Folco Portinari was then a man in his prime and one of the most truly admired individuals in Florence, “a citizen of great distinction, and possessed of many talents” in Boccaccio’s judgment, a man “in the highest degree good” in Dante’s. Portinari would serve two terms in the Signoria, as a judicious member of the city government. But beyond that, he displayed a generosity of spirit rare indeed in a Florence so characterized by pugnacity and greed. He was tireless in his support of the sick and the needy, and even of stray animals. In 1285, after several years of planning, he began the construction of a hospital, on family lands just outside the walls, specifically for the poor. It opened in 1288 and was dedicated to Santa Maria with the name of Santa Maria Nuova. (It is today one of the city’s leading hospitals, and the current Via Portinari angles up to it from the Corso.)
Monna Tessa, who had taken care of Beatrice as a child, was put in charge of the nursing, and she brought together a corps of oblates, religious women dedicated to the service of the sick, the first such nursing staff on record. The creation of Santa Maria Nuova was a truly memorable act in the epoch; and it is not surprising that, as Dante would write, Beatrice wept so bitterly upon the death of her father in 1289.
Portinari was married to Clia de’ Caponsacchi, whose family had owned vast estates in Pagnolle, atop a hill overlooking the Alighieri farm. The Caponsacchis came to Florence in the twelfth century (Cacciaguida once more supplies the date) and built themselves houses near the mercato vecchio, in the San Piero Maggiore section. The Portinaris had ten children, among them five daughters, of whom Beatrice was the eldest.
In the Vita Nuova, the remarkable blend of reminiscence and poetic forays put together in the early 1290s, Dante tells of his first glimpse of Beatrice, she being at the start of her ninth year, as he calculates, and he near the end of his. “She appeared humbly and properly dressed,” he remembers, “in a most noble color, crimson girded and adorned in the manner that befitted her so youthful age”—adorned, it may be supposed, with a wreath of flowers suitable for the occasion and for her youth. It was then that the boy’s entire being yielded to the supreme power of Love, in the poet’s later idiom.
Following Love’s command, Dante sought out Beatrice “many times in my childhood”; sought her out in the walkways of the sestiere and even more in the little church of Santa Margherita, the parish church of the Portinaris, where Beatrice came to pray with her mother and Monna Tessa, almost every morning. Here Dante could sit not ten feet away and gaze at her in silent ardor. Gradually, he came to see in her “such noble and laudable bearing that of her could certainly be said those words of the poet Homer: ‘She seemed no child of mortal man but of God.’”
With the passing of days, Dante’s rudimentary education went forward, in a local school perhaps, and sometimes with a private tutor. He evidently read Priscian, the sixth-century Latin grammarian (he puts Priscian in Hell alongside Brunetto Latini and the other sodomites, but this may be in part a case of mistaken identity), as well as a book of moral instruction that he learned by rote, the fables of Aesop, and a treatise on polite behavior. The medieval Latin he was introduced to proved a hindrance rather than a help to the reading of Virgil, Cicero, and Boethius a decade afterward, under the guidance of Latini. But Dante absorbed everything—philosophy, theology, literature, history—and forgot nothing; and his visual imagination was being stirred constantly by wanderings in the interiors of the great churches of Florence and to the bridges and the distending vistas of river and hills that they afforded.
There seems to have been no question at any time of a formal engagement between Dante and Beatrice Portinari. Such matters were entirely the province of the parents, and the Alighieris and Portinaris had other plans. On February 9, 1277, one of the few dates in Dante’s early life that can be established with precision, Dante was formally betrothed to Gemma Donati, the daughter of Manetto Donati. Dante was not yet twelve; Gemma was about ten. But it was a binding contract of marriage; breaking an engagement was a major offense in Florence, and, as we have seen in the case of Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, could lead to murderous revenge and civil violence. A ring was placed on Gemma’s finger; and she brought to the ceremony a dowry described as twice the customary amount.
