Dante in Love

by A. N. Wilson

  He himself says that his first refuge and lodging [Par. XVII.70–71] was at Verona, where he was the guest of the great Bartolomeo della Scala. (He will return to that court later in the story, and we can discuss the della Scalas then.) Probably, before he found his ‘refuge and lodging’, there was a deracinated and agitated spell in Tuscany. The Whites who had been exiled from Florence with him plotted a counter-coup to oust Corso Donati. In June 1302, Dante was present at a meeting of the Whites at San Godenzo in the Mugello region, twenty miles north-east of Florence, and they voted to reimburse the Ubaldini, a powerful Ghibelline family, for any losses incurred in fighting a war against the Florentine Blacks. Vieri de’ Cerchi was present at this meeting as Chief of General Staff (stato maggiore). And the great Ghibelline clan of the Uberti were soon involved in the campaign. Lapo degli Uberti, who was offering his support, was the son (perhaps nephew) of that Farinata degli Uberti, victor of Montaperti, whom Dante was to meet in Hell. It was a summer of sporadic fighting. Whether Dante was involved in actual combat we do not know, though he was to admit, about five years later in a poem,18 that he had ‘made war’ on Florence. Whether he was actually fighting, or merely lending moral support, the Whites lost the castle of the Piantravigne in the Valdarno to the Blacks, and they failed to oust the Blacks from Florence.19 Attempts against Black supremacy were to prove futile, and since hindsight now teaches us that all Dante’s hopes for a return to Florence were to be dashed, it seems pointless to dwell too long upon the military and political schemes which obsessed him in the immediate aftermath of his humiliation and exile, when he was still hoping to make a comeback.

  Three years later, in 1304, some of the Whites – Dante had already quarrelled with them – returned to Florence. So did some of the old Ghibelline families. The arms of the Uberti, which had been humiliated at Campaldino, were lifted up and kissed, like holy relics. Cardinal Niccolò da Prato, dispatched by the Pope to offer terms to both sides, was compelled to flee again. Another orgy of violence followed, and shooting broke out in the Mercato Vecchio, instigated by a family of whom history hears for the first time – some ruthlessly ambitious bankers named Medici.

  Corso Donati, as we have already noted, came to a sticky end. In 1308, he was accused of plotting against the commonwealth to bring in the Ghibellines under the leadership of Uguccione della Faggiuola, whose daughter was the last of his brides. He had assumed that armed help would come from Uguccione and that he could fight off the forces sent by the Priors. First, he locked himself away in his own private fortress tower in the Borgo San Piero Maggiore. Then he made a dash for it on horseback into open country. He was overtaken by Catalan cavalry, mercenaries paid for by the Priors. He had always had the gift of the gab, and he usually had at his disposal violent retainers who would fight on his behalf. Now, though words did not fail him, his new Ghibelline allies did. He offered spurious, blustering justifications. They meant nothing to the Spanish mercenaries. He offered them money – but where was it? He suddenly seemed old. He fell on the ground, and the Catalans stabbed him in the throat. He was taken to the Vallombrosan convent of San Salvi, and there he died.

  Or so Villani describes his death. In Dante’s version, he was dragged to his death at his horse’s heels [Purg. XXIV.82–4]. We need not necessarily suppose that Dante meant this to be believed literally. By then, Dante’s life, and the key figures in it, had been mythologized. By the time Corso Donati died, Dante had been in exile six years and it is probable that the seeds of the Comedy had been planted in the poet’s mind.

