Dante
Glory
"lo gran disio dell' eccellenza" (the great desire of excelling) (Painting by Luca Signorelli)
In his book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt wrote as follows: “As publicist and man of letters, [Dante] laid stress on the fact that what he did was new, and that he wished not only to be, but to be esteemed the first in his own walks. But even in his prose writings he touches on the inconveniences of fame; he knows how often personal acquaintance with famous men is disappointing, and explains how this is due partly to the childish fancy of men, partly to envy, and partly to the imperfections of the hero himself.*…
Continue Reading →Divina Commedia
See for yourself, or read the Book (painting by Domenico di Michelino, 1465)
(by Dante Alighieri 1/6/1265 – 14/9/1321) (completed 1320)
[Note: extracts are from, and reference is to, the John Ciardi translation]
The greatest epic poem of all time (and we can say this with confidence, despite the dodgy standard of TVC’s latin).
It has a brilliantly (classically) simple structure – Recounting, in terza rima, how Dante spends the 1300 Easter vacation on a salvational tour of the worlds of our minds (and souls), guided through Hell and Purgatory by his poetic mentor, Virgil and accompanied by his poster-girl, Beatrice, in Paradise. There they meet Dante’s fiamma benedetta a flame of heavenly wisdom, S. Thomas Aquinas. S. Thomas was a formidable thinker but no great writer. Dante, taking hold of the 13th C theologian, supplied the art. “it is the flame, eternally elated, of Siger, who along the Street of Straws syllogized truths for which he would be hated.” (Pa. X) But he did something more: he created a new universe. And it was a universe that left Aquinas and Augustine, the best of the ancient Christians, pounding in the wake of something strange and monolithically modern. As Harold Bloom said with his usual wisdom in The Western Canon, “The Comedy…destroys the distinction between sacred and secular writing.”
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