Dante in Love

by A. N. Wilson

  On the hard rock

  ’Twixt Arno and the Tiber, he from Christ

  Took the last signet, which his limbs two years

  Did carry.

  [Par. XI.98–101, Cary]

  ‘The blessed Francis, not through science, nor through discipline of the schools, but by mental possession and ecstasy, applied his mind so strongly to God that he was, as it were, transfigured beyond the measure of human sense, and knew more of God than the theologians know through their study or through letters’ – thus Dante’s biographer Leonardo Bruni.4 Francis was an unusual saint by any standards, but particularly by medieval standards. Unlike most (perhaps all?) medieval saints up to this point, he was not of noble or royal birth – his father was a rich merchant. He was not a priest. He was not a monk. He did not die a martyr’s death. It was simply his holiness and his willingness to obey the letter of the Gospel which shone out and made him instantly attractive. He was canonized in 1228 within two years of his death.

  There had been followers of Francis in Florence even before the establishment of his Order of Friars Minor. Bernard and Giles, two of his earliest followers, had come to the city in 1208 or 1209. The friars settled in Florence at the hospice of San Gallo. They appear to have built a church to the Holy Cross, Santa Croce, as early as 1228 when it is mentioned in a bull of Pope Gregory IX, two months after the saint’s canonization. (As Cardinal Ugolino, that Pope had been an early champion and protector of the order.) It was this Pope who had solved a dilemma which, almost from the beginning, had threatened to split the Franciscan order and the Franciscan idea. If they had embraced Holy Poverty, how could they own property on which they built friaries and churches?

  From early days, the Franciscans divided into the Conventuals, who thought that it was in order to build convents for themselves and to live there; and the Spirituals, who felt that even to own property collectively was to defy the ideals of St Francis.

  The saint’s earliest biographer, Thomas of Celano, recounts how at Mass, Francis was jubilant when he heard the priest read out the passage from the Gospel that the disciples of Christ should not possess gold or silver, or money, nor carry along the way a scrip or wallet or bread or staff. He cried out, ‘This is what I wish, this is what I seek, this is what I long to do with all my heart!’5 Yet, though he abominated money, rejected his father’s riches and lived as a poor man, Francis had accepted legal ownership of the mountain retreat where he received the Stigmata, La Verna. It was Pope Gregory IX who gave to the order the concept of usus pauper. According to pauper use, friars had the use of money and property but not its ownership, which resided with the Papacy.

  The Church of Santa Croce was a parable of the bitter division within the whole Franciscan movement. In 1252, the friars began a lavish rebuild of their church, a great T-shaped basilica, which resembled the Upper Church at Assisi and the Frari Church at Venice. The Tau was a symbol of redemption very dear to the saint. When the lavish new church was scarcely thirty years old, plans were afoot for yet another rebuild on an even grander scale, with a view to outshining their rivals the Dominicans who, between 1246 and 1279, had built the magnificent Santa Maria Novella at the other end of Florence. It was this third church which Giotto decorated.

  As the witty poem which he wrote on the subject testified, Giotto, who had been born a poor boy, was quite amused by the quarrels of these rich noblemen and bankers, all vying with one another to build expensively decorated places of worship to prove their devotion to Holy Poverty. Poverty was not so holy, Giotto felt, if it was imposed upon you by the Fates rather than by your own will.

  Here may’st thou find some issue of demur:

  For lo! Our Lord commendeth poverty.

  Nay, what His meaning be

  Search well: His words are wonderfully deep,

  Oft doubly sensed, asking interpreter…

  But here on earth, our senses show us still

  How they who preach this thing are least at peace,

  And evermore increase

  Much thought how from this thing they should escape.

  For if one such a lofty station fill,

  He shall assert his strength like a wild wolf,

  Or daily unmask himself

  Afresh until his will be brought to shape;

  Ay, and so wear the cape

  That direst wolf shall seem like sweetest lamb

  Beneath the constant sham.

