by A. N. Wilson
When Dante and Virgil enter the circle of Hell reserved for thieves, they find it is a place haunted by hideous monsters, such as Cacus (Dante makes him into a centaur) who was killed by Hercules. Then there occurs one of those devices most beloved of Dante – recognition. It has been deftly compared5 to Proust’s technique of encountering half-forgotten characters from his early past at a party of the Guermantes, the annoying laugh of a schoolboy being retained in the body of an old man, for example, causing instant recognition. Similarly, after the horror-movie of Cacus the centaur thundering past them, three spirits drift by and Dante overhears one of them ask, ‘Where has Cianfa got to?’ [Inf. XXV.43, author’s translation]. The reader is not given much help by Dante at this point. Certainly, there is no direct explanation that Cianfa is Cianfa Donati, and in a sense there does not need to be a specific explanation. Partly, this is because Dante has here inflicted the grossest punishment possible upon a family so proud of its illustrious name – he has made them nameless. But more than that, he makes them actually into an indistinguishable, writhing mass of monstrosity. One of the unnamed Donati spirits who is asking for the whereabouts of Cianfa realizes that Cianfa has turned into a giant lizard and is squeezing him round the neck and clawing at his thighs. Then the lizard and the man start to turn into one another, their two heads blend together, human arms are formed out of the front claws of the serpent, and the hybrid monster then attacks the other two Donati. In the confusion, it is difficult to tell which spirit is which, and which monster is a man-serpent, and which a serpent-man. Two snake-claws burst out of the man’s penis. The man-serpent lies down, and pushes out his snout, pulls his ears into his head as a snail does his horns. The soul which has turned into a serpent hisses and disappears into the valley. The other transformed monster says, ‘Buoso will go crawling down the road as I have done’ [Inf. XXV.140–41, author’s translation]. Buoso is another Donati – again, contemptuously deprived of his surname. It is one of the most disgusting episodes in the Inferno: stomach-churning, in fact. Hell is the destined home for these nameless Donati. Since the vision is supposed to be happening in 1300, Dante cannot include the gruesome end of Corso in October 1308. Corso achieved his ambition, as leader of the Black faction, and displaced Dante and the Whites. But achieving an ambition in Florentine politics was itself a kind of punishment; he came to learn how much he was detested by his rivals and enemies. The Priors charged him with conspiracy, together with his father-in-law Uguccione della Faggiuola, of conspiring against the liberties of the commonwealth. He was summoned to appear before the podestà, a summons which, needless to say, he evaded. His house was besieged and he attempted an escape on horseback. He fell. Benvenuto, in his commentary on Dante’s Purgatorio, says that Corso’s foot caught in the stirrup and he was dragged along the ground until mercenaries caught up with him and slit his throat.6
Dante was to envisage the brother, Forese, telling us from Purgatory that Corso was more to blame than anyone for the sorry state of Florence, and he foresees his death:
I see him, dragged by the tail of a beast,
towards the valley where sins are not forgiven.
[Purg. XXIV.83–4, author]
Dante makes Corso’s grisly end grislier by giving him the punishment meted out to traitors – he is dragged by the tail of the animal.
Forese Donati, who utters the prophecy, was one of the youths with whom the young Dante developed his passion for literature and his ambition to be a poet. Dante was to find him in Purgatory, making reparation for his gluttony, and so emaciated as to be unrecognizable. It is Forese who flatteringly has a dawning recognition of Dante: ‘Tell me if I see here him who invented the new rhymes which begin, “Ladies who have intelligence in love”’ [Purg. XXIV.49–51, author] – one of Dante’s most celebrated canzoni. Forese himself was a poet, who belonged to the same literary circle as Dante.
He is fully aware of his brother Corso’s vile character, and is able to tell Dante that at least one member of the Donati family – their sister Piccarda – is in Paradise.
