Dante in Love

by A. N. Wilson

  The significance of Beatrice in his life did not remain static, however. His love for her did not burn with the same ecstatic heat from the moment he saw her until the moment he began to write his Comedy with Beatrice as its focal point. The reader of Dante gets used to holding in the head several modes of perceiving, several ways of taking a hold of experience. Cruder minds will want to say that Beatrice ‘stands for’ theology, or the life of grace, and therefore ‘can’t be’ real, or cannot be Beatrice Portinari, or that her identity is unimportant. Another form of crudity will want to establish the biographical ‘facts’ ‘behind’ the poem. Neither of these approaches is quite right. And, even for a modern mind unused to the allegorical frame of mind which came naturally to medievals, nor is such rigidity true to experience. Look back at the truly significant events and people in your own life. Do they remain static? Or do they not, rather, change all the time? Your memory of them is creative, changing them, as the years pass, and investing them with significances which perhaps you did not notice at the time. This is especially true of the dead.

  So it is with Beatrice. At the end of the Vita Nuova, Dante quotes his own sonnet ‘Oltre la spera che più larga gira’:

  Beyond the sphere that makes the widest round,

  passes the sigh arisen from my heart;

  a new intelligence that Love in tears

  endowed it with is urging it on high

  [VN XLI, Musa]

  He tells us that after he had finished writing this poem, he received ‘a miraculous vision in which I saw things that made me resolve to say no more about this blessèd one until I would be capable of writing about her in a nobler way’ [VN XLII, Musa].

  When did he write these words? Did the original Vita Nuova have a different ending? We shall discuss this in the next chapter. The paragraph sits oddly beside what has happened only a few pages before. He has told us that Beatrice has, for a time, actually passed out of his mind. Another love has come to him.

  Sometime afterward, when I happened to be in a place which recalled past times, I was in a very pensive mood, and I was moved by such painful thoughts that I must have had a frightening expression of distress on my face. Becoming aware of my terrible condition, I looked around to see if anyone were watching me. And I saw at a window a gracious lady, young and exceedingly beautiful, who was looking down at me so compassionately, to judge from her appearance, that all pity seemed to be concentrated in her.

  [VN XXXV, Musa]

  XI

  THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY

  WHEN HE SAW THE LADY AT THE WINDOW, DANTE SAID TO HIMSELF, ‘It must surely be true that with that compassionate lady there is present most noble Love.’

  The death of Beatrice meant, for Dante, a new life was to begin. In one sense, this involved a man in his mid-twenties taking stock of his life so far, and trying to come to terms with the loss of a woman he loved; trying to come to terms with not only her death, but the fact of death, which had now taken from him his father, his mother and his ideal woman. But the crisis of Beatrice’s death was a profound and complex one which involved Dante’s entire being, his whole sense of self. Some of these things are talked about in the book he wrote, called La Vita Nuova. Some of these things, significantly, are not mentioned in the text. Other women apart from Beatrice cross the pages of the Vita Nuova, and in particular One Other Woman, unnamed. This donna gentile – gentle or noble woman (it is a phrase he has also applied to Beatrice) – is sometimes spoken of as the Lady of the Window, because of the way in which he speaks of her.

