Chapter 5: Dante’s Three Beasts

Abstract

This chapter gives Dante’s literary biography, as had Dorothy Sayers with the Inferno, in these three parts. Its Leopard section discusses his youthful writings, which include perhaps the Mare amoroso, his lyric poetry of sung canzoni, beginning, he tells us, with “A ciascun’alma presa, e gentil core” at eighteen, and the “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore”, which he then embeds in Vita nova XIX and at Purgatorio XXIV.49–51, as well as its presence in the Vatican Canzoniere. His Vita nova creates prose autobiographical incarnational chapters as frames for the poems, in prosimetron, as Boethius had also done. The Lion section of this chapter will discuss Dante’s tragic Exile and his espousal of Empire, with his restless and usually unfinished prose writings of the De monarchia, the De vulgari eloquentia, and the Convivio, in Latin and Italian prose. Its Wolf section, his Commedia, recalls Saint Francis’ conversion of the Wolf of Gubbio as Dante’s taming of the tragedy of his Exile; the Libro del Chiodo, metamorphosed into the Pilgrimage of his Commedia, his returning to the beauty of the poetry of his youth from his bitter middle period of unfinished prose writings about poetry and politics.

Verse

Verse tal mi fece la bestia sanza pace, che, venendomi ‘ncontro, a poco a poco mi ripigneva là dove ‘l sol tace. Inf 58–60

Dante carefully discussed the Ages of Man in Convivio IV¹; Dante’s fellow student, Francesco da Barberino, illuminated them, with first a woman in the Officiolum,² and then in the Tesoro, with a man at ten stages of his life³ (Plate LVI Ages of Man, Francesco da Barberino, a, b, c, d, Officiolum; e, Brunetto Latino, Il Tesoro, BML Plut.42.20, scribe, illuminator, Francesco da Barberino, fol. 96^r). This well illustrates the observation by his fellow student, Dante, his Convivio IV.12:

Because its knowledge is at first imperfect through lack of experience and instruction, small goods appear great, and so from these it conceives its first desires. Thus we see little children setting their desire first of all on an apple, and then growing older desiring to possess a little bird, and then still later desiring to possess fine clothes, then a horse, and then a woman, and then modest wealth, then greater riches, and then still more.

Dante further discussed these Ages of Man:

I say that human life is divided into four ages. The first is called adolescence, which means “increase of life”; the second is called maturity, which means “the age that can be helpful” (that is, that can give perfection, and so it is considered a perfect age, for one can give only what one has); the third is called old age; the fourth is called senility, as has been said above.

Regarding the first age no one is in doubt, for all learned persons are in agreement that it lasts up until the twenty-fifth year. Since up until that time our soul is concerned with the growth and the beauty of the body, when many and great changes occur in one’s person, the rational part cannot discriminate with perfection. Consequently the Law directs that prior to reaching this age a person may not do certain things without a guardian of sufficient age.

Regarding the second age, which is truly the highest point of our life, there are many different opinions as to its duration. But leaving aside what the philosophers and physicians have to say about it and referring to the appropriate law, I say that in the majority (on the basis of which every judgment regarding what is natural can and must be made) this age lasts for 20 years. The reasoning which leads me to this conclusion is that if the highest point of our arc is in the thirty-fifth year, this age of life must have a descent and an ascent of equal duration; this ascent and descent are like the handle of a bow in which but little flection is observed. It obtains, then, that maturity is completed in the forty-fifth year. Just as adolescence lasts for the first twenty-five years, ascending toward maturity, so the descent, that is, old age, lasts for the same number of years following maturity; and so old age concludes in the seventieth year. (Conv IV.24)

The Three Beasts who encounter Dante in Inferno I, which, by line 58, are singular and feminine, “la bestia”, represent many things, among them the Three Ages of Man, the Leopard being Youth, the Lion as Prime, the Wolf as Age. Francesco da Barberino in his Officiolum similarly saw his relation to Florence as in the form of a monstrous Geryon-like chimaera whom he overcomes (Plate L b, c, Francesco da Barberino, Officiolum chimaera). Thus we see this group of writers, Brunetto, Francesco, Dante, all being allegorically self-referential about their aging.

This chapter will present Dante’s literary biography, as had Dorothy Sayers with the Inferno, into these three parts (Plates LXVIII, LXIX, LXX).⁴ Its Leopard section will discuss and present his youthful writings, which may include the Mare amoroso,⁵ his lyric poetry of sung canzoni, beginning, he tells us, with “A ciascun’alma presa, e gentil core” at eighteen, and the “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore”, which he then embeds in Vita nova XIX and at Purgatorio XXIV.49–51, as well as its presence in the BAV lat. 3793 Vatican Canzoniere at folio 99^v. His Vita nova creates prose autobiographical incarnational chapters as frames for the poems, in prosimetron, as Boethius had also done. The Lion section of this chapter will discuss Dante’s tragic Exile and his espousal of Empire, with his restless and usually unfinished prose writings of the De monarchia, the De vulgari eloquentia, and the Convivio, in Latin and Italian prose. Its Wolf section, his Commedia, can recall Saint Francis’ conversion of the Wolf of Gubbio as becoming Dante’s taming of the tragedy of his Exile; the “Book of the Nail”, the Libro del Chiodo (Plate XI a, b, c, d), as metamorphosed into the Pilgrimage of his Commedia, his returning to the beauty of the poetry of his youth from his bitter restless middle period of unfinished prose writings about poetry and politics.⁶

The Leopard, Dante’s Youth

Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly again and again: finally it can be reckoned upon beforehand and becomes a part of the ceremony.

Franz Kafka⁷

It had been the Roman tradition carried on through further centuries for fathers who were notaries to train their biological sons in their profession, which required Latin, thus keeping the Classics of Cicero, Sallust, Terence, Lucan, Livy, Virgil, Statius, Ovid, in that language, alive.⁸ Instead, the monastic world of celibacy artificially took oblates away from their families to in turn became celibate monks and clergy and their Patristic Latin was far more derived from the Psalter, Jerome, Gregory, Augustine, Bede, and Bernard, than from Cicero or Virgil. Dante had both strands, first ecclesiastical Latin from the Benedictines of the Badia, of his boyhood, later from studying with the Dominicans of Santa Maria Novella and the Franciscans of Santa Croce, while he had classical Latin first from Alagerius, his father, and then from Brunetto Latino, his guardian for around ten years, from the ages of 15/17 to 25,⁹ Brunetto adding to the mix, as we have seen, Greco-Arabic learning from Aristotle’s Ethics, Alfraganus’ Almagest, Alfonso X el Sabio’s own Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, perhaps the dream vision of Mahomet, the Kitab al-Mirag, Il Libro della Scala,¹⁰ texts acquired when on embassy at the court of Alfonso X el Sabio of Spain who was beginning to compose his Las Cantigas de Santa Maria¹¹; also such texts as Alanus de Lille’s De Planctu Naturae and Anticlaudianus in Latin, Geoffrey de Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, Gossuin de Metz’s Image du Monde, Richard de Fournival’s Bestiare d’Amour, and Guillaume de Loris and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose in French, which were acquired during Brunetto’s exile in Arras following the 1260 Montaperti disaster, as well as Provençal poetry.

While the Greek and Latin epic poets, Homer, Virgil, Lucan, and Statius, pseudo-documented propagandic dynastic history about war, “Arma virumque cano”, a different strand had centered on love, in Athens on the friendship between men and boys, in Greek Sicily these becoming pastoral eclogues about the love between shepherds and shepherdesses that will become Shakespeare’s pastoral Winter’s Tale, while in Rome in Latin, Ovid’s heterosexual love poetry was written for and caused his exile from the imperial court of Caesar Augustus. Add to this mix the Comedies of Terence of lovelorn youths enacted in Carthage and of Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas, where Amore poses as Aeneas’ son Ascanius in Dido’s lap, with Augustine’s responses in the Confessions to these Carthaginian tales. Brunetto Latino carefully taught Ovid as the poet of the Art, and of its palinode, the Remedy of Love, of fin amor, jokingly to himself in his Tesoretto, lines 2357–2380 (Plates IX a, XLVII c, d, LVII b, LIX, Brunetto and the god of Love, Brunetto and Ovid, Brunetto confesses to Friar at Montpellier, Tesoretto, Francesco da Barberino, BML Strozzi 146, fols. 21^r, 21^v, 23^v), and in this way to his students, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, and Francesco da Barberino, who were also his discipuli scriptores, his scribal apprentices.

Ovid was driven into exile to Constantia on the Black Sea, where he penned the Tristia, a lesson to be shared also by all these poets following him. Cicero in the Somnium Scipionis had already had the younger Scipio Africanus learn that lesson¹²; Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy would have his alter ego, his soul, Lady Wisdom, laugh at his acedia, his being chained to the whores of the theater of lust and sonneteering, and thus wean him—and us—from that self-pitying immaturity.¹³ Later, bourgeois Jean de Meun will similarly be laughing at Guillaume de Lorris’ courtly beginning to the French Roman de la Rose,¹⁴ to be turned into Italian sonnets in Il Fiore, perhaps by Francesco da Barberino when in Padua, where its sole surviving manuscript originated before it went to Troyes, to Dijon, then Montpellier,¹⁵ for in medieval and Renaissance documentation it is Francesco da Barberino who is considered their author.¹⁶ Dante will then mirror reverse the Roman’s wet dream red rosebud into the Commedia’s White and Gold Rose.¹⁷

Dante as the apprentice ward of Brunetto may have himself written Il Mare amoroso, a beast fable found in the BRicc 2908 manuscript of Brunetto’s Tesoretto copied out in a school-boyish hand and given in this book’s online Appendices in facsimile with transcription at https://www.florin.ms/DCAppendices.pdf. It plays with the Italian words “Amore/Morte”, that we find in Brunetto’s Tesoretto and Tesoro, in Dante’s Inferno XV, and in Francesco da Barberino’s use of the iconographical figures of Amore and of Morte as shooting arrows from two bows at us. It is a poem that mixes together Richard de Fournival’s Bestiare d’Amour derived from the Physiologus,¹⁸ that Brunetto would have encountered in the Amiens region when he was in exile there from 1260 to 1265 and which he used in his own Bestiary section in the French Li Livres dou Tresor and then in its Italian Tesoro version that he dictated to his students. But also the Mare Amoroso adds Arthurian material, not in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiare d’Amours, while ending with the love and grief of Hadrian for the death of the beloved youth Antinous,¹⁹ again absent from the Bestiare d’Amour. If this were Dante’s own rendition, as a love poem to Brunetto, who spoke clearly against homoeroticism, it would be on the order of Alcibiades’ wooing of Socrates, of Alexander’s teasing relation to Aristotle (Plate I), and of Antinous’ to Hadrian. The second reference is to Keherdin, Isolda’s brother, who is Tristan’s bosom friend, and to the storm-tossed ship in which he brings Isolda to the mortally ill Tristan, sickened from a poisoned spear wound, the other Isolda telling falsely that Tristan’s ship has a black, not white, sail, causing Tristan’s death.²⁰ This book postulates this poem is a precocious adolescent schoolboy exercise.

Brunetto’s manuscripts can include folios of lyrics in Provençal, or, in a Li Livres dou Tresor manuscript in Ferrara, on an end paper, Dante’s sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti about lovers in a boat,²¹ given here in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation²²:Verse

Verse Guido, I wish that Lapo, thou and I  Could be by spells conveyed, as it were now,  Upon a barque, with all the winds that blow Across all seas at our good will to hie. So no mischance nor temper of the sky  Should mar our course with spite od cruel slip;  But we, observing old companionship, To be companions still should long thereby And Lady Joan, and Lady Beatrice,  And her the thirtieth on my roll, with us   Should our good wizard set, o’er seas to move   And to talk of anything but love; And they three ever to be well at ease, As we should be, I think if this were thus.

