Dante Alighieri

by Paget Toynbee

  After again seeking shelter with the Scaligers at Verona, this time as the guest of Can Grande della Scala, Dante, on the invitation of Guido Novello da Polenta, went to Ravenna (probably in 1317 or 1318), “where,” says Boccaccio, “he was honourably received by the lord of that city, who revived his fallen hopes with kindly encouragement, and, giving him abundantly such things as he needed, kept him there at his court for many years, nay, even to the end of his days”.31 At Ravenna, his last refuge, where his sons Pietro and Jacopo and his daughter Beatrice resided with him, Dante appears to have lived in congenial company;32 and here he put the finishing touches to his “sacred poem,” the Divina Commedia, his work upon which he tells us “had made him lean for many years”.33

  Boccaccio states that at Ravenna many scholars came to Dante for instruction in the poetic art, especially in vernacular poetry, which he first brought into repute among Italians.34 While he was here, after the Inferno and Purgatorio had been completed and made public, Dante was invited by a poet and professor of Bologna, Giovanni del Virgilio, in a Latin poem,35 to come and receive the laurel crown at Bologna. To this suggestion Dante sent a reply in the form of a Latin eclogue36 declining the invitation, the laurel having no attraction for him unless conferred by his own fellow-citizens in the same Baptistery where as a child he had received the name which he was to make so famous.

  At the end of 1319 or beginning of 1320 Dante appears to have paid a visit to Mantua, on which occasion a discussion was started as to the relative levels of land and water on the surface of the globe. Dante subsequently wrote a treatise on the subject (if we may trust the evidence of the treatise De Aqua et Terra37 traditionally ascribed to him), which was delivered as a public dissertation at Verona, on 20 January, 1320.

  From the mention of Dante’s name in a document lately discovered in the Vatican38 it has been inferred that Dante was at Piacenza some time in 1319 or 1320. The document in question, which is incomplete, contains the account of a process instituted at the Papal Court at Avignon against Matteo Visconti of Milan, and his son Galeazzo,39 for an attempt upon the life of Pope John XXII by means of sorcery. The story of the episode, which is an exceedingly curious one, as showing that in his own life-time Dante had the reputation of a sorcerer, is briefly as follows. In October, 1319, Matteo Visconti sent for a certain Bartolommeo Canolati who was reputed to be an adept in the black art, and showed him a small silver figure of a man, on the forehead of which was written “Jacobus 40 papa Johannes”. He then explained to Bartolommeo that he wanted him to apply to this image41 the requisite “fumigations” and incantations to ensure the death of the Pope, who was his bitter enemy.42 Bartolommeo declared that he did not know how to do anything of the sort, but being taxed with having in his possession a powerful drug adapted for the purpose, he admitted that he had once had it, but protested that at the bidding of a friar he had thrown it all away. Matteo thereupon dismissed him with an injunction to hold his tongue, on pain of death. Bartolommeo, however, divulged what he had seen, and the matter came to the ears of the Pope, who summoned him to Avignon, where he was examined before three cardinals, one of whom was Bertrand du Pouget, the same who subsequently condemned Dante’s De Monarchia to the flames.43 As the result of this inquisition, in the following February proceedings were initiated against the Visconti for conspiring against the life of the Pope. Meanwhile another sorcerer whom Matteo had employed having failed to produce any effect by his incantations, Galeazzo sent for Bartolommeo to Piacenza, and repeated the proposal that he should practise on the image. By way of putting him on his mettle Galeazzo told him that he had sent for Maestro Dante Alighieri of Florence to perform the task, but that he had far rather that Bartolommeo should undertake it, as he had no wish to let Dante have any hand in the matter.44 The record states that Bartolommeo said he would think the matter over—but the sequel to the story is lost. If Galeazzo’s statement about Dante is to be taken literally it would appear that Dante was in Piacenza somewhere about the date of this transaction, towards the end of 1319 or the beginning of 1320.

