[Born at Florence, 1265. Died at Ravenna, 1321. Aged 56.]
The eldest and greatest poet of modern Italy. He was of a noble
Florentine family. He came into stormy times, and his life was
tempestuous. His native city was then split between the fierce hostile
factions of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the two great parties that
distracted Germany and Italy in the middle ages. An _urban_ faction in
Florence was that of the Blacks and Whites. Dante was a Ghibelline, and
a White: a keen partisan, and a distinguished citizen, he shared the
passions and the vicissitudes of his party. Two battles are mentioned in
which he gained honour as a soldier. At thirty-five, he was in the
supreme magistrature of the city. When Charles of Anjou, in passing
through Florence, took the part of the Blacks, Dante was amongst the
sufferers. He was condemned to exile, and confiscation of his property:
but, on a revision of the sentence, to be burned alive. He wandered
long, in France and in Italy, and rested at last, under the shelter of
Guido Novelli, at Ravenna. He died there. He was once married, but not
happily. A boyish love for Beatrice Portinari lives, as a sort of
ethereal idea, throughout his poetry and life. He wandered and sang. His
marvellous poem, “The Divine Comedy,” was composed during his long
exile. It at once raised the modern Italian to the rank of a classical
tongue, and the poetry of modern Italy to a height to which it has never
again soared. The poet relates his journey, as a living man, through the
three invisible worlds, which receive, as his church teaches, the souls
of other men when released from the body: Hell, Purgatory, Heaven.
Through Hell and Purgatory he is led by the shade of the poet
Virgil--indeed his beloved leader in their common art. Through Paradise,
his Beatrice herself, in whom he impersonates Theology, guides him. The
ghosts he sees, those under punishment especially, are chiefly his
deceased contemporaries, and Italians: so that the other shadowy world
is with him almost a reflexion of his own world here. From the first
step of his pilgrimage to the last, he sees sights of his own imagining,
transcending all experience, almost all conception, yet delineated with
such vivid precision, in language so simply real, that a feeling only
short of belief accompanies the reader, and remains with him. Italian
peasants meeting the poet, pointed out, as they looked with awe on “his
pale and visionary brow,” the man who had been down to Hell. Prominent
characteristics of his poetry are strength, daring, intensity, grace,
absolute self-reliance, and boundless invention: above all, the
continual self-presence of the poet as the centre to his own thoughts,
and to the worlds which he traverses and describes. He began to write
his poem in Latin verse; but Dante was too essentially a poet to write
out of his mother-tongue;--a poet expresses _himself_ in his verse, and
only the mother-tongue is near enough to him for that.
[This Bust is by Alessandro d’Este, and was placed in the Protomoteca
at the expense of Canova. It corresponds in the chief characteristics
of the face with the portraits taken from the life, of which there are
several. In Florence Cathedral, near the tomb of Giotto, is an
authentic portrait. The one lately discovered on a wall in the palace
of the Podestà at Florence, is extremely interesting, as being a
youthful likeness by the hand of his friend Giotto. The monument to
Dante in S. Croce is the work of Stefano Ricci. It was erected in
1829, at the public expense.]