Can Grande, who had been a lad of fourteen when Dante had last seen him, was now twenty-four in 1315 and the imperial viceroy as well as the lord of Verona. He had shared both those positions with his brother Alboino, until the latter’s death in November 1311. It was not long before Dante, observing his host with warm admiration, came to honor the qualities he would have Cacciaguida extol in his Paradiso: a heroic disregard for money, a capacity for the most demanding work, a munificence so remarkable that even his enemies could not keep silent about it. Drawing on the name Cane (dog), Dante draws attention subtly to the Veronese at the very start of the Inferno, when Virgil predicts the appearance of a greyhound that will bring peace and harmony to Italy by routing the forces of disharmony, as represented by the leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf.
The man himself comes down to us as tall and strikingly handsome, soldierly in bearing, and normally gracious in manner, though he could also be quick-tempered and obstinate. Villani describes him as the richest and most powerful ruler of all time in Lombardy; and Boccaccio finds him second only to Frederick II in stately magnificence. These accolades testify, among other things, to Can Grande’s masterful performance as viceroy, bringing Brescia back from Guelph control into the imperial fold (which Henry VII had never been able to do), rescuing Vicenza from the Paduan Guelphs, and then making peace with Padua. Under the leadership of Can Grande, three cities in north-central Italy—Verona, Padua, and Vicenza—were formed into a potent imperial league.
But for Dante, it was not less Can Grande, the patron of the arts and the host without parallel, who was most to be revered. In his letter to Can Grande from Ravenna, Dante recalled that, on arriving in Verona, he beheld not only Can Grande’s “splendor” but also “enjoyed your bounty.” Like other special guests, Dante was given his own apartment in the Scaligeri palazzo. Its walls were decorated in Dante’s honor with images of the Muses (for visiting soldiers there were portrayals of Victory; for preachers, symbols of Paradise). Elaborate meals were served him, with musicians and jugglers providing entertainment. On occasion, Dante was invited to dine at Can Grande’s table, a signal mark of recognition. Such bounty, Dante told the lord vicar of Verona, had exceeded reports—which he, Dante, had thought to be exaggerated. In the poet’s phrase, “I became your most humble servant and your friend.”
The Scaligeri palace, a large, rugged, unostentatious affair, occupied much of what is now called Piazza dei Signori, presided over today by a statue of Dante (from 1865), standing tall, hand on chin, his head bent slightly toward the row of windows from which he had gazed out so often. The broad rapid Adige flows by only a few steps away; and a narrow lane leads to the Piazza delle Erbe, crowded with shopping stalls, much like the mercato vecchio near Dante’s home in Florence. Dante could not but have been drawn to these and other urban elements (like the Arena), but for all his extravagant praise of Can Grande—as “the magnificent and victorious lord, Vicar General of the Holy Roman Empire”—he rarely alludes, in poetry or prose, to any aspect of the city itself.
He mentions the Adige (Inferno xii), but only a stretch of it some distance north, toward Trento. He had almost certainly watched the annual Lenten race, the winner of which earned the green cloth that Dante bestowed metaphorically upon Brunetto Latini. But he never, for example, speaks of the church and monastery of San Zeno, Verona’s patron saint, with its Lombard decor and its porch covered with sculptures of scenes that surely intrigued Dante—among them, that of King Theodoric riding madly to the devil.
What he did do, with his unappeasable relish for the colorful or discolored byways of Italian history, was to introduce the twelfth-century abbot of San Zeno, in Purgatorio xviii, and through him the current abbot, and a minor scandal in the della Scala family. Gherardo, who served in the monastery during the reign of Frederick Barbarossa and who died in 1187, appears on the fourth terrace of Purgatory, amid the slothful, and presents himself:“I was Abbot of Verona, under the rule
of the good Barbarossa, of whom Milan
still talks with grief.”
The abbot then alludes to “one who already has a foot in the grave,” Alberto della Scala, who would die in 1301. This person, says the abbot, will have cause to mourn over San Zeno:“because his son, deformed in his whole body
and worse in mind, and who was born in shame
he has put there in place of the true shepherd.”
