Who was Dante Alighieri? is a national icon in Italy and world Dante Alighieri probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to simply as Dante, was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa (modern Italian: Commedia) and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.
Dante is known for establishing the use of the vernacular in literature at a time when most poetry was written in Latin, which was accessible only to the most educated readers. His De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular) was one of the first scholarly defenses of the vernacular. His use of the Tuscan dialect for works such as The New Life (1295) and Divine Comedy helped establish the modern-day standardized Italian language. His work set a precedent that important Italian writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio would later follow.
Dante was instrumental in establishing the literature of Italy. His depictions of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven provided inspiration for the larger body of Western art and literature. He is described as the “father” of the Italian language, and in Italy he is often referred to as il Sommo Poeta (“the Supreme Poet”). Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also called the tre corone (“three crowns”) of Italian literature.
Dante is to Italy what Shakespeare is to the English, what Cervantes is to the Spanish and what Goethe is to the Germans, but maybe he is also something more
Who was Dante Alighieri – Life, writer and politics
Dante was born Durante Alighieri in Florence, Italy, in 1265, to a notable family of modest means. His mother died when he was seven years old, and his father remarried, having two more children.
Dante was the son of a moderately wealthy landowner. His mother died when he was just seven years old and his father when he was a teenager.
At twelve years old, Dante was betrothed to Gemma di Manetto Donati, though he had already fallen in love with another girl, Beatrice Portinari, who he continued to write about throughout his life, though his interaction with her was limited. The love poems to Beatrice are collected in Dante’s La Vita Nuova, or The New Life.
In his youth, Dante studied many subjects, including Tuscan poetry, painting, and music. He encountered both the Occitan poetry of the troubadours and the Latin poetry of classical antiquity, including Homer and Virgil. He read Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae and Cicero’s De amicitia. By the age of eighteen, Dante had met the poets Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia, and others. Along with Brunetto Latini, these poets became the leaders of Dolce Stil Novo (“The Sweet New Style”), in which personal and political passions were the purpose of poetry.
Political Life
Dante wasn’t only a literary person and a writer; he was also a politician who played an important role in Florence during his lifetime.
Dante, like most Florentines of his day, was embroiled in the Guelph–Ghibelline conflict. As a young knight, Dante actively participated in the 1289 Battle of Campaldino between the rival cities of Florence and Arezzo and their respective allies. The two sides in this battle were divided over their support for either the Pope (the Guelphs) or the Holy Roman Emperor (the Ghibellines), a rivalry that would cause a chasm in Florentine politics that lasted over half a century.
Back in Florence, Dante worked as a municipal official and was involved in politics between c. 1295 and 1302. In 1300 he was elected to the prestigious position of prior of the city (one of seven). Contrary to the government of Florence, Dante wanted to see his city free from papal interference, which he saw as a morally corrupt institution
Following their defeat of the Ghibellines, the Guelphs split into two factions: Dante’s White Guelphs, who were wary of the Pope’s political influence, and the Black Guelphs, who remained loyal to Rome. Initially, the Whites ruled Florence and drove the Blacks out, but Pope Boniface VIII planned a military occupation of the city. A delegation of Florentines, including Dante, was sent to Rome to ascertain the Pope’s intentions.
The Black Guelphs destroyed much of Rome and established a new government while he was there. Dante was informed that his assets had been seized and that he was considered an absconder for fleeing the city. Dante was sentenced to perpetual exile and never returned to his beloved Florence. Dante, an outcast, wandered Italy for several years, sketching out La Commedia, his great work.
In 1301, when the black Guelph political party (radical supporters of the pope e church) came to power, Dante, who was a member of the white Guelph political party and against Pope Boniface VIII because of his interference in political life and his connections with the most economically influential families, was sentenced to death. The latter was headed by the Black Guelph party.
The condemnation at the stake announced in Dante’s absence was issued on the basis of accusations which were mostly false and cleverly fabricated about him. The accusations included fraud, extortion, corruption, and even sodomy with a young boy.
Dante’s exile
He was further disillusioned with Rome following the Pope’s enforced exile to Avignon in 1309. Dante began to support, instead, the ambitions of the Holy Roman Emperor, although his political allegiance shifted depending on circumstances. Dante nurtured hopes that the Holy Roman Empire would restore Christian order to Europe. In this he was hopelessly wrong, but he did at least correctly predict that the bickering between the different Italian city-states would only lead to the downfall of all.