This scene, a topos, can be found also in the Heidelberg Codex Manesse (Cod Pal. Germ. 848).²³ For, as Ezra Pound noted in The Spirit of Romance and as Dante would show in De vulgari eloquentia, lyric poetry in this period was intensely multicultural, Sicilian, Catalan, Gallegos, Provençal, Swiss, German, French, Tuscan poets all creating canzonieri that enrich each other’s, even Kings, like Thibaut I of Navarre, Frederic II of Sicily, and Alfonso X el Sabio of Spain, composing them. Likewise musical melodies and tunes could be shared among the Peoples of the Book, both secular and sacred, as carried by pilgrims.²⁴ Saint Francis himself was a troubadour, his mother Pica from Provence. While the later Catalan Llibre Vermell de Montserrat set sacred words to secular tunes for incubating pilgrims in its church to sing and dance.²⁵

Brunetto’s embassy become exile (to be repeated with Dante’s embassy become exile), with his journeying from Spain to Picardan Arras, had him encounter that mockingly bourgeois poetic of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, of Adam Bossu and of the splendid Aucasin and Nicolete,²⁶ playing Bakhtinesque Canivalesque games against the “Courtly Love” syndrome of the Champagne and Parisian worlds of power.²⁷ Andreas Capellanus’ Art of Courtly Love²⁸ was written tongue-in-cheek, much as would Chauntecleer speak to Pertelote, who says in Latin the opposite to what he says he translates “truthfully” into Middle English.²⁹ Capellanus’ lovers speak increasingly affectedly as they rise up the ladder of the social classes until they come to the top—where they revert to mere bestiality. It is all a façade, a grooming, a stalking, by the male of the female, a sugar coating to rape. Dante’s Beatrice, like Boethius’ Philosophy, will turn the tables on it, Beatrice twice reproaching Dante, in the Vita nova X and in Purgatorio XXXI. Though Dante first will try to seduce Beatrice with his harassing lyrics and then us with his dominoing pornographic Arthurian Northanger Abbey, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina romance-reading of Francesca and Paolo in Inferno V, that so twists the texts of St. Paul and St. Augustine, as he plays the Arabic maqāmāt role of a Galeotto, the name of the oarsman steering the boat of Tristan and Isolda wrongfully into disaster, a name Boccaccio next will use with this intent in the Decameron in plague tide. The aristocratic class, concerned with the inheritance of property entitlement, punished adultery on the part of the woman with death, while at the same time this social class read for idle amusement such dangerous pornographic romances of Guinevere and Lancelot, of Tristan and Isolda, playing fatal games of “amor, amor, a morte”. Christian canonical law instead, from St. Paul, taught the equality of husband and wife in the payment of the marriage debt, that if a spouse of either gender strayed this was due to the sexual incapacity of the other partner, the other’s fault.³⁰

The thirteenth-century Vatican canzoniere manuscript, BAV lat. 3793’s folios include Sicilian and Tuscan lyrics with poems by Giacomo da Lentini, Pier delle Vigne, Frederick II, Manfred, Bonagiunta Orbicciani, Guido Guinizelli,³¹ Guittone d’Arezzo, Guglielmo Beroardi, 57^r, Brunetto Latino, 57^v, Palamidesso Bellindote, 59^v, Chiaro Davanzati, 63^v, Andrea Monte, Cino da Pistoia, Bondie Dietaiuti, 58^r, Guido Orlandi, Rustico di Filippo, Guido Cavalcanti, among others, and Dante Alighieri’s own early “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore”, 99^v.³² Some are scoffing lyrics, not about love, but about hate, tenzoni against the tyranny of Charles in which poets dialogue politically, saying, like court jesters, like cartoonists, what is dangerous to say but true. Particularly interesting are the early poems that are clearly of Brunetto’s circle, Guglielmo Beroardi, 57^r, Palamidesso Bellindote, 59^v, Rustico di Filippo, Dante Alighieri, 99^v, and Guido Cavalcanti and some of the folios’ scripts are similar to the Rettorica, Tesoretto, and Tesoro manuscripts that I postulate are Dante’s, where the “r” goes below the line.

Then the later Canzoniere Palatino prefaces itself with an idolatrous figure of the god of Love on a column, but next presents carefully the images as if the voices of the poets alongside their poems, such author portraits being like today’s Zoom boxes on the screen of our consciousness, being their voices, bringing what is far in space and time near to us, being both seen and heard as we read the manuscript folios,³³ beyond their death, in doing so copying the Provençal manuscript tradition (Plates LXIV a, b, c, 7 a, Canzoniere Palatino Bonagiunta, Jacopo da Lentini, Guittone d’Arezzo, LXV a, Guido Guinizelli, BNCF Banco Rari 418, fols. 25^v, 18^r, 2^v, 13^v). Dante’s own canzoniere of poems will be gathered up by others as Le Rime, these including the circa 1296 Rime petrose to a lady named “Petra”.

Brunetto on his return to Florence, 1280/1282, following his sojourn first in Spain, then France, perhaps with the Templars of the Jerusalem Kingdom, shared with the new generation all this, including Avverroïst materials, as well as the drawing of maps of the Mediterranean in the Arabic manner (Plate LXXVI a, b, BBodleian Douce 319, Arabic Mappa mundi, Tresor, fol. 8^r, detail; c, Brunetto, Natura, Mediterranean, Tesoretto, BML, Strozzi 146, fol. 10^r; d, Hereford Mappa Mundi; e, Sabine Rethoré, Modern Map of Mediterranean Sea). Giovanni Villani, writing Brunetto Latino’s obituary in 1294, praised him and his teaching of young Florentines highly. But there is one whiff of disapproval, “fu mondano uomo”, that he was worldly.³⁴ Also with Guido Cavalcanti, his older student, we find criticism coming from the Black Guelfs Betto Brunelleschi and Guido Orlandi, and from the Franciscans and Dominicans, for Cavalcanti’s heretical Avverroïsm. All this gave rise first to the idolatry of the 1283 Fedeli d’amore of the dolce stil nuovo, then was 39. dramatically converted to lay piety, to the adaptation of Franciscan religious lyrics set to jocular secular tunes, especially with the 1291 lay burial society, the 6/30. Compagnia dei Laudesi di Orsanmichele, to which the secular families of Brunetto Latino, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante Alighieri all belonged, and who celebrated the miracles at her shrine in her tabernacle in the civic and secular grain market, perhaps modeled on the miracles of Alfonso X el Sabio’s Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, rather than at ecclesiastical 43. Santa Croce or 1. Santa Maria Novella of the Franciscans and the Dominicans.³⁵

When you crossed the Ponte Vecchio into the Oltrarno, you saw on your left-hand side the 39. Piazza Santa Felicita with the column bound in iron at its center (Plate IX a, God of Love, Tesoretto, Francesco da Barberino, BML Strozzi 146, fol. 21^r; b, Column in Piazza Santa Felicita, Oltrarno). Felicity is ironically the first named woman saint in the canon of the Mass, the pregnant African slave who was martyred along with her mistress Perpetua, while still lactating her new born child, in the arena at Carthage, for their refusing with blood, with milk, to sacrifice to pagan idols on pillars, their refusing to practice idolatry.³⁶ Giovanni Villani tells us, as we noted, that on St. John’s Day, 24 June 1283, when Dante was eighteen, a thousand young Florentines gathered there, dressed in white, to celebrate the god of Love, Amore.³⁷ Francesco da Barberino illustrated the scene with the pagan god Amore as a free standing idol on a Corinthian column, a pillar, before the Renaissance, shooting arrows from two bows at people (Plate IX a, BML Strozzi 146, fol. 21^r). He also illustrated the god of Love shooting arrows from two bows while on horseback in the Documenti d’Amore (Plate XLVII a, b, BAV Barb lat. 4076, fol. 99^v). Let me explain why this was, in medieval eyes, outrageous idolatry. It is on the order of modern-day Florentine adolescents covering their beautiful schools with the ugliest angriest graffiti. It is a mixture of Woodstock and Altamont.

A friend at Princeton, who was also friends with Einstein, Panofsky, and Janson at the Institute for Advanced Study, William Sebastian Heckscher, wrote a brilliant paper on how in the Middle Ages, paganism was correctly seen as practicing the state religion of Roman gods and emperors sculpted as free-standing idols on tall pillars, to be worshipped with blood sacrifices. Outside the Popes’ bedroom in their Lateran palace in Rome, along with the equestrian statue they thought was of the Emperor Constantine, now held to be of Marcus Aurelius and at the Renaissance placed instead on the Capitoline, were two pillars; on top of one the cock crowing at Peter’s Betrayal of Christ, on the other the nude boy in bronze, the Spinario, at which pilgrims threw stones, as they saw its genitalia from standing beneath it, which symbolized for them Genesis 3.18 on the Fall causing us to walk among the thorns and thistles of this earth (Plate LVIII a, b, Spinario, Rome).³⁸ Medieval depictions of the Golden Calf of Exodus showed it as being idolatrously worshiped on a pillar, a column. In the Renaissance the bronze statue of the Spinario was moved to the Capitoline and is now at eye level, identified as Ascanius, Aeneas’ son, whom we recall Venus replaced with her own child, Amore, Cupid, in Queen Dido’s lap, Aeneid I, here in Dryden’s translation:Verse

Verse But Venus, anxious for her son’s affairs, New counsels tries, and new designs prepares: That Cupid should assume the shape and face Of sweet Ascanius, and the sprightly grace; Should bring the presents, in her nephew’s stead, And in Eliza’s veins the gentle poison shed:

We have noted that the iconography for the god Amore as a nude winged boy, as an idol on a pillar, is found 39. Piazza Santa Felicita, in Brunetto Latino’s Tesoretto (Plate IX a, BML Strozzi 146, fol. 42^r), in Dante Alighieri’s Vita nova (titled by Giovanni Villani as the Vita nova d’amore³⁹ and whose text mentions the “Fedeli d’amore” four times), in Francesco da Barberino’s Documenti d’Amore (BAV Barb lat. 4076 and 4077), and in the Canzoniere Palatino (BNCF Banco Rari 217, fols. 1^r, 9^r, 33^v, 60^v.). Francesco da Barberino was a fellow student with Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavalcanti of Brunetto Latino, this event taking place during Dante and Francesco’s adolescence and part of the rebellious Fedeli d’Amore movement among these young poets. Dante in that year was just eighteen and already scribbling poetry, such as “A ciascun’alma presa, e gentil core”, the sonnet he addressed to Guido Cavalcanti of the “Fedeli d’amore”, as noted by Giovanni Boccaccio and Leonardo Bruni, a poem that he would come to embed in Vita nova III. It seems the Florentine “Fedeli d’amore” adolescents were already anticipating the paganism of the Renaissance with its free-standing idolatrous statues, such as by Donatello and Michelangelo, of Bacchus and David, in this Flower Power Glastonbury-like festival.

Perhaps his Maestro/Ser Brunetto, instead, steered Dante during this awkward adolescence of turbulent hormones and confused sexuality, to courting a young girl he once knew, rekindling that attraction to a rich banker’s daughter, to Beatrice Portinari, of his own neighborhood. To which harassment and grooming she will rightly respond with indignant “Me too” anger. Dante will come to play with all these traditions, all these voices, presenting them in a rich Bakhtinian dialogue of conversion from a stalking, grooming, adulterous lust after a banker’s daughter (Daisy’s “money in her voice” of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), pivoting to the “Love as strong as Death” (Song of Solomon 8.6), the “Love that moves the Sun and the other Stars” (Par XXXIII.145), the Beatles’ “Love is all you need, All you need is Love, Love, Love”, bringing our fallen earth into beatitude. In his writings we journey from his apprentice poems, next embedded into the Vita nova, its first part uncomprehending of Beatrice’s true meaning, through her weaning of him from that class and gender exploitation, as in her scorn at him in Vita nova X and in the mention of Guinevere and Lancelot where the Lady Malehaut coughs disapprovingly at their aristocratic adulterous romance which caused Camelot’s downfall, Par XVI.13–15 (Plate LXXVII BL Egerton 943, fol. 154^v, Fallacy of Nobility).