It was a large sum, but rather modest in view of the enormous wealth of the Donati family. It had made its name as early as 1065 by founding a hospital near the church of San Piero Maggiore (it was later transferred to the Vallombrosa hills). The Donatis were generous patrons of the parish churches of San Martino and Santa Margherita. Their lordly houses and towers dominated the Corso, and one of their houses shared a rear wall with the house in which Dante was born.
Sheer proximity of property and residence was most likely a prime reason for the betrothal. In addition to being next-door neighbors in Florence, the Donatis and Alighieris owned adjoining agricultural territory in Pagnolle; Dante and Gemma could have waved to each other many a time across the fields. And there was already a family relation of sorts: Manetto’s grandfather Uberti, the founder of that branch of the clan, had married one of the daughters of Bellincione Berti and was thus a brother-in-law of Alighiero I, Dante’s great-grandfather. (According to Cacciaguida, Uberti was much displeased that Berti then gave him one of the contemptible Adimaris as another brother-in-law.)
Manetto Donati was a kindly individual, ready to help out financially at later moments. His daughter Gemma was a serious, steady girl, so one gathers, nice-looking if not of such beauty as to make the pulse throb. Some eight years after the civil contract was signed in 1277, there would be a religious ceremony, and the young couple would take up their life together. Dante never once mentions his wife Gemma in any of his writing, nor are there any sly hints of domestic discontent. On the purely literary level, Gemma Donati may be said to have supplied Dante with an essential requirement in the troubadour tradition that he would soon be following poetically: a faithful wife to make it impossible for him to do anything vis-à-vis his loved one except to look at her with hopeless longing.
THREE
Love, Poetry, and War: The 1280s
NINE YEARS AFTER Dante first beheld Beatrice, and again on the first of May, in 1283, the young woman actually spoke to him. With two other ladies “of greater years,” Dante says in the Vita Nuova, Beatrice was passing along the street; she looked up to where Dante was standing frozen to the spot. “In her ineffable courtesy ... she greeted me, such that I then seemed to see all the terms of beatitude.” Feeling thus wholly blessed, Dante went home and fell asleep. In his dream he saw the figure of Love, his lord and master, holding in his arms the lady who had just greeted him, “naked except that she seemed to me wrapped in a crimson cloth.” In one hand Love held Dante’s heart, which he gave to the lady to eat, after which he broke into bitter weeping and, with the lady in his arms, seemed to ascend to heaven.
When he had recovered himself, Dante wrote a sonnet about the dream-experience—he had already, he observes, had some self-taught practice in “the art of saying words in rhyme”—and sent copies of it around the city to the fedeli d’Amore,with whom Florence was packed: devotees of the lord of Love, who wrote poems to their master and recited them in little gatherings all over town.
The sonnet began:A ciascun alma presa egentilcuor
[To every captive soul and gentle heart]
It went on to invite his readers to give their own views on the event being described. Then Dante set forth his dream, from the appearance of Love to his departure, weeping, bearing the lady in his arms. To this missive there were many replies, with as many different readings of the vision. “Among the correspondents,” Dante says, “was one whom I call first among my friends.” This was Guido Cavalcanti, who sent along a sonnet beginning:Vedeste, al mio parere, omne valore
[You saw, in my opinion, all worth]
Having seen the lord of Love, the sonnet implies, Dante had seen all that was best, all the moral and intellectual virtues bound into a single figure. I
t was a handsome tribute, coming from the individual who was regarded as the most brilliant Florentine poet writing in the “new style,” and one of the city’s most striking personalities.
Guido was the son of Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, with whom Dante holds a faltering conversation down in the sixth circle of Hell (Inf., x, 52-57). Cavalcanti, being punished as a heretic, rises up from his fiery tomb next to Farinata degli Uberti, the brave Ghibelline. It is a suitable place for him, since his son Guido had married the daughter of Farinata, in one of the several betrothals that aimed, without much effect, to lessen the tension between Guelph and Ghibelline families. Cavalcanti had been a rich and good-looking man, with a large house near the mercato vecchio in San Piero Maggiore. To Dante, he asks piteously about Guido, “Where is my son, and why is he not with you?” Dante hesitates to answer. The pilgrim knew, in 1300, that Guido had been exiled, partly through Dante’s own act (as will be described); the poet, writing ten years later, knew that Guido would be back in Florence and dead of malaria before the year was out.