  Hence by their art, this doctrine plagues the world:

  And hence, till they be hurl’d,

  From where they sit in high hypocrisy,

  No corner of the world seems safe to me.6

  It is a remarkable poem from one who was earning his living from the Franciscans, but a good example (of which Dante is the supreme) of the tradition of strong speech which we constantly find in the Trecento and Quattrocento. Robust criticism of the system did not imply that you wished to bring it down. But Giotto highlights the fact that the embrace of Holy Poverty looks different, depending where you come from. From his position as a poor boy who had become a successful artist and who depended upon the patronage of the rich, too much exaltation of Holy Poverty would be pure hypocrisy. Dante, reduced to poverty by exile, perhaps found it a little too easy to denounce avarice – though in his day, as in every day, there was plenty of it about.

  It has been rightly seen7 that Giotto undertook to decorate the Bardi Chapel at Santa Croce with an iconography which emphasized the need for reconciliation between the warring Franciscan factions. For example, in the first fresco in the cycle, the scene of Francis’s Renunciation of Worldly Goods (undoubtedly painted by others to Giotto’s specifications and designs), Francis’s father is glowering at Francis, but he has not come to blows with him. The irreconcilable difference (indeed, hatred) between the actual Francis and his father have been softened into a scene of reconciliation – perhaps in part to spare the banker Ridolfo de’ Bardi who paid for the chapel. (He appears as the Prior of Assisi looking on at the Renunciation scene.) Francis, incidentally, falls back not into poverty and isolation but into the arms of the Church – literally. He is being enfolded in his nakedness into the cope of the bishop.

  In other words, Francis from the first – says the iconography – implicitly accepts the pauper use. His experiment of Holy Poverty would be impracticable anarchy without the supporting arms of the Church holding him up. And the banker, far from standing for everything which Francis and Christ abominated, is forgiven and accepted in the guise of a friar: similar iconographical and conceptual gymnastics were to take place when Giotto adorned the chapel at Padua in memory of the old usurer Scrovegni. Padua was notorious in the Trecento as a centre of usury,8 and when Dante was to visit Hell it was not surprising that he should have encountered Paduans in the circle reserved for usurers. In Canto XVII of the Inferno, Dante met Rinaldo degli Scrovegni, who is recorded as making a number of substantial loans to Gerardo da Camino and the commune of Vicenza between 1282 and 1297, the largest being to Gerardo da Camino in June 1284 for which interest was charged at 20 per cent.9 Many members of the Scrovegni family were involved in the business, as agents, debt collectors and money launderers. The Scrovegni were the nearest thing which Padua possessed at this date to a bank.10 Once they had accumulated their fortune, they appear to have given up large-scale lending and to have lived as magnates.

  There were two primary objections, at the time, to usury: its commonness and its sinfulness. Noble families which stooped to moneylending or involvement in banking, in any of the great Italian cities, would appear to have become déclassé in the eyes of other nobles: for example, in Vicenza, the Dalesmanni and the Scintilla were no longer regarded as noblemen once they had stooped to this activity.

  Behind the social stigma lay the religious objection, maintained to this day in large parts of the Islamic world, but forgotten among the Christians. (Not by Ezra Pound, however – his obsession with it is a major theme of the Cantos.) During Dante’s lifetime, it would see
m that the Church strained at gnats and swallowed camels. The only recorded acts of penance for usury were by relatively unimportant men who had loaned fairly small sums of money. There is no record of the great moneylending families having been censured by the Church. Although Enrico Scrovegni’s endowment of the Arena chapel in Padua may have been intended to expiate the sins of old Rinaldo, his father, there is no record of anyone suggesting this at the time – except for Dante, who puts Rinaldo in Hell. The friars of the Eremitani and Enrico’s great enemy Giovanni da Nono denounced Enrico’s vainglory and hypocrisy in having the chapel built, but not the sinful manner in which his fortune was accumulated.11

