A Nose for Dante Alighieri ~ Italy's Devine Poet

Tuesday, 23 January 2007 21:06

Italian scientists have reconstructed the face of their nation's most famous poet, Dante Alighieri, nearly 700 years after his death.  Using a combination of modern forensics and a plaster model made from Dante's skull in 1921, they produced the bust pictured above.  Several scholars, including some on the reconstruction team, were surprised at Dante's "new look," especially the shape of his nose.  Centuries of portraits, most painted long after the poet's death, had led them to expect a less slanted nose.

Staring into the face of one of history's greatest poets made us want to get to know the man behind the nose.  So we took the first step in any quest to know Dante.  We got lost in his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy.

Lost and Found with Dante 

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost

So begins Dante's divine epic. For seven centuries, Dante's readers have connected with that feeling--of finding themselves lost--before following him on a poetic journey that leads, literally (or at least literarily), from the depths of hell to heaven's heights.  Along the way we see the wonders of divine justice, get a crash course in medieval Italian politics, and bask in lyrical passages crafted to convey the glory of God.  And we come face-to-face with a work that helped invent the modern Italian language, not to mention vernacular literature itself.

Politics and Poetry

Born in Florence, Italy, in 1265, Dante became one of the city's leading political lights by the turn of the 14th century.  Yet his very success proved Dante's downfall. In 1301, the Florentine faction he helped lead lost power to a rival faction, and Dante wound up exiled.  Bad news for his budding political career.  Good news for the history of literature.

A few years into his exile, Dante began writing La commedia (people added "divine" later) in the Tuscan dialect of vernacular Italian he had spoken back home. By epic's end, his poem consisted of 100 cantos, each roughly 140 lines long, and all written in terza rima, a rhyme scheme Dante invented for the project.

The Cosmos in Cantos

The first canto introduces the entire work. The other 99 are divided into three equal parts: Inferno, in which the Roman poet Virgil leads Dante through nine descending circles of hell; Purgatorio, in which Virgil and Dante ascend Mount Purgatory; and Paradiso, in which Dante's deceased love, Beatrice, takes him on a tour of heaven.  (As a heathen poet, Virgil couldn't go to heaven, even allegorically.)

Together, the cantos drew a detailed map of the medieval Christian cosmos.  But The Divine Comedy wasn't all fire, brimstone, penance, and salvation.  Dante also wove in classical allusions, philosophical reflections, and juicy details from his personal life--including spats with political enemies, who got their just deserts in Dante's vision of hell. 

Literary Legacy

The end result was a poem that's widely regarded as one of the greatest literary works of all time, and that set a new standard for vernacular verse.  Before Dante, serious writers stuck mainly to Latin--the language of law, church, and Roman literature.  Many viewed works in the common tongue, like Dante's "comedy," as vulgar by definition.

But Dante got the last laugh on strict Latinists. His poem's power and popularity helped turn the Tuscan dialect into the basis for modern Italian--and made him the most famous writer in that living language's literary history.  Not bad for a washed-up politician who found himself lost in the woods.

...by Steve Sampson