Dante Alighieri died on September 14, 700 years ago. You could ask why this should be noted; why it should be at all important? What follows is an attempt to answer that question. As I hope you will see, Dante is important; art is important; life must be examined.
Whilst we are animals, and much of our behaviour can be explained by looking at animals, we are indisputably different. Despite the acknowledged song capability of cetaceans, no hump-backed whale ever wrote Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and despite their extraordinary spatial facility, no chimpanzee ever devised Swan Lake.
It is obvious that animals – predatory species, especially – can have imagination. They can see what is going to happen and even plan it. But really we are the only animals who create art. Bower-birds decorate their nests to attract a mate, as we dress to so do, and this decorative art is perhaps not so different. What is different is our use of art – pictures, story-telling, performance and music – to pass on culture and to express the idea of the human condition.
No other species does this, and this is what Dante, supremely, did in one of the greatest works of art ever produced. That is why we need to talk about him and his disciple, Boccaccio – and Florence. Florence is key to the story of Dante Alighieri and of Giovanni Boccaccio and of Francesco Petrarca and, really, the beginning of the Renaissance. And of vernacular literature, not only in Italy, but, arguably, in England.
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Our project is called The Van Diemen Decameron, and it takes its inspiration from Giovanni Boccaccio, who was Dante’s greatest admirer and disciple. So admiring of Dante was Giovanni that he copied out all 14,233 lines of the Commedia for his friend and fellow poet, Francesco Petrarca – known to us as Petrarch. He also gave a series of lectures on Dante’s work in 1373 which were almost certainly attended by Geoffrey Chaucer, who was in Florence at the time on a diplomatic mission. The influence of Boccaccio on Chaucer is noted by scholars, but even to a layman such as me, it seems obvious. Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida, in particular, seems to derive from Boccaccio’s telling of the same tale. And his structure of The Canterbury Tales, with members of a group telling tales to the others, is also reminiscent of Boccaccio’s Decameron.
I am not suggesting plagiarism – far from it. There were stories that were in the zeitgeist, as it were, and writers used them. Just as many painters used the same biblical events for subjects, so writers used stories. Boccaccio’s plot-lines for the Decameron, were pulled from the complete known world, as were Shakespeare’s 250 years later for his plays. And the influence of Boccaccio’s lectures, and his time in Florence, seem to have been important to Chaucer. This sharing of stories, but also the sharing of a feeling – a mood that something was happening – this, I imagine, Chaucer, Boccaccio and Petrarca feeling. A bit like being part of the amazing explosion of theatre in Elizabethan London, or the flowering of opera in Italy in the late 19th century, or rock and roll in the 1960s in Liverpool. Or, from personal experience, the vibrant revival of theatre and then film in Australia in the 1970s. Sometimes things just take off. I certainly think that in the early 14th century, vernacular literature in Florence “took off”.
But, although Boccaccio revered Dante, and Dante wrote in the Florentine vernacular, Dante Alighieri was different. He was from a slightly earlier generation. Boccaccio was just eight when Dante died. And the Commedia is completely a work of Dante’s imagination and his lived experience. It is not recycled stories. Yes, he draws on philosophical, and more importantly, theological concepts for his construction of Purgatorio (where Aquinas is important) Inferno and Paradisio, but the fabulous construction of the nether-world is his alone, and it is populated by historical figures or by Dante’s contemporaries. They all receive their punishment or reward according to his moral judgement of them as he journeys through Purgatory and Hell, first guided by Virgil, then – at last, in Paradise – by his platonic love and muse, Beatrice. Dante meets everyone and sees their torment, their equanimity or their reward.
The really important moral message of the Commedia, for me, is that actions matter. You will be judged, so try to do good. This is, of course, contra to the idea of “grace” and also the idea of “the chosen”, such as Calvin proposed later in Geneva.
