Monday, February 18, 2008Monday, February 18, 2008
The illustration at left, borrowed from the "Digital Dante" image collection, shows Dante and Vergil being addresssed by Farinata degli Uberti in the 10th canto, from the Circle of the Heretics. It is just one of many fabulous images at that site, which I encourage you to visit. The artist in this case is Gustave Dore.
Dante's masterpiece has inspired many other artists by its breathtaking scope and poetic power. Dante uses poetry to communicate an experience of God at all levels of the Divine Comedy, for God's presence is felt as much in the Inferno (by the very fact of His absence) as in the Paradiso.
The entire drama is a kind of pilgrimage for Dante, who stands in for all humans facing the implications of their own mortality. It begins when Dante is at midlife, lost in a forest, wandering in the half-light. He is befriended by the shade of the ancient Roman poet Virgil, who has been sent to conduct Dante through Hell for the sake of instructing him. From there he will proceed to Purgatory, eventually seeing Paradise and the Beatific Vision.
In Dante's version of the afterlife, souls find that place that most accurately expresses what they were in life, from the vantage point of their most profound commitments, testimony to what each of them most loved. Thus in Hell, souls act out for all eternity their relationships to their chosen love-objects, in an endless, sterile repetition that never brings satisfaction of their longing. Dante stresses throughout that the souls in Hell have all chosen to be there, through their stubborn refusal to give up their preoccupations with earthly things and look to God for their ultimate satisfaction. What we find here is a system for classifying sins, punishing the sins of carnality the most lightly, the sins of malice most heavily.
Dante began work on the Divine Comedy in 1308, during his exile from Florence. The poem is called a comedy for technical reasons: it moves from Hell to Paradise, ending in joy rather than in destruction. It's a religious allegory, aesthetic achievement, personal statement, and a depiction of the political life of the time, all at once.
The setting is the life of the northern Italian communes in the 13th and 14th centuries, which we've been studying thus far. Life in a commune was characterized by the intensity of its public dimension. During Dante's time, Florence was the largest it would ever be in the late medieval and Renaissance periods, around 100,000 people (it would lose population in the Plague mid-century). It was small in area: within a second set of walls, one could walk across town in 10 minutes. A third set of walls was in the planning stages in 1300. The problem was that it was very crowded at the center, because the population boom during the 13th century had brought in hordes of new people form the surrounding countryside. This cased social problems and strains, which are reflected in the Divine Comedy. The entire area of Florence, including the countryside, encompassed 250,000 people or thereabouts.
The frame of reference for people living there was limited in space, but deep in time; for example in the Paradiso, cantos 15--17 one of Dante's 12th century ancestors, Cacciaguido, describes the city at that earlier time. This sense of a shared connection with the past was, unfortunately, not conducive to peaceful relations, for it engendered a struggle for control over the city's past, present, and future. Canto 10 of the Inferno presents the character we see here, Farinata degli Uberti, a Ghibelline leader, recalling a famous battle, the Battle of Montaperti in 1260. This spirit is an enemy of Dante's family, and yet they converse.
There was an intimate quality to urban life, for though the population may have been large at this time, the significant families all knew one another. Dante's relationship with his love, Beatrice, was shaped by the urban environment: he meets her at banquets, in church, and in the streets. In these encounters, a glance takes on special significance (again, the image is from the Digital Dante collection, this one from Evelyn Paul's illustrations for La Vita Nuova).
As you already know, the history of Italy during this period presents a contrast with that of northern Europe. The Papacy had an effect on Italian history because of the Papal States stretching across the middle, dividing Italy into North and South. Southern Italy came under Muslim domination in the 9th century, but was conquered by Norman noblemen (from northern France) in the 11th century. What developed there was a bureaucratic monarchy, far different from the developments in the north. Southern and northern Italy thus became culturally distinct, with no real sense of common ground. Popes in the meantime strove to keep Italy divided, in an effort to protect the autonomy of the Papal States.
Italy, unlike northern Europe, retained its ties with its past in the ancient world. There were reminders in the physical remains of ancient buildings; also, these cities retained a more urbanized commercial life when northern European culture was distinctly agrigultural. Italy itself had a relatively poor agricultural base, but was well located for trade. As a result of all these factors, feudal patterns of land tenure did not evolve as extensively as in northern Europe. There was a variety of social classes, including freemen with varying levels of material life and skills. There was also greater social fluidity than in the north, with the nobility and the commercial classes not as widely separate.
Thus, instead of the extensive consolidation of feudal estates under a powerful landed nobility, popular elements in city government were able to develop into commercial and manufacturing elites. As we know from Wednesday's reading, many governments in the communes were modelled on the corporate structure that governed guild institutions. Such institutions were strong in Italy: even knights, for instance, organized themselves into corporate groups, and associations of friendly families allied with one another into consorteria. Communal privileges over trade, taxation, minting of coinage, legislation, and administration were all gradually established in towns such as Florence, which became free from the strictures of obligations to feudal landlords.
Dante himself had been a prior, one of the governing body of the regime, in Florence's government in the year 1300. His most important political work, De Monarchia, expresses a wish to see a universal (i.e., imperial) government. He blames the Pope for the failure of imperial power to establish itself in Italy. His hopes will turn to the Hohenstaufen after his exile, but the line is extinguished. He eventually went into permanent exile and ended his life in Ravenna.
Terms from the textbook:
Homework Questions: for Dante's Inferno cantos I-VI, IX-XI, XIV-XV
Laurel Carrington carringt@stolaf.edu
Most recent update: January 23, 2008