Dante the Florentine, Part 3

Dante
by R.W.B. Lewis, Ph.D.

(Page 3 of 3)

Drawing on the cultural legacy he had imbibed from Brunetto Latini, Dante came to believe that the city, the città, was the place where men and women could properly live and thrive-if the city were organized, ruled, and shaped in the Florentine manner of the 1280s. Città, in its richest meaning, was a term of utmost value for Dante. He could even imagine Paradise as a città, a heavenly city, and had obviously absorbed the Ciceronian idea, formulated in De Natura Deorum (with which Dante was reasonably familiar), that even the gods were "united in a sort of civic society," so that the entire universe could be thought of as a city of gods and men. And he could find the theme expressed in the opening lines of Virgil's Aeneid, the poem Dante most revered, where Virgil promises that his poem will tell of "a man who suffered much in war until he could found a city."

In his larger vision, Dante conceived of his own mundus as a constellation of well-formed city-states under the ideally balanced leadership of pope and emperor. But Florence was to be the exemplar among the urban centers. With this inspiring thought in mind, Dante served his city in military venture against the Tuscan Ghibellines in the 1280s and took part in civic affairs from about 1295 onward. In 1300 he served a term in the city government as one of the six priors, collectively known as the Signoria; and in its dealing, he became notable for putting the welfare of the commune above all other considerations.

It was another fateful period in Florentine history. The Florentine temper, then as later, was combative; and the Guelphs, so long the city's leaders, fell to quarreling vociferously with each other. In the fall of 1301, actual war broke out between them: between the White Guelphs, now so labeled, represented by Vieri de' Cerchi and oriented toward the merchant class; and the Black Guelphs, led by Corso Donati and favoring the nobility. Dante happened to be in Rome when hostilities began. He was in Siena, on his journey north, in March 1302, when the Black Guelphs summoned him to appear to answer criminal charges. When he failed to show, he was convicted of heinous and wholly trumped-up crimes and condemned to death. Dante never set foot in Florence again.

During his nineteen years of exile, and despite problems of sheer survival in the early period (he was reasonably comfortable later, in Verona and then in Ravenna), Dante became the complete creative writer. He was prolific almost beyond reckoning. In 1304 there came the De Vulgari Eloquentia, a tract on the superiority of the vernacular over Latin for the writing of poetry. Not long after came the Convivio, or "Banquet": a celebration of the mode of long lyric poem called a canzone (song), with Dante offering a number of his own canzones for analysis. Some time after 1308, Dante composed the De Monarchia, another Latin treatise, addressing the ideal relation of empire and papacy, inspired by the appearance of Henry of Luxembourg as the potential pacifier and uniter of Italy. But prior to that, Dante had launched upon his major enterprise, the three-part poem he simply called the Commedia, the term for him referring to a work that begins in misery and ends in happiness: from the souls in torment in the Inferno to the souls in blessedness in Paradise. But throughout, it is the voice of Dante the exiled Florentine that we hear.

The note is struck in the De Vulgari Eloquentia: "Of all who in this world are deserving of compassion, the most to be pitied are those who, languishing in exile, never see their country again, save in dreams." The Commedia, to which the adjective Divina was affixed two centuries afterward, is, all things considered, the greatest single poem ever written; and in one perspective, as has been said, it is autobiographical: the journey of a man to find himself and make himself after having been cruelly mistreated in his homeland. It is also a rhythmic exploration of the entire cultural world Dante had inherited: classical, pre-Christian, Christian, medieval, Tuscan, and emphatically Florentine. And it is the long poetic tribute to Beatrice Portinari which Dante promised, at the end of the Vita Nuova.

While completing the Commedia in Ravenna, in 1321, in a passage at the start of Paradiso xxv, Dante voiced his increasingly dreamlike hope of a return to his city:

Should it ever come to pass that the sacred poem
To which heaven and earth have set their hand
So that it has made me lean through many a year,
Should overcome the cruelty that shuts me out
From the fair sheepfold where I used to sleep,
A lamb, foe to the wolves who war upon it
With a changed voice now, and with changed fleece,
I will return a poet, and at the font
Of my baptism I will take the laurel crown.

By 1321, the first two parts of the Comedy had been transcribed and sent in circulation for some years, and Dante was being acclaimed through much of Tuscany as its greatest poet. But the Florentine authorities did not soften toward him, and the imagined ceremony of coronation at the baptismal font in San Giovanni never took place. Dante died on September 14, 1321, in Ravenna, and was buried there.

The first sign of official acceptance did not come until 1373, when the Signoria granted a petition, urged on it by a number of citizens, to permit Giovanni Boccaccio to offer a series of lectures on Dante's life and works. Boccaccio was the greatest and most influential admirer of Dante in his generation. The Decameron, like Boccaccio's other writings, is thick with allusions to stories and passages in the Comedy; Boccaccio also transcribed and composed a commentary on the poem. In the early 1350s, he compiled the first biography of Dante; it remains a unique and indispensable source. Boccaccio was Tuscan-born, in 1313, and in his early years he could listen to tales and legends about the still living Dante Alighieri. In later decades-Boccaccio spent a considerable period in Naples but returned to Florence around 1340-he made a point of consulting people who had known Dante, including literary associates and followers. After 1345, Boccaccio lodged in the home of Lippa de' Mardoli, the second cousin of Beatrice Portinari, who could tell Boccaccio a great deal about Dante's youthful passion.

Boccaccio thus addressed his cultivated and attentive audience with an easy authority. The lectures began in late October 1373, and after an introduction at once reverential and spirited, in which Boccaccio spoke of Dante as "a very great poet" to whom all honor was due, he began to sketch out Dante's life, beginning with his ancestry. He told of the Eliseo clan, one member of which had come from Rome to Florence in earliest time and had settled there. Into this family, with the passage of years, Boccaccio continued, "there was born and there lived a knight by the name of Cacciaguida, in arms and in judgment excellent and brave." In his youth this knight's elders gave him as a bride "a maiden born of the Alighieri of Ferrara...."

© June 2001, Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

R.W.B. Lewis, professor of English and American studies at Yale University, is the author of Edith Wharton: A Biography, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bancroft Prize. His other books include The City of Florence, The Jameses, and American Characters. He most recently was given the award for lifetime achievement as a biographer by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.