Dante, in Convivio II.12, will come to describe how in the aftermath of Beatrice’s death in June 1290 he was reading Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis and that he took to attending lectures at the schools of the Franciscans at Santa Croce and the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella, now adding Philosophy and Theology to his study of classical literature, diplomacy, and law from Brunetto Latino, and medicine perhaps at Santa Maria Nuova, while still centering on lyric poetry.⁴⁰ Nancy Thompson ably discussed the conflict taking place at this time between the Conventuals and the Spirituals at Franciscan 43. Santa Croce, and how this came about from Peter John Olivi’s arrival from Montpellier, then his return there, his student Ubertino da Casale likewise leaving on account of the Conventuals’ wealthy non-Franciscan building campaign.⁴¹ We recall Brunetto Latino’s Tesoretto describing his own conversion to Spiritual Franciscanism, away from the pagan god of Love, at Montpellier in line 11260 (Plate LIX a, BML Strozzi 146, fol. 23^v, Brunetto Latino confesses sins to Friar at Montpellier, Tesoretto, Francesco da Barberino). From this, and similarly cobbling together materials from Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, from Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, from Andreas Capellanus’ De arte oneste amandi, all finally critical of “fin amor”, while recycling his own lyrical tenzoni in dialogue with Guido Cavalcanti and others in the delicate Gothic/Islamic dolce stil nuovo of Florence’s Fedeli d’amore, derived in turn from the Sicilian, Gallegan, Catalan, Provençal, and Arabic poetic, Dante then adds the Crusades’ Fall of Acre and its loss of the Jerusalem Kingdom in May 1291, which came about immediately after the deaths of both Folco Portinari, 31 December 1289, and of his daughter, Beatrice, who, married to Simone de’ Bardi, died, perhaps from childbirth, 6 June 1290, to be buried either in the Oltrarno church of Santa Lucia or in the Bardi’s Santa Croce where the wealthy Portinari funded its building of dedicatory chapels.

Dante thus creates his brilliant apprenticeship and maqāmāt conversion work to the Commedia, the prosimetron Vita nova, in which he recycles his youthful love lyrics, and in which Jerusalem is metamorphosed as Florence, Christ as Beatrice, a conversion from the changeable pagan god of Love to a healing faith, which mirrors that of the Tesoretto’s Montpellier conversion.⁴² It was precisely during this time that Peter John Olivi was lecturing on Jeremiah’s Lamentations, “Quo modo sedet sola civitas”, at the studium of 43. Santa Croce, 1288–1289.⁴³

But more. The miracles at 30. Orsanmichele had begun, 3 July 1292, perhaps modeled on those of Alfonso X el Sabio’s Las Cantigas de Santa Maria (Plate XXXII a, b, c, d).⁴⁴ Guido Cavalcanti, Orsanmichele’s neighbor, wrote his celebratory sonnet “Una figura della Donna mia” and Dante presented his Vita nova to his beloved Maestro at Easter as a eucharistic offering, “Messer Brunetto, questa pulzelletta”, both sonnets opening this book. Here we witness the progress from the Fedeli d’amore of 39. Piazza Santa Felicita (Plate IX a, b) and going from their love lyrics in Canzonieri manuscripts to the 6. Compagnia dei Laudesi di 30. Orsanmichele, with their Laudario manuscripts, from centering on the pagan god of Love on a phallic pillar as an idol to that of the love of the God in the reverence for the Theotokos, God’s Mother, within a womb-like tabernacle in the manner of Las Cantigas de Santa Maria. The Tesoretto had similarly journeyed from the realms first of Natura, then of the Virtues, to that of the god of Love and of Ovid teaching the Art and Remedies of Love to where Brunetto Latino confesses his sins to a Friar at Montpellier (Plate LIX BML Strozzi 146, fol. 23^v), then and now a center of healing, next to be taught the Cosmos by Ptolemy (Plate LVII b, Cosmos, Brunetto, and Ptolemy, fol. 26^v).

Guido Cavalcanti wrote the sonnet on the 30. Orsanmichele miracles, which so carefully mirror those of the Spanish Las Cantigas manuscript, composed and perhaps given to Brunetto’s Florence by King Alfonso X el Sabio (Plates XXXII c, XXXIV b, https://archive.org/details/b.-r.-20/mode/1up). This maps the paradigm shift from the pagan god Amore on its column to the image in a tabernacle in a granary built in a garden by the laity, combining profane and sacred; from Oltrarno’s 39. Piazza Santa Felicita (Plate IX b), to the city’s center by the 29. Palazzo de’ Cavalcanti, between the ecclesiastical Piazza San Giovanni (Plates XVI-XXIII) and the government buildings of the Palazzo di Podestà, now the 20. Bargello, and 40. San Piero Schieraggi, to become the Palazzo del Popolo, now the Palazzo Vecchio.⁴⁵ That Guido Cavalcanti’s sonnet was addressed to another Guido, the Black Guelf Guido Orlandi, who reproached him in a tenzone, echoing the Franciscan and Dominican claim that the 6/30. Compagnia dei Laudesi di Orsanmichele was idolatry and heresy, carries with it still a whiff of the earlier Fedeli d’amore’s cult of the pagan idol on a pillar. It is where the laity, not the Church, rebelliously comes to celebrate the Gospel enacted by St. Francis.

I had earlier written on the “Paradigms of Pilgrimage” that we find in the Vita nova, as given twice over in its structuring.⁴⁶ It plays brilliant numerological games, its forty-two chapters echoing the Hebrew names of the forty-two stations replicated in Numbers 33,⁴⁷ as well as the Pilgrim tale of Luke 24. Station twenty-one, Arada, חֲרָדָה, exactly at the center, means “miracle”, and here we are told of Beatrice miraculously working to bring the lover into existence from his potentiality. It concludes by speaking of her miraculous smile, in the Italian, “mirabile”. While the other paradigm Dante has performed is from Luke 24, and the Benedictine liturgical drama, the Officium Peregrinorum (found also in the vernacular in a San Egidio Laudario manuscript),⁴⁸ which opens with the singing of “Jesu, Amor et Desiderium”, and then continues to act out the dramatic irony of the two mourning disciples who meet a Third whom they do not recognize but who is the resurrected Christ.

The Emmaus tale is encountered twice in the Vita nova, and the first time it is presented it is misread, misunderstood, and unrecognized. It is presented in the ninth section of the work. The Vita nova calls great attention to numerology and above all to that number, “nine”. The title of the work, in Latin, and repeated in rubrics at the opening of the text, puns upon “new” and “nine”, in contradistinction to the oldness of eight, the octagonal font, the pagan Emperor Octavian/Augustus who saw at Ara Coeli a vision of the Virgin and Child. These two numbers, eight and nine, then become, in medieval numerology, the numbers of conversion. Augustine similarly had had his conversion occur in the eighth book of the Confessions, his baptism into the new life in the ninth. Beatrice is equated with “nine” (Vita nova XXXVIII-XXXIX). From the nearby 21. Badia tower (Plate XXVIII a, b, c, d, e, f), Dante would physically hear the 3+3+3+9 tolling of their bell for the Angelus, the prayer of the Angel Gabriel to Mary of the Annunciation three times each day. Dante is here drawing attention to his code and to the means by which it can be cracked.

In that chapter Dante has gone away from Florence (just as Luke and Cleophas were journeying away from Jerusalem (Plate LXII a, b, c, d, e, Pilgrims at Emmaus), when on the road he meets Amore disguised as a pilgrim: “E però lo dolcissimo segnore… ne la mia immaginazione apparve come peregrino leggeramente vestito e di vili drappi” [And therefore the most sweet lord… in my mind appeared like a pilgrim lightly clad and with shabby garb]). Dante is, for a pilgrim, improperly on horseback: “Cavalcando l’altr’ier per un cammino” [Riding out the other day along a road]; the pilgrim Amore is correctly on foot, and probably barefoot. (John Donne will play with that paradox in his “Good Friday Riding Westward” four centuries after.)

There is a further relation to the Emmaus paradigm than might be apparent to a modern reader. The monastic liturgical dramas not only made use of Psalm 113 in the Easter Tuesday performances of the Officium Peregrinorum; they also, as we noted, prefaced that play with the hymn, “Jesu, Amor et Desiderium” [Jesus, Love and Desire].⁴⁹ As well, the pilgrimage to Rome, if ROMA was spelled backward, was to AMOR, Love (similar to the EVA/AVE palindrome beloved, for instance, by Fra Angelico). For these reasons many uses of the Emmaus paradigm in medieval texts yoked the erotic to the Christological, including Tristan’s encounter with two Venetian pilgrims on the shores of Tintagel, upon his pilgrimage not to Christ but to Isolde,⁵⁰ Johannes von Hadlaub, disguised as a pilgrim wooing his mistress,⁵¹ Petrarch’s Pilgrim Sonnet XVI to Laura, Chaucer’s Troilus’ failed tryst to Criseyde,⁵² Shakespeare’s Romeo’s pilgrimage to Juliet.⁵³ Partly what lies behind the medieval game with pilgrimage, which can and should be chaste, but which is mocked as being of lust, is the statement in I Peter 2.11: “Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul”. Prohibitions give rise to mocking misrule, to satirical saturnalia, to Bakhtinian “Carnival”.⁵⁴ Dante, in the razio to his poem, stresses the Emmaus-like sudden loss of Amore. But the appearance of his Amore, here, is more that of Cupid than that of Christ. The Christological references are deliberately kept cloudy and unclear at this stage of the pilgrimage of the Vita nova, in trobar clus, both for its Luke-like persona, who is foolish and slow to believe, and for its readers who mirror him.

The other half of this tally comes in Vita nova XL with the sonnet’s lines:Verse

Verse Deh peregrini che pensosi andate, forse di cosa che non v’è presente, venite voi da sì lontana gente, com’a la vista voi ne dimostrate, che non piangete quando voi passate per lo suo mezzo la città dolente, come quelle persone che neente par che ’ntendesser la sua gravitate? [O pilgrims, meditating as you go, On matters it may be, not near at hand, Have you then journeyed from so far a land, As from your aspect one may plainly know, That in the sorrowing city’s midst you show No sign of grief, but onward tearless wend, Like people who, it seems, can understand No part of all its grievous weight of woe?]

Its commentary goes on to speak of pilgrims journeying from Florence to Rome to see “quella imagine benedetta la quale Iesu Cristo lasciò a noi per essemplo de la sua bellissima figura” [that blessed image that Jesus Christ has left for us as a pattern of his most beautiful face]. It is generally assumed that this is the Veronica veil shown each Easter Friday to pilgrims at St. Peter’s. But an investigation of pilgrimage practices in Rome in the thirteenth century indicates instead that this is the face of Christ in the apse mosaic of St. John Lateran which was said to have floated miraculously into the basilica through the Golden Door.⁵⁵ To enter this door, to view this face, the Santo Volto gave the pilgrim, even in the thirteenth century, a most valuable indulgence. The Lateran, before the 1307 earthquake, was of far greater importance and sanctity than was the Vatican. In Vita nova IX that Christ imaging was obscure; in Vita nova XL it is revealed, the Pilgrim’s Progress of the work deliberately being that of I Corinthians 13.12: “Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem; nunc cognosco ex parte, tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum” [For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known].

