The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (48 page)

While Hell is a pit, Purgatory, on an island at the antipodes of Jerusalem, is a mountain that questing souls can climb up. As Dante reaches up out of Purgatory, his guide, Virgil, suddenly disappears, but Beatrice comes, with a reproach:

The way up is divided into the seven deadly sins. Just as in Hell, the graver sins are at the bottom, and at the very top is the Earthly Paradise. Then Paradise consists of heavenly spheres. The seven planetary heavens starting from the Earth are the heavens of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. These are surrounded outside by two stellar heavens—the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, and of the Primum Mobile. Beyond is the Empyrean, and finally God. Even the perfections of Paradise thus have clear division, and the planetary heavens (corresponding to the seven deadly sins) are staged around the seven cardinal virtues. They range from the secular and the active toward the highest contemplative. Each of the three
cantiche
ends with the word “stars” (
stelle
).

And the Paradise ends with Saint Bernard’s prayer for Dante, urging the Virgin to intercede to give him at least a moment’s direct vision of God:

The Virgin lifts her eyes upward and so does Dante. Now in a flash he perceives the Divine Essence that conquers speech and memory—“the Light in which everything the will has ever sought is gathered … and … every quest made perfect.”

We can taste the beauty of Dante’s Italian:

Dante’s feat of prosody has daunted even the ablest translators. His work on the
Comedy
from 1308 to 1321 “had made him lean for many years.” To translate fifteen thousand lines in tightly rhymed terza rima requires that many triple rhymes. John Ciardi concluded that the English language, unlike Italian, had no such rhyming resources and so settled for something less. Still the English reader should not be frightened by the language barrier. English translations in prose and verse—by Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Ciardi, and others—can be read with the same pleasure and suspense that attend the reading of the
Odyssey
or the
Aeneid
. The adventure story in verse takes the reader along, from the picturesque, malodorous, and horrendous to the glamorous, fragrant, and delightful. The searing heats of Hell and the dazzling lights of Paradise are as much a part of the story as the allegorical scholar’s meaning. Dante wrote in the vernacular “to be of more general use … for he knew that if he had written metrically in Latin as the other poets of past times had done, he would only have done service to men of letters.”

It is remarkable that he could produce so coherent a structure in years of wandering. After the decree of exile in 1302, Dante went to Forli and Verona in 1303, then he was taken in by Bologna until 1306, when all the Florentine exiles were expelled. As a refugee he moved on to Sarzana, then to Lucca and Casentino with other stops in Tuscany, before returning to Verona, which he left in 1318 for his last honored years in Ravenna. There scholars and poets became his disciples. After the “Inferno” and “Purgatorio” became public, Dante’s reputation spread. But when he was invited to Bologna to receive the poet’s laurel, he declined an honor that he said he would accept only from his native city. Dante’s patron, Guido Novello da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, sent him with an embassy to the doge of Venice to settle a dispute over the death of some Venetian sailors. When the unfriendly Venetians refused them permission to return to Ravenna by sea, they had to return overland along the malaria-infested coast. The malaria contracted on the way proved fatal to Dante, who died in Ravenna in 1321 at the age of fifty-six.

At Dante’s death, the last thirteen cantos of the “Paradiso” were nowhere to be found. Virgil had never completed the
Aeneid
. In this too had Dante followed his guide? Despairing admirers finally asked his sons Jacopo and Piero, both “rhymers,” to complete their father’s work. But, as Boccaccio reports, a lucky miracle made this unnecessary. One night, in the ninth month after Dante’s death, while Jacopo di Dante was asleep

Then Dante, still in the vision, took Jacopo by the hand, led him to the room where Dante had been sleeping, touched one of the walls, and said, “What you have sought for so much is here.” The next morning before dawn Jacopo went to the designated room and there in a hidden recess found the thirteen missing cantos “all mouldy from the dampness of the walls, and had they remained there longer, in a little while they would have crumbled away.”

Had Dante never written the
Comedy
he would still have been a creator of modern literature. Early in his years of exile he wrote another work in Italian, the unfinished
Convivio
, a mini-encyclopedia of philosophy for the layman. And if Dante had never written works in Italian, he would still be a major figure in medieval thought for his Latin treatises.
De vulgari eloquentia
(1304–5) summarized the biblical account of the origin of language, and admitted the superiority of Latin but defended Italian as a new literary language that all could understand. In
De monarchia
he described the divine plan for the Roman Empire. The emperor, like the pope, had received his mandate direct from God. Dante, torn between the claims of this world and the next, was the unhappy ambassador—in Latin praising the Italian vernacular, and in Italian marking the paths into the otherworld.

