Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES)

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Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES) Page 6

by Lewis, R. W. B.


  Thus refreshed intellectually, Dante went on to study the theologians, beginning with a stay at Santa Maria Novella, the Dominican center whose church and cloisters lay just outside the western stretch of the old wall-circuit. Here he was instructed in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, the learned Dominican monk who had died in 1274 as he was finishing his masterwork, the Summa theologica. This prodigious text, which incorporated and in effect Christianized the recently rediscovered philosophy of Aristotle, supplied the basic doctrinal structure of the Comedy. Dante later spent time at the Franciscan center of Santa Croce, on the other side of town, and was guided through the mystical treatises of Bonaventura, among them his account of the “journey of the mind to God,” in a phrase that became the title of his most influential work. From Bonaventura, who took to himself much of the visionary thought of St. Augustine, came the mystical strain in the Comedy, which everywhere pervades and gently modifies the toughly realistic philosophizing of Aquinas.

  All these figures appear in the Comedy in person. Aristotle is seen early on, permanently settled in Limbo, where he is identified by the phrase “the master of them that know.” Thomas Aquinas is met with in Paradise, in the heaven of the sun, where he names other kindred souls nearby, Boethius among them, who “from martyrdom and exile came to this place.” Aquinas the Dominican then sings the praises of Saint Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan order, though ending with some harsh words for the contemporary representative of his own order. Bonaventura follows, prompted to speak “of the other leader,” Dominic, because he had made “such fair utterance” about Saint Francis. He eulogizes Dominic, his learning and staunch fight against heresy, but he too regrets the current degeneracy of his fellow Franciscans. He ends by announcing himself: “I am the life of Bonaventura of Bagnoreggio.”

  Dante’s readings in 1292-1294 bore fruit for the rest of his creative and intellectual life. If at the end of the Vita Nuova he had become a poet, one dedicated to the lyrical praise of love, he was now something richer—culturally speaking, something more substantial: a poet who commanded the language and ideas of the major classical schools of philosophy and the theological ranges of the thirteenth century.

  Not long after the completion of the Vita Nuova, Dante’s always pressuring and sometimes wayward imagination took a radical turn, one that testified to a certain inner turmoil but also carried implications about his future. As though in temporary repudiation of the sweet new style he had been practicing and praising, Dante suddenly engaged in an exchange of scurrilous sonnets, three on each side, with Forese Donati. If Guido Cavalcanti was Dante’s “first friend,” Forese Donati (probably a few years older than Dante) was the one whose company he most enjoyed, with whom (one fancies) he went carousing, and relayed gossip, and joked. One day, without any known provocation, Dante sent Forese a sonnet that spoke darkly of the incessant coughing “of the luckless wife of Bicci, known as Forese” (a slurring reversal of his friend’s given name and nickname). “The coughing and other troubles,” the sonnet goes on, were not due to bad “humors” but, rather, to Forese’s failure to attend to her sexually—to “the gap she feels in the nest.” Her mother is heard saying—here Dante puns on an enduring Tuscan vulgarity about the female sex organ—that the daughter should have married the aged but wealthy Count Guido of the Casentino.

  In the Purgatorio (xxiii), as we will see, Dante did his best to make up for this slander. But here he is merciless; and in the two sonnets following he accuses Forese not only of marital ineptness but also gluttony (for which in fact Forese is doing penance on Mount Purgatory), thievery (“people who carry purses keep clear of him”), probable illegitimacy, and servility before those who mistreat him.

  Forese in turn denounces Dante as a sluggish (ozioso) layabout, living off the charity of others and from his father’s usurious transactions. He cites an incident in which Dante should have leaped to the defense of his father, when somebody blackguarded the older man for usury, but Dante was an abject coward. Out of sheer terror, the sonnet announces, he defecated in his pants an amount such “that two packhorses could not carry it.”

