Preferred Citation: Durling, Robert M., and Ronald L. Martinez Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante's Rime petrose. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8s200961/
 | Time and the CrystalStudies in Dante's Rime PetroseRobert M. Durling |
Parentibus parentumque memoriae
Preferred Citation: Durling, Robert M., and Ronald L. Martinez Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante's Rime petrose. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8s200961/
Parentibus parentumque memoriae
Preface
This volume is a collaborative effort, extending over a number of years. As is characteristic of collaborations, the boundaries of each partner's contribution are difficult to establish. Countless discussions and exchanges over the years have in many cases made it impossible to say that this or that idea came from one of us rather than the other. This mutual debt and blending of views has been, in fact, one of the great satisfactions of the project. The chapters that make up the book may be more clearly assigned, since although we have made many suggestions to each other, we have done the writing separately. Thus Durling is the main author of the Introduction, Chapters 1, 2, and 4, Appendices 1 and 4, and the Index; Martinez of Chapters 3, 5, and 6, and Appendices 2 and 3.
A number of people have read the manuscript, in part or in its entirety, at various stages of its evolution and have given us generous encouragement and helpful criticism. We would like to thank especially Leonard Barkan, Harry Berger, Jr., Kenneth Durling, John Freccero, Rachel Jacoff, and David Quint. Robert McMahon's detailed criticisms of an entire early version were particularly helpful. Discussion with the members of the 1988 Stanford Dante Institute helped to clarify a number of ideas. Nancy Vine Durling has read the entire manuscript in all of its avatars, has caught many mistakes, and has made numerous helpful suggestions. The University of California at Santa Cruz has been generous with sabbatical leaves. The staffs of the libraries of the University of Minnesota, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at Santa Cruz have been unfailingly helpful, as have the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. We are grateful also to Anne Canright, Doris Kretschmer, and Rose Vekony, all of the University of California Press, for their technical expertise and their generous support.
The text of the petrose is reprinted from Le rime, edited by Gianfranco Contini (copyright 1946: Turin, Giulio Einaudi); the text of Book 2 of the De vulgari eloquentia from Opere minori, volume 2, edited by Pier
Vincenzo Mengaldo (copyright 1979: Milano-Napoli, Ricciardi); and of Vita nuova, chapter 19, from Opere minori, volume 1, part 1a, edited by Domenico De Robertis (copyright 1984: Milano-Napoli, Ricciardi), all with the generous permission of the publishers. Portions of Chapter 2 were published in Dante Studies, volume 93 (copyright the Dante Society of America); they are reprinted with the generous permission of the publisher.
The text of the Commedia is quoted from Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, edited by C. H. Grandgent, revised by Charles S. Singleton (Cambridge, Mass., 1972); the text is substantially that of Petrocchi. Except as otherwise identified, translations are by the authors.
Introduction
The so-called rime petrose are a group of four canzoni all written, as it seems, within a fairly short period of time—perhaps several months. They celebrate Dante's frustrated love for an unnamed and unidentified lady who is compared in each of them to a stone: sometimes a precious stone because of her beauty and her power over him, sometimes an ordinary stone because of her coldness toward him. After the often faltering sweetness of the Vita nuova and the excessive abstractness of the canzoni later to be collected in the Convivio (at least one of them can be dated 1294, "Voi che intendendo il terzo ciel movete",[1] in the petrose we find a new power and an approach to poetic form that represents an important—we believe, the decisive—departure from his earlier poems.
The critical tradition has been puzzled by these poems and often embarrassed by their overt expression of sexual desire and violent feeling. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this embarrassment took the form of a tendency to interpret the poems allegorically; the lady was most frequently identified as Philosophy, along the lines of Dante's allegories in the Convivio.[2] Michele Barbi and Gianfranco Contini led a salutary reaction against the allegorical tendency; Contini in particular strove to free the reading of the poems from the excessive biographical literalism that resulted in endless debates as to the identity or difference of the donna pietra and the donna gentile of the Vita nuova, the "pargoletta," and other real or imagined ladies referred to in Dante's poems. Contini went to another extreme, however: although he insisted on the earthly realism of the petrose, he regarded their importance as almost exclusively stylistic—the lady was for him essentially a pretext for technical experimentation.[3] This view has become the dominant one, and most recent critics have tended to minimize the thematic seriousness of the petrose; while they see them as an important moment of preparation for the stylistic effects of the Commedia,[4] they generally accept Contini's dictum that the inspiration of the petrose is "radically fragmentary."[5] On the other hand, several recent critics have rightly insisted on this the-
matic seriousness, but in a negative sense. For instance, Bruce Comens (1986) sees a theological condemnation of the poet's love as implicit in the poems themselves, which thus become dramatic monologues, a kind of case study in the psychology of sin. We believe that a balanced reading of the petrose requires qualification of both these views—of the first, because the poems are quite serious thematically and are much more than mere stylistic experiments;[6] of the second, because it cannot as it stands account for the positive side of the struggle with negativity in the poems or for the precision of their autobiographical references.
The Rime Petrose in Dante's Development
The date of the petrose can be plausibly determined. The first poem of the series, "Io son venuto al punto de la rota," opens with an astronomical description that is sufficiently detailed to be dated: it describes the configuration of planets in December 1296, near the winter solstice. Though possible, it is unlikely that the reference was invented retrospectively, and therefore the generally accepted view, which we also adopt, is that the poems date from the winter of 1296–97.[7]
Not a great deal is known about Dante's life in the last years of the thirteenth century, though our information for this period is greater than for the later ones. In 1296 he was thirty-one years old, having been born, probably toward the end of May, in 1265.[8] He had been married for some time to Gemma di Manetto de' Donati,[9] was presumably living with her, and the couple must by now have had several of their children.[10] There is evidence that Dante had financial difficulties in these years: we know that at some time during this period he became a member of the Arte dei medici e degli speziali, one of the powerful Florentine guilds, which he seems to have joined in order to qualify for political office. Between November 1295 and June 1300 we see him advancing through a series of minor political offices that was to culminate in his election to a normal two-month term (early June-early August 1300) as one of the six priori, the executive council of the city.[11]
As a public figure Dante must have been much respected, since he was later chosen to be part of a delegation to Pope Boniface VIII seeking help in settling the violent factionalism between the Whites (Dante's party) and the Blacks.[12] But Boniface had secretly favored the Blacks, and, whether from Florence or from Rome or perhaps while returning from the 1301 mission, Dante was forced to flee the armed coup in Flor-
ence, fostered and countenanced by the pope, which was to mean that he would never see his home again: he was prominent enough among the Whites to be repeatedly singled out for sentencing in absentia and was far too proud and conscious of his worth to accept amnesty at the price of doing public penance.
Thus the petrose mark an extremely interesting moment in Dante's career as a writer, when he was visibly casting about for new directions, and before the unforeseen shipwreck of all his expectations that was to yield its ultimate result in the Commedia. In this book we argue that the moment represented by the petrose is that of the first full emergence in Dante's work of what we will call his microcosmic poetics, a poetics that, as we shall see, points directly toward the poetics of the Commedia both in its positive/constructive aspects and in what, for want of a better term, we must call its problematicity. Some time after 1305, Dante decided to abandon the ambitious project of the Convivio, which he seems to have begun soon after going into exile, in favor of what was to be the Commedia. Although the Convivio remains a puzzling and perhaps misunderstood work, one thing is certainly clear: in comparison with the Commedia, it was not Dante's true poetic vocation. It was an aberration stemming in large part, as we can see from its first book, from the new exile's sense of intense wrong and from his desire to testify explicitly before men both his innocence and the sense of his earlier work. These will be powerful motives in the Commedia as well, but the Commedia represents a return to the principles that govern the petrose, though of course in terms of a much fuller project and a much more extensive knowledge of the philosophy and theology of his time.
The Vita nuova is far more permeated with microcosmic thinking than has been recognized, as we try to demonstrate in Chapter 1, but Dante's grasp of the problematic inherent in his emerging approach to poetry is still preliminary in comparison with the petrose, which set forth a much fuller conception of the possibilities of a microcosmic poetics, as well as of the difficulties and ambiguities of the role of the poet.
It may be helpful to list some of the striking ways in which the petrose represent a new departure for Dante:
For the first time, Dante makes the natural world an explicit focus, assimilating and exploring in his poetry what were thought in his time to be valid scientific concepts, especially from astronomy and astrology.
For the first time, Dante seeks to make the metrical form of his poems—their stanza forms—imitative of the cosmos: imitative not in a generic sense (as might be argued, as we shall see, for sonnet form or canzone form in general), but imitative of the particular aspect of the cosmos focused on by the individual poem.
For the first time, Dante bases the themes and structure of his poetry on the parallels thought to exist between the cosmos and the human body.
For the first time, Dante extends the themes and style of his poetry to include violently negative feelings.
The last-mentioned aspect of the novelty of the petrose is in some respects the key to their significance. The movement we somewhat inexactly call the dolce stil nuovo had, it is true, extended the range of vocabulary and theme of lyric poetry in Italian to include technically precise scientific and philosophical ideas and terms; in the Vita nuova, as we shall see, Dante's intense originality led to the experiment of making complex philosophical ideas the basis of the very structure of some of the poems. The dolce stil nuovo was not a stranger, either, to the idea that the passion of love could lead in a negative direction. The Vita nuova was in part an elaborate refutation of the pessimistic naturalism with which Dante's friend and rival Guido Cavalcanti viewed love, and it included the death of the lady, as well as the death-oriented narcissism of the lover, as central problems, in order to urge that love, rightly followed, led beyond death. But the dolce stil had still remained within a quite limited register of stylistic effects, dominated by a cult of sweetness and euphony that Dante shows many signs in other works of wishing to transcend. The moralizing canzoni, such as "Poscia ch' Amor del tutto m'ha lasciato," and the canzoni of the Convivio represent efforts to transcend the dolce stil primarily in terms of content, adapting its vocabulary, forms, and rhetoric to doctrinal exposition (often compared with the manner of Guittone d'Arezzo) that often involved an essentially arbitrary relation between integument and content.[13] In the petrose we are still in the realm of love poetry, but the break with the dolce stil is much more thorough; it involves style and form as well as content. In the petrose we see Dante expanding the emotional range of love poetry to a degree unprecedented before him and exploring the limits of poetic language with an extraordinary new intensity.
But we must ask what is the intimate connection between the first
three aspects of the new poetics and the exploration of the theme of violence. It is not simply that a cosmic poetics must include the negative in order to be complete; rather, the converse would seem to be the case for Dante already at the period of the petrose. That is, the negative aspects of his personality and his experience—impulses to violence, violent feelings of frustration, hostility mixed with desire, self-destructive impulses, feelings of subjection to the body and to mortality—are apparently so central to his experience and so powerful that the full force of a cosmic perspective is required for them to be controlled and mastered. This is no "merely stylistic" matter. As we shall see, it is a problem at the very core of Dante's activity as a poet in the Commedia as well as in the petrose.
The question of the relation of the petrose to the Commedia needs to be approached with some caution. The supposition that the Commedia represents some kind of rejection of the petrose has several causes. One is the plausible enough notion that the "pargoletta" with whose love Beatrice seems to reproach Dante in Purgatorio 28 is a reference to the congedo of "Io son venuto al punto de la rota." This is of course possible, but the identification of the "pargoletta," a term used by Dante in several other poems that have no evident relation to the petrose, is entirely hypothetical. Another cause lies in the assumption that the love celebrated in the petrose is sinful—or, better, that in the petrose Dante accepts and identifies himself with the aspects of his difficult love that specifically reflect a fallen nature.[14] We should be on guard against a logical circle here: we cannot use Beatrice's reproach in Purgatorio 28 as evidence that in the Commedia Dante regarded the enterprise of the petrose as sinful simply because the idea seems plausible.
Another problem is presented by the undeniable references to the petrose in the Medusa episode in Inferno 9. John Freccero (1972) established that the episode concerns the interpretive danger of reading in the letter rather than in the spirit; he pointed out numerous connections of the passage with the petrose, including the presence in them of the theme of the Medusa. Freccero's brilliant and influential article actually devotes little more than a page to the petrose, so that it is difficult to derive from it a clear statement about them; it seems to suggest that Inferno 9 identifies the petrose as the product of a poetic that devoted obsessive attention to the literal surface of the poetic text at the expense of deeper meanings, parallel to erotic fixation on the female body. It is not clear whether that is in fact Freccero's view, but in any case the idea
of the petrose as mere surface would seem to be a version of Gianfranco Contini's formula: the petrose are essentially technical experiments. (Just what may be the relation between poetic surface and inner meaning in the petrose is, of course, the subject of this book.) Another problem with the idea that Inferno 9 condemns the petrose is that the petrose themselves identify and grapple with the danger of the Medusa. What view do they take of it? Is it possible that the references in Inferno 9 are motivated not by a palinodic impulse but by the reverse?
It seems to us that these and many other questions can be answered satisfactorily only when we have achieved a more adequate understanding of the petrose themselves. Only when they are seen in a clearer light will it be possible to define what in them Dante may later have wished to reject. Gianfranco Contini's approach had at least the merit of bracketing the palinodic issue and opening the door to an appreciation of the importance of these complex poems. No one doubts that the experiments with harshness and difficulty of rhyme and diction in the petrose were important technical preparation for the Commedia.[15] We believe that their importance for the Commedia goes far beyond the merely technical, so that it would be utterly implausible to suppose that Dante could later have rejected their poetics without qualification. Whatever Inferno 9 means must be much more closely specified. And as soon as one approaches the petrose on their own terms—raising such questions as the full meaning of the horoscope that opens "Io son venuto," for instance, or the metaphysical significance of the rhyme scheme of "Amor, tu vedi ben," or of the allusions to the names of Christ in the same poem—one is reminded that, as in the Commedia, there is no such thing in Dante as a technique devoid of important inner significance, no such thing as "mere" surface. As Bruce Comens (1986) properly points out (though in the context of a moralistic condemnation that we see as both narrow and premature), the form of the petrose is not at all external to their themes; rather, it is their necessary vehicle.
Microcosmic Poetics:
Sources and Models
The cosmic perspective of the petrose involves the poet's effort to grasp the significance of his difficult love in terms of his relation to the cosmos as a whole. This involves understanding the cosmic forces that impinge on him: he is embedded in nature, characteristically thought of, in me-
dieval scientific terms, as the formative power of the heavenly bodies shining down on the realms below the moon. Astronomical and astrological doctrines thus play a fundamental role in all these poems. But man himself is traditionally regarded as a microcosm—as possessing a structure closely resembling that of the universe as a whole—and in both the Platonic and the Stoic traditions, health, wisdom, and salvation require the little universe of the soul to imitate the harmony of the great universe. The cosmological theme is thus intimately associated both with the need for self-understanding and with the idea that art is a primary mode in which the soul seeks to pattern itself on the harmony of the universe.
We find in the petrose, then, that just as their explicit themes concern the lover's and the lady's relation to the seasons and to the motions of the planets and the fixed stars, so also in their form—as we might say, in their patterned motions—they imitate the cosmic cycles. The imitation of the heavenly bodies in the poetic form is different in each of the petrose; it is by no means generic but instead closely and intricately shaped by the themes of the individual poem, and it is always part of the poet-lover's struggle toward health. It thus constitutes one of the most interesting and significant aspects of these remarkable poems. In order to understand this imitation we must devote some attention to the "scientific" ideas on which it rests.
The hundred years preceding Dante's birth had seen the assimilation of a major portion of ancient Greek philosophical and scientific thought. During the last half of the thirteenth century and into the fourteenth, there was a marked spread of interest in astronomy and the closely allied science of optics. Although in many respects Dante's scientific conceptions were old-fashioned, to some extent the emergence in his poetry of a strong interest in astronomy no doubt reflects the current excitement, and its expression, especially in the Commedia, was certainly facilitated by the growing availability of information: of treatises and astronomical tables, such as the Toledan tables (ca. 1060) and the Alfonsine tables (1272), and of equatories, analog devices for determining planetary positions.
[Ptolemy's] Almagest was first translated into Latin (from the Greek) in c. 1160 by an anonymous Sicilian author, and was followed in 1175 by the very popular translation from the Arabic by Gerard of Cremona. The stimulus caused by this diffusion of astronomical theory did not have much effect on astronomical calculation and tables until about the middle
of the thirteenth century, but for the remainder of that century and the whole of the fourteenth there is a flood of new tables and fresh forms of equatoria. This change must be associated with the introduction of the Arabic forms of numerals which first appear in astronomical tables c. 1260 and become standard practice by about 1320.[16]
We assume in the following that the reader has some familiarity with the traditional geocentric conception of the universe:[17] earth fixed unmoving in space, surrounded by the seven planets (in order out from earth: the moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn)—which were sometimes (in the wake of Aristotle) thought of as fixed in a series of transparent spheres, sometimes (in the wake of Plato) as moving in mathematically determined orbits—the seven planets themselves surrounded by the sphere of the fixed stars. Onto the sphere of the fixed stars, which was thought to make a complete revolution once (approximately) each day, were projected from the earth such great circles as the equator, the meridian, and the ecliptic (the apparent annual path of the sun, a projection of the earth's own orbit). All change—all generation and decay—was thought to be confined to the region below the moon and to be governed by the influence of the stars and the planets, and all sublunar reality was thought to mirror to some extent the nature of the universe as a whole, to be a microcosm. Man, of course, was the microcosm par excellence.
It is not our purpose to identify the direct sources of Dante's conception of the microcosmic-macrocosmic relation; variants of the doctrine appear in literally hundreds of texts available to him.[18] The most important sources of the tradition include Plato's Timaeus,[19] Macrobius's Commentary on the Somnium Scipionis,[20] and Boethius's masterpiece, the Consolation of Philosophy; Dante had clearly studied closely the latter two and probably also the first, which was available to him, though in fragmentary form, in the fourth- or fifth-century translation and commentary by Calcidius.[21]
As is now understood, the Vita nuova reveals that Dante studied Boethius—a major channel for Neoplatonic conceptions, both philosophical and artistic—much earlier than used to be thought. We believe that the Vita nuova reveals some further Neoplatonic readings, but clearly neither the Vita nuova nor the petrose reflect the extraordinary effort to master the entire system of scholastic thought that is seen in the Convivio and the Commedia. Nevertheless, the petrose certainly show that Dante had been reading intensively in the astronomical and astro-
logical literature, beyond what is already reflected in the Vita nuova (which reflects al-Fargani's [Alfragano's] epitome of Ptolemy's Almagest, Macrobius, and Martianus Capella, as well as Boethius). The evidence is strong that he was by now familiar with the Timaeus; there is no question as to his knowledge of Seneca's Natural Questions; and he is clearly familiar with the general outlines of the astrological tradition stemming from Ptolemy, whether he read the Tetrabiblos itself or one of its countless epigones, such as Michael Scot's Liber introductorius. He had probably read some astronomical handbook such as Sacrobosco's De sphaera. He must have used an almanac, such as that by Prophatius, to calculate planetary positions. Whether he had read Firmicus Maternus's Mathesis or Manilius's Astronomica is very doubtful. We have not attempted to identify the direct sources of Dante's knowledge of astronomy and astrology any more than of his knowledge of the microcosmic tradition; our quotations will be drawn from the main texts of the tradition and will serve as illustrations.
Plato's whimsical myth of creation in the Timaeus represents the universe as an ideally harmonious and organically unified living being. According to his influential account of the fashioning of the World-Soul (Timaeus 34b–37c), the divine workman, the demiurge, mixed in a bowl equal portions of being, identity, and difference (each already compounded of the intellectual and the physical); he then divided this mixture according to an elaborate set of proportions derived from the Pythagorean lore of the numerical basis of musical intervals:
This entire compound he divided lengthwise into two parts which he joined to one another at the center like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their original meeting point, and, comprehending them in a uniform revolution upon the same axis, he made the one the outer and the other the inner circle. Now the motion of the outer circle he called the motion of the same, and the motion of the inner circle he called the motion of the other or diverse. The motion of the same he carried round by the side to the right, and the motion of the diverse diagonally to the left. And he gave dominion to the motion of the same and like, for that he left single and undivided, but the inner motion he divided into six places and made seven unequal circles having their intervals in ratios of two and three, three of each, and bade the orbits proceed in a direction opposite to one another.[22]
As the commentators have recognized, Plato almost certainly has in mind here an orrery or spherical model of the heavens (see Cornford
1937 74), constructed of metal strips representing, among other great circles on the celestial sphere, the equator, the ecliptic, and the colures (the meridians) of the equinoxes. His circle of the motion of the same corresponds to the celestial equator (the projection onto the celestial sphere of the earth's equator); the motion of the circle of the Same, then, corresponds to the apparent daily revolution of the entire heaven from east to west, whose direction and rate never vary (a phenomenon we now explain in terms of the rotation of the earth on its axis). The circle of the motion of the Other, within the circle of the Same and making the figure of the Greek letter chi, corresponds to the ecliptic (the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun), along which the sun appears to make a circuit, in a year, from west to east—in other words, in the direction contrary to the daily turning of the sky (a phenomenon we attribute to the fact that as the earth revolves around the sun, our line of sight to the distant stars changes with our position relative to the sun, so that we see a slightly different pattern of stars each successive night).
That Plato has the demiurge place the orbits of all the planets within the circle of the Other shows that he was struck by the fact, apparently not well known in his day (Vlastos 1975 36–51), that the orbits of all the planets visible to the naked eye diverge only slightly from one plane (that of the earth's orbit) and are visible within a band (the zodiac) extending approximately nine degrees north and south of the ecliptic. On the basis of this new scientific fact, Plato was strengthened, it seems, in his claim that the cosmos demonstrated the reconciliation of his fundamental logical and metaphysical principles (being, identity, and difference) and that the principle of identity had primacy because the daily motion of the Same swept along with it the motion of the Other. He thus had also devised a way to represent the mediated derivation of the multiplicity of the cosmos from a principle of unity, since the one circle of the Same is united with the one circle of the Other, differing only in angle and direction, and then the circle of the Other is divided into the orbits of the planets, whose changing relative positions, in conjunction with the influence of the fixed stars, account for all the variety of sublunar things.
The circles of the Same and the Other are representations of particularly conspicuous celestial phenomena, and they are the basis of Timaeus's assertion that men are made according to the model of the cosmos, are microcosms. The main likeness between the world and the
human being is that both are incarnate souls; the human soul is a little analog of the World-Soul. This means that the great principles that govern the cosmos—being, identity, and difference—have their counterparts in the human soul, both as logical principles underlying all forms of knowledge and as the principles of the very life of the soul. Since the visible motions of the cosmos are the expression of the life of the World-Soul, its visible circling reveals the circular and cyclical soul-life that sustains the universe. So also in the little world of man, the spherical head corresponds to the heavens: it houses the soul-motions that, at least ideally, are capable of imitating the ordered perfection of the heavens:
The sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest benefit to us, for had we never seen the stars and the sun and the heaven, none of the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been uttered. But now the sight of day and night, and the months and the revolutions of the years have created number and have given us a conception of time, and the power of inquiring about the nature of the universe. And from this source we have derived philosophy. . . . God invented and gave us sight that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven [i.e., the cycles of the World-Soul], and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed, and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries.
(Timaeus 47a–c [Plato 1961 1174–75])
For Plato, then, all knowledge and all moral, psychological, or artistic harmony not only imitate the cosmos and the Soul that animates it, but also to some extent partake of their nature.[23] These conceptions profoundly influenced all the traditions of ancient and medieval thought.
In the rest of this section we shall examine the structure of a poem from Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae, "O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas," the clearest and most recognizable instance of a form that is derived directly from the passages in Plato we have just been examining.[24] During the Middle Ages, Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae was one of the most widely studied of all philosophical texts. Brilliantly written and shaped, this impassioned handbook of Neoplatonic doctrine had the distinction of Menippean form (alternation of verse and prose). Moreover, many of the poems are among the best ever written in Latin, a fact that by itself would explain the great popularity of the book. The author of a number of important schoolbooks (translations
of Aristotle's organon and Porphyry's introduction to it, commentaries on both, compendia on arithmetic and music) as well as of theological texts, Boethius was the last important Platonic thinker to study at a philosophical school with an uninterrupted tradition, probably at Alexandria rather than at Athens (Courcelle 1948 259–261), and he was fully recognized as an authority by the schools of the high Middle Ages.[25] That the Consolatio was a major influence on Dante's thought from a period at least as early as the composition of the Vita nuova is well known.[26]
"O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas" is the ninth poem in the third book of the Consolatio.[27] The intense crafting of this poem is supported by its exalted tone and magnificent imaginative sweep. It is placed conspicuously at the climax of the third book, in which Philosophia has at least succeeded in raising Boethius's contemplation away from his own narrow circumstances and the vagaries of Fortune to the cosmos as a whole and its creator. It comes at the moment when Boethius grasps the need for the full intellectual ascent and the need for illumination, and although Philosophia is the speaker, she speaks for him. The poem occupies the very midpoint of the work as a whole[28] and is only twenty-eight lines long, so it can be quoted here in its entirety. The O with which the poem begins represents the passionate outcry of the desiring soul caught in earthly clouds and misery:
O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas,
terrarum caelique sator, qui tempus ab aevo
3 ire iubes stabilisque manens das cuncta moveri,
quem non externae pepulerunt fingere causae
materiae fluitantis opus verum insita summi
forma boni livore carens, tu cuncta superno
7 ducis ab exemplo, pulchrum pulcherrimus ipse
mundum mente gerens similique in imagine formans
perfectasque iubens perfectum absolvere partes.
10 Tu numeris elementa ligas, ut frigora flammis,
arida conveniant liquidis, ne purior ignis
evolet aut mersas deducant pondera terras.
Tu triplicis mediam naturae cuncta moventem
14 conectens animam per consona membra resolvis;
quae cum secta duos motum glomeravit in orbes,
in semet reditura meat mentemque profundam
17 circuit et simili convertit imagine caelum.
Tu causis animas paribus vitasque minores
provehis et levibus sublimes curribus aptans
in caelum terramque seris, quas lege benigna
21 ad te conversas reduci facis igne reverti.
Da, pater, augustam menti conscendere sedem,
da fontem lustrare boni, da luce reperta
24 in te conspicuos animi defigere visus.
Dissice terrenae nebulas et pondera molis
atque tuo splendore mica; tu namque serenum,
tu requies tranquilla piis, te cernere finis,
28 principium, vector, dux, semita, terminus idem.
O You who with perpetual reason govern the world,
Sower of earth and sky, who from eternity command
3 time to move and, fixed, give motion to all else,
whom no external causes drove to fashion
the work of fluid matter, but rather the indwelling form
of the highest good, free of all envy: You derive all things
7 from the eternal example; most beautiful, You carry
in mind the beauteous world, form it to like pattern,
bid its perfect parts to fill it out and make it complete.
You bind the elements with numbers, so that freezings may
10 combine with flames,
dry things with liquid, lest the purer fire
fly up or its weight cause earth to drown.
To be the mid-point of triple Nature,[29] to move all things,
14 You attach the soul and diffuse it through adapted members;
and Soul, cut in two, has globed its motion in two orbs,
goes forth to return to itself, turns about the depth
17 of mind, and curves the heavens to a like pattern.
With similar causes You bring forth souls and lesser lives,
and, fitting those sublime creatures to light chariots,
You sow them in sky and earth, and, by a kindly law,
21 when they turn back to You, make them return by ascending fire.
Grant, Father, that the mind climb to Your august throne,
grant that it find the fount of good, grant that finding light
24 the spirit may fix its sharpened sight in You.
Shake off the clouds and weight of earthly matter
and flash forth with your splendor; for You are the clear sky,
You are the peaceful rest of the just, to see You the goal,
the Beginning, the Mover, the Guide, the Path, the End,
28 the Same.[30]
"O qui perpetua" was widely studied out of context because it gives a succinct summary of some of the central doctrines of Plato's Timaeus, in a Neoplatonic version that was particularly congenial to medieval Christian thinkers, treating Plato's demiurge (not given a name by Plato, and of unclear status in his account) as the one transcendent God,
who not only made the universe but also maintains it continuously in being. The poem was frequently used as a school text and was often the subject of commentary; in manuscripts it is often found, with commentary, without the rest of the Consolatio.[31] It is well known that Dante echoes it a number of times in the Commedia.[32]
Klingner (1921) derived the form of "O qui perpetua" from the traditional three-part structure of Greek and Roman hymns:[33]epikléseis, or invocations (1–6); aretalogía, or enumeration of the deeds of the deity (6–21); and euchaí, or petitions (22–26).[34] Although most of Klingner's discussion concerns questions of doctrine and sources, in a final section he points out that lines 26–28 (from "tu namque serenum" on) have no counterpart in pagan hymns, which without exception end with the petitions, but stem rather from Jewish and Christian tradition, as in the conclusion of the Gloria (". . . miserere nobis. Quoniam tu solus sanctus, tu solus dominus, tu solus altissimus . . .") or of the Lord's Prayer.[35] The relation of the poem to the traditional pagan hymn seems to us indisputable,[36] but the division by subject matter does not quite coincide with the divisions Klingner asserts (thus the poem invites several alternate modes of division).
In subject matter the three parts are as follows: the first (lines 1–9) deals with the transcendence of God and with the causes of his creating the world. God is unmoved in eternity and though fixed himself, he moves all things (this notion, as Scheible [1972 102–104] points out, derives from Aristotle's unmoved Mover); his fashioning of the world was motivated solely by his supreme goodness (Timaeus 29e); he fashioned the world according to the eternal Ideas (29a, 37a–38a); the world is complete and perfect (33b, 37d). Actually, these lines descend through the logical hierarchy of causes. First, logically and causally prior, comes the final cause, the reason for the creation (insita summi / forma boni ); next comes the formal cause, the eternal pattern according to which the world is fashioned (cuncta superno / ducis ab exemplo ); then the focus becomes God as efficient cause ( formans ). The material cause is not omitted; it appears at the beginning of the next section (elementa ).
The second part (lines 10–21) describes the structure of the world: first the relation among the elements (10–12), which are joined indissolubly by numerical proportion (Timaeus 31b–32c, 69a); second the World-Soul (13–17), incarnate in the world (13–14; Timaeus 34a, 36d–e), divided into the two motions of the Same and the Other (15; Timaeus 36b–c), by which it revolves on itself in perfect circularity and
so turns the heavens, which are its image (16–17; Timaeus 36d–37b); third the lesser souls sown (Timaeus 41d, 42d) in chariots (41e) through earth and sky (these are human souls), whom the inborn principle of soul, fiery (40a, 45b), causes to turn back toward the Creator (18–21; Timaeus 41c).
The third part of the poem (lines 22–28) is a prayer to the Creator that the mind may ascend to the vision of him, phrased as if the ascent had three stages: conscendere sedem (to ascend to your seat), fontem lustrare boni (to find the fountain of good), in te . . . defigere visus (to fix the eye of the mind in you).[37] One may say that the first three lines of the final section take us from below all the way to the goal, while the last four resituate us as being below and needing illumination among the clouds and weight of the earthly, setting the goal as at the other extreme (clouds versus the sky beyond). But we can distinguish more sharply: lines 25–26 treat the two extremes as separated; with requies and finis (line 27), motion toward the goal is introduced.
The function of the very last line of the poem is complex. Rhetorically it is a restatement, a recapitulation of the statement of the entire poem.[38] As the poem begins with the apostrophic naming of God as Creator ("O qui . . ."), so its last line consists of a series of names for him. These names recapitulate the entire cycle of the procession of all things from God and their return to him that the poem has described. They go from God as beginning to God as end; indeed, they have a logical order beyond that: motion precedes the guide, after whom comes the path; dux is at the center of the line, at the point that represents the turning of procession into return. The last word of the line can be read in two ways, either with or without a copula—or, as we might say in English, either with or without capitalizing same: without the capital, "Beginning, mover, guide, path, goal are the same"; with the capital, "The Same [i.e., the Neoplatonic One] is beginning, mover, guide, path, goal." The last line thus represents a circle; like the poem as a whole, it is a kind of projection onto a linear sequence, a kind of straight line, of the circle of procession and return.
The poem in its entirety, then, shows how the world proceeds from and returns to God, and this return has two aspects. The more obvious is the one introduced in line 21, the return of souls to God. The other aspect of return is the fact that the universe as a whole is held in unity by its yearning back toward God and its imitation of God.[39] This unity of the world is emphasized in lines 10–17, and it is the unity of a sphere:
first in the proportion that holds together the elements with earth at the center, fire at the circumference; then in the circular motion of the incarnate World-Soul. The same verb, converto (to turn in a circle), is used of the turning of the heavens and the turning of the lesser souls back toward the Creator.
The lines on the World-Soul will repay closer examination. First of all, the World-Soul is "the mean of triple nature"—that is, the principle of Soul is (a) at the center of the world (Timaeus 34b) and (b) between the principles of Mind and of matter: it is the principle that enables them to be joined. Soul, then, holds the world together, and it does so by virtue of its own unity-in-division, its combining of the two opposing motions of the Same and the Other. These turn in perfect circularity and are the life—the unity—of the cosmos. They are the return of the cosmos to God, for the World-Soul looks always to God and is always converted toward him: mentemque profundam circuit. As God forms the world in the image (similique in imagine ) of the eternal Idea, so the World-Soul imitates God, turning the heaven into a likeness of what it sees in Mind:
. . . mentemque profundam
circuit et simili convertit imagine caelum.[40]
Now not only does Soul occupy the center of the world, it occupies the center of the poem as well, it holds the poem together and moves the poem, both in that it is named as the principle of motion, especially of return, and in that the poem expresses the fiery desire to return of one of the animae minores. The division of Soul into its two motions occurs at the midpoint of the poem (at secta, line 15) and in the central line of five devoted to the World-Soul,[41] and of course the two motions are, as line 17 reminds us, made visible in the motion of the heavens (and they are joined in the central region of the heavens, preeminently at the equinoxes, where the ecliptic crosses the equator of the celestial sphere, but also in the entire region between the tropics, where the ecliptic ranges).
The poem itself, then, is a model of the world; not only in theme, in structure, too, it is a microcosm. If the first section of the poem treats God as source, origin of the world, the second, Soul as holding the world stable by its return, and the third, God as goal, it becomes important that the last line of the poem begins with principium, as the first begins with the O , now both a literal instance of the circularity that is the subject of the poem (and the shape of the poem) and an omega, a long O .[42] For, as the last line shows, the poem is built on the idea of
God as both Alpha and Omega. Furthermore, at the end of line 27 we have te cernere finis; here at the end of the poem finis immediately precedes principium, as well as coming at the end of line 28 in terminus idem. The first and last words of the poem show a similar relation: omega (the end) and idem (the Same, i.e., God as the transcendent One, the origin); they even form a significant sentence, The goal is the Same. Like the universe, then, the poem can be regarded as an expansion of the tautology of its first and last terms.[43]
A further aspect of the poem as microcosm is the order of the terms that represent its main focuses. It originates in God, his causality being enumerated in a pattern of descent, and then, beginning in line 10, the description of the world moves from elementa to anima to mens and animus. While there is a descent from the World-Soul to the lesser souls (animas vitasque minores, 18), this sequence of terms as a whole also ascends through the principles that constitute the world (matter, soul, mind). Lines 10–28, then, imitate both kinds of return: the return of souls and minds to the Creator in its explicit argument, the stable hierarchical structure of the world in the sequence of terminology. Even the grammatical case of the various nouns contributes: we begin with accusatives (elementa, animam, animas vitasque ) for the objects of creation but move to the dative (of the recipient of a gift—menti ) when the mind prays to be granted ascent, and it contributes a slight but effective nuance that when the mind fully comes into its own the term animus appears in a genitive (of possession— animi ).[44]
The clearly controlled rhetorical movement of the poem is supported by the emphatic patterns of anaphora that differentiate its three parts: First, Oqui (line I), qui (line 2), quem (line 4); second, Tu (line 10), tu (line 13), tu (line 18); and third, Da (line 22), da (line 23, twice), dissice (line 25). The circular structure of the poem involves these terms also, for the anaphora tu (line 26), tu (line 27), te (line 27) leads to the last line of the poem and the idem, which, as we have seen, looks back to the O with which the poem began.[45] The function of the pattern of anaphora is complex, for if there are six complete sentences in the poem (or seven, if one counts a full stop after mica in line 26), each is introduced by a monosyllable, O,tu, or da. In fact, this articulatory sequence itself forms a complete sentence: O tu, da, and each of the articulatory monosyllables (and each anaphoric sequence) expresses the nature of one of the traditional parts of the ancient hymn as discussed by Klingner: O [qui]—invocation (epikléseis ); tu [followed by verbs expressing efficient cause]—actions of the deity (aretalogía ); and da —petition (euchaí ).[46]
It has long been recognized that "O qui perpetua" comes at the midpoint of the entire Consolation of Philosophy, marking the transition between a first half dominated by the traditional negative arguments of the tradition of consolatoria (the fleetingness of worldly goods and the inevitability of reverses of fortune) and a second half concerned with the positive theme of the intellectual ascent to the knowledge of God and his providence (Alfonsi 1942–43). There is an important analogy between this structure of the Consolatio as a whole and the fact that the first part of "O qui perpetua" mirrors the descent of the world from God; the second part, the return to God. Although the accents of "O qui perpetua" are exalted and entirely positive, it is precisely the principle of the descent of the divine power into multiplicity, necessarily entailing the principle of mutability—soon to be defined as the very essence of Fortuna—that accounts for Boethius's misfortune. Just as the principle of soul holds the poem and the cosmos together at their centers, "O qui perpetua" holds together the entire Consolatio; the five lines on the circling soul are the knot that binds all five books.[47]
In "O qui perpetua" we have a particularly interesting instance of the Neoplatonic conflation of grammatical/rhetorical categories with metaphysical/religious ones. A chief informing principle of the poem is that imitation of the ascent in words is already a mode of practicing it. It would be misleading to suppose that the effect on the reader was thought to be merely vicarious. As Plato argued in the Timaeus, the philosophical ascent has as its goal the imitation of the harmonious cycles of the World-Soul, especially through contemplation of the heavenly cycles;[48] the imitation of the cosmic cycles in words governed by numerical proportion was clearly intended to move the soul of the reader to an analog of the cosmic harmony, in a process that unified the soul both in its rational, conceptual theoria of the heavens (the explicit subject of the poem) and in its other motions as well (see Chamberlain 1976 80–84, 91–93). This is of course the intent of the Consolatio as a whole, the motions of the soul at its center controlling the large forms of the work as a whole.
Dante's Conception of the Form of the Canzone
Neoplatonic imitations of the motions of the cosmos such as the one just examined occur in texts that were indisputably known and studied
by Dante. As we shall see, as early as the Vita nuova Dante is striving to give the form of his canzoni a metaphysical (if not yet really cosmological) foundation. Our understanding of his conceptions is considerably enhanced by the fact that we have Dante's own discussion of the nature of the canzone in the De vulgari eloquentia,[49] which he seems to have written—and abandoned—late in the first decade of the fourteenth century, the same time span that saw the writing of the ambitious Convivio, also abandoned, it seems, in favor of the Commedia. In the De vulgari eloquentia we will find strong confirmation of our claims for the nature of the new microcosmic poetics of the petrose.
The first book of the De vulgari eloquentia moves from general topics—the superiority of the vernacular to "grammar" (i.e., Latin and Greek), the origin of language, the confusion of tongues, the interrelation of the Romance languages—to the nature of the noblest Italian vernacular, the vulgare illustre latium (which Dante urges should be based on the language spoken at the most illustrious courts of Italy rather than on the language of any particular region or city). Dante apparently planned to treat the entire subject of eloquence in the vernacular, and he refers in several passages (1.xix.3, 2.iv.6, 2.viii.6) to a fourth book on the middle and low styles; but the work breaks off in the second book, in the midst of the section on the canzone, which follows a first section establishing that the vulgare illustre latium should be used only by the best poets writing on the noblest subjects in the noblest poetic forms.[50]
One of Dante's aims is to claim for his own lyric poems the standing in the Italian tradition he felt they should have, and if in the course of his discussion he cites many passages from Provençal and Italian poets as representing an authoritative canon (the Italians feature Guido Guinizelli, Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and a few others), it is in order to set beside them the poems of his own for which he claims authority. The eleven references to his own poems are interestingly distributed, in fact, among the main categories of his serious lyric: there are three references to the Vita nuova, three to the petrose, one to the Convivio, three to uncollected doctrinal poems, and one to a lost poem. Three canzoni are singled out by being mentioned twice: "Amor, che movi tua virtù dal cielo" (Dante 1979a 174, 216), "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore" (pp. 204, 218), and "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra" (pp. 212, 226). Significantly, the rime petrose are cited on an equal footing with "Donne ch'avete," the poem that Dante had identi-
fied as his first major achievement;[51] they are proudly put forward as instances of the high canzone and are clearly regarded by Dante as embodying the thematic seriousness, as well as the technical mastery, required of the tragic style. They are in no sense being repudiated or apologized for; rather, one purpose of the treatise is to assert normative rather than eccentric status for them. We believe that Dante's references to them, when read in the full context of Book 2, support our readings. For this reason, Book 2 is included, with translation, in Appendix 4.
The section on the canzone, as it comes down to us, argues that the canzone is superior to the sonnet and the ballata, that it is the only form, in fact, worthy to treat the highest subjects (arms, love, virtue) in the noblest (the tragic ) style. It discusses the relation of the canzone to music, the appropriateness of the various verses (Dante excludes verses with even numbers of syllables and those with more than eleven or less than five, effectively limiting the high canzone to the hendecasyllable and the settenario ), the form of the canzone stanza, and the nature of the "tragic" style, covering both vocabulary and syntax. We will focus here on Dante's conception of the form of the canzone stanza; the important sections on the poetic qualities of "smooth" and "hairy" words will come under discussion especially in Chapter 5 (on "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro").
A particularly striking aspect of Dante's discussion of the canzone stanza is his use of apparently musical terminology, which has led to serious misunderstanding.[52] All canzone stanzas, he asserts, are based on musical principles; each is "constructed to receive a certain melody" ("omnis stantia ad quandam odam recipiendam armonizata est," 2.x.2 [1979a 210]), even though it may never be set to music. In fact, in 2.viii Dante has established the independence, even the superiority, of the words of a canzone relative to the music. After asking whether the term canzone (cantio ) refers to the words or to the music, he decides in favor of the first possibility, never even mentioning that the term might refer to the union of words and music:
Nullus enim tibicen, vel organista, vel citharedus melodiam suam cantionem vocat, nisi in quantum nupta est alicui cantioni; sed armonizantes verba opera sua cantiones vocant, et etiam talia verba in cartulis absque prolatore iacentia cantiones vocamus. Et ideo cantio nichil aliud esse videtur quam actio completa dicentis verba modulationi armonizata.
(2.viii.5–6 [Dante 1979a 202])
For no wind player or organist or string player calls his melody a canzone except insofar as it is wedded to some canzone; but the harmonizers of
words do call their works canzoni, and such words lying on the page in the absence of a performer we still call canzoni. And thus it is clear that a canzone is nothing other than the action, complete in itself, of writing words harmonized with a view to musical setting.
Here Dante clearly is not thinking of the author of the words of a poem as also the composer of an eventual musical setting. Far from it: he thinks of the musical settings as produced by musicians: their melodies (the authorship is clearly assigned) are called canzoni only when "wedded" to texts that carry the name, marriages in which the texts are clearly thought of as the male partners, the melodies as the subordinate, female ones. Likewise, and significantly, there is no mention of the musical aspect in the formal definition of the canzone that sums up this chapter: "a yoking together of equal stanzas, in tragic style, without refrain, treating one thought" ("equalium stantiarum sine responsorio ad unam sententiam tragica coniugatio," 2.viii.8 [1979a 204]).
Dante's discussion of the canzone stanza does agree with what is known today about troubadour musical practice,[53] but he never even mentions the properly musical factors—intonation, melisma, high points, low points, final tones, cadences—that mark the structure of a melody as such; he never refers even to the concept of musical modes, only to repetition and change of melody (or lack of them). His reference to manuscripts of canzoni implies that it was normal for them to lack music: ("talia verba in cartulis absque prolatore iacentia cantiones vocamus" fails conspicuously to mention musical notation). The one representation Dante gives of the singing of one of his poems (Purgatorio 2.106–114) leaves us in the dark about who its composer may have been, though it makes it perfectly clear that it was not Dante. In fact in Italy there had almost certainly never been a direct connection between the writing of a canzone and the composition of its musical setting, such as there had been—in theory, at any rate—in Provence. No Italian melodies for canzoni survive from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and the leading student of the subject, though strongly persuaded of the inseparability of canzone and music, concludes that the Italians always borrowed melodies (Monterosso 1970b 808). In any case, nowhere in the De vulgari eloquentia is there any indication that Dante planned to write about the rules of musical composition. He accurately characterizes Italian poetic practice; he tells us nothing about musical practice, and there is no reason to suppose he had any particular technical knowledge of music (his terms derive rather from the rhetorical tradition).
Dante's references to the musical structure of the canzone stanza, then, have quite another function. In the first place, they are to be taken as characterizations of the verbal patterns, the literary-rhetorical forms, de facto and, in his judgment, de jure established as appropriate for musical setting; they retain the literary awareness of a connection between lyric poetry and song. In the second place, they reflect his conviction that the composition of verse is inherently musical in a broader sense, since it is a fashioning of words governed by numerical proportion. For this reason, and also because verse involves the tempering of opposites, such as "combed" and "bristling" words (for discussion of these terms, see Chapter 5) or sweetness and harshness (2.vii), verse is in itself a valid imitation of the musica mundana, the harmony of the universe, and probably for Dante, because of its greater intellectuality, a higher one than music itself.[54] We shall return to this point after our survey of Dante's discussion.
After having ranked the various verses in hierarchical order, led by the hendecasyllable, Dante turns to the canzone stanza. Just as the canzone includes the entire art of poetry, so also the canzone stanza, he says, includes the entire art of the canzone, the term stanza itself indicating the fact:
. . . hoc vocabulum per solius artis respectum inventum est, videlicet in quo tota cantionis ars esset contenta, illud diceretur stantia, hoc est mansio capax sive receptaculum totius artis. Nam quemadmodum cantio est gremium totius sententie, sic stantia totam artem ingremiat; nec licet aliquid artis sequentibus arrogare, sed solam artem antecedentis induere.
(2.ix.2 [1979a 206])
. . . this term stanza has been chosen for technical reasons exclusively, so that what contains the entire art of the canzone should be called stanza [room], that is, a capacious dwelling or receptacle for the entire craft. For just as the canzone is the container [literally, lap or womb] of the entire thought, so the stanza enfolds its entire technique; and successive stanzas are not permitted to introduce any new technical devices, but must clothe themselves in the devices set by the preceding.
In addition to speaking of the canzone and the stanza as "rooms" or "containers," Dante uses the revealing metaphor of a bundle of sticks, a fascis, in which the sticks correspond to the verses, the bindings to the factors—especially the grammatical constructions and the rhymes—that tie the lines together into a whole (2.v.8, 2.viii.1; cf. 2.iii.1, 2).[55] The basic unit of construction is not so much the individual line (though
that must receive its due attention) as the group of lines. In this light Dante's description of the stanza form of the canzone is more comprehensible, particularly his assertion that the principal division among stanza types is between those with only one "melody" and those involving a transition from one "melody" to another, the latter always involving the repetition of musical phrases. In poetic terms, then, what Dante is referring to by "melody" is in fact a fixed bundle, a group of lines (of fixed length): the stanza is conceived as built out of a small number of such units (from one to five), depending on whether or not any are repeated within the stanza:
Quia quedam sunt sub una oda continua usque ad ultimum progressive, hoc est sine iteratione modulationis cuiusquam et sine diesi—et diesim dicimus deductionem vergentem de una oda in aliam (hanc voltam vocamus, cum vulgus alloquimur)—: et huiusmodi stantia usus est fere in omnibus cantionibus suis Arnaldus Danielis, et nos eum secuti sumus cum diximus "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra."
(2.x.2 [1979a 210])
For some are governed by one melody progressively from beginning to end, and this without repetition of any musical phrase and without diesis—diesis is the name we give to the passage from one melody to another (which we call volta when speaking to the unlearned).—Arnaut Daniel used this type of stanza in almost all of his canzoni, and we followed him when we wrote "To the short day and the great circle of shade."
In other words, the scheme of "Al poco giorno" would be ABCDEF (the lines are all hendecasyllables, hence the capital letters; the italics indicate rhyme-words rather than rhymes); the stanza has no division and no repetition (it presents the further peculiarity, not mentioned by Dante, of rhyming only between rather than within stanzas).
Other stanzas, however—most, in fact—have diesis and therefore at least one further subdivision. Dante's terminology for the subdivisions in the parts of the stanza is used today:
Quedam vero sunt diesim patientes: et diesis esse non potest, secundum quod eam appellamus, nisi reiteratio unius ode fiat, vel ante diesim, vel post, vel undique. Si ante diesim repetitio fiat, stantiam dicimus habere pedes; et duos habere decet, licet quandoque tres fiant, rarissime tamen. Si repetitio fiat post diesim, tunc dicimus stantiam habere versus. Si ante non fiat repetitio, stantiam dicimus habere frontem. Si post non fiat, dicimus habere sirma, sive caudam.
(2.x.3–4 [1979a 212])
Others, however, involve diesis: and there cannot be diesis, as we use the term, without the repetition of a melody, whether before the diesis, or after it, or both. If there is repetition before the diesis, we say that the stanza has pedes [feet]; and it is fitting for it to have two pedes, though occasionally it is given three, very rarely however. If repetition occurs after the diesis, then we say that the stanza has versus [turnings]. If there is none before, we say the stanza has afrons. If there is none after, we say it has a sirma, or tail.
In these terms the stanza of "Io son venuto al punto de la rota" has two pedes: ABC.ABC and a sirma: CDEeDFF (the last two letters are italicized to indicate repetition of the entire word). "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro" also has two pedes and a sirma: ABbC.ABbC: CDdEE. "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore," however, has both pedes and versus: ABBC.ABBC:CDD.CEE; and "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna" is similar except that it has rhyme-words rather than rhymes: ABA.ACA:ADD.AEE (this stanza, however, would seem to depart from Dante's rule that any verse unrhymed in the first pes or versus must be answered in the second; he perhaps thought of the B and C rhyme-words, unanswered within the stanza, as instances of claves ["keys"] like those practiced by Gotto of Mantova, to whom he attributes the term in 2.xiii.5).[56] Dante apparently wrote only one canzone with (undivided) frons, a lost poem he mentions in 2.xi.5. Dante also says (z.xiii.11) that the versus may be treated as separate from the concatenatio and concluding couplet;[57] he wrote only one canzone of this type, "Io sento sì d'Amor la gran possanza." (See Figure 1 for these various stanzas; we have specified their rhyme schemes as well as line lengths for convenient reference, but Dante's discussion of the melodic divisions and subdivisions of the stanzas does not specify rhyme.)
Dante's statement that diesis requires the subdivision of one of the two parts of the stanza is not logically founded,[58] though it does reflect Italian practice, which departs here from Provençal practice. We believe that the petrose reflect Dante's characteristic tendency to establish a metaphysical—cosmological—basis for this traditional practice.[59]
As Dante points out, the rules of the canzone stanza offer the greatest possible freedom to the poet:
Vide ergo, lector, quanta licentia data sit cantiones poetantibus, et considera cuius rei causa tam largum arbitrium usus sibi asciverit; et si recto calle ratio te duxerit, videbis autoritatis dignitate sola quod dicimus esse concessum.
(2.X.5 [1979a 212])
See, therefore, reader, how much freedom is allowed to those who write canzoni, and consider for what reason custom has assigned to itself such large choice; and if reason leads along the right path, you will see that it is only on account of the dignity of authorship that this freedom has been granted.[60]
It is in the disposition of the parts of the stanza, the establishing of the complex harmonies of proportion resulting from the interaction of the numbers of syllables and the number of lines from part to part, that the poet's mastery is especially shown; an entire chapter is devoted to this topic (2.xi), and another (2.xii) to the question of the proportion of hendecasyllables to settenarii. It is especially striking to the modern reader, who is used to thinking of stanzas in terms of rhyme schemes, that so far rhyme has not been referred to as in any way constitutive of the form of the stanza. Dante does think of rhyme as a unifying or binding factor, but he speaks of it as if, in the planning of the stanza, it were added to the lines after their number and order (and therefore the syntactic units they can hold) had been determined. He does not speak of it as a musical or melodic factor; there is no association between line endings and musical phrase endings (cadences or semicadences), and therefore the choice between alternate, equally permissible rhyme schemes does not affect the melodic structure of the stanza. Rather, Dante thinks of rhyme in rhetorical terms, as the rhetorical ornament of similiter desinens. In assigning the rhymes, the poet again has great freedom—virtually unlimited in frons and sirma, subject to a few rules in pedes and versus. He clearly thinks of a given "melodic" structure as capable of receiving a number of different rhyme schemes; given a first pes with the rhymes ABBC, for instance, the second pes could evidently be rhymed ABBC, ADDC, CDDA, BAAC, CAAB, and so forth; the first of these alternatives (i.e., ABBC.ABBC) is the scheme of the pedes in "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore." Dante's practice was mainly to have pedes that were duplicates in every respect, but the other alternatives are fully allowed for by his theory—as well as practiced by other poets.[61]
There is no doubt some inconsistency in Dante's analysis, for if rhyme had no constitutive relation to stanza form, there would be no way of determining the division, or lack of it, of any canzone stanza whatever. In practice, and historically, rhyme is constitutive of stanza form in the vernacular, and it is precisely for that reason that Dante's exclusion of it from the numerical or spatial phase of stanza design is so significant. He is establishing ontological priorities among activities
Fig. 1.
Terminology of the Canzone (through page 29 )
that could hardly be separated in practice, and his priorities privilege the abstract, intellectualistic aspects of poetic creation, those which most clearly support the analogy with God's creation of the world.
One of the most interesting aspects of the metaphors Dante uses for the construction of the canzone stanza is that they envisage the establishing of the stanzaic scheme as a kind of demarcation of space. This is
Fig 1
(continued)
perhaps more obvious in the metaphor of the room (which is, however, even more abstract than that of the bundle of sticks), since what is to occupy the room is the sententia of the poet and the provisions of his technique. The metaphor of the bundle of sticks is in a real sense closer to the literal, for if the sticks are the lines of verse that are bound together, then the bundle that is formed of these actual lines of verse literally does occupy space. The design of the bundle, then, which is prior to the writing of the lines, is the assignment of empty spaces; that is, the number of syllables in each line, the number of lines in each frons, pes, versus, or sirma, are the limits that demarcate the spaces. The activity of
Fig. 1.
(continued)
designing the stanza is thus a kind of geometry, an assigning of spatial determinations to what was initially undifferentiated. Dante's terminology, from coartare (2.iii.1) to mansio to fascis to modum quo ligare (2.iii.2) to conditor (2.iii.6) to comprehendere (2.iii.8) and contenere (2.ix.2), reflects this conception, which looks back to the figure of God the geometer delineating with his compasses the space within which the world will exist.[62] It has not, we believe, been observed previously that Dante's other terms for the stanza, receptaculum and gremium, seem to be
Fig. 1.
(continued)
echoes of Plato's terms for space in the cosmogony of the Timaeus, as translated by Calcidius:
Quam igitur eius vim quamve esse naturam putandum est? Opinor, omnium quae gignuntur receptaculum est, quasi quaedam nutricula.
(Timaeus 46a [Plato 1962 46]; emphasis added)
What then shall we consider its power or its nature to be? I think that it is the receptacle of all things that come into being, as it were a kind of nurse.
Decet ergo facere comparationem similitudinemque impertiri illi quidem quod suscipit matris, at vero unde obvenit patris, illi autem naturae quae inter haec duo est prolis.
(Timaeus 50d [1962 48])
Let us use a comparison and say that that which receives is comparable to the mother, that which is the source to the father, and the nature that is between them to the child.
Calcidius's commentary introduces further terms:
Quae quidem corpora cum sola et per se ac sine suscipiente [ex] eadem essentia esse non possunt, quam modo matrem, alias nutriculam, inter-
dum totius generationis gremium, non numquam locum appellat quamque iuniores hylen, nos silvam vocamus.
(Plato 1962 277–278; emphasis added)
For since these bodies cannot exist without a recipient or by virtue of their essence alone, he speaks of the womb of all generation, which more recent writers call hylê and we call matter, sometimes as their mother, sometimes as their nurse, and frequently as space.
Although this theme is not made explicit in what survives of the De vulgari eloquentia, it is implied by its entire analysis; and, as we will try to show, the conception is the key to the form of the petrose, in which the principle of imitation of the musica mundana pervades the poems from the most abstract level of stanza design to theme and the shape of sententia (see Chapter 5, note 9).
The idea that human song imitates the cosmos is explicit in the Timaeus, of course, but Dante also knew of Plato's idea of the circling orbits of the planets as song (the idea later known as the music of the spheres) from Cicero's Dream of Scipio and Macrobius's Commentary on it, one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages, and a principal source of Dante's knowledge of Platonic and Neoplatonic lore. Macrobius explains that human music imitates the music of the cosmos even in its strophaic forms:
Hinc Plato in Re publica sua cum de sphaerarum caelestium volubilitate tractaret, singulas ait Sirenas singulis orbis insidere significans sphaerarum motu cantum numinibus exhiberi. nam Siren dea cantans intellectu valet. theologi quoque novem Musas octo sphaerarum musicos cantus et unam maximam concinentiam quae confit ex omnibus, esse voluerunt . . . ideo canere caelum etiam theologi comprobantes sonos musicos sacrificiis adhibuerunt, qui apud alios lyra vel cithara, apud nonnullos tibiis aliisve musicis instrumentis fieri solebant. in ipsis quoque hymnis deorum . . . per stropham rectus orbis stelliferi motus, per antistropham diversus vagarum regressus praedicaretur ex quibus duobus motibus primus in natura hymnus dicandus deo sumpsit exordium.
(Commentary 2.3.1–6; Macrobius 1970a 103–105)
Therefore Plato, when in his Republic he came to treat of the revolutions of the celestial spheres, said that a Siren was sitting on each orb, signifying that the motion of the spheres was to the gods audible music. For Siren in Greek means a singing goddess. The theologians have explained the nine Muses to be the musical song of the eight spheres plus the one
greater harmony that is made up of all of them . . . and so, the theologians agreeing that the heavens are singing, they included music in their sacrifices, which was customarily made with lyre or harp or in many cases with pipes and other musical instruments. In the very hymns to the gods they demonstrated out of what two motions that first hymn sung to God by nature took its beginning, . . . in the strophe the direct motion of the sphere of fixed stars, in the antistrophe the varying returnings of the planets.
Exactly what Macrobius may have had in mind in comparing the classical strophe to the motion of the Same, the antistrophe to the motion of the Other, is difficult to say, since we cannot determine what kinds of performance of choral odes may have been accessible to him. But for Dante the basis of the analogy lies in the parallel between the recurring form of the stanza and the motion of the heavens as cyclical, as well as in the notion that the stanza is made up of contrasting or opposing motions. For, returning to the De vulgari eloquentia, diesis divides the canzone stanza into two parts governed by different melodies, different formal patterns. Diesis thus involves a transition to difference. In the stanza with diesis as practiced by Dante, there are always two pedes: that is, the stanza proceeds through a subdivision involving repetition of an identical scheme (the pes ); at the diesis the identity is abandoned and the stanza enters into its other motion, usually involving many more rhymes. In the canzone as a whole, then, the entire complex system of cycles and subcycles is repeated in each stanza, the principle of identity (the motion of the Same) thus governing and carrying forward the whole.
The elements of stanza form are not of Dante's invention, but he was tireless in seeking theoretical foundations for his practice, even—or perhaps especially—when it was based on tradition. And the influence of Dante's practice (though perhaps not the influence of the De vulgari eloquentia, which remained virtually unknown until published by Trissino in the sixteenth century) reinforced certain structural possibilities at the expense of others. Dante's preferences were certainly based in part on the ontological and cosmological considerations we have outlined. After him it became normative for canzoni to consist exclusively of hendecasyllables and settenarii, for stanzas with diesis to have two pedes and a sirma, and for them to be joined by what Dante calls a pulcra concatenatio —a last element of stanza form which in the petrose has clear cosmological significance. In the De vulgari eloquentia he explains that
the poet is free to interweave rhymes from the first part into the second (cf., once more, the stanza of "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore"):
Et quidam diversos faciunt esse rithimos eorum que post diesim carmina sunt a rithimis eorum que sunt ante; quidam vero non sic, sed desinentias anterioris stantie inter postera carmina referentes intexunt. Sepissime tamen hoc fit in desinentia primi posteriorum, quam plerique rithimantur ei qui est priorum posterioris: quod non aliud esse videtur quam quedam ipsius stantie concatenatio pulcra.
(2.xiii.7 [Dante 1979a 228–230])
And some make the rhymes after the diesis different from those before it; others do not so, but interweave rhymes from the first part of the stanza with those of the second. But this is done most frequently with the first line of the second part, which many rhyme with the last line of the first part: and this seems to be none other than a lovely chaining together [concatenation] of the stanza.
The concatenation is a particular kind of echo effect, which Dante uses skillfully for a variety of purposes in different poems; significantly, in the context of the microcosmic concerns of the petrose Dante thinks of it as a kind of concrete linking of the two parts of the stanza. In the petrose, in a small way, it is like the point at which the Demiurge joins the circle of the Same to the circle of the Other.
Precious Stones
The idea of stone and especially of precious stone is naturally fundamental to the rime petrose, which develop as their central motif the idea that the lady is a petra: as hard as a stone, but also as beautiful and as powerful as a precious stone. In Dante's time, precious stones are believed to have powers deriving from the star or planet that fashioned them. As one might expect, this power is thought of as radiating invisibly from them; it is hidden, but its propagation is nonetheless thought of on the model of light. Dante writes of the influence of the donnapetra as if it were a kind of light proceeding in a straight line toward him from her, against which he has no shield; often it is implicitly or explicitly identified with the lady's gaze. In "Così nel mio parlar" the metaphorics of light is exchanged for that of combat: the lady's glance is like an arrow or a spear from afar; in the course of the poem this combat at a distance turns into hand-to-hand combat and finally into the act of love, which culminates in a return to the exchange of glances, this time the
prolonged—and ultimately peaceful—mutual gaze of the lovers, finally reconciled, at least in fantasy.
As one would expect, the petrose give special prominence to the term petra. Petra is the only generic substantive for stone (or precious stone) used in the entire series; such generic terms as gemma, sasso, scoglio, roccia, speco, and grotta never appear. The third petrosa, "Amor, tu vedi ben," in which petra is used as a rhyme-word thirteen times, deploys the full range of Dante's use of the term. It is used generically in lines 11, 12, 18, 41, and 57, with metaphorical reference to the lady in line 62. It is used of a rock or stone (the normal word would be sasso ) in line 16, and of precious stones in lines 19 and 26, with metaphorical reference to the lady in lines 22 and 56. It is used of a specific precious stone, crystal, in line 26. In "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra" there is a similar range of usage: generic in lines 5, 9, 18, 26, and 34 (metaphorically of the lady in line 5), and of precious stone (metaphorically, again) in line 39.[63] In "Io son venuto" and "Così nel mio parlar," the term petra, in rhyme with itself, is used for the very first mention of the lady—in "Io son venuto," as the concluding rhyme-word of the first stanza; in "Così nel mio parlar," in the second line of the poem, in a rime riche with the verb impetra ("acquires" or "turns to stone").
For the most part, the names of specific stones or precious stones are not used in the rime petrose. The exceptions are marmo in "Io son venuto," the adjective cristallina in "Amor, tu vedi ben," and diaspro in "Così nel mio parlar." Vital to the meaning of the second petrosa, "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra," is the specific meaning concealed in the last, apparently generic, use of the term. In each of the petrose, then, one kind of stone is specified either explicitly or by the context. As we shall see, the stones are significantly related in terms of opacity versus transparency: crystal permitting all to be seen, but jasper, marble, and the hidden stone opaque in differing ways. They are also related rhetorically, tropically: marmo and diaspro are the proper specific terms for what they name; in cristallina petra the substantive is generic, the specification adjectival; in "Al poco giorno" the specification is suppressed, and the generic term is troped (but occulte, in a hidden way) to refer to the specific one.
Moreover, Dante draws widely on the lore of precious stones (and of stones in general). In the Middle Ages occult or hidden powers were attributed to precious stones, as well as to a number of metals. These beliefs no doubt had their origin in popular superstition, but in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were shared by the educated; in fact they had received "scientific" explanation as a particular type of influence exerted by the heavenly bodies on sublunar substances. In other words, the "virtue" or hidden power of such a metal as gold was thought of as the concentrated power of the star, planet, or astronomical/astrological configuration that had brought it into being: in the case of gold, the sun.
In the universe as conceived by the more Aristotelian as well as the more Platonic thinkers of the high Middle Ages, the heavenly bodies governed all modes of change in the sublunar world, the realm of the elements and of things made out of them, including human bodies and temperaments.[64] In the Commedia Dante was to assert that, other than the human soul, only three things had been directly created by God: the angels, the heavens, and first matter (Paradiso 29.25–36); the implication is that all else was brought into being by the heavens and their angelic movers.[65] Aristotle had asserted (Meteorologica 3.4) that minerals—stones and metals—were formed from "exhalations" underground, which were then acted on by the force of the heavens. Aquinas's commentary on the passage explains:
Ita quod principium activum principale est virtus coelestis, quae dicitur virtus mineralis, a qua habent fossilia quaedam, puta lapides pretiosi, quandam virtutem coelestem et occultam: per quam occultas operationes vere exercent.
(Lectio 13 [Aquinas 1875 23:531])
Thus, because the heavenly bodies are the principal active principle, through a power of theirs known as the mineral-producing power, certain minerals, for instance precious stones, have a certain hidden power: through which they actually work hidden operations.
The supposed properties of precious stones were the subject of a large number of treatises of various lengths. The shorter and more typical form consists of a simple list of the properties of individual stones, often in alphabetical order. In many cases these go back to Pliny[66] and Isidore of Seville's adaptation of him,[67] as well as to treatises supposedly by Aristotle and Theophrastus; they exist in both prose and verse, in both Latin and vernacular versions.[68] A particularly popular and widely read one, by the eleventh-century Marbodus, bishop of Rennes, discusses some two dozen precious stones in elegant and succinct Latin hexameters (PL 171; Riddle 1977).
The most famous literary account of the formation of precious stones is in Guido Guinizelli's canzone "Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore";[69] we may call it the simple Aristotelian theory:
Foco d'amore in gentil cor s'aprende
come vertute in petra preziosa,
che da la stella valor no i discende
anti che '1 sol la faccia gentil cosa;
poi che n'ha tratto fòre
per sua forza lo sol ciò che li è vile,
stella li dà valore:
così lo cor ch'è fatto da natura
asletto, pur, gentile,
donna a guisa di stella lo 'nnamora.
(11–20 [Contini 1960 2:463])
The fire of love is lit in a noble heart as is the virtue in a precious stone, for the power does not descend into it from its star until the sun makes it a noble thing; after the sun has drawn from it all that is base, its star gives it power: so a heart that nature has made elect, pure, noble: a lady, like the star, fills it with love.
Here three phases are distinguished in the production of the precious stone: the existence of a suitable material, the preparation of the material by the sun, and the descent of virtue into the stone from the star—which clearly implies the idea of the imposition of a substantial form on the prepared material.[70]
The next stanzas further develop the analogy between lover and gem, distinguishing between the proud, who are like the mud (opaque to the rays of the sun and thus incapable of being prepared to receive the valore from the star), and the noble, who are like clear water (transparent and capable of form). A further stanza compares the lover, who takes his cues for action from the starlike lady, to the angels taking intention from the sight of God and turning their heavens according to it.[71]
It was generally agreed that the light of the heavenly bodies, along with their motion and their changing positions, was the major principle of becoming in the sublunar realm. Even Aquinas asserted that the light of each of the heavenly bodies differed formally (i.e., substantially) from that of every other; he believed each to be unique in its species because intended to exert a distinct effect on the sublunar:
Si autem lux primo die facta, intelligitur lux corporalis, oportet dicere quod lux primo die fuit producta secundum communem lucis naturam;
quarto autem die attributa est luminibus determinata virtus ad determinatos effectus, secundum quod videmus alios effectus habere radium solis, et alios radium lunae, et sic de aliis.
(Summa theologica Ia, quaest. 70, art. 1 [Aquinas 1875 1:437])[72]
For if the light made on the first day is understood to be corporeal light, we must say that on the first day light was produced according to the common nature of light; but that on the fourth day the heavenly bodies received specific powers ordered toward specific effects, as we see that the rays of the sun have effects different from those of the moon, and so on.
The simple or naive form of this doctrine has the inconvenience of making the earthly material entirely passive, attributing all imposition of form to the direct agency of the heavenly bodies (thus violating Aristotle's principle of indwelling causes).[73] An extreme version is the following by the thirteenth-century Polish optical theorist Witelo, a follower of Albertus Magnus, in the dedication of his optical treatise to William of Moerbeck (Aquinas's associate and one of the most distinguished translators of the century):
Est enim lumen supremarum formarum corporalium diffusio per naturam corporalis formae materiis inferiorum corporum se applicans, et secum delatas formas divinorum et individualium artificum per medium divisibilem caducis corporibus imprimens, suique cum illis incorporatione novas semper formas specificas aut individuas producens, in quibus resultat per actum luminis divinum artificium tam motorum orbium quam moventium virtutum.
([Witelo] 1535 fol. 1)[74]
For the light of the forms of the heavenly bodies is the diffusion through nature of the corporeal forms that apply themselves to the material of sublunar bodies, and, having brought down the forms of the divine individual makers into the mode of the divisible and imprinting them on bodies that pass away, through its incorporation with them it produces ever new specific or individual forms, in which we can see, because of the active light, the divine workmanship both of the heavenly spheres and of the intelligences that move them.
Witelo is thinking of the light of the stars and planets (especially, of course, that of the sun) as actually carrying down from above and imprinting on the elements the substantial forms they bear. Somehow the visible forms of things were transmitted by light through the air. Witelo is here expressing a view close to Robert Grosseteste's "metaphysics of
light"—by which he was influenced—a view that helps explain the intensity with which optics was studied in this period.[75]
For many reasons, the most interesting medieval mineralogical treatise is the Mineralium liber by Albertus Magnus (1890–99 5:1–55),[76] which has been translated and annotated by Dorothy Wyckoff (1967).[77] As Bruno Nardi established, in both the Convivio and the Commedia Albert is a major influence on Dante's metaphysical and cosmological ideas;[78] whether or not Dante knew the Mineralium liber, its positions are in most respects similar to those taken in others of Albert's works that Dante did know.[79] Albert seeks to give an exhaustive philosophical-scientific account of the formation and virtues of stones, precious stones, engraved gems, and metals. After his general discussions, he includes alphabetically arranged lists that subsume most of the "information" contained in earlier lapidaries. Albert used a fairly wide variety of sources;[80] he also adds comments of his own and refers frequently to his own experience.
All stones, Albert says, are formed from either earth or water: from earth by conglutinatio, from water by congelatio. Transparent stones are a kind of mean between earth and water, retaining qualities of each. Albert thinks of the four elements as embodiments of the basic qualities: hot, cold, wet, dry. The transformation of one element into another involves its gradual taking on of the other's properties. Thus if water is cold and wet, earth cold and dry, he finds it logical to think of stones as formed by water's gradually taking on the dryness of earth, which accounts for its solidity:
Cum enim terra ad se convertit aquam, primo virtutes terrae intrant substantiam, et alterant eam, et aquae quasi dominantes tenent eam: et tunc incipit aqua stare et terminari, et tamen adhuc perspicuitatem non omittit, et tunc deinde corrumpitur, et transit in terram, et accipit terrae qualitates, quae sunt opacum siccum.
(Albertus Magnus 1890–99 5: 12)
For when Earth converts Water into [Earth], first of all the power of Earth enters into the substance [of Water] and alters it, but that of Water, still dominant, contains it; then the Water begins to grow firm and be limited by a boundary, although as yet it does not lose its transparency; and then finally it is destroyed and passes into Earth, and takes on the qualities of Earth, opacity and dryness.
(Albertus Magnus 1967 33; translation revised)
Thus if the process is fixated while the material still retains the transparency of water, we have crystal and other transparent stones. The influence of external cold is thought of as a kind of pressure:
In montibus altissimis frigiditas est perpetua, quae est excellens . . . quae frigiditas exprimendo humidum apprehendit aquam a nivibus congelatam, et inducit in eam proprietates sicci, sicut est naturae frigiditatis excellentis: et ex illo sicco coagulat glaciem in crystallum vel alium lapidem perspicuum.
(1890–99 5:12; emphasis added)
In very high mountains there is perpetual and extreme cold . . . And this cold, by squeezing out the moisture, attacks the Water frozen by the snows, and induces in it the properties of dryness—for this is the nature of extreme cold—and then, out of that dryness, solidifies the ice into crystal or some other transparent stone.
(1967 32; translation slightly revised)
This is very close in conception to Seneca's description of the formation of crystal:
Aqua enim caelestis minimum in se terreni habens, cum induruit longioris frigoris pertinacia spissatur magis ac magis, donec omni aere excluso in se tota compressa est, et umor qui fuerat lapis effectus est.[81]
For when water from heaven, that has very little of earth in it, has hardened through the persistence of long cold, it grows thicker and thicker, until, all the air having been expelled, it is entirely compressed into itself, and what was liquid has become a stone.
Seneca attributes the transparency of crystal to the purity of the air from which the water itself had been formed. Albert follows Aristotle's notion of transparency as a quality supremely possessed by the heavenly spheres:
Aliquando autem vis terrea apprehendit aquam ita quod frigidum iam exprimit humidum, et siccum terminat materia in seipsa, manente aquae transparentia. Pervietas enim aquae non convenit eidem in quantum est frigidum vel humidum vel utramque habens qualitatem, sed in quantum convenit cum coelesti corpore.
(1890–99 5:13)
Sometimes, too, an earthly force attacks Water in such a way that cold expels its moisture, and dryness causes it to take on the shape of a solid, although the transparency of the Water remains unchanged. For the
clearness of Water does not depend on how much it contains of the qualities of cold or moisture, or both, but upon how much it has in common with the substance of the heavens [Ether].
(1967 34)
Albert criticizes four theories of the production of stones in general: three of them are erroneous—(1) that they are formed by volcanic heat; (2) that they are produced by a soul of the stone; (3) that no substantial forms are produced—and the fourth is too general (1.1.4; 1890–99 5:6–7). The same pattern appears in his critique of the theories of the "virtues" of precious stones; three are erroneous—(1) that they derive from the elements that compose the stones; (2) that in them the supernal idea or form is less submerged in matter than in other objects; (3) that they are produced by the imaginings of the movers of the spheres (i.e., the angelic intelligences)—and the fourth is too general. The fourth, general cause in each case is the influence of the heavenly bodies.
On the powers of precious stones, Albert explains, "Hermes"[82] and his followers believed
omnium inferiorum virtutes esse in stellis et imaginibus coelorum. Omnes autem virtutes infundi in inferioribus omnibus per circulum Alaur, quem primum circulum imaginum coelestium esse dicebant. Has autem virtutes descendere in res naturae nobiliter et ignobiliter. Nobiliter autem quando materiae recipientes has virtutes, fuerint superioribus imaginibus similes in lumine et perspicuitate. Ignobiliter autem, quando materiae fuerint confusae et foetulentae, in qua quasi opprimitur virtus coelestis. Haec igitur causam isti dicunt, quoniam lapides pretiosi prae aliis habent mirabiles virtutes: quia videlicet in substantia magis simulantur superioribus, et in lumine et perspicuitate: propter quod a quibusdam eorum stellae elementales esse dicuntur lapides pretiosi.
(Mineralium liber 2.1.2 [1890–99 5:26])
that all the powers of sublunar things are in the stars and constellations. For all powers are poured into sublunar things by the circle Alaur, which they said was the first circle of constellations, but they descend into natural things either nobly or basely: nobly when the materials that receive them are more similar to the heavenly bodies in brightness and transparency, basely when the materials are confused and muddy, in which the heavenly virtue is almost drowned. And this is the reason, they say, why precious stones have marvelous powers beyond other things, for they are in substance more like the heavenly bodies in brightness and trans-
parency, for which reason they are called by some "elemental stars" [i.e., stars made from the four elements, not from the "fifth essence"].
(our translation)
Except that it does not mention the phase in which the material is prepared, this theory is exactly the one implied by Guinizelli's analogy. Indeed, we have just seen that Albert attributes the transparency of certain stones precisely to their similarity to the heavens. He does not deny this theory, he regards it as too general:
hic non quaerimus causas agentes et moventes primas, quae forte sunt stellae et stellarum virtutes et dispositiones: hoc enim alterius scientiae proprium est: sed quaerimus causas efficientes proximas, quae in materia existentes materiam transmutant.
(Mineralium liber 1.1.4 [1890–99 5:6])
Here we are not inquiring into the first active and moving causes, which may be the stars and the virtues and positions of the stars, for this is the subject matter proper to another science; but we are inquiring into the proximate efficient causes that, existing in matter, transmute matter.
Albert's explanation is elaborate; the vis mineralis, he argues, comes into being only where the appropriate materials exist in a place naturally apt to produce minerals,[83] and it functions in a way strictly analogous to that of the vis formativa in the father's seed as it shapes the embryo in the womb:[84]
Dicimus igitur quod sicut in semine animalis quod est superfluum nutrimenti, descendit a vasis seminariis vis formativa animalis, quae format et efficit animal, et est in semine per modum illum quo artifex est in artificiato quod facit per artem: sic est etiam in materia aptata lapidibus virtus formans et efficiens lapides et producens ad formam lapidis hujus vel illius . . . cum materia sicci passi ab humido unctuoso, vel materia humidi passi, aptatur lapidi a sicco terrestri, et generatur in ipsa ex virtute stellarum et loci . . . virtus formativa lapidis, sicut generativa in semine a testiculis quando semen fluerit attractum ad vasa seminaria, et unaquaque materia secundum speciem propria virtus. Et hoc est quod dicit Plato, secundum merita materiae infunduntur virtutes caelestes.
(Mineralium liber 1.1.4 [1890–99 5:7])
We say, therefore, that as in the seed of an animal, which is superfluous food, there descends from the seminal vessels the animal formative power, which forms and fashions the animal, and which is in the seed in the mode by which the craftsman is in the object shaped by his craft: so also
in materials made suitable to be stones there is a power that forms and fashions the stones and produces them in the form of this or that particular stone . . . when there is dry matter that has undergone the action of oily moisture, or moist matter that has been acted on [by dry], and there is generated in it, out of the power of the stars and of the place . . . a power that forms stones, as the generative [power] descends into the seed from the testicles when it is attracted to the seminal vessels, and in each particular material its own power according to its species. And this is what Plato says: the celestial powers are infused according to the merit of the material.
(our translation)
Where there is suitable material in a suitable place, then, the stars infuse the vis mineralis, which operates purposefully (as an entelechy) through the hot and cold of the elements as through tools. It prepares the materials and imposes on them the substantial form of the stone. Albert insists that the vis mineralis is infused into the matter, operates within it, and eventually becomes the substantial form of the stone and thus, in the case of a precious stone, the source of its power (1890–99 5:11, 26).
Striking in Albert's theory is the projection onto the cosmic scale of the principles of sexual reproduction, the influence of the heavens being parallel to the pouring of seed into the womb of the earth. In essence, this is a version of the ancient myth of the hieròs gamós, the marriage of sky and earth. At another level it is interesting as an effort to devise a theory that will give a certain autonomy to earthly process, thought of as initiated by the first causes but proceeding in some sense on its own.[85]
When he attempts to answer the question of why some places and not others are capable of producing minerals, Albert produces a clear statement of an analogy—very important for our understanding of the petrose —between the influence of the stars and the activity of human craftsmen:
. . . stellae qualitate et lumine et situ et motu movent et ordinant mundum secundum omnem materiam et locum generabilium et corruptibilium. Virtus autem sic determinata a stellis infunditur loco generationis unicuique rei, et modo quo in naturis locorum determinatum est. Haec enim virtus et elementi et elementati omnis est productiva et generativa.
Et est ista virtus loci ex tribus virtutibus congregata, quarum una est virtus motoris orbis moti. Secunda est virtus orbis moti cum omnibus
partibus suis et figuris partium quae resultant ex situ partium diversimodi se respicientium propter multimodam motorum velocitatem et tarditatem. Tertia autem est virtus elementaris. . . . Est autem prima harum virtutum ut forma dirigens et formans omne quod generatur, sicut virtus artis ad materiam artificiati se habet. Et secunda est sicut operatio manus. Et tertia sicut operatio instrumenti quod manu movetur et dirigitur ad finem inceptum ab artifice. Et ideo dixit Aristoteles quod omne opus naturae est opus intelligentiae. Locus enim recipit has virtutes, sicut matrix recipit virtutem formativam embrionis. Haec igitur virtus determinata ad lapidum generationem, in materia terrestri vel aquea est, in qua conveniunt omnia loca in quibus lapides generantur.
(1890–99 5: 11)
. . . the stars, by their [differences in] quality, light, position, and motion, move and order the world [by influencing] the matter and place of everything that can be generated or corrupted. The power of the stars, determined in this way, is poured into the place of the generation proper to each single thing, as has been explained in The Nature of Places. For this power generates and produces both the elements and elemented things.
The power of a place, then, is a combination of three [powers]. One of these is the power of the Mover that moves the sphere. The second is the power of the sphere that is moved, with all its parts, and the figures that result from the varying position of the parts with respect to each other as they move more rapidly or more slowly. The third is the power of the elements. . . . Now the first of these powers, since it is the form that shapes everything that is generated, is related to the matter of the thing made as is the virtue of art. And the second is related to it as is the operation of the hand. And the third corresponds to the operation of a tool that is moved by the hand and directed to the end conceived by the artisan. And therefore Aristotle said that every work of nature is a work of Intelligence: for the place receives these powers just as the womb receives the power that forms the embryo. This power, then, determined to the generation of stones, is in the earthy or watery materials which are common to all places where stones are generated.
(1967 29–30)[86]
Albert was extremely fond of this analogy between human art and the operation of the heavens, and it occurs frequently in his works.[87] Here the heavenly—angelic—intelligence (the "Mover") takes its idea from the eternal patterns of things in the mind of God, and through a power that is analogous to the virtus or habitus of art in human beings it directs the motion of the sphere, compared in its turn to the motion of the hand of a human artist. The elemental powers—the qualities hot, cold, dry, and wet—are like tools held by the hand because they act on the matter that is being shaped, as we have seen: "primo virtutes terrae
intrant substantiam [aquae]" (1890–99 5:12).[88] The analogy between the heavenly bodies and the human craftsman necessarily involves the converse: that the process whereby the human artist shapes his material is like the shaping influence of the revolving heavens. As we have already suggested, this is one of the fundamental principles of Dante's new poetics. Also, the petrose ask what kind of causality can be exerted by human art—whether in the shaping of the artifact or through the shaped object itself.[89]
The connection of human art with the causality of the heavens is more than just an analogy, for human intelligence and the capacity for artistic creation are themselves to some extent produced by the influence of the stars and planets in the horoscope of the individual; Dante unmistakably takes this view in his invocation of the stars of Gemini in Paradiso 22.[90] Albert and Thomas both insist that human actions are not determined by the stars; still, the passage in which Aquinas discusses the indirect influence of the stars on the mind is very revealing:
Sciendum est tamen quod, licet corpora coelestia directe intelligentiae nostrae causae esse non possint, aliquid tamen ad hoc operantur indirecte. Licet enim intellectus non sit virtus corporea, tamen in nobis intellectus operatio compleri non potest sine operatione virtutum corporearum, quae sunt imaginatio, et vis memorativa, et cogitativa . . . ; et inde est quod, impeditis harum virtutum operationibus propter aliquam indispositionem corporis, impeditur operatio intellectus, sicut patet in phreneticis et lethargicis et aliis hujusmodi; et propter hoc etiam bonitas dispositionis corporis humani facit aptum ad bene intelligendum, in quantum ex hoc praedictae vires fortiores existunt; unde dicitur in secundo De anima, c. ix, quod "molles carne aptos mente videmus."
Dispositio autem corporis humani subiacet coelestibus virtutibus. . . . Ideo indirecte corpora coelestia ad bonitatem operantur; et sic, sicut medici possunt iudicare de bonitate intellectus ex corporis complexione, sicut ex dispositione proxima, ita astrologus ex motibus coelestibus sicut ex causa remota talis dispositionis. Et per hunc modum potest verificari quod Ptolomaeus in Centiloquio dicit: "Quum fuerit Mercurius in nativitate alicujus, in aliqua domorum Saturni, et ipse fortis in esse suo, dat bonitatem intelligentiae medullitus in rebus."
(Summa contra Gentiles 3.84 [Aquinas 1875 12:359]; see Nardi 1967a 71)
However, we should note that, though celestial bodies cannot be directly the causes of our understanding, they may do something indirectly in regard to it. For although the understanding is not a corporeal power, the operation of understanding cannot be accomplished in us without the operation of corporeal powers: that is, the imagination, the power of
memory, and the cogitative power. . . . And as a result, if the operations of these powers are blocked by some indisposition of the body, the operation of the intellect is impeded, as is evident in demented and sleeping persons, and in others similarly affected. And that is why even the good disposition of the human body makes one able to understand well, for, as a result of this, the aforesaid powers are in a stronger condition. Thus it is stated in De anima 2.9 that "we observe that men with soft flesh are well endowed mentally."
Now the condition of the human body is subject to the influence of the celestial motions. . . . So, the celestial bodies act indirectly on the good condition of understanding. Thus, just as physicians may judge the goodness of an intellect from the condition of its body, as from a proximate cause, so also an astrologer may judge from the celestial motions, as from a remote cause. And in this way can come true what Ptolemy wrote in the Centiloquium, "When Mercury is in the nativity of some one, in a house of Saturn, and is strong in his being, he gives a goodness of intelligence that sees deeply into things."
(Aquinas 1956 2:17–18; translation altered)
Dante states this doctrine explicitly in Book 4, chapter 2, of the Convivio:
Lo tempo, secondo che dice Aristotile nel quarto de la Fisica, è "numero di movimento secondo prima e poi"; e "numero di movimento celestiale," lo quale dispone le cose di qua giù diversamente a ricevere alcuna informazione. Ché altrimenti è disposta la terra nel principio de la primavera a ricevere in sé la informazione de l'erbe e de li fiori, e altrimenti lo verno; e altrimenti è disposta una stagione a ricevere lo seme che un'altra; e così la nostra mente, in quanto ella è fondata sopra la complessione del corpo, che a seguitare la circulazione del cielo altrimenti è disposta a un tempo e altrimenti a un altro.[91]
One of the most curious parts of Albertus Magnus's treatise on minerals is his discussion of the powers possessed by precious stones engraved with images (sigilla )—usually, in his notion, astrological images,[92] such as representations of constellations (we have seen him use the term figura for constellations, and there is no question that he thinks of them as a kind of picture outlined by the stars). He believes that the stars themselves sometimes imprint such images on stones and discusses the phenomenon at length, deciding that it is simply a special case of the imposition of form by the influence of the heavens.
Albert's explanation of the fact (as he regards it) that stones engraved by men have occult powers is most interesting. The typical case is a seal representing a constellation: it must be carved at the time the constel-
lation is in force, and usually it will possess virtue only when the astrological situation of its carving is repeated.[93] Both in the intention of the carver and in the form he imposes on the stone, the constellation is the cause of the image, and it naturally will exert its influence through the human agency (carving) most fully when it is astrologically in power. The philosophical basis for this astounding notion is the doctrine of the transitivity of causal relations:
Non autem dubitandum, quin omne quod est causa aliquo modo causae, est etiam aliquo modo causa causati. Si igitur vis et afflatus siderum influit quandam causalitatem artis in artifice, pro certo nisi impediatur, influet omnibus operibus artis aliquid suae virtutis.
(Albertus Magnus 1890–99 5:51)
And it is not to be doubted that everything that is somehow the cause of a thing is also somehow the cause of whatever results. If, then, the force and inspiration of the stars pour some influence causing art into the artisan, certainly, unless it is somehow prevented, it will pour something of its power into all the works of the art.
(Albertus Magnus 1967 135; translation revised)
Albertus, Aquinas, and Dante all agree that, to the extent that artistic creation draws on fantasy, memory, and the power of association (vis cogitativa ), the three bodily faculties listed by Aquinas, it is affected by the influence of the heavenly bodies. The influence of the heavens, moreover, does not end at birth; it extends not only to the artist's basic complexion or constitution, but also to the daily, weekly, and seasonal variations of his bodily state as affected by the heavens.
As we shall see, these astrological doctrines of the influence of the heavens in shaping sublunar things, of the transitivity of heavenly causality through such privileged objects as precious stones, of the direct influence, both at birth and from day to day, of the heavens on the human temperament (including faculties directly involved in all artistic creation), and of the analogy between the influence of the heavens and the shaping activities of human craftsmen are all reflected in the rime petrose. In fact, it is not going too far to say that the petrose cannot be understood without taking these doctrines into account.
The Problematic of the Petrose
The petrose grow out of the rich traditions which we have sketched thus far, to which we will frequently refer in the chapters that follow. Our
purpose is more than simply to recover "medieval" meanings of the poems for which modern readers need annotation. A sense of the intellectual backgrounds of the poems deepens our sense of the fundamental issues that are at stake, issues that Dante increasingly realized were for him inherent in the very activity of writing poetry. To a surprising degree, the petrose show Dante grappling with problems that anticipate those of the Commedia, particularly the need to understand and represent as fully as possible his own nature in its relation to the universe as a whole and—agonizingly—the mutual alienation between the poet and those he most wishes to reach: in the petrose, the lady; in the Commedia, the Florentines.
First, two preliminary questions. The first regards the dramatic situation implied by the poems: how long has the lover been wooing the lady? Already in the first poem, "Io son venuto al punto de la rota," it is clearly implied that the speaker's love is no recent phenomenon, no new emotion born in the winter being described, for, as the central stanza puts it, although all animals' spirits are deadened by the cold, his love is increased ("e il mio [spirito] più d'amor porta"). In other words, his love preexisted the winter and is now increasing. The second poem, "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra," intimates the return of spring, for the lady is said to be frozen in both seasons (though it is not completely clear whether the spring in question is the one that preceded the winter of "Io son venuto"—perhaps the time of his falling in love—or the one that follows it). Similarly, the third poem in the series, "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna," refers to the lady's disdain for love as existing "in all seasons" (line 2).
Now these indications are fairly general: they do not permit the establishment of a chronology of events, for no specific events are related. Their function would seem to be exclusively that of establishing, as the basic situation, the idea that the speaker's love for the lady has existed, and that the lady has been rejecting his advances, for an extended though unspecified period of time, perhaps as much as a year. In fact, the poems do not really imply that they are the product of successive occasions; rather, all spring from the same ideal present: they are successive confrontations of a single problem, and they rest on a coherent analysis of it.[94]
Second, is the love celebrated in the petrose to be thought of as adulterous? One should consider that none of Dante's works makes the slightest reference to his marriage. For example, the issue of adultery is excluded
from the Vita nuova partly by the religious theme of the book and its insistence (beginning in chapter 2) that sensuality played no part in the love that Beatrice inspired. More fundamentally, Dante's marriage is not part of the fictional situation; within the Vita nuova —in the fiction of the book—it simply does not exist. In fact, it had to be rigorously excluded, unless the issue of adultery was to become explicitly a theme. Those who observe Dante in church (chapter 5) and the ladies who question him about the purpose of his love for Beatrice (chapter 18) are not thinking of him as a married man with family responsibilities (as he in fact was), and if Beatrice had so regarded him she would surely have snubbed him much sooner! In other words, although we do not always reflect on the fact as we read, the Vita nuova must be read as if Dante had not been married. To be sure, there must have been a relation between the realities of Dante's marriage and the fictions of the Vita nuova, almost certainly a deeply significant one; but we cannot know it.
It is important to see that the theme of adultery as an issue is also rigorously excluded from the petrose, although the same is not true of the theme of sexuality. It is not that the petrose assert the superiority of a lover's claim to a husband's, a frequent theme in the Provençal and Old French tradition; rather, the issue is simply excluded. Thus it will not do to assume that the love represented in the petrose is adulterous. There is nothing in the poems to justify the assertion, which could only be made on the basis of some quite unjustifiable appeal to the facts of Dante's biography. Married or not, Dante was perfectly capable of writing poems about nonadulterous love, as the Vita nuova shows. For that matter, if biography is to enter the interpretation of the petrose, it would be quite as legitimate to see them as about some real or imagined phase of Dante's relationship with his wife, who at least had a stunningly appropriate name: Gemma (a word that, both as a name and as a common noun, is absent from the poems). By the same token, it seems to us a serious mistake for modern readers to label the sexuality of the petrose as obviously reprehensible. The complexity of the poems can only emerge if we resist the temptation of a priori judgments.
The problematic that emerges from the poems can be set forth as follows: The goal the lover aims for is given in the last stanza of the last of the poems, "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro":
Ancor ne li occhi, ond'escon le faville
che m'infiammano il cor, ch'io porto anciso,
guarderei presso e fiso
per vendicar lo fuggir che mi face;
e poi le renderei con amor pace.
(76–80)
In other words, the imagined goal of the lover, represented as a prolonged mutual gaze (itself the culmination of the act of love), is complete reciprocity and a complete communion of intersubjectivity. The actual situation, however, is the opposite of mutual and peaceful intersubjectivity, for the lady utterly refuses the lover's claims on her attention: lover and lady are antagonists, each actively denying the subjectivity of the other. The poems are represented as the lover's effort to express and communicate the nature of his predicament, as well as to work through it. The traditional status of love poems—that they are addressed to, and woo, the lady (this becomes explicit in the last poem)—gives us the basis of the identity of the erotic problem with the poetic one, as we shall see.
Since the lover is blocked in his wooing of the lady, because she refuses and flees his love (and the petrose represent the refusal as much more radical and thorough than is customary in the troubadour and Italian traditions), the lover is in a fundamental sense alone with his desire, and he must find a way to deal with it. The petrose represent him, as it were, alone in the cosmos, confronting with his individual faculties a whole array of negative forces. The difficulty of his situation is represented at one level by the winter that is the scene of the first and third poems; yet the winter is itself the product of cosmic forces, the power of the stars. The forces arrayed against the lover range from the lady's hostility to the influence of the stars (a kind of conspiracy of the entire cosmos against him) to the destructive forces inherent in his own nature (traceable to his nativity and strongly affected by astrological influence). Against these forces the lover strives for a positive victory, and the analysis and representation of the negative forces is essential to the enterprise. The new microcosmic poetics, in short, is represented as a determined—and hopeful—response to the difficulty of the lover's situation.
This poetics, then, represents the struggle between positive and negative aspects of the poet-lover's situation and of his nature. Thus it requires a certain deliberate self-division by which the poet pits the two sides of his nature against each other. He understands these two sides in terms of the Platonic analogy between the two "motions" of the World-Soul—called by Plato the motions of the Same and the Other—and the two basic motions of the human soul, roughly identifiable with rational
and irrational.[95] Each of the petrose is a phase of the effort to deal with negativity by allowing it scope, within the higher coherence of the poet-lover as ultimately master of himself and confident of the positive value of his love. His love is not merely irrational desire, but it does include that component (the Other, the irrational)—ultimately, he hopes, governed and contained, like the cosmos, by the Same. In fact, each successive petrosa optimistically allows greater scope to the negative, taking greater and greater risks, both psychological and artistic.
In the last poem of the sequence the negative motives—anger, frustration, violence, and self-destructiveness—must be confronted directly. "Così nel mio parlar" has two phases: a katabasis involving successive retreats into inner allegorical stages, in which the violence is increasingly identified as within the lover himself, and an anabasis in which the violence is imagined as redirected outward, turned into "playful" erotic violence, and gradually disarmed, so that the poem culminates in the prolonged gaze of mutual acceptance and reconciliation. As a symbolic or imagined working through of the problem (thus at the imaginative level a kind of victory over it), these are phases of repeated (self-)destructive division overcome, in intention at least, by reintegration.
In terms of the drama between the lover and the lady, the sequence can of course have no solution other than a fantasy of reconciliation. The violence could be fully disarmed only in a reciprocal relation in which the lady would be the match of the lover in every respect. And this leads close to the core of the problem. The adoption of the microcosmic poetics—the very effort to represent in all its complexity the lover's relation to the cosmos as a whole—in itself constitutes simultaneously the choice of a certain solitude and the effort to break out of that solitude. In terms of the tradition of love poetry, this solitude is supposed to be merely provisional, a temporary deferral. But we can already see in the petrose how powerful in Dante is the sense—and to some extent the choice—of isolation within the cosmos created by poetry, how violent the need for living communication with the world. The erotic and the poetic problematics are identical: both include the paradox that the difficulty of eliciting response requires the elaboration of the poetry, but the elaboration of the poetry requires the indefinite deferral of direct interaction and therefore of response. There is also the (unanswerable) question of to what degree both aspects of the lover's situation—his impasse with the lady and his isolation within the poetic cosmos—are expressions of sexual fear.
In modern terms, of course, one must be struck by the absence of any but a mythicized representation of the psychology of the lady. Her refusal of the lover is depicted as so absolute that the possibility that the lover might do well to try to understand the Other better is simply excluded. There is no questioning of the status of the male subject as such: obviously Dante lived in an age when the politics of gender were far from understood. They provide the background against which the potential tragedy of the impasse must be seen. Though his insights were partial, Dante had a strong intuition into what linked his isolation, his monologism, his violent anger, and the traditions of courtly love song. The poem in which he is finally able to speak his anger at the lack of true reciprocity between the sexes, though this anger takes a most disturbing form, is a landmark in the history of love poetry.
Moreover, the petrose show us one of the fundamental structures of the Commedia. To be sure, the scope of the masterpiece is immeasurably greater, including all of history as well as the entire cosmos, setting forth a profoundly original and intensely meditated analysis of the social and spiritual evils that plagued the world, as well as a fully elaborated philosophical position and a religious quest that has often been mistaken for practicing mysticism. An important core of the situation of the Commedia, however, is closely parallel to that of the petrose. First, like the petrose, the Commedia represents—and in fact springs from—a situation in the "real" world in which the speaker is almost totally blocked. In the Commedia this obstruction has two main dimensions. First, whatever the date at which the Commedia was first planned and its composition begun, a very large portion of it was written after 1313,[96] the year of the death of the emperor Henry VII, to whom Dante had looked as the savior of the political situation in Italy and the rest of Europe. From Dante's point of view, as countless passages in the Commedia and other works make clear, the dominant political tendencies of his day—especially the weakness of the Empire, the rise of the French crown, and the involvement of the papacy in temporal affairs (not to mention its corruption and the corruption of the monastic and religious orders)—were leading Florence, Italy, and the whole of Europe to disaster. Dante had worked extremely hard to further the success of Henry's effort to gain control of Italy. In the Commedia, he is divinely charged to return to the world and write the poem; the poem thus becomes a divine intervention in history, represented in the cantos of the
sun and Mars (Paradiso 10–17) as parallel to the intervention at a similar moment of crisis that inspired the foundation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. In other words, the writing of the Commedia is, as a political act, in large measure the expression of Dante's despair at the political realities and the normal avenues of political action.
The second way in which the poet is blocked in the outside world—no less important than the first—is the fact that he is exiled from his native city and that his fellow citizens have repeatedly demonstrated a literally murderous hostility toward him. Significantly, in the Commedia the city of Florence is personified as a woman: in one particularly revealing passage, as a bride (Paradiso 15.97–102), in another as like Phaedra (Paradiso 17.46–48). The first pain of exile, as Cacciaguida tells Dante, is that one is barred from what one most loves:
Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta
più caramente; e questo è quello strale
che l'arco de l'essilio saetta prima.
( Paradiso 17.55–57)
Compare the unfailing arrows of "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro," lines 9–12:
ed ella ancide, e non val ch'om si chiuda
né si dilunghi da' colpi mortali
che, com'avesser ali,
giungono altrui e spezzan ciascun arme.
An important parallel obtains between the hostility of the city of Florence and that of the donna pietra. Even though Dante's picture of the lady's hostility is no doubt poetic hyperbole, one can understand why earlier in this century Guerri and Filippini, disregarding the reliable grounds we have for dating the poems prior to Dante's exile, interpreted the lady of the petrose as an allegory of Florence (Dante 1946 149).
The point is not that the situation of the Commedia can be reduced to that of the petrose, but that they share a fundamental parallel in the structure of the poet's relation to the world and to his poetry. In both, the relation with the audience he wishes to win is intensely conflicted. In both, the relation between poetry and action in the world is paradoxical. The Commedia gives us Dante the poet-prophet driven to write the poem by his despair of the world of history; confronting a hostile world, he woos the world and his city. And the poem deals with the poet's situation in the world by constructing an elaborate model of the
universe as he hopes it to be, a universe in which the difficulties he faces are not palliated but are inevitably taken toward their resolution, in which the ultimate victory of what the poet stands for is assured. These statements apply almost without revision to the petrose. And if the petrose show the lover moving, through a katabasis into his own self-destructive violence, to a mutual gaze of reconciliation, the Commedia gives us a protagonist who must go through an even more violent katabasis into his own and others' negativity—Hell itself—and who ascends beyond this into ever more perfect intersubjectivity (culminating, not by accident, in a prolonged gaze into the light).
Thus one of the fundamental problems in the Commedia—for Dante as well as for his readers—is the blurring of the line between the representation of "reality" and religious faith on the one hand and what must be called wish fulfillment on the other. The nub of the problem can be represented in the Commedia's claim to speak for God, which Dante realizes is dangerously close to fraud. Modern readers have a further problem in that Dante's effort to make philosophically and scientifically true statements about the universe increases the difference between his model of the universe and the real one as we know it. (How aware Dante may have been of this problem is an intriguing question: to what extent did he understand that his very ability to construct so lucidly his elaborate model was inherently a sign—even a cause—of its imminent rejection?) In any case, no matter how powerfully Dante imagines the resolution of his solitary activity, whether in perfect reconciliation with the lady or in perfect communion with God, the more ambitious his poem is, the more effectively it commits him to his alternate universe, as opposed to the real one. This problem—and Dante's awareness of it—is already sharply present in the petrose. In the petrose, too, the poet's effort to achieve power over the lady is, by the choice of poetry, inevitably shifted away from the practical goal into the alternate universe of art, in spite of the poet's fierce desire. Beginning with the petrose, Dante's poetry exists in the tension of this unresolvable paradox.
1—
Early Experiments:
Vita nuova 19
In the second book of the Convivio, writing of the period following Beatrice's death, Dante says:
. . . dico che, come per me fu perduto il primo diletto de la mia anima, de la quale fatto è menzione di sopra, io rimasi di tanta tristizia punto, che conforto non mi valea alcuno. Tuttavia, dopo alquanto tempo, la mia mente, che s'argomentava di sanare, provvide, poiché né il mio, né l'altrui consolare valea, ritornare al modo che alcuno sconsolato avea tenuto a consolarsi; e misimi a leggere quello non conosciuto di molti libro di Boezio, nel quale, cattivo e discacciato, consolato s'avea. E udendo ancora, che Tullio scritto avea un altro libro, nel quale, trattando de l'Amistade, avea toccate parole de la consolazione de Lelio, uomo eccellentissimo, ne la morte di Scipione amico suo, misimi a leggere quello. E avvegna che duro mi fosse ne la prima entrare ne la loro sentenza, finalmente v'entrai tanto entro, quanto l'arte di gramatica ch'io avea e un poco di mio ingegno potea fare; per lo quale ingegno molte cose, quasi come sognando, già vedea, si come ne la Vita nuova si può vedere.
(2.12; Dante 1964 1: 180–182)
Although this passage has sometimes been taken to mean that Dante read the Consolatio and the De amicitia only after the composition of the Vita nuova,[1] it is now recognized that both texts were major influences on the "little book";[2] nonetheless, the prevailing view seems still to be that only with the Convivio does Dante's writing reflect any strongly conceptual influence from Boethius or other Neoplatonic writers.[3] We believe the evidence presented in this chapter will bring some qualification of that view: Dante means that when he first read Boethius he understood many philosophical ideas as if in a dream, and that they can be seen in the Vita nuova.
As Bruno Nardi showed,[4] beginning with the Convivio Dante's works show a marked influence of Neoplatonic ideas: to mention only the most important, a qualified emanationism related to the Liber de causis and a view of the development of the human embryo and of the "origin
of the human soul," to use Nardi's phrase, close to Albertus's and Siger's and very different from Aquinas's. We do not propose that these ideas already appear in the Vita nuova, of course; rather, the themes and structure of "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore," as they emerge from a close examination of the poem and its divisione, seem clearly to derive on the one hand from Boethius's Consolatio, especially "O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas," discussed in the Introduction, and on the other, especially in the emphasis on division itself, from some of the most characteristic ideas of the Greek Christian Neoplatonists—the Pseudo-Dionysius, widely read and commented; Maximus the Confessor, accepted as an auctor; and conceivably Gregory of Nyssa. All three of these had been translated by Johannes Scotus Eriugena. Maximus's glosses on the Pseudo-Dionysius were included in the Pseudo-Dionysian compendia produced in the thirteenth century, as were generous portions of Eriugena's remarkable Periphyseon or De divisione naturae, which included long quotations from all three.[5] The most important and accessible of the three was of course the Pseudo-Dionysius; Dante could have read his ideas in one of the numerous scholastic commentaries, of which the most interesting are those on the De divinis nominibus.[6]
Emanationist ideas were available to Dante in many texts, from Proclus's Elementatio to the Liber de causis to Avicenna to Albert (who like many others had supposed the Liber de causis to be by Aristotle). A main peculiarity of the Greek tradition introduced into the West by Eriugena, however, in addition to its insistence on the identity of grammatical/dialectical and metaphysical division,[7] is the stress placed—similar to Boethius's—on the third member of the triad monê-próodosepistrophê: the movement of the return, both of the cosmos and of the human soul, to their source. In the Pseudo-Dionysius's De divinis nominibus and in Eriugena's De divisione naturae, furthermore, Dante would have found further examples of literary structure consciously fashioned, like "O qui perpetua," on the same triad,[8] and there can be little doubt that they would have aroused a very lively interest in him.[9] In any case, there is no question about Dante's knowledge of Boethius, and his reading of the Consolatio may in fact be sufficient to account for Vita nuova 19; more speculative questions will be restricted to the notes.
In the Vita nuova, Dante associates the stages of his development as a poet with the stages of his love for Beatrice. In the second chapter he relates that his debut as a poet circulating a sonnet to other Florentine poets took place because of his mysterious dream of Beatrice in the
arms of the god of love, and that his friendship with his "first friend" (Guido Cavalcanti) dated from Guido's reading and replying to Dante's sonnet.[10] Similarly, in chapters 18 and 19 he tells how, when Beatrice had denied him her greeting, the turmoil into which he was plunged led eventually, through a conversation with a group of ladies, to his undertaking an altogether new theme in his poems, praise of Beatrice, as opposed to the self-regarding poetry he had composed before. As Charles S. Singleton (1949 55–77) shows, this change of subject, which brings the first major structural articulation of the Vita nuova, is also an important step in the dialectic of the book, which leads, in his phrase, "From Love to Caritas."
The poem in question is the first canzone in the Vita nuova (which is structured symmetrically around the central group of three canzoni), "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore." It will be the focus of our attention here, for, as we shall see, Dante was fully justified in regarding it as a major poetic breakthrough. Our approach to the poem will be through the "division" of it that Dante made in the prose of chapter 19. (Text and translation of all of chapter 19 may be found in Appendix 4.)
