by A. N. Wilson
To take an obvious example – the sixth scene in the Life of Mary in Padua, one of Giotto’s most justly celebrated frescos.
The scene is framed by Giotto in a child’s toy fort against a completely still, flat blue sky. There is no attempt to paint either an Italian or a Palestinian city: it is as simple as a stage set designed by a child. Nothing can distract us from the central thing, which is the meeting of the two central figures, and an old man’s sexual awakening in the presence of his wife. In order to pull off his trick, Giotto does not present us with a realistic picture of the kiss either, if by ‘realistic’ is meant purely representational. To do so, he would have had to show at least one of the characters with their backs to us, or if side by side, with Anna’s lips lost in Joachim’s beard. Instead, he allows his perspective to be skewed, so as to show us the two lips meeting. They are full, eager lips. The old man’s grip on the woman’s shoulder is firm, but his eyes are staring straight ahead as if he does not quite know what is happening as she runs her fingers through his crinkly grey hair. Her slightly cunning, sexy almond eye is that of a keenly erotic adept who knows exactly what she wants: not merely a child, but pleasure in the act of begetting. There is something unforgettably comic, as well as touching, in the scene. She smoulders; he is numb.
What we see in the lips of Anna and Joachim at the Golden Gate can be seen replicated in fresco after fresco: in the grief of the mothers whose babies are being killed during the massacre of the Innocents, in the somnolent soldiers at Christ’s tomb, in the sly, somewhat camp angel peeking from behind a pink pillar at the Last Judgement.
Ruskin at Pisa, at the Victorian frayed end of the Christian tapestry, recovered something like faith at Pisa when he saw this visualized Catholic wholeness in the Campo Santo.
Briefly, the entire doctrine of Christianity, painted so that a child could understand it. And what a child could not understand of Christianity, no one need try to… The total meaning was, and is, that the God who made earth and its creatures, took at a certain time upon the earth, the flesh and form of man; in that flesh sustained the pain and died the death of the creature He had made; rose again after death into glorious human life, and when the date of the human race is ended, will return in visible human form, and render to every man according to his work. Christianity is the belief in, and love of, God thus manifested.18
Just such a Christian synthesis, in words, not in paint, would one day be Dante’s achievement: as a French translator of the poem in 1900 saw, the Comedy was ‘the whole of Christian civilization, the whole of human nature from its most violent to its most delicate… and the whole of Nature’.19
Dante, watching Giotto’s genius unfold on the walls of Padua, saw the story anew. It was the Gospel story inhabited by contemporary Italians. It was Our Blessed Lady and the sinner Zacchaeus and the cruel Roman soldiers with the faces of his friends and neighbours. Dante saw that what Giotto had done in paint could also be done in literature. The great drama of Christian theology could be peopled with people he had known, just as Giotto used real-life contemporary models for his Biblical figures. Together with angels and saints, Dante could explore the workings of Christian theology by contemplating the destiny of his friends the Cavalcanti, of his childhood playmates, of his dangerous in-laws the Donati, of his old mentor Brunetto Latini. And what of the great public figures of Dante’s age, or of the recent past? What of Frederick II, or of Manfred his son? His imagination was not yet ready to conceive it as a whole, but its kinship with the work of Giotto cannot be denied.
Giotto was decorating a chapel in Padua for the Scrovegni family. When he got to Hell, Dante met Rinaldo degli Scrovegni among the usurers:
A Paduan among the Florentines,
I sit here, while they deafen me with their hourly shouts;
‘Let the sovereign cavalier come forth
‘Who’ll bring the purse with the three goats upon it!’
Then he twisted his mouth, and darted out his tongue,
Like a great ox who tried to lick his nose.
[Inf. XVII.70–75, Cary]
He is in Hell for doing what Dante’s father did – he is in the circle of usurers. He amassed one of the largest personal fortunes in Padua, and died between March 1288 and October 1289. It was his son Enrico who married a daughter of Francesco d’Este and it was he who built the famous chapel of the Scrovegni with its frescos by Giotto.
