[null, {"document_url": "http://worldheritage.org/articles/eng/Dante_Alighieri", "unformatted_src": "/images/delete.jpg", "src": "https://worldheritage.org/images/delete.jpg", "formatted_filename": "delete"}, null, {"document_url": "http://worldheritage.org/articles/eng/Dante_Alighieri", "unformatted_src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Antonio_Cotti_-_Dante_a_Verona.jpg", "src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Antonio_Cotti_-_Dante_a_Verona.jpg", "formatted_filename": "File:Antonio Cotti Dante a Verona", "rendered_width": 50}, null, {"document_url": "http://worldheritage.org/articles/eng/Dante_Alighieri", "unformatted_src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Dante_Alighieri01.jpg", "src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Dante_Alighieri01.jpg", "formatted_filename": "File:Dante Alighieri", "rendered_width": 50}, null, {"document_url": "http://worldheritage.org/articles/eng/Dante_Alighieri", "unformatted_src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Dante_Luca.jpg", "src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Dante_Luca.jpg", "formatted_filename": "File:Dante Luca", "rendered_width": 50}, null, {"document_url": "http://worldheritage.org/articles/eng/Dante_Alighieri", "unformatted_src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Dante.deathmask.jpg", "src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Dante.deathmask.jpg", "formatted_filename": "File:Dante", "rendered_width": 50}, null, {"document_url": "http://worldheritage.org/articles/eng/Dante_Alighieri", "unformatted_src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Dante_Alighieri_Statue_SantaCroce.jpg", "src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Dante_Alighieri_Statue_SantaCroce.jpg", "formatted_filename": "File:Dante Alighieri Statue SantaCroce", "rendered_width": 50}, null, {"document_url": "http://worldheritage.org/articles/eng/Dante_Alighieri", "unformatted_src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:DanteFresco.jpg", "src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:DanteFresco.jpg", "formatted_filename": "File:DanteFresco", "rendered_width": 50}, null, {"document_url": "http://worldheritage.org/articles/eng/Dante_Alighieri", "unformatted_src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Dantes_tomb_ravenna.jpg", "src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Dantes_tomb_ravenna.jpg", "formatted_filename": "File:Dantes tomb ravenna", "rendered_width": 50}, null, {"document_url": "http://worldheritage.org/articles/eng/Dante_Alighieri", "unformatted_src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Santa_Croce_Firenze_Apr_2008_(17).JPG", "src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Santa_Croce_Firenze_Apr_2008_(17).JPG", "formatted_filename": "File:Santa Croce Firenze Apr ( )", "rendered_width": 50}, null, {"document_url": "http://worldheritage.org/articles/eng/Dante_Alighieri", "unformatted_src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:DanteDetail.jpg", "src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:DanteDetail.jpg", "formatted_filename": "File:DanteDetail", "rendered_width": 50}, null, {"document_url": "http://worldheritage.org/articles/eng/Dante_Alighieri", "unformatted_src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Dante-alighieri.jpg", "src": "http://images.worldlibrary.net/articles/eng/File:Dante-alighieri.jpg", "formatted_filename": "File:Dante alighieri", "rendered_width": 50}, null]

Dante Alighieri
 


Durante degli Alighieri (Italian: ), simply called Dante (Italian: , UK , US ; c. 1265–1321), was a major Italian poet of the late Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa (modern Italian: Commedia) and later christened Divina by Boccaccio, is widely considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature.[1]

Dante has been called "the Father of the Italian language".[2] In Italy, Dante is often referred to as il Sommo Poeta ("the Supreme Poet") and il Poeta; he, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also called "the three fountains" or "the three crowns".