The "divisions" of the Vita nuova, in which Dante indicates for almost all of the poems their subdivision into parts, are, as Bruno Sandkühler showed, firmly based in the thirteenth-century procedures of commentary on scriptural and philosophical texts, which always proceed by listing topics and indicating the initial phrase of each subdivision.[11] Nevertheless, Dante's divisions have puzzled many readers, for their function, aside from what today seems a pedantic exactitude, is by no means obvious. We believe, however, that close attention to them, especially to the division Dante makes of" Donne ch'avete," will be illuminating. "Donne ch'avete" emerges, in fact, as a remarkable experiment in Neoplatonic poetic form, anticipating in many ways the structural intensities of the rime petrose.
At the end of chapter 19, after what seems to many readers a tiresomely detailed subdivision of "Donne ch'avete," Dante claims a certain reticence:
Dico bene che, a più aprire lo intendimento di questa canzone, si converrebbe usare di più minute divisioni; ma tuttavia chi non è di tanto ingegno che per queste che son fatte la possa intendere, a me non dispiace se la mi lascia stare, ché certo io temo d'avere a troppi comunicato lo suo intendimento pur per queste divisioni che fatte sono, s'elli avvenisse che molti le potessero audire.
(19.22; Dante 1980 132)
This is one of a number of passages of what might be called "reticent commentary" in the Vita nuova;[12] the term might even be used to characterize the book as a whole. These passages stress the distinction between the simple and the discerning; they seem to imply the existence of a small initiated elite and to suggest that the book has an esoteric meaning.[13] There is an obvious contradiction between the circulation of the poems (cf. lines 57–58, and chapter 20, "Appresso che questa canzone fue alquanto divolgata tra le genti . . . [Dante 1980 133]), represented as intended by the poet, and the fear of its being understood that is mentioned here, a contradiction that is never resolved.
In our view, this reticence is meant to whet the interpreter's curiosity. For it is striking that Dante says quite plainly that understanding the poem ("per più aprire lo intendimento di questa canzone") requires dividing it; as the previous sentence says, what is easily understood need not be divided for the reader: "però che questa ultima parte è più lieve a intendere non mi travaglio di più divisioni." In other words, the canzone is not easily understood, and the divisions are a clue to its meaning.[14] We may further observe at this point that Dante introduces the poem itself with a reference to the importance of its structure, which the division is to explain: "cominciai una canzone con questo cominciamento, ordinata nel modo che si vedrà di sotto ne la sua divisione" (Dante 1980 116–117; emphasis added).
In order to follow the clues Dante has offered, we must look closely at the divisione itself and then take it to the poem. We begin with Dante's assertion that he will divide this canzone "più artificiosamente"—more carefully, more elaborately—than the preceding poems, so that it may be better understood. The prominence given the division of this poem is part of the systematic emphasis the poem receives: it inaugurates the new topic of praise (chapter 18), a major step forward in Dante's development, he says; it is the first canzone in the book; it is prepared by the major incidents of the fainting spell of chapter 16 and the discussion with the ladies of chapter 18; and its composition—at least that of its first line—is credited to some kind of divine inspiration, which Dante says came to him as he was walking beside a clear river.[15] Considering the care with which Dante has articulated the placing of "Donne ch'avete" in the Vita nuova as a whole, it should not be a surprise that its divisione has some importance as well.
Dante's procedure remains constant throughout this divisione: he first announces into how many subparts he is dividing the portion
under examination; then he describes the content of each subpart; finally he quotes the first words, the incipits, of all but the first subpart (as we shall see, the rather insistent parallels of phrasing are not casual). Dante first divides the poem as a whole into three parts: I, a proem; II, the "intento trattato"; and III, a "serviziale" or "ancella" (the commiato ). Although he does not raise the question of the relation of the three parts to the stanzas of the poem (a point to which we will return), the incipits show that they are related to the stanzas as follows:
I. Proem: stanza 1
II. Intento trattato: stanzas 2–4
III. Ancella: stanza 5
In the division of part I, four subparts are distinguished, but division does not descend below a first level; in the division of part II, however, successive subparts are subdivided. Thus while the divisione of part I suggests paratactic arrangement, that of part II is strongly hypotactic:
II. Intento trattato: stanzas 2–4
A. "che di lei si comprende in cielo": stanza 2
B. "che di lei si comprende in terra": stanzas 3–4
1. "da la parte de la nobilitade de la sua anima": stanza 3
2. "da la parte de la nobilitade del suo corpo": stanza 4
a. "bellezze che sono secondo tutta la persona": stanza 4.1–8
b. "bellezze che sono secondo diterminata parte de la persona": stanza 4.9–14
i. "li occhi, li quali sono principio d'amore": stanza 4.9–12
ii. "la bocca, la quale è fine d'amore": stanza 4.13–14
The division of part II is what will mainly concern us. It has excited some discussion. Early on it was pointed out that stanzas 2 and 3 receive no subdivision;[16] Leo Spitzer called attention to the fact that in each case it is the second of two parts that is subdivided:
Si constata che nella seconda parte della canzone (che comprende tre strofe) continua a suddividere sempre il secondo membro, di modo che le suddivisioni ulteriori toccano precisamente gli aspetti terreni, corporei, particolari della donna. . . . Le strofe 2a e 3a non sono suddivise, non perché contengono la cosa più importante, ma perché contengono gli as-
petti relativamente generici: con le suddivisioni Dante scende sempre più nei particolari. Si deve tenere presente che il modo di pensare scolastico non rinnegava ciò che era particolare, corporeo, terreno, bensì lo accettava e, partendo da esso, saliva in alto.[17]
Spitzer's suggestion for the reason behind Dante's procedure had the merit of seeking a conceptual, even philosophical basis, and it is interestingly close to the mark, even though he allowed his complacent generalization about Scholasticism to satisfy his curiosity.[18] It was Bruno Sandkühler who made explicit the basis of Spitzer's remark: parts are subdivided at levels that are lower and lower on the chain of being and of value (heaven, soul, body, whole, parts),[19] since in both Platonic and Aristotelian terms the generic is by definition at a higher metaphysical level than the particular. We may add that the subdivided parts themselves naturally become smaller and smaller: part II is three stanzas long; part II. B, two stanzas long; part II.B.2 one stanza long; part II.B.2.b, six lines; part II.B.2. b. ii, two lines.
As Spitzer observed, in his division of part II Dante in each case subdivides only the second member, despite the fact that what is left undivided is in two cases (II.A and II.B.1) an entire stanza. Now we have already mentioned the insistent parallels of phrasing: again and again Dante writes, "Questa seconda parte si divide in due." And as we have seen, Dante suggests at the end of the divisione that "a più aprire lo intendimento di questa canzone, si converrebbe usare di più minute divisioni." To the best of our knowledge, no one has ever taken up Dante's suggestion.[20] If we were to do so, the divisione itself offers the clue to its completion: di più minute divisioni means more minute divisions not only in the sense of smaller ones, as at first appears, but also in the sense of more of them: più can modify either minute or divisioni. In other words, to complete the division we should follow the procedure Dante has used: he has divided the second parts, we should divide the first parts, and we should do so according to the principles we have seen him follow. Will we find that questa prima parte si divide in due? We will indeed. Let us begin with part II.A (stanza 2):
Angelo clama in divino intelletto
e dice: "Sire, nel mondo si vede
maraviglia ne l'atto che procede
18 d'un'anima che 'nfin qua su risplende."
Lo cielo, che non have altro difetto
che d'aver lei, al suo segnor la chiede,
e ciascun santo ne grida merzede.
22 Sola Pietà nostra parte difende,
che parla Dio, che di madonna intende:
"Diletti miei, or sofferite in pace
25 che vostra spene sia quanto me piace
là 'v'è alcun che perder lei s'attende,
e che dirà ne lo inferno: O mal nati,
28 io vidi la speranza de' beati."
We wish a principle of division parallel to Dante's "che si comprende di lei nel cielo" / "che si comprende di lei in terra," and it is readily found: the two parts of the stanza treat what is said of her by the angels and the blessed and what is said of her by God, and the second part begins there: Sola Pietà (line 22). In other words, we now have
II. A. Heaven
1. Angels and blessed
2. God
B. Earth
1. Soul
2. Body
But it is necessary to look more closely at part II.A.1. Can it be subdivided? First one angel is represented as speaking, then heaven, then all the santi, all the inhabitants of heaven—clearly an instance of part versus whole (i.e., Dante's criterion for dividing stanza 4). But if part II.A.1 can be divided thus, what is the point of the division? That is, what is the difference between what the single angel says and what heaven as a whole and all the blessed say? Let us look closely, for at this point the richness of Dante's idea will begin to be apparent.
Angelo clama in divino intelletto
e dice: "Sire, nel mondo si vede
maraviglia ne 1'atto che procede
18 d'un'anima che 'nfin qua su risplende."
Lo cielo, che non have altro difetto
che d'aver lei, al suo segnor la chiede,
e ciascun santo ne grida merzede.
The single angel says that Beatrice's atto is so resplendent that it shines all the way up to heaven. Heaven as a whole asks God for Beatrice herself. Each of these parts invokes the idea of the completion of a circle of procession and return: Beatrice's atto is the result of her virtues; the use of the term risplende in line 18 is based on the idea that the atto that proceeds from Beatrice is itself a reflection of the special grace God has bestowed on her, a returning of God's light back to him. It is only a partial return of Beatrice, of course. What all of heaven asks is the return to heaven of all of Beatrice. In parts II.A.1.a and II.A.1.b, then, there is an ascent both in the nature of the speakers (first a single angel, then all heaven) and in what is said; in both cases there is the return of what has proceeded from God, but in the first instance it is partial, in the second complete. In other words, the subdivision of this first part of part II.A reveals a rather elaborate enactment of the Neoplatonic principle of procession and return, at several metaphysical levels.
Dante uses the Neoplatonic term procedere both in the poem (17: "l'atto che procede d'un'anima") and in the divisione ("le sue vertudi effettive che de la sua anima procedeano "), and of course we have not done justice to the maraviglia that is asserted of Beatrice: her atto, her vertudi effettive, are marvelous because of their effect in the world, which will be the subject of stanzas 3 and 4. Thus there are two levels at which Dante sees procession and return: from God to Beatrice back to God, and from Beatrice to others back to God (as well as back to Beatrice). That the term procedere is used explicitly only of her virtues, and not of the divine procession, of which her radiance is the reflection, is an instance of the same reticence that governs Dante's division of the poem.[21]
So far we have discussed only the first half of stanza 2. What of the second half, where God speaks? If the subject of what is said in the first half is heaven's awareness of Beatrice and its desire for her return, in the second half God speaks of his intention that Beatrice remain on earth for a while. The blessed are asked to suffer this decision in peace, for them a consummating telos of acquiescence in God's just will.[22] These last seven lines of stanza 2 fall into two groups: God's reply has two parts (II.A.2.a and b), the first asking the angels to accept his will, the second concerning alcun (obviously Dante himself), of whom two things are said: (i) that he is on earth and will lose Beatrice and (ii) that he will tell the damned in hell of her. Here the circular pattern of pro-
cession and return is enlarged. The poem ascends to God as speaker (all of part II.A.2), but what God says concerns (a) the postponement of return and (b) further procession, for if the angel's perspective included earth and heaven, God speaks of heaven, earth, and hell. Return is implied in (b) because no doubt Dante will return from hell,[23] but also because the last line of the stanza (Dante speaking within God's speech within Dante's poem) has heaven mentioned in hell, just as hell is mentioned in heaven, and because Dante will testify in hell that he saw the one awaited (hoped for) in heaven ("la speranza de' beati"), a return to the theme of the desire of the blessed for Beatrice's return.
Only when God speaks do we get the full statement of "che si comprende di lei nel cielo," for, appropriately enough, what God says is more comprehensive, embraces not only the present referred to by the angel but also Beatrice's future and beyond, not only heaven and earth but hell as well. Return is implied, but Dante's loss of Beatrice through her death is made parallel to the loss of God, which the souls in hell have suffered through the second death, an idea that stanza 3 will develop further. Stanza 2 ends, then, both with the hope of return and with two ultimate separations or divisions: soul from body (death) and soul from God—two furthest extensions, as it were circumferential points, where the circle of progression and return may seem to break down. Finally, it is worth noting that stanza 2, encompassing the entire cosmos, has the widest range of reference of any stanza of the poem: from the angels chosen as midpoint, stanza 2 looks up to God, down to hell. In sum:
II.A. "che si comprende di lei in cielo"
1. Angels and blessed
a. Angel (part ): Beatrice's atto (part ) returns
b. All (whole ): let Beatrice herself (whole ) return
2. God
a. Acquiesce
i. in my will (general )
ii. that she remain on earth (particular )
b. Dante will
i. lose her (particular )
ii. speak in hell of the hope of the blessed (more general )
The upward movement within II.A.1 and from II.A.1 to II.A.2 is matched by the downward motion within II.A.2 (as in the second parts Dante has outlined). God speaks to what is below him, revealing his will for those who are on earth, including the one who will journey to hell. Beatrice's return from earth to heaven is implied in both II.A.2.a and b, just as Dante's return from hell is implied in II.A.2.b.
From its second stanza, then, "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore" makes clear that it is based on the Neoplatonic idea of procession and return and that it mirrors, with all its characteristically Dantesque dramatis personae and its Aristotelianisms, the descent of God's creative power into reality and multiplicity, at each stage enacting in one respect or another the pattern of return as well as of procession. And it needs to be emphasized that Dante's theological precision here is striking; he understands how the Neoplatonic analysis (always based on the model monê-próodos-epistrophê[24] ) was applied to different metaphysical levels. The descent into particulars observed by Spitzer is associated not just with descent on the metaphysical scale of value, as Sandkühler saw, but with the fundamental principle of Neoplatonic cosmogony: its origin the utterly transcendent One, the cosmos is generated by a descent into increasing differentiation and multiplicity—that is, by metaphysical division.[25] Dante's explicit divisione refers only to the descent; his not dividing the first part in each case leaves it up to the reader to discover the principle of return that is also built into the structure of the poem. In the Vita nuova as a whole, then, Dante's use of the procedure of division, including the placing of the divisioni (before the death of Beatrice, after the poems; after her death, before the poems), is probably also to be connected with these Neoplatonic ideas and will no doubt richly repay further study.[26]
Turning now to stanza 3, our first observation is that Beatrice's effect on the world is that of mediating the return of souls to God. She is an instrument, then, of reunification, and the topic of the stanza (part II.B.1), according to Dante's divisione, is precisely her vertudi effettive, her power to change others. After the three initial lines (a link with stanza 2 announcing the new topic), stanza 3 is clearly divided into two parts: Beatrice's effect (1) on cor villani (4–8), and (2) on noble hearts, alcun che degno sia (9–14): once more we find an ascending order. Each of these two parts, again, is subdivided according to a similar principle—brevity of encounter versus stare a vedere and parlarle. Thus:
II.B.1. "che di lei si comprende in terra"
a. Her effect on ignoble hearts
i. Brief encounter: their thoughts die (partial death)
ii. Staying to gaze
a . "diverria nobil cosa" (turn, conversion)
ß. "o si morria" ( full death)
b. Her effect on noble hearts
i. Brief encounter: forgives all (temporary grace, virtù effettiva )
ii. Speaking with her: cannot die badly ( full salvation/return)
She is an agent of reunification—or of an ultimate division. The midpoint of stanza 3, and thus of the entire poem, is of course lines 35–36. The two halves of the poem are bridged by this pair of lines, whose subject is the effect Beatrice has on those cor villani who gaze on her for more than an instant. On the human beings whom the poem is counting as lowest (apart from the damned), Beatrice's effect is a final discrimination, reached after the partial death of line 34. Either they become noble (and therefore begin the ascent of return to the Creator) or they suffer the division of body and soul. And the stanza goes on, always in ascending order within II.B.1.b.ii, to those already worthy; they become even more so, first temporarily, then permanently. The last line of the stanza means, of course, that anyone who has spoken with Beatrice is assured of salvation (just as, one presumes, those cor villani who are not converted to nobility in line 36 die both the first death of the body and the second death of the soul—damnation—which would refer back to the ending of the previous stanza).
At the very end of the intento trattato—at the end of stanza 4, in the particularized praise of Beatrice's body—we descend, according to the divisione, from eyes to mouth. This is a puzzling passage, for it really does not seem possible, without the gloss, to take the last three lines of the stanza as referring to the mouth,[27] and it is striking that this is the only second subpart in the whole division of part II for which Dante does not provide the incipit. In any case, here at the end of the body of the poem we have, according to the gloss, the collocation of beginning (eyes) and end (mouth), the latter identified with Beatrice's greeting. The love her eyes awaken constitutes the turning of the soul toward the
goal: saluto/salute (cf. lines 41–42). Alpha and Omega: at the furthest point of his division of the poem, Dante again refers to the entire circle of procession and return.
The end of love has been referred to in the first part of the stanza, though in a larger sense:
Poi la reguarda e fra se stesso giura
che Dio ne 'ntenda di far cosa nova.
God's purpose, the end of his creation of Beatrice, then, is some miracle, some novo, naturally involving the return to him of some portion of his creation.[28] The term intendere is an important one in the entire context of chapter 19. It has a considerable range of meanings, from perceive to understand to mean to intend (referring to purpose). Here it clearly refers to God's purpose. When used of God in stanza 2, however, its meaning is less clear cut: "che parla Dio, e di madonna intende" (23), which has as its most obvious meaning "God speaks, referring to Beatrice"; in the light of the parallel construction in line 53, the term here implies that God has a purpose for Beatrice, an idea that is of course clear from the rest of what he says. We shall return to the related terms intento and intendimento, used both of the poet and of the poem, below.[29]
Now the function claimed for Beatrice in "Donne ch'avete" (and in the Vita nuova as a whole) derives from the Christian Neoplatonic conception of man as the midpoint of creation, the summing up of the rest of creation, and at the midpoint between heaven and earth, partaking of both and for that reason uniquely capable of mediating between them, of reconciling them.[30] The rest of creation was created to serve man and suffered in his fall; its salvation depended on that of man. Man's fall necessitated the further mediation between the divine and the human, effected by Christ, who was thought of as the only perfect realization of the mediating function of mankind as well. Christ's sacrificial death is matched in importance by the metaphysical reunification he was thought to carry out.[31]
Charles Singleton established that the Vita nuova as a whole is governed by the analogy between Beatrice and Christ. His analysis (1949 esp. 18–24) dwelled particularly on the parallels established in chapter 23 (at the center of the book) between Dante's dream of Beatrice's death and the Gospel accounts of Christ's death. The idea of Beatrice's mediating the return of souls-—in chiave neo-platonica, as we have tracked it
in "Donne ch'avete"—is of course inseparable from the analogy drawn between her death and Christ's. Her death is referred to repeatedly in "Donne ch'avete": implicitly in the desire of the blessed for her return and in the prediction of Dante's losing her, explicitly in the term cosa mortale.[32] And in the central stanza of the poem, literal death is mentioned three times: "Madonna è disiata in sommo cielo" refers to Beatrice's death, "diverria nobil cosa o si morria" to the death of the ignoble, and "non pò mal finir chi l'ha parlato" to that of the ennobled. In its symmetrical arrangement with death at the center, "Donne ch'avete" answers to the overall pattern of the Vita nuova. Furthermore, in the order Beatrice-ignoble-noble we observe the pattern of descent and return that dominates the entire poem.
We just discussed the use of the term intendere of God. The same term is used of the reader's understanding of the poem, and closely related terms, intento and intendimento, refer to the subject and meaning of the poem. As we saw, the term as applied to God refers both to purpose and to reference. It is clear that the intendimento of the poem is an analog of God's intention. Translating into terms appropriate to poems, we may say that for Dante poems have meaning because they are made to an end, a purpose. How does "Donne ch'avete" define its own purpose?
According to both the poem and the divisione, the poem is the fruit of the poet's pensare. It is the child ( figliuola ) of the poet's thought, and we may again look to the center of the poem to note the effect the sight of Beatrice has specifically on thought: for the unworthy, the effect is a negative one—"onne 10r pensiero agghiaccia e pere"; for the worthy, it is the opposite of freezing—being set afire, "spirti d'amore inflammati" reach the heart. According to stanza 1, this fire is in the mind: he writes, "per isfogar la mente." Now the poem is addressed to "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore," and the prominence of the term intelletto in the first line is repeated in the first line of the next stanza: "Angelo clama in divino intelletto." This is an emphatic collocation. The status of intellect as such is at stake in the poem, as is its relation to love. It is worth noting that the first line, in addition to its usual gloss "ladies who have understanding of love," means also "ladies who have understanding from Love," in whom Love has awakened intellect. Obviously, there is a close relation among the terms intendere, intelletto, and intelligenza—for the grasping of the grand pattern of the procession of the world from God
and its return to him, and of Beatrice's part in it, is the work of the intellect, of the intellect fired by love:
Oltre la spera che più larga gira
passa 'l sospiro ch'esce del mio core;
intelligenza nova, che l'Amore
piangendo mette in lui, pur su lo tira.
(41.1–4)
"Donne ch'avete," then, is a reflection back to Beatrice of the radiance, the divine fire, that has emanated from her, and this pattern of procession and return is an analog of the procession and return of Beatrice's own atto described in stanza 2. As Beatrice's radiance is a reflection of God's radiance and ultimately returns to him (both directly and reflected from those whom she affects), so the poem (the atto that proceeds from the poet) is a reflection of Beatrice's light and returns to her by way of the intermediaries it will find. This is the subject of the commiato:
"Insegnatemi gir, ch'io son mandata
a quella di cui laude so adornata" . . .
non restare ove sia gente villana:
ingegnati, se puoi, d'esser palese
solo con donne o con omo cortese,
che ti merranno là per via tostana . . .
Dante's poem will also return to God. In this way the final stanza is a coherent fulfillment of the circular pattern of the rest of the poem.
It needs to be emphasized that the discovery in "Donne ch'avete" of a structure based on the principles of procession and return is not the imposition of some arbitrary pattern. The questions we have taken to the first parts were determined by the method followed by Dante himself in his division of the second parts. Furthermore, the consistency in the first parts (as, following Dante, we have subdivided them) of the ascent from the first to the second subdivision (as opposed to descent from the first part to the second part in Dante's division) is impressive, much too great to be the result of anything but conscious planning. We believe we have clearly established that the relation between the poem and the divisione is extremely close, that the divisione is no merely adventitious addition. That the Vita nuova reflects some of the major philosophical ideas in the Consolatio is, furthermore, no more than Dante suggests in Convivio 2.12, and it would be only natural to expect him to have responded intensely to—and with an effort to emulate—
Boethius's poems. It is well known that "O qui perpetua" remained a key text for him.[33]
And the points of analogy between "Donne ch'avete" and Boethius's "O qui perpetua" are numerous. Both poems have as their subject the circle of procession and return, and both have a structure closely based on this pattern. Within the intento trattato of "Donne ch'avete" we begin in heaven and rise to God, as in Boethius's poem we begin with God. The theoria of each poem then descends into the created universe, but while Boethius's imitation of the ascent proceeds from the elements up through soul and intellect, Dante follows a descending order but at each degree enacts in some way the phase of return (in this, particularly, seeming to reveal the influence of the Greek fathers). Both poems involve two types of return, Boethius's more obviously than Dante's: the active return of souls to God and the fact that the stability of the world is itself a result of its "rest in motion"; but while Boethius focuses on the World-Soul, Dante uses the example of Beatrice's radiance. Both poems juxtapose ends and beginnings (though this is trner of Dante's comment on Beatrice's eyes and mouth in the divisione than of the poem itself);[34] both poems stress the divine intellect (in Boethius, explicitly the repository of the forms of things); and both have as a fundamental theme the ascent of the intellect toward a vision of the relation of the cosmos to its maker, an ascent motivated by intense yearning.
Dante's division of part II always into two parts obscures the obvious symmetry of its structure (and that of the entire poem) by stanzas:
Stanza 1. Proem
Stanza 2. Heaven
Stanza 3. Soul
Stanza 4. Body
Stanza 5. Commiato
And here, in addition to the fact that the entire structure of the poem is built on the circle of procession and return, is a particularly conspicuous analogy with Boethius's poem—in both, the principle of soul occupies the central, mediating portion of the poem,[35] and the exactly central lines state a major turning and division: in "O qui perpetua," the division of the World-Soul into the two motions of the Same and the Other; in Dante's poem, the effect of Beatrice's virtues in discriminating worthy and unworthy and in converting souls. In both poems, soul
is the middle principle of three levels of creation, between intellect (the angels) and body. Appropriately to Dante's more explicitly Christian approach to the theme of mediation, the principle of soul at the midpoint of "Donne ch'avete" (Beatrice's soul, not the World-Soul) includes the principles of both life and death—explicitly, the death of the ignoble, but associated through its central position in the poem with the death that holds the center of the Vita nuova as a whole.[36]
We believe it is plausible that Dante's adaptation of the pattern of processio/ reditus must have been based on direct knowledge of Neoplatonic texts in addition to Boethius (though exactly which it is difficult to determine). He had certainly grasped some fundamental notions, such as the identity between logical/grammatical and metaphysical categories characteristic of Neoplatonism. In the Vita nuova, what Dante seems to have taken from his Neoplatonic readings is focused on the procession and return of God's radiance in relation to souls and on the nature of logic—aspects, in other words, that could be most readily assimilated to the fundamental Christological patterns of the book—rather than on the more properly metaphysical cycle of procession and return in the cosmos itself (though he clearly alludes to the latter by using the technical term procedere in his divisione of "Donne ch'avete"). Although he uses "O qui perpetua" as a partial model for "Donne ch'avete," his canzone—like the Vita nuova as a whole—avoids the cosmological as such. Later, Dante was to evolve a synthesis of Neoplatonic emanationism and Christian creationism parallel in certain respects to the eclecticism of Boethius's own Christian philosophy. In this regard we can see in this first experiment a continuity with some later tendencies, especially that of eschewing the notion of the World-Soul.[37]
Several other questions arise at this point. The first concerns the relation between the poem and its divisione, and is closely related to the question of when "Donne ch'avete" was composed. Was the divisione written at the time of the first collection of poems into a book, as presumably most of the prose of the Vita nuova was? If so, was the poem revised then so as to fit it more closely to the divisione? Or is it more reasonable to believe that both the poem and the divisione were revised sometime later? Certain passages in the Vita nuova, of course, are most easily explained on the hypothesis of a later revision, such as the concluding promise to write of Beatrice "what has never been said of any woman," as well as lines 42–43 of "Donne ch'avete." It might seem that
the Neoplatonic ideas in "Donne ch'avete" and its divisione, too, could only be the result of later revision.
This notion, however, is held in little favor today, largely because no sign of a later revision appears in the manuscript tradition.[38] We believe the most reasonable view to be that "Donne ch'avete" and its divisione, more or less as we have them, were integral to the first version of the Vita nuova. There are several grounds for this view, in addition to the argument from the manuscript tradition. One is the integral relation of the structure of "Donne ch'avete" to that of the Vita nuova as a whole.[39] Another is the fact that in the period immediately following the Vita nuova Dante avoided in his poetry the Neoplatonic pattern of procession and return, which suggests that the experiment of "Donne ch'avete" (and that of the rest of the book, which really needs to be examined in greater depth along the lines of this discussion) was confined to the first period of composition of the Vita nuova and was felt by Dante, during the more intensive philosophical studies reflected in the Convivio, to be insufficiently grounded. In particular, he may well have seen that the thorny issue of emanationism required further study and reflection. This would help explain the passage in Book 2 of the Convivio with which we opened this chapter.[40]
The evidence we have presented here is also relevant to the question of when Dante began thinking of a poem along the lines of the Commedia. For that work is dominated by the pattern of return, and the Paradiso becomes increasingly Neoplatonic as Dante approaches the source of all procession; indeed, the Commedia is coherent with the poetic procedures of "Donne ch'avete" as well as of the petrose, as we try to show in Chapter 6. Although it would not make much sense to suppose that Dante already had the Commedia specifically in mind when he wrote "Donne ch'avete," his demonstrated debt to Boethius in that poem and the intensity of his experimental grounding of the structure of a poem in a philosophical concept make it very likely that he had already begun to meditate on the possibilities of the idea of return as the basis of a long poem. This is to our minds the simplest and likeliest explanation of the conclusion of the Vita nuova and, perhaps, of lines 42–43 of "Donne ch'avete."
In any case, "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore" is an extremely ambitious poem which Dante had every right to consider a major turning point in his development, as chapters 18 and 19 assert it to be. It is en-
tirely characteristic of the dialectic of the Vita nuova, furthermore, that the theme of praise, represented in chapter 18 as adopted almost in aporia, turns out to involve the lover in larger and larger issues. The poem may be a "giovane soave e piana," but she is a "figliuola d'amore," a daughter of the cosmic principle of love: her youthful beauty masks a great intellectual toughness and daring.
2—
The Solstice and the Human Body:
"Io son venuto al punto de la rota"
Although there is no sure indication of the order in which the rime petrose were written, it seems likely that "Io son venuto al punto de la rota" was the first, since it sets forth the situation and terms that govern the rest of them; but it may of course have been written later.[1] "Io son venuto" is perhaps the most immediately impressive of the petrose with its grandiose description of winter and its expression of the speaker's passionate opposition to the cold. It places the entire series of the petrose in relation with a well-known set of topics that goes back at least as far as Virgil's description of the peace of night and the turmoil of the despairing Dido—the tension between the impassioned lover and the rest of nature.[2] Of all the petrose, "Io son venuto" offers the fullest explicit statement of a central theme of the entire group: the relation of the lover's experience to the cosmos as a whole.
It has always been recognized that "Io son venuto" is an extraordinary poem, and some of its peculiarities have been identified. It has been observed that there is a parallelism among the stanzas (Dante 1949 149–150), that from stanza to stanza there is a descent along the ladder of creation (Renucci 1958 73; see Boyde 1971 296–298). "Io son venuto" is clearly unique in the insistence with which the parallels are carried out; in other cases the comparison with nature either occupies only part of the poem (as in Arnaut's experiments) or else is not developed systematically (as in "De ramis cadunt folia" and Raimbaut). The grandeur and vividness of Dante's descriptions of winter have elicited much admiration, and Fenzi in particular has demonstrated some of the complexity of the speaker's relation to the season, which is not simply a matter of opposition.[3] But the critical tradition has been essentially oblivious to two major aspects of the poem: (1) the presence of a detailed parallelism between the cosmos and the human body and (2) the relation of the astronomical opening to the poetics of the poem, and
thus to its themes at levels deeper than the immediately apparent. These aspects of the poem are very closely related, as we shall see.
Our analysis of "Io son venuto" will have four parts. First we examine the description of winter in the poem, with its highly elaborate parallelisms and symmetries, and, in a preliminary way, the situation of the speaker in relation to the winter. This will lead to a detailed discussion of the powerful opening of the poem, in which we find the striking suggestion that the astronomical position described is significantly related to the configuration of the planets at Dante's birth. We will thus be led to the third major focus of this chapter, the significance of the theme of birth, which is introduced with such apparent casualness in the third line of the poem and which, we shall argue, refers to the birth of Dante's new poetics. In the last section, we shall return to our reading of the poem, with special emphasis on the theme of the human body.
1
As we suggested in the Introduction, in the petrose Dante conceived of the stanza form of the canzone as imitating the motion of the heavens. "Io son venuto al punto de la rota" seems to be the first poem in which he endeavored to embody that principle fully. The study of Book 3 of Seneca's Natural Questions (see Durling 1975) seems to have played a particularly important role in this experiment. The most important points of connection are (1) the acting out of cyclic recurrences, patterned especially on the motion of the heavens, as a principle of literary structure; (2) the idea that the life cycle of the speaker is an instance of the cyclicality governing the cosmos; (3) the prominence given the concept of the inversion of an astrological position; and (4) the parallel between the human body and the earth, extended by Dante to the rest of the cosmos. The first of these principles of course underlies all of the petrose; so also, to a certain extent, do the others, but they are most explicit in "Io son venuto."
We begin with the Senecan theme of the cosmic cycles and with Renucci's observation (1958 73) that the successive stanzas of the poem describe winter in the different realms of nature, mentioned in descending order: the heavens; the atmosphere; birds and animals; plants; earth and water. Thus the poem represents—includes—the cosmos as a whole. The stanzas are rigorously parallel. Each consists of three groups of three lines each (we will call them a, b, c ) devoted to the description
of winter, and a fourth group of four lines (we will call it d ) devoted to the state of the lover; the four parts are parallel from stanza to stanza metrically, syntactically, and thematically.[4] It is not merely that nine lines go to the description of winter; rather, each stanza describes or alludes to one or more cycles proper to the level of nature it describes. Thus (but not exhaustively!):
1 a. the annual cycle of the sun and the daily turning of the sky
b, c. the periods of Venus and Saturn
2 a, b, c. the generation of wind and precipitation
3 a. the seasonal migration of certain birds
b, c. the seasonal apathy of other birds and animals
4a. the seasonal deciduousness of plants
b. evergreens
c. the cycle of generation of plants (flowers)
5 a, b, c. the cyclical movement of waters
In each stanza, furthermore, there is a clearly discernible parallel pattern in the cycles themselves:
1a. Night rises; the sun sets.
b. Venus is veiled and remote.
c. Saturn is strong.
2a. The wind rises,
b. approaches and clouds the sky.
c. Rain and snow fall.
3 a. Migratory birds have flown away.
b. Nonmigratory birds are silent.
c. Other animals are apathetic.
4a. Deciduous foliage has fallen.
b. Evergreen foliage remains.
c. The flowers are dead.
5 a. Earth draws up waters.
b. The road is flooded.
c. The ground freezes.
To take part a first, in 1a there is both a rising and a setting; thereafter rising predominates (except for 4a). In part b, the emphasis is on im-
mobility. In parts 1c and 5c the emphasis is on the increasing immobility of things, but in 2c, 3c, and 4c the motion is downward.
Thus, although Dante has avoided a monotonous identity of pattern, the description of winter in each stanza follows a similar pattern: (a) upward motion; (b) motionlessness or ineffectiveness of what is above; (c) descent. This pattern is that of a half-cycle, closely related to Dante's conception of the "arc of life," which Bruno Nardi showed to be parallel to the presence of the sun above the horizon and its nightly disappearance.[5] it can hardly escape notice that, just as the successive stanzas concern progressively lower realms of nature, so the high and low points of each stanza are lower and lower as we move through the poem. Starting with the heavens, our eye moves in a descending series of half-circles that implies a descending spiral. In view of the explicit theme of the poem, the explanation is not far to seek: the pattern of the parallel stanzas is an imitation of the gradually descending path of the sun as it nears the winter solstice; each day the sun rises a little later and a little farther to the south, crosses the meridian at noon a little lower in the sky, and sets a little earlier and, again, farther to the south.
The last stanza introduces one of the important "scientific" notions we discussed in the Introduction, the idea that when it has been frozen for a sufficiently long time, ice turns to crystal:
la terra fa un suol che par di smalto,
e l'acqua morta si converte in vetro
per la freddura che di fuor la serra . . .
Used of the landscape that surrounds the speaker, which we of course understand to be Italian, probably Florentine, these terms are hyperbolic or metaphorical, for crystal was supposed to be formed in the far north or perhaps in the Alps; but the reference to the doctrine is clear. Common to the passages on the formation of crystal and other stones is the idea that cold is a form of pressure exerted on things: a compound becomes stone when the cold has, as it were, squeezed out all the air (Seneca) or moisture (Albertus); Dante has "la freddura che di fuor la serra." In this context of ideas, the descending spiral of the sun, by which the cold increases, is like the turning of a great press, gradually increasing its enormous pressure to cause the compression and hardening of the waters in the last stanza.[6]
The descent through nature of the five stanzas of the poem thus involves something much more interesting than a static hierarchical rela-
tion or the mechanical following out of a topos. The gradual increase in pressure from stanza to stanza derives from a carefully controlled set of gradations. For instance, the descent through the successive realms of the cosmos, since it is a movement from the outer spheres toward the center, is a movement into ever greater enclosure: the heavens enclose the whole; the atmosphere encloses the earth; the birds live in the air but animals on the ground; and so on. Particularly in the first two stanzas, the idea of enclosure is given great prominence.
Now in describing the effect of winter in successively lower realms, the poem is imitating the pouring down into the sublunary of the influence of the heavenly bodies, especially, as we have seen, that of Capricorn, Saturn, and Mars. This is true both of the sequence of the five stanzas and of the structure of each stanza in itself; for in each stanza what we might call an upper part (a, b, and c ) concerns the heavens or the product of their influence, and a lower part (d ) concerns the lover on whom all these influences are impinging. This is not merely a thematic imitation, as we have seen: the daily rotation of the heavens, which brings the sun closer and closer to solstice as it moves along the ecliptic, is imitated in the repetitive cyclic structure of the upper part of each stanza.
One formal peculiarity of the stanzas is particularly interesting, the relation of the change in subject matter to the diesis, the change of "melody" of the stanza. Formally, the relation of part d, where the state of the lover is introduced, to the rest of the stanza is somewhat anomalous. In the terminology of the De vulgari eloquentia, parts a and b constitute the two pedes of the stanza, consisting of six hendecasyllables rhyming ABC.ABC; parts c and d are the sirma with concatenatio, rhyming CDEeDFF ; all but one line are hendecasyllables (line 10 is a settenario). The anomaly consists in the fact that although the diesis—the major formal division of the stanza—occurs after line 6, it is only in part d, at line 10, that the topic of the speaker's opposition to the rest of nature, which is the major shift in subject matter, is brought in. In other words, there is a dissonance between the formal and the logical organization of the stanza, since one would expect the topic to change at the beginning of the sirma. The winter encroaches, as it were, on the sirma, comes down into it.[7]
This invasion of the sirma by the winter is a formal correlative of the theme of the invasion of the poet's spirit. But part d is introduced by the one settenario in the stanza, and the shortness of that settenario,
along with the fact that it rhymes with the immediately preceding line, and especially the emphasis with which the speaker's solitary opposition to the cold is introduced, give the turn to part d very much the feeling of the diesis, the major turn, of a stanza. The speaker achieves, as it were, only a delayed diesis, or a subdiesis; yet it is a powerful one.[8]
As we said in the Introduction, Dante's new poetics involves a certain self-division. "Io son venuto" is a particularly clear case of this: in the first part of each stanza, in order to represent the forces that seem arrayed against him, the poet must identify himself with them, he must imitate them; and he does so, as one might say, icastically—that is, by means of visual representations—and, equally important, by enacting analogous motions and cycles. Then in each stanza the other pole of the lover's struggle with the season comes into focus.
At the solstice, all things may seem to come to frozen immobility in a way that mirrors the paired impasse between the lover and the lady. But the rigidity of winter is only temporary; further rotation of the heavenly wheel will eventually bring spring. As a matter of fact, as Dante knew, it is in Sagittarius and Capricorn that the sun seems to move fastest along the ecliptic.[9] By symbolically acting out the descent to solstice, the poem seeks to move the lady past the solstice of her rejection, to turn her toward springtime. "Io son venuto" represents the first half of a pattern of descent followed by ascent—katabasis followed by anabasis—that will be more fully explored in "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro."
One of the most important aspects of the poet's opposition to the season is of course his writing of the poem itself. Part d of the first four stanzas and of the congedo represents love as a burden that the lover cannot cast off despite the season:
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Insofar as "Io son venuto" is dominated by the idea of winter, it explores, of the two motions of the heavens (those of the Same and the Other), the effects specifically due to the motion of the Other. Each stanza brings not only the description of the effects of cold as such, but also explicit references to the annual cycle of the sun and the revolutions of the other planets. The motion of the Other is opposed by the motion of the Same, which carries the entire heavens with it and produces the diurnal cycle of day and night. The poem powerfully exploits the juxtaposition of these two principles. For instance, in stanza 1, sunset and the rising of stars are phenomena caused by the diurnal turning of the heavens (i.e., the motion of the Same); the presence of Gemini in the night sky and the positions of Venus and the sun in Capricorn and of Saturn on the Tropic result from the diverse motions of the Other. In stanza 3, the striking reference to the seven gelid stars' also refers to the diurnal motion of the Same.
Particularly interesting is the third stanza, where the independence of the poet's love from the turning of time is contrasted with the silence of birds and animals:
Fuggito è ogne augel che 'l caldo segue
del paese d'Europa, che non perde
le sette stelle gelide unquemai . . .
(27–29)
The migration of birds is contrasted with the fixity of the northern stars, those of the Great Bear, which are never lost, never set, over Europe. Such lesser species as migrant birds may escape the cold, but not the lover: he is fixed. The sphere of the fixed stars, in its daily turning, is kept before us in this reminder that the northern stars (unlike the sun of stanza 1) never set. At the center of the poem, then, we are presented with the fixed axis of the cosmos, just as in the outermost stanzas we see (in stanza 1) the ecliptic and the Tropic and (in stanza 5) the center of the earth, the other extreme.
e li altri han posto a le lor voce triegue
per non sonarle infino al tempo verde
se ciò non fosse per cagion di guai;
e tutti li animali che son gai
di lor natura, son d'amor disciolti,
però che 'l freddo lor spiriti ammorta:
e 'l mio più d'amor porta . . .
(30–36)
The stanza is carefully gradated: from the (evasive) activity of migrant birds, to the silence of the remaining birds, to the extinguishing of the fiery spirit in the other animals. The terms apply, per antithesin, to the poet: the poet's love is not extinguished, his burden is increased; he does not flee but stays with the cold stars; there is no truce (triegua ) for him (cf. guerra in the next stanza). And—most important—he is not silent: that is, he is singing—writing the poem. Thus, the central stanza of the poem correlates love as a burden, the turning of the sky, and the poet's song—contrasted with the (absent) songs of the birds.
Closely following on "e 'l mio più d'amor porta" comes the parallel (it is implicit, but strongly operative nonetheless, and it, too, is based on troubadour tradition)[10] between the poet's song and the blossoming of the world in the springtime:
Passato hanno lor termine le fronde
che trasse fuor la virtù d'Arïete . . .
(40–41)
We have already discussed the correlation of the cycles of this stanza with the larger cycles of the speaker's life (and death). What concerns us here is the contrast/parallel between the birth of the leaves and flowers "che trasse fuor la virtù d'Arïete" and the poem itself; for it is in part the virtù di Capricorno (or of Saturn in Gemini) that is drawing forth the new poetry. The explicit parallel in this stanza is between the foliage and the spina, the thorn of love; equally important is the implicit parallel between the foliage and the poem: the poet is now bringing forth, in this winter, more than the perhaps facile poetics of spring formerly allowed him to do.
The writing of the poem itself, then, is one of the most important forms of the speaker's opposition to the universal cold. Both as lover and as poet he is the same in winter as in the other seasons. As Plato had said, and as the tradition agreed, the principle of identity is superior to
the principle of diversity, is in fact its source. The emphasis on the sameness of the speaker's love identifies him with the superior principle, and stanzas 3 and 4 explicitly refer to the speaker's superiority to time—
ché li dolzi pensier' non mi son tolti
né mi son dati per volta di tempo
(37–38)
and to the possibility of immortality—
per ch'io son fermo di portarla sempre
ch'io sarò in vita, s'io vivesse sempre.
(51–52)
In "Io son venuto," then, the poet's effort to confront the complexities of his nature and to represent them in their cosmic context is a struggle to achieve identification with the Same. Of course, the problem is not simple, for to the extent that the speaker's love is an expression of the influence of Saturn and other planets, it results from the motion of the Other, not that of the Same. Furthermore, passion and sexual desire almost by definition resist the higher principle of identity—rationality.[11] The issue is whether or not a synthesis is possible. But now we must examine the astrology of the poem.
2
The opening of "Io son venuto al punto de la rota" is well known as the first astronomical description in Dante's poetry:
Io son venuto al punto de la rota
che l'orizzonte, quando il sol si corca,
ci partorisce il geminato cielo,
e la stella d'amor ci sta remota
per Io raggio lucente che la 'nforca
sì di traverso che le si fa velo;
e quel pianeta che conforta il gelo
si mostra tutto a noi per lo grand'arco
nel qual ciascun di sette fa poco ombra.
(1–9)
I have come to the point of the wheel where the
horizon gives birth at sunset to the twinned heaven,
and the star of love is kept from us by the sun's ray that
straddles her so transversely that she is veiled;
and that planet that strengthens the frost shows itself
to us entirely, along the great arc where each of the
seven casts little shadow . . .
Since astronomical positions involving three or more planets do not repeat themselves more than once every few hundred years, students of Dante realized early in this century that this description might permit the poem to be dated.[12] Clearly the first three lines mean that when the sun sets, the sign (or constellation) of Gemini rises or becomes visible in the eastern sky. This places the date somewhere near the winter solstice, when the sun enters Capricorn (in Dante's time this occurred around December 14). Venus is said to be remote from us because of being "forked" or "straddled" by the rays of the sun, which must refer to a conjunction of Venus and the sun. One might suppose that the joining of the rays of Venus and the sun would strengthen the star of love, but the power of the sun is determined by the sign of the zodiac it is passing through, and it is midwinter. (Once the sun has set, of course, Venus, too, is below the horizon and so "remota" for this reason, too.)[13]
The "planet that strengthens the frost" is almost certainly Saturn. Whether the moon or Saturn,[14] it would have to be opposite the sun, or nearly so, in order to "show itself entirely to us along the great arc where each of the seven makes little shadow." The "great arc" must be the Tropic of Cancer, for in the winter night sky a planet at or near the Tropic of Cancer is at greatest visibility, rising early in the evening and crossing the meridian at or near its greatest possible angle above the horizon (at the latitude of Florence, a planet on the Tropic crosses the meridian 691/2 degrees above the horizon).[15] Saturn is much more likely than the moon for several reasons. Most important, Dante is surely describing a particularly hard winter with a long period of cold weather, not merely a brief cold spell depending on a phase of the moon. Further, the moon makes the complete circle of the heavens every month, while Saturn, the slowest of the planets, takes almost thirty years to complete its circle around the zodiac, and its positions are therefore much more unusual. The full context of the poem, as we shall see, is full of references to Saturn.
We have, then, Venus and the sun in conjunction in or near Capricorn, and Saturn somewhere near the Tropic of Cancer. The precision of this description is indeed sufficient to date it: only once in Dante's lifetime did such a configuration occur—in December 1296. The exact date of the conjunction of Venus and the sun was December 24. So
much is generally agreed. Actually, the description implies a complete horoscope, and it is surprising that no one seems to have considered the possibility that Dante might have known and had in mind the positions of the other planets. And what exactly was the position of Saturn? Figure 2 shows the positions of all the planets on December 24, 1296, as seen from Florence an hour after sunset.[16]
Several aspects of this configuration strike one immediately. First is the prominence held by Mars along with Saturn. Both in the eastern sky
Fig. 2.
Florence, December 24, 1296, 5:30 P.M.
at sunset, they will dominate the sky all night long. The very fact that Mars is in Taurus, a house of Venus, would signify to the astrologically minded a love beset by conflict.[17] Mars in Taurus is closely related to the basic conception of the entire series of the petrose; once alerted by the actual astronomical position, we may notice many references to the god of war. Furthermore, both Saturn and Mars are retrograde, that is, they seem to be moving backward on the ecliptic (toward the west rather than the east),[18] a motion that was thought to weaken the influence of beneficent planets but to be particularly threatening in the case of the malefic Mars and Saturn. One notes, furthermore, that except for Mars and Saturn all the planets, not only the sun and Venus (explicitly placed by the poem), are below the horizon, and their positive influence is therefore seriously weakened.[19] The night belongs entirely to Mars and Saturn. Finally, Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus are closely grouped around the sun, a configuration that in another sign would probably be thought extremely beneficent.
As readers versed in astrology would recognize, stanzas 2–5 of "Io son venuto" refer to events that are not only characteristic of winter but were thought to be due to the influence of Saturn, the father and destroyer of all earthly beings, who presides over the sowing of crops and the reproduction of animals (including man) in his benign phase and determines their senescence and death in his harmful one. As the outermost planet, Saturn sets the limits of all things (cf. termine, line 40). The coldest and slowest of the planets, Saturn is associated with earth, water, and lead; he governs rain (stanza 2) and floods (stanza 5) and is particularly likely to cause both when on the cusp between two signs—as in December 1296. It is this planet's influence that causes human beings to be lustful.[20]
The poem is filled with references to the lore of Saturn's influence on both mind and body. The themes—basic to the poem—of the paradoxical combination in the lover of cold and fire and of his hardness and tenacity of mind are traditionally associated with Saturn.[21] The references to the earth, to flood, to water and air trapped under ground, derive from the lore of melancholic sexuality and the influence of Saturn, for the slow steadiness of Saturn was supposed to influence the strong vital spirits of the melancholic, who were thought to be particularly subject to lust because of the large amount of air combined with blood in their sperm. The related association of orgasm with the eruption of underground waters mixed with vapors, which we find in stanza 5, derives from Aristotelian physiology.[22]
The position of Saturn in Figure 2 requires further comment. It is indeed near the Tropic of Cancer; it has just entered Gemini, Dante's natal sign, on the very day of the conjunction of Venus and the sun. To appreciate how unusual and how meaningful this event may have seemed to Dante, one must consider that the slowness of Saturn means that it lingers for a long time in each sign of the zodiac, but also that once it has left a sign it does not return for almost thirty years. The presence of Saturn in Dante's natal sign was no doubt of great significance in his eyes, and the horoscope of December 24, 1296, on this ground alone, would seem to have a special relation to his natal horoscope. But before turning in this direction, we need to substantiate more fully our claim that Dante's natal horoscope is relevant to "Io son venuto."
First of all, as we have seen, the poem refers directly both to the idea of birth and to what we know Dante claimed was his natal sign, Gemini. Critics seem not to have paid much attention to the odd fact that, although there is no question that the "wheel" of the first line is, among other things, the zodiac, Dante says that he, rather than the sun, has reached the point of the wheel:
Io son venuto al punto de la rota
che l'orizzonte, quando il sol si corca,
ci partorisce il geminato cielo
There is an implicit reference to the traditional notion of the wheel of Fortune, whose iconography portrayed individuals carried on the wheel as if fixed to it,[23] traditionally associated with the turning of the heavens and thus with time. If we take the wheel as referring to the heavens themselves (one of its main references), at which point on the wheel are we to place the speaker? Perhaps near the sun—an important suggestion of the lines, however, is that the horizon is giving birth not only to Gemini, but also in some sense to Dante himself.
It may also seem odd that Dante identifies the season by the sign in or near which night, not the sun, is rising.[24] This is actually one of the keys to the poem as a whole: the reference is inverted. Inversion is a major idea governing the entire poem, which begins with allusion to birth and ends with allusion to death. At another level, the poem ends with the mention of orgasm, which initiates gestation, and in a line that refers to Dante's natal sign, begins with birth, which ends gestation. In embodying cold instead of the warmth that is natural to her youth, the lady is herself one of the most important instances of inversion. But the most explicit reference to the idea appears in the congedo, where the
astrological situation of the winter is imagined as reversed: in the springtime, instead of cold, warmth rains down from all the heavens: but that is the season of Dante's birth.
In the analogy between the year and a human life, the winter solstice would correspond to death. If in the macrocosm Saturn, Mars, and Capricorn cause an unusually severe winter with heavy flooding, for the microcosm of the speaker they might produce a cataclysm. Thus the solstitial inversion, the speaker's resistance to the season, the unnaturalness of a lady stony in youth, the analogy of the year and the life cycle—these themes are parallel to the idea of death as an inversion of birth. Now Saturn, the planet that sets the limits for all things, including the moment of their death, is, as Manilius points out, the planet governing inversions: his locus is the imum coeli because he has been cast down from his former eminence.[25] And of course the feast of Saturn, the Saturnalia, took place just before the winter solstice, as Dante could have known from Macrobius.[26] All the systems of inversion in "Io son venuto," then, including the insistent syntactic inversion, require us to see the astrological situation it describes as an inversion of the situation at Dante's birth.
In considering what idea Dante may have had of his natal horoscope there is naturally a large element of uncertainty. In Paradiso 22, in a passage we will consider in the next section, he says that he was born with the sun in Gemini; according to Boccaccio's testimony, which there is no real reason to doubt, Dante told a Ravenna friend shortly before his death that he had been born in the month of May.[27] It is reasonable to conclude that Dante's birthday fell—or that he supposed (or even pretended) that it fell—between May 14, 1265 (when the sun entered Gemini), and the end of the month.[28] But there is no way of determining more closely on what day or at what time of day he was born.[29] This means that we cannot know the position of the moon or the ascendant, both of which were considered of major significance in any horoscope. We do not know whether Dante knew the actual positions of the planets at his birth (though the combined evidence, we believe, strongly suggests that he did: it was common for well-to-do families to have horoscopes cast for the newborn; or Dante may have cast his own horoscope retrospectively, using such an almanac as the one by Prophatius, which he probably used for the Commedia ).[30]
It might seem otiose to consider the question, except for one further important fact: leaving the moon out of consideration, during the time when the sun was passing through Gemini in May 1265, the positions of
the other planets changed very little because the faster-moving planets, Mercury and Venus, were alternating between direct and retrograde motion (Mercury, for instance, remained for the entire period within the limits of 70.15 and 63.38 degrees longitude).[31] Thus, although the ascendant, and therefore the positions of the planets in the various hour-houses of Dante's natal horoscope, cannot be known, much else can be.
If the theme of astronomical inversion in "Io son venuto" invites us to consider whether December 1296 is an inversion of the position of Dante's natal horoscope, we already know the most conspicuous element of that inversion, the position of the sun: in December 1296, near winter solstice; in May 1265, something more than half a sign away from summer solstice (this is the "altro / dolce tempo novello," when love rains down from all the heavens). The inversion would be more complete if Dante's horoscope were cast for dawn or shortly after (as opposed to sunset in "Io son venuto"). Are there other elements of inversion? We give two charts for the latter part of May, as seen from Florence an hour after sunrise (the hour is chosen for its symmetry with that in "Io son venuto"). The choice of dates is not entirely arbitrary: Dante arrives in Gemini in Paradiso 22; he leaves it in Paradiso 27. We find it plausible that the numbers are significant; in other words, we suspect that Dante's birthday falls on May 22 or 27, or else in between. Figure 3 gives positions for May 22, 1265; Figure 4 for May 27, 1265. We incline toward May 27 as the date Dante knew or supposed to be his birthday,[32] but in any case both charts are offered as examples only.
What is most striking about the configuration in both charts (and this aspect changed virtually not at all during the entire period from May 14 to June 14) is that Saturn is in Gemini, not far from its position in December 1296; but in 1265 it is close to conjunction with the sun, whereas in 1296 it is in opposition to it. It must be stressed that the positions of Saturn recur at large intervals: during Dante's entire lifetime Saturn was in Gemini during only two periods, 1265–67 and 1294–96,[33] a fact that is surely most significant for the interpretation of "Io son venuto." On May 27, 1265 (Figure 4), not only is Saturn close to conjunction with the sun, but it is also in conjunction with Mercury (in Gemini, the night house of Mercury) and in orbal conjunction with Jupiter in Taurus (and Jupiter is close to orbal conjunction with the 1266 position of Venus, if Dante made his Prophatius mistake here), whereas in December 1296 the sun is in a house of Saturn and in
Fig. 3.
Florence, May 22, 1265, 6:15 A.M.
Fig. 4.
Florence, May 27, 1265, 6:00 A.M.
conjunction with Venus, Mercury, and Jupiter, and all four are in opposition to Saturn. In both 1265 charts, the possible harmful influence of Saturn is strongly counteracted by the conjunction (or near conjunction) with a whole group of beneficent planets in strong phases, but in 1296 the beneficent planets are canceled out and the harmful ones unusually strengthened. In the relation between December 1296 and May 1265, then, we find a whole system of astrological inversion involving Saturn, the very planet of inversion;[34] the inversion is especially pronounced if May 27 is taken as the contrast, but it is still very much in evidence on May 22, or indeed on any Gemini chart for 1265.[35] Seen in relation to Dante's natal horoscope, "Io son venuto" represents something much more serious than merely an unusually severe winter. Dante would have been on very firm ground in interpreting December 1296 as extremely threatening for a Gemini of 1265.[36]
The poet's war with the stars is a very real one, then, and we begin to have some insight into the prominence of Mars in the horoscope. It is particularly striking to find that Mars was retrograde[37] in December 1296; the fact provides a major confirmation of the traditional dating of the poem, because the climactic expression of the poet's determination, in stanza 5, unmistakably refers to it: "e io de la mia guerra / non son tomato un passo a retro."[38] There could hardly be a more emphatic way of differentiating the poet from the astrological influences that threaten him: though the very planet of war may turn back—retrograde—with whatever defeat or weakening that event may seem to promise, the lover will not do so. His love does not derive from the turnings of time and will not be defeated by them.
But other important aspects of Dante's natal horoscope have a close relation with the horoscope of December, especially the prominence of both the planet Mercury and his "house," the sign Gemini. Dante probably considered Mercury the "lord" of his horoscope, that is, the most dominant influence, sufficiently so for him to consider himself a "child" of the planet (see Hauber 1916). Since we do not know what he thought his ascendant to be or the position of his moon, we cannot be completely sure,[39] but he clearly ascribed major importance to the influence of Gemini, both in this poem and in Paradiso 22.[40]
Gemini is one of the two houses of Mercury, in which the planet was said to "rejoice"—the other being Virgo.[41] These two signs have the distinction of being the only ones that represent human beings rather than animals or objects. This fact was traditionally interpreted to mean
that the natives of these two signs are particularly suited for the intellectual professions,[42] and the children of Mercury were well known as scholars, writers, and interpreters.[43] As Benvenuto da Imola says, Gemini "facit homines literatos et ingeniosos" ("makes people learned and clever"—cited by Sapegno ad Paradiso 22).
The Twins of Gemini were variously identified in antiquity.[44] In the most common view they are the mythical Castor and Pollux, sons of Leda, the former by Leda's mortal husband, Tyndareus, the latter by Jupiter. As Dante knew, Castor and Pollux were among the deities most popular in ancient Rome and had a close relation to Mars, the patron of Rome's founding; they were thought to appear in battle to help Rome, and their myth is of course inherently warlike.[45] Dante would have found references to them in the works of countless writers.[46] For him, the myth is connected with such major concerns, both moral and poetic, as the duality of human nature, the need for inner struggle, and the problematic of interpretation. In terms of the Commedia, of course, a pair of twins, one of whom gives up part of his immortality to save his mortal brother, is obviously the antitype of the fratricidal twins of the Earthly City (Romulus and Remus, Eteocles and Polynices),[47] children of the baleful influence of Mars.[48]
The astrological importance of Gemini, as well as the importance of Mercury as the patron of learning and literary creation, can be seen in a favorite medieval schoolbook, Martianus Capella's De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae, which relates that the seven liberal arts were Mercury's wedding gift to his bride Philologia ("love of learning").[49] The De nuptiis claims a continuity among the arts of language, the knowledge of the cosmos, and the Neoplatonic ascent to the ultimate Truth, a continuity expressed in two allegorical journeys (Mercury's and his bride's) from the world of sense—represented with elaborate cosmological symbolism—to the beyond. Martianus's sprightly book had enormous influence; it furnished the basic outline of the trivium and quadrivium in the schools of the Middle Ages and inspired such allegorical works as Bernard Silvester's Cosmographia and Alain of Lille's De planctu Naturae and Anticlaudianus. Although the astrological as such is veiled in the De nuptiis, it is quite important,[50] and one striking passage clearly alludes to the conjunction of the sun and Mercury in Gemini at dawn (i.e., at the ascendant) in such a way as to suggest a horoscope.[51] The particular appropriateness of Gemini is explained by Bernard Silvester, in his commentary on the De nuptiis,[52] on the basis of an interpretation of the
myth of Castor and Pollux that treats them as representing body and spirit—parallel, in Bernard's view, to the relation between language (Philologia, originally mortal) and reason (Mercury)—thus an instance of the union of opposites in which the cosmic harmony consists.[53] Commenting on a line from the opening hymn to Hymen, "complexuque sacro dissona nexa foves," he writes:
nexa, id est iuncta, complexu, proportione, sacro quia, ad tempus, divinum mortali ut, in eternum, mortale iungatur divino; quod tibi illud de Castore et Polluce apte figurat. Pollux enim "perditio," Castor vero "extremum malum" interpretatur. "Perditio" dicitur spiritus humanus quia sicut semina terre mandata primo moriuntur ut post modum vivant, sic anima corpori iuncta. Corpus autem "extremum malum" dicitur quia, ut super Virgilium diximus, partientibus anime quod est nil inferius humano corpore occurrit. . . . Et Pollux quidem dicitur deus quia est spiritus substantia rationalis et immortalis, Castor mortalis quia corpus substantia hebes et dissolubilis. Deus mortalem mortem recipit ut suam deitatem ei conferat, quia spiritus ad tempus moritur ut corpus in eternum vivat.
(Wetherbee 1972 267–268; Westra 1986 69)
Joined by a sacred bond; that is, united by proportion; for divine is united with mortal in temporal life just as mortal is united with divine in eternity. This is aptly illustrated by the story of Pollux and Castor. For Pollux means "perdition" and Castor "utmost evil." The human spirit is called "perdition" because, just as seeds consigned to the earth first die that they may later come to life, so does the soul when united with the body. And the body is called "utmost evil" because, as I explained in glossing Virgil, those who have classified all existence have encountered nothing lower than body. . . . And Pollux is called a god because spirit is a rational and immortal substance, while Castor is mortal because body is a substance weak and subject to decay. The god undergoes mortal death so as to confer his deity on him; for spirit dies temporally that the body may live eternally.
(Wetherbee 1972 114–115; translation slightly altered)
In another part of his commentary, Bernard again treats the myth as an instance of the reconciliation of divergent principles, identifying Pollux as the contemplative life, Castor the active life (saved from the degradation of pleasure by the other's vision).[54] As we shall see, Dante's treatment of the Twins as a main symbol of human duality, both sides of which must be preserved, is interestingly close to Bernard's.[55]
In strictly astronomical terms, Dante would have found that Gemini
Fig. 5.
Montpellier, April 8, 1300, 6:15 A.M. ( See discussion on p. 364 n. 63. )
possessed a number of peculiarities. As he read in al-Fargani's epitome of Ptolemy's Almagest, of the fifteen brightest stars in the sky, no fewer than four are associated with (i.e., rise and set with) Gemini: Capella, Betelgeuse, Rigel, and, the brightest of all, Sirius.[56] As Martianus Capella, Macrobius, and Calcidius all point out, Gemini is the sign where the sun dwells longest (thirty-two days, as opposed to the average
thirty),[57] and it is the only sign in which there can ordinarily be two successive new moons (as Macrobius puts it, where the moon can be born twice).[58] Manilius observes that three zodiacal signs rise backwards or upside down: the successive signs Taurus, Gemini, and Cancer.[59] The Twins appear feet first above the horizon, a fact with a clear relation to the two major themes of "Io son venuto": inversion (of astrological influences, of negative into positive) and birth.
Another peculiarity of the constellation Gemini is that it lies in the portion of the zodiac that crosses the Milky Way. The Twins' feet, along with the horns of the Bull, extend into one of the most thickly populated parts of the galaxy. On the opposite side, Sagittarius and Scorpio mark the other crossing of the galaxy.[60] These, according to Martianus Capella's Astronomia (8.817), are two of the ten circles one must learn to distinguish in the sky, the others being the colures of the Equinoxes and Tropics; the parallels marking the Arctic, Antarctic, temperate, and tropical zones; and the equator. On a clear night Gemini is a magnificent spectacle, close to the Milky Way and accompanied by the bright stars of Taurus, Orion, and Canis Major. Thus the scene described in the first stanza of "Io son venuto" is one of extraordinary grandeur.
The prominence of Mercury and Gemini in Dante's natal horoscope, then, casts a different light on the prominence of Saturn. As the patron of science and meditation, Saturn can have an exceptionally strong positive influence.[61] The conjunction or near conjunction of Saturn and Mercury in the night house of Mercury (our example shows conjunction, but it is only a guess), of course, would be especially appropriate for a philosophical poet. But it is clear that "Io son venuto al punto de la rota" represents Dante's effort to identify himself with the positive side of Saturn's, Mars's, and Mercury's influence—favoring moral struggle, philosophy and science, and the creation of poetry—as against the dangerous negative side.[62] These aspects of his stars will enable him, he hopes, to confront and master what in both astrological and emotional terms is the most threatening situation of his lifetime, and to make it the occasion of growth and development.[63]
3
The full significance of the topos of birth in "Io son venuto" only emerges when it is viewed in connection with the Commedia, especially the Paradiso. Birth is one of its basic patterns (see below, pages 255–
258). "Io son venuto" is involved in the passage that tells us Dante considered himself a Gemini:
S'io torni mai, lettore, a quel divoto
triunfo per lo quale io piango spesso
le mie peccata e 'l petto mi percuoto,
tu non avresti in tanto tratto e messo
nel foco il dito, in quant'io vidi 'l segno
che segue il Tauro e fui dentro da esso.
O gloriose stelle, o lume pregno
di gran virtù, dal quale io riconosco
tutto, qual che si sia, il mio ingegno,
con voi nasceva e s'ascondeva vosco
quelli ch'è padre d'ogne mortal vita,
quand'io senti' di prima l'aere tosco;
e poi, quando mi fu grazia largita
d'entrar ne l'alta rota che vi gira,
la vostra region mi fu sortita.
A voi divotamente ora sospira
l'anima mia, per acquistar virtute
al passo forte che a sé la tira.
( Paradiso 22.106–123; emphasis added)
In his ascent through the heavenly spheres, Dante reaches the sphere of the fixed stars (to sojourn there for six cantos and perhaps six and a half hours)[64] from the sphere of Saturn—from the planet itself, in fact, whose location has been indicated fairly precisely ("sotto il petto del Leone ardente," Paradiso 21.3; i.e., somewhere near the star Regulus, known as the "heart of the Lion," cor leonis ). But Dante does not tell us to which degree of Gemini he comes, nor which of its stars he may be near.[65]
Dante recognizes, he says, that all of his ingegno comes from these stars:
O gloriose stelle, o lume pregno
di gran virtù, dal quale io riconosco
tutto, qual che si sia, il mio ingegno
Modern commentators sometimes express surprise that Dante attributes so much of his talent to the influence of his stars.[66] We should regard the lines as an important indication of the extent to which Dante regarded his ingegno as something bodily —not intellectual in the strictest sense but involving faculties that both Aquinas and Dante identify as subject
to planetary influences (see Introduction, pp. 43–45) and that were generally agreed to be produced originally under the power of the heavenly bodies—and (a closely related, extremely technical point) as depending on the nature of his sensitive soul as it developed in the womb under the influence of the heavens, before his intellect, properly speaking, was infused.[67]
Since the passage in Paradiso 22 is explicitly about Dante's birth, his use there of such terms as pregno and nasceva has occasioned no surprise. But they deserve attention, even if in both Latin and medieval Italian nasci/nascere for the rising of a star or planet is extremely common. Dante says he owes his ingegno to the " lume pregno/ di gran virtù " of these stars: but in what sense is the light pregnant? Obviously it was pregnant with the ingegno Dante says he owes to it, in that the simple light of each heavenly body in some sense contains the diversity of the forms it imposes on the sublunar.[68] Dante's ingegno , however, is not fully formed at the time of his birth. As Beatrice points out in Purgatorio 30, it was present in him virtualmente , potentially; the seed was planted and must be cultivated. In this sense, then, Dante was himself pregnant with his ingegno until it fully emerged. There is thus a parallel between his condition at birth and the "lume pregno di gran virtù."
The passage draws a further parallel with the sun, which, as we saw in the Introduction, is the most frequently cited instance of a lux simplex virtually containing a multiplicity of forms:
con voi nasceva e s'ascondeva vosco
quelli ch'è padre d'ogne mortal vita.
Dante was being born literally, the sun figuratively. It is of course the combined influence of sun and sign that Dante here recognizes as the source of his ingegno . The term riconosco is significant: in acknowledging that he owes his nature to his stars, Dante gives his stars praise that might seem due to himself. Thus the passage is closely related to the discussion in Paradiso 4 of Plato's doctrine that souls return to their stars after dath:
Quel che Timeo de l'anime argomenta
non è simile a ciò che qui si vede,
Però che, come dice, par che senta.
Dice che l'alma a la sua stella riede,
credendo qualla quindi esser decisa
quando natura per forma la diede;
e forse la sua sentenza è d'altra guisa
che la voce non sona, ed esser puote
con intenzion da non esser derisa.
S'egli intende tornare a queste rote
l'onor de l'influenza e 'l biasmo, forse
in alcun vero il suo arco percuote.
(Paradiso 4.49–60; emphasis added)
Beatrice's clarification here is quite precise: nature, in which the influence of the heavens is predominant, gave the soul to be the form of the body.[69]
An important aspect of the passage is its function as invocation:
A voi divotamente ora sospira
l'anima mia, per acquistar virtute
al passo forte che a sé la tira[70]
—here poetic composition is explicitly said to depend on the influence of the stars. Dante represents himself as sighing—yearning—toward Gemini in order to acquire poetic power, virtute. He would seem to have to open himself to their influence, submit himself to it. Thus the relevance of Dante's invocation is not restricted to its appropriateness to his visiting his natal sign: the sphere of the fixed stars is the first agency of the diversification of God's creative power, since the undifferentiated Primum Mobile, just above it, transmits God's power simply.[71] In the context of this theme, Dante's relation to his natal sign is significant as the one example brought before us of the fact that, since all creation serves man,[72] the diversification of human bodies and ingegni is the single most important function of the sphere of the fixed stars.[73] There Dante meets Adam, the first father of the multitude of men; the meeting with the Apostles, the first fathers of the Church (that is, of spiritual men), reflects the same principle.[74]
The movement to generality of causes that governs the entire cantica involves the clear association of higher causes with higher heavens. In terms of his conception of the cosmos, then, Dante's contemplative ascent to origins is an ascent to more and more general themes, indeed, to the theme of general causality itself, and it requires him to place himself in rapport with higher and higher heavenly bodies—to open himself to their influence. And as he does so he enacts ever fuller metaphors of the poetic process, in particular the one whereby the poet's shaping art is an analog of the workings of the turning heavens.[75]
As the italics are meant to suggest, the entire passage on Gemini from Paradiso 22 is a tissue of allusions to the first stanza of "Io son venuto." Paradiso 22 identifies the sign Gemini with a periphrasis, calling it "il segno / che segue il Tauro" (110–111); so does "Io son venuto," which calls it "il geminato cielo" (3). In Paradiso 22, the metaphor of pregnancy is used of the light of the stars of Gemini ("lume pregno / di gran virtù," 112–113), and that of birth of the sun in Dante's natal sign ("con voi nasceva," 115); in "Io son venuto," the metaphor of birth is used of the rising of Gemini ("l'orizzonte . . . / ci partorisce," 2–3), and that of pregnancy is implicit in the repeated mention of love as a burden (especially evident in the contrast between the parturition of line 3 and the "non disgombra" of line 10). Both, moreover, stress the relation of Gemini and the sun to the horizon. "Io son venuto" opens with Dante's arrival at the point of the wheel; Paradiso 22 twice echoes this idea, first in Dante's arrival in the sign/constellation Gemini ("e fui dentro da esso," 111), then, with a conspicuous verbal echo, in commenting on the arrival ("grazia . . . / d'entrar ne l'alta rota che vi gira," lines 118–119);[76] in both cases (in Paradiso 22 explicitly) the arrival implies the beginning of a new phase of poetic activity, and both associate the poet's birth with the inception of the new phase.[77]
The emphasis on the horizon in both texts requires comment. The term carries a great deal of symbolic weight. As we have seen, a major focus of the problematic of "Io son venuto" is the paradoxical concomitance of embeddedness in nature—subjection to the power of stars and seasons—and superiority to it. This is the specifically human situation—between time and eternity—on which rests the traditional idea of man as horizon between the two, adapted by Dante in the Monarchia to the horizon between incorruptible and corruptible.[78] As we saw in Chapter 1, Dante's treatment of Beatrice in "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore," in which he places the stanza on her soul between those on heaven and her body, is an instance of the idea that human beings are the medietas, or nexus of unification, of the entire cosmos, which the metaphor of man as horizon expresses. It is clear not only that the term orizzonte in "Io son venuto" refers at one level to the poet himself, but also that "l'orizzonte . . . ci partorisce il geminato cielo" means that whatever is meant by il geminato cielo is coming into being at the place where the two aspects of his human nature are joined—or, in the terminology ofInferno 12.84, where the two natures are married, "dove le due nature son consorti." But that place is precisely the locus of poetic ingegno.
As Dante's use of the terminology of marriage (consorti ) in Inferno 12
may suggest, the locus of poetic ingegno, the place where the two sides of his nature are joined, is also the locus of his sexuality. The problematics of love and desire on the one hand and of poetic creation on the other are inextricable, after a certain point indistinguishable. Thus, if the topos of birth in "Io son venuto" refers not only to Dante's literal birth but also to the birth of his new poetics, to the coming to maturity of his poetic ingegno, this theme does not in any way diminish the importance of the other themes, least of all that of his literal birth. Far from it, for the new poetics is represented as Dante's response to a situation in which both external and internal causes threaten his life. The difficulty of his love requires him to explore the relation of his bodily nature to the universe that impinges on it; to be adequate to such an exploration, the new poetics requires him to explore the bodily foundation of his talent and his art. The two statements are virtually equivalent. The greatness of the achievement of the petrose, like the greatness of the Commedia, testifies in part to the seriousness of the crisis from which they spring.
Thus the winter of "Io son venuto," which at one level is the enemy of the poet's love and even of his life, at a deeper level is seen as essential to his full maturing. It would seem that Dante saw the relation between his natal horoscope and that of December 1296 as coherent, a fulfillment of the providence that was seeing to the development of his gifts, in part by adversity and testing. There is every reason, then, to take seriously the erotic theme as well. It is no mere pretext; at issue is the possibility of integrating sexual desire with the rest of experience, including the practice of art. The point of departure is optimistic: the petrose rest on the presupposition that the two natures can be married, that love is attainable, that the war between the sexes can be disarmed, that integration of the personality and victory over its negative tendencies are possible, in large part through the mediation of art. In this connection the double tradition about the Twins—as Castor and Pollux, and as Adam and Eve—is particularly interesting. The petrose express the refusal to renounce the specifically sexual nature of the issues. Whatever the solution, it must, to use Dante's phrase in the Monarchia, "sapere utranque naturam."
4
We are now in a position to consider the fact that the successively lower realms of nature through which the eye descends in the course of "Io
son venuto" are parallel to the parts of the human body:[79] the heavens are parallel to the spherical human head; the realm of the atmosphere corresponds to the apparatus of breathing; the spirit of the birds and animals corresponds to the human spirit, which dwells in the breast; and so forth. Not only is this the first of Dante's poems to include an astronomical description; it is also the first in which he adopts the analogy with the human body as a principle of structure.[80] It is a major feature of the new poetics, and clearly integral to Dante's effort to see and represent his situation fully. As is well known, medieval microcosmic tradition produced a proliferation of supposed correspondences between the human body and the world; Dante's knowledge of the traditions was undoubtedly vast, but his use of them was selective. He has nothing like the encyclopedic exploitation of every possible correlation that we find in the work of the remarkable twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen, for example, though he was undoubtedly familiar with such correspondences as those she drew between the four winds and the four limbs or the four rational powers of the soul (cogitatio, locutio, intentio, gemitus ), between birds and desires, or between the three levels of earth and the three parts of the torso.[81] His use of the analogy is actually closer to Robert Grosseteste's correlation of the head with the heavens, the breast with the air, the belly with the sea, and the feet with the earth.[82] He was familiar with the correlation of the powers of the soul with all the aspects of the sensible world[83] and with the fivefold division of beings, according to which man shares being with the stones, life with the plants, feeling with the animals, intellect with the angels, and has reason as his own distinguishing property.[84] He probably knew Bernard's convenient compendium in the De mundi universitate, describing the creation of man:
Has utique corporis partes de multis singulas, de communibus exceptavit angustas: cerebrum, cor, epar, tria vitae fundamina suscepturas. In minori mundo homine Physis intelligit non errandum, si maioris mundi similitudinem sibi sumpserit in exemplum. In illo subtili mundano corporis apparatu caelum fastigio supereminet altiore. Aer, terra: terra de infimo, aer de medio circumsistunt. De caelo deitas imperat et disponit. Exequuntur iussionem, quae in aere vel in aethere mansistant potestates. Terrena quae subiacent gubernantur. Non secus in homine cautum est, inperaret anima in capite, exequeretur vigor eius constitutus in pectore regerentur partes infimae pube tenus et infra collocatae. Physis igitur, sollers ut erat artifex, cerebrum animae, cor vitae, epar appententiae, futurum destinat fundamentum.[85]
(Bernard Silvester 1876 64)
Therefore these three small parts of the body she [Nature] distinguished from the rest: the brain, the heart, the liver, the three foundations of life. In man, the lesser world, Nature understood that she would not err if she took the likeness of the larger world as a model for it. In that subtle structure of the world's body the heavens rise above the rest with higher roof. Air and earth: earth in the lowest place, air in the middle place, have circular shape. From the heavens the divinity rules and disposes. The powers that dwell in the air or in the aether carry out its commands. The earthly things that are lowest are governed. Just so in man, it should be that the soul in the head should command, that its vigor, established in the breast, should carry out its commands, and those parts located lower—as far as the groin and below—should be ruled. Nature, therefore, skillful artisan that she was, provided the brain as the foundation of the soul, the heart as that of life, the liver as that of desire.
Bernard correlates the heavens with the head, the air with the breast and heart, the earth with liver and abdomen. In the poem that immediately follows this prose description (Bernard Silvester 1876 65–71), he develops the parallels even further, drawing directly and heavily on the Timaeus. First come the five senses, correlated with the elements (sight with fire, the eyes with the sun; hearing with air; smell with corruptior aer; taste with water; touch with earth). Then come three sections each developed to a part of the body: breast, abdomen, and genitals. The breast is the seat of the heart, and it is pyramidally shaped because it houses the vital fire;[86] the lungs surround the heart to ease its heat with moist coolness. The power of the brain is moist, that of the heart fiery. In the abdomen, the liver makes blood, which combines fire, air, and water. Bernard's description of the body ends with the genitals, entrusted with the endless fight to preserve the species:
Saecula ne pereant decisaque cesset origo,
Et repetat primum massa soluta chaos,
Ad genios fetura duos concessit et olim
Commissum geminis fratribus illud opus.
Cum morte invicti pugnant genialibus armis,
Naturam reparant perpetuantque genus.
Non mortale mori, non quod cadit esse caducum,
Non a stirpe hominem deperiisse sinunt.
Militat adversus Lachesin sollersque renodat
Mentula Parcarum fila resecta manu.
Defluit ad renes cerebri regione remissus[87]
Sanguis et albentis spermatis instar habet.
Format et effingit sollers Natura liquorem,
Ut simili genesis ore reducat avos.
Influit ipsa sibi mundi Natura superstes,
Permanet et fluxu pascitur usque suo.
Scilicet ad summam rerum iactura recurrit
Nec semel ut possit saepe perire perit.[88]
Lest the generations perish and the fountain cease, cut off, and the dissolving mass seek chaos again, so that she might continue to give birth she appointed two genii, once and for all gave over that work to twin brothers. They fight unconquered against death with their genial weapons, repair nature, and perpetuate the race. They do not permit what is mortal to die, what falls to pass away, they do not let man die off from his stock. The penis makes war on Lachesis and skillfully knots up again the thread cut by the hand of the Fates. The blood, sent down from the brain, flows down to the loins and appears as white sperm. Skillful Nature forms and fashions that liquid so that what comes into being will have a face similar to its ancestors. Nature, surviving the world, influences [flows into] herself, she remains and is fed with her own flux. For the waste touches even the highest of things, and so that she may not die altogether, she dies frequently.
The point is not, of course, that Dante is following in every detail some scheme of correspondences, whether Bernard's or another. But there is a broad similarity of outline, since both draw on the Timaeus tradition. Just as "Io son venuto" describes a descending spiral in the cosmos, so also it describes one in the body. As the influence of the heavenly bodies affects the rest of nature, so the influence of the head flows down to the rest of the body; we follow it pube tenus et infra, to use Bernard's phrase (stanza 5 does include references to the feet—walking is implied in cammino and passo —correlated with the earth in traditional analogies).[89] And a principal question needs to be raised: namely, what relation is supposed to obtain between this great cosmic parallel to the human body and Dante's own, actual human body, which inhabits this universe and moves through this landscape? The relation is clearly one of tension; but let us examine it more closely.
To begin with stanza 1 here we have what is in some respects the most direct relation between the cosmos and Dante's body, even though it is introduced by the adversative però "nonetheless": in spite of the winter, his mind casts off none of the thoughts of love that burden him, since it is harder than a stone in its fixation on the image of the lady. Now, a first level of meaning, one that recurs throughout the poem, is that in its fixation on the lady his mind is resisting the force of the winter, a season contrary to love. But the matter is more complicated. First, his mind is parallel to the heavens; like the heavens, his head influ-
ences the rest of his body. Second, the lover's tenacious fixation on the image of the lady is related to the lore of the influence of Saturn, the patron of melancholy, obsessive desire, and strong vital powers. In fact, since we have brought the horoscopes of 1296 and 1265 together, we are led to the idea that the lover's ability to maintain his love in the face of the opposition of the entire cosmos derives from the qualities expressed in his natal horoscope.
That his mind is "harder than stone in holding strongly an image of stone" identifies the aspect of the mind referred to as the imagination, or fantasy, a bodily faculty usually, in medieval physiology, thought to be located in the head.[90] The suggestions of this phrase are multiple. It draws on the traditional psychology of love, in which the mind knows external objects because the imagination, as impressionable as wax, takes on their form and presents this form to the intellect. Love is thus a condition in which the imagination is dominated by the image of the beloved.[91] That the imagination should become hard as stone reflects both its taking on the qualities of the beloved and the lore of the influence of Saturn (see above, p. 82).
In stanza 2 the parallel is drawn between wind, cloud, and precipitation on the one hand and sadness and weeping in the human body on the other:
e poi si solve, e cade in bianca falda
di fredda neve ed in noiosa pioggia,
onde 1'aere s'attrista tutta e piagne.[92]
(20–22)
Here the opposition is explicitly confined to Love's not abandoning the speaker, though it is also clear implicitly that the speaker is not weeping. Striking and puzzling is the notion that Love draws his webs "up out of the wind." Whatever else, this clearly means that Love is not actively seeking to catch people in the winter—another version of the idea that love in winter involves opposition to the season.
In stanza 3, the connection with the human breast is not limited to the references to spirit, though that is crucially important. Here, as we have already noticed, occur the most important references to fire in the poem, and unlike Bernard—and the Timaeus tradition in general—Dante does not identify the liver as the seat of passion, but rather the heart, the seat of the vital fire and of spirit:
e tutti li animali che son gai
di lor natura, son d'amor sciolti,
però che 'l freddo lor spirito ammorta:
e 'l mio più d'amor porta.
(33–36)
This is the central stanza of the poem and is clearly meant to stand as an axis of its symmetries. Dante is drawing also on the traditional association of birds with desire and with love song; we have already discussed the importance of this stanza to the theme of the bringing forth of poetry. As compared with Bernard's correlations, Dante's are simpler and less rigid: with the animals we share motion and appetition because of the fiery spirit that dwells in the heart; with plants we share the most basic power of life, that of growth and nourishment, also located in the heart.[93]
When in stanza 4, then, the analogy with plants is drawn, the emphasis is on the power of life. The antithesis between life and death is sharpened, and the evergreens are correlated with the possibility of immortality.
e la crudele spina
però Amor di cor non la mi tragge;
per ch'io son fermo di portarla sempre
ch'io sarò in vita, s'io vivesse sempre.
(49–52)
Juxtaposed with the mention of immortality is the first explicit mention of death:
. . . morta è l'erba . . .
e tanto è la stagion forte ed acerba
c'ha morti li fioretti per le piagge
(42, 46–47)
and we note that morta/morti echoes the less explicit ammorta of the previous stanza. The evergreens are significant because they provide an analog to immortality, explicitly referred to in the last line of the stanza. The laurel, of course, was a familiar emblem of poetic immortality. The thorn of love in the speaker's heart is, as vegetable, related to the category of the stanza, but the bodily correlation seems less insistent here except for the explicit mention of the heart.
As can readily be seen, these three central stanzas are closely related as referring to the breast—lungs (with the respiratory tract) and heart—though in the second and fourth stanzas the analogy with the body is perhaps more elusive than in the more sharply focused first, third, and
fifth stanzas. The fifth stanza in fact is the most explicit of all, as well as the most problematic:
Versan le vene le fummifere acque
per li vapor' che la terra ha nel ventre,
che d'abisso li tira suso in alto;
onde cammino al bel giorno mi piacque
che ora è fatto rivo, e sarà mentre
che durerà del verno il grande assalto;
la terra fa un suol che par di smalto,
e l'acqua morta si converte in vetro
per la freddura che di fuor la serra:
e io de la mia guerra
non son però tornato un passo a retro,
né vo' tornar; ché, se 'l martiro è dolce,
la morte de' passar ogni altro dolce.
(53–65)
Here Dante explicitly draws the parallel between the veins of the human body and those of the earth, between the interior of the earth and the human belly. The parallel governs the entire movement of the stanza, for the "death" of love mentioned in the last line is of course orgasm, a "flooding" or emission parallel to the emissions from the belly of the earth. As we have seen, Bernard uses the metaphor of flowing (fluxus ) to refer to seminal emission, as well as the notion that orgasm is like death; he also, using the terms influit and defluit, associates it with a metaphor of astral influence, since according to the Platonic physiology he is adopting, the seed is marrow that has flowed down the spinal column from the brain (which in turn is correlated with the heavens).[94] How detailed the sexual physiology is in "Io son venuto" may be debated, to be sure, but that the petrifaction in the stanza alludes to tumescence is indisputable.[95] The reference to the speaker's life span in stanza 4 and the mention of the death of love at the end of stanza 5 bring in the idea that orgasm literally shortens life, that the species may be preserved at the expense of the individual life.[96] This involves the possibility of the death of the speaker, which is brought into clear focus in the congedo.
The landscape of stanza 5 is represented as an obstacle to movement. What is the relation of this landscape to the speaker's body, and especially to his desire for the death of love with his beloved? Crucially important here is the notion of the protagonist's continued motion against the backdrop of the winter scene, which functions on at least two levels: if he were to stop in the literal scene, he would die of the cold like the
grass and flowers, or at least be deadened like the animals; if he were to stop in the metaphorical scene, it would be to accept—and rest in—lust and orgasm in their mechanically (astrologically) conditioned, one might say their most brutal, form. But he goes forward in his war, which is thus directed against both the literal winter and the metaphorical winter of dehumanized lust. We must not lose sight of the fact, either, that the death of love yearned for by the speaker is not yet attainable. His love, his goals, and the state of his body are thus emphatically differentiated from the state of the cosmic projection of the human body through which he moves.
As the poet says, the floods and freezings do not make him turn back. Nor, poetically, does he turn back from the theme of orgasm, for he ends the last stanza with it. Thus one of the functions of the fifth stanza is actually to contain and limit the notion of orgasm as the lover's erotic goal:
e io de la mia guerra
non son però tornato un passo a retro,
né vo' tornar; ché, se 'l martiro è dolce,
la morte de' passar ogni altro dolce.
Curiously, the terminology of defeat and death in these lines is turned into the idea and tonality of victory: with Mars retrograde, the lover may seem to go toward defeat, he is enduring the struggle and suffering of a martiro in the present, and he wishes—and fears—the little death of orgasm in the future. But in part because the physiological (and dangerous) aspect of orgasm has been externalized in the first lines of the stanza, the point is really that the poet's spirit will not be subdued by the melting and flowing of orgasm, any more than it has been by the winter. This morte is only orgasm, not death itself, and its sweetness will ultimately derive, not from the natural floodings and emissions, but from the love between the couple, their spirit. It may also be pointed out that the mention of parturition in line 3 of the poem has an obvious relevance to the goal of the lover qua lover. There is the suggestion that his love is procreative in tendency, not merely erotic in the narrow sense; thus the bringing of le fummifere acque into the poem does not imply a giving way to them.
onde cammino al bel giorno mi piacque
che ora è fatto rivo, e sarà mentre
che durerà del verno il grande assalto.
(56–58)
The poet's not turning back when faced with this obstacle is delayed until line 63, but it is assured. The syntax of the first clause of this sentence is worth examining: "onde cammino al bel giorno mi piacque / che ora è fatto rivo." The logically principal idea—"the road is flooded"—has been made subordinate to the qualifier—"(the road, which) pleased me in good weather." Thus considerable emphasis is gained by the strain of the construction (the sense is partly that winter has violated the pleasant landscape) and attention called to the fact that the road still pleases the speaker, he has not turned back. In other words, the positive memory (of il bel giorno ) and the positive hope (of reciprocation) dominate the poet's response to winter in all its meanings—the literal winter, the unnatural coldness of the lady, the stars as potentially lethal, the negative side of his own temperament.
The congedo, however, envisages the possibility that the poet's tenacious love will result in death. He is threatened with petrifaction:
Canzone, or che sarà di me ne l'altro
dolce tempo novello, quando piove
amore in terra da tutti li cieli,
quando per questi geli
amore è solo in me, e non altrove?
Saranne quello ch'è d'un uom di marmo,
se in pargoletta fia per core un marmo.
(66–72)
Taking it at face value, the congedo is deceptively simple: if the lady's heart, in spite of her youth, is still hard in the springtime, then the speaker will be turned to stone. There are several reasons why this should be so. One is that, as the rest of "Io son venuto" insists, it is natural for all nature, and to some extent also for man, to withdraw from love in the cold weather; the entire poem is based on the opposition of the lover's fiery passion to the rest of nature and to the perhaps natural enough resistance of the lady (natural enough in view both of her youth and of the season). But her youth is increasingly nubile, and a pargoletta might be expected to have a tender heart. In the springtime, then, all nature will incite her to love: if that fails, then his case is hopeless.
Another reason is the pattern the poem has set up for the lover, that of antagonism to the season. By the logic of this opposition, unless the lady's response changes drastically, he will be cold in the warm season: if in the winter, when cold rains down from all the heavens, his head rains down love, then in the spring it will rain down a freezing influence.
These two kinds of logic reinforce each other effectively. They correspond to two aspects of the poet's "guerra"—his struggle against the lady's cold refusal and his struggle against the dangers within himself. Although the ending of "Io son venuto" envisages the poet's death if confronted by refusal in the springtime, the next poem, "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra," adopts the theme of the lady's continuing resistance (see especially lines 7–12). Thus the second line of logic has already been transcended in that poem: the poet will survive the spring.
The idea of a stony lady whose influence might turn one to stone is, of course, a reference to the myth of the Medusa[97] that makes this passage even more complex and more threatening. Ovid's account suggests that the Medusa turned its victims precisely to white marble,[98] and several other elements of the myth have particular relevance as well. First, perhaps, is the presence in the story of a mirror, for Perseus was only able to kill the Gorgon by seeing her face reflected in the shield furnished him by Minerva. As Petrarch saw, there is an association in Ovid's text between the victims of the Medusa and the paralyzed immobility of Narcissus, fixated on his reflection (see Durling 1976 29–32). In this context, the suggestion of the last stanza of "Io son venuto," with its mention of flooding and of water turning to glass, includes that of a mirror. The danger referred to in the congedo, then, understood in connection with the Medusa and with Narcissus, would be that of being caught in the one-sidedness of frustrated desire, inevitably selfish and narcissistic, from which (if renunciation is excluded) only the living relation of reciprocity can release one.
The idea of the donna petrosa as potentially a Medusa is, then, a basic idea in the entire sequence of the petrose, although no explicit references are made to the myth itself. The last stanza of the third poem, "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna," has a clear parallel with the congedo of "Io son venuto" and must be counted as the other most pointed allusion. In fact, the danger is already suggested in "Io son venuto" by the terminology of stanza 1, where the speaker's mind is said to be "più dura che petra" in its fixation, a clear parallel to the rhyme-word marmo. The suggestion is that the danger of death is as much within him as outside him, as becomes clear in "Così nel mio parlar."
The pattern of anaphora, so emphatic in "Io son venuto," is associated with this mode of ending the stanzas with the repetition of the rhyme-words,[99] which are of course very important in creating the powerful insistence of the poem. They are strategically chosen (in later
chapters we will trace their relation to the rhyme-words of the other poems in the series),[100] and they reflect the most important themes of the poem: the harshness of the lady, as well as her beauty; at the center of the poem, the tension between temporal existence and immortality; and at the closing, the danger of death. Their arrangement is symmetrical:
It is striking that while, as we have said, the poem represents (includes) the cosmos as a whole—and in the congedo the overall pattern of tracing the descending influence of the heavens is repeated, so that the references to the heavens surround (contain) the rest of the poem/cosmos—still, the arrangement of the rhyme-words emphasizes precisely the opposite principle: the largest factors (time, eternity) are enclosed and contained by the threatening petra and marmo at the extremes.[101]
Nevertheless, in the congedo, the love within the speaker is associated with the creative and procreative love that pours into the world in the spring. The congedo is in fact the best gloss on Love's spiderwebs in stanza 2: Love's nets, withdrawn upward in winter, must be the springtime influences mentioned in the congedo. There is an interesting suggestion (which is followed up in the third petrosa ) that Love's nets are a way for Love to draw man upward. But there can be no question that the freezings and floodings of the last stanza represent dangers like the Medusa. Indeed, that is precisely the point of their inclusion: "Io son venuto" and the other petrose steadfastly confront the lady's stoniness, which by that very token cannot objectively be Medusan. "Io son venuto" is built on the premise that all must and can be confronted, and one of the most powerful patterns in the poem is that by which the last stanza fulfills the first: the poem as a whole describes the descent of the influence of the heavens into the lower realms of the cosmos, and as the Twins emerge from below the horizon, so the last stanza brings up into the light the waters of the abyss. In other words, the contemplation of the poet descends through the body, and the unifying action of the poem brings up into poetry themes and feelings usually repressed and excluded from it, including cataclysm in the macrocosm, orgasm in the microcosm.
We argue, then, that the opening of the poem means that the poet
has himself come to the point of the wheel, that is, of the cycle of his own life (not merely of the year), when a new poetics is born, which he calls the geminato cielo. Its birth is the result of the interaction of winter, of the remoteness—difficulty—of his love, and of the dual influence of Saturn, sweeping grandly across the night sky, with his temperament and spirit; it is geminato also because it requires him to understand and represent the dualities in his nature and in the planetary and other influences he feels. Dante's use of the metaphor of birth for the rising of Gemini, then, expresses a particularly rich set of interrelated factors. First, his coming to this new poetic maturity is the fulfillment of the potential ingegno that was planted in him by the stars at his literal birth; second, it requires the bringing out or up, from below, of negativities often kept below the surface, or horizon, of awareness, particularly in poetry; third, it includes the idea that the bringing forth of poems is like giving birth—a major parallel between poetics and procreative sexuality.[102] When we consider the importance in the poem of the parallels between the cosmos and the lover's body, we must say that what is being born here for Dante is the problematic of the human body itself, a major theme and structural principle in both the Commedia and the other petrose.
Dante's use of the periphrasis il geminato cielo instead of the proper term (i Gemelli ) expresses yet another nexus of important ideas, involving the idea of the poem as microcosm: the new poetics—including this particular poem—represents the heavens in its explicit discourse; it also imitates them in its cyclical structure, and it exploits the microcosmic relation of cosmos and human body in a particularly rich and subtle way. The opening of "Io son venuto" thus does represent two heavens: the human head is the twin of the vault of the sky. The heaven of this new poetics, then, is geminato for several reasons in addition to the ones just given. If the literal meaning of the term refers to the influence of the sign Gemini and the planet Mercury, the poet's ingegno reflects this influence in a more than merely generic sense. For his poetry now reflects the dual nature of the Twins and the ambiguous nature of their myth: it confronts the relation of soul and body, or spirit and flesh, and—most important—it confronts negative and potentially violent feelings and strives for the victory of the higher principle. But this victory cannot involve the abandonment of the lower principle: the poet's spirit is to be Pollux to the Castor of his mortal negativities. A different form of the same idea associates himself and the lady with the male and female ver-
sion of the Twins. There can be no victory without integration, and for this reason the poet-lover's intent toward the lady must include that of inducing her to confront and overcome the negativities within herself as well. This theme emerges more and more explicitly in the next two poems and culminates in the violent confrontation of "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro," at the end of which a resolution is represented. But the dangers within the poet are considerable ones, as he well knows. The danger of death recurs in all the poems, becomes in fact more insistent.
3—
The Sun and the Heliotrope:
"Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra"
Poetic Filiations
Of the petrose, Dante's sestina has been the most studied. Its historical situation between the archetype of the form, Arnaut Daniel's "Lo ferm voler," and Petrarch's multiple essays in the Rime sparse have guaranteed its interest for literary historians.[1] In addition, the intricate scheme governing its rhyme-words has aroused interest among students of poetics. Because the dominant principle of the form is the system of allotting places to the six rhyme-words, readers have emphasized the changing juxtaposition of semantic elements as the main source of the poem's effects and meaning.[2] Contini's view that the sequence of topics in Dante's poem is alogical has been influential in this respect (Dante 1946 157). Although the relevance to the poem's subject of the recurring rhyme-words has been admitted, the tendency to treat the poem as the consequence of a preestablished scheme rather than as a marriage of sentenza and form has with few exceptions persisted.[3] Finally, the poem has generally been regarded as an isolated effort; the view is typified by Contini's judgment that the imitation of Arnaut in the petrose "was, in Dante's intention, but a parenthesis."[4]
We hold that the emphasis on stylistic results at the expense of elucidating the relation of form to subject is anachronistic as an approach to Dante's poem (Bartolozzi 1982 1). Like the other petrose, "Al poco giorno" exhibits a complexity of form and an intensity of thematic development that are interdependent. In these respects, the sestina foreshadows important techniques in the Commedia: there is nothing parenthetical about it. Indeed, the close relation of the sestina to "Io son venuto" fully justifies "A1 poco giorno" as an instance of the microcosmic poetics born in the canzone. Our discussion therefore begins with close attention to the features of "Io son venuto" that are exploited in the sestina. We will then interpret the final verse of the poem, which
has never been given a satisfactory reading and which we find to be a key to the construction of the sestina.
The links between "Io son venuto" and the sestina are manifold. The first two rhyme-words in the canzone are petra and donna, and these recur as the last two rhymes in the first stanza of "Al poco giorno."[5] The two poems share over twenty important terms, as well as similar phrasing.[6] In many respects the sestina, by presenting scenes predominantly in the warm season, answers the question posed at the conclusion of "Io son venuto": what will become of the speaker during the spring and summer, when Love will pour down on earth from the heavens? Implicitly, the existence of the sestina means that the speaker has endured the warm season; thus the dangerous moment foreseen in the canzone has in a sense already been transcended. The sestina is therefore part of the speaker's strategy of overcoming the single moment of fixation, the moment of winter-solstitial danger, and of placing the scenes of his love against a wider temporal background.
The circulation of images in the lover's fantasy has been a principal argument for the essentially static nature of the sestina (Cudini 1982 192). But the lover's fantasy also expands temporally in the verb tenses of the poem. The verbs are in the present tense in stanzas 1 and 2, and the moment of enunciation seems to pass almost imperceptibly from the winter solstice to the early moments of spring, although in fact the entire second stanza, ruled by the simile (similemente ), is still within the ambit of the opening moment: "Al poco giorno . . . son giunto, lasso." Rather than insisting on the fixed initial moment, we note how the use of tenses enlarges the lover's vision, first through recollection, and subsequently through cautious anticipation.
After the present tenses of the first two stanzas, stanza 3 posits a circumstance ("When she wears a garland") more specific than the undifferentiated states of stanzas 1–2, and this leads to the introduction of past tenses, first at 3.5 ("m'ha serrato," "[Love] has locked me") and then at 4.3 ("io son fuggito," "I have fled"). These are not real aorists but have the effect of imperfects, and end by returning to the present: Love has locked me and still locks me; I have fled and still, habitually, flee. But in stanza 5 the past event is treated as an isolated numinous moment: "I saw her once, dressed in green" ("L'ho veduta già vestita a verde"), and this leads to the formulation of a specific wish with an implied future reference: "I have desired her in a fair grass field" ("l'ho chesta in un bel prato d'erba"). A real future then appears in stanza 6,
qualified by its place in an adynaton but qualified in the opposite sense by its allusion to a comprehensive eschatological perspective.
Thus, if the moment of enunciation always returns to the present at the solstice, the range of the lover's meditation grows in its expressive and temporal domain, extending first to a past continuous with the present, then to a specific instance in the past, then to an implied future, and finally to an explicit (even if apparently unhoped-for) future. The subjective present, first a kind of terminus at the solstice, becomes more and more comprehensive. Despite the lover's fixation, the poem shows the speaker's mind illuminated and moved by the petra. Conversely, as we shall show, the lady becomes animated in the lover's mind. Speaker and lady mirror each other's tenacity—refusal, obsession—but also each other's mutability—imaginative reach and inchoate animation. The lover's mind, imagining a spring, transcends the constriction of the punto staged in "Io son venuto."
We have argued that an important device linking the stanzas of "Io son venuto" is the descent of the sun in the sky as it approaches the winter solstice. "Al poco giorno" begins by reiterating the astronomical situation established in the canzone: "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra." The verse is not pleonastic.[7] It establishes not only the brevity of the day but also the annual predominance of darkness, of the night circle. Thus, like "Io son venuto," which mentions the setting of the sun ("il sol si corca," verse 2) and the prevalence of night thought of as opposite the sun in the Tropic of Cancer ("lo grand'arco," 8), the sestina begins with a clear reference to both daily and annual motions of the sun.[8] From a cosmological perspective, the two motions of the sun make visible the motions of the Same and the Other. We will show that Dante's allusion to the logical principles of Same and Other accounts for many of the sestina's features—the tension in the poem between tenacity and change, for example—and will help manifest the principles of the poem's form.[9]
In view of the parallels between "Al poco giorno" and "Io son venuto," it might appear puzzling that there is no explicit mention of the sun in the former except in terms of its effects. These include the "poco giorno," which announces a privation; the "dolce tempo" (10); the growth of plants; and the phenomena of shadow and shade.[10] The lack of explicit reference to the sun in the sestina derives from "Io son venuto," where effects of the sun are named at the beginning of each stanza, at first explicitly, but in stanzas 3–5 implicitly. Positioned op-
posite Gemini in stanza 1, the sun is named in stanza 2 as the cause of winds, but in the third stanza it is heat, and in the fourth the "vertù d' Arïete," that represent solar effects.[11] Least directly, stanza 5 alludes to the sun as remote cause of the warmth in the vaporous waters rising from the earth.[12]
The disappearance of the sun in "Io son venuto" accompanies the figure of the sun's descent as it approaches the solstice. But like the love of the speaker himself, the presence of the sun in its effects counters the seasonal privation of light and heat. The decline of the sun in "Io son venuto" prepares the inexplicit, but central, functions of the sun and solar motion in "Al poco giorno." The canzone shows the persistence of the lover's heat surrounded by winter; the sestina, the speaker's contemplation of the lady set against the turning of the seasons—itself a solar effect.[13] The emphasis on seasonal revolution in canzone and sestina is both thematic and structural: at the end of "Io son venuto," the speaker refuses to turn back; yet the progress of the seasons will operate a return to spring and complete the cycle. The sestina, in turn, generated from the orderly circulation of rhyme-words over the six stanzas, embodies cyclical recurrence as the principle of its form (Durling 1965 84–85; Durling 1976 17; Shapiro 1980 7, 8–10).
Thus the final sirma of "Io son venuto," which reiterates tornare, may be combined with its central verses:
e 'l mio più d'amor porta;
ché li dolzi pensier' non mi son tolti
né mi son dati per volta di tempo,
ma donna li mi dà c'ha picciol tempo.
(36–39)
What results is the pattern for the sestina, a poem in which the speaker's contemplation is juxtaposed to the seasons in nature and in which the lady acts as a luminary that gives and withdraws light. The key terms volgere and tornare come from the middle and end of the canzone, so that, in conjunction with the astronomical parallel that joins the first verses, the sestina is linked to the beginning, middle, and end of "Io son venuto."[14]
The prominence of turning and recurrence in the sestina continues the theme of astronomical inversion announced with the canzone. But the canzone also begins with the birth of Dante's natal sign and of the poetics suited to man as the horizon of corruptible and incorruptible.
In the sestina, the twinning of principles appears thematically in the concern with both rigidity and change, poet and lady, short time and the eternal. But a geminate poetics also emerges in linguistic and formal terms. Although lexical pairing as a poetic device in "Io son venuto" is limited, in formal terms, to the final couplet of each stanza with identical rhyme-words, the pairing of linguistic and formal elements is a key constructive technique of the sestina. Thus, each stanza is linked to the next by identical rhyme-words (in Provençal terminology they are capcaudadas ), both stanzas and verses are taken in pairs, and conjunctions of the six rhyme-words result from a scheme that shifts them in pairs (see below). In addition, as Cudini has shown in an exhaustive analysis of the sestina's diction, the poem exhibits both a persistent bisyllabism and a dittology of terms, an organization of language in terms of binary (and ternary) schemes.[15]
Thus a gemination of linguistic elements and the rotation of rhyme-words distinguish the sestina, not merely as consequences of a rigorous form but as principles closely related to the poetics heralded by the rising of Gemini in "Io son venuto." In that poem, the negative moment is also the birth of a new poetics; it projects an antithetical natal horoscope of the poet, and this principle of astronomical inversion is maintained not only in thematic terms but in features like the inversion of verb and subject at the beginning of each stanza except the first as well. The sestina follows suit by beginning in a dramatic and oft-remarked syntactic inversion, and it stages the negative moment of the lover through the oft-remarked antithesis of light and darkness. Strictly speaking, however, in Dante's cosmos light and darkness are not opposites, for light has no contrary; rather, light and darkness are related as plenitude and privation, act and potency. Thus, although the sestina begins by defining a moment of privation, it implies, and in part represents, the activation of that potency by light. The darkness of the sestina, as if it were a diaphanous gem, attracts the light of the sun.
Quella Ch'a Veder Lo Sol Si Gira
Although the sun is not mentioned in "Al poco giorno," the poem is heliotropic in structure and theme: its formal principles and sequence of topics follow the movement and tropic turns of the sun, the "volta di tempo." Our argument proceeds not from a negative premise but from the traditional relation of privation and act: the seasonal darkness at the
solstice manifests the privation, therefore the potentiality, of light.[16] The argument from privation is appropriate to the sestina. The rhymeword ombra (which appears first and last in the stanzas and first in the tornata ) implies a source of light, while in astronomical terms the poem's beginning at the winter solstice projects the summer solstice six months distant.[17] The logic of privation is explicit in the tornata, where the lady is said to cause the disappearance of shadows. We shall discuss the tornata more fully later, but one of its implications is that the cancellation of shadows signifies the disappearance of the sun as their cause—or the sun's eclipse by a rival source of light.[18]
The enigmatic tornata of "Al poco giorno" derives in part from Arnaut's riddling tornada in "Lo ferm voler."[19] Whatever the problems of Arnaut's verses, Dante's lines have remained without a fully satisfactory literal reading.[20] Like the congedo of "Io son venuto" (and, as we shall see, of "Amor, tu vedi ben" as well), the tornata is a recapitulation and a microcosm of the poem as a whole:
Quandunque i colli fanno più nera ombra,
sotto un bel verde la giovane donna
la fa sparer, com'uom petra sott' erba.
(37–39)
Fanno in verse 37 leads to emphasis on far sparire, the only other verbal form in the tornata.[21] Especially striking is the disappearance by zeugma of fa sparer, which remains understood between uom and petra. Far sparer is thus simultaneously doubled and concealed. An elaborate conceit is at work here: the elimination of shadows is literally the disappearance of a nonappearance, and it is rendered by a textual erasure of far sparer itself. Implied is the antithetical principle: the appearance of the lady's light, her brightness, beauty, and power. Dante's text, black on white, renders the lady's full presence only negatively, only as a privation. And the full presence of the lady is highly ambiguous: does it mean the lover's extinction, his disappearance, as most readers assume? Or is there the suggestion of an apocalyptic manifestation, as one reading has claimed?[22] We shall return at the end of this chapter to the question of how the sestina's final antithesis is to be interpreted.