So there were quite a number of complicated reasons why Dante showed interest in the building and decoration of the Arena Chapel in Padua, not least, perhaps, in Giotto’s depictions of Hell.
In April 1304, a papal legate had apparently reconciled the feuding Black and White factions of the city, a major feat of diplomacy that occasioned a city-wide celebration. Even here the Florentine spirit of competition prevailed as one group tried to outdo the other in devising the most spectacular diversions for ‘rejoicing and making merry’. On the last day of April, men of the sesto of San Frediano put up notices saying, ‘Whosoever desires news of the other world should come on the 1st day of May upon the Carraia Bridge, and beside the Arno’. The 2,000 or so who assembled the next afternoon on the Ponte alla Carraia witnessed an unearthly sight. The whole bridge had become a stage for what Villani called a ‘gioco da beffe’,20 almost a pantomime, an enormous representation of Hell, complete with flames, demons and wailing men, all held aloft in boats. And if one can believe Antonio Pucci, author of Centiloquio (written in 1373), the sights of that imagined place were both terrifying and funny because ‘chi piangeva di quello, e chi ridea’. Although Giotto was almost certainly in Padua in 1304 and would not have been able to see this spectacle, which Vasari attributes to none other than the painter Buonamico Buffalmacco, the event suggests that, not unlike some modern filmgoers, his Florentine contemporaries did not find horror and amusement (Villani’s word is ‘sollazzi’) incompatible, an attitude that is paralleled in Giotto’s great mural in the Arena Chapel.
Unfortunately, the celebration ended in disaster. The great weight of the crowd made the bridge collapse, killing many. Villani notes that they got what they came for: news of the other world.
Even Christians of our day are unwilling to dwell on the notion of Eternal Punishment. For Catholics of Dante’s day, it was an underlying feature not only of all theology but also of much of their humour, as may be seen in the grotesque depiction of punishments in Giotto’s Hell at Padua.
The rationalist notion of Hell looks upon the doctrine as a morbid projection, a psychiatric state. ‘We are not melancholy because we believe in Hell, but we believe in Hell because we are melancholy,’ wrote Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, a laicized clergyman.21 Dante, weeping with pity at the tormented melancholy-madness which afflicted both father and daughter, might have thought that the Victorian rationalists had missed the point of the doctrine of Hell. Everyone knows that when he came to write the Inferno, he saw inscribed over Hell’s Gates the words ‘Abandon Hope all ye who enter here’ [Inf. III.9]. It is sometimes forgotten that these words are the culmination of a much longer inscription in which the Gate of Hell explains its purpose to those entering its dreaded portal:
JUSTICE IT WAS THAT MOVED MY GREAT CREATOR
DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE CREATED ME,
AND HIGHEST WISDOM JOINED WITH PRIMAL LOVE.
[Inf. III.4–6, Musa]
No one is in Hell who did not in a sense choose to be there. Each sinner has set his/her own will against God’s will. In His will is our peace – that is the simple secret of the universe which Piccarda Donati tells Dante when he reaches Heaven. The tormented souls in Hell knew it too, with their intellects. But some besetting sin distracted their reason and made them prefer money or power, or their uncontrolled anger, or sexual pleasure, to the virtue which every mind and every conscience can recognize. Virgil is quite clear about the hideous paradox of Hell. The souls whom Charon is transporting across the river Acheron, whether to unbearable heat or freezing ice, are anxious to get there.
Fear has been turned to desire. Disio, desire, is a key Dantean word. Throughout the Comedy, it is his yearning, his desire, which leads him on, not only to see Beatrice, but to see God. It is, in the Dantean way of seeing things, a word to describe the prime motive of a human life. Disio has been perverted. It has overcome a proper fear of Hell. Now, their disio is for Hell itself. [Inf. III.126]. It is the state of mind which we see in an intelligent man who knows that heroin, or alcohol, or erotomania will destroy him, but who sets out upon yet another binge. It is the state of mind reached by statesmen who, having started upon a war with at least some noble motives, are now bent upon killing and destruction for their own sake. The fear which is a proper spur to virtue has been laid aside in favour of a perverted and insatiable longing.
