Much of what we know of Dante's life is gleaned from his writings, where as often as not, however, his account of what actually happened forms part of an ideal self-interpretation. Born into the minor nobility of Florence (his family, of Guelph allegiance, appears over the years to have suffered a degree of socio-economic decline) in May, 1265, he had a secondary education based on classical and medieval texts, and, as a young man, moved in the company of some of the most cultured and influential figures in contemporary Florence, including the pedagogue and rhetorician Brunetto Latini and the poet Guido Cavalcanti, the latter especially having an important place in the development both of his literary aesthetic and (by way of reaction to Cavalcanti's own emphases in this area) of his philosophy of love.
In 1285 he married Gemma Donati, by whom he had three (or possibly four) children, but his constant muse and inspiration, from before the time of the early Vita nuova [New Life, c. 1294] through to the sublime moments of the Paradiso, was Beatrice (1266-1290), the daughter of Folco Portinari (if Boccaccio's identification of her is correct), whom he first saw when he was nine. Towards the end of 1286 and into the early part of 1287 he was for a time in Bologna where he came under the influence of Guido Guinizzelli, like Cavalcanti decisive for the development of his lyric poetry, and two years later, in 1289, he took part in the battle of Campaldino and in the siege of the Pisan castle of Caprona. In keeping with a provision designed precisely to enable nobles to participate in the commercial and political life of the commune, he enrolled in 1295 in the Guild of Apothecaries (a sort of coterie of those interested in the natural sciences), and in 1300 was elected to Florence's highest municipal office, the Priory, for a period of two months (the statutory term) from June to August. The political situation, aggravated throughout by tension between the Black and White Guelphs (the former, headed by Corso Donati, opposed to popular participation in government), was turbulent, and it fell to Dante and his associates to banish the heads of both parties – including Cavalcanti, who died in that same year – for the sake of civic peace. With the intervention (encouraged by Pope Boniface VIII) of Charles de Valois in October 1301 Corso Donati was in the ascendant, with the result that Dante himself was charged with fraudulence in public office, fined, and sentenced to two years' exile. With his refusal to submit, his property was confiscated and his exile made permanent. For a time he made common cause with other White Guelphs in the same situation, but, disillusioned, he eventually struck out on his own, never, in fact, to return to Florence. From this point on, it becomes difficult to trace his circumstances, those of a wanderer in exile. In 1303 and 1304, he spent some time with Bartolomeo della Scala in Verona and, later, from 1312 to 1318, he was at the court of Can Grande della Scala (a committed Ghibelline and Imperial Vicar), this, probably, being the least unhappy phase of his long exile. In 1315, the Florentines offered an amnesty on the basis of an acknowledgement of guilt and a light fine, but Dante, in a letter addressed to a friend in the city, sounded a defiant note, disgrace and dishonour, he says, – never merited in the first place – being out of the question:
This, then, is the gracious recall of Dante Alighieri to his native city, after the miseries of well-nigh fifteen years of exile! This is the reward of innocence manifest to all the world, and of the sweat and toil of unremitting study! Far be it from one familiar with the ways of philosophy to embark on such a senseless act of abasement and to submit oneself at the oblation like a felon in bonds! […] Far be it from an advocate of justice, after suffering wrong, to pay out to those who have wronged him, as though that were their proper desert. No, my father, not by this path will I return to my native city. If some other can be found, in the first place by yourself and thereafter by others, which does not derogate from the fame and honour of Dante, that will I tread with no lagging steps. But if by no such path Florence may be entered, then I will enter Florence never. What! Can I not anywhere gaze on the face of the sun and the stars? Can I not under any sky contemplate the most precious truths, without I first return to Florence, disgraced, nay dishonoured, in the eyes of my fellow citizens? Assuredly bread will not fail me.
In 1318, he accepted an invitation to be the guest of Guido Novello da Polenta in Ravenna, where he settled with members of his family. In 1321 he undertook a diplomatic mission to Venice on behalf of Guido, but contracted malaria on his return and died in Ravenna, where he was buried, on (as seems most probable) 13 September 1321.