  And Boniface? The Pope who in Dante’s mythologized, but not necessarily wrong, version of events, what of the Pope who, for Dante, was capable of enraging St Peter himself in Heaven by the very thought of him? Here again, there was a sad and violent end. It had been a mistake for the Pope to put his trust in his old sparring partner and enemy Philip the Fair. Charles of Valois’s (Philip’s brother) attempts to regain Sicily for the French were unsuccessful. His army was unable to defeat that of the Aragonese Frederick in Sicily. Philip, meanwhile, back in France, revived the old row about clerical immunity from fines, taxes and prosecutions. He prosecuted the Bishop of Pamiers. In his denunciations of this act, Pope Boniface made even greater claims than usual for the place of the Bishop of Rome in the European scheme of things. Philip’s response was to question whether Boniface VIII’s election, which had taken place during the lifetime of his predecessor Celestine V, had been legitimate. The King of France forced many of his senior clergy to sign a proposal that the Pope’s election had been invalid and that he should be deposed. The Pope responded by excommunicating him. Philip thought to resolve matters by violence. Together with his lawyer, William of Nogaret, whose parents had been burned as heretics, and Sciarra Colonna, Boniface’s old Roman enemy, they collected 300 horsemen and 1,000 troops paid for by the exiled Florentine bankers, the Peruzzi.

  On 7 September they arrived at beautiful Anagni. A traitor had left open the heavily barred gates of the city, allowing the French troops to swarm into the narrow streets and to reach the cathedral – dating from the fifth century – which Boniface VIII had himself done so much to beautify, adding rich stuffs and vestments to its treasury, visible to this day. There on the wall, over what was once the great south entrance, we still see his statue in his robes and his papal tiara, and over his head are the magnificent mosaics of his Gaetani ancestors. The townsfolk were in panic. The bells of the cathedral rang out in warning.

  The French had chosen their moment carefully to burst through the gates with their cry of ‘Vive le roi de France et meure Boniface’.20 Many of the cardinals who had residences in Anagni were absent and those who were in residence – Cardinals Gentile, Francis Caetani and Theodore of Orvieto – did not stay around to defend the Holy Father. They made their escape. Their deserted houses were plundered. The papal palace remained more fiercely guarded, but the attackers broke in by firing the doors. There was heavy fighting, and some of the Pope’s most loyal supporters, such as the Archbishop of Gran, were killed. The Pope’s nephew Peter and his son Roffred were captured. When he heard of this, the Pope ‘wept bitterly’. During the afternoon, there was negotiation and truce, but at the time of Vespers, the intruders managed to force their way into the papal palace and, eventually, into the presence of the Pope himself.

  They found an old man, but a proud one. He had had himself vested in his full papal regalia and he held a crucifix in his long tapered hands. Although he had intended to be seated upon a throne when he received his assailants, exhaustion had made him collapse and he was lying on a couch. William of Nogaret, the professor of law from Montpellier who had been ennobled by Philip the Fair, entered with a gang of soldiers. ‘What do you here, son of a Patarine?’ asked the Pope, a typically lofty question.

  The Pope was put under armed guard and was heard to mutter the words from the Book of Job, ‘The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away’.

  Meanwhile, the Colonna troops had found the wine cellar; others, the treasury. ‘No one could have believed that all the kings of the earth could have had such treasure.’21 The incident was a shocking one. First to be shocked were the townspeople of Anagni. The armed guard brought the old man down to the marketplace to bless them. It provoked an immediate demonstration in the Pope’s favour, and the trailing of the French fleur-de-lys banner in the mud. There was more fighting, and this time Boniface’s supporters had the upper hand. Nogaret and his small army escaped. Philip the Fair and his supporters had grossly overplayed their hand and the incident caused revulsion throughout Europe. Though the Pontiff had been kept for three days and three nights without food or drink, with a final burst of energy he denounced Philip the Fair and excommunicated him, with his last onslaught of mellifluous, punctilious, eloquent lawyer’s Latin – ‘Super Petri solio’ (‘Above the chair of Peter’). But Boniface had endured a terrible ordeal. Under armed guard, he travelled back to Rome, but within forty days he was dead.

  Rumours abounded – that
he had died, raving mad, gnawing his hands. But when they opened his tomb in 1605, his body showed no sign of violence and his expression was one of calm resignation. The long beautiful hands were, as we should expect, ungnawed.

