Beatrice replies with an indictment covering the time from Dante’s pursuit of her in poetry to his erotic meanderings after her death. She invokes the Dante of the late 1280s:“This man was such in his new life potentially
that every good talent would have come
to wonderful fulfillment.”
But Dante squandered that gift. She, Beatrice, had sustained and inspired him for years, but after her death Dante went astray:“As soon as I was on the threshold of my second age,
and I had changed life, he forsook me,
and gave himself to others.”
After she had become pure spirit, she was “less precious and pleasing to him”:“And he did turn his steps in a way not true, Pursuing false visions of the good ...”
In vain she appeared to him in dreams; he paid no attention. Beatrice, the partaker of divinity, is for the moment also, in part, the jealous young neighbor in the sestiere. She reflects aloud that Dante would have been eternally damned, had she not gone down in person to the Inferno to beg Virgil to lead the poor sinner through the darkness and up the mountain. She turns to face Dante and to ask, as though she still cannot quite believe it:“What allurements or what advantage
were displayed to you in the aspect of others,
that you had to wander so?”
Dante, weeping, replies:“Present things with their false pleasure,
turned away my steps
as soon as your face was hidden.”
It is a perennial excuse: you were gone, they were here. Beatrice lectures him on the making of proper moral choices; but when Dante fails to look at her, she commands him sharply, “Lift up your beard! (alza la barba!) You will grieve the more by looking at me.” Dante’s confession that he “recognized the venom of her statement,” and venomous it was, implies that he had behaved like a beardless schoolboy, and that it was time he grew up.
A wave of remorse sweeps over Dante, such that he falls senseless to the ground. It is an apt reminder of the moment in the Inferno when Dante had been overcome by the story of Francesca. That marked the beginning of his moral self-inquiry; here it reaches its end.
After Dante recovers consciousness, the narrative reverts to allegory, with two visions of the relation between church and state. In the first or ideal relation, the griffin draws the chariot, the church, reverentially to the tree of knowledge, which now represents the empire. Dante is made aware that Beatrice is seated alone on the earth, near the chariot, with only her seven handmaidens around her. Again the heavenly figure, she informs Dante of his sacred mission to watch closely the next spectacle and, after his return to earth, to write what he has seen.
There appears a second visitation of animals, an eagle, a fox, and a dragon, variously attacking the chariot and representing successive assaults upon the church over the centuries. The chariot-church is thereby transformed into a beast with seven heads and ten horns, and a harlot now sits upon it. A giant approaches who first kisses the harlot and then drags her away. Such is the wordless drama of the church under Boniface VIII (the harlot) and the French king (the giant) who courts and then defiles it.
Beatrice in the interval has become “sighing and compassionate,” with a beauty of eyes and visage that, Dante says, completely satisfied his “ten years’ thirst” (la decenne sete); in the visionary year 1300, it has been ten years since Beatrice died. The two are now, to a degree, reunited.
Dante and Statius are made to drink from the stream Eunoe, which removes all memory of unhappiness and wrongdoing. Dante confides to the reader that he could sing at length of this “sweet draught,” but “all the pages ordained for this second canticle are filled.” He can say no more. The canticle ends with a chiming stress on his “renewal” and the same astral allusions that conclude the Inferno: I came back remade from the most holy water,
even as new plants renewed with new leaves,
pure and ready to mount to the stars.
[... puro e disposto a salire alle stelle.]
EIGHT
Ravenna, 1318-1321: The Comedy Is Finished
IN THE SPRING of 1315, when Dante was working on the Purgatorio in Verona, he received an unsettling communication from the Florentine authorities. A ferocious Tuscan warlord, Uguccione della Faggiola, having seized the town of Lucca and laid siege to the hilly region of San Miniato, above the Arno, was threatening immediate large-scale invasion of Florence. The desperate city rulers, as one way to increase their defensive strength, decided to recall the hordes of Ghibelline and White Guelph exiles scattered across the countryside. The outcasts were offered reentry and pardon, if they would pay a small sum on the huge fines leveled against them and if they would appear as abject penitents, with naked feet and a rope around their necks, in the baptistery of San Giovanni.