In fact, it is contra to what was proposed generally in the Reformation which was to come. The early Protestants were strongly of the belief that some were chosen, and others were not. And actions did not matter as to your state of grace. You were pre-destined to heaven or hell. How this knitted with Calvin’s extreme Puritanism – a controlling of people’s behaviour – I have no idea.
Dante, by contrast, had a special section of the after-life, called “limbo” where people who could not have been saved by Christianity could dwell. People who lived before Christ, or righteous Moslems, for instance, could reside in relative comfort. No one was condemned except by their actions. I confess to admire this. I find the idea of “the chosen” abhorrent. “We’re saved and the rest of you are damned, so I can do what I want.” This is the message of Hillsong and the other Pentecostal sects, which I find a complete aberration of Christianity.
Christianity, to me, is not about “grace” (I struggle to understand the idea, whilst loving the song). It is about duty to one’s fellow. To me, it is about the other, not the self. My ideal of a Christian is the recently deceased American Bishop John Shelby Spong, who struggled with the liturgy of his church, but forcefully propagated its morals. And somehow got away with it. And Dante Alighieri made this very idea of reward in heaven, for good deeds – rather than grace – clear in his great work. Graceful conduct over “grace”.
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So Dante Alighieri’s Commedia is considered by nearly everyone who knows it as one of the pinnacles of human artistic achievement. But it comes from strange, and strangely humble, beginnings.
The object of Dante’s love and of his early poetic works was a real girl – and then woman – with the rather prosaic name of Beatrice Portinari. They were both nine years old when he first set eyes on her on May 1, 1274, and Dante fell passionately, but platonically, in love. She became the subject of his early poetry. This adoration went on despite her marriage, and Dante’s marriage; through his raising a family and her considerable child-bearing and it endured till her death at the age of 25 in June 1290.
And even beyond. Nothing physical ever happened between them. They never as much as kissed – hardly ever met – but long after her death, Dante immortalised and idealised her as his guide through Paradiso, the last stage of his journey through the other-world in his Commedia, the great narrative poem that we call The Divine Comedy.
How could an intelligent, worldly man, one who was involved in politics, who fought in two military campaigns and had a wife and family – how could he keep this romantic fantasy at the centre of his life? The Commedia is not a “courtly love” narrative, but Dante’s mad obsession with an unattainable woman seems to smack of it. And we need to see that, by the time Dante was writing the Paradisio section of the Commedia, Beatrice had been dead for at least 20 years. Neither of them were blessed with long lives. What was going on?
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To me the relations between the sexes are at the centre of what a society is, and Dante’s adherence to the mad “Courtly Love” ideal is a great revelation, but also a marker. To me it shows that 1350 and the Black Death do really form a boundary between the Mediaeval and the Renaissance. Because no-one ever wrote like that again – certainly not Boccaccio, despite his love of Dante, and of women. Petrarch’s sonnets are love poems, but not ones of chivalric “courtly” love – they are straightforward “I love you” or,”I love her” poems, albeit very well done.
So, around 1350, something changed on the Italian peninsula.
The Crusades were over, and armed men roamed Italy. In the chaos of a land reduced in population by about half following the Black Death of 1348, landowners struggled for labour to work their lands and cities struggled against one another just to survive. Private armies of condottieri (literally, contractors), which were basically bands of mercenary soldiers led by aristocratic thugs, were available for hire to the highest bidder; and were happy to switch sides when they got a better offer.
Chivalry – which had always been a chimera – was dead, and with it, courtly love.
But although Dante’s courtly love passion for Beatrice may have seemed strange to Boccaccio and madness to modern minds, his idea of conscience, and of actions having consequences, are all too relevant today. When we see politicians taking no responsibility for outrageous breaches of ministerial standards (remember them?), and their evading any consequences for egregious actions, Dante is still relevant.
Because great art is always relevant. When asked by a student how to become a good artist, Picasso replied, “Dessiner les Antiques” (draw the masters). Learn from history and those who previously reflected well on the human condition – such as the great Dante Alighieri who died on the September 14, 700 years ago.
James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