  It was at Padua that, according to Benvenuto, the two men, Dante and Giotto, coincided. And since the greatest painter and the greatest poet of the Florentine Trecento and early Quattrocento were contemporaries and are recorded as having been friends, it was natural that those who wrote biography in the old manner should have yearned to place Dante at Giotto’s side in Padua, while the Arena, or Scrovegni, Chapel was being adorned by Giotto’s frescos. ‘Giotto’s name bridges over the gap between Dante’s life in Florence and his years of exile,’ wrote the Englishman Prebendary Ragg in 1907; ‘between the days when the familiar portrait of the poet of the Vita Nuova was painted by the “coetaneo ed amico suo grandissimo” [Vasari] and the two knelt, as we have pictured them, side by side in Roman sanctuaries at the Jubilee: and those later years when at Padua and perhaps elsewhere, the living presence of his old comrade brightened the gloom of the exile’s spirit, while the strong and chastened imagination of the poet of Heaven and Hell supplied the artist with congenial fancies for his frescos in the Madonna dell’Arena.’12

  It is easy to mock this approach to history. The author, the English chaplain in Venice in the early years of the twentieth century, was the clergyman who accidentally buried Ronald Firbank in the Protestant cemetery, unaware that the writer was a Catholic. Prebendary Ragg and his wife also befriended that difficult man ‘Baron Corvo’. Ragg goes on to pose the rhetorical question, ‘What is more likely than that Giotto should have consulted his poet friend about the design for the great campanile, as he consulted him later on, so we are told, on the subjects of his famous frescos at Padua?’

  Sadly, we possess no absolute proof that Dante sat with Giotto while the painter was at work, in Padua or anywhere else. The Prebendary asks us to imagine Dante and Giotto ‘in that summer of 1306, working away in the cool chapel newly erected by the Scrovegni family just three years before; as we watch the white walls clothing themselves, the painter’s brush reacting to the stimulus of the poet’s imagination, while the Paduan sun outside bakes everything and hot air vibrates above the ruins of the neighbouring “Arena” – the glare without becomes unreal; reality is concentrated within those four walls.’13

  It is a charming thought. Rigorists might object that the hot air has not confined itself to the Arena in Padua. Nevertheless, the Edwardian clergyman-amateur had the right instinct in wishing to pair Dante and Giotto. There are useful points of comparison between the two. Theirs was a fructiferous friendship. Dante was an artist as well as a poet. (Remember, he was drawing an angel when his friends came upon him during a scene in the Vita Nuova.) Giotto was a poet (and an architect) as well as a painter. Florentines were indeed Renaissance men. There is every reason not merely to compare Giotto and Dante but to believe that Dante actually drew inspiration from Giotto’s work. It is hard to spend long in the Arena Chapel (the zenith of Giotto’s achievement, as has often been observed) and not to feel that it must have been suggestive to Dante of the poem which he was, in his exile, eventually to write. Remember, at this point, the lyricist, the Latinist, the would-be-philosopher Dante had probably formed no inkling of the great scheme of his Comedy.

  When he went to Rome at Easter 1300, we remember, he saw a Croatian pilgrim clearly thinking to himself, ‘O Jesus Christ, my Lord, the One true God, is this what your face truly looked like then?’ [Par. XXXI.107–8, Musa]. The desire to reconstruct the Jesus of history might seem a natural one to us, but for the first 1,000 years of Christendom, His sacred icon was stylized, as it still is in the Eastern traditions of Christianity. Even if we believe that the stylization is of a face which might plausibly be based upon a memory of the historical Jesus, that is not the point of the Russian or Greek icon. When the faithful Eastern Christian looks at an icon, he prays to Christ to be remembered in His Kingdom, but he is not indulging in historical speculation. Dante’s Croatian, however, is doing precisely that. He is wondering if the Veronica in Rome is an authentic picture.

  One of the most dramatic consequences of the Great Schism, the division between Eastern and Western Christianity which was effective from the twelfth, and keenly felt in the thirteenth, century, was the development of visual art, of realistic painting. In Siena, the masters of the Trecento, above all Duccio, straddle two traditions. The gilded and stylized settings of the figures in his Maestà altarpiece are obviously the cousins of the Eastern icon, but in the physiognomical realism, and in their dramatic display of emotion, they are Western. I have looked at Duccio’s Maestà and believed myself to be seeing an illustration to the last canto of the Paradiso in which the faithful, guided by St Bernard, pray to the Virgin and, with all eyes focused upon her, are led up to a vision of the Ineffable, the Almighty Himself.

