Inferno Decoded

by Michael Haag

  THE COUNCIL OF FLORENCE

  Three years after the consecration ceremony to celebrate the completion of Brunelleschi’s dome, the city witnessed an even more resplendent occasion. In the summer of 1439, the leaders of the Greek Orthodox and the Catholic churches met with each other at the Council of Florence, in a desperate effort to unite Christianity, East and West, against renewed aggression by the armies of Islam.

  The Byzantine emperor John VIII Paleologus came to Florence in person at the head of a delegation of more than seven hundred Greeks. Both lay and ecclesiastical, they included the patriarch of Constantinople, bishops from throughout Asia Minor and the Balkans, and numbers of learned monks and secular philosophers. The emperor’s need was to win Western help to save Constantinople and what remained of his empire from the Ottoman Turks. To do that, however, he first needed to meet with the Catholic delegation of several hundred monks, clerks and prelates, led by the pope. Their immediate task was to negotiate and overcome the various theological differences and conundrums that had grown up between the Eastern and Western churches, and, in the course of hundreds of years, helped to drive them apart.

  The sessions of the Council of Florence were held in the church of Santa Maria Novello, and its successful outcome was solemnly announced in the Duomo, beneath Brunelleschi’s dome. But ultimately the council proved a failure, because when the Greeks returned home, their concessions were almost entirely repudiated by local churchmen and the Greek laity. To many in Italy and the West, this seemed a wanton act of suicide. There was a streak of fatalism in the East, however, and in their hour of need they felt an especially strong attachment to their old traditions. What’s more, they knew that this earthly life is merely a prelude to the everlasting life to come, and they were not about to buy safety in this world at the price of eternal salvation.

  GREEKS AND THE FLORENTINE RENAISSANCE

  The historical legacy of the council was nonetheless profound, thanks to the presence among the Greek delegation of the Neoplatonist philosopher Gemistus Plethon, and his follower the Greek Orthodox churchman Basilios Bessarion, who gathered together the most complete Greek library in Italy. To these two men an incalculable debt is owed for the progress achieved by humanism in Italy, and so the full flowering of the Renaissance.

  The story of Florence as the birthplace of the Renaissance can only be appreciated by understanding how the contributions made by Plethon and Bessarion were born out of their despair as they witnessed the dying days of the Byzantine Empire, and their fear that with its passing they would lose their civilisation, their very world.

  THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE

  The term ‘Byzantine Empire’ is a recent invention. It’s a label dreamed up by modern historians to describe the eastern half of the Roman Empire – the half that survived the barbarian invasions and extended from northern Italy, through the Balkans and Asia Minor, into the Middle East and along the coast of North Africa. For centuries its capital, Constantinople, was the largest, wealthiest, most cultivated and learned city in the world. For people of that time, however, there was no need to make up a label; they went on calling it the Roman Empire, and people like Bessarion and Plethon called themselves Romans.

  The Byzantine equivalent of the barbarian invasions in the West came in 632 with the invasion of the Arabs in the East where the native population – overwhelmingly Christian, otherwise Jewish – were persecuted and oppressed. In response, the Byzantines launched a series of crusades. By 975, their armies had liberated Damascus and most of Syria, and all of northern Palestine to the walls of Jerusalem. But within a century they were confronted by a new and vigorous Muslim enemy, the Turks, who not only reconquered the Middle East but overran all of Asia Minor, and stood on the shores of the Bosphorus opposite Constantinople.

  The Byzantine emperor called to the West for help. It arrived in the form of the First Crusade, which recovered Jerusalem in 1099. Successive crusades were despatched as needed; for two hundred years they held back the Muslim advance and protected the Christians of the East. Yet even as Christians in the East formed a united front against the Turks, the Eastern Church in Constantinople and the Western Church in Rome jealously argued the divine inspiration of their increasingly divergent interpretations of Christian practices and beliefs.