  In the Dante annals, this episode is known as a tenzone, or dispute. It did not last very long, and Dante and Forese were warm friends again by the time of Forese’s death in 1296. But the unsavory diction and scabrous allusions marked, in their way, Dante’s reentry into the world of the mundane, after the heavenly visions of Beatrice. For Dante, poetically, it was an exercise in the “low style,” a well-known literary mode of satiric and polemical nature. Socially, it heralded a return to the realities, often rough and grimy, of the here-and-now Florence—a new attention to what was happening around him, on the street corners of the sestiere of San Piero Maggiore and across the city at large.

  It is less surprising that in the next phase of Dante’s life, beginning around the middle of 1295, we see him stepping into the urban political scene. Here too his poetry played a role, as he lets us know in Paradiso viii. In Venus, the terzo ciel, a spirit approaches Dante, reciting the opening line of the canzone “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete.” It is Charles Martel, of French royal descent, who had heard the poem sung at a happy gathering in Florence in March 1294, during a three-week visit Charles was making to meet up with his father, King Charles II of Naples. His quick understanding of the poem’s obscure allusions and his full appreciation of its beauty endeared the visitor to Dante and, in doing so, gave impetus to Dante’s entrance into public life. Charles Martel was the titular king of Hungary, “the land the Danube waters,” as Dante has him say; and he had some claim to the throne of southern Italy. He arrived in Florence on March 5, riding up from Siena accompanied by two hundred knights in armor, clad in scarlet and green. This visit was a civic love feast, and as the historian Filippo Villani narrates, “the Florentines treated [the king] with great honor, and he showed great love for the Florentines.” It was also a cultural festival. Charles listened responsively to performances of music and poetry and was escorted to the studio of the painter Cimabue, where he was allowed to see the artist’s recently completed portrait of the Virgin Mary, a work that so enraptured the Florentines (legend has it) that they carried it around the city in a triumphal procession.

  It seems likely that Charles and Dante talked seriously together about political matters. In Paradise, Charles, as though picking up a former topic of conversation, asks forthrightly:Now tell me,

  would it be worse for a man on earth

  were he not a citizen [cive]?

  Dante answers at once:“Yes,” I replied, “and here I ask no reason.”

  Their encounter led Dante to envisage Charles as the leader who would pacify and unite Italy and the Continent. But one year later Charles died in Naples, of the plague, at the age of twenty-three. “The world below held me but little time,” Charles laments to Dante in Paradise. Even so, Dante, himself now age thirty, felt that the moment had arrived to take on civic responsibilities.

  In 1295, perhaps around midyear, Dante inscribed himself in the apothecaries guild of Florence. He was, of course, neither a physician nor a pharmacist, though he had studied these subjects as portions of natural philosophy. But it was a guild hospitable to literary and intellectual folk; Dante was listed as a “Florentine poet.”

  It was another critical moment in the city’s public life. In March of that year, Giano della Bella, author of the Ordinances of Justice (and a neighbor on Via del Corso), was driven into exile; he died two years later in France. The Ordinances, which came into effect in 1293, excluded members of the nobility and families of ancient wealth from having any part in the city government, and exacted severe penalties for harassment by a noble person or a “magnate” of a common citizen. In severe instances, a guilty magnate could have his hand cut off. Over two years, more than seventy members of noble families suffered the less painful punishment of exile. But in 1295, Giano became the victim of a skillful plot in which he was accused of treachery, and he fled the city.


  Having had a hand in that plot, in alliance with the inevitable Corso Donati, was the recently elected Pope Boniface VIII. The former Cardinal Caetani had come into power in December of the previous year via a process that brought to an end one of the great sad dramas of medieval history—and that would have crucial consequences for Dante.

  In the summer of 1294, the cardinals in Rome, wrangling hopelessly among themselves over the choice of a new pope, came to the unexpected decision to elect an Abruzzese monk named Pietro da Morrone, who spent much of his time in a cave in Mount Morrone. It was a lunatic idea, as has been said; the cardinals had to crawl up the mountainside in the Abruzzi to greet and prostrate themselves before the new pontiff. But the act was probably dictated as much by religious hope—Pietro was a saintly figure, wholly devoted to the poor and wretched in his reign—as it was by internal politics. But once in Rome, Pope Celestine V proved himself woefully incompetent. Within five months, he had abdicated, the only pope in history to do so, baited and maneuvered by the pope-in-waiting, Cardinal Caetani, who was soon invested as Boniface VIII.