Coupled with this pilgrimage toward Rome Dante gives us a most careful definition of the various kinds of pilgrims according to their geographic goals, a definition already present in Alfonso X el Sabio’s Las Siete Partidas⁵⁶:

…chiamansi palmieri in quanto vanno oltremare, là onde molte volte recano la palma; chiamansi peregrini in quanto vanno a la casa di Galizia, però che la sepultura di sa’ Iacopo fue più lontana de la sua patria che c’alcuno altro apostolo; chiamansi romei in quanto vanno a Roma, là ove questi cu’io chiamo peregrini andavano.

[They are called Palmers who go overseas, where they often bring back the palm; they are called Pilgrims who go to the shrine in Galicia, for the tomb of St. James is the farthest from his homeland than is that of any other apostle; they are called Roamers who go to Rome, where those whom I call Pilgrims were going.]

But Dante is implying that his own city, through which these pilgrims are traveling, is another pilgrim city. In quoting Jeremiah: “Quomodo sedet sola civitas” [How doth the city sit solitary], Lamentations I.1, preached on by Peter John Olivi, he is drawing an analogy between Florence and Jerusalem; the one city for the loss of Beatrice mirroring that other city for the death of Christ, in the manner of Christ’s seeing prophecies concerning himself in the Old Testament as fulfilled in the New. Dante is thus drawing Florence into the Emmaus paradigm twice over, the first time obscurely, the second time with clarity.

One can use the same formula as for the Commedia and the Tesoretto, for the autobiographical Vita nova:

I Florence, Lost Jerusalem Youth, 1265–1293 Dante Alighieri, Author True History ―> Material Cause Literal Level Flesh/Blood/Body Beatrice Portinari Outside the Poem

II Florence=Jerusalem Folly―›Wisdom, 1265–1293 Dante Alighieri, Lover Fact/Fiction Poems/Dreams Formal and Efficient Causes Moral and Allegorical Levels Mind/Soul Beatrice Within the Poem

III Everywhere=Jerusalem Everyone, 1254—>now We the Reader ―> True Efficient and Final Causes Moral and Anagogical Levels Soul Christ Beyond the Poem

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose father, a great scholar of Dante, was in political exile from Italy in London, often painted self-referential scenes derived from the Vita nova. As a Victorian he does not show Love, Amore, the winged boy, as naked, but as clothed, in his paintings at Ottawa, National Gallery, Beatrice’s Salutations, 1859, London, Tate Gallery, Beatrice’s Death, 1856, 1890, Dantis Amor, 1869, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Dante painting angels the year following Beatrice’s death, and being visited by her brother, 1853. It was Dante who wrote (and Dante Gabriel Rossetti who translated both Cavalcanti’s and Dante’s sonnets, as well as the Vita nova⁵⁷), the charming Easter “Messer Brunetto, questa pulzeletta” [Master Brunetto, this my little maid] sonnet to accompany its gift of the Vita nova to his maestro,⁵⁸ one of the two sonnets opening this book.⁵⁹

I loved the passage in Virginia Woolf’s writings where she described the contents of a writer’s desk, that description of past texts becoming her present writing. Samuel Beckett also does so in Krapp’s Last Tape. Which I am doing in this book, gathering up a lifetime of research and writings. That is the technique Dante uses, taking his juvenile poetry of the dolce stil nuovo, of the Fedeli d’amore, which he began at eighteen, then recycling these in the Vita nova and then again in the Purgatorio, and Paradiso, beginning with Casella’s singing of “Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona” in Purgatorio II and ending with the vernacular Franciscan lauda he humbly and anonymously composed for St. Bernard to sing (who should instead be singing in Latin Gregorian chant as a Cistercian monk), “Vergine Madre, Figlia del tuo Figlio” in Paradiso XXXIII of the Commedia. It is precisely the kind of lauda that the lay Compagnia dei Laudesi di Orsanmichele sang. Indeed, there is a similar lauda composed by “Maestro latino” in such a manuscript, BNCF Palatino 168, fols. 34^v–46^v, presented in facsimile and diplomatically in https://www.florin.ms/DCAppendices.pdf.

Giovanni Villani had mentioned that the celebration of the Fedeli d’amore of 24 June 1283 had been the last period of peace in Florence before the outbreaks of violence between Black and White Guelfs. We need at this point to turn back to “Chapter 2: Dante’s Circle in Space”, Dante’s Florence, and to its 9. Piazza San Pier Maggiore Plate XXV a, b, c, d, for an overview of the history of Dante’s Florence, first of the conflict between Ghibelline and Guelf and then between Black Guelf and White. Brunetto Latino modeled Florence’s government on Cicero and other Roman writers and on the concept of the love of God, neighbor, even enemy, from the Gospel, participating in the Republican Commonwealth of the “Primo Popolo”. The disastrous ambush of the Florentine Guelf forces at Montaperti in 1260 by King Manfred and the Ghibellines ended in exile for the Guelfs until the victorious Battles of Benevento and Tagliacozzi under their elected champion, the avaricious and belligerent Count Charles of Anjou and Provence. The 1280 Peace of Cardinal Latino, working against Charles’ tyranny, had allied merchant Guelf and noble Ghibelline families in Florence, with peace-weaving marriages between them, for instance, with Ghibelline Farinata’s daughter, named Beatrice, wed to Guelf Cavalcanti’s son, Guido, Inferno X. Seeking to further stabilize Florence, Giano Della Bella proclaimed the Ordinaments of Justice, January 1293, which prohibited blood feuding on pain of exile and death, the Podestà with the Gonfalone or Banner of Justice, a “pacifica orifiamma” (Par XXXI.127), kept in 30. Orsanmichele (Plate XXXII), arriving at the scene with his armed band to arrest the perpetrators and end the violence. When Corso Donati, a noble, murdered a commoner, and Giano Della Bella did not carry out the sentence against Corso, the people rioted, attacking the 20. Bargello (Plate XXVII). For this failure Giano Della Bella had himself to go into exile, being punished, ironically, under his own Ordinaments.

The Ordinaments of Justice required participants in government to be members of trade guilds, having a commercial livelihood, that they participate in its prosperity, rather than being land-holding feuding nobility. Dante, in order to participate in government, enrolled in 1295 in the guild for medical doctors and spice merchants, the Arte de’ Medici e Speziali, whose stemma or coat of arms was of the Madonna and Child, whose patron is Mary’s portraitist, St. Luke. This guild was also responsible for the production of manuscripts, written on parchment, illuminated with pigments and bound with leather and metal. Dante, from the 15th of June to the 15th of August 1300, served as one of the six Priors of the Arti, required by the Ordinaments of Justice to live together for two months in the 23. Torre della Castagna, removed from corruption, and to adjudicate in cases of violence, voting on sentences with chestnuts (Plate XXIX a, b). Meanwhile the Guelf party had fractalled into the Black Guelfs, who became like the violent noble oligarchic Ghibellines, as opposed to the White Guelfs, who instead maintained the Guelf tradition as the party for republican peace, lay piety, and commercial prosperity. We have already seen in Boccaccio’s narration how Guido Cavalcanti on foot was being taunted at the 6. Compagnia dei Laudesi di Orsanmichele tombs beside 5. Santa Reparata (Plate XXI) by a group of Black Guelf horsemen led by Betto Brunelleschi, and how Guido Cavalcanti and the Black Guelf Guido Orlandi were sparring in poetic tenzoni about 30. Orsanmichele (Plate XXXII), in both instances the accusation of heresy being leveled at Guido Cavalcanti.

During Dante’s tenure as Prior his great friend and fellow White Guelf Guido Cavalcanti and their great enemy, the violent Black Guelf Corso Donati came to blows and Dante was constrained to pass sentence of exile with chestnuts on both of them. As a result Guido died of fever contracted during that exile to Sarzana on his return in August 1300 and was buried with other members of the 6/30. Compagnia dei Laudesi di Orsanmichele beside Santa Reparata (Plate XX),⁶⁰ while Corso never forgave Dante for being exiled, causing Dante’s exile in turn to be lifelong—like that of Giano Della Bella. Dante’s wife, Gemma Donati, related to Corso Donati, remained in Florence, under the protection of her family, their house sacked but not destroyed, while their children, Pietro, Jacopo, Giovanni, and Antonia, joined their father in exile in the Veneto when they came of age, where Jacopo and Pietro would write commentaries to their father’s Commedia and Antonia would become an Olivetan nun, taking the name, “Beatrice”, in Ravenna.

The Lion, Dante’s Prime

…COM’IO RIGVARDANDO TRA LOR VEGNO,

IN VNA BORSA GIALLA VIDI AZZVRRO

CHE D’VN LEONE AVEA FACCIA E CONTEGNO

And as I gazing round me come among them,

Upon a yellow pouch I azure saw

That had the face and posture of a lion.

Inf XVII.58–60

Carefully educated as a youth in Florentine Guelf Republicanism by Brunetto Latino, who died in 1294, in his prime Dante met with shattering disaster. He had joined the Guild of Physicians and Spice Merchants, the Arte dei medici et speziali, a Guild also involved in the production and sale of manuscript books, in order to participate in the form of government devised by Giano della Bella of the Utopian Ordinaments of Justice. As later with Savonarola and Giorgio La Pira, this dream of Christian peace imposed on the feuding lawlessness of Corso Donati’s ilk, by presenting the Gonfalone of Justice, kept in Orsanmichele 30,⁶¹ provoked an equal and opposite reaction, Giano della Bella going into exile, the Black Guelfs returning through the Porta a’ Pinti Gate to Ghibelline-like violence, led by Corso Donati rising up against Dante’s party of the Cerchi, the Whites. Dante, Dino Compagni tells us, was sent by the Whites to the Pope in October 1301, who instead was favoring the Blacks, Charles of Valois, their protector, entering the city, 1 November 1301. The Podestà, Cante de’ Gabrielli da Gubbio, who was imposed on Florence, next pronounced the sentence of exile against Dante and other White Guelfs, 27 January 1302. Further charges followed, including a sentence of death by being burned alive if he returned to Florence, that are given in the “Book of the Nail”, the Libro del Chiodo (Plate XI a, b, c, d, d), then kept in the 20. Bargello. Essentially the violent Blacks expelled, even killed, the peaceable Whites in opposition to them, removing them from the city, while destroying and looting their homes. Pope Boniface VIII, Charles of Valois, Canto de’ Gabrielli da Gubbio, and Corso Donati were the aggressors against the Florence taught by Brunetto Latino of the Primo Popolo and later with the Secondo Popolo to be the city for the love of God and neighbor, “l’amor di Dio e del prossimo”, even enemy, “del nimico”, the Libro del Chiodo filled with these unjust sentences and condemnations against them. It echoes what had occurred to the Guelfs of Brunetto’s 1260 exile following the Ghibelline victory at Montaperti—and which would occur again to Savonarola’s city whose King is Christ by the Borgia Popes.⁶² 25. Dante’s House (Plate XXXI a, b, c, d, e, f) was sacked and looted by his neighbors, whom he places in the Circle of Thieves, but it remained standing, his wife Gemma being under protection from her Black Guelf Donati family. Small wonder Dante lost his loyalty to the Papacy and that he placed, jokingly, Pope Boniface VIII, who favored Charles of Valois and Black Guelf Corso Donati, and who was still alive, not dying until 1303, ignominiously in Hell (Inf XIX.52), upside down.

