The Art of the Divine Comedy, Our Most Visual Poem
Seven Hundred Years of Dante in Painting & Manuscript
“I think Dante’s poetry, on the whole, the greatest of all the poetry I have read: yet when it is at its highest pitch of excellence, I hardly feel that Dante has very much to do. There is a curious feeling that the great poem is writing itself, or at most, that the tiny figure of the poet is merely giving the gentlest guiding touch, here and there, to energies which, for the most part, spontaneously group themselves and perform the delicate evolutions which make up the Comedy.”
— C. S. Lewis, “Dante’s Similies,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature
I first encountered the Divine Comedy in college, where I read it (purely for joy) in a number of translations. For several weeks I was a terrible bore on the subject; Dante was, to borrow a line from Ray Bradbury, my lunch and dinner and midnight snack. In the years since he has been an intermittent obsession; certain lines and images (as befitting our most visual of poets) have a way of burying themselves in the brain to emerge at unexpected moments, like the heretics in their sarcophagi. For years I was haunted by that line in Canto Ten of Purgatorio, in the Mandelbaum translation:
For in that scene there was the effigy
Of one who turned the key that had unlocked
The highest love.
There is something here of Eliot’s Four Quartets, but also of Alice peering through the small door into the garden. The way to approach Dante is first to let these images register in the soul, unencumbered by the need to understand the manifold layers of meaning nested in each. That can come later.
What brought me back to Dante this year was learning that Percy Shelley (along with Whitman my favorite nineteenth-century poet) had attempted translations of select passages, and might have gone on to translate the whole Comedy into English had his life not been cut sadly short. We can only mourn what might have been, for while Dante has benefited from the gifts of many great English poets (Longfellow, Sayers), he has had only one translator of genius. Perhaps that’s just as well, for if Shelley had completed the Comedy I might evermore read nothing but that. Here, for example, is a selection from his rendering of Canto Twenty-Eight of Purgatorio, which he titled “Matilda Gathering Flowers” and which numbers among my favorite English poems:
Read the whole poem here.
As I was reading, and rereading, Shelley’s fragments of Dante, I stumbled on some of the many manuscripts into which the Comedy was inscribed in the late Middle Ages. These have convinced me that the ideal way to read Dante is in facsimile, if such a thing exists: the Yates Thompson Dante, the Egerton Dante, the Dante Urbinate are all surpassingly beautiful, and deserve a wider audience than mere specialists. It’s a crime that most English translations of the Comedy are printed in plain typeface with no illustrations to speak of. I feel strongly that Dante on the page should look more like this, from the Urbinate, illustrated by Guglielmo Giraldi:
or this, Beinecke MS 428, now housed at Yale University, illustrator unknown:
The moon figures prominently in Dante’s poem, beginning with the celebrated lines in Canto Twenty of Inferno, which the Cary translation of 1814 renders with surprising, almost psychedelic splendor:
“But onward now:
For now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine
On either hemisphere, touching the wave
Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight
The moon was round. Thou mayst remember well.”
Thistelton-Dyer deciphers this enigmatic passage in his book English Folk-Lore. In the Middle Ages the Man in the Moon was often perceived as being a man walking along the road with a thornbush on his head, his dog trotting along several paces in front of him. At various times the man was identified as either Isaac, son of Abraham, or Cain, the first murderer, who was cursed to wander the earth in exile. In the notes for his translation, Mandelbaum adds, “Popular belief in Italy holds that God placed Cain in the moon.” Explaining the business about Seville, he adds, “The moon is now setting at the western edge of the northern hemisphere (‘below Seville’).”
The moon becomes a major presence in Paradiso, when Dante ascends through the Sublunary Sphere and the Sphere of the Moon, as depicted in the above images. C. S. Lewis especially admired Dante’s portrayal of medieval cosmology, weaving it into his Narnia books and discussing it at length in The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Dante, he writes, drawing on Aristotle, placed the boundary between the earth and the heavens in the orbit of the moon. He viewed space not as terrifying and heartless—a perception unique to moderns—but confined and radiant with the communion of saints.
Here in the Urbinate Manuscript we see depicted the Lustful on the Seventh Terrace of Purgatory, whose disordered passions are purified through fire. I quite like this image because it looks as though the Lustful are being punished with exceptionally red, curly hair. Perhaps they’re Irish. (Someone has described them as the “This is fine!” dog of the Middle Ages.)
Here we see Dante and his beloved Beatrice, in Canto Twenty-Two of Paradise, in the Sphere of the Fixed Stars, where Dante delivers an invocation to the constellation Gemini. The poem renders the scene thus:
“The gentle lady — simply with a sign —
impelled me after them and up that ladder,
so did her power overcome my nature;
and never here below, where our ascent
and descent follow nature’s law, was there
motion as swift as mine when I took wing.”
The above image, again from the Dante Urbinate, is one of my favorite works of medieval art. I’m thinking of getting it printed and hanging it up on the wall of my office.
More illustrations, and commentary, after the jump.