  But the overall effect of reading Dante is something much more robust, something much more shockingly realistic than Duccio’s vision of the world. The painter with whom he has a more obvious kinship is Giotto di Bondone, his Florentine friend and contemporary. Proust’s M. Swann identifies his beloved mistress with the Zipporah in Botticelli’s Sistine frescos; but sees a resemblance between a pregnant housemaid and the figure of Charity painted by Giotto in the Arena Chapel at Padua and gives her the nickname of Giotto’s Charity.

  He does so because Giotto has palpably and immediately captured true faces, just as Dante was to do in his Comedy, and Proust, almost 600 years later, but writing in the same tradition of European realist-symbolism, was to do in À la recherche du temps perdu. There are girls, it is true, whose faces possess some of the sorrow and majesty of Duccio Madonnas, but the intensity of emotion in Duccio is almost entirely facial. There is very little drama in his work. It is not rooted in earth.

  Proust or – if they are different beings – the narrator of À la recherche – was slow, as a boy, to appreciate the copies of the Giotto figures which M. Swann had given him. But in time he came to see their power. The figure of Charity, for example, embodies the virtue, without displaying it on her ‘vulgar and energetic face. By a fine stroke of the painter’s invention, she is trampling all the treasures of the earth beneath her feet, but exactly as if she were treading grapes in the wine-press to extract their juice, or rather as if she had climbed on to a heap of sacks to raise herself higher; and she is holding out her flaming heart to God, or shall we say “handing” it to him, exactly as a cook might hand up a corkscrew through the skylight of her basement kitchen to someone who has called down for it through the ground-floor window.’14 Not only is this a bull’s-eye in its capturing of the qualities of Giotto. It could also apply directly to the powerful way in which Dante was, in his Comedy, to make the figures of actual life carry meaning. The purpose of the whole work, in fact, could be said to be to find a way in which our reaching after God in Heaven can be made from our own mundane location, from the location of a world where Tuscan peasants feel their way through a field of glow-worms at night, or watch hoar frost vanish from a field; or where Venetian armourers dip their gruesome tools into boiling pitch – Trecento equivalents of a French maid in the late nineteenth century reaching out of a basement kitchen. ‘What Giotto accomplishes with his pencil, opening a new world before men’s wondering gaze, and making it so live that in Mr Berenson’s words, “we realize his representation more quickly and more completely than the things themselves”, even so does Dante with his pen. The “tactile values” if we may so
speak of Dante’s work, and of the personages whom we see as Dante leads us through his three kingdoms, are even more powerful and convincing than the figures in Giotto’s frescos.’15

  Charles Williams, more than sixty years ago, reminded us of the two traditions of Christian prayer, the one which rejected images – especially images of God – and which approached God by the Via Negativa, the Negative Way; and the other which drew near to God by means of the Affirmation of Images. ‘In the literature of Europe the greatest record of the Way of Affirmation of Images is contained in the work of Dante Alighieri.’16

  With St Francis of Assisi, Christianity had entered a new phase of its existence. The wounds of Christ had appeared in an actual human body in the thirteenth century. Francis himself encouraged the faithful to visualize Christ’s birth as an actual event. He is credited with the invention of the Christmas crib, or at least with the invention of tableaux of the scene at Bethlehem in which real Italian farm animals and real people posed to bring the Incarnation of God imaginatively to life.

  This Franciscan spirituality is reflected strongly in Giotto’s work. As he paints the old story once again, he places real, recognizable human faces, figures who are ridiculous as well as solemn, ecstatic, lazy, sensual.

  Giotto is not a realistic painter in the way that, let us say, Vermeer or Rembrandt were realistic in later ages. The drapery is stylized; the landscapes in which the figures find themselves are almost abstract in their simplicity. But we can see the way he is going to lead Western art – hence it being almost true, or true enough, to say he was ‘the artist who made the transition from the medieval to the modern school of painting’.17 And the way he operates in his fresco series is highly comparable to Dante’s close-up technique in the Comedy, homing in on a figure and then moving hastily on to the next episode.