To document this we turn to the 20. Bargello’s Libro del Chiodo where (Plate XI b, p. 4 1302) “Dante Alleghieri de sextu Sancti Petri Maioris” is condemned to two years of exile, for the crime of barratry (“super baracteriis, iniquis extorsionibus et lucris illicitis”, c, p. 15 “Dante Allighierii”, d, p. 147 “De sextu Porte Sancti Petri Dante Alleghierij”), both exiling Dante and sentencing him to death, by burning, by the sword.⁶³ Exile from one’s city in the Middle Ages carried with it simultaneously excommunication. Dante is both stateless and deprived of the Sacraments, punished both physically and spiritually. For what sin? For Barratry, for taking bribes, profiting from public office. The sin Dante jokes about in Inferno XXI, Barratry in the lay world being the twin sin of Pope Boniface VIII’s Simony in the ecclesiastical one, of financially profiting from abusive hierarchies of power.

Then Dante in exile first, like Brunetto, is involved with plotting how to win back Florence, but disastrously fails to take in his teacher’s experience to not “put your trust in princes” (Psalm 146.3). While associating with figures like Alfonso X el Sabio, seeking to be Holy Roman Emperor, or Charles of Anjou, seeking the get-rich-quick scheme of the Constantinople Crusade, Brunetto always opted instead for the Republican form of the city commune for peace and prosperity, addressing these rulers with the Quaker-like “tu”, as an equal, teaching the love of God, of neighbor, of enemy. Dante, however, took up the imperial theme in his desire that the elected Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VII, would bring about world peace, the Pax Romana, as a new Caesar Augustus. Dante wrote the De Monarchia in Latin, juxtaposing Brunetto’s concepts from the classical Ciceronian world of liberty, overarching these with the Virgilian one of world order. Had Brunetto written the Commedia Cicero or Cato or Scipio would have been his guides. Instead, Dante elects Virgil, and the Aeneid as the book over which he falls asleep and dreams, in the manner of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun falling asleep over Macrobius’ Ciceronian Somnium Scipionis and dreaming the Roman de la Rose. Had Brunetto or Michelangelo written the Commedia, while Judas might have been in Satan’s mouth, we noted, neither Brutus nor Cassius would have been. It is just possible that Dante is manifesting, in this condemnation of them, Hell’s tyrannical injustice. They, with the pens, the styli, with which they stabbed Caesar, were whistleblowers on the order of Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, abhorrent to conservatism, for using the parrhesia studied by Karl Popper, I.F. Stone, and Michel Foucault.⁶⁴ Brunetto’s Tesoro, dictated to Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, and Francesco da Barberino, was a whistle-blowing Pentagon Papers text against his elected King Charles of Anjou, written for “love of his enemy”, attempting to teach Good Government to a now dead tyrant and others of his ilk.⁶⁵

First Dante strove with other Whites to win back Florence. In 1302 he was at San Godenzo in the Mugello, then, the following year, at Forlì. On 20 July 1304, the Whites with the Pistoians attempted to storm the city from Brunetto’s La Lastra, but were repulsed. Dante spoke of them as that “compagnie malvagia e scempia” [vicious and ill company (Par XVII.62)], and he took refuge in Verona with Bartolomeo della Scala. On 6 October he was at Sarzana in Lunigiana (where Guido Cavalcanti had been exiled), working for Moroello Malaspina. Like Yeats later, he was now having to seek noble patrons, departing from his Guelf Republican upbringing, first with the Malaspina dynasty in Lunigiana, then with Can Grande Della Scala in Verona and finally with Guido da Polenta in Ravenna, imitating Virgil’s patronage with Maecenas and Caesar Augustus in the composition of the questionable Epistola to Can Grande.⁶⁶ Before the final two patrons, Giovanni Villani and Giovanni Boccaccio note, he may have studied at Bologna and Paris, Boccaccio suggesting he even studied at Oxford; Giovanni de Saravalle, the Franciscan who translated the Commedia into Latin for English Bishops, stating: “Dilexit theologium sacram, in qua diu studuit tam in Oxoniis in regno Anglie, quam Parisius in regno Francie” [He delighted in sacred theology, which he studied both in Oxford in England’s kingdom, as in Paris in the kingdom of France].

Dante in exile was restless, his soul broken by this trauma. Instead of writing a Vita nova or a Commedia during this period he was writing literary criticism, he was writing theory about poetry, but what he was not writing was poetry. He began the De vulgari eloquentia perhaps in 1302, stopping perhaps in 1305, the Convivio perhaps in 1304, stopping in 1307, these works written in tandem, the first in Latin about the vernacular languages, giving many examples of them, the second in the vernacular language of Tuscany’s Florence, neither work finished. In Convivio I.iii he wrote of his exile and poverty, as had likewise Brunetto done before him:

Since it was the pleasure of the citizens of the most beautiful and famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast me out of her sweet bosom–where I was born and bred up to the pinnacle of my life, and where, with her good will, I desire with all my heart to rest my weary mind and to complete the span of time that is given to me–I have traveled like a stranger, almost like a beggar, through virtually all the regions to which this tongue of ours extends, displaying against my will the wound of fortune for which the wounded one is often unjustly accustomed to be held accountable. Truly I have been a ship without sail or rudder, brought to different ports, inlets, and shores by the dry wind that painful poverty blows. And I have appeared before the eyes of many who perhaps because of some report had imagined me in another form. In their sight not only was my person held cheap, but each of my works was less valued, those already completed as much as those yet to come.

The De vulgari eloquentia is not only, paradoxically in Latin, a defense of the vernacular languages, it is also a study of multicultural vernacular canzoni, quarrying again the material such as found in the Vatican canzoniere (BAV lat. 3793), that he may have written in part himself. For instance, this is perfectly consonant with his participation in the Fedeli d’amore movement of his teenage years:

Learned writers in all three vernaculars agree, then, on many words, and especially on the word ‘love’. Thus Giraut de Borneil: Si.m sentis fezelz amics, per ver encusera amor; [If I felt I were a genuine and accepted lover; I would indeed bring charges against love] The King of Navarre:⁶⁷ De fin amor si vient sen et bonté; [From true love come knowledge and goodness] Master Guido Guinizzelli: Né fe’ amor prima che gentil core, né gentil cor prima che amor, natura. [Nor did nature create love before the gentle heart, nor the gentle heart before love]. (DVE I.ix)⁶⁸

Besides mentioning vernacular renditions of Biblical stories (such as we find in his teacher’s Tesoro), and those of Troy, Rome, and the “beautiful doublenesses” (ambages pulcherrimae) of the Arthurian matter, he names a multitude of the Provençal, Sicilian, and Tuscan poets, often citing the first line of their canzoni in their dialects (he who would later in Purgatorio XXVI compose words for Arnaut Daniel to sing in Provençal): of Peire d’Alvernha for the langue d’oc, Cino da Pistoia for Tuscany’s ‘sì’. Brunetto’s Tesoro, as taught to Guido Cavalcanti, Dante Alighieri, and Francesco da Barberino, in its “First Redaction” in Italian, had already praised Emperor Frederick II and King Manfred, the Guelfs having made their peace with the Ghibellines in their alliance of the 1280 Peace of Cardinal Latino to bring down the tyranny of Charles of Anjou. So Dante in the De Vulgari eloquentia is free to praise Emperor Frederick, King Manfred of Sicily, and King Thibault of Navarre for the “nobility and integrity that were in their hearts; and, as long as fortune allowed, they lived in a manner befitting men, despising the bestial life. On this account, all who were noble of heart and rich in graces strove to attach themselves to the majesty of such worthy princes, so that, in their day, all that the most gifted individuals in Italy brought forth first came to light in the court of these two great monarchs” (DVE I.vii.4). While following this with a return to the political invective of the tenzoni of earlier time, now meted out to contemporary tyrants: “Racha, racha! What is the noise made now by the trumpet of the latest Frederick, or the bells of the second Charles, or the horns of the powerful marquises Giovanni and Azzo, or the pipes of the other warlords? ‘Only Come, you butchers! Come, you traitors! Come, you devotees of greed!’” (DVE I.vii.5).⁶⁹

Dante, who was now wandering from court to court, seeking Augustan patronage in the manner of Virgil, next criticized the republican civic style of the Tuscan poets, listing “Guittone d’Arezzo, or Bonagiunta da Lucca, or Gallo of Pisa, or Mino Mocato of Siena, or Brunetto the Florentine”, while excepting “Guido, Lapo, and one other, all from Florence, and Cino, from Pistoia”, the “one other” being himself (DVE I.xiii.1–6). We remember that lyric about the three in a boat, “Guido, I wish that Lapo, thou and I”. We recall, too, the Beatles’ breakup and John Lennon shot. He then goes on to say that Aldobrandino Padovano had written in a courtly, non-civic style, and he praises the Bolognan dialect and how Sordello of Mantua abandoned his own dialect in his writing. He noted that the Bolognan poets write in a purer form than is the ordinary speech: “The great Guido Guinizzelli wrote: Madonna, ‘l fino amore ch’io vi porto [Lady, the true love that I bear you]; Guido Ghislieri: Donna, lo fermo core [Lady, the faithful heart]; Fabruzzo: Lo meo lontanogire [My distant wandering]; Onesto: Più non attendo il tuo soccorso, amore [No longer do I expect your help, love]. All these words are very different from what you will hear in the heart of Bologna”.

He continued to list the poets that were in the Vatican Canzoniere: “Bertran de Born on arms, Arnaut Daniel on love, Giraut de Borneil on integrity; Cino da Pistoia on love, his friend on integrity. So Bertran says: Non posc mudar c’un cantar non exparia [I cannot refrain from sending forth my song]; Arnaut: L’aura amara fa.l bruol brancuz clarzir [The bitter breeze makes the leafy copses whiten]; Giraut: Per solaz reveilar che s’es trop endormiz [To re-awaken the joys of company which have sunk into too sound a sleep]; Cino: Digno sono eo di morte [I am worthy of death]; his friend: Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire [Grief brings boldness to my heart]. As for arms, I find that no Italian has yet treated them in poetry” (DVE I.xiii.9).

When he discussed the hendecasyllable he again catalogued the poets with their first lines as if from the index to that Canzoniere: “And all the best poets seem to have accepted this, and have begun their illustrious canzoni with a hendecasyllable. Thus Giraut de B.: Ara ausirez encabalitz cantarz… The King of Navarre: De fin amor si vient sen et bonté [From true love come knowledge and goodness]… Guido Guinizzelli: Al cor gentil repara sempre amore; Delle Colonne, the judge of Messina: Amor, che lungiamente m’hai menato [Love, who long have led me]; Rinaldo d’Aquino: Perfino amor vo sì letamente [I go so happily for true love’s sake]; Cino da Pistoia: Non spero che giamai per mia salute [I have no hope that ever for my benefit]; and his friend: Amor, che movi tua virtù da cielo [Love, who send your power down from heaven]” (DVE II.v.4).

Which he then repeated: “Of these it is definitely the hendecasyllable that earns the highest ranking when we try to write poems in the tragic style, because of its peculiar aptness for such composition. For there are some stanzas that seem to rejoice in being composed entirely of hendecasyllables, as in that poem of Guido of Florence: Donna me prega, perch’io voglio dire [A lady begs me to discuss]; or as I myself wrote: Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore [Ladies who have understanding of love]. The Hispanic poets have also used this device: and by Hispanic I mean those who have written poetry in the language of oc, such as Aimeric de Belenoi: Nuls hom non pot complir adrecciamen. [No man can accomplish fittingly]” (DVE II.xii.3). Dante will write the Commedia in hendacasyllables, much as Shakespeare will write in iambic pentameter.

