Dante in Love

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘Henry VII,’ wrote Florence historian Ferdinand Schevill, ‘was the last emperor who unquestioningly believed in the remarkable institution [the Holy Roman Empire] which went back to Charlemagne and Otto and which in the general view had Julius Caesar as its founder. Because of this faith of his, Henry staked his all on forcing an antiquated order on a changed Italy and lost.’7 Henry was buried at Pisa, and Tino da Camaino designed his splendid monumental tomb8 in the Camposanto there.

  The Emperor’s death was greeted with rapture by his enemies. The Florentines announced to their allies that ‘Jesus Christ had procured the death of that most haughty tyrant, Henry, entitled King of the Romans and Emperor, by the rebel persecutors of Holy Church, to wit, your Ghibellines and our foes’.9 They rejoiced that free Guelf government should continue in the city without interference.

  The Pope, having thrown in his lot with Philip the Fair, now found himself the slave of the King of France. In a bid for freedom, he annulled Henry’s decree against Robert of Naples and appointed him as Imperial Vicar, that is, the Emperor’s representative in Italy, until a new figure was elected to the Imperial throne. During the next few years, the papal candidate presided over the south. In the north, however, Henry had already appointed an Imperial Vicar in the person of the great lord of Verona, Can Grande. For years, Can Grande was also to be Dante’s patron. And it was back to Verona, after Henry VII’s death, that Dante would eventually return. Yet another shattering disillusion had broken Dante’s life. He had first lost Beatrice – and the experience had led to the long period of reading philosophy and of writing canzoni which absorbed Courtly Love conventions and heretical philosophical ideas. Then had followed the political life and he had lost Florence itself, and with it all wealth, all power, all stability. The next trauma had been the experience of falling in love in the Casentino, and the rethink of all earlier experiences. Then had come his ill-placed hopes in the revival of Empire. This, the last of the illusions, was now shattered. He was destined to spend seven or eight more years alive. During these years, his vision, and his poetry, and his entire person would now be focused, as never quite before, on the Vision of God.

  When we read Dante’s immediate reactions to the arrival of the new Emperor Henry on the Italian scene, we receive not only a snapshot of a particular moment of European history, but also an extraordinary insight into Dante’s personal psychology, his real vein of fanaticism, the side of his nature which Horace Walpole saw as the ‘Methodist parson in Bedlam’. An earlier judge of the situation, but one no less jaundiced than Walpole, was the fifteenth-century Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni. He wrote a short ‘biography’ of Dante in 1436, and as a patriotic Florentine who wished to celebrate the city’s greatest poet, and a Republican civic humanist who wished to celebrate the virtues of an independent city state, he was naturally torn.

  Bruni’s Dante was unlike Boccaccio’s. Whereas Boccaccio had depicted our poet as a character from his own Decameron, a hen-pecked husband constantly swayed by the emotions of love into romantic tangles, Bruni drew a solid citizen, a loyal husband and father, who accepted his civic duties by holding political office and by enlisting in the military forces of the commune. Bruni acknowledged that Dante had been exiled by ‘a perverse and iniquitous law’. In the years immediately following the exile, Bruni’s Dante ‘tried with good works and good behaviour to regain the favour that would allow him to return to Florence’.10 But then, Henry VII came to Italy and Dante ‘could not maintain his resolve to wait for favour, but rose up in his proud spirit and began to speak ill of those who were ruling the land, calling them villainous and evil and menacing them with their due punishment through the power of the Emperor’.11

  In other words, the essentially good republican citizen went off the rails when he became an Imperialist. As we have already seen, Bruni’s picture does not entirely fit with the facts of the case. Dante spent the first few months, if not the first year, of his exile agitating with the Whites, and if not actively fighting against Florence, at least supporting those who did. He was very far from trying to ingratiate himself with the Black Guelfs. Nevertheless, Bruni’s fictionalized version of Dante is not totally implausible. There are, Bruni averred, two types of poet. The first is someone possessed by a ‘furor’. This sort of poet is inspired. The second has trained to write poetry by laborious study of theology, philosophy, astronomy, arithmetic and history. And Dante, says Bruni, who wants to make his Florentine poet fit a model of Renaissance humanist good sense, was of the second sort. Now, there is no need to accept Bruni’s distinction. Perhaps all truly great poets are, in fact, something of both – Milton or Rilke or Goethe or W. B. Yeats were all possessed by ‘furor’ and yet they had all studied to be poets, and made use of intensive reading, though it was not necessarily the wide reading which would have been required of a scholar.