  In the summer of 1321, a difference having arisen between Ravenna and Venice, on account of an affray in which several Venetian sailors were killed, Guido da Polenta sent an embassy to the Doge of Venice, of which Dante was a member. The ambassadors were ill received by the Venetians, who, it is said, refused them permission to return by sea, and obliged them to make the journey overland along the malarious seaboard. The consequences to Dante were fatal, for he contracted a fever (as is supposed) on the way, and, growing worse after his return to Ravenna, died in that city on 14 September, 1321, aged fifty-six years and four months.45 At Ravenna Dante was buried, and there, “by the upbraiding shore,” his remains still rest, in spite of repeated efforts on the part of Florence to secure possession of “the metaphorical ashes of the man of whom they had threatened to make literal cinders if they could catch him alive”.46

  “The noble knight, Guido da Polenta,” writes Boccaccio, “placed the dead body of Dante, adorned with the insignia of a poet,47 upon a funeral bier, and caused it to be borne upon the shoulders of his most reverend citizens to the place of the Minor Friars in Ravenna, with such honour as he deemed worthy of the illustrious dead. And having followed him to this place, in the midst of a public lamentation, Guido had the body laid in a sarcophagus of stone, wherein it reposes to this day. Afterwards returning to the house where Dante had formerly lived, according to the custom of Ravenna, Guido himself pronounced a long and ornate discourse, as well in commendation of the great learning and virtue of the dead man, as for the consolation of his friends whom he had left to mourn him in bitter sorrow. And Guido purposed, had his estate and life endured, to honour Dante with so splendid a tomb, that if no other merit of his had kept his name alive among future generations, this memorial alone would have preserved it. This laudable purpose was in a brief space made known to certain who at that time were the most renowned poets in Romagna; so that each, not only to exhibit his own powers, but also to testify to the love he bore toward the dead poet, and to win the grace and favour of the lord Guido, who they were aware had this at his heart—each, I say, composed an epitaph in verse for inscription on the tomb that was to be, which with fitting praise should make known to posterity what manner of man he was who lay within. And these verses they sent to the illustrious lord, who through the evil stroke of Fortune not long after lost his estate and died at Bologna; on which account the making of the tomb and the inscription of the verses thereon was left undone.”48

  Boccaccio goes on to say that many years afterwards he was shown some of the verses which had been composed for Dante’s epitaph, but that he did not consider any of them worthy of preservation, saving only fourteen lines by Giovanni del Virgilio of Bologna, which he transscribes.49 The sarcophagus (no doubt an ancient one) in which Dante’s remains were deposited by Guido da Polenta was apparently left without any inscription until late in the fourteenth century. It is known, from the record of an eye-witness, that in the year 1378 there were two epitaphs inscribed upon the tomb.50 One of these, consisting of six hexameters,51 was by Menghino Mezzano of Ravenna, a contemporary and friend of Dante;52 the other, consisting of three rhyming hexameter couplets, was by a certain Bernardo Canaccio, who is conjectured also to have been personally acquainted with Dante. This second epitaph, which runs as follows:—

  Jura Monarchiae superos Phlegetonta lacusque

  Lustrando cecini voluerunt fata quousque;

  Sed quia pars cessit melioribus hospita castris

  Actoremque suum petiit felicior astris,

  Hic claudor Dantes patriis extorris ab oris

  Quem genuit parvi Florentia mater amoris.53—

  was till comparatively recently supposed to have been written by Dante himself. The real author, however, was established to be Bernardo Canaccio by the discovery about fifty years ago of a passage in a fourteenth century manuscript of the Commedia, in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, in which the lines are ascri
bed to him by name.54

  Dante’s burial-place, left incomplete, as Boccaccio records, owing to the misfortunes which overtook Guido da Polenta, appears to have been neglected and to have gradually fallen into decay. The tomb was restored in 1483 by Bernardo Bembo (father of the celebrated cardinal, Pietro Bembo), who was at that time Prætor of the Venetian Republic in Ravenna. He entrusted the work to the Venetian sculptor and architect, Pietro Lombardi, who, among other things, recarved the face of the sarcophagus, and inscribed upon it the epitaph of Canaccio mentioned above, to which the letters S. V. F.55 were prefixed, evidently under the impression that the author of the lines was Dante himself; while the epitaph of Menghino Mezzano was omitted.

  DANTE’S TOMB AT RAVENNA

  Much of the work executed by Lombardi under Bembo’s directions, including the inscribed epitaph, and the marble relief of Dante reading at a desk, remains to this day.56

  The tomb was a second time restored, more than two hundred years later (in 1692) by Cardinal Domenico Maria Corsi, the Papal Legate57; and a third time, in 1780, by Cardinal Luigi Valenti Gonzaga, who erected the mausoleum, surmounted by a dome, as it now stands.