Dante went on to praise the construction of canzoni: “as in this one by Giraut: Si per mon Sobretos non fos [If it were not for my Above-All]; Folquet de Marselha: Tan m’abellis l’amoros pensamen [So greatly does the thought of love please me]; Arnaut Daniel: Sols sui che sai lo sobraffan che.m sorz [I am the only one who knows the overwoe that rises]; Aimeric de Belenoi: Nuls hom non pot complir addreciamen [No man can accomplish fittingly]; Aimeric de Peguilhan: Si con l’arbres che per sobrecarcar [Like the tree that, because it is weighed down]; The King of Navarre: Ire d’amor que en mon cor repaire [Passion of love that dwells in my heart]; The Judge of Messina: Ancor che l’aigua per lo foco lassi [Although water flees from fire]; Guido Guinizzelli: Tegno de folle empresa a lo ver dire [I think it a foolish business, to tell the truth]; Guido Cavalcanti: Poi che di doglia cor conven ch’io porti [Since it is fitting that I bear a heart full of sorrow]; Cino da Pistoia: Avegna che io aggia più per tempo [Although I have for a long time]; and his friend: Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona [Love that speaks to me in my mind]” (DVE II.vi.6). Again that unnamed poet is Dante himself, this poem repeated in Convivio III and in Purgatorio II, where it is sung by the music performer Casella. He next advised the study of the poetry of Virgil, Ovid, Statius, and Lucan as well as Latin prose writers such as Livy and Pliny. Finally he heaped political scorn on Guittone d’Arezzo, the convert to the Frati gaudenti, the Jovial Friars, and those like him now governing Florence as their Podestà with corruption (DVE II.vi.8, Inf XXIII.103).

One phrase which he rejected, but which is poignant, is where he wrote: “There is one that is, flavored and no more, typical of pedantic students and teachers: ‘I am stricken with sorrow more than most, for whoever drags out his life in exile, revisiting his native land only in dreams’” (DVE II.v.5). This reminds one of Brunetto’s father’s letter penned from exile to Lucca’s San Frediano district following Montaperti’s disaster and sent to Brunetto as he seeks to return, stating that its pages are stained with tears.⁷⁰

Dante almost simultaneously took up the writing of the Convivio in Italian, first conceived as taking up the razio of fourteen of his lyrics, though only completing three of these: “Voi che’ ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (Conv II, Par VIII.31–148, IX.1–12, where Dante associates it with Carlo Martello, his friend of 1294); “Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona” (Conv III; Purg II, where Dante has it sung by the shade of Casella); “Le dolce rime d’amor ch’i solia” (Conv IV), then abandoning this project as had earlier Brunetto Latino abandoned both the Rettorica and the Tesoretto, in order to complete Li Livres du Tresor/Il Tesoro. This last canzone with its lengthy discussion on and against Ghibelline nobility will be discussed in this book’s eighth and final chapter, on Dante’s Decolonialism.

The Convivio is verbose and unfinished, indeed discarded for the far superior Commedia. It is prose versus poetry. But parts of it will be found throughout this book. As in Brunetto’s writings there is much discussion of Cato from Lucan’s Pharsalia, a historical figure who will recur in the Purgatorio as a typological figura for the angry Moses on Mount Sinai, when instead Cato was noted for his Stoic non-espousal of anger (Conv III.5). The passage against mercenary professions: “Nor should we give the name of true philosopher to anyone who is a friend of wisdom for the sake of utility, as are jurists, physicians, and almost all those belonging to religious orders, who study not in order to gain knowledge but to secure financial rewards or high office; and if anyone were to give them what they seek to gain, they would not persevere in their study” (Conv III.11), will recur in Paradiso XI which opens with a powerful apostrophe against sophistic learning for personal gain, lust, and idleness, used by lawyers, physicians, priests, and politicians, through plagiary, fraud, and violence. Dante had been reading Solomon’s Proverbs, Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and from these he shaped his allegory of Philosophy as Wisdom, God’s Daughter, the Shekinah, playing at his side at the Creation of the World: “‘When God prepared the heavens, I was there; when he set a circle on the face of the deep with a fixed law and a fixed circuit, when he made firm the skies above and set on high the fountains of the waters, when he enclosed the sea within its boundary and decreed that the waters should not transgress their bounds, when he laid the foundations of the earth, I was with him, ordering all things, and I took pleasure every day’” (Conv III.15; Proverbs 8.27). Michelangelo would fresco her beside God at the Creation in the later Sistine Chapel as if his beloved Vittoria Colonna.

Dante next writes the De Monarchia, 1308–1310, arguing for the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII. Carefully trained by Brunetto as a Guelf in support of the Papacy, his White Guelf Florence has been bitterly betrayed by Pope Boniface VIII and his vicious minions. A sentence of exile in the Middle Ages, we recall, also carried with it excommunication from the Sacraments. Dante is fuoruscito, an exile on all levels. He has already anticipated the De Monarchia in Convivio IV.4, speaking of the previous Holy Roman Emperors while at the same time using the same arguments as had Brunetto from Republican Cicero on the need for Peace and Justice, but now as obtained not by a Republic but by a Monarch, an Emperor.

Moreover, a city requires for the sake of its culture and its defense mutual relations and brotherhood with the surrounding cities, and for this reason kingdoms were created. Since the human mind does not rest content with limited possession of land but always seeks to achieve glory through further conquest, as we see from experience, discord and war must spring up between one kingdom and another. Such things are the tribulations of cities, of the surrounding cities, of the communities, and of the households of individuals; and so happiness is hindered. Consequently, in order to do away with these wars and their causes, it is necessary that the whole earth, and all that is given to the human race to possess, should be a Monarchy–that is, a single principality, having one prince who, possessing all things and being unable to desire anything else, would keep the kings content within the boundaries of their kingdoms and preserve among them the peace in which the cities might rest. Through this peace the communities would come to love one another, and by this love all households would provide for their needs, which when provided would bring man happiness, for this is the end for which he is born.^4.

This pre-eminent office is called the Empire, without qualification, because it is the command of all other commands. And thus he who is placed in this office is called the Emperor, since he is the commander of all other commands; and what he says is law for all and ought to be obeyed by all, and every other command gains strength and authority from his. And so it is clear that the imperial majesty and authority are the highest in the fellowship of mankind.

However, in Convivio II.5 Dante had spoken of the “Emperor of the Universe, who is Christ, son of the sovereign God and son of the Virgin Mary, the true woman and daughter of Joachim and of Adam, the true man who was slain by us, by which he brought us to life”, which will become again his perspective in the Commedia. As it will be of Girolamo Savonarola and Giorgio La Pira.

In a sense the Convivio is intended to continue the razo of the trobar clus of Dante’s poetic of the Vita nova, even there a prosaic interruption dumbing down the brilliance of the prosimetron.⁷¹ Both these works, the De Eloquentia and the Convivio are in prose though both discourse on and include poems and fragments of poetry. Similarly, Brunetto left his prose Rettorica commentary on Cicero written for his porto, his banker patron, and his dream vision poem, the Tesoretto, written for Alfonso X el Sabio, unfinished, in order to take up his magnum opus of great political import for the exiled Guelf Florentine bankers, Li Livres dou Tresor in French and addressed to Charles of Anjou, their chosen candidate to be first “Sanatore” of Rome, then King of Sicily and Jerusalem, who had always refused to learn Italian.

Dante was in Italy between September 1310 and January 1311, writing his Epistle V, “Ecce nunc tempus acceptabilis”, on the coming of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII. Francesco da Barberino, his former fellow student, similarly wrote Epistles in support of Henry VII.⁷² It would be during these years before Henry VII’s death at Buonconvento, 24 August 1313, in which Dante wrote his brilliant but misguided De Monarchia, and in which Francesco de Barberino perhaps commissioned two manuscripts, one in Latin, one in Italian, now in the Laurentian and Riccardian libraries (Plate XIII a, BML Plut. 89 inf.41; b, BRicc. 1538). Both writers living abroad in exile now saw classical texts as for all Europe in a dream of Empire, a dream of Justice, a dream of Peace. For both it is next rudely shattered.

Dante’s two further Epistles, these against Florence, Epistles VI, “Dantes Alaghierri florentinos et exul immeritus scelestissimis Florentinis intrensectis”, dated “Scriptum pridie Kalendas Apriles in finibus Tuscie”, 31 March 1311, and another, Epistle VII, to the Emperor, from the same place, 16 April 1311, against Florence, caused, 2 September 1311, 6 November 1315, Dante’s sentence of exile to worsen and now to also include his children, being further decreed by Florence, claiming Dante to be Ghibelline and to be beheaded at the Porta La Croce, now Florence’s Piazza Beccaria (as we noted, Florence’s place of public execution from that of San Miniato, until Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments caused the Tuscan Grand Dukes to prohibit capital punishment in 1786).⁷³ In 1316 an amnesty was granted, accepted by Francesco da Barberino (who had written similar letters praising the Emperor Henry VII and who had sought, as his notaio, to teach Corso Donati about Justice), though this amnesty was roundly rejected by Dante in his Epistle XII, written to a Florentine friend.

The Wolf, Dante’s Age

Verse

Verse And pearls are like poets’ tales; disease turned into loveliness. Isak Dinesen

Dante’s earliest form of poetry, during his Age of the Leopard, had been sung lyrics, the canzoni, which he next fractalled into his prosimetron, the Vita nova; then, in his Age of the Lion, he wrote mainly in prose; finally, rather than writing a martial aristocratic tragic epic, dripping with bloodshed, in exalted style, from which the author cannot be included, Aristotle decreed, since Homer did not do so, Dante, during his Age of the Wolf, instead wrote a democratic, humble, peaceable pilgrimage poem, in which he is centrally present, standing in for ourselves, his “Freedom Readers”, as Everyman, a Will Langland, a John Bunyan, journeying from pride to humility.⁷⁴ To do this he combined Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Terence’s Comedies, Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, Virgil’s Aeneid, Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae, Lucan’s Pharsalia, Ovid’s Art and Remedy of Love, Metamorphoses and Tristia, Jerome’s Bible, Augustine’s Confessions, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, the Kitab al-Mirag, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, and Brunetto Latino’s Tesoretto, with references to the Alexandrian, Arthurian, and Carolingian romances, braided into a university curriculum in history, geography, astronomy, ethics, and politics. He had earlier embedded his idolatrous love lyrics into a conversion tale centered on Beatrice, the Vita nova. His own exile, following so soon after the exile, then death, of his greatest friend, Guido Cavalcanti, his turning to prose, and then the death of his Emperor, were his tragedy, his Ovidian Tristia. But his Commedia is a comedy, partaking of the theater, in particular of the Comedies of the African ex-slave Terentius Publius Afer, Terence, of the household of Scipio Africanus the Younger, concerning whom Cicero wrote in the Somnium Scipionis. Terence’s plays begin with irresolvable crises and end with peaceable resolutions, where the youths, the women, the slaves, as in Mary’s triumphant Magnificat, all come out on top, laughingly educating their irascible patriarchs who legally own, but fail to control, them.

Dante, the exile from Florence, in writing the Commedia, becomes instead, as a stateless pilgrim, a World Citizen. In that poem he converts and baptizes dramatic encounters by fractalling and shadowing them into the liturgical drama of the Officium Peregrinorum, where, in dramatic irony, the two disciples, one of them Luke the Gospeler in the medieval tradition, meet a Christ they fail to recognize until the breaking and blessing of bread at the Emmaus inn (Plate LXII Pilgrims at Emmaus, a, Silos Cloister sculpture; b, BAV lat. 4776, fol. 39^r; c, d, e, Botticelli’s drawings for Purgatorio XXI).⁷⁵ Each sinner Virgil and Dante, as Cleopas and Luke, meet, is as a shadow Christ within themselves. Each contains the potential of conversion from evil to good, arabesqueing from Satan’s lies to the truth of God. Bertran de Born (Inf XXXVIII) and Arnaut Daniel (Purg XXVI) were poet colleagues at Richard Coeur de Lion’s court. Just so did I read the paperback science fiction novel a Princeton student loaned me, only to find in its final pages that its Benny, who guides its hero, a dead science fiction writer, named Alan Carpenter, through Hell, then heroically, unselfishly, sacrifices himself to save that science fiction writer, is Benito Mussolini.⁷⁶ If a villain can serve to save a reader’s soul, then the villain, too, like the penitent Good Thief at the Crucifixion, is saved. Bertran de Born ended his life as a monk, Guido da Montefeltro, a friar, both praised earlier by Dante, then are placed by him in Inferno. Dante, in the Commedia, turns everything inside out.