  Nevertheless, if the distinction were accepted, it is true that Dante was a poet of the second sort, one who had ‘scorned delight and lived laborious days’ in order to write the poem which would one day become his Comedy. And on the whole – not always, but on the whole – his persona as the author of the Comedy is that of a learned and wise man. Likewise – again, on the whole – the character of Dante the pilgrim within the poem is of a docile man, a man under the instruction first of Virgil, then of Beatrice, then of St Bernard, who wishes to subdue the wayward mind and the vengeful pride and the adulterous heart into the obedient, mainstream worldview of the ‘ordinary’ European Catholic. Naturally, if this aim had been successful, the Comedy would have been dull indeed. Apart from its technical virtuosity, the sheer brilliance and beauty of its words, its music, and apart from its dramatic scene-painting and its unforgettable characterizations, one of the things which makes it such electrifying reading is its unpredictability – the sudden blazes of anger, its passionate intensity, its impenetrable hatreds. We shall never know, for example in the Inferno, what made him subscribe to a doctrine unknown to orthodox Catholicism, namely that a human being could be so wicked that demons could come and possess his soul and hold it in Hell even before his bodily death, as has happened to Ser Branca d’Oria in Canto XXXIII. (Folkloric accounts exist in medieval literature of similar superstitious tales; for example, a Mercian monk had a vision of an eighth-century King in Hell before his death, and it has been argued that Luke 22.3, ‘Then entered Satan into Judas Iscariot’, provides justification for the notion.12) But surely Aquinas, Beatrice, Dominic and many another inhabitant of Paradise would have been able to point out to Dante that by sanctioning such a tale, he had undermined one of the fundamental points of the whole poem, namely the existence, up to the moment of death, of free will? The author of these vengeful lines is not the serene Dante but the Tourette’s Syndrome Dante, who in part animates the whole thing. Likewise, the extraordinary and gratuitous malice which, for example, could imagine as a torment for flatterers that they should be repeatedly submerged in human shit, and who, when confronted by one of them, could come up with the cruelly polite circumlocution, ‘If I rightly recollect, I have seen you before with your hair dry’ [Inf. XVIII.120–21, Mandelbaum]. The serene scholarly poet sits side by side at the desk with the vengeful malicious madman and the reader never knows which of them is going to frame the next taut terza rima. (Both scholar and madman are alike technically brilliant.) What is more, although the painstaking, scholarly ‘humanist’ poet had no doubt planned the shape and pattern of the Comedy, the other Dante, the possessed Dante, was constantly changing, constantly on the move, so that even within the course of the Comedy itself, the opinions and viewpoint are altering. In spite of what must have been rewrites – comparable to the wholesale rewrite of the ending of the Vita Nuova – the glorious inconsistencies remain.

  XVIII

  DANTE IN LOVE AGAIN WITH BEATRICE

  DANTE HAD RESIDED IN VERONA EARLY IN HIS EXILE, AFTER A spell in Tuscany. He found the accent and dialect harsh after the gentle tones of Tuscan voices [DVE I.iv.9]. As he wa
lked the streets of that beautiful city, Dante overheard some such Verona-voices observing, ‘See him? He’s been to Hell and back, and brought back news of what it’s like for people down there… Oh, yes, you can tell where he’s been – look how crisp his beard is! Look at his face – burnt – darkened – that’d be all the heat and smoke down there that caused that!’1 They were right, in a way. He had been to Hell and back. The strain of his profound emotional and spiritual journeys, combined with the swooping of high political hopes and profound despondency as Henry VII’s career reached its tragic end, had unhinged him. So, to Verona he returned.