It is not inaccurate; Alberto made his illegitimate son Giuseppe, a cripple and perhaps mentally defective, the abbot of San Zeno, which he headed from 1291 to 1314.
Dante had undoubtedly met Giuseppe, and as Can Grande’s youngest brother he may have warranted a certain respect. But the poetic memorial that Dante contrived for him was coldly contemptuous.
The Purgatorio, to repeat, was written in Verona, and was in circulation before Dante left the city and went on to Ravenna in 1319.
The canticle strikes a heartening note at once. “To course over better waters, the little boat of my wit now raises its sail”: so the Purgatorio begins, as Dante prepares (he tells us) to sing “of that second realm (quel secondo regno) where the human spirit purges itself and becomes worthy to ascend to heaven.”
There are torments and troubles enough in the purgatorial experience, but the tone from the outset is that of hope refreshed, something the poet himself may have been feeling in his safe and comfortable Verona lodgings. It is exactly the feeling expressed by Manfred, the Ghibelline loser in the battle of Benevento in 1266, whom Dante comes upon in the first moments of the new venture, in the region called the Ante-Purgatory. He is golden-haired and noble in features, but Dante notices that one of his eyebrows is cleft. Manfred explains that he was pierced by a sword at Benevento but, dying, repented of his sins. He had been excommunicated by the pope; yet even the papal curse does not condemn him forever or mean that “eternal love may not return, so long as hope retains any of its green.” That final phrase, about hope keeping its greenness, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as the epigraph for All the King’s Men, a Dantean thought that runs like a theme through the novel.
The Ante-Purgatory, the setting for the first nine cantos of the canticle, is the temporary home of spirits awaiting their turn to ascend the mountain. But “temporary” is a relative term in the second realm. Manfred is required to wait for thirty times his natural life, or more than a thousand years. On the other hand, Dante is pleased and surprised, a little later, to meet his old friend, the Florentine musician Casella, among a horde of more than a hundred spirits, all of whom had died fairly recently and yet are already being transported by angelically guided boats to Mount Purgatory.
At Dante’s request, to solace him for the arduous climb in store, Casella sings a canzone of Dante that he had formerly set to music, “Amor che nella mente mia ragiona” [Love, speaking fervently in my mind of my lady]. It is a fitting choice, since the canzone is about philosophy as the human wisdom that can guide the mind and the will toward divine wisdom: a precis of the Purgatorial ascent, which concludes with Beatrice, Divine Wisdom incarnate.
The souls in the Ante-Purgatory are largely late repentants, individuals who delayed submitting themselves to divine mercy through some defect of character or because of an unexpectedly violent death. Manfred is among the latter, as is Buonconte da Montefeltro, the Ghibelline leader at Campaldino, whose body was washed into the Arno. As Buonconte finishes talking, there appears quietly another spirit who addresses the poet in her childlike manner:“Pray, when you return to the world
and are rested from your long journey ...
Remember me, who am la Pia.
Siena made me, Maremma unmade me.”
Son la Pia. In the original Tuscan, remarks the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, the young woman’s words “are so delicate that they seem to be sighed rather than sung, and they accompany as with music the utterance of that poor and gentle name.” Let us listen to them:“Deh, quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,
e riposato de la lunga
via ...
ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;
Siena mi fé, disfecimi Maremma”
Pia Tolomei was married to a lordly Sienese, who imprisoned her in his castle in the Maremma, the melancholy coastal region south of Siena, and then murdered her, perhaps so that he could marry another. She is a classic case of the wife as victim. Edith Wharton, replying (in February 1909) to a young Englishman who had spoken derisively of women who complained about their marriage, named Pia Tolomei, along with Iseult, Francesca da Rimini, and Anna Karenina, as “women who were discontented with their husbands” and for good reason.