Dante was born in Florence, Italy. The exact date of his birth is unknown, although it is generally believed to be around 1265. This can be deduced from autobiographic allusions in the Divine Comedy. Its first section, the Inferno, begins, "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" ("Midway upon the journey of our life"), implying that Dante was around 35 years old, since the average lifespan according to the Bible (Psalm 89:10, Vulgate) is 70 years; and since his imaginary travel to the nether world took place in 1300, he was most probably born around 1265. Some verses of the Paradiso section of the Divine Comedy also provide a possible clue that he was born under the sign of Gemini: "As I revolved with the eternal twins, I saw revealed, from hills to river outlets, the threshing-floor that makes us so ferocious" (XXII 151–154). In 1265, the sun was in Gemini between approximately May 11 and June 11.[3]

Dante claimed that his family descended from the ancient Romans (Inferno, XV, 76), but the earliest relative he could mention by name was Cacciaguida degli Elisei (Paradiso, XV, 135), born no earlier than about 1100. Dante's father, Alaghiero[4] or Alighiero di Bellincione, was a White Guelph who suffered no reprisals after the Ghibellines won the Battle of Montaperti in the middle of the 13th century. This suggests that Alighiero or his family may have enjoyed some protective prestige and status, although some suggest that the politically inactive Alighiero was of such low standing that he was not considered worth exiling.[5]

Dante's family had loyalties to the Guelphs, a political alliance that supported the Papacy and which was involved in complex opposition to the Ghibellines, who were backed by the Holy Roman Emperor. The poet's mother was Bella, likely a member of the Abati family.[4] She died when Dante was not yet ten years old, and Alighiero soon married again, to Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi. It is uncertain whether he really married her, since widowers were socially limited in such matters, but this woman definitely bore him two children, Dante's half-brother Francesco and half-sister Tana (Gaetana). When Dante was 12, he was promised in marriage to Gemma di Manetto Donati, daughter of Manetto Donati, member of the powerful Donati family.[4] Contracting marriages at this early age was quite common and involved a formal ceremony, including contracts signed before a notary. But by this time Dante had fallen in love with another, Beatrice Portinari (known also as Bice), whom he first met when he was only nine. Years after his marriage to Gemma he claims to have met Beatrice again; he wrote several sonnets to Beatrice but never mentioned Gemma in any of his poems. The exact date of his marriage is not known: the only certain information is that, before his exile in 1301, he had three children (Pietro, Jacopo and Antonia).[4] Dante in Verona, by Antonio Cotti

Education and poetry

Not much is known about Dante's education; he presumably studied at home or in a chapter school attached to a church or monastery in Florence. It is known that he studied Tuscan poetry and that he admired the compositions of the Bolognese poet Guido Guinizelli—whom in Purgatorio XXVI he characterized as his "father"—at a time when the Sicilian school (Scuola poetica Siciliana), a cultural group from Sicily, was becoming known in Tuscany. His interests brought him to discover the Provençal poetry of the troubadours, such as Arnaut Daniel, and the Latin writers of classical antiquity, including Cicero, Ovid and especially Virgil. Statue of Dante at the Uffizi, Florence

Dante said he first met Beatrice Portinari, daughter of Folco Portinari, at age nine, and claimed to have fallen in love with her "at first sight", apparently without even talking with her. He saw her frequently after age 18, often exchanging greetings in the street, but never knew her well. In effect, he set an example of so-called courtly love, a phenomenon developed in French and Provençal poetry of prior centuries. Dante's experience of such love was typical, but his expression of it was unique. It was in the name of this love that Dante left his imprint on the dolce stil novo (sweet new style, a term which Dante himself coined), and he would join other contemporary poets and writers in exploring never-before-emphasized aspects of love (Amore). Love for Beatrice (as Petrarch would show for Laura somewhat differently) would be his reason for poetry and for living, together with political passions. In many of his poems, she is depicted as semi-divine, watching over him constantly and providing spiritual instruction, sometimes harshly. When Beatrice died in 1290, Dante sought refuge in Latin literature. The Convivio chronicles his having read Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae and Cicero's De Amicitia. He then dedicated himself to philosophical studies at religious schools like the Dominican one in Santa Maria Novella. He took part in the disputes that the two principal mendicant orders (Franciscan and Dominican) publicly or indirectly held in Florence, the former explaining the doctrines of the mystics and of St. Bonaventure, the latter expounding on the theories of St. Thomas Aquinas.

