8 Dante’s Work and First Interpreters
Four Periods in Human Life.—In the Convivio (iv. 23, 24) Dante represents human life under the image of an arch, ascending and descending. For the perfectly-natured the summit of this arch is in the thirty-fifth year. Life is divided into four ages, like the four seasons of the year. Adolescence, Adolescenza, the increase of life, ascends from birth to the twenty-fifth year; Youth or Manhood, Gioventute, the perfection and culmination of life, lasts from the twenty-fifth to the forty-fifth year; Age, Senettute, descends from the forty-fifth to the seventieth year; after which remains Old Age, Senio, the winter of life.
Three Periods in Dante’s Work.—Dante’s work falls into three periods, representing to some extent Adolescenza, Gioventute, Senettute. The first is that of his “New Life,” the epoch of the romantic worship of Beatrice in her life and after her death, in which the youthful poet beheld many things by his intellect, as it were dreaming, quasi come sognado (Conv. ii. 13). This period comprises the Vita Nuova, with the lyrics contemporaneous with it, and closes in the promise “yet to utter concerning her what hath never been said of any woman.” The second period corresponds to Dante’s second age, or Gioventute; it is the period in which the image of Beatrice in the citadel of his mind is somewhat obscured by the tempests of passion and political turmoil, and for a while had become less paramount when her poet directed his thoughts to the service of philosophical research. Joined to the first period by the canzone addressed to the angelic movers of the sphere of Venus, it includes the greater part of the collection of lyrics (Canzoni, Bellate, Sonnets) included in the Rime or Canzoniere; the two unfinished prose treatises which expound the mystical meaning and technical construction of these canzoni, the Convivio and the De Vulgari Eloquentia. The three political letters connected with the Italian expedition of Henry VII. and, most probably, the special treatise in Latin prose on the Empire, the Monarchia, connect the second with the third period. This last period is the period of the Divina Commedia; the return to Beatrice, but now the allegorical Beatrice; the fulfilment of the supreme promise of the Vita Nuova; the result of the labours in art and philosophy which the second period had witnessed, of political experience, and of the spiritual and moral revulsion of Dante’s later years, after the bitter disillusion of the Emperor Henry’s enterprise and failure: “A fruit of sufferings excess.” To this period, subsidiary to the Divina Commedia, belong the letters to the Italian Cardinals, to the Florentine friend and to Can Grande, the Quaestio de Aqua et Terra (if authentic), and the two Eclogues.
In addition to these works, several Italian scholars of high repute have attributed to Dante the Fiore—a rendering of the Roman de la Rose in 232 sonnets—the author of which twice calls himself “Durante.” The editors of the sexcentenary testo critico have wisely excluded it from their volume, and it has been edited as an “appendice dantiana” by Parodi. Also we know of several smaller things of Dante’s now lost: the letters mentioned by Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo; a serventese containing the names of the sixty most beautiful women in Florence, referred to in the Vita Nuova (V. N. vi.), one of his earliest poems; and a canzone on love, of peculiar structure, quoted in the De Vulgari Eloquentia (V. E. ii. 11).
Early Commentators.—No sooner had Dante passed away than his apotheosis began with the epitaph by Giovanni del Virgilio:
Theologus Dantes, nullius dogmatis expers
—“Dante, the theologian, skilled in every branch of knowledge,” and the canzone on his death by Cino da Pistoia:
Su per la costa, Amor, de l’alto monte
—“Up the side, Love, of the lofty mountain.” Boccaccio tells us that it was Dante’s custom to send the Divina Commedia by instalments to Can Grande at Verona, and he adds a striking story of how, eight months after his death, the poet appeared in a vision, “clad in whitest garments and his face shining with an unwonted light,” to his son Jacopo, to reveal to the world where the manuscript of the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso was hidden. It is a fact that in April or May, 1322, Jacopo presented a complete copy of the sacred poem to Guido da Polenta, who was then Captain of the People at Bologna. Straightway the work of copyists and commentators began, above all at Florence and Bologna. The earliest dated MSS. are the Codice Landiano at Piacenza and the Codice Trivulziano at Milan (the latter of Florentine origin), dated 1336 and 1337 respectively. Of commentaries, the first two are those on the Inferno, written in the twenties of the century, by Dante’s son, Jacopo Alighieri, in Italian, and Ser Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli, chancellor of the Commune of Bologna, in Latin. The earliest extant commentators on the complete poem are the Bolognese Jacopo della Lana and the Florentine author of the Ottimo Commento, probably Andrea Lancia; the former wrote shortly before and the latter shortly after 1330. Both wrote in Italian. Pietro Alighieri composed a Latin commentary on his father’s work about 1340, and revised it, with additions, some years later. An important Latin commentary on the Inferno, by the Carmelite Guido da Pisa, dates from the forties of the century. And, before the fourteenth century closed, a new epoch in Dante scholarship was inaugurated by the lectures and commentaries of Giovanni Boccaccio at Florence (1373), Benvenuto da Imola at Bologna (1375-80), and Francesco da Buti at Pisa (1380-90). Of all these earlier commentators, Benvenuto da Imola is by far the greatest; and he unites mediaeval Dantology with England’s cult of the divine poet in the first complete edition of his commentary which was given to the world by Lacaita and William Warren Vernon.