Dante was effectively exiled for his political views in January 1302. As the translator D. I. Sayers notes in her introduction to Hell, part I of the Divine Comedy, Dante had “three gifts hampering to the career of the practical politician: an unaccommodating temper, a blistering tongue, and an indecent superfluity of brains” (xxxii). Dante was duly charged with massive corruption by officials belonging to a rival political faction. The charges were fictitious but the sentence was real enough: to be burnt at the stake. Understandably, Dante, then on his way back from Rome, chose to avoid Florence.
Never settling in any one city thereafter, Dante first went to Verona, then moved around central and northern Italy. Meanwhile, Dante’s wife Gemma Donati and their three sons and daughter remained in Florence. It was during this wandering exile that he wrote his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy. Dante never did return home, and he died of malaria in Ravenna on 13 September 1321.
Death and burial
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Dante’s final days were spent in Ravenna, where he had been invited to stay in the city in 1318 by its prince, Guido II da Polenta. Dante died in Ravenna on 14 September 1321, aged about 56, of quartan malaria contracted while returning from a diplomatic mission to the Republic of Venice. He was attended by his three children, and possibly by Gemma Donati, and by friends and admirers he had in the city. He was buried in Ravenna at the Church of San Pier Maggiore (later called Basilica di San Francesco). Bernardo Bembo, praetor of Venice, erected a tomb for him in 1483.
On the grave, a verse of Bernardo Canaccio, a friend of Dante, is dedicated to Florence:
In 1329, Bertrand du Pouget, Cardinal and nephew of Pope John XXII, classified Dante’s Monarchia as heretical and sought to have his bones burned at the stake. Ostasio I da Polenta and Pino della Tosa, allies of Pouget, interceded to prevent the destruction of Dante’s remains.
Cenotaph in Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence
Florence eventually came to regret having exiled Dante. The city made repeated requests for the return of his remains. The custodians of the body in Ravenna refused, at one point going so far as to conceal the bones in a false wall of the monastery. Florence built a tomb for Dante in 1829, in the Basilica of Santa Croce. That tomb has been empty ever since, with Dante’s body remaining in Ravenna. The front of his tomb in Florence reads Onorate l’altissimo poeta — which roughly translates as “Honor the most exalted poet” and is a quote from the fourth canto of the Inferno. [40]
In 1945, the fascist government discussed bringing Dante’s remains to the Valtellina Redoubt, the Alpine valley in which the regime intended to make its last stand against the Allies. The case was made that “the greatest symbol of Italianness” should be present at fascism’s “heroic” end.
Recreated death mask of Dante Alighieri in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence
A copy of Dante’s so-called death mask has been displayed since 1911 in the Palazzo Vecchio; scholars today believe it is not a true death mask and was probably carved in 1483, perhaps by Pietro and Tullio Lombardo.
Legacy: the Renaissance & Beyond
“Italians speak Italian” It appears self-evident. However, not long ago, there were no “Italians” in the modern sense, nor was there a single “Italian” language. It is little known that when Italy became a country in 1861, only about 2.5 percent of her people spoke what we now call Italian. Even as recently as 1951, less than 20% of Italians used Italian exclusively in their daily lives. Indeed, until recently, most Italians considered Italian to be a second language. Their first language was often a regional or local language. As the millennium began, Italian was becoming the primary living language of the majority of Italians.
Besides literature, Dante influenced Renaissance painters; for example, his vision of Hell inspired many works depicting the Last Judgment. Michelangelo (1475-1564), the renowned artist, was said to be able to recite passages from the Divine Comedy by heart. Finally, Dante himself became the subject of Renaissance art, most notably inside Florence’s cathedral. In this 1465 painting by Domenico di Michelino, the poet is shown standing in front of the hill of Purgatory and the city of Florence, holding a copy of his Divine Comedy.
Today, the Divine Comedy continues to be studied at colleges and universities worldwide and continues, too, to perplex scholars with its breadth of language and depth of themes and characters. As the historian M. Wyatt states, it is “a poem that resists classification in its employment of classical, medieval, and proto-Renaissance literary conventions in a wide variety of linguistic registers” (4). Perhaps here lies the key to the continuing fascination of Dante and his work.