Farther on, the pilgrims observe a soul sitting alone with watchful eyes. He is Sordello, a poet from Mantua; he is overjoyed to find himself in the presence of the Mantuan Virgil. Sordello (he died sometime after 1269) had lived mostly in Provence, where he had written a much admired poem about a Provençal baron. The work accused the French leaders involved of gross cowardice, and, remembering this, Dante breaks out in invective against war-makers in Italy. (More literary lineage: in 1840, Robert Browning brought out a long narrative poem named for Sordello, complex but full of energy and dealing with the man and his war-torn times.) Sordello leads the pilgrims to a little dell, where late-repentant kings of France and England, formerly enemies, now lie pensively and sing in harmony.
There is an exchange with Nino Visconti, Dante’s Pisan friend who had been betrayed by his uncle Ugolino. Then, spent by all he has seen and heard, Dante falls asleep. He is awakened to hear Virgil saying, “Have no fear. All is well ... You have arrived at Purgatory.” Following Virgil, Dante mounts three stone steps and kneels before the attendant angel, begging admission. The angel carves seven Ps with a sword on Dante’s brow for the peccati mortali, the seven deadly sins that will be successively purged during the long climb up the mountain. Then, with keys given him by their keeper, Saint Peter, the angel unlocks the gate and the pilgrims enter.
Drama and allegory alternate, the two modes fuse and modulate one another, in the course of that climb, which continues through the next seventeen cantos. The allegory reaches its climax in the Earthly Paradise, with the elaborate pageant representing divine revelation in all its sources (the books of the Old and the New Testaments and others). But meanwhile, as the pilgrims ascend the seven terraces there is enacted what in the present context is the central drama of the Comedy: the process of Dante’s imaginative self-exploration, to an important degree his self-forging. In this regard, there is more manifestly a story in the Purgatorio than in the Inferno, which consists mainly and overwhelmingly of an unbroken descent into the lowest depths of human depravity.
On the first terrace of Purgatory, for example, where the sin of pride is being purged, Dante makes himself confront his own pride—as a poet. The pilgrims have edged their way upward from the foot of the mountain, along a cleft some eighteen feet wide, to the lowest terrace. Here formerly proud ones are bending their backs under heavy burdens of stone. One of these turns his head to look up at Dante, who recognizes him as Oderisi of Gubbio (he died in 1288), an illuminator of manuscripts and a miniaturist. It is Oderisi who sounds the theme of what might be called cultural pride, the belief of painters and poets in their lasting supremacy. Take Cimabue and Giotto, he says:“CredetteCimabue ne la pittura,
tener lo campo, ed ora ha Giotto il grido,
sì che la fama di colui è scura. ”
[Cimabue thought to lead the field in painting,
and now Giotto has the cry,
and the fame of the other one is obscured.]
For all his political and literary activities, Dante had kept a proud eye on contemporary achievements in Florentine painting. He had known both the artists mentioned by Oderisi: Cimabue (c. 1250—1302) and Giotto (1266-1337). At age fifteen, Dante is thought to have joined the procession celebrating Cimabue’s Madonna. He had become friendly with Giotto; and the painter, or perhaps an assistant, had painted a portrait of Dante, dreamy-eyed and sensitive, into the fresco of Paradise (now mostly faded) in the chapel of the Bargello.
Dante shifts the discussion to poetry, having Oderisi observe quirkily that one Guido has replaced another in popular esteem—Cavalcanti, that is, had replaced Guinizelli—but“perhaps there has been born one who will chase both of them from the nest.”
Thus, anonymously, Dante again appoints himself the leading poet of his time. But he immediately undercuts this show of pride. “O empty flurry of human powers,” Oderisi now exclaims (anticipating Andy Warhol’s estimate of fame’s time span), “how short a time does green endure upon the top.” With audible sincerity, Dante, after listening thoughtfully to Oderisi’s words, confesses that “Your true saying has filled my heart with holy humility, and lowered my swollen pride.”
At Virgil’s command, Dante stands up straight, but his thoughts are still “bowed down and shrunken,” as he meditates on his presumptuousness. Engraved in the pavement of the terrace, he sees depictions of ancient pride, among them Lucifer, Nimrod, and “Troy in ashes and ruins.” The confession of personal pride and the abject penitence have evidently sufficed, for there now appears an angel who brushes away the first letter P from the poet’s brow. As they climb toward the second terrace, Dante finds the ascent appreciably lighter than the first. It reminds him of the path that wound up from the Arno to the old church of San Miniato, in its wild and wooded surroundings, one of Dante’s favorite excursions.
