by Michael Haag
Afterwards Dante wrote a sonnet about his vision, which he sent to Guido Cavalcanti, leader of the Fedeli d’Amore, the Faithful Followers of Love, a group of poets of erotic and mystical inclinations. He was soon invited to become a member.
EMERALD EYES
The next time Dante speaks of seeing Beatrice, it is in a church. He does not say which church, but the church of Santa Margherita de Cerchi in a passageway off the Via del Corso was the parish church of the Dante family, and also the burial place of members of the Portinari family – in fact it claims to hold the tomb of Beatrice herself. The occasion is a mass, and prayers are being said to the Virgin Mary. Dante has taken a place that gives him a clear view of Beatrice, his ‘beatitude’. He stares at her so intently that another woman, in the direct line of sight between Beatrice and himself, keeps turning round, fancying that he is looking at her, and when the mass is over sure enough he hears worshippers remarking on his attraction to this woman. That gives him the idea that he can hide his adoration of Beatrice by pretending to be in love with this other woman, ‘a screen to the truth’ as he calls her. So well did he play his part that people who had noted his lovelorn behaviour now thought they had discovered its cause. To complete the deception, Dante wrote numerous poems in honour of this ‘screen lady’, and thereby concealed the truth of his love for Beatrice for many years.
During all of this, as we follow his life in the pages of the Vita Nuova, Dante never offers a description of Beatrice. He says nothing about the colour of her eyes, the colour of her hair, the complexion of her skin, nothing of her figure or the way she walks, nor does he mention that she is betrothed to another man whom she eventually marries in 1287 at the age of twenty-one, nor that he has been betrothed from the age of eleven, and that he marries before Beatrice, when he is twenty in 1285. Neither does he have anything more to say about the physical Beatrice in the whole of the Divine Comedy, other than a single reference to her emerald eyes.
BEATRICE CUTS DANTE DEAD
As it happened, the screen lady left Florence at about the same time as Dante himself had to travel in the same direction. Soon the rumour went round that he and the lady were having an affair. When the rumour reached Beatrice – that ‘destroyer of all evil and the queen of all good’, who ‘alone was my blessedness’ – she passed him in the street and cut him dead.
The effect on Dante was devastating. Until then, he says, his anticipation of seeing Beatrice again and receiving her greeting so filled him with love that no man was his enemy: ‘I would have pardoned whosoever had done me an injury’. Withdrawing to his room in pain and confusion, he was revisited by his vision of the Lord of Love who wept for Dante, explaining ‘I am as the centre of a circle, to the which all parts of the circumference bear an equal relation, but with thee it is not thus’. Dante does not understand, and asks, ‘What thing is this, Master, that thou hast spoken thus darkly?’ To which the Lord of Love answers, ‘Demand no more than may be useful to thee’.
The implication is that not being at the centre of the circle is a bad thing, but Dante has not yet undergone sufficient spiritual development to understand why. The reader, however, can look ahead to the Divine Comedy, which was then still to be written. There we see that circles describe Dante’s conception of the universe. The circles of the Inferno lead down to the deepest pit of Hell, the circular terraces of the Purgatorio ascend to the sky, and the spheres of the Paradiso – spheres being the three-dimensional version of circles – expand beyond the boundaries of this earth, sphere encompassed by sphere, and encompassed again by greater and greater spheres, until a vast sphere encompasses the entire universe beyond which is nothing but the all-encompassing mind of God.
The Lord of Love is saying to Dante that he must stand at the centre, which means to love not just a woman but the whole universe. Already in the Vita Nuova this begins to happen – which is why Dante calls it the New Life – and the process will reach its fruition in the Divine Comedy where through his love for Beatrice he journeys into the Inferno, through Purgatory, and emerges into Paradise, driven by his growing understanding that his love for Beatrice is one and the same as the divine love that is the motive force throughout all creation.
DEATH OF BEATRICE
Meanwhile, in the Vita Nuova, the death of Beatrice’s father in 1289 leads Dante to reflect on her own mortality.
And then perceiving how frail a thing life is, even though health keep with it, the matter seemed to me so pitiful that I could not choose but weep; and weeping I said within myself: ‘Certainly it must some time come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die’. Then, feeling bewildered, I closed mine eyes; and my brain began to be in travail as the brain of one frantic.
Dante’s fears would come true soon enough. He had begun to write a poem about his love for Beatrice and how he craved her greeting – ‘Always soliciting / My lady’s salutation piteously’ – when he learned that she had died. These words from the Lamentations of Jeremiah 1:1 came to him: ‘How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow, she that was great among the nations!’ Otherwise he was all but struck dumb with grief: ‘My pen doth not suffice to write in a fit manner of this thing’. Instead it is left to Boccaccio to describe what Dante could not bear to write in the Vita Nuova:
The beautiful Beatrice was nearly at the end of her twenty-fourth year, when, as pleased Him who is all-powerful, she left the anguish of this world and departed to the glory which her own merits had prepared for her. At her departure Dante was left in such sorrow, grief, and tears that many of those nearest him, both relatives and friends, believed there would be no other end to them except his death; and this they thought must come quickly, seeing that he gave ear to no comfort or consolation offered him. The days were like the nights and the nights the days; and no hour of either passed without cries and sighs and a great quantity of tears. His eyes seemed two copious fountains of flowing water, so that most marvelled whence he acquired enough moisture to supply his weeping. …
He was, by his weeping and the pain that his heart felt within him, and by his taking no care of himself, become outwardly almost a wild thing to look upon, lean, unshaven, and almost completely transformed from what he had been wont to be before.