In his proem, Ser Graziolo, or his contemporary translator, strikes the keynote of all reverent criticism of the Divina Commedia, and defines the attitude in which the divine poet and his works should be approached:
“Although the unsearchable Providence of God hath made many men blessed with prudence and virtue, yet before all hath it put Dante Alighieri, a man of noble and profound wisdom, true fosterling of philosophy and lofty poet, the author of this marvellous, singular, and most sapient work. It hath made him a shining light of spiritual felicity and of knowledge to the people and cities of the world, in order that every science, whether of heavenly or of earthly things, should be amply gathered up in this public and famous champion of prudence, and through him be made manifest to the desires of men in witness of the Divine Wisdom; so that, by the new sweetness and universal matter of his song, he should draw the souls of his hearers to self-knowledge, and that, raised above earthly desires, they should come to know not only the beauties of this great author, but should attain to still higher grades of knowledge. To him can be applied the text in Ecclesiasticus: ‘The great Lord will fill him with the spirit of understanding, and he will pour forth the words of his wisdom as showers.’”
Footnotes
1 V. N. xxx. Cf. Moore, Studies in Dante, ii. pp. 123, 124. Del Lungo and others calculate the date as June 19th.
2 Two daughters are mentioned: Antonia and Beatrice. It is probable that they are one and the same person, Antonia being the name in the world of the daughter who became a nun at Ravenna as “Suora Beatrice.” A recent discovery has revealed the existence of a Giovanni di Dante Alighieri, “Johannes filius Dantis Alagherii de Florentia,” at Lucca in October 1308, who would then have been at least fourteen years old. But it seems more probable that the “Dante Alighieri” in question is not the poet. See M. Barbi, Un altro figlio di Dante? in Studi danteschi, v. (Florence, 1922).
3 It is to this conspiracy, as initiating the papal interference in Florentine politics which led ultimately to Dante’s own exile, that the poet alludes in Par. xvii. 49-51, where Cacciaguida speaks from the standpoint of April 1300.
4 See B. Barbadoro, La condanna di Dante, in Studi danteschi diretti da Michele Barbi, vol. ii.
5 Cf. Del Lungo’s notes to La Cronica di Dino Compagni in the new Muratori (tom. ix. pt. ii.), and Luzzatto, La Cronica di Dino Compagni, p. 70, n. 1. It is clear that both Bologna and Siena sent ambassadors, but that Compagni (misled by the name) erroneously supposed Malavolti to have been a Sienese.
6 Rime cxvi.: O. canz. xi. Torraca takes this canzone as written when Dante was in the Casentino in 1311. Boccaccio speaks of an earlier stay of the poet in that region. It should be noted that Del Lungo has argued that Dante, after withdrawing from the active measures of the Bianchi, remained in Tuscany, or near at hand, until the dissolution of the party in 1307, when he may have gone to Verona.
7 We know from the Purgatorio that Dante at some time visited Lucca, where a lady, said to have been Gentucca Morla, made the city pleasant to him. Dante’s words seem to imply no more than an agreeable friendship (Purg. xxiv. 43-45). This visit may have been at an earlier date.
8 Cf. A. Della Torre, L’epistola all’ Amico fiorentino, in Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana, n.s. xii.; M. Barbi, Per un passo dell’ epistola all’ Amico fiorentino, in Studi danteschi, ii.
9 In 1350 Boccaccio was commissioned by the captains of Or San Michele, a religious confraternity at Florence, to convey a sum of money to “Suora Beatrice, daughter of the late Dante Alighieri,” a Dominican nun in the monastery of Santo Stefano degli Ulivi at Ravenna. This Suora Beatrice is mentioned, as no longer living, in a document of 1371. In a document of 1332, the only children of the poet who appear, together with his widow Gemma, are Jacopo, Pietro, and Antonia (of whom we know nothing more). It seems, therefore, probable that Dante had one daughter, Antonia, who, after 1332 (perhaps after the death of her mother), entered religion at Ravenna as Suora Beatrice. See O. Bacci, “Beatrice di Dante,” in Giornale Dantesco, viii. pp. 465-471.