Dante would have read aloud his seven-minute sound bites of the work-in-progress Cantos of his Commedia to his noble hosts, Moroello Malaspina in Lunigiana, Bartolomeo and Can Grande Della Scala in Verona, Guido Novello da Polenta in Ravenna, as had Virgil read the Aeneid to Caesar Augustus in Rome. Dante has gone from the lyrics of his Age of the Leopard, to the prose treatises of his Age of the Lion, and now to drama, beginning in tragedy, as trauma, as nightmare, ending in comedy, in smiles, in laughter, in his conversion as of the Age of the Wolf, the Wolf whom he, like St. Francis, is now taming. What he does not ultimately write is a prideful epic of violence and conquest, but instead its inside-out conversion to peaceable humility. Nevertheless it contains within its scattered leaves all three of the Beasts, all these manifestations in prose and in poetry metamorphosed into the Gospels and Apocalypse’s Tetramorph, Beatrice’s Gryphon, these too being heraldic chimaera but in whose eyes is Truth.

The arrogantly proud statue of Dante in the Santa Croce piazza got it all wrong. I see several perspectives, which are related to each other, about Dante’s Third Age of the Wolf following his exile from his fair sheepfold of San Giovanni’s 3. Baptistery (Plate XVII a, b, c) in Florence. These insights are where Dante comes to see through Imperialism and to opt for the Gospels’ Decolonialism against all discrimination on the basis of Nation, Race, Language, Gender, Class, Religion, to be discussed in this book’s final chapter. Another is about his humbly accepting correction, his unlearning of earlier dogma, such as the spots on the moon, the hierarchies of angels, and this time his trobairitz razo is itself within the poetry presented to him by the others educating him to truth, no longer in his own boring prose. And yet another perspective is that of gray-clad Spiritual lay Franciscanism, echoing that of Brunetto’s Confession to a Franciscan in Montpellier, following his sentence of exile after Montaperti (Plate LIX BML Strozzi 146, Tesoretto, fol. 23^v, Brunetto confessing to Friar at Montpellier, Tesoretto, illustrated by Francesco da Barberino).

It is not just Paradiso XI that celebrates Franciscanism, it is the whole Commedia, indeed Dante’s entire life and death, that does so: St. Francis’ wolf of Gubbio shadowed as in a photographic negative in Inferno I.49–54. Next there is the dropping of the Franciscan tertiary’s cord (a soul-selling from one’s Vows of Poverty, Chastity, Obedience, a backsliding as will also be the enraptured listening to Casella singing solo Dante’s lyric “L’amor che ne la mente mi ragiona”, rather than the hundredfold Gregorian chanting of “In exitu Israel de Aegypto”), to summon Geryon,Verse

Verse I’ avea una corda intorno cinta,     e con essa pensa alcuna volta     prendea la lonza a la pelle dipinta. [Around my waist I had a cord as a belt and with it once I thought I could catch the leopard with the painted hide. (Inf XVI.106, referring to I.31–36)]

Francesco da Buti of the University of Pisa claimed Dante was first a Franciscan oblate, studying at Santa Croce’s famous school, when he was left orphaned of his mother at five, of his father as a teenager, then later a tertiary.⁷⁷ We see the uses of Franciscanism elsewhere in the Commedia: Guido da Montefeltro’s use and abuse of the Franciscan cord, “then wore the cord, believing that, so girt, I made amends” (Inf XXVII.67–68); the Padre Nostro (Purg XI.4–5), sung as a lauda, “laudato sia ‘l tuo nome…da ogne creatura” [praised be Your name… by every creature]; the story of Clarissan Piccarda, of the Donati family, whose convent in Florence, founded by St. Francis for St. Agnes, St. Clare’s sister, possessed Frances’ saio, his garment (Par III)⁷⁸; St. Francis’ prominent presence, before Saints Benedict and Augustine, in the Celestial Rose (Par XXXII.34); Dante’s Invocation to the Virgin that he gives to Cistercian St. Bernard (Par XXXIII) to sing as a Franciscan lauda in its use of the vernacular, not Latin; and finally Dante’s burial in exile at the church of San Francesco in Ravenna, his corpse, as is traditional of a tertiary, having that cord with the three knots he, fictively, threw away, summoning Geryon, monster of Fraud.

When I taught in Colorado I learned of the Penitente who had come from Spain before the Anglos, who were often of Jewish conversi stock, and who for over a century had had no access to priestly sacraments.⁷⁹ So they had, instead, practiced a profound lay piety, at Christmas enacting the shepherds seeking the Christ Child, at Easter crucifying themselves, and creating bultos, sculpted figures, some with hinged arms so they could be placed in coffins following the Crucifixion, and also santos primitively lacking Renaissance perspective (Father Thomas J. Steele, S.J., noting that perspective came in with gunpowder and marksmanship), these being often of images of the Christ Child as a pilgrim, now without his Old World pilgrim Mother, the Virgin of Atocha.⁸⁰ Florence was so often placed by Popes under interdicts, for instance, to punish her for the murder of the Vallombrosan Abbot Tesauro from Pavia, the casus belli for Montaperti, even when its Guelf bankers were raising funds to protect the Popes from King Manfred, that the city had become accustomed also to lacking the priestly sacraments,⁸¹ so instead practiced an intense lay piety, manifested in its numerous compagnie dei laudesi, like that of Orsanmichele, and other groups, like the Misericordia, carrying out the Gospel’s Acts of Mercy, later even practicing flagellation, and from this Florence’s greatest art, in architecture, sculpture, frescoes, polyptych panels, and music in the form of laude, was produced,⁸² instead of from the subiti guadagni of the Medici, their “get rich quick” schemes from seizing power, or from the hierarchies of the Church. Dante’s great pilgrim poem, the Commedia, even in exile, is like Florence’s civic architecture of the Arnolfian walls and gates, the 4. Duomo, the 20. Bargello, 30. Orsanmichele, and is the product of the lay piety, even in exile, of a city republic whose king is the revolutionary lay Jesus of Mary’s Magnificat, of James’ Epistle and Peter’s, and of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Florence is perceived as a new Jerusalem, the “Visio Pacis”, the Kingdom of God within us, by Brunetto Latino, by Dante Alighieri, by Giano Della Bella, by Girolamo Savonarola, by Giorgio La Pira, down the centuries.

I also have these two questions to ask of the Commedia, following on Brunetto Latino’s Guelf teachings to Dante, Why does he have the imperial poet Virgil be guide, instead of the republican orator Cicero? And why are Brutus and Cassius being devoured by Satan alongside of Judas? Just as Dante explains the Vita nova as a Janus text, so is the Commedia such a text of doubleness. Following that so also will be Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. Both learn, as had Ovid and Boethius before them, not to “put your trust in princes” (Psalm 146.3). This book’s final chapter, “Dante’s Decolonialism”, will explain Dante’s Justice, Dante’s Rose, as about us all in a Republic as “equally in God’s image”.Verse

Verse «Qui sarai tu poco tempo silvano;  e sarai meco sanza fine cive  di quella Roma onde Cristo è romano”. [Here you will be a brief while a stranger; and then you will be forever a citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman. (Purg XXXII.100–102)]

Dante’s Emperor fails him in being mortal. In choosing Virgil as a “Falstaff” guide Dante freely elects to be led by il “Duca mio”, “il Duce”, a Benito Mussolini, of the “false and lying gods”, through the Virgilian lacrimae rerum of tragedy, as if by a Mercury as Psychopomp, the soul guide of the dead with snake-wreathed caduceus/virga, the Inferno repeating, mirroring, the Libro del Chiodo of his exile. And then we arrive at Terentian Comedy, with laughter “Out of Africa”, in the Purgatorio, and with Franciscan laude, such as sung by the Compagnia dei laudesi of 30. Orsanmichele in the Paradiso.

The Commedia is Dante’s Augustinian Confessions just as much as had Brunetto in the Tesoretto shown himself at Montpellier confessing to a Franciscan (Plate LIX BML Strozzi 146, fol. 23^v). Indeed, the Commedia likewise is a Confession Manual. For we find Dante forever in his Infernal pages presenting himself as committing each of the seven deadly sins in turn, reflecting, as Dorothy Sayers showed, the fractalling of Dante’s biography as the Three Beasts, the Leopard of his Youth, the Lion of his Prime, the Wolf of his Age, and we vicariously sin with him, if we are taken in by his fraudulence. Dante constructs his Commedia of once real flesh and blood persons whom he and his teacher knew, even, with Bocca degli Abati at the very bottom of Hell, of his own flesh and blood betraying his own city, Via dei Tavolini, 8, being the 28. Abati palace of his mother’s family neighboring Dante’s house, Inf XXXII.79–81, 106–108. Each of the other sinners is a mirroring and fractalling of himself—and of ourselves. Then we unlearn all this criminal experiencing in his sunlit Purgatory, as we with him are undoing each of the Seven “P”s on our own brows, reaching up our own hands to find those scars not there.

Of Dorothy Sayers’ fractalling Sins of the Leopard we find Francesca and Paolo (Lust, Inf V), and Filippo Cavicciuoli degli Adimari “Argenti” (Anger, Inf VIII,52–63, Necrologia of the Compagnia dei Laudesi di Orsanmichele, Decameron XIII.ix, Black Guelf). Of the Sins of the Lion we have Pier delle Vigne (Violence against Self, Inf XII), Brunetto Latino (Violence against Nature, Inf XV). Of the Sins of the Wolf are Vanni Fucci (Theft, Inf XXIV–XXV), Ulysses (False Counsel, Inf XXVI), Adam of Romena (Falsifier, Inf XXX), Bocca degli Abati (Treachery, Inf XXXII.79–81, 106–108), Ugolino della Gherardesca (Inf XXXII–XXXIII). Of these sinners the following were his close neighbors in Florence, Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti 29, Farinata degli Uberti, Filippo Argenti 16 (“philippus arçenti” in the Compagnia dei laudesi di Orsanmichele Santa Reparata Necrologia, Archivio di Santa Maria del Fiore, I.3.6), Cianfa degli Abati 28 in the Circle of Thieves and Bocca degli Abati 28 in the Circle of Traitors, of his own mother’s family, while Brunetto Latino was his teacher, replacing his dead father, teaching him Ovid’s Art and Remedy of Love, and the false Infernal rhetoric of Ulysses and Catiline with the true Purgatorial rhetoric of Cato and Cicero. Dante studying Brunetto’s documents in brown ink on parchment met further historical persons with which to people his fictive poem.⁸³ These formerly real people now inhabit a lying dream and are being used to serve as negative and positive examples for its “Freedom Readers”.