The omission of the verb, like the avoidance of reference to the sun, is an important clue to the meaning of the enigmatic tornata. We propose that the decoding of the last verse depends on its relation to the lore of the heliotropes, both gem and plant. Medieval lapidaries attrib-
ute to the heliotrope stone two related virtues that have direct bearing on the meaning of "Al poco giorno": the power of obscuring the sun, and—in some accounts, consequently—the power of rendering the bearer of the stone invisible.[23] In the lapidaries Dante is likely to have consulted, the power of the gem depends on its conjunction with the plant of similar name, the heliotropium.[24] If the common nouns petra and erba of Dante's tornata refer to the heliotropia (stone) and heliotropium (plant), respectively, then the comparison established in the tornata is between the lady's power of canceling shadows—and thus the light of the sun—and the power of the petra sott' erba to render a man invisible. Thus, we can translate the tornata as follows:
Whenever the green hills make blackest shade,
wearing [lit., under] a lovely green [garment] the young lady
makes it disappear, as stone under plant [makes disappear] a man.
In this way the tornata, like the sestina as a whole, establishes a parallel between the brightness of the petra, whose immature vigor is signified by her mantle of green, and the magical conjunction of stone and herb. Dressed in green, the stony lady embodies the conjunction named in the lapidaries.[25]
We offer this interpretation as a solution to more than the crux of the last line of the poem. The identification of the conjunction of petra and erba in the person of the lady just at the close of the lyric is an important clue to the specific poetics and meaning of the sestina. Three oft-noted aspects of the form are affected by our argument concerning the tornata: first, we confirm Fowler's (1975 38–43) proposal of a relation between the circulation of rhyme-words and the motion of the sun; second, the requirement that stone and herb must be joined in order to be efficacious is represented in the verbal effects of the poem, which depend on the juxtapositions and shifting positions of rhyme-words, on their conjunctions; finally, because the effect of joining stone to herb results in the obscuration of the sun, the poem alludes to a kind of solstitial inversion, the great theme of "Io son venuto," and to the relation between the temporal cycles marked by the luminaries and the end of time, a topic that is explicit in "Amor, tu vedi ben" but appears implicitly in the adynatou of the sestina as well.
Before proceeding, however, we shall anticipate possible objections to our reading of the final verse. In the context of the syntactic boldness and frequent inversions of the petrose, nothing prevents us from reading
uom in the object case and the phrase petra sott' erba as the singular subject of fa sparer.[26] In fact, a similar instance of zeugma and ellipsis is attested in the sestina itself, where the image is of mortar locking stone, "più forte assai che la calcina petra" (18), with serrato (17) understood.[27]
A second difficulty seems to lie in Dante's choice of preposition. Why does he write sott' erba rather than con erba? The latter would seem the logical translation of the relation expressed by the Latin passive in Marbodus's popular account of precious stones: "if [the gem] is joined to an herb of the same name, it draws whoever bears it from human sight."[28] In other lapidaries, however, the placement of the plant beneath the stone is explicit: "if the plant of the same name is placed beneath the stone and consecrated with the proper verses, the gem will render a man invisible."[29] Although relative positions are reversed, the expression subiecta lapidi is similar to the petra sott' erba of the sestina. Sotto does not therefore present significant difficulties.
We turn now to the implications of heliotrope lore for the sestina. After exploring the parallel between the lady and precious stones and its function in the poem, we consider Dante's allusion to the Ovidian myth of Clytie, the keystone to the sestina's emphasis on seasonal change. Then we shall outline the poem's complex mimesis of solar motion. We end by reconsidering the final stanza and tornata and suggesting the implications of Dante's use of the sun and the lore of gems in his version of Arnaut's scheme.
Petra Sott'erba:
The Hidden Stone
One result of sotto in the tornata is the chiastic parallel between the lady dressed in green and the heliotrope stone joined to the plant. Comparison of the donna to a precious stone is of course a topos in the troubadour and stilnuovo traditions.[30] In "Al poco giorno," the relation of the lady to stones or gems is one of the axes of the poem's structure. Paired to her presentation as a stone is her evolving relation to flora: she is clad in green, nuova, garlanded. The contrast of stone and greenery implies again the lady's paradoxical denial of love in her youth. But it also points to the poem's staging of both the lover's wish that the lady yield to him and his fear that her denial will be definitive. Hope and negation are evenly balanced—indeed, interdependent—as the poem evolves.
In the four central stanzas of the sestina, the progress of the lady's
power follows the development of a precious stone. The first two of these stanzas allude to traditional theories regarding the formation of stones from either the conglutination of earth or the freezing of water.[31] The second stanza compares the lady to shaded snow, drawing on the accounts of crystal formed from ice and snow subjected to pressure and cold. The speaker's litotes, "non la move, se non come petra," refers to the subtle effects produced on the lady's hardness by the dolce tempo (ultimately, the sun) as it prepares her for infusion with stellar virtue, as in Guinizelli's "Al cor gentil."[32] The lady's starsi gelata is her potential phase, preparing her transformation into a donna di virtù, a lady of power. These implications are developed in the third stanza, where the image of the lady garlanded with new greenery draws all other images from the speaker's mind, anticipating the oblivion produced by the lady in the tornata. The key term in the third stanza is trarre, which echoes the lapidaries' terminology of the lodestone.[33] The fourth stanza begins with the central verses of the sestina (19 and 20 of thirty-nine), which make explicit the lady's relation to both precious stones and medicinal plants. For the first time in the sestina, petra and erba are consecutive as rhyme-words, anticipating their contiguity in the final verse; at the same time, the fourth stanza records the lady's surpassing of precious stones and her rivalry with the sun, the cause of the stone's preparation.[34] From coagulate earth in the first stanza, to potential crystal in the second, to lodestone in the third, the lady has progressed from potency to action equaling that of a planetary cause. It follows that her beauty in stanza 5 is sufficient to animate other stones, like Beatrice in the Vita nuova, who not only arouses potential love but creates the power to love where it is not innate.[35] The lady's development moves thus: hardness and opacity (stone); hardness and translucence (snow); opacity and power (lodestone); transparency and power (gem); active light (sun).[36]
Comparison of the petra to flora proceeds first by difference, then by way of resemblance. In stanza 1, the lady offers but hard ground for the speaker's evergreen love, and in stanza 2 her snowy immobility contrasts with the hills greening in the sun. But she is also linked to the green hills as examples of the change the speaker wants of her. In stanza 3 the blonde hair of the lady is mixed with the green of a garland. Whereas stanza 4 might appear a retreat from contact between greenery and the lady's body, the appearance of petra and erba together in the stanza unite the lady's effects to the power of gems and medicinal herbs. In stanza 5 direct relation is restored by the lady's wearing green, and in stanza 6
the petra is transformed, in metaphor, to green wood. The tornata summarizes the lady's appearances associated with green: she is dressed in it (hence "under" it); it is an element of her power; it expresses her youth (giovene donna ) and possible susceptibility to love, as suggested in stanza 6 ("come suol far bella donna").
The development of the lady is not objective description but the report of the speaker—a report that derives, with the speaker's desire, from his enracination in her hardness (verse 5). The image of the root is proleptic of the speaker's wish to make love to the petra and itself anticipates the final image of the lady as green wood.[37] The series of images for the power of the lady—ice, stone, gem, sun—is bracketed by both the vigor of the speaker's desire and the lady herself, thought of as a living thing capable of passion. Thus, in the lover's fantasy, the lady becomes increasingly animate (like green wood) as the lover consummates his meditation. Indeed, the development of Dante's sestina is the reverse of Petrarch's in "Giovene donna," where the lady becomes an idol of diamond, topaz, and gold as a result of the speaker's thought (Durling 1971). As we shall show, the lover's attempt, in his fantasy, to render the lady animate is one of the principles governing the distribution of the rhyme-words, a sentenza justifying the intricacies of the sestina. The theme of the lady's animation is closely related to "Amor, tu vedi ben," where the speaker begs Love to put love in the lady's heart, as well as to the cathartic fantasy of revenge in "Così nel mio parlar," where the speaker imagines Love finally striking the petra. In all the petrose, the effect hoped for by the speaker is the reverse of the effect of the Medusa: the lady softens, comes alive, yields to love. But the lady's animation is simultaneous with the culmination of her power—and thus of her danger to the speaker. Consummation of the speaker's wish for a living woman who will return his love is inseparable, in the logic of the poem, from the image of the lady's potentially devastating final denial: the end of the poem marks a limit, a nexus where the speaker's wish and his fear coincide and become undecidably fused. The conjunction of stone and plant, the activation of the heliotrope, also place the speaker and poet at a crisis that is at once erotic and poetic.
The animation of the lady and the lover's fantasy follow the natural metamorphoses determined by the sun: the six stanzas enact the change of seasons through a solar half-year.[38] After the solstitial beginning, the first stanza, juxtaposing snow and the dolce tempo, suggests early spring. The lady's garland in the third stanza points to the iconography of personified spring and to the rituals of Maying; the fronda verde of the
fourth, to the foliage of early summer; and the prato d'erba encircled by high mountains, where the speaker would have his way, to the sexual symbolism of harvests.[39] The sixth stanza foreshadows, with ritorneranno, the theme of solar conversio, which occurs at both solstices: at midsummer, the season found in the poet's fantasy in stanza 5; and at midwinter, the season marked at the poem's beginning.
The development of the lady as a stone, the changing of the seasons, and the lady's union with green, all occurring at the same time, are the discursive equivalent of the conjunction of the speaker's desire in the hard soil of the petra: the poem is the unfolding of the possibilities latent in that initial image, as the speaker's desire, guiding his meditation, transforms the lady into a living thing capable of passion. The poem registers the weaving together of change and fixity, vegetative and mineral worlds, in the order of its terms; petra and erba are thus shifted by the formal scheme such that they coincide—vertically, at the sestina's center, where the lady's relationship to precious stones and medicinal herbs is explicit, and horizontally, in the final verse, where the conjunction of the two heliotropes, one vegetable, one mineral, consummates the action of the poem. The final conjunction imitates the desired and dangerous conjunction of the speaker with the powerful petra, just as it marks the place where the poem both summarizes and exhausts the principles of its making. We shall return to the meaning of this final conjunction; let us note here only that the Same and the Other represent in the sestina the predicaments of speaker and petra, which include both tenacity and mutability, fixation and change. The two principles are shown in the motion of the sun, the model for the structure of the poem, to whose description we now turn.
Heliotropisms
The importance of change in the sestina—the changes rung on the rhyme-words, the modulation of seasons and colors, the development of the lady as stone and legno —has led readers to link the sestina form itself with the problematics of temporal alteration (Durling 1965 83–87; Durling 1976 14–18; Shapiro 1980 53–60). But this is to say that it unfolds under the sun, whose motion in the zodiac is the cause of seasonal change. The identification of the poem's ruling principles with heliotropic movement makes specific the poem's close relationship to the book Dante knew as De rerum transmutatione: Ovid's Metamorphoses.[40]
Dante's reliance on Ovid in the petrose has been documented by En-
rico Fenzi, especially in terms of the ruling theme of petrifaction.[41] In the sestina, both the image of the speaker rooted in the lady's hardness and the lady herself imagined bursting into flame have Ovidian precedents.[42] And if the sestina is governed by the sun, the central placement of the topos of Love's wound ("non può sanar per erba," 20), echoing the untreatable wound of Ovid's Apollo ("nullis amor est sanabilis herbis" Metamorphoses 1.523), is suggestive.[43]
The sestina's implication of the heliotropium invokes specifically the Ovidian tale of Clytie, the girl changed into a sunflower as punishment for her jealousy of the sun, as Vanni Bartolozzi has recently argued.[44] Like Clytie, the speaker of the sestina is rooted in his obsession, "barbato nella dura petra," echoing the enracination of Clytie, radice tenta. But Dante's transfer of Clytie to the sestina is not merely anecdotal.[45] Ovid's book has as its proclaimed intention the narration of how bodies are changed to new forms. It returns repeatedly (though not from a strictly Platonic perspective) to stories of the Same enduring the mutations of the Other.[46] The conclusion of the tale of Clytie is a case in point:
. . . et sub Iove nocte dieque
sedit humo nuda nudis incompta capillis
perque novem luces expers undaeque cibique
rore mero lacrimisque suis ieiunia pavit,
nec se movit humo: tantum spectabat euntis
ora dei vultusque suos flectebat ad ilium.
membra ferunt haesisse solo, partemque coloris
luridus exsangues pallor convertit in herbas:
est in parte rubor, violaque simillimus ora
flos tegit. illa suum, quamvis radice tenetur,
vertitur ad Solem mutataque servat amorem.
(Metamorphoses 4.260–270 [Ovid 1981])
. . . and beneath Jove, the sky, night and day
she sat on the ground unkempt, her hair uncovered,
for nine days she endured hunger and thirst and
fed herself with dew and tears alone; nor did
she move from the ground: she only
gazed at the sun as it went, turned her head to the
face of the god. They say her limbs adhered to the
ground, and her pallid bloodless color turned
partly to the color of grass: remained, in part red;
her face is hidden by a flower almost like a violet.
Though held by her root, she turned her love to
the sun and, though changed, maintained her love.
Ovid's text offers several parallels with the sestina: the change in Clytie's color is echoed by the changing hillsides in stanzas 1–2; her abject prostration on the ground is echoed in the speaker's willingness to sleep in stone and eat grass; her experience of weather and want is echoed in the sestina's concern with temporal mutations in general. But Ovid's text is most compelling as a parallel for formal reasons: it is a microcosm. The ten verses repeatedly juxtapose Clytie's immobility in the earth and her mutation under the sun. The final pointed contiguity "though changed, maintained her love" ("mutata . . . servat")—is the model, repeated at each extreme of the passage, with "night and day she sat" ("nocte dieque / sedit") and "though held . . . she turned ("tenetur / vertitur") each marking the turn of a hexameter and each alluding to both diurnal motion and Clytie's fixity. The verses within the frame then elaborate the same principles, from "for nine days" ("novem luces expers"), to the pivot on "nor did she move" ("nec se movit humo"), back to "gazed at the sun . . . turned her head" ("spectabat . . . flectebat"), and pivoting again on "her limbs adhered" ("membra . . . haesisse solo") through the changes of her external appearance and back to the close of the frame.
Therefore, Ovid's passage gives nested, redundant versions of Clytie's identity and transformation: the account of her gyrations in place is mimetic of the process it describes. Like the sestina itself, which decrees the varying positions of the rhyme-words, Ovid's text is both literally metamorphic and—given its subject—heliotropic, changing with the sun's movement.[47] It is a model of solar motion.[48]
Both the heliotrope and the hliotropium—once Ovid's Clytie—allude by etymology and operation to the sun and its motion. We have noted that the gem is said to affect the light of the sun; moreover, the Latin name, solsequium, indicates that the heliotrope plant turns, like Clytie, and follows the sun in the sky.[49] The gem is active; the plant, passive. Especially significant for the astrological situation of "Al poco giorno" is the fact, widely reported in the encyclopedias, that the plant flowers at the summer solstice. Thus, "heliotrope" also refers to the moment when the sun apparently reverses the direction of its proper motion along the ecliptic. In Isidore's account,
Heliotropum nomen accepit, quod aestivo solstitio floreat, vel quod solis motibus folia circumacta convertat. Unde et a latinis solsequia nuncupatur.
(Etymologiarum 17.9.37 [Isidore 1911])
It is called heliotropium, because it flowers at the summer solstice, or because its leaves are turned around by the motion of the sun. Hence it is called sun-follower by the Latins.
The solstice, the stasis at the reversal of solar movement, and the darkening (conversio ) of the sun by the gem joined to the plant coincide linguistically. Hence, the nature of the plant and the power of the clustered herb and gem focus on the sun's tropisms: the reversals of its motion at the solstices and its conversio or eclipse by the magic of the stone. The joining of stone and plant thus invokes the sun at the limits of its motion. In the context of the whole sestina, the motion of the sun implicit in allusion to the heliotropes regulates the complex movement of the rhyme-words in the stanzas, while the combination of active gem and passive plant, the lady's power and the lover's passion, constitutes the thematic tension of the poem.[50]
The technique of shifting rhyme-words in successive stanzas of the sestina (often described as retrogradatio cruciata ) links "Al poco giorno" closely to the spiral movement of the sun as well as to the solar tropics.[51] Both in the Timaeus and in Macrobius's commentary on the Somnium Scipionis, the highly visible motions of the sun help to reveal the complexity of other celestial motions.[52] The sun's spiral traverse of the sky during the year, minutely analyzed by Dante in the Convivio, demonstrates the combined movement of the Same—the diurnal motion of the celestial sphere—and the Other, which includes the proper motions of the planets.[53]
Now the ordering of the rhyme-words in the sestina requires the combination of two movements, as in the following specimen of rhymeword order for the first two stanzas: 123456 / 615243.[54] Because the second order begins reversed (6,1) and includes a reversed series (6,5,4), there is retrogradation. There is also crossing because part of the first order is reiterated in the usual way (1,2,3) in alternation with the reversed series. Moreover, the two movements are cyclical, with points of departure and return that coincide at the termini of each stanza (e.g., 6,1; 3,4). Although there are several ways of describing it, the scheme must be analyzed as a pair of opposed and superimposed movements. The movement of the rhyme-words is thus analogous to the movement of the sun, whose path across the sky results from the combined, although opposed, motions of Same and Other.[55]
Other aspects of the poem's scheme are modeled on solar movement as well. The procedure for deriving the order of the rhyme-words for the stanzas may be represented as always beginning with the extreme
terms and proceeding to the next most remote term, until two mean terms are selected. The figure so made may be expressed as a diminishing semicircular spiral, the figure that the sun traces in the sky as it rises and sets ever farther south when approaching the winter solstice.[56] In addition, because there is reversal of movement each time a new rhymeword is selected (e.g., 6 to 1, 1 to 5, 5 to 2), the procedure alludes to the tropic points, the movements of conversio in the sun's motion.[57] In this sense the tropic points are themselves the limits of the poem's form. As is observed in Dante 1967 2:265, the system of rhyme-words in the sestina is related to the conversio or antistrophe of the Latin rhetoricians, in which words are repeated at the extremes of successive clauses.[58] Thus the technical description for the poem's most conspicuous feature coincides with the terms for the solstice and for the movements—and effects—of the heliotropes. As we shall see at the end of our discussion, the convergence of linguistic and astronomical patterns is crucial to the efficacy of the poem.
We noted earlier that the principle of combining two movements also applies to larger structures of the poem. The sestina form guarantees that the stanzas will be linked as coblas capcaudadas: that is, the last verse and first verse of contiguous stanzas share a rhyme-word. Dante develops this feature by arranging the topics in stanzas such that each stanza pair displays a thematic chiasmus opposing mean half-stanzas to extreme half-stanzas. The topics are in every case instances of the Same juxtaposed to the Other: persistence intersecting with change. For example, the mean terms of the chiasmus in stanzas 1–2 concern the lady's immutability ("dura petra . . . si sta gelata"), while the extreme terms allude to the cycle of seasons ("al bianchir de' colli . . . gli fa tornar di bianco in verde")—and so on for stanzas 2–6.[59] The pattern is thus the equivalent on the level of sentenza of the scheme determining the position of rhyme-words. And like the retrogradatio cruciata, which assures that all the terms will assume extreme and mean positions in the stanzas, the arrangement of topics means that each pair of subjects will alternately take up the means and extremes of the chiasmus: the cycles not only cross, they also represent a circulation in which inner terms become outer, the center becomes the periphery.
The scheme that distributes rhyme pairs in each stanza is thus repeated in terms of pairs of stanzas.[60] This pattern is in turn mirrored in the whole poem, which joins its center—where erba and petra meet vertically—to its end, where they join on the same line. This weaving together of two cycles in the sentenza and in the form of the poem imi-
tates the macrocosm: the two junction points may be compared to the two crossing points of the Same and the Other in Timaeus's account of the World-Soul. Where, in Timaeus's account, the two points correspond to the equinoxes, in the sestina the two conjunctions represent the limits of solar motion: the solstices.[61] The sestina thus varies Dante's usual representation of the two motions in the pedes and sirma (strophe and antistrophe) of the stanza. With its undivided stanza, the two motions are combined into a single spiral weave that signifies, with great symbolic efficiency, both the embeddedness of the mind in the sublunar world and its kinship to the unchanging Same.
We recall that in the Neoplatonic reading of the Timaeus, the World-Soul is the emanation of noûs, Mind, which it circles as its origin. This circling is the motion of the Same, the revolution upon itself of the World-Soul, which is rational and contemplative of eternal truths. But the World-Soul also attends to the material universe, to what is extended and irrational; this activity corresponds to the circle of the Other, the model for the motions of the planets, associated by Calcidius with motions of passions like wrath or cupidity (Freccero 1986 77). The human soul, made of the same material, has the same revolutions.[62] The highest part of the soul, the intelligence or reason, moves as the circle of the Same: it turns on itself and contemplates eternal things. The soul's revolutions according to the circle of the Other are contrary motions, which represent the soul's other power, the will, in its relationship to the temporal world.
In its double movement the mind also has two foci: when concerned with the object of the will, the mind is turned outside itself; when with the object of the speculative intellect, within itself. These two objects coincide only when the mind identifies both with God: as the object of the will, the Good, which the mind orbits objectively; and as the object of the intellect, the True, which the mind contains and encircles within itself (Freccero 1986 254).
A precise expression of the World-Soul and its two revolutions, internal and external, is given in the central verses of Boethius's "O qui perpetua." In one sense the World-Soul revolves around the Mind, its center in the intelligible hierarchy; in another sense it turns, via the two motions, the cosmic machine of which it itself is the ordering principle:
Tu triplicis mediam naturae cuncta moventem
Conectens animam per consona membra resolvis.
Quae cum secta duos motum glomeravit in orbes,
In semet reditura meat mentemque profundam
Circuit et simili convertit imagine caelum.
(13–17)
To be the midpoint of triple Nature, to move all things,
You attach the soul and diffuse it through adapted members;
and Soul, cut in two, has globed its motion in two orbs,
goes forth to return to itself, turns about the depth
of mind, and curves the heavens to a like pattern.
The movements of the World-Soul as a model for the human mind are of central importance for our reading of Dante's one sestina. For Dante, who did not accept the literal existence of the World-Soul, the poem's heliotropic structure, pointing to the sun, may well reflect the identification of the World-Soul with the sun in medieval commentary on the Timaeus (Gregory 1955 123). Like the anima mundi, which permeates the universe from center to periphery, the sun stands in the middle of the rank of planets (fourth of seven), while mystically it is the center of the zodiac (Freccero 1986 229–231). Like the World-Soul, the horizon of the intelligible world (Mind, circled by the Same), and the physical cosmos (whose changes are governed by the Other), the sun is a mediating symbol of the intellectual sun that is God (Convivio 3.12.6).
We have suggested that the sestina's rhyme-words move in opposed, intersecting circular movements (or combined linear and circular movements), just as the circles of Same and Other move obliquely with respect to each other and intersect at the equinoctial points. The circulation of the lover's imagination—a power peculiarly liminal because both shared with the lower animals and indispensable to the embodied intellect—traces a double movement that is simultaneously meditation intra nos and attention extra nos —the typical movement of mind in the body, turned both in on itself and outward to the physical world.[63] Thus, while on the one hand the sestina mirrors the complex double movement of the sun, which manifests the cosmic motions, on the other hand it embodies the double motion of the speaker's meditation, which circulates the fixed image of the lady in his fantasy—the sun within him—and is turned by the planetary sun as the source of life and seasonal change. The heliotropic movement of the speaker's mind in the sestina is thus an instance of how self-consciousness may be modeled on the principles of celestial motion. As Scartazzini noted long ago (Dante 1875 2:505), Dante's expression for the moment of self-consciousness in the account of human generation in Purgatorio 25.122, "vive e sente e sé
in sé rigira" ("it [the soul] lives and feels and turns on itself"), echoes In semet reditura meat, from "O qui perpetua," on the World-Soul. In fact, Boethius's passage, which refers to Nature, the World-Soul and Mind, is resumed in Dante's reference to life (Nature), sensation (the Soul) and self-consciousness (Mind), nailing down the parallels in micro- and macrocosm. In the sestina, the action of the mind in the body is registered in the form of the poem itself, which, given the repercussion of sixes that marks it, might be described as "sei in sei rigira."[64]
Horizon and Adynaton:
The Tornata
We noted earlier that Dante drew on the metaphor of the human soul as horizon in setting out the double fines of humankind in the Monarchia: corruptible as a composite of soul and body, and so ordered to secular happiness, signified by the earthly paradise; incorruptible as a rational soul, and so ordered to the beatific vision (Dante 1979C 496–98). The mind as horizon verging on eternity goes far to explain the turn taken by the sestina in its final stanza, where the adynata, by invoking circumstances that cannot be fulfilled in nature, bring the poem to the boundary of time and eternity.[65]
The tornata, where the poem's two suns—inner and outer, lady and planet—coincide, presents the lover's crisis in eschatological terms. In one reading, the lady eclipses the sun and annihilates the lover; in other terms, her denial defeats the natural cycle marked by solar motion, and the poem itself ceases. But as we saw, the consummation of the poem is ambiguous. The dangerous maximum of the lady's power coincides with her animation and susceptibility to love. The course of the poem hopes for her descent to the Other, to passion and change.
In the speaker's words, for the lady to fall in love is as implausible as the apocalyptic rivers flowing uphill of the adynata. Temporal and erotic consummation are thus linked. Allusions to the sexual union of speaker and lady petra occur in every stanza of the poem—suggested by barbato in stanza 1, by the hills "covered" with vegetation in 2, by the piccoli colli that are like the lady's breasts in 3, by the reference to the medication of love's wound in 4, and in the fantasy of 5.[66] Stanza 6 verges on explicitness in staging the speaker's worship of the shadow cast by the lady's dress—a shadow that, at midsummer noon, would be almost directly beneath her. Thus the poem is increasingly erotic as the sun climbs higher and higher in the sky: a striking corroboration of
how the poem fulfills the speaker's fantasy through the movement of the sun.[67]
The fantasy of joining with the lady is closely linked to the poem's development of the seasons and to the cycles of time. The solar motions as cause of generation and corruption are mirrored thematically in the topic of the speaker's desire for union with the petra, for generation. Desiring union with the petra, the speaker offers submission to the toil of generation, to payment of the debt of nature.[68] Thus stanza 6 and the tornata refer to the consumption of speaker and lady: the lady's unlikely ignition as green wood, the speaker to be exhausted by "sleeping in stone." In its immediate relation to generation, the sexual dimension of the poem is governed by the circle of the Other, although the speaker's love, and the ultimate telos of generation—species immortality—participate in the circle of the Same. The lower principle is not excluded, but subsumed in the higher.
Consummation as a natural process, governed by the motion of the Other, is thus joined at the end of the poem to consummation in the sense of a cataclysm or apocalypse. Like the relationship of the diurnal poco giorno and the annual gran cerchio d'ombra in the opening verse, the short cycle that contains the narrative of speaker and lady is contained in turn by the series of secular ages and finally by eternity, of which time is merely the imitation.[69]
The boundary of time and eternity is introduced into the sestina by the adynata in stanza 6. As a rhetorical figure, the adynaton measures the unlikeliness of an event by comparing it to a natural impossibility.[70] But the language of the sestina does not rule out natural circumstances during which the reversal of rivers and the firing of green wood might occur. Both events are possible during natural cycles: at high tide, a cyclical event, rivers flow backward near the mouth; and green wood ages, in time, to become inflammable.[71] In view of Dante's debts to Seneca and Ovid, it is striking that the two events involve water and fire: in terms of the cycles outlined in the Naturales quaestiones and the Metamorphoses, both the reversal of rivers and the burning of green wood would occur—the first during the cataclysm, when underground waters rise to cover the hills, the second during the ekpyrosis, when all wood would burn.[72]
Specifically, Dante's adynata derive from the sestina of Arnaut the appeal to the transformations of nature and time countenanced in a Christian cosmos, where miracles, which violate nature, occur to mani-
fest the will of the Creator (Shapiro 1980 71). The speaker's hope that the lady will take fire (a commonplace in the amorous, "Ovidian" tradition) echoes Arnaut's reference to the flowering of the seca verga in the birth of Christ from a virgin. And for the reversal of rivers we must recall Dante's text of choice when exemplifying allegorical exposition: the return of the Jordan during the Exodus.[73]
In exitu Israel de Aegypto . . .
Iordanus conversus est retrorsum.
(Psalm 113: 1–2)
When Israel went out of Egypt . . .
Jordan was turned back.
Like the text of the psalm, the adynaton establishes conditions for polysemy. The questions raised in the tornata regarding the destruction or vindication of the speaker, the cessation of temporal cycles at the end of time, and the repetition of impossible events and miracles suggest that, allusively at least, the sestina is already within this fourfold frame of reference. The fourfold sense of biblical exegesis, which links events to the moral life, to the life of Christ and history of the church, and to the universal dispensation of salvation and damnation—that is, all history—is a developed form of the macro-/microcosmic structure developed in the sestina, in which the cosmic cycles alluded to in the opening verse are mirrored by the turnings of the speaker's mind.
Our view of stanza 6 is strengthened by verses 34–36. As in "Io son venuto" and "Amor, tu vedi ben," the possibility of the speaker's death is raised—dormire in petra (35) anticipates coricare in poca petra as a periphrasis for entombment in "Amor, tu vedi ben."[74] The reversal of time in stanza 6 is a double one: the cyclical return of the summer solstice guaranteed by the form of the poem, and the greater conversio at the end of time, when the movement of the sun above and below the horizon will cease and the cosmos will be transformed, in the twinkling of an eye, to the immutability of Eternity.[75] The terms of the adynaton in 6.1 ("ritorneranno i fiumi a colli") echo traditional uses of the figure in the poetic tradition, but for the sestina it has a self-referential meaning as well, alluding to the scheme in which rhyme-words would return to their original positions if the poem were to continue beyond the sixth stanza. Stanza 6 is thus a kind of horizon of recurrence, the threshold of a necessary conversio in the form of the poem.[76] Although the speaker is apparently fixed at the solstice, he imagines both the possibility of a sex-
ual consummation in the natural world and a final consummation of the ages in the magna dies domini, the great day of the Lord of the prophetic texts and Christian eschatology.[77] The poem implicitly adds the prospect of a transcendent solstice, the day of the Lord, that doubles and contains the astronomical opposition of winter and summer solstices. The poem's first line, so striking in its syntactic inversion and rhetorical catachresis, in fact foreshadows the terms for the Day of Judgment used by Virgilio as he speaks to Cato in the Purgatorio:[ 78]
"Tu'l sai, ché non ti fu per lei [libertà] amara
In Utica la morte, ove lasciasti
La vesta ch'al gran dì sarà sì chiara."
(1.73–75)
In a very precise sense, "Al poco giorno," with its emphasis on effects of shadow, is itself the shadow or adumbration of the total brightness of the last day: pocogiorno at the beginning of the poem and più nera ombra at the end project, per antiphrasin, the gran dì; Dante will, in fact, imagine a transcendent solstice in the Paradiso when he sees Christ in the heaven of the stars—transcendent because the pilgrim is by that time far past the planetary sun.[79] The negativity of the sestina, both optical and moral, is in potency—and to that extent prepares—the brightness alluded to at the end of the poem. The uses of ombra in the poem (carefully calculated, as with all the rhyme-words) prepare this brightness:
al gran cerchio d'ombra (1.1)
gelata come neve a l'ombra (2.2)
Amor lì viene a stare a l'ombra (3.4)
e dal suo lume non mi può far ombra (4.5)
l'amor ch'io porto pur a la sua ombra (5.3)
per veder do' suoi panni fanno ombra (6.6)
quandunque i colli fanno più nera ombra (tornata 1)
The first three uses describe cast shadows, ombre portate: the shadow of night cast by the earth itself; snow in the shade cast by the hills; and Love in the shade of the lady's brows, or personified and worshiping at her side, in the shade she casts. But Love in her eyes is also the ray of her glance, her light; this is the basis of the next use, describing the lover's inability to shade himself from her lume, and the subsequent use as well,
referring to the speaker's devotion to her image (or her shadow). The final use is to the shadow of the lady's body (clothed, or with panni as a synecdoche for the body). But this is the shadow that, in the tornata, is eliminated by the lady's brightness, as the green dress over her body manifests the conjunction of the two heliotropes and the apex of her power. The passive shadows in the first two instances give way to the ambiguous third use, and then to uses that define the lady as light: from her eyes, as an optically formed imago; and in relation to her shadowdispelling brightness. Thus the ombra in the sense of a privation of light in fact disappears gradually throughout the poem, accompanying the development of the lady's power as a stone. Thus, ombra is clearly the most important rhyme-word in the poem. It appears first and last in the stanzas and first in the tornata; it is the single rhyme-word assonant or consonant with all the others (and thus may be said to contain them); and it is itself a variation (or shadow) of Arnaut's rhyme-word cambra, which again appeals to the stanza as a container.[80]
But the importance of ombra will inevitably be shared with its rhymeword counterpart, donna, which first appears as the last rhyme-word in the first stanza. The sestina's scheme is such that the rhyme-word that appears last in the first stanza will in subsequent stanzas always fill the place just abandoned by the rhyme-word that appears first in the first stanza. This scheme links the other rhyme-words, too, but ombra and donna circumscribe the initial, defining stanza of the poem. Such a feature is not without thematic import: donna repeatedly enters the place previously occupied by ombra. In other words, donna repeatedly eclipses ombra, a substitution that anticipates the lady's cancellation of shadows in the tornata.
In the cantos of Dante's natal sign of Gemini (whose relation to the petrose we have suggested in Chapter 2) we come upon two figures that distinctly recall key principles of the tornata of "Al poco giorno": brightness and inversion. In Canto 25, Dante is blinded by the appearance of John the Evangelist:
Poscia tra esse un lume si schiarì
sì che, se'l Cancro avesse un tal cristallo
l'inverno avrebbe un mese d'un sol dì.
Although John is not in the body, as the pilgrim first suspects, Dante's image alludes to the doctrine, to be explained in Canto 25, of the blessed
as possessing two robes, due stole, at the general resurrection on the gran dì. As in the simile, the sun in Cancer (in addition to its normal position in Capricorn at the winter solstice) would make the day last twenty-four hours: it would cancel the night cycle and the poco giorno and eliminate winter. This image is specifically linked to the reference to "unwintering" (svernare ) at the upper confines of Gemini, in the Primum Mobile, and to the reference at the lower confine of Gemini, in Saturn, to the reversal of the Jordan's motion (Paradiso 22.94–96). In our concluding chapter, we shall discuss more fully the relation of the petrose to these scenes in the cantos that bracket Gemini and to the theme of Dante's hope for universal reform in relation to his own poetic power.[81] We can observe here, however, that the sestina, like the horizon of mind between the temporal and the eternal, is inscribed in a double order of time: insofar as it looks for a natural solution to the speaker's desire—the revolution of the annual cycle—the sestina looks back to its parent canzone "Io son venuto," where the speaker's restoration depends on riding out the negative cycle and awaiting the return of the warm season; but in its incipient, implicit invocation of an eschatological context, "Al poco giorno" points forward to the strategies and terminology of the great "double sestina," "Amor, tu vedi ben," and beyond that, to the Commedia.
The Stay of the Sun
The tornata of "Al poco giorno" embraces the range of meanings that we have brought out thus far: both sexual consummation and the adumbration of the last day; both the fulfillment of natural cycles and the cessation of motion; both the eclipse of the planetary sun by the lady's brilliance—a triumph of the petra that suggests the annihilation of the speaker—and the projection of the poet's wish for a transformation of the petra in a sense favorable to him.
Quandunque, the first word of the tornata, is especially rich in implication. In Dante 1967 2.268 several occasions during the year are suggested as possible referents—winter darkness, but also summer, when the hills are heavy with foliage and cast deep shadows, or even the long shadows at dawn or dusk on a given day. Such a comprehensive quandunque epitomizes the speaker's heliotropic imagination embracing the several seasons and days of the solar year, answering both to the speci-
ficity of the opening—"Al poco giorno"—and to the eschatological sweep of allusions to the cataclysm and the day of the Lord.
Indeed, in formal terms comprehensiveness is one function of the tornata itself, whose traditional name impinges with special force on the sestina. In its embrace of all the rhyme-words (we shall discuss the question of their order in a moment), the tornata fulfills its microcosmic function for the poem and the cycles of time it represents, from the solar day to the solar year to the completion of the six secular ages.[82] With the addition, in the tornata, of six further appearances of the rhyme-words to the thirty-six in the stanzas, the completed poem yields a number like 36 + 6, completing the sestina's allusion to 1296, which was a leap year of 366 days.
After the form itself, the microcosmic richness of the tornata is Dante's most studied adaptation of the poetics of Arnaut's sestina. That there are several interpretations of the adynata in stanza 6 derives from the multiple figural referents for Arnaut's seca verga: Adam and the Virgin Mary, Seth's branch, Aaron's rod, Joseph's wand.[83] The very principle of containment of meaning derives from Arnaut's conception of his poem, in which cambra is a rhyme-word, as a series of structures emboitées, indeed stanze in a self-conscious manner.[84]
Given the importance of the conjunction of stone and plant in Dante's sestina, it is significant that the horizontal conjunction of erba and petra in the final verse is an effect of Dante's careful redistribution of the order of the rhyme-words, as compared with that in Arnaut's tornada. Arnaut's order in both his stanza 6 and his tornada is (in most editions) bDFECA, bEdCfA (rhyme-words are italicized):
B C'aissi s'enpren e s'enongla
D Mos cors en lei cum l'escorss' en la verga;
F q'ill m'es de ioi tors e palaitz e cambra,
E e non am tant fraire, paren ni oncle:
C q'en paradis n'aura doble ioi m'arma,
A si ia nuills hom per ben amar lai intra.
bE Arnautz tramet sa chansson d'ongl'e d'oncle,
dC a grat de lieis que de sa verg'a l'arma,
fA son Desirat, cui pretz en cambra intra.
For so seizes and nails itself
my body to hers like the bark to the branch;
that it is of joy the tower and palace and room,
and I love not so much brother, parent, nor uncle;
such that in paradise my soul will have double joy of her,
if any man for loving well gains entrance there.
Arnaut sends along his song of nail and uncle,
for the pleasure of her who has the soul of his staff,
his Desirat, whose praise enters the chamber.[85]
Arnaut's tornada follows the convention of having the rhyme-words that appear in final position (ECA ) repeat the order of the last three verses in the sixth stanza, so that the tornada is structurally a repetition of the sirma.[86] The scheme also echoes the principle of retrogradatio cruciata by weaving the sequence bdf with the sequence ECA (retrograde with respect to the rhyme-word order of stanza 1) so that—especially in light of the devices noted above—the tornada suggests a convergence toward its center. Finally, Arnaut accents the closure of the tornada by leaving unaltered the positions of the first and last rhyme-words (b,A; inverse order) with respect to the last stanza.
An important consequence of Arnaut's order is the conjunction of four of the rhyme-words in pairs that privilege their semantic relationships: verga/arma and cambra/intra. The conspicuous exception is the pair oncle—ongla singled out as the metonymic name for Arnaut's technique, which often depends on homonymy (Dragonetti 1982 240). Dante's emphasis on the proximity of erba and petra in his sestina alludes to Arnaut's christening of his poem, and points to the proximity of the two heliotrope terms as a key to his own poem's technique: just as oncle and ongla are nearly homonymous, the terms hidden by petra and erba—heliotropium and heliotropia —differ only, so to speak, in ungue.
Dante's rhyme-word order in the tornata of "Al poco giorno" challenges Arnaut's. Because Dante conceived of the sestina as a canzone without diesis, he abandons the convention of echoing the sirma in the tornada. He does adopt Arnaut's idea of echoing the initial rhymewords from the stanzas in the poem's last formal unit. Dante's tornata is ordered as follows:
bA Quandunque i colli fanno più nera ombra 37
dF sotto un bel verde la giovane donna 38
eC la fa sparer, com'uom petra sott' erba. 39
AFC echo the first three stanzas (verses 1, 7, 13), bde the second three in inverse order (verses 31, 25, 19). A cycle bAFCedb is thus suggested, de-
parting from b (colli ) and returning to A (ombra ); bA in verse 37 restates, in inverse order, their juxtaposition in the first two lines of the sestina (ombra/colli ). But Dante remains one up on Arnaut, because a segment of the cyclical order starting from the middle (F ) and returning to it (FCedbA ) also reflects the rhyme-words that end the stanzas (FCEDBA ).
Like Arnaut, Dante mirrors the symmetry of the stanzas in the tornata, and by echoing the order of both initial and terminal stanza rhyme-words he doubles the converging elements and enhances the power of his closure. Nor is this all. Compared to Arnaut's tornada, contained by b and A rhyme-words, Dante's might appear to lack closure of its own. In fact its closure, working simultaneously with its reflection of the center of the sestina, is more powerful than that of "Lo ferm voler." The result of Dante's weave is a concluding juxtaposition eC (petra, erba ) that marks the tropic, central point of the cycle AFCedb, which itself reflects the order of the initial rhyme-words in the stanzas (AFCEDB ). That is, Dante has made mean terms into final terms and reiterated the superimposition of center and terminus suggested by the two conjunctions of E and C rhyme-words (petra, erba ) in the text.
The apparent lack of closure in Dante's tornata is a clue to its meaning: what if Dante had used Arnaut's order without change? The words would appear as follows: colli; petra; verde; erba; donna; ombra. They would thus exhibit a logic of semantic pairing much like that in Arnaut's tornada: hills are stony, grass is green. And like Arnaut's oncle and ongla, the remaining pair, donna and ombra, are linked by assonance rather than by semantic relation. Dante's avoidance of the Provençal order is one clue to the extent to which his own order is willed. One result, we have seen, is the crucial meeting of petra and erba. But in accordance with emphasis in the tornata on eschatological closure, it is also significant that, taken consecutively, the six rhyme-words fall into a significant hierarchy: colli; ombra; verde; donna; petra; erba. The order is spatial and causal in terms of how higher levels contain and influence lower. Hills cast shadows; the lady is within the shadows and under her green dress; the speaker, under her influence, places the stone under the plant. And we must reverse petra and erba in our list because the text instructs us to do so: petra sott' erba. The gesture that puts stone under plant is thus also the gesture that determines the poem's final order of
rhyme-words. And because the final rhyme order reflects the entire sestina, it is also the gesture that orders the poem as a whole. The conjunction of stone and plant, of petra and erba, and all they have come to imply, is the key to the poem and to its power.
As a reflection of the chain of being and causation, the final order is a static imitation of the cosmos, just as the sestina proper is a dynamic model of the movements of Same and Other. In the light of the eschatological suggestions at the end of the poem, the rhyme-words, after exhausting their places in the scheme of the sestina, are placed in an order that implicitly summarizes and contains time. As we shall see, this idea will be explicitly worked out in "Amor, tu vedi ben." The effect of the tornata, folding center to periphery, wrapping the poem up on itself, is like the rolling up of the heavens at the Apocalypse: "et caelum recessit sicut liber involutus" (Apocalypse 6.14). The final order is an order, so to speak, of shadows: each element interposed between the source of light and the lover—the hills, the lady's garment, her body, her brows—casts its shadow around him; the sestina is the sum of these shadows, a sum that reflects the geocentric cosmos itself as a series of spheres that transmit, but also obscure, the absolute source of light.
The summation implied by the hierarchy of rhyme-words has a formal dimension as well. One consequence of the structure of the sestina is that the scheme disposing the rhyme-words is not deducible from any given stanza; in the terms of the De vulgari eloquentia (2.ix.2), the "art," the habitus of the verse groups, is not contained in the stanza, as is normally the case in Dante's conception of the canzone. It follows that because a complete cycle of the rhyme-word scheme requires all six stanzas of the sestina, the whole poem, which is the container of the meaning (the sentenza ) coincides with the stanza insofar as the stanza is understood as the container of the form. This makes of the sestina a special case among the gamut of possible canzone forms but also renders it uniquely powerful: the convergence of the formal unit and the unit of meaning harmonizes with the other principles that lead toward a climactic fusion of meaning and formal principles as the poem approaches closure.
The gesture that creates the final order of rhyme-words is also a clue to the importance of inversion in the poem.[87] For in the series of terms as written, petra precedes erba. Here again Dante is borrowing from
Arnaut, who ends his sestina with inverted syntax (en cambra intra ). Like "Io son venuto," too, where all stanzas but the first begin with inverted syntax, "Al poco giorno" both begins and ends with a crucial and rhetorically brilliant inversion (Dante 1946 156). The inversion emphasizes the closure of the form, its recirculation within its limits. But there are other implications as well. The reversal of the order just at the final term—the tropic, the conversio —invites us to read the poem in both directions: literally forward and down to the conjunction of stone and plant, but also logically and allusively backward and upward to the remote cause and antithesis of all shadows: the sun. The tornata, though referring like the sestina as a whole to the obscuration of the sun, is designed also to lead back to the sun—to make us, as readers, heliotropic, to find the sun that the poem's shadows presuppose. In this sense the poem turns the reader's gaze to the heavens—like the obsessed Clytie, to be sure, but also like the philosophical spectator in the Timaeus, who is equipped with eyes precisely so that he may consider the motions of the heavens.
Now the power of the heliotrope, and indeed the very possibility of our interpretation, depend on identifying conjunction—pairing, gemination—and inversion as principles of the poem's technique and structure. In other words, far from presenting an arbitrary sequence of stanzas, the meaning and power of the poem require its having exactly the form and dispositio of terms that it in fact does have. The poem, in which rhetorical (conversio, antistrophe, retrogradatio ) and cosmic order (solar conversio, planetary retrogradation) coincide, is itself the conjunction of stone and plant, the activated talisman. Several of the lapidaries describing the heliotrope in fact prescribe a third element, a versified charm, as an ingredient necessary for activating the power of the heliotrope: the conjunction of stone and herb must be "sacrato legitimo carmine" if it is to be efficacious.[88] Just as Arnaut refers to his sestina as a "chansson d'ongl'e d'oncle," a bizarre encounter of nail and uncle, Dante's verses join stone and plant in a scheme that imitates the cosmos with all the resources of art. It is likely that Petrarch registered the precise relationship of Dante's poem to the lore of lapidaries at the center of the sixth sestina of the Rime sparse:
Et ò cerco poi'l mondo a parte a parte
se versi o petre o suco d'erbe nove
mi rendesser un dì la mente sciolta.
(Rime sparse 214.16–18)[89]
Petrarch brings together the three elements—stone, herb, and verse-required to activate the power of the sestina and free the speaker-lover from obsession with the lady.
Dante's poem works as an artifact not only to deploy a structure of conjunctions, but also magically to enlist the inversions of time and the heavens and focus them on the petra, with the hope of making her fall in love and so release the speaker from his dangerous impasse. The text suggests two possible outcomes at different levels of interpretation. The first, more obvious, has the young petra grow in power until her brilliance overwhelms the speaker, who disappears, like the shadows, with his text. In the second, the marvelous art of the poem that joins petra to erba and activates the heliotrope permits the speaker to escape the negative moment and project an antithetical bright summer that will see the lady burn with love for him: in this sense, the conclusion of the poem is an enfranchisement.[90] But the two outcomes are irremediably entwined, for the increase of the lady's power and the consummation of the poem's scheme are simultaneous. What the lover wishes and what he fears come to fruition at once. The adynata can thus be taken as indications of the improbability of the lover's satisfaction, or as themselves a system of defenses he puts up against the actual—and dangerous—possibility of achieving the lady's love.[91] The poem concludes, then, in aporia. The cycles of time imitated and thus embodied in the poem will not provide the necessary solution, will not bring about the solstice of the lady's acceptance. Dante's next attempt to find the power to move the lady will be the great "double" sestina, "Amor, tu vedi ben," where a transcendent basis to the poet's craft, as well as his love, is shown to be indispensable.
4—
The Poem as Crystal:
"Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna"
The third of the rime petrose, "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna," has, as Dante writes in its commiato, a "novità," something unprecedented, "che non fu mai pensata in alcun tempo." The novelty of the poem seems indeed to have been too much for many critics, who have been baffled or put off by it.[1] This lack of comprehension has led to the poem's being regarded as "unworthy" of Dante,[2] and the prejudice has extended also to the references to "Amor, tu vedi ben" in De vulgari eloquentia 2.xiii,[3] where the assertion that the excessive repetition of the same rhyme ("nimia . . . eiusdem rithimi repercussio"), ordinarily a fault, can be justified in an appropriate context, has been taken as apologetic.[4] We believe, rather, that Dante is laying triumphant claim to a mastery from which lesser talents are barred, for he cites "Amor, tu vedi ben" as a celebration of his arrival at maturity as a poet, compared in his metaphor with being knighted (on the entire passage, see Appendix 1). Because of its place among the petrose and the prominence claimed for it by the De vulgari eloquentia, not to speak of its intrinsic interest, "Amor, tu vedi ben" needs to be examined much more closely than it seems to have been before now.
One key to Dante's conception of "Amor, tu vedi ben" is in the phrase already mentioned: "la novità che per tua forma luce." In suggesting that the form of the poem emits or transmits light, Dante is of course invoking one of the central categories of medieval esthetics, brightness (claritas ), often associated with harmony (consonantia ) and wholeness (integritas ).[5] More explicitly than "Al poco giorno," the poem draws on the so-called light metaphysics, in which light is associated, as in this phrase, with form.[6] And in saying that the form of the poem emits light, Dante is speaking of it as a spatial structure rather than as a temporal one. He is viewing it, as we would say, synchronically rather than diachronically. This often happens in the congedo of a canzone, but
here the emphasis is particularly strong. In the context of the petrose, as of the Paradiso, any object that emits light is drawn into the semantic field of precious stones. As we shall see, "Amor, tu vedi ben" is being implicitly compared to a crystal, in a metaphor that has a surprising range of reference and implication. "Amor, tu vedi ben" is in fact extremely ambitious: with greater clarity than any of the other petrose, it shows Dante experimenting with themes and formal conceptions that anticipate the Paradiso; we shall find also that it is related in important respects to "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore."
Within the petrose, "Amor, tu vedi ben" represents, obviously enough, the most difficult and daring formal experiment. It is no accident that the microcosmic aspect of the poem—its imitation of the motion of the heavens—is developed more intensely than in the other petrose. In a way, "Amor, tu vedi ben" represents the climax of the poet's effort to understand and represent his experience in the framework of the cosmos as a whole and, through the practice of art, to make the positive side of his temperament prevail. It is particularly significant, then, that the theme of the lover's imminent death appears in this poem with greater insistence than in either of the first two. It would seem that the more valiantly the poet struggles to make the positive energies of his art prevail, the more strongly the negative side of the situation and of his temperament manifests itself. "Amor, tu vedi ben" sharply reveals the paradox of the enterprise of the petrose and Dante's awareness of it; and it leads, in the final stanza, to a prayer for divine help—necessary in the literal "biographical" situation because only some kind of grace can overcome the lady's coldness and save the lover's life, and necessary to the poet's art because it is now clear that the poet-lover cannot, by his own powers, guarantee that his artistic triumph of creating a crystalline model of the cosmos will not itself turn out to be a Medusan petrifaction that will even more irrevocably isolate him from the lady.
1
The argument of "Amor, tu vedi ben" can be summarized as follows:
Stanza 1. The lady's cruelty, a kind of rebellion against Love, is unrelenting; she is as if turned to stone.
Stanza 2. The lover's faithful submission to Love makes him defenseless against her and therefore menaced with death.
Stanza 3. The effect of the lady's cruelty on the lover is parallel to that of winter in the cosmos, especially where winter is most severe: she makes his blood freeze and his thoughts turn to tears.
Stanza 4. It is especially through the eyes of lady and lover that their exchange takes place; but whereas her gaze penetrates his heart and makes him entirely devoted to her, she does not respond to the light of love in his eyes.
Stanza 5. Therefore he begs God to have pity on him and to drive the cold from her heart, lest he die when found in such a state by the spring.
As is readily seen, the third—the central—stanza is devoted to the macrocosmic-microcosmic parallelism between the effects of winter and the experience of the lover. In this stanza, for the first time in the poem, the theme of the metamorphosis of water into crystal appears. We therefore begin with it. Stanza 3 as a whole draws a parallel between the effect of winter in the north, where cold is most intense, and the effect on the lover of the lady's coldness toward him; exactly half the stanza is devoted to each term of the comparison. Two effects are compared in the two halves, and each effect is assigned (with one exception) to one of the formal subdivisions of each half-stanza, either pes or versus. In the first half-stanza we see the effect of cold on water and then on air, and in the second, the effect of the lady's coldness on the lover's blood and then on his pensiero; water and blood, air and thought, are thus made analogous. The symmetries within each half-stanza and between the two half-stanzas are elaborate.
Segnor, tu sai che per algente freddo
l'acqua diventa cristallina petra
là sotto tramontana ov'è il gran freddo,
e l'aere sempre in elemento freddo
vi si converte, sì che l'acqua è donna
in quella parte per cagion del freddo.
(25–30)
As we saw in the Introduction, these transformations—water into crystal (by way of ice) and air into water—were thought in Aristotelian natural science to obey the same principles, and they exemplify the basic
pattern of change in the sublunar world, the passage of matter (= receptivity to form ) from the form of one of the four elements into those of the others, always by way of the intermediate steps. Thus fire (hot and dry) changes into air (hot and moist), changes into water (cold and moist), changes into earth (cold and dry), and back and forth, always through the same steps. The change of water into crystal is a special case, as we have seen, of the transformation of water into earth. In our first half-stanza, the elements, with their transformations, are mentioned in ascending order (water, air), while the transformation in each case is downward (water to earth, air to water).
Now the term that represents the cause of the transformations—freddo—in each pes ends lines that surround the lines stating the result. As in "Io son venuto," the cold is thought of as exerting pressure on the elements; the idea is clearest in the second line, where, surrounded by the two lines ending with freddo, we see the water turning, not merely to ice, but to crystal: "l'acqua diventa cristallina petra." The air, on the other hand, appears in the first line of the second pes as already turning into water, but the transformation itself, "vi si converte," takes place in the second line, at the end of which we find the result: "l'acqua è donna"; and the line is surrounded, like petra, by the fourth and sixth lines, ending with freddo. Thus the half-stanza as a whole, like the inner line of each pes, is enclosed by the cold—both because its first and last lines both end with freddo,[7] and—more importantly—because the lines are logically and syntactically parallel in identifying the cause of the transformations: per algente freddo and per cagion del freddo. Hence, while there is a parallelism in the order of the two phrases that identify the transformations ("l'acqua diventa," 26, and "l'aere . . . vi si converte," 28–29) and in the addition of a phrase that assigns the locality ("là sotto tramontana," 27, and "in quella parte," 30), the assignment of causality occupies in each case the end of both the first line and the last. Syntactically, these members are the parts of a compound-complex clause depending on "Segnor, tu sai che . . ."; thus "per algente freddo" and "per cagion del freddo" occupy the very first and last places in the syntactic unit of the dependent clause.
But "l' acqua è donna" does not only refer to the transformation of air into water; it also generalizes the two phrases that precede it. Because water turns to ice and to crystal and air to water, water is donna. Crystal may be a stone, but it retains the transparency of water: it has not taken on completely the nature of the element earth, but retains a transpar-
ency that can only derive from the purest water, derived in its turn from the purity of the air from which the water was formed.[8]
The entire cycle of elemental transformations is implied in the first half of stanza 3, although the terms explicitly refer only to three elements (acqua, petra, aer ). Fire is conspicuous by omission; we shall encounter it in the commiato. If we number the phrases of the elemental cycle (1) fire, (2) air, (3) water, (4) earth, it is clear that the half-stanza gives us first 3–4, then 2–3. In other words, the stanza begins at a logical midpoint; to restore logical order, one would have to begin at the center of the half-stanza with air, follow to the end with water, and return to the beginning of the stanza to follow water to stone. Thus the cycle of transformations is represented as circling around the center of the half-stanza.
It is important to be clear that the term freddo, which identifies the cause of the transformations, refers in this half-stanza to the influence of the heavenly bodies. The enclosure of the half-stanza by freddo thus represents the spatial as well as the causal enclosure of the sublunar within the heavens. The first half of stanza 3, then, is already a little model of the cosmos. As such it has been carefully prepared by the preceding stanzas, and it is powerfully effective in broadening the frame of reference of the poem to the cosmos as a whole, in this respect looking back to "Io son venuto al punto de la rota."
The second half of stanza 3 draws the parallel with the lover's experience:
così dinanzi al sembiante freddo
mi ghiaccia sopra il sangue d'ogne tempo,
e quel pensiero che m'accorcia il tempo
mi si converte tutto in corpo freddo
che m'esce poi per mezzo de la luce
là ond'entrò la dispietata luce.
(31–36)
The lady's cold appearance or expression— il sembiante freddo —corresponds to thefreddo of the first line of the stanza, but also to the indication of locality (là sotto tramontana ). One is struck by the difference made possible by the parallelism: "dinanzi al sembiante freddo" versus "là sotto tramontana." The initial effect is to assimilate dinanzi toward sotto: the parallel expresses his subjection to her cold influence, as if it were coming from above—as if, at one level of suggestion, he were fac-
ing a mountain. But, to be more exact, the lady's sembiante, which emits cold, corresponds to the planet(s) or astronomical configuration[9] whose influence produces the cold of winter, as one sees from the fact that her cold influence is transmitted in her light ("la dispietata luce," 36), which is thus even more strictly parallel to the freddo of the first half-stanza. In parallel with the pattern of the first half-stanza, the identification of the lady as cause begins (il sembiante freddo ) and ends (la dispietata luce ) the second half-stanza.
The poem has already said (line 24) that the negative intensity of the situation threatens the lover with death. As in "Io son venuto," the danger is associated with the special astrological configuration at the winter solstice of December 1296, threatening above all to a Gemini. In a way that is similar to the implicit references in "Io son venuto" to the cataclysm, here the permanent freezing of the far north (not merely the winter of the Florentine landscape as before) is invoked, because it is the Medusan danger of petrifaction that threatens the poet, as in the commiato of the earlier poem; indeed, the second half of this central stanza represents what is easily recognized as an incipient petrifaction.
Of course, the lady is only metaphorically a planet or sun, and she only metaphorically surrounds the lover, who more properly is said to be before her, dinanzi. As befits a metaphorical parallel, the enclosure of the second half-stanza is achieved, not by the same word ( freddo ), but by its troped substitute (luce ).[10] The motif of enclosure is retained, however, in the idea of the blood freezing over, which corresponds to the freezing of water in the first half-stanza, as the conversion of his thoughts into tears corresponds to the conversion of air to water (in snow or rain). The parallel between weeping and atmospheric precipitation looks back to "Io son venuto," line 22: "onde l'aere s'attrista tutto e piagne";[11] as in "Io son venuto," the parallel aere-pensiero depends on the unstated correlation of thought with breath or spirit.[12]
At the center of the microcosm of the second half-stanza (still of stanza 3) is the lover's heart, not explicitly referred to here (as it is at the midpoints of stanzas 1, 2, and 4), but implied as the fountain of his blood and as the dwelling place of the love expressed in his pensiero (see Chapter 5, note 47). The second half-stanza, then, implicitly represents a process parallel to the circulations of the elements in the first halfstanza: entrance through the lover's eye of the lady's cold influence, production of fear and sorrow in the heart (freezing of the blood), and con-
version of thought to tears that go out through the eye. The process, however, involves motion to and from a center, as opposed to motion around a center.
These patterns—formal and thematic—involving disposition and motion in relation to a center are particularly important here at the central stanza of "Amor, tu vedi ben." At the center of the poem, and at the poet's heart, is the danger of death. In the first petrosa this danger is confined to the congedo; in the second it receives no explicit mention at all. Its presence here is striking and looks forward to the full emergence of the theme in "Così nel mio parlar." There is much more to say about stanza 3, but it is time now to consider the functioning in the poem as a whole of the stanza form that makes these patterns possible.
2
In form, "Amor, tu vedi ben" is closely related to the two preceding petrose. Its resemblance to "Al poco giorno" in this regard is especially close, since, like that poem, it uses rhyme-words instead of rhymes and varies their order according to a scheme that, if repeated an additional time, would reproduce the original order. The relation of the second and third petrose is so close, indeed, that "Amor, tu vedi ben" has become known, somewhat inaccurately, as a "double sestina."[13]
In the terminology of the De vulgari eloquentia, the stanza of "Amor, tu vedi ben" has diesis and consists of two pedes (of three lines each), followed by two versus (again, of three lines each), with concatenatio (lines 6–7) and with two lines unmatched (claves ) within each stanza (lines 2 and 5, the central line of each pes ).[14] Dante has only one other canzone in which the two major parts of the stanza—before and after the diesis—are both subdivided: "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore."[15] And "Amor, tu vedi ben" is unique among Dante's poems in having pedes and versus that are of equal length.[16] In having both rhyme(-word)s within the stanza and rhyme(-word)s between stanzas (including two lines that rhyme only between stanzas), the stanza of "Amor, tu vedi ben" represents a reconciliation of the principles of the sestina (technically an undivided stanza) with those of the traditional Italian stanza. Numerically, it combines, and might be said to harmonize, the numbers five and twelve: there are five stanzas of twelve lines, with five rhymewords per stanza. With the shorter (six-line) commiato, then, we have 5 × 12 + 6 = 66 lines.
Perhaps the most immediately striking difference between the form of this poem and that of the sestina is that while in the sestina each rhyme-word appears only once in each stanza, so that, although the order of the rhyme-words changes, their relative frequency does not, here the stanza differentiates them: in each stanza, two of the rhymewords appear once, two appear twice, and one appears six times.[17] The variation of order is simpler than the retrogradatio cruciata of the sestina: here each successive stanza takes its first rhyme-word, like the sestina, from the last line of the previous stanza, but the others are simply displaced and thus preserve their sequence:
Stanza 1. ABA.ACA:ADD.AEE
2. EAE.EBE:ECC.EDD
3. DED.DAD:DBB.DCC
4. CDC.CEC:CAA.CBB
5. BCB.BDB:BEE.BAA
Commiato. AED.DCB[ 18]
If we follow rhyme-word B through this scheme, we see that in stanza 1 it appears in the second line, in stanza 2 in the fifth. Now, as it continues to be displaced, its frequency increases, and the word gains in prominence: it appears more often and more emphatically by reason of its contiguity with itself, and it occupies a later and thus potentially more emphatic position in the stanza. In stanza 3 it appears in the eighth and ninth lines, in stanza 4 in the eleventh and twelfth lines. Then in stanza 5 it appears a total of six times, in the first, third, fourth, sixth, seventh, and tenth lines; and at this point—that is, in the last two lines of stanza 4 and the first line of stanza 5—it appears three times in succession for the first and only time in the poem.[19] We have followed a complete cycle, which, according to the law of the form, would begin again if the poem were to continue—as we can see from the other rhyme-words, each of which also carries out a complete cycle, although beginning, in stanza 1, at a different phase of it.
Clearly enough, in each stanza of "Amor, tu vedi ben," one of the five rhyme-words predominates, and this special effect, which certainly accounts for much of the particular character of the poem, is one Dante has set up with extreme care. The order in which the rhyme-words come to predominance is (after stanza 1), the reverse of the order in which they first appear and in which, though displaced, they continue
to appear: within the stanzas (disregarding repetition) they appear in the order ABCDE, EABCD, and so on; they predominate in the order AEDCB. This scheme brings the rhyme-word freddo to dominance in the central stanza of the poem, where, as we have seen, the macrocosmic-microcosmic parallelism is made explicit, the threat of petrifaction begins to be realized, and the key notion of the crystal is introduced.
The process whereby the termfreddo comes to dominate the central stanza of the poem is clearly integral to its meaning. We saw in Chapter 2 that a principal factor in the astronomical configuration of December 1296 was the dominance of Saturn and Mars in the night sky and that line 8 of "Io son venuto" unmistakably refers to the large night circle ("il gran cerchio d'ombra," as "Al poco giorno" terms it) described probably by Saturn along the "grand'arco." The changing domination of the stanzas by the rhyme-words of "Amor, tu vedi ben" imitates the cyclical process whereby the combined motions of the Same (producing day and night) and the Other (the changing positions of the sun, moon, and planets), gradually bring the principle of cold to dominance over the sublunar realm in the winter. Freddo is the principle of cold that Saturn strengthens, "quel pianeta che conforta il gelo."
In "Io son venuto," the imitation of the motion of the heavens is located primarily in the sentenza of the poem, in the sequence of its topics as the eye moves ever lower, describing a kind of descending spiral that is analogous to the approach of the sun to the solstice. We saw that formally "Io son venuto" exploits a tension between the stanza form and the assigning of topics to its various divisions: the formal function of the diesis is to some extent overridden by the parallelism of the first four lines of the sirma with the pedes, and by the extension into the sirma of the topic of the pedes —the description of winter—as if the winter were invading the sirma. In "Amor, tu vedi ben," in contrast, the form imitates the cycles of the heavens more directly, and its relevance to the sentenza is left relatively implicit. Again, we are dealing with the imitation not just of any winter but of the winter of 1296, which threatens the Gemini of 1265 with petrifaction—hence the transformation of water into crystal, not merely ice.
If the central stanza of "Amor, tu vedi ben" gives us the coldest moment in the poem, the coldest freezing on earth, and the greatest danger to the lover, it naturally corresponds to the winter solstice, for the lowest point of the sun in its annual journey is the highest point of night and of cold.[20] At that moment, the poem itself becomes crystallized; for,
while in its diachronic aspect the poem imitates the temporal process of winter, synchronically it is fixed, rigid, and symmetrical, permanently shaped, the product of a temporal process of which it remains to some degree a map: it is a crystal. This is of course the point of the renewed assertion of the importance of freddo in the commiato, where it is the only rhyme-word to be repeated:
Canzone, io porto ne la mente donna
tal che, con tutto ch'ella mi sia petra,
mi dà baldanza, ond'ogni uom mi par freddo:
si ch'io ardisco a far per questo freddo
la novità che per tua forma luce,
che non fu mai pensata in alcun tempo.
(61–66)
Here the poet speaks in triumphant opposition to the cold, both of winter and of the lady. It is the fire of his love, present in the terms baldanza and (especially) ardisco, that enables him to fashion the form of the poem, to impose the form he has conceived on intractable materials—hard stone at one extreme, formless water at another. And just as the water becomes permanently crystal, the poem takes on its form permanently.
But the fourth line of the commiato has an important ambiguity: per questo freddo means not only "during this cold" and "in this cold," but also "by means of this cold." That is, by means of this word "freddo," at the center of the poem and of the commiato, the poet's creative fire fashions an object that emits light through (per ) and because of (per ) its form—which is transparent and brilliant, a precious stone that can be no other than a crystal. And the term forma has a rich range of meanings, from the stanza form itself—that space, dwelling, or receptacle, as the cosmological terminology of the De vulgari eloquentia has it—to the beauty of the poem and the substantial form that constitutes its essence. "Amor, tu vedi ben," then, involves a series of analogies for the poet's art. If he fashions his poem per questo freddo, he is like the winter in transmuting water and air. A more general analogy is implied between the poet's art and the influence of the heavens on the sublunar. This is, of course, a main traditional sense of the phrase art imitates nature, and it is a fundamental category in the Paradiso. The poet's mind both intuits the form (la novità fu pensata ) and circles around the subject matter he is fashioning. The Timaeus analogy of the motions of the World-Soul and the cycles of the soul within the human head provides a wealth
of geometric figures and analogies, many of which imply that the poet shapes his work by a kind of light, like the sun.[21] In Chapter 6 we shall return to the discussion of passages in the Paradiso that are related to the petrose in this respect.
But we are not finished with the form of the stanza or of the poem overall. For if the central stanza represents the solstice, we are dealing also with the turning of the cycle of the heavens past the solstice toward spring. This, too, is worked out in the poem, and not without surprises. Let us return first to the stanza form itself, for we can achieve a more accurate description of it by taking note of the difference between its two halves. In the first half, the dominant rhyme-word appears four times, but in the second half it appears only twice. In the first half of each stanza the other rhyme-words are outnumbered (four to one individually, two to one as a group), and, as we have seen, they are enclosed within the dominant word ABA.ACA. But in the second half, other words predominate (two to one as a group), and the closed form opens: ADD. AEE. This opening prepares for the next stanza, the coming to dominance of the rhyme-word E.[22]
Now in stanza 3 the second half-stanza is not divided equally between the two transformations it describes: the second transformation occupies four lines instead of only three. To "sì che l'acqua è donna," the summary of result given in the fifth line of the stanza, corresponds a much longer description: "che m'esce poi per mezzo de la luce / là ond'entrò la dispietata luce." We are moving, of course, toward the dominance in stanza 4 of the rhyme-word luce, and whereas in the first half of stanza 3 the effect of the cold is the paralyzing of motion in petra and the descent of snow and rain within the atmosphere, here there is a measure of interchange across a boundary between inner and outer. For although the lover's tears by implication fall as he sheds them, still they go out through the eye. And if the stanza ends with the troped replacement off reddo, it is noteworthy that in the second half-stanza the term freddo itself has lost the status of a substantive and has been reduced, one might say, to an adjective. We shall return to the important motif of the eye as a boundary or horizon between inner and outer world below.
The fact that the central stanza, so enclosed in its first half by freddo, opens in its second half first to tempo and then to luce is itself the turning toward spring, distant though spring may be. And the analogy suggests that unlike the heavens and the elements, lover and lady inhabit the same realm, the sublunar. She is not his metaphysical superior, she
is not sopra, as the spatial term dinanzi reminds us. His subjection is unnecessary, is itself the nucleus of the problem. "Così nel mio parlar" will violently reject even metaphorical subjection; in "Amor, tu vedi ben," the change is already being prepared in the difference between literal and troped enclosure in the two halves of stanza 3.
3
We have seen that "Amor, tu vedi ben" continually operates a metamorphosis on its materials, and that the chief analog is the transformation of water into ice and then crystal. The principle is operative from the very beginning of the poem. The sequence of rhyme-words in the first stanza mirrors the sentenza by gradually replacing donna with petra. The transition begins in lines 6–7, where the reference of the term donna changes: the result of the lady's taking on the role of cruel domina (line 6) is that she no longer has a "core di donna," where the warmth of feeling would dwell; so, as the frequency of the term donna is matched in the second half of the stanza by that of freddo, donna loses its direct reference to the lady and comes to refer to a statue of petra —stone as the product of cold.[23]
In stanza 2, the term donna sinks to its lowest frequency, and the process of stanza 1 is repeated as the lady changes from donna to petra in lines 15 and 22; the lady has lost her proper term. In stanza 3 (line 29: the center of the five stanzas), donna is transferred to water: "l'acqua è donna." In stanza 4, the first appearance of donna (line 44) refers to other ladies, and the second (line 45), to the lover's fantasy of her returning his love: a reference to her that does not yet fit. Stanza 5 has the lady appearing first in pronouns, as in stanza 4, but in the second half of the stanza the term petra referring to the lady ("questa gentil petra," 56) is, with the mediation of the word tempo, replaced at last by the proper term, donna, which in its second appearance in the stanza finally names the lady herself (for line 59, like line 44, refers to others).
Thus the alternations of the terms donna and petra act out first the lady's transformation into a stone (which took place in the past of the poem) and then her transformation back into a woman (which will, the lover hopes, take place in the future). This reversal of the metamorphosis into stone that is given in the initial sequence of rhyme-words in stanza 1, and from which the sequence in the other stanzas derives, is worked out through the basic formal principle of having the rhyme-
words dominate the stanzas in the reverse of the original order. And the central stanza, where water turns to crystal and air to water, offers the sequence of terms petra-acqua-donna: in other words, at the midpoint of the terminological metamorphosis of the stone back into the woman, donna refers to the element water, that element which more than any other was taken to represent the inherent formlessness—or rather, receptivity to form—of first matter.[24]
The same process that brings about the dominance of freddo at the center of the poem brings about that of luce in stanza 4 and of tempo in stanza 5. The term freddo, in its sense of an influence from the heavens, is related to both these terms as species to genus. In other words, cold is the effect of a particular kind of light, and the cold season is one of several seasons.[25] As Gianfranco Contini observed, the rhyme-words of "Amor, tu vedi ben" are much more abstract than those of "Al poco giorno"[26] (except for the two they share): colli and erba are concrete objects, verde and ombra sensuous qualities—in fact, particular modes of light. The difference is partly due to the technical need in "Amor, tu vedi ben" for highly multivalent terms; but it is also due to the basic plan of the poem, which capitalizes on this very need by making a basic structural pattern—at all levels of form and meaning—from the replacement of specific terms, like freddo, by generic ones, like tempo. Thus, by referring beyond time itself, stanza 5 is continuing a movement toward first principles that governs the entire poem.
This comparison of rhyme-words suggests one way in which "Amor, tu vedi ben" occupies a special place in the sequence of the four petrose. In a number of respects it is the culmination of a process begun in "Io son venuto,"[27] each stanza of which, and its commiato, ended with a couplet on a rhyme-word: petra (stanza 1), donna (2), tempo (3), sempre (4), dolce (5), marmo (commiato ). We may characterize the first three petrose as gradually extending the principle of the construction of stanzas with rhyme-words from a kind of incipience in "Io son venuto" to fullest development in "Amor, tu vedi ben." Not only that—the process involves particular rhyme-words, especially donna and petra, which appear in all three poems, and tempo, which has a special function in the first and third. The extension of the principle leads to its undoing: time and what is beyond time, partly because of the inevitable turning of time, mainly because of the ultimate victory of the higher principle, will change both donna and petra. The form of "Amor, tu vedi ben" mimics both modes of causality.
In "Io son venuto," as we saw, the conversion of water into ice (the
first stage of any eventual change into crystal) is troped in the term vetro and is a main focus of stanza 5. Yet the rhyme-word tempo appears in that poem in stanza 3, the first stanza referring to the human breast, and there we find the first mention in the poem of the future coming of spring ("al tempo verde," 31).[28] As a rhyme-word, furthermore, tempo appears in this stanza to signal the lover's superiority to time:
ché li dolzi pensier' non mi son tolti
né mi son dati per volta di tempo.
(37–38)
In relation to "Io son venuto," "Amor, tu vedi ben" reverses the relative position of these two terms: "Io son venuto" places the freezing of water in the last stanza, representing the approach to solstice, and the poem ends with the possible petrifaction of the lover (lines 74–75); "Amor, tu vedi ben," however, places the motif of petrifaction at the center, representing the solstice, and moves beyond it to the rhymeword tempo at the end. "Amor, tu vedi ben" thus prepares the shattering of all rigidities, both of form and of feeling, that is the subject of the last petrosa, "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro."
4
The rhyme-word luce is predominant in stanza 4. Light, as the main vehicle of the influence of the heavenly bodies, is continually implied in the poem. It is also, of course, the medium of sight, whose importance in the poem we begin to appreciate by noting that the first action in stanza 1 and the last in stanza 5 are acts of seeing: tu vedi and vedrò. Figure 6 lists all references to acts of seeing in "Amor, tu vedi ben," most of which are identified by verbs, though we include also clear mentions of things seen.
Light is the category that most inclusively unifies this poem; it is attributed to the entire range of beings and things referred to, from precious stones at one extreme to God at the other; as we shall see, Dante is drawing on an important tradition that emphasized the unifying quality of light. The term luce refers to the encompassing frame of the light of the heavens, explicitly named—generically in line 50, specifically (the sun and daylight) in lines 20 and 46. It expresses the lady's beauty (36, 40, 43) and the light in the lover's eyes (5), and it is used to refer directly to the lover's eye (35 and 42).
But light first enters the poem as something reflected, as "lo tuo rag-
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Fig. 6.
Acts of Seeing in "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna"
gio che al volto mi luce." The terms luce and vertù, moreover, are closely associated: explicitly connected are lo tuo raggio in line 5 and la tua vertù in line 2, as are, in lines 20–21, the sunlight and the vertù and luce of a precious stone. In fact, these two yokings of luce and vertù encompass the entire natural and supernatural range of reference of the poem, though it is only in the last stanza that lo tuo raggio is identified as divine: vertù che se' prima . . . che sensibil luce. This is a major development in the poem and will occupy us later.
Now precious stones, as lines 20–21 point out, emit light, an idea that is assumed in all the petrose and underlies the notion of this poem as a kind of crystal. This, indeed, is the central fact about precious stones in "Amor, tu vedi ben," because line 19 contains the seventh of the thirteen appearances of the rhyme-word petra:
E mai non si scoperse alcuna petra
o da splendor di sole o da sua luce,
che tanta avesse né vertù né luce
che mi potesse atar da questa petra.
(19–22)
The explicit point here is that the lady surpasses any precious stone both in cold hardness and in beauty and power. But in this central passage
the stone receives its light and virtue, both of which, as we know, derive especially from the sun,[29] both in the formation of the stone and in its display.[30]
In accord with well-established medieval-Ovidian tradition, Dante speaks of love as a blow the heart receives through the eye, the lady's image being carried by her light, the arrow of love. Here is one way in which the lady resembles a precious stone herself, probably a crystal: cold herself, she emits fire.[31] In a general sense, claritas is well known as a quality of all beauty,[32] and it seems the term luce is used in that general sense in line 37, perhaps also in line 36. But as the lady's influence is exerted primarily through the lover's eyes, so is it primarily to be seen in her eyes as well, the windows of her soul. In "Amor, tu vedi ben," the eye, whether the lover's or the lady's, is repeatedly said to emit light. The explicitness of lines 35 and 36, moreover, makes it necessary to identify a number of other passages as references to the lady's eye—"la luce / là ond'entrò la dispietata luce"—for the lady's beauty is not in itself merciless (dispietata ), rather, her intention is revealed in her facial expression (lo sembiante freddo ), especially in her eyes. It is the lady's hostile gaze that makes her seem like a statue (lines 10–12).[33] Figure 7 lists the appearances of the rhyme-word luce, identifies its referent and part of speech, and calls attention to a pattern of concentric symmetry.
One of the most striking parallels revealed by Figure 7 is that between the first and last appearances of luce: "lo tuo raggio che al volto mi luce"; "la novità che per tua forma luce." The syntax makes per la tua forma parallel with al volto, and la novità with lo tuo raggio. This is no chance parallel, for the last instance of luce is an emphatic characterization of the novel form of the poem. The parallel carries an important level of meaning: though the lady disregards the light of love in his eyes, perhaps she will be less likely to ignore it as it shines through the form of the poem. But one inescapable point of the parallel volto-forma would seem to be that the form of the poem itself is like that of the eye—that the poem is itself a kind of eye. It is like the lover's eye, as the connection volto-forma shows; it is also like the lady's eye, since the central instance of the rhyme-word luce (the pupil, as it were) is the one that shows the lady's blindness, or refusal of the light of love.
We may perhaps say that the crystal and the eye are the two metaphors of the poem, correlated with cold and fire, respectively. And of course, their association is not arbitrary or even novel in itself, though Dante's conjunction of them is novel. Popular belief and medical termi-
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Fig. 7.
Luce in "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna"
nology had long since associated them: the eye has its humor cristallinus;[34] the prism that projects the spectrum on the wall has long borne the same name as the iris of the eye.[35]
The centralized references of the rhyme-word luce to the eye and to sight are only one way in which "Amor, tu vedi ben" is like an eye. The first half of the stanza, which, as we saw, functions in stanza 3 as a model of the cosmos, has the form ABA. ACA, clearly analogous with the arrangement of the appearances of luce we have just seen. Actually, in
stanza 3 (line 35), the mention of the lover's eye serves to redefine the terms of the macro/microcosmic parallel, which up to that point has explicitly involved only the interior of the body—the blood. Making weeping parallel with rain or snow makes the eye parallel with the atmosphere, through which the light of the heavens penetrates to the earth with its veins and rivers.[36] Thus within the poem stanza 3 defines the boundary between the lover's inner world and the outer world: its midpoint is the boundary itself, a passage from outer world in the first halfstanza, to inner world in the second. The idea of the eye as a structural principle is basic to the poem.[37]
5
We are now in a position to consider the impressive last stanza of the poem, where the ideas of light and vision are redefined, along with the other themes and structural patterns we have been examining:
Però, virtù che se' prima che tempo,
prima che moto o che sensibil luce,
increscati di me, c'ho sì mal tempo;
entrale in core omai, ché ben n'è tempo,
sì che per te n'esca fuor lo freddo
che non mi lascia aver, com'altri, tempo:
ché se mi giunge lo tuo forte tempo
in tale stato, questa gentil petra
mi vedrà coricare in poca petra,
per non levarmi se non dopo il tempo,
quando vedrò se mai fu bella donna
nel mondo come questa acerba donna.
(49–60)
The now dominant rhyme-word tempo first appears in this stanza in the phrase prima che tempo; its last appearance is in dopo il tempo. One could hardly have a more striking instance of Dante's method of surrounding passages with the rhyme-words. Between these outer extremes, the four other instances of tempo refer to the events, real or hoped for, of the lover's passion. Before we can fully appreciate their significance, we must try to answer an important question: what is the meaning of the phrase aver, com'altri, tempo (line 54)?
Foster and Boyde (Dante 1967 2:27) give the following gloss: "Contini and Mattalia gloss 'requie,' i.e., 'time for rest,' 'repose'; but the context seems to require that the following lines are advanced as an expla-
nation." In other words, in this reading, if the lady's cruelty causes the lover's death (lines 55–57), she will have deprived him of time in the sense of shortening his life. This does not seem a satisfactory reading, since the poem has already made this point; it makes line 54 merely an obscure expression that introduces its own restatement. In this last stanza of an intensely crafted poem, we can expect Dante to give the term tempo a functional, nonredundant sense. By this criterion, the gloss rejected by Foster and Boyde—requie —is superior, both because to enjoy an object of desire was said to be a kind of resting in it[38] and because if the lady does reciprocate the lover's desire, she will be giving something beyond mere longevity, to which com'altri probably does not refer, since longevity was not widely shared.
Furthermore, the mounting intensity of the stanza as a whole requires our phrase to have a certain semantic weight. The other appearances of tempo here refer (a) to the lover's suffering: "ho sì mal tempo"; (b) to the lady's ripeness, or rather, since she is unripe (acerba ), to the present moment as a kairós: "ché ben n'è tempo"; (c) to the springtime: "lo tuo forte tempo."[39] The first three of these inner-stanza references occur in the subclauses of petitions:
increscati di me, c'ho sì mal tempo,
entrale in core omai, ché ben n'è tempo,
sì che per te n'esca fuor lo freddo
che non mi lascia aver, com'altri, tempo.
(51–54)
Line 54 should be seen, then, as a restatement of the lover's petition to the lady: "Give me time." It is partly her time that is meant, but mainly, in context, aver tempo must refer to the nature of the fruition the lover hopes for. Aver tempo means, then, as we understand it, "to come to fruition insofar as human nature and its generative powers are temporal."[40]
Of course, "aver, com'altri, tempo" looks back also at the appearances of the rhyme-word tempo in the first four stanzas of the poem. At the beginning of the poem this term is at the lowest point of its cycle, but as its frequency increases and its referent changes, the theme of the nature of time gradually takes possession of the poem:
1. Stanza 1 (line 2): she heeds love at no time.
2. Stanza 2 (line 17): Love treats the lover like a stone, annoying for a long time. We note the passage from negation (the time referred
to does not exist) to hypothesis (the long time is introduced in a comparison).
3. Stanza 3 (line 32): his blood freezes over at all times.
4. Stanza 3 (line 33): his despair shortens his allotted time. So far, the instances of the term refer to the actual events of the affair in its present phase, and of course at all times is the antithesis of at no time. So far, all the appearances of tempo have been connected with negative experience.
5. Stanza 4 (line 47): he wishes for place and time to serve her.
6. Stanza 4 (line 48): for her, he wishes to live a long time.
In instances 5 and 6, at last, we move from negative to positive versions of time, to the desired future; the referent grows from an occasion for serving her, to a long life (with her, of course)—the antithesis of instance 4 (line 33). Thus in the first four stanzas we have moved from nonexistent time, to time as the scene of suffering and death, to time as the medium of service and fruition.
The four inner appearances of the rhyme-word tempo in stanza 5, then, occur in strictly chronological order (that is, as the lover hopes): (a) his suffering (past and present); (b) the kairós (the present as prepared by the past); (c) fruition (future); (d) death (future). The mention of the forte tempo and the danger of death, of course, involve the idea that the lover's death is inevitable, whether fruition takes place or not. In these four references, then, stanza 5 recapitulates the entire poem and refers to the entire time span of the love affair, past, present, and future (in both the hoped-for result and its negative alternative, and including the entire remainder of the lover's life).
The last two lines of the stanza expand the chronological reference to include all time and all space:
. . . dopo il tempo,
quando vedrò se mai fu bella donna
nel mondo come questa acerba donna.
(58–60)
Finally, in the stanza as a whole, all time has been enclosed, encompassed by a higher principle than that of the heavens which enclose stanza 3: the eternity of the virtù that is both prima che tempo and dopo il tempo.
What is this "vertù che se' prima che tempo"? It can be none other
than God himself: only God pre-exists time.[41] The theological reference is precise. Indeed, the term virtù (Latin virtus ) had long been recognized as one of the names of God.[42] As compared with the term potentia, it has the force of power as exercised and thus a particular association with the doctrine of creation and of the Logos. This can be clearly seen from the passage in Augustine's Confessions (Book II) where Augustine represents his striving to grasp the meaning of the phrase In the beginning (Genesis 1:1). He arrives in 11.8 and 9 at the equation of inprincipio not only with in eternity but also, and mainly, with in Verbo tuo and a series of terms all referring to the second person of the Trinity:
In hoc principio, Deus, fecisti caelum et terram, in Verbo tuo, in Filio tuo, in Virtute tua, in Sapientia tua, in Veritate tua.
(11.9; emphasis added)[43]
In this beginning, God, you made heaven and earth: in your Word, in your Son, in your [efficient ] Power, in your Wisdom, in your Truth.
The beginning of stanza 5 of "Amor, tu vedi ben" involves a set of complex references to terms traditionally known as names of God. First, virtù refers to God's power—or rather, to his omnipotence; prima che tempo refers to his eternity; prima che moto refers to him as unmoved Mover;[44]prima che . . . sensibil luce refers to the sun and to the Logos as intellectual light. The passage involves the idea of God as creator also because time, motion, and light were regarded as primary objects of God's creative act: they were all created together, and they all imply each other—time is the measure of motion and is marked by the sun and moon; they also imply the existence of space, which is referred to in line 47.[45] Further, as we have seen, the light of the heavens is the vehicle of their virtù, of their power to shape the sublunar according to their changing motion in time.[46]
The main theme of stanza 5 is the possibility of transcending the influence of the heavens—all the negativities of temperament and weather—through the appeal to God's higher power and his supersensible light.[47] Alone among all the petrose, "Amor, tu vedi ben" begins with an apostrophe. More accurately, the poem as a whole is an extended apostrophe, marked by repeated use of the second-person pronoun and verbs and, in the firmly controlled progress of its argument, by the formal vocatives in stanzas 1, 3, and 5: "Amor, tu vedi . . ."; "Segnor, tu sai . . ."; "Però, vertù . . ., increscati di me. . . ."[48]
At this point we should look back once again to stanza 3, where we
saw the microcosmic parallel drawn between the lover's experience and the transformations undergone by the elements in winter. We saw that the first half-stanza represents two phases of the cyclical transformation of the four elements (water into earth, air into water) and that, although the lover's experience is microcosmically parallel, still there is a straight-line motion in toward the center (the lover's heart) and out from it. We can now see that the same juxtaposition of the two patterns occurs in the poem as a whole: the cycle of the elements is brought about by the circling of the heavens and of time; set against this is the lover's direct appeal—from his position at the center of the cosmos—to the virtù that transcends the cosmos: a motion out from the center, then (cf. "Oltre la spera che più largo gira"); an appeal for direct intervention, a motion toward the center, "entrale in core." The motions of the lover's appeal and God's imagined intervention are parallel—on a much larger scale and in reverse order —to the motions in stanza 3 that bring the external light (her beauty) into his heart and his tears out from it. In this sense, the boundary between inner and outer that is represented by the eye in stanza 3 and elsewhere is parallel to the boundary of the cosmos itself. And man exists at these boundaries—or is himself the horizon between the temporal and the eternal.
One function of the firmly controlled placing of the apostrophes is to make clear how stanza 1 reaches toward stanza 5. One might say that the poem represents the straight path of the lover's prayer up through the heavens to its goal beyond time. In another sense the poem represents a spiral gradually increasing in scope as it remounts toward the source. For it must be clear that this poem, in quite another key, is like "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore" in being patterned on the idea of procession and return. We may note, moreover, the further parallel of the poem as a whole with stanza 3. There, as we saw, the cycle of elemental transformations is initially taken at its midpoint. The poem begins at a midpoint in two ways: in time, between the past and future of the love affair (ultimately placed within time as a whole); and in space, on earth, at the center of the spherical cosmos. And if the end of stanza 3 opens toward spring, in stanza 5 the entire poem opens toward eternity.
At the outset, the poem perhaps seems to be addressed to the god of love, according to the familiar medieval convention.[49] But as we saw in the association of the terms vertù and luce, as the poem moves through the Segnor of stanza 3 to the opening of stanza 5, the vocatives increasingly invite Christian interpretation.[50] The figure addressed in the poem
is identified in the last stanza as Christ:[51] the reference to the Last Judgment implies Christ's presence, and the stanza is resonant with echoes of the opening of the Gospel of John:
Omnia per ipsum facta sunt. Et sine ipso factum est nihil, quod factum est. In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum; et lux lucebat in tenebris, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt . . . Erat lux vera, quae illuminat omnem hominem venientem in hunc mundum.
(John 1:3–5)
All things were made through him. And without him was nothing made of the things that were made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men; and the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not overwhelm it. . . . He was the true light, that lights every man that comes into this world.
These associations retrospectively affect the poem, in particular the light imagery:
e poi s'accorse ch'ell'era mia donna,
per lo tuo raggio ch'al volto mi luce,
d'ogne crudelità si fece donna.
(4–6)
At first this may seem to mean only that the lady sees by the light in the lover's eyes that he is in love with her, or that he desires her sexually; this seems to be all she sees, and the knowledge makes her cruel and confident of her cruelty. But stanza 4 identifies this resistance to love as a resistance to light:
In lei s'accoglie d'ogni bieltà luce;
così di tutta crudeltate il freddo
le corre al cor, ove non va tua luce
per che ne li occhi sì bella mi luce
quando la miro. . . .
(37–41)
Tua luce refers to lo tuo raggio of stanza 1, but that the issue is becoming more complex is revealed by the complexity of the syntax. What is the antecedent of che (line 40), the luce of line 37 or that of line 39? This is not a trivial question within the problematic of the poem: it is the question of the sanction the lover is claiming for his love, the basis of his accusation of her cruelty. Does he love her because she is beautiful? In this case, che = luce of line 37. Or does he see how beautiful she is be-
cause he loves her? In this case, che = luce of line 39. When the question is posed, it is immediately clear that the answer must be both: che must refer to both meanings of luce. This question only reveals its full significance, however, and can only be fully resolved, in terms of the redefinition of Amor given in the last stanza, where entrale in core continues and culminates the light imagery of lo tuo raggio and tua luce. This latter instance, the central appearance of the rhyme-word luce, as we have seen, refers to God's light. As usual in Dante, the question is resolved in Neoplatonic terms.
For the light imagery is cosmogonic. The vertù of stanza 5, the Logos, brings the world into existence by a Fiat lux, a kind of radiation of light—first suprasensible or intelligible, then sensible. In this respect, this is the same universe as that of the Paradiso:[52]
La gloria di colui che tutto move
per l'universo penetra, e risplende
in una parte più, e meno altrove.
(Paradiso 1.1–3)
The beauty of the lady, as of any creature, is a ray emanating from the superessential sun. She is supremely lovely: "In lei s'accoglie d'ogne bieltà luce . . . / per che ne li occhi sì bella mi luce . . . / che. . . ." In other words, his vision of her beauty is a recognition of the reflection in her of the light that created her. Thus, tua luce in line 39 is particularly rich: "tua luce, / per che ne li occhi sì bella mi luce / che. . . ." It is the reflection of the Creator that shines through both the lady's beauty and the lover's love of her beauty.[53] The light is both what is revealed and the medium of the vision.
These passages draw on the familiar idea of the reflection of God's light as a kind of circulation.[54] That is, both the lady's beauty and the lover's love originate in the vera luce; one ray proceeds from the source, is reflected in the lady's beauty, and is recognized by the lover, who refers it to its source and reflects it back to the lady; the other ray, which proceeds from the source and is the medium of the lover's vision of the lady's beauty, is neither recognized by the lady nor referred to its source. Her reciprocation would of course complete and intensify both circles. These ideas are very close to those that govern "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore."[55]
Finally, the actus mentis of the last stanza reaches a mode of eschatological analogy that retrospectively affects the meaning of the structure
of the poem. Diachronically, the poem is like (a) the heavens, in circling to fashion its sententia; (b) a direct motion outward through the heavens to the empyrean; (c) an expanding spiral. Synchronically, the poem is a crystal by being (a) a composite of form and matter whose form emits light; (b) like the crystal of the eye; (c) related to the spherical crystalline heavens. If synchronically the poem is like the heavens it is because, formally and thematically, it is a model of the eschaton, that is, of the heavens immobilized, the ultimate state of the creation dopo il tempo.[56] As we saw in Chapter 3, the second petrosa, "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra," also reaches an eschatological mode in its final stanza: the adynaton at a deeper level refers, though only implicitly, to events prophesied for the "Great Day." The explicitness of the last stanza of "Amor, tu vedi ben," like the greater thoroughness with which it develops the spatial metaphors of its form, is part of the overall pattern of the first three petrose. They invoke progressively larger contexts.
6
None among Dante's lyrics, then, more fully anticipates the Paradiso than "Amor, tu vedi ben" (along with "Al poco giorno" and "Donne ch'avete"). Stanza 5 imitates, both temporally and spatially, the pre-existence of God, the procession of all things from God, and the return of all things to God—the "harvest of these spheres," as the Paradiso puts it. The importance in the poem of the names of God can now be more closely determined. Not only virtù is involved, of course, but also amore and luce. The change in meaning that we have traced through Amor, Segnor, and virtù (it might be more accurately termed a gradual making explicit of meanings) is the most emphatic and fundamental instance of the activity of redefinition we have identified as basic to this poem. Redefinition pervades "Amor, tu vedi ben" in the "eiusdem rithimi nimia repercussio," where the primary focus is precisely the poet's ability to make the multivalence of his terms meaningful and not merely arbitrary. It should not be surprising that from the very first word of the poem we are involved with the question of the term of terms, to use Kenneth Burke's expression,[57] which orders all the others.
From the outset, the psychological issue between the protagonists involves naming: the lady calls herself donna in line 3; she takes on, as if entitled, the status of the lover's domina. By the same token, the issue between them is how to name his love and its raggio. He claims that his
love derives from the absolute principle of love; he claims to be able to show how his use of each term in his lover's discourse leads back to that ultimate source and acknowledges a responsibility to it. The poem itself is this claim. The strictures of readers like Marigo and Contini, who see no principle of order in Dante's use of the rhyme-words, are actually anticipated in the poem: a merely temporal existence would limit the poet to merely cyclical troping, like the elemental troping that turns air into water into earth and back again. But the poem makes the very large claim that the terms it uses are not equivocal but are ordered analogically.[58] It is not a mere sophistication to say that by beginning with Amor and ending with the theme of the enclosure of time by eternity, the poem shows its beginning to be its telos, its Alpha to be its Omega. Like "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore," "Amor, tu vedi ben" demonstrates the abiding influence on Dante of Boethius's "O qui perpetua."[59] The prayer of the poem, explicitly about the love affair, is thus the confession that human art does not impose an order of its own on its materials. Only the existence of God—and the poem's setting itself in relation to it—can prevent the "form" of the poem from being merely arbitrary.
Perhaps worse than arbitrary: the daring gamble of the poem is that the poet's superiority to the winter and to the Medusan influence of the lady can be demonstrated by adopting as principle of form the cold itself (per questo freddo ), and producing a crystal. This is said to be the product of fire: io ardisco; and the text repeatedly asserts that the poem results from the poet-lover's perception of the divine light shining through the universe, through the beauty of the lady, in his own love. This crystal, then, placed in the light before the lady, can reflect the divine light into her heart and win her love.[60] But this can occur only if the poem does catch some reflection of God's light. Thus God is appealed to not only as ultimate judge and as source of grace; he is also invoked as the foundation of poetic meaning.
We have seen the insistence on the danger of death grow through the three first petrose, and we have seen how the poet constructs more and more elaborate frameworks—analogs of the cosmos and even of the eschaton —to conjure and control it. "Amor, tu vedi ben" is the culmination of this series not only because the theme of death has grown in intensity but also because its last stanza makes explicit that divine intervention is needed. Like the first two petrose, however, "Amor, tu vedi ben" avowedly envisages the lady as the sole source of the danger; it goes so far as to assert that if God does not cause the lady to return his
love, the lover will die. This statement of the danger is both extreme and obviously suspect.
Not only suspect in its projection of all responsibility for the negative onto the lady: it is also untenable in the hypothesis of God's responsibility, no matter how palliated the idea may be within conventions of love poetry. The realization is very close to hand, and will emerge clearly in "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro," that the fundamental danger to the lover is a self-destructive, even suicidal tendency within himself, compounded of exacerbated desire, frustration, anger, and—as the recurrence of the Medusa theme alerts us—sexual fear. In this connection it is significant that the literal winter of "Io son venuto," though it is mentioned in the commiato of "Amor, tu vedi ben," has essentially been replaced in the body of the poem by the metaphorical winter that obtains between lover and lady. The dialectic that has allowed the ever fuller expression of the negative aspect of the lover's situation within the confident exercise of the poet's craft has thus reached a particularly marked antithesis. The ending juxtaposes the lover threatened with death, awaiting in aporia the intervention for which he has prayed, and the poet contemplating the constructive triumph of his art. The disparity calls out for resolution, and "Così nel mio parlar" achieves a new power and a new balance between theme and craft in its release of violent anger.
5—
Breaking the Ice:
"Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro"
The last of the rime petrose, long neglected by criticism, has slowly regained its original status as a masterpiece of lyric art.[1] Yet in many respects the old reluctance remains. Contini (Dante 1946 165), while ranking the poem with "Io son venuto," judges it "too abstract and solitary a thesis" and finds the language becoming an end to itself, divorced from sentenza. His views, with a few exceptions, have dominated criticism of the poem.[2] Peter Dronke's brief discussion (1968 162–66) hypothesizing that the lady's harshness is a reflex of her desire has made fresh evaluation of the canzone possible and necessary.
The grouping of "Così nel mio parlar" with the petrose is apparently not supported by the textual tradition of the poem, which depends heavily on Boccaccio's transcriptions of Dante's canzoni. Boccaccio placed "Così" first among the fifteen canzoni he transcribes, and the other petrose in seventh, eighth, and ninth positions, centrally in the collection.[3] In many respects the poem is unlike the other petrose. We look in vain for explicit mention of the heavens or the seasons. Nor do the poem's formal properties resemble the rigorous patterns of the other petrose. Only close interpretation will reveal the importance of the speaker as microcosm in the poem's structure. And of course "Così" tells a very different story: the three other petrose are contemplative, mirroring the speaker and nature at the frozen impasse of the winter solstice. They project larger and larger contexts in which the poet's negativity and frustration are framed. But they are in a sense mute, do not address the question of speaking directly to the lady. "Così" imagines the speaker retaliating against the petra, speaking to her, making love to her. First Love, then the lady, are placed in the role of the antagonist whom the speaker must in some sense understand and accommodate but must also dominate, if he is to integrate his nature. Thus, the divergences from the other petrose are a symptom of a crisis in the poetics of the petrose
themselves and a final attempt of the speaker to devise an efficacious poetics that will persuade the petra—this time with recourse to violence. The poet attempts to break out of the isolation he has achieved in the elaboration of his own splendid artifices; the poem, consequently, is based on the problematic of inner and outer, in a sense the problematic of language and representation itself.
Despite its differences from the other petrose, there is widespread agreement that "Così" belongs in a group with them (Pernicone 1970C 233). The linguistic links with the other petrose have long been recognized (parallels in Baldelli 1978a 13). In "Così" there is special emphasis on terms from the last five verses of the final stanza of "Io son venuto"—that is, the last of the sections introduced by the adversative ("e io . . .")—so that "Così" in a sense begins where "Io son venuto" leaves off. The speaker's refusal to step back (un passo a retro ) is met in "Così" with the lady's dodging (s'arretra, 6) of Love. Guerra in the last stanza of "Io son venuto" holds the position occupied in all previous stanzas by the term Amor: this warfare of the speaker is expanded into the panoply of combat we find in "Così." The imagined sweetness of death ("la morte de' passare ogni altro dolce," 65) returns, though in quite different terms, in "Così" when the lover, taking his revenge, outlasts the canonical hours ("passerei vespero e squille," 69). These substitutions war temporarily replacing love, the parlar aspro replacing the martiro dolce and morte dolce of "Io son venuto"—typify the passage from the paralysis of "Io son venuto" to the dynamism of "Così." The final rhymeword of "Io son venuto," dolce, is matched by its antithesis in the first rhyme of "Così," aspro.[4] Both petra and donna, the rhyme-words from the first two stanzas of "Io son venuto," appear at the beginning (2) and end (79) of "Così." Moreover, petra undergoes a significant transformation into the verb impetrare. The transformation of the senhal of the petrose, connoting immobility, into an ambiguous verb implying either hostile desire or static rigidity is also typical of the greater dynamism in the language of "Così nel mio parlar."[5] And it states at the outset the riddle at the heart of the poem: is the lady's insensibility to love the result of a self-enclosure that excludes all but cruelty (impetra, first meaning)? Or does her request (impetra, second meaning) for greater cruelty mask—and therefore reveal—her desire?
In addition to the recurrence of identical words in rhyme, the close relationship of "Così" to the other petrose is especially apparent in the domination of two features in the handling of rhymes. First, the couplet
that concludes the stanza of "Così" alludes to the concluding couplet with identical rhyme-words in "Io son venuto" and "Amor, tu vedi ben" and to the appearance of rhyme-words in pairs in contiguous stanzas in "Al poco giorno." Moreover, "Così" has a high proportion of rich (or "derivative") rhyme, especially early in the poem: already in the first stanza, three pairs (aspro/diaspro, petra/impetra, arme/atarme ) establish the link with the technique of the other petrose (Baldelli 1973 931–32). Of these, the initial pair is definitive: it expresses the equivalence of power between petra and lover that the poem will attempt to achieve, and thus at the very outset relates the power of the poem and the virtue of a precious stone.[6]
The formal nod to paired rhymes points also to the most important link of "Così" to "Amor, tu vedi ben": Dante's discussion of faults of rhyme in the De vulgari eloquentia 2.xiii. After mentioning "Amor, tu vedi ben" as a feat that justified repetition of rhymes, Dante goes on to include "harshness of rhymes" ("asperitas rithimorum") as a fault to be avoided, "unless it be mixed with softness" ("nisi forte sit lenitate permixta"), adopting the same phrase that justified breaking the rule in the case of "Amor, tu vedi ben."[7] Dante's language suggests that "Così," exemplifying the poet's willful choice of harsh rhymes, is a pendant to "Amor, tu vedi ben" and to the reiterated rhyme-words that are the key to its nova forma. In the case of "Così," it is the mixture, or tempering, of harsh and smooth sounds ("lenium asperorumque mixtura" ) that offers the key to the specific poetics of "Così" and its relation to the cosmological tradition.
The metaphor of temperament, invoked frequently in the De vulgari eloquentia, derives from the notion of the canzone as a harmony of contrasting parts.[8] The metaphor has roots in the metaphysical tradition that characterized the soul itself as a harmony, in the cosmological tradition where temperament refers to the mixture of the four elements in all material substances, and in the medical tradition, where it refers to the mixture of humors in the body.[9]
That the poem is a tempering of harsh and smooth is apparent from an inventory of its rhymes. Of the eighty-three words in rhyming position, forty-four include syllables that are aspre; thirty-nine—nearly half—consist of syllables that are dolci.[10] The mixture is varied from stanza to stanza and indeed from pedes to sirma: the pedes of stanzas 1, 4, and 5, in which the lady, Love, and the lover mount their attacks, have the highest proportion of harsh rhymes. In stanza 5, where the lover
obtains the upper hand, all the rhymes are aspre, marking the speaker's hostile domination. But the sirma of 5 has two harsh rhymes out of three (–orro and –elli ), that of 6 only one, and the tornata none.[11] The fact that of the sirme only one, that of stanza 4, in which the lover faces death, has a majority of harsh rhymes (3/2), whereas in the pedes three stanzas have a majority of harsh rhymes, one a minority (2: it reflects the lover's defenselessness), and two a parity of harsh and smooth rhymes, suggests that the pedes and sirma represent opposed principles, their joining a harmonization of those principles.[12] As we shall see, Dante's treatment of the stanzas bears out this supposition. Far from overwhelming the poem, Dante's use of harsh rhymes is modulated and expressive and results in the "shining" of tragic form ("ipsa tragoedia nitescit"). Like "Amor, tu vedi ben," the art of "Così nel mio parlar" justifies its boldness and extremity and maintains the rules of decorum that Dante would outline in the De vulgari eloquentia.[ 13]
The changing balance of harshness and sweetness in the rhymes reflects the speaker's attempt to equal the aggression of the petra with his own speech, to balance her oppression of him with his rima (1–2, 11–13). The principle that Dante invokes in the first verses can, it is true, be documented in contemporary vernacular texts;[14] but it is also conspicuous in the Platonizing tradition in the form given it by Boethius, when Philosophy reminds her pupil that "you have learned under Plato's authority that words should be akin to the things spoken about"—a formulation of mimetic decorum echoed by writers from Alain of Lille to Jean de Meun and Chaucer.[15]
The principle of decorum in "Così" is closely echoed in the Inferno at the entrance to Cocito, the final ring of Hell, where reminiscences of the canzone are abundant.[16] In his need for the harsh rhymes ("rime aspre e chiocce") adequate to the center of the earth Dante appeals to the muses of the mythical founder of Thebes, Amphion, whose lyre moved stones to form city walls.[17] The link of Amphion to the speaker of the petrose is rich with implications. Amphion is one of the examples adopted by Macrobius (among others) to exemplify the power of music over inanimate objects and recalcitrant individuals.[18] The choice of rime aspre for "Così" may thus be an instance of deliberate election of the appropriate musical ethos for the persuasion of the indurate petra; for, as Boethius notes in the De musica, the harsher modes are appropriate for moving ruder peoples, the softer for more civilized ones.[19] And the speaker himself, by indulging in the harsh mode, may also obtain a measure of relief—a musically induced catharsis.[20]
In other respects as well, Macrobius's discussion of the music of the spheres (1970a 103–7) is relevant to the speaker's choice of an aspro speech. At the beginning of the discussion, Macrobius observes that sounds are harmonious if the blows producing them occur according to proportion ("dulce in aures . . . et musicum defert"), harsh if they do not ("ineptum et asperum personat").[21] The opposition of proportional and deformed sounds is followed by an account of the World-Soul fashioned according to the squares and cubes of the first odd and even numbers, which provides the basis for the physical cosmos and its harmonies.[22] These harmonies, Macrobius goes on, can be found also in the human microcosm and its products; here we encounter Macrobius's claim that the Same and Other in the World-Soul are reflected in the strophe and antistrophe of the choric stanza. Throughout his discussion, Macrobius writes of the World-Soul as woven from odd and even numbers (contexta ), like the celestial music that imitates it.