  It might have been supposed that Dante Alighieri, who had now endured two years of bitter exile, would rejoice in the discomfiture of this Pope who had done so much to harm him, whose machinations had done such damage to the office of the Apostolic See, and to the Body of Christ. But this was not the case. Dante was never predictable in what he was going to say about contemporary events. On the one hand, Dante would never waste an opportunity to denounce Boniface for his corruption of the Church and its true function. But the blasphemy of the French, bursting into the Pope’s own apartments with their fleur-de-lys banners, and laying hands upon the Vicar of Christ as if he were any secular capo dei capi: this, Dante could not tolerate. The very fervour which made him denounce the Pope’s pretensions to secular power only reinforced his reverence for the Holy Father’s sacred office. He saw the French attack as a re-enactment of Calvary:

  I see the Fleur-de-lis enter Anagni

  and in His vicar Christ made prisoner

  I see the gall and vinegar renewed;

  I see Him being mocked a second time,

  Killed once again between the living thieves.

  [Purg. XX.86–9, Musa]

  To believe in the Incarnation is to be compelled to think in concrete images. The enfleshing of God happened only once, but therefore has divine implications for all other enfleshings. God is made flesh in Christ. He can therefore be found enfleshed in the girl Dante loved aged nine. He is also enfleshed in the Church, that organization which exists in order to perpetuate the everlasting miracle of the Eucharist. The very fact that the Vicar of Christ happened to be a man whom Dante abominated only sharpened his tragic sense of what had happened to Christ’s body, the Church. It was only a matter of time before Philip the Fair’s pressure upon the French cardinals led to the inevitability of a French Papacy in France dominated by the King of France.

  Initially, the cardinals elected Niccolò di Boccasino as Boniface’s successor, Cardinal Archbishop of Ostia, a Dominican lawyer and one of Boniface’s closest friends, who had not fled Anagni when the French troops perpetrated their outrage. But Boccasino (in deference to his friend Benedetto Caetani, he took the name Benedict XI) was a sick man and he lacked any of Boniface’s strengths of character. He feebly absolved the two Colonna cardinals who had tried to declare his very election invalid, and he even more feebly pronounced pardon on all involved in the Anagni outrage.

  When he died at Perugia on 7 July 1304, the conclave assembled there to elect his successor. Inevitably, there was a division between the French and the Italian factions and the wrangling lasted eleven months. At length, on 5 June 1305, they elected the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Bertrand de Got. Anxious not to be the puppet of the King of France, Pope Clement V, as he now became, paradoxically felt that the safe haven for the Papacy should be, not Italy, so constantly prone to civil wars and invasions, but the comparatively independent territory of the South of France. He moved the papal court to Avignon and there, in a fortified palace, the Papacy was immured for seventy years: the ‘Babylonian captivity’. This remarkable turn of events only quickened Dante’s burning rage and grief at the contrast between his pure vision of Christ’s Church in its perfection, and the sordid reality of things. In the middle of his life, he found himself in a dark wood, and the way was lost.

  Dante was probably in Siena in 1302 when he heard the sentence of his banishment. There followed two or three peripatetic years. There were groupings with the White Guelfs, and then a separation from them which would prove permanent. Though he would align himself eventually with Ghibellines, it was true to say – as his old crusading ancestor tells him when they meet in Heaven – that ‘You will have done well to become a party on your own’ [Par. XVII.68–9, author].

  It was not to be of any use to Dante, as an artist, to support one side or the other in the narrow politics of the Italian City – and the experience of exile was to this extent essential for the making of his poem. He stayed in Verona at the court of Bartolomeo della Scala and briefly with Scarpetta Ordelaffi, a Ghibelline lord, at Forlì in the Romagna. He moved from Verona to Bologna, from Bologna to Arezzo, where his half-brother Francesco lived. The restlessness of the life made it impossible to do sustained work, but it was all contributing to the formation of the Comedy, just as it was providing him with useful data for a work he was accumulating almost willy-nilly – about the state and nature of language. Between 1304 and 1306, he was chiefly in the Veneto, as the guest of Gherardo da Camino, and it was probably during this time, says Benvenuto, that he spent some time with Giotto at Padua.

  XIII

  DANTE AND THE PAINTED WORD. GIOTTO AT PADUA

  DANTE’S FRIENDSHIP WITH GIOTTO DI BONDONE WAS CENTRAL to his development. Clearly, the bond between the two men, rather like Dante’s friendship in his early twenties with Forese Donati, was sustained by banter.