This is a hard vision of humanity. And in Dante’s Hell, there are some hard cases. One of the most pitiable, whom Dante met in a comparatively low degree of Hell, was Guido da Montefeltro (1223–98), the leader of the Ghibellines in Romagna. His life followed a conventional pattern of medieval virtue; and you might have thought that this soldier turned friar, by renouncing the soldier’s armour for the friar’s corded girdle, would have begun to do penance for whatever sins he had committed. But this is not the case. This great aristocrat and warrior spent his early manhood as an excommunicate fighting for the Ghibellines. In 1286, when the whole of Romagna submitted to the Pope, Guido did likewise. There were to be lapses from his obedient position. In 1288 or 1289, he took the leadership of the Pisan Ghibellines and was implicated in one of the most horrible murders. This was when the leader of the Guelf party in Pisa, Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, was betrayed by Archbishop Ruggieri. Ugolino had betrayed his party and allowed Guido da Montefeltro back into the city. But he was rewarded with treachery. Archbishop Ruggieri had Ugolino and his four sons imprisoned in a tower, in what is now the Piazza dei Cavalieri in Pisa. They were given no food or drink.
The passage in the Inferno describing the father’s agony as he watched his sons starve to death is one of the most memorable in the whole poem. As the days pass inexorably, and the children weaken, and the hunger gnaws at Ugolino, he begins to lose his moral sense. Little Anselm calls out, ‘Father, why are you looking at me like that?’ [Inf. XXXIII.51, author]. Ugolino is unable to reply. The next day, as he has begun to chew his own hands in agony, he sees four starving replicas of his own face staring imploringly at his own. In their despair the boys, thinking that his chewing gesture is one of hunger rather than despair, utter the fatal words, ‘Father, you would be in much less pain if you were eating us. It was you who clothed us in this wretched flesh – tear it off again!’ [Inf. XXXIII.61–3, author]. By the sixth day, all the children are dead. Blinded by hunger, Ugolino finds himself crawling through the cell, grabbing at their corpses. Then, with one of those terrible, compressed lines which are so characteristic of Dante’s style, Ugolino says simply, ‘Poscia, più che ’l dolor, poté ’l digiuno’ – ‘Then, hunger had the edge over grief’ [Inf. XXXIII.75, author]. This could mean that he died of a grief which was even stronger than his hunger, but most commentators agree that he ate them. In Hell, Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri are stuck in the same frozen hole of Hell, like a couple of starving dogs. Ugolino, on top, is digging his teeth into the Archbishop’s skull at the point where the brain connects to the nape of the neck. He is holding the skull like a dog with its bone.
It seems a fit punishment for the Archbishop who condemned Ugolino to his terrible fate. But does the father, who weeps with misery as he chews so hungrily in Hell, deserve an everlasting repetition of the torment he underwent in that tower? Modern-day secular courts, social workers and psychiatrists would all plead extenuating circumstances. In so doing they would be depriving Ugolino of the moral freedom which is, in Dante’s moral universe, the most precious gift from Heaven: his free will.
I shed no tear, nor answered all that day
Nor the next night, until another sun
Came out upon the world. When a faint beam
Had to our doleful prison made its way,
And in four countenances I descried
An image of my own, on either hand
Through agony I bit; and they, who thought
I did it through desire of feeding, rose
O’ the sudden, and cried, ‘Father, we should grieve
‘Far less, if thou wouldst eat of us: thou gavest
‘These weeds of miserable flesh we wear;
‘And do thou strip them off of us again.’
Then, not to make them sadder, I kept down
My spirit in stillness. That day and next
We all were silent. Ah, obdurate earth!