At 18, Dante met Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia and soon after Brunetto Latini; together they became the leaders of the dolce stil novo. Brunetto later received special mention in the Divine Comedy (Inferno, XV, 28) for what he had taught Dante: Nor speaking less on that account I go With Ser Brunetto, and I ask who are his most known and most eminent companions. Some fifty poetical commentaries by Dante are known (the so-called Rime, rhymes), others being included in the later Vita Nuova and Convivio. Other studies are reported, or deduced from Vita Nuova or the Comedy, regarding painting and music.

Florence and politics Dante Alighieri, detail from Luca Signorelli's fresco, Chapel of San Brizio, Orvieto Cathedral

Exile and death

Pope Boniface quickly dismissed the other delegates and asked Dante alone to remain in Rome. At the same time (November 1, 1301), Charles of Valois entered Florence with the Black Guelphs, who in the next six days destroyed much of the city and killed many of their enemies. A new Black Guelph government was installed, and Cante de' Gabrielli da Gubbio was appointed podestà of the city. In March 1302, Dante, a White Guelph by affiliation, along with the Gherardini family, was condemned to exile for two years and ordered to pay a large fine.[6] Dante was accused of corruption and financial wrongdoing by the Black Guelphs for the time that Dante was serving as city prior (Florence's highest position) for two months in 1300.[7] The poet was still in Rome in 1302 where the Pope, who had backed the Black Guelphs, had "suggested" that Dante stay. Florence under the Black Geulphs therefore considered Dante an absconder.[8] Dante did not pay the fine, in part because he believed he was not guilty and in part because all his assets in Florence had been seized by the Black Guelphs. He was condemned to perpetual exile; if he returned to Florence without paying the fine, he could have been burned at the stake. (In June 2008, nearly seven centuries after his death, the city council of Florence finally passed a motion rescinding Dante's sentence.)[9] A recreated death mask of Dante Alighieri in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence Statue of Dante in the Piazza di Santa Croce in Florence, Enrico Pazzi, 1865

An early outside indication that the poem was underway is a notice by Francesco da Barberino, tucked into his Documenti d'Amore (Lessons of Love), written probably in 1314 or early 1315. Speaking of Virgil, Francesco notes in appreciative words that Dante followed the Roman classic in a poem called "Comedy" and that the setting of this poem (or part of it) was the underworld; i.e., hell.[10] The brief note gives no incontestable indication that he himself had seen or read even the Inferno or that this part had been published at the time, but it indicates composition was well underway and that the sketching of the poem may likely have begun some years before. (It has been suggested that a knowledge of Dante's work also underlies some of the illuminations in Francesco da Barberino's earlier Officiolum [c. 1305–08], a manuscript that came to light only in 2003.[11]) We know that the Inferno had been published by 1317; this is established by quoted lines interspersed in the margins of contemporary dated records from Bologna, but there is no certainty whether the three parts of the poem were each published in full or were published a few cantos at a time. Paradiso seems to have been published posthumously. Mural of Dante in the Uffizi Gallery, by Andrea del Castagno, c. 1450 Dante's tomb in Ravenna, built in 1780 Cenotaph in Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence

On the grave, some verses of Bernardo Canaccio, a friend of Dante, dedicated to Florence:

parvi Florentia mater amoris
"Florence, mother of little love"


The first formal biography of Dante was the Vita di Dante (also known as Trattatello in laude di Dante), written after 1348 by Giovanni Boccaccio;[12] Although several statements and episodes of it have been deemed unreliable on the basis of modern research, an earlier account of Dante's life and works had been included in the Nuova Cronica of the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani.[13]

On April 30, 1921, in honor of the 600th anniversary of Dante's death, Pope Benedict XV promulgated an encyclical named In praeclara summorum, calling him one "of the many celebrated geniuses of whom the Catholic faith can boast" and the "pride and glory of humanity".[14]

In 2007, a reconstruction of Dante's face was undertaken in a collaborative project. Artists from Pisa University and engineers at the University of Bologna at Forlì constructed the model, portraying Dante's features as somewhat different from what was once thought.[15][16]

