Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [10]
Dante’s Divine Comedy, describing his journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven and what he saw therein, is a Christian epic about vice and virtue, rewards and punishments. It has an enormous cast of characters, many of them Dante’s contemporaries. In 1294 he became involved in politics in Florence, a city that was itself highly political, deeply committed to the Guelf or papal cause. Florence was split into two parties, as were most Italian cities, and the party to which Dante belonged, having opposed the ultratriumphalist Pope Boniface VIII, lost the game, and he was exiled in 1302, a sentence renewed in 1315. These Italian city faction fights were vicious and deadly. Dante’s property was confiscated, and he was condemned to be burned at the stake if he returned to the city. He spent much of his life, therefore, in exile, chiefly in Ravenna, where he died, and he laments in pitiful verse the pain of “eating another man’s bread and using another man’s stair to go to bed.”
Yet there is little bitterness in his great Commedia. Dante was a man of exceptional magnanimity, of all-encompassing love for mankind as well as individuals, and he understood, too, the nature of divine love, which suffuses the universe and gives it meaning. His poem is moralistic and didactic, as plainly so in many ways as a great altarpiece in a medieval cathedral. He takes the Christian faith with awesome seriousness and does not seek to discount the miseries of the damned or the pains of Purgatory. In this sense he was a medieval man, built to be sure on a gigantic scale, but untouched by doubt about the mechanics of the universe as described by the church. But he was also a storyteller of immense resources and a poet of genius. The narrative moves forward at a great pace and is full of delightful, striking and terrifying incidents, lit by flashes of vivid verbal color and what can only be called inspiration.
Moreover, Dante was not just a medieval man; he was a Renaissance man too. He was highly critical of the church, like so many scholars who followed him. Although a Guelf, he was impressed by the German emperor Henry VII, who came to Italy in 1310 and converted Dante to the idea of a universal monarchy, expressed in a Latin treatise, De monarchia, condemned as heretical after the poet’s death. Dante had great faith. He grasped the point of medieval Christendom, that the only way to personal peace was submission to the divine will, however hard it was at times to bear. But he had the critical spirit of the new times that were coming. He saw into the heart of things with a piercing gaze. All men (and women), rich and poor, well or badly educated, could find something in him, and read or listened to his verse with wonder. His fame came soon after his death, and continued to grow steadily. Soon, Florence, which had expelled him, was fighting with Ravenna for custody of his honorable, and now highly valuable, bones. Dante not only launched the Italian language as a vehicle for high art; in a sense he launched the Renaissance itself, as a new era of creative endeavor by individuals of unprecedented gifts. He became a model, a beacon, a mentor, as Virgil was to him, an energizing, vivifying source for talents of a lesser order and a towering giant against whom the most ambitious could measure themselves. After Dante, nothing seemed beyond human reach.
That was the view of another Tuscan, Giovanni Boccaccio, born in 1313, when Dante still had some time to live, and destined by his merchant father for a life of business. For this purpose he was sent to Naples, but there he found, like Dante, his lifelong love, Fiammetta, who emerges in all his work, like a palimpsest. He was Dante’s heir, in his ability to handle the newly mature language and in his surpassing ability to tell a tale. His mother was French, and he subsumed in his work the legacy of the French medieval romances. He took the ottava rima of the minstrels and gave it literary status, made it indeed