Why open’dst thou not upon us? When we came
To the fourth day, then Gaddo at my feet
Outstretched did fling him, crying: ‘Hast no help
‘For me, my father!’ There he died; and e’en
Plainly as thou seest me, saw I the three
Fall one by one ’twixt the fifth day and sixth:
Whence I betook me, now grown blind, to grope
Over them all, and for three days aloud
Called on them who were dead. The fasting got
The mastery of grief.’ Thus having spoke,
Once more upon the wretched skull his teeth
He fastened, like a mastiff’s ’gainst the bone.
[Inf. XXXIII.50–76, Cary]
The story of Christian theology – it could be said, the whole story of Western thought – has been an everlasting battle between Determinism and some effort at declaring a belief in our freedom to make moral choices. If we are no more than the sum of our DNA, or no more than what the materialist forces of history have made us, or no more than the product of our social environment, then courts of law – let alone Hell – are monstrous engines of injustice; for how can someone be held to account for his behaviour if it is all preordained?
Ugolino, if he is to be allowed the dignity of a Christian soul, is seen as a man who had the choice not to eat his sons – even when he was literally blind with hunger.
And Guido da Montefeltro, who benefited from Ugolino’s fall, and who was an ally of Archbishop Ruggieri? He is in Hell for his part in the murder? No. For Guido repented, and eventually gave up the world to become a Franciscan friar. How is he also in Hell? It will come as no surprise to those who have caught the measure of Dante’s prejudices, to know that Guido is in Hell because of his association with Pope Boniface VIII.
‘A man of arms at first, I clothed me then
In good Saint Francis girdle, hoping so
To have made amends. And certainly my hope
Had failed not, but that he, whom curses light upon,
The high priest, again seduced me into sin.
And how, and wherefore, listen while I tell…
[Inf. XXVII.64–9, Cary]
The damnation of Guido – in Dante’s imagination at least – is one of the harshest things in the Inferno. To all outward appearance, Guido’s repentance was much more than a token adoption of a friar’s habit. He embraced poverty and begged for his food from the public. Given the number of enemies he had made, it is not surprising that he came in for a great deal of abuse, and when he entered the town of Fano and even the asses started to bray at him, the old soldier reasserted himself and he roared in fury, ‘There was a time when I have been round Fano with more hundreds of mounted men-at-arms than there are asses here!’22 Yet it was precisely because his repentance was real, and that he truly was living the life of a penitent friar, that the Pope sought out Guido. Boniface had been having trouble, as usual, with his enemies the Colonna cardinals. The Pope apparently promised Guido absolution in advance of any sin which he might commit in offering advice. This idea of offering conditional absolution in advance of sins committed was not unknown in the medieval Church, but Dante clearly regarded it as moral and logical nonsense. The Pope wanted advice from the holy friar (formerly a brilliant military strategist and Machi
avellian political intriguer) about the pos sible capture of the castle of Palestrina/Penestrino near Rome from the Colonnas. Guido suggested that the Pope should lie; offer the Colonnas an amnesty and then, when he had lured them out of the strong hold, raze it to the ground. Dante’s version of events was confirmed by two other historians of the time, Villani and Francesco Pipini’s Chronicon. The Pope did indeed capture the castle in the manner advised by Guido.
So it is, that when Guido died in the habit of the Franciscan friar, and the holy saint of Assisi came down from Heaven to claim his soul, he was met by a demon, who succeeds in bearing his prey to Hell not out of malice as such, but out of pure logic:
‘No power can the impenitent absolve;
‘Nor to repent, and will, at once, consist,
‘By contradiction absolute forbid.’
Oh misery! How I shook myself, when he
Seized me and cried, “Thou haply thought’st me not
“A disputant in logic so exact!”
[Inf. XXVII.114–119, Cary]
You cannot both will and not will something. That is why Guido perishes through a logical nonsense, and why, logically, if you believe in freedom of the human will, and in God, you must believe in the possibility of the human being turning away from God eternally. Hence the logic of Hell.