Dante Apprentice—and we with him—fall into the initial deadly sin, of Lust, in Inferno V, while we together read the pornographic tale of Paolo and Francesca, reading the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere (remember Beatrice laughingly coughing—ahem—in Paradiso XVI.13–15, when Dante indulges in social climbing away from Christian Boethian humility). That book (and here also, the Commedia), and he who wrote it (here, also, Dante), being a Tristan/Boccaccian Galeotto in time of plague and pestilence, a Chaucerian Pandarus in time of war. In Inferno VI, Dante meets the glutton Ciacco and is greedy for knowledge of Farinata, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, Jacopo Rusticcucci, all of whom named in documents Brunetto Latino wrote,⁸⁴ Arrigo and Mosca, these all of the Primo Popolo, who had hypocritically, blasphemously, minted the new florin, Europe’s first Euro, with the Virgin’s lily and the ascetic John the Baptist, though Ciacco is silent beyond saying they are to be found lower down still. Then, in Inferno VII, the Circle of Avarice/Prodigality, Dante wishes to partake of Fortune, who is so ready to both give and then take psychopathically. In Inferno VIII, both 16. Filippo Argenti, his own neighbor, who had looted his home,⁸⁵ and Dante Apprentice are angry, and, filled with wrath, Dante vengefully rejoicing when Virgil shoves Argenti away from safety.

The sins of the Lion, his and ours, are of Violence, of the Prime of Life. Dante then, in Inferno X, as we noted, encounters among the heretics, the feuding Ghibelline Farinata degli Uberti and Guelf Cavalcante Cavalcanti, at the Peace of Cardinal Latino made father-in-law and father, respectively, of Dante’s own Avverroïst soul-mate, Guido, whose death he is about to cause and about whose fate he is silent, that Guido who had married Farinata’s now to-be-widowed daughter, yet another Beatrice. Following those forever entombed for disbelieving the Resurrection come those similarly violent against their neighbors, as tyrants and murderers. Then, in Inferno XIII, the suicides, the violent even against themselves, Dante so implicated with the plucking of the thorn branch that is Pier delle Vigne, the Peter who becomes a Judas tree, despite, Dante proclaims, his attentive reading of Virgil’s Aeneid III.22–68, and who is so shadowed in the Florentine who made of his own house his gibbet (Dante’s 25. Casa di Dante, Plate XXXI?), though in the following canto, Inferno XIV.13–15, and then in Purgatorio I-II, we will have the virtuous suicide of Lucan’s Pharsalia, Cato, dying for the freedom of Rome against imperial Caesar—whose author, Lucan, in turn honorably suicides on Nero’s order.⁸⁶ The violent against Nature are the Usurers and among them we come to meet those of the Primo Popolo who coined the Florentine florin, Europe’s initial Euro: Ser Brunetto Latino, in Inferno XV, and, in Inferno XVI, we finally meet Guido Guerra, Tegghiaio Aldobrandi and Jacopo Rusticcucci, all named in documents Brunetto Latino wrote out in punning brown ink, and which Dante may have copied as his apprentice scribe, his discipulus scriptor.⁸⁷

Then, leaving behind the Usurers (his own family’s profession), among whose souls he sees Reginaldo Scrovegni (whose son Enrico had the Arena Chapel frescoed by Giotto), and entering the Sins of the Wolf, of Age, in Inferno XVI–XVII, Dante now fraudulently concocts the Geryon monster of Fraud, and swears, perjuring himself, “by the notes of this my Comedy”,Verse

Verse  ma qui tacer nol posso: e per le note di questa Commedia, lettor, ti giuro, …ch’i’ vidi… [But now I cannot keep silent, and by the letters of this Comedy, Reader, I swear…that I saw…(Inf XVI.127–130)]

on this chimaera in this realm of lies, he even seemingly, improbably, flies, and then lands in the midst of Pandars and Seducers, as Dante Author himself was to us in Inferno V.137 (“Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse” [A Galeotto was the book and he who wrote it]). In this fantasy, Dante’s book that he swears by is this flying carpet of a monster he concocts taking us into imaginary bookish realms of unreality that he plagiarizes from Virgil’s Aeneid VI, Mahomet’s Kitab al-Mirag/Libro della Scala ,and Florence’s legal archives. Next are Simonists and Diviners, and, in Inferno XXI–XIII, those of the sin for which he himself was exiled from Florence and condemned to death, Barratry, in the Libro del Chiodo,⁸⁸ here laughingly being punished not by Black Guelfs led by Corso Donati, but by clownish black demons who swear crazily on Lucca’s Holy Face and the servant Saint Zita who in Lucca beat the boy the devil sought to take with her broomstick and stole her master’s cloak to give to a beggar who was Christ in disguise. Next in Inferno XXIV–XXV we find Dante shamelessly, thievishly, plagiarizing everyone, the Bible, Ovid, Lucan, Brunetto’s Tesoro, even Brunetto’s final archival document, which was on Vanni Fucci of Pistoia,⁸⁹ in order to outdo all their descriptions of serpents.

Among the Evil Counselors in Inferno XXVI he meets Ulysses in the bi-forked tongues of flame whose narration of his ship voyage (Plate LXXVI a, b, BBodleian Douce 319, Arabic Mappa mundi, Tresor, fol. 8^r, detail; c, Brunetto, Natura, Mediterranean, BML, Strozzi 146, Tesoretto, fol. 10^r; d, Hereford Mappa Mundi; e, Sabine Rethoré, Modern Map of Mediterranean Sea) reflects that of the Commedia’s metaphor for itself as pilgrim ship voyage to Jerusalem, here going in the opposite direction beyond the Columns Hercules set at Gibralter, drawn by Francesco da Barberino in the Arabic manner in the Laurentian Tesoretto, Columbus’ colonializing voyage to the “nuova terra” of America, and whose suicide speech, “fatti non foste a viver come bruti” [you were not made to live as beasts] (Inf XXVI.119), the beasts of the Leopard, Lion, and Wolf, is taken from Catiline’s speech in Sallust and taught to Dante by Brunetto as the example of false, not true, rhetoric.⁹⁰ Dante Apprentice—and we—are seduced by that false rhetoric, that false counsel of the future Papal “Doctrine of Discovery”. And drown—as dead bodies fall.

Next Virgil mounts the Giant Antaeus, Dante mounts or is embraced by Virgil, and we in turn are raised, as are John of Salisbury’s dwarves on the shoulders of giants, in a circus act, that we may see this desolation of Hell.⁹¹ In this final psychopathic realm we witness Ugolino devouring Archbishop Ruggieri’s brains, Inferno XXXII–XXXIII (Plate XLIII a, b, Palatino 313, fol. 77^r; c, Master of the Paduan Antiphoners, BL Egerton 943, fol. 58^v; d, Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica, Pacino di Bonaguida, Ugolino arrested, BAV Chig L.VIII.296, fol. 143^r), who tells of his dream of himself as a wolf with his progeny likewise being attacked by dogs (seemingly referring to Dante’s exile, followed by his children joining him, recalling Ernest Jones’ comment on the dream within the dream as that which the Dreamer wishes were not true but is⁹²), and then we disbelieve, misread, his words in which he says “Poscia, più che ’l dolor potè ‘l digiuno” [then fasting had more power than grief (XXXIII.75)], over his Eucharistic cannibalism of his four progeny, to be next mirrored in that of Satan/Saturn devouring his three progeny, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius—Dante a fourth, betraying his Guelf city with his Ghibelline poem, of the same blood line as 28. Bocca degli Abati?—thus even betraying, devouring ourselves into nothing.⁹³ This is nefas, what is not to be spoken of. The baby Dante on Easter Saturday, 27 March 1266, under the mosaics of Florence’s 3. Baptistery (Plate XVII b, Octagonal Dome; c, Coppo di Marcovaldo, Satan with Brutus, Cassius, Judas; Plate LXXVIII, b; Plate LXXIX, b), saw both the nefas, the nihilism, the not-to-be-spoken-of cannibalism of Satan/Saturn devouring three sinners, and the fas, the Word as Deed, of Christ as Creator, as Man, seeing all that is good. In this way Dante Author has given us Dante Pilgrim giving his Augustinian Confession that we “might see and know and yet abstain”.⁹⁴

The surface reading, the more shallow reading, of the Commedia’s Inferno and Purgatoiro, is to see the sin as committed just by the various figures whom Dante meets, by the Other, not by oneself, historic figures once of flesh and blood and bone, but now made into as if historical novel fictions with whom he—and we—socially interact, Dante fractalling his Three Ages/Beasts into his poem. But the deeper reading is to see their sins as Dante’s own—and as ours—and to see this with the humility of true learning. Each of the Seven Deadly Sins in turn are committed virtually, blindly, in the fiction of the poem, then undone and understood by him in the Purgatorio. And we with him undo and, hopefully, understand them in ourselves through Dante’s psycho-therapeutic soul healing. I recall an incarcerated convict in Attica State Prison honestly proclaiming, when I explained that Dante’s sinners blame everyone but themselves, that he had done the same. Let us watch how Dante mirrors each in turn in a fractalling of ourselves, as readers, first who are damned, then who become “Freedom Readers”. We are each we meet in this Confession Manual. The sins make us bestial, in the hallucinating world of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, of the Three Beasts, Leopard, Lion, and Wolf, who become the chimaera Geryon; but also become transformed, metamorphosed, into the visionary Gryphon Christ of the Four Beasts of the Evangelists. In the Middle Ages one confessed to the priest before consulting one’s doctor, diseases considered to be of the troubled soul disturbing the balance of the humors. The confession of each sin in turn heals us, renders us close to the angels at Purgatorio’s gates, so similar to those on Mount Sinai’s terraces with their pilgrim monks who heard pilgrims’ confessions,⁹⁵ in Paradiso XXXIII.131 (Plate LXXII b, Confession gate on Sinai), even coming to see ourselves mirrored in God, “mi parve pinta de la nostra effige”. Once, at Casamari Abbey, I witnessed the monk in the dispensary doling out penicillin and other medicines, and, for one contadino, reaching down a great jar of ointment and applying it with a feather to a sore on a hand to heal it. What could be more gentle than the application of a salve with a feather? Feel it, but only just, upon your brow.⁹⁶

Dante, and we with him as we read, in his fiction, so commit first the Sins of the Leopard: Lust, Gluttony, Avarice/Prodigality, Anger; then of the Lion: Violence (against Neighbor, Self, Nature); last of the Wolf: those of Envy and Pride, with their fractalling malbowges, in Hell’s darkness, that realm of labyrinths, whose Emperor is Satan, the Father of Lies; followed in a mirroring by their palinodal Purgations: from Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice/Prodigality, Gluttony, and Lust, on the sunlit terraces of the Mountain: ABCDEFG|GFEDCBA, unwinding in reverse order the screw, to arrive in Paradise, the Cosmos righted from Earth at the center to, instead, God and ourselves as Freedom Readers at the center, the Earth at the very farthest periphery.⁹⁷

Dante, in real life, at some point returned to Verona, where his patron was now Can Grande Della Scala, at which time he was friends with Immanuello Romano, who created a parallel Commedia in Hebrew.⁹⁸ Dante also, perhaps, played with the parallel to the Islamic dream vision of the Kitab al-Mirag, the Libro della Scala, of Mahomet’s dream vision guided by the angel Gabriel, including a flight on a Geryon-like monster.⁹⁹ Then, on the invitation of Guido Novello of Polenta, Dante came to Ravenna where he was able to complete the composing of the Commedia. In the Spring of 1321, Guido sent him on embassy to Venice, at which point he became ill with malaria and died on his return to Ravenna, 14 September 1321, at the age of fifty-six years and four months, Francesco da Buti tells us,¹⁰⁰ which could give his birth date as 14 May 1265, under the sign of Gemini. He is buried in Ravenna’s church of San Francesco.

Study Questions

Discuss trauma and literature. Discuss the difference between criticism and poetry, the criticism of literature versus literature itself. Discuss neuroscience and literature, using Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind and Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Read Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy or Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: A Introduction to Logotherapy and imagine how it could help you in a future trauma.