  THE ‘TREACHEROUS DOGE OF VENICE’

  Ongoing theological disputes repeatedly led to outright hostilities between the Byzantines and the West. In 1182, a Constantinople mob slaughtered thousands of the city’s Venetian merchant population, along with their wives and their children. They were repaid by the so-called Fourth Crusade (excommunicated by the pope), which allowed itself to serve the interests of Greek pretenders to the imperial throne while at the same time being manipulated by Enrico Dandolo, the doge of Venice, to sack Constantinople in 1204.

  Despite being nearly ninety and all but blind, Dandolo led the attack in person. He died in Constantinople the following year, and was buried in the south gallery of the Hagia Sophia. This is that same ‘treacherous doge of Venice’ who’s mentioned in chapter 58 of Dan Brown’s Inferno, in the clue written inside Dante’s death mask.

  For fifty-six years after these events, the West ruled the rump of the Byzantine Empire as its own prize. It was finally retaken by the Greeks in 1261.

  Enrico Dandolo, the ‘treacherous Doge of Venice’, whose tomb in Istanbul becomes a prime goal in Langdon and Sienna’s quest.

  BYZANTINE RENAISSANCE

  Although for a time Constantinople was again a great emporium, the eastern trade passing through Trebizond on the Black Sea from where it was shipped to the Golden Horn, Black Sea traffic ultimately declined in the face of further Turkish conquests. Meanwhile, in the absence of a Byzantine merchant marine, the Aegean and Mediterranean trade passed entirely into Italian hands, which gave them a hold over the economic life of Constantinople. Already in 1267 the Genoese had established themselves at Galata, on the opposite shore of the Golden Horn, and even the Venetians were soon back in the city itself.

  In 1347 the Black Death struck Constantinople, killing a third of its population. That same year the Serbians seized Adrianople (Edirne), and in 1355 they attempted to take the capital. By then, however, the Ottomans had crossed the Dardenelles into Europe, where in 1363 they took Adrianople and made it the capital of their accelerating empire. Constantinople was threatened on all sides.

  Yet throughout this time, and right up to its conquest by the Ottomans in 1453, Constantinople experienced a brilliant renaissance. This revival in learning had started even before the birth of Dante in the West, and amounted to a greater intensification than ever before in the study of ancient Greek literature, philosophy and science, while in art it expressed a new realism in mosaics and painting. The onslaught of the Turks eventually destroyed the Byzantine Empire, but not before the influence of this Greek awakening spread to the West, stimulating and broadening the Italian Renaissance.

  CONSTANTINOPLE AVANT GARDE

  Something of Constantinople’s final story can be read at the church of St Saviour in Chora, standing close by the Land Walls in the western reaches of the city. The church dates originally from the early fifth century, and has been rebuilt and restored several times. Between 1316 and 1321, a new dome was built over the existing nave, the two narthexes and the parecclesion (funerary chapel) were added, and the whole was entirely redecorated. The man responsible for this work was Theodore Metochites, whose mosaic portrait showing him offering his church to Christ can be seen over the door that leads from the inner narthex into the nave. Rising to the position of Grand Logothete, that is chancellor, under the emperor Andronicus II Paleologus, Metochites became a very rich man and a great patron; the decorations in his church have been acclaimed as the supreme achievement of late Byzantine art.

  Metochites had known more than power and wealth; he was in the words of one of his pupils ‘a living library’, and after the recovery of the city in 1261 he refounded its university. A renowned polymath,
he was among other things an astronomer, a historian, a poet and a philosopher steeped in ancient Greek learning. The Byzantines had never lost sight of their ancient heritage, and throughout their history could as readily quote from Homer as from the Bible. For some among them, therefore, the route to regeneration lay in their classical heritage, in that unconquerable empire of past glory that lay beyond the military conquests of their enemies. Metochites was a classical scholar, and even as he was presiding over imperial defeats at the hands of the Ottomans in Anatolia, and reflecting in his learned essays on the parlous state of Byzantine society, in the mosaics of his church and most especially in the frescoes of the parecclesion he was eagerly patronising work that broke with the static and two-dimensional iconography of Byzantium.