  Not only was the death of Dante recorded as an event of importance by his fellow-citizen, Giovanni Villani, in his Florentine chronicle,58 but numerous elegies were written on the occasion by friends and contemporaries of the poet in various parts of Italy. Among these were poems by Cino da Pistoja, and Giovanni Quirini of Venice, with both of whom Dante had exchanged sonnets in his lifetime.59 Cino, who thirty years before had addressed a canzone to Dante on the death of Beatrice,60 now wrote a canzone on Dante’s own death, addressed to Love, whose ardent and faithful votary Dante had ever been; after bewailing the bitter loss sustained by all lovers of the Italian tongue, of which Dante had been, as it were, the fount and source, he turns to Florence and points to the fulfilment of Dante’s own prophecy in the Inferno (xv. 72) that however much his native city might desire to have him back her wish would be unavailing; he concludes with congratulations to Ravenna on being deservedly in possession of the great treasure which Florence had cast out.61 Quirini, besides a lament on Dante’s death, wrote a sonnet in defence of his friend’s memory against the imputations of Cecco d’ Ascoli, and he addressed another to Can Grande della Scala, urging him to give to the world without delay the cantos of the Paradiso which had not yet been made public.62 Quirini’s lament, which is an eloquent testimony to the estimation in which Dante was held by his contemporaries, is as follows :—

  If it hath happed for any mortal man

  That sun or moon was darkened, or on high

  Comet appeared, portending sudden change,

  Reverse of fortune, and disaster dire;

  A greater portent should we look for now,

  And signs more strange than e’er were seen before,

  Since death relentless, black and bitter death,

  Hath quenched the brilliant and resplendent rays

  That beamed from out the noble breast of him,

  Our sacred bard, the father of our tongue,

  Who glowed with radiance as of one divine.

  Alas! the Muses now are sunken low,

  The poet’s art hath fallen on evil days,

  Which erst was held in worship and renown.

  The whole world weeps the glorious Dante dead—

  Him thou, Ravenna, heldest dear in life,

  And holdest now, and hence are held more dear.63

  * * *

  1 Paradiso, xvii. 55-60. It is most natural to suppose that among the “things beloved most dearly” left behind in Florence Dante intended to include his wife. But this is not admitted by those who hold that Dante’s marriage was an unhappy one.

  2 Convivio, i. 3, 11. 15-40.

  3 De Vulgari Eloquentia, ii. 6, 11. 36-9.

  4 Paradiso, xvii. 61-9.

  5 This is supplied by Flavio Biondo in his Historiae ab inclinato Romano Imperio (see Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana, No. 8 (1892), pp. 21-8, where the evidence is discussed by M. Barbi).

  6 Paradiso, xvii. 70-2.

  7 Vita di Dante, ed. cit. pp. xx.-xxxi. No other trace of this letter has been preserved.

  8 See Imbriani, Studi Danteschi, pp. 385-8. There is, however, grave reason to doubt whether the “Dantinus quondam Alligerii de Florentia” mentioned in this document can be Dante, since a “Dantinu’s (presumably the same) is mentioned again several times in Paduan documents many years after Dante’s death, e.g. in 1339, 1345, 1348, and 1350 (see Zingarelli, Dante, p. 214).

  9 See Annual Report of the Cambridge (U.S.A.) Dante Society for 1892 (pp. 15-24).

  10 Purgatorio, viii. 118-34.

  11 See Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana, No. 8 (1892), p. 27.

  12 To this period (about 1308) is usually assigned Dante’s supposed visit to the Camaldolese Monastery of Santa Croce del Corvo in Lunigiana, an account of which is given in a letter (of doubtful authenticity) from Frate Ilario, one of the monks, to the Ghibelline leader, Uguccione della Faggiuola. According to the writer, Dante presented himself at the monastery, and, being asked what he sought, answered “Peace”. The monk then entered into conversation with Dante, who presently produced a book (the Inferno) from his bosom, and gave it to him with a request that he would forward it to Uguccione, adding that if Uguccione desired to see the other two parts of the poem, he would find them in the hands of the Marquis Moroello Malaspina and King Frederick of Sicily (to whom respectively the Purgatorio and Paradiso are said to have been dedicated). This letter has long been regarded as a forgery, possibly from the hand of Boccaccio. But recent investigations have proved that at any rate Boccaccio cannot have forged it, and there is now a tendency to accept it as genuine (see Wicksteed and Gardner, Dante and Giovanni del Virgilio, 1902, pp. 326-34; and Rajna, La Lettera di Frate Ilario, Perugia, 1904). A translation of this letter, which was written in Latin, is given in Appendix B.