In the De vulgari eloquentia and elsewhere, Dante too uses forms of texere, though for the activity of assembling words, syntactic units, verses, or stanzas in relations that are musical.[23] The tempering or harmonizing of rough and smooth rhymes in the canzone points, we suggest, to how "Così" might be seen broadly to reflect cosmological ideas: as a weave of contrary principles—feminine and masculine, Other and Same, irrational and rational, even and odd—that form a harmony.[24]
Dante's terminology when discussing the difference of harsh rhymes and sweet (or smooth) suggests a more specific link between "Così nel mio parlar" and the theoretical discussion of the De vulgari eloquentia. The metaphors of combed (pexa ) and hairy (yrsuta ), slippery (lubricia ) and bristly (reburra ), for words including smooth (pexa, lubricia ) or harsh (yrsuta, reburra ) syllables are derived not only from the texture of cloth but, as traditional rhetorics make explicit, also from that of human hair, combed or unkempt. Verses, says Geoffroi de Vinsauf, may be "combed" or "shaggy" depending on their diction and syntax.[25]
In "Così," the lady's hair is mentioned in the fifth and sixth stanzas, where the speaker seizes it. The gesture is ambiguous: is he undoing her braids? Or entering them, joining them? The gesture refers in a veiled way to a sexual embrace and suggests how the fantasy is an act of release for both lover and lady, the exchange of an ornatus that is restrictive and combed (pexa ) for one that is yrsuta, like the rime aspre themselves. Since the lady's hair is curled and gilded by Love himself ("ch' Amor per consumarmi increspa e dora," 64), the lover's handling of the braids is a specific countermeasure to Love's prior attack.[26] But in the context of
the aspro diction of the canzone, the lady's hair, curls, and braids are also a reflexive image of the poetics of the canzone, its harmonizing weave of harsh and smooth, Same and Other, violence and peace.[27]
It is significant that so much of the specificity of "Così" lies in its lexis and rhymes, which for Dante were the metaphysically least important—the last—of concerns. They are the ornatus, the final clothing or adornment (as the metaphors for harsh words suggest) of the framework of the canzone: implicitly they are the equivalent of the flesh, in relation to the spirit. The emphasis on the ornatus as the distinguishing feature of the poem will be significant, both as concerns the domination of a verbal trope—metaphor—in the language of the poem and in the implications of the speaker's undoing of the lady's adornment in the concluding fantasy. More important, the underscoring of ornament operates a kind of metaphysical inversion, making what is logically and metaphysically last, first. This gesture is echoed in the action of the canzone.
Thus, in "Così" the speaker gives scope both to the dangerous power of a dark eros that threatens to kill him and to his own fantasies of a violent "pacification" of the petra. Although the poem is not explicitly cosmological in structure or theme, in some respects it has the widest range, imagining a descent to a caldo borro that corresponds to a kind of sexual inferno and a subsequent ascent to a moment of profound mutual understanding that anticipates the pilgrim's final vision in the Commedia.[28] The poem therefore attempts to include what is verbally and psychologically at the extremes of normative and orthodox experience—harshness of rhyme, suicidal despair, sexual violence—and to recover them in the terms of the final pacification. The attempt to equal the aggression of the petra is not only a vendetta, but also an attempt to balance her violence, to lift both lovers from the impasse of frustrated lust and displaced aggression. The attempt and the results are problematic, as we shall see; but "Così" remains so far consistent with the general project of the petrose, and unmatched in its disturbing power among lyric poems of any age.
Katabasis
The poem begins with the lady's evasion of Love's attack (1, pedes ), shifts to her attack on the speaker (1, sirma; 2, pedes ), and shifts again to the destruction, through the lady's image, of the speaker's internal
senses (2, sirma; 3, pedes ). A personified god of love presents a direct threat to his life (3, sirma ; 4, pedes, sirma ). The situation is then reversed, with the speaker imagining the lady's vulnerability, first to Love's stroke (5, pedes ), then to his own grip and caresses (5, sirma ). The final scene (6, pedes, sirma ), with the speaker dominant and close to the lady, reverses the speaker's subjection to the god of love in the central stanzas. The final configuration is also transformed: if Love's attack on the speaker is treacherous, the speaker's violence is presented as beneficial to both speaker and lady. Both position and intention are reversed.
The structure of "Così nel mio parlar" is thus demarcated by the development of the dominant metaphor of combat and by the antithesis between the lover's inner experience and his relation with the outside world.[29] At the outset (stanzas 1 and 2), the struggle with the lady is described in terms of combat at a distance: the two are archers shooting at each other from afar. The lover's arrows, even if they reach their mark, do not penetrate the lady's armor, but hers penetrate all his defenses and reach their mark no matter how he flees her presence or tries to conceal himself. His relation to what is outside, other than the lady, is likewise one of fearful silence and anxious defensive concealment (24–30). Because so many of the lady's arrows have found their mark, his life is threatened.
In the sirma of stanza 2 the lover is attacked by the lady's viso, the image of her beauty that penetrates his eye.[30] His inner experience is dominated by the lady's image ("de la mia mente tien la cima"), which attacks him from within. Finally (lines 22–26), Death is gnawing at his faculties (lines 31–34). The image of the file wearing through a scorza a scorza transforms the idea of piercing armor to a vision of scraping the outer layers of bark to reach the quick. The teeth of Love, with which Death is gnawing him, intensify the file metaphor to that of something like a wild animal, with the object of attack his senses.[31] Thus, the tree metaphor and the animal metaphor, in addition to constituting a rise in intensity, include in their range the deep life (the quick within the scorza ) only dimly available to awareness as well as an outer, much more perceptible level, that of the experience of the senses, still firmly represented as inner experience.
By the second pes of stanza 2, the speaker's defense is vested in his art (rima ), though inadequate to the burden of the lady's image ("il peso che m'affonda"). The metaphor of the burden on the speaker, taken over from the first stanza of "Io son venuto" (10–14), is thus linked to
the system of inner/outer distinctions: sinking to lower levels is parallel to entering deeper and deeper into the speaker's life.[32]
Stanzas 2 and 3 also develop the tension between inner and outer experience in terms of the relation of inner suffering and verbal expression. In the sirma of stanza 2, expression (rima ) would balance the crushing weight on the lover: in one sense, then, expression redresses the balance, brings the lover back up to the surface. The sirma of stanza 2 is parallel in structure: the speaker's defense would be speech, a dire altrui exposing the source of power behind the image and behind the lady. Just after mention of the inner awareness of the file wearing through successive layers of strength comes the passage on the lover's anxiety to prevent any observer from seeing into his inner state (27–30): he must both try to shield himself against the lady's arrows and prevent any external expression. The open avowal of the penser ("per tema non traluca / lo mio penser") would defend the speaker from the lady's destructiveness by breaching the laws of courtoisie that bind him to his fate.[33]
This tension between the lover's need for external expression and the necessity of preventing it gradually becomes extreme, reaching its high point in the next stanza. The inverted logical sequence of the pedes of stanza 3, like their inverted syntax, contributes strongly to this tension: the lover is said to fear discovery more than death, and the sequence moves from the trembling of the heart in its fear of being seen from the outside, to the inner experience of the slow loss of vital sensation—said to be less feared, but represented as actual rather than hypothetical. The inversion also means that the poem continues to progress, with anguished strain, both downward and inward.
At this moment, with the sirma of stanza 3, comes the first major shift in the metaphor of combat. The combat is abruptly transferred from the outer world of the hostile relation of lover and lady to the inner scene, and it is no longer combat at a distance but a hand-to-hand struggle with the personified god of love, represented as having reached its final phase with the defeat and imminent death of the lover. The earlier metaphors of descent and of filing and gnawing have prepared for this moment, which is situated in the innermost parts of life and which finds the lover cast down and helpless. But the scene also derives much of its power from the earlier tension arising from the ban on expression, because implicitly it is an unmasking of impersonal, unconscious agencies to reveal the conscious and determined hostility of a human figure—which remains, nonetheless, a mask.
The struggle is represented in several stages. In the first, the god has struck the lover to the ground and is standing over him; the lover cries out and humbly begs for mercy, but the god seems determined to refuse it (sirma of stanza 3, 35–39). It may seem obvious to say that the struggle (though internal) is represented as if taking place in the outside world; it is important that the lover is still experiencing it as if from within his body, but also as if his body were there in the internal scene. For instance, in this first stage he cries out, and he must interpret Love's facial expressions and bodily attitude ("par messo al niego").
If in this first stage Love is simply standing over the lover after having felled him, in the next stage (first pes of stanza 4, 40–43) Love moves into action: he raises his hand again and again as if to strike and holds the lover forcibly to the ground supine (a riverso ) and too exhausted to struggle any longer ("d'ogni guizzo stanco"). The moment of the death blow seems to have arrived, and the lover has the inner experience of the physical combat:
allor mi surgon ne la mente strida;
e '1 sangue, ch'è per le vene disperso,
fuggendo corre verso
lo cor, che 'l chiama; ond'io rimango bianco.
(44–47)
The first line of this sccond pes of stanza 4 is in some ways the most remarkable in the poem.[34] Within the allegory on the inner stage, the division between inner and outer is maintained: there is a kind of retreat (parallel to the file's action a scorza a scorza ) to further levels of inner awareness. And in the terror of awaiting the death blow (as if from outside), the lover is now again blocked from "outward" expression ("allor surgon ne la mente strida," 44), whereas in the previous pes he has been represented as crying aloud. Of course, part of the surprising power of line 44 lies precisely in the ambiguity of ne la mente: since the locus of the entire allegorical scene is the lover's mente, the phrase both maintains the inner/outer distinction and the blockage of expression in the personified combat and obliterates that distinction, placing the silent inner screaming in what we may call the "real" mind of the lover, blocked from the outside world by his obsessive inner conflict. The ambiguity is mapped in references to the sword, which is presented both objectively and subjectively: properly as the aggressive weapon (spada ), then metonymically as cause (mano, fiede ) and effect (dolor ). The ambiguity is maintained in the rest of the pes, for the lines about the blood
rushing to the heart and the resultant pallor of the lover apply both to the events of the imagined combat and to the "actual" bodily state of the lover caught up in the intensity of his imagining.
The third stage of the hand-to-hand combat with Love is the sirma of stanza 4 (48–52). We are back in the allegorical fiction, as Love strikes with his sword under the lover's left arm:
Elli mi fiede sotto il braccio manco
sì forte che 'I dolor nel cor rimbalza;
allor dico: "S' elli alza
un'altra volta, Morte m'avrè chiuso
prima che '1 colpo sia sceso giuso."
What is the status of lines 50–52? Like the strida, this speech is within the lover in the inner drama; but again like the strida, it is understood to be silent, both within the lover in the allegory and within the lover as he exists in the "real" world. Expression is enclosed doubly in the lover, and death, it is said, will close him up entirely if Love raises his hand another time. The most profound enclosure—the ultimate silence of death—coincides with the threat of a final descent (sceso giuso ). The speaker can fall, and withdraw, no further.
At this moment the allegorical combat is suspended. With the opening of the next stanza the major transition of the poem takes place, and it brings the next major change in the treatment of the metaphor of combat. The lady is substituted for the lover as the victim of Love's blow:
Così vedess' io lui fender per mezzo
lo core a la crudele che '1 mio squatra . . .
We have been abruptly returned to the "outer" world and to the combat between lover and lady that had dominated until the sirma of stanza 3. The pattern is maintained in the reversal of circumstances that takes place in stanzas 5–6, where first Love (lui ) then the speaker (io ) are the aggressors, while the lady is persistently the victim. In rapid succession, the blow to the heart, the barks of frustration, the tresses (Love's whips), and thefaville are, in the speaker's wish, inflicted on the lady. What had been her gestures and devices of attack become the lover's weapons, and she becomes the victim. The reversal of agent and patient is thus the turn that in a sense activates the text, as we shall discuss below.
Two aspects of the combat with Love require further comment here. One is the fact that each of the three stages of the struggle involves some kind of speech on the part of the lover, while the god of love him-
self is entirely silent (the closest he comes to speech is his defiance—"sfida la debole mia vita"—which presumably refers to the announcement of intention in his gestures and facial expression). There is a progression from the grido of line 37 (which is understood to be aloud, though within the inner drama) to the strida of line 44 (which are within the lover within the inner drama) to the dico of line 50 (which are at a first level clearly still within the lover within the inner drama, like the strida, but whose term, dico, is ambiguous). However, it is clear that the inchoate attempts at expression in the central stanzas, and the very tension between extreme inwardness and an externalizing representation of that inwardness, are a function of the speaker's re-ascent and reemergence through the medium of his own speech, the rima that redresses the balance of the lady's harshness, which is then secured by the turn to the "outer" world in stanza 5.
The other aspect is more striking still. While the nature of the allusion to Dido and Aeneas in lines 35–36, which state that Love has struck the lover down "con quella spada ond'elli ancise Dido," will be addressed more fully below, here we wish to emphasize the fact that Dido committed suicide with the sword in question. In other words, the sudden irruption of the hand-to-hand combat with Love reveals, more clearly than heretofore in the sequence of the petrose, that the suffering repeatedly said to be leading the lover toward death derives from a self-destructive or even suicidal tendency within himself.[35]
Aissi L'enverse
A dominant theme of"Così" is, we have argued, the tempering of lover and lady in a sexual commixtio oppositorum. This pattern is prepared by a pattern of reversals and inversions.[36] What in "Amor, tu vedi ben" is the lover's petition for a transformation in the lady is replaced in "Così" with the lover's shift from victim of the lady's refusal to agent of retaliation. This narrative reversal is one of a series of inversions at several levels of the poem's organization. The speaker's original assumption of the parlar aspro is both in emulation and in opposition to the lady's attack: the poem is an extended antiphrasis—predicated, ultimately, on the assumption that the aggression of the petra is itself an inversion of love. The astronomical reversal and rhyme-word inversions in the other petrose are replaced in "Così" by the gradual reversal of physical and psychological domination. And the elaborate exchange of weapons between speaker and lady is matched at the expressive level by an exchange
of metaphor, as the speaker reclaims, so to speak, the figurative language associated early in the poem with the lady. Finally, the most challenging and problematic inversion in the poem is the implicit claim that the poem's violence is in the service of reconciliation, "quia bellum est propter pacem."[37] We turn first to the inverted stanza structure and narrative reversal in the poem, subsequently to the treatment of figurative language (especially the centrally placed personification of Amor), and finally to the poem's emphasis on return, by means of the aspro language itself, from discord to peace.
The reversal of roles in the poem is mirrored in the shifts in the poem's stanza form from disjunction to harmony of content and form. With respect to the construction of the stanza, "Così nel mio parlar" differs significantly from "Io son venuto," where the depressed "subdiesis" suggests the constraint on the speaker. In "Così," however, Dante's manipulation of the stanza gives the effect of rapid movement toward a goal, working first against the thematic emphasis on inward movement (thus, for example, the tormented syntax of the pedes in stanza 3) and subsequently in synchrony with the poem's movement out and away from the speaker's inner life.[38] The single settenario of "Io son venuto" is expanded in "Così" to three, symmetrically disposed (lines 3, 7, and 11 of thirteen), rendering the stanza less weighty.[39] The rima baciata that closes each settenario, combined with marked consonance and alliteration, reiterates the impression of agility.[40] The stanzas are rounded out with four consecutive rime baciate, unique in Dante's practice.[41]
Subtleties in the stanza structure, however, temper the effect of speed. The consecutive couplets, emphasizing forward motion, are answered by the settenarii, symmetrically disposed, which establish a dominance of the center.[42] As Momigliano noted (Dante 1946 166), the sirma repeats the structure of the pedes, adding only the third endecasillabo, so that the stanza falls into three units, each built around a settenario. The sirma (CDdEE), moreover, is equal in weight to the first five lines, outside the series of couplets, and symmetrical with it. Thus the principle that brought the pedes down into the sirma in "Io son venuto" by having the first three verses of the sirma duplicate the form of the pedes works in "Così" to shift the point of articulation back above the diesis, to the center of the stanza.
The stanza in "Così" thus balances great dynamism with underlying stability. In terms of the stanza as a complexion of parts, Dante's practice in "Così" tests, but does not violate, the licentia poets may claim in
fashioning the stanza, and mirrors, in its tensions, the exacerbated complexio of the speaker.[43] It alludes to the topics of descort but remains an orthodox canzone.[44]
The overlap of descent and return in the stanzas extends through the canzone. Dante continues the subject matter of each sirma into the pedes of the following stanza.[45] The effect is notable. Over stanzas 1 and 2 the lady's blows ("spezzan ciascun arme," 1.12) also shatter the speaker's shield ("ch'ella non mi spezzi," stanza 2.1). Over stanzas 2 and 3 the topic of internal corrosion (lima, scemi, rodere ) recurs at the diesis of the next stanza (denti, manduca, bruca ). Still more thorough is the progress of Love's killing blows in stanzas 3–4; struck to the ground at the diesis of stanza 3, the speaker must face Amor again at beginning, diesis, and end of stanza 4. In a decisive turn for the poem's narrative, this last blow is imagined striking the lady at stanza 5.1, thus carrying the topic of Love's blows into the next stanza, where the persistence of the topic becomes part of the scheme of retribution for the lady's violence ("dà nel sol quanto nel rezzo," 57). In stanzas 5–6 the lover's grip on the lady's hair is carried through the next stanza in terms of the sferza, the lady's braids as Love's whips.
This maintenance of logical units of sentenza across the division between stanzas is much more than an extension of the troubadour techniques for linking stanzas with repeated elements (coblas capfinidas, capcaudadas ).[46] New subjects are begun in the sirma and continued into the pedes of the next stanza, so that the synchrony of topics and formal units is displaced by the measure of the sirma; since topics are so often introduced in the sirma (or cauda, "tail"), it becomes in a sense a frons, or head. With an effect similar to that of consecutive couplets, the stanza appears to be out of temperament—inverted, in fact. The overlapping of stanzas is one of several patterns guiding the overall movement of the canzone. Boyde (1971 143) notes a comprehensive pattern dividing the poem into three main sections: stanzas 1–3, in which the speaker is attacked by the lady and her image; stanza 4, the center of the canzone, where the speaker faces death; and stanzas 5–6, which turn the tables.[47] The divisions are well marked. A proliferation of negatives characterizes stanzas 1–3, culminating with the denial of the speaker's plea for mercy by the god of love ("messo al niego," 39).[48] The scene of the speaker's subjection to Amor is defined by anaphoric reference to love at formal articulations (sirma, pes, sirma in stanzas 3 and 4): E', Egli, Elli. And the last section is characterized by the optative and conditional forms describing the speaker's fantasy, from Così vedess'io to renderei.[49] They coun-
terbalance, in the expression of a hypothetical satisfaction of desire, the negatives of stanzas 1–3; in some cases explicitly, as the speaker denies his previous timidity: "e non sarei pietoso né cortese" (stanza 5.6).
In these larger patterns we can see how the disjunction of logic and form in stanzas 1–3 is countered in stanzas 5–6 by an opposing tendency returning the stanzas to harmony. The shift toward re-alignment of the pedes and sirma with logical units begins with the repetition of Elli, Love's pronoun, introduced in the sirma of stanza 3 and then repeated in the first pes and the sirma of stanza 4. Thus the anaphoric—or perhaps we should say antistrophic—repetition returns the poem to a normal relation of pedes and sirma, reasserting the movement of the Same.[50] The last instances ofEgli (stanzas 3.9, 4.9) center the poem, for their center is the central verse of the text, where rhyme, consonance, and assonance on –e(r)so dominate: "esto perverso / che disteso a riverso." This stanza also marks the return to the harmonious relation of pedes and sirma by being internally unified, linked at its extremes by identical instances of elli alza (1, 11) and by the antithesis of alza and giuso. Stanzas 3–4 are thus the zone of overlap, or crossing, between the domination of the petra and the domination of the speaker, the crisis preceding the decisive reversal of roles; by the same token, they mark the crossing of domination between Other and Same, for it is as the death blow is about to fall, between stanzas 4 and 5, that the speaker imagines Love's sword striking not himself, but the petra.
The return to harmony of stanzaic form is underlined by the return in stanza 5 to the opening words of the canzone: "Così vedess'io," optative, expresses the desire that is the poem's efficient cause (Vallone 1974 259). The related beginning to stanza 6, "S'io avessi," identifies stanzas 5–6 as parallel. In fact, the two stanzas restate the idea of retaliation at corresponding points:
la crudele che'l mio squatra (5.2)
che fatte son per me scudiscio e ferza (6.2)
per me, com'io per lei (5.8)
io mi vendicherei di più di mille (6.8)
ch'Amor per consumarmi increspa e dora (5.12)
per vendicar lo fuggir che mi face (6.12)
The persistence from sirma to pedes of the topic—here, the lady's braids—serves to bind the parallel stanzas together, so that the impetus created by the overlap of logic and form is redefined, by the dominance
of the Same, as a return to rather than a departure from harmony. These parallel instances of retaliation in the last two stanzas also mark the lover's withdrawal from violence and are thus crucial to the attempt to transform the poem's ethos as it nears its conclusion (see below).
Beyond the relation between the speaker's imbalance and the imbalance of the stanzas, the inversion of the stanza is linked to the content and movement of the poem as a whole. The topic overlapping each stanza division is related to the warfare between speaker and lady, specifically to penetration: the lady's colpi, the ferocious denti d'Amor, Love's blows, and the speaker's gestures, seizing the lady's hair and ambiguously "pleasing" her, are part of a single series of gestures suffered by the lover in stanzas 1–4 and by the lady in the fantasy of stanzas 5–6. The formal dynamism of the poem thus prepares the prosopopoeic metamorphosis, in the congedo, of the canzone into an archer who fires the lover's words into the lady's heart.[51] The production of the poem as an arrow aimed at the lady is the last step in the lover's emergence from the blocked expression of the early stanzas: it represents the ultimate turning outward and rendering audible of his speech in the form of actual publication. The reversal of roles and the lover's emergence from the depth and inwardness of his perilous nadir are thus closely related. In the terms of the opening verse, he has found the parlar aspro that can match the aggression of the petra, and the rima that can balance his own negative tendency ("tal che non potrebbe adequar rima," 21).
At the stanzaic level, the friction of constant forward insistence and centric symmetry restates the thematic tension between descent and return, inwardness and publicity, initial violence and final peace. In the terms of the Timaeus, "Così" risks a maximum degree of departure into the Other—giving irrationality a maximum of scope, both in lexical choice and formally in the gremium of the stanza—to return, finally, within the dominant circle of the Same. In terms that resonate with the final stanza of "Io son venuto," "Così nel mio parlar" is an occasion for the lover both to give maximum scope to the violent sexual contest with the petra and to bring to the surface what is Other, and potentially most dangerous, within himself.
Metaphors of Love
As readers have seen, "Così" depends for its chief effects on the ornatus of translatio, or metaphor.[52] Not only rhetorically, but also thematically and structurally, the poem is built around its metaphors, and it ends
with a stunning conversio of the poem into an archer—but not before the poem has broached the possibility of discarding all ornatus, all rhetoric in the imagined approach of the lover and the petra.
A central axis of metaphor in the canzone turns on rapid metamorphosis in the meaning of the term Amor. As in the Vita nuova, the lover's decay and recovery are expressed in the various appearances assumed by Love.[53] The term Amor appears five times in stanza 3, four times in stanza 4, twice in stanza 5, and once in stanza 6; if we count pronouns and implicit uses, then once in 1, twice in 2, six times in 3, four times in 4, twice in 5, once in 6, and not at all in the congedo —an increase and diminution of frequency that recalls the pattern of the rhymewords in "Amor, tu vedi ben."
In the initial situation, not Love but the lady attacks the speaker, though in a sense it must be Love who fires the arrows that she evades in verses 7–8. Thus, in stanza 1 Love appears only by the metonymy of his arrows. In stanza 2 the speaker seems to say that the lady is within him, dominating his mind, but the lima in verse 22, as Contini (Dante 1946 168) suggests, is identifiable with Love ("il chiuso e doloroso Amore"), so that Love appears in stanza 2 via metonymy of effect for cause. And because Love is addressed with the personal pronoun ("ti dà forza," 26), the personification of Love in the next stanza is anticipated.[54] In stanza 3, love is first mentioned explicitly—"li denti d'Amor" —and then personified as a subject:
E' m'ha percosso in terra e stammi sopra
con quella spada ond'elli ancise Dido,
Amore, a cui io grido
merzé chiamando . . .
(35–38)
The appearance of Amor personified announces the crisis. Love becomes apparently most real when the lover is nearest death.[55] As often in Duecento poetry, Love is verbally closely linked to death ("s'elli alza / un'altra voltA , MOR te m'avrà chiuso," 50–51).[56] The personification of Amor locates the center of the poem (leaving aside the congedo ), framed, as we noted earlier, by pronouns referring to Love. The personification is further marked by being set in both verse and syntactic juxtaposition to the name of Dido, the first appearance of a classical name in Dante's poetry and the only such name to appear in his extant lyrics.[57]
It is important that Love personified also signals the end of Love's
domination; with the term chiuso, used by the speaker to name the final blockage of death, Love as an aggressor begins to retreat from the poem. In stanza 5 he appears, hypothetically attacking the lady (vedess'io lui ) and, less vividly, as the lady's coiffeur. Though still personified, Amor has become a remote agent, as in stanzas 1 and 2; the same is true in stanza 6, where, although he wields a whip, it is the lady's braids that do the lashing. Love works finally through human agents: the arrow fired by the poem is Love's arrow, but it is the ardent love of the speaker for the petra, not the personified Amor of the middle of the poem.
The figure of Amor in "Così" has a conspicuous origin and history. Rhetorically, the central stanzas are dominated by the reified terminology of Amour courtois: the Love of the central stanzas is akin to the god of love of the Fiore or the Amor of Francesca in the Commedia: an allegory of sexual libido as an ineluctable force.[58] This Amor is represented in the central scene in a manner reminiscent of Cavalcanti's lyrics, where the scene of the heart slain by Love frequently recurs. In Cavalcanti, Love is just such a hostile agent, destructive of intellectual activity and life both figuratively and literally.[59] From the same naturalscientific tradition, Dante draws the representation of the lover's plight as the crisis of a disease, with the lover going pale and enduring repeated strokes to the heart: his senses are "unstrung" (allenta ); he goes limp (disteso ) and cannot move (guizzo ).[60] In sharp distinction to the poems of Cavalcanti, however, "Così" represents the lover as fighting back. The reaction is led by the body: screams rise from the threatened lower soul into his brain, and blood rushes to the heart that summons it.[61] The consequence of this reactive behavior is the irascible outburst of the following stanza.[62] The domination of the lover's mind by the hostile images of the lady, which echoes the symptoms of the melancholic disease of hereos, in which love dominates the subject, is broken not by reason, but by the body's irascible retaliation.[63]
The mutations of love suggest how the canzone works by stripping away and reallocating metaphors and screens, schermi.[64] The early stanzas are rich in troped terms: the lady's jasper, signifying her freedom from love's harm; her winged blows (presumably her glances); her rule of the lover compared to a flower topping its stem; comparison of her to a ship; Love as a file; and Love's teeth. The two central stanzas (3–4) dominated by the personification of love, suggest an allegory of the lover's heart as a vanquished knight.[65] As in Cavalcanti's allegories, where the heart is represented as a chamber, the central scene, which
seems to be experienced and observed by the lover simultaneously and to occur both inside the heart and to the whole body, manifests the lover's inner division, his negativity aligned against his own life.[66]
In the final two stanzas, the frequency of figurative terms diminishes notably. In stanza 5, to be sure, we have the lady as scherana and the periphrastic caldo borro, but the emphasis is on the lady herself. Her lack of defenses puts the spotlight on her body—her hair, her eyes—rather than on her metaphorical bolts, jasper, or file.[67] And having reached her hair, the lover returns to it and rests finally in her eyes. Although figure and metaphor are not absent in stanzas 5–6—the lady's eyes give out sparks, and the lover compares himself to a bear—Love is here the speaker's love, physical and spiritual.
There is thus a metalepsis of Love, from an implied agent to a personified figure, a rhetorical simulacrum like that of the Vita nuova, to the love of the speaker himself for the lady and her desire for him. The decisive turn in stanza 5 removes a screen, allowing lady and lover to meet with unmediated directness: a meeting that concludes with the lover looking directly into her eyes, the source of his pain.[68] The result, as in the Vita nuova, is a breakthrough in the understanding of the relation of speaker and lady. The figure of Amor acts as hinge mediating the shift in power from petra to speaker imagined in the poem. And because Love is the agent first of the lady and subsequently of the speaker—who imagines Love striking the petra and the canzone as an archer, like Amor—, he becomes a basis for the complicity of the protagonists. Each first acts through Love's trappings and then abandons them.
Removing the schermi of Love is one of a series of revelations. First, the person attacking the speaker is not a god of love but the lady herself; that is, the love assailing the speaker is in fact, however displaced, her love. Second, while the sword that killed Dido was Aeneas's sword, it was Dido who wielded it.[69] As in Dido's case, we infer, the speaker's harm results in part from his own hand: Love's arm, Love's hand (mano, 40), are ultimately his own. The periphrasis about Love's sword thus makes a key point about the figure of Love: it is an image of the speaker himself as a near-suicide, locked in a schizoid condition that, as in the case of Pier delle Vigna in the Commedia, puts him at risk of becoming unjust to himself. In the context of "Io son venuto," it is the lover's diseased temperament, which we might attribute to negative elements in his Saturnine horoscope, that is helping to kill him: suicide was a typical fate of Saturn's melancholy children.[70]
The allusion to Dido exemplifies some of the functions of figurative
language sketched above.[71] Love kills Dido because, as the son of Anchises and Venus, Aeneas was half-brother to Cupid (traditionally the son of Venus and Jupiter).[72] Although the logic is tortuous, the allusion introduces important parallels between the speaker and Dido and among the petra, Love, and Aeneas that reverse the sexes of the corresponding protagonists in Virgil's poem. The allusion is thus in one sense an inverted comparison, discordant like the relation of content and form in the stanzas and a preparation for the subsequent reversal of roles. But in a deeper and more important sense it is another instance of the speaker's masking, his assumption of the place of the victim, of the irrational Other: self-comparison to Dido, like the personification of Amor as the Lover's own suicidal disposition, is a splitting of the self required for the eventual purpose of reconciling the two sides of his nature—for the union of the two Gemini represented in the mutual gaze of the last stanza.
In Virgil's poem, it is Aeneas who is unyielding, who is compared to stone when he abandons Dido.[73] And it is Dido who—like the lover is wounded by love's arrow and haunted by an image of Aeneas that slowly destroys her. The events of the canzone digest several passages from Dido's history in the Aeneid, not merely by way of allusion but also as a parallel narrative.[74] The culminating parallel, the sword that Dido uses to kill herself, was obtained in an exchange of gifts: Dido gave Aeneas the sword ornamented with jasper that he wears when he receives Mercury's embassy from Jupiter.[75] Dido and Aeneas thus exchanged virtues: Dido surrenders her decorum and safety, suggested by the jasper-studded sword; Aeneas relinquishes the sword that signifies his virility and independence.[76]
The exchange of virility for chastity anticipates the narrative reversal we find in "Così nel mio parlar": supine and victimized, deprived of the manly sword held by Amor, the lover imagines taking his love directly to the petra in stanzas 5 and 6. Love's sword in the central scene returns, veiled in the guise of the speaker placing his hands (like Love's mano ) in the lady's hair. Ironically, the status of Amor as a foreshadowing of the lover himself prepares the lover's active role in the final scene, so that the lover's defeat prepares his recovery. Indeed, the immediate threat of death, crystallized by the allusion to the exemplum of suicide and the unmasking of Love's real agency, releases the lover's irascible strength and permits his breakout from the crippling conventions of reticence and passivity imposed by courtoisie. For of course the lover does not finish like Dido—he does not commit suicide. Nor in the lover's fantasy
of turning the tables does the lady adopt Dido's role—she does not ask for death (mortem orat ); rather, the lover imagines her asking for love, thus reversing the request for greater cruelty attributed to her at the beginning of the poem.
In a larger sense, Dante's use of the Dido episode in the Aeneid reiterates the import of the parlar aspro as a dialectical response to the lady's attack. We recall that in "Io son venuto" the project of the petrose is announced by the discord between the lover and the rest of nature. This topos, which was to resonate in subsequent lyric, is derived in part, as we saw, from Dido's sleepless anxiety while the rest of nature is at peace.[77] The passage is the more conspicuous for being introduced with an adversative construction ("At non infelix . . . Phoenissa") similar to that which opens the book itself ("At regina . . . " ). The Virgilian model is adopted by Dante in "Io son venuto" for the presentation of a male lover whose persistent love is discordant with the winter season.[78] In "Così nel mio parlar," the manifest discord is that between the lover and the petra, whose recalcitrance (s'arretra ) is an unnatural and disingenuous refusal of love; at a deeper level it is between the lover and a Love that is at once outrageous (esto perverso ) but also in a sense the will of the lover himself. Thus, with its allusion to the pathos of Dido as the example for the moribund lover, "Così" rewrites an important page of Augustine's itinerary, where sympathy with Dido, the victim of passion, is presented as the specific tendency that the autobiographer must attempt to transcend. "Così nel mio parlar," by permitting the disintegration of the erotic protagonist into the roles both of perverse Eros and of Love's victim is a first step of that "Romanesque" poetics of prosopopoeia that permits a dialectical recuperation of the tragedy of damnation in the Inferno.
The allusion to Dido is significant also in relation to the transformation of the poem into the lover's weapon in the congedo. The image of Love stabbing the speaker is a condensed or metaleptic scene of the causes that are propelling the lover to the verge of extinction. In this sense, it draws on the narrative of Dido, for the identification of the causes that lead to misfortune is a topos of tragedy and of elegiac love poetry and figures prominently in Dido's story.[79] The extreme resonance of the periphrasis, alluding to the series of Dido's enamorment and death, to the exchange of swords, to the ambiguous relationship of Aeneas and Love, and to the scene of Dido's suicide itself, marks a shift from a tropic to a metonymic mode in which the final term, the effect, implies a series of causes.[80] The outcome of Heroides 7—the metamor-
phosis of Aeneas's suicidal sword into Dido's pathetic pen—is thus also reversed in the congedo of the canzone, where the pen proves stronger than the sword.
Metaphors are thus both volatile and mutable over the course of the canzone. The poem molts its vesti di figura as it progresses, the same dynamism of its syntax and stanza form operating in the use and development of metaphorical terms.[81] Metaphor in medieval poetics has been characterized as the trope of the unquiet heart that longs to rest in its home, where there is neither metaphor nor language.[82] In this sense, metaphor itself is implicated in the poem's teleological movement toward the lady and toward concrete terms. One of the movements of "Così" leads from the schermo of Amor at the center of the poem to the demythologized love that fires the lady and the lover in the final scene of the poem. It is to the specifically teleological function of metaphor itself as it leads to the final scene, and to the teleological structure of the whole poem, that we now turn.
The Poem As Telos
The goal of the poem as metaphor is the description of the congedo as an archer—itself a common figure for purposeful action. In Dante's philosophical tradition, the falling of a stone, the animal seeking nourishment or its mate, the arrow fired at its target, and the instrument in the hand of the artisan are examples of action directed to an end.[83] In the Paradiso, the figure of the arrow describes the pilgrim's rapid and purposeful ascent through the heavens;[84] in the canzone the arrow's target, as of all the poem's art, is the lady's heart. But the figure also informs the sense in which the poem's language moves to an end: the persuasion of the lady and the peace that the poet hopes will follow his success.[85] And if the figure posits the lady's heart as the segno, the target, it also projects the speaker as the arrow's origin, as the bow that is found slack (disteso, allenta ) at the center of the poem but taut and effective at the end. The figure of the speaker as an archer, firing the arrow of his desire at the lady's heart, contains the whole utterance of the lyric, from the attacco ("Così . . . voglio" ), through the center, to the congedo.[86]
Stanzas 2–3, the speaker's descent to his nadir, also concentrate the teleological imagery. The figure of corrosion that begins with the lima and concludes with the feral denti d'amor (32) outlines the attack on the speaker's life in terms of an animal gnawing its food (rodermi, manduca ). And the three consecutive figures in stanza 2—the fior di fronda,
the lady as legno, and the speaker's obsession as a peso that sinks him illustrate the natural movement of elements and the movement of the will toward the goal that satisfies it: the blossom crowns the stem, earth sinks below water, and human agents create instruments, like ships, that reach elected goals.[87] The ship directed for port is of course a common figure for the goal-oriented pilgrimage of life, for the work of art and for the lover.[88] The cima della mente occupied by the lady is the locus of the proprium or distinguishing perfection of humanity, the rational mind.[89]
The simultaneous mention of rising fire and descending stones as expressions of natural motion is a topos of Platonic discourse (Patch 1932). Its most famous appearance is in Augustine's Confessions 13.9.10:
Fire tends upwards; a stone downwards. They are impelled by their own weights; they seek their own places. . . . Not put in proper order, they are without rest; when they are set in due order, they are at rest. My love is my weight! I am borne about by it, wheresoever I am borne. By your gift we are enkindled, and we are borne upwards. We glow with inward fire, and we go on . . . for we go upwards to "the peace of Jerusalem."[90]
The passage documents the links between the figurative language of stanza 2 and the poem's other dominant images: the sparks in the lady's eyes that ignite the speaker, the heart that drives him, the evolution of the canzone as a form toward the harmony of its parts (ordinantur ), the speaker's drive to seek the peace of the final verse, in concert with things animate and inanimate.[91]
Surveying the whole canzone, the thematic return to peace emerges as a return of both form and content: the stanza returns from the discord of logic and form to harmony in the final stanzas; an elaborate variation of topics articulates the reversal of roles between lover and lady; the speaker returns from his katabasis to a position of parity with the lady; ornatus is stripped away; and, invoking retributive justice, the speaker transforms the lady's violence into eros and brings peace ("renderei . . . pace," 78), the telos of violence. These patterns find their goal in the speaker's final gaze into the lady's eyes:
Ancor ne li occhi, ond'escon le faville
che m'infiammano il cor, ch'io porto anciso
guarderei presso e fiso,
per vendicar lo fuggir che mi face;
e poi le renderei con amor pace.
(74–78)
The juxtaposition of amor and pace at poem's end recalls the juxtaposition Dido/Amore at the poem's center. But whereas in verse 31 the terms are separated by inverted syntax and a verse break, here the terms come together on the same line and approach synonymy.
The lover's gaze into the lady's eyes and his concession of peace with love are the goals of his fantasy, the equivalent of the pilgrim's gaze into the light at the end of the Commedia. As in Dante's gloss to "Donne ch'avete" in the Vita nuova, the eyes and mouth of the lady are respectively the origin and goal of love: "ne l'una dico de li occhi, li quali sono principio d'amore; ne la seconda dico de la bocca, la quale è fine d'amore" (Dante 1980 132).
The last sirma of the canzone is the conjunction of the origin and goal of the speaker's love, its Alpha and Omega.[92] A complete cycle is implied: the procession of Love (escon ) from her eyes and its return by the speaker to her eyes and mouth (renderei ). This descent and return is modeled ultimately on the procession and return of love: even the harshness of "Così" can stand as what pseudo-Dionysius would call an echo (resonantia ) of Love on a cosmic scale.[93] The final gestures are prepared over the entire canzone—in its form, diction, and figurative language.
As we noted above, Dante's final sirma on the eyes of the petra echoes the terms of "Donne ch'avete," which exemplifies the procession and return of love through Beatrice:[94]
De li occhi suoi, come ch'ella li mova
escono spirti d'amore inflammati,
che feron li occhi a qual che allor la guati
e passan sì che'l cor ciascun retrova.
(51–54)
It is striking that in the Vita nuova this is but the second explicit mention of Beatrice's eyes, and the first in verse.[95] Dante exercises a similar restraint in "Così": we are surprised that the lady's eyes are mentioned for the first time in the final sirma (verse 74), for Dante has throughout the canzone narrated the effects of the lady's penetrating glance, from the winged colpi (the rays of her eyes) to the generalized viso in stanza 2 to the visual species (optical images) that compose the phantasm.[96] But all these references to the eyes are veiled: when the poet confronts the lady's eyes as the efficient cause of his suffering, the poem immediately concludes. The lady's eyes are the concrete term toward which tends the series of figurative expressions referring to eyes.[97]
The emergence of the lady's eyes—and implicitly, her recognition of the speaker's love—as the goal of the poem's aspro diction and restless metaphors is the process by which the poem, to adapt Contini's phrase, converts its petroso content into form and so fulfills the poet's desire to fashion a parlar aspro that will match the lady's acts.[98] In "Così," this process is worked out in detail: the figurative language for the lady's acts and the lover's suffering is reassigned as tropes for the canzone as the instrument of the speaker's revenge and gratification. Lady and poem exchange figurative terms, and the poem's increase in referential concreteness with regard to the lady is accompanied by the troping of the poem's language as a series of metaphors for its own efficacy. The speaker's return of the lady's gaze in the narrative is mimed by the poem itself as a message (meant to be a trenchant one) for the lady's eyes. Like the crystalline "Amor, tu vedi ben," "Così," which presents the congedo as an archer, is a device, a machina intended to move the lady, to make her fall in love. The sum of the poem's parts and their relations is subordinated to this telos, the final cause of the poem's composition and the purpose of its metaphorical dynamic. This final trope is registered not only in the reallocation of the metaphors, but in the content of the metaphors themselves: arrow, ship, file, teeth, sword, braids.
The dominant figure in the poem is Love's arrow: shot from the lady's eyes at the speaker in stanza I, these projectiles are literally returned by the archer who personifies the canzone in the congedo: "e dàlle per lo cor d'una saetta" (82). The final dàlle echoes the lady's empowerment of Love ("chi ti dà forza," 26), her indiscriminate firing ("dà nel sol," 57), and the speaker's restitution of peace after gazing into the lady's eyes (renderei ).[99] The poem's achievement is visible in the promotion of saetta, found in initial position in stanza 1, to rhyming status with vendetta, the last word of the poem. Transforming the poem into an archer, the speaker completes the repossession of the weapons of Amor—bow and arrows, as well as torch ( faville, 74)—previously controlled by the lady.[100] In the poem, these weapons culminate in the sword of Love, whose redirection by the speaker in the interval between stanzas 4 and 5 is decisive: it could be said that the sword, always implicitly a phallus (as in the Aeneid ), becomes directly attached to the desire of the speaker to possess the lady physically.[101]
The shift in possession of Love's weapons illustrates the transformation, developed over the entire canzone, of the lady's glances, her rays and arrows, into the speaker's words, into his parlar. The lady's hostility
is mediated by her looks, by her phantasm in the speaker, and by the appearance of Amor—all understandable as optical phenomena.[102] Even the speaker's fear of discovery is given in optical terms:
per tema non traluca
lo mio penser di fuor si che sì scopra.
(29–30)
By contrast, the speaker's defenses and his retaliation are verbal. His early inability to match her with rhymes, his refusal to publish her name, are nearly fatal. It is as he begins to "speak" that the situation is reversed: from the rising, if still internal, strida in the mind and the summons from the heart (chiama ) to the imagined shout in the borro ("Io ti socorro," 47), to the act of speech of the poem itself. From the poem's perspective, it would signify the speaker's victory if he could both see her suffering Love ("Così vedess'io," 53) and make her call out for him ("perchè non latra per me," 58). He would then possess her Medusan strength and impose on her his desire that she speak her love. On a deeper level, the purpose of the poem is the achievement of the speaker's expression, escape from the blockage that nearly kills him, and the provocation of the petra so that she, too, may reveal her love. Thus the poem is fashioned so as to lead to a turning outward of both speaker and lady, allowing their meeting in a common acknowledgment of love.
The lover's actions toward the lady, as far as the explicit statements of the poem go, are directed toward her long braids, and only one of his gestures is concretely named: "nei biondi capelli . . . metterei mano"; "S'io avessi le belle trecce prese . . . pigliandole." We are told that he would pass the entire day with those braids ("anzi terza . . . con esse passerei vespero e squille"), that he would not be "pietoso né cortese" but like a playing bear, and that he would take revenge a thousand times ("io mi vendicherei di più di mille") for the suffering they have caused him; he compares them here to whips (which are also braided ).
It has sometimes been supposed that the meaning of these lines is that the lover would literally whip the lady with her own braids. This misses the point entirely. The lady's hair stands here for her entire sexual nature and desirability; that her hair is braided stands for her customary courtly ornatus, including the elaborate clothing of a noble woman; laying hands on the hair of her head—and maintaining the grasp—signifies an abrupt transition to intimacy. The braids are scudiscio e ferza, of course, because the lady's refusal has been painful, but also because they
incite his desire, they are a target and symbol of desire. The implications of the detail of the lover's putting his hands in her braids are considerable; we return to them shortly.
The pattern that has the speaker repossessing the weapons of Love thus extends to the only weapons that are part of her body: the lady's tresses. The change from arrows, armor, and swords to parts of the body marks the approach to the imagined reconciliation through lovemaking that distinguishes the end of the poem: it is part of the ritual of casting away weapons, of making peace.[103] The reference to Love's artistry ("ch'Amor per consumarmi increspa e dora," 64), connected with the traditional figure of composition as weaving, and the emphasis in stanza 5 on the lady's hair bring, as we have already suggested, a key self-reflexive moment in the poem. They recall the metaphoric terms of aspro and leno, of pexa and yrsuta, lubricia and reburra, describing the ethos, the diction, and the phonic substance of Dante's composition.[104] The lady's braid is the concrete term for the figurative expressions that define Dante's style in "Così"—in other words, the term that the poem's own metaphors for art approach as a goal, for it marks the speaker's arrival at the object of his desire and the narrowly specific definition of the poetics of the canzone as aspro. Seizing the lady's hair, the speaker mimes his fashioning of the parlar aspro.
The emphasis in "Così" on figures of movement toward a goal culminates in the final scene, where there is a saturation of terms that denote or imply satisfaction and rest. The lady's fire, her faville, is returned to her via the speaker's own, so that in terms of the tendency of elements (used metaphorically, of course) the poet's ardor has found the place of its rest, its proper sphere.[105] And the completion of the speaker's revenge both allays his rage and fulfills positive justice, allowing him and the petra to participate in the larger harmony that pervades the cosmos.[106] On this level of harmony, the poem's reacquired proportion—what Dante called the harmony of its parts (armonia compaginis )—echoes the reconciliation, the pax, between the lovers.[107] The return of peace, which is the goal of the poem's violence and, indeed, of all movement, is accompanied by the gaze facies ad faciem that evokes traditional terms for contemplation and the beatific vision.[108] Similarly, the kiss implied in the last verse suggests the mutual inherence of the lover and the beloved described in the Song of Songs (whose relevance for the petrose we have already noted).[109] The final gaze is also a double reversal: the power of the gaze is assumed by the speaker, and it is used not to pet-
rify, but to mollify.[110] The imagined moment of plenary mutual interiority is matched by the external operation of the poem, the publication of the speaker's word announced in the congedo, and thus is the logical conclusion of the theme of private and public in the canzone; nevertheless, it remains one of great tension, for though the private fantasy is peaceful, the public word is still aggressive.
Vivos De Marmore Vultus
It will seem scandalous to many readers that Dante's poem of violent sexual fantasy concludes with the terms—they are quite unmistakable—of the beatific vision. But to declare the scene parody would be an oversimplification.[111] We must read again the last two stanzas, in detail, if we are to appreciate their very subtle shifts of meaning.
The fantasy of the lady's reciprocation begins with her being plunged into the hot pit of sexual desire and frustration, exacerbated to the point that its expression is bestial, latra; this state is attributed to the lover ("com'io per lei"), and in spite of its evident hyperbole (for his speech, however violent, is still superbly articulated), the term latra carries a real shock value (particularly as it is the culminating term in the series of B/b rhymes, perhaps the most intrinsically harsh rhymes in the entire poem: squatra, atra, latra, latra, the equivocal rhyme of the last two contributing considerable emphasis to the effect).[112] So also the caldo borro, which continues the themes of sinking, drowning, and enclosure (cf. especially "il peso che m'affonda," line 20). The fantasy of both protagonists being reduced to bestiality naturally includes the most difficult question raised by the poem: can such exasperated lust ever be humanized, ever be reconciled with the principle of love? This question is more profound and difficult than the question of what a lover should do when confronted with an unwilling lady (obviously he should leave her and find another), and it is what justifies Dronke's insistence that the central theme of the poem is the struggle for the lady's acknowledgment that her hostility is in fact the mask of an intensity of desire that matches the lover's.
Dante's claim within the poem would seem to be that lust can be redeemed for love only by granting it its scope, always within a largeness of spirit that gradually disarms its inevitable aggressive component. This view is part and parcel of the refusal we have traced in the other petrose to renounce either of the two principles (flesh and spirit, body
and soul) represented by the Twins of Gemini. The caldo borro, of course, is one of several indirect references to the sexual organs, in this case clearly to the female organ, and there is a strong suggestion that the next lines (especially the mention of the lady's hair) involve a certain exchange of upper for lower.[113]
Thus the lover's imagined response, "Io vi soccorro," is really quite ambiguous.[114] In the first place, one of the overt meanings derives from the notion that the lady is sinking or drowning in a pit from which the lover can withdraw her. But there is an element of irony, too, for the help he offers involves her subjection to her lust as well as to his desire. Later, at the level imagined as reached in the last line of the last stanza, his help has led to peace, has rescued her from the inhuman state of the borro. One of the most striking things about the passage, however, is that once the lover takes action, the borro itself disappears from the poem. We are free to imagine that the lover joins the lady there, but the suggestion is really much stronger that the locus of the encounter is the literal bed. This change is an important step in the demystifying movement of the last two stanzas, which we associate with the poem's overall de-metaphorizing activity.
The last stanza of the poem, then, is an indirect representation of sexual intercourse. "Con esse passerei vespero e squille": the braids are to be undone slowly and gradually; this stands for the removal of all ornatus, including clothing. "Non sarei pietoso né cortese": there is to be no holding back or sparing of the lady out of false delicacy or the sentimental passivity of the traditional courtly lover (who, like Lancelot, is often imagined as paralyzed when offered the object of his desire). "Anzi farei com'orso quando scherza": obviously this means that the lover will be rough and potentially dangerous, but it probably implies as well an extreme delicacy and precision of movement. The image of the bear also includes the greater physical size and weight of the lover compared to the lady (and, as we have already noted, the lover's being supine under the blows of Love's sword clearly implies, when the fantasy is reversed, the lady's being supine). Thus, the puzzling line "io mi vendicherei di più di mille," still explicitly referring to the lady's trecce, invites (especially since the trecce have been called whips) the completion mile colpi, "a thousand blows." In the context of the earlier stanzas, the implied blows are strongly suggested to be blows of what is represented in the poem by Aeneas's sword: the penis.
It is easy to lose sight here of the insistence on slowness earlier in the
stanza. In the sirma, the gradual disarming of hostility and violence is completed, and full communication and reconciliation are represented as achieved in the long unflinching gaze of the couple into each other's eyes: "Ancor ne li occhi . . . / guarderei presso e fiso / per vendicar lo fuggir che mi face." The "vengeance" here is no infliction of pain: the lady must endure the lover's gaze, and he hers. In the context of all the petrose, the sustained gaze of the lover here represents the refusal of aversion from the lady's glance, breaking the power of the lady's gaze in "Così" as in the other poems. The prolonged mutual gaze of the two lovers is a pointed demystification of the idea that the lady could be a Medusa.[115] The now merely human couple has been divested of all mythology. And of course the time scheme of the pedes governs the sirma. That is, the gazing takes place at the same time as the earlier gesture of seizing the hair. "Nei biondi capelli . . . metterei mano" establishes contact with the lady's head, and the mutual gaze of the last lines brings the two heads close together. The reference to the traditional kiss on the lips that marks the ritual reconciliation of former enemies means that in the course of the stanza the term vendicare has undergone important changes. The injury said to be avenged changes: in the previous stanza the lady's golden hair is described as consuming the lover, in the last stanza the trecce are whips; but in the sirma the injury to be avenged is the lady's very absence, her avoidance of the lover. So, too, the mode of the so-called vengeance diminishes from the thousand blows of the pedes to the fixed gaze of the sirma. One of the ambiguities of the stanza lies precisely in this shift. At one level the violence is all playful, sharply bracketed, and identified as lovers' play, since the entire scene presupposes the lady's willing participation; at another the couple's mutual hostility and resistance are represented as very real, but these reactions, by being given scope and worked through, are shown to be disarmable.
The speaker's fantasy is not technically one of rape. His wish is that the lady call for him ("perché non latra / per me, com'io per lei," 59–60), that she feel the goad of love that he feels and reach out to him for its appeasement. The fantasy is thus that the lady will desire him. Dronke argues that the petra is herself moved by Amor, that her hostility to the lover is the sign of an unacknowledged investment. The poem purports to be as much a mirror held up to show the petra her violence as it is an admission, and catharsis, of the speaker's own violence. The imagined lovemaking in the last two stanzas would then be no more than what the lady herself wants; indeed, it is the lady's pleasure that is imagined
("piacere'le"). In this respect the poem must be distinguished from poems like Guinizelli's "Chi vedesse a Lucia un var capuzzo," where the fantasy is precisely the pleasure of taking a woman by force.[116] Unlike Guinizelli's fantasy, moreover, "Così" does not (in feudal terms) ameliorate the violence it depicts by lowering the social class of the woman: Dante characterizes the petra not as a femina but as a donna, a lady of power and station deserving of the honorific voi ("Io vi soccorro," 63)—a connotation that the irony does not eliminate.
It will have struck readers that the peace achieved in the body of the poem appears to vanish in the congedo, where, returning to the diegetic present, the speaker commands the poem to attack the lady. The congedo expresses the reversal of roles active in the poem as well as the poem's antiphrastic quality by inverting generic expectations; rather than a petition placed humbly at the feet of the domina, a suppliant envoi, it is an imperious assailant. But the congedo is also ironic (though in a sense different from line 63), for it proposes to make the lady fall in love. The poem would be the arrow of love that the lady has hitherto evaded; love comes most suddenly and violently to those who pretend immunity from it, like Virgil's Dido or Chaucer's Troilus. The feudal ethos of the final verse—"che bell'onor s'acquista in far vendetta"—is thus curiously ameliorated by its sentenza, which is that the petra, unnaturally rigid and averse to love, be mollified.[117]
In this sense the poem is a call or lure (richiamo ) attempting to win the lady over to Love.[118] Her answering call, were it to come, would fall into the pattern of calls and requests in the poem: it would reverse the lady's request for greater and greater cruelty ("impetra più natura cruda," 4) and compensate Love's (but also in a sense the lady's) refusal of the speaker ("merzé chiamando ," 38). The speaker would answer the lady, running to help her ("'10 vi soccorro ,"' 61) as the speaker's own blood answers the heart's call ("corre verso lo cor, ch'el chiama," 47) and saves him from running to his death ("ov'io per sua bellezza corro ," 56). Thus, whatever else might be said, it is clear that mutual recognition and reciprocity is the ideal posited by the poem, and that Dante strcngly insists on the aggressive component of desire. In this respect the poem is a demystification of the idolatry of the lady in the courtly tradition, which places her on a pedestal supposedly far above all strenuous sexual encounter and makes the lover her submissive servant in spite of the avowedly sexual nature of his intentions. Indeed, one of the most interesting suggestions of the poem is that the traditional courtly elevation of the lady is itself partly an expression of a fear of women and resultant
anger toward them. That the violence in "Così" is as much within the lover as in the lady is acknowledged; the disarming of the violence within the lover, it is suggested, could take place only within a relationship in which that violence was indeed matched within the lady.[119]
Sed contra. All this said, the poem's sexual politics remain disconcerting. The fact that the lady's desire for violent lovemaking is presupposed at the beginning of stanza 5 really does not palliate the fact that, whatever peace is imagined as achieved at the end, the fantasy is avowedly violent. In the prolonged gaze of the sirma of stanza 6, too, one may see merely the infliction on the subjected and humiliated woman of the victorious superiority of the male. Moreover, the premise, advanced by Dronke, that the lady's hostility is a repressed eroticism, and its corollary, that the lady will be stirred to acknowledge her own desire by reading the poem, are also suspect: the gambit that no is really yes, pervasive enough to have enjoyed a "scientific" revival in the psychoanalytic theory of denegation, has received of late its sufficient critique. At the same time, one is not free to simplify the issue. The denial of the possibility of the kind of violence the poem ascribes to the lady would be as naive as the denial of the expression of male violence in the poem.
But the problem may lie still deeper. The poet's wish is for a word, a logos, that can move the will of the petra. Thus, the fantasy of making the lady fall in love might also seem the wish to forcibly alter her will: the metaphorics of the poem, in this view, would sublimate literal force, the force of the hand, for the force of the pen, of language—an effect that may be seen as increased, not diminished, by the elaborate periphrasis and allusion. Indeed, we saw that this exchange of pen for sword is latent in the background of the canzone, in the language of Ovid's letter from Dido to Aeneas. Not only the tropes that present the lover's suffering and subsequent revenge—shields, swords, arrows, the file, whips—remain phallic and warlike; the poem's elaborate investment in and enlistment of the intellectual constructs of the scholastic age—the implication that the lady's refusal is unnatural, a retrograde motion blocking the natural telos of desire, the always intractable Other that must be bent back within the harmonious order of the Same—are subtle and powerful ways in which concerted ideological force is applied to the petra as recipient of the poem's message. In this sense, the suggestion of the petrose that the petra in fact does not yield presents itself as rather a vindicating datum: her difficulty is not expunged, her difference not reduced.
For it remains that the poem's elevation of its language to act, to ex-
ercise power, remains hypothetical, a possibility never realized. The poem, though it rears up to fire its words at the lady, never does so in fact; it can only be a metaphor, the rhetorical image of an archer. It is finally but a parlar aspro, and its satisfaction of vengeance and pleasure are expressed in contrary-to-fact conditional terms. The bravado of the congedo, the passage from petition to imperative (dàlle ), the apotropaic and exorcistic quality of the poem's language are linguistic gambits that cannot guarantee the lady's return of love. The lover cannot know, within the poem, if the poem will work and change her. The relation of poetry to the "real world" remains deeply problematic: all that he has secured is the survival of his own voice.
Both because of its violent content and because the result of the enunciation must remain suspended, the final effect of the poem is profoundly ambiguous. A measure of its ambiguities, and of the poet's own uneasy relation to the admixture of love and violence, may be taken by considering the reigning myths, inexplicit but deeply ingrained, of the petrose—Medusa, Narcissus, and Pygmalion.[120] As we saw, by grasping the lady's hair and gazing into her eyes, the speaker in one sense transcends the threat, one that haunts the four poems, of petrifaction by the lady's harsh and unyielding beauty.[121] The mutual gaze of the lovers suggests the speaker's escape from his frustrated obsession and the lady's emergence from her inhuman rigidity. But the scene of the speaker's violence also raises the specter of the Gorgon's origin: because her violation by Neptune occurred in Minerva's temple, Minerva turned Medusa's loveliest feature—her hair—into snakes.[122] Thus the Gorgon is a type of the punished victim, virtually an icon of the raped female. The uncanny, overdetermined return to the lady's hair—evoking the special attribute of Medusa—in the narrative and technique of "Così" raises again the question of the content and origin of the speaker's fantasy: is the poem a revised memory or fantasy of a rape?[123]
If the myth of Medusa raises the question of the lady as threatening the lover with petrifaction, the myth of Pygmalion, in which the lady begins as a rigid statue fashioned by the artist, is its antithesis and complement, raising the question of the poet himself as producer and idolater of reified images.[124] Pygmalion, the sculptor who falls in love with an image of his own making that, at his request, is brought to life by Venus, resembles the poet-speaker of the petrose, who attempts, in dazzling exercises of art, to find the verbal formula that will persuade his petra, the lady of his desire, to feel love, to act, as he says, "come suol far
bella donna."[125] In one sense, then, all the petrose are attempting to bring the petra to life, to reverse the petrifying power of the Medusa.[126] This demiurgic function of the poet reflects medieval interpretations of Pygmalion, who was sometimes compared to Prometheus, animator of the first humans, and thus allegorically to the creator God himself, who made man after his own image.[127] But Pygmalion was also seen as a type of the idolater, the fool who fashions and adores an image of his own creation.[128] The myths of Medusa and Pygmalion thus encapsulate the dilemmas that the petrose repeatedly raise: a hard-won but substantial reconciliation, or indulgence in fantasies of rape? Persuasion, or reification?[129]
The specter of the lover's paralysis presented by the Medusa myth is in fact the specular complement of the lady as a statue brought to life by art and desire in the Pygmalion myth. This speculation, the mind of the obsessed lover mirrored in the frozen image of the petra, is an originary Narcissism that threatens to envelop both terms, both the subject and the object of contemplation. The final danger in the petrose, as we have anticipated, is not so much the death of the lover or the persisting inflexibility of the lady, but the self-enclosure of the poet in his own vision, his own private universe—his own monologism. The statue is dead because it cannot speak: Pygmalion's ivory girl is froide, sourde et mue; the petra must be forced, in the speaker's fantasy, to cry out for him ("perché non latra per me . . .").[130] But the poet of the petrose is barred from the facile fantasy of the Roman de la rose, where the animated image speaks and offers the sculptor his heart's desire. For the petra really to speak would have breached the confines of lyric art as Dante practiced it. When the poet's lady does speak, in the person of Beatrice in the Commedia, it is from the transcendent status of a soul in glory: one of the dead.
Dante required the Commedia—and a different interpretation of the agency of the lady in the economy of love and salvation—to solve the dilemma posed by the sexuality of the idolized donna. Or perhaps merely to displace it. When she returns in Purgatorio 30–33, Beatrice appears in many of the guises of the petra: she comes sotto verde manto (30.32; the petra is sotto un bel verde in "Al poco giorno," 38).[131] She attacks the pilgrim ("nell'atto . . . proterva," 30.70) with sword-sharp words ("volgendo suo parlare a me per punta") and bitter (acro ) terms and attitudes that recall the petra of "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro," whose atti are harsh (aspro ) and blows telling. In passages that,
like "Così," are dense with military terminology, the pilgrim's responses are those of a broken crossbow ("la voce allentò," 31.21) like the distempered lover of"Così" ("n'allenta l'opra," 34).[132] The virtues have brought the pilgrim before Beatrice's eyes, which are precious stones:
"posto t'avem dinanzi a li smeraldi
ond'Amor già ti trasse le sue armi."
(Purgatorio 31.116–117)
Her several reckonings, which earlier left him momentarily frozen ("sì come neve . . . ," 30.85) and later leave him petrified ("impietrato, tinto," 33.74), repeat the lover's terror before the Gorgon-like petra ("dinanzi dal sembiante freddo," "Amor, tu vedi ben," 31).[133] The first petrosa also recurs in Purgatorio 30–33 in relation to weather and winds: 32.53, for instance, an allusion to Aries ("la vertù d'Ariete," "Io son venuto," 41), and 31.72, "quello [vento] che spira dalla terra di larba" ("lo vento peregrin che l'Italia turba," "Io son venuto," 15; noted in Dante 1946 153). The recurrence of impetra, nuda, and atra, three rime aspre characteristic of "Così," in the text of Purgatorio 30–33 is strong corroboration for this return of language and scenes from the rime petrose along with the return of Beatrice.[134] Beatrice as a dangerous, even petrifying, power is not new: we saw it in "Donne ch'avete," where she ennobles the good but destroys the ignoble. In Purgatorio, however, her return, more powerful than her old self ("vincer parìemi più sé stessa antica," 31.83), seems also to mark her assimilation of the dangerous beauty and aggressiveness of the petra along with the attributes of the biblical Wisdom and of Boethius's Lady Philosophy. Indeed, Dante seems to have literally incorporated the petra—as harshness, as phonic material—in his conception of Beatrice's name, inclusive at its center of the -atr cluster of atra.[ 135] Like Dante's revision of his response to the Sapienza of the Convivio—first fera e disdegnosa owing to the defect of the observer, and later, when properly understood, seen as benign, even umile—the passage of the attributes ofpetra to Beatrice redefines them as the just indignation of a slighted benefactor, the rigorous solicitude of a parent and moral teacher.[136] It is striking that Beatrice never seems more like a real woman than when she returns at the summit of the Purgatorio—when she fiercely attacks Dante, when she is most like the petra.
6—
The Rime petrose and the Commedia
In this book we have endeavored to demonstrate how rich and complex is the art of the rime petrose, which represent, we argue, the major turning point in Dante's development, after "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore," for in them Dante achieves for the first time what we have called his microcosmic poetics. The question of the relation between the petrose and the Commedia is highly problematic and has so far received little close attention.[1] In our view, the poetics of the Commedia is fully understandable only in the light of the petrose, and it is the task of this chapter to show in part how the principles that inform the latter are at work also in Dante's masterpiece.
As we suggested in the Introduction, the petrose are the first of Dante's works to explore the extent to which the speaker's predicament and the poet's art are instances of the cooperation of the whole of creation in the destiny of a single individual. This theme provides the principle on which the whole of the Commedia is constructed. At the lowest point of the Inferno, the pilgrim must endure—and the poet must represent—the weight of the entire cosmos that impinges on the center. And in the Paradiso the longest span of text devoted to a single sphere—nearly six cantos—goes to Dante's natal sign, to which he attributes his ingenium. In this way, Dante treats the world of the poem as a macrocosm of which the pilgrim is a microcosm. This constructive habit exactly reflects the structure of the geocentric cosmos itself, whose heavens revolve around and form the sublunar world, all for the sake of humankind.
A full inventory and study of the uses of the petrose in the Commedia would require another book, for the petrose enter and inform the later work in innumerable ways. As is well known, their aspro diction informs some of the most remarkable cantos of the poem:[2] those of Pier delle Vigne, of the Malacoda and the sowers of discord, of Maestro Adamo, and in particular the entire circle of the traitors, where the petrose return in force.[3] As Contini and others have argued, the rich multilingualism of the Commedia, its variation of stylistic registers, its "concreteness" of
semantic fields, look directly to the petrose as their model. It may be that sufficient attention has been directed to the lexical and stylistic dimensions. Because we contend that many passages in the Commedia betray the presence of the petrose even in the absence of harsh diction,[4] we shall place more emphasis on thematic and structural connections, which have received less discussion. Two examples, one specific and one general, will illustrate our point.
An important aspect of the presence of the petrose in the Commedia is technical: it entails the stylistic and structural gambits associated with the poems. As Russo pointed out, Stazio's treatise on generation in Purgatorio 25 is inconceivable without the precedent of the petrose. The fashioning of lucid poetry out of dense scientific reasoning—in particular, we note, the language of sexual generation, perception, and the powers of the soul; the use of rimas caras (e.g., -agro, -izzo ); the articulation of Stazio's speech in syntactic periods adding up to canto length (seventy-five lines); the abundance of tropes and figures (homeoteleuton, etc.) typical of Dante's most elevated style; a phonic web as densely organized as that of "Così nel mio parlar"—all these features look back to the petrose .[5] Nor is this without reason, for the passage, as Martinez has argued elsewhere, is based on the thematics of man as the horizon between corruptible and incorruptible; the production by God of the immortal soul and its joining to Nature's perfected work is itself the horizon, the union of mortal and immortal natures in a substance that is "one in reason." In a fulfillment of the myth of Castor and Pollux, the union with the body of the immortal soul confers on the body its share in immortality. The thematics of man as horizon, fundamental to the petrose, appears in the Commedia in terms of the Neoplatonic scheme of return to the stars.
Indeed, the larger themes of the petrose—the relation of sexuality to the principle of mind, the relation of the imagination and the poet's art to the art of nature, the power of gems and crystals—are woven deep into the fabric of the whole Commedia. In the Paradiso, both the spheres and the blessed are compared to gems.[6] The relation of precious stones and the heavens is logical, indeed inevitable, because the formation of gems depends directly on celestial influence.[7] Like the heavens, gems are (variously) diaphanous and emit or reflect light: Albertus Magnus once refers to gems as "earthly stars." And intelligible light, conditioned by the spheres, is a power forming the imagination of the poet (as noted in Purgatorio 17.17: "Moveti lume che nel ciel s'informa") and thus his craft. The transitivity of the stars' influence in the poet's craft
justifies placing a discussion of poetic fame in Purgatorio II between displays of divine sculpture; thus the poets are given their place in the hierarchy of makers.[8] The complex interaction of stellar influence, imagination, and sexuality is posed, finally, in Purgatorio 7–9, amid a flurry of echoes of the petrose.[9]
To make a vast subject tractable, we shall study the presence of the petrose in the Commedia under rubrics derived from our Introduction. There we claim that the petrose (1) mark a decisive advance in Dante's poetic use of a scientific view of the natural world; (2) systematically imitate specific aspects of the cosmos and the human body in theme and form; and (3) treat normally excluded themes in an attempt to overcome or mediate negative impulses and experience. Because of the close interrelation of these topics, some overlapping is inevitable, especially between points 1 and 2; thus, our discussions below of Inferno 24–25 and 32–34 necessarily bring up topics of the microcosm, treated more systematically in the second half of the chapter.
The Cosmos of the Petrose in the Commedia
The Legacy of "Io son venuto"
The extent to which the achievement of the petrose conditions Dante's presentation of the natural cosmos in the Commedia can be gauged in those passages where "Io son venuto" has left traces. All five stanzas of the canzone are echoed by Stazio in his account of why conventional weather ceases above the gate of Purgatory (Purgatorio 21.46–57; emphasis added):
Per che non pioggia, non grando, non neve,
non rugiada, non brina più sù cade
che la scaletta di tre gradi breve;
nuvole spesse non paion né rade,
né coruscar, né figlia di Taumante,
che di là cangia sovente contrade;
secco vapor non surge più avante
ch'al sommo d'i tre gradi ch'io parlai,
dov' ha'l vicario di Pietro le piante.
Trema forse più giù poco od assai;
ma per vento che 'n terra si nasconda,
non so come, qua sù non tremò mai.
Phenomena of the lower elemental spheres (of air, water, and earth)—clouds, rain, snow, frost, lightning, and earthquakes caused by ter-
restrial vapors—are mentioned here, just as they are mentioned, in descending spatial order, in "Io son venuto": wind, clouds, fog, and snow in stanza 2; brina in stanza 4; terrestrial vapors ("vapor che la terra ha nel ventre") in stanza 5. The same passage returns to inform Purgatorio 5.109–120 and Paradiso 28.79–84.[10] Individual stanzas, however, also receive specific mention in the Commedia; and the whole of "Io son venuto" also functions as a microcosmic form for the Inferno, as we show later.
The skyscape of stanza 1 of "Io son venuto" returns in the Commedia at the beginnings of the three cantiche (see below). The beginning of stanza 2, describing the vento peregrin that arises in Ethiopia, furnishes the rhyme of copia (referring to snakes) with Etïopia in Inferno 24 and the terms for the allegorical storm prophesied by Vanni Fucci ("tragge Marte vapor di Val di Magra / ch'è di torbidi nuvoli involuto"), which echoes turba, nebbia, vapor in "Io son venuto" (15, 19, 54).[11] Stanza 3, describing the flight and silence of birds, is echoed three times in the Commedia, in Inferno 5 and in Purgatorio 24 and 26, each case treating of migratory birds. In the first instance, migrating cranes are compared to the group of damned lovers, including Paolo and Francesca ("cantando lor lai / . . . traendo guai," Inferno 5.46–48; cf. "Io son venuto," 6–7: guai gai ). In the second, the poet Bonagiunta's departure is compared to a flight of birds ("Come li augei che vernan lungo 'l Nilo," Purgatorio 24.64; cf. "Fuggito è ogne augel che'l caldo segue / del paese d'Europa, che non perde / le sette stelle gelide unquemai . . . ," 29). In the third, it is love-poets who are likened to cranes migrating in different directions ("come grue ch'a le montagne Rife / volasser parte, e parte inver'l'arene, / queste delgel, quelle del sole schife," Purgatorio 26.43–45). Finally, stanza 5, with its reference to the assault of winter and the conversion of ice into crystal, is evoked in the lowest regions of Hell, as we show in the second half of this chapter.
As this list of parallels may suggest, the events in the middle stanzas of "Io son venuto"—winds, movement of birds and of the sun, death, and return of vegetation—are a repertory of changes in the world of the elements, the realm to which the poet of the petrose is in part bound. Similarly, the migration of birds in the similes of the Purgatorio underlines the alternation of the seasons, the alternae vices of the solar year. But the crucial link is the association of migrating birds with poetry, for both Bonagiunta and Guinizelli, each described by the tenor of one of these similes, were (and figure as) poets.[12]
The complex thematic links established in the central stanzas of "Io
son venuto" between the poet and nature are found again at the heart of the Purgatorio. In the Commedia as in troubadour and stilnuovo lyrics the song and movement of birds is a canonical metaphor for desire, and especially desire in poetry. As we noted in Chapter 2, the stilled bird-song and evergreens at the center of "Io son venuto" are juxtaposed to the poet's persistent song and vigorous love. In turn, the flights of birds in Inferno 5 and in (and near) the seventh terrace of Purgatory are not accidental, for both zones treat of sexual desire and its representation in lyric and narrative poetry.[13] These emphases affect the structure of the Purgatorio. Dante places three discourses on love and free will squarely at the center of the middle cantica. Especially in Virgilio's two discourses (cantos 17 and 18), we find echoes of both Inferno 5 and Purgatorio 24–27 in the language of appetition, inclination, and motion toward desired objects used to explain how all human motivation is a form of love. Love is thus the central topic of the Purgatorio (amor or its related verbs and adjectives occur seventeen times in Cantos 16–18), just as it appears at the center of "Io son venuto":
e tutti li animali che son gai
di lor natura, son d'amor disciolti
però che'l freddo lor spirito ammorta:
e 'l mio più d'amor porta . . .
(33–36)
A striking verbal link helps confirm the echo of "Io son venuto" here. Just as the birds keep their song under truce in winter ("a le lor voci triegue," 30) in the canzone, the pilgrim's forward movement in Canto 17 is interrupted ("la possa de le gambe posta in triegue" ) by the setting of the sun.[14] Moreover, the problem at issue in this part of the Purgatorio—that of the primary notions and instincts, which do not admit choice and are thus free of blame—appears through imagery that echoes the language of "Io son venuto" on animal activity and vegetation in relation to the lover's own vitality: the rising of flame ("come'l foco movesi in altura," 18.28), the greening of vegetation ("come per verdi frondi in pianta viva, " 18.54), the labor of bees ("studio in ape," 18.58). Compare, from the canzone:
Passato hanno lor termine le fronde
che trasse fuor la vertù d'Arïete
per adornare il mondo, e morta è l'erba;
ramo di foglia verde a noi s'asconde
se non se in lauro, in pino od in abete.
(40–44) [15]
We recall, too, that the beginning of the discussion regarding love and free will originates in the pilgrim's question to Marco Lombardo regarding the power of the heavens ("i cieli i vostri movimenti inizia," 16.73). Thus, the center of the Purgatorio is devoted to the question of celestial influences and human freedom, just as the complexities of "Io son venuto" and the other petrose develop from the poet's struggle with his horoscope. As we showed in Chapter 2, one problematic of the petrose derives from the double nature of the lover, who both suffers and transcends the influence of his stars. We find at the center of the Purgatorio a similar crucial threshold or horizon between appetition, ruled by inclination or talento, and election, ruled by reason and the spirit. The center of the Purgatorio develops the themes of celestial influence, the mutable seasons, the distinction of day and night, love, and poetics, much as if it were an extended lyric poem enclosing at its heart the spark of love.
Beginning with Nature:
Astronomical Incipits
One of the striking links of the Commedia to the petrose is the use of Natureingang: beginning a canto with a description of nature, usually a particular season and a particular hour, viewed astronomically (thus a horoscope, in the most general sense).[16] When Dante identifies the season and time of day by reference to the heavens near the beginning of each cantica, he is alluding to the petrose. These passages (Inferno 1.37–43; Purgatorio 1.19–42; Paradiso 1.37–45), it has been recognized, are themselves related one to another: along with the triple repetition of stelle at the end of each cantica, they establish the role of the stars as the chief lure and ultimate destination of the pilgrim. In addition, they establish the close correlation between the pilgrim's journey and its date, during and after Holy Week of 1300, and thus to the topos of the reverdie, the re-greening of Nature in the spring, which commemorates the creation of the world and provokes the poet's resumption of his song.[17] That commemoration and its beneficent effect on the pilgrim, afflicted after his narrow escape from the dangerous passo of Inferno 1.26, are the subject of the first astronomical passage in the Commedia:
Temp'era dal principio del mattino,
e 'l sol montava 'n sù con quelle stelle
ch'eran con lui quando l'amor divino
mosse di prima quelle cose belle;
sì ch'a bene sperar m'era cagione
di quella fiera a la gaetta pelle
l'ora del tempo e la dolce stagione . . .
(Inferno 1.37–43) [18]
We recall that in his sestina Dante refers to spring as il dolce tempo (Io), and in fact the spring hour and season mentioned in the last verse of the passage above (Inferno 1.43) are a counterpart to "poco giorno e . . . gran cerchio d'ombra" of the sestina. More generally, the sunset that opens "lo son venuto" ("quando il sol si corca," 2) is reversed in the sunrise of Inferno 1 ("e'l sol montava in su," 2).
More specific parallels with the petrose emerge in the corresponding skyscape opening the Purgatorio:[19]
Lo bel pianeto che d'amar conforta
faceva tutto rider l'orïente,
velando i Pesci ch'erano in sua scorta.
(1.19–21)
Compare, from "Io son venuto":
e la stella d'amor ci sta remota
per lo raggio lucente che la 'nforca
sì di traverso che le si fa velo;
e quel pianeta che conforta il gelo
si mostra tutto a noi per lo grand'arco
nel qual ciascun di sette fa poca ombra . . .
(4–9)
The scene in Purgatory inverts the opening of "Io son venuto" in several ways: it is spring rather than winter ("Io son venuto," we recall, though set at the winter solstice, alludes to the previous spring, to the vertù d'Arïete that drew forth flora, and to the autumn season during which vegetation dies); the scene precedes sunrise rather than follows sunset; Venus, its influence diminished by proximity to the diminished sun (which has already gone below the horizon) in "Io son venuto," is strengthened by its proximity to the increasing sun after the spring equinox in the Purgatorio. The conflict and danger in the petrose horoscope—Saturn glowering from its command position on the tropic—is not only inverted by the exuberance of Venus but also literally simplified and integrated. Dante has taken from his astronomical beginning to "Io son venuto" the terms used for the sun, Venus, and Saturn and
applied them to Venus alone: a unanimity of reference that magnifies her strength linguistically as well as astrologically.
The idea of linking the action of a poem to a specific hour and season is a legacy of the petrose that decisively affects the whole Commedia.[ 20] We know, of course, the positions of the planets in April 1300 (the horoscope of the poem): the sun, Mercury, and Jupiter in Aries (and Mars very close, on the cusp with Pisces), the moon in Libra, Saturn in Leo, Venus in Pisces (erroneous for April 1300) (see Figure 5, p. 90). As is stated in Inferno 1, the configuration is an auspicious one, because the position of the sun and the planets recalls those at the creation of the world. Not only that: March 25, a date very near the ecclesiastical date for the vernal equinox (March 21, although in 1300 the equinox actually fell on March 15), is the traditional date for the Annunciation, an event that has its own significant horoscope. "Io son venuto" deploys the horoscope for the poet's nadir and implicitly that of his nativity, but the inception of the Commedia commemorates the nativity of the universe along with the incarnation of its creator. If the petrose suggest the homology of the lover's struggle against his stars and the poetics of difficulté vaincue, the temporal setting of the Commedia betrays the poet's wish that his work share in the fertility of annual cosmic renewal, the virtù d'Arïete.[21] In the context of the horoscopes of the petrose, the time of the Commedia is also propitious: a triple conjunction of the sun, Mercury, and Jupiter, with Saturn in a depressed position (at the imum caeli, in fact); the baneful effects of Saturn are further tempered by being in Leo, the sign that rules Italy (see Figure 5).[22] The rising of the sun in Purgatory, as Dante says (Purgatorio 2.56–57), chases Capricorn, the sign of the winter solstice, from the skies. Venus in the morning sky pours love out over all the world, as in the season anticipated in "Io son venuto." And in the position of the heavens that Dante describes in Inferno 1.37–40, the ascendant (that is, the sign just about to rise) is the poet's own sign and symbol of the poetics of "Io son venuto," Gemini. The poet's natal sign is about to be born from the horizon just as the Commedia begins.[23]
The favorable position of the sun and the planets points to the fact that April of the Jubilee year 1300 was a time propitious for the pilgrim's journey and for the world. (The next year, 1301, was hardly very propitious for Dante or—from Dante's perspective—for Florence.)[24] As we learn, natural auspices are not enough: the fact that it is the world's birthday does not give the pilgrim aid sufficient to ward off the
lion and the wolf. He will need the help first of Virgil—the apologist of Rome—and subsequently of Beatrice. Law and Grace must supplement Nature before the pilgrim can escape the selva oscura, and before he can ascend the mountain mantled by the sun he must first descend to Hell in a katabasis, a poetic and spiritual agon similar in many respects to that of the petrose themselves.
The planets, however, help to signify the universal reformation for which the poet yearns. Repeatedly (Purgatorio 2.1–6, 27.1–6; Paradiso 1.37–43, 29.1–12) Dante returns to the configuration of the sun in Aries and the full moon in Libra (during the action of the poem the moon of course does not remain full, but it is evoked as such) as a cosmic anticipation of the age of justice he hopes is about to dawn.[25] These passages continue the theme of the astronomical horoscope throughout the poem; for the solstitial poetics of the petrose they substitute an equinoctial poetics adumbrated in the division of light and dark of "Al poco giorno." Two examples will demonstrate this equinoctial poetics. Purgatorio 2 begins:
Già era'l sole a l'orizzonte giunto
lo cui meridïan cerchio coverchia
Ierusalèm col suo più alto punto;
e la notte, che opposita a lui cerchia,
uscia di Gange fuor con le Bilance,
che le caggion di man quando soverchia . . .
(1–6)
The passage blends reminiscences of both "Io son venuto" (". . . il punto de la rota"—here a high point rather than a low one; "l'orizzonte, quando il sol si corca" ) and "Al poco giorno" ("cerchio d'ombra"; "son giunto" ). It also echoes several astronomical principles from the first two petrose: night thought of both as a point opposed to the sun and as a circle; the presentation of sunrise as well as the opposed rising of night (like the nocturnal rising of Gemini in "Io son venuto"); and the habit of inversion, of discussing one seasonal moment (the spring equinox) in terms of its opposite (the autumnal equinox, when night prevails over day). But whereas in "Io son venuto" the sun is setting and the night rising on the same horizon for the observer, in Purgatory the rising sun and the night rising from the Ganges are in different hemispheres; the point of view is truly bihemispheric. The several inversions of the canzone—winter solstice inverting summer, nocturnal Gemini opposing the poet's native sun in Gemini, a poetry dominated by
winter, cold and night (note soverchia )—become here a series of balanced mediations: the sun, close to the equinoctial point, divides the days and nights equally (schematically speaking, in Aries and Libra). To the emphasis in the petrose on the sun's extreme points on the ecliptic, implying a balance achieved over and through time, the Purgatorio offers a balance attained on the instant, synchronically. The mention of Libra is thus far from ornamental: it symbolizes the poetics of justice that will rule over the terraces of purgation.[26]
The cosmic balance is most fully realized in the spectacular moment described in Paradiso 29 in which the duration of Beatrice's gaze at the divine point is compared to the time it takes the opposed sun and moon simultaneously to cross the horizon during the equinox:
Quando ambedue li figli di Latona,
coperti del Montone e de la Libra,
fanno de l'orrizzonte insieme zona,
quant'è dal punto che 'l cenìt inlibra
infin che l'uno e I'altro da quel cinto,
cambiando l'emisperio, si dilibra,
tanto, col volto di riso dipinto,
si tacque Bëatrice, riguardando
fiso nel punto che m'avëa vinto.
Poi cominiciò: "Io dico, e non dimando,
quel che tu vuoli udir, perch'io l'ho visto
là 've s'appunta ogne ubi e ogne quando. . . ."
(1–12)
As Boyde (1981 238–239) points out (arguing in defense of the traditional reading), the length of time in question is a single moment. In its dimensionless brevity it is a figure for eternity. Because sun and moon are in the positions they held at the creation, when they were fashioned to rule over day and night, the whole passage (especially in view of the question, raised in the canto, of the interval between creation and the angels' fall) is a kind of enactment of the procession of created time from eternity.
The passage enacts the moment of balance it describes by the placement of quando at each extreme (once in Italian, once in Latin; once a conjunction, once a noun; once as an empirical instance, once as a metaphysical absolute), by the placement of emisperio and dilibra at the midpoint (sixth of twelve verses), by the two uses of punto (4, 9), and by the coordination of quanto and tanto linking the second and third tercets.
The whole passage is itself a kind of balance, poised on the instant of cosmic equilibrium between the sun and moon. To be sure, the forces balanced are dissimilar: sun and moon are twins (Dante refers to them in the Purgatorio as gli due occhi del mondo ), but like Castor and Pollux or spirit and body they have differing roles and metaphysical status.[27] Nevertheless, the textual balance between a host of double principles is momentarily achieved: twin luminaries, one active, one passive; the twin signs of the equinoxes (one, the Scales, is double); twin hemispheres halving the passage, syntactically twin (quanto . . . tanto ); twinning and twinned terms (ambedue, insieme, l'uno e l'altro ); twin modes of created reality (ubi and quando ). The metaphysical relation of God and nature is mirrored in the astronomical relation of sun and moon. The whole passage, which begins with Italian quando referring to a single moment, and which concludes with substantival Latin ubi and quando to mark the unifying point of all times and places, enacts a return to the Godhead with Beatrice's gaze, so that the text passes from the world of multiplicity in the first verse (note ambedue ) to the simplicity embedded in appunta.[28]
Both passages depend on the principle of the visible and astronomical horizons: the horizon is the connective line, the zenith the fulcrum, of the great statera that holds sun and moon evenly balanced at the equinox. We have argued that Gemini at the horizon in "Io son venuto" announces the special poetics of the petrose. In those poems, the horizon suggests the medietas of the embodied soul; it alludes to the constructive properties of the four poems, whose stanza forms allude to the pairing of Same and Other; it can mark the membrane of inner and outer in the body (as in "Amor, tu vedi ben"). We shall see that the horizon is also a key structural principle in the Purgatorio; already in the opening cantos, the land- and skyscapes repeatedly invoke the horizon itself and the moment when the sun approaches, touches, and crosses it. Faint after the passage of Hell, the reader experiences the beginning of the Purgatorio as the return to view of the sky and the horizon. The pilgrim's first recorded sensation is the sight of the blue sky clear as far as the visual horizon ("puro infino al primo giro," 1.15). The narrator observes that the Great Bear has set ("la onde'l carro già era sparito," 1.30), and he begins the second canto with the sun just about to rise, so that the formal articulation of the canto itself is associated with the visual line of the horizon.[29] The Purgatorio emphasizes dawn, evening, and the horizon because it is the only cantica to take place on the earth; corre-
spondingly, it focuses on the pilgrim as an embodied soul who tires and must sleep, who dreams. These emphases reflect the great theme of the Purgatorio: the recovery of the natural justice of the person in the integration of spirit and flesh, of reason and desire.
The division of day and night as a structural feature of the Purgatorio is illustrated at the moment when the pilgrim's forward motion is impeded halfway through Canto 17:
Già eran sovra noi tanto levati
li ultimi raggi che la notte segue,
che le stelle apparivan da più lati.
(70–72)
The shadow line dividing the day from the night thus falls exactly athwart the center of the canto, the cantica, and the poem.[30] The division implies a host of other twin concepts: in place of forward motion we have Virgilio's discourse on love ("Se i piè si stanno, non stea lo tuo sermone," 17.84), so that we pass from activity to contemplation; from the external light of the sun to the inner light of the mind ("luce dell'intelletto," 18.16); from motion to deliberation and choice, reflected in the discussion of first inclinations ("de' primi appetibili l'affetto," 18.57) and elective actions, which mark the horizon of nature and reason in the self; from a view of the mountain to self-scrutiny, from what is perceived to what is understood in the mind ("vostra apprensiva da esser verace / tragge intenzione, e dentro a voi la spiega," 18.22–23), marking the horizon of the exterior and interior senses, of the body and the mind, which also appears in the cantica as that between waking and dreaming. The appearance of the word stelle in this passage, at the very center of the Commedia, is clearly linked to its recurrence at the end of each cantica, where it stands as the lure and goal of human contemplation: that it appears at the moment of the pilgrim's infirmity in Purgatory seems to insist on the double status of the wayfarer, embedded in his body, but mindful of Plato's advice and so watchful of the stars.[31]
The principles embodied in the "equinoctial" passages return in the astronomical verses opening the Paradiso proper:
Surge ai mortali per diverse foci
la lucerna del mondo; ma da quella
che quattro cerchi giugne con tre croci,
con miglior corso e con migliore stella
esce congiunta, e la mondana cera
più a suo modo tempera e suggella.
Fatto avea di là mane e di qua sera
tal foce, e quasi tutto era là bianco
quello emisperio, e l'altra parte nera . . .
(1:37–45)
In addition to the relation established by verse numbering, the passage is recapitulatory of the seasonscapes in the Inferno and Purgatorio: Surge echoes the strong emphasis on this word in Purgatorio I (7, 9, 106); the sun's conjunction with better stars looks back to the sun's upward march with its planets in Inferno 1 (in close conjunction with Mercury and Jupiter)—though here of course the emphasis is on stars, not planets—and the reference to morning and evening reiterates allusion to the hexaemeral skyscape evoked in the proem to the Inferno: night is divided from day by the sun's transit of the equinoctial point. The metrically and syntactically balanced juxtapositions (indeed, the cosmic halving) of mane and sera, of bianco and nero, recall the verbal emphases of "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra" (beside the incipit, see bianchir in 2 and "più nera ombra" in 37); the reiteration of giugne and congiunta in the context of the sun's placement at a given astronomical point ("diverse foci . . . da quella") repeats the model of "Al poco giorno" ("son giunto," 2).
But this final astronomical incipit to a cantica is especially suggestive in its reference to some of the fundamental principles we have identified as important for the poetics of the petrose, as well as anticipating principal themes of the Paradiso. Circle and cross, the symbols of divine perfection and human suffering historically fused in the Crucifixion, prepare the cross and circle in the heaven of Mars, where the pilgrim learns his own destiny as victim and exile. Four circles making three crosses forces the reader to imagine (and not for the last time in the cantica ) a model of the cosmos conceived on geometric and numerological (thus Platonic) lines. The sun as suggello (seal) announces the theme of the causal and formative influences of the heavens, which dominates the whole of the Paradiso. In view of the poet's invocation of the Muses in the verses immediately preceding (13–36) and the insistence on the fatefulness of precise astronomical junctures, the passage recalls the tempering of the poet by the negative punto of the petrose. The sunrise described, finally, is also the appearance of the light of the world, and thus both a nativity and a theophany. In the drama derived from a mere crossing of the horizon, we recall the first verses of Dante's starscape in "Io son venuto."
Landscapes 1:
The Semblance of Winter
Inferno 24–25—more exactly, the seventh bolgia of Malebolge—is especially rich in reference to the petrose. Rime aspre abound (-astro, -appa, -eggia, -ucci, -adro, -oppa, -orra ), including the rare instance of a word aspro because of excessive syllabic length, disconvenevole.[32] But we also find instances of equivocal rhyme and rich rhyme (tempra, 24.2, 6; tempo, attempo, 26.8, 10, 12) opening and closing the bolgia, and of course the rhyme on -opia (copia, Etïopia, elitropia, 25.89, 91, 93) linked to "Io son venuto" and, less obviously, to the sestina. The three terms tempra, tempo, and -tropia define the thematic axis the bolgia shares with the petrose: temporal cycles. The bolgia opens with reference to the seasons and repeatedly invokes the human life span ("chi sua vita consuma," 24.49), the life of the Phoenix ("more e poi rinasce," 24.107), and shorter cycles like that of Vanni Fucci's combustion or the mutations of the thieves; it closes with the poet's allusion to his own life ("più m'attempo"). Within this frame, there is a systematic evocation of the annual winds from the third stanza of "Io son venuto" in Vanni Fucci's hostile prophecy of Florentine strife (24.142–151).
The terms of Vanni Fucci's prophecy evoke the elemental world of "Io son venuto." His opening, "Tragge Marte vapor . . . ," echoes, and has the energy of, the finite verbs beginning the stanzas of that canzone (cf. especially "Levasi de la rena d'Etïopia / lo vento peregrin . . . ," 14–15). "Di torbidi nuvoli involuto" (146) and "spezzerà la nebbia" (149) resume the snow-bearing scirocco of "Io son venuto" 14–22, especially "l'aere turba " (15) and "copia / di nebbia" (17–18). And Vanni Fucci tells his prophecy to cause the pilgrim sorrow ("perché doler ti debbia," 151) in a way reminiscent of the speaker's aggressive conclusion to "Così nel mio parlar": "dàlle per lo cor d'una saetta." Vanni Fucci's meteorological allegory, moreover, forms a clear pendant to the long opening simile. Because this is an astronomical incipit of great scope and significance, it is a fitting companion to the incipits described above. In it Dante establishes, as in "Io son venuto," a complete microcosm; as in that canzone, the establishment of a winter scene prepares for an inversion, an eventual "unwintering."[33]
At the beginning of Canto 24, after the narrow escape from Malacoda and his devils in the bolgia of barratry, the pilgrim's reaction to Virgilio's change of expression is compared to a shepherd's response to the landscape during an early morning in February:
In quella parte del giovanetto anno
che'l sole i crin sotto l'Aquario tempra
e già le notti al mezzo dì sen vanno,
quando la brina in su la terra assempra
l'imagine di sua sorella bianca,
ma poco dura a la sua penna tempra,
lo villanello, a cui la roba manca,
si leva, e guarda, e vede la campagna
biancheggiar tutta; ond' ei si batte l'anca,
ritorna in casa, e qua e là si lagna,
come 'l tapin che non sa che si faccia;
poi riede, e la speranza ringavagna,
veggendo il mondo aver cangiata faccia
in poco d'ora, e prende suo vincastro
e fuor le pecorelle a pascer caccia.
Così mi fece sbigottir lo mastro,
quand' io li vidi sì turbar la fronte,
e così tosto al mal giunse lo 'mpiastro;
ché, come noi venimmo al guasto ponte,
lo duca mio si volse con quel piglio
dolce ch'io vidi prima a piè del monte.
(1–21)
Like "Io son venuto," the passage descends through creation, from the stars of Aquarius, to the sun, to the sphere of air from which frost condenses, finally to the display of hoarfrost on the ground. The final term is a human microcosm, the shepherd. The parallels of macro- and microcosm are developed through parallels between the human realm and the natural world: the year is a youth; the sun tempers his locks in the water of Aquarius; hoarfrost, snow's sister, writes itself on the earth with a pen. The anthropomorphisms prepare the application of the vehicle to the tenor, Virgilio's change of expression, which passes from a turbata fronte to the piglio dolce he had at the beginning of the poem. The changes recorded are of the soul as they are manifest, or written, in the body: for Dante, the face is the supreme physical expression of the soul (Convivio 3.8.7–8), so the transformations described are signs of the inner man, of the occulta cordis. The passage establishes a thread linking the movement of the heavens to the psyche.
Because tenor and vehicle are mediated by a discernible change, the passage also implies a panorama of time in the cosmos and in man: if Virgilio's expression is mapped by the changing appearance of the earth (and thus, in a metonymy of effect for cause, by the whole cosmos), the
brevity of this change is the smallest of a series of intervals that includes the melting of hoarfrost (in poco d'ora ), the daily routine of the shepherd, the duration of seasons, and the annual motion of the sun.[34] The linking of the cosmic scale with the rural vignette is probably one that Dante considered characteristic of pastoral.[35]
Thus the parallels between the petrose and the simile that opens Inferno 24 involve the topics of the microcosm with respect to both cyclical time and hierarchical space. The simile is framed by references to the sun. The first, to Apollo, is explicit; but the second is implicit: Virgilio's sweet look harks back to the scene in Inferno 1 where the pilgrim is comforted first by the sun, and then by Virgilio, whose voice serves "là dove il sol tace" (Inferno 1.60). Dolce is thus already linked to the comforting effects of the sun and the spring, "la dolce stagione" (Inferno 1.43).[36] The pairing in the simile of the sun's position with the movement of night to the south recalls the astronomical openings of "Io son venuto" and "Al poco giorno," which juxtapose the predominant darkness to the remote sun; we shall return to this important detail in a moment.
Simile and petrose also show parallels in the use of brina and bianco, terms associated with meteorological events.[37] Transitory weather phenomena are rendered in both contexts with cangiare and tornare: the cangiata faccia of the world in the Inferno contrasts with the lover's refusal to change in the petrose ("e'l mio disio . . . non cangia il verde," "Al poco giorno," 4) and echoes the return of green to the earth under the effect of the sun ("il dolce tempo . . . / . . . che li fa tornar di bianco in verde," "Al poco giorno," 10–11).[38] A similar principle governs the use of poco in Inferno 24: the pen of the frost poco dura, so the interval the villanello must wait is poco d'ora. Poco in these cases echoes the catachretic poco in "Al poco giorno," though with opposed meaning: in the sestina, the brevity of the day marks the sun's yearly nadir; in the Inferno, the brevity of the frost marks the sun's return.
In technique as well as diction the passage echoes the moment of the petrose. The use of identical rhymes (tempra, faccia ), rich rhymes (anno, vanno ), and harsh rhymes (-astro, -anca, -agna, -accia, -empra ) makes the derivation certain (Dante 1957b 263). For readers who treat the petrose as examples of a fixated poetics, their reprise in the language of this simile has only negative implications: the risk of paralysis, the loss of Virgilio, the end of the quest.[39] In a related view, the passage is a double warning: to the poet as author, reminding him that his own writing is
as ephemeral as the hoarfrost, and to the reader, who is liable, like the villanello, to misread what is before him.[40] These readings assume that the technical mastery in the simile and subsequent cantos is divorced from true inspiration and therefore an instance of the poet's reprehensible virtuosity.[41] In our view this reading neglects a major dimension of the text.
A difficulty with treating the winter simile as the embodiment of a paralyzed poetics is that the immediate (and demonstrably the latent) sense of the simile is positive. The scene is one of winter relaxing, of hope returning. The suffering of the villanello is temporary, the trend back to warmth will prevail. Far from expressing stagnation, the allusion to the petrose here focuses on the return of spring; it also recalls a previous artistic and personal triumph against odds. The poco d'ora in the passage is not only part of a tour de force unfolding a brief frown on Virgil's face into a panorama of seasonal change; it is itself an atom of that change and prepares for the larger vistas that follow.
For the application of the simile to the pilgrim's situation is auspicious. The pilgrim's fear at Virgilio's perturbation is a result of the danger just escaped—a peril that, given the nature of the previous bolgia, must in some sense recall the successful escape of the historical Dante from prosecution for barratry. The return of Virgilio's original expression from il piè del monte both comforts the pilgrim and presages the next cantica, which will unfold on the slopes of a mountain.[42] Suggesting the unlocking of winter's grip in February, a full month before the equinox, the simile anticipates the wayfarer's escape from wintry Cocito and his emergence, on Easter Sunday, on the shores of Purgatory, where Venus and Love, not Saturn and cold, dominate the sky. In Purgatory, the pilgrim will enjoy the bucolic otium of the Valley of Princes and hear Virgil's eclogue quoted by Stazio; pastoral similes will adorn the text. In Eden, which Matelda will identify with the Golden Age of classical poetry, the pilgrim will be poco tempo silvano.[43] The pastoral quality of the passage, though the villanello 's lot be a hard one, is a striking relief from the fumy arzanà of the devils (as traditional commentary has always agreed); more important, it is a promise of better to come. The simile is a kind of pertugio or channel, replacing the broken bridge over the bolgia and revealing what is ahead.
The melting of the hoarfrost, some readers argue, marks the erasure of both a text and its writer.[44] But this erasure is less a cautionary example for poet and reader than the advent of a new poetics, underwrit-
ten by the sun. The hoarfrost, less permanent than ice or snow, is an unlikely symbol for a threatening poetics.[45] The echo of the opening chapter of the Vita nuova in assempra suggests rather that the hoarfrost is a phantasm, a negative ombra of snow, and its erasure an image of the mind in its ability to become a tabula rasa for new forms, new "writing."[46] In addition, that the hoarfrost is erased by the sun is only part of the story. The equivocal rhyme on tempra establishes the ratio between the quickly blunted penna of the hoarfrost and the sun's rays (crini ) acquiring temper—that is, strength—in the cold water of Aquarius.[47] The implication of the simile is that the sun's rays, too, are a writing instrument but that its "words" are to be (in a metaphor not infrequent in Dante) the foliage of the new season.[48] Dante is in a sense reinverting Raimbaut's description of ice crystals as inverted flowers, flor enversa: in Dante's simile, the writing of the sun will supplant the frosty script of winter. But this "solar" writing will be different because of its tempering in the cold waters of Aquarius; that is, the sun's remission in winter is part of its discipline, a tempering that will make it—or, out of metaphor, the poet—write all the better. The tempering implied involves both the sun and the writer: it is cosmic.
The impoverished villanello of the simile and the weather of February create a scene that is unmistakably Saturnine, and so appropriate to the planet whose house is Aquarius.[49] The pastoral context of the passage, however, suggests that Saturn's domination will itself be transformed. We have suggested that the opposition of the sun in Aquarius and the nights that head al mezzo dì is a specific point of contact between the simile and the petrose. As in "Io son venuto," the positions in the simile of night and day in relation to the zodiac are suggestive: if the sun is in Aquarius, a house of Saturn, then the night (thought of as a point) is in Leo, the house of the sun. More significant still, Aquarius is one of the extreme terms of the zodiacal division between the luminaries and the planets that gives rise to the rhyme-word scheme of "Al poco giorno."[50] The signs between Aquarius and Cancer are lunar, those between Leo and Capricorn solar. Aquarius (with Capricorn) are the two houses of Saturn, the most distant planet from the luminaries; they are also the hinge where the system of apportioning planets to signs reverses direction and moves back toward the sun and moon. In this sense Aquarius, like the solar nadir of the petrose, is a cosmic extreme, from which the sun and the cosmos are bound to return, indeed are already returning.[51]
As in the petrose, moreover, we are invited to foresee the antithetical season. Should we have difficulty doing so, Dante gives us, at the beginning of the next bolgia, a pastoral scene of fireflies observed by a villan at high summer:
Quante 'l villan ch'al poggio si riposa,
nel tempo che colui che 'l mondo schiara
la faccia sua a noi tien meno ascosa,
come la mosca cede a la zanzara,
vede lucciole giù per la vallea,
forse colà dov' e' vendemmia e ara . . .
(Inferno 26.25–30)
Whereas the winter scene emphasizes labor, the chill of early morning, and the sun still tempered by cold, the summer scene depicts leisure (si riposa ), dusk, and the season when the sun shines longest.[52] The hope of the villanello, marked in the winter simile by an image of gathering (la speranza ringavagna ), is fulfilled in the summer simile in the intimations of harvest (vendemmia e ara ); he is no longer giù per la vallea but resting on the slope, al poggio si riposa. We would seem to have here another preview of the bucolic scenes awaited in the Purgatorio.[53] But there is more. The image of the sun tempered in Aquarius projects how the present Saturnine season will be replaced by the Saturn of the Paradiso. There, Saturn in Leo, the house of the sun, tempers its cold and regains the distinction of ruler of the Golden Age, the saturnia regna of Virgil's fourth bucolic. In the sphere of perfected monastic contemplation, the hoarfrost of February will be transformed into crystal, ice so cold that it can emit fire.[54] As in the petrose, the ultimate import of Saturnine influence in the poet's life is to strengthen his bent for intellectual work and contemplation, to temper his gifts and make him worthy of his high task.
Landscapes II:
The Floor of Heaven
In Cocito the pilgrim approaches the center of the earth ("il punto / al qual si traggon d'ogne parte i pesi," Inferno 34. 111). The punto is the lowest point in the physical cosmos ("Quell'è il più basso loco e 'l più oscuro / e 'l più lontan dal ciel che tutto gira," 9.28–29). It corresponds to the winter solstice—the sun's lowest position in the ecliptic (il punto della rota ), endured by the poet of "Io son venuto"—and to the central stanza of "Amor, tu vedi ben," dominated by the rhyme-word freddo.
The transposition of the solstice in "Io son venuto" to the geocenter of Cocito is a continuation, in a much greater spatial range, of the pattern of descent to the earth in "Io son venuto." The assistance that Virgilio and the pilgrim receive from the giant Anteo both causes and signifies their descent to the punto, for the grip of a son of the earth ("figli della terra," 31.121) is by metonymy the grip of earth itself. The predominance of earth and cold in Cocito echoes its predominance in the fifth stanza of "Io son venuto." Sixteen terms from that fifth stanza, many with thematic force, recur in Inferno 31–34: acque, vapor, terra (and its rhymes guerra and serra ), ventre, abisso, freddura, verno (vernare ), smalto (vetro ), tornare, morte. We may speak of a sedimentation of terms from the lowest realm of "Io son venuto" in the lowest realm of Hell. Such a concentration is itself mimetic, as the center of the earth was, in Dante's scientific lore, the darkest, densest place in the cosmos.[55]
The domination of earth means the domination of cold. At the winter solstice of "Io son venuto," the stella d'Amor is remote, and Saturn, distant and malefic, rains cold on the earth. In Hell, the pilgrim is most distant from the Empyrean in a frigid realm dominated by Satan, the infernal Saturn. Fallen, dark, immobilized, parricidal (he has his "children" in his mouths), Satan, as Georg Rabuse showed, is a figure of Chronos-Saturn who devoured his children, who presides over winter, cold, death, heaviness (his metal is lead, his element earth), and who is thought of as cast down, at the imum coeli.[56] The remoteness of Saturn from the earth is inverted in the remoteness of Satan from the warmth of the Empyrean.
Saturnine Cocito harks back to the petrose for the effects of cold on water: the "acqua morta che si converte in vetro" of "Io son venuto" (60) is closely echoed in Inferno 32.23–24:
. . . un lago che per gelo
avea di vetro e non d'acqua sembiante.
This language, as well as that for the lady in "Al poco giorno" ("gelata come neve all'ombra," 8) and the terms for the transformation of ice to crystal in "Amor, tu vedi ben":
Segnor, tu sai che per algente freddo
l'acqua diventa cristallina petra
là sotto tramontana ov'è il gran freddo,
(25–27)
return in the gelatina (32.60), the gelati guazzi (32.72), the gelata (33–91), and the visiere di cristallo (33.98) of the fredda crosta (33.109).
The references to crystal and ice in Cocito continue the microcosmic implications of the natural science of "Amor, tu vedi ben." Tears condensed from pneumatic "thought" and driven from the lover's eye ("e quel pensiero . . . / mi si converte tutto in corpo freddo / che m'esce poi per mezzo de la luce," 34–36) reappear in the tears forced from the fratricides in Caina (32.38–39) and in the frozen tears ("visieri di cristallo," 33.98) of the treacherous in Tolomea. The hard visors ("duri veli," 33.112) are cognates of the icy velo of Cocito. In the presentation of Alberigo as blind, and of Cocito itself as a darkened glass (vetro ) or crystal, Dante suggests that it is like a great blind eye, a sphere whose diaphaneity will never be informed by light. "Lucerna corporis tui est oculus tuus . . . si autem oculus tuus fuerit nequam: totum corpus tuum tenebrosum erit" (Matthew 6:22–23); and Lucifer, formerly the light-bearer, has become dark ("per non aspettar lume, cadde acerbo," Paradiso 19.48). In the implicit continuities we recognize again the poetics of "Amor, tu vedi ben."
