  Dante was one year old in 1266, and he grew up in a city that was at last fully realizing itself. It had been moving fitfully toward that goal for a good many years, in a series of developments that led both to prosperity and to a gathering self-image: a feeling for the primacy of the civic and the public over the private and the factional, combined with a sense of the larger importance of the merchant class as against the nobility. The Florentine merchants began to form themselves into guilds (or Arti) as early as 1206, when the Bankers’ Guild was founded. There followed the Wool Guild of 1212, the Silk Guild on Por Santa Maria in 1218, and much later Apothecaries, Judges, Notaries, and others, well into Dante’s lifetime. Eventually, there were seven “major” merchant guilds and fourteen “minor” (artisan) guilds: butchers, bakers, blacksmiths, leather workers, and the like.

  The guilds were the source of stability and continuity in thirteenth-century Florence, a vital bureaucracy that held the society together and kept the economy expanding while Guelphs and Ghibellines came and went. The surging Florentine economy was based principally upon banking and international trade in luxury items, especially handsomely adorned leather goods. And it was a telling moment in the Florentine annals when, in 1252, the first gold florin was minted and almost instantly became the basic monetary measure in Europe. For it was engraved not, as had been customary, with the image of a pope or emperor but with the symbols of the city: on one side, San Giovanni, the patron saint of Florence; on the other side, the lily, the city’s secular emblem.

  Dante made a public gesture of allegiance in 1295 by entering the Guild of Apothecaries (by a bit of legal stretching, philosophers and men of letters could inscribe therein). Meanwhile, he could take pride in the ways the city was completing itself physically. By the time of his birth, four bridges spanned the Arno at strategic intervals, uniting the northern and southern sections and in particular making the hitherto disregarded section known as Oltrarno, beyond the Arno, a significant part of the urban whole. The bridge Buondelmonte rode across to his death in 1216 had then been the only passageway over the river. About five years later, a second bridge was erected a short distance downriver; it was given the name Ponte Nuovo, the New Bridge (it is now Ponte alla Carraia), and the preexisting one immediately—and for always—became known as Ponte Vecchio. A third crossing, upriver, was added in 1237 (Ponte alle Grazie today), and in the late 1250s a fourth bridge was built near the church of Santa Trinità, from which it took its name.

  There remained one major, indeed enormous, architectural necessity: a new circuit of walls, to give Florence its distinct and lasting shape. This was an urgent human need as well. By the time Dante entered his teens, the population of Florence had grown to some eighty thousand, in Europe second only to Paris. But a great many of these cittadini lived outside the walls that had been built in 1172, when the population was less than thirty thousand. Such folks led a precarious existence, their homes routinely destroyed in pursuit of a scorched earth policy whenever Florence came under siege. Besides, to live outside the walls was not really to belong to the city at all. The city was by definition a walled entity, and a citizen—cittadino actually means one dwelling in the città—was one who resided inside the circuit.

  Similarly, several of the city’s most valued religious centers were, as of 1280, outside the walls: the convent and church of Santa Maria Novella, the Florentine home of the Dominicans, to the west; the then small church of Santa Cro
ce, the Florentine home of the Franciscans (created in the late 1220s, soon after the death of Saint Francis), to the east; the convent of San Marco, to the north, and that of Santo Spirito, to the south. Dante in his early years studied betimes with the Dominicans and listened to the Franciscan friars preaching in the piazza outside Santa Croce, and to do so he had to make his way beyond the protective walls.

  To bring these families and monuments into the city, the Florentine government known as the Secondo Popolo decreed in 1284 that a new and very much larger circuit of walls be constructed, and appointed the Tuscan-born architect Arnolfo di Cambio to design it. It was the successor not only to the 1172 circuit mentioned above but also to the ancient circuit of a century earlier, the cerchia antica later named for Cacciaguida and cited by him in Paradiso xv as source and symbol of a happier time:Florence, within the ancient circling ... abode in peace, sober and chaste.

  Neither peace, sobriety, nor chastity was a feature of Dante’s Florence; but the circuit of walls planned by Arnolfo di Cambio is among the great urban-architectural achievements of all time. It expanded the city in all directions; it not only brought the several churches and convents into the city but also, by a curvature of walls, related them to each other meaningfully, along fixed diagonal lines—the Dominican Santa Maria Novella to the northwest, the Franciscan Santa Croce to the southeast, and so on. The entire circuit was about five and a half miles in circular length; the walls stood forty-seven feet high and were seven feet thick, wide enough at the top for two soldiers to pass each other on patrol. There were fifteen massive gates, shouldering up to as much as 115 feet; every 370 feet there was a tower, seventy-three in all, with an average height of 75 feet. A wide road stretched along the walls within (portions of it form Florentine boulevards today) and another one outside, with a broad ditch circling both road and walls. The entire circuit was completed in 1333.