  13 Bk. ix. ch. 136.

  14 “Novisti forsan et ipse

  Traxerit ut juvenem * Phoebus per celsa nivosi

  Cyrrheos, mediosque sinus tacitosque recessus

  Naturae, coelique vias terraeque marisque,

  Aonios fontes, Parnasi culmen, et antra

  Julia, Pariseos dudum serusque Britannos.”

  15 “Dilexit theologiam sacram, in qua diu studuit tarn in Oxoniis in regno Angliae, quam Parisius in regno Franciae.”

  16 Epistola v. § 1.

  17 Epistola vi.

  * I.e. Dantem.

  18 Epistola vi. §§ 2, 3, 4.

  19 Epistola vii. § 2.

  20 The text is printed by Del Lungo in Dell’ Esilio di Dante, pp. 107 ff.

  21 Vita di Dante, ed. cit. p. xxi: “Il tenne tanto la riverenza della patria, che, venendo l’ imperadore contro a Firenze e ponendosi a campo presso alla porta, non vi volle essere, secondo lui scrive, contuttochè confortatore fusse stato di sua venuta”.

  22 Epistola vi. § 3.

  23 “The Florentines,” says Villani, “fearing the coming of the Emperor, resolved to enclose the city with moats from the Porta San Gallo to the Porta Santo Ambrogio, and thence to the Arno; and then from the Porta San Gallo to the Porta dal Prato d’ Ognissanti, where the walls were already begun, they had them raised eight cubits. And this work was done at once and very quickly; and it was without doubt the salvation of the city, for it had been all open, the old walls having been in great part pulled down, and the materials sold” (bk. ix. ch. 10).

  24 A few days after the event the following letter was addressed by the Signoria of Florence to their allies announcing the news: “To you our faithful brethren, with the greatest rejoicing in the world we announce by these presents the blessed news, which our Lord Jesus Christ, looking down from on high as well to the necessities of ourselves, and other true and faithful Christians, the devoted servants of Holy Mother Church, as to those of His own cause, has vouchsafed to us. To wit, that the most savage tyrant, Henry, late Count of Luxemburg, w
hom the rebellious persecutors from old time of said Mother Church, namely the Ghibellines, the treacherous foes of you and of ourselves, called King of the Romans, and Emperor of Germany, and who under cover of the Empire had already consumed and laid waste no small part of the Provinces of Lombardy and Tuscany, ended his life on Friday last, the twenty-fourth day of this month of August, in the territory of Buonconvento. Know further, that the Aretines and the Ghibelline Conti Guidi have retired themselves towards Arezzo, and the Pisans and Germans towards Pisa taking his body, and all the Ghibellines who were with him have taken refuge in the strongholds of their allies in the neighbourhood. . . . We beseech you, therefore, dear brethren, to rejoice with ourselves over so great and fortunate accidents.”

  (The original Latin text of this letter is printed by F. Bonaini, in Acta Henrici VII Romanorum Imperatoris et Monumenta quædam alia suorum temporum historiam illustrantia, 1877, vol. ii. p. ccclxv; an Italian translation is given by Del Lungo, in Dino Compagni e la sua Cronica, 1880, vol. i. pp. 637-8.

  25 Epistola viii.

  26 Purgatorio, xxiv. 37, 43-5.

  27 This Gentucca was the daughter of Ciucchino di Guglielmo di Morla of Lucca. Her husband, Buonaccorso di Lazzaro di Fondora (familiarly known as Coscio or Cosciorino Fondora) several times mentions her in his will (dated 15 December, 1317). Dante’s Gentucca is identified with this lady on the strength of the statement of an early commentary on the Divina Commedia (as yet unpublished), confirmed by documentary evidence (see C. Minutoli, Gentucca e gli altri Lucchesi nominati nella D. C., in Dante e il suo Secolo, pp. 221-31).

  28 The text is printed by Del Lungo in Dell’ Esilio di Dante, pp. 148 ff.

  29 This man, who bore the title of “bargello” is described by Villani (bk. ix. ch. 76) as “uomo carnefice e crudele”. He was appointed chief magistrate in May, 1316, but was displaced in the following October by Count Guido of Battifolle, who was appointed Vicar in Florence by King Robert of Naples.