  He speaks of a period of grief which extended a year beyond Beatrice’s death – so we are here in 1291 or 1292. Sentimentalists, particularly bourgeois Victorian ones, have wanted this new ‘gracious lady’ to be Dante’s wife Gemma. The factor which would count in favour of this reading is actually not a sentimental one. It is that, by working backwards from the dates in Gemma’s mother’s will, made in Florence on 17 February 1321, we can work out that Gemma began to give birth to Dante’s children in precisely the year after the death of Beatrice. It was between 1291 and 1296 that Gemma and Dante had their children. Dante certainly had three children – Pietro, who grew up to be a lawyer, Iacopo, who was a priest in later life, and Antonia. Two other children are named. One is Beatrice – who was eventually a nun in Ravenna; but it is now generally believed that Sister Beatrice, of the convent of Santo Stefano degli Ulivi, was the name in religion taken by Antonia Alighieri. Another possible child is a son called Giovanni. It was only in 1921 that a legal document came to light – the witness to a commercial transaction in Lucca, signed on 21 October 1308 by ‘Iohannes f[ilius] Dantis Alagherii de Florentia’ – Giovanni, son of Dante di Alighiero of Florence. We shall never know for certain whether this was Dante’s son, but if so, he named his three sons after the three Apostles who saw Christ in His Transfiguration, the three saints who, when Dante reached Paradise in his Comedy, questioned him about Faith, Hope and Charity. There would be a neatness about this.1 In any event, no one could accuse Dante, in the years following Beatrice’s death, of treating his wife as if she was his sister, as he slightly boorishly accused the Donati men. The celibate St Thomas Aquinas took the view that physical intercourse causes a submergence of the rational faculty.2 But there is no reason for the married Dante to have thought the same. Beatrice – Love-on-a-pedestal, the object of Courtly Love – makes an apt emblem of Theology, the love for One whom, as Scripture says, no one has ever seen. The wife, the figure with whom he can literally get to grips, makes an appropriate allegory-figure for secular Philosophy, for Reasoning. The years of discovering philosophy could easily have coincided with the early years of his married life. And – who knows? – the Lady at the Window could easily have been his wife. When he makes women the emblems or figures of abstract entities in his work – Beatrice = Theology/Grace, or the Lady at the Window = Philosophy – we are not to suppose that Beatrice was especially pious or the Window Lady a would-be philosopher. The allegorical weight makes them correspond much more to his own thoughts and feelings than to their characters, which are barely sketched at all. Mention has already been made of the fact that Beatrice in the Vita Nuova inhabits an unnamed city. If he does not even name his native city, it is perhaps not surprising that he does not name his wife (whether or not she suggests the Lady at the Window). Dante is not concerned in his writings with his married life, and it will always remain unimaginable. The tempests of his emotional life, his ex-marital life, do, however, become the subject of his art, now intensely private, now involved in the most extraordinary way with all the public events of the day; now bound to a few streets and windowsills of Florence, now spread across courts, battlefields and papal curia; now rooted in earthiness, now soaring through the worlds beyond, through Hell, Purgatory and the seven Planetary Heavens and beyond.

  Writing about the Lady of the Window, or Donna Gentile, some twelve or fourteen years later (probably between 1304 and 1307), in the unfinished discourses which he entitled Il Convivio (The Banquet), Dante says that the Lady, who represents Philosophy, displaced Beatrice in his affections. And given the date – 1291 – it looks likely that she was one and the same person as his wife.

  Whether the Donna Gentile was Gemma, by whom he became erotically obsessed (as she certainly seems to be when she appears at the window for the first time in the Vita Nuova), or whether she is only an allegory or whether she is both, the displacement of Beatrice comes as rather a shock. Indeed, most readers of Dante, who know only the Comedy, never open the pages of Il Convivio, and would probably be incredulous that such thoughts occur in his work. Surely the fact which ‘everyone knows’ (everyone who has not read him, that is) is that Dante fell in love with Beatrice and went on loving her devotedly for the rest of his life?

  But, eventually, he tells the readers (or audience, if they were lectures) of the Convivio discourses, after about thirty months, the thought of the new lady has driven all other thoughts from his head [Conv. II.xiii] – though he
re he is saying, in effect, that what was so all-embracing for him was not a new love-object, but the thing she represented – the study of philosophy. The Donna Gentile ‘is’ Philosophy, just as Beatrice ‘is’ simple Faith, or the acceptance of Divine Grace.

  Whether we think of the Donna Gentile as a purely allegorical figure or not, Il Convivio is clearly different from the ending of the Vita Nuova, which does indeed contain the consoling Donna Gentile; but at the end of the Vita Nuova as we have it, Dante berates himself for allowing this woman to console him. At the close of that book, he is granted a vision of heavenly glory and resolves to write of Beatrice again. He prays that his soul may go to see the glory of his lady, that is Blessed Beatrice, who now in glory beholds the face of God who is Blessed for ever and ever [VN XLII].