  As throughout Byzantine history, the artists who decorated St Saviour worked anonymously in the service of their patron’s wishes. In this instance Metochites was probably actively inspirational, encouraging a return to the canons of the Hellenistic past, so that the figures in the mosaics and the frescoes are placed in a universe of solidity, space and movement, allowing dimension for the drama of human thoughts and feelings that play in every face and gesture. To this has been added an intensity of colour and emotion, the drama brought to a peak of urgency and resolve in the Anastasis (Greek for Resurrection), the painting in the apse of the parecclesion showing Christ not so much raising the dead as yanking them from their graves. The fresco is conceived and executed with far greater energy than anything attempted by Dante’s friend Giotto, who was commencing the movement in that direction in Italy at that time, but remained for the moment some distance behind the avant garde that surrounded Metochites. The Anastasis is a tremendous leap into life. It is also a precursor of the European Renaissance.

  The Anastasis of St Saviour at the Chora church in Istanbul.

  RESTORING PAGANISM ON THE RUINS OF CHRISTIANITY

  A century after the Anastasis, at the time when the Byzantine emperor John VIII Paleologus was attending the Council of Florence in 1439, his younger brother Constantine was regent at Constantinople. Four years later, Constantine was placed in charge of the Peloponnese, which he ruled from the mountain eyrie of Mistra, a jewel of Byzantine architecture and art overlooking ancient Sparta. With the Turks ravaging Greece, and amid an atmosphere of grim foreboding, Constantine spent his days with the philosopher Gemistus Plethon, originally from Constantinople and one of the most radical thinkers of the century. Plethon had attended the Council of Florence, which confirmed his belief that Christianity offered no solutions; he proposed the salvation of society through a return to the ideals of ancient Greece, supported by a revived Hellenic religion and an ethical system based on Neoplatonic philosophy. He lectured in Florence on Aristotle and Plato, and was influential in Cosimo de’ Medici’s founding of the Platonic Academy, where his aim was to restore paganism upon the ruins of Christianity.

  When John VIII died childless at Constantinople towards the end of 1448, his brother came from Mistra and succeeded him to the imperial throne as Constantine XI Paleologus. But it was already too late, and by May 1453 almost everything was lost; the Turks had tightly surrounded Constantinople and were moving in for the kill. ‘Remember that you are the descendants of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome’, Constantine told his commanders on the eve of Constantinople’s fall, ‘and be worthy of your ancestors’. Hours later, fighting at the city walls, Constantine was cut down and never seen again. His words, wrote Edward Gibbon, had been ‘the funeral oration of the Roman Empire’.

  Plethon did not live to see the end. He died at Mistra in 1452. Twelve years later, his Italian admirers removed his remains to Rimini, ‘so that the great Teacher may be among free men’, and inscribed his tomb with ‘Prince of Philosophers of his time’.

  The greatest monument raised to Plethon and his fellow emigré Greeks, however, was the spirit of humanism in Florence, which was spreading outwards throughout Europe. The city’s fifteenth-century chancellors taught the people that they were the heirs of Rome, and that it was the duty of scholars to immerse themselves in public life. The Medicis, especially Cosimo and Lorenzo the Magnficent, who took their inspiration from Plethon’s lectures on classical literature and philosphy, along with those of Bessarion and other Greeks from the time of the Council of Florence, were devoted humanists, enthusiastic book collectors, passionate patrons of the arts, and supporters of Plethon’s Platonic Academy. Byzantium may have died, but the writings and teachings of ancient Greek civilisation were kept alive by the scholars and refugees who brought their learning to the West, and instilled the spirit of humanism in Italy.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Botticelli and Infernal Art

  The masterpiece before him – La Mappa dell’Inferno – had been painted by one of the true giants of the Italian Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli. An elaborate blueprint of the underworld, the Map of Hell was one of the most frightening visions of the afterlife ever created.

  Robert Langdon, Inferno, chapter 14

  Above all else, we associate Sandro Botticelli with the ethereal beauty of the women in his Primavera, and the sensual awakening of his Birth of Venus. Each painting is about the nature of love, and has as its central figure the goddess of love.