The causes of ice and stone in the petrose and in Cocito are homologous in each case to the poetic principles at work. In the petrose, harsh rhymes and exacting forms represent a mimesis of the rigor and pressure of cold in hopes of fashioning the perfect, efficacious crystal. Cocito echoes the specific effect of cold in each petrosa: the burdensome thought of the lover ("ond'io son carco," 11) mirrored in the downward thrust in the stanzas of "Io son venuto" returns in the ubiquitous gravity ("ogni gravezza," 32.74; also 32.3, 34.111);[57] the lover hemmed in by his love in the sestina ("che m'ha serrato . . . ," 17; "chiuso intorno," 30) in the constriction of the brothers ("sì stretti," 32.41, 47); cold as a cause at the center of "Amor, tu vedi ben" ("Per cagion del freddo . . . ," 25, 30) is repeatedly invoked ("per la freddura," 32.53; also 31.123, 32.70–71, 33.101).[58] The association of cold with the chattering of teeth and jaws ("sonar con le mascelle," 32.107; also 32.36, 108) echoes the rime aspre of "Così nel mio parlar."[59] Indeed, if the four petrose had not been linked by tradition, the reading of Cocito would have ensured their association.
In Cocito, the poet's art of enclosing words in meter imitates the pressure on the central point.[60] Invoking the myth of Amphion, who made stones come together in the walls of Thebes, the poet imagines his poetics as the enclosure of the punto itself.[61] Evidence of this cen-
tripetal art appears everywhere: in verbal juxtapositions ("legno legno," 32.49), in the proximity of the brothers Napoleone and Alessandro, in the poet's call to draw Capraia and Gorgona to the mouth of Arno (33.82).
The poet's imitation is announced in verses that closely echo the first verse of "Così nel mio parlar":
S'ïo avessi le rime aspre e chiocce,
come si converrebbe al tristo buco
sovra '1 qual pontan tutte l'altre rocce,
io premerei di mio concetto il suco
più pienamente . . .
(32.1–5; emphasis added)
Later terminology ("il dolor che'l cor mi preme," 33.5; "Il duol che'l cor m'impregna, 33.113) suggests a continuum linking the gravity at the center to the inner grief of Ugolino and Alberigo and to the poetic effort required for their presentation. The convergence of material fact, moral state, and poetics is what the poet asks of Amphion's Muses: the convenientia or decorum, which fits subject matter to language "sì che dal fatto il dir non sia diverso." Such a decorum is already manifest in the opening of Canto 32, cited above, which promotes terms with the con prefix to the status of rhyming word (converrebbe, concetto, conduco ).[62]
As in the petrose, the poetics of the text derives from the specific cosmological feature described. Like a giant press, the accumulation of physical weight and grief at the center presses down on the poet, extruding the harsh rhymes ("premerei di mio concetto il suco"). The poet is like a telamon bearing the weight of the entire cosmos—not merely of the Inferno, as reference to the poem as a soma or ponderoso tema later in the Commedia will suggest.[63] The petrose figure both as a basis to the poetics of the rest of the Commedia and as part of the burden the poet has borne. Thus the dramatic confrontation of the lover and the petra imagined in "Così nel mio parlar" is pointedly recalled in the episode of Ugolino and Ruggieri.
Virtually all the narrative elements of "Così nel mio parlar" are alluded to: betrayal and revenge, blows, barking, gnawing, cries, cruel language. To mention only the most striking parallels: the terms bruca, manduca, and rode in the canzone are developed in Ugolino's feast on Ruggieri's skull ("come'l pan per fame si manduca," 32.127; "non altrimenti Tidëo si rose le tempie a Melanippo," 32.130–131); Ugolino
dreams that his children are pierced by the teeth of Ruggieri's dogs ("fender il fianchi," 33.36) in what is a rehearsal of his own doglike attack on Ruggieri ("coi denti . . . come d'un can, forti," 33.77–78), just as the speaker of "Così" imagines the lady pierced by love's sword ("vedess'io fender . . . lo core," 53–54) in retaliation for his own suffering of Love's strokes ("mi fiede sotto il braccio," 48); Ugolino gazes at his progeny ("guardai nel viso," 33.47–48), as the "Così" speaker imagines staring at his lady ("guarderei presso e fiso," 76); Ugolino turns to stone within ("sì dentro impetrai," 33.49), as the lady in the canzone opts for cruelty ("impetra maggior durezza," 3–4); the child stretched out before his father ("si gittò disteso," 33.68) recalls the speaker supine before Love ("disteso a riverso," 42).
But there are crucial differences: Ugolino, mute in his hatred ("stemmo tutti muti," 33.65) offers no help as his sons die ("padre mio, ché non m'aiuti?" 33.69); in the canzone, the speaker imagines offering help to the lady as she sinks in the caldo borro ("Io vi soccorro," 61). Ugolino's speech to his dead offspring ("due dì li chiamai . . . ," 33.74) is pointless, but the lover's fantasy of reciprocal cries begins an exchange of gestures, and the poem itself is an utterance that would compel hearing, a richiamo to heed Love's call, as the children's example in the mews is a call to heed the message of forgiveness. The speaker's struggle to escape the interiority of his suicidal frustration is mirrored, though in reverse, by Ugolino's withdrawal into a petrified silence. Ugolino desires revenge, but the lover's desire is both for his own survival and for the transformation of the lady. Ugolino's silence and despair represent the possible final phase of both lover and lady in the petrose: the lady hardened in refusal, the lover petrified by her Medusa-like power. The implicit solution, in both cases, is the offer of words that shatter the isolation and withdrawal of despair. And it is this offer that the petrose, however problematically, attempt.
Thus the Ugolino episode, and Cocito in general, stage a simplification of the ambiguities of "Così nel mio parlar"; the theme of the rigidity of the petra as traceable to an obscure and perverse sensuality reappears in Ugolino as the refusal of both pietas and Christian forgiveness. The reciprocal violence of the traitors echoes the speaker's struggle with the petra, but in a context of exasperated political faction and demonic cruelty that justifies the pilgrim's treatment of the traitors Bocca and Alberigo.[64] The poet's reiteration of the language of "Così nel mio parlar" in Cocito implicitly acknowledges his own violence; but
it also marks his distance from the personal aggression of "Così." The Medusa—darkly alluded to in Ugolino's stoniness and in the poet's reference to "Gorgona" (33.82)—loses its sexual content and returns to an orthodox role as an instrument of justice, indeed of the justice visited by the poet on the traitors when he encloses them in Cocito. In this sense, the rime aspre of Cocito augur (like the rime aspre of "Così") the poet's victory. Like a new Perseus, he makes the power of the Gorgon his own.
Thus, it ought not to be thought that reference to the petrose in Cocito means their rejection. Far from rejecting the petrose, the poet compares his art to the walling of Thebes by the power of song. It is of course more than that: it is a cosmogonic poetics, marking out the foundation of the universe (discriver fondo a tutto l'universo ); it is the poet's equivalent and reflects the Creator's drawing of his compass around the heavens ("Colui che volse il sesto / a lo stremo del mondo," Paradiso 19.40–41); it is evidence of the penetration of the poet's gift, of his microcosmic poetics, as far as the dark center of the cosmos. It also reiterates the poetics of the petrose in that it marks a moment of birth.
Ironically for its tenants, but auspiciously for the pilgrim, Cocito includes references to birth and childhood: Ugolino's figliuoli who are the new life ("l'età novella," 33.88); Napoleone and Alessandro, who are uterine brothers ("d'un corpo usciro," 32.58); Anteo who is figlio della terra. Implicit is a countermotive to the oppressiveness of the center—or, rather, a redefinition of its meaning. To the asperity of the speech of Cocito, with its imitation of clucking and chattering jaws, Dante opposes the equally onomatopoetic speech of the infant, who speaks the puerilia of mamma and babbo (32.9). The child's call to his parents for nourishment and protection affirms the bonds of kinship so spectacularly violated by the traitors of Caina; it draws our attention, moreover, to the words of Alberigo, the pilgrim's last interlocutor in Hell, who portrays himself as pregnant with pain ("il duol che'l cor m'impregna," 33.113). For Alberigo's pain there will be no accouchement. But the pilgrim, by passing through the center of the earth, is uprooted from the cave of Hell (". . . prima ch'io dell'abisso mi divella," 34.10). What for Satan and the damned is a devouring maw ("il fondo . . . che divora / Lucifero con Giuda," 31.142–143) is for the pilgrim a womb in which he prepares for the labor of rebirth on the shores of Purgatory ("Prima ch'io dell'abisso mi divella," 34.100). That the icy veil of Cocito is a legacy of the poet's natal ingegno along with the bel nido of Gemini will emerge in the heaven of Gemini itself, where we will also have to
reckon with the fantasy of the power of poetry figured in Amphion's moving of the stones.
Microcosmic Form
The Body of Hell
We begin with a striking parallel of a general kind, which had escaped notice until the microcosmic structure of the first of the petrose had been pointed out: the fact that Dante's Hell is a giant projection of the human body.[65]
Dante and Virgil begin their descent through Hell at what corresponds to the head (Limbo, which represents at one level our knowledge of the ancient world—that is, our memory—and may well correspond to the rear ventricle of the brain, thought to be the seat of memory);[66] we pass the devouring gullet among the gluttons, the spleen with the sullen. Within the city of Dis we reach a river of blood, the forest of the heart, and what should be a fountain or reservoir of life but is instead an arid burning plain. Some years ago Charles Singleton pointed out the existence, in Inferno 12–13, of what he called a "semantic field" of references to the breast, which he connected with the theme of man's double nature. We first see Chiron when he is looking at his breast; a while later Virgil stands at Chiron's breast, "dove le due nature son consorti" (12.84; cf. 12.97).[67] The circles of violence, in other words, correspond to the human breast. The Malebolge, furthermore, where fraud is punished, are based on an elaborate parallel between the digestion of foods and the work of the mind, for truth is the food of the soul, fraud its poison, and their concentric circles have an obvious relation to the labyrinth of the intestines (see Durling 1981a). Hell is divided, and Dante requires transportation, at points roughly corresponding to the major divisions of the human body. Flegïàs carries Dante across what corresponds to the division between head and breast, Geryon across what corresponds to the diaphragm. Anteo and the other giants are in a location that corresponds to the genitals, and they are like grotesque rebellious penises. Cocito, finally, corresponds to the large intestine, and there we find the infernal Saturn immobile in the ice.
Dante's spiral through Hell is a reenactment—in much greater detail, with much greater complexity, and in a different register—of the solstitial and microcosmic sequence of "Io son venuto." There are many correspondences between the five stanzas of this first of the petrose and
the realms of Hell: a sky—the hemisphere of light in Limbo—as memory (Canto 4, stanza 1); wind and storm as erotic passion, related especially to mouth and eyes, cries and weeping—and to lyric poetry (Canto 5, stanza 2); the breast, especially the heart, as seat of fire (Cantos 12–16, stanza 3); the correlation of animal souls and plant souls with the vital powers of the human soul (Cantos 12–16, stanzas 3–4). Cocito and the descent thereto, finally, as we have said, have a clear correspondence with the last stanza of "Io son venuto."
Dante's Hell is, of course, an inverted parody of the body of Christ, the Church. It is Babylon, the body of Satan. In De genesi ad litteram, explaining Isaiah 14:12–14, Augustine wrote:
Quae in figura regis velut Babylonis in diabolum dicta intelliguntur, plura in eius corpus conveniunt, quod etiam de humano genere congregat. . . . Et sicut corpus Christi quod est Ecclesia, dicitur Christus sicut illud est . . . . "Sicut enim corpus meum unum est, et membra habet multa, omnia autem membra corporis cum sint multa unum est corpus; ita et Christus" (1 Cor. 12:12): eo modo etiam corpus diaboli, cui caput est diabolus, id est ipsa impiorum multitudo.[68]
What is said figuratively as if of the king of Babylon is to be understood of the devil, they apply to his body, which he too congregates out of the human race. . . . And just as the body of Christ, which is the Church, is called Christ, so that one. . . . "For just as my body is one but has many members, for although the members of the body are many, the body is one; so also Christ" (I Cor. 12:12): in the same way also the body of the devil, whose head is the devil, is the multitude of the damned.
Dante's other two realms, Purgatory and Paradise, are also microcosmic in form. We have anticipated some of the microcosmic aspects of the Purgatorio in the first section; we turn now to a more elaborate consideration of how the microcosmic poetics of the petrose inform the Paradiso. We depart from our contention that "Amor, tu vedi ben," the poem as crystal, also represents the "crystalline" eye, for the Paradiso, because it is Dante's itinerarium mentis, is in physical terms the journey of his highest sense, his vision; more concretely, it is the journey of his eye.
Oculus Mundi
Dante's first heaven, that of the moon, touches on several features that recall the concerns of the petrose: the question, fundamental for the whole of the Paradiso, of heavenly influences (4.49–63—an explicitly
Platonic context) and the parallel between them and the work of human artists; the first comparisons of the heavens (or their inhabitants) to precious stones; and the first instances of optical effects and analogies. As we shall see, in the moon Dante establishes formal resemblances among the heavens, the human body, and the eye—as worked out in detail in "Amor, tu vedi ben" and predicated on the microcosmic poetics born in "Io son venuto." The status of the moon itself, in turn, as the focal point for the influence of all the heavens implies that the microcosmic poetics at work extends at least to all the parts of the Paradiso that take place in time and space.[69]
"Amor, tu vedi ben," we have argued, is a gem—a crystal. The moon is referred to as a pearl ("margarita," Paradiso 2.34). Its reflectivity, however, is likened to that of adamant, a stone traditionally described as slightly darker than crystal.[70] In the lapidary lore of the Paradiso, the relation of adamant to crystal is not accidental. Later in the Paradiso Dante refers to the heaven of Saturn as a crystal; and numerous details justify the pairing of the moon—the first planet—with the last, Saturn, whose importance for the horoscope of the petrose we discussed in Chapter 2. Like the moon, Saturn was thought to radiate cold and as such has usually been taken as the planet mentioned in "Io son venuto," 7.[71] In the moon and Saturn, this cold, taken in bono, indicates the austerity and dedication of the contemplative life ("caldi e geli," 21.116). Accordingly, in both the moon and Saturn Dante speaks only to religious: nuns in the moon, monks in Saturn. As we shall see later, there are good reasons why Dante wishes to include reference to the outermost planet in his treatment of the innermost. And not only Saturn: Dante also recalls the moon in the heaven of the fixed stars by looking down to see it;[72] and he remembers it also in the first heaven, the Primum Mobile ("qualunque cibo per qualunque luna," 28.132).[73] These relations are founded in a common element: the moon, it was generally held, was made in part of elemental water;[74] Dante's Saturn, because a cristallo (21.25), is therefore also a form of water (Rabuse 1976 20), while the Primum Mobile was "caelum aqueum vel crystallinum."[75]
In "Amor, tu vedi ben," elemental water, the type of amorphousness, is juxtaposed to the rigidity of crystal, water frozen to lapidary hardness. The poem turns, as we have seen, around a center that represents the cycle of states of water.[76] The moon also includes several states of water. The souls—nuns who have failed to maintain the rigid purity of their vows—appear as reflections in water (2.13–16) and disappear like
heavy objects sinking (2.123); the pilgrim's mistaken understanding of moonspots, dissolved by Beatrice's correction, is compared to melting snow. The pearl signifying the planet is a form of congealed water: in the lapidaries, pearls are attributed to dewdrops absorbed, hardened, and excreted by oysters.[77] As in "Amor, tu vedi ben," moreover, the amorphousness of water is implicitly juxtaposed to the informing and unifying power of light: the entrance of the pilgrim and Beatrice into the sphere of the moon is compared to a ray of light entering water without dividing it, "com'acqua recepe / raggio di luce permanendo unita" (2.35–36).[78]
The presence of cold, of water, of light, thus satisfies the requirements for the crystal ignited by fire that is the form of "Amor, tu vedi ben." Crystal, we have suggested, is already present by allusion in the reference to adamant. But it is also glanced at in the several references to mirrors: in the pilgrim's initial ascent, compared to a reflected ray of light (1.49–53); in the experimental mirror proposed by Beatrice (2.88–90);[79] and in the simile describing the pilgrim's sight of the souls in the heaven, citing Ovid's Narcissus (3.10–18). As we saw in Chapter 4, crystals, mirrors, and the eye are closely related in Dante's thought.[80] Thus, crystal is also implicitly present by virtue of the humor crystallinus of the eye, the image with which the canto closes and toward which it moves. The eye, too, is a crystal activated by light.
Cold ( freddo ), the states of water, the burning-glass and the eye, the language and metaphysics of light—these are the topics of "Amor, tu vedi ben." But Dante's central concern in the petrose is the specificity of poetic form. In "Amor, tu vedi ben," as we saw, that specificity—which gives the canzone its forma, its beauty—is in the system of rhyme-words that come to domination in the stanzas and that give the poem its shape as a model of the cosmos. It is this formal perfection and luminosity that justifies the nimia repercussio of the rhyme-words. And it is in the recurrence of such formal principles that the heaven of the moon most richly re-evokes the poetics—and beauty—of the petrose.
The presence of the petrose is especially conspicuous in Paradiso 2 in the use of lexical repetition.[81] Thus, in the second part of Beatrice's explanation regarding moonspots (106–148) we find cielo (112) repeated at 115 and 130; fare (123) at 128, 130, and 132; terms related to girare (113) at 118, 127, and 138; variations on diverse (116, 135) at 117 (distratte ), 118 (differenze ), 119 (distinzion ), and 134 and 146 (differente ); and on formale
(147) at 110 (informare ), 134 (conformate ), and 148 (conforme ). The repetitions thus strike on the two fundamental principles Beatrice is trying to explain: that variation in the cosmos is the result of formal principles that are diverse. The last example recalls a key term in "Amor, tu vedi ben": forma. At the end of the canto, allusion to the technique of "Amor, tu vedi ben" becomes more direct, in two instances of equivocal rhyme: lega (139, 141) and luce (143, 145). Luce, one of the rhyme-words of "Amor, tu vedi ben," is repeated again out of rhyme in verse 145 ("da luce a luce"), so that the term appears both paired and three times in succession, recalling its cycling in the canzone. Dante's allusion—appropriately, a formal one—to the technique of "Amor, tu vedi ben" calls attention to his elaborate evocation of the poetics and sentenza of that poem in Beatrice's discourse on the moonspots, which occupies the entire second half of Paradiso 2.
As in Boethius's "O qui perpetua," alluded to at the end of Paradiso 2, the principles of form are expressed by a homology between the order of discourse and the order of the cosmos: logical and metaphysical hierarchies are reflected both in the order of the heavens and in the construction of Beatrice's two discourses. Each discourse is a model of the cosmos; between them, they present a descent from first principles to experimental facts, followed by a re-ascent to the first cause expressed in microcosmic terms—techniques that recall "Amor, tu vedi ben" and the models of form, "Donne ch'avete" and "O qui perpetua," that we studied in the Introduction and in Chapter 1.
In Beatrice's first speech, mention of the stars, the sun (and moon), and the observer is apparently casual and for the sake of the argument. In fact, Beatrice returns immediately to first principles in beginning her refutation of the pilgrim's error. Her speech is divisible into two parts. The undivided first part is the rebuttal of the pilgrim's erroneous view: if rare and dense explained the diverse intensity of the stars, then the starry sphere would impart but a single virtue. But this we know is false, for each star produces distinct virtuous influences. The second part is subdivided: the moon could be thought of as pierced throughout by "light" patches (in which case, Beatrice points out, the sun would shine through during eclipses); or it might have light patches of depth short of the whole diameter, beyond which dense material would resume (like the layering of lean and fat in a body, or pages in a book). But if that were the case, the light reflected from the moon would not
show dark patches, for experiment (involving three mirrors at differing distances and a candle placed behind the viewer) demonstrates that dense strata at varying distances would not affect the intensity of reflected light.
Descending from a formal explanation to double empirical proofs, Beatrice refers first to the stars, next to solar eclipses (natural phenomena visible to all), and then to the observer of an experiment. The experiment is at the lowest metaphysical level because it involves induction from the senses and from a particular case. Her description of it, however, also sketches a model of the cosmos: the mirrors suggest the moon; the candle, the sun; the viewer's eye, that of man on earth.[82] The model is an apparently casual version of the balanced sun and moon in Libra that we discussed earlier.[83] More important, reference to the observer of the experiment looks forward to the microcosmic analogy with the eye in the second speech. In this sense the movement of reascent has, implicitly, already begun.[84]
The second account forms a diptych with the first. It is, however, much more complex. Where the first is destructive (riprovando ), hammering away at the pilgrim's error until it is melted and his passive intellect is free, the second is constructive (provando ), like informing light—and this is a key to its structure. It both reflects elements of the first and reverses them. Although apparently descending from stars to the planets to the metaphor of the body, it also ascends to higher and higher poetic and metaphysical levels in a complex design that recalls the structural intricacies of Boethius's "O qui perpetua" and "Donne ch'avete."
Beatrice begins by describing how the uniform influence of the first heaven, the Primum Mobile, is diversified, first by the multitude of stars and subsequently by the planets. In these four tercets she descends from the Empyrean to the planets and speaks of the cosmos as a material creation. In her account of all the planets with a single tercet, however—"li altri giron per varie differenze"—she treats the circle of the Other logically as one circle, as Plato does in his account of how the Demiurge fashions the universe.[85] The presence of an abstract principle anticipates the ascent to higher levels that follows.
In the next section (127–132), Beatrice explains how the effects of the planetary spheres just mentioned (the arte del martello ) draw their movement and power from their intelligences (the fabbro ).[86] Although still speaking of the planets, she has ascended in metaphysical level with
mention of the intelligences that govern the planetary and stellar spheres. In the last lines of this section, she speaks of the intelligence of the first heaven ("la mente profonda che lui volve") as the exemplar for the activity of the stellar sphere ("e'l ciel che tanti lumi fanno bello"), directly echoing the language of "O qui perpetua" for the World-Soul turning around noûs. The reference again raises the metaphysical temperature, so to speak, and prepares the microcosmic image of the following section.
In verses 133–138, Beatrice compares the joining of the intelligence with the starry sphere to that of life with the body.[87] In the comparison of the heavens to a physical body there is another apparent descent.[88] However, the introduction of the microcosmic simile—a trope—heightens the stylistic level. Where the previous section ascended from material to intelligible realms, moreover, now Beatrice's language adumbrates the unity of the first cause and establishes the human person, soul and body, as an image participating in that unity. In terms like bontate and unitate, Boethian and Neoplatonic terms for the intelligible hierarchy screen the Christian equivalent of the Neoplatonic One.
The last three tercets appear to repeat the previous four. But Beatrice now uses the glow of life radiating from a part of the body to describe the union of intelligence with its sphere: she compares the virtue of the star to the expression of happiness in the human eye. Although the term of comparison is a part of the whole and thus lower in metaphysical rank, at the same time the vehicle of the metaphor is the active, radiant letizia of the soul reflecting the Creator who is its source. In terms that Plato would have found familiar, the diaphanous sphere of the eye is the part of the body most like the heavens, most like the intellect in its permeability to form, most like the lieto fattor himself.[89] Most striking, the stars, described previously as multiple (tante vedere ) and full of lights (tanti lumi ), are now presented as actively shining: "la virtù mista per lo corpo luce "—the first use of an active verb derived from lux in rhyme position in Beatrice's two discourses. Just as the presence of light in the eye is the sign of a living person, so the visible radiation of light from the stars is evidence of the virtù they possess: only here, in Beatrice's discourse, do the stars actively shine and the eye gleam. The use of the active form, luce, is thus also the act that unifies the whole passage.
The descent from cosmos to the body and its parts has therefore also been an ascent, via terms of the intelligible cosmos, to the first cause,
which logically and metaphysically contains the entire creation. It is in the final, comprehensive tercets that allusion to "Amor, tu vedi ben" is strongest:
Virtù diversa fa diversa lega
col prezïoso corpo ch'ella avviva,
nel qual, sì come vita in voi, si lega.
Per la natura lieta onde deriva,
la virtù mista per lo corpo luce
come letizia per pupilla viva.
Da essa vien ciò che da luce a luce
par differente, non da denso e raro;
essa è formal principio che produce,
conforme a sua bontà, lo turbo e'l chiaro.
Virtù (twice), corpo (twice), luce (three times), forma (and conforme )—all these are important words from "Amor, tu vedi ben" (and in the presence of much other repercussio: repeated diversa, avviva/vita/viva, lieta/ letizia ). Note also the oppositions denso/raro, turbo/chiaro, as against di notte e di luce (46), luogo e tempo (47) in the canzone.
Heaven and earth, soul and body, generic and specific, whole and part, logical order and trope, containment and contained, exemplar and microcosm—these categories are all exploited in the ordering of Beatrice's discourse. We note with all of them Dante's use of a poetics learned from Boethius and when composing "Donne ch'avete." But the resemblances with "Amor, tu vedi ben" are the most extensive. Beatrice's simile of the pilgrim's mind as snow, melting under the heat of her arguments so that she can reinform it with the truth, forms the center of her whole discussion and corresponds to the central stanza of "Amor, tu vedi ben."[90] Both the metaphor of the informant as craftsman and that of the heavens as revolving around and informing the sublunar are, we recall, essential to the form of "Amor, tu vedi ben," and they constitute the principal theoretical underpinnings of Beatrice's two discourses. Perhaps most important for the parallels with Dante's crystal poem, Beatrice's speeches are themselves modeled, logically and spatially, to exemplify the activity of circling and informing performed by the heavens; the form of her discourse is itself a model of the cosmos (see Chapter 2, note 75). Finally, of course, Beatrice's speech is itself (as Nardi intuited) a form of light, of luce that informs the pilgrim's mind. That light shapes it as the hammer shapes metal or the spheres shape the sublunar world (thus the reference to the "strokes"—colpi —of the sun melting
the snow); it is as if the colpi of the sun and the blows of the heavens as hammers echo the repercussio of Dante's craft in "Amor, tu vedi ben"—precisely in the crucial term, thrice repeated, of luce. And that same light is everywhere in the canto like the glimmering of lights from a crystal—to adopt an image of Adam of St. Victor. It is a light that radiates, successively, in the three mirrors and in the moon, in the eye, in sources of light like candles and the sun, in the stars.[91]
Beatrice's discourses focus, finally, on the human body and the eye as microcosms for the cosmos. It is a tendency that will have considerable consequences for the Paradiso as a whole, whose structure, as we argue below, is itself modeled after that of the human mind. In the immediate context, the concluding image of the heavenly sphere as a radiant eye is particularly suggestive. In one sense it might refer to the moon itself, its face turned to the earth like a brightly shining eye, echoing its functions both in the hexamereal tradition and in Dante's own usage—moon and sun are "li due occhi del ciel" in the Purgatorio (22.132). More to the point, Beatrice's discourses in Canto 2 require that the diversity of formal principles represented by the various stars and the diversity of the moon's surface—turbo e chiaro —be homologous phenomena.[92] In one sense, the moon is a receptacle for (and representation of) all the spheres above it.[93] And in terms we have already used of the atmosphere and the surface of the eye, the moon is itself a horizon between the sublunar and ethereal realms, as described in the astronomical treatises Dante knew.[94]
But in metaphor—and metaphor is crucial, as we saw—the eye that concludes Beatrice's discourse is a human eye, part of a human face. In the heaven of the moon, for the last time in the Paradiso with the exception of Beatrice and the final vision, the pilgrim sees and the poet emphasizes the human effigy and visage. From the reference to Cain in the moon to the simile of faces reflected in water ("d'i nostri visi le postille," 3.13) and the beautiful image of a white pearl on a white brow ("perla in bianca fronte," 3.14), the face is constantly presented. Dante's use of volti (2.66, from vultus ) and vedute (2.115) for the stars also suggests faces, and of course the lunar orb is a face, a faccia.[ 95] Dante's appeal, in Beatrice's discourse, to the great chain of being ("di grado in grado / che di sù prendono e di sotto fanno," 2.122–123) rests on Macrobius's image of the chain as a series of mirrors reflecting the same face, vultus eius.[96] The presence of the human imago is not surprising: as Nardi has shown, the underlying metaphysics of Beatrice's explanations is more Neoplatonic than Aristotelian, depending—as the citation of "O qui
perpetua" confirms—on the Platonic theory of celestial influence, by which ideas in the divine mind (imagines ) are impressed, as formal principles, on the material world below.[97] In Christian terms, of course, the archetypal human imago is that of the Logos, of Christ—as the pilgrim will discover at the end of the poem.
In a subtle but most important sense, however, the happy radiant eye of Paradiso 2 is the eye of Beatrice. It is Beatrice's eye through which, in a complex optical simile (1.49–54), the pilgrim first leaves the earth. The pilgrim's look to the stars and the glance at Beatrice are inseparable: Beatrice lieta, or bella, or ridente, is constantly the passport upward.[98] But the heavens smile because Beatrice's smile is the reflex of a fictional cosmos ordered to the satisfaction of the pilgrim by its author, who is Dante.[99] In the happy, responsive, and solicitous eye of Beatrice, the poet imagines the antidote to the unyielding sembiante freddo of the petra; in his joyful reception in Paradise, the antidote to his painful exclusion from his native city. This inversion of aspects and of outcomes, attempted with such art in the petrose, the poet achieves for himself in that heaven of the stars so often anticipated in the moon.
The Heaven of the Sun
In the Commedia, the great majority of astronomical passages describe or include mention of the sun: the "pianeta / che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle" (Inferno 1.17–18) functions in the poem as beacon, guide, timepiece, symbol, and chief minister of the heavens through all three cantiche. In one sense, its importance culminates in the heaven of Gemini, where it is named "padre di ogni mortal vita" in connection with its role in the nativity of the poet. The importance of the sun in the Commedia is similar to its place in the petrose, where three of the poems exemplify in their form the principles of the sun's motion and effects: "Io son venuto" imitates the sun's descent to winter solstice; "Al poco giorno," in its spiral movement of rhyme-words, graphs the sun's movement with both Same and Other; and "Amor, tu vedi ben" imitates the changing effects of the sun in conjunction with successive constellations or planets and is arranged axially with cold at its center, representing the winter depression of the sun and the central location of a cold earth and the coldness of the lady.[100] Although "Così" appears to lack the sun (see, however, "nel sol quanto nel rezzo," 57), the treatment of the lady's glances as shafts of light anticipates, as we saw, the imagery in the Para-
diso of the pilgrim's upward motion as a beam of light or arrow seeking its target, and ultimately of emanation and return as the propagation and reflection of light.
The first twenty-seven lines of Paradiso 10 are themselves an astronomical incipit. They introduce the principle that orders the heaven of the sun, the motions of Same and Other that cross at the equinoctial points on the celestial equator:
Guardando nel suo Figlio con l'Amore
che l'uno e l'altro etternalmente spira,
lo primo e ineffabile Valore
quanto per mente e per loco si gira
con tant'ordine fé, ch'esser non puote
sanza gustar di lui chi ciò rimira.
Leva dunque, lettore, a l'alte rote
meco la vista, dritto a quella parte
dove l'un moto e l'altro si percuote;
e comincia a vagheggiar nell'arte
di quel maestro che dentro a sé l'ama,
tanto che mai da lei l'occhio non parte.
Vedi come da indi si dirama
l'oblico cerchio che i pianeti porta,
per sodisfare al mondo che li chiama.
Che se la strada lor non fosse torta,
molta virtù nel ciel sarebbe in vano,
e quasi ogne potenza qua giù morta;
e se dal dritto più o men lontano
fosse'l partire, assai sarebbe manco
e giù e su del ordine mondano.
Or ti riman, lettor, sovra 'l tuo banco,
dietro pensando a ciò che si preliba,
s'esser vuoi lieto assai prima che stanco.
Messo t'ho innanzi: omai per te ti ciba;
ché a sé torce tutta la mia cura
quella materia ond'io son fatto scriba.
(emphasis added)
In its twenty-seven lines, the passage enacts the procession of the cosmos from the Creator and the beginning of the creature's return to him. The first two tercets treat of the Trinity, the procession of the cosmos from it, and its immanence in creation. The next five describe the motions of the Same and the Other, which mediate the eternal to the temporal and which through the movements of the sun govern birth and decay in the sublunary world. In the final two tercets the poet invites
the reader to reflect on the text (which is now before the reader, innanzi, as the heavens were straight above, leva . . . dritto ) and testifies to his own yearning to return to its order in his narrative.[101]
The passage has thus a tripartite structure emphasizing (1) the divine summit, (2) the two motions as mediators, and (3) the reader or poet as last term and subject of return. This structure (like the length of the passage) is clearly modeled on Boethian principles, as has been widely recognized (Dante 1979b 3:153). Boethian derivation is evident in the combination of expressed petitions and yearning for the source (il mondo che li chiama; torce mia cura ). In structural terms, the divisions are nearly parallel to those of Boethius's poem. "O qui perpetua" is divided into a nine-verse section on the procession of the world from the mind of God; a twelve-verse section (with a central five-verse section of lines of fifteen syllables) on the physical form of the cosmos, with the World-Soul at its center; and a final seven-line section, the prayer proper, asking that the speaker be raised up to a vision of the fountain of Good. In Dante's proem, one line shorter than the Latin poem's twenty-eight, the division is six lines on the Godhead, fifteen on the two motions, and six again on the reader-poet's return.[102]
Dante's passage is based on Neoplatonic principles: the poet and reader ascend by contemplating the movements of the heavens (5–6). The viewer's lifting of his gaze to the celestial cross imitates the Father's unswerving gaze upon the Son and the Creator's (quel maestro ) unswerving contemplation of the cosmic model (che mai da lei l'occhio non parte ). Thus, the whole passage unfolds the procession within the Trinity.[103] As in Boethius's poem, however, where the participation in the World-Soul by individual souls implies the upward return of the latter (mentioned as early as line 21, "facis igne reverti," but already implicit in the internal meditation of the World-Soul on noûs —"In semet reditura meat mentemque profundam / circuit," 16–17), the movement of return actually begins much earlier, with the poet's invitation to look at the equinoctial point itself (Leva dunque, lettor . . .)—where, as Freccero notes (1986 242), the logical connective implies that human souls participate in the rationality of the heavens. As in Boethius, the ascent begins with the invitation itself. Descent and ascent, procession and return, are simultaneous, interwoven in the passage.
At the end of the passage the poet himself is twisted back to his subject, the heaven of the sun, imitating the twisting away of the Other from the Same and its return at the opposite point of the circle. The
implication is that the crossed circles are the specific formal model of his poetics. It is no accident that (again like Boethius) Dante places at the exact center of his proem (lines 13–15) the point where the two motions are joined:
Vedi come da indi si dirama
l'oblico cerchio che i pianeti porta,
per sodisfare al mondo che li chiama.
"Si dirama / l'oblico cerchio," the forking away of the oblique circle, is the cardinal event in the whole passage (Freccero 1986 81). It may be hazarded that the spiral form of terza rima is itself an instance of the oblico cerchio crossed with the equator.[104] That the two circles are the constructive principle of the heaven of the sun will be evident in the rest of this section.
As in Boethius, finally, the last terms are crucial. The Latin poem ends and begins with beginning and end, Alpha and Omega, in the inversion of initial O and final Idem. In Dante's proem the first verse ends with Amore, the Spirit that enlivens creation, and the last verse with scriba, naming the poet who writes under Love's inspiration, who returns to his Author in writing this passage, who extends in words (innanzi ) the intelligible richiamo of the heavens even as he himself hears the world calling to the divine art that informs it, "per sodisfare al mondo che li chiama." The reader, for his part, practices return both in looking up to the heavens and in reflecting on the cruciform cosmos in the poet's text (di retro pensando )—that is, both per mente and per loco —so that the joined actions of memory and vision (which leads here to desire, vagheggiar nell'arte ) themselves imitate the two motions of intellect and will.
The proem to Paradiso 10 also echoes, in addition to "O qui perpetua," distinguishing aspects of the petrose. Some of these are verbal details: the beginning of verse paragraphs with forms of the verb—guardando, leva, vedi, or ti riman, messo t'ho (inverted)—recalls "Io son venuto" articulated by inverted finite verbs (levasi, fuggito son, passato han, versan ).[105] Its petitions and yearning evoke the reiterated (again, structural) petitions of "Amor, tu vedi ben" and the powerful desire for satisfaction and love throughout the petrose. The rhyme on morta and porta (around torta ) regarding the inclination of the ecliptic echoes the central rhyme of "Io son venuto" (ammorta/porta ) defining the contrast between the winter apathy of animals and the speaker's love: alludes,
that is, both to an effect of the inclined ecliptic and to the spiritual principle of the Same that thrives in the lover. Manco/(banco) /stanco in turn echo the negative moment of "Così nel mio parlar," where the lover is near death (stanco, 43) and wounded by Love in the left side ("sotto il braccio manco," 48) (the third rhyme is bianco ).[106]
Specific verbal echoes are confirmed by shared thematic concerns and structural principles. The emphasis on the participation of the mind in a cosmic order; mention of divine and human artisanal skill (that of nature is implied); the apparently paradoxical truth that the departure of the Other from the Same is required for the wholeness of nature, and thus the idea that the Other—what twists away—must be included in the ambit of Mind, are general notions underlying both the petrose and the proem to the heaven of the sun.[107] More specifically, spiral motion as an imitation of the movements of the sun and the soul recalls "Io son venuto" and "Al poco giorno"; and the movement in the text to and from first principles (eternity, the One) recalls "Amor, tu vedi ben." As we shall see, the crossed circles of the proem return in the sun itself, whose status as the heart and governor of the zodiac is implicit in Dante's establishment of the point of the vernal equinox, "dove 'l sol è più vivo." In the poet's elaboration of his solar heaven we see perhaps the fullest development within the Commedia of a range of poetic effects first attempted in the petrose. It is properly Dante's heliotropic heaven.
Perhaps the most remarkable artistic achievement of the poet's heliotropic art in Paradiso 10–14 is the representation of the sun's annual and diurnal motions, which express the logical motions of the cosmos. The two motions inform the figurative language of the sphere, influence its syntax, govern the selection of topics broached by the speakers, and determine the articulation of the whole heaven. In one sense the two motions refer directly to the sun. The groups of theologians are compared to a clock (10.139) because the sun, set in the heaven for a sign of seasons and times, marks days and years; to dancers (10.79, 12.22, 13.22) because the strophe/antistrophe of choral song imitates the movements of the heavens;[108] and to double lunar rainbows and imaginary constellations because the sun was ruler of the zodiac.[109] They are compared to millstones, echoing Dante's comparison in the Convivio of the sun's motions to those of a millstone (Freccero 1986 227–234). The pairing of Francis and Dominic is also stated as that of chiarezza (brightness, intellect) and ardore (heat, charity) near the end of the heaven, in 14.40; both brightness and heat are attributes of the sun.[110]
It is the two motions themselves, however, that are the principal object of Dante's representation. The division of the theologians into two groups results from the distinction, in the human microcosm, of the two motions: those who approach God through ardent love, like the Seraphic Francis, and those who approach him through the light of intellect, with the Cherubic Dominic (Ferrante 1984 274)—though Dante does not adhere strictly to these distinctions, as Francis and Dominic and their followers share in both forms of devotion, through ardent love and works and through contemplation and study.[111] As readers have noted, the linkage and concordance of the two reformers to the one end (ad una militaro ) and the movement of the two circles are repeatedly described with the coordinating expression l'un . . . l'altro.[112] The homology of coordinate phrasing and the cosmic motions is a key to Dante's specific poetics in the heaven of the sun, where paired terms—luce e luce (10.122), voce a voce (10.146), moto a moto e canto a canto (11.5)—reiterate the parallelism of the two circles.[113] Doubling is itself a reiterated topic, again centered on the two princes ("due principi," 11.35; also "due campioni," 12.44) and the two circles of theologians ("due archi," 12.11; "due segni in ciel," 13.13; "due circonferenze," 14.74).[114] It recurs in the presence not only of the two champions, but also of the two perfect men, Christ and Adam, and in the two questions introduced by Thomas, one regarding the corruption of the Dominicans, the other the salvation of Solomon.[115] The two questions are a form of structural pairing whose principal example is to be found in the coordinated, chiastically ordered biographies of the two founders: that of Francis, related by the Dominican Thomas, and that of Dominic, related by the Franciscan Bonaventure. The chiasmic distribution of biographer and subject reiterates the founding chiasmus of the proem, marked both by the celestial Chi and by the movement from center to circumference and back again described at the beginning of Canto 14.[116]
As is well known, the topics of the effects, birthplaces, birth, and orders established by the two saints show close parallels of position, length, and wording in the two biographies (Dante 1979a 206). Each biography is thirty-five tercets long; each contains an account of the saint's birthplace and birth; each decries the decline of the respective orders. The pairing of the saints persists in the design and detail of the biographies. Thus the binomial l'un . . . l'altro or one of its elements appears at the opening (11.37–38, 12.34) and closing (11.118–122, 12.106—111) of the narratives, while the centers of the passages (11.70–75, 12.70–
75) are marked with appearances of the word Cristo, as the spouse of Poverty (like Francis himself) in the life of Francis and in rhyme in the life of Dominic.[117] The center, itself a crossing point, is marked by Cristo, by the cross (11.72), just at the moment when each saint is named ("Francesco e Povertà," 11.74; "Domenico fu detto," 12.70).[118] However, at only one point do the two biographies verbally coincide—we might say cross—in the same line:
. . . nacque al mondo un sole,
come fa questo talvolta di Gange.
(11.50–51)
non molto lungi al percuoter de l'onde
dietro a le quali, per la lunga foga,
lo sol talvolta ad ogne uom si nasconde.
(12.49–51)
Only talvolta is identical and on the same line in both cases. The sun, explicit in 12.51, is present in the pronoun (questo ) of 11.51 and explicit in the previous verse. Francis appears as a rising sun, and Dominic, born in the west, is associated with a setting one. But the punctual juncture of the two passages has more to tell us than that.[119] That the terms of identity should be talvolta and (pronominally) sole is important: Dante refers in each case to the variability of where the sun rises and sets. He is thus referring to the sun's proper motion in the ecliptic, the motion that carries it south in the winter and north in the summer, twice crossing the equator at the equinoxes—as implied in the proem to Canto 10.
The commentators agree that the sun rising talvolta from the Ganges is a spring (equinoctial) sun. In fact, questo seems to require that Francis's sun be equinoctial, since it refers to this very sun where the pilgrim finds himself.[120] But both passages also refer to the year in a more general manner. Thomas mentions the place from which Perugia feels the seasons, which depend on the position of the sun as it rises over the Appenines; Bonaventure refers to the west, from which Zephyrus comes to reclothe the earth with foliage. The sun appears in each passage as the daystar, rising and setting, and in terms of its effects over the year.[121]
In Paradiso 12, Bonaventure's biography of Dominic passes directly into the list of twelve constellated Franciscans. The juxtaposition implies that the two biographies inset in Cantos 11–12 are themselves paired cycles spinning in the heaven of the sun—like the biga, or two-wheeled chariot, of which Francis and Dominic are the wheels ("l'una
rota della biga . . . l'altra," 12.106, 110). As the circles of sapientes spinning in opposite directions mimic the principles of Same and Other that unify the cosmos, the two "wheels" of the biographies are the fullest imitation in the text of the cosmic motions. Like the circulation of rhyme-words in "Al poco giorno" and "Amor, tu vedi ben," the textual wheels of the heaven of the sun, intersecting precisely in the term of the sun's motion itself—talvolta —imitate the "volta di tempo" and in so doing enact the poet's own return to the Maker. The principles laid down in the proem are thus fully satisfied. But the poet's role in the biographies of Francis and Dominic is not only that of maker. Thirteenth-century accounts of Francis and Dominic as gemelli, noted by Kaske (1961 237–240), would have permitted Dante to associate his inspiration by the stars of Gemini with the providential influence of the two reformers.
It is implicit that the sun also helps to cause the eloquence displayed in talking about it.[122] Dante's rich linguistic inventions (including the allegory of Francis as a sun, the liturgical song of the Church referred to in 10.139–141, and the wealth of metaphors deployed) are rhetorical colors adorning the heaven like gems and flowers. The several metaphorical series—drawn from the language of chivalry and love service as well as from georgic and pastoral—are linked to what for Dante were traditional subjects of poetry.[123] As readers have noted, the heaven of the sun features many allusions to the Song of Songs, the biblical book that provided a rich vein of erotic imagery to the lyric tradition of the Middle Ages, including the alba, the dawn song, of which there is a version in the heaven of the sun.[124]
Dante's exactitude regarding the place of birth of each saint is a key to the importance of the heavens. Francis and Dominic enjoy the virtues instilled before and at birth at the geographical situs where the rays of the sun and the stars coincided to inform them.[125] But the poet's own genius and destiny, like those of Dominic or Francis, are also a consequence of the influence of the sun in his generation.[126] Self-included in the bella scola of Limbo, Dante is also self-included in the company of the sapientes, whose circling has the pilgrim as its focus: like the stars circling the earth, the circling of the sapientes around the pilgrim is evidence of his own infusion by wisdom, a paideia that will be repeated explicitly in the heaven of Gemini.[127] The plenitude and diversity of wisdom in the doctors of the Church is complemented by the poet's own fullness and variousness of art.[128] It is not unlikely, then, that the
verse Dante attributes to Dominic, "Io son venuto a questo" (12.78), is a distant but deliberate echo of the first verse of "Io son venuto." It links the saint's election, demonstrated by the viva virtute that filled him, to the poet's, equally influenced by the stars to which he turns in his own heaven ("per acquistar virtute," 22.122) and by the sun (22.116). But where in the canzone the speaker arrives at the dark nadir of the winter solstice, the pilgrim-poet in the Commedia arrives in the sun at its moment of greatest fertility, dov'è più vivo.[129]
As the Timaeus describes it, the crossing of the Same and the Other in the heavens provides the model for the union of intellect and will in the human microcosm. The human soul, we recall, is made from the same "stuff" as the World-Soul.[130] Thus, in terms of the poetics we have traced, the celestial Chi, where macro- and microcosm intersect, marks the point where the soul coincides, as it were, with the cosmos, and the art of God and Nature with that of the poet ("e io era con lui," 10.34). We can reach further and say that the celestial Chi unifies the poetics of the petrose—based on the motions of the sun and of the planets—with that of the Commedia and authorizes the unfolding of Dante's microcosmic poetics in the universal scope of the Paradiso.
The celestial Chi, the Creator's mark in the heavens (here Dante is following the tradition, as John Freccero has pointed out, of identifying the zodiac as the Creator's signature), is also the poet's mark, a trace of his own history as well as of his artisanal skill. As a form of the Cross, it echoes the cross Christ had to bear; it echoes, too, the negative punto, the katabasis of the petrose. By inviting the reader to consider the cosmic chiasmus as his prelibation, the poet is also inviting him or her to discern the vestiges of that chiasmus in the heaven he has composed, which manifests it everywhere. Where the stigmata mark the flesh of Francis, the corresponding sigillo, the mark that allows us to discern the poet's ingegno and virtù, are in the body of the poem itself, in its perceptible form. As in "Amor, tu vedi ben," it is through the fashioning of formal beauty that the poet touches on his divine gift.
Reversal and Return
The Nest of the Twins
In the heaven of the poet's natal sign of Gemini, the themes and poetics of the petrose return, transformed, with special force. The return of the
poetics of the petrose is one among several. Neoplatonic influence is strong, and with reason. In Paradiso 4.49–60, Plato's doctrine of the descent of souls from the stars is countenanced if taken as referring to the influence of the stars. In Paradiso 22 the tolerant option becomes the poem's fact, as the pilgrim, voyaging to the stars that presided over his birth, recognizes in the technical sense their influence over his genius, as we noted earlier.[131] The pilgrim's return, by visual retrospection, to earth (twice: "col viso ritornai," 22.133, and "adima / il viso," 27.77–78), to which he must also soon return in the body ("per il mortal pondo, / ancor giù tornerai," 27.63–64), also touches on several Platonic topics. Leaving the planetary spheres behind, the pilgrim comprehends their motions (22.142–150)—a feat held in the Timaeus to be impossible without a model (Plato 1961 1169). In the same passage, Dante subtly recuperates a Platonic tenet by giving the planets in the "astrological" order ascribed to Plato (Macrobius 1970a 73–74, 89), placing Mercury and Venus above the sun.[132] Dante's reordering is perhaps only verbal; but the principle of benigne interpretare (echoing Macrobius's own attempt to minimize Plato's error) is affirmed, inspired perhaps by the pilgrim's approach to the Good ("Lo ben che fa contenta questa corte," 26.16), in terms Plato and Boethius would recognize, and in his professed love for all the creatures (26.64–65).[133]
The presence of Adam (26.82–142) suggests, however, that the poet's return is not only intellectual. In returning to his stars, the pilgrim (properly, for a Gemini) acknowledges both his natures, utranque naturam. The reference to Christ as Alpha and Omega (26.17) implies the whole adventure of human time, from creation to apocalypse, and notably the drama of the Fall and redemption: of exile, exodus, and return to Eden. The pilgrim, sitting his exams in the theological virtues, has come to Jerusalem from Egypt (25.55–56); his meeting with James the apostle excites reference to Galicia, where the apostle's tomb was an important destination for pilgrims (25.17–18); meeting Peter is like a pilgrimage to Rome, where Peter was martyred and buried.[134] But the pilgrimage sites are also figures for the final destination, the celestial Jerusalem: and so the pilgrim's return is also to Paradise, the celestial garden of the lily and the rose, Christ and the Virgin (23.73–74), and to first father Adam, who forfeited the paradise to which his descendant now returns. And if the poet imagines a journey back to his oldest ancestor, he also sketches a future return to his native city of Florence, the specific terrestrial situs where he was born after his information by the stars, indeed to the bap-
tismal font where he was enrolled among the souls that might expect salvation. Gemini, traditionally the gate for returning souls, locates a series of cycles or returns, both in the fiction of the poem and with reference to the future of the poet, both in the abstract terms of Platonic remeatio and in the concrete terms of the poet's own history.[135] The pilgrim's journey of the intellect and the tragic destiny of the poet form a double cycle, each wound around and reflecting the other.
The pilgrim's journey to the origins of both his natures is also in the largest sense the return to his auctores.[136] As in the sun, there is a host of writers. Included in the census are the intellectual and spiritual influences that formed Dante's mind and spirit: philosophers (Aristotle by name, Peter Lombard by allusion), Apostles (Peter, James, John, Paul by citation), Moses, David and the prophets, the Muses. Sacred sources and, if more subtly, classical learning are represented.[137] During his examination on the theological virtues, the pilgrim refers to his authorities as stars, "da molte stelle mi vien questa luce" (25.70).[138] Dante's ruling metaphor is that the auctores —indifferently the texts and their authors—are like stars because they have poured their power into him, shaping him as the stars help shape sublunar creatures. For his conceit, Dante could draw on Augustine's account of the apostles and fathers of the Church as the heavenly bodies (see Chapter 2, note 75).[139] He also had his own precedent in the Purgatorio, where the virtues appear first as stars and subsequently as nymphs dancing around the chariot of the Church.[140] Both Christ and the Virgin, objects of the great double triumph of Canto 23, are stars: Christ is the daystar, sol degli angeli as Beatrice calls him in the sun (10.53); the Virgin is the viva stella invoked day and night by the pilgrim (23.92).[141]
The principle of return also applies to the text. The sun is mentioned more often in Gemini than in the sun itself.[142] The beautiful lunar imagery in Canto 23 points to a cosmic proportion: the sun is to Christ—sol degli angeli—as the moon is to the planetary sun. As the sun illuminates the crowns of stars formed by the wise men, Christ illuminates the host of the blessed, a star cluster or galaxy.[143] Echoes of the cantos of the sun return in countless details: in mention of clocks, gyres, and round dances;[144] of sapientia and syllogisms;[145] of feudal and military metaphors;[146] and of the mystic marriage of moon and sun, of bride and bridegroom.[147] The text doubles over on itself and brings the sun into Gemini as if to reiterate their conjunction at the poet's birth. (During the time of the poem, of course, the planetary sun is in Aries, two signs away.)
Like the heaven of the sun, the heaven of the Twins is studded with binaries: the double crown of theologians and the double biographies of Francis and Dominic are answered by the double downward look of the pilgrim (Cantos 22, 27) and the double triumph of Christ and Mary (23). Echoing the double crowns, the triumphs enact a cosmic dance and mystery play.[148] On a smaller scale, the heaven is filled with pairs that represent the mediation of authority. The triumphant Christ and the militant pilgrim suggest the institutional mediation of the Church.[149] The soul and body, doppia vesta (25.92), and the pairing of Christ and Adam suggest the mediation of heaven and earth in man himself. Double, too, is Scripture ("le nove e le scritture antiche," 25.88), and double are the instruments of authority and revelation ("filosofici argomenti e per autorità," 26.25). There are two kinds of proof, physical and metaphysical ("fisice e metafisice," 24.134); even the terms of Aristotelian metaphysics, form and matter ("la lega e'l peso," 24.84), which provide the discursive forms for the pilgrim's confession of faith, are a pair. Finally, there are personal pairs, like the harmony of Franciscans and Dominicans in the sun; examples include the apostles Peter and Paul and Peter and James, compared to cooing doves ("l'uno a l'altro pande / girando e mormorando, l'affezione," 25.19–20), and the frequently mentioned relation of master and disciple.[150]
One reason why Dante imagined such a network of links between sun and Gemini might be found in the Convivio, where certain features of the starry heaven (its 1,022 discernible stars along with the Milky Way, its visible and invisible poles, its daily and precessional motions) signify both the sublunar realm governed by the movements of the sun, whose science is physics, and the incorruptible realm, whose proper science is metaphysics.[151] The starry heaven (the heaven of Gemini) is thus both a sphere of double motion and a horizon between the visible and invisible cosmos. Like the sun, marked with the two reformers and ordered in terms of the two cosmic motions, Dante's heaven of stars is a geminato cielo writ large and small.
More subtle are the returns of the darkest moments of the Inferno— texts whose relevance to the petrose we have already discussed—in the heaven of Gemini. The teeth of love ("con quanti denti questo amor ti morde," Paradiso 26.51) contrast with Ugolino's gnawing on Ruggieri ("riprese il teschio misero coi denti," Inferno 33.77).[152] The wolves who corrupt the church and promote civil war (Paradiso 25.6, 27.55) recall the Guelph (= Welf) Ugolino and his sons as wolves and cubs.[153] The poet's appeal to the Muses ("Polimnïa con le suore," 23.56) for help with
a ponderoso tema that strains his mortal shoulders (omero mortal ) is modeled on the appeal to Amphion's Muses in Inferno 32, where the subject is even weightier.[154] The parallels suggest that the poetics that locks the damned at the center of the earth is to be specifically relaxed in the poetics of the Paradiso, which is modeled after the music of the swiftly whirling spheres.[155] The magnificent paired triumphs of Christ and Mary, and the circolata melodia reenacting Gabriel's seminal annunciation, are the poet's reward (to himself, to the reader) for having endured the burden of describing the fondo, the static center of the cosmos.[156] Thus, the terms for both the inspiration and expression of the writer are of expansiveness and fluidity: meare (23.79), roratelo (24.8), s'io spandessi (24.56), diffondere (24.92), piove (24.135), ploia (24.91), distillò (25.71), stillasti (25.76), repluo (25.79). Compression and rigidity are supplanted by grace and generosity (ubertà, 23.130). Consonant with the larghezza proclaimed by Beatrice, grace is showered on the pilgrim in a profusion of elements: light and heat (fire, dry and hot) appear over thirty times; the breath of the Holy Spirit (air, warm and moist) appears over ten times (cf. "l'alito di Dio," 23.114); water and milk (cold and moist) and food (cold and dry), almost twenty times.[157]
The symptomatic echo of Cocito in Gemini is the opening simile of Canto 23, in which Beatrice, expecting the appearance of Christ, is compared to a mother bird waiting for sunrise so she can forage for her young. The passage is especially important because it is a kind of microcosm of the heaven as a whole. In the simile, Dante transforms the scene of Ugolino watching his sons as the orribile torre is nailed shut (Inferno 33–43–75):
Come l'augello, intra l'amate fronde,
posato al nido de' suoi dolci nati
la notte che le cose ci nasconde,
che, per veder li aspetti disï0ati
e per trovar lo cibo onde li pasca,
in che gravi labor li sono aggrati,
previene il tempo in su aperta frasca,
e con ardente affetto il sole aspetta,
fiso guardando pur che l'alba nasca . . .
(23.1–9)
The parallels are subtle but resonant. To the mother bird in the nest with her young are juxtaposed Ugolino and his sons in the muda, a place where fledglings molt and hawks are tamed; to the concealing
night, the darkness of the nights in the prison; to the mother's eagerness ("previene il tempo") for the light by which she will see her young ("per veder li aspetti disiati"), Ugolino's dreadful premonitions ("già il mio cor s'annunziava," Inferno 33.41) and the sight of his dying children mirroring him ("scorsi / per quattro visi il mio aspetto stesso," 33.56–57). But the differences are critical. In this canto of the Virgin and her Son, the vengeful father is replaced by a careful mother. There are verbal echoes (veder li aspetti and visi . . . aspetto ) but no common rhymes. The bird is on the "aperta frasca" rather than the closed tower ("in che convien ch'altrui si chiuda," Inferno 33.24). What is ordinarily negative becomes positive when illuminated by love: night conceals the chicks and prevents foraging but also evokes the mother's patience and solicitude, as the darkness and terror of the muda is the backdrop for the eucharistic offer of Ugolino's offspring. The grave labor of finding food is cheerfully assumed (note the shift effected between gravi and -grati ) because it is the dolci nati that are to be fed. The changes measure the poetics by which Dante transmutes the blindness, hatred, and despair of Ugolino. Indeed, the passage clearly enshrines the theological virtues: Faith ( previene ), Hope (s'aspetta ), and Love (amata fronda, ardente affetto ).
The remarkable transformations of Ugolino's darkness into the hopefulness of the simile is an effect of the stars of Gemini and of the sun on the poet's ingegno. More directly, they are consequences of that mediation by Beatrice, gazing at the sol salutis, that is the tenor of the whole passage. With respect to the darkness of the Ugolino episode, the sun rises in the text just as it will rise for the mother bird, just as the poet hopes it will rise for him during the erotic and poetic agon of the petrose. Ernesto Proto has noted that the expectation of the mother bird for the rising sun recalls the verses on the Phoenix attributed to Lactantius: "converso novos Phoebi nascentis ad ortus / exspectat radios et iubar exoriens."'[158] The immediate import of the allusion is clear: as the Phoenix expects its resurrection to spring from the fire of the sun, Beatrice will transmit the rising light of promised resurrection to the pilgrim. The Phoenix however is also suggestive as the emblem of a poetics that constantly renews itself. The bird cares instinctively for her chicks, cued by the sun and the design of Nature ("quella virtù ch'è forma per li nidi," Paradiso 18.111). In the present context, however, the bird's love of her environment is a clue to the poet's own love of his linguistic dwelling. The amatefronde reiterate a common synecdoche in
the Commedia for language and poetry.[159] The simile is accordingly rich in echoes of Dante's poetic trajectory. It draws on the topoi of the dawn song, the alba, itself a genre of love poetry; the bird on the bough is a figure of the poet, as in "Io son venuto."[160] The bird in its habitat also invokes Guinizelli's cardinal "Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore," where the ausello nella verdura is compared to Love dwelling naturally in the noble heart, paired with the sun as the power that prepares earth for transformation into a gem.[161] This Phoenix, then, is the poet's genius, acknowledging its repeated reinvigoration by the sun. And no ordinary sun: strikingly, when Beatrice turns to gaze at the sun of Christ, where "il sol mostra men fretta" (that is, nearest the zenith, where the sun appears at noon on the summer solstice), the position of the planetary sun is equinoctial and the simile is of dawn. In what we must call a hyperiotropism, all the cardinal positions of the sun in its diurnal and annual movements are implied.[162] But the passage is further complicated by the maternal imagery—for Beatrice is the antithesis of Ugolino, a father blind to the loving offer of his children and deaf to their requests for consolation. Like the Virgin at the end of the canto, she is a nourishing mother, alma mater.[163] But Beatrice's role is not narrowly that of a mediatrix for the paschal lamb (il benedetto agnello ) that is Christ. Beatrice as a mother attentive to her dolci nati foreshadows the Virgin as nurse to the souls compared to fantolin at the end of the canto.[164] And both Beatrice and the Virgin as nurses focus on the latte . . . dolcissimo of the Muses at 23.57. The feminine sources of the poet's inspiration and nurture are closely related and form a decisive counterpart to his information by the auctores. As shown of the poet's virtù in the cantos of the sun, the heaven of Gemini, which contains an abundance—we should say ubertá —of figurative language (Scaglione counts ten similes in Canto 23), is evidence that the poet, nurtured by the sphere of the galaxy, has drunk the milk of Paradise.[165]
The maternal solicitude of Beatrice and the Virgin are thus more than pretexts for affective poetry. In the heaven of Dante's natal sign, which both begins and ends with allusions to birth (22.112–117, 27.98), the poet's formation and education are implicitly staged. The apostles and the philosophers examine him as if he were a university student, a baccellier. If they have provided spiritual and intellectual food (Dante's adjective is almi, nourishing), the Virgin provides the sustenance of grace and the Muses the inspiration, the latte, of the poetic gift.[166] The topics of feeding and nurture evoke, as well as allegories of the Muses,
infantile contexts and images: the fantolin that reaches for the breast, the mother bird solicitous for her young, the pilgrim as innocent lamb (dormi agnello ).
In fact, throughout the heaven of the fixed stars Dante returns repeatedly to the language of genealogy and filiation. The planets themselves, during the pilgrim's glance down in Canto 22, are arranged as families: Jupiter mediates between father (Saturn) and son (Mars), Mercury is called Maia after his mother, Venus is called Latona after hers. The apostles are fathers and brothers; Beatrice is a sister (suora, 24.28) to Peter. John approaches his fellow apostles and the pilgrim like a virgin debutant ("a la novizia," 23.105); the Church is the bride of Christ; Adam is the old father, padre antico (26.92). Mothers and fathers together imply generation. Beginning the heaven of stars, Dante had referred to his sign as pregnant, "lume pregno di gran vertù." In the balance of the heaven there is direct reference to but a single conception—but it is an important one. The Annunciation is recalled at the center of the triumph of Mary in Canto 23:
"Io sono amore angelico, che giro
l'alta letizia che spira del ventre
che fu albergo del nostro disiro . . ."
(23.103–105)
The circular song of Gabriel around Mary more than commemorates the Annunciation: it is an archetype for the seminal effect of the stars and planets as they circle the sublunar world, and reiterates the specially propitious placement of the heavens at the time of the Incarnation.[167] In the heaven of Gemini, authority and intellect (represented by apostles, philosophers, and the Logos) and a loving nature (Mary, the Muses) celebrate a mystic marriage, a hieròs gamós, whose direct beneficiaries are the mind and imagination of the pilgrim.[168]
Thus, if properly speaking the heaven entered by the pilgrim is a celestial sign, several of its metaphoric names—seno, manto (of the Primum Mobile above it), sfera tondo, arche, ovile, basilica, and especially il bel nido di Leda —argue that Gemini evokes the womb of the pilgrim's gestation, in which he was infused with his physical characteristics, in part by the effect of the stars, in part through the fleshly inheritance from Adam.[169] The poet's formation reiterates the hieròs gamós of the Creation and Incarnation, as does his tuition, a series of infusions from the apostolic and poetic tradition that shape his segnato cervello.[170] Ulti-
mately, the image of the mother bird hovering over the nest is a figure for the care the heavens, revolving around the earth, have exercised in forming the pilgrim-poet, directing his development as the writer who would compose the Commedia .[171] And if Gemini is a figure of the womb, then implicit in the space of the pilgrim's natal sign ("la vostra regïon," 22.120) is also the archetype of the space of the poem itself. As we noted earlier, Plato called the absolute space within which the cosmos is formed the receptacle, or womb (receptaculum, gremium ), of nature: terms Dante then adopts in his treatise for the space—the stanza —in which the poem is elaborated. In Gemini we find albergo for the Virgin's womb, seno for the heaven itself. The sexual metaphor functions equally for the creation and ornatus of the universe, for the information and nurture of the poet, for the matter and form of the poem. The poet's sojourn in Gemini is a happy return to the womb. But it is also a brief one, lasting—not by chance—no longer than Adam's stay in Paradise.
Reversed Polarity
At the center of the vast heaven of Gemini, Dante airs his hopes for the reception of his poem in Florence:
Se mai continga che il poema sacro
al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra,
sì che m'ha fatto per molti anni macro,
vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra
del bello ovil ov' io dormi' agnello,
nimico ai lupi, che li danno guerra;
con altra voce omai, con altro vello
ritornerò poeta, ed in sul fonte
del mio battesmo prenderò 'l cappello.
perchè nella fede, che fa conte
l'anime a Dio, quivi entra' io, e poi
Pietro per lei sì mi girò la fronte.
(Paradiso 25.1–12)
The central position of the passage underlines the relation between the baptismal font, entrance to the faith, and Gemini, the gate to the invisible heavens, associated in the cosmological tradition with the Milky Way.[172] Thus, a ratio is established between the baptismal font, Florence as the sheepfold, and Gemini as the womb, the nido.[173] The triple circling of the pilgrim's brow by Peter echoes the circling of Mary by
Gabriel and ratifies the poet's investiture by the stars. The passage may also derive some of its power from astronomical reference. In the heaven of Gemini, which recalls the sun in the poet's natal sign ("con voi nasceva") at his birth ("quand'io senti' di prima I'aere tosco," 22.117), mention of the vello may also allude to the sun. The vello, as the pairing of agnello and vello in rhyme suggests, is that of the ram—and the ram of Jason's fleece became Aries, the place where the sun rises and sets during the spring equinox.[174] The pilgrim, taking the evergreen crown in San Giovanni, would imitate the most celebrated of returns, the return of the sun to its equinoctial point—the moment celebrated at the beginning of the Paradiso (1.37–42).[175]
The passage also summarizes the concerns we have broached regarding the relation of the petrose to the Commedia.[176] It focuses the inevitable topics of Gemini: the doubleness of human ends, earthly and celestial; the problematic necessity to include and give scope to the negative impulses in the poet in order to understand them and integrate the self. The poema sacro is one to which both heaven and earth have contributed. In the metaphor of the hand of heaven, the operation of the heavens as the tools or instruments of the divine will is implicit. The passage echoes the juxtaposition, in the invocation of Canto 23, of the sacrato poema and the ponderoso tema, of celestial power and burdensome responsibility, of the task of sustaining both heaven and earth.[177] The poems' traverse of earth is recalled: the rhyme on terra/serra/guerra from "Io son venuto" (61–62) echoes the entrance to Cocito, where, in the form of Antaeus, figlio della terra, the earth assists the pilgrim. The aspro poetics returns literally in the consecutive rhymes -acro, -erra, -ello, and emblematically in the poet's altro vello, at once the sign of poetic maturity, the trophy of his quest, and an echo of the vello of Lucifer, which assisted his escape from Hell. The echoes of the petrose and the Inferno suggest that the pilgrim's experience of Hell, and of his own temperament and negativity, have in a sense coauthored his poem.
But the passage also locates many of the problematics we have identified with the petrose: the poet's successful traverse of Hell and his crowning in Gemini contrast starkly with his exclusion from his earthly nido, Florence.[178] The wolves and hounds of Ugolino's dream return in the lupi of civil war that keep the poet from his city. Against the safe enclosures of womb and sheepfold must be placed the strife-torn world, the threshing floor ("l'aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci," 22.151) mentioned at both limits of Gemini. Though the passage begins the canto of Hope,
and appears to express that virtue, the construction is cautious, marked more by resignation than by optimism. The poet's hope for the crown at the place of his baptism echoes Boethius's yearning for the fons boni; but the return envisioned is an earthly one, the crown celebrates poetic virtù rather than the martyr's victory.[179] The abyss separating the pilgrim's crowning by Peter in heaven and the desired but improbable return to Florence creates an effect of intense poignancy.
Ducite Carmina:
The Poem as Charm
Centrally located in the heaven of Gemini, at its focal point so to speak, the verses on the poet's return to Florence have the quality of a magical charm or adjuration. Peter's triple turn around the pilgrim; the subjunctive mood; the embedded mythological and astronomical patterns; the recall of the solemn initiation of baptism, of the poem as sacrato, and of the poet's physical sacrifice—these gestures attempt to harness the implicit power of the poem and refract it as a force capable of breaking the obstinacy of the Florentines. It is a gesture, we have argued, that Dante first learns with the petrose. And it is a gesture that is repeatedly employed in the heaven of Gemini, where what we might call the magical strategies of the petrose as powerful forms that transmit the craft of the poet and of his makers are re-attempted in terms of the much larger stakes of the Commedia.
When the souls ascend, Dante describes their movement as a reverse snowfall:[180]
Sì come di vapor gelati fiocca
in giuso l'aer nostro, quando il corno
della capra del ciel col sol si tocca,
in sù vidi'io Così l'etera adorno
farsi . . .
(27.67–71)
The inversions of direction (flakes fall upward), of element (souls are predominantly fires or lights), and of season (Paradise is an endless summer) are accompanied by the name Capricorn in a periphrasis ("il corno / della Capra") that disassembles and inverts the order of its elements, so that the passage is also a kind of rebus.
The reversal in the natural order is one of a series; reversals frame the heaven of Gemini. Gemini is enclosed by the ladder of Saturn preceding and by the vision of the angelic hierarchies following: that is, first by a vertical, subsequently by a concentric model of procession and re-
turn.[181] The shift from a ladder with angels ascending and descending to a set of circles that reverse center and periphery expresses in symbolic terms the pilgrim's transition from Saturn through Gemini to the Primum Mobile. As readers have seen, the universe turns inside out. In this climate of inversions, both Saturn, at the foot of the ladder, and the Primum Mobile, where the angelic hierarchies are shown in their real order (rather than in relation to their respective spheres), locate striking, explicit inversions. The reference to the Jordan's backward turn (retrorso ) at 22.94 (Gemini begins at 22.100) balances the apparent confusion of the seasons that will result from the centesma negletta in the calendar: after nine thousand years, the equinox, falling in December, will make January a spring month (Gemini ends at 27.98–99). The passage lists two additional reversals, which are in fact rectifications:
Ma prima che gennaio tutto si sverni
per la centesma ch'è là giù negletta,
raggeran sì questi cerchi superni,
che la fortuna che tanto s'aspetta,
le poppe volgerà u' son le prore,
sì che la classe correrà diretta;
e vero frutto verrà dopo '1 fiore.
(27.142–48) [182]
In Dante's conception (a kind of false adynaton ), the turning heavens will effect a reversal of human fortunes. The great event will correspond in effect if not in fact to an apokatastasis —the return of stars, as in the great year, to their original positions. The result will be a new Golden Age. The appearance of the topic of cosmic renewal in this region of Paradise is scarcely casual. Rabuse shows that the topics of the aurea secula accompany the pilgrim's sojourn in the saturnia regna of contemplation and tranquillity of the "monastic" heaven. The mildness of the sphere results from the position of Saturn, a cold planet, in Leo, the house of the sun (Rabuse 1978 20–21). The temperate Saturn of contemplation (anticipated in the opening simile of the seventh bolgia ) is the inversion of the negative Saturn of Hell, dominated by water and cold, and the negative astrological moment of the poet in the petrose, dominated by cold, lust, and weeping.
As in the previous passage, reversals in the natural cosmos are expressed in similar language. The term svernare will be once reiterated ("sbernare," 28.118) and once echoed (by verna at 30.126). Sbernare (from exhibernare ), referring to the angelic hosannahs, means "to greet the spring with song." The paradox of a perpetual transition from winter
to spring anticipates verna of the Empyrean rose, always blossoming in perpetual spring. But svernare at 27.142 also means precisely "to unwinter": the privation signified by the prefix s- is foremost. Like the implied abolition of shadows in "Al poco giorno," svernare negates the season of corruption and privation. And in the subsequent angelic praise, the perpetual refreshment of spring is also affirmed with the negation of a negation, with a spring "che notturno Arïete non dispoglia" ("un-despoiled by a nocturnal Aries"—that is, by a sun in Libra, bringing the autumnal stripping of foliage).[183] Finally, the svernare/ verna group recalls the words of Bocca degli Abate, who quips in Cocito that the traitors are "wintering" there ("dietro a me verna," 33.135), so that the term itself is unwintered, its meaning literally and cosmically reversed.
We saw that in Paradiso 27.67 mention of vapor gelati, of Capricorn and winter, suggests an inversion of seasons that brings the cold of Cocito and the petrose into the text of the Paradiso. But the cold returns in the form of crystal, and it is a cold that emits fire—first tempering the cold of Saturn, then as a shining sun, and finally in the heaven nearest the fire (pyr ) of the Empyrean, the cristallino.[184] In Saturn, Dante sees the golden Jacob's ladder within the crystalline sphere:
Dentro al cristallo che'l vocabol porta,
cerchiando il mondo, del suo caro duce
sotto cui giacque ogne malizia morta,
di color d'oro in che raggio traluce
vid' io uno scaleo eretto in suso
tanto, che nol seguiva mia luce.
(21.25–30)
What follows—the descent of the souls ("tanti splendor," 32) who strike the rungs like sparks ("quello sfavillar," 41), the image of the souls as rooks seeking to warm themselves ("a scaldar")—confirms that the crystal of Saturn is a conduit of light and heat from the Empyrean. In the most stunning implicit reversal within Gemini, John the Evangelist is compared to a crystal bright as the sun, in a passage that includes the only rima tronca (technically an asprezza ) in the entire Paradiso:
Poscia tra esse un lume si schiarì
sì che, se 'l Cancro avesse un tal cristallo,
l'inverno avrebbe un mese d'un sol dì.
(25.100–102)
As Saturn is tempered by its position in the house of the sun, the pairing of the winter sun in Capricorn with a second sun in Cancer (which the sun enters at the summer solstice) is a poetic parhelion, a second or twin sun that abolishes night and winter.[185] The poet's natal sign becomes the zone of surplus light, the gran dì absolutely inverting the poco giorno of the sestina. And in the context of the pilgrim's attempt to see John's body, the double sun prefigures the future coincidence of due stole of soul and glorified body in heaven, the final and complete integration of utranque naturam, as suggested by the mystical interpretation of crystal as a symbol of the Incarnation—and thus in one sense a significant purpose of the poem.[186]
The last crystal in the Paradiso glows with the light of the original fiat lux:
E come in vetro, in ambra, o in cristallo
raggio resplende sì, che dal venire
a l'esser tutto non è intervallo. . . .
(29.25–27)
The three uses of cristallo in the upper heaven bracket Gemini as Gemini is bracketed by Saturn and the Primum Mobile.[187] Each higher mention of crystal is more inclusive and glowing with a more exalted light: cristallo of Saturn refers only to the planet; in Gemini the term refers to a soul compared to a sun; but in the crystalline heaven itself ("il sovrano edificio del mondo, che tutti gli altri inchiude") it is a term of comparison for the whole cosmos: the cosmos as a crystal instantaneously filled with the Creator's light.[188]
In the heaven of Gemini, where the poet's imagination is, in a sense, nearest its source, Dante's wish to imagine his poetic virtù as efficacious, like the will of God himself, comes to the surface. The passages discussed above show parallels with specific devices in the petrose that raise the question of poetic effectiveness. The upward snowfall, the return of the Jordan, and the backward slip of January closely resemble the adynata of the sestina, which cautiously imagine circumstances in which the lady might be transformed, the bright solstice of her consent achieved.[189] Other reversals—the notturno Arïete, the winter sun in Cancer—echo the nocturnal risings and horoscopic inversions that shape the latent power of "Io son venuto." The increasingly inclusive crystals of the upper spheres match the struggle toward first principles that moves "Amor, tu vedi ben"; the light that fills those crystals recalls
the poet's hope of using the beauty and luminosity of his poem to stir the petra. And the verses at the center of Gemini, as if they were the focal point of the entire vast heaven, render explicit, as in "Così nel mio parlar," the hope that the poem will move hearts that are hardened to him—as if the capital acquired in creating the forms of the petrose, and in representing the whole cosmos, were sufficient to alter the historical reality of his city. Like the petrose, conceived as talismans directed to changing the lady's mind, the Commedia would be the poet's Archimedean point, from which he might move the political and religious renewal that his direct participation had failed to achieve.[190] The Commedia might thus be thought of as a great crystal, its composition reflecting both the celestial influence intrinsic in its author—his horoscope—and his personal judgment, desire, and acquired skill.[191]
The attempt to fashion a poem that will have genuine power is marked by terrible risk. As in the case of the petrose, it isolates the poet in a fictional world, a representation of the cosmos that must be truly inspired, truly the result of heavenly causes, if it is to have authenticity and success. When Dante invokes the centesma negletta, the error of the Julian calendar, in his prophecy of a coming reform, he runs the prophet's customary risk of being refuted by events. But not only that risk: the neglected hundredth is also a measure of the inaccuracy of his own poem in relation to the real cosmos. Dante knew, of course, that the conventional date of the equinox (March 21) was in error by more than a week: in 1300 the true equinox fell on March 12. The dates and positions of the planets in the poem were thus—for Dante—all slightly out of focus. Such an error was perhaps negligible and no doubt rhetorically justified, as Moore has convincingly argued. But another much greater and more important error is not so easily dismissed, and to this error Dante may also have alluded with his mention of the centesma negletta. We refer, of course, to the precession of the equinoxes, by which (as Dante reckoned it) the position of the equinox on the zodiac precessed eastward one degree every hundred years, or 1/100 degree per year—a centesma.[ 192] Otherwise excluded from Dante's astronomical calculations for the Commedia, this amount coincides almost exactly with the error in the Julian calendar of eleven minutes per year.[193] Thus, assuming the astronomical conventions of the Commedia, in the nine thousand years required for the equinox to fall in late December because of the error in the calendar, the equinox would precede into Capri-
corn, and the winter solstice would fall in Libra: an inversion of solstices and equinoxes. But already in Dante's day the error was considerable; the equinox was in Pisces, and Dante's natal stars were perhaps not those of Gemini but of Taurus (see Figures 3 and 4).
If the Commedia is treated simply as a fiction, these variances between convention and reality perhaps do not matter very much. But what of the announced intent of changing the Florentines and reforming the corrupt world? Dante's evocation of the neglected fraction, the temporal margin of error, opens the possibility that he was aware that his poem would have to renounce its hope (its pretense?) of power deriving from the stars and planets.[194] Once again, the possibility of the poem's being fraudulent (though deeply implicit) haunts Dante. If he read Isidore and Marbodus on precious stones, he also read that the distinction of true ones from counterfeits was extremely difficult.[195]
The petrose are thus truly microcosmic of the Commedia, truly the great poem in nuce: not only in their experiments in diction and realism, in their greater inclusiveness of negative themes; not only in their dazzling formal complexity and daring—they are also prototypical of the Commedia in their intentions and in the problematic that besets them, in their aspirations for the power and consequence of poetry and in their haunting intuition of its limits. It is not merely that Dante draws on the astronomical and natural themes of the petrose; the specific problematic of the petrose is assumed into the body and problematic of the Commedia, the poema grows out of the nucleus of the lyrics, which remain central to it. Although the theme of reification is part of their problematic, the petrose do not exemplify it in their poetics, which demonstrate, as perhaps no other juncture of Dante's career as a lyric poet does so well, his capacity for self-transformation through his craft.
The Golden Bough
At the beginning of the Paradiso, the example invoked for the poet's inspiration is the flaying, or turning inside out, of Marsyas the satyr. As Edgar Wind puts it in his analysis of this passage, "To obtain the 'beloved laurel' of Apollo the poet must pass through the agony of Marsyas" (Wind 1968 174). The full import of this figure is complex; we wish to note here that the poet's self-comparison to Marsyas and invocation of Apollo anticipate the poet's apostrophe of his natal constella-
tion in Canto 22 (see Chapter 2). In addition to the theme of facing a difficult trial (lavoro, aringo, passo forte . . .), the key terms spirare, virtù and the metaphor of birth are central to both passages:
O buono Appollo, all'ultimo lavoro
fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso,
come dimandi a dar l'amato alloro.
Infino a qui l'un giogo di Parnaso
assai mi fu; ma or con amendue
m'è uopo intrar nell'aringo rimaso.
Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue
sì come quando Marsïa traesti
de la vagina de la membra sue.
O divina virtù, se mi ti presti
tanto che l'ombra del beato regno
segnata nel mio capo io manifesti . .
(1.13–24)
O glorïose stelle, o lume pregno
di gran virtù, dal quale io riconosco
tutto, qual che si sia, il mio ingegno,
con voi nasceva e s'ascondeva vosco
quelli ch'è padre d'ogne mortal vita
quand'io senti' di prima l'aere tosco. . . . .
A voi divotamente ora sospira
l'anima mia, per acquistar virtute
al passo forte ch'a sé la tira.
(22.112–117, 121–123)
The powerful image of Marsyas drawn from his own skin associates the infusion of a new poetics with a birth, as in "Io son venuto," and anticipates the moment of departure from the sign of Gemini, when the pilgrim is drawn up from the nest of Leda by the force of Beatrice's glance:
E la virtù che lo sguardo m'indulse,
del bel nido di Leda mi divelse
e nel ciel velocissimo m'impulse.
(27.97–99)
We have already characterized this passage as a kind of birth: it establishes, in concert with the image of Marsyas flayed, the idea of Dante's upward motion in Paradise as a succession of births into higher and higher levels. In an ultimate reversal, the pilgrim's vision, in the Pri-
mum Mobile, of heaven turned inside out is the realization, on a metaphysical level, of the flaying of Marsyas.
In fact, Dante's verb divellere (27.98) is etymologically a synonym for flaying (dis-vellere, from vellere, itself meaning "to tear away," and vellus, "pelt, fleece"). The verb recurs at major transitional moments in the poem. Arriving in Purgatory, the pilgrim is cleansed by a rush that is marvelously replaced ("cotal si rinacque / subitamente là onde l'avelse," Purgatorio 1.136). And shortly before, the pilgrim uses divellere to describe his imminent separation from the abyss of Hell ("'Prima ch'io de l'abisso mi divella,"' Inferno 34.100). It is difficult not to conclude that Dante, in this last use, is punning on the method of departure used, that of climbing hand over hand along the thick pelt of Satan:
appigliò sé a le vellute coste;
di vello in vello giù discese poscia
tra'l folto pelo e le gelate croste.
(34–73–75) [196]
Vello and divella in the Inferno thus become avelse in the Purgatorio and divelse in the pilgrim's departure from Gemini. An etymological thread, whose denominators are the verb divellere and the idea of passage or birth, links moments of transition from the cosmic low point of the Inferno to the heaven of Gemini.
Dante's progress as a pilgrim might thus be characterized as a series of births that move him first downward, then upward to new and more inclusive horizons of vision and understanding. In view of the petrose, heralded by the birth of Gemini from the horizon in "Io son venuto," the same may be said of his poetics. That Dante was a ceaseless experimenter who never repeated himself has become a critical commonplace. The ultimate practical failure of his poems set aside, our reading strongly suggests that Dante consciously understood his poetics as a perpetual self-renewal, never achieved without cost. This poetics he announces, and brings to full consciousness, in the rigorous officina of the rime petrose.
Flaying and birth are thus the reverse and obverse of one concept, that of poetic achievement both as a form of martyrdom (we recall Michelangelo's self-portrait [inspired by Marsyas?] on the flayed skin of Bartholomew in the Sistine Last Judgment ) and as access to a new voice—in poetic terms, a new life. In the Aeneid, the plucking of the
golden bough determines the election of Aeneas to journey to the underworld. Virgil's verbs, twice forms of avellere, are surely behind Dante's preference for similar forms at critical junctures of his poem and constitute implicit claims to his election for katabasis and return.[197] The golden frond (auricomos ) is paired with the Golden Fleece. In the moving verses at the center of Gemini, the changed poetic voice is paired with a new skin:
con altra voce omai, con altro vello
ritornerò poeta.
Vello, with all its other meanings, may imply the poet's death and return to Florence in the form of a book: his voice, writing; his vello, the vellum of a manuscript; his recognition, posthumous—but in the form of the evergreen ivy or laurel accorded to poets, perennial.[198]
Notes
Introduction
1. Paradiso 8.34-37 associate it with Charles Martel's visit to Florence in March of that year; see Dante 1965 2:343-346.
2. See the careful summaries of the debates in Fenzi 1966 230 and 286-294.
3. "Tra i problemi più dibattuti della bibliografia dantesca è quello circa l'identificazione della così detta donna Pietra. In fondo, il problema non ha ragione di porsi, perché la donna Pietra è semplicemente il legame che unisce le liriche più tecnicistiche di Dante, nelle quali l'energia lessicale e la rarità delle rime si trasformano, a norma di 'contenuto', nel tema della donna aspra, dell'amore difficile" (Contini, in Dante 1946 149; cf. Fenzi 1966 286-287).
4. The most careful elaboration of this view is Blasucci 1957 (also in Blasucci 1969).
5. "La leggittima ammirazione corrente per questa serie suggestiva deve pur lasciar chiaro come, innanzi ai 'frammenti' di poesia petrosa che s'articolano nella Commedia (per esempio il cerchio dei traditori), l'ispirazione delle petrose appaia, essa, radicalmente 'frammentaria"' (Contini, in Dante 1946 xxi). See Fenzi 1966 293-294 n .21.
6. The first critic who seems to us to have recognized the psychological and ethical seriousness of any of the petrose is Peter Dronke, in his three pages on "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro" (1968 164-166).
7. We discuss the grounds for this dating in Chapter 2, pp. 80-81.
8. On all aspects of Dante's biography, see Petrocchi 1978; for Dante's birthdate, see pp. 1-5. In both versions of his life of Dante, the Trattatello in laude di Dante, Boccaccio gives only the years of Dante's birth and death; in the Esposizioni sopra il Dante, however, explaining that "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" refers to Dante's age as thirty-five in 1300, he relates:
E che egli fosse così assai ben si verifica per quello che già mi ragionasse un valente uomo, chiamato ser Piero di messer Giardino da Ravenna, il quale fu uno de' più intimi amici e servidori che Dante avesse in Ravenna, affermandomi avere avuto da Dante, giaccendo egli nella infermità della quale e' mori, lui avere di tanto trapassato il cinquantesimosesto anno, quanto dal preterito maggio avea infino a quel dì. E assai ne consta Dante essere morto negli anni di Cristo ICCCXXI, dì XIIII di settembre; per che, sottraendo ventuno di cinquantasei, restano trentacinque.
(Boccaccio 1965 20; see Padoan's note 6, p. 775) break
If this testimony is accepted, corroborated as it is by Dante's own indication (in Paradiso 22.110-120) that he was born under Gemini (and it is perhaps inherently less likely to have been distorted by Boccaccio's love of "literary schemas" than other matters), we can at least locate the date of Dante's birth in the period between the entrance of the sun into Gemini, which in 1265 took place on May 13, and the end of the month (Petrocchi does not mention Boccaccio's testimony on this point, apparently regarding it as untrustworthy). See Chapter 2, notes 8, 32.
9. The two had been betrothed as children in 1277, according to Florentine custom; we do not know when they were actually married.
10. Both of Dante's sons, Pietro and Iacopo, would have to have been of legal age (at least fifteen) when they were included in the commune's sentence of death against Dante in 1315. Thus both of them, and possibly a third son who may have died in childhood, must have been born by 1300.
11. See Petrocchi 1978 18-30; Dante's entrance into politics was made possible by the new Ordinamenti di Giustizia of 1295, which lifted the ban on lesser nobles' running for office.
12. It is not entirely certain whether Dante was sent on the mission of November 1300 or that of October 1301 (the traditional view); see Petrocchi 1978 29-30.
13. The question of the sequence and dating of Dante's other canzoni is so vexed, and the petrose represent on the whole so radical a departure from them, that for the most part we simply leave them to one side. On the several canzoni that seem to have special connections with the petrose, see Chapter 4, note 48.
14. See below, "The Problematic of the Petrose ."
15. See especially Blasucci 1957.
16. Price 1970 123; on the Toledan and Alfonsine tables, see also Millas Vallicrosa 1943-50. Such patterns as Charles S. Singleton (1965a) established for the lengths of cantos around the center of the Commedia may depend on the use of the new Arabic numerals; the technique of casting out of nines, however, is ancient (see Martianus Capella 2.103-105 on the numerology of the names of Mercury and Philologia). For optics in the thirteenth century, see Crombie 1953.
17. For an excellent survey of Dante's scientific and philosophical ideas, see Boyde 1981. The best discussion of Dante's astronomical conceptions is Buti and Bertagni 1966; see also d'Alverny 1970; Moore 1895; and Orr 1957. For general discussions of the science of Dante's day, see Crombie 1959; and the very useful volume by Edward Grant (1979). For a useful survey of astrology in Dante, see Kay 1988 147-162.
18. For the concept in general, see Allers 1944; Rico 1970, esp. 11-107; Barkan 1975; and Kurdzialek 1971. For the twelfth century, see Gregory 1956; d'Alverny 1953; and Chenu 1976. For the concept of a literary work as microcosmic in the Neoplatonic tradition, see Coulter 1976.
19. See Olerud, and F. M. Cornford's useful commentary (1937).
20. Macrobius 1970a; there is an English translation by W. H. Stahl (1952). For the Timaeus in the Middle Ages, see Klibanksy 1939; Gregory 1958, esp. continue
chap. 4, "Il Timeo e i problemi del platonismo medievale"; and Chenu 1976 108-141.
21. Plato 1962. Calcidius ends at Timaeus 53 b.
22. Timaeus 36b (Plato 1961 1166). Calcidius translates the passage:
Tunc hanc ipsam seriem in longum secuit et ex una serie duas fecit easque mediam mediae in speciem chi Graecae litterae coartavit curvavitque in orbes, quoad coirent inter se capita, orbemque orbi sic inseruit, ut alter eorum adverso, alter obliquo circuitu rotarentur, et exterioris quidem circuli motum eundem, quod erat eiusdem naturae consanguineus, cognominavit, interioris autem diversum; atque exteriorem quidem circulum, quem eundem cognominatum esse diximus, a regione dextra per sinistrum latus eidem et simili illi circumactioni virtute pontificioque rotatus dato. Unam quippe, ut erat, eam et indivisam reliquit, interiorem vero scidit sexies septemque impares orbes fabricatus est iuxta dupli et tripli spatia orbesque ipsos contraria ferri iussit agitatione.
23. For an analysis of the Timaeus itself as mirroring the structure of the human body—and thus of the cosmos—see Brague 1985.
24. For detailed discussions of microcosmic form in other important texts known to have influenced Dante—Virgil's Fourth Eclogue and the third book of Seneca's Naturales quaestiones —see, respectively, Büchner 1955 1196-1211; and Durling 1975 97-100.
25. See Gibson 1981; and Chadwick 1981.
26. See the excellent survey of the entire question in Tateo 1970.
27. Not much effective analysis has yet been carried out of the formal structure of the Consolatio. Chamberlain 1970 is an extremely careful and useful survey of references to music in the Consolatio. He shows (pp. 86-89) that 1 m.5 ("O stelliferi conditor orbis") and 3 m.12 ("Si vis celeri") refer to the main classifications of the musica mundana as set forth in De musica 1; he shows that the entire work is governed by the idea that "the world music should be used by man to order his own moral and intellectual activity" (p. 90), indeed, that the idea of music is in a sense the most fundamental one in the work; yet his discussion asks only what explicit or implicit statements about music are to be found within the Consolatio, and never raises the question of the relation of the structure of the poems (or of the work as a whole) to these principles. Gruber 1978 has important observations on the symmetrical arrangement of the various meters around "O qui perpetua" (pp. 19-24) but focuses almost entirely on questions of doctrine and sources (on "O qui perpetua," see pp. 277-290); Lerer 1985 (on "O qui perpetua," see pp. 138-145) and Crabbe 1981 have virtually no formal analysis; Scarry 1980 is based on extremely vague criteria. There really has been little advance beyond Fritz Klingner's suggestive discussion (1921).
28. As has generally been recognized; and cf. Gruber's observation on the place of "O qui perpetua" among the various meters (see last note).
29. This translation departs from the way the verse was understood in the Middle Ages: as most of the commentaries agree, "triplicis . . . naturae" was understood as a modifier to animam rather to mediam; see Gregory 1958 4-5 continue
and nn.; and Courcelle 1967 277, 293, 295. Gruber so takes the phrase (1978 282), referring to Timaeus 35a-36b (quoted above, p. 9). Dante seems to have understood the verse as we do, as a reference to the position of the soul as the mean between the two extremes. See Chapter 1, notes 30 and 31.
30. Text from Boethius 1957 51-52.
31. Courcelle 1967 271-274. For the doctrinal background, see Klingner 1921; Theiler 1964 (also in Theiler 1966); Theiler 1970; and Scheible 1972. Scheible's balanced discussion of the question of Boethius's debt in this poem to Proclus's commentary on the Timaeus (see esp. pp. 109-112) in our opinion rightly emphasizes the difference between the two writers' philosophical positions (a difference in our view due largely to Boethius's monotheistic Christianity). Scheible also demonstrates Boethius's use of Plotinus in several passages of 3 m.9. For the medieval discussions of the orthodoxy of Boethius's views, see Courcelle 1967 275-332; and Gregory 1958 2-15.
32. See Tateo 1970 657; and Kranz 1967. For additional parallels, see Chapter 6, pp. 229, 231-235.
33. As established by Norden (1913).
34. "Boethius more prisco ab invocationibus exordium sumit, parte media virtutes factaque dei praedicat, denique preces profert" (Klingner 1921 40).
35. He concludes: "In hymnis vero heroicis versibus compositis, Boethius quantum scio primus eo usus est. Qui hymnum Platonicum ad antiquissimam formam compositum illo quasi vertice addito ad pulchritudinem perfectam adduxit" (ibid.).
36. The completion of the pagan hymn with the conclusion pointed out by Klingner is a formal correlative of Boethius's ambition to preserve the achievements of classical philosophy in the Christian context: implicitly the claim is made that pagan philosophy prepares for Christianity, and Christianity crowns and completes it.
37. As Klingner (1921) showed, the terminology reflects the late Neoplatonic identification of the Good with the One; he argued that Proclus was the main influence. See above, note 31; and below, notes 39 and 40.
38. Klingner's discussion of the conclusion continues: "Sic enim reditus animae non solum desideratur et poscitur, sed quodam modo in ipso hymno agitur. Et sicut in ceteris versibus qui praecedunt res a deo productae et rursus revocatae et ad eum festinantes explicantur et verbis quasi expanduntur, ita in extremis omnis ille tamquam decursus et recursus rerum in quinque nomina eius contrahitur, postremo omnia velut in unum punctum in illud idem concurrunt" (1921 61-62). One wishes he had developed this insight further; it has gone unnoticed by later commentators.
39. Sheldon-Williams (in Armstrong 1967 429-431) writes:
For pagan and Christian alike, the cosmos is modelled on the Forms, which are located in the Mind of God. Therefore a proper understanding of the creation leads to the knowledge of the Mind of the Creator, and therefore of the Creator himself. The discourse of Scripture and the variety of nature reveal the same truth because their unifying principle is the same. The Scriptures express the Word of God, which, like the Neo- soft
platonic Intellect ( Noûs ) is the pleroma of all the Forms ( noetà ). . . . As power [the forms] are creative ( ousiopoioí ), as light they lead the creature back to its Creator: for they are the rays ( phôta, aktînes, augaî ) of which God is the Sun, the apprehensible aspect of divinity, whether intelligible or visible, through which he communicates himself to the minds and sense of his creatures, and through that knowledge draws them back to him, for "knowledge is a kind of conversion."
Thus the Christians shared with the Platonists the conception of universal nature as rest-in-motion or motion-in-rest consisting of three aspects: the eternally abiding First Principle; a procession therefrom through the Forms into their effects; and a return of the effects through the Forms to their First Principle. The names given to these aspects, by Platonist and Christian alike, were monê, próodos, epistrophé; but also, because every intelligible and creative principle abides what it is, and in order to accomplish its will emits power, which achieves its effect when the intention which emitted it is fulfilled, they were given the names ousia, dunamis, energeia.
The latter triad, which does not feature prominently in Neoplatonism, tended, after the ps.-Dionysius, to be preferred by Christians, since it was more convenient than the other for the exposition of a doctrine of creation (God effecting his will) as opposed to one of emanation (an automatic process).
40. Mente in line 7 refers to the transcendent principle of Mind ( noús in Neoplatonic terminology), assimilated to the Christian idea of the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, in an ablative of means, as holding the Ideas of things ( gerens, line 8); this is a version of Augustine's theory of the ideae seminales, based on John I: "through him were all things made"; cf. Gregory 1962, chap. 2, "Mediazione e incarazione." Menti in line 22 refers to the created analog of noûs aspiring to knowledge of it. So also forma boni in line 6 corresponds to fontem boni in line 23 (the referents are identical). As the terms applied to Soul here echo those used of God in the first section, so also the parallelism of convertit in line 17 with conversas in line 21 (noted above) establishes a descending chain of analogies.
41. As this poem occurs in the central book of five; cf. Klingner's observation that there are five names for God in the last line (note 38 above). See below, note 46.
42. This is not arbitrary; Boethius was fluent in Greek as well as in Latin, and he was used to thinking of the Roman letters (which existed exclusively in capitals and uncials, minuscules not having yet been invented) as counterparts of the Greek: Roman A was for him physically identical with Greek capital alpha; the long O of many Latin endings corresponded to the Greek omega endings, as every schoolboy knew. For end-at-beginning and beginning-at-end, cf. the pattern in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, of line 5, "Ultima . . . ," and line 70, "Incipe. . . ."
43. See Freccero 1983 15-16. Considering the intense attention to detail that the poem evinces, it would not be fanciful to see its thematic alpha and omega in the first and last vowels of the last word of line 2 ( aevo ), where the sense is continue
again the circle. Tempus ab aevo: time is set in motion from eternity, its alpha which is also its telos (its omega ), toward which it turns and therefore circulates.
44. We mentioned above that there are alternative ways of dividing the poem. In addition to 1-6, 6-21, 22-28, and 1-9, 10-21, 22-28 (which gives sections of nine, twelve, and seven lines), the marginal line numbers may suggest another division, into groups of seven, according to which lines 1-7 would concern God, 8-14 and 15-21 the structure of the world, and 22-28 the return of the mind to God. In any division, of course, three lines go to the elements, five to the World-Soul, four to the lesser souls, and seven to the petition, which, as we have seen, breaks naturally into two groups of three and four lines. The sharply distinguished nature of the last line of the poem, combined with the clear break after line 9, may suggest that the poem can also be conceived as three groups of nine plus one, though it must be admitted that the clear break comes after line 17 rather than 18.
45. Dante's structuring of "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna" probably owes much to his study of this aspect of "O qui perpetua"; see Chapter 4, pp. 158-162.
46. Among its other microcosmic aspects, there is also evidence that Boethius thought of the poem in terms of numerical composition, especially that number is cited as the binder of the elements (terms with obvious application to poetry, which by definition is built of harmonious numerical proportion among syllables written in elementa—letters; see pp. 22-28, 315-317, for Dante's use of the term ligare to refer to the construction of the canzone stanza). The nominative and other forms of the second-person pronoun occur for a total of either nine or ten times, depending on whether one counts tuo (line 26). If one counts the emphatic series of substantives at the end of the poem, beginning in line 26, including idem as one of them (the quantity of the i marks it as a masculine nominative), the result is exactly nine. Furthermore, da occurs three times in lines 22-23, and the relative pronoun qui/quem occurs three times in lines 1-4. That three is of major significance—no doubt trinitarian—is assured by its explicit occurrence in triplicis . . . naturae, just after the reference to number as the binder of the elements in line 10, and it cannot be accidental that all five lines on the World-Soul have fifteen syllables. It is worth considering also that the number twenty-eight (an exfoliation of the perfect number seven) has a special status in Neoplatonic lore. Macrobius (1970a 29-31) enumerates the following significances: it is the length of the lunar month, as seven is of the week; it is the sum of the first seven digits; it is the number of weeks after which the human fetus may first live if born.
47. Further analysis would no doubt reveal that "O qui perpetua" is a microcosm of the Consolatio in many other ways as well.
48. See pp. 10-II above.
49. The most useful edition is that by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo (Dante 1979a), which includes an Italian translation and a useful commentary.
50. In addition to Mengaldo's 1979 edition, see his 1968 edition (Dante 1968) and the useful Pazzaglia 1967; Marigo's controversial edition (Dante 1957a) is often useful for commentary.
51. See Chapter 1. break
52. What follows reflects qualified agreement with Pazzaglia 1967.
53. See Monterosso 1970b.
54. Pazzaglia seems to us to have excessively reacted against Marigo's excessive vagueness on this point. Poetic form, as distinct from musical form, imitates the musica mundana in sharply definable ways. The distinction Pazzaglia seeks to draw between Platonic and Aristotelian phases, we believe, lacks foundation: "Dante lascia cadere ogni considerazione della musica 'mundana' e 'umana'. . . . Pur tenendo fermo il principio della proporzione e dell'armonia cosmica, lo interpreta in chiave aristotelico-scolastica, e cioè fisica e naturalistica, piuttosto che matematica. . . . La musica, per Dante, non ha più alcun diretto addentellato metafisico, ma è un'ars con propri caratteri specifici e una propria capacità agogica sulla psicologia dell'uomo" (Pazzaglia 1967 21-22). It is true that music and poetry have each their own autonomy for Dante; that there is no "diretto addentellato metafisico" is overstated.
55. Nancy Vine Durling reminds us of Erich Auerbach's use of this analogy (Auerbach 1953 106) to characterize the laisse of the Chanson de Roland. Auerbach's perceptive remark would seem to be an unconscious echo of the De vulgari eloquentia.
56. 2.xiii.10 seems to contradict itself on this point; see Appendix 4, note 17.
57. See Appendix 4, note 18.
58. See Appendix 4, note 14.
59. This may be the case also in his disdain for lines with an even number of syllables: see 2.v.7; and Appendix 4, notes 6 and 7.
60. This last phrase is somewhat obscure; we believe Mengaldo's translation, "solo per il prestigio dei modelli riconosciuti" ("solely because of the prestige enjoyed by the recognized models [of canzone form]") does not account for the freedom to depart from the models which Dante is assigning to the poet. Rather, Dante's point would seem to be either (1) that the canzone itself, because of its preeminence among vernacular forms, has this authority or (2) that the composition ofcanzoni is ideally restricted to those who have the discretion to make intelligent use of this freedom, in other words to those poets who possess authority, like Dante himself. We incline to the second interpretation, which is consistent with the position explicitly taken in 2.1, where the use of the vulgare illustre latium is restricted to the optime poetantes—the best poets—and in 2.2, where the canzone is identified as the form most suited for the vulgare illustre.
61. See Mengaldo's notes in Dante 1979a 230-233. On Dante's reference to "Amor, tu vedi ben," see Appendix 1.
62. For the iconography of the creation of the world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, see Zahlten 1969 153-156 and plates 123, 167, 180, 269, 282, 284, 286-290 (many of these show God holding scales as well as compasses); and cf. Friedmann 1974 (and Par. 19.40). For cosmic binding, see Lapidge 1980, whose argument is seriously flawed in omitting from consideration the obvious dependence of most of the passages discussed on Anchises' speech in Aeneid 6.
63. As we show in Chapter 3, this last use of the term in this poem is generic in appearance only: it conceals a specific term.
64. See Boyde 1981 248-255. break
65. See ibid., 263-265.
64. See Boyde 1981 248-255. break
65. See ibid., 263-265.
66. Naturales Historiae 36 and 37.
67. Etymologiarum liber 16 ( PL 82.562-577).
68. Evans (1922) prints a number of Latin and French lapidaries. See also Evans 1933, 1953; Pannier 1882; Albertus Magnus 1967, apps. B and D; and Thorndike 1923-58, vols. 2 and 3.
69. Echoed in Inferno 5 by Francesca's "Amor, che nel cor gentil ratto s'apprende." See also Chapter 3, note 32.
70. This is especially evident because in the traditional doctrine of love Guinizelli is assuming, the lover's desire takes on the form of the beloved as telos (as in Virgilio's discussion in Purgatorio 18.37-39).
71. See below, note 86.
72. Summa theologica Ia, quaest. 70, art. 1. This is the view taken by Beatrice in her explanation of the cause of the spots on the moon in Paradiso 2. There were differences of opinion as to the degree and nature of the heavenly influences, of course; as Nardi pointed out, Aquinas sometimes regarded their influence as a motus ad formam rather than the imposition of form.
73. See the lucid outline in Nardi 1967a 69-95.
74. This adaptation of Ptolemy's and ibn Haitham's treatises on optics was the standard Western text until Kepler.
75. See Crombie 1953 128-134; Crombie 1959 1:99-113. Cf. McEvoy 1982 149-222; and Mazzeo 1960 56-90 and, for the "light-metaphysics" in the Commedia, 91-132.
76. On Albert as a natural scientist, see Thorndike 1923-58 2:517-592; and Weisheipl 1980.
77. See also Riddle and Mulholland 1980.
78. See Chapter 1, pp. 53-54; and Chapter 2, notes 67-68.
79. As Nardi showed (1967 34-58), Albert's views on the development of the fetus were adopted by Dante in several respects where Albert differed sharply from Aquinas.
80. They include Aristotle's Mineralogica, Epiphanius of Constantinople, Avicenna's Liber de congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum (Holmgard and Mandeville 1927), Marbodus, and the encyclopedist Thomas of Cantimpré; see Grant 1987 615-624. On Albert's use of Arnold of Saxony and Thomas of Cantimpré, see Albertus Magnus 1967 68-70.
81. Quaestiones naturales 3.12; Seneca 1961. Interesting and characteristic is the Ovidian turn of phrase, "qui fuerat, aequore erat, fiat super aequora saxum."
82. Evidently Hermes Trismegistus; the text Albert is citing has not been identified; see 1967 273-274.
83. As Nardi showed (1960 69-101), Albert's doctrine of the virtus loci is an extension of Aristotle's notion of the natural place of the elements. See the edition of the De natura loci by Paul Hossfeld (Albertus Magnus 1976); and Hossfeld 1969, 1978.
84. There is a further analogy with the digestion and assimilation of food, Mineralium liber 1.1.8 (1967 12). Albert insists, however, that the vis mineralis is not a soul.
85. This is not strictly true, however, since in Albert's emanationism, based continue
on the Liber de causis, the first axiom is that any superior cause always acts more strongly than an inferior one that it acts through. See De causis et processu universitatis 2.1.5 (Albertus Magnus 1890-99 10:441-442).
86. The translation has been revised. Albert is not drawing a comparison: the intentio of the angelic intelligence looking into the mind of God is the formal cause of the shaping of the sublunar (as in Guinizelli's poem), though transferred to the vis mineralis. See Nardi 1967b 97-99, 29-31.
87. E.g., De causis et processu universitatis (Albertus Magnus 1890-99 10: 385, 387, 409, 453, 509). "Quod cum intelligentia sit plena formis, imprimit illas formas in materiam per corpora celestia tamquam per instrumenta" (cf. ibid. 2.2.21, pp. 510-511) is one of the propositions condemned by the bishop of Paris in 1277 as heretical (Albert died in 1280). Aquinas, too, seems aimed at in the condemnation of this thesis; see Litt 1963 174-185; Wipfel 1977.
88. All this power is "poured" into the matter itself—Albert had not encountered Occam's razor, "Entia non sunt multiplicanda"! (See Litt 1963 110-148.) The more he tries to free himself from the astrological theory, the more he involves himself in it and in its tendency to personify the forces of nature.
89. Dante states the analogy explicitly in Paradiso 2, a passage that is closely related to Albertus Magnus's conception; see Chapter 2, note 75.
90. We discuss this passage, and other connections of parts of the Commedia with the petrose, in Chapters 2 and 6.
91. Dante 1964 2:16-18. We leave out of consideration here the question of Dante's views on the possible intellect.
92. This was a well known branch of "white" (non-infernal) magic, amply attested from late antiquity and important enough that a fairly large number of treatises exist on it; these are listed by Thorndike 1947. The most important is the Lapidario del rey d. Alfonso X, which classes stones and images according to whether they owe their power to a constellation, a star, a zodiacal sign, a decan, or a planet; there is a facsimile edition of the whole (Fernando-Guerra and de Madrazo 1881) and of the first part (Brey-Mariño 1982).