  Clearly, the two versions are incompatible. In 1304–7, he is writing as if the previous book ends with the displacement of Beatrice, and in the version of the Vita Nuova which we now possess, the Donna Gentile is herself displaced by a glorified Beata Beatrice. Leaving aside the question of what a modern reader is to make of the allegorization, both of Beatrice and of the Donna Gentile, there is obviously a literary puzzle here. The neat answer to the conundrum is that Dante, having broken off Il Convivio unfinished in 1307, and moving towards the vision of Beatrice which was to become the Comedy, went back and rewrote the Vita Nuova to make it consistent with his new vision.

  This was the solution propounded by the great Dante scholar Bruno Nardi. Since Nardi posed this neat solution to the problem, there has been no shortage of Danteists eager to defend the authenticity of the Vita Nuova as we have it.

  There are two telling arguments against Nardi. One is that there is no manuscript tradition suggesting any revision of the Vita Nuova. All the manuscripts which survive preserve the version which we have. And a supplementary point to this is that, if Dante regarded the contradictions as damaging in some way, either to himself or to the memory of Beatrice, he could easily have destroyed the manuscript of the unfinished Convivio. He didn’t. Secondly – and more tellingly, because this is external evidence and does not depend upon arguing from a negative – Cecco Angiolieri addressed some sonnets to Dante commenting upon his own sonnet upon Beatrice in the Empyrean (the highest sphere in Heaven, the abode of God Himself) – ‘Oltre la spera’. Various external factors make it clear that Angiolieri could not have written these responses after 1303.

  This sonnet, quoted on p.136, which is embodied in the penultimate chapter of the Vita Nuova, is addressed to two ladies in whom Dante has confided his sorrows. It is a poem of astonishing power, subtlety and gentleness. As Dante’s gentle sigh of love leaves his chest, the new ‘intelligenza’ which his grief has brought him leads his spirit upward, through the astronomical heavens until it reaches the crystalline Heaven of the Primum Mobile where all is still. It – this new faculty, this ‘intelligence’ – speaks to Dante of what it has seen, but when it speaks, Dante does not, strictly speaking, understand it. It is wonderfully mysterious; many who have experienced unfathomable consolations which cannot quite be put into words during bereavement will find it true. If the ‘intelligenza’ had told Dante, like a spirit medium at a séance, that he came with a message from the Other Side and that it was Beatrice who spoke, the consolation would be less, certainly the gentleness of the ending would be less powerful.

  The literary puzzle – of Dante in Il Convivio altering the story of the Vita Nuova and making the Lady Philosophy, or the Lady of the Window, supplant Beatrice – is perhaps resolved if we just accept that Dante was a man of contradictions. He cannot quite, in 1307, have forgotten writing this sonnet. He cannot even – quite – have forgotten having the experiences. But experiences which autobiography arranges on the page chronologically do not necessarily happen chronologically. The explanation for the literary puzzle could well be – if we possessed the necessary biographical information! – psychological. In the midst of his ‘discarding’ an earlier self, he also was that earlier self. In the midst of losing the old love, he was also ever more deeply attached to it. We can see in this remarkable sonnet the seeds of the Comedy. But Dante could not see this even in 1307, and there is certainly no reason to suppose that he could see it when he wrote the Vita Nuova.

  To dismiss Beatrice, the Donna Gentile, or indeed the other figures in Dante’s poetry and prose as mere allegory seems patently absurd, even when he appears to be asking us to do so. Yet equally hazardous would be to take his work as a purely factual account – if facts ever are pure, and if writers’ accounts of their own lives ever are factual. Whether we believe (as I do) in the theory of the rewrite of the Vita Nuova, we have to accept that Dante’s whole technique as a poet was to use certain figures in his life as symbolic – as what some newspaper editors, when seeking about for justification for particular op-ed pieces, call ‘pegs’. Beatrice Portinari existed and she is (surely? – yes, many have doubted it3 – but surely) the Beatrice of the poem, as Dante’s earliest biographer Boccaccio claimed.