But Dante the pilgrim is still somewhat uneasy about his former displays of vanity, even as Dante the poet may be uneasy about his manner of exalting himself through Oderisi. This is revealed in his remarks, on the second terrace, to one of the envious spirits. These have their eyes wired shut, so that they may no longer look with bitterness on the beauty or achievement of others; they are enveloped in fog and lean against one another, for comfort and to learn companionship. Dante is touched by the spectacle but reflects that envy had never been one of his worst faults of character. He conveys this to Sapia, a noble Sienese lady (she had been guilty of wicked joy at the defeat of the Sienese by the Florentines, but had later helped found a home for weary travelers). “My eyesight will be taken from me here,” Dante tells her, “but only for a short time, for my offense is small.” And then:“Greater far is the fear by which my soul is suspended
for the torment below, for even now
the burden down there weighs me down.”
Dante had called out to the envious to ask if any of them were Italian, and Sapia had answered from the crowd to say that here, in Purgatory, they were no longer divided by nation or state but belonged to the one true city. But perhaps Dante had meant, Are there any here who were once pilgrims or sojourners in Italy? The exchange lies behind the startling sequence in the next canto, xiv, where Dante, with the help of two spirits from Forli and nearby, traces the course of the Arno River as a steady descent into savagery and hatred, making a pilgrim of any man of good will.
Guido del Duca and Rinieri da Calboli have been leaning against one another, listening to Dante and Sapia. One of them asks Dante where he comes from. And Dante:“Through the midst of Tuscany there spreads a stream which rises in Falterona, a course of one hundred miles does not suffice it. From its banks I bring this form.”
“You are talking about the Arno,” Guido comments; and Rinieri wonders why Dante had not named the river, as though it were something horrible. It is fitting, Guido tells him, that the river’s name should perish, “for from its beginning ... virtue is driven out as enemy by all.” He then traces its malevolent course.
It begins in the Casentino—on Monte Falterona, as Dante had said—and first takes its direction among filthy hogs: brutti porci; thus does Dante characterize the dwellers in the Casentino, some of whom had given him their hospitality on his intermittent visits. “Then,” Guido continues, “coming down, it finds snarling curs,” the citizens of Arezzo, to which the Arno turns sharply southward. “On it goes in its descent,” we hear, until it finds “dogs growing into wolves,”
the Florentines. The “accursed and ill-fated ditch” (maladetta e sventurata fossa), having descended through many more deep gorges,“finds the foxes, so full of fraud that they fear no guile that might trap them.”
The fraudulent foxes are the Pisans, Ugolino and the likes of him.
It is an unrelenting diatribe, a wholesale indictment of Tuscany and its people, the exile’s furious song. And though the Arno in fact shifts geographical direction dramatically—now south, now west, now due north, now west again—its course as rendered poetically (John D. Sinclair points this out) is an uninterrupted descent, as though into the depths of the Inferno.
The third terrace deals with rage, seen as blinding—the souls are enveloped in smoke—and as destructive. Dante has a sudden vision ofpeople kindled with the fire of anger slaying a youth with stones, and ever crying loudly to each other: “Kill, kill!”
Hate crimes of this sort, as they might be called today, lead Dante to puzzle over the cause of such evils: whether they arise in the human soul, or are stirred by outside forces. Marco Lombardo, a Venetian courtier, whom Dante questions on the matter, speaks to him out of the smoky mist. “You who are living,” he says, “refer every cause up to the heavens, as if they swept everything onwards, of necessity.” Yet men are given freedom of the will and a light by which they can distinguish good from evil. “Free will, if it be well nourished, will at length gain the victory.” The lines foreshadow Cassius’s wise saying to Brutus in Julius Caesar: Men at some time are masters of their fate.
Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES) Page 11