  It had been his ‘first refuge’ when he was expelled from Florence in the summer of 1304. Presumably, he had got there in time for the annual palio. In Siena, the palio is a dangerous horse-race. In Verona, it was a foot-race run, as in ancient Greece, by naked athletes. Did he think with rueful amusement, when he watched the young Adonises racing through Verona, of how much his old mentor Brunetto Latini would have appreciated the sight? And was it that train of association which had prompted him, when envisaging the shade of poor old Brunetto running across the hot sands of Hell, to think that he resembled ‘one of those who run for the green cloth at Verona’? [Inf. XV.122, author].

  Dante’s hosts at Verona were the Scaligeri, or the della Scala family, whose punning coat of arms, a ladder (scala) surmounted by the Imperial eagle, told their story of successful social climbing and Ghibelline politics. Their grandeur was quite recent. Mastino della Scala was the first in the family to be appointed podestà of Verona in 1260. He was murdered in 1277 and his brother succeeded to the captaincy. This lasted for quarter of a century, during which time Verona was at peace. Such was the prosperity, and increase of population, that for the first time since the days of Charlemagne it was necessary to extend the city walls.

  Alberto’s illegitimate son, Giuseppe, was a monster of ugliness and deformity. Alberto had him made into the Abbot of San Zeno, the great Benedictine monastery at Verona. No one could accuse Dante of sycophancy towards his hosts and benefactors. An aristocratic or powerful hand held out to feed him was certain, if tainted by sin, to be nipped, if not mauled. Alberto was taken to task in the Purgatorio. A former Abbot of Zeno, being purged of his sloth, takes the opportunity to tell Dante and his readers that he knows one who already has one foot in the grave (i.e. Alberto) who will come to regret appointing his son to the abbacy:

  Because, in place of its true shepherd, he

  put one who was unsound of body, and

  still more, of mind and born in sin, his son

  [Purg. XVIII.124–7, Mandelbaum]

  None of Dante’s patrons were ever to be spared, and it was in deference to his acknowledged genius that they had him to stay for very extended periods.

  The supposed journey to Purgatory happened in 1300, and Dante could therefore write with confidence that Alberto had one foot in the grave – he died, in fact, on 10 September 1301.

  As well as his illegitimate son the depraved abbot, Alberto had three lawful sons. The eldest, Bartolomeo, was Lord of Verona from 1301 until 1304. Bartolomeo is generally assumed to be ‘il gran Lombardo’ of Paradiso XVII.71, whose kindness to Dante is prophesied by the old Crusader Cacciaguida. Bartolomeo died young, in 1304, and was succeeded by his younger brother Alboino. In this brother’s direction, Dante delivered a gratuitous side-swipe in Il Convivio. He is making the point that fame for its own sake does not constitute nobility. If it did, then Asdente, a shoemaker from Parma who made a name for himself as a soothsayer, would be worthy of respect. Alboino della Scala, likewise, would be as widely respected as Guido da Castel [Conv. IV.16]. The reference would have been an easy one for his readers to pick up. This Guido is mentioned again in the Purgatorio [XVI.125–6] as a revered old Lombard. The implication appears to be that, as well as living very long, Guido was a Lombard in the popular European sense of the word, a banker, but an honest one. We have obviously lost the immediacy of the image, but the insultingness of the reference to Alboino della Scala is clear enough. He is being held up as a contrast to the well-respected old Lombard. That is, no one respects Alboino, who was Lord of Mantua. When Henry VII arrived in Italy, he appointed the two surviving della Scala sons, Alboino and Francesco, as his Imperial Vicars. Alboino died in 1311, leaving his brother as the sole deputy of the Emperor on Italian soil. This brother Francesco is the man known to all by his nickname, the Big Dog – Can Grande.

  Dante celebrates many of Can Grande’s virtues in his poetry – his warlike exploits [Par. XVII.78], his magnificent bounty [Par. XVII.85–6] and his indifference to money – qualities to which Can Grande’s other contemporaries also attest. He was tall and handsome (‘fuit staturae magnae et pulchrae’, says the Verona Chronicle) and his manner of speech was gracious. He was also totally lacking in self-control, and was the terror of his enemies. (‘Acer et intractabilis’, thought Albertino Mussato, who had the misfortune to be Can Grande’s prisoner.) Much of his life was devoted to warfare, attacking Padua on a regular basis, and taking Cremona after bloody engagements. As far south as Lucca to the northern towns of Vicenza and Padua, cities fell to the ‘mailed fist’ of the Dog. He clearly aimed at becoming the ruler of a united Italy. He died in Treviso, which he had also taken by force, in 1329.