A celebration was held for the 750th anniversary of his birth, in 2015.[17][18]


See also Works by Dante Alighieri

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso); he is first guided by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love (and of another of his works, La Vita Nuova). While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for most modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and knowledge to appreciate. Purgatorio is arguably the most lyrical of the three, referencing more contemporary poets and artists than Inferno; Paradiso is the most heavily theological, and the one in which many scholars have argued the Divine Comedy's most beautiful and mystic passages appear (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa"—"at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142). Dante, poised between the mountain of purgatory and the city of Florence, displays the incipit Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita in a detail of Domenico di Michelino's painting, Florence, 1465.

With its seriousness of purpose, its literary stature and the range—both stylistic and thematic—of its content, the Comedy soon became a cornerstone in the evolution of Italian as an established literary language. Dante was more aware than most early Italian writers of the variety of Italian dialects and of the need to create a literature and a unified literary language beyond the limits of Latin writing at the time; in that sense, he is a forerunner of the Renaissance, with its effort to create vernacular literature in competition with earlier classical writers. Dante's in-depth knowledge (within the limits of his time) of Roman antiquity, and his evident admiration for some aspects of pagan Rome, also point forward to the 15th century. Ironically, while he was widely honored in the centuries after his death, the Comedy slipped out of fashion among men of letters: too medieval, too rough and tragic, and not stylistically refined in the respects that the high and late Renaissance came to demand of literature.

He wrote the Comedy in a language he called "Italian", in some sense an amalgamated literary language mostly based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, but with some elements of Latin and other regional dialects. He deliberately aimed to reach a readership throughout Italy including laymen, clergymen and other poets. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression. In French, Italian is sometimes nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break free from standards of publishing in only Latin (the language of liturgy, history and scholarship in general, but often also of lyric poetry). This break set a precedent and allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience, setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future. However, unlike Boccaccio, Milton or Ariosto, Dante did not really become an author read all over Europe until the Romantic era. To the Romantics, Dante, like Homer and Shakespeare, was a prime example of the "original genius" who sets his own rules, creates persons of overpowering stature and depth, and goes far beyond any imitation of the patterns of earlier masters; and who, in turn, cannot truly be imitated. Throughout the 19th century, Dante's reputation grew and solidified; and by 1865, the 600th anniversary of his birth, he had become established as one of the greatest literary icons of the Western world. Dante Alighieri, attributed to Giotto, in the chapel of the Bargello palace in Florence. This oldest picture of Dante was painted just prior to his exile and has since been heavily restored.

New readers often wonder how such a serious work may be called a "comedy". The word "comedy" in the classical sense refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events tended toward not only a happy or amusing ending but one influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, as Dante himself wrote in a letter to Cangrande I della Scala, the progression of the pilgrimage from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy (in the classical meaning of the word), since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.

Statue of Dante Alighieri in Verona

Dante's other works include Convivio ("The Banquet"),[19] a collection of his longest poems with an (unfinished) allegorical commentary; Monarchia,[20] a summary treatise of political philosophy in Latin which was condemned and burned after Dante's death[21][22] by the Papal Legate Bertrando del Poggetto, which argues for the necessity of a universal or global monarchy in order to establish universal peace in this life, and this monarchy's relationship to the Roman Catholic Church as guide to eternal peace; De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"),[23] on vernacular literature, partly inspired by the Razos de trobar of Raimon Vidal de Bezaudun; and La Vita Nuova ("The New Life"),[24] the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, who also served as the ultimate symbol of salvation in the Comedy. The Vita Nuova contains many of Dante's love poems in Tuscan, which was not unprecedented; the vernacular had been regularly used for lyric works before, during all the thirteenth century. However, Dante's commentary on his own work is also in the vernacular—both in the Vita Nuova and in the Convivio—instead of the Latin that was almost universally used. References to Divina Commedia are in the format (book, canto, verse), e.g., (Inferno, XV, 76).