Death, which did not defeat his works and became the arena for his
Divine Comedy
, played tricks on Dante’s bodily remains. Too late, the people of Florence tried to bring back their exiled hero. Again and again they tried to persuade the people of Ravenna to yield Dante’s bones to Florence. In 1515 one of their own, the Medici pope Leo X, received a petition from the Florentine Academy with a promise from Michelangelo to make an appropriate tomb in Florence. Leo X authorized a mission from Florence to Ravenna to accomplish their hopes. But “the much wished-for
translation of Dante’s remains did not take place,” the envoys reported to Leo X, “inasmuch as the two delegates of the Academy who were sent for the purpose found Dante neither in soul nor in body; and it is supposed that, as in his lifetime he journeyed in soul and in body through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, so in death he must have been received, body and soul into one of those realms.”

Still, the reason for the pope’s disappointment remained secret. In 1782, when Dante’s tomb in Ravenna was to be renovated, the opening of the coffin again revealed no remains. But no one betrayed the secret of the empty tomb. It was still a secret in 1865, on the six hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth, when Florentines repeated their effort. Now the officials of Ravenna replied that since the creation of a unified Italy, the Florentine Dante was no longer in “exile.” The tomb was to be opened and the remains to be identified during the anniversary celebration. Just then a workman breaking through a wall in the Braccioforte Chapel adjoining Dante’s tomb happened on a secreted wooden coffin. Inscriptions on this coffin and expert examination of the skeleton it contained identified these as the remains of Dante. It was decided to open the original tomb in public. An eyewitness on that day, June 7, 1865, reported the suspense. Would a second skeleton be found there? The original tomb was publicly shown to be empty. The rediscovered skeleton was then assembled and displayed on white velvet under glass to receive the homage of all Italians. Dante’s bones were once again entombed in the city that had given him his last living refuge.

W
AS
there escape from the cataloged virtues and vices of Dante’s afterlife? Could there be stories without a moral, of human adventure and misadventure? The horrors of the plague provided Boccaccio with the incentive and the opportunity. But for the writer there was no easy refuge from stereotypes of classic lore and medieval legend with their themes of love and battle, of cowardice, deception, and courage. It was only a natural catastrophe that provided Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) the frame for a human comedy in the modern spirit.

Boccaccio’s early life followed the fortunes of his father. Born in Florence in 1313, an illegitimate son, he seems still to have been received amiably into his father’s household. His stepmother, a relative of Dante’s Beatrice, may have been the “reliable source” for his life of Dante. After a good education in Latin and accounting, at fourteen he was sent by his father to the Bardi firm’s branch office in Naples to learn the banking business. Six unhappy years there as an apprentice banker were followed by another six years learning canon law at the university. When the kings of Naples needed a full line of credit to finance their defense of the papal cause, the young banker was welcome at court. There “lusty young lords and cavaliers” attended “the bravest and most honorable ladies, shining in glittering gold and adorned with their precious and most rare jewels.” These Neapolitan delights stayed with him all the rest of his life, drawing him back to the scenes of his youth.

One glittering lady in particular, known under the pseudonym of Fiammetta, would play a leading role in Boccaccio’s life and work. At their first meeting, “the shining eyes of the fair lady, all sparkling, looked into my eyes with a piercing light … which, passing through my eyes, struck my heart so deeply with the beauty of that fair lady, that it resumed its earlier trembling which still endures.” Boccaccio never married, but he did father five children by unidentified mistresses.

When his father’s firm went bankrupt about 1340, Boccaccio returned to Florence, where he would remain a Neapolitan in exile. “Of my being in Florence against my will I shall tell you nothing,” he wrote back to his boon companion in Naples, “for it would have to be set forth not in ink but in tears.” And he signed himself, “Fortune’s enemy.”

Boccaccio’s early works were a product of Naples’s fertile literary life. When he returned to Tuscany at the age of twenty-seven, he had already
written poetry and prose on conventional themes of myth and chivalry. In terza rima he recounted a contest between Diana and Venus, and the pursuit by young lovers.
Il Filostrato
, the story of Troilus and Criseida, was a long epic of the love of two friends for the same woman that would provide a basis for Chaucer’s poem and Shakespeare’s play. And from
Teseide
, set in Athens in the time of Prince Theseus, Chaucer fashioned his
Knight’s Tale
.

In Florence, without the patronage of his father or the diversions of a brilliant court, Boccaccio found it hard to feel at home. After a trip to Ravenna seeking employment or benefaction, he returned to Florence in the spring of 1348 at the horrendous climax of the Black Death. Now, in place of the Greek gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, knights and ladies of his earlier works, Boccaccio created his own version of the Human Comedy. And his tales of daily life would survey the succulent sensualism of medieval life.