Quite possibly,7 Piccarda was friends with her cousin Gemma, Dante’s wife. Florence was divided into six wards or sesti. Gemma, Dante and the other Donati, including Piccarda, all grew up in the same small sesto. Dante was to meet Piccarda again in the Heaven of the Moon among those who had failed to keep their religious vows. She is in Paradise, and she is at peace, so she does not trouble to rehearse with Dante what they both know already – why she had neglected her vows [Par. III.55].
Piccarda Donati entered the Franciscan order of St Clare in Florence. She took the name of Sister Costanza – Constance – the name of the Empress who also appears alongside her in Heaven – heiress of the Kingdom of Sicily and Southern Italy. Marriage was, as we have seen, big business for the eminent families of Florence, and the grandi were reluctant to see their daughters enter religious orders8 and renounce the chance to form alliances with other gangsters. Nor could the teaching of the Franciscans – the insistence upon poverty and the vanity of accumulating riches – have been congenial to the bankers, merchants and mercenaries who made up the city’s elite, any more than their persistent criticism of papal interference in the affairs of the popolo can have recommended itself to the Guelfs.9 The great church of Santa Croce which we see today was begun in 1295, but there was a strong Franciscan presence there before, centred upon a smaller church which was the origin – in the absence of a university at this date in the city – of one of the great philosophical and intellectual schools of medieval Florence. The other was the Dominican community at Santa Maria Novella – but it is striking that whereas 43 per cent of the Dominicans came from the great city families – Donati, Bardi, Cavalcanti, Adimari and so forth – the Franciscans tended not to be so attractive to the native-born. Only 14 per cent of Franciscans at Santa Croce were Florentine born.10 All this is highly suggestive that Piccarda was a Poor Clare (that is, a female Franciscan) by conviction, and against the will of her family.
In 1283 (possibly 1288),11 while Corso Donati was podestà of Bologna, he took it into his head that Piccarda should marry a Florentine called Rossellino della Tosa. Accordingly, he wrenched her from the cloister and made her go through the marriage ceremony. It appears that the marriage was unconsummated and that she died shortly thereafter. Hence her not being accorded a high place in Heaven as she had broken her vows.
Dante’s journey of sanctification is taken with reference to childhood friends and acquaintances – to figures he had known in the streets of Florence since boyhood. From the dreadful end of Corso, and the monstrous, phallic lizard-transformed hissings and snarlings of the Donati in Hell, he stares implacably at the full consequences of deliberately setting the human will towards evil, not good. No one goes to Hell unless he or she has willed it, that is, willed something other than God’s will.
Forese, wit, poet, glutton, Dante’s friend, still has a long way to go in Purgatory before he can say that he has conformed his will to that of God; but he wants to do so, which shows he is not conjoined with the monstrous, scaly penis-eruptions of his kinsmen in Hell. But it is the sister, who tried to live in the Franciscan cloister at Florence, and was dragged out to become a pawn in the ridiculous phallic game of money and violence which was Corso’s lifeblood, it is Piccarda who has understood the simplicity of the secret. St Augustine had begun his Confessions with the recognition that God made us for Himself, and that our hearts are restless until they find rest in Him. Piccarda absorbs this wisdom with one of the most beautiful lines Dante ever wrote: ‘E ’n la sua volontade è nostra pace’ – ‘In his will is our peace’ [Par. III.85, author].
Though Dante was to glimpse this idea in his vision, he was, even within the terms of his own personal mythology, a very long way from realizing it in his youth, where other ambitions – to be a great poet, and to rise to a position of civic importance in his powerful city – vied with his concentrated love of Beatrice as his utmost preoccupations. Peace was a long way in the f
uture, perhaps never attained in his lifetime.
Such were the Donati, the great faction to which the child Dante was politically and maritally attached. He tells us of ‘il gran’ Barone’ – his great enemy; he was to write, as we shall see, skittish rimes to Forese, and he was to canonize Piccarda. But of his wife, Gemma Donati, he would write not one word. Not a word! Inevitably, any reader of Dante is bound to be puzzled by this. How could he, who wrote so much about himself in the Comedy, not even mention that he was allied to one of the most powerful factions in Florence – one that he satirized so mercilessly? How could he not have mentioned the mother of his children? Yet in spite of Gemma being the mother of these children, Dante never tells us, when the tragedy befell him, whether or not Gemma shared his exile.