93. This accounts, in Albert's view, for the fact that many ancient gems have lost their virtus: the precession of the equinoxes has robbed them of it ( Mineralium liber 2.3.3).
94. We accept the ordering of the four poems established by Michele Barbi, as do most modern critics; see Dante 1969; Dante 1979d 192.
95. The self-division of the poet's nature in the poems is one of the important meanings of the mystifying phrase "il geminato cielo" in the first petrosa; see Chapter 2, pp. 95, 106-108. On the solitude of the poet in his cosmos, see Chapter 2, note 2; Chapter 4, pp. 163-164.
96. For the topical references that offer some clues to the chronology of the composition of the Commedia, see Petrocchi 1978.
1— Early Experiments:Vita nuova 19
1. So, for instance, Michele Barbi, in his introduction to the Convivio (Dante 1964 xxv n .1): "La Vita nuova prima di quest'applicazione doveva esser già composta, perché altrimenti non si giustificherebbe la citazione di quell'opera per continue
provare che avanti tali sue letture e tali suoi studi 'molte cose quasi come sognando già vedea."' The misunderstanding rests on the ambiguity of Dante's last phrase, in which the già and the imperfect vedea can be taken to refer to a time before the readings referred to, if one disregards the fact that avea and potea are also imperfects and thus do not support the distinction. But now that it is established that the Consolatio and the De amicitia were in fact important influences on the Vita nuova (see next note), it is clear that the passage means, "once having penetrated into those books, I saw many things in them, as can be seen from the Vita nuova, but imperfectly (in the light of the better comprehension that I now have), thus as if dreaming." On the whole passage, see Dante 1988 201-212.
2. See esp. De Robertis 1970 60-68. Nardi (1967a 201) comments: "Questo libro di Boezio non è affatto vero che fosse poco conosciuto. Era anzi una delle opere più lette e commentate dai dotti nelle scuole, ed era largamente penetrato persino nelle letterature volgari." The Consolatio is a protreptic—that is, one of its aims is to win adherents to the study of philosophy; as such, it is very much suited for an introductory course, one of the reasons it was so frequently used in schools. It may well have been one of the first texts Dante heard discussed. See the review of recent scholarship on the Florentine studia in Davis 1984 and Dante 1988 204-210.
3. Tateo 1970 is an excellent survey of the question.
4. In addition to the works already cited, see Nardi 1960.
5. It forms approximately 6 percent of the total: see Dondaine 1953 84-89, 135-138. We note that Nardi assumes, without discussion, that when Dante was reading the Liber de causis he was also reading the De divinis nominibus (1949 55-57). Whenever he read it, the probability is strong that he read it with both the Maximus and the Pseudo-Maximus (Eriugena) glosses (however, none of the passages from Eriugena quoted below are from the latter; it is possible, but not very likely, that Dante knew the De divisione naturae itself).
I. P. Sheldon-Williams (in Armstrong 1967 532-533) gives a convenient summary of Eriugena's influence:
Both as a translator and as an original writer, Eriugena's influence was to prove considerable. The Dionysian versions form the basis for those of Saracenus and Grossteste (written in clearer Latin and from better texts), and therefore underlie the curriculum of the philosophical schools where the ps.-Dionysius was the chief authority until superseded by Aristotle in the thirteenth century, and the tradition of Western mysticism, which also derives from the ps.-Dionysius. The doctrines of the Periphyseon were taught by Eriugena's disciples and their followers, such as Remigius, Heiric of Auxerre and the mysterious "Icpa." The work was epitomized by Honorious of Autun . . . and others. It was widely read among the Cathars, and was supposed to have inspired some of the heresies of Almeric of Bena and David of Dinant, and was condemned in the thirteenth century in consequence.
And yet it continued to be influential; for although no further copies were made after the twelfth century and many then existing must have suffered the fate of heretical works, and although the first printed edi- soft
tion, which appeared in 1681, was immediately placed on the Index, much of the text was preserved in glosses to the Latin Dionysius, in which form it was studied by, among others, St. Albert the Great. Eriugena, therefore, though banned and unacknowledged, has been a formative influence in the tradition not only of Western mysticism, but also of medieval scholasticism.
For an excellent recent introduction to Eriugena's thought and influence, see O'Meara 1988. For the question of Dante's knowledge of Eriugena, see Dronke 1965 and Allard 1987.
6. This major text was commented by William of Champeaux, Grosseteste, Thomas of Verceil, Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, Ulrich of Strasburg, perhaps Alain of Lille, and many others; see De Bruyne 1946 vol. 3. Albert's and Aquinas's are naturally the most likely commentaries for Dante to have known. The presence of a fairly full collection of Aquinas's commentaries at Santa Croce has been established (see Davis 1988 342-346) and of course would be expected at Santa Maria Novella.
7. I. P. Sheldon-Williams (1972 215n.) writes:
Dialectic ["in the Platonic conception . . . as the combined operation of division and collection"], from being simply a branch of philosophy, becomes in Neoplatonism, through the process of analogy, the whole of philosophy. . . . Division . . . is the process by which the descent is made from the One to the Many, and analytic the means by which the ascent or return is made from the Many to the One; that is to say, they are the descent from, and the return to, a Principle which remains always what it was. Dialectic and its Source, which is also its End, thus comprise the triad monê-próodos-epistrophê, by which the Neoplatonists reconciled the transcendence with the immanence of God. But the thoroughness with which Eriugena applies the principles of Dialectic finds no parallel in the system of any predecessor.
8. For the De divinis nominibus, see von Ivánka 1940 (also in von Ivánka 1964).
9. In the third of the petrose, "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna," we find a clear interest in the question of the divine names; see Chapter 4, pp. 157-158, with notes.
10. Dante 1980 37-44. All quotations from the Vita nuova are to this edition.
11. Sandkühler 1967 41-42, 50-53. De Robertis (1970 208-222), on the basis of some impressive verbal parallels, has argued for the influence on the divisioni of Brunetto Latini's Retorica.
12. The most interesting example of "reticent commentary," aside from chapter 19, is perhaps chapter 25; Dante's answer to the imagined doubt regarding the figure of Love in fact raises more questions than it answers: for Dante's claim that vernacular poets have the same license as Latin poetae, including that of using personification if they can provide a ratio for its use, does not constitute a ratio of his use of it. Dante asserts that he could furnish an explanation if he chose to; his not doing so calls attention to itself. See Chapter 4, note 50.
13. We reject the famous theory of the esoteric group of "fedeli d'Amore" developed by L. Valli and his followers. A detailed statement of the arguments continue
would take us too far afield; suffice it to say that like other "allegorical" interpretations of Dante's lyric poems, it rests on inadequate comprehension of the literal sense of the poems.
14. De Robertis (Dante 1980 132, note on a troppi ) summarizes thus: "è intelligibile anche troppo, si abbia o no ingegno da intendere"; as we shall see, this misses the point completely.
15. As De Robertis observes (Dante 1980 129), this is also the only poem whose division is preceded by introductory remarks.
16. Shaw 1929 119-120.
17. Spitzer 1937; in Spitzer 1976 131-132. Spitzer is in polemic here with J. E. Shaw, who had maintained that the "ostensible theme" of the praise of Beatrice masked the "real theme" of Dante's anxieties and dependence on her, which he was reluctant to make explicit by dividing stanzas 2 and 3.
18. Spitzer was equally complacent in his claim that the last stanza is no easier to understand than the earlier ones: "dal momento che Dante, riguardo all'ultima strofa, come pure in altri casi, afferma che essa è 'lieve ad intendere' e pertanto non abbisogna di suddivisione, egli deve pensare la stessa cosa anche delle altre" (1976 132). Here is an obvious undistributed middle term (stanza 5, easy to understand, is undivided; 2 and 3 are undivided; therefore stanzas 2 and 3 are easy to understand—this would be valid only if every undivided text were easy to understand).
19. Dante 1980 52-53. De Robertis refers the subdivisions to rhetorical practice: "più artificiosamente: con più arte, ossia con più 'sottili' (xli,9) o 'minute' (cfr. 22) partizioni (a metterne in rilievo appunto l'artificiosa e complessa struttura retorica), ossia, come vedremo, per gradi successivi (gliene offrivan modello le partizioni delle scienze, coi relativi 'alberi,' nella Retorica di Brunetto, 48-55), ma si ponga mente soprattutto alla tripartizione fondamentale, che sarà ripresa per la canzone in morte di Beatrice (xxxi,3) e per la seconda canzone del Convivio (III,i,13), ed essa stessa arieggiante le partizioni del discorso della retorica classica" (p. 129). Valid enough observations, which do not unlock the puzzle. As far as the models for the procedure of division are concerned (and without derogating from the impressive parallels De Robertis found between Vita nuova and Retorica —though not specifically in the divisione of "Donne ch'avete"), here is a good example from the beginning of Aquinas's commentary on the Pseudo-Dionysius's De divinis nominibus:
In hoc igitur libro, qui "de divinis Nominibus" inscribitur, more eorum qui artificiose scientias tradiderunt, primo, praemittit quaedam necessaria ad sequentem considerationem; secundo, incipit prosequi principale intentum in 3 cap. quod incipit ibi: Et primam . . .
Circa primum, duo facit: primo, ostendit rationem divinorum Nominum; secundo, ostendit quod Nomina, de quibus in hoc libro tractatur, sunt communia toti Trinitati; et hoc 2° cap. quod incipit ibi: Thearchicam totam essentiam . . .
Circa primum, duo facit: primo, continuat se ad praecedentem librum, ubi alloquens beatum Timotheum, dicit quod post Theologicas Hypotyposes, idest divinas distinctiones quibus personae in Trinitate ad in- soft
vicem distinguntur, transibit ad reserationem, idest manifestationem, divinorum Nominum, secundum suam possibilitatem. Perfecte enim ea exponere supra hominem esse videtur.
Secundo, ibi: Esto . . . , incipit praemittere quaedam necessaria ad sequens opus. Praemittit autem duo: primo, quidem, modum procedendi in hoc opere, hoc enim necessarium est praescire in qualibet doctrina. Secundo, ostendit rationem divinorum Nominum de quibus in hoc libro intendit; ibi: Has sequentes. . . .
(Aquinas 1950 6)
As can readily be seen, dividing only the second of two members was not customary and would have been noticed as unusual by anyone familiar with exegetical practice. For that matter, here is a particularly striking example of a series of divisions of only the first members, from the commentary of Albertus Magnus on the De divinis nominibus (Albert's insistence here is of course motivated by the fact that he is isolating the very first members of his text; the rest of his commentary divides the entire treatise in more or less equal detail):
Dividitur enim iste liber in duas partes. In prima determinat de nominibus divinis, quae ad suam considerationem pertinent in communi. In secundo determinat de unoquoque in speciali, in quarto capitulo, ibi Si igitur oportet iam etc. Prima pars dividitur in tres partes. In prima determinat de ipsis nominibus communiter ostendens modum significandi ipsorum. In secunda dividit divina nomina in primas suas differentias, scilicet quod quaedam dicuntur unite de personis et quaedam distincte, quibus adhuc non devenitur in specialia nomina, in secundo capitulo, ibi: Thearchicam. In tertia determinat modum accipiendi cognitionem istorum nominum, in tertio capitulo, ibi: Et primum, si videtur etc. Prima pars dividitur in duas. In prima ostendit modum, quo deus significatur istis nominibus; in secunda dicit se velle determinare de istis nominibus secundum determinatum modum, ibi: Nunc autem quaecumque sunt praesentia etc. Item prima dividitur in duas. In prima ostendit quo et a quibus significatur deus per huiusmodi nomina; in secunda, qualiter significatur, ibi: Istis deiformes etc. Item prima dividitur in duas. In prima ostendit quo significatur deus, quia per sacram scripturam, in secunda, a quibus, quia a sanctis viris, ibi: De hac, igitur, sicut dictum est etc. Prima pars dividitur in duas. In prima continuat se ad quendam librum, quem fecit de divinis personis, quem non habemus; in secunda ostendit, quod per sacram scripturam nobis deus nominatur, ibi: Esto autem et nunc etc.
(Albertus Magnus 1972 3)
20. The only exception is Durling's presentation of an earlier version of this chapter at the April 1975 meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, "Reticent Commentary in the Middle Ages: Vita nuova 19 and 25."
21. Dante uses the term of the divine procession in Convvivio 3.2.4; as Bruno Nardi shows (1967 92-94), that is a passage derived from the Liber de causis.
22. Thus God's speech provides an instance of the Dionysian triad powerjustice-peace, again based on monê-próodos-epistrophê. See Introduction, note 39.
23. These lines have occasioned some puzzlement: does Dante mean he will be damned? Or can he be referring to the Inferno? Pazzaglia (1970) usefully continue
summarizes the debates; and cf. J. E. Shaw's attentive analyses of the positions prior to 1929 (1929 122-128).
Foster and Boyde (Dante 1967 2:99-100), opting for the first possibility above, cite "Lo doloroso amor che mi conduce," lines 32-42, which do say, to paraphrase, " if God does not forgive me for my sins, my soul will depart to the torment it will deserve, and it will not fear; for it will be so intent to imagine her that it will feel no pain; so that, if I have lost her in this world, in the next world Love will pay tribute to me." But it is one thing to have the speaker say if, another thing to have God himself predict one's damnation. In the terms set up by "Donne ch'avete," not to speak of the Vita nuova as a whole, the speaker's insight into Beatrice's radiance and his knowledge of what is said about her in heaven would make it self-contradictory for line 28 to mean that he will be one of the damned; rather, the vision of heaven offered in stanza 2, not to speak of his insight into Beatrice's perfections, places him clearly among the worthy, among those who have "stayed to gaze on her" (line 35); cf. De Robertis's comment: "le parole rivolte ai 'mal nati', quello squarcio di luce nell'abisso, non saranno trasposizione della discesa all'inferno del Salvatore?" (1970 132 n .1). Furthermore, in our view, the implication of the return of colui from hell is required as part of the system of parallelisms among the various types of return in the poem.
In short, the notion that lines 27-28 predict Dante's damnation goes against the clear sense of the text and against the plan of the entire Vita nuova. Do we then have to conclude that the passage is a later revision or that Dante was already planning the Commedia when he first wrote the Vita nuova? No, only that some of the grandiose possibilities of the theme of procession and return as a basis for poetic structure had begun to dawn on him.
24. Again, see Introduction, note 39.
25. The influential Maximus the Confessor distinguished five divisions by which the world came into existence: (1) "that which divides from the uncreated nature created nature in general"; (2) "that by which the universal and simultaneously created nature is divided into intelligibles and sensibles"; (3) that "by which visible nature is divided into heaven and earth"; (4) that "by which the earth is divided into paradise and the inhabited globe"; (5) that "by which man himself, who, well and beautifully . . . added to the sum of things that are—as a most effective agent of the continuity of all, in everything naturally establishing in himself a mediation between all extremes effected by every difference—is divided into male and female."
Quarum [scil. divisionum] primam inquit esse aiunt eam, quae a non creata natura creatam universaliter naturam et per generationem esse accipientem dividit . . . . Secundam vero per quam ipsa simul omnis natura a deo per creationem esse accipiens dividitur in intelligibilia et sensibilia. Tertiam deinceps per quam ipsa sensibilis natura dividitur in caelum ac terram; quartam itidem per quam terra dividitur in paradisum et orbem terrarum, et quintam per quam ipse in omnibus veluti quaedam cunctorum continuatissima officina omnibusque per omnem differentiam ex- soft
tremitatibus per se ipsum naturaliter medietatem faciens bene ac pulchre secundum generationem his quae sunt superadditus homo in masculum feminamque dividitur.
(Eriugena's version in the De divisione naturae 2.3; text and translation from Sheldon-Williams 1972; cf. PL 122.530)
See below, note 30.
For Dante's later emanationism, see Paradiso 2.112-138, and Nardi's discussions (1960 16-20, 97-106); cf. Introduction, pp. 41-43, and Chapter 2, note 75.
26. On the relation between the terms of rhetoric and metaphysics, see Introduction, p. 18, and above, note 7.
27. Barbi's note reads, in part: "I manoscritti sia della Vita nuova sia delle rime varie sono concordi in legger viso; né ci è ragione di scostarsi della loro testimonianza, ben potendo il poeta aver voluto vedere in là 've non pote alcun mirarlafiso la determinazione di una parte del viso, cioè la bocca" (Dante 1932 78 n .). Once it is decided that the mouth is meant, Barbi's point is no doubt valid; but it is more natural to take the lines as referring to the eyes, in the tradition and in Dante the usual place where Love is visible (see Foster and Boyde's note on "Al poco giorno," line 16—Dante 1967 2:267).
28. The phrase cosa nova picks up cosa mortale from line 53; it may well refer to Beatrice's death, the chief occasion on which the "friendship of the number nine for her" is manifested; see Vita nuova, chapter 29.
29. For Dante's use of the term in other contexts, particularly with nonThomistic (i.e., Neoplatonic) emphasis, see Nardi 1967 345-346.
30. On Maximus's fifth division (see note 25 above), Eriugena comments (in a late addition):
. . . extremitates hic vocat invisibilem sensibilemque creaturam quae a se invicem veluti longissimo spatio naturali differentia discrepant. Sunt enim naturarum conditarum duo extremi termini sibimet oppositi, sed humana natura medietatem eis praestat; in ea enim sibi invicem copulantur et de multis unum fiunt. Nulla enim creatura est, a summis usque deorsum, quae in homine non reperiatur. Ideoque officina omnium jure nominatur.
(text and translation from Sheldon-Williams 1972 18-19; cf. PL 122.530)
. . . by the extremes he here means the invisible creature and the sensible creature, which by natural difference differ from one another as though by a very wide space. For they are opposed to one another as the two extremes of created natures; but human nature supplies a middle term between them, for in it they are joined to one another, and from being many become one. For there is no creature, from the highest to the lowest, which is not found in man, and that is why he is rightly called "agent (of continuity)" [ officina, literally "workshop," translating ergasterion; see Sheldon-Williams 1972 218-219, note 9] of all things [this final sentence is a quotation from Maximus]. break
Eriugena quotes Maximus again in the influential passage in Book 3 (again based on Maximus, contaminated with Gregory the Great—see Chapter 2, note 84):
. . . non immerito dicitur homo creaturarum omnium officina quoniam in ipso universalis creatura continetur. Intelligit quidem ut angelus, ratiocinatur ut homo, sentit ut animal irrationale, vivit ut germen, corpore animoque subsistit, nullius creaturae expers.
( De divisione naturae 3.37 [Sheldon-Williams 1981 286; PL 122.733])
Eriugena's De divisione naturae, along with his translations of Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus, is thus a main intermediary of the idea of man as the copula of all creation:
inter primordiales rerum causas homo ad imaginem Dei factus est ut omnis creatura et intelligibilis et sensibilis, ex quibus veluti diversis extremitatibus compositus unum inseparabile fieret, et ut esset medietas et adunatio omnium creaturarum.
(Sheldon-Williams 1972 28; PL 122.536; emphasis added)
See Gregory 1955 103-104 and 104 n .3. For the history of the idea from Plato to Eriugena, see Sheldon-Williams 1972 219-220 n .62.
In a famous passage, Dante writes of man as "the horizon between the corruptible and the incorruptible" ( Monarchia 3.16):
Homo solus in entibus tenet medium corruptibilium et incorruptibilium; propter quod recte a phylosophis assimilatur orizonti, qui est medium duorum emisperiorum. Nam homo, si consideretur secundum utranque partem essentialem, scilicet animam et corpus: corruptibilis est si consideretur tantum secundum corpus; si vero secundum alteram, scilicet animam, incorruptibilis est. . . . Si ergo homo medium quoddam est corruptibilium et incorruptibilium, cum omne medium sapiat naturam extremorum, necesse est hominem sapere utranque naturam. Et cum omnis natura ad ultinum quendam finem ordinetur, consequitur ut hominis duplex finis existat: ut, sicut inter omnia entia solus incorruptibilitatem et corruptibilitatem participat, sic solus inter omnia entia in duo ultima ordinetur, quorum alterum sit finis eius prout corruptibilis est, alterum vero prout incorruptibilis.
(we cite Nardi's edition, Dante 1979C 496-498, but accept the traditional emendation in lemma 4)
For man alone among beings holds the mean between the corruptible and the incorruptible; for which reason he is rightly likened by the philosophers to the horizon, which is the mean between two hemispheres. For man, if he is considered according to both his essential parts, namely soul and body: he is corruptible if considered only according to the body, but if considered according to his other part, his soul, he is incorruptible . . . . If then man is a certain mean between corruptible and incorruptible things, since every mean partakes [literally, tastes] of the nature continue
of the extremes, man must partake [literally, taste] of both natures. And since every nature is ordered to some final end, it follows that man's final end is double: so that, just as he alone among beings participates in both corruptibility and incorruptibility, so he alone among beings is ordered to two final ends, of which one is his end in so far as he is corruptible, the other in so far as he is incorruptible.
Nardi (1967b 89-91) showed that this passage involves one of Dante's borrowings from the Liber de causis, where it refers to the World-Soul, as Aquinas and Albert both point out in their commentaries (cited by Nardi); the horizon is between time and eternity: "Esse autem quod est post aeternitatem et supra tempus est anima; quoniam est in orizonte aeternitatis inferius et supra tempus."
Albert and Aquinas both define horizon as the juncture of two hemispheres; it would seem that Dante's substitution of the terms the corruptible and the incorruptible for time and eternity (not considered by Nardi, who also seems unfamiliar with the application of the idea to man himself, as opposed to the World-Soul—see his notes, Dante 1979c) is a contamination of the Liber de causis passages with the passages we have quoted from Eriugena and the Greek fathers and provides further possible evidence for his familiarity with them. Alexander of Hales and Bonaventure are further possible sources; see Theiler 1970; and Schneider 1960, 1961. See also next note and above, note 25.
The interesting phrase sapere utranque naturam seems to be related to one of the parallels R. B. Woolsey found between Bernard Silvester's Megacosmos and the second-century Hermetic Asclepius: according to him, Bernard's "curabit utrumque" (referring to the body and the spirit, or earthly and heavenly realities) echoes the Asclepius statement, in a similar context, that man is "ex utraque natura" (Woolsey 1948 343). See Nock 1973 324; Bernard cites the idea of man as medietas in the following passage:
Mentem de caelo, corpus trahet ex elementis,
Ut terras habitet corpore, mente polum.
Mens, corpus diversa licet iungentur ad unum,
Ut
sacra
conplacitum
nexio
reddat opus.
Divus erit, terrenus erit, curabit utrumque
Consiliis mundum, religione deos.
Naturis poterit sic respondere duabus,
Et sic principiis congruus esse suis.
Ut divina colat, pariter terrena capessat,
Et
geminae
curam sedulitatis agat,
Cum superis commune bonum rationis habebit.
(Bernard Silvester 1876 55; emphasis added)
He will take his mind from the heavens, his body from the elements, that he may live on earth with his body, in the sky with his mind. Mind and body, though they be different, will be yoked together, that the sacred nexus may make the work pleasing. He will be divine and he will be earthly, he will concern himself with both: the world with his counsels, continue
the gods with his worship. Thus he will be able to be dutiful with two natures and thus be worthy of his beginnings. That he may cultivate divine things, and at the same time grasp earthly things, following his concerns with twinned sedulity, he will share with the gods the good of reason.
Dante's use of this traditional Neoplatonic notion to found his doctrine of the two goals of human existence is of course one of the capital points of the Monarchia. In a parallel but narrower way, we find his characteristic refusal to give up either side of human experience in the petrose as well. See Chapter 2, pp. 106-108.
31. In particular of the division into male and female sexes, regarded by the Greek fathers as foreign to the ideal essence of humanity and an anticipation of the Fall. The disappearance, in the resurrected Christ, of the sexual (based on Galatians 3:28) was seen as the first stage of the cosmic reunification; Eriugena's discussion of this idea is in PL 122.530-536, based mainly on Maximus, and 794-815, based mainly on Gregory of Nyssa. See Sheldon-Williams's lucid account (1972 217-218 n .42). Eriugena quotes at great length from Gregory of Nyssa's De hominis opficio (chap. 16: PG 44.177-188) in his section on the division of the sexes ( De divisione naturae 4.12-17: PL 122.794-830); for instance, the following passage is close to the others we have cited on man as medietas:
Duorum quorundam per extremitatem a se invicem distantium medium est humanitas, divinae videlicet incorporalisque naturae, et irrationabilis pecudalisque vitae. Licet enim utrumque praedictorum in humana comparatione considerari: portionem quidem Dei quod rationabile est et intellectuale, quod iuxta masculum et feminam differentiam non admittit, irrationabilis vero corporalem constitutionem et duplicationem in masculum et feminam partitam. Utrumque horum est omnino in omnibus humanam vitam participantibus.
( PL 122.795; cf. PG 44.181-182; cf. Introduction, note 29)
Human nature is the mean between two natures extremely distant from each other, namely the divine and incorporeal nature and the irrational life of beasts. For we can consider both of them in the composition of man: the portion of God, what is reasonable and intellectual, which does not admit of difference according to male and female; and on the other hand the bodily constitution of the irrational, duplicated and divided into male and female. Both of these are in all those who participate in human life.
32. See above, note 28.
33. See Introduction, note 32.
34. Except perhaps in his use of the term finire in lines 3 and 42.
35. See Introduction, pp. 15-17, and cf. above, notes 30 and 31, in particular Gregory of Nyssa's situating human nature between the divine/incorporeal and the bodily.
36. See Introduction, note 27; the symmetrical arrangement of meters in the Consolatio may also have influenced Dante's arrangement of verse forms in the Vita nuova. break
37. As Nardi (1967b 89-94) showed, Dante's citations of the Liber de causis regularly turn what is said there of the World-Soul to apply to the human soul, a tendency already visible in his adaptation of Boethius to "Donne ch'avete"; cf. Gregory 1955 123-174; and Gregory 1957. This is also true of many of the commentaries on "O qui perpetua" assembled by Pierre Courcelle (1967). In the Paradiso, of course, Dante has Beatrice speak of the angels as "enlivening" their respective spheres (which he calls "organs of the world"— Paradiso 2.121), and says that their "power" ( virtù ) is joined to the spheres in a way similar to the union of soul and body in man ( Paradiso 2.139-144); the ambiguity of the passage is no doubt intentional. Dante was probably familiar with the discussion by Albertus Magnus of Avicenna's and Averroës's positions (Avicenna favored incarnation of the heavenly intelligences, Averroës regarded them as separated; Albert expresses some doubt but opts for Averroës and Alpetragius) in the De causis etprocessu universitatis 1.4.7 (Albertus Magnus 1890-98 10:423-427). But he avoids the concept of the World-Soul as such.
38. On which Barbi (Dante 1932 cclxiii) states: "Poca sembra essere stata, per le lezioni di senso, la corruzione introdotta nel testo nel passaggio dall'autografo al capostipite delle due tradizioni. In generale fra a e b c'è accordo perfetto."
39. Cf. Barbi's observations on the integral relation of the divisioni to the rest of the text, contra Boccaccio's relegation of them to the margins (ibid., xvi-xviii).
40. There is a close relation between "Donne ch'avete" and the second canzone of the Convivio, "Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona," which is usually dated around 1294. From the point of view of our discussion here, one of the most striking things about the later canzone is that it completely avoids reference to the pattern of procession/return, despite the fact that it associates the lady it sings of with the biblical figure of Sapientia (often identified with the Logos). See Vincenzo Pernicone's excellent discussion (1970a). We accept his view (which follows Barbi's) that this canzone was probably originally composed with allegorical intent (i.e., the lady was Philosophy).
2— The Solstice and the Human Body: "Io son venuto al punto de la rota"
1. On "Io son venuto al punto de la rota" there are classic discussions by Neri (1914); Contini (1946 xx-xxi, 149-150; all citations below are to this edition); and Renucci (1958 67-70, 72-75). See also Damon 1961; and Boyde 1971 48, 141-147, 288-299, and passim. Fenzi's (1966) discussion of "Io son venuto" is particularly fine; we have relied heavily on his scrupulous résumés of earlier scholarship. Goldin (1973 345-351; see note io below) has some perceptive pages on the implied solitude of the speaker in this poem.
2. See Aeneid 4.522-532 (quoted in Chapter 5, note 77), which includes the following details that appear in "Io son venuto": the motion of the stars (line 524); the silence of birds and animals (525-527); the increase of care ( "ingeminant curae," 531); the rising of a tide or flood (531-532); the use of the conjunction at (see Chapter 5, note 78). See Friedrich's suggestive discussion (1964 250-251). For connections between Book 4 of the Aeneid and the other petrose, continue
especially "Così nel mio parlar," see Chapter 5, pp. 180-185. For Aeneid 8, see Chapter 6, note 23.
The persistence of love in winter is a not uncommon form of this topic; along with the renewal of love in the springtime it is one of the so-called topics of exordium (see Curtius 1953 80-84, 193-194). Dante's poem draws, then, on a tradition represented by such medieval Latin lyrics as the famous "De ramis cadunt folia" (no. 234 in Raby 1959); it has a direct connection with a number of poems by Arnaut Daniel, the "miglior fabbro del parlar materno," as Dante calls him in the Purgatorio (26.117), whose influence on the petrose is of course considerable, particularly in terms of his cult of trobar clus, or difficult style (see Daniel 1960 nos. 3, 9, ii, 16, and pp. 65-106; cf. Fenzi 1966 247-253). An important suggestion for the poem seems to have been derived from poems by Arnaut's brilliant predecessor and master, Raimbaut d' Aurenga, especially the winter poem "Or resplan la flors enversa" (see Chapter 5, note 36). Bernart de Ventadour also has a winter poem, "Tant ai mo cor pie de joya," which explicitly claims the increase of poetic ability in the winter:
3. Fenzi (1966 255) notes, along with the traditionally recognized theme ("strofa per strofa aspetti d'una natura invernale caratterizzati da una serie di trasformazioni tipiche—str. 2-5—s'oppongono all'inalterabile ardore dei 'pensier d'amore'"), a second theme, "interwoven" with the first: "il tema della corrispondenza tra la condizione personale e l'ordine naturale delle cose che lo conferma. E' una conferma implicita—le dichiarazioni di Dante sono per la prima interpretazione—che in primis s'affida al tema della violenza: come la natura soffre ferite e trasformazioni che l'offendono e ne rovesciano le leggi: [citing stanza 5] così il poeta sopporta una violenza che lo blocca in uno stato innaturale, in cui la sua mente è 'più dura che petra' e in cui egli giunge a desiderare il suo male" (pp. 255-256). Fenzi then notes a series of correspondences within stanzas: (1) the "forte imagine" corresponds to fatal necessity deriving from the stars; (2) whereas the first stanza stressed immobility, here there is motion, both of the wind and of Love's spiderwebs; (3) this stanza rests on recognition of kinship with the animals: "entrambi si riconoscono in un'alterna vicenda [Fenzi seems unaware of his echo of Ovid's—and Seneca's— alternae vices here] di felicità e di tristezza, d'amore e di disamore . . . prevedibile e aperto l'uno, interno, fitto, e problematico I'altro" (p. 257); (4) the spina recalls the trees of the earlier part of the stanza; (5) the poet's guerra recalls the grande assalto of the winter (pp. 256-258). Fenzi also notes that it is the central stanza of the poem where it is said that "sweet thoughts are not given to me nor taken away by the turning of time," and observes that the last two stanzas have a "giuoco di chiaroscuro più mosso, dove la memoria del verde e dei fiori sopravvive alla loro morte e dove l'incalzante presente si rompe . . . e si ricompone" continue
(pp. 257-258). Although he has little to say about the astrology of the poem (but see his apt quotation from Seneca on p. 243), Fenzi's perceptive discussion represents an impressive advance over earlier readings.
4. For the form of the stanza, see Figure 1. Each of the four groups of lines—(a) ABC; (b) ABC; (c) CDE; (d) eD FF —is syntactically independent from the others, and between stanzas corresponding groups are to a large extent syntactically parallel. Parallels of content between stanzas are frequent; for instance, part a in each stanza except the last mentions the stars; part b in each stanza uses metaphors of closing, hiding, veiling; part c in each stanza refers to death. The list could be prolonged.
5. Nardi 1967 110-138, esp. 112-114. See also Damon 1961 317-318. Nardi supposed that Convivio 2.26.6 rested on a misunderstanding of Aristotle's De caelo; we think rather than it shows the extent to which Dante's thinking was permeated with astrological conceptions, for that a planet's influence is drastically reduced when it sinks below the horizon is a commonplace of the astrological literature. See, for instance, Dante's canzone "Poscia ch'Amor del tutto m'ha lasciato," lines 96-101 (emphasis added):
Al gran pianeta è tutta simigliante
che, dal levante
avante
infino a tanto che s'asconde,
co li bei raggi infonde
vita e vertù qua giuso
ne la matera sì com'è disposta . . .
6. In Convivio 3.5.13-22, Dante compares the spiral path of the sun to the turning of a screw; imagining how the sun would appear to a city ("Maria") at the North Pole, he writes (Dante 1964 1:312-313):
Però conviene che Maria veggia nel principio de l'Ariete, quando lo sole va sotto lo mezzo cerchio de li primi poli, esso sole girar lo mondo intorno giù a la terra, o vero al mare, come una mola de la quale non paia più che mezzo lo corpo suo; e questa veggia venir montando a guisa d'una vite dintorno, tanto che compia novanta e una rota e poco più.
Cf. Boyde 1981 151-152, 340. See Chapter 3, note 52.
7. The fact that the first three rhymes of the sirma (i.e., those of part c )CDE—are parallel to the rhyme scheme of parts a and b—ABC—contributes to the sense of a continuation of the frons, as opposed to the break associated with the sirma.
8. Another peculiarity of the technique of the stanza intensifies this effect: the insistent anaphora whereby part d in each stanza begins with "e." It is coupled with an intermittent but still insistent pattern of anaphora throughout: in every stanza except the last, part c begins with "e," and in the first three stanzas part b also begins with "e." Also, with the exception of the first stanza, all the stanzas of the poem begin with a finite verb in syntactic inversion.
There seems a clear analogy between Dante's turning of the stanza on the adversative e and the similar (though not systematic) turns in Raimbaut de Vac- soft
queiras's "D'Amor nom lau, qu'anc non pogey tan aut," lines 12-13 (". . . e la bella felhona / sap") and 23-24 (e 'lh trefana, sol quar e belha res, / val") (Linskill 1964 117-118). For the connections with "Così nel mio parlar," see Chapter 5, pp. 176-179.
9. The observation is common in astronomical handbooks: in the northern hemisphere, winter is four days shorter than summer. Calcidius makes the point in his commentary on the Timaeus (Plato 1962 162).
10. Like the parallel with birdsong, these are topics of the Natureingang studied by Scheludko; see E. M. Ghil, in Keller et al. 1986 87-99. For the relation to this tradition of "Io son venuto," see Goldin 1973 351, which, however, overstates the narrowness of reference of the troubadour tradition and fails to see the importance of the Virgilian and other classical precedents.
11. See Cornford 1937 on Timaeus 43d. The question of the relation between the pedes and the sirma of the poem is thus more complex than suggested above, to the extent that the repetition of the pedes makes them akin to the motion of the Same.
12. The principal arguments on which the dating of the poem rests were already assembled in Angelitti 1901, a paper delivered in July 1900.
13. Since Angelitti it has been customary to understand remota as referring to superior conjunction, when Venus is on the opposite side of the sun from the earth (in Dante's terms, at the highest point of its deferent, but still below the sun); superior conjunctions of Venus and the sun in Capricorn took place during Dante's lifetime in December 1272, 1280, 1288, 1296, 1304, 1312, and 1320; inferior conjunctions in Capricorn also took place at roughly eight-year intervals, thus, during Dante's adult years, in December 1284, 1292, 1300, 1308, and 1316. Dante does not say that Venus is "remote" pure and simple, however; he says it is remote because of the rays of the sun.
14. If the planet is the full moon (full because of "tutto"), the conjunction of Venus and the sun cannot possibly be superior, for such a conjunction in Capricorn did not take place even once during Dante's lifetime at a full moon or even close to one. Inferior conjunctions of Venus and the sun in Capricorn did take place at or near the full moon, however, in 1284, 1292, 1300, and 1308, which thus become astronomically possible dates for the stanza, whatever their unlikelihood on other grounds may be.
15. This astronomical phenomenon is associated with the so-called night circle, the portion of a circle of latitude (on the earth) that is in darkness at any given time; its correlate is the "day circle." At the equinox, the sun is at the latitude of the equator and its rays are perpendicular to the axis of the earth; therefore, at all latitudes day and night are of equal length: day circle and night circle are equal. When the sun is below the equator (i.e., from the autumnal equinox to the vernal equinox), most of the northern hemisphere is in shadow and the nights are shorter than the days; this can be plotted on a circle for any given latitude and any given day. The night circle is greatest and the day circle smallest at the winter solstice; when the sun moves above the equator again (at the vernal equinox), the phenomenon is exactly reversed at each latitude. Dante continue
refers to the night circle in the first line of the second petrosa, "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra." See Chapter 3, pp. 111-113.
16. Data from Tuckerman 1964; they have been corrected for the latitude and longitude of Florence.
17. Chaucer's Wife of Bath is the most celebrated instance of this combination; as she says, "Myn ascendent was Taur, and Mars therinne" (Chaucer 1957 82). The seminal discussion is Curry 1926 104-132. Contra Curry, see North 1969 133, 280-283; contra North, Smyser 1970. See also Wood 1970, who is biased against the importance of astrology in Chaucer.
18. Saturn was retrograde from mid-September 1296 until the last week of February, Mars from early October until the very end of December (data from Tuckerman 1964).
19. This assumes, of course, that the configuration is a horoscope, that is, literally, an inspection of the hour, because the hour is significant as some sort of kairós; the idea is certainly implied by the poem.
20. See Macrobius Saturnalia 1.10.18-22. Ptolemy gives a convenient summary: "Saturn, when he gains sole dominance, is in general the cause of destruction by cold, and, in particular, when the event concerns men, causes long illnesses, consumptions, withering, disturbances caused by fluids, rheumatisms and quartan fevers, exile, poverty, imprisonment, mourning, fears, and deaths, especially among those advanced in age . . . . With regard to weather, he causes fearful cold, freezing, misty and pestilential; corruption of the air, clouds, and gloom; furthermore, multitudes of snowstorms, not beneficial but destructive, from which are produced the reptiles harmful to man. As for the rivers and seas, in general he causes storms, the wreck of fleets, disastrous voyages, and the scarcity and death of fish, and in particular the high and ebb tides and in rivers excessive floods and pollution of their waters. As for the crops of the earth, he brings about want, scarcity, and loss" (1940 179-183). Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl (1964) offer a great wealth of mythological, medical, and astrological lore about Saturn, with particular emphasis on the theory of the humors and the concept of melancholy; for weather, flood, crops, see pp. 134-139. For the positive side of Saturn's influence, see below, note 61.
21. See Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl 1964 52-58 (Aristotle and Galen), 332-337 (Ramon Llull); and Nardi 1966b 258-263. See below, Chapter 5, pp. 181-182, for a discussion of hereos, the sickness of love, in "Così nel mio parlar."
22. See the famous Aristotelian Problem 30.1, in Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl 1964 17-42 (text and translation, 18-29), esp. 21-22: "It is for this reason [i.e., that it contains air] that wine excites sexual desire, and Dionysus and Aphrodite are rightly said to belong together, and most melancholic persons are lustful. For the sexual act is connected with the generation of air, as is shown by the fact that the virile organ quickly increases from a small size by inflation . . . . Also the effusion and impetus of the semen in sexual intercourse is clearly due to impulsion by air . . . . That melancholy persons contain air is obvious in some cases; for most melancholy persons have firm flesh and their veins stand out, the reason being the abundance not of blood but of air." break
23. Courcelle 1967 has a rich set of illustrations.
24. Compare Purgatorio 2.1-6:
Già era 'l sole a l'orizzonte giunto
lo cui meridïan cerchio coverchia
Ierusalèm col suo più alto punto;
e la notte, che opposita a lui cerchia,
uscia di Gange fuor con le Bilance,
che le caggion de man quando soverchia . . .
25. Astronomica 2.929, cited in Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl 1964 141n.40.
26. Saturnalia 1.2.9. In connection with "Io son venuto" 's beginning at sunset, it is interesting that the first topic discussed at the banquet related in the Saturnalia concerns whether the day begins at sunset or at midnight (1.2.19-21).
27. See Introduction, note 8.
28. If Dante followed the ecclesiastical calendar, which reckoned transition between signs to take place on the twenty-first of the month (as we do today), we could limit the field to the period between May 21 and 31 (he clearly used the ecclesiastical date for Easter in the Commedia—see Boyde 1981 163-165). Palgen suggests that Dante may have invented his Gemini nativity as befitting his poetic gifts: "Whether Dante was really born a Gemini is a question I would like to set aside: possibly he simply invented the fitting horoscope for someone with his fate and his inclination for theological and philosophical speculation. Caution in drawing biographical conclusions is surely advisable here" (1940 69). Palgen was apparently unaware of the evidence for Dante's having cast the actual horoscopes of December 1296 and May 1265. The evidence for Dante's having studied such horoscopes is, we believe, conclusive—for his having studied them, not for their biographical accuracy.
29. Pecoraro (1987 345-347) arbitrarily interprets the passage from Boccaccio to refer to June 1, in this, as in many other positions—e.g., how Dante would have calculated longitudes, Mars as the "bel pianeta che d'amar conforta," Sinai as the antipodes of the Earthly Paradise—attributing an illusory exactitude to very general or vague expressions, ones that are often, in Dante's case, deliberately evasive. See below, notes 30, 63, 65, and Chapter 6, notes 17 and 20.
30. Boffitto and Melzi d'Eril 1908. We do not know exactly when this almanac became available, presumably it was prepared late in the thirteenth century. Boffitto and Melzi demonstrated that its particular format for the positions of Venus made it easy to mistake the 1301 position for that of 1300; they thus provided the most natural explanation for Dante's having Venus as a morning star in Pisces in Purgatorio 1—
Lo bel pianeta che d'amar conforta
faceva tutto rider l'orïente,
velando i Pesci ch'erano in sua scorta
(1.19-21)
—a passage that echoes "Io son venuto," line 6. In April 1300, Venus was in fact an evening star in Taurus. (In passing, it may be observed that only Venus and continue
Jupiter are ever bright enough to justify such expressions; Mars could never do so.) Dante would probably have had to use an almanac to cast his natal horoscope, and he could have made such a mistake either with Prophatius's tables, if they were available in 1296-97, or with another's.
In order to cast a horoscope from Prophatius's almanac, Dante would have had to calculate the positions of the planets from the tables and then correct their position to take into account the difference in longitude and latitude between Florence (or whatever place he was taking as location) and Montpellier, for whose longitude Prophatius had established the tables. Now Dante supposed Gibraltar to be 90 degrees west of Jerusalem (the correct difference in longitude is 40.83 degrees). It would seem reasonable to assume, then, that Dante supposed longitudinal differences to be a little more than twice their actual size. If so, he would have supposed Florence to be about 15 degrees (or one hour) east of Montpellier (the correct figure is 7.22 degrees); Jerusalem would be about 65 degrees east of Montpellier, more than four hours (the correct figure is 31.30 degrees, a little over two hours). Latitudes, in contrast, were accurately known and could be ascertained with an astrolabe. If Dante calculated horoscopes on the basis of Prophatius's almanac (and leaving out of consideration inaccuracies inherent in the almanac itself and the possibility of mistakes like the one he made for Venus), and if he made longitudinal corrections such as we have indicated, the error introduced would have been negligible except in the case of the moon, which moves approximately 1 degree per hour, and the ascendant. This last is a major point, of course, on which depends the calculation of houses, for which, furthermore, there were several methods. Some aspects of Dante's astrological practice, as we may call it, are impossible to know; we have omitted any inferences depending on the moon or the ascendant.
31. Mercury is important to all horoscopes of this time period because during the entire two weeks, it was in Gemini (its night house), where its influence was thought to be particularly strong. During most of the period (from May 21 on), Mercury was in the subdivision of his house where his influence was even more intensified—its so-called terms ( fines ), the first six degrees of the sign. For Mercury as the possible "lord" of this horoscope, see above, pp. 87-91. During the same two weeks, Saturn also was within Mercury's "terms" in Gemini and within the orb of conjunction with Mercury (in exact conjunction on May 31 at 63.5 degrees). What Dante would have made of the fact that Mercury was retrograde during most of the period, we cannot know.
As for the positions of Mars and Venus, they, too, throughout most of the two-week period, were very close together. On May 16 they were about 18 degrees apart, but with Mars retrograde they entered the orb of conjunction, in Cancer, on May 18. Since Mars moves very slowly along the ecliptic, and since Venus was retrograde between May 25 and June 5, for the rest of May Mars and Venus were never more than 10 degrees apart.
Jupiter was moving slowly through the last degrees of Taurus in May, gradually decreasing the distance between himself and Mercury and Saturn. On June 8, the extremely rare conjunction (orbal) of the three planets took place.
32. It is in Paradiso 22, of course, that Dante explicitly refers to his birth and continue
pays his tribute to the stars of Gemini. But the terms in which Dante relates his departure from Gemini are particularly appropriate to birth: "del bel nido di Leda mi divelse " ( Paradiso 27.98), and the reference to Leda's nest, which involves a reference to Leda's womb (the first nest of Castor and Pollux), inclines us to the view that the time spent by Dante in Gemini is to be taken as parallel to the time he spent in the womb (see below, note 64). In Paradiso 16.34-39, Dante has Cacciaguida date his birth by reference to Mars in Leo (as it is at the time of Dante's journey). If May 27 was Dante's birthday, the reference would gain additional motivation from the fact that in 1265 Mars entered Leo on May 26. Finally, the planetary positions for May 27 are more interesting than those for May 22; this is an arbitrary element, of course, but Dante may well have indulged in such arbitrary (but motivated) guesswork.
33. Saturn was in Gemini, during Dante's lifetime, as follows: (1) 1265-67. Saturn entered Gemini at the beginning of May 1265, in direct motion; around September 18 of that year it turned retrograde at 12 degrees Gemini, remaining retrograde until about January 6, 1266; on October 3, 1266, its motion became retrograde again, at 26 degrees Gemini, and remained so until about February 10, 1267, at 19.5 degrees Gemini; on June 14, 1267, Saturn entered Cancer. (2) 1294-97. Saturn entered Gemini in direct motion on June 19, 1294; on about September 6 it turned retrograde at 6 degrees Gemini, moving backward into Taurus on December 15; on January 24, 1295, it reached 28 degrees Taurus, and its motion became direct again. Saturn reentered Gemini on February 26, 1295; about September 21 it turned retrograde at 20 degrees Gemini, remaining retrograde until about February 18, 1296, turning at 13 degrees Gemini. Saturn left Gemini on August 1, 1296, and reached 4 degrees Cancer around October 5, where it once again turned retrograde. On December 24, 1296 (the date of the conjunction of Venus and the sun), Saturn entered Gemini retrograde, turning to direct motion only on February 22, 1297, at 27 degrees Gemini. On April 14, 1297, Saturn left Gemini, not to return until April 1324.
If Dante speculated on the future returns of Saturn to Gemini, he would have had to suppose that the one in 1324-26, if he lived to see it, would be the last of his lifetime; his life thus would have been punctuated by three such returns (1265-67, 1294-97, 1324-26), at approximately thirty-year intervals. In September 1321, when Dante died, Saturn was in Aries.
For the question of Dante's expectation of the "great conjunction" of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in Gemini in 1325, see Woody 1977.
34. Dante no doubt considered either Saturn or Mercury to be the "lord" of his horoscope. Mercury is the more likely (see pp. 87-91). Although he does not say so explicitly, Boccaccio's description of Dante in the two versions of the Trattatello in laude di Dante is recognizably Saturnine:
Fu adunque questo nostro poeta di mediocre statura, e, poi che alla matura età fu pervenuto, andò alquanto curvetto, e era il suo andare grave e mansueto, d'onestissimi panni sempre vestito, in quello abito che era alla sua maturità convenevole. II suo volto fu lungo, e il naso aquilino, e gli occhi anzi grossi che piccioli, le mascelle grandi, e dal labro di sotto era continue
quel di sopra avanzato; e il colore era bruno, e i cappelli e la barba spessa, neri e crespi, e sempre nella faccia malinconicoe pensoso.
(Boccaccio 1974 465, cf. 512)
Parts of Boccaccio's description might almost have been lifted from Ptolemy's description of the Saturnine:
Saturn, if he is in the orient, makes his subjects in appearance dark-skinned, robust, black-haired, curly-haired, hairy-chested, with eyes of moderate size, of middling stature, and in temperament having an excess of the moist and the cold.
(1940 309)
That Boccaccio was thoroughly aware of the astrology of the petrose is proved by his use of it in the Decameron and elsewhere; see Durling 1985; cf. Quaglio 1967, an excellent survey of astrology in Boccaccio. For Boccaccio on Saturn, see Boccaccio 1951 Book 8, proem and chapter 1.
35. The horoscope for June 4, given as an example in Durling 1975 126, shows an even closer grouping.
36. How seriously a horoscope like this could be taken is seen in the attitudes of the Avignon cleric Opicinus de Canistris, who was born precisely on December 24, 1296. He thought that the reason his whole life was dogged by strife, misfortune, and inner conflict—as indeed it seems to have been—was the double influence of Saturn and Mars in his natal chart. Also, thanks to a common medieval confusion between ante and antí, he thought his nativity had a connection with the anti-Christ that was pernicious to himself. The fanatical exactitude of Opicinus's elaborate drawings, in which he tried to relate his own situation with the rest of the cosmos, including the geography of Europe, is most instructive. Of course, Opicinus was a crank—but so to some extent was Dante. See Salomon 1936 : 122-129. Volume 2 of this remarkable study consists of reproductions of Opicinus's drawings; see esp. vol. 2, Tafel 22.
37. Exactly what the significance of Mars retrograde would have been thought to be in this planetary configuration, it is difficult to say; Opicinus (see previous note) clearly regarded it as particularly baleful and associated it with his frequent defeats (cf. Palgen 1940 47-50).
38. It is hardly necessary to point out that the term passo is the vernacular correlate of the Latin gradus, or step.
39. The emphasis in "Io son venuto" on Saturn ascending might indicate that he thought of Saturn as the most dominant. See below, note 51.
40. The grounds would have included the near conjunction of the sun and Mercury in Gemini.
41. Firmicus Maternus 2.2-3; cf. Ptolemy Tetrabiblos 1.17.
42. Ptolemy Tetrabiblos 4.4: "For anthropomorphic signs are of some assistance to all scientific pursuits or those useful to man" (1940 389).
43. Ibid.: "For if Mercury governs action, to speak generally, he makes his subjects scribes, men of business, calculators, teachers, merchants, bankers, soothsayers, astrologers, sacrificers, and in general those who perform their continue
functions by means of documents, interpretation, and giving and taking" (Ptolemy 1940 383). Firmicus Maternus 3.1: "Mercurius in parte horoscopi partiliter constitutus in his, in quibus gaudet signis, in diurna genitura facit philosophos, grammaticae artis magistros aut geometras aut caelestia saepe tractantes aut qui ad hoc spectent, ut deorum possint praesentiam intueri, aut sacrarum litterarum peritos; facit etiam frequenter oratores et advocatos, praesertim si in hoc loco vel in suis signis vel in ceteris vocalibus signis fuerit inventus. Quod si sic Mercurium Sol aut Saturnus aut Iuppiter in diurna genitura respexerit, magnos viros faciet, qui sacris et gloriosis stemmatibus coronentur; facit etiam tales, ut illis maxima imperatorum negotia credantur" (1913 155-156); cf. 5.2.15, 7.26.
42. Ptolemy Tetrabiblos 4.4: "For anthropomorphic signs are of some assistance to all scientific pursuits or those useful to man" (1940 389).
43. Ibid.: "For if Mercury governs action, to speak generally, he makes his subjects scribes, men of business, calculators, teachers, merchants, bankers, soothsayers, astrologers, sacrificers, and in general those who perform their continue
functions by means of documents, interpretation, and giving and taking" (Ptolemy 1940 383). Firmicus Maternus 3.1: "Mercurius in parte horoscopi partiliter constitutus in his, in quibus gaudet signis, in diurna genitura facit philosophos, grammaticae artis magistros aut geometras aut caelestia saepe tractantes aut qui ad hoc spectent, ut deorum possint praesentiam intueri, aut sacrarum litterarum peritos; facit etiam frequenter oratores et advocatos, praesertim si in hoc loco vel in suis signis vel in ceteris vocalibus signis fuerit inventus. Quod si sic Mercurium Sol aut Saturnus aut Iuppiter in diurna genitura respexerit, magnos viros faciet, qui sacris et gloriosis stemmatibus coronentur; facit etiam tales, ut illis maxima imperatorum negotia credantur" (1913 155-156); cf. 5.2.15, 7.26.
44. See Boll and Gundel 1931; Gundel 1972 620-633.
45. Ovid's account of their becoming stars is in the Fasti:
At mihi pande, precor, tanto meliora petenti,
in Geminos ex quo tempore Phoebus eat.
"cum totidem de mense dies superesse videbis,
quot sunt Herculei facta laboris" ait.
"dic" ego respondi "causam mihi sideris huius";
causam facundo reddidit ore deus:
"abstulerant raptas Phoeben Phoebesque sororem
Tyndaridae fratres, hic eques, ille pugil.
bella parant repetuntque suas et frater et Idas,
Leucippo fieri pactus uterque gener.
his amor, ut repetant, illis, ut reddere nolint,
suadet et ex causa pugnat uterque pari.
effugere Oebalidae cursu potuere sequentes,
sed visum celeri vincere turpe fuga.
liber ad arboribus locus est, apta area pugnae:
constiterant illo—nomen Aphidna—loco.
pectora traiectus Lynceo Castor ab ense
non exspectato vulnere pressit humum.
ultor adest Pollux et Lyncea perforat hasta,
qua cervix umeros continuata premit.
ibat in hunc Idas vixque est Iovis igne repulsus,
tela tamen dextrae fulmine rapta negant.
iamque tibi, Pollux, caelum sublime patebat,
cum 'mea' dixisti 'percipe verba, pater!
quod mihi das uni caelum, partire duobus:
dimidium toto munere maius erit.'
dixit et altera fratrem statione redemit:
utile sollicitae sidus utrumque rati."
(
Fasti
5.693-720 D. XIII. KAL. IUN. C. [i.e., May 18] [Ovid 1957])
But open to me, I beg, as I seek things so much greater, when the sun enters Gemini. "When you see that as many days remain in the month as Hercules performed labors," he says. "Tell," I reply, "the reason for this constellation"; the god replies with eloquent mouth: "The two sons of Leda, one a horseman, the other a boxer, had carried off Phoebe and continue
Phoebe's sister. Idas and his brother take up arms and demand their sisters, both having promised to become brothers-in-law to Leucippus. Love urges them to demand them back, love urges these others to keep the sisters, and each fights with equal reason. The grandsons of Oebalus could have escaped by fleeing, but it seemed base to win by cowardly flight. There was a clearing, an apt place for a fight: they halted there—Aphidna is the name of the place. Castor, run through the breast by an unexpected wound from Lynceus' sword, fell to the ground. Pollux is quick to avenge him and pierces Lynceus through with his spear where the neck joins the shoulders. Idas attacks Pollux, even the fire of Jove hardly repels him, and they say that the lightning did not shake his weapon from his right hand. Already the high heavens were opening to you, Pollux, when you said, 'Hear my words, father! The heaven that you are giving to me alone—divide it between the two of us: half a gift will be greater than a whole one.' He spoke, and redeemed his brother with alternate stay: and both stars are helpful to a ship in trouble."
In Ovid's account the myth is deeply ambiguous, then, capable of being read in a severely negative sense as well as in its more frequently cited sense as an instance of brotherly devotion. The allegorical interpretation given by the Christian Fulgentius (probably fourth century), for instance, treats the brothers as personifying the consequences of the libidinous abuse of power (i.e., Jupiter's):
Sed ex hoc ovo generantur tres, Castor, Pollux, et Helena, nihilominus seminarium scandali et discordiae, sicut ante diximus, "et geminum luctu concussit adultera mundum." Castorem vero et Pollucem quasi in modum perditionis ponunt, unde et in mari Castorum signa dixerunt quae periculum creant; nam ob hanc rem etiam ambos alternatim resurgere atque occidere dicunt, quod superbia nonnumquam iubet, nonnumquam occidat.
( Mythologiarum 2.13)
But from this egg three are born, Castor, Pollux, and Helen, nothing less than a sowing of scandal and discord, as we have said, "And the adulteress shook both Asia and Europe (the twinned world) with grief." They see Castor and Pollux as signifying destruction, and at sea they say that the constellation that brings danger is Castor's; for this reason, too, they are said to rise and die alternately, for pride sometimes commands, sometimes kills.
See below, note 47.
46. See Real-Encyclopädie (Pauly-Wissowa), s.v. Dioskuroi; Aen. 6.121; Ovid Amores 3.2.54; Hyginus Fab. 77, 78; Horace Sat. 1.1.27; Cicero De nat. deor. 2.2.
47. Hyginus's account, in his astronomical handbook, makes a point of their not striving for principatus:
Gemini. Hos complures astrologi Castorem et Pollucem esse dixerunt, quos demonstrant omnium fratrum inter se amantissimos fuisse, quod neque de principatu contenderint, neque ullam rem sine communi con- soft
silio gesserint. Pro quibus officiis eorum Iuppiter inter notissima sidera eos constituisse existimatur. Neptunum autem pari consilio munerasse, nam equos his quibus utuntur donavit et dedit potestatem naufragiis saluti esse. Alii dixerunt Herculem esse et Apollinem; nonnulli etiam Triptolemum quem supra diximus et Iasiona a Cerere dilectos et ad sidera perlatos. Sed qui de Castore et Polluce dicunt, hoc amplius addunt ut Castor in oppido Aphidnis sit occisus, quo tempore Lacedaemones cum Atheniensibus bellum gesserunt. Alii autem, cum oppugnarent Spartam Lynceus et Idas, ibi perisse dixerunt. Pollucem ait Homerus concessisse fratri dimidiam vitam, itaque alternis diebus eorum quemque lucere.
(Hyginus 1983 63-65)
See also Alain of Lille's reference ( Anticlaudianus 4.6.8--9; PL 210.526): "Hic proles Ledaea micat, nec pignus amoris / Quem prius in terris gessit deponit in astris."
48. See below, note 62. Rabuse (1957) discusses the children of Mars on pp. 88-92, of Saturn on pp. 284-285, but he does not connect them with the problematic of the Twins or of the frères ennemis. That the Twins were sometimes associated with the frères ennemis can be seen in certain medieval representations; for instance, Herrad of Landsberg, in the Hortus deliciarum, shows them as jousting knights (1979 fol. IIV; and cf. fol. 215). The Twins have also been associated with Virgil's mysterious phrase about the Veltro, "e sua nazion sarà tra feltro e feltro" ( Inferno 1.105). Leonardo Olschki (1953) argued that it refers to the traditional felt caps of Castor and Pollux, thus to Dante's own birth. The late Robert E. Kaske showed (1961 237-240) that a considerable number of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century texts associate Castor and Pollux with St. Francis and St. Dominic and their respective orders; he found a number of details in Paradiso 11-12 which draw upon the association and argued that "tra feltro e feltro" refers to the coarse habits of the two mendicant orders. See our pp. 236-240.
There does not appear to be any reference in the petrose to the traditional role of the Dioscuri as helpers of storm-beset sailors or to their association with St. Elmo's fire.
49. For a useful account of Martianus's allegory and its influence, see Wetherbee 1972 83-92. On Bernard Silvester, see below, notes 85 and 88. On Martianus's doctrines and for bibliography, see Gersh 1986 2:597-646.
50. For instance, Mercury consults his mother, Maia, about his marriage—and naturally he visits her on his zodiacal rounds, since she is one of the Pleiades: "in quam sententiam mater illum anxia, cum annua peragratione zodiaca in Pliadum numero salutaret, impulerat" ( De nuptiis 1.5 [Willis 1983 3]). In other words, Martianus's references to Mercury (and Apollo) fluctuate between mythological and astrological: he is alternately planet and god. A very high proportion of Eriugena's glosses on the first book are explanations of the cosmological—mainly astronomical—allegories; see Lutz 1939 8, 14, 15, 19-26, 29-30, 34-45.
51. It would be the ideal horoscope for a philosophical poet, as Dante must have seen: when Apollo agrees to help Mercury persuade Jupiter to allow his continue
marriage with Philologia, the two gods, "metamorphosed" into their astronomical identities, suddenly pass from a grove on Parnassus (symbolizing the cosmos) to the heavens:
interea tractus aerios iam Phoebus exierat, cum subito ei vitta crinalis immutatur in radios, laurusque, quam dextera retinebat, in lampadem mundani splendoris accenditur, fiuntque volucres, qui currum Delium subvehebant, anheli flammantis lucis alipedes. atque idem pallio rutilante ac reserato stellantis poli limine Sol repente clarius emicuit. Cyllenius quoque in sidus vibrabile astrumque convertitur. atque ita metamorphosi supera pulchriores per Geminos propinquitate quadam signi familiaris invecti augusto fulsere caelo, ac mox Tonantis palatium petiverunt.
( De nuptiis 1.29-30 [Willis 1983 15])
In the meantime Phoebus had gone out into the tracts of the air, and suddenly the fillet binding his hair changed into sunbeams, and the laurel that he was carrying in his right hand was lit up as the lamp that lights the world, the birds that were drawing the Delian chariot suddenly became fire-breathing horses with winged feet. And he, in a flaming cloak, opening the threshold of the starry pole, suddenly shone forth as the Sun. Cyllenius, too, is changed into a planet and shining star. And thus, by a heavenly metamorphosis more beautiful, carried through Gemini by a certain nearness of the familiar sign, they shone forth on the high heaven, and now made for the palace of the Thunderer.
52. Cambridge University Library, Ms. Mm 1.18, fols. 1-29r; published in part by Wetherbee 1972 267-272; on it, see his pp. 115-125. The commentary as a whole has now been published by Westra (1986).
53. "Tractaturus namque philosophus de coniunctione sermonis et rationis incipit de causa coniunctionis, scilicet concordia utili, qui naturas licet dissonas in unam sociat essentiam" (Wetherbee 1972 271; Westra 1986 49). See the fine discussion of the opening poem in Le Moine 1972 21-29. A basic theme of Bernard's commentary is the duality of human nature between soul and body or spirit and sensuality. This is parallel, he says, to the relation (of marriage) between Adam and Eve (Westra 1986 143-144, and cf. pp. 44, 48), who are thus brought into parallel with the Twins. This node of association (Mercury-Philologia, Castor-Pollux, Adam-Eve) may perhaps have been a factor in the growing popularity of the male-female version of the Twins; see below, note 55.
54. This is a comment on the astrological passage quoted above ( De nuptiis 1.30):
Vita contemplativa Pollux, i.e. "perditio" dicitur quia bona hec relinquendo animam suam perdit ut eam invenire mereatur. Activa vita "extremum malum" dicitur quia terminus corporee voluptatis esse perhibetur. Inter voluptatem namque et contemplationem media est actio. Ille immortalis esse ex hoc monstratur, quia morte corporali non ita contemplatio ut actio terminatur. Unde Dominus dicit Mariam eam elegisse, propterea quod ab ea non auferetur. Castori Pollux confert deitatem quia actio ad contemplationem transiens assequitur immortalitatem.
(Wetherbee 1972 268; Westra 1986 240) continue
55. The traditions available to Dante included other identifications of the heavenly Twins besides the predominant one as Castor and Pollux. The most important represent them visually as male and female. These appear in a very few ancient representations of the zodiac, apparently restricted to Egypt and unknown in the Christian West; see H. G. Gundel 1972 600-695 ("Bildliche Darstellungen"); Neugebauer and Parker 1969 72-75, no. 54, pl. 35; Stern 1953 199-202. In the Middle Ages, representation of the Twins as a male and female pair becomes increasingly common, particularly from the thirteenth century on; by the fifteenth century a large majority of representations of the Twins in calendars (in Books of Hours, etc.) are of a male-female pair. They occur in cathedral sculptures, as on the west portal at Amiens, and in a wide variety of types of manuscripts, from astronomical-astrological ones to the Liber Scivias of Hildegard of Bingen to Psalters and Books of Hours. See Boll 1903 235-236, with n. 1; Haseloff 1897 10-24, 63; Bober 1948; Saxl 1915-53 1:25; 2:104, 132, 150, and Abb. 6, 10, 11, 12; and 3:73 and Abb. 230; Domínguez-Rodríguez 1973 43; and Moralejo-Alvárez 1977 169 (which has a useful discussion of Christian allegories of the zodiac and their reflections in art but erroneously states that the St. Gallen version of Hildebertus's De ratione xii. signorum identifies the Twins as Adam and Eve—see Bettmann 1847 593-594). For the Christian allegoresis of the zodiac, see Hübner 1975; Daniélou 1961 131-142.
Another tradition represents the Twins as both female; apparently it originates at the court of Alfonso X the Wise of Spain (see Brey-Mariño et al. 1982; and Domínguez-Rodríguez 1979). Finally, there is a tradition that represents them as a single bicephalous (dividing either at the neck or at the waist) human figure, apparently of Byzantine origin (e.g., in Paris B.N. Ms. lat. 7330, fol. 11, or Ms. grec 2419, fol. 1).
If the Twins are represented as male and female, who are they? In medieval terms, several main possibilities suggest themselves: most probably the Twins represent Adam and Eve, the original couple and in a sense the product of the same "birth," or else the masculine and feminine sides of human nature. Origen, in his first homily on Genesis, states: "Interior homo ex spiritu et anima constat. Masculus spiritus dicitur, femina potest anima nuncupari" (Origène 1976 66, trans. Rufinus); the idea became a commonplace. These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, of course, and, according to the later Greek fathers, the division of the sexes itself was anticipatory of the Fall; the resurrected Christ was thought to be androgynous (see Chapter 1, note 31). This aspect of the tradition has a clear analogy with the traditional interpretation of Castor and Pollux as the mortal and immortal sides of man. It seems possible that Martianus Capella's association of the marriage of Mercury and Philologia with the sign Gemini could have contributed to the growing popularity of the male-female Twins, particularly in the wake of Bernard Silvester's commentary; cf. also Chapter 1, note 30, and Bernard Silvester's twin genii, p. 98 and note 88 below.
56. Alfragano 1910 139-141. Durling 1975 116 erroneously takes the reference to Capella as a reference to Castor. On the stars Castor and Pollux, see Ptolemy Tetrabiblos 1.9 (1940 49). break
57. Martianus Capella 8.848 (Willis 1983 321). This is still true: the earth is farthest from the sun, and therefore moving slowest, at aphelion, then known as the sun's apogee, when the sun is at about the eighth degree of the constellation (not the sign) Gemini (i.e., around July 8).
58. "Inde fere numquam in eodem signo bis continuo nascitur nisi in Geminis, ubi hoc non numquam evenit, quia dies in eo sol duos supra triginta altitudine signi morante consumit; rarissime in aliis si circa primam signi partem a sole procedat" (Macrobius 1970a 27); cf. Martianus Capella 8.865-866 (Willis 1983 327-328). On Calcidius, see above, note 9.
59. Manilius 1932 2.197-202; see Housman's notes there and on p. vii. In his edition of Lucan, Housman (1926 333) points out that Gemini and Cancer are the two constellations that extend highest in the sky at transit.
60. Macrobius erroneously claims that the Milky Way crosses the ecliptic at the two Tropics ( Commentarii 1.12.1)—he is following Porphyry's Cave of the Nymphs; see Macrobius 1952 133n. 1: the error is obvious and was recognized in the Middle Ages. This symmetry is significant in his doctrine of the descent of the soul to the earth, in which again he follows Porphyry. He says that the gate by which the soul descends is at the summer solstice, that by which it returns to heaven at the winter solstice. Dante nowhere explicitly associates Gemini with the celestial gates, but there is a strong connection between the Commedia and the entire passage in Macrobius, not only because it is from Gemini that Dante leaves the visible universe in Paradiso 27, but also because in his journey heavenward Dante roughly retraces the path Macrobius implies for the soul's return to the stars, with the curious coincidence of the penultimate step via Leo, beneath which Dante visits Saturn: contiguous to Leo is the constellation Crater, the soul's first downward step according to Macrobius: see Commentarii 1.12.8.
61. Although Saturn's influence was usually considered to be negative, it was not forgotten that when he ruled Italy the world was innocent; the Golden Age is heralded by Virgil as Saturnia regna (Fourth Eclogue; cf. Plato Laws 713-714). From Ptolemy on, the tradition claimed him as a chief influence in forming the philosophical cast of mind, especially when associated with the beneficent planets and "in honorable positions" (Ptolemy 1940 339-347):
[as chief ruler Saturn] makes his subjects . . . strongminded, deep thinkers, austere, of a single purpose . . . [allied with Jupiter] wise, patient, philosophical . . . [allied with Venus] prophetic . . . , mystics, religious addicts, but dignified and reverent, modest, philosophical . . . [allied with Mercury] inquirers into . . . law and custom, fond of the art of medicine, mystics, partakers in concealed and secret rites.
Plotinus identified the power of Saturn with that of noûs, the cosmic principle of intellect (Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl 1964 152-156). According to Macrobius's account of the descent of the soul through heavenly spheres, Saturn endows it with the "motions" of ratiocination and intelligence, "ratiocinationem et intelligentiam, quas logistikón et theoretikón vocant," Mercury with the power of speech and interpretation ( Commentarii 1.13). In such contexts Saturn's coldness and slowness are positively valued. The Christian tradition continue
eclectically adapted the positive side of the figure of Saturn to its own themes, identifying the new Golden Age with monastic peace and contemplation (Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl 1964 159-169). When in the Paradiso Dante makes Saturn the abode of the contemplatives, his text becomes a kind of compendium of these traditions; see Palgen 1940 63-67. The central theme of Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl's great Saturn and Melancholy is the interweaving of traditions that leads to the association of the melancholic (Saturnine) temperament with artistic genius.
62. In the Commedia, Hell and Paradise are conceived as the realms of those who were dominated by the negative power of their stars (Hell) versus those whose "battles with the heavens" ( Purgatorio 16.77) resulted in an ability to follow the positive side of the planet's power. The fullest discussion of this aspect of the Commedia so far is in Rabuse 1957. Rabuse was unaware of the presence of the body analogy in the Commedia and was led astray by his determination to see in the Commedia a detailed imitation of Macrobius's account of the descent of the soul into matter and its re-ascent out of it. His book is nonetheless indispensable, particularly in its ground-breaking treatment of the relation between the infernal realm of Mars and the cantos of Mars in the Paradiso —on which see also Schnapp 1987, a more balanced discussion, though it underestimates the importance of the astrological dimension.
63. The horoscopes discussed in this chapter may well have a significant relation with those of the Commedia. See Figure 5 (p. 90), which shows the position of the planets for an hour after sunrise, Friday, April 8, 1300 (the morning generally accepted as meant in Inferno I). The positions are those for Montpellier calculated from Prophatius by Boffitto and Melzi (1908 129-130); we have disregarded the difference in longitude between Montpellier and Jerusalem, since we cannot know Dante would have calculated it (see above, note 30). Comparison of this horoscope of Inferno 1 with Figures 2, 3, and 4 reveals that all have one important point in common: the close grouping of Mercury, Jupiter, and the sun (Jupiter's greatest distance is 10 degrees in 1265, in 1296 it is 3 degrees, and in 1300, 5 degrees). Again, we emphasize that this configuration changed relatively slowly. We have indicated the position of Venus for April 8, 1301 (her actual position in 1300 was in Taurus). (According to Prophatius—and in fact—the full moon occurred on April 6; the reference in Inferno 20.127 to the moon as having been full "last evening" is thus anomalous. The anomaly is sometimes resolved by appeal to the ecclesiastical calendar, in which the paschal full moon is identified as occurring on April 7 [Moore 1903 177]. We show the moon in the position given by Prophatius.)
64. This is similar to the length of time Adam says he spent in the Garden of Eden ( Paradiso 26.139-142) and seems to us to provide additional support for the notion that Dante's time in Gemini is parallel to his life in the womb; see above, note 32.
65. In Dante's time, as he knew, the zodiacal constellations no longer corresponded exactly to the astrological signs; the vernal equinox (the first point of the sign Aries) had already precessed about 18 degrees (more than half a sign) continue
into the constellation Pisces. Although Dante may seem to be referring to the constellation Gemini ( stelle, lume ), it seems clear that he is disregarding the distinction, as he did in Purgatorio I (see Boyde 1981 163-165). We could not conclude, for instance, that he must have been born when the sun was actually in the constellation Gemini (i.e., from 20 degrees of the sign Gemini on—after June 6) because of the good grounds we have for believing that he was born in May. Intentionally or not, Dante would seem to have concealed any really definite clue to his birthdate. Of course, it is possible that he was actually born when the sun was in the zodiacal sign Cancer but with the stars of Gemini, and that he decided to claim Gemini as his sign because of its appropriateness to a philosopher-poet; but again, there is really no reason not to accept Boccaccio's report (see Introduction, note 8).
66. E.g., Singleton, in Dante 1975 2:365: Dante's apostrophe to these stars "constitutes the most eloquent witness to the belief in the influence of the heavenly bodies to be found anywhere in the poem. That these bodies do have such influence is granted in Purgatorio 16.73-81; but that the poet would grant, in his prayer here, that these glorious stars gave him . . . all, whatever it may be . . , of his genius was perhaps hardly expected by the reader." For the early commentators' remarks on these lines, see Costa 1988 50-52; Costa gives a useful survey of much of the lore of Mercury known to Dante (pp. 43-64).
67. The complexities of the doctrine of the human intellect do not seem to have left much trace in the petrose, which precede the most intense period of Dante's encounter with Avicennism and Averroism; see Nardi 1960 1-68; and Nardi 1949 175-200. In this connection, one of the points in Nardi's analysis on which we are not satisfied is his interpretation of Convivio 4.21.3-8. The passage is quite susceptible to a Proclan or Avicennan interpretation, namely, that it is the mover of the sphere (possibly of the dominant planet or of the fixed stars) that produces the possible intellect (this would be reconcilable with the Dominican position, which Dante seems clearly to adopt, that the active intellect is directly created). This view receives support in Dante's insistence that the first part of his explanation of the origin of human nobility will be natural, the second theological, and that the first part never unmistakably refers to God but both cites the Liber de causis (citations omitted in Nardi's discussion) and uses the terms motore and prima intelligentia, which in the Proclan tradition refer to levels of emanation below the One. Nardi nowhere discusses the question of Dante's knowledge of Proclus's Elementatio theologiae, which William of Moerbecke had translated, which Aquinas identified as the source of the Liber de causis and constantly cites in his commentary, and which seems to have circulated in Dominican circles, though not outside them (see Kaiser 1963). In short, it is possible that in Paradiso 22 Dante is ascribing the production of his possible intellect to the stars of Gemini. Even more clearly emanationist passages, such as those in Paradiso 1, 2, 13, and 27, however, are ambiguous on some key points (e.g., in Paradiso 2, just how close is the analogy between the way life is "bound up" with the body in human beings and the relation between the heavenly movers and their spheres?); see below, note 75. In any case, the question is beyond continue
our scope in this book (as well as our capacity!) and not central to our argument, which is that the petrose rest on an analogy between heavenly and human art that anticipates the Commedia in a general way but not in such details.
68. We incline to the view, then, that Dante would have subscribed to the views of Albertus Magnus's follower Witelo, though the term pregno does not establish it. In Paradiso 2 (see below), Beatrice says that the angelic mind "makes itself the seal," i.e., imposes the form—this language does not see the Movers as producing motus ad formam. Albert himself, of course, seems to have been inconsistent on many of these questions; cf. the previous note, and see Introduction, pp. 35-45.
69. Dante had read about the descent of the soul not only in the Timaeus but also in Macrobius's more widely read—and much more detailed—account in the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. There the doctrine is that until they incline downward toward bodies, all souls dwell in the sphere of the fixed stars. Riconosco is one of several terms in Paradiso 22 that seem rather pointed echoes of Macrobius's account:
animarum originem manare de caelo inter recte philosophantes indubitatae constat esse sapientiae: et animae, dum corpore utitur, haec est perfecta sapientia ut, unde orta sit, de quo fonte venerit, recognoscat .
( Commentarii 1.12.2; italics added)
Among those who philosophize correctly, it is established that undoubted wisdom holds that the soul draws its origin from the heavens: and this is the full wisdom of the soul as long as it dwells in the body that it recognize whence it has arisen, from what source it has come.
Just as in Purgatorio 25.61-66 he has Statius correct Averroës's reading of Aristotle on the separability of the intellect, so his allusion to Macrobius in Paradiso 22 is a correction of the doctrine of pre-existence and looks back to Paradiso 4; Statius's account (25.103-105) also refutes Aeneid 6.733, the Platonic-Stoic view that the body is the source of the perturbations of the soul (see Durling 1981a 81-82). This care to distinguish the true astrological doctrine from the pagan distortions is entirely in line with Aquinas's position; see Litt 1963 220-240.
Associated with the theme of paternity, as it is here, riconosco is an especially interesting term, and the theme is integrally bound up with the myth of the Twins. While in the myth Zeus does the paternal recognizing—and what amounts to adopting—here Dante is filially acknowledging his debt: the two actions go together. The term is used again, very conspicuously, in Dante's final expression of thanks to Beatrice ( Paradiso 31.84), also in a sense filial.
70. One notes, in the related context of "Io son venuto," the drawing up of the waters of the abyss by the power of the stars, also expressed with the term tirare, also a reference to the poetics of the poem; see below, pp. 106-108, and Chapter 6, pp. 248-250.
71. See, most notably, Paradiso 2.61-148, 27.105-120.
72. It is emphasized in this sphere when Beatrice says to Dante, "vedi quanto mondo / sotto li piedi già esser ti fei" ( Paradiso 22.128-129), with clear continue
allusion to Psalm 8:7: "constituisti eum super opera manuum tuarum, et omnia subiecisti sub pedibus eius."
73. The fixed stars are a higher cause than the planets (except for the sun); see the discussion in Paradiso 2 quoted below.
74. The principle here again is nature first and divine intervention second, as in the accounts of embryology in Convivio 4 (see above, note 67) and Purgatorio 25. Dante's version of the parallel between the creation of man in Genesis and the creation of the Church goes back to Origen's homily on Genesis 1 and to Augustine's use of the analogy in Confessions 13, as does the underlying astrological analogy; see next note.
75. The analogy between human art and the art of the turning heavens is explicit in Paradiso 2, in a passage closely related to Albertus Magnus's conception of the analogy, discussed in the Introduction (pp. 41-43):
Dentro dal ciel de la divina pace
si gira un corpo ne la cui virtute
l'esser di tutto suo contento giace.
Lo ciel seguente, c'ha tante vedute,
quell' esser parte per diverse essenze,
da lui distratte e da lui contenute.
Li altri giron per varie differenze
le distinzion che dentro da sé hanno
dispongono a lor fini e lor semenze.
Questi
organi del mondo
così vanno,
come tu vedi omai, di grado in grado,
che di sù prendono e di sotto fanno.
Riguarda bene omai sì com'io vado
per questo loco al vero che disiri,
sì che poi sappi sol tener lo guado.
Lo moto e la virtù d'i santi giri,
come dal fabbro l'arte del martello,
da' beati motor convien che spiri;
e'l ciel cui tanti lumi fanno bello,
de la mente profonda che lui volve
'prende l'image e fassene suggello.
(
Paradiso
2.112-132; emphasis added)
Beatrice goes on to draw the analogy between the intelligences and the human soul animating its body (lines 133-148). Boyde (1981 371-372, 266-269) notes Aquinas's description of this position as heretical in Summa contra Gentiles 2.43 and De veritate, quaest. 5, art. 9; the doctrine that the intelligences are souls of the heavens and that the heavenly bodies are organs was number 102 among the theses included in the famous condemnation of 1277: "Quod anima celi est intelligentia et orbes celestes non sunt intrumenta intelligentiarum sed organa, sicut auris et oculus sunt organa virtutis sensitive" (Denifle and Chatelain 1889 549; see Introduction, note 87, and above, note 67). See Chapter 6, pp. 228-232.
Although Beatrice does not spell out the analogy as fully or in quite the same way as Albert does, the terminology and the general conception are extremely continue
close. Albert correlates three terms in each term of the analogy: the mover (the angel, or Intelligence) he correlates with the habit of art, the sphere with the operation of the hand, and the powers of the elements with "the operation of a tool that is moved by the hand and directed to the end conceived by the artisan." Albert is discussing the formation of stones, and the elements are terrestrial; Beatrice is establishing the priority of form, showing that the nature of the heavenly spheres itself derives from the Intelligences that move them, as a human body is both shaped and moved by the soul. Dante correlates the sphere with the hammer, which moves and stamps the subject matter (see Chapter 6, note 8).
Dante's analogy derives from the type of interpretation of Genesis 1 given by Augustine in the Confessions, according to which, in God's new creation (the Church), the firmament is the Bible and the heavenly bodies are the apostles, saints, and clergy who illuminate—and thus shape—the laity (made parallel with the sublunar):
Ita, Domine, ita, oro te, oriatur . . . , oriatur de terra veritas et iustitia de coelo respiciat, et fiant in firmamento luminaria . . . et erumpat temporanea lux nostra et de ista inferiori fruge actionis in delicias contemplationis verbum vitae superius obtinentes, appareamus sicut luminaria in mundo, cohaerentes firmamento Scripturae tuae. Ibi enim nobiscum disputas, ut dividamus inter intelligibilia et sensibilia, tamquam inter diem et noctem vel inter animas alias intelligibilibus, alias sensibilibus deditas, ut iam non tu solus in abdito diiudicationis tuae, sicut antequam fieret firmamentum, dividas inter lucem et tenebras: sed etiam spiritales tui, in eodem firmamento positi atque distincti, manifestata per orbem gratia tua, luceant super terram et dividant inter diem et noctem et significent tempora, quia vetera transierunt et ecce facta sunt nova.
(13.18 [Capello 1948 547-548]; italics are the editor's and identify biblical phrases Augustine has woven into his text)
Thus, Lord, thus, I pray you, . . . so let the truth rise from the earth and let justice look down from the heavens and let there be lights in the firmament . . . and let our temporary light break forth from that lower sphere of activity into the joy of contemplation, obtaining the Word of Life from on high, and let us appear as lights to the world, clinging to the firmament of your Scripture. For there you remonstrate with us, so that we may distinguish between intelligible and sensible things as if between day and night or between souls given over to intelligible things and those given over to the things of sense, not as once you, alone in the secret of your decrees, before the firmament was made, divided the light from the darkness: but as also your spiritual ones, set and distinguished in the same firmament, your grace having been revealed throughout the world, shine upon the earth and divide the night from the day and signify time, because old things have passed away and behold all things have been made new.
Cf. 13.15: "Aut quis nisi tu, Deus noster, fecisti nobis firmamentum auctoritatis super nos de Scriptura tua divina? Coelum enim plicabitur ut liber, et nunc, sicut pellis, extenditur super nos" (Capello 1948 541). break
This analogy is of course closely related to that between the sciences and heavens which Dante develops in Convivio 2.13-14 (which itself goes back at least as far as Martianus Capella's assignment of each of the Muses to one of the heavens, 1.27-28); particularly relevant is Dante's statement of the grounds of the parallel, which are three: (I) like the heavens, each science revolves around its subject as around a center; (2) as the heavens illuminate the visible, so the sciences illuminate the intelligible; (3) like the heavens, the sciences induce perfection in their subjects ( Convivio 2.13.3-5); Busnelli and Vandelli (Dante 1964 188 n .4) cite parallels in Gregory the Great, Hugh of St. Cher, Isidore of Seville, and Ristoro d'Arezzo; see also d'Alverny 1964.
The Commedia is partly the expression of an aspiration to shape Christendom according to the analogy Augustine establishes between the saints and clergy and the heavenly bodies. As we have seen, in "Io son venuto" and in Paradiso 22 Dante associates the emergence of talent with the rising of heavenly bodies, in a way derived from Augustine's use of the metaphor in the passages just quoted. The analogy Augustine draws between the influence of the heavenly bodies and that of the clergy also underlies Dante's entire treatment of the theologians in the cantos of the sun. The elaborate sun symbolism, for instance, of the parallel lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic ( Paradiso 11 and 12) derives directly from it (see Chapter 6, pp. 237-240):
Di questa costa, là dov'ella frange
più sua rattezza,
nacque al mondo un sole,
come fa questo talvolta di Gange.
Però chi d'esso loco fa parole,
non dica Ascesi, ché direbbe corto,
ma Orïente, se proprio dir vuole.
Non era ancor molto lontan da
l'orto,
ch'el cominciò a far sentir la terra
de la sua
gran virtute
alcun conforto . . .
(
Paradiso
11.49-57; emphasis added)
de toutes les vertuz habonde
que Diex a mises en cest monde;
compainz est a toutes les choses
qui sunt an tout le monde ancloses,
et de leur bontez parçonierres:
il a son estre avec les pierres,
et vit avec les herbes drues,
et sent avec les bestes mues;
oncor peut il trop plus an tant
qu'il avec les anges antant.
Que vos puis je plus recenser?
Il a quan que l'an peut penser,
c'est uns petiz mondes noveaus.
(Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun 1970 3:71)
76. And both associate that arrival with the act of seeing the stars of Gemini ("io vidi 'l segno," Paradiso 22.10); in "Io son venuto," l'orizzonte ci partorisce refers to the emergence to sight of what is born, like nasceva in Paradiso 22.115).
77. See Appendix 1 for Dante's use in the De vulgari eloquentia of the metaphor of birth with reference to the petrose.
78. See above, Chapter 1, pp. 67-68, with notes.
79. This was first pointed out in Durling 1975 104-113.
80. For the importance of this principle in the Commedia, see Durling 1981a and 1981b. For the parallels between "Io son venuto" and the Inferno, see Freccero 1972; Durling 1975 117-120; and below, Chapter 6, pp. 201-224.
81. Hildegard of Bingen Liber divinorum operum simplicis hominis, PL 197.840, 847, 843-844, 819, respectively.
82. Grosseteste 1912 59 ("Quod homo sit minor mundus"): "Caput namque ad caelum refertur; in quo sunt duo oculi tanquam lumina solis et lunae. Pectus aeri coniungitur, quia sicut inde emittitur spiraminis flatus, sic ex aëri vento- soft
rum spiritus. Venter autem mari assimilatur propter collectionem omnium humorum quasi congregationem aquarum. Vestigia postremum terrae comparantur. Sicut enim ultima membrorum arida sicut terra, sive sicca sicut terra." On Grosseteste's "microcosmism," see McEvoy 1982 370-401.
83. See Origen's allegoresis of creation, in his first homily on Genesis: Origène 1976 40-72 (this is Rufinus's Latin translation).
84. Gregory the Great's remarks ( PL 76.1214: "Habet homo commune esse cum lapidibus, vivere cum arboribus, sentire cum animalibus, intelligere cum angelis") underlie, as Gregory points out, John the Scot's influential discussion of man as officina in the De divisione naturae (see Chapter 1, notes 30 and 31). Jean de Meun has Nature echo Gregory's homily in Roman de la rose 19011-23. Man, she says,
85. See Stock 1972 198-219; Wetherbee 1972; Bernard Silvester 1973, 1978; and Kurdzialek 1971. For the rich diversity of Bernard's sources, which make the Cosmographia such an important intermediary of microcosmic thought, see also Dronke's collection of "testimonies" (Bernard Silvester 1978 70-91).
86. According to Timaeus 56b, the geometric form of the element of fire is the tetrahedron.
87. This is the Timaeus doctrine of the semen (74a-b, 91a-d), which Bernard seems to have known through Constantinus Africanus, the medical writer (see next note).
88. Bernard Silvester 1876 70-71. We have corrected Barach and Wrobel's text according to Vernet's text, quoted in Stock 1972 217. Italics are added to call attention to parts of the passage of special interest in connection with "Io son venuto": the entrusting of immortality to twin brothers; the use of astrological metaphors for the influence of the brain on the genitals (cf. Timaeus 91); the metaphor of flux and flood for orgasm; the notion of the little death. The twin genii are either the testicles or the male and female genitals (cf. also Maximianus's elegy in praise of the penis, quoted by Dronke in Bernard Silvester 1978 87-88). See also Dronke 1965 413-416; and Schipperges 1962. Wetherbee (Bernard Silvester 1973 134 nn . 107, 110) cites Constantinus Africanus De commu- soft
nibus locis 3.15 and 3.35 as a possible source; cf. Bernard Silvester 1978 47-49, with notes.
89. For example, by Grosseteste; see above, note 82.
90. See Nardi 1966b.
91. Aristotle's De anima is the fountainhead of this tradition; see Aquinas 1959 153-162. Andreas Capellanus (1972 3-6) is the classic discussion of love as "immoderata cogitatio." See Durling 1971 on Petrarch's "Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro" (Petrarch found the suggestion of idolatry in the identification of the lady with stone).
92. For the topos, as well as for several aspects of the descriptions of winter in "Io son venuto," cf. Roman de la rose, lines 17889-902, on the effects of storms (the speaker is Nature):
Voire plourer a grosses lermes
refont il l'air an divers termes,
s'an ont si grant pitié les nues
qu'el s'an depoillent toutes nues,
ne ne prisent lors un festu
le noir mantel qu'els ont vestu;
car a tel deul fere s'atirent
que tout par pieces le descirent;
si li aïdent a plourer
con s'an les deüst acourer,
et pleurent si parfondemant,
si fort et si espessemant
qu'el font les fleuves desriver
et contre les chans estriver.
(Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun 1970 3:37)
As Lecoy notes (p. 172), the entire passage is imitated from Ovid's description of the deluge in Metamorphoses 2.272ff.—not, however, the topos of weeping.
93. Dante accepted the Aristotelian position on the primacy of the heart, the "hearth" of the body, parallel to the sun in the macrocosm, as repository of all the vital powers of the soul, as against the Platonic position, voiced by Bernard Silvester, on their being shared out. Dante's position derives especially, it seems, from Albertus Magnus's popularization of the commentaries by Averroës on Aristotle's scientific treatises. See Durling 1981b 6 n .1 and pp. 33-34.
94. In the Commedia, of course, Dante adopts the Aristotelian view that semen is ultra-digested heart's blood ( Purgatorio 25.37-45), just as in "Io son venuto" he locates the seat of passion in the heart, not the liver; see Durling 1981a 61-93.
95. In fact, Dante is drawing on a well-established interpretation of the Medusa; see pp. 105-106, 118, 143, 162-164, and 193-197, and note 97 below.
96. The richness of association includes Bernard Silvester; Seneca, on the cataclysm; Ovid, on the deluge; and Jean de Meun.
97. In addition to Ovid's version ( Metamorphoses 4.772-803; see next note), continue
Dante was familiar with Jean de Meun's references in the Roman de la rose, lines 20787-21184. John Freccero (1972) established that there are focused echoes of stanza 5 in the Medusa episode in Inferno 9, which must thus be a comment on "Io son venuto."
98. Metamorphoses 5.182-235 and passim; e.g., "in hoc haesit signum de marmore gestu" (183). Cf. 3.418-419: "Adstupet ipse sibi vultuque inmotus eodem / haeret ut a Pario formatum marmore signum" (of Narcissus). The implication of whiteness is frequent in these passages.
99. This figure Cicero calls conversio, and Martianus Capella, antistrophe (both terms name the figure as a turning back toward the previous phrase). They are often paired in rhetorical handbooks: Cicero De oratore 3.54.206: "geminatio [but Dante did not know this treatise] verborum habet interdum vim, leporem alias, et paulum immutatum verbum atque deflexum et eiusdem verbi crebra turn a principio repetitio, turn in extremum conversio" (Wilkins 1902). Martianus Capella 5.534: "epanafora relatio, quotiens per singula membra eadem pars orationis repetitur hoc modo: 'Verres calumniatores apponebat, Verres de causa cognoscebat, Verres pronuntiabat.' antistrofe conversio. Haec figura hoc differt a superiore, quod in illa ab eadem parte orationis saepius incipitur, hic in eadem terminatur, ut est 'pro Fonteio frumenti numerus Gallia, peditatus amplissime Gallia, equites numero plurimo e Gallia."' See Foster and Boyde's commentary on "Al poco giomo," Dante 1967 2:265).
100. See Chapter 4, pp. 144-148.
101. The idea of symmetrically placed rhyme-words enclosing verses is exploited even more fully in "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna"; see Chapter 4, pp. 141-143. In "Io son venuto" a similar, though not as rigorous, symmetry governs the words Dante uses for cold (in each stanza contrasted with terms for warmth, always referring to the sun):
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102. The third petrosa, "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna," also seems to appeal to natural procreativity; see Chapter 4, p. 156. Purgatorio 25-26 develops an extended parallel between procreation and poetic creation.
3— The Sun and the Heliotrope: "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra"
1. Riesz 1971 is a broad historical study. See also Fenzi 1966; Sheehan 1967; Bondanella 1971; Durling 1971; Freccero 1975; and Vanossi 1980 295-296. Roubaud (1969) is avowedly concerned with purely formal elements (see note 53 be- soft
low), while the recent microanalyses of di Girolamo (1976) and Cudini (1982) stress phonic relations and proportions. A recent attempt to combine literary-historical and linguistic approaches is Shapiro 1980. Bartolozzi (1982), in the wake of Fenzi (1966), draws parallels with Ovid and suggests the relevance of the Medusa; we draw upon his useful reading below. One of the most suggestive readings of the poem remains Fiedler 1960.
2. Shapiro 1980 13, 33-34, 81-88.
3. Although Shapiro (1980) credits Petrarch with signifying, with the sestina, the human temporal predicament (cf. Durling 1965 84-86; Durling 1975 17-18), she denies Dante this sensibility. Dante's sestina is, rather, a "curiously static realization" (p. 91). She echoes Contini in judging the poem as showing "temporal notations superimposed on each other in an achronic segmentation that displays virtually no organic principle of succession" (p. 91) and adds: "Four of the six full strophes display maximal mobility: they could be exchanged, as to sense, with any other of them that produce a satisfactory closure of the series (II-V)" (p. 92). The studies of Durling (1971), di Girolamo (1976), Vanossi (1980), and Cudini (1982) also do not depart from Contini's premises in this respect.
4. Dante 1946, 157 (our translation).
5. In fact, as Contini notes (Dante 1946 156), five of the six rhyme-words in the sestina appear in rhyme in the canzone. For parallels between the petrose, see Baldelli 1973 937. Cudini (1982 185) notes the relations as well, but does not elaborate.
6. In the following list of shared, or closely related, words, each term is followed by two numbers giving verse numbers for the two poems, "Al poco giorno" first, "Io son venuto" second: perde (3, 28); però (4, 10); dura (5, 12); neve (7, 21); gelata, gelide (7, 29); dolce (10, 64-65 [36 dolzi ]); tempo (10, 67); riscalda, scalda (10, 16); tornar (11, 63-64); bianco (11, 20); fioretti (12, 47); mente (14, 12); amor (16, 27; 11, 23, 36, 50, 70); bellezza, bella (19, 25); piccioli (17, 39); forte (18, 13); vertù (19, 41); fuggire (21, 27); lume, lucente (23, 5); poggio, poggia (24, 24); fronda (24, 40); farsi, fare (23, 6); portare (27, 51); chiudere (30, 19); altissimo, alto (30, 55); ritornare, tornare (31, 63-64); fiume, rivo (31, 57); legno, ramo (32, 43). Similar phrasing includes: poco giorno, poca ombra (1, 9); però non cangia, però non disgombra (4, 10); copre di fioretti, morti li fioretti (12, 47); fare ombra, farsi velo (23, 6); poggio né muro mai né fronda verde, in lauro in pino o in abete (24, 44).
7. A striking parallel has been found in Peire d'Alvernha's "De jostals breus jorns els lonc sers" (Zenker 1900, 745; cited in Beggiato 1973 366), but the parallels do not persist through the poems.
8. For Dante's conception of night as a point opposite the sun, see Chapter 2, note 15. The conception is also hexaemeral; see Zahlten 1969, 174-178 (illustrations nos. 336-356) for examples of day and night as dark and light circles in medieval illustrations of the six days of creation.
9. See Bartolozzi 1982 2-4 for the relation of tenacity and change.
10. In Convivio 2.14.15, Dante notes that the sun cannot be looked at directly. In the sestina, the sun appears lexically only as a pun: "sol per veder do' suoi panni fanno ombra" (36), in antithesis to ombra at the end of the line and joined continue
to per veder, alluding to the faculty the sun activates (cf. Timaeus 45b-46a; Convivio 2.8.14-15, 3.7.3-4, 3.9.12). For the traditional pun sol = solus, see Macrobius 1970a 79 ( quod talis solus appareat, sol vocetur ) and Isidore Etymologiarum liber 3.70.
11. At the beginning of the Inferno (1.38-39), Dante refers to the sun rising with the stars that accompanied it at the creation; it is early April, and the sun is in Aries. For the sun in Aries as generative, see "Io son venuto," 40-42; Paradiso 10.28-31, 28.117.
12. We established that in "Io son venuto" the heat and air in the fummifere acque (53) are macrocosmic forms of the heat and air that produce tumescence and ejaculation. The association of the heat in semen and the heat of the sun is a traditional one; Dante twice repeats the Aristotelian remark in the Physics that man is generated by another man and the sun ("generat enim homo hominem et sol," Monarchia 1.9.3). The homology of solar and seminal heat is explained in Aristotle's De generatione animalium 736b33-737a8; see the discussion in Albertus Magnus 1916-21 1085 ( De animalibus 16.23).
13. Seasons are the effect of the sun's motion along the ecliptic; see Aristotle, De generatione et corruptione 2.10 (336a15), and Dante's discussion of the indispensability of an inclined ecliptic if there are to be seasons, Paradiso 10.13-21.
14. In addition to links at points of articulation, structural affinities coordinate the two texts. Part d of each stanza of "Io son venuto," which marks the shift of focus to the condition of the speaker, is echoed in the first stanza of the sestina: "e'l mio disio però non cangia il verde." What is more, each instance of the "subdiesis" in "Io son venuto" then furnishes an element for a stanza of the sestina: the speaker's retention of amorous thoughts ("in tener forte imagine di petra," 13) appears reversed in the sestina when the lady expels other ladies from his mind ( "trae de la mente nostra ogn'altra donna," 14); the webs that Love withdraws from the winds ("ritira," 23-24) give way, in the sestina, to Love's capture by the lady's garlanded hair ("sì bel ch'Amor lì viene a stare a l'ombra," 16); the cruel thorn fixed in the speaker's heart in stanza 4 of the canzone recurs as the chief image of the lover's desire in the sestina ("barbato ne la dura petra," 5). And the speaker's resolution not to turn back on his quest, with reiteration of tornare in stanza 5 (63, 64), looks forward to the sestina's double use of tornare (11, 31). Such variations may be explained as mere technical exercise; we suggest, however, that in many respects the sestina magically inverts the terms of the canzone. See pp. 135-137 below.
15. Cudini (1982 185-188), following Contini's suggestion regarding the pairing of coordinate terms (Dante 1946 157), demonstrates a series of binary and ternary relationships ("la disposizione per coppie di elementi cui un terzo si unisce per ripresa ulteriore, per addizione," 186), among which are bicolon and tricolon, assonant pairing of the rhyme-words and the words that close hemistiches, the prevalence of trochees ( bisillabi piani ) in the accentual scheme (there are 122!), and unprecedented dittology (e.g., "per piani e per colli," 21). See also Vanasco 1979 112-113; and di Girolamo 1976 256-257, 261.
16. The relation of privation and act is an axiom of Aristotle's ontology. For the principle, see Metaphysics 7.6.1032b2-5. See also Albertus Magnus Physico- soft
rum 1.2.16 (quoted in Shaw 1948 29): "privatio uno modo est contrarium, et secundum hoc est privatio actus et formae, sed alio modo est aptitudo in subiecto relicta ad formam, et sic principiat motum in materia, et hoc modo est appetitus et desiderii causa." This logic is particularly in evidence in discussions of light, which is defined as the act of the diaphanous medium, whose darkness is its potentiality for light; see Convivio 3.9.12 ("trasmutasi questo mezzo di molta luce in poca, siccome alla presenza del sole e alla sua assenza").
17. At Purgatorio 30.89, Dante refers to the equatorial zone as "la terra che perde ombra." Singleton (Dante 1975 748) notes Dante's allusion to a passage in Lucan describing the verticality of the sun's rays at the equator: "Hic quoque nil obstat Phoebo, cum cardine summo / Stat librata dies; truncum vix protegit arbor: / Tam brevis in medium radiis compellitur umbra. / Deprensum est hunc esse locum, qua circulus alti / Solstitii medium signorum percutit orbem" ( Pharsalia 9.428-432). Aside from the question of Lucan's poem as a source for the petrose (Contini notes in Dante 1946 153, for example, the close relation of Purgatorio 30.89 to the second stanza of "Io son venuto" and their common source in Lucan; verses 23-24 of "Al poco giorno"—"e dal suo lume non mi può far ombra / poggio né muro mai né fronda verde"—may themselves echo, as in "vix protegit arbor," the passage quoted above), the passage is suggestive for its close juxtaposition of the notions of sun, shadow, and solstice.
18. Compare Beatrice eclipsed by the "sol degli angeli," so bright "che Beatrice eclissò ne l'oblio" ( Paradiso 10.60).
19. For the most recent full discussion, see Daniel 1978 643-646.
20. Pellegrini (1953 30) suggests that uom petra is a single concept—"stoneman"—buried under the grass because frozen and dead. For criticisms of this reading, see Fiedler 1960 38; Pellegrini's interpretation is accepted by Shapiro (1980 99). Bartolozzi (1982 16) argues for an allusion to the serpent in the grass as in Virgil's first eclogue: "latet anguis in herba."
21. Fanno, trochaic, begins the second hemistich in 36; sparer, iambic, concludes the first in 39.
22. See Comens 1986.
23. For information on the heliotrope, Dante could draw on a rich encyclopedic tradition, on contemporary scientific sources, and on the poetic tradition. There are accounts in Isidore Etymologiarum liber 17.9.37 (1911), Marbodus of Rennes Liber de gemmis, PL 171.1757; Albertus Magnus 1967 88-89; Uguccione da Pisa Magnae derivationes (quoted in Toynbee 1902 267-269). For other lapidaries, see Evans 1922. For the Italians, see Intelligenza, 39.1-9 (in Battaglia 1930 400); Fiore 182.10 (Battaglia 1930 334); "Mare amoroso," 239 (in Contini 1960 2:496). For Dante's use of lore from the lapidaries, see Austin 1951-52.
24. Cioffari (1936-37) discusses both the stone and the plant and notes that in nineteen sources he consults, seventeen discuss both stone and plant together. For such conjunctions of precious stones and medicinal herbs (linked also to geometrical figures and constellations), see Evans 1922 108, 246-249.
25. The reading advanced by Pellegrini (1953 30) provides the lady with a green shadow; this is much more plausible if she is compared to a green stone continue
(which, as a medium that reflects light, must color it; cf. Convivio 3.7.4). All the lapidaries list the heliotrope as green (it is often compared to the smaragdus ); some add blood-colored veins: "est autem colore smaragdino sanguineas habet venas" (Evans 1922 201); "come smiraldo su' color verdia / avegna che gottato di sanguigno," Intelligenza 39.6-7. It is suggestive that in "Io son venuto" Dante rhymes Etïopia with copia (14, 16); these two words are rhymed with elitropia in Inferno 24 (89, 91, 93).
26. It is true that in medieval Italian indefinite uom is rarely found in the accusative; but see verse 36 of Dante's "Poscia ch'Amor": "ché 'l saggio non pregia om per vestimenta," and Paradiso 3.36. Rohlfs (1968 2:232) cites also Purgatorio 17.33.
27. Austin (1951-52, 133-134) holds that Dante is referring here to limestone, petra calcina; such a reading is clearly possible, though the reading that involves zeugma is probably preferable precisely because it is rhetorically more elaborate. A similar instance of both inversion and zeugma may be found in one of Dante's sonnets, "Chi guarderà già mai," where the subject is also precious stones: "E però, lasso, fu'io così ratto / in trarre a me'l contrario de la vita / come vertú di stella margherita" (Dante 1946 120). Contini notes: "margherita, soggetto, come vertú è oggetto, d'un sottinteso ratto in trarre." One consequence of suppressing the verb phrase is the juxtaposition of stella and margherita, star and stone, suggesting the causal link between the virtue of the stone and the influence of the star.
28. "Nam si iungatur eiusdem nominis herba, / subtrahit humanis oculis quencunque gerentem" ( PL 171.1758a).
29. "Ulterius si elitropia huiusmodi nominis herba subiecta lapidi fuerit et sacrata legitimo carmine gemma reddit hominem invisibilem" (Evans 1922 229, fifteenth century, but based on Thomas of Cantimpré). Consultation of other lapidaries suggests that it is the juice or sap of the plant that is meant.
30. For examples in the scuola siciliana, see Vanasco 1979. Among the Tuscan poets, there are examples in Monte Andrea, "Poi che'l ferro la calamita saggia " (Contini 1960 2:466-467).
31. See Introduction, pp. 37-38, above.
32. Contini 1960 2:460-464. We give Contini's summary of stanza 2: "Tutta la stanza precisa le nozioni di potenza e atto: il sole purifica la pietra e la rende atta a ricevere dal suo specifico astro le concrete proprietà di gemma; la natura corrisponde al sole, il cuore (nobile) alla pietra (preziosa), la donna (che fa passare all'atto la virtualità amorosa) all'astro." In Guinizelli's canzone the precious stone is the gentle heart; in the sestina, the lady represents first the stone, then the star that activates other stones.
33. On trarre, see Dante 1967 2:190; and Guido delle Colonne, "Ancor che l'aigua" (Contini 1960 1:107-110), where trarre is used of the attractive powers of the lodestone (v. 78). The verb is often associated with the calamita. The Mare amoroso gives "Perciò inver'voi si trae ciascun core / sì come il ferro inver' la calamita (vv. 198-199 [Contini 1960 1:494]); and Guinizelli's "Madonna il fino amor," in a passage that impinges directly on "Amor, tu vedi ben," offers: "In quella parte sotto tramontana / sono li monti de la calamita, / che dan ver- soft
tud' all'aire / di trar lo ferro" (vv. 49-52 [Contini 1960 2:455]). For trarre in Dante's sonnet "Chi guarderà già mai," see note 27 above.
34. See Introduction, pp. 32-45, above; and Guinizelli, "Al cor gentil," 14-15: "che dalla stella valor no i discende / anti che'l sol la faccia gentil cosa." Comparison of the lady to the sun is common in the poetic tradition; see Guido delle Colonne, "Gioiosamente canto," 15 ("lucente piú che spera"), and "Amor che lungiamente," 36-37 (Contini 1960 1:99, 105); and Guido Guinizelli, "Tegno di folle 'mpres', a lo ver dire," 23-24: "ed infra l'altre par lucente sole / e falle disparer a tutte prove," and 36: "come lo sol di giorno dà splendore" (Contini 1960 2:450). In the Convio 2.15.5 it is said of Lady Philosophy that doubts fall away in her presence "quasi come nebulette matutine a la faccia del sole; e rimane libero e piano di certezza lo familiare intelletto, sì come l'aere de li raggi meridiani purgato e illustrato." At Convivio 3.14.5 the lady's effect is that of splendor in the technical sense (cf. Paradiso 1.1-18).
35. See chapters 19-21, especially the prose commentary to the sonnet "Ne li occhi porta la donna mia Amore": "che ne la prima [parte] dico sì come virtuosamente fae gentile tutto ciò che vede, e questo è tanto a dire quanto inducere Amore in potenzia là ove non è . . ." (Dante 1980 141-142).
36. For this scheme, see Albertus Magnus 1967 14-18. Dante refers to the effect of the sun on precious stones in the Convivio 3.7.3: "Certi [corpi] sono che, per molta chiaritade di diafano avere in sé mista, tosto che'l sole li vede diventano tanto luminosi, che per multiplicamento di luce in quelle e ne lo loro aspetto, rendono a li altri di sé grande splendore, sì come è l'oro e alcuna pietra."