  It was while at Can Grande’s court, between the years 1312 and 1318, that Dante was to finish the Purgatorio and to write much of the Paradiso.

  Though Can Grande’s contempt for money and money-grubbers was well attested, this did not imply an austere court at Verona. It was a stupendous court, designed to flaunt the high importance of the della Scala family in the European scheme of things. Can Grande’s court was compared by Boccaccio to that of the Emperor Frederick II himself. Sagacio Muzio Gazzata, a chronicler of Reggio, who was received as a guest there while in exile, recollected that

  Different apartments, according to their condition, were assigned to the exiles in the Scala palace; each had his own servants, and a well-appointed table served in private. The various apartments were distinguished by appropriate devices and figures, such as Victory for soldiers, Hope for exiles, Muses for poets, Mercury for artists, and Paradise for preachers. During meals, musicians, jesters and jugglers performed in these rooms. The halls were decorated with pictures representing the vicissitudes of fortune.

  On occasion Cane invited certain of his guests to his own table, notably Guido da Castello, who on account of his single-mindedness was known as the Simple Lombard, and Dante Alighieri.2

  This is hardly the bitter salt bread of exile as promised to Dante by his crusading forebear. Yet Dante Gabriel Rossetti might well have been right to suggest, in ‘Dante at Verona’, that the merriment and coarseness of Dante’s fellow-guests at Verona, and even the rough humour of Can Grande himself, might in the end have forced him to move on:

  So the day came, after a space,

  When Dante felt assured that there

  The sunshine must lie sicklier

  Even than in any other place,

  Save only Florence. When that day

  Had come, he rose and went his way.

  He went and turned not. From his shoes

  It may be that he shook the dust,

  As every righteous dealer must

  Once and again ere life can close:

  And unaccomplished destiny

  Struck cold his forehead, it may be.

  No book keeps record how the Prince

  Sunned himself out of Dante’s reach,

  Nor how the Jester stank in speech:

  While courtiers, used to cringe and wince,

  Poets and harlots, all the throng,

  Let loose their scandal and their song.

  No book keeps record if the seat

  Which Dante held at his host’s board

  Were sat in next by clerk or lord –

  If leman lolled with dainty feet

  At ease, or hostage brooded there,

  Or priest lacked silence for his praye
r.

  Eat and wash hands, Can Grande; scarce

  We know their deeds now: hands which fed

  Our Dante with that bitter bread;

  And thou the watch-dog of those stairs

  Which of all paths his feet knew well,

  Were steeper found than Heaven or Hell.3

  We could search Verona in vain for traces of Dante’s residence there. And the claim of Benvenuto, in one of the earliest commentaries on the Comedy, that the ruins of the Roman Arena at Verona suggested the physical structure of Hell is not very convincing.

  The memorial is not in the stones but in the work he accomplished while he was here. Can Grande was an enabler. In his private apartment, waited upon by, in effect, his own servants, Dante was at peace. And he could be visited by the figure who helped his poetry even more than Can Grande – the figure of Beatrice.

  While he was resident in Verona, Dante heard the news that the Pope, Clement V, was dead. He died at Roquemaure near Carpentras and was buried at Uzeste, three miles from the parish church which he had recently had rebuilt. In death as in life he had been through and through a Frenchman. Even by the standards of the age his nepotism was remarkable – no fewer than five out of the twenty-four cardinals were his relations.

  The Sacred College now assembled at Carpentras, near Avignon, to elect Clement’s successor. Ten of the cardinals came from Gascony, and were likely to vote for a French successor and a continuation of the ‘Babylonian captivity’ of the Supreme Pontiff in Avignon. There were only seven Italian cardinals and it was to them that Dante now addressed one of his open letters. It is a magnificent piece of political invective couched in elegant, well-balanced prose. The Methodist parson has been silenced and replaced by the author at work on the Comedy.