  Dante called Celestine a quitter, making out his shadowy figure early in the Inferno, just inside the gates of Hell, among the trimmers, those who never became fully alive, and labeling him the one “who from cowardice made the great refusal.” For much later generations of Abruzzese mountain folk, among them the novelist Ignazio Silone, Celestine has been the greatest character in their history, and his canonization in 1354 has always seemed entirely fitting. But for Dante, Celestine’s refusal (rifiuto) paved the way for the ascendancy of Boniface, a brilliant strategist possessed by a dream of absolute spiritual and secular power, who eventually connived to banish Dante from Florence forever.

  There were almost literally countless civic opportunities for an energetic and ambitious young man in the Florence of 1295. Giano della Bella’s Ordinances had been rapidly curtailed, but the government was still essentially middle-class republican. At the head were the three priors, drawn from the major guilds and housed across the way from the Alighieri house, in the Tower of the Castagna. Below them were a series of councils (consigli), varying in size from thirty-six to three hundred, and composed of citizens who discussed and debated (the Florentine love of argument was never more richly gratified), made proposals, and passed votes. Because of the peculiarities of scheduling and limitations of term, there were close to two thousand openings on the councils available every year.

  Dante moved ahead at an impressive pace. Existing records show that Dante addressed the special council of the captains of the twelve major guilds as early as December 14, 1295; and in June 1296 he is found holding forth to “the council of the hundred.” His topics of discourse are not mentioned, but one may well suppose that, even by Florentine standards, Dante was unusually eloquent. His reputation at a later date, as will be noted, was of one so persuasive in discourse as to be unnerving. There are no extant records for the following few years, but Dante must have gained in political strength and acumen, for in June 1300, he was elected a prior and moved into the Tower for two months of civic authority.

  During these public years, Dante continued to lead a private and family life. His civic duties, after all, took him for the most part no farther than the fortresslike building, about a three-minute walk, called the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo (the Bargello), the home of the captain, or elected representative, of the people. This building, according to an inscription on its wall, was to provide a setting for men capable of governing the city with a jocund heart (governare la città con cuore giocondo in the charming original phrase); and Dante for a time sought to do just that. Meanwhile, in the reasonably spacious home next to San Martino del Vescovo there resided Dante and his immediate family; the loving sister of unknown name, who came to his bedside during a grave illness in early 1290; his half brother Francesco, with whom Dante grew closer by the year; and a half sister Tana (Gaetana).

  Of the four children of Dante Alighieri and Gemma Donati the oldest, Giovanni, appears to have been born in 1288; and so, when Dante talked to the council of one hundred, he was eight years old. The others were spaced about a year apart: Pietro, Iacopo, and Antonia. It was a harmonious family, by all evidence. Gemma was a patient and devoted wife, who cast a tolerant eye on Dante’s imaginative erotic forays; and she supported their daughter when, in 1320, the young woman came to Ravenna, where her father was living, entered a convent, and took the name of Beatrice.

  There were money problems, less than Forese Donati scornfully suggested in the tenzone but not unimportant ones in a Florentine world where the acquisition of money, moneylending, and banking were primary elements. The family income, under Dante’s guidance, came entirely from property rentals, chiefly of the farmlands in Camerata, below Fiesole, and even more in Pagnolle (the farm here was called La Radere), which was rich in olive groves, vineyards, and fruit trees. There was also apparently a piece of city property in the parish of San Antonio, just outside the walls. Half brother Francesco was the one to handle these affairs, while Dante was writing his poetry or casting his vote in the councils. Francesco was diligent and scrupulous, handing over the proceeds periodically to the head of the family. But expenses outran these rentals, and in 1297 Dante had to float a substantial loan, for which his kindly father-in-law, Manetto Donati, and his mother’s father, Durante degli Abati, stood as guarantors. A little later, Dante borrowed about 130 florins directly from Manetto, and in 1299 Francesco managed to scrape up a loan of 125 florins.