37. The link between the root of the speaker's desire and the efflorescence of the lady's passion follows Arnaut's sestina, which develops the ferm voler (1) of the speaker in terms of the rhyme-word verga, whose meanings range from the penis to various forms of wood (club, switch, rod, stick, frond, branch), inclusive of the flowering seca verga (25) of the Incarnation. See Jernigan 1974 143.
38. The poem's six stanzas, verging on a seventh, suggest the six-month alternation between summer and winter solstices. For the six-month separation of the solstices, see Macrobius, Commentarii 1.6.57: "sol quoque ipse de quo vitam omnia mutuantur septimo signo vices suas variat, nam a solstitio hiemali ad aestivum solstitium septimo pervenit signo."
39. For personified Spring, see Ovid's description in the Metamorphoses 2.27: "Verque novum stabat cinctum florente corona"; the verse is, appropriately, part of Ovid's description of the palace of Phoebus, the sun. For garlands and May ceremonies, see Toschi 1955 65. In the Purgatorio, the place of perpetual spring, the pilgrim has a vision of Lia making a garland (27.102). The "bel prato d'erba" is, like the "piccioli colli" of stanza 3, a displaced reference to parts of the lady's body; see below, note 66.
40. See Monarchia 2.7.10; in Epistola 3.7 the title is given as De rerum transformatione.
41. Fenzi 1966 244-245.
42. Daphne is rooted ("pigris radicibus haeret," Metamorphoses 1.551) and the Heliades are fixed in terms ("radice retenta est," 2.349) that will be echoed in the metamorphosis of Clytie. Medea's passion for Jason is given in terms of an continue
elaborate simile describing combustion (7.79-83), but Apollo's passion merits a brush fire (1.492-496).
43. Ovid's tale of Actaeon, with its emphasis on the victim's flight before his own hounds ("fugit Autonoieus heros," Metamorphoses 3.198; "ille fugit per quae fuerat loca saepe secutus," 228; "famulos fugit ipse suos," 229), may be echoed in Dante's sestina ("ch'io son fuggito per piani e per colli," 21). Significantly, the episode occurs under the midday sun ("iamque dies medius rerum contraxerat umbras / et sol ex aequo meta distabat utraque," 144-145).
44. Bartolozzi 1982 14-16. Barbi admits as one of Dante's rime dubbie the sonnet "Nulla mi parve" (Dante 1946 267; for discussion, see Barbi and Pernicone 1940). The sonnet refers to Clytie; as Contini notes, verses 9-10 of the sonnet are a paraphrase of Ovid's verse describing Clytie's rotation: "vertitur ad solem mutataque servat amorem" ( Metamorphoses 4.270). Even if "Nulla mi parve" is not by Dante (and Barbi is very reluctant to accept it), Dante's verse 19 in the canzone "Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona" ("Non vede il sol, che tutto il mondo gira") appears to echo Metamorphoses 4.226-228: "omnia qui video, per quem videt omnia tellus, / mundi oculus". Dante's later interest in the fourth book of Ovid's poem is of course beyond doubt. The reference to the heliotrope plant at Epistola 5.1 links the plant to the sun, and probably to Clytie as well: "quoniam Titan exorietur pacificus, et iustitia sine sole quasi heliotropium hebetata quum primum iubar ille vibraverit, revirescet" (Dante 1979e 540). For the identification with the plant and not the stone, see Cioffari 1936-37.
45. The association of the heliotrope with Clytie is confirmed by the medieval commentators on Ovid, from Arnulf of Orléans to John of Garland, Giovanni del Virgilio, and the Ovide moralisé. See Ghisalberti's citation on John of Garland's entry on Clytie in the Integumenta Ovidii: "Convertitur in solsequium quasi sequens solem et alio nomine vocatur eliotropium ab elio quod est sol et tropos quod est conversio quia convertitur se ad solem." The heliotrope, John of Garland notes, is called cichorea because it "dances" with the celestial motion ( chorea ) (John of Garland 1933 51).
46. "In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora" is the incipit of Ovid's poem. For rich and nuanced readings of this structure, see Barkan 1986.
47. Contini's observation of "la frequente compenetrazione delle cose in rima: il bianchir del v.2, il color del successivo anticipano il verde della rima quarta, e la terza rima erba determina il barbato del v.5" (Dante 1946 157) points to the metamorphic dimension of the poem, which is closely linked to the natural metamorphoses of plants over the course of seasons—note the terms linked in Contini's list.
48. Clytie's episode in the Metamorphoses follows the narrative of the sun's passion for Leucothoe, where the sun's domination of the seasons and heavens is mentioned ("'Ille ego sum,' dixit 'qui longum metior annum, Omnia qui video, per quem videt omnia tellus, mundi oculus"' ( Metamorphoses 4.226-228); we have noted the relation of the pun on sole to vedere in the last line of the sestina.
49. A sonnet attributed to Dante, "Nulla mi parve" (Dante 1946, 267), paraphrases Ovid's text in a notably petroso context: "Né quella ch'a veder lo sol continue
si gira / e'l non mutato amor mutata serba, / ebbe quant'io già mai fortuna acerba" (9-11).
50. Macrobius ( Commentarius, 1.20.4-5) observes that the sun is called the regulator ( moderator ) of the other planets because it sets a rule, or limit, on their motions: "moderator reliquorum dicitur quia ipse cursus eorum recursusque certa spatii definitione moderatur, nam certa spatii definitio est ad quam cum una quaeque erratica stella recedens a sole pervenerit, tamquam ultra prohibeatur accedere, agi retro videtur, et rursus, cum certam partem recedendo contigerit, ad directi cursus consueta revocatur. Ita solis vis et potestas motus reliquorum luminum constituta dimensione moderatur."
51. For the scheme in medieval rhetorical manuals, see Mari 1899; and, recently, Vanasco 1979 115-116.
52. "Plato in Timaeo cum de octo sphaeris loqueretur sic ait: ut autem per ipsos octo circuitus celeritatis et tarditatis certa mensura et sit et noscatur, deus in ambitu supra terram secundo lumen accendit quod nunc solem vocamus" (Macrobius 1970a 78 [1.20.2, quoting Timaeus 39b]).
53. See Convivio 3.5 in its entirety, esp. 3.5.13: "Dico adunque che'l cielo del sole si rivolge da occidente in oriente, non dirittamente contra lo movimento diurno, cioè del díe e de la notte, ma tortamente contra quello." In 3.5.14, the path of the sun over the year is compared to the spiral threads on a wine-press; see Chapter 2, note 6. But the text here is not certain.
54. There are numerous accounts of this scheme (e.g., Mari 1899 953-60; Daniel 1960 50; Riesz 1971 49-52; Dragonetti 1982 232-233; Shapiro 1980 7-8; and Vanasco 1979 114-117). The most succinct is the formula of Roubaud 1969 31-32: "La permutation de la sextine décrit simultanément ce double mouvement d'imbrication et de renversement en utilisant pour cela deux unités complexes 123 et 456 de trois rimes chacune (deux triplets de mots-rimes non rimés et non assonancés entre eux), la transformation réalisée par la permutation @ étant l'imbrication de l'unité 2ì, "inverse" de 2:654 et de l'unité 1, avec le résultat 6 1 5 2 4 3; la primauté de la 'retrogradatio' (préférée par les troubadours, par opposition aux trouvères) étant réalisée par la double inversion, celle de l'unité 2 et celle de l'imbrication, qui 'mélange' 2 et 1 dans cet ordre et non dans l'ordre opposé: 12-@-2ì1."
55. The resemblance of the sestina scheme to the combined movements of the Same and the Other is underscored if we think of one movement proceeding left to right (e.g., 1 2 3) and the other from right to left (e.g., 6 5 4), for Plato's terms describing the movements of the World-Soul are given in terms of right- and left-handedness: "The motion of the same he [the Demiurge] carried round by the side to the right [ a regione dextra per sinistrum latus usque ad dextrum inflexit ], and the motion of the diverse diagonally to the left [ per diametrum in sinistrum latus eidem ]. And he gave dominion to the motion of the same and like" ( Timaeus 36c [Plato 1961 1166]). See Introduction, note 22, for Calcidius's Latin text.
56. See Chapter 2, pp. 72-75, above. Dragonetti (1982 232, with diagram) has observed a version of this pattern in the sestina.
57. Fowler (1975 40) has observed that the paired order of the rhyme-words continue
may be linked to the Ptolemaic distribution of zodiacal signs among the planets: "A normal sestina's endword sequence matches the sequence of corresponding lunar and solar zodiacal signs. The Ptolemaic division of signs between the chief luminaries followed a regular order whereby the pair closest to the zenith, Leo and Cancer, were assigned to Sol and Luna themselves; the next pair, Gemini and Virgo, to the most proximate planet, Mercury; Taurus and Libra to the next nearest, Venus, and so on round the zodiac. This distribution from alternate sides, particularly if we consider signs of the northern hemisphere alone (Scorpio / Aries / Sagittarius / Pisces / Capricorn / Aquarius), very much resembles the distribution of repeated words from alternate ends of a sestina stanza, working in to the middle. Moreover, pairs of numbers designating opposed signs add to 7, and make the familiar sequence 615243 starting from the solstitial point. Thus Dante's ode, which explicitly mentions the winter solstice ( Al poco giorno ) and which like many sestinas after it dwells on imagery of light and dark, may be meant to render in its stanzaic structure the sun's annual course round the ecliptic." Fowler's brilliant intuition is an important basis for our reading: the sun, among its other roles, is the ruler of the zodiac, which is bisected by the ecliptic, the solar path that results from its double motion. We can add to Fowler's insight the observation that Ptolemy's zodiacal distribution is based on placing the sun below Venus and Mercury (sometimes known as the Platonic order): this makes the sun sixth in the downward order of planets. Dante alludes to this Platonic order in the heaven of Gemini; see Chapter 6, p. 241, below. For the sun and the zodiac, see Freccero 1986 221-244.
58. On antistrophe, see Willis 1983 187 (5.534) and Chapter 2, n. 99, above.
59. Taking consecutive (not overlapping) pairs, compare ghirlanda d'erba/ fronda verde (stanzas 3.1, 4.6) to the mean terms calcina petra/più vertú che petra (3.6, 4.1); and vestita a verde/panni fanno ombra (5.1, 6.6) to chiuso . . . d'altissimi colli/ritorneranno i fiumi a'colli (5.6, 6.1—the return of the rivers, the cataclysm, is the completion of a long cycle, a return of the Same; see below, p. 128).
60. The sestina scheme involves taking the rhyme-words in opposed or reversed pairs (e.g., 61 52 43) but also in triplets (654 123), as the analyses of Fowler and Roubaud point out. The binary and ternary possibilities represent parts of the sestina's key number of six, interesting numerologically because it is both the sum and product of its aliquot parts 1, 2, and 3 (for the numerology of the sestina, see Appendix 3). As Cudini (1982 186) notes, the distribution of "syllabic mass" into binary and ternary structures is another form of emphasis on the number six; Vanasco (1979 117), in the wake of Mari 1899 957-958, shows that the order and proportion of rhyme-words may be expressed in a metrum quadrangulare (after Everard the German and his Laborintus ).
61. The close relation of the tropic and equinoctial points (it is, in a sense, the relation between the ecliptic circle and the equinoctial circle) is brought out in Aquinas's discussion of Timaeus 36b-d: "Nam in caelo consideratur duplex motus circularis; unus simplex et uniformis, secundum quem caelum movetur seu revolvitur motu diurno ab oriente in occidentem, qui quidem fit secundum circulum aequinoctialem. Alius autem motus est planetarum, qui est ab occi- soft
dente in orientem secundum circulum Zodiacum, qui intersecat aequinoctialem in duobus solstitialibus punctis, scilicet in principio Cancri, et Capricorni" ( De anima 7.103 [Aquinas 1959 20]).
62. For the relation of the tradition of the Timaeus to Dante's Commedia in particular, see "The Pilgrim's Firm Foot on the Journey Without a Guide," "Pilgrim in a Gyre," " Paradiso X: The Dance of the Stars," "The Final Image: Paradiso 33," all in Freccero 1986. For the background of the Timaeus in the Middle Ages, see Gregory 1955 and 1958. A recent omnibus of this tradition is Miller 1986.
63. Aquinas ( De anima 7.105) writes that the two circles in Timaeus's discourse signify odd and even with respect to number (cf. 2, 3), mobile and fixed intelligence with respect to the soul, and the equinoctial and zodiacal circular motions with respect to the heavens.
64. Our pun is not wholly facetious. As Albert and Thomas observe in their commentaries on Aristotle's De anima, the division of the circle of the Other in Timaeus's account requires, if it is to produce seven orbits, six divisions. The sestina, too, if the tornata is included, has seven parts produced with six divisions. The linear extension of the sestina can thus be linked to the divisions in the Other, the principle of recirculation of the rhyme-words to the unchanging circulation of the Same. Like the movement of the Other, however, which returns always to the movement of the Same (the equinoctial crossings), the linear movement of the sestina is also included in a great cycle that returns it to the movement of the Same—the order of the rhyme-words repeats itself if the sestina is prolonged.
65. See Chapter 1, note 30.
66. Some of the erotic dimensions to the language of the sestina have been noted by Austin (1951-52 133), who observes that colli in 17 might refer to the lady's breasts; and by Fiedler (1960 37), who suggests a sexual meaning for the phrase dormire inpetra. Pézard (Dante 1979d 200) points to the reminiscence of the Song of Songs in the piccioli colli (e.g., "duo ubera," "mammae tuae"); see the recent discussion of this aspect by Cudini (1982 194-195). The sexuality in the language is a debt to Arnaut's sestina, whose sexual meanings have been explored by Jernigan (1974) and Shapiro (1980 39-43). On erba (Dante 1967 2:267), recall the Provençal and Sicilian commonplace of Pelias's spear, sole remedy of the wound it causes, a figure for the stroke of love.
67. For Petrarch's adaptation of this image to his own tropism around the laurel—the metamorphosed, sublimated Laura—see Freccero 1975.
68. The imperative to procreate, as part of Nature's struggle against death, is in the tradition of Alain of Lille's De planctu naturae, Bernard Silvester's De mundi universitate, and the Roman de la rose (vv. 19505-19906). See Chapter 2, pp. 96-99, above.
69. Timaeus 37d-39a; see Appendix 3.
70. On the adynaton we have consulted Curtius 1953 97; Cherchi 1971; and Shapiro 1980 70-90.
71. A providential (but possibly also natural) such event is the calming of the continue
Tiber's current in the Aeneid, facilitating the return of Aeneas to the ancestral home of the Trojan race ("tacita refluens," 8.87). See also Guinizelli's sonnet "Madonna mia" (Contini 1960 2:475): "tornerà l'acqua in su d'ogni rivera," 4.
72. For the rising of waters in Seneca, see Naturales quaestiones 3.27-30, esp. 3.27.11: "iam omnia, qua prospici potest, acquis obsidentur: omnis tumulus in profundo latet et inmensa ubique altitudo est. tantum in summis montium iugis vada sunt"; also 3.28.6: "ergo ut solet aestus aequinoctialis sub ipsum lunae solisque coitum omnibus aliis maior undare, sic hic, qui ad occupandae terras mittitur, solitis maximisque violentior plus aquarum trahit nec ante quam supra cacumina eorum, quos perfusurus est, montium crevit, devolvitur"; and 28.7: "qua ratione, inquis? eadem ratione, qua conflagratio futura est. utrumque fit, cum deo visum ordiri meliora, vetera finiri. acqua et ignis terrenis dominantur. ex his ortus est et ex his interitus est." That Christian miracles explode the limits of pagan adynata was a topos of Christian apologetics; see, for example, Innocent III's relation of the prophecy that the Roman temple of justice would last "dum virgo pariet" and thus, from the pagan perspective, would be everlasting ( Sermo in nativitate domini, PL 112.253).
73. See the letter to Can Grande Epistole 13.7. The importance of the psalm and its interpretation in the structure of the Commedia is of course well established, largely because of Erich Auerbach and C. S. Singleton; see Singleton 1960; and Shapiro 1980 72.
74. In the sestina, there is also the prospect of a bestial diet of grass like that of mad Nebuchadnezzar (Bartolozzi 1982 14) in Daniel 4:22: "et foenum, ut bos, comedes." Ovid's Io, transformed into a heifer, suffers a similar fate ("frondibus arboreis et amara pascitur herba," Metamorphoses (1.632), as does Ocyroe ("iam cibus herba placet," 2.662.)
75. For the position of the planets after the end of time in the opinion of Thomas Aquinas, see Litt 1963 247.
76. Dante's adynaton of the rivers flowing up to the hills is virtually proverbial, as Shapiro recalls (1980 89), citing Horace's version in Odes 1.29.11: "quis neget arduis / pronos relabi posse rivos / montibus et Tiberim reverti." See also Ovid Metamorphoses 13.324: "ante retro Simois fluet." Other uses actually link the return of rivers to the backward movement of the sun. Because of the importance of Aeneid 4 elsewhere in the petrose (see Chapter 2, p. 71, and Chapter 5, p. 182), the adynaton at 4.489 ("sistere aquam fluviis, et vertere sidera retro"), referring to the impossibility of Dido's changing Aeneas's mind ("ab incepto retorquere," glosses Servius), is especially suggestive.
77. For the magna dies domini, see Amos 8:9-14; Zephania 1:7, 14-18; Malachi 4:1-4; Zecharia 14:1-12; Micah 4:1-13; Joel 2:1, 31, 3:1, 12-15; and 2 Peter 3:10. Litt (1963 244-47) discusses the day of the Lord in the context of the pagan magnus annus (see Chapter 6, p. 251, below). In addition to the expression magna dies domini (Joel 2:1; Zephaniah 1: 7), the darkening of the sun is a topic of the day of the Lord: "Sol convertitur in tenebras, et luna in sanguinem" (Joel 2:1); "Et erit in die illa, dicit Dominus Deus, occidet sol in meridie. Et tenebrescere faciam terram in die luminis" (Amos 8:9); "Et erit in die illa: non erit lux, sed frigus et gelu" (Amos 14:6). The obscuration of the planetary sun continue
marks the coming of the Sun of Justice; see Malachi 4:2: "Et orietur vobis timentibus nomen meum Sol iustitiae."
78. In Dante 1967 2:264, it is observed that poco giorno is "a nice example of a callida iunctura rendering novum a notum verbum (cf. Horace Ars poetica 46-48). In rhetoric such a usage was called abusio (catachresis): 'A. est quae verbo simili et propinquo pro certo et propio abutitur, hoc modo: Vires hominis breves sunt, aut parva statura' ( Rhet. ad Her. 4.33.45)."
79. This is one of the usual glosses to Paradiso 23.12-13, "la plaga / sotto la quale il sol mostra men fretta." The sun moves slowest in the ecliptic at the time of the summer solstice. The other gloss usually offered, that the place indicated is that of the sun at noon, is of course compatible.
80. See Perugi 1978 79. The poetics of the sestina itself is at work in the relation of rhyme-words. Ombra is assonant with the tonics of donna and colli and with the atonic final vowels of erba and petra. But it is also consonant with the mute/liquid cluster of petra and with the inversion of such clusters in erba and verde.
81. See Chapter 6, pp. 253-255.
82. On the numerology of the sestina, see Appendix 3.
83. On this allusion in Arnaut, see the discussions in Daniel 1978 640; Shapiro 1980 41 and Jernigan 1974 142-144. For the figural context of Joseph's wand, see Kaske 1971.
84. Shapiro 1980 40; for Dante's discussion of the stanza as a room ( stantia, mansio ), see De vulgari eloquentia 2.ix.2 and our discussion above, Chapter 1, pp. 22-32.
85. We follow Daniel 1960 375-378 for the text. For other readings of these verses, which substantially alter the meaning of the tornada, see Jernigan 1974 146-148.
86. For the order of the rhyme-words, see Daniel 1978 643; as Perugi notes there, part of the reasoning in defense of the order ongla, oncle, is the convention of the tornada as repeating the sirma. As we know, Dante himself considered the sestina stanza to be without diesis (see Introduction, pp. 23-27).
87. The poem thus becomes a kind of carmen retrogradum; cf. Roncaglia 1981 19-20. For description and specimens of retrograde verses in Latin, see John of Garland's Paisiana poetria (1977 chap. 2, verses 196-210; chap. 6, verses 164-170; chap. 7, verses 1189-1215). Dante certainly knew the pavement inlay in the Florentine baptistery, showing the sun at the center of a zodiacal wheel inscribed with the palindrome "EN GIRO TORTE SOL CICLOS ET ROTOR IGNE," suggesting the back-and-forth motion of the sun between solstices (Freccero 1986 230, 311).
88. "Nam si iungatur eiusdem nominis herba / Carmine legitimo, verbo sacrata potenti, / Subtrahit humanis oculis quemcunque gerentem" (Marbodus Liber de gemmis, PL 171.1758a).
89. The whole question of Petrarch's debt to the petrose (see, e.g., Durling 1971 and 1976 16-18) needs to be reconsidered in the light of the evidence presented in this chapter and elsewhere in this book.
90. As Fiedler notes (1960 38), one of the times implied by quandunque is continue
the present of the speaker's utterance and the reader's experience of the poem. In this sense speaker and reader are the conjunction—like petra and erba —that activates the virtue of the sestina and releases the speaker from his bondage; or, perhaps, entraps the reader as well.
91. As Bloom (1975 278) puts it, "poems are apotropaic litanies, systems of defensive tropes and troping defenses"—though we are taking the idea in a less metapoetic sense than Bloom does.
4— The Poem as Crystal: "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna"
1. Contini's view of "Amor, tu vedi ben" seems to be that the strain of maintaining the rhyme scheme leads Dante inevitably to take refuge in a series of unrelated conceits: "un tal gioco di rime sfuggirà ai processi evocativi e tenderà a provocare sintatticamente, sempre nuovi 'concetti"' (Dante 1946 160-161).
2. Marigo calls the poem "Bizantinismo sottile e non degno di Dante, ozio di letterato medievale non di poeta" (Dante 1957a clii).
3. Dante 1979a 234-236.
4. Marigo again: "La canzone Amor, tu vedi ben, non è allegata come opera eccellente di poesia, ma come frutto di uno sforzo ( nisi sumus ) nuovo e ingegnosissimo di artificio tecnico . . . . Novum aliquid atque intentatum è veramente questo componimento colle sottili e non sempre chiare varietà di sensi date alle medesime parole, e col concetto della parola-rima dominante, che insiste e s'aggira intorno a quelli delle altre quattro in ogni stanza . . . . Se badiamo al paragone ut nascentis militie dies ecc., ne inferiremo che la prova del tormentatissimo artificio à stata fatta nel tempo in cui la sua fama di rimatore cominciava ad affermarsi" (Dante 1957a 272). Marigo's metaphor of the "circling" of the rhymewords is a curious abortive insight.
A noteworthy exception to the general view is König 1983, who regards the poem as a "high point" of Dante's "Formkunst" (p. 245); see also below, notes 13 and 19; for the interpretation of the reference to the poem in De vulgari eloquentia, see Appendix 1. König's suggestive discussion sees the achievement of the poem as "die Vorstellungswelt, Sprache und metrische Formkunst des 'neuen Stils' in das vom reifen Dante für schwieriger und aussagemächtiger erachtete provenzalische Dichtungsmodell eingebracht und—unter Erhaltung ihrer Eigenart—auf eine höhere Stufe der Formgestalt gehoben zu haben" (p. 251). He mentions in passing the centrality of the rhyme-word freddo and the presence of microcosmic thinking in stanza 3.
5. See De Bruyne 1946, vol. 3, devoted to the thirteenth century.
6. It is associated also with color. Behind all the twelfth- and thirteenth-century discussions of claritas lies the famous passage in the Pseudo-Dionysius's discussion of beauty as a name of God ( De divinis nominibus 4; see De Bruyne 1946 3: 126 n .3; Aquinas 1950 112):
Supersubstantiale vero pulchrum pulchritudo quidem dicitur propter traditam ab Ipso omnibus existentibus, juxta proprietatem uniuscuiusque, pulchritudinem et sicut universorum consonantiae et claritatis causa, ad similitudinem luminis, cum fulgore immittens universis pulchrificas fontani radii ipsius traditiones. break
The supersubstantially beautiful is called Beauty because it gives all things their beauty according as is fitting, as the cause of the harmony and brightness of all things, in the likeness of the light which shines with its brilliance into all things, allowing them to partake of the rays of the fount itself so as to become beautiful.
For the pervasive influence of the Pseudo-Dionysius in Gothic style, see Panofsky 1946 and von Simson 1959. See also below, notes 52, 53, and 59.
7. This should not be thought an arbitrary observation. In De vulgari eloquentia 2.Xiii.10, Dante uses the terminology of inner and outer to refer to the middle as opposed to the first and last lines of pedes and versus; see below, Appendix 4, p. 325.
8. So says Seneca; see Introduction, pp. 38-39.
9. Given the astrological context, the term sembiante may include a reference to the astrological notions of aspect, rejoicing, and being cast down; see Boll, Bezold, and Gundel 1931 58-60; Gundel and Gundel 1950 2122-24.
10. In relation to freddo, luce is a trope (genus for species, thus a synechdoche); as referring to planetary influence it is used in its proper sense.
11. For Jean de Meun's use of this analogy, which Dante probably has in mind, see Chapter 2, note 92.
12. Perhaps via the medical notion of the spiriti whereby the brain exercises control over the body. The theory derives from Galen, and there may well be also a reference to the widespread notion, also derived from Galen, that the vapors arising from seminal fluid were often the carriers—or recipients—of images. See Nardi 1966b.
13. Jeanroy (1913) shows that the stanza of "Amor, tu vedi ben" is a variant of a well-established Provençal type. König (1983 247-250) has a good discussion of the relation to Provençal models.
14. The De vulgari eloquentia of course makes no mention whatever of rhyme-words as distinct from rhymes; in fact, in citing "Amor, tu vedi ben" as an instance of repetition of the same rhyme, Dante seems to obliterate the distinction altogether.
15 . Vita nuova 19; see Chapter 1.
16. "Donne ch'avete," whose versus are identical with those of "Amor, tu vedi ben," is another unicum: alone among Dante's canzoni, it has pedes that are longer than its versus. As Mengaldo observes (Dante 1979a 216-217), Dante's usual practice is to have the sirma exceed the pedes, usually by one verse. Among the other peculiarities of "Donne ch'avete" are its continuing the rhymes of the first division into the second and the closeness of its form to that of the sonnet: ABBC.ABBC.CDD.CEE. Like many sonnets, and like "Amor, tu vedi ben," it has five rhymes. See König 1983 247-248; cf. note 48 below.
17. More clearly than the number twelve (the number of lines in its stanza), six, as the number of appearances of a rhyme-word, would seem to relate this form to that of the sestina, in which (independently of the commiato ) each rhyme-word appears a total of six times. See below, note 46, and Appendix 2.
18. The order in the commiato is the order in which the rhyme-words have predominated in the stanzas, except that the central one is repeated. break
It is worth reflecting that if the principle of the sestina had been followed in "Amor, tu vedi ben," the result would have been the following sequence:
1.
ABA.ACA:ADD.AEE
2.
EAE.EDE:EBB.ECC
3.
CEC.CBC:CAA.CDD
4.
DCD.DAD:DEE.DBB
5.
BDB.BEB:BCC.BAA
Dante may be presumed to have considered and rejected this scheme, which has the following disadvantages as compared with the one he actually adopted: (a) here, the third and fourth rhyme-words dominate, respectively, the third and fourth stanzas, rather than the fourth and third—in other words, the rule of changing the original order is lost at the center; (b) here, with retrogradatio cruciata, the entire first half of each successive stanza is occupied by rhymes from the second half of the previous one—in other words, Dante's scheme spreads the rhymes from one stanza out more evenly across the following one; (c) here, except for the stanza where it would appear six times, stanzas in which a rhymeword appears once alternate with ones in which it appears twice—in Dante's scheme, in contrast, as we have seen, there is an ordered progression of frequency. Each of these differences is important to the effects Dante sought in "Amor, tu vedi ben," and one of the proofs lies in the fact that the order of the rhyme-words in the commiato is determined not by the rule by which the order has been changed from stanza to stanza, but by the order in which the rhymewords have predominated; in other words, the sequence in the commiato recapitulates microcosmically the structural peculiarity of the poem as a whole.
19. In the sestina, each rhyme-word appears twice at the corresponding point—i.e., ending the last line of one stanza and the first line of the next. König (1983 249-250) makes the interesting observation that a consequence of the form of "Amor, tu vedi ben" is that after the stanza in which a rhyme-word predominates, once it has appeared in line 2 of the immediately following stanza there is a gap of fourteen verses before its next appearance, a gap which he argues refers to the predominance in Dante's early production of stanzas of fourteen lines.
20. This is the mode of thought that lies behind the lines in Purgatorio 2.1-9, describing how night circles opposite the sun. See Index under Inversion.
21. Per questo freddo has the further meaning "because of this cold weather," that is, because of the special tempering the poet's nature is receiving within the ongoing processes of nature.
22. If we list the appearances of rhyme-word C, distinguishing between the two halves of the stanzas, we have the following: (1) 1:0, (2) 0:2, (3) 0:2, (4) 4:2 (5) 1:0. Thus, within the stanza where it dominates, the frequency of the rhyme-word declines from four instances in the first half to two in the second and then, in the next half-stanza, to one, its lowest frequency.
23. There may well be an echo in lines 11-112 of "Amor, tu vedi ben" of Jean continue
de Meun's description of Pygmalion ( Roman de la rose, lines 20817-830 [Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun 1974 549-550]; emphasis added):
Pygmalions, uns
entaillieres
Portreans en fust et
en pierres,
En metaus, en os et en cires
Et en toutes autres matires
Qu'en puet en tex ovres trouer,
Por son grant engin esprouver,
[Car onc de li nus ne l'at mieudre . . .]
Si fist une ymage d'ivuire;
Si fist et portret l'ymagete
Si bien compassee et si nete,
Et mist au fere tel entente
Qu'el fu si plesans et si gente
Qu'ele sembloit estre aussi vive
Cum la plus bele riens qui vive.
See Chapter 5, note 125, and Chapter 6, pp. 196-198.
24. See, for instance, Augustine Confessions 13.2.2:
Quid te promeruit materies corporalis, ut esset saltem invisibilis et incomposita . . . quia non erat, promereri ut esset non poterat. Aut quid te promeruit inchoatio creaturae spiritalis, ut saltem tenebrosa fluitaret, similis abysso, tui dissimilis, nisi per idem Verbum converteretur ad idem, a quo facta est, atque ab eo illuminata lux fieret . . . ?"
(1948 521; emphasis added)
How did corporeal matter deserve from you that it might be even without form and void? since it was not, it could not deserve to be. Or how did the inchoate spiritual creature deserve from you to have even its fluid shadowy existence, similar to the abyss and different from you, unless it were turned by that same Word to the Same, by which it was made and, illuminated by him, became light?
For the thirteenth-century discussions of first matter, see Nardi 1960 69-101.
25. In this view, cold is an effect of light just as warmth is.
26. In Dante 1946 160: "rime tanto più astratte di quelle della sestina."
27. It is a vital part of the plan of the petrose that, in addition to the rhymewords that end its stanzas, "Io son venuto" includes, often in rhyming position, most of the words that appear in the two sestinas as rhyme-words (in the following list, italics indicate that the word appears rhymed in "Io son venuto"): ombra (line 9), verde (30, 43; cf. "verdura," 45), freddo (21, 35; cf. "freddura," 61), tempo (31, 67), erba (42); closely related to colli is piagge (46), and to luce, "lucente" (5); cf. also the keywords "vertù" (41), "stagion forte" (45), "raggio" (5). One may remember the chiastic ordering of the rhyme-words of "Io son venuto": petra-marmo ( I-congedo ), donna-dolce (2-5), tempo-sempre (3-4); see Chapter 2, pp. 105-106.
28. As Fenzi observed; see Chapter 2, note 3.
29. See Introduction, pp. 37-45, on the theory of formation of stones. break
30. One of the ideas Dante has in mind in comparing the poem to a crystal is certainly the fact that crystals served as burning glasses, whose traditional shape was not lenticular but spherical. The lapidaries know nothing of refraction or focus. The traditional idea, expressed by Isidore of Seville and repeated even by Albertus Magnus, was that crystal, when placed in the sun, emits fire: Albertus Magnus De mineralibus 2.2.3 (1890-99 5:32): "Hic (scil. cristallus) frigido oculo solis appositus ignem ejicit: sed si calidus sit, hoc perficere non potest" ("This, if placed cold in the eye of the sun, emits fire: but if it is warm it cannot do so" [Albertus Magnus 1967 83; Wyckoff's translation has been revised]).
Isidore is clearly a direct source for Albertus; see Etymologiarum liber 16.13, PL 82:577: "Hic oppositus radiis solis adeo rapit flammam, ut aridis fungis, vel foliis ignem praebeat" ("This, placed in the rays of the sun, so seizes its fire that it extends fire to dry bark or leaves"). In the thirteenth century it was being realized that the shape of the glass was what focused the rays of the sun; among lapidaries, as far as we have been able to ascertain, the only one to mention the fact was the thirteenth-century Lapidario del rey D. Alfonso X.
One of the basic ideas of "Amor, tu vedi ben," and perhaps one of the reasons for its being so cold, is that it is to be placed before the lady in the light, in the hope that it will be the one precious stone that can help him, that it will emit the fire that will ignite her heart; this is closely related to the ending of"Così nel mio parlar," in which the poem itself is made an arrow designed to strike the lady's heart.
In another connection Dante closely associates the crystal emitting fire with the sun; see Paradiso 25.101-102: "Se Cancro avesse un tal cristallo, / l'inverno sarebbe un mese d'un sol di." See Chapter 6, pp. 250-255.
31. See preceding note.
32. See above, note 6.
33. Paradiso 2.139-144, using luce as a verb, draws a parallel between the light of a heavenly body, which is attributed to the happiness of its angelic mover, and the light of gladness in the pupil of the human eye; the parallel depends, like Dante's use of luce in "Amor, tu vedi ben," on the idea that the eye emits light (see Chapter 6, pp. 228-232):
Virtù diversa fa diversa lega
col prezïoso corpo ch'ella avviva,
nel qual, sì come vita in voi, si lega.
Per la natura lieta onde deriva,
la virtù mista per lo corpo luce
come letizia per pupilla viva.
34. This was of course the term for the crystalline lens of the eye from as far back as Alexandrian times; Galen's notion of its function as the organ of sight properly speaking was the most widely echoed opinion in the Middle Ages.
35. Spherical crystals have in many ages been treated as models of the cosmos as well. This may well have some connection with the fact that Aristotle and others compare the transparency of the celestial spheres to that of crystal; continue
and crystalline heaven was the name given to the outermost sphere (see Enciclopedia dantesca, s.v. "cristallo"). An interesting example is discussed in Dumas 1982, on item no. 6 of Childeric's tomb, a "boule de crystal de roche diam. 45-46mm": "Des boules semblables dont le diamètre varie de 25 à 55 mm. ont été fréquemment découvertes dans les tombes tant d'hommes que de femmes, souvent montées en pendentifs formés de cercles d'or et surtout d'argent qui se croisent."
The connection between crystals and the eye was particularly well established in literature; Dante almost certainly has in mind the passage in Guillaume de Lorris's portion of the Roman de la rose where the dreamer sees in the Fountain of Narcissus two crystals (implied to be round or at least rounded) that show him the contents of the Garden of Déduit (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun 1974 79-80):
Ou fons de la fontainne aval
Avoit deus pierres de cristal
Qu'a grant entente remirai.
Et une chose vos dirai
Qu'a merveilles, ce croi, tendrés
Maintenant que vous l'entendrés.
Quant li solaus, qui tout aguiete
Ses rais en la fontainne giete,
Et la clartés aval descent,
Lors perent colors plus de cent
Es cristaus, car por le solel
Deviennent jaunes et vermel.
Si sont cil cristal merveilleus,
Et tel force ont que tous li leus,
Arbres et flors, et quanqu'aorne
Li vergiers, i pert tous a ore.
(lines 1537-52)
Dante does not take over any of the details of the passage; it is striking, in fact, that color—which Aristotle and Galen identify as the visible as such—is not mentioned in "Amor, tu vedi ben." While the idea of light, as well as its association with the notion that Love's arrow enters the heart via the eye, is a commonplace by Dante's time, to be sure, it had been given its most brilliant development by Guillaume de Lorris in this portion of the Roman de la rose; see Chapter 5, pp. 179-182, with notes. In this, as in many other respects, the rime petrose must be seen against the background of this important thirteenth-century masterpiece; see above, note 23. If "Amor, tu vedi ben," at one level of meaning, brings the statue of the lady to life, it involves as well a reference to the myth of Pygmalion ( Metamorphoses 19.243-297), used by Jean de Meun as the corrective to the example of Narcissus ( Roman de la rose, lines 20818-21194); the close association of the myths derives from Ovid. See Poirion 1970; also Chapter 5, pp. 196-197.
36. See Chapter 2, pp. 96-106.
37. The idea that the overarching atmosphere is like an eye looking at the continue
heavens is not as outlandish as it may seem; indeed, it underlies the analogy between weeping and precipitation we have seen in "Io son venuto," "Amor, tu vedi ben," and the Roman de la rose. The analogy is familiar in architecture as well. The most famous monument of ancient Rome, for example, the Pantheon, has a hemispherical vault that is an analog both of the spherical cosmos itself and of the atmosphere. The oculus, as it is called, at the summit of the vault, is open to admit the moving rays of the sun: the building as a whole (whose spherical structural module is partly dissembled in the flat floor) is like a giant eyeball. Seen from above, the similarity is particularly striking. See the illustrations in de Fine Licht 1968 figs. 5 (p. 13) and 228 (p. 231); cf. fig. 206 (p. 203), of the Thermae Mercurii at Baiae; MacDonald 1976 figs. 15 (p. 23), 37 (p. 39), and 98 (p. 91). See Chapter 6, pp. 252-255.
38. See, for instance, Augustine's famous discussion of frui and uti in De doctrina christiana 11
39. Contini glosses forte tempo as "aspra tempesta," which is of course a possible reading. We follow Foster and Boyde, whose interpretation seems preferable for the following reasons: (1) The possessive must indicate a special connection between the tempo and Love; the spring is peculiarly Love's own, "quando piove / amore in terra da tutti li cieli" ("Io son venuto," 67-68). (2) The threat of death in the springtime would be parallel with the ending of, again, "Io son venuto," and although petrifaction is not explicitly mentioned here, the theme is so important in "Amor, tu vedi ben" that it would have to be understood; this would, then, be a further reference to the theme of the Medusa. (3) A number of other parallels between "Io son venuto" and "Amor, tu vedi ben" and surrounding "Al poco giorno" as well are more specifically wintry.
40. Cf. Boccaccio's used of the term tempo for "opportunity" in the Decameron; for example, 2.3.28 (1976114): "Idio ha mandato tempo a' miei desideri" ("God has provided an opportune time for the fulfillment of my desires"); 2.5.78 (1976 139): "preso tempo" ("seizing the opportunity"); 2.6.9 (1976 143): "attender tempo" ("wait for the favorable moment").
41. Aquinas Summa theologica Ia, quaest. 46, art. 3 (1875 1:342): "Quattuor enim ponuntur simul creata, scilicet coelum empyreum, materia corporalis, quae terrae intelligitur, tempus, et natura angelica" ("It is held that four things were created simultaneously, namely the empyrean heaven, corporeal matter, implied in the term earth, time, and the angels")—cf. Summa contra gentiles 1.15 (1875 12:20): "Omne quod incipit esse vel desinit, per motum vel mutationem hoc patitur . . . . [Deus] est . . . aeternus, carens principio et fine" ("Everything that begins to be or stops being does so through a motion or change . . . . [God] is . . . eternal, having neither beginning nor end").
We must note how misleading is Contini's note to lines 49-50 (1946 164): "Amore è una vertù, dunque non propriamente una sostanza, e si è d'accordo con la Vita nuova (xxv.II)." The reference is to Dante's "Amore è uno accidente in substantia"; the notion of an accident that would precede time is selfcontradictory. But Dante's definition is in any case deliberately misleading (see below, notes 42 and 50). break
42. In both "Amor, tu vedi ben" and the Vita nuova, Dante is thinking of the Pseudo-Dionysius's treatment of the names of God as naming superessential absolutes in which the creatures participate. Albertus Magnus writes:
. . . est commune omnium istorum nominum de quibus in hoc libro agitur quod in Deo sunt res significatae per nomen essentialiter et per prius et ab ipso sunt in aliis sicut a causa effectiva et exemplari.
( Super Dionysium de divinis nominibus, art. 13, quaest. 1 ad 1 [quoted in Ruello 1963 103n.73])
. . . it is common to all those names which are discussed in this book that the things signified by the names are in God essentially and in a prior way and because of him they are in other things, he being their effective and exemplary cause.
Aquinas explains:
Nullum nomen convenit Deo secundum illam rationem secundum quam dicitur de creaturis: nam sapientia in creaturis est qualitas, non autem in Deo . . . . Quia omnis effectus non adaequans virtutem causae agentis recipit similitudinem agentis, non secundum eandem rationem, sed deficienter: ita ut quod divisum et multipliciter est in effectibus, in causa est simpliciter et eodem modo; sicut sol secundum unam suam virtutem multiformes et varias formas in istis inferioribus producit.
( Summa theologica Ia, quaest. 13, art. 5; Opera omnza 1.91; emphasis added)
No name belongs to God by the same principle by which it is said of creatures: for wisdom in creatures is a quality, but not in God . . . . For every effect that is less than the power of the efficient cause receives the likeness of the agent, not according to the principle, but deficiently: so that what exists divided and in multiplicity in the effects, in the cause exists simply and according to one mode; just as the sun by its one power ( virtutem ) produces many and various forms in these lower creatures.
See note 57 below.
43. See also Origène 1976 24 (Rufinus's translation): "In hoc ergo principio, hoc est in Verbo suo Deus caelum et terram fecit, sicut et Evangelista Iohannes in initio Evangelii suo ait."
The Gospel of John provides the principal biblical discussion of the Verbum Dei as the true light, giving Verbum Dei and Filius Dei as names of God, as well as Via, Veritas, and Vita; the first epistle of John provides two other equally famous names: Deus charitas est and Deus lux est (1 John 4:7-8).
44. Cf. the Pseudo-Dionysius's De divinis nominibus, chap. 9: "motus Dei immobilis" (Aquinas 1950 315).
45. Aristotle had defined time as "the measure of motion with respect to before and after" and had pointed out that motion, time, and space are notions that all imply each other ( Physics 3.1). These positions were widely adopted in the Middle Ages; Augustine alludes to them (e.g., Confessions 11.23), and Aqui- soft
nas regularly cites them (e.g., 1875 22:381-383; cf. Summa theologica 1a, quaest. 66, art. 4).
46. In this light, sixty-six as the number of lines in the poem, and six as the number of appearances of the dominant rhyme-word in each stanza, probably are to be associated with the traditional numerological identification of six as the number of the created world, as Petrarch seems to have understood; see Durling 1976 17-18. See also above, Chapter 3, pp. 122-126, and Appendix 2. In this connection, the number twelve is almost certainly associated with the months of the year, and five with the planets other than sun and moon.
47. Bloch (1977 176-189) argues that the very nature of the canso is an appeal for judgment, usually from the lady as judge, against the lauzengier. Dante has transposed the appeal, making it one against the lady. See also Bloch 1977 144-160.
48. "Amor, tu vedi ben" has several points of similarity with the canzone "Amor, che movi tua vertù da cielo" (usually associated with the pargoletta poems; mentioned twice in the De vulgari eloquentia, first [2.v.4] as an instance of the nobility of a hendecasyllable opening a canzone, later [2.xi.7] as having pedes longer than the sirma ). The parallel between the openings of the two poems ( Amor, followed by a pronoun and a second-person singular verb in the present tense) is symptomatic of a larger and more important parallel: both poems are extended apostrophes, prayers to Love to change the lady's heart, arranged in an overtly argumentative structure that is punctuated by the vocatives (in "Amor, che movi": "Amor, che movi . . . tu cacci . . . Dunque, segnor . . , guarda . . ."). In both poems, both the lover's love and the lady's beauty are represented as instances of the radiation of the cosmic principle of love ("Amor, che movi": "Feremi ne lo cor sempre tua luce," 16; and "perché nel suo venir li raggi tuoi, / con li quai mi risplende, / saliron tutti ne li occhi suoi," 28-30). But "Amor, che movi," extremely Guinizellian in metaphorics and tone, avoids the strong identification of Amor with the superessential Light that we find in "Amor, tu vedi ben"; only lines 1-2 clearly allude to it ("Amor, che movi tua vertù da cielo / come 'l sol lo splendore"). For the possible connections of this poem and "Io sento sì d'Amor la gran possanza" with the petrose, see Pernicone 1970a, 1970b.
Another poem with insistent apostrophe of Amore is the much later canzone montanina "Amor, da che convien pur ch'io mi doglia" (see lines 1, 46, and 61), though this one is not argumentative but, instead, basically narrative in structure.
49. The name Amore occurs once in each of the first three petrose ("Io son venuto," 50; "Al poco giorno," 16; "Amor, tu vedi ben," 1), and four times in "Così nel mio parlar" (lines 32, 37, 64, 72), where of course the personification becomes an actor in the internal drama (lines 35-52). See pp. 179-185.
50. This process, whereby the god of love is replaced by-or gradually identified as-Christ, has an important parallel in the Vita nuova, where the figure of Love, originally a "segnore di pauroso aspetto" (chap. 3) and, until chapter 12, largely assimilated to the medieval Cupid, gradually blends into something close to the figure of Christ. In the culminating moment, Love himself draws an continue
analogy between the pair Giovanna-Beatrice and the pair John the Baptist—Christ (Dante 1984 167-169):
parve che Amore mi parlasse nel cuore, e dicesse: "Quella prima è nominata Primavera solo per questa venuta d'oggi; ché io mossi lo imponitore del nome a chiamarla così Primavera, cioè prima verrà lo die che Beatrice si mosterrà dopo la imaginazione del suo fedele. E se anche vógli considerare lo primo nome suo, tanto è quanto a dire 'prima verrà,' però che lo suo nome Giovanna è da quello Giovanni lo quale precedette la verace luce, dicendo: 'Ego vox clamantis in deserto: parate viam Domini."' Ed anche mi parve che mi dicesse, dopo, queste parole: "E chi volesse sottilmente considerare, quella Beatrice chiamerebbe Amore, per molta simiglianza che ha meco."
The passage is evasive. Although it explicitly draws the parallel Giovanna-John the Baptist, identifying precedence as the tertium comparationis, it leaves implicit the parallel Beatrice-verace luce. Likewise, the final sentence does not fully state the analogy Beatrice-Christ; rather, it asserts the similarity between Beatrice and the Amore whose identity is in question. It is immediately after this chapter that Dante gives his misleading definition of love as "uno accidente in substantia," after which the figure Amore entirely disappears from the book (cf. Singleton 1949 73-75, 112-114).
51. Since the poem as a whole is thus identified as a prayer to Christ, it implies that the speaker has not only the right to woo the lady but also a serious claim to her love; see Introduction, pp. 46-47.
52. This is true, of course, in a very general sense; none of the technical terminology of emanationism is present, except for raggio.
53. See above, note 6. Albertus Magnus writes:
Sicut lumen, quod est causa pulchri, per emissionem radiorum a causa efficit omnia luminosa, ita etiam secundum immisionem fulgoris a fonte pulcherrimi omnia pulchritudine participant.
(on De divinis nominibus 4; cited in De Bruyne 1946 3.185; emphasis added)
Just as the light, which is the cause of the beautiful, by the emission of rays from the source [the sun] makes everything luminous, so according to their reception of radiance from the fountain of the most beautiful all things participate in beauty.
The passage quoted in note 6 above continues:
. . . et est principium omnium pulchrum, sicut effectiva causa, et movens tota, et continens amore propriae pulchritudinis, et finis omnium, sicut finalis causa (etenim pulchri causa omnia fiunt), et exemplaris, quoniam secundum ipsum cuncta determinantur, propter quod et idem est bono pulchrum quoniam bonum et pulchrum secundum omnem causam cuncta desiderant, et non est aliquid existentium quod non participet pulchro et bono. break
. . . and the beautiful is the beginning of all things, as their effective cause and mover, containing them within the love of its own beauty, as their final cause (for all things are made for the sake of beauty), and their formal cause, because all things are determined according to it, so that the beautiful is the same as the good, since all things desire the good and the beautiful in every cause, and there is nothing among existing things that does not participate in the beautiful and the good.
De Bruyne (3: 266) quotes a characteristic comment from Albert's follower Ulrich of Strasburg:
Est etiam causa finalis, quia cum forma a perfectibili desideretur in quantum est perfectio, et haec perfectionis natura non est in forma nisi similitudo Lucis increatae, quae similitudo est pulchritudo rerum, patet quod forma desideratur et intenditur in quantum est bonum et etaim pulchrum. Et sic divina pulchritudo in se vel in sua similitudine est finis alliciens omne desiderium.
(emphasis added)
He is the final cause [of beauty], too, because as form is desired by the perfectible in so far as it is its perfection, and since the nature of this perfection in the form is nothing other than a likeness of the uncreated Light, it is clear that form is desired and intended in so far as it is both good and beautiful. And so the divine beauty, in itself or in what resembles it, is the goal that beckons to every desire.
54. It is especially through the idea of light as unifying and congregating ("congregating them to the one, true, clear, uniform cognition, and filling them with the one unifying light," De divinis nominibus 4.5.106-107) that the Pseudo-Dionysius (4.14.178) makes the transition to his discussion of love as a name of God, through a passage that returns to the idea of the Good as cause, container, and goal of all motion, from the natural harmonies of the universe to the mystical ecstasy of the saints (p. 146):
. . . sicut quidam aeternus cyclus, propter bonum ex bono in bono et ad bonum, in non errante convolutione circumambulans et in eodem et secundum idem et procedens et manens semper et restitutus.
. . . like a certain eternal cycle, because of the Good out of the Good in the Good to the Good circulating with a not errant circling, and in the Same and according to the Same both proceeding and remaining always and restored.
See Chapter 5, note 99.
55. See Chapter 1, pp. 55-62.
56. Convivio 2.14.13: "dal cominciamento del mondo poco più de la sesta parte è volto; e noi siamo già ne l'ultima etade del secolo, e attendemo veracemente la consummazione del celestiale movimento" (Dante 1964); cf. Nardi 1949 316-317; Nardi 1967a 164. See also Litt 1963 242-243.
57. See Burke 1961 33-38, 163-171. The term petra, of course, in one of its uses, stands in this poem for the other extreme; it is thus striking, in connection continue
with this poem, that in discussing the names of God, Aquinas repeatedly uses the term lapis as an example of various aspects of the activity of naming. One of the most interesting instances is as follows:
In significatione nominum aliud est quandoque a quo imponitur nomen ad significandum, et aliud ad quod significandum nomen imponitur, sicut hoc nomen lapis imponitur ab eo quod laedit pedem, non tamen imponitur ad hoc significandum quod significat laedens pedem, sed ad significandam quamdam speciem corporum; alioquin omne laedens pedem esset lapis.
( Summa theologica Ia, quaest. 13, art. 2)
In the way names mean it often happens that there is a difference between the thing the name is taken from in order to signify, and the thing which the name is to signify, as the term lapis (stone) derives from harming the foot, but it is not used to order to signify "harming the foot" but to denote a certain class of bodies; otherwise everything that harms the foot would be a stone.
Aquinas is drawing on Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum liber 16.3.1: "Lapis a terra tanquam densior, etiam vulgo discernitur. Lapis autem dictus, quod laedat pedem." When in stanza 2 of "Amor, tu vedi ben" Dante writes:
he is engaging in etymological play; the "petra che t'avesse innoiato" must be a stone in the way. But "porto nascoso il colpo de la petra" also preserves the idea of the etymon of lapis: laedens, "harmful."
58. We see a reflection here and in the Vita nuova of Aquinas's clarification of the Nominalist-Realist debate on the names of God in terms of a theory of analogical terms founded on the analogy of being, and specifically on the analogy of proportion with respect to potency and act (thus a change in emphasis from formalism to efficient cause ); see Montagnes 1963 esp. 81-96.
59. See Introduction, pp. 11-18, and Chapter 1, p. 66-68.
60. It is tempting to think that Dante had been struck by Albertus Magnus's phrase oculo solis, which does not appear in the sources of the De mineralibus, particularly because of the connection with the opening of the poem: "Amor [ = sol iustitiae ], tu vedi." We have noted, as important for helping to establish the analogy between the poem and the eye, the parallel between "lo tuo raggio che al volto mi luce" and "la novità che per tua forma luce," the first and last appearances of luce in the poem, both verbs. La novità is made parallel with lo tuo raggio. If we read novità with an eye to the meaning Dante assigns to the term novo in the Vita nuova (i.e., miracle), we may see in the last line of the poem that what Dante hopes is shining through its form is something he continue
5— Breaking the Ice: "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro"
1. Fenzi (1966 305) quotes Momigliano's attack on the poem's "excesses." The poem's importance to contemporaries is suggested by Boccaccio's transcription of it in the first place in his copies of Dante's canzoni and his allusion to it in Decameron 5.8; see below, note 3. For balanced recent appreciation, see Dante 1967 2:273-275. Vallone 1974 is especially valuable for citations of verbal parallels (mostly in secondary stilnovisti like Lapo and Cino) and insight into the tormented psychology of the speaker; di Girolamo 1976 emphasizes the metaphorical functions, inclusive of displaced sexual reference, of Dante's language.
2. But see Vallone 1974 265-266, 269; and di Girolamo 1976 27, who contradict Contini here. Regan (1982) offers insights but seems not to know Dronke. Comens (1986) reads the petrose as a set of dramatic monologues depicting the speaker's surrender to sexual concupiscence and wrath; his views require forcing of the text (e.g., 164, 167, 168, 173, 179) and neglect the formal complexities of the poems (as well as much of the bibliography on them); his article renders extreme the "theological" notion that the experience recorded in the petrose is to be viewed as exclusively negative. A similar logic would require us to condone continue
without question all forms of anger in the Commedia on the grounds of their "theological" foundation.
3. For Boccaccio's copies of Dante's canzoni, see Dante 1946 288-291; Pernicone 1970C; and Pernicone 1973b 952. Boccaccio's placing of the petrose as first and central is, however, striking; the last poem in Boccaccio's order is "E' m'incresce di me sì duramente" (67), which has many features in common with "Così nel mio parlar"; it is thus arguable that Boccaccio thought of the petrose and related poems as the most important in Dante's stravaganti.
4. The antithesis of rime aspre and dolci rime is spelled out in the commentary to "Le dolci rime" in Conviio 4.2.11-13. See also Dante 1946 165.
5. Boyde (1971 201) notes the ambiguous syntax of "questa bella petra, / la quale ognora impetra / maggior durezza e più natura cruda" (2-4). If la quale is object, then impetra is a metaphorical verb meaning "petrifies"; but if durezza is object, then the verb means "obtains." See also Dante 1946 167; and Vallone 1974 238.
6. The text of the canzone has the lady wearing the jasper ("si veste d'un diaspro," 3), suggesting that she displays it prominently on her brow or upper body. Dante was of course familiar with jasper from the description of the twelve stones, standing for the twelve tribes of Israel, in Aaron's breastplate in Exodus (28:6-21). In Martianus Capella 1.75, the sun wears a crown with twelve stones, among which are jasper and heliotrope. The lady's jasper is usually glossed as a reference to her chastity, citing the lapidary of Marbod of Rennes (see Dante 1946 168); see PL 171:1743:
Caste gestatus fugat et febres, et hydropem
appositusque juvat mulierem parturientem.
Et tutamentum portanti creditur esse;
Nam consecratus gratum facit atque potentem,
Et sicut perhibent, phantasmata noxia pellit.
Marbod (as well as Isidore, Hrabanus, etc.) merely notes that the jasper is most effective against fever when borne by a chaste person. Other attributes of the stone include protection from harm, conferral of charm and strength, and the repulsion of harmful fantasies; these other associations may be more specifically relevant to "Così nel mio parlar." The petra is protected not only from Love's arrows but also from the corrosive thoughts of love that torture the speaker; the poem itself would be the erotic fantasy aimed at her hitherto impenetrable armor. Some lapidaries also observe that jasper was more effective when carved with the figure of an armed man (identified often as Mars) or a virgin wearing a stole (probably Pallas with the aegis, bearer of the Gorgon); see Evans 1922 206: "sculpere oportet in eo [iaspide] martem armatum aut virginem stolatam cum veste circumfusa tenentem laurum." Such associations suggest a derivation of the military themes of the canzone from the key rhyme aspro / diaspro and hint at the submerged presence of the Medusa.
7. See above, pp. 138-139, and Appendix 1, pp. 261-263. Foster and Boyde (Dante 1967 2:273-275) offer excellent commentary. break
8. In addition to De vulgari eloquentia 2.vii.6 (on the tempering of harsh and smooth words: "Omativa vero dicimus omnia polisillaba [yrsuta] que, mixta cum pexis, pulcram faciunt armoniam compaginis") and 2.xiii.13 ("nam lenium asperorumque rithimorum mixtura ipsa tragedia nitescit"), Dante uses the metaphor of temperament in discussing the dialect of the Bolognese (1.xv.5, "Si ergo bononienses utrinque accipiunt, ut dictum est, rationabile videtur esse quod eorum locutio per commixtionem oppositorum ut dictum est ad laudabilem suavitatem remaneant temperata"). Mengaldo here cites Boethius's Institutio arithmetica (1867 2.32): "non sine causa dictum est, omnia, quae ex contrariis consisterent, armonia quadam coniungi atque componi. Est enim armonia plurimorum adunatio et dissidentium consensio."
9. Aquinas, following Aristotle, refutes the idea that the soul is a harmony or temperament ( Summa contra gentiles 2.63-64). The exploration of the limits of the stanzaic habitudo, the mixture of rhymes ( rithimorum relatio ), and the weaving of hendecasyllables and heptasyllables ( contextum carminum ) ( De vulgari eloquentia 2.xi.I), is what results in the determinate complexion or temperament of each canzone stanza ("cantio est coniugatio stantiarum," 2.ix.I); "possumus . . . dicere stantiam esse sub certo cantu et habitudine limitatam carminum et syllabarum compagem," 2.ix.6). The recurrence of metaphors like compages, mixtura, coniugatio, and armonia means that Dante is drawing on the idea of a substance (a material body, a living creature, an artificial product) as a complexio or temperament of primary elements. The analogy between the canzone and the body is based finally on their common status as composites of matter and form—sententia and habitudo in the poem, matter and temperament or complexion in the body. Both are thus susceptible of harmony and discord: in an analogy that goes back to Hippocrates, the body's health is a harmony of humors or qualities, while the canzone, as we noted of Dante's terminology, may be thought of as a whole series of harmonies: of words and music, of words in meter, of harsh and smooth rhymes, of the parts of the stanza ( armoniam compaginis ). As Monterosso (1970a 381) observes, Dante's immediate model when he discusses harmony is the harmony of the proportions of the physical body "Quella cosa dice l'uomo essere bella cui le parti debitamente si rispondono, per che de la loro armonia resulta piacimento. Onde pare l'uomo essere bello, quando le sue membra debitamente si rispondono, e dicemo bello lo canto, quando le voci di quello, secondo debito de l'arte, sono intra sé rispondenti" ( Convivio 1.5.13). See Spitzer 1963.
10. De vulgari eloquentia 2.vii (see Appendix 4 for translation). We follow Dante 1967 2:275, in the determination of dolci and aspre syllables found within the rhyme: "ignoring . . . all consonants except those which close the penultimate syllable, and open the final syllable." For convenience, we summarize here Foster and Boyde's explanation of verbal harshness, drawn from De vulgari eloquentia 2.vii: "Asperitas is found in words which are aspirated (his example is 'honore'), which have fewer than two or more than three syllables, which are stressed on the final syllable, or which have certain consonant groups-namely double z or double x, or consonant groups made up of two liquids or a liquid followed by a mute" (p. 275). break
11. Di Girolamo (1976 19) notes: "si notino pure le poche rime facili, che coincidono con i rari momenti di serenità e di sogno: come la rima baciata face :pace, che conclude l'ultima stanza, o come dora:allora."
12. A similar opposition distinguishes the octave of Dante's sonnet "Com' più vi fere Amor co' suoi vincastri" (Dante 1946 51-52), marked by harsh and rare rhymes, from the sestet, where the rhymes are dolci—as Contini points out.
13. Foster and Boyde (Dante 1967 2:274) note that "in short, D goes far beyond the simple mixture of vocabula pexa and vocabula yrsuta that he recommends in De vulgari eloquentia II.vii.6," but add, "the poem is experimental, and it is not evidence of a break with traditional poetics: rather, it is the exception that proves the rule." Vallone (1974 269), however, thinks "Così" and the Vita nuova the principal lyric moments on the way to the Commedia.
14. Guittone d'Arezzo (cited in Dante 1979a 85): "Credo savete ben, messer Onesto / che proceder dal fatto il nome dia"; and Ubertino to Guittone: "Se'l nome deve seguitar lo fatto."
15. See Consolatio 3.pr. 11: "Quod si rationes quoque non extra petitas sed intra rei quam tractabamus ambitum collocatas agitavimus, nihil est quod admirere, cum Platone sanciente didiceris cognatos de quibus loquuntur rebus oportere esse sermones." Boethius refers to Timaeus 29b. Alain of Lille De planctu naturae pr. 4 (Häring 1978 839) makes the relevant point that sometimes discourses must be ugly in order to accommodate "deformed" subjects: "Sed tamen aliquando, ut superius libavimus, quia rebus de quibus loquimur cognatos oportet esse sermones, rerum informitati locutionis debet deformitas conformari" (emphasis added).
16. See Chapter 6, pp. 217-223.
17. See Inferno 32.1-12. Dante knew the story of Amphion from many sources, including Ovid, Statius, and Brunetto Latini.
18. "Hinc aestimo et Orphei vel Amphionis fabulam, quorum alter animalia ratione carentia, alter saxa quoque trahere cantibus ferebantur, sumpsisse principium, quia primi forte gentes vel sine rationis cultu barbaras, vel saxi instar nullo affectu molles, ad sensum voluptatis canendo traxerunt" (Macrobius 1970a 105 [ Commentarium 2.3.8]). Just above, Macrobius opines that none is so merciless or hard of heart ("nullum sit tam immite, tam asperum pectus" ) that he cannot be moved by music, which is a memory of the music known in heaven ("quia in corpus defert memoriam musicae cuius in caelo fuit conscia"). Macrobius's other example is Orpheus, whose skill in moving rocks and trees is remembered by Dante in the Convivio 2.1.3; there, too, the rocks and stones moved by Orpheus are allegorized as cruel listeners: "che vuol dire che lo savio uomo con lo strumento de la sua voce fa[r]ia mansuescere e umiliare li crudeli cuori."
19. "Musica non modo speculationi, verum etiam moralitati coniuncta. . . . Nulla omnino . . . aetas quae a cantilenae dulcis delectatione seiuncta sit. . . . Lascivus quippe animus, vel ipse lascivioribus delectatur modis vel saepe eosdem audiens cito emollitur, ac frangitur. Rursus asperior mens vel incitatioribus gaudet, vel incitatioribus asperatur . . . . Nulla enim magis ad animum disciplinis via, quam auribus patet. Cum ergo per eas rhythmi modique ad animum usque descenderint, dubitari non potest quin aequo modo mentem atque ipsa continue
sunt efficiant atque conforment. Id vero etiam intelligi in gentibus potest. Nam quae asperiores sunt Getarum, durioribus delectantur modis. Quae vero mansuetae, mediocribus" ( De musica institutione 1.1; quoted in Monterosso 1971 1062).
20. Dante could have known of the specifically cathartic effects of music from Aristotle's discussion of the function of music in education in the eighth book of the Politics.
21. "Quia percussus aer ipso interventu ictus vim de se fragoris emittit, ipsa cogente natura ut in sonum desinat duorum corporum violenta conlisio. sed is sonus, qui ex qualicumque aeris ictu nascitur, aut dulce quiddam in aures et musicum defert, aut ineptum et asperum personat. nam si ictum observatio numerorum certa moderetur, compositum sibique consentiens modulamen educitur: at cum increpat tumultuaria et nullis modis gubernata conlisio, fragor turbidus et inconditus offendit auditum" (Macrobius 1970a 96).
22. See Macrobius 1970a 99: "in Timaeo suo mundi animam per istorum numerorum contextionem ineffabili providentia dei fabricatoris instituit"; p. 101: "Timaeus igitur Platonis in fabricanda mundi anima consilium divinitatis enuntians ait illam per hos numeros fuisse contextam, qui et a pari et ab impari cybum id est perfectionem soliditatis efficiunt"; pp. 102-103: "ergo mundi anima, quae ad motum hoc quod videmus universitatis corpus impellit, contexta numeris musicam de se creantibus concinentiam necesse est ut sonos musicos de motu quem proprio impulso praestat efficiat . . . ait enim Plato, ut supra rettulimus, auctorem animae deum post numerorum inter se imparium contextionem hemioliis epitritis et epogdois et limmate hiantia intervalle supplesse."
23. See De vulgari eloquentia 2.xii.1: "Est etiam, ut superius dictum est, habitudo quedam quam carmina contexendo considerare debemus"; 2.xii.3: "Horum prorsus, cum tragice poetari conamur, endecasillabum propter quandam excellentiam in contextu vincendi privilegium promeretur. Nam quedam stantia est que solis endicasillabis gaudet esse contexta, ut illa Guidonis de Florentia ['Donna mi prega'] et etiam nos dicimus ['Donne ch'avete']." See also 2.12.4, 5, 7, and 9; also 2.13.5, 7.
24. Alain of Lille presents the reconciliation of the discordant elements in the kind of anthropomorphic terms that we suggest are reversed in the case of "Così": that is, the reconciliation of petra and speaker has something in it of the joining of discordant elements. See Alain Deplanctu naturae pr. 4 (Häring 1978 840): "Deus igitur mundiali palatio varias rerum species ascribendo quas, discrepantium generum litigio disparatas, legitimi ordinis congruentia temperavit, leges indidit, sanctionibus alligavit. Sicque res generum oppositione contrarias, inter quas locus ab oppositis locum posuerat, cuiusdam reciproce habitudinis relativis osculis federando in amicicie pacem litem repugnantie commutavit. Subtilibus igitur invisibilis iuncture cathenis concordantibus universis ad unitatem pluralitas, ad idemptitatem diversitas, ad consonantiam dissonantia, ad concordiam discordia, unione pacifica remeavit."
25. Matthew ofVendôme (Faral 1924 154) writes: "Ex superficiali ornatu verborum elegantia est in versibus . . . . Siquidem in hoc articulo versificatorem oportet esse expeditum, ne ex penuria ornatus hirsuta verborum aggregatio in continue
metro videatur mendicare: sed, quadam similitudine sumpta a rebus materiatis, sicut de lana caprina et de panniculis inveteratis nemo festivum potest contexere indumentum . . . similiter in versibus." And Geoffroy de Vinsauf (Faral 1924 254):
26. Perugi (1978 77) argues that Dante's verse echoes Arnaut's "aesplan e daura." If so, the alteration of aesplan to increspa supports our point: as the lady's coiffeur, Love curls and roughens the surface of her hair, makes it, technically, reburrus (and see Mengaldo's note on this word, quoting Uguccione da Pisa: "Reburrus.a.um, hispidus, recalvus, renudatus, discoopertus, scilicet cuius primi et anteriores capilli altius ceteris horrescunt" [Dante 1979a 191]).
27. Combing or adorning hair is a specific image for "grooming" words in Geoffroy de Vinsauf Doctrina de arte versificandi 2.3.7 (Faral 1924): "in hoc adjectivo perpexa, per pexionem designamus ornatum, sicut cum dicitur 'Verba habes perpexa,' id est ornata"; 2.3.21: "sicut homo . . . quando vult pulchriores reddere capillos, comit vel pectit eos, similiter dicitur comere vel pectere verba, quando reddit pulchra."
28. Vallone (1974 248) is especially good on the paradoxical final moments of the poem, where sardonic parody and a mystical serenity overlap.
29. Contini (Dante 1946 157) speaks of an alternation of objective and subjective moments.
30. For the aggressive viso of the lady, see Dante's canzone "E' m'incresce di me si duramente" (Dante 1946 62), where the lady's penetrating sight is a recurring topic: "Entro'n quel cor che i belli occhi feriro" (7); "lor vittoriosa vista" (22); "alza li occhi micidiali e grida" (49); "per una luce che nel cor percosse" (65); "lo mirare intento ch'ella fece" (78). "E'm'incresce di me" alludes to the innamoramento of the Vita nuova, and as Fenzi (1966 271) has pointed out, it is closely related to "Così nel mio parlar." For the lady's glance as an arrow, see note 99.
31. In "E'm'incresce di me," the speaker is similarly impeded in his operations: "Che a tutte mie virtù fu posto un freno / subitamente, sì ch'io caddi in terra, / per una luce che nel cuor percosse" (63-65). Contini (Dante 1946 168) and most editors read vertù in verse 34 as referring to the power of the denti d'Amor that corrode the pensier, but Peter Boyde (1971 201) observes that the phrase is ambiguous; Foster and Boyde (Dante 1967 2:279) provide a more convincing case for taking pensier as the subject of bruca than they do for their preferred solution: "Metaphorically, Death is devouring D's senses with Love's continue
teeth; in somewhat plainer language ( cioè ), the tormenting obsession with his beloved ( pensier ) is corroding the power of his senses and slowing down their operation, thus leading him to his death which, obviously, occurs when their operation finally ceases." Vallone (1976 252) notes that " Tre donne," 47-48 ("ivi dovel'l gran lume / toglie a la terra del vinco la fronda"), is similarly ambiguous.
32. Vallone (1976 247) notes: " Si pongono da una parte tre modi personali di essere ( mia mente, mio mal, m'affonda ) e di fronte tre elementi della realtà esterna ( fronda, onda, rima )."
33. The prohibition on speaking the lady's name derives from the "rules" of Courtly Love; see the thirteenth rule of Andreas Capellanus (1972 310: "Amor raro consuevit durare vulgatus"). In chapter 5 of the Vita nuova, Love prescribes elaborate schermi for the protagonist so that his love for Beatrice may be secret; in "Lo doloroso amor" (Dante 1946-68), the speaker has borne his pain secretly ("l'ho portato nascosto," 7; Contini's note is "il soverchio dolore s' oppone alla discrezione cavalleresca").
34. Vallone (1976 257) makes the link—a phonosymbolic one—of strida with the previous corrosion of the lover's faulties: "il verbo strida sembra provocato dall' attrito di quei molti e confusi residui, generati dal lavorio della lima e dal rodio del cuore a scorza a scorza."
35. " La lotta, come sempre nei grandi poeti intimisti, si sposta all' interno. Per non cedere a petra occorre anche vincere i sentimenti dell' animo, di qui sradicarla" (Vallone 1976 244). But Vallone overlooks the extent to which the threat comes from the lover himself.
36. Dante's concern with inversion in "Così", as in all the petrose, may owe a debt to Raimbaut d' Aurenga's masterpiece, "Ar resplan la Flors enversa" (Pattison 1952 199), which is based on a comples series of inversions —thematic, imagistic, formal, linguistic—worked out in six stanzas. Raimbaut's techniqe of rim derivatiu is often considered a forerunner of the sestina (De Riquer 1975 1:445), and his use of rhyme-words and derivative rhyme makes " Ar resplan" a possible predecessor of the petrose . Although Dante never mentions. Raimbaut, we suggest that Raimbaut's poem has influenced " Così" in the following ways: in the perverso / riverso / verso rhyme, which reflects Raimbaut's use of enversa/ enverse as the initial rhymes of each stanza (and as the seminal idea of the poem); int he speaker's reference to the lady's braids as whips ("che son per me scudiscio e ferza"), which echoes Raimbaut's description of his lady's eyes as whips ("Vostre belh huelh mi son giscle"); and in the speaker's desire that his poem strike the lady like an arrow ("dàlle per lo cor d'una saetta"), which echoes Raimbaut's desire that his poem be so that it will move the lady (" A midons lo chant e.1 siscle / Clar, qu'el cor l'en introl giscle"), a verse that also might anticipate " Amor, tu vedi ben,"52 ("entrale in core omai"). Moreover, Raimbaut's idea that his opem is itelf in some sense (or senses) reversed ("Mos vers an, qu'aissi l'enverse" —with a suggestive duplication of vers ) may be behind Dante's extraordinarily self-conscious and intense exploration of forms of inversion in "Così" and the rest of the petrose . For the hypothesis that "Ar resplan" is an immediate precedent for "Lo ferm voler," see Roncaglia 181 29-31.
37. The augustinian tag is quoted by Albertus Magnus in his De homine, continue
quaest. 67, art. 1: "bellum enim semper est propter quietem et pacem, ut dicit Augustinus" (cited in Shaw 1948 35).
38. Fenzi (1966 271) notes, "Il ritmo che poi aumenta in crescendo, sempre più fitto, sempre più marcato."
39. Dante uses pondus in the De vulgari eloquentia 2.v.3 when speaking of the relative "weights" of verses—eleven-syllable lines being the weightiest of all. Settenarii are permitted in a canzone in any number so long as they do not outweigh the eleven-syllable lines; Dante suggests one, two, three, four, or five (Dante 1979a 170). In "Così" Dante uses three—the mean.
40. A case in point is the middle of stanza 1, where the sequence of assonant vowels gives an effect of internal rhyme: "perch' ella s'arretra, / non esce di far etra / sa etta " (6-8).
41. "Ne risulta che dal sesto verso in giù non s'hanno se non rime baciate, con un effetto d'insistenza incalzante, spezialmente in presenza dei settenari" (Dante 1946 165). "Doglia mi reca," which has six rime baciate after the piedi (counting the concatenatio ), is the nearest rival; but the series is interrupted: ABbCdACcBeEffGgHIiiHH.
42. Again, in a manner unique among Dante's canzoni. "Donne ch'avete," the first canzone of the Vita nuova, is a near miss: its stanzas are composed entirely of eleven-syllable lines and therefore perfectly symmetrical with respect to the pondus of the verses, but they have an even number of lines (fourteen) and therefore no central verse.
43. There are several forms of licentia to which Dante refers: of stanzaic habitudo ( De vulgari eloquentia 2.x.5), of verse lengths (2.xii.5), of rhymes (2.xiii.4); but they must be justified by authoritative precedent (2.x.5). As we suggested earlier, Dante's own authority is sufficient to justify the license of his choice; thus, the principle by which Dante fashions the stanza of "Così" is closely akin to that which justifies the use of the aspro diction.
44. Descort is defined in the late Provençal Leys d'Amors: "Descortz es dictatz mot divers; e pot haver aytantas coblas coma vers, so's a ssaber de v a x, las quals coblas devon esser singulars, dezacordablas e variablas en acort, en so et en lengatges. E devon esser totas d'un compas o de divers. E dei tractar d'amors o de lauzors o per maniera de rancura: 'quar midons no mi ayma ayssi cum sol', o de tot aysso essems, qui.s vol" (Hill and Bergin 1973 1: 265). "Così" has regular stanzas and only one language, but it does treat of Love "per maniera de rancura." Examples in Dante's tradition are the multilingual descort of Raimbaut de Vaqueiras ("vuelh un descort comensar / d'amor, per qu'ieu vauc aratges / quar ma domna.m sol amar, / mas camiatz l'es sos coratges, / per qu'ieu vuelh dezacordar / los motz, e.ls sos e.ls lenguatges"; cited in Spitzer 1963 90); Giacomo da Lentini's "Dal core mi vene" (Contini 1960 1: 68); Bonagiunta da Lucca's "Or veo la rivera" and "Ai faux ris," attributed to Dante (1946 240). This last instance is a discordo plurilingue, with numerous features reminiscent of the petrose, from the gravis mea spina (42) that recalls the crudele spina of "Io son venuto" (49), as Scherillo and Crescini observe (Dante 1946 241), to the characterization of the donna as having a "cor di ghiaccio / et tant d'aspresse" (!) (27-28). The dardi and stocchi (17) are of course generic for a canzone about cruel love. It continue
is significant in connection with Raimbaut's poem (whose self-definition has obviously influenced that of the Leys ) that the writing of descortz is presented as willful: "Vuelh dezacordar los sos"; cf. "Voglio esser aspro." Marshall (1981) points out that a small number of isostrophic descortz in Provençal have survived; see also, for the Italian discordo, Russell 1982 59-71.
45. A comparison with "Io son venuto" is instructive here. In that canzone the dissonance of logical and formal units is internal to the stanza; "Così" is distinguished rather by the relation between stanzas, which is fully manifested only over the whole span of the poem. The effect of overlapping between the stanzas of "Così" applies to the parts of the stanza as well: the two pedes can be seen as two sirmata that overlap, the fifth verse in each stanza being taken twice. This notion is less fanciful if we note that lines 5-9 of each stanza end with a couplet, just as the sirma does.
46. There is no comparable overlapping in Dante's other lyric poems. Boyde (1971 243) claims that the linking of stanzas in "Così" is a version of the Provençal technique, similar to what Dante does in "Li occhi dolenti" ( Vita Nuova, chap. 31). But he underestimates the extent to which consecutive sirma and pedes are permeated by links; compare "E'm'incresce di me," a poem closely related to our canzone, where the technique remains very close to that of coblas capfinidas (and see Boyde 1971 239).
47. For the poem's center as heart or bosom, see Regan 1982 140. As Fenzi (1966 267) has noted, the center of the poem is correlated to the attack on the speaker's heart: the center of the body and the formal center of the text coincide, with consequences for interpretation. See Chapter 4, pp. 143-144.
48. Negatives in initial position: verses 7, 10, 14, 15; medial, verses 9, 13, 21, 24, 29, 31; final, verse 39. There is therefore a development, with negatives migrating from initial to final position, where the instance is a substantive (a rhetorical conversio of negare ).
49. In stanza 5, six instances ( vedesse, sarebbe, griderei, farei, metterei, piacerei ); in stanza 6, seven ( avessi, passerei, sarei, farei, vendicherei, guarderei, renderei ). This section of the poem echoes the techniques of the plazer, the Provençal genre used for wishful thinking, of which the most famous example in Italian is Cecco Angiolieri's sonnet "S'i'fosse fuoco, arderei'l mondo" (Contini 1960 2:377). For Dante's own essay in the genre, "Guido, io vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io," see Dante 1946 34-36.
50. On anaphora and antistrophe, see Chapter 2, note 99.
51. "The canzone which he is now sending is his revenge: it can become the arrow thrust in the woman's heart, the one thing that may shatter her defences" (Dronke 1968 166). And see di Girolamo 1976 21: "La situazione cortese della poesia come panegirico della dama è qui completamente ribaltata: il testo diviene esso stesso strumento di vendetta (ultimo vocabolo e ultima rima della canzone), ed è in grado da trafiggere (a freddo, e fuori dall'allucinazione della quinta stanza) il cuore di madonna." Describing words as arrows is of course a topos; see Chapter 5, pp. 181-182. break
52. Di Girolamo (1976 27) notes: "É quindi alla metafora che è affidato il messaggio centrale della canzone."
53. For the guises of Love in the Vita nuova, see Chapter 4, note 50; and Singleton 1949 74-77.
54. Use of the familiar pronoun probably excludes the petra from consideration as the lima, as Dante will use the honorific form voi in verse 61. It is worth remembering, however, that at Paradiso 31.81 Dante shifts to the familiar in his farewell words to Beatrice, after using the respectful voi for thirty-five cantos.
55. For the distinction of love as substance and accident, see the Vita nuova 25.11 (Dante 1980 164), and our remarks, pp. 390-391.
56. For this topos of the lyric tradition, see Guittone d'Arezzo, "Ahi, Deo, che dolorosa," 28: "Amore quanto a mor te vale a dire" (Contini 1960 2:193); and Inferno 5.106: "Amor condusse noi ad un A MOR te." But amor and mors are also found in Aeneid 4, linked to the name of Dido; see 4.171: "nec iam furtivum Dido meditatur amorem"; 4.291-292: "sese interea, quando optima Dido / nesciat et tantos rumpi non speret amores"; and 4.450-451: "Tum vero infelix fatis exterrita Dido / mortem orat."
57. "Con la violentissima 'scinderatio' . . . . fra E' e Amore, rifà senza dubbio il verso all'accesissimo incipit di 7.1-2, 'Anc eu no l'ac, mas ela m'a / tostemps en son poder Amors"' (Perugi 1978 77).
58. In the Roman de la rose, the ceremony of Amanz's feudal homage to Amor (in many respects a model for subsequent representations of this event, inclusive of stilnuovo lyric) includes the lover's insistence that Love treat him fairly, as a loyal vassal ought to be treated:
Sire, fis je, grant talent é
de fee vostre volenté;
mes mon servise recevez
en gre, foi que vous me devez.
Nou di pas por recreandise,
que point ne dot vostre servise,
mes sergenz en vain se travaille
de fee servise qui valle,
se li servise n'atalante
au seignor cui l'en presente.
(2013-22).
59. See Cavalcanti's famous canzone "Donna mi prega" (Contini 1960 2: 524-525).
60. All three of these terms recur in the Commedia applied to similar instruments: in Purgatorio 16.47, when Marco Lombardo recalls his idealism, "quel valore amai / al quale ha or ciascun disteso l'arco"; in Paradiso 15.6, where in reference to the celestial harp formed by the cross in the sphere of Mars Dante refers to "le sante corde / che la destra del ciel allenta e tira"; and in Paradiso 20.143, "E come a buon cantor buon citarista / fa seguitar lo guizzo della corda." For the analogy of the tempered bow and the body, Nardi (1930 131) cites one of continue
the aphorismi of Serapion Damascenus recorded by Pietro d'Abano in his Conciliator (diff. 21, pr. 3): "Complexio corporis animati est ad figuram numeri consoni, idest, proportionem seu similitudinem armonici numeri. Huiusmodi autem proportio et consonantia musica magis reperitur in complexione temperata quam in aliis." From this point of view, the lack of health in the body can be described as distensio corporis by a physician like Jacopo da Bologna (Nardi 1930 244).
61. For the distinction of higher and lower souls (the Platonic distinction of intellectual, vital, and nutritive— Timaeus 69b-72d), see Vita nuova, chap. 2, where Dante's first sight of Beatrice produces a different comment from each of the "souls" or spirits.
62. Vallone (1974 256) notes: "È necessario scendere sempre più in basso per tentare poi di risalire. L'estrema umiliazione, il soffocamento d'ogni guizzo, l'offesa e la burla della stessa angoscia ricuperano nel fondo della coscienza i residui più inconditi e li sollevano a ribellione."
63. Arnaldo da Villanova interpreted the name of the disease as hereos because it dominates the physical life of its victims: "It is called heroic love, as if pertaining to lordship, not because it only afflicts lords, but either because it dominates by subjecting the soul and commanding the heart of man, or because the acts of such lovers toward the object desired are like the acts of subjects toward their lords" ("Dicitur autem amor heroycus, quasi dominalis, non quia solum accidat dominis, sed quia aut dominatur subiiciendo animam et cordi hominis imperando, aut quia talium amantium actus erga rem desideratam similes sunt actibus subditorum erga proprios dominos"; quoted in Lowes 1913-14 497; our translation).
64. The topic of flaying, though submerged, is implicit in the use of scudiscio and scorza. Perugi (1978 80) points out that "infine la reduplicazione in rima di XLVI 25 a scorza a scorza discende certo dalla clausola di 18.32 com l'ecors'en la veria: nella stessa canzone cfr. in rima il binomio sinonimico di 67 scudiscio e ferza, precisa gemmazione di veria." The imagery of flaying will be echoed in passages of the Commedia that are closely related to "Così": thus atra/ squatra/ latra returns in Inferno 6 as atra/latra/isquatra in the presence of iscoia: "Graffia gli spiriti ed iscoia ed isquatra" (18).
65. The association of Love with military activities and attributes goes back at least to Ovid, for whom every lover was a soldier ( militat omnis amans ) and every seduction a campaign. It acquires medieval trappings when courtly love service assumes the elaborate forms of vassalage; see Perella 1968 128-129. Love as a quasi-military dux is manifest, even etymologically, in the lyrics (cf. "Lo doloroso amor che mi conduce" ), in the Vita nuova, and in the Commedia (cf. "Amor condusse noi ad una morte," Inferno 5.106); and see Vallone 1974 255, for parallels. In the case of Dante, however, the military metaphor is taken much more seriously, both as an indication of the violent descort between speaker and lady in the petrose and as the context for the poet's own initiation into a select company—hence the determination of "Amor, tu vedi ben" as an unattempted task worthy of a knighting day (see Appendix 1). Owen (1975 45) reprints a miniature from Bibliothèque Nationale Ms. fr. III, fol. 126v (Paris), showing Lancelot continue
holding Meleagant supine on the ground, sword at his breast, when King Bademagus intervenes. The positions illustrate those of Amor and the speaker in the poem.
66. In terms contemporary with Dante, the stanza is a poetic inquiry into Love's nature— Amor quid sit —closely related to Cavalcanti's own famous canzone, "Donna mi prega." Indeed, Cavalcanti's role as primo amico in the rhetorical excursus of Vita nuova 25 may help account for the elaborate reference to his poetry in the third stanza of "Così." Part of the reference is thematic: for example, the representation of the speaker's inner life through an interior theater, direct speech between the hypostatized spiriti, and the depiction of Amor as pitiless and destructive. Corti (1951 642) argues that the description of psychological states as an internal theater, as well as the tendency to represent the lover's plight as a deadly battle, characterizes Cavalcanti's lyrics. For the lotta or battaglia, see Corti 1951 650-652, with reference to Dante's adoption of these topics in the Vita nuova ("Amore . . . che fiere . . . e quale ancide"). Corti also discusses the phenomenon of Cavalcantian spiriti, noting in particular the ballata "Vedete ch'io son un," echoed in stanzas 3-4 of "Così." Boyde has analyzed the phenomenon of speaking spiriti, in both Cavalcanti and Dante, with reference to the rhetorical category of sermonicatio; for the link with Cavalcanti generally, see Dante 1967 2:278.
67. For scherana, see the parallels in Vallone 1974 260.
68. For the direct gaze as a formula in the Commedia, see Vallone 1974 265.
69. Ovid puts this succinctly in the Heroides ("Dido Aeneae," 195-96): "Praebuit Aeneas et causam mortis et ensem / Ipsa sua Dido concidit usa manu."
70. A summary of this thematics can be found in Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl 1964 146. In Paradiso 8.1-9, distinguishing between the (spurious) influence of Venus and Cupid as gods and the "real" influence of the planet, Dante draws on passages depicting the relation of Dido and Amor in the Aeneid that are also echoed in "Così nel mio parlar"; see Aeneid 1.715-19, 4.83-85.
71. Dante's use of the form ancidere in the poem ("ella ancide," 9; "il cor ch'io porto anciso," 75) strengthens the association with Dido; in Inferno 5.61, Dido is "colei che s'ancise amorosa."
72. This is made explicit in Ovid's Heroides 7.31-32 ("Dido Aeneae"): "Parce, Venus, nurui, durumque amplectere fratrem; / Frater Amor: castris militet ille tuis."
73. Dido reproaches Aeneas with having been born in the stony Caucasus ("sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens / Caucasus," Aeneid 4.366-67). Remaining unyielding—"mens immota manet," 4.449—he resembles the inflexible Amor of the canzone, "d'ogni merzé . . . messo al niego." The immutability of Amor before the speaker's pleas ("grido / merzé chiamando, e umilmente il priego," 37-38) reenacts Aeneas's refusal of Anna's embassy from the queen: "nullis ille movetur / fletibus aut voces ullas tractabilis audit" (4.438-439). See also the Heroides 7.37-38: "Te lapis et montes innataque rupibus altis / Robora, te saevae progenuere ferae."
74. Dido struck by Love's arrow: "uritur infelix Dido totaque vagatur / urbe furens, qualis coniecta cerva sagitta / . . . haeret lateri letalis harundo" ( Aeneid continue
4.68-69, 73). Dido consumed by love's fire: "At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura / Vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni" (4.1-2). Cf. "cioè che'l penser bruca la lor vertù" (33). Dido burned with a hidden, silent wound: "est mollis flamma medullas / interea et tacitum vivit sub pectore vulnus" (4.66-67). Cf. "dispietata lima / che sordamente la mia vita scemi" (22-23). Dido haunted by the image of a fierce Aeneas: "agit ipse furentem / in somnis ferus Aeneas" (4.466). The lover's strida at line 44 may also echo the sound of Dido's death wound: "illa gravis oculos conata attollere rursus / defuit: infixum stridit sub pectore vulnus" (4.688-689).
75. "Atque illi stellatus iaspide fulva / ensis erat Tyrioque ardebat murice laena / demissa ex umeris, dives quae munera Dido / fecerat" ( Aeneid 4.261-264).
76. The sense of the exchange as a symbolic one is heightened by Servius's gloss on the jasper sword ( Aeneid 4.262): "ensem pro vagina posuit" (Thilo and Hagen 1923-27 1/2:512). Possiedi (1974 23) points out the function of Aeneas's jasper sword in the lapidary economy of the canzone: "la pietra che esalta la virtù della donna, distrugge il sensuale amatore dantesco, come un tempo la sua consorella africana."
77. See Aeneid 4.522-525, 529-532:
Nox erat et placidum carpebant fessa soporem
corpora per terras, silvaeque et saeva quierant
aequora, cum medio volvuntur sidera lapsu,
cum tacet omnis ager, pecudes pictaeque volucres . . .
at non
infelix animi Phoenissa, neque umquam
solvitur in somnos oculisve aut pectore noctem
accipit: ingeminant curae rursusque resurgens
saevit amor magnoque irarum fluctuat aestu.
The importance of this passage for subsequent lyric, notably that of Petrarch, is well known.
78. The parallels include the use of the adversative conjunction for the lover's "subdiesis," echoing the repetition of At regina . . . at non in the Aeneid. We note, too, that the tragedy of Dido unfolds during the winter ("desaevit hiems," notes Anna as she persuades Dido to entertain her love for Aeneas [ Aeneid 4.52]). The whole of Book 4, with its self-contained structure modeled after Greek tragedy, is played out to the tune of Dido's tragic furor, which is discordant with the fated destiny of Rome. See Chapter 2, note 2.
79. Ovid's Dido provides an instance in the epitaph she orders; it is the final distich of her letter ( Heroides 7.195-196): "Aeneas furnished the cause of death, and the sword; Dido killed herself with her own hand." In the Aeneid, the sequence of causes stretches further: to the designs of Love—that is, of Venus—who collaborates with Juno to arrange the pseudomarriage in the cave; to the stratagem of Venus, who replaces Ascanius, sitting in Dido's lap, with the impish godlet of love himself, as Dante recalls in the Paradiso; to the divine plan instituted by Jove; to the fates.
80. "Haerent infixi pectore vultus / verbaque" ( Aeneid 4.4-5), describing continue
how profoundly Aeneas's features strike into Dido's heart (with the verb used for the arrow point, haerere ), begins the series of events centered on Dido's wound: when Dido stabs herself, Aeneas's image ( vultus ) has literally become the mortal stroke ( vulnus ) that kills her, a continuity outwardly symbolized and completed by her use of his sword. Ovid, in the Heroides, will make the notion explicit ("Dido Aeneae," 189-190): "Nec mea nunc primum feriuntur pectora telo; / Ille locus saevi vulnus amoris habet." This pattern of imagery in Aeneid 4 is well known (see Otis 1970 70-72); it closely parallels the narrative of the canzone, in which the lady's effects are parsed as darts, as a file, and finally as a killing sword. What is more, the series of transformations of Love's agency in the Aeneid —beginning with the intervention of Venus (1.657; in collusion with Juno, 4.92ff.) and the placement of Cupid in Dido's lap (1.717-719), and culminating with Dido's use of Aeneas's sword ("ensemque recludit Dardanium," 4.647) to compass her suicide—anticipates the several designations of Love's agency in the canzone.
81. Often remarked is the development of the nautical metaphor of the lover as a calm sea—already a sophisticated variation on the more frequent equation of the lover to a ship, and fortune to a stormy sea—into the image of sinking in the next line ("il peso che m'affonda," 20). But there is no question here of a protosurrealism or of "irrational" associations of images. The calm of the marine surface, of which the lady is ignorant or contemptuous ("cotanto del mio mal par che si prezzi"), is also an image of the lover's present suppression of inner turbulence and the anticipation of the explosion of violence to come; it is poca bonaccia.
82. For the figure of the unquiet heart and Christian metaphorics, see Ferguson 1975. As Geoffroy de Vinsauf puts it: "Do not always permit the word to dwell in its own place: such residence is unseemly to the word itself: let it escape its proper place and journey elsewhere [ peregrinetur alibi ] and establish an agreeable seat in another's establishment: let it be, there, a new guest, and let its novelty be pleasing" (Faral 1924 211). Although the passage concerns tropes in general, Geoffroy's remarks echo classical definitions of the trope of metaphor. See Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.34.45: "Translatio est cum verbum in quandam rem transferetur ex alia re, quod propter similitudinem recte videbitur posse transferri"; and Isidore Etymologiarum liber 1.37.2: "Metaphora est verbi alicuius usurpata translatio, sicut cum dicimus 'fluctuare segetes' 'gemmare vites' dum in his rebus fluctus et gemmas non invenimus, in quibus haec verba aliunde transferuntur."
83. Dante quotes in the Convivio (2.6.2) the opinion of Epicurus that by following their appetites animals tend toward their ends, which are nourishment and reproduction. Aquinas, discussing the ends of man, illustrates movement directed at a goal (as opposed to self-movement) with the flight of the arrow ( Summa theologica 1a, quaest. 1, art. 2): "sicut sagitta tendit ad determinatum finem ex hoc quod movetur a sagittante, qui suam actionem dirigit in finem."
84. In the De vulgari eloquentia (2.viii.1), the target or end ( signum ) of an analysis (here, of a canzone) is logically prior to the analytical procedure, the "archery" ( admissionis sagittae vel iaculi ); in the Convivio (4.22), the target continue
( segno ) is the subject of human felicity that the poet has in hand ( I'arco della nostra operazione ). In the Commedia, the majority of uses may be listed as species of the single genus of purposeful activity: as an illustration of speed in reaching the target; as an expression of the direction of desire; as the emanation of the creative Logos; and as an illustration of speech. For the first, see Paradiso 2.23, 5.91; for the second, Purgatorio 6.130-131, 16.48 ("quel valore amai, al quale ha or ciascun disteso l'arco"). For the third, see Paradiso 1.119-121, 124-126; 8.103-105; 29.22-24. For the fourth, see Purgatorio 25.17-18, 31.16-21 (quoted below, note 92). For the figure of the arrow returning to the bow, see Singleton 1965 56-80; for the arrow and bow as images of the body, see Olson 1982 90-93.
85. The speaker's canzone is an expression of the tendency of all human activity to seek its natural end, as in Thomas Aquinas's response: "proprium est naturae rationalis ut tendat in finem" ( Summa Theologica 1a, quaest. 1, art. 2); this end, like the end of all movement and desire, is rest, quies, toward which even war and strife are subordinated as means. Dante writes at the beginning of the Convivio (1.1.1.): "ciascuna cosa, da providenza di propria natura impinta, è inclinabile alla sua perfezione."
86. Vallone (1974 267-268) points out how dritto in the congedo picks up presso efiso in stanza 6 and per lo cor ("per mezzo / lo core") in stanza 5.
87. Dante discusses natural love or gravity in the Convivio 3.3.1-5, listing different orders of being, from the elements like earth and fire through human beings, which incorporate all the desires; in the Monarchia, these natural dispositions illustrate ideas of concord (cf. I.1 5: "ita homines plures concordes dicimus, propter simul moveri secundum velle ad unum, quod est formaliter in suis voluntatibus, sicut qualitas una formaliter in glebis, scilicet gravitas, et una in flammis, scilicet levitas"). These ideas return in the Paradiso, 1.1 03-172, discussed below, note 91.
88. The nautical voyage as a figure for a directed task is traditional; it is implicit in one of Ovid's self-descriptions as narrator ( Ars amatoria 1.8). Dante adopts it the Convivio 2.1.1 and 4.28.8, where it illustrates the biography of Guido da Montefeltro (see Inferno 27.79-81), and the figure returns in the Commedia to describe both the pilgrimage itself ( Purgatorio 17.77-78) and the task of narrating it ("Per correr miglior acque alza le vele / omai la navicella del mio ingegno," Purgatorio 1.1-2). The simile of the lover as a ship making for port is a topos of love lyric (and is so anthologized in the Mare amoroso, 293-294 [Contini 1960 1:498]). Dante's version appears in many respects an adaptation of the figure in Giacomo da Lentini's canzone "Madonna, dir vi voglio": "paria che sofondasse, / e bene sofondara / lo cor, tanto gravara—in su' disio" (58-60).
89. "Quella parte, coiè la ragione, ch'è la sua perfezione maggiore" ( Convivio 2.8.11); also 3.3.12. The association of the cima della mente or apex mentis with a flower is a traditional Neoplatonic metaphor ( anthos; cf. Wallis 1972 153); for the apex mentis in "Così," see Friedrich 1964 156; and Mazzotta 1979 162.
90. "Ignis sursum tendit, deorsum lapis. Ponderibus suis aguntur, loca sua petunt . . . . Minus ordinata, inquieta sunt; ordinantur et quiescunt. Pondus meum, amor meus, eo feror, quocumque feror. Dono tuo accendimur et sursum ferimur. Inardescimus et imus . . . quoniam sursum imus ad pacem Ierusa- soft
lem" (Capello 1948 532-533; translation Augustine 1960 454). A previous application of this passage to verse 20 of "Così" is in Mazzotta 1978 290.
91. Even closer and more extensive resonance with the canzone is to be found in Dante's own terms for universal teleology in the Paradiso, where rising and sinking movements are combined with the voluntary motion of human agents:
Onde si muovono a diversi porti
per lo gran mar dell'essere, e ciascuna
con istinto a lei data che la porti.
Questi ne porta il foco inver la luna;
questi ne' cor mortali è permotore;
questi la terra in sé stringe e aduna.
(1.112-117)
The context of the passage is appropriate for "Così" because devoted to explaining why the pilgrim, a material body, can ascend like fire. The principle of natural inclination is itself compared to an arrow ("quest'arco saetta," 1.119) and its goal to the peace of the Empyrean ("il ciel sempre quïeto," 1.122), while the failure of natural love is attributed to the "deafness" of matter ("la materia è sorda," 129)—echoing the saetta, the pace, and the petra of our canzone. The pilgrim's motion toward his goal is compared to the arrow's flight:
ed ora lì, com'a sito decreto,
cen porta la virtù di quella corda,
che ciò che scocca drizza in segno lieto.
(1.124-126)
92. In the Purgatorio, too, the pilgrim's view of Beatrice is parsed in terms of two beauties, her eyes and her mouth. Thus, her ninfe invite her to unveil her mouth for the pilgrim: "fa noi grazia che disvele / a lui la bocca tua, sì che discerna / la seconda bellezza che tu cele" (31.136-138); her eyes, in turn, are "li smeraldi / ond'Amor già ti trasse le sue armi" (31.116-117), and so akin to the eyes of the petra —which also fire shots—in "Così." For the evolution of the petra into the figure of Beatrice, see below, note 136.
93. PG 3.717b: "Et haec quidem omnino bono participant, illa autem magis et minus privantur, alia autem obscuriorem habent boni participationem, et aliis secundum ultimam resonantiam adest bonum." Albertus Magnus comments ( Super librum Dionysium de divinis nominibus 4.169): "sicut in his quae malo fini semper coniuncta sunt, ut amor luxuriae, qui tamen, inquantum amor, habet aliquam resonantiam boni, imperfecte tamen."
94. We have argued that "Donne ch'avete" is structured as procession and return; the final account of the lady, whose eyes are the origin and whose mouth the goal of Love, is a recapitulation of the structure. The rhyme riso/fiso/viso returns in Dante's canzone "Amor che nella mente mi ragiona," commented on in the third book of the Convivio, in a similar context; the lady's viso is the vehicle of return to beatific contemplation: break
Cose appariscon ne lo suo aspetto
che mostran de' piacer di Paradiso,
dico ne li occhi e nel suo dolce riso
che le vi reca Amor com'a suo loco.
Elle soverchian lo nostro intelletto
come raggio di sole un frale viso:
e perch'io non le posso mirar fiso.
(55-61)
95. The first is in chapter 3, the first instance of the saluto: "e passando per una via, volse gli occhi verso quella parte ov'io era molto pauroso."
96. Cf. the frequency of mention of the eyes in "Amor, tu vedi ben" (see Chapter 4, pp. 153-155). On the eye rays as razzi, raggi, radii, and their relationship to light rays, see Favati 1975 188: "Di solito, la parola [razzo] si accosta ai raggi o rai che anche Dante adopera col senso di 'sguardi,' benchè sempre al plurale." Aristotle ( De insomniis 459a) notes that the persistence of visual images in dreams is analogous to the continued motion of a projectile after it has been cast.
97. When occhi appears in "Così" before this point, it refers always to the eyes of others. On verses 74-75 and their possible derivation from Arnaut, see Perugi 1978 83: "riteniamo . . . non impossibile che 7.28 'lo cors m'abranda' abbia fornito il modello immediato per Rime 46.74-5 'Ancor ne li occhi, ond'escon le faville/che m'infiammano il cor' (si osservi che nel modello ad abranda precede in rima aflama )."
98. "È affermata fin dal primo verso la conversione del contenuto nella forma, la poetica delle provenzali rimas caras " (Dante 1946 163).
99. See the passage in the Convivio about the danger of ocular contact, which is marked as the moment when Love lets fly his arrow: "E qui si vuol sapere che avvegna ché più cose ne l'occhio a un'ora possano venire, veramente quella che viene per retta linea nella punta della pupilla, quella veramente si vede, e nella immaginativa si suggella solamente. E questo è però che il nervo per lo qual corre lo spirito visivo, è diritto a quella parte; e però veramente l'un occhio l'altro occhio non può guardare, sicchè esso non sia veduto da lui; chè sì come quello che mira riceve la forma ne la pupilla per retta linea, così per quella medesima linea la sua forma se ne va in quello ch'ello mira: e molte volte, nel dirizzare di questa linea, discocca l'arco di colui al quale ogni arma è leggiere" (2.9.4-5). For the possible relationship of this passage to the optical principle of the centric ray as described by Alhazen, see Edgerton 1975 85-86.
100. The denti d'Amor previously used on the speaker also return in the parlar aspro, a corrosive speech produced by jaws that bark in the caldo borro. A scriptural tradition that compares trenchant words and God's searching Logos to arrows and swords is behind Dante's conception of his poem as mordant—a conception made explicit in the tornata. The description of the Psalmist's enemies at Psalm 57:5 ("Filii hominum dentes eorum arma et sagittae, Et lingua eorum gladius acutus") provides one context for the principal images in the canzone (see also Proverbs 25:18: "Iaculum, et gladius, et sagitta acuta, Homo qui loquitur contra proximum suum falsum testimonium"). In the Old Testament, arrows are often forms of divine wrath (Isaiah 5:28), while the sword is continue
the word of the prophet (Isaiah 49:2: "et posuit os meum quasi gladium acutum"). Examples could be multiplied.
101. The presence of Cupid's weapons is probably no accident. Of the traditional attributes discussed by Panofsky (1972), only the blindfold and nudity are explicitly absent, though they remain implicit in the speaker's fear of being seen and in the lady's lack of vulnerability—she is never explicitly ignuda. Panofsky (p. 105) cites the account of Hrabanus Maurus, copied from Isidore: "Cupidinem vocatum ferunt propter amorem. Est enim daemon fornicationis, qui ideo alatus pingitur, quia nihil amantibus levius, nihil mutabilius invenitur. Puer pingitur, quia stultus est et irrationalis amor. Sagittam et facem tenere fingitur, quia amor cor vulnerat, facem, quia inflammat." The pairing of the wound and the flame in the canzone ("le faville / che m'infiammano il cor," 74-75; "m'ha ferito il core," 80) are probably another echo of Virgil, whose influential verses "cura / vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni" ( Aeneid 4.1-2) touch on both the wound and fire of love, as Servius notes: "et bene adludit ad Cupidinis tela, ut paulo post ad faculam, ut 'et caeco carpitur igni'; nam sagittarum vulnus est, facis incendium" (Thilo and Hagen 1923-27 1/2:459-460).
102. As Aquinas points out in his commentary on the De anima, the word phantasm is from phos, "light" (Aquinas 1959 162).
103. The displacement of exact sexual terms in the final scene is very marked; Perugi (1978 80) suggests that scudiscio e ferza is a "precisa gemmazione di veria ( verga )" from Arnaut's sestina. It might therefore be a veiled allusion to "lo membro che l'uom cela"—as indeed, it has been hidden here. For the sexual nature of the weapons in the poem, see di Girolamo 1976 23-24.
104. See above, pp. 169-170.
105. .
Poi, come'l foco movesi in altura
per la sua forma ch'è nata a salire
là dove più in sua matera dura,
Così l'animo preso entra in disire,
ch'è moto spiritale, e mai non posa
fin che la cosa amata il fa gioire.
(
Purgatorio
18.28-33)
106. The association between the justice within the soul and the cosmos described in the Timaeus, on the one hand, and the justice that reigns in the state (described in the Republic ), on the other, is a leading theme of commentary on the Platonic texts in the Middle Ages; see Freccero 1986 177.
107. Dante also uses, in De vulgari eloquentia 2, the form compago (2.vi.2; 2.vii.6; 2.ix.3, 6); his use may allude to the traditional etymology of the word in pax. See Mengaldo's note in Dante 1979a 177.
108. Boethius's yearning to fix his eyes on the fountain of good in "O qui perpetua" ( defigere visus, 25) is possibly echoed here. Augustine's glosses on 1 Corinthians 13:12 are particularly rich in reference to the beatific vision; see Confessions 13.13: "Sic interim sentio, propter illud coelum coeli, coelum intellectuale, ubi est intellectus nosse simul, non ex parte, non in aenigmate, non per speculum, sed ex toto manifestatione facie ad faciem. " Augustine's discussion of continue
the vision of the saints in the penultimate chapter (22.29) of the De civitate Dei is a gloss on facies ad faciem, including the topic of the final peace that passes understanding (Philippians 4:7).
109. See Perella 1969 51-58, and related notes. Perella cites (p. 52) Bernard's Sermones super Cantica 2.2.3 ( Opera 1.9-10), where the "kiss" is identified with Christ as the Incarnation, which joins heaven and earth in a kiss of peace: "making peace between the things of earth and heaven, for He is our Peace who has made one out of both." He also cites (p. 291 n .14) Guillaume de Saint-Thierry's paraphrase of the bride's longing for the kiss of the bridegroom as the soul's longing for the beatific vision: "Mysterium regni Dei desidero, palam nihi annuntiari de Patre deposco; faciem ad faciem, oculum ad oculum, osculum ad osculum. Osculetur me osculo oris sui " ( Exposé sur le Cantique des Cantiques [Paris, 1962], 118-120).
110. Among the effects of love Aquinas lists liquefactio: "quae opponitur congelationi. Ea enim quae sunt congelata, in seipsis constricta sunt, ut non possint de facili subintrationem alterius pati . . . Unde cordis congelatio vel duritia est dispositio repugnans amori. Sed liquefactio importat quandam mollificationem cordis, qua exhibet se cor habile ut amatum in ipsum subintret" ( Summa theologica 1a-2ae, quaest. 28, art. 5).
111. Vallone (1974 265) takes a more cautious tack: "la novità della petrosa è che, fermo restando questo sfondo, il poeta si sente tanto audace da guardare presso e fiso. Si esprimono due atti distinti; l'accostarsi e il guardare senza distogliere lo sguardo. È attitudine di uomo degno di alto destino, non di uomo mortale."