  The name Primavera was given to the first painting by Giorgio Vasari, a student of Michelangelo and himself a painter as well as an architect, although he is most famous these days as the first art historian, author of the Lives of the Artists. Vasari said the painting ‘signifies spring’.

  Botticelli’s Primavera.

  THE STORY OF LOVE

  Primavera is rich in meaning and symbolism. At its simplest, it can be described as being like an episode in a fable by Ovid, a story of metamorphosis.

  Starting with the three figures on the right, the fleeing nymph Chloris is pursued by the amorous Zephyr; the two become one, uniting in the beauty of Flora. Another scene has yet to unfold to the left, among the three Graces, and beyond them the god Mercury, seemingly indifferent. This much is the initial phase in the metamorphosis of love that is revealing itself in the garden of Venus, who surveys the events from the centre of the painting.

  The second painting, Birth of Venus, is less visually complicated, but tells a similar story. The newly born Venus, emerging from a seashell, is moved and inspired by the winds of passion; she expresses the dual nature of love, both sensuous and chaste.

  Dan Brown’s Inferno, however, introduces us to another side of Botticelli, when Robert Langdon encounters the artist’s vision of the underworld. ‘The Map of Hell was one of the most frightening visions of the afterlife ever created’. It is grim, dark and terrifying, Langdon says, ‘unlike his vibrant and colourful Primavera or Birth of Venus’. Langdon goes on to explain that ‘Botticelli’s Map of Hell was in fact a tribute to a fourteenth-century work of literature that had become one of history’s most celebrated writings … a notoriously macabre vision of hell that resonated to this day. Dante’s Inferno.’

  Unfortunately, Langdon and Sienna Brooks have to rush off before the professor can tell us more; Sienna’s apartment is under siege from a detachment of storm troopers and a woman on a motorcycle with spiky hair, all of whom apparently want to kill them. We’re left to find out for ourselves whether it was truly nothing more than a desire to pay tribute to Dante that compelled Botticelli to entirely change the tone and direction of his work, and to descend into the regions of Hell.

  RENAISSANCE UNDERCURRENTS

  For clues about the currents – and undercurrents – that swept through Renaissance Florence, we can turn to another painting, by Giorgio Vasari (1511–74). Painter, architect and writer on the history of art, and friend and student of Michelangelo, Vasari knew everyone in the intellectual and cultural worlds of Florence at the time.

  Commissioned by Luca Martini, a great friend of Michelangelo’s and a member of the Platonic Academy at Florence, the painting shows six Tuscan poets and thinkers gathered in conversation. Although t
hey were not all in fact alive at the same time, they were bound together by a common philosophical outlook. All were humanists, men whose concern was the development of the individual human being, and who were devoted to the revival of ancient knowledge and literature.

  That did not necessarily mean they were opposed to the Church or to prevailing Christian theology, nor that they stood apart from the conservative social order of the time. They were however acquiring and recovering materials from beyond the confines of medieval Christendom in the West, and not only beyond its geographical boundaries but also reaching into the centuries of Greek and Roman civilisation before the advent of Christianity. Their desire was to explore, create and experiment with new things. There could be tension in their activities. And, at times, they were handling dynamite.

  Dante Alighieri sits at the centre of the painting. The Italian Renaissance and the humanist movement could be said to have begun with his epic journey into Hell, guided by the pagan Roman poet Virgil.

  Facing Dante is his closest friend, the poet Guido Cavalcanti (c.1255–1300), whose death could be laid at Dante’s door. During his brief political career, Dante was instrumental in sending Cavalcanti into exile, during one of the many factional disputes that turned Florence from a shared paradise into a living hell. Guido was the son of Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti, an Epicurean materialist philosopher and probably an atheist, who was denounced by the papacy as a heretic, and whom Dante consigns to the sixth circle of his Inferno to suffer eternal torment. Throughout the Divine Comedy, as we have seen, Dante gives every appearance of being ruthlessly faithful to Christian theology and its rewards and punishments.