Boccaccio, whose métier in the Decameron was to write farcical stories about unhappy marriages, made Dante and Gemma into the ill-matched pair of a medieval fabliau, the sort of tale that Chaucer enjoyed.
Accustomed to devote himself by night to his sacred studies, he was wont to converse as often as he pleased with emperors, kings, and all other exalted princes of the earth, dispute with philosophers, and find pleasure with the most delightful poets, mitigating his own sorrows by listening to theirs. But now he could be with them only so long as it pleased his bride, and whenever she wished to withdraw him from such high company, he was obliged to spend his time listening to womanish conversation which, if he wanted to avoid further annoyance, he had, against his will, not only to agree to but to praise. He was accustomed, whenever the vulgar crowd wearied him, to withdraw into some solitary place, and there to speculate what spirit moves the heavens, whence comes the life of all creatures on earth, and what are the causes of things, or brood over strange ideas, or compose verses whose fame should after his death make him live to posterity. But now he was not only deprived of all this pleasant contemplation at the whim of his bride, but he had to keep company with those who are ill-suited to such things. He was accustomed to laugh, to weep, to sing, or to sigh freely, as sweet or bitter passions moved him. Now, however, he either did not dare to do so, or he had to give account to his wife, not only of important things but even of the slightest sigh, showing its cause, where it came from, and where it went. This was because she believed his joy was occasioned by love for someone else, his sadness by hate for her.12
But the truth is that we cannot draw inferences from total silence. Although Dante made an allegory of his whole life, and although his life was changed into a poem, he did not necessarily wish to use every element of his life. Humanly speaking, we sense the plausibility of Boccaccio’s version. How could Gemma not have been distressed that her husband devoted his exile to hymning the glory of another woman?
From the point of view of his poetic career, the more momentous encounter was with another neighbour of his in the sesto of San Piero. The house where Corso, Forese and Piccarda grew up is only a few yards down the street from the family whom the Donati made into their greatest enemies, the Cerchi. And only a few yards further away from that is the Casa Portinari. All the people who are central to Dante’s history, both to his personal tragedy as a failed politician, and to his imaginative life as author of the Comedy, grew up a few blocks away from one another, cheek by jowl in the high-towered via San Martino.
In the Casa Portinari on May Day 1274, Dante was taken by his father to a party given by a wealthy banker named Folco Portinari, where guests included Folco’s daughter, Bice, a common diminutive of Beatrice. (The Portinari were rich. Folco was several times Prior of the city and endowed the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova.) When the food was served, the children ran off to play. Dante, a brooding boy, was arrested by the sight of Beatrice in her bright red dress, with her delicate features and her shy, quiet manners.
There is no parallel in literature for the significance of this sight. Readers might think of the narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu coming upon Gilberte, the daughter of Odette and M. Swann, on one of his childhood walks at Combray; a homelier parallel would be the love felt by David Copperfield for Little Em’ly. But, from the beginning, in Dante’s passion for Beatrice there was something quite extraordinary. ‘At that very moment,’ he tells us, ‘and I speak the truth, the vital spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the most minute veins of my body were strangely affected; and trembling, it spoke these words: Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur michi [Here is a God stronger than I who comes to rule over me]. At that point the animal spirit, the one abiding in the high chamber to which all the senses bring their perceptions, was stricken with amazement and, speaking directly to the spirits of sight, said these words: Apparuit iam beatitudo vestra [Now your bliss has appeared].’13
Some grown-ups remember, others forget, what it was like to be a child. The intensity of feeling – of taste, sight, personal slight, pain of various kinds – is sometimes all but intolerable. It is both an inestimable privilege, and a curse, to fall in love during childhood. It is a curse because the pain is unendurable – and what does a child ‘do’ with such feelings? The child cannot make love as older bodies can. The child can only adore, sufferingly.