112. For this rhyme in Monte Andrea ("sì'l cor dell'omo squatra," in rhyme with atra ), see Baldelli 1973 937.
113. Vallone (1974 261) cites the near parallels of burrato in Inferno 12.10 and 16.114; he quotes a canzone of Paolo dell 'Abbaco ("Voce dolente pia nel cor che piagne"):
Ahi ventre golforeo che non li squatra
El forte laccio dell'avaro Giuda
Che disperato suda
Nel caldo borro sostenendo guai.
The expression suggests an intense misogyny; see Perugi 1978 96-100, who claims to find in Dante's text (though not here) traces of Arnaut's obscene and misogynistic sirventes.
114. Vallone (1974 261) notes: "l'idea del soccorrere è riportata quasi sempre in Dante al bene che dall'alto si distribuisce in basso: è un idea sacra. Beatrice (e basti questo esempio) è pietosa perche soccorre il poeta ( Inferno 2.133). . . . L'ironia di io vi soccoro si muta così in caricatura." But Vallone retreats from the ambiguity suggested by the cited parallels.
115. The speaker's ability to see the petra is thus analogous, though obviously in a different context, to the removal of the veil over Moses' face described in 2 Corinthians 3:18: "Cum autem conversus fuerit ad Dominum, auferetur continue
velamen." For the possible relation of this passage to the petrose and the Commedia, see Freccero 1972.
116. See especially lines 9-10: "Ah, prender lei a forza, ultra su'grato, / e bagiarli la bocca e'l bel visaggio / e li occhi suoi, ch'èn due fiamme de foco!" (Contini 1960 2:479); in the final verses, however, the poet repents. See also Fiore 57, 60, and 66.
117. The congedo of "Così" is thus not strictly opposed in meaning, as has been claimed (Comens 1986 186), to the congedo verse that echoes it, "chè perdonar è bel vincer di guerra" ("Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute," 107), a sentiment that echoes the moment fantasized at the end of stanza six of "Così." For the close relation of "Così" and "Tre donne" in terms of rhymes (e.g., cruda, ignuda ), see Baldelli 1973 938-939. The last line of the congedo to "Così" is modeled, as Perugi notes (1978 79), on Arnaut Daniel 17.50: "q'atenden fai pros homs rica conquesta." Dante cites this poem ("Sim fos amors de ioi donar . . . .") in De vulgari eloquentia 2.xiii.2.
118. Dante will refer to the heavens as lures in Purgatoro 14.147.
119. On this anticourtly dimension, already observed by Fenzi (1966 266), see di Girolamo 1976 27: "si tratta di un messaggio che, benchè non immediatamente anticortese, esorbita per molti aspetti dalle possibilità espressive di un poeta cortese"; and Comens 1986 185.
120. See above, Chapters 2, pp. 104-105; 3, pp. 116-119; and 4, pp. 143, 163; and the current chapter, pp. 191-193. For Medusa and Pygmalion in the petrose, see also Mazzotta 1979 284-287.
121. In Genealogie 10.9, Boccaccio (following a gloss of Arnulfus of Orléans) "demystifies" the Medusa's petrifying power as the paralyzing effect of great beauty (Boccaccio 1951 2:496): "Quod autem prospectantes in saxa converterent, ob id fictum existimo, quia tam grandis esset earum pulchritudo, quod eis visis obstupescerent intuentes, et muti atque immobiles non aliter quam essent saxei devenirent."
122. Ovid Metamorphoses 4.793-802; esp. 800-801: "neve hoc inpune fuisset, / Gorgoneum crinem turpes mutavit in hydros."
123. We thank Rachel Jacoff for this suggestion.
124. The link is the more striking in Mss. Ba and Ce of the Roman de la rose, where a passage of fifty-two lines describing the Medusa directly precedes the tale of Pygmalion; see Freccero 1986 127, 303. In Ovid, the Gorgon is a maker of instant statues; see Barkan 1981 646.
125. Ovid Metamorphoses 10.238-298; see also the Roman de la rose, lines 20755-21236. Among the numerous parallels between the texts of the petrose and the narrative of Pygmalion in the Roman, the most striking is in lines 20817 and 20823: "Pygmalions, uns entaillierres / . . . / Car onc de li nus ne l'ot mieudre"; and "Amor, tu vedi ben," 10-12: "mi fa sembiante pur come una donna / che fosse fatta d'una bella petra / per man di quei che me' intagliasse in petra" (see Chapter 4, note 25). The insistence in the Latin narrative on Pygmalion's palping of his statue, both before and after it is brought to life ("saepe manus operi temptantes admovet / . . . / et credit tactis digitos insidere membris / . . . / continue
manibus quoque pectora temptat," Metamorphoses 10.254, 257, 282), may be related to the sexual meaning of the speaker's hands ( "metterei mano," 65) in the fantasy of "Così nel mio parlar."
126. Both "animating" forces—the poet's persuasive skill, exhibited in all the petrose, and the petition of higher powers (as in "Amor, tu vedi ben")—are reflected in the Pygmalion narrative, where the impression of the statue's life is an effect of the sculptor's skill, her actual animation the result of Pygmalion's prayer to Venus ( Metamorphoses 10.274-275: "Si, di, dare cuncta potestis, / sit coniunx, opto").
127. See the Ovide moralisé 10.3586-3678 (de Boer 1915-38 vol. 15); and Barkan 1981 642. Pygmalion's sculpture adheres closely to the traditional idea, which we have seen expressed in Albertus Magnus and Dante himself, of art or sculpture as the realization in matter of a concept already fully apprehended in the mind; this of course answers to many passages in the petrose, and constitutes the principal hidden premise that makes poetry an activity parallel to sculpture: see "la mente mia, ch'è più dura che petra / in tener forte imagine di petra" ("Io son venuto," 12-13); "Io porto nel la mente donna" ("Amor, tu vedi ben," 61).
128. For this interpretation, which is based on a reading of the Roman de la rose (which compares Pygmalion to Narcissus), see Robertson 1963 99-103.
129. Although most nearly explicit in the reference to a sculptor in "Amor, tu vedi ben," the petrosa that shows the greatest number of parallels to the Pygmalion narrative in the Roman de la rose is the final scene of"Così nel mio parlar": aside from generic resemblances involving the lady's unwillingness to hear the lover's suit ("el n'antant riens ne ne sent," 20919) are the striking parallels of the lover's burning as he gazes into the eyes of the petra ("Ancor ne li occhi, ond'escon le faville / che m'infiammano il cor . . . / guarderei presso e fiso" (74-76); cf. "et quant de plus prés la regarde / plus art son queur" (21131-32); also the verse of the lady as one "che m' invola / quello ond'io ho più gola" (80-81) and Pygmalion's reference to the statue as "la bele qui mon cuer m' anble " (21097).
130. Of course, Dante's petra "parla e sente come fosse donna"—but this means merely that the poet departs from the premise of a woman whose cruelty has made her, though alive, seem like stone. Indeed, Dante's line seems to almost precisely invert the terms of Jean de Meun's "sourde et mue / qui ne se crole ne se mue"; and note also Boccaccio's wording for the Medusa's admirers: "muti atque immobiles."
131. "Al poco giorno" and "Io son venuto" are also recalled in the rich rhyme and derivative rhyme on ombra at 31.140-144 ( ingombra, adombra; cf. "Io son venuto," 9-10: ombra, ingombra ). Indeed, the whole scene, with Beatrice revealing her mouth to the pilgrim while the heavens harmonize ("armonizzando il ciel," 31.144), is a transformation of the congedo of "Al poco giorno," with the rhyme-words ordered hierarchically and the lady presented as a second sun. For the parallel of barbato ("Al poco giorno," 4) with dibarba (31.70), see SturmMaddox 1987 132.
132. In addition to the crossbow ( balestra, 31.16), see the strale of 31.48, the continue
rete and saetta of 31.63, the armi of 31.117; also the pageant as an army ("glorioso essercito," 32.17) and Beatrice as an admiral ( ammiraglio, 30.58).
133. For the lover's petrified mind, see "Io son venuto," 12 ("la mente mia ch'è più dura che petra"); but see also Purgatorio 33.79-80, where it is Beatrice who seals the pilgrim's mind indelibly, "che la figura impressa non tramuta." For echoes of "Io son venuto" in 30.85, see Chapter 6, note 33.
134. For impetra ("Così," 3), see 30.133 ("nè l'impetrare spirazion mi valse"). Nuda ("Così," 4, 8, 9: cruda, ignuda, chiuda ) is at 33.100, 102, 104: nude (of parole ), rude, conchiude. Atra ( atre, 30.54, rhyming with patre and matre ) echoes "Così," 54, 55, 58, 59: squatra, atra, latra, latra. Atre, with vowels interchanged, gives ( p)etra —not an arbitrary observation in view of the close phonetic, sometimes anagrammatic relationships linking many of the words in the petrose (e.g., sordamente, rodermi: "Così," 23, 25). Sturm-Maddox (1987) builds her case for a palinodic evocation of the rime petrose in Purgatorio 30-31 around Beatrice's use of the term pargoletta (31.59) as reference to "Io son venuto," 72. Sturm-Maddox is, however, prudently aware of the lack of specificity of this designation, which occurs elsewhere in Dante's lyrics, and cautions (p. 127): "The pargoletta is the marker of a textual presence, not that of an historical presence."
135. In Paradiso 7.14, Dante disassembles Beatrice's name into the two halves of her nickname, Bice —BE and ICE ("pur per Be e per ice ")—suppressing the -atr core; the pointed alliterativeness of this passage seems specifically to recall Beatrice's oddly stuttering self-announcement in Purgatorio 30.73: "'Guardaci ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice."' It is significant that in the only one of Dante's lyrics (outside of the Vita nuova ) that names Beatrice ("Lo doloroso amor" [Dante 1946 67-70]), we find an early excursion into harsh diction (e.g., agro, magro, verses 15, 18); "un vento freddo, da rima petrosa," is Contini's remark (p. 67). Perugi's analysis (1978 70-73) elucidates many of Dante's debts to Arnaut in "Lo doloroso amor."
136. "Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona," 73-86; see Convivi 3.15.19.
6— The Rime petrose and the Commedia
1. The most suggestive discussion so far is Freccero 1972 (also in 1986 119-135). Sturm-Maddox (1987) recognizes the place of the petrose in the text of the Purgatorio; although the recognition is welcome, her reading of "Io son venuto" as strictly fatalistic is erroneous.
2. See Dante 1946 149-50; Blasucci 1957; Marti 1960 525-530; and Jacomuzzi 1972 18. Toja (1973 735) makes a case for associating passages of intense transumptio (e.g., Purgatorio 6.76-151) with the tradition of trobar clus (but see also Blasucci 1979 28-29), thus indirectly with the petrose.
3. For the "brau lengage" of Pier delle Vigne, see Spitzer 1942 92-93. The tenzone of Sinon and Maestro Adamo is often linked to Dante's tenzone with Forese, a category of "realism" closely linked to the petrose; see Dante 1946 20-21; Contini 1970a 170; and Marti 1960 526-527. Cantos 5, 6, 7, 12, 24, and continue
25 show important connections with the petrose as well; see our discussions, pp. 202, 212-217, and 223.
4. Blasucci (1969 5-6) minimizes the importance of the scientific dimensions of the petrose in favor of the category of "energy": "Ma di gran lunga più imponente [than the astronomical and elemental aspects], come s'è detto, è lo sviluppo nel poema di quel linguaggio carico d'energia, che costituisce la risorsa stilistica più feconda delle petrose."
5. Russo 1971 103-158; for the features noted in the text, see esp. pp. 144-156.
6. For terms relating to gems in Dante's Paradiso, see Appendix 3.
7. Dragonetti (1968 275-418) argues that the distribution of gems in the Paradiso is systematic, a hierarchy of attributes derived largely from the Etymologiarum liber of Isidore. For the gems of the Paradiso, see Appendix 3.
8. In Albert's De animalibus (1916-21 1081), the seminal and formative virtù of the spheres is compared to the art of the sculptor Policleitus, to whom Dante alludes in Purgatorio 10.32. The allusion illustrates Albert's discussion of the spheres as the tools, the chisels or hammers, of the intelligences who are the craftsmen; Dante refers, in the heaven of Gemini, to the hammers and anvils of Nature (24.102). See Chapter 2, note 75.
9. For this passage, see below, note 31.
10. The cycle of evaporation and rainfall, one of the solar cycles described in Purgatorio 5, is linked to the cycle of water in "Amor, tu vedi ben"; see Convivio 4.18.4 and Quaglio's notes in Dante 1964 1: 386. For Paradiso 28 as an echo of "Io son venuto," see Comens 1986 167.
11. See below, pp. 212-217, for our discussion of Inferno 24-25.
12. The relation to poetry and poets is in the allusive register as well. As we know, Dante draws on two of his Latin exemplars, Lucan and Statius, for the bird similes in the Purgatorio. He draws on Lucan as well for his account of the serpents in Inferno 24-25—the same passages consulted for the accounts of the wind in "Io son venuto," as noted by Contini (Dante 1946 14). Dante's bird similes have been much discussed: see, e.g., Shoaf 1975; and Ryan 1976. On the poets in the Purgatorio specifically, see, e.g., Abrams 1976, 1985; Folena 1977; Moleta 1979-80; Martinez 1983; and Barolini 1984.
13. A recent reading along these lines is Abrams 1985.
14. In both cases, triegue rhymes with segue; triegua appears but three times in the Commedia.
15. For virtù in the Purgatorio, see 16.59; 17.54, 73; 17.104: "amor sementa in voi d'ogni virtute"; 18.51: "specifica virtù ha in sè colletta"; 18.62, 73 (seven uses). Cf. also 16.114: "ogn'erba si conosce per lo seme"; abete at 22.133; lauro at 22.108; verdura at 23.69; and erba, acerba at 11.115, 117.
16. No other lyrics of Dante adopt both these features. Dante's canzoni in the Convivio "Voi ch'intendendo" and "Amor che ne la mente" both draw on astronomical concepts, but neither has a seasonal beginning that includes telling time by the planets and stars; Sonnet 1 of the Vita Nuova ("Erano quasi atterzate l'ore") is unspecific except with reference to the time of night. For a recent history of the spring beginning in lyric poems of the Latin West and in continue
European vernacular poetry, see Wilhelm 1964. A poem sometimes attributed to Arnaut, "Entre'l taur e'l doble signe," has a fully astronomical incipit; see Daniel 1981 78-81.
17. For a suggestive (if minority) view on the meaning of these three passages taken together, see Pecoraro 1987 231-238. The dating of the poem remains a topic of debate, but opinion in favor of April 8, 1300, as the date of the pilgrim's entrance to Hell is now preponderant; see Moore 1895 145-176; and Boyde 1981 163-165. For the creation of the world in the spring, with the sun in Aries, see Moore 1903 61, 64, 73, 54- n , 170 n .
18. Just before, at 1.17-18, Dante had mentioned the sun as the "pianeta / che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle." Dante's concern with the astronomical resonance of his lines may be gauged by the fact that the first mention of the sun in the poem, at verse 17, balances the third mention of it, at verse 60; the fulcrum is verse 38, cited in the text (if we count lines, 1.17 is twenty-one lines from 1.38, and 1.38 twenty-two lines from 1.60. If we count tercets, the symmetry is exact). For other echoes of the petrose in the first two cantos of the Inferno, see below, pp. 204-207.
19. For the parallels, see Baldelli 1978b 69; Mazzotta 1979 44.
20. The other principal influence is, of course, the Vita nuova, in which events in the text are correlated with celestial motions and recoverable dates (such as that of Beatrice's death, June 8, 1290). For reconstructions of Dante's and Beatrice's horoscopes in the Vita nuova, see Pecoraro 1987 345-363, 440.
21. Dante's reference to the spring in Purgatorio 32.53-54 periphrastically names the sun in Aries ("la gran luce mischiata con quella / che raggia dietro alla celeste lasca"); gran luce is plausibly an antiphrase of poco giorno and gran cerchio d'ombra. For Aries, see also Paradiso 1.40, 28.117, and 29.2 (discussed below, pp. 210-211).
22. For Leo as ruler of Italy, mentioned by Ptolemy, see Rabuse 1972 22.
23. Jacomuzzi (1972 18) observes that the very first lines of the Commedia echo the petrose. Relevant text is: Nel mezzo del cammin . . . / mi ritrovai ( Inferno 1.1-2); dura / . . . aspra e forte (1.4-5); punto (1.11; rhyming with giunto, 1.13). Cf., from the first two petrose, the identification of a specific point on the arc of life ("Io son venuto al punto della rota") and the insertion of the speaker in relation to it ( mi ritrovai; son venuto; son giunto ); the threatening darkness of the negative point ( quel punto ); the speaker's response ("lasso" in "Al poco giorno"; ahi in the Commedia ). Dura, selvaggia, and aspra recall the diction of the petrose. A striking detail is how the rhyme on giunto/punto in the Commedia (which then closes out with a rime riche—compunto —in the style of the "equivocating" petrose ) draws the link between giunto and punto (not in rhyme) in the early verses of "Io son venuto" and "Al poco giorno."
The descent to Hell in Canto 2 of the Inferno also shares situation, diction, rhyme, and syntax with "Al poco giorno" and especially "Io son venuto." Notable are the evening scene; the appeal to the contrast of other animals and the poet ("e io sol uno," 2.3); and the speaker's resolution ("a sostener la guerra / . . . del cammino," 2.4-5). Compare, in "Io son venuto": the adver- soft
sative e . . . in each sirma distinguishing the lover from the rest of nature, and the lover's insistence on going the course ("e io da la mia guerra / non son però tornato," 62-63), expressed with the same rhyme ( -erra ) used in Inferno 2. The same sources—the insomnia of Dido in Aeneid 4 and of Aeneas in 8—are alluded to in "Io son venuto" and at the beginning of Inferno 2.
24. The horoscope of Florence comes into play in the canto of Pier delle Vigne ( Inferno 13), where the presence of Mars in the city's natal horoscope is said to account for its recurrent strife. See Rabuse 1957 11-77; and Schnapp 1987 37-38.
25. See Monarchia 1.11.5, where justice "est enim tunc Phebe similis, fratrem dyametraliter intuenti de purpureo matutino serenitatis."
26. Dante 1973 2:26. The same principles apply to the first verses of Purgatorio 15, 25, and 27.
27. For Dante's insistence, in a polemical context, on the differences between sun and moon, see Monarchia 3.4.
28. For a similar textual strategy on Dante's part, see Paradiso 13.55-57 and Sapegno's note in Dante 1957b, 952.
29. There are additional references, throughout the cantica, both to the horizon itself (e.g., 3.70, the midpoint of that canto) and to effects of the horizon: dawn and dusk, or determinations of time according to it (e.g., 3.25-26, 4.139).
30. Singleton (1965a) shows that the seven central cantos of the Purgatorio form a symmetrical fan, at the core of which are two mentions of free will, also symmetrically placed, by Marco Lombardo (16.73) and by Virgil (18.73). Singleton claims that the symmetry at the center is the poet's mark, or seal, on his work. It is thus appropriate that the original separation of light from darkness should be echoed at the center of the poem: the poet forms his text by dividing it. By the same criterion, the central division of night and day is framed by references, twenty-five tercets away, to the influence of the planets: 16.73: "lo cielo i vostri movimenti inizia"; 18.70-71: "poniam che di necessitate / surga ogni amor." Close by (16.106-10, 18.76-80) there are references to the sun and moon.
31. The previous evening in Purgatory, when the pilgrim had met Sordello, also includes a subtle weave of references to the petrose, beginning in Canto 7 and continuing through the beginning of Canto 9: for example, the phrasing of "mentre che l'orizzonte il dì tien chiuso" (7.60) rephrases "Io son venuto," 19: "[lo vento] questo emisperio chiude tutto e salda." Verse 7.85 ("prima che'l poco sole omai s'annidi") echoes the birth of Gemini from the horizon in the canzone ("l'orizzonte, quando il sol si corca, / ci partorisce il geminato cielo"), with the pairing poco sole echoing poco giorno in the sestina. The depiction of the stars in the constellation Scorpio arrayed like gems on the forehead of dawn at the beginning of Canto 9 is very much in the style of the petrose. Such parallels might appear generic, but they gain in force when we note the exact verbal echoes of the language of "Io son venuto" in these cantos: thus the rhymes at 8.100-103 ( alto/assalto/smalto ) reproduce the rhymes of the canzone (55, 57-58), though in a different order. Subsequently, at 8.131, 133, 135, torca/sol non si ricorca/inforca repeat the rhymes in verses 2 and 5 of the canzone ( sol si corca / inforca ), while at continue
9.13-15 guai / lai / inchinai evoke guai / gai in verses 32 and 33 of the canzone. Remarkable about this pattern is the fact that the triple repetition of the rhyme -alto (which Dante uses also in Inferno 9) from "Io son venuto" is at the exact center of a section of 139 lines (that is, of canto length) that begins at 8.42, with the pilgrim gelato at the thought of the appearance of the serpent, and concludes at 9.42, with the pilgrim again feeling the cold: aghiaccia.
32. Inferno 24.66. Strictly speaking, the word is one of the yrsuta ornativa by reason of excessive length, prolixitatis ( De vulgari eloquentia 2.vii.6).
33. That this passage is related to the petrose is well known; see Dante 1957a 263; and Baker 1974. The simile is linked to three other passages in the Commedia that employ the imagery of melting, or "unwintering": Purgatorio 30.85-99; and Paradiso 2.106-108 (discussed below, pp. 225-226) and 33.64-66. For the relation of Purgatorio 30.85-99 to the petrose, see Blasucci 1969 25-27; and SturmMaddox 1987 130. The passage requires more extensive analysis, however, for it is less a palinodic qualification of the petrose than their incorporation in a new context; the imagery and techniques of "Io son venuto" are much in evidence. In the passage, the snow frozen in the "living beams" ( vive travi ) of the evergreens in the mountains on the spine of Italy, subsequently thawed by the south winds blowing from the tropics, is compared to the tears and sighs of the pilgrim produced by the song of the angels. The operation of cold in both the earth and the pilgrim is described in terms by now familiar to us from our study of the petrose: the snow in the mountains is constrained ( stretta ) by the Slavonian or north winds as the ice contracts around the pilgrim's heart ("il gel che m'era intorno al cor ristretto" ). The living beams, the back ( dosso ) of the mountains, and the breath ( spiri ) of the wind are terms that mediate the animate and the inanimate, the world and the body. The "land that loses shade" in the passage is of course a direct reference to, and a meteorological inversion of, the wind from Ethiopa of "Io son venuto":
Levasi de la rena d'Etiopia
lo vento peregrin che l'aere turba,
per la spera del sol ch'ora la scalda;
e passa il mare, onde conduce copia
di nebbia tal che, s'altro non la sturba,
questo emisperio chiude tutto e salda;
e poi si solve, e cade in bianca falda
di fredda neve ed in noiosa pioggia,
onde l'aere s'attrista tutto e piagne.
The passages are complementary (the common source in Lucan's Pharsalia 9.528-531 is pointed out by Contini in Dante 1946 153). In the canzone, the sun, having passed to the south of the equator, heats the air and raises winds that bring warm moist air to Italy to feed winter snows; but in the Purgatorio, the land that loses shade yields the warm breezes that melt the snow. In the first case, snow is produced by the release of water; in the second, snow melts into flowing water. The parallel between macro- and microcosm is elaborated with great complexity in the formal frame of the five tercets. The vehicle of the simile continue
occupying the first two tercets relates the freezing and the melting of the snow. The tenor begins with the third tercet ("così fui . . .") and reiterates the moments of freezing and melting: freezing appears in the third and fifth, melting in the fourth and fifth tercets. Each term of the simile includes a subsimile: in the vehicle, the melting of snow is compared to a flame melting its way through a candle; in the tenor, the real effect of the angel's song is compared to imagined results of a verbal intercession (Dante 1957b 742). The entire passage is thus an application of the natural landscape deployed in "Io son venuto" to the pilgrim on the summit of the mountain of Purgatory (see above, pp. 197-198). ( Dante Studies 102 [1984, published in 1988] appeared too late to be taken into account here.)
34. Baker (1974 78-79) notes the focus on time, but for him the prevailing mood is one of stagnation and paralysis.
35. See Virgil's "si parva licet componere magnis," Georgics 4.176. The association of the passage with pastoral is of long standing; see Dante 1957b 262-263; Dante 1970 409.
36. References to spring in the petrose use dolce: "il dolce tempo che riscalda i colli" ("Al poco giorno," 10); "dolce tempo novello" ("Io son venuto," 67).
37. Sorella bianca in the simile (25.4) recalls the "bianca falda / di fredda neve" ("Io son venuto," 10-II); biancheggiar (25.9) echoes "bianchir de' colli" ("Al poco giorno," 2) and "tornar di bianco in verde" ("Al poco giorno," 11). The brina as an effect of winter recalls "Io son venuto," 47-48: "li fioretti . . . / li quai non poten tollerar la brina."
38. In addition, the shepherd's va-et-vient ( ritorna, riede ) contrasts with the speaker's "non son però tornato un passo a retro, / né vo' tonar" in "Io son venuto" (63-64), his fixed determination to ride out temporal cycles.
39. The petrose, according to Baker (1974 80), show an "earlier, inferior aesthetic . . . marked by egocentrism, preciosity, art for its own sake."
40. Hawkins 1980; Chiampi (1981 81-89) also discusses the melting hoarfrost as an image of deformatio in relation to both pilgrim and poet.
41. For an earlier statement of this view, see Terdiman 1973.
42. The anticipation of the mountain of Purgatory anticipates Ulisse's glimpse of the mountain in the next bolgia, 26.132-135.
43. Purgatorio 3.79-87 and 27.76-87 are similes of pastoral inspiration; Matelda's identification is at 28.139-44, poco tempo silvano at 32.100. For Eden and the Golden Age in the Commedia, see Mazzotta 1979 122-124, 221-225.
44. Hawkins 1980 5; and Chiampi 1981 84.
45. Baker (1974 84) cites Rabanus's gloss on frost as malitia perversorum. To be sure, Dante's canto of the thieves is rich in references to the act of writing and to its ephemerality; but as we hope to show elsewhere, this is part of a systematic investigation in Cantos 24-25 of the effects of time—the archthief—on all human works. The point of Dante's self-administered lesson is not the banal one that his own works are also ephemeral, but that the poet must, because embedded in time, inevitably rewrite the Word in his own unstable words. This sense of a genealogy of poets, parallel to the parody in the canto of human sexual genealogy, underlies the concern in the canto on the rivalry of Lucan and Ovid continue
and accounts for Dante's paragone with the ancient poets. Dante must be a "thief" to repair the damage of time.
46. What the author of the Vita nuova finds in the book of his memory is, of course, the rubric "Incipit vita nova," a beginning. For the tabula rasa as an image of mind, see Aquinas 1959 171.
47. Although the apparent meaning here is that the sun's rays are cooled by Aquarius (the sun is not very hot in February), the idea of the sun's rays acquiring strength is compatible.
48. See esp. Adam's comparison of languages to foliage in Paradiso 26.132; and below, note 159. For the sun's production of new foliage ( novelle fronde ), see Paradiso 12.46-51.
49. Demonstrated by Baker (1974 82-83), who gives citations from Ristoro d'Arezzo's Composizione del mondo, showing that the impoverished villanello typifies the inhabitants of a Saturnine world.
50. See Chapter 3, p. 115 and note 57.
51. See Ptolemy 1940 79-81; and Macrobius 1970a 89 ("superius enim diximus in Capricorno Saturnum post omnes fuisse. ergo secunda adiectio eum primum fecit qui ultimus fuerat, ideo Aquarius qui Capricornum sequitur, Saturno datur").
52. The verb schiarire will return in rhyme in the heaven of Gemini, where it describes John the Evangelist as a sun ( schiarì, Paradiso 25.100). See below, pp. 252-253.
53. Chiampi (1981 87) notes the relation between the similes at 24.1-21 and 26.25-33. Cassell (1984 83-84, 160) reads the details of the simile in Canto 26 as a moralization on the punishment meted the false counsellors. There is no contradiction: what is, in Nature, a scene of benign repose may also be, in the writing of the contrapasso, a sign of condemnation.
54. For the significance of Saturn in Leo and the Golden Age, see Rabuse 1976 272-274 and 1978 19-21; also 1978 28-29, where he cites Isidore's justification ( De natura rerum liber 13.1) of the cold of Saturn as necessary for tempering the great heat of the heavens generally.
55. Macrobius 1970a 91-92 (1.22.1-8). Macrobius's language ("demersum est stringente perpetuo gelu") sounds like an account of the production of crystal.
56. See Chapter 2, pp. 82-84.
57. "Io son venuto," 10-12 ("E però non disgombra / un sol penser d'amore, ond'io son carco / la mente mia"), is echoed in Cocito by Camiscion de' Pazzi's reference to Sassol Mascheroni: "questi che m'ingombra / col capo sì, ch'i' non veggio oltre più" (32.63-64).
58. The repetition of freddo and freddura in Cocito, although the terms are never in rhyme, is a form of repercussio like that of the dominant rhyme-words in "Amor, tu vedi ben."
59. In "Così nel mio parlar," only the rhyming word rezzo (57; Inferno 32.73) connotes cold. But the rhyme with z, prominent in Cocito (see Inferno 32.68-75, on -azzi, -ezzo ) and identified as particularly harsh ("z . . . lictera non sine multa rigiditate profertur," De vulgari eloquentia I.xiii.5), imports the rigor of cold into the motives for linguistic harshness in the canzone. See, in "Così," -ezzi continue
(14-18), -orza (25-26), -alza (49-50), -ezzo (53, 57), -erza (67, 68, 71, 72); and, not in rhyme: merzé, bellezza, durezza, guizzo, spezzan.
60. Dante draws on the commonplace of meter as a kind of enclosure or constriction of words within a boundary; see, for example, Latini 1948 3.10: "mais li sentiers de risme est plus estrois et plus fors, si comme celui ki est clos et fermés de murs et de palis."
61. See Benvenuto da Imola 1887 2:533: "potuit [Amphion] mirabili eloquentia sua cumulare et aggregare lapidem lapidi, et saxum saxo ad constructionem moeniorum thebanorum, et ego potero coniungere rithimum rithimo ad descriptionem istius pessimae civitatis."
62. See especially the insistence on the forms of convenire: converrebbe ( Inferno 32.2); convegno (32.135); "conviene ancor ch'altrui si chiuda" (33.24); "mi convegna" (33.117). For these forms and their meaning, see Shoaf 1988. Boitani (1981 85-86) notes that the poet's request for decorum (32.12) is echoed by Chaucer's recommendation that words be "cosyns to the dede." The source for both poets is Timaeus 29b. Boethius translates ( Consolatio 3.pr. 12): "Platone sanciente didiceris cognatos de quibus loquuntur rebus oportere esse sermones." In Caina, where treachery involves kinsmen, the principle is ironically applied.
63. Stazio refers to the Achilleid as "la seconda soma" ( Purgatorio 21.93); "ponderoso tema" occurs at Paradiso 23.64 (on which see pp. 243-244 below). Dante may be invoking, in his emphasis on the burden of narrating the center of the earth, Ovid's account of Numa ( Metamorphoses 15.1-2): "Quaeritur interea quis tantae pondera molis / sustineat tantoque queat succedere regi [to Romulus]"; and Boethius's version of the Hercules myth ( Consolatio 4 m. 7.29-31): "Ultimus caelum labor inreflexo / sustulit collo pretiumque rursus / ultimi caelum meruit laboris."
64. Not that the poet presents the pilgrim's response as other than extreme: it is itself an instance of the mimesis of the desperate conditions at the center of the cosmos.
65. See Durling 1975, 1981a, 1981b.
66. Boccaccio understood Limbo as corresponding to a place in the brain, and clearly understood this entire dimension of the Inferno; see his note on Limbo, where he cites Bernard Silvester's De universitate mundi (Boccaccio 1965 134-136).
67. Singleton 1966.
68. De Genesi ad litteram 11.24.31-25.32 ( PL 34.457-458); cf. Enarrationes in Psalmos 139.7 (in verses 5 and 6), 13 (in 10).
69. On the heaven of the moon, see Proto 1912; Nardi 1967a; Miller 1977; and Pastore Stocchi 1981—whose attempt at a transhistorical "Galilean" reading we find overstated (see esp. pp. 170-171).
70. "Quasi adamante che lo sol ferisse" ( Paradiso 2.33). Benvenuto da Imola (1887 4: 343) recalls that adamant is "parum cristallo obscurior." See also Marbod ( PL 171.1739): "De crystallorum natum sumptumque metallis / Hunc ita fulgentem crystallina reddit origo"); and Albertus Magnus (1967 70): "a little darker coloured than rock crystal."
71. See also Purgatorio 19.2-3, where the two cold planets are paired: "il freddo della luna / . . . e talor da Saturno." continue
72. Dante's downward gaze in Paradiso 22 includes mention of the "problem" that occupies Beatrice in Canto 2: "Vidi la figlia di Latona incensa / sanza quell'ombra che mi fu cagione / per che già la credei e rara e densa" (22.139-141).
73. The enigmatic verses referring to "la figlia del sole" ( Paradiso 27.136-138) have been assigned to the moon, with fresh arguments, by Pierotti 1981. Pierotti (p. 217) cites Bonaventure's Collationes in Hexaemeron 22.2, in which the filia solis, the sponsa of Canticle 6.9, is identified with both the Church and the Moon: "sicut luna est filia solis et recepit lumen ab eo, similiter militans Ecclesia a superna Ierusalem; unde Apostolus dicit eam matrem nostram, quia est mater influentiarum, quibus efficimur filii Dei."
74. Zahlten 1969 174 quotes the Imago mundi of Honorius of Autun, PL 172.138b: "Huius corpus est globosum, natura igneum, sed acqua permistum."
75. Aquinas, Summa theologica 1a, quaest. 68.art.4c; cited in Litt 1963 312.
76. Corpo appears in "Amor, tu vedi ben," as corpo freddo, to describe the water of tears; it is repeated in Paradiso 2 at verses 37 and 39 (twice) to describe the body of the pilgrim and that of the sphere.
77. For this explanation, widely disseminated, see Marbod ( PL 171.1766). Benvenuto (1887 4:344) has: "ostrea . . . concipiunt de rore coeli."
78. Dante's language reflects the biblical description of the heavens as the waters above; as Nardi showed (1944 307-13), Dante's reference to quest'acque in Paradiso 29.21 is to the Holy Spirit brooding over the waters above (see also 2.7: "l'acque ch'io prendo già mai non si corse"). The passage echoes, moreover, the imagery of Christian lyric in describing Mary's conception by the Holy Spirit—surely the ultimate example of how light informs matter, a re-evocation of the original fiat lux of Creation. See Adam of St. Victor "In natale sequentia" 16-18 (Spitzmuller 1971 638): "Nec crystallus rumpitur / nec in partu solvitur / pudoris signaculum"; and the anonymous sequence cited by Cosmo, quoted in Dante 1979b 3:33:
sicut vitrum radio
solis penetratur
inde tamen lesio
nulla vitro datur
sic immo subtilius
matre non corrupta,
Deus Dei filius
sua prodit nupta.
79. "E indi l'altrui raggio si rifonde / così come color torna per vetro / lo qual di retro a sé piombo nasconde."
80. See Chapter 4, pp. 152-155; and, for the mirror imagery in "Io son venuto," Chapter 2, pp. 104-105. Dante describes the eye as a leaded mirror in Convivio 3.9.8.
81. Baldelli 1978a identifies such repetition as typical of the petrose.
82. The moon as mirror was of course commonplace: see Zahlten 1969 175; and Macrobius 1970a 75 ("luna speculi instar").
83. See pp. 208-209.
84. Miller (1977 263-266) suggests that the homely experiment also fore- soft
shadows the pilgrim's final direct vision of the hypostatic union of the two natures in Christ at the very end of the poem, as well as the recurrence in the Paradiso of mirror imagery (p. 269); thus, the passage is microcosmic of the poem as well as of its putative object, the heavens (p. 276); the grammatical and logical orders are homologous with the cosmological. For other mirror imagery in the Paradiso that is cosmological, see 21.16-18, 28.4-15.
85. For this text, see Introduction, pp. 9-11.
86. For this analogy in Albertus Magnus, see Introduction, pp. 41-44, and Chapter 4, pp. 161-162.
87. Cf. Aquinas 1959 63: "Sed sicut oculus est pupilla et visus, et ibi anima et corpus, animal." For the problem implicit in Dante's analogy of the intelligences joined to the spheres like the soul joined in the body, see our remarks in Chapter 2, notes 67 and 75, and Introduction, note 87.
88. In "Donne ch'avete" the descent was precisely from soul to body; see Chapter 1, pp. 63-64.
89. Cf. Timaeus 47a-c; cited above, p. 11.
90. The words at the center of Beatrice's two speeches are caldo, neve, colore, freddo, luce, and aspetto.
91. The several mirrors to which Miller (1977) refers—the speculum inferius of creatures and the speculum superius of the divine mind—are thus implicit in the ascent performed by Beatrice. See esp. Miller 1977 269: "The ascending mirrors of knowledge imply the descending mirrors of being [in Alain's Anticlaudianus ]."
92. In his clarification of the moonspots, Nardi (1967c 5) observes that the question of diverse virtues which Dante raises applies to all the celestial spheres: "E questo fa sì che il problema delle macchie lunari accenni già ad implicare tutta la cosmologia dantesca."
93. See Nardi 1967 23-25, where the increasing determination of influence in each successive lower sphere is explained; the moon, the lowest planet, is logically subject to the formal virtues in the superior spheres. The variation of the moon's surface reflects the variation of all the spheres, which are partially diaphanous and partially lucent: "Tertium [the third heaven, subdivided into stars and planets] partim diaphanum et partim lucidum actu, quod vocant caelum sidereum" (Aquinas, Summa theologica 1a, quaest. 63, art. 4c; cited in Litt 1963 312).
94. "Infra lunam et aer et natura permutationis pariter incipiunt, et sicut aetheris et aeris, ita divinorum et caducorum luna confinium est" (Macrobius 1970a 75, 90).
95. In Inferno 10.80 it is, in Farinata's words, "la faccia della donna che qui [in Hell] regge."
96. Macrobius 1970a 58 (1.14.15).
97. Nardi 1967c 30-31; and Tateo 1970 656. See also Miller 1977 275-278.
98. Thus in 5.94 ( sì lieta ). See also 8.15; 14.79; 18.56 ( luci . . . gioconde ); 21.23; 23.59-60, 70; and 25.116.
99. Beatrice's eyes thus correspond, toute proportion gardée, to the nearly all-seeing deuspierres de cristal in Narcissus's fountain in Guillaume de Lorris's part continue
of the Roman de la rose (1537-70); see our discussion, Chapter 4, p. 153 and note 35. In addition to the almost all-seeing eye crystals, Pézard (Dante 1965 1377-78) points to the discussion of moonspots in the Roman (16,833-80), although the explanation there given is that rejected by Dante. That Dante consulted the Rose in composing both "Amor, tu vedi ben" and Canto 2 of the Paradiso is therefore highly probable. For discussion, see Nardi 1967c 8; and Dante 1979b 3:35.
100. See Figure 7 (page 154) for references to the sun in "Amor, tu vedi ben."
101. Freccero 1986 221-244, is an indispensable account of the opening verses of Canto 10 and their implications for the heaven of the sun. For a numerological analysis of the same passage, see Hardt 1973 43-52. Hardt emphasizes the first seven tercets as a group and shows how the passage is organized in terms of seven, ten, and twenty-eight (a perfect number, like six).
102. The archetype of the distinction Beatrice draws at 10.53-54 between the planetary sun, "lo sol visibil," and the "sol degli angeli" that it signifies is the speculation of the Father in the Son, the uncreated Godhead in the incarnate Logos, as Thomas makes clear during his great cosmogony at 13.52-60 ("il suo raggiare aduna / quasi specchiato, in nove sussistenze, / eternalmente rimanendosi una," 58-60). The doubling of father and son and spiritual and sensible suns is Dante's adaptation of the Platonic World-Soul both contemplating its origin in the divine intellect, or noûs, and circling the created universe, drawing it back to its ideal archetype. This double duty is expressed in the double motions of Same and Other (see Dronke 1986 87). Dante's heaven of the sun is thus one of his most elaborate adaptations of the Platonic World-Soul to a Christian context. Indeed, nature, the sun, and the Spirit, the three most common "translations" for the anima mundi in Christian interpretation (Gregory 1958 123), are all implicit in the opening verses of Canto 10: spira at 2, ministro della natura at 28—thus they enclose the proem.
103. "These two motions, intellectual generation and the spiration of Love, volition, are the two motions of the Trinity which find their counterpart in the cosmos, 'dove l'un moto l'altro si percuote,' insofar as the cosmos can reflect the inner life of the Trinity" (Freccero 1986 241).
104. The rhymes gira, rote, percote, arte, dirama, torta, manco, mondano, and scriba point either directly to the celestial circles ( gira, rote, percuote, dirama, torta ) and their effects ( manco, mondano ) or to the idea of demiurgic and poetic craftsmanship ( arte, scriba ). Arte here is also the ars quaedam dei of Christ, of the Cross: the intersection of God and man; see Foster 1977 123. Other terms closely related to the movement of the circles are ordine, obliquo cerchio, strada, dritto, and torce. As Freccero (1986 258-271) shows, terza rima mediates discursive temporality and circular return—precisely the functions of Other and Same.
105. The construction of the whole passage in terms of tercets—units of two tercets apiece, together with a second section of three tercets (beginning with the central verse "Vedi come da indi si dirama") closed out with a two-tercet coda—is itself reminiscent of the structure of a canzone stanza: two equal pedes, a sirma beginning with concatenatio (which often corresponds to the central continue
verse of the stanza, as in "Io son venuto"), and the tornata. The modularity of the canzone stanza, significantly expressed in the Paradiso in a passage describing the junction of Same and Other, is much in evidence here as a constructive principle.
106. Though less determinably, Dante's use of chiama in "Così" ("e'l sangue . . . / fuggendo corre verso / lo cor, che'l chiama") may be recalled in the use of chiama in rhyme ( Paradiso 10.15); the same may be said of percuotere ("Così," 35; Paradiso 10.9).
107. For the Timaeus on the irrationality of the Other, see Introduction, pp. 48-49.
108. The dance of the two groups is compared at 10.79 to the movement of girls performing a ballata, which includes both stanzas and a repeated ripresa or ritornello (Dante 1979b 3:164); in this allusion to a poetic form in the context of solar motion Dante would seem to recall Macrobius's observation that the movements of dancers and of strophic forms imitate the motions of the heavens (see Introduction, pp. 30-31).
109. The sun is the fourth planet but also the mystical center of the zodiac, within which dance the planets, the choreae stellarum of Calcidius. See Freccero 1986 227-231; and for the cosmic dance in Calcidius, Miller 1986 232-273.
110. Rabuse (1978 9) cites "summe fulgens, summe calens."
111. See 12.97, "Con dottrina e con volere insieme," said of Dominic.
112. Freccero (1986 242-243) notes that the parallel syntax of the Father's relation to the Son in the prologue ("l'amore che l'un e l'altro eternamente spira") suggests that the processions of the Word and of Love—in other words, of intellect and will—are the archetypes of the double solar motion, "l'un moto e l'altro," acted out in the double dance of spirits. For examples of the binary phrase, see 10.2 (God and Logos), 10.9 (two cosmic motions), 10.97-103 (the listing of the sapientes ), 10.142 (the parts of the clock), 11.35-37 (Seraphic Francis and Cherubic Dominic), 11.3-5 (the two circles as millstones), 12.34 (Francis and Dominic again), 12.126 (the two extreme factions of Franciscans), 13.16 (the rays of the two circles), 13.16-18 (the movement of the two circles), 13.34-36 (the two questions Thomas raises and answers), 13.45 (Christ and Adam, the two perfect men), and 14.67 (the two choirs, that is, the two circles).
113. See also tin tin (10.143); se'l vero è vero (10.113); foglio a foglio (12.121); giù d'atto in atto (13.62); uno due e tre . . . tre e'n due e'n uno (14.28-29).
114. The principle of two related motions also appears throughout in the form of coordinated terms ( risalir and discende [10.87]; estrema a intima [12.21]; surgere and cadere [13.142]; chiarezza e ardor [14.40]) and coordinated clauses (12.78-79; 13.52-53, 82-84, 97-100). A passage like 12.22-24 is constructed entirely of paired elements: "Poi che'l tripudio e l'altra festa grande, / sì del cantare e sì del fiammeggiarsi / luce con luce gaudiose e blande." The same may be said, on a much larger scale, for 13.1-27.
115. The two questions give rise in turn to a set of pairs and variations: Thomas repeats verbatim the phrase regarding the Dominicans that mystifies the pilgrim: "U' ben s'impingua, se non si vaneggia" (10.96, 11.39; first hemistich repeated also at 11.25). But he both repeats and twice varies the remark he continue
makes about Solomon, passing from non surse il secondo (10.114; repeated once verbatim at 11.26) to non ebbe il secondo (13.47) and fu sanza pare (13.89).
116. "Dal centro al cerchio, e sì dal cerchio al centro" (14.1): the construction is a chiasmus. Dante certainly knew that the Greek X was named Chi (see p. 333 above for Calcidius's translation, which uses chi ). It is tempting to think that the superabundance of the word chi in Canto 11.4-8 (eight instances in anaphora) is a reflection of the Greek letter. The celestial Chi is a cosmic sign of the reconciliation, the joining ( horizon ) of divine and human in Christ; Christ in Greek begins with this letter. See Rabuse 1976 200; and Freccero 1986 242.
117. The Cristo rhyme-word concentrated at the center in Dominic's case is matched in the vita of Francis by distribution of Cristo to the center ("pianse con Cristo," 11.72), latter half (11.104-107), and early part ("nacque un sole," 11.50; this is also a sol oriens, Christ) of Francis's life. For the Cristo rhyme in the Paradiso, see Hardt 1973.
118. There are more than a dozen passages where the two biographies show parallels or resemblances in identically numbered verses: 35-39 and 46-51 (discussed in our text), 57, 59, 61-62 (the mystic marriages), 64, 68, 71-72 ( Cristo ), 79, 83, 100, and 107.
119. It is known that Dante drew the idea—and the phrasing—for the pairing of Francis and Dominic in terms of cardinal points from a prophecy of Joachim of Fiore: "erunt duo viri, unus hinc, alius inde" (see Dante 1979b 3:173). Joachim and Sigier form yet another pair: of heterodox figures.
120. Questo is thus a shifter here. In Dominic's case, opinion has varied between a summer solstitial sun—because of its lunga foga, its long course—and another equinox; but Moore (1903) shows that language and situation require a northwesterly, or late summer, sun, moving from the solstice toward the autumnal equinox.
121. In the biographies, the "arco della vita" of Francis is presented as a single day, that of Dominic as a season, from sowing to harvest. This portrayal corresponds to the emphasis on Francis himself as a sun, who generates, and on Dominic as a farmer, an agricola, who tills and weeds.
122. In a technical sense, the systematic linking of the sapienza (11.38, used only here and at 23.37, in Gemini) of the wisemen with eloquence is a function of the sphere of the sun, where the Son—Wisdom—is considered by the angelic order of the Virtues in relation to the Holy Spirit, the poet's dictator. See Foster 1977 121; also Freccero 1986 241-243; and Dronke 1986 94.
123. Dominic is the lover and champion, drudo, who defends his beloved as a paladino, giving rise to the series of metaphors of soldiery: militare (12.34); esercito, insegna (12.37); imperador, milizia (12.40); campione (12.43); drudo (12.55). The court of the sun is rich in cortesia; Dominic the paladin fights his battles on the field of honor ( campo , 12.108); the followers of Francis strip ( scalzasi, 11.83) before the beauty of Poverty, the bride. St. Thomas's phrase in rebuke of his order ("U' ben s'impingua, se non si vaneggia," 11.139) might have been drawn from an allegorical eclogue. On this last passage, see Dronke 1986 86, associating Thomas's diction with the language of the Song of Songs.
124. The figure of the bride—Poverty and Faith—in the lives of the reform- soft
ers derives from the Song of Songs, long viewed by exegetes as an allegory of Christ's love for the Church. For the church as bride, cf. 10.140 ("la sposa di Dio") and the sposa (Poverty) in the narrative of Francis's life (11.32, 84). See Priest 1972; Freccero 1986 232; and Dronke 1986 94-96, 100-102. See also Dronke 1986 101 on Richard of St. Victor's allegorical exposition of the Song of Songs.
125. Francis makes the earth feel his virtue as he rises from his birthplace ("Non era ancor molto lontan dall'orto, / ch'ei cominiciò a far sentir la terra / della sua gran virtute alcun conforto," 11.55-57), while Dominic's conception and birth are evidence of the virtue of the sun ("e come fu creata, fu repleta / sì la sua mente di viva virtute, / che nella madre lei fece profeta," 12.58-60) and he is defined as reflected light ( splendore, 11.39).
126. Such an inference regarding the virtù and sapientia of the poet demonstrated in the art of the heaven itself is not without precedent in commentary on the canto. Readers have noted that Dante's inclusion of figures like Boethius and Sigieri, who were victims of injustice, echoes his own historical status as exile and victim; see Dante 1979b 3:157.
127. The dominant pair, Adam and Christ, the creature and his incarnate Creator, mark the possible limit of human virtue ("quantunque alla natura umana lece / aver di lume, tutto fosse infuso / da quel valor che l'uno e l'altro fece," 13.43-45); in 13.82-84, Thomas refers to the Incarnation, the supreme act of fecundation: "Così fu fatta già la terra degna / di tutta l'animal perfezione; / così fu fatta la Vergine pregna." For the pilgrim's infusion by the Apostles in Gemini, see below, pp. 242-244.
128. See Ferrante 1984 273-274: "In the Sun, which is the turning point in the journey, Dante reaches the climax of diversity, the greatest number of individual souls to be seen or named in any sphere of Paradise, and at the same time the beginning of a special unity, the appearance of all the souls in one symbolic figure, in this case concentric circles."
129. The sun's generative power is at its strongest at the time of the pilgrim's journey, when it is near the vernal equinox. In the heaven of the sun, this power is demonstrated by the richness of reference to flowers, garlands, vines, roots, shrubs, fruits, stocks, and gardens, as well as to pasturing and husbandry: e.g., infiora (10.91, 14.12); serto (10.102); pianta (11.137); rosa (12.19, 13.135); ghirlanda (12.19); fronde (12.46); agricola (12.67); orto (12.68, 103); vigna (12.86); vignaio (12.87); seme, fascia (12.96); sterpi (12.100); arbuscelli (12.105); coltura (12.119); paglia (13.36); seme (13.69); legno, specie (13.70); biade (13.132); prun (13.134); agno (10.94); peculio (11.124). The sun, like Gemini, is a garden; as a vinekeeper ( vignaio ), Dominic cooperates with sunlight in producing healthy fruit: "gran dottor si feo, / tal che si mise as circuir la vigna, / che tosto imbianca, se il vignaio è reo" (12.85-87). For the topos of the garden in relation to the monastic and fraternal orders and the cantos of Francis and Dominic, see Mazzotta 1979 109-117, with scrupulous résumés of previous readings of these cantos; see also Ferrante 1984 298.
130. Timaeus 36b (Corford 1937 142); and see Freccero 1986 77.
131. See Chapter 2, pp. 92-96. As if to insist on this point, Dante uses continue
meare to describe illumination (in the sun, 13.54; and in Gemini, 23.79), rather than as the term for the descent and return of the soul, as in Macrobius 1970a 48 (speaking of the gates of souls, located where the Milky Way crosses the zodiac): "per has portas animae de caelo in terras meare et de terris in caelum remeare creduntur." For discussion of Paradiso 4.49-60, see Freccero 1986 223-224.
132. For this order in the sestina, see Chapter 3, note 57.
133. In addition to "O qui perpetua," see Boethius Consolatio 4 m. 6.44-48:
Hic est cunctis communis amor
Repetuntque boni fine teneri,
Quia non aliter durare queant,
Nisi converso rursus amore
Refluant causae quae dedit esse.
134. Dante lists the pilgrimage sites in a famous passage (chap. 40) of the Vita nuova; see Dante 1984 237-241.
135. In Macrobius 1970a 48, the Milky Way, located in the starry sphere, is the precise point whence just souls descend and where they return, hinc profecti hunc revertuntur. For Macrobius's error in placing the crossing of the equator and Milky Way, see Chapter 2, p. 91 and note 60.
136. In his discussion of this word in Convivio 4.6.3, Dante does not mention, but certainly knew, Uguccione's derivation of auctor from augere, to increase. On this etymology, see Toynbee 1902 102.
137. Echoes of Virgil, Statius, Horace, and Lactantius have been noted in the beautiful verses on the mother bird in Canto 23.1-12; see Dante 1979b 3:368.
138. At 24.139-141, Dante's recitation of the Athanasian creed, he refers to the truth of the faith as "come stella in ciel in me scintilla"; at 29.87, the truth of Beatrice's explanation shines like a star, "come stella in ciel il ver si vide."
139. Sapegno (Dante 1957b 1090) cites Daniel 12:3: "Qui autem docti fuerint, fulgebunt, quasi splendor firmamenti; et qui ad iustitiam erudiunt multus, quasi stellae in perpetuas aeternitates."
140. For other texts, see Wingell 1981. Wingell (pp. 130-132) documents the association of the stars with the virtues and with the gifts of the Spirit, represented in the Purgatorio by a candelabrum Dante compares (after Apocalypse 1: 20) to the seven stars of the Wain ( Purgatorio 30.1).
141. Bosco and Reggio (Dante 1979b 3:389) recall that Mary is stella matutina in the litanies. The Virgin as bel zaffiro (23.101) drives home her stellar status, for medieval "sapphire" was usually lapis lazuli, whose field of blue speckled with iron pyrites makes it look like a sky strewn with stars (thus inzaffira ). See Isidore Etymologiarum liber 16.9.2 ( PL 82.574b): "habens pulveres aureos sparsos."
142. Dante names the sun in Gemini eight times—three more than in the heaven of the sun.
143. "Un sol che tutte quante l'accendea, / come fa'l nostro le viste superne" (23.29); "il bel giardino / che sotto i raggi di Cristo s'infiora" (23.71-72); "Come a raggio di sol, che puro mei / per fratta nube" (23.79-80). Each heaven, more- soft
over, includes a passage where the principal luminaries—sun, moon, and stars—are in effect represented together (10.64-69, 76; 23.25-30). As Scaglione (1967 157) notes, the collocation evokes Revelations 8:12; it is also hexaemeral (Genesis 1:14-17)—for which see Zahlten 1969 174-176.
144 . Girare appears five times in the heaven of the sun and eight times in Gemini, out of a total of twenty-three instances; poli appears as a rhyme only at 10.78 and 24.11, where it rhymes with oriuoli, a variant of orologio, which appears at 10.139 (there are no other instances in the poem); circulare appears only at 13.21 ("che circulava il punto dov'io era") and 23.109 ("Così la circulata melodia"); corona, which appears twice in the sun (10.65, 11.97), appears also at 23.95; ballo appears only at 10.79 and 25.103. For the cosmic dance in the Paradiso, see Miller 1977 276-277.
145. The scholastic terminology and university pedagogy of the exams echoes the pilgrim's discussions with the sapientes in the heaven of the sun. Note the use of sapienza, for example, used in the Paradiso only at 11.38 (of Solomon) and at 23.37; and of sillogizzare and sillogismo, both used in the Commedia only in the sun (10.138, 11.2) and in Gemini (24.77, 24.94).
146. For military metaphors, compare primipilo (24.59), baron (24.115, 26.22; of the apostles), principe (25.23), stuolo (25.25), conti (25.42), and imperator (25.38) with the language used of Francis and Dominic; see above, note 123.
147. Beatrice, the tenor of the simile that opens Canto 23, is awaiting the rising/noon sun of Christ, just as in the heaven of the sun the Church, bride of the Song of Songs, "mattina lo sposo perche l'ami." For Beatrice's relation to the Bride, see Freccero 1986 232, 237.
148. For the double triumphs, see Gmelin 1954 3:406-408, 414-415.
149. For the triumphs, see note 148; the militant pilgrim is at 25.52, 57.
150. Peter and Paul (24.62); John and James (25.94); master and disciple (25.64: "come discente ch'a dottor seconda"). Dante, of course, thought James the Great and John the Evangelist to be brothers, the sons of Zebedee (Matthew 5:21). Dragonetti (1968 355) discusses the heaven of Gemini as a union of heaven and earth represented by Castor and Pollux; see also p. 369, where Dante's adjective dia (26.11) is linked to the Greek prefix signifying "double" or "twin." See above, pp. 361-362.
151. See Convivio 2.14.3-5. The number 1,022 is broken down into digits that reflect local motion (2), alteration (10), and growth (1,000), all of which concern physics. The Milky Way signifies metaphysics because the stars that are the source of its light are difficult to see. In the heaven of Gemini, the presence of James, "per cui si vicita Galicia" (25.18), alludes to the Milky Way, one name of which is la via di Sa' Iacopo. In addition, the souls are placed around fixed poles in 24.11, while the text alludes to the southern pole by positing a sun in Cancer in midwinter (25.101). Special mention is reserved for the precession of the equinoxes and the unwintering of January, some forty lines after the pilgrim and Beatrice depart from the fixed stars for the Primum Mobile (27.142-144). The relation of the heaven of the stars to the sun reiterates the links: the sun is the chariot that, in one explanation Dante cites ( Convivio 2.14.5), ran amok and continue
burned the sky, creating the Milky Way; fifteen of the twenty-four stars that make up the imaginary constellation in the extended simile of Paradiso 13 are drawn precisely from Alfraganus's list of 1,022 used in the Convivio passage on the fixed stars; and the same simile imagines the northern, the visible, pole.
152. Blasucci (1969 19) lists these among examples of Dante's "energy."
153. "I lupi che . . . danno guerra" (25.6); "lupi rapaci in vesta di pastor" (27.55). For the biblical sources, see Dante 1979b 3:448-449.
154. Both passages depend on Ars poetica, 38-40, comparing the poetic subject to a physical burden: "Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, aequam / viribus et versate diu, quid ferre recusent, / quid valeant umeri." This is attributed to "Magister noster Oratius" and cited at De vulgari eloquentia 2.iv.4 (Dante 1979 164).
155. Wingell (1981 128-129) cites, in another context, Augustine's contrast of the dark, chilled, fallen angels ( tenebrosi frigidique ) with the warm breath of Pentecostal inspiration.
156. Mary's triumph, like that of Christ, is elaborately symmetrical, a textual circle. We note here a few examples: quivi at verseheads at 23.73 and 23.136; the "splendori . . . fulgorati" of the spirits (at 23.82) are balanced by the candori of those at 23.124, and the speaker's desire for Mary (at 23.88-89) by that of the souls reaching out at 23.121-124. Qualunque melodia (23.97) is paired with the circulata melodia of 23.109. There is a parallel between circling and crowning at 23.101, 106 ( coronava, girerommi ). The central five tercets, finally, are marked by assonance on i-a: tira, lira, inzaffira, dia, melodia, Maria (Baldelli 1973 947).
157 . Ploia echoes its use in the heaven of the sun ("lo refrigerio dell'etterna ploia," 14.27) and pingue the use of impingua at 10.96, 11.25, and 11.139.
158. De avi Phoenice, 41-42; cited in Dante 1979b 3:368.
159. Adam's discussion of languages as leaves on a tree, "come fronda in ramo" ( Paradiso 26.135-138), adapting Horace's figure in Ars poetica, 60-62, is continuous with the identification of poetry with the leaves of the laurel ("la fronda peneia," as in Paradiso 1.25-33); see the related images of poetic fame as erba in Purgatorio 11.115-117. In Paradiso 26.64-66, the pilgrim proclaims his love for all the leaves in God's garden: "le fronde onde s'infronda tutto l'orto / de l'ortolano etterno"—that is, all the creatures. For the recurring metaphor of infrondescence, see Dragonetti 1968 347-357.
160. For the alba, see Saville 1972; for the poet in relation to birdsong, see "Io son venuto," 27-39, with our discussion in Chapter 2, pp. 76-79.
161. See Introduction, pp. 34-35; for a full discussion of this poem in Dante's Commedia (not including the allusion here), see Moleta 1979-80.
162. .
Così la donna mia stava eretta
e attenta, rivolta inver la plaga
sotto la quale il sol mostra men fretta.
Beatrice is looking at the location of the solstitial sun at noon, for the sun shows least haste both when it is near the meridian and when it apparently reverses direction, in the ecliptic, at the solstices, especially the summer solstice. That continue
Christ is at solstice and the planetary sun at equinox is one measure by which Christ transcends the planetary sun; but in another sense the two suns, planetary and supracelestial, are complementary, paired suns, the sun of heaven and the sun of earth.
163. Dante uses almi of the apostles at 25.138.
164. "Come fantolin che inver' la mamma / tende le braccia, poi che'l latte prese" (23.122). For Beatrice and the Virgin linked by the similes of Canto 23, see Scaglione 1967 167.
165. Dragonetti (1968 362) points out the etymological play between Galassia and Galicia: the relation of east and west, sunrise (Galilee) and sunset (Galicia), reiterates the relation of Francis and Dominic in the heaven of the sun. For Macrobius (1970a 48), the milkiness of the galaxy is consonant with its role as the gate of souls: "ideo primam nascentibus offerri ait lactis alimoniam, quia primus eis motus a lacteo incipit in corpora terrena labentibus."
166. In Dante's first eclogue to Giovanni del Virgilio, the allegory of poems milked from the Muses' breasts is frequent: del Virgilio's first eclogue is "lituris / Pyerio demulsa sinu" (1-2); del Virgilio's poetic studies have made him full and eloquent, "lacte canoro / viscera plena ferens et plenus usque palatum" (31-32); finally, the first ten cantos of the Paradiso are ten vascula of milk to be sent to del Virgilio drawn from an ewe lactis abundans (59-64; Dante 1979e).
167. For the propitious moment of the Incarnation, see Monarchia 1.11.1-2. At Convivio 1.21, after describing the conception and development of the embryo, Dante offers that if the heavens were at their best, the child born under them "sarebbe un altro Iddio incarnato." The theologians, orbiting the pilgrim, also foreshadow Gabriel's circulation around Mary. We recall the description, in the sun, of how matter was prepared for the union of divine and human: "Così fu fatta già la terra degna / di tutta l'animal perfezione; / così fu fatta la Vergine pregna" (13.82-84).
168. Gabriel's song is foreshadowed by the tone of Solomon's voice in the heaven of the sun ("una voce modesta, / forse qual fu dall'angelo a Maria," 14.35-36). The echo of Solomon in Gabriel links the language of the Canticle in the heaven of the sun, used to celebrate the union of the Church with the bridegroom and his followers Francis and Dominic, with the divine marriage of the Holy Spirit and the flesh of Mary in the heaven of the stars. Sposa, which appears in the sun at 10.140, 11.32 and 84 (Poverty), and 12.43—all but once of the bride of Christ—appears three times in Gemini (25.111, 26.93, 27.40); its other uses in the Paradiso are at 31.3 and 32.128.
169. In Convivio 4.21.10 Dante refers to the womb as recettaculo (4) and to the dwelling of the soul in heaven (the passage is translated from Cicero) as abitaculo (4.21.9). Cf. the Virgin's womb as albergo of Christ (23.105), a term that also reflects liturgical language.
170. Rabuse (1978 19) cites Gregory the Great ( Moralia, Ep. miss . 12 c.55 n.64) on the meaning of the womb in sacred speech: "in sacro eloquio ventris vel uteri nomine mens solet intelligi." break
171. As Beatrice says of the pilgrim in Purgatorio 30.109-114:
Non pur per ovra delle rote magne,
che drizzan ciascun seme ad alcun fine
secondo che le stelle con compagne,
ma per larghezza di grazie divine,
che sì alti vapor hanno a lor piova,
che nostre viste là non van vicine.
The pilgrim's destiny is a result of planetary influence, free will, and grace.
172. The crossing of the Milky Way with the zodiac is the gate through which souls enter time. Macrobius put the gate at the solstitial points of Capricorn and Cancer, but in fact the Milky Way traverses the Zodiac at Gemini and Libra (see Chapter 2, note 60).
173. In the heaven of Mars, where the pilgrim's baptistery is "il bel ovil di San Giovanni," Florence is remembered as sober and chaste "nella sua cerchia antica" and the cradles ( le culle ) carefully tended by loving nurses.
174. For the sun in the Ram, see Currado Malaspina's prophetic words (echoing "Io son venuto") to the pilgrim in Purgatorio (8.133-139):
Ed elli: "Or va; che 'l sol non si recorca
sette volte nel letto che 'l Montone
con tutti e quattro i piè cuopre ed inforca,
che cotesta cortese oppinïone
ti fia chiavata in mezzo della testa
con maggior chiovi che d'altrui sermone,
se corso di giudicio non s'arresta."
See also Ecloga 2.1-2 (Dante 1979e): "Velleribus Colchis prepes detectus Eous/ alipedesque alii pulcrum Titana ferebant."
175. The horoscope of Florence, which began its new year on March 25, ab Incarnatione, may also be implicit: March 25 was the ideal date of the city's foundation; Dante's crowning and the city's birthday would represent, in their simultaneity, a reconciliation. Since in Dante's time most baptisms occurred at Easter or just after, Dante's commemoration of his baptism would likely fall between the possible dates of Easter—in other words, almost entirely within the sign of Aries.
176. For a reading of this passage with emphasis on the pilgrim's fulfillment of his prophetic destiny, see Sarolli 1971 381-419; see also Mazzotta 1979 116-123.
177. This conception of the poem as including both the astricolae and the infera regna recurs in Dante's first eclogue to Giovanni del Virgilio (48-50), precisely where Tityrus (Dante) is considering the question of poetic crowning.
178. Florence is the nido from which Dante will chase the two Guidi in Purgatorio 11.99.
179. Compare the similarly hypothetical "S'io torni mai," at the pilgrim's entrance to Gemini, and "S'io avessi le rime aspre e chiocce," beginning Canto 32: the first, appropriately yearning in its hope of heaven; the second, a modesty continue
topos disclaiming a skill subsequently demonstrated. See Bosco and Reggio's remarks in Dante 1979b 3:411.
180. As the commentators note, this image also echoes the imagined "ascension" of Beatrice in Vita nuova 23.25.
181. .
Ficca di retro a li occhi tuoi la mente,
e fa di quelli specchi a la figura
che 'n questo specchio ti sarà parvente
(21.16-18)
is echoed by
For Jacob's ladder as a model of the angelic hierarchies, see Rabuse 1972 62, quoting Simon of Tournai: "Hac distinctione angelorum textitur aurea catena hominum sive scala Iacob in qua vidit angelos ascendentes et descendentes."
182. Moore (1895 95) notes the relation of svernare to Dante's other coinages like sfogliare ( Purgatorio 23.58), smagare, etc. See also Blasucci 1969 17-18. We prefer ruggire to the more frequent raggiare because of the biblical parallels: Jeremiah 25: 30, Hosea 11.10, Joel 3.16, and Amos 1.2; the last two are accounts of the dies Domini.
183. For parallels to sbernare and the implications of Aries here, including the evocation of the lyric Natureingang, see Contini 1970b 212-213; and Kirkpatrick 1978 162-166.
184. See Epistola 13.68 for Dante's etymological discussion of empireo ("et dicitur empyreum, quod est idem quod celum igne sui ardoris flagrans"). For Dante's use of cristallino for the Primum Mobile, see Convivio 2.14.19.
185. Dante's presentation of John between references to winter ("l'inverno," 25.102; "Capra del ciel," 27.69) is perhaps less arbitrary than it seems. Dante's accumulation of apostles in Gemini includes Peter in person and Paul by reference (Peter's caro frate of 24.62); the pair have their festival on June 29, not long after the summer solstice. Although the feast of John the Baptist —implicitly remembered in Paradiso 25.8-9—is June 24, even nearer the solstice, the feast of John the Evangelist is on December 27, near the winter solstice (Cattabiani 1988 236-238). Dante's ideal solstice in Gemini thus includes the Evangelist, feasted near the winter solstice, made into a sun that fills the whole year with light.
186. In his De universo ( PL 111.472), Rabanus Maurus, after showing that crystal signifies baptism and the immutability of the angels, concludes: "Aqua ergo in crystallum versa est quando corruptionis eam infirmitatem, per resurrectionem suam ad incorruptionis firmitatem est immutata."
187. The three substances named suggest a gamut concluding in cristallo. continue
Glass is an artificial gem finest when most like a crystal: "Maximus tamen honor in candido vitro, proximoque in crystalli similitudine" (Isidore Etymologiarum liber 16.4, PL 82.538a). Amber is an organic gem struck into lapidary quality by the heat of the sun; as a resin it is a gum, and thus the etymon ofgemma: "Gemmae vocatae, quod instar gumi transluceant" ( Etymologiarum liber 16.6.3). As electrum, moreover-often confused with the metal alloy—it was mystically understood as the union of the two natures in Christ; see Rabanus De universo 15 ( PL 111.473): "nisi quod in electro aurum et argentum miscentur, ut res una ex metallis duobus fiat, in qua et per argentum auri claritas temperatur, et per claritatem auri species clarescat argenti. In redemptore autem nostro utraeque naturae, id est divinitas et humanitas, inconfuse atque inseparabiliter sibimet sunt unitae."
188. For the quotation, see Convivio 2.3.9. Dragonetti (1968 379) reads cristallo as Cristo-stallo and argues for the progressive crystallization of the whole cosmos, enveloped as it is by the maggior corpo of the First Heaven. In this context, does Dante's ambra recall Arnaut's sestina rhyme-word cambra?
189. Compare, with respect to poems as charms, Virgil's Eclogue 8, where adynata and spells ( carmina ) combine in the speakers' attempts to influence their lovers.
190. In effect, then, the raggiare of the heavens would seem to invoke the apokatastasis, the return of all the heavens to their original positions at the last Great Year, an event traditionally associated with cataclysm and upheaval. Servius notes, in his glosses on Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, that the return of the Golden Age is one of the topics of the apokatastasis (Thilo and Hagen 1923-27 3/1:45). See Macrobius 1970a 128-129 (Macrobius follows Cicero in thinking the Great Year to be fifteen thousand years).
191. It might be supposed that such a gem would be incised with the figure of Gemini, the poet's natal sign. Albertus Magnus (1967 141) notes that stones carved with the Gemini predispose wearers "toward friendship and righteousness and good manners, diligent observation of laws, and concord."
192. Dante probably associated Plato's Great Year ( Timaeus 39d) with the period of the precession of the equinoxes that he invokes in Paradiso 27, as does Macrobius ( Commentarii 2.11 [1970a 128-129]). His conception of the heaven of the stars as representative of metaphysics ( Convivio 2.14.11) rests on the notion, also mentioned by Macrobius, that the precessional motion of the stars is invisible to the eye ("quasi ci tiene ascoso").
193. Dante refers to the precession of the equinoxes at Convivio 2.14.11-13, in his discussion of the sphere of the fixed stars: "E per lo movimento quasi insensibile che fa da occidente in oriente per uno grado in cento anni significa le cose incorruttibili, le quali ebbero da Dio cominciamento e creazione e non averanno fine; chè fine de la circulazione è redire a uno medesimo punto, al quale non tornerà questo cielo, secondo questo movimento. Chè dal cominciamento del mondo poco più de la sesta parte è volto; e noi siamo già ne l'ultima etade del secolo, e attendemo veracemente la consumazione del celestiale movimento." See Pecoraro 1987 25-29. break
194. In his treatise on engraved gems, Albertus Magnus accounts for their loss of power over time (see Introduction, note 93).
195. See Marbodus ( PL 171.1770a): "veras a falsis labor est discernere gemmas."
196. Divellere also might afford a rhyme for the last tercet in each cantica, which always concludes on the word stelle. There is none such in the Inferno (the rhyme is belle ), but in the Purgatorio the rhyme is novelle (33.143) and in the Paradiso, velle (33.143), a Latinism for the will—no form of divellere, then, but a kind of homonymic rhyme echoing the divellere/ vello nexus noted in Inferno 34 and in Gemini. If our criteria seem too permissive, it might help to add that Dante insists on the etymological play, both at the end of the Purgatorio ("rifatto sì come piante no velle / rino vellate di no vella fronda," 33.143-44), carefully echoing pianta and rinacque in Purgatorio 1.135-36, where avellere appears (1.136), and at the end of the Paradiso (33.141-43), where emphasis is on forms related to volere and alliteration on v: "sua voglia venne. / A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa; / ma già vol g eva il mio disio e'l velle."
197. Virgil uses avellere (6.143) and convellere (6.149); Dante's debt is most immediate in the parallels between the replacement of the rush plucked in Purgatorio 2 and that of the Golden Bough: "primo avulso non deficit alter / aureus" ( Aeneid 6.143-144).
198. See Ecloga 2.48-50 (Dante 1979e):
cum mundi circumflua corpora cantu
astricoleque meo velut infera regna patebunt,
devincire caput hedera lauroque iuvabit.
Appendices
1. It is on this single passage, for instance, that Mengaldo rests his assertion that the De vulgari eloquentia "assigns the limits" of the petrose (Dante 1979a 8, 234-235).
2. Mengaldo (ibid. 145 n .9) notes the important parallel in Convivio 1.5.
1. It is on this single passage, for instance, that Mengaldo rests his assertion that the De vulgari eloquentia "assigns the limits" of the petrose (Dante 1979a 8, 234-235).
2. Mengaldo (ibid. 145 n .9) notes the important parallel in Convivio 1.5.
3. On the ceremony of investiture, see M. Bloch 1939; Keen 1984; and Flori 1976, 1978, and 1979.
4. The paragon of knighthood, Lancelot, on the day of his knighting, took on two very difficult quests, according to the Vulgate Cycle (that Dante knew well the Livres de Lancelot dou Lac is guaranteed by his references to its details in Inferno 5 and Paradiso 16); the circumstances of the second are illuminating. During the feast in Lancelot's honor a knight enters, sent by the Lady of Nohaut, beleaguered by an enemy of hers, to ask King Arthur, her liege lord, to send her a champion. Lancelot breaks in and asks to be assigned this mission. King Arthur at first refuses, saying it is most dangerous and requires an experienced knight. Now—and this is the point that interests us—Lancelot reminds Arthur that this is the first request he has made since his knighting and that if Arthur should deny it, his new knight will be greatly shamed before all men (Micha 1978-83 8:260-283). Here is the sense of the term prerogativa —that is what Lancelot claims, a request ( rogativa ) that takes precedence over other requests. It is not a matter of indulging the new knight, but of allowing him the continue
scope to prove his worth, as, of course, Lancelot amply does. And Dante, too, in our view.
5. No one supposes that the second nisi forte clause characterizes a fault; Mengaldo comments: "La lenium asperorumque rithimorum mixtura . . . risponde al canone fondamentale del De vulgari eloquentia" (Dante 1979a 235 n .4). It is true that Dante identifies "ipsa inutilis equivocatio" as always a fault; and the traditional view has no doubt rested on the assumption that Dante is referring to "Amor, tu vedi ben" there also. That is by no means the sense of the passage, however, and to take "ipsa inutilis equivocatio" as referring to "Amor, tu vedi ben" requires us to assume that the equivocal rhymes in that poem are "useless"—a view we argued against in Chapter 4.
The only other critic, to our knowledge, who interprets the reference to "Amor, tu vedi ben" in a positive light is Bernhard König (1983 246): "I see no distancing in this sentence, but rather a proud assertion of the exceptional character of the canzone ["Amor, tu vedi ben"]. It is the product of what was in a sense a heroic effort, such as is possible only once in a lifetime, when all one's powers are at highest tension. . . . Dante is not criticizing his unusual rhyme scheme; rather he is justifying it as part of an unprecedented poetic project, whose uniqueness the concluding verses of the canzone had already proclaimed." This seems to us the correct view.
6. See the material assembled by Keen (1984), esp. pp. 80-81, the entirely characteristic urgings given new knights: "Seek therefore this day to do deeds that will deserve to be remembered, for every new knight should make a good beginning" (from a thirteenth-century romance) and "it is my wish that this day you shall show such prowess as it befits you to show: that is why I have set you in the van of the battle: there so do that you may win honor" (from Froissart).
7. See Rabuse 1957; Schnapp 1987.
8. Paradiso 25.2 identifies the poema as one "al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra," and in Paradiso 27.64-66 St. Peter urges Dante to speak: "e tu, figluol, che per lo mortal pondo / ancor giù tornerai, apri la bocca, / e non asconder quel ch'io non ascondo." But these and other instances fall far short of the explicit pronouncements of Cacciaguida, which is the final answer to the question Dante puts to Virgilio in Inferno 2: "Ma io perché venirvi?" It is really the unique undertaking of the poem that explains Dante's unique journey; Beatrice's explanation in Purgatorio 30.136-138 is on a different allegorical level:
Tanto giù cadde, che tutti argomenti
a la salute sua eran già corti,
fuor che mostrarli le perdute genti.
9. As Dante knew, men were often knighted on the eve of a battle; see Keen 1984 79-80.
10. Cf. Enciclopedia dantesca, s.v. "addobbare" (1:52): "Chiosa Benvenuto: 'id est qui ita adornas istos splendore!'; e il Buti: 'Che sì li adorni questi spiriti di splendore!'. Ma alla scelta della parola D., oltre che dalla rima, fu forse tratto dalla conoscenza della sua origine (francese, adober, 'armare cavaliere'); si tratta infatti di anime di combattenti per la fede." break
Schnapp misleadingly (perhaps inadvertently) conflates knightly investiture and assumption of the cross: he writes that addobbare is "a highly specialized term like the related verb 'decussare,' denoting the symbolic act known in the Middle Ages as 'cruce signari': an imprinting of the sign of the cross on the crusader's scapulary, signifying his transformation into a knight of the Holy Cross" (1987 137). I have found no instance of adober/addobbare in the sense of cruce signare, unless it is Dante's own metaphor here in Paradiso 15. In the rites of taking on the cross ("cruce signari") printed by Andrieu, Brundage, and Pennington, no indication is given of restriction to knights. There are no references to the military purposes of crusades (only in several of the services are there even the vaguest references to the possibility of combat: generally the prayer is that the pilgrim may voyage and return home in peace ), nor to the social status of the pilgrim, and, as Brundage points out, the ceremonies for taking on the cross grew out of the generic rites for pilgrims (not always or even principally pilgrims bound for the Holy Land; see Brundage 1966 289 n .1), in which the pilgrims' staffs and scripts were blessed. None of the services includes a symbolic blow like that of confirmation or knightly investiture. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, persons of both sexes and all social stations took the cross, including archbishops, friars, and cooks, and, among the military, squires and footsoldiers; see Powell 1986 20-21 (and see his list of known participants in the Fifth Crusade, 209-246); and Housley 1986 123-156 (I owe these references to the kindness of Richard Mather). That the ideas of Crusade and pilgrimage are closely related and in some respects inseparable is, of course, evident. But knightly investiture and becoming a pilgrim or Crusader should be sharply distinguished.
11. Cacciaguida's use of the term is connected with his characterization of earlier, simpler Florence within the circle of its walls, in which women did not wear (rich) cinture (15.97-102). See the survey of Dante's use of cingere in Enciclopedia dantesca 2: 5-6. It is used again of knighting in Paradiso 8.146; particularly interesting is the parallel with Purgatorio 1.133: "Quivi mi cinse sì com'altrui piacque" (with the reed of humility; see below, note 19).
12. Privilegio refers to the prerogatives of rank, as well as to the right to quarter one's arms with those of the gran barone; cf. Enciclopedia dantesca, s.v. "privilegio."
13. There is also allusion, of course, to Matthew 10: 33, 16:24, etc., as already in the symbolic taking on of the cross of the Crusader. See Paradiso 14.103-108:
Qui vince la memoria mia lo 'ngegno;
ché quella croce lampeggiava Cristo,
sì ch'io non so trovare essempro degno;
ma chi
prende sua croce
a segue Cristo,
ancor mi scuserà di quel ch'io lasso,
vedendo in quell' albor balenar Cristo.
One may note that this is a very good example of nonuseless equivocal rhyme. Schnapp (1987) has a good discussion of Dante's taking on his personal cross. break
14. Cf. the allusion to Charles of Valois in Purgatorio 20.73-75:
Sanz' arme n'esce e solo con la
lancia
con la qual
giostrò
Giuda, e quella ponta
sì, ch'a Fiorenza fa scoppiar la pancia.
This is, of course, the same blow to which Dante refers in Paradiso 17, and it is closely related to the issue of Guido Cavalcanti's exile and death and thus to the blow that strikes Cavalcante in Inferno 10.
One may add that Cacciaguida's urgings that Dante make all his vision manifest compare the poem to a wind that strikes the highest towers (lines 133-134), "che le più alte cime più percuote." Very deeply submerged in the blow of that wind is the blow of the metaphorical knightly lance.
Dante uses the imagery of knightly combat in various other passages of the Commedia, whether explicitly or implicitly. Explicit is Statius's reference ( Purgatorio 22.42) to the "giostre grame" of Inferno 7, which reveals the implicit metaphor in "percoteansi incontro" ( Inferno 7.28); closely related are the implicit references to the cranes as like knights in battle formation in Purgatorio 26.43-46 and Inferno 5.46-49 (the presence and relevance of this allusion were demonstrated by Ryan).
15. That Boccaccio was well aware of Dante's puns on names is shown by the effective use of the pun on Cavalcante in his novella on Guido, Decameron 6.9.
16. In view of Dante's play on the names in Inferno 10 (in addition to the pun on Cavalcante, there are puns on Farinata, associated with the whited sepulchers of the Sermon on the Mount, and on Guido / guida ), there is probably a pun on Guido in Cacciaguida's name: in many respects Paradiso 14-18 is the last answer to the anxieties expressed in Inferno 10—anxicties about Guido as a poetic rival, about the social superiority of Guido and his relatives, about Guido's death and Dante's part in it, about Guido's Averroism. Cacciaguida may be understood to be dispelling these anxieties: egli caccia Guido.
17. Dante's questioning of Cacciaguida about the obscure prophecies of Ciacco, Farinata, Brunetto, and others is already anticipated in his careful questioning of Farinata about Cavalcante's failure of foreknowledge. See Durling 1981b.
18. Behind all the weapon metaphors lies the important passage in Ephesians 6: 10-18 (emphasis added):
De cetero, fratres, confortamini in Domino et in potentia virtutis eius. Induite vos armaturam Dei, ut possitis stare adversus insidias diaboli. Quoniam non est nobis colluctatio adversus carnem et sanguinem, sed adversus principes et potestates, adversus mundi rectores tenebrarum harum, contra spiritualia nequitiae in caelestibus. Propterea accipite armaturam Dei, ut possitis resistere in die malo et in omnibus perfecti stare. State ergo succincti lumbos vestros in veritate et induti loricam iustitiae et calceati pedes in praeparatione evangelii pacis; in omnibus sumentes scutum fidei, in quo possitis omnia tela nequissimi ignea exstinguere. Et galeam salutis adsumite et gladium spiritus, quod est verbum Dei; per omnem orationem et obsecrationem orantes omni tempore in spiritu et in ipso vigilantes in omni instantia. break
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the equipment of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith, with which you can quench all the flaming darts of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God.
(RSV)
For Dante's definition of his role as parallel to that of the prophet Nathan confronting King David with the sin of Bathsheba, see Sarolli 1971.
19. See Schnapp 1987 218-228 on the traditional free speech of the Christian, especially the martyr, or witness. Perhaps also, in such a richness of interconnections, it would not be farfetched to see in Dante's being girt with the reed an anticipation of a girding on of a pen (= sword), reeds being one of the traditional materials from which pens were made, mentioned in some noted biblical passages, for instance Psalm 44(46):2: "lingua mea calamus velociter scribentis."
20. He may well have been aware that, as Keen points out (1984 72-73), the patterns of the liturgical service of investiture had originally been derived from the ceremonies of coronation of kings.
1. Physics 4.223b.14; and Cornford 1937 103. See also Convivio 4.2.5-6: "il tempo è numero di movimento."
2. Macrobius, as Stahl points out (Macrobius 1952 162), overlooks the fact that the zodiacal order places Mercury just above the sun, while in Plato's order the next planet is Venus.
3. The two six-hour intervals, each occupying a quadrant, are matched by the reference in 27.143 to the nine thousand years, or three zodiacal signs (also a quadrant of the whole zodiac), required for the shift of the vernal equinox to December. In 27.115-17, Dante refers to the Primum Mobile as the standard by which time is measured; he uses as an analogy the measurement of ten by 1/2 (= 5) and 1/5 (= 2), addends of seven, and elements of the 6/1, 5/2, 4/3 system of shifting rhyme-words in the sestina.
4. The number 1296 is of course not technically perfect. The next perfect number after 6, 7, and 10 is 28, the sum of the first seven digits; it has a special relation to the sun, since it denumerates the great solar year of a "week" of leap years (thus 7 × 4). Multiplying 28 by the great lunar "year" of 19 years (the paschal or synodal cycle), we derive the "great year" of 532 years. See Honorius of Autun De imagine mundi, chap. 79 ( PL 172.157). break
1. For the theological meaning of the Paradiso gemstones in general, which is based on the iconography of the celestial Jerusalem (Apoc. 21.19-22) and the description of the faithful as the vivi lapides, the living stones of the spiritual city, in 1 Peter 2:4-5, see Schnapp 1986 194-198.
2. See Intelligenza 39.1 (Battaglia 1930 153): "Elitropia v'è, cara margherita."
3. Dante's order inverts that of Albertus Magnus (1967 39-43), which begins the discussion of color in stones with crystal and adamant, then red, blue, and green stones (the balash ruby, sapphire, and topaz are mentioned), and finally white stones—pearls.
4. Albertus Magnus (ibid. 75) holds that the balash is weaker than the carbuncle, "just as the female is as compared to the male."
3. Dante's order inverts that of Albertus Magnus (1967 39-43), which begins the discussion of color in stones with crystal and adamant, then red, blue, and green stones (the balash ruby, sapphire, and topaz are mentioned), and finally white stones—pearls.
4. Albertus Magnus (ibid. 75) holds that the balash is weaker than the carbuncle, "just as the female is as compared to the male."
5. On this stone, see Isidore Etymologiarum liber 16.10.6 ( PL 82.575c): "Solis gemma candida est, traxitque nomen, quod ad speciem solis in orbem fulgentes spargit radios."
6. For the etymology of tò pân, given in the Glossa ordinaria, see Schnapp 1987 197-198.
1. The sense of this paragraph depends on a typically medieval version of the Platonic doctrine of participation, in which something or someone is "worthy" by virtue of participation in the abstract (and higher) principle of "worth."
2. Salus has a range of meanings, including health, safety, and salvation.
3. Mengaldo (Dante 1979a 163) translates: "Quanto a noi, quindi, che miriamo a un'opera dottrinale, ci occorrerà emulare le loro poetiche ricchi di dottrina," clearly taking poetrias to mean "treatises on poetry." This reading does not satisfy us, especially because the ergo of the next sentence does not refer to a manner of writing treatises but to a method of writing poetry. It should be noted that the nobis of this sentence follows on "quantum . . . imitemur, tantum . . . poetemur." Dante's point is that our method of writing poetry should resemble as much as possible that of the "regular" poets, though we write in the vernacular. In other words, he is not calling attention to his echoing Horace here because that is how one writes a treatise (which would be trivial), but because he is transmitting the precepts of the method.
4. Horace Epistles 2.1 38-140: "Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis aequam / viribus, et versate diu, quid ferre recusent, / quid valeant umeri" ("Take on a subject equal to your powers, O you who write, and consider for a long time what your shoulders are strong enough to bear, what they will refuse").
5 . Aeneid 6.128-129: "Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras, / hoc opus, hic labor est" ("But to retrace one's steps and emerge [from the underworld] to the upper air, this is the work, this is the labor").
6. This and the next parenthetical comment suggest that Dante did not understand the nature of the masculine endings or of the standard ten-syllable line in Provençal and French. In Italian, most words are accented on the penult, and the normal line (the hendecasyllable) has a feminine ending. break
7. Even numbers were thought of as female, odd as male, with three (the first odd number) being the first stable structure. These Pythagorean notions may help explain Dante's misunderstanding about the normative line in Provençal and French.
8. This sentence uses the artifices of isocolon and inversion but lacks the socalled rhetorical color of metaphor; Dante's target is a clearly identifiable academic style. See Mengaldo, in Dante 1979a 180-181.
9. This sentence adds to the refinements of the previous one that of sarcasm, since the marchese in question is the notorious and hated Azzo VIII (Mengaldo, in Dante 1979a 181).
10. Mengaldo writes: "F. Forti (in Dante e Bologna, pp. 127-149) has given the best explanation: this pattern is differentiated from the preceeding ones especially by its use of the metaphoric-symbolic technique of transumption, summit of the ornatus difficilis: Florence is personified . . . as a lady 'from whose bosom have been snatched the flowers that adorned her' (her best citizens), and the one who perpetrated the violence, Charles of Valois, is identified antonomastically with Totila (the destroyer of Florence, confused with Attila . . .). . . . Charles of Valois' responsibility for the Florentine crisis of 1301-1302 is polemically associated . . . with the defeat of the Angevin war on Sicily, which took place soon after" (Dante 1979a 182-183).
11. The obscurity of this paragraph derives from the fact that Dante shifts from one sense in which the term song can be active or passive (i.e., referring to the same event, it means the act of singing or the thing sung) to another. In the second part of the paragraph, Dante refers to two different events (the composition of the song and its later performance), and his use of the ideas of activity and passivity refers more particularly to the imparting or the receiving of form. Thus the composition of a song is active because it imposes form on the song, but its performance is passive because the singer must conform his performance to the song, take on the form of the song.
12. These are the three types of stanza with diesis: (1) undivided first part ( frons ), divided second part ( versus ); (2) divided first part ( pedes ), undivided second part ( sirma ); (3) divided first part ( pedes ), divided second part ( versus ).
13. Only the first line of this canzone—unique in Dante's output, as it seems, in having a frons —has survived.
14. That there can be a stanza with diesis but with undivided first and second parts seems directly to contradict 10.3-4 above.
15. Dante is referring to a form of internal rhyme, frequent in the dolce stil nuovo, in which the beginning of one line (usually a hendecasyllable) rhymes with the ending of the previous line; in "Poscia ch'Amor del tutto m'ha lasciato," for example, in each pes a trisyllable at the beginning of the third verse (a hendecasyllable) rhymes with the preceding verse (a quinario): break
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16. The notion that the initial arrangement of the rhyme-words of a sestina (as well as the successive ones) is a matter of indifference, when much of the interest of the form in fact depends on it, seems evasive or even deliberately misleading. Similarly, Dante makes no distinction between rhymes and rhyme-words.
17. Here is another contradiction, this time with the first sentence of this lemma 10.
18. Dante is apparently thinking of a second part in which either (a) the concatenation or the final rhymed pair encloses two or more identical versus or (b) the order of the last versus is changed (e.g., by adding a line) to permit the rhymed ending. "Io sento sì d'amor la gran possanza" seems to be the only instance in Dante's poems; the scheme is AbC.AbC:CDDE.CDDE.FF, thus an instance of possibility (a)—i.e., the concatenation is achieved (as in "Donne ch'avete") by the presence of the C rhyme as the first in the versus, and a couplet is added after the two identical versus.
19. This passage is discussed in Appendix 1. break
Appendices
Appendix 1—
"Nascentis militie dies"
In Book 2 of the De vulgari eloquentia, after treating the ordering of rhymes in the canzone stanza, Dante lists three particular faults in the use of rhyme:
Tria ergo sunt que circa rithimorum positionem potiri dedecet aulice poetantem: nimia scilicet eiusdem rithimi repercussio, nisi forte novum aliquid atque intentatum artis hoc sibi preroget—ut nascentis militie dies, qui cum nulla prerogativa suam indignatur preterire dietam: hoc etenim nos facere nisi sumus ibi:
Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna;
secundum vero est ipsa inutilis equivocatio, que semper sententie quicquam derogare videtur; et tertium est rithimorum asperitas, nisi forte sit lenitati permixta: nam lenium asperorumque rithimorum mixtura ipsa tragedia nitescit.
(Dante 1979a 232–234)
There are three things, then, in the disposing of rhymes, which it is not fitting for the courtly poet to do: namely, the excessive repetition of the same rhyme, unless perhaps some new and unprecedented artistic intention demands this, like the day of the birth of a knighthood, which disdains to go by without claiming some prerogative: this we strove to do in:
Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna;
and the second is useless equivocation, which always seems to detract from the meaning; and the third is harshness of rhyme, unless it is mixed well with smoothness: for tragedy particularly shines in the mixing of harsh and smooth rhymes.
Interpretation of this passage has in general followed the lines set down by Gianfranco Contini in his edition of the rime:
Quando, nella penultima pagina del De vulgari, [Dante] condannò, con l'inutile equivocazione, dannosa al senso logico (la sententia ), la soverchia ripetizione d'una stessa rima, di quella sua poetica ormai vecchia celebrò tuttavia ancora l'ardita intenzione di novità e il prodotto. . . . Il novum aliquid atque intentatum riproduce quasi alla lettera la novità del congedo, che non fu mai pensata in alcun tempo . . . . Nei primi anni del secolo dunque
. . . sonnecchiava ancora in Dante l'ammirazione per l'antico tecnico ch'era stato in lui: poiché veramente non s'esce dall'ambito della pura tecnica.
(Dante 1946 160)
We have cited this passage in Chapter 4, as representative of the prejudice that has prevailed against "Amor, tu vedi ben." Once one accepts, as we have tried to demonstrate, that "Amor, tu vedi ben" is an impressive achievement in which the equivocal rhymes are far from "useless," it is clear that the notion that the De vulgari eloquentia is critical of the petrose must be reexamined.[1] Contini's phrases "quella sua poetica ormai vecchia" and "l'antico tecnico ch'era stato in lui" spring from the traditional undervaluing of the petrose that does not see the nature of their links with the Commedia.
Moreover, in view of the insistence on technique we find in the De vulgari eloquentia, not to speak of the Commedia, it is odd to be asked to suppose that when he wrote the De vulgari eloquentia Dante was no longer a technician: why "l'antico tecnico" and "era stato"? Further, does Dante's analogy with the nascentis militie dies justify the term "sonnecchiava . . . l'ammirazione"? Does the comparison indicate that Dante's pride was slumbering or that it was very much awake? Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo makes a very perceptive point, though he fails to draw from it the natural conclusion; he points out that Dante has used the analogy between poets and knights earlier in Book 2 of the treatise:
Et cum loquela non aliter sit necessarium instrumentum nostre conceptionis quam equus militis, et optimis militibus optimi conveniant equi, ut dictum est, optimis conceptionibus optima loquela conveniet. Sed optime conceptiones non possunt esse nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est: ergo optima loquela non convenit nisi illis in quibus ingenium et scientia est. Et sic non omnibus versificantibus optima loquela conveniet. . . .
(Dante 1979a 144)[2]
And since speech is not less necessary an instrument of our thought than a horse is to a knight, and since it is fitting that the best knights have the best horses, as we have said, it is fitting that the best language be used for the best conceptions. But the best conceptions can only be found where there is wit and knowledge. And thus it will not be fitting that all versifiers use the best language . . .
Dante's reference to the ceremony of investing a knight,[3] then, comes in a context where he is (1) claiming the authority to define the "illustrious volgare"; and (2) adopting the role of arbiter of its use, restricting it to the very best poets, who, like the best knights, have the right to exclusive use of the best vehicle, since only they can manage it appropriately. And one must not lose sight of the fact that in each case Dante cites his own canzoni as instances of, not departures from, the illustre vulgare; he is seeking to establish the validity of his claim to judge and rank the achievements of all other poets. Can there be any doubt that throughout the De vulgari eloquentia Dante implicitly claims to be the best poet writing in Italian? The entire context, then, implies that the metaphorical investiture of Dante as poet was a particularly exalted one, and thus the
special achievement appropriate to it must be an achievement comparable to that in the knighting of the best knights.[4]
The traditional view, as we see it in Contini's and Mengaldo's formulations, takes the phrase nimia . . . eiusdem rithimi repercussio as identifying a fault in "Amor, tu vedi ben." But this seems to us to be a distortion of the sense of Dante's words. While asserting that excessive repetition of the same rhyme is usually a fault, he also asserts that under certain circumstances it is not a fault, namely, when it is justified and supported by an unusual total artistic purpose, as in "Amor, tu vedi ben." In this assertion he uses the same concessive formula, nisi forte, as he does later in the passage when he asserts that while harshness of rhymes is a fault, under certain circumstances it is not a fault, that is, when the harsh rhymes are blended with smooth ones.[5]
Mengaldo rightly accepts Maggini's gloss on the analogy: "il nascentis militie dies non alluderà all'età giovanile, come vuole il Marigo . . ., ma 'al principio del nuovo esercizio, della nuova maniera."' By the same token, the point of the analogy is not that on the day of his investiture a new knight is to be indulged in un-knightly or in some sense incompetent activity, but rather that it is appropriate for the new knight to achieve something particularly fine. If Dante had thought that "Amor, tu vedi ben" was a seriously flawed poem, he would never have cited it as the achievement that marks his arrival to maturity as a poet. His arrival to maturity—and also to a degree of social standing, honor, and responsibility analogous to that of the best knights. What marks that day must be an achievement that has some claim to seriousness of purpose, not a mere technical exercise or a "Bizantinismo d'ozio letterario."[6]
An aspect of this passage from the De vulgari eloquentia that has not received the attention it deserves is its relation to Dante's interview with his ancestor Cacciaguida in Paradiso 14–17.[7] As has always been recognized, this interview is a particularly important moment in the definition of Dante's mission as poet. It is the most elaborate of the reenactments in the poem of Aeneas's meeting with Anchises in Aeneid 6; Cacciaguida makes explicit and explains the earlier obscure prophecies about Dante's exile; and, in answer to Dante's worries about whether his poem will offend the powerful, Cacciaguida not only encourages him to write fearlessly but—and this is the aspect that most interests us—also explains that Dante's journey through the Other World has taken place in order that he may write the poem:
Ché se la voce tua sarà molesta
nel primo gusto, vital nodrimento
lascerà poi, quando sarà digesta.
Questo tuo grido farà come vento,
che le più alte cime più percuote;
e ciò non fa d'onor poco argomento.
Però ti son mostrate in queste rote,
nel monte e nel la valle dolorosa
pur l'anime che son di fama note,
che l'animo di quel ch'ode, non posa
né ferma fede per essempro ch'aia
la sua radice incognita e ascosa,
né per altro argomento che non paia.
( Paradiso 17. 130–142)
It must be stressed that this passage is unique in the Commedia; nowhere else is it stated that the writing of the poem is the final cause of Dante's journey.[8] It is no exaggeration to say that Cacciaguida explicitly lays on Dante the duty of writing the poem and that he is empowered to authorize him to do so. In other words, in the interview between Cacciaguida and Dante we have an analog of the ceremony of knightly investiture; Dante is being armed and prepared for the mission of writing the Commedia as though he were being knighted.[9]
It is not surprising that these central cantos are filled with references to the ceremony of knightly investiture. The first such reference is Dante's exclamation on seeing the souls shining in the pattern of the cross "deep in Mars": "O Elïòs che sì li addobbi!" (Paradiso 14.96). The verb addobbare derives, of course, from the French adouber, "to dub (a knight)," one of the two most important items in the terminology of knightly investiture, the other being accolade, or colée, referring to the traditional blow on the cheek or neck received by the new knight. The exact meaning of adouber is disputed. Marc Bloch (1939 435–436) supposed that it derived from a Germanic word for "strike" and thus referred to the colée, while more recent opinion sees it as referring to the traditional gift of complete arms to the aspirant or, specifically, to the girding on of the most important of them, the sword (Flori 1976, 1978, 1979). The traditional gloss on Dante's use of the term here is "to adorn,"[10] which is no doubt accurate enough as far as it goes. There seems no doubt that Dante understood the term as referring to arming or clothing, rather than to the colée; but the full sense of his use of the term is only seen in relation to his other references to knightly investiture.
Several of these are explicit. Cacciaguida's account of himself in Paradiso 15 relates that the emperor Conrad knighted him: "el mi cinse de la sua milizia," where milizia refers specifically to knighthood (Aglianò), and there is no doubt that cinse refers to the girding on of the sword.[11] In Paradiso 16.130, Cacciaguida says of the Florentines who were knighted by the "gran barone" (Ugo il Grande), "da esso ebbe milizia e privilegio,"[12] where the main reference is to the fact of being knighted and only implicitly to the ceremony.
Dante has not insisted on the analogy, but its presence is clear. He is to be a Crusader for the truth, like Cacciaguida; he prepares for the ceremony with a particularly intense act of devotion, a holocaust (sacrifice) of his will (Paradiso 14.88–93); Cacciaguida's status as ancestor, as Crusader, as knighted by an emperor, makes him parallel to the traditional sponsor (see Keen 1984 66–67, 77–79). Perhaps the most telling of the implicit echoes of the ceremony of investiture in Dante's Sendung is the prediction of his exile. This clearly corresponds to the accolade of investiture, the symbolic blow on the cheek or neck, which, as we infer from Dante's treatment here, he associated with the blow on the cheek given in the sacrament of confirmation: a foretaste, then, of the suffer-
ings the new soldier of Christ must be prepared to undergo. Dante's exile is referred to in the terminology of battle. He asks Cacciaguida to clarify the predictions he has received:
dette mi fuor di mia vita futura
parole gravi, avvegna ch'io mi senta
ben tetragono ai colpi di ventura;
per che la voglia mia saria contenta
d'intender qual fortuna mi s'appressa:
ché saetta prevista vien più lenta.
(Paradiso 17.22–27)
The tetragono is first the geometric square, expressing the balanced firmness of Dante's character, but it is also the figure made by joining the endpoints of the quadranti in tondo to which the cross in Canto 14 has been compared.
Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta
più caramente; e questo è quello strale
che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta . . .
E quel che più ti graverà le spalle. . . .
(Paradiso 17.55–57, 61)
The weight on the shoulders is generically a burden, but in the full context there is a clear reference to the cross the Christian must bear, as well as to the cross worn on the shoulder by the Crusader. The reference to the tetragono, then, must be understood as including reference to the cross as shield and to its frequent inscription on shields.[13]
Ben veggio, padre mio, sì come sprona
lo tempo verso me, per colpo darmi
tal, ch'è più grave a chi più s'abbandona;
per che di provedenza è buon ch'io m'armi.
(Paradiso 17.106–109; emphasis added)
Particularly striking is this image of the antagonist as mounted on a horse, spurring toward Dante to strike a blow (probably with a lance; if not, certainly with a sword),[14] against which Dante must arm himself: the metaphors are knightly, and it is necessary to imagine Dante as also on horseback—that is, metaphorically at least, as a knight. From this perspective it becomes clear that the apparently casual pun which has a Cavalcante falling backward ("supin ricadde," Inferno 10.72) is by no means casual but is a variant of the jousting metaphor: Cavalcante falls as if unhorsed in a knightly combat, and against the same antagonist Dante sees spurring toward him: time, the whole focus of Cavalcante's misunderstanding of Dante's ebbe.[15] The encounter with Cavalcante and Farinata is in several respects the most important prefiguring of the encounter with Cacciaguida; common to Inferno 10 and Paradiso 17 are the major themes of poetic mission, poetic superiority, exile, death, foreknowledge, and faith.[16] In contrast with the hysterical instability of Cavalcante, Dante will be firm and circumspect in his joustings with the great adversaries.[17]
An important vehicle of the analogy with knightly investiture is the terminology of clothing, which is evident in the terms addobbare and cingere. As has been observed ofInferno 26, Dante associates his mission as poet with the prophetic roles of Elijah and Elishah, the symbol of whose transfer of authority is the inheritance of Elijah's mantle (pallium ) by Elishah (2 Kings 2:13), "colui che si vengiò con li orsi" (Inferno 26.34). In Inferno 26–27, the fiery fasce of the false counsellors are parodic versions of the prophet's mantle, but they are also parallel to the robes of light of the souls in the Paradiso, of whom it can also be said that "catun si fascia di quel ch'elli è inceso." The mantle recurs at the beginning of Paradiso 16 (just after Cacciaguida's account of his life and death). Here it is only indirectly related to the prophet's mantle:
O poca nostra nobiltà di sangue,
se gloriar di te la gente fai
qua giiù dove l'affetto nostro langue,
mirabil cosa non mi sarà mai:
ché là dove appetito non si torce,
dico nel cielo, io me ne gloriai.
Ben se' tu manto che tosto raccorce:
sì che, se non s'appon di di in die,
lo tempo va dintorno con le force.
(Paradiso 16.1–9)
Although only indirect, the grounds of the connection of this mantle with that of the prophet and the clothing of a knight are clear enough. First is the representation of an inheritance as a mantle, derived from the passage in 2 Kings. Second is the fact that what Dante inherits from Cacciaguida, nobility, is directly related to the theme of knighthood. Add the intensity of the theme of Dante's receiving his mission and, fourth, the associations set up in Canto 15 with Elijah and Elishah: first, Cacciaguida tells us that one of his brothers was named Elishah (Eliseo—Paradiso 15.136); second, he relates his death as a divesting of his soul from the coils of the world:
Quivi fu' io da quella gente turpa
disviluppato dal mondo fallace.
(15.145–147)
Again deeply submerged is the connection with Elijah, who as he ascends is divested of his mantle; that the connection is not arbitrary is guaranteed by the emphasis placed on Cacciaguida's having been girt by the emperor and the use of addobbare for the shining garment that makes the souls invisible to Dante, parallel to the other fiery garment that was explicitly compared to Elijah's fiery chariot. The provedenza with which Dante wishes to arm himself has a clear connection with the theme of foreknowledge and prophecy.[18]
A clear implication of Paradiso 17—and one that is entirely consistent with De vulgari eloquentia 2—is that Dante's weapon, the pen, is the analog of the knight's sword and lance; and on the association with prophecy (and cf. Cacciaguida's term visione ), on the heavenly imposition of Dante's mission, rests the
implicit reference to Ephesians 6:17, "adsumite gladium spiritus, quod est verbum Dei." Cacciaguida's "Tutta tua vision fa manifesta" echoes Apocalypse 1:17, 19: "Noli timere . . . Scribe ergo quae vidistis."[19]
Returning to Dante's use of the analogy of knightly investiture in connection with "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna," it is clear that when Dante wrote the passage in Book 2 of the De vulgari eloquentia he did not foresee the use he would make of the analogy in the Commedia; one is tempted to say that he had not yet seen the complex interconnections we have pointed out between his exile and what he would come to regard as his consecration as the poet of the sacro poema. But the fact that in the Commedia he used the analogy to express his sense of mission and that he entwined it so thoroughly with the imagery of the prophetic mantle and the jousting and archery metaphors we have examined does not undermine the point we have made about the analogy as a claim for the seriousness of "Amor, tu vedi ben." The metaphor of knightly investiture was a solemn and exalted one for Dante,[20] so much so that he featured it in one of the culminating episodes of the Paradiso. It must therefore be taken very seriously when we find it in the De vulgari eloquentia.
In view of all these considerations, we find it extremely significant that in his reference in De vulgari eloquentia 2.xiii to "Amor, tu vedi ben," in his allusion to knightly investiture, Dante uses also the metaphor of birth to signify his arrival at maturity as a poet (nascentis militie ). As we have tried to show in Chapter 2, the apparently casual reference to birth in "Io son venuto," line 3—"l'orizzonte, quando il sol si corca, ci partorisce il geminato cielo"—is part of a complex of imagery referring to the birth of Dante's new poetics. That view receives a striking confirmation in the fact that in the De vulgari eloquentia Dante explicitly used the metaphor of the birth of a new knighthood to refer to the petrose.
Appendix 2—
The Numerology of the Sestina
The evident relation of the sestina to the number six has been often discussed (Dragonetti 1982 234–236; Durling 1965 