Dante’s intellectual development and public career
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in
1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his
native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a
banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher
Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made
his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in
his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the
Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even
further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the
Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.
Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his
father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in La
vita nuova (The New Life), and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest
between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled
Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father
apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he
was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown.
Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco,
and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come
into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri
left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country.
About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.
Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal
partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century
the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and
inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of
ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of
Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento,
expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with
postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany.
Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.
Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual
dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning
exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher,
this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an
encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public
consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti,
Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers
to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that
humans are social (political) beings. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being
beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for humanity were
individuals not members of a city-state.
A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and
master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our
republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most
important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had
passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical
citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European
vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and
politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating
questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as
well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the
mainstays of Dante’s early culture.
Of these, Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero
began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as
fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to
become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a
wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for
instructing Dante in the means by which humans make themselves immortal, and in his farewell
words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will
survive.
Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the
time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of
making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the
Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most
important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.
As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a
complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s
exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in Il convivio (The
Banquet), written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia (Concerning Vernacular Eloquence),
written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular.
His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed
upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante
dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).
Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to
concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and
died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is
as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness,
his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record
the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful
aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.
One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same
appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated
fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s
thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands—
sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to
be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited
with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”
La vita nuova
Portrait of Dante with Beatrice and VirgilPortrait of Dante Alighieri wearing a laurel
wreath and holding a book. Beatrice is depicted above Dante, and Virgil is depicted below him;
from an engraving on paper by Cornelis Galle I, c. 1633–50.
La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante
made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum—that is, a work
composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems
composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts
from before 1283 to roughly 1292–93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work,
contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The
Divine Comedy.
The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It
contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a
fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary
provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course,
conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is
simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her
salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced
when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his
determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death
(that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally
the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a
young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and,
in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has
never been written of any woman.”
Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely
impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or
descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical
identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality.
Names are rarely used—Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s
sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one
hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he
seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which
Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are
indications of his early and abiding ambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.
A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most
responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse
provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a
refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even
philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue
that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined
and noble sense of life.
It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point
of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart,
and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady,
especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding
of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una
cosa” (“Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an
adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love
Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the
dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which—the simple means by which
it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the
Purgatorio (XXIV).
This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which
he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante
reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But
what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of
the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was
transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began
attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and
within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every
other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“You Who Through
Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style,
associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated
with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually
to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.
Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the
commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which
philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public
arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf
and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling
Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a
party of “Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the
Blacks.
There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he
was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighboring town, whose purpose it was
to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and
embattled Pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably
was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist
Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the
extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs—the party supporting the pope—had been
restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy.
By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in
turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf
moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement
in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and
most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders
of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.
Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new
alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of
Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of
Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In
order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss
these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the
legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered.
Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante.
In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence.
That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized
the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January
1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was
condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing
to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to
death.
Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he
frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act
toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the
means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true
“divine comedy.”