The invitation was issued around the middle of May and reached Dante a month later, passed on by several friends. To one of the latter (a monk or a priest, seemingly), Dante wrote a reply, in which he scorned the terms of the pardon as “ridiculous and ill-advised.” He denounced the required “self-abasement,” refusing utterly “to allow himself to be presented at the altar as a prisoner.” To do so would be to confess himself guilty; the faint trace of guilt-feeling detectable some years before had now altogether vanished. He was, he said, innocent of any crime against the state. “Is this the glorious recall whereby Dante Alighieri is summoned back to the fatherland after suffering almost fifteen years of exile?” If a dignified and worthy offer of return were proposed to him, he would accept “with no lingering feet.” Otherwise, he would continue to live away from his native home.
The letter was passed from hand to hand in Florence, and had a reverberating effect there. With the Inferno and many cantos of the Purgatorio in circulation, Dante was becoming recognized as a great poet, some were saying the greatest poet in Italy; and in a cultural climate where poetic achievement was highly valued, his opinions and judgments were becoming influential. The official Florentine rancor grew proportionately the more intense.
In August 1315, Uguccione della Faggiola inflicted the most devastating defeat on the Florentine troops since the battle of Montaperti in 1260. Maneuvering Pisan and Lombard forces and German cavalry, he left two thousand Florentines dead and as many more wounded. The encounter took place at Montecatini, not more than thirty miles to the west of Florence. Uguccione now controlled most of western Tuscany, and Florence was in a state of near panic. But the expected attack was never launched; a political and military revolt flared up against Uguccione, and he fled to Verona, to ally himself with Can Grande. He was killed four years later in a skirmish with the Paduans.
The unrelenting Florentine rage expressed itself in mid-October, in an order condemning Dante to be executed and all his property confiscated. So much was repetitious of the previous decree of 1302; what was new was that the condemnation now included not only Dante but also his three sons; all were “to have their heads struck from their bodies.”
Dante’s children had led an inevitably precarious life since their father was sent into exile. Their inclusion in the new decree meant, among other things, that all three were at least fifteen years old, this being the age at which males became eligible for decapitation. Giovanni, the eldest, was in his late twenties in 1315. He had taken refuge in Lucca and may have been there when Dante made his stay. Beyond that, he disappears from view.
Pietro, his second son, was a young man of promise. He followed after his father in the poet’s wanderings, coming to stay with him in Verona and living alongside him in Ravenna. After Dante’s death nullified the sentence of execution, Pietro was able to return to Florence and look after the family’s property.
But Verona remained the city of Pietro’s heart. With the financial support of Can Grande, he studied law in Bologna and acquired a certificate in jurisprudence; he was also declared qualified (because of his “strong moral character,” it was said) for ecclesiastical benefits. In Verona, to which he came back at the end of the 1320
s, Pietro became known and admired as a judge and citizen.
Looking ahead over his noteworthy career: Pietro managed to recover the family holdings outside Florence, at Camerata and Pagnolle, and enjoyed the income from them (money he divided with Iacopo). In 1353, he acquired a villa and extensive land in Gargnano, near Verona and in the center of the Valpolicella district (already famous for its wines), amid the hills on the western side of the Adige. The property remained with direct descendants of Dante for two centuries, until around 1540, when the only legatee was the young woman Ginevra. In 1549 she married Count Serégo, with the agreement that the family resulting would be called Serégo Alighieri. The present Count Serégo Alighieri, Pieralivise, is a man of courtly and quietly distinguished bearing who manages the wine-producing territory and the residential quarters with skill and grace, and is quick to be of friendly service.
Pietro Alighieri had literary leanings. He tried his hand at poetry, without much success, but over the years he compiled a full-length commentary in Latin on his father’s epic masterpiece, a work indispensable ever since to scholars of Dante and of medieval literature.