Guido Cavalcanti was about ten years older than Dante and, astutely recognizing the remarkable talent of the eighteen-year-old, became as it were an older brother, both poetically and personally, to Dante. Their friendship flourished through continuing exchanges and conversations. There came a moment when Dante addressed one of his most enchanting lyric poems to Guido and their fellow Tuscan poet Lapo Gianni, “Guido i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io...” Guido, I wish that Lapo, thou and I
Could be by spells convey’d, as it were now
Upon a barque, with all the winds that blow
Across all seas at our good will to lie.
They would sail free of human cruelty and spite, the sonnet continues (in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation), and the wizard who had set them on their magic journey would see to it that their adored ones were present, and they would not “talk of anything but love.”
Dante also speaks admiringly of Lapo Gianni in De Vulgari Eloquentia. Tuscans generally, he says there with unrepressed savagery, “are imbecilic in their language,” and yet a few have attained excellence: “Guido, Lapo and another” —that is, himself—“all from Florence, and Cino da Pistoia.” The last-named was another and younger poetic correspondent and a jurist in the making.
Dante’s father died (in the early 1280s), close to the time when Dante’s spirits were being kindled by Beatrice’s courteous greetings and by the flurry of poetic composition and exchange that followed. Dante, now an orphan (with a stepmother), immediately took charge of his father’s slim business affairs, as a first step selling the letters of credit the older man had held for outstanding loans. Dante was, for the moment, in funds.
But Dante quickly found another father, a figure of incalculably greater importance to him culturally, politically, and humanly than Alighiero II. This was Brunetto Latini, in many respects the key figure and certainly the representative man in the richly productive history of Florence from 1266, when the Guelph party took command after the victory at Benevento, until his death in 1294. This is the man whose “dear and kind paternal image”—so the poet tells him when they meet in the seventh circle of the Inferno—was fixed in his mind and his heart. Latini, in turn, addresses Dante in a kind of tender grief as “my son.”
Latini, born around 1220, was already a citizen of renown when in 1260 he was sent on a political mission to King Alfonso of Castile. On his return journey, at Roncesvalles, he met a scholar from Bologna of whom he asked for news from home. The scholar told him of the massive Ghibelline victory at Montaperti, saying, as Latini would put it, that the Guelphs were driven from the city and that “the losses were great in imprisonments and death.” Latini thereupon settled in France for six years, directing his energies to philosophy and literature. He composed the Livres dou tresor, a vast encyclopedic work written in French and long held in high esteem by French readers, and the Tesoretto, an allegorical excursion composed in Italian. He also completed a translation into Tuscan Italian of Cicero’s rhetorical treatise De Inventione and a translation of Aristotle’s Ethics. With these and other achievements, Brunetto Latini brought classical literature into the world of thirteenth-century Florence.
He was back in Florence within weeks of the Guelph victory in 1266, and from that moment on he was a leading voice in the city’s politics and culture. He became senior advisor to the Guild of Judges and Notaries in 1272, was for a period the chief notary in the city (the indispensable man in any important urban transaction), and served on several missions to foreign potentates.
For Dante and others in the literary community, Brunetto Latini was a true role model: the man of letters who was energetically active in public affairs and for the welfare of the city. He was a “great philosopher,” in the sage judgment of Giovanni Villani, Florentine chronicler and friend of Dante; and he was the “fat-remover” (disgrossatore) from the bloated writings of the Florentine bureaucrats—a crucial role, then as always; and he taught them the arts of “speaking well and guiding and ruling the republic.”