  These transactions were not uncommon, and the ease with which they were carried through testifies both to Dante’s good standing in the community and to his good relations with his in-laws. So much may be kept in mind when we come, as shortly, to the bitter conflict between Dante and his wife’s cousin Corso Donati. They also help account for the near obsession with money—with greed and financial corruption—displayed in the Comedy.

  The discord that gradually convulsed Florence, as the thirteenth century gave way to the fourteenth, originated in a neighborhood brawl. It began not in political disagreement but in simple family feuding. At one point in the mid-1290s, for example, the Donatis, a family of proud descent, observed the nearby palazzo of the Cerchis, a very wealthy but more recently arrived clan, being walled and heightened to overshadow their own. There were fisticuffs in the streets between youngsters from both families; and Corso Donati—who had once, typically, been married to a Cerchi—was heard to speak scathingly in public of the Cerchis (pigs and asses were his recurring references).

  Guido Cavalcanti joined the fray. That elegant poet and cultivated nobleman was also hotheaded and prone to violence; he sided vigorously with the Cerchis and soon became the most visible member of that contingent. Seeing him as a threatening figure, the Donatis conspired to assassinate him. The attempt failed, but Guido, learning of it, organized a small cavalry band and rode down upon Corso Donati, coming along the street, and sought to stab him with an arrow. That effort failed too, but it was from events such as these that the area became known around town as “the sestiere of scandal.”

  Things grew more troubled. At a May Day dance in 1300, a brigade of young Donatis engaged in bloody combat with a cluster of Cerchis, and before it was over Ricoberino de’ Cerchi, a lad of perhaps sixteen, had his nose cut off. “That blow,” writes Dino Compagni in his chronicle of Florence, “was the destruction of our city.” Six weeks later, on the 24th of June, the feast of San Giovanni, while the leaders of the guilds were marching through the streets, they were assailed verbally by a large group of magnates, Donatis and others, who shouted, “We won at Campaldino, but you keep us from the offices and honors we deserve!”

  The time had come, the priors agreed, to take action. The two clans were now clearly divided into war-making parties, and they took or were given names borrowed from a similar period of strife in Pistoia: Whites and Blacks. The Cerchis and their allies were the Whites, the Donatis and their adherents were the Blacks.

  Dante
’s personal affections lay with the members of the White faction (though he was also married to a Donati); but he was coming to believe that the welfare of Florence transcended these squabbles and even these private loyalties. Before the month was out a number of Whites were sent into exile, Guido Cavalcanti among them. A similar number of Blacks, most conspicuously Corso Donati, were banished. The minutes of the priors’ discussions do not exist, but it appears that Dante made the key proposal and that he argued fluently in its favor.

  Corso Donati was sent down to Castel della Pieve, on the southern edge of Tuscany; but he speedily disobeyed the injunction and fled south to Rome, where he began to consort with useful future comrades-in-arms. As to Guido Cavalcanti, he was assigned to Sarzana, in western Tuscany, about ten miles below the coastal town of La Spezia. His health declined; the distance from his native city seemed insuperable. From Sarzana, he wrote a hauntingly wistful poem to his loved one and sent it to her in Florence:Perch’i’ non spero di tornar giammai,

  ballatetta, in Toscana ...

  [Because I do not hope to return

  ever again into Tuscany, little ballad ... ]

  The ballad must go in his place. In the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot, American-born, self-exiled to England, about to accept conversion to the Anglican faith, found poetic impetus in Guido’s opening line and refurbished it with a mix of Shakespeare, for the opening of his own poem Ash-Wednesday in 1930: Because I do not hope to turn again

  Because I do not hope

  Because I do not hope to turn

  Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope ...

 

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