THE MYSTIC NUMBER NINE
How Beatrice died is not known, but it was probably in childbirth. Dante composed himself sufficiently to write two pages about the number nine in relation to her death:
The number nine, which number hath often had mention in what hath gone before, (and not, as it might appear, without reason), seems also to have borne a part in the manner of her death: it is therefore right that I should say somewhat thereof.’ For Dante nine is the number of Beatrice, the square of three which is the Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; nine is also the number of Love.
WAS BEATRICE REAL?
But the question arises, was Beatrice ever real? Though the Divine Comedy is populated with historical figures like Cleopatra, the prophet Mohammed and several popes, it is nevertheless a fiction; Dante did not really venture into Hell. And so why believe that the Beatrice sitting two seats away from the Virgin Mary confirms the existence of Beatrice Portinari or any other real young woman of Florence?
The tomb of Beatrice. As Dan Brown describes, the wicker basket alongside holds handwritten letters from lovelorn visitors.
The Vita Nuova, however, is a different matter. This book is presented by Dante as a memoir, a selection of memories:
In that part of the book of my memory before the which is little that can be read, there is a rubric, saying, Incipit Vita Nova [here begins a new life]. Under such rubric I find written many things; and among them the words which I purpose to copy into this little book; if not all of them, at the least their substance.
Here, before Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, is where a Florentine woman called Beatrice makes her appearance. Not that Dante tells us much about her other than her first name and age and de
ath. We will just have to take his word for it that he is not making her up – not that he even gives us his word for that.
THE BEATRICE MYSTERY
The evidence for the existence of Beatrice depends on three things. The first is Dante’s description of her and his reaction to her; one has to decide if it rings true. Most people reading the Vita Nuova do feel that in all its extreme sensibility the portrait of the lovelorn young Dante is believable. But the girl could be anyone, and the name Beatrice could just be a cover. After all, Beatrice means blessed, which is how Dante describes her and deploys her from the start of the Vita Nuova to the end of the Divine Comedy. Beatrice is a name, a quality, that Dante could have applied to any Giovanna or Maria.
The second piece of evidence comes from Boccaccio, who was born in 1313, eight years before Dante’s death, and who probably wrote his life of the poet after 1350, the year in which he is known to have visited Dante’s daughter, who took the name Beatrice when she became a nun. That visit was part of Boccaccio’s researches into his subject, which included interviewing anyone he could find who actually remembered the poet or whose family had some connection – which in the case of verifying the events of the Vita Nuova meant reaching back sixty years and more. And so it is to Boccaccio that we owe the information that there really was a Beatrice, that she was the daughter of Folco Portinari, and that Dante met her at a May Day party at the Portinari house. Although what Boccaccio actually says is that the girl was called Bice, which is generally used as the diminutive for Beatrice.
What led Boccaccio to identify Dante’s Beatrice with Folco Portinari’s daughter? We are not told. Dante was not popular in Florence during his lifetime, where in fact they would have burned him at the stake if they could. His fame only spread later, and in this Boccaccio played a part, giving lectures at the Badia church in Florence on the greatness of the city’s native poet. So by about the middle of the fourteenth century there may well have been many people happy to come forward, declaring themselves to be Dante’s friends, and claiming too, perhaps, that it was a girl in their family who was the original for Beatrice. We do know that Boccaccio’s stepmother’s mother was a Portinari, so the Portinari family, at least, was happy to accept that Dante’s Beatrice was their girl.
There is one further piece of evidence, and that is the will of Folco Portinari in which he makes a bequest to his daughter ‘Bice’. Another record tells us that this Bice (never Beatrice) Portinari married someone called Simone di Bardi. And that is as much as anybody knows about the reality of Dante’s Beatrice.
But there are more things to ponder. What to make of Dante’s daughter Antonia becoming a nun while living in Ravenna with her father and taking the name Beatrice? Clearly she was honouring her father, but what would her mother have made of the choice? Gemma Alighieri, the mother of Dante’s four children, was still alive; Dante was forever writing about his Beatrice but never once did he mention the existence of his wife. Would Antonia have taken the name Beatrice had she ever been a real flesh-and-blood rival to her mother? Then again, Boccaccio met Sister Beatrice in Ravenna and whatever she may have said to him, it did not deter Boccaccio from asserting the reality of Beatrice nor that she was Folco Portinari’s daughter.