  We do not know exactly how old Giotto was, but he seems to have been about two years younger than the poet.1 Whether Dante was alone when he fetched up in Padua, or whether he had brought his family, we cannot guess. Giotto, however, was surrounded by young sons, and with that brutality which was part of the poet’s humour, Dante said how extraordinary it was that Giotto had become famous for making beautiful pictures, but ‘you don’t seem able to make equally beautiful pictures in real life’. That is – how can a man who paints such beautiful pictures have such plug-uglies for children? To this badinage Giotto smilingly replied, ‘Quia pingo de die sed fingo de nocte.’ (Because I paint by day and sculpted these children by night. Or – I paint by day and fuck by night.2) This reply pleased Dante so much not only because it was a good joke but because it was réchauffé from the learned source of the Saturnalia of Macrobius.

  Mention has already been made of Giotto in relation to Dante’s own feelings of professional rivalry with his friend Guido Cavalcanti.

  Cimabue thought

  To lord it over painting’s field; and now

  The cry is Giotto’s, and his name eclipsed.

  Thus hath one Guido from the other snatched

  The lettered prize: and he, perhaps, is born

  Who shall drive either from their next.

  [Purg. XI.92–7, Cary]

  All Dante’s acquaintances, whether in life or literature, were destined, if they turned up in the pages of the Comedy, to become emblems; Giotto is the emblem of getting ahead, of an artist making his mark, and not merely competing against his own highest standards but outstripping others in painting, as Dante did in verse.

  A fascinating insight into this is offered by Antonio Paolucci, who took part in the restoration of the Upper Basilica at Assisi after the earthquakes of 1997. Signor Paolucci believes that it was in the Upper Basilica that Giotto was working as an apprentice. As he worked on the damaged Cimabue frescos of the Evangelists at the closest possible range, Paolucci believed he could see a different and more confident hand at work, a new style was being admitted; Giotto was ultimately taking over the series. He believes this is where Giotto was working as an apprentice to Cimabue.

  In my last years spent in Assisi working on the post-earthquake restorations I often thought of these lines [Credette Cimabue ne la pintura] and above all when restoring the Evangelists in the final bays of the presbytery, decorated with the images of the Great Doctor Saints – Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose and Gregory. In my judgement in the whole of Assisi there does not exist a clearer or more conspicuous example of stylistic change and development. It begins with the heavy classicism of Cimabue’s Evangelists. As you progress down the line the Byzantine influence is left behind and you can see a new art form developing, that of the Trecento. The last bay is in my opinion the work of the young Giotto.3

  The Franciscans, the Order of Friars Minor, were, then, early patrons of Giotto. Dante too had be
en deeply impressed by the Franciscan school at Santa Croce in Florence and he was haunted by the figure of St Francis of Assisi himself.

  The old form of the name Assisi was ‘Ascesi’ – which could be seen by a punster as the Latin word meaning ‘I have ascended’. Dante makes just such a play on words when, in Heaven, Thomas Aquinas tells the story of St Francis’s life and says that when one speaks of Assisi, it would be more appropriate to call it the Orient, from whence arose the Sun itself. For Dante, in common with most Catholics of the Trecento, saw St Francis of Assisi as something very close to another Christ. He had embraced poverty as a young man. Dante saw ‘My Lady Poverty’ as languishing, bereft of her first husband, Christ, for more than 1,100 years, when she was at last embraced by Francis. It was in this embrace of Holy Poverty that Francis a few years later renounced riches to follow Christ. He went to the Sultan in Egypt and preached peace. His closeness to Christ was demonstrated in the miracle of the Stigmata – the very wounds which Christ had received on the Cross were implanted in the body of Francis himself. The phenomenon occurred at or around the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross (14 September – it was the date on which Dante was to die in 1321) in 1224 – when Francis was in retreat at La Verna. Since then, there have been others who have received the Stigmata – most notably in our times, Padre Pio. There can be few more extraordinary demonstrations of the religion of the Incarnation, of spiritual truth manifested in fleshly form.