Dante's career as a poet and philosopher or, more exactly, as a poet-philosopher, for the idea is always and everywhere intimately one with the image whereby it is articulated – is conveniently marked out by the vernacular works represented by the Vita Nuova, by the Convivio [Banquet, 1304-1307], and by the Commedia or Divine Comedy (c. 1307-1321; the ‘Divine' is a later addition to the title), and by the Latin treatises De vulgari eloquentia [On Vernacular Eloquence, c. 1305] and Monarchia [Monarchy, c. 1318], each of which answers to a permanent preoccupation in Dante with the deconstruction and reconstruction of his moral and intellectual life in the areas upon which they touch. The Vita Nuova presupposes a long and complex development in the field of vernacular lyric poetry, the tradition in which Dante stands going back by way of the stilnovisti or “new style” poets represented especially by Cavalcanti and Guinizzelli and of the Tuscan or transitional poets represented by Guittone d'Arezzo into the Sicilian school of the first half of the thirteenth century, itself heir to the lyric poetry of Provence. The principal theme in this verse, variously articulated but never (until the time of the stilnovisti) resolved in its complicated substance, was love, both as a subjective inflexion of the spirit and as an object of speculative concern. On the one hand, there was its power to ennoble and to dignify the lover morally, while on the other there was its ability to enslave and ultimately to destroy him. Dante's friend and poetic mentor Cavalcanti inclined to the latter position, love, for him, being a disruptive power of the sensitive soul. Dante, though a beneficiary of Cavalcanti as regards technique, took the opposite view, love for him, as a discourse of the mind, being a principle of renewal or of new life in the obedient subject. This, then, as the title suggests, is the main theme of the Vita Nuova, ostensibly an account of Dante's meeting with Beatrice, of his rebuff at her hands, of his rethinking his whole understanding of love, of its trial in the kindly presence of another woman, and of love's ultimate triumph as a matter, less of acquisition, than of disposition. Consisting as it does of a series of thirty-one poems expounded and analysed in the accompanying prose, the libello or “little book” emerges in this sense, not so much as an exercise in autobiography, as (in keeping with a typically medieval sense of the providential reality and deep significance of the event as revealed through reflection upon it) an essay in affective philosophy, or, more exactly, of the soul's emergence into a new state of affective awareness. The Commedia, as Dante's final and vastly more sustained meditation on the deep structure and finality of love, is as yet a long way off; but some of its most salient themes are here announced in a preliminary fashion, in a manner appropriate to the as yet modest culture of a poet schooled in the ways of a pre-eminently Sicilianizing and stilnovistic tradition of vernacular lyric verse-making.
Following Beatrice's death in 1290 and the composition of the Vita Nuova, Dante continued to experiment in the ways and means of vernacular lyric poetry, the most notable products of this period being a number of moral and allegorical rime and the so-called rime petrose or “stony poems” the former taking up and developing the initiative of Guittone d'Arezzo as a moralist and the latter representing a reaction on the levels both of substance and of style to the elegance and self-possession of Dante's own earlier stilnovistic manner. Each alike form an essential part of the pre-history of the Commedia in its nothing if not resourceful thematic and stylistic profile. But the next major undertaking (major in stemming once again from a characteristic concern in Dante with the intelligibility of self in its historical unfolding) is the Convivio, in part at least a reaction on the part of one jealous of his reputation as a philosopher and teacher to the upheaval of exile. Exile, indeed, enters explicitly into the genesis of the work as Dante gives an account at the beginning of the text of the mortifying experience of being an outcast and wanderer in his own country, the Convivio emerging in this sense as an act of self-vindication on the part of one humiliated by circumstance but prepared to rise to the challenge of misfortune by way of philosophy and pedagogy:
How I wish that it had been the good pleasure of the Governor of the universe that the reason justifying my action! For then others would not have wronged me, nor should I unjustly have undergone punishment, a punishment as extreme as exile and poverty. From the time when the citizens of Rome's most beautiful and famous daughter, Florence, saw fit to cast me away from her sweet bosom – where I was born and nourished until my full maturity, and where, with her gracious consent, I desire with all my heart to rest my weary mind and complete my allotted span – I have made my way through almost all the regions to which this language extends, a homeless wanderer, reduced almost to beggary, and showing against my will the wound inflicted by fortune, which is very often imputed unjustly to the one afflicted. I have indeed been a ship lacking sail and rudder, carried to various ports and river mouths and shores by the parching wind raised by painful poverty; many have seen me in person who perhaps entertained a different image of me in virtue of a certain reputation I enjoyed, so that in their eyes not only do I myself lose in esteem, but all my works, those still to be produced no less than those already completed, are cheapened (Convivio I. iii. 3-5).
What amounts, therefore, to a feast of philosophical wisdom set out for “the many men and women in this language of ours [...] bowed down by domestic and civic care” (Convivio I. ix. 5 and I. i. 4) begins with a large-scale demonstration of the equality of the vernacular to the task in hand, this being followed in the remaining three treatises of the book by a sustained account of Dantes own enamouring with philosophy, with the nature of philosophy itself as love of wisdom, and with an account of gentilezza or nobility as the first of what he evidently intended as a series of moral meditations in the following – in the event unwritten – sections of the text. In fact, the incompletion of the Convivio, like that of the contemporary De vulgari eloquentia, enters ultimately into the interpretation of the text with its various kinds of notional and structural tension, but, for all that, it remains even so Dante's great middle-period work, giving authentic and enthusiastic expression both to his philosophical concerns (at once Platonic and Neo-Peripatetic in character) and to his sense of the power and persuasiveness of the young Italian language in respect of high-cultural discourse.