Iacopo, born around 1296, joined his father in Verona, if he did not actually accompany him there from Lucca and Tuscany. He too received benefits from Can Grande, who set him up with a comfortable income for literary study. Iacopo went on to Ravenna with his father and apparently stayed on there. He likewise worked intently over the Comedy, composing a carefully planned “design” of the Inferno, a tracing of its structure and sequences.
Then there was Antonia, Dante’s only daughter, born at the turn of the century. She appears to have remained in Florence with her mother, Gemma, unmolested but threadbare until 1318, when the two women journeyed up to Ravenna to be reunited with husband and father. It was in Ravenna, in 1320 or the year following, that Antonia took the veil and became the nun called Sister (Suor) Beatrice, in honor of the name that Dante had celebrated in the Vita Nuova and was now poetically associating with the saints and angels in Paradise. Sister Beatrice entered the Ravenna convent of Santo Stefano degli Olivi. We hear mention of her as late as a document of 1371, where she is named as “Sister Beatrice, the daughter of Dante Alighieri.”
Dante’s decision to leave Verona, which occurred at some time in 1318, derived in part, one judges, from his incorrigible restlessness, but also seems to have derived from a growing aversion to certain aspects of life in Can Grande’s palazzo. He was compelled at times to attend the court entertainments, to watch the buffoons perform their clumsy routines, to listen to the crude jokes that made the visiting soldiers roar with laughter.
In the spring of 1318, Dante received a letter from the lord of Ravenna, Guido Novello da Polenta, inviting him to come and stay; Dante accepted with alacrity. But he left Verona carrying with him a fund of admiration and affection for Can Grande della Scala, of whom he would prophesy great things in the Paradiso and to whom he would dedicate that canticle in a richly eulogistic letter.
The attractions of Ravenna were many and various. To the south lay the seaside town of Rimini, just below the point where the Rubicon flowed down into the sea, the stream that Julius Caesar decided to cross in 49 B.C. (as Dante knew). Here had lived the former Francesca da Polenta, who had married the lord of Rimini, Giovanni the Lame, and had been killed by him with her lover, Paolo. Francesca da Rimini was the aunt of Dante’s new host, Guido da Polenta.
The city shone with traces of ancient history and former glory. It had been a Roman city since the second century B.C., but its period of grandeur really began in A.D. 402 when Honorius, for strategic reasons, made Ravenna the capital of the Roman Empire. His sister Galla Placida began the process of adorning the city with splendidly decorated churches, the feature for which Ravenna has long been most renowned. In 473, the Western Empire came to an end. The barbarian warrior Odoacre thereupon declared himself king of Italy, choosing Ravenna as his capital. But Theodoric, the king of the Ostrogoths—the eastern branch of the Teutonic tribe of Goths—promptly declared war on Odoacre, and after a three-year siege with thirty thousand men destroyed the enemy forces, and Odoacre, and took the title of king of Italy, settling in Ravenna.
Dante had been dimly aware of the Ostrogothic ruler as the one who quite unjustly imprisoned Boethius and ordered his execution; and he most likely had approved the sculptured scene on the portal of San Zeno in Verona, showing Theodoric being hurried toward hell on a stallion. Now he began to see other dimensions of the man. Theodoric, a little over forty when he became king, could neither read nor write; but he governed with intelligence and vigor for three decades, and with unflagging energy saw to the building and the decoration of several of the city’s finest churches, along with a palazzo and a stately mausoleum, of hewn stone, for his own interment. Theodoric brought to the creations he supervised a deep feeling for the interplay of the Byzantine and the Western: as in the magnificent mosaics in the church of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, among them a spectacle that must have stirred Dante to the core—twenty-six martyrs approaching Christ on his throne, followed by sixteen fathers of the church; a pageant magically akin to the procession Dante had portrayed in the Earthly Paradise.