At the level on which these things are conceived by callous adults who have either forgotten their childhood or not experienced love during it, all that had happened was that a little boy had formed a crush on a little girl. But it was out of this touching but commonplace happening that Dante was to interpret all his subsequent experiences, all his philosophy of life, and ultimately his idea of God Himself.
Although Dante’s obsession with Beatrice was to become the framework through which he viewed all other experience, we should not suppose that the book in which he first wrote about it, the Vita Nuova (a prose work which we shall discuss in Chapter XI), tells us very much in the way of novelistic or gossipy detail. The city in which the encounters with Beatrice take place is not so much as named in the book. ‘We are never given a glimpse of the city of Florence,’ wrote Professor Mark Musa, one of the best modern Dante scholars and translators, in his essay on the Vita Nuova. ‘Its massive medieval architecture has dissolved; its twisted, busy colourful streets have been reduced to straight lines in space, along which Beatrice or a group of pilgrims passes.’14
The life-changing significance of the encounter seems to force Dante to exclude the sort of detail which the novelist (or the modern reader of Dante!) would look for. Indeed, the two children – his childhood self, falling in love, and the girl-object of his passion – are frozen into symbol immediately by his seeing them in terms of numerological mystery. She would grow up and so would he. She, like Dante, had an arranged marriage – to a wealthy banker named Simone de’ Bardi. But Beatrice and Dante were not sweethearts, or doomed lovers. His love for her was something other.
V
DANTE’S EDUCATION
DANTE’S FRIEND, THE HISTORIAN AND CHRONICLER GIOVANNI Villani, reckoned that there were between 8,000 and 10,000 children in Florence receiving an elementary education at this date. This would mean that Florence had a literacy rate much higher than the medieval European norm of some 10 per cent. The majority of Florentines could read and write – a major contributory factor to its dominance of European commerce and finance.1 Merchants, shopkeepers, even labourers had some education. A century after Villani, 80 per cent of Florentine household heads submitted fiscal declarations in their own hands.2
Dante will undoubtedly have been one of the many Florentine children given formal education. If he had not done so already at home, he would, at school, have learned to write. We do not have any specimens of his handwriting, but Leonardo Bruni, one of his early biographers, had seen ‘certain epistles’, and tells us that Dante wrote ‘with a finished hand, with thin, long letters, perfectly formed’.3 Though they were trained to be literate, Florentine children had – naturally, in those days before printing – few books. To possess a dozen books was to possess a considerable library.4 Edu
cation was perforce largely oral, with much enforced learning by heart. Dante would have begun school at six or seven years old and stayed at primary school until he was eleven. Primary education was in the hands of laity and clergy. When he advanced to secondary education, he probably attended a school run by the Church.
The pattern of secondary education was formal, as we should expect. To Donatus, with his grammar and excerpts from Latin Masters, would have been added the Fables of Aesop and the Eclogues of Theodulus. But he would have been taught only in Italian and basic Latin. Dante never knew Greek. In so far as he read Aristotle in later life, it would have been in Latin translations. He praised Homer but he never read him.
It may well be that he was first introduced to the study of philosophy in his teenage years, however, by Brunetto Latini. Some writers on Dante have spoken as if Brunetto was his tutor either in a formal or informal capacity. This seems rather unlikely. Brunetto was forty-five when Dante was born. He was no mere schoolmaster; rather, he was a celebrated author and a distinguished notary, a magistrate of the Guelf party. It seems unlikely that such a man would have been employed by the Alighieri family as a personal tutor. But he might have been a friend of Dante’s father. Dante regarded him as a master, thinking of him as a dear, kind father-figure [Inf. XV.83]. Interestingly enough, Dante believes it was Brunetto who taught him to believe how man ‘makes himself eternal’ [Inf. XV.85].
Does this mean that, until persuaded otherwise by Brunetto, Dante had not believed in the immortality of the soul? Or does it mean that Brunetto had been one of those early humanists who did not believe in the immortality of the soul, and whose example had persuaded Dante with hindsight that he had been wrong? Or does it mean that Brunetto taught him how to become immortal through fame as a writer?