  Yet the allegory – the Window Lady representing Philosophy – reminds us of the fact that Dante’s journey, one day to be turned into art as the Comedy, took in the intellectual advances and discoveries of his time. When he speaks of studying ‘philosophy’ we must take the term as Aristotle would have understood it to include, yes, ethics and ideas and religion, but also mathematics and science and above all astronomy. He tells us that he reapplied himself to the study of philosophy in his twenties but that he found it difficult. Dante himself tells us that he was not well grounded in grammar or philosophy as a boy – he had to self-educate after a major emotional crisis in his twenties. But it is probable that he had some grounding in the formal schooling of the Trivium – grammar, dialectic and rhetoric; and in the Quadrivium – of mathematics, geometry, astronomy and music.

  Mathematics was to be important to Dante as a poet. Numbers and number-symbolism inform almost every verse he composed, as well as helping him to make astronomical calculations. He was lucky to live in an age when the study of mathematics, long dormant in Western Europe, had been revived. Leonardo Fibonacci (1170–1240), called the greatest mathematician of the Middle Ages, and sometimes known as Leonardo the Pisan, had travelled in Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Greece and Sicily. From the Arabs he had learned the useful Arabic method of numerals. No speedy progress in arithmetic was likely to have been made by someone trying to divide MCMCCCLVI by DCCIX, but as soon as Arabic numerals were introduced, quick mathematical calculation could be made even by non-mathematicians. Leonardo was the first Western European to introduce the concept of Pi and to calculate its value. He introduced fractions and cubic roots, but also many features of applied mathematics which had a swift and revolutionary effect upon European life. It is no accident that, armed with skills learned from Leonardo, surveyors and engineers were able to begin work building Chartres cathedral, or that bankers in Lombardy and Tuscany could begin to calculate rates of exchange, and the value of alloys.

  His work also had an effect on the third great subject of the Quadrivium, astronomy. Even today, with modern light pollution, the night sky above Tuscany is bright with stars. And Dante, more than any of the great poets, loved the stars.4 The very word ‘stars’ ends each of the books of his Comedy. The book culminates with allusion to the Love which moves the sun and other stars [Par. XXXIII.145]. (He uses the word stelle, like the French word astres, to mean heavenly bodies, both stars and planets.)

  In all his books, but especially in the Comedy, he alludes to heavenly bodies in very specific ways, by name and constellation. But they are also a source of wonder, calling forth metaphor and simile. Stars are jewels, torches, flames, immortal nymphs, adorning every region of the sky [Purg. IX.4; Purg. VIII.89; Par. XXIII.26]. Heaven is made more beautiful by their light, and the joy of the angels is expressed in their shining, as mortal joy shines forth in human eyes [Par. II.130, 142–4]. The eyes of Beatrice shone brighter than stars [Inf. II.55]; when we read the sacred books, it is like
the light coming from many stars [Par. XXV.70]; faith gleams like a star in the sky [Par. XXIV.14]. Truth itself, when it dawns upon the mind, does so like a star appearing in Heaven [Par. XXVIII.87]. There is no time of night which Dante does not evoke in his poetry, perhaps one of the most spinetinglingly beautiful being those lines in the Purgatorio when the daylight banishes the last ‘trembling’ star – ‘par tremolando mattutina stella’ [Purg. XII.90].

  But Dante was not like P. G. Wodehouse’s Madeline Bassett, who believed that the stars were God’s daisy chain. Dante was not an uninformed star-gazer who made vague or soppy references to the movements of heavenly bodies, or to the moon and sun.

  Astronomy was one of the basic studies which Dante would have undertaken as a child. And as a mature man, he considered that, of all the seven sciences of the Trivium and the Quadrivium, astronomy was the noblest. This was for two reasons. Aristotle had said that a science is noble in proportion to the nobility of its subject, and the certainty of its conclusions. In both of these, astronomy excels. Its subject is the movement of the Heavens, and its certainty is perfect [Conv. II.xiv.244–7]. If Astronomers are sometimes mistaken, the fault lies with them, and not with science – a somewhat perplexing concept, first expressed by Ptolemy in his book on ‘judicial astronomy’.