Belonging to the same period as the Convivio and sharing some of the same linguistic concerns (the emergence of the vernacular both as a means of elevated discourse and as a principle of historical and social identity) is the Latin treatise De vulgari eloquentia. Intended as a comprehensive survey of the vernacular in all its expressive registers but overtaken both by its own structural tension and by the increasingly urgent call of the Commedia as a fresh response to the problems of language and literature generally, and thus incomplete, the treatise is in two parts. Book I offers a broad account of the history and development of vernacular speech from Eden down to its own time, developing as it does so the notion of an Italian language apt in its lexical, morphological and phonological consistency to reflect the mores of the Italian people as a whole. Book II, by contrast, taking its cue from the progressively literary tone of Book I, pursues the matter in terms of the necessities of vernacular verse-making in the high style. Alert, however, to the exclusivism of this programme (to its implicit association of excellence in Italian with the categories of the stilus tragicus or elevated style), Dante appears to have abandoned the project in favour of the more accommodating solution of the Commedia, whatever else it is, a massive affirmation of the young vernacular in all its expressive possibilities.
Belonging probably to the latter part of the second decade of the fourteenth century (for it contains a reference at one point to the Paradiso) is the Latin treatise Monarchia, a response at one and the same time both to the contents of the hierocratic or papalist wing of the political debate in Dante's time and to what might be described as the rationalistic element in his own temperament, his desire as far as may be to confirm the kind of specifically philosophical happiness open to man this side of death. This, at any rate, prompts the vigorously dualistic solution of the third and final part of the book given to a demonstration of the parallel character of papal and imperial authority in the governance of mankind here and now. The first part of the book sets out to show the necessity of a single supreme power on earth in the interest of peace and justice (an emphasis sitting uncomfortably, it has to be said, with most kinds of socio-political development in thirteenth and early-fourteenth-century Europe), while the second seeks to establish the historical right of the Romans in particular to exercise this power (Rome, for Dante, entering as of the essence into the world-historical design as fashioned from beforehand in the divine mind). Carefully but passionately ratiocinative in manner, the Monarchia testifies eloquently to the prophetic energy always and everywhere discernible in this area of his thought and writing, and indeed to the element of imperial and (especially) ecclesiastical reformism conspicuous in the Commedia.
Other texts from Dante's hand include, in the early period, a cycle of sonnets reproducing the substance of the Roman de la rose (the so-called Fiore or Flower attributed by some but not by all scholars to Dante), a number of letters touching both on political issues and, more personally, on the predicament of the spirit in exile, and a discourse delivered in Verona in 1320 on the geological structure of the sub-lunary world, the De situ acque et terre [On the location of water and land]. But Dante's reputation as a poet-philosopher rests supremely on the Commedia, a poem everywhere presupposing the experience of his other works but, in point of scale, of philosophical and theological acumen, and of imaginative intensity, inferrable from none of them. The product of Dante's years in exile, but drawing even so on insights and intuitions constituting between them permanent features of his poetic and philosophical temperament, the poem offers an account, at the literal level, of a journey effected by Dante himself as the stylized protagonist of his own text through the three realms of the afterlife (hell, purgatory and paradise), accompanied in this by a series of guides consisting of Virgil, Beatrice, and, in the final moments of the poem, the mystic theologian Bernard of Clairvaux. At every stage of the journey, the poet-pilgrim meets and speaks with prominent historical, political and literary figures from his own and previous generations, as well as with others known only to himself and indeed for whom no other testimony exists, all of them symbolic in respect of the spiritual condition they embodied in time and to which they now testify anagogically or in respect of their status in the next life. It is, in fact, this intrinsic link between the anagogical and the historical which accounts for the power and persuasiveness of the undertaking generally; for if on the one hand the poem sets out in keeping with Scripture to affirm the centrality of death and resurrection in the experience of every man and woman as called into communion with God, then on the other it seeks once and for all to confirm the intrinsic continuity of the what is and of the what will be of that experience under the aspects of time and eternity respectively. By way, that is to say, of what amounts in the text to a sustained and nothing if not sophisticated typology, not to mention an endless and endlessly resourceful imaginative energy, Dante seeks in the Commedia – somewhat after the manner of a prophet – to confirm the immanence of the eschatological in the existential, the result being one of the most original and one of the most profound poetic and theological utterances in European and in world letters generally.
The history of Dante's reception in and beyond Europe is at every point determined by the circumstances of that reception in respect of their leading ideological and aesthetic preferences. An early tradition of Dante commentary, reaching down into the high Renaissance, concerned itself pre-eminently with the allegorical and erudite content of, in particular, the Commedia, and, in the sixteenth century, with linguistic questions too. To the fore among its earliest readers, though in a manner signalling radical changes in literary taste and aesthetics, were Petrarch and Boccaccio, the latter especially seeing him as the equal of the great classical auctores. Readings of the poet in the early modern and modern period have emphasised by turns his naturalism, his primitivism, his historicism, his political reformism and nationalism, and (over against the monolinguism or stylistic particularity of Petrarch) his plurilinguism or expressive resourcefulness, each successive generation of readers and critics managing in this way to find a Dante congenial to it and favourable to its own leading concerns.
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Citation: Took, John. "Dante Alighieri". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 15 May 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1131, accessed 24 November 2024.]