Odd though, that Dante should have used the real name, if that is what he did, of Beatrice Portinari. In the Vita Nuova he explains the extreme lengths to which he went to conceal the identity of the woman he adored, going so far as to develop a fraudulent relationship with another woman to whom he addressed love poems. Yet within five years of the death of Bice Portinari, he was broadcasting her identity all over Italy. And then he would continue to do so in his Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. It does seem rather strange. In troubadour poetry the practice was to use a senhal, a fictitious name, to conceal the identity of the lady. Why would Dante not have done the same?
6 VIA DEL CORSO
When all is said and done, there is something immensely appealing about Beatrice as one of the great feminine literary eidolons, a young woman who captured the heart of Italy’s greatest poet, who won a place in heaven two seats away from the Virgin Mary, and whose ultimate character was that of Love who makes the entire universe go round – that pretty little girl living round the corner from Dante at number 6 Via del Corso, in a house that stands there to this day.
Beatrice guides Dante through Paradise in Botticelli’s illustration for the Divine Comedy. The flames represent divine love.
DANTE AND THE FAITHFUL FOLLOWERS OF LOVE
After Dante had his dream or vision that Beatrice had eaten his heart (see p.45), he described the experience in a sonnet and sent it to Guido Cavalcanti (c.1255–1300), leader of the Fedeli d’Amore, the Faithful Followers of Love.
The Fedeli were a brotherhood of poets in Florence who pursued an erotic mysticism, first through actual experience with women, then by expressing the experience in poetry. They developed a system for measuring their progress, both erotic and spiritual, as they made the divine ascent through the levels of Love.
While their ladies may have been of flesh and blood, the Fedeli made clear that their ultimate Lady should be interpreted symbolically, perhaps manifested as the divine feminine, Sapienta, the Holy Wisdom.
Influenced by the troubadours, by notions of chivalry and by courtly love, their idea was to regenerate society by achieving a harmony between the two sides of their natures, the sexual and the emotional on the one hand, and the intellectual and mystical on the other. While retaining the notion of nobility in their lives, they would make it depend on personal virtue rather than on inherited wealth or position, and they would achieve spirituality without living a life of withdrawal or celibacy. Their movement looked very much like an attempt to reconcile the conflicting strands in Florentine society – the aristocratic, the mercantile and the religious – which within their lifetimes would tear their city apart.
THE LORD OF LOVE
Dante’s sonnet was called Amor, or Love. He begins by inviting a reply from Cavalcanti and other members of the Fedeli. Then he gives the hour – the first of the nine last hours of the night, the number three or its multiples always being significant for Dante – when the Lord of Love appeared before him in a vision. And then in the final six lines, he says how the Lord held Beatrice in his arms and made her eat Dante’s heart, before leaving in tears:
He seem’d like one who is full of joy, and had
My heart within his hand, and on his arm
My lady, with a mantle round her, slept;
Whom (having wakened her) anon he made
To eat that heart; she ate, as fearing harm.
Then he went out; and as he went, he wept.
Guido Cavalcanti replied to Dante, interpreting his dream, saying that Love rules the earth and goes to people as they sleep and takes their hearts. Because Love knew that Death had claimed Beatrice as his prey, Love took Dante’s heart to protect her, and though Love wept as he carried Beatrice away, this should be interpreted as joy (dreams meaning the opposite in the morning), because Love knew that Death had been thwarted.
After this Dante was invited to join the Fedeli, which he did. Cavalcanti attracted Dante into the Whites, his branch of the Guelfs, and before long Dante was involved in politics. In 1300, as one of the six ruling priors of Florence, Dante found himself in the necessary but hateful position of having to exile Cavalcanti from the city in order to keep the peace. While in exile Cavalcanti died of malaria. That event weighed on Dante who was still an idealist and not yet convinced from further bitter experience that art was a better means of social transformation than politics. Art can create self-fulfilling prophecies – and that will become the aim of the Divine Comedy.
Some have found more to Dante’s method than that. They have seen in the poetry of the Fedeli d’Amore a symbolic language understandable only to initiates, and believe that this coded language conveys esoteric meanings. This was true of Dante as well, and Dante himself encouraged the notion. In Canto IX of the I
nferno he wrote:
O you possessed of sturdy intellects,
observe the teaching that is hidden here
beneath the veil of verses so obscure.
The entire Divine Comedy, they have argued, was laden with esoteric meaning and was open to political and heretical interpretations, leading to associations between Dante and the Templars, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons, all of them transmitters of the secrets.
CHAPTER THREE
The Divine Comedy
Dante is sometimes called a medieval poet, but although he was writing at a time when England and France were still in the Middle Ages, late thirteenth-century Italy was not. Along with his friend the painter Giotto, Dante is a precursor of the Renaissance, one of those men who made the Renaissance happen.
Written in his native Tuscan instead of the more prestigious Latin, the Divine Comedy is no pious recounting of Christian truisms; it’s an extraordinary adventure through space and time that challenges the conventions and doctrines of the age.
Dante is a fearless writer, condemning and punishing popes and kings alike, speaking his mind on whether non-Christians really do belong in Hell, and whether others – homosexuals, for example – do too. Though ultimately he keeps within the bounds of orthodoxy, or gives the impression of doing so, his remains a restless and searching mind.
CLIFF-HANGERS AND NARRATIVE DRIVE
