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13 Death
Dante, The Man and The Divine Comedy
For the Medieval faithful, Hell was the place of turmoil, chaos, pain, despair, wretchedness, and a general bad time. The Christians certainly took on these definitions of hell, and used that fear aspect to its fullest.
This early "popular" view of Hell, is vividly depicted in Dante Alighieri's Inferno; it is probably the most recognized non-religious depiction of Hell. Part of a total set of works, known as The Divine Comedy, written from 1307 to 1321, offers us a classic medieval world-view of the afterlife.
It also includes the lesser-known Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Heaven or Paradise). His Rings or Circles of Hell are quite detailed, and he had a spot for just about everyone he knew, including the Pope!
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| Dante Alighieri, painted by Giotto in the chapel of the Bargello palace in Florence. This oldest portrait of Dante was painted during his lifetime before his exile from his native city. |
Dante was born in 1265, between May 14 and June 13. As an infant, Dante may have been originally christened 'Durante' in Florence's Baptistery, and the name Dante could be a shortened version of that name.
He was born into the prominent Alighieri family of Florence, with loyalties to the Guelphs, a political alliance that supported the Papacy, involved in complex opposition to the Ghibellines, who were backed by the Holy Roman Emperor.
These factions fashioned their names after those of opposing factions of German Imperial politics, centered around the noble families the Welfs (Guelfs or Guelphs) and Waiblingen (Ghibellines), but adapting their meaning to the Italian political arena. After the defeat of the Ghibellines by the Guelphs in 1289, the Guelphs themselves were divided into White Guelphs, who were wary of Papal influence, and Black Guelphs who continued to support the Papacy. Dante (a White Guelph) pretended that his family descended from the ancient Romans (Inferno, XV, 76), but the earliest relative he can mention by name is Cacciaguida degli Elisei (Paradiso, XV, 135), of no earlier than about 1100.
Dante's father, Alighiero de Bellincione, was a White Guelph who suffered no reprisals after the Ghibellines won the Battle of Montaperti. This suggests that Alighiero or his family enjoyed some protective prestige and status.
The poet's mother was Bella degli Abati. She died when Dante was 7 years old, and Alighiero soon married again, to Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi. (It is uncertain whether he really married her, as widowers had social limitations in these matters.) This woman definitely bore two children, Dante's brother Francesco and sister Tana (Gaetana).
When he was nine years old he met Beatrice Portinari, daughter of Folco Portinari, with whom he fell in love "at first sight", and apparently without even having spoken to her. He saw her frequently after age 18, often exchanging greetings in the street, but he never knew her well—he effectively set the example for the so-called "courtly love". It is hard now to understand what this love actually comprised, but something extremely important for Italian culture was happening. It was in the name of this love that Dante gave his imprint to the Stil Novo and would lead poets and writers to discover the themes of Love (Amore), which had never been so emphasized before. Love for Beatrice (as in a different manner Petrarch would show for his Laura) would apparently be the reason for poetry and for living, together with political passions.
When Beatrice died in 1290, Dante tried to find a refuge in Latin literature. The Convivio reveals that he had read Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae and Cicero's De amicitia.
When Dante was 12, in 1277, he was promised in marriage to Gemma di Manetto Donati, daughter of Messer Manetto Donati. Contracting marriages at this early age was quite common, and involved a formal ceremony, including contracts signed before a notary.Dante had already fallen in love with another girl whom he called Beatrice. Years after Dante's marriage to Gemma he met Beatrice again. He had become interested in writing verse, and although he wrote several sonnets to Beatrice, he never mentioned his wife Gemma in any of his poems.
Dante had several sons with Gemma. As often happens with significant figures, many people subsequently claimed to be Dante's offspring; however, it is likely that Jacopo, Pietro, Giovanni, Gabrielle Alighieri, and Antonia were truly his children. Antonia became a nun with the name of Sister Beatrice.
Dante, like most Florentines of his day, became embroiled in the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict. He fought in the battle of Campaldino (June 11, 1289), with Florentine Guelph knights against Arezzo Ghibellines, then in 1294 he was among those knights who escorted Carlo Martello d'Anjou (son of Charles of Anjou) while he was in Florence.
To further his political career, he became a doctor and a pharmacist; he did not intend to take up those professions, but a law issued in 1295 required that nobles who wanted to assume public office had to be enrolled in one of the Corporazioni delle Arti e dei Mestieri, so Dante obtained quick admission to the apothecaries' guild. The profession he chose was not entirely inapt, since at the time books were sold from apothecaries' shops. As a politician, he accomplished little of relevance, but he held various offices over a number of years in a city undergoing some political agitation.
Earliest manuscripts
According to the Società Dantesca Italiana, no original manuscript written by Dante has survived, though there are many manuscript copies from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The oldest belongs to the 1330s, almost a decade after Dante's death. The most precious ones are the three full copies made by Giovanni Boccaccio (June 16, 1313 – December 21, 1375, Italian author and poet), in the 1360s, who himself did not have the original manuscript as a source.
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Dante, poised between the mountain of purgatory and the city of Florence, displays the famous incipit Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita in a detail of Domenico di Michelino's painting, Florence 1465. |
Structure and story
The Divine Comedy is composed of three canticas, each composed of 33 cantos (or "canti"):
Inferno (Hell)
Purgatorio (Purgatory)
Paradiso (Paradise)
The first cantica, Inferno, is the most famous of the three, and is often published separately under the title "Dante's Inferno". Here, the poet tells in the first person, of his travels through the three realms of the dead, lasting during the Easter Triduum in the spring of 1300. His guide through Hell and Purgatory is the Latin poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid and the Fourth Eclogue, and the guide through Paradise is Beatrice, Dante's ideal of a perfect woman. [Beatrice was a real Florentine woman whom he met in childhood and admired from afar in the mode of the then-fashionable courtly love tradition.]
Politically: in northern Italy's political struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, Dante was part of the Guelphs, who in general, favored the Papacy over the Holy Roman Emperor. Florence's Guelphs split into factions around 1300: the White Guelphs, who opposed secular rule by Pope Boniface VIII and who wished to preserve Florence's independence, and the Black Guelphs, who favored the Pope's control of Florence. Dante was among the White Guelphs who were exiled from Florence in 1302 by the Lord-Mayor Cante dei Gabrielli di Gubbio, after troops under Charles of Valois entered the city, at the request of Boniface and in alliance with the Blacks. The Pope said if he had returned he would be burned at the stake. This exile, which lasted the rest of Dante's life, shows its influence in many parts of the Comedy and it may explain why Dante placed the Pope into his depiction of Hell!
Following, are three pages, each describing a section of Dante's Afterlife presentations.