Dante Alighieri
1265–1321

Dante Alighieri, ‘that singular splendour of the Italian race’ as Boccaccio, his first biographer, calls him, was born , a lawyer’s son, in Florence in May 1265. He was baptised Durante, afterwards contracted into Dante; and the old biographers loved to dwell on the appropriateness of both names, ‘the much-enduring’ and ‘the giver’. In his Vita Nuova, the new (i.e. probably early), life, he relates how he first set eyes on ’the glorious lady of his heart, Beatrice,’ he, then, being about nine years of age and she a few months younger. To Boccaccio, and to his statement alone, we owe the generally accepted fact that she was the daughter of Folco Portinari, for Dante himself never gives the slightest clues to her family name. That chance meeting in May 1274 determined the whole future course of the poet’s life. The story of his boyish but unquenchable passion is told with exquisite pathos in the Vita Nuova. There is no evidence that any similar feeling was aroused in the heart of Beatrice herself. She was married early to Simone de’Bardi, but neither this nor the poet’s own subsequent marriage interfered with his pure and platonic devotion to her, which became even intensified after her death, on 9 June 1290. Shortly after, Dante married Gemma Donati, daughter of a powerful Guelph family. That it proved an unhappy marriage is mere conjecture, based on the fact that after Dante’s exile he never appears to have seen his wife again. In 1289 Dante fought at Campaldino, where Florence defeated the Ghibellines, and was at the capitulation of Caprona. He was registered in one of the city guilds – that of the Apothecaries – being entered as ‘Dante d’Aldighieri, poeta.’ In 1300, after filling minor public offices, and possibly going on some embassies abroad, he attained to the dignity of one of the six priors of Florence – a dignity lasting for only two months. It was towards the ’White Guelphs’ or more moderate section that his sympathies tended; as prior, he procured the banishment of the heads and leaders of the rival factions, showing characteristic sternness and impartiality to Guelph and Ghibelline, White and Black alike. Shortly afterwards the leaders of the Whites were permitted to return. The partiality thus shown was a prominent feature in the accusations against Dante; but he had a complete answer in the fact that then he was no longer in office. In 1301, in alarm at the threatened interference of Charles of Valois, Dante was sent on an embassy to Rome to Pope Boniface VIII. From that embassy he never returned, nor did he ever again set foot in his native city. Charles, espousing the side of the ’Neri,’ or Blacks, their victory was complete; and in January 1302 sentence of banishment went against Dante and others, nominally on the baseless charge of misconduct in office. This was followed by a more severe sentence on 10 March, which condemned them to be burned alive if ever caught, and which was repeated in 1311 and 1315. Dante’s principal halting-places seem to have been – first Verona, in Tuscany, in the Lunigiano, near Urbino and then Verona again. During this period he is said to have visited Paris; but some of his biographers connect that visit with the period of his early education. Among these is Serravalle, who wrote as late as 1417, and who is also the sole authority for Dante’s alleged visit to England and Oxford. Those who, like Boccaccio, take him to France during his exile, suppose him to have been recalled to Italy and politics by the election of Henry of Luxemburg as emperor and his visit to Italy, where no emperor had set foot for more than fifty years. The exile’s hopes were now roused to the highest pitch, but were finally crushed by Henry’s unexpected death on 24 August 1313, after which, Dante took refuge in Romagna, and finally in Ravenna, where for the most part he remained until his death, on 14 September 1321. He was buried with much pomp at Ravenna , and there he still lies, restored in 1865 to the original sarcophagus. Dante had seven children, six sons and one daughter, Beatrice, a nun at Ravenna; but his family became extinct in the 16th century. A cast was taken of his face after death so that we have an absolutely authentic record of his features. The dates and sequence of his various works are matters of conjecture. Doubtless the Vita Nuova is the earliest. By far the most celebrated is the Divina Commedia, in which he purposes ‘to say of Beatrice that which never yet was said of any woman.’ In this vision of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven we have an encyclopaedic view of the highest culture and knowledge of the age on philosophy, history, classical literature, physical science, morals and theology, expressed in the most sublime and exquisite poetry, and with consummate power and beauty of language. The Divina Commedia may be said to have made the Italian language, which was before, so rude and unformed that Dante himself hesitated to employ it on such a theme, and is said to have commenced his poem in Latin. No work probably in the world, except the Bible, has given rise to so vast a literature. There have been many hundred editions, it has been translated hundreds of times into various European languages; and of commentaries, introductions and essays there is no end. The next important work is the fragment called the Convito, or Banquet, which takes the form of a commentary on some canzoni, or short poems, of the author, of which there are only three, though the work, if completed would have contained fourteen. The De Monarchia expounds Dante’s theory of the divinely-intended government of the world by a universal emperor acting in harmony with a universal Pope. Another unfinished work, De Vulgari Eloquio, discusses the origin of language, the divisions of languages, and the dialect of Italian in particular. Canzoniere is a collection of short poems and sonnets.