Latini played an important part in transforming Florence into something not very far from a republic. The immediate process began in 1279 with a visit to Florence by Cardinal Latino Malebranca, the learned and skillful nephew of Pope Nicholas III, the author of the grandly solemn hymn Dies Irae, and a severe moralist who chastised the Florentine women for their gaudy apparel. With the laudable aim of restoring peace in Florence, he urged the return of the Ghibelline exiles and even held large open-air meetings at which leading figures from both parties knelt on the ground and kissed one another on the mouth. Among the Guelph participants were Guido Cavalcanti; Dante’s father-in-law, Manetto Donati; and Brunetto Latini.
The accord, such as it was, did not last very long. The Guelphs, settled in power, were proving no less vindictive and violent than the Ghibellines had been. But next, a number of enlightened citizens, Latini conspicuous among them, moved to create an urban authority quite independent of both warring factions. It would consist of selected representatives from the merchant class—that is, from the guilds of trade that, as mentioned, had been coming into prominence for some time. There were now twenty-one guilds across the city: major (bankers, wool makers, judges, and others), medium (bakers, shoemakers, and the like), and minor (hotel keepers, armor makers, and so on). Power was invested—this was the key feature—in three priors, elected for a period of three months, and during that period, the ruling authority, the Signoria, in Florence.
The three priors were housed in the tall rugged Tower of the Castagna so that, in the phrase of a contemporary observer, “they might be free from the threats of the potenti,” the jealous nobles and men of wealth. The Torre was next to the Badia and directly across from the home of Dante Alighieri. The first priors entered the Tower in 1282. Brunetto Latini was one of the three in 1286.
The time would come in the mid-1290s when Dante would seek to fill the shoes of his departed master (who died in 1294). But in the 1280s, the influence of Latini showed mainly in the expansion of what might be called Dante’s cultural horizon, as the younger writer began to read and absorb the works of Cicero, Boethius, and finally Virgil. Latini’s aesthetic impact on Dante’s poetry, meanwhile, was not very great; and Dante in these happy years was mainly occupied with his ongoing courtship of Beatrice Portinari and the poetry it engendered.
That courtship took several bizarre turns, if we accept Dante’s account of the affair in the Vita Nuova, as, on balance, we probably can. One day, Dante records, Beatrice was seated in her usual pew in Santa Margherita, with Dante stationed nearby. Halfway between them was another “gentle lady of pleasing aspect” who kept staring at him; and Dante heard someone behind him remark that this second lady had obviously “devastated” the young man. Dante immediately played up, with the idea of using the “gentle lady” as a screen (schermo) for his true love. He made such a show of hiding his secret love for the screen-lady that everyone assumed that she was of course his
beloved.
Dante even composed a few “little things in rhyme” for the screen-lady, though he holds back from quoting any of them. The romantic game went on for a goodly stretch, “some years and months” in Dante’s phrase, and at one point he felt such a surge of good feeling toward the screen-lady that he resolved to speak her name openly in a poem, and did so, as he tells us, in a work that sang “the names of sixty of the most beautiful ladies in the city,” those of Beatrice and the screen-lady buried in the inventory.
But there came a day when the screen-lady was obliged to leave Florence and “journey to a faraway city.” Dante, worried that people would be suspicious if he did not make a show of grief, devised a rather prosaic sonnet, which began:O you who along the way of Love
pass by, attend and see
if there be any grief as heavy as mine.
In the Vita Nuova, Dante does not hint at the fact that during this same time—in 1286 or thereabouts—he fulfilled his marriage contract with Gemma Donati, in the traditional religious ceremony in the Church of San Martino del Vescovo. They began their life together in the Alighieri house across the way. Their first child, Giovanni, was born apparently in 1287.
Looking back on his relationship with Brunetto Latini in these same years, Dante declares his gratitude in a teasingly ambiguous phrase during their exchange in the seventh circle of the Inferno (Inf., xv, 82-87). “For in my memory is fixed and now goes to my heart,” he says, bending down reverentially toward the older man—the dear and kind paternal image of you
Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES) Page 3