There were personal pleasures in the city, as well. Guido da Polenta turned out to be a devoted adherent of the Florentine poet, and close and cordial relations were established from the start. Guido had come to power in Ravenna on the death of an uncle in 1316. A decade younger than Dante, Guido had taken part in a few minor skirmishes but was essentially a man of peace. In a modest way, he personified one of the major themes of the De Monarchia: he labored for peace as the sine qua non of a healthy life in literature and the arts. Several poems of his have survived, of no special merit; but he had been among the first to recognize Dante as sommo poeta, the “greatest poet” of his time. In the long perspective of history, Guido da Polenta is best known for his attentive hospitality to Dante Alighieri.
The hospitality included financial aid to the sons Pietro and Iacopo. With the exception of Giovanni, still perhaps in Lucca, Dante’s entire family was now gathered about him: Pietro, Iacopo, Antonia (until she entered the convent), and Gemma. Dante, in his writings, is almost completely reticent about his family. He recites his own ancestry via Cacciaguida in the Paradiso and there are affectionate passing references to a sister and a brother in the Vita Nuova. At another extreme, there is the tale of Ugolino devouring his sons and grandsons. About the immediate Alighieri family, what indications we have (the commentary on the Comedy, the adopted name of Beatrice) suggest that the relations were amicable if also, as one suspects, distant.
In Ravenna, a literary and intellectual circle of sorts gathered around Dante. Its members included several Florentine exiles: Dino Perini, a poet of slight pretension for whom Dante had a genuine affection; the philosopher and physician Fiduccio de’ Milotti; and the notary Pietro Giardini. Dante could talk with them in the Tuscan dialect about their old homeland and the possibilities of going back there some day. There is evidence that Dante did some teaching in the city, perhaps giving informal lectures on literature and theology.
Dante did give one formal lecture at this time, a discourse on the question whether water in its own sphere was in any part higher than the earth that emerges from it. He delivered the talk on January 20, 1320, in Verona, having returned there for this specific purpose. It was a dryly factual talk, enlivened only by a sardonic reference to the local clergy who refused to attend the lecture, fearing, rightly, that it would go against current church doctrine. Dante, armed with an array of astronomical and physical facts, which he had collected during his studies for the Comedy, argued unequivocally that water did not, anywhere, rise higher than the earth. The invitation to talk was itself a tribute to Dante’s reputation as a scientific expert.
Dante’s life in Ravenna, as he completed the final phases of the Paradiso, was further warmed by an exchange about Latin and vernacular poetry with a professor of literature in Bologna. He was known as Giovanni
del Virgilio because of his devotion to the Latin poet, and he had read the first two canticles of the Comedy. Around 1319, he sent Dante a Latin eclogue praising the Italian work but arguing that subjects of such grandeur could only be dealt with properly in Latin. He suggested some possible themes, citing in particular the smashing victory of Uguccione della Faggiola at Montecatini, and ended by inviting Dante to Bologna, where he would be crowned with the laurel.
Dante received the communication in high good humor and soon responded—it was a typical gesture—with a Latin eclogue of his own, exactly the same length as Giovanni’s. In Dante’s poem, the author appears as the shepherd Tityrus, his young friend Perini is Meliboeus, and Guido da Polenta is Iollas. Tityrus politely declines the invitation to Bologna, being determined to be crowned in Florence, if anywhere. To win Giovanni—who enters the scene as Mopsus—over to his opinion, Tityrus sends him ten measures of his best milk—presumably, ten cantos of the Paradiso. Giovanni, thoroughly delighted, replied with another eclogue. The answer Dante was able to compose reached Bologna only after his death.
The Paradiso had by this time been completed for nearly a year. He had made his journey through the heavens, guided by Beatrice, and had been bathed in the radiance of the Divine Light.
In the Paradiso, Dante ascends; he does not climb, as in the Purgatorio, but, as he is constantly remarking, is propelled upward with the speed of an arrow. He is swept up through the lower planets—the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun; on through the higher planets—Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; into the Fixed Stars; then upwards to the Primum Mobile, whence come all distinctions of space and time, of “where” and “when,” though itself beyond space and time; to the Empyrean, the actual and eternal dwelling-place of the Three-in-One God, of the angels and the saints, of the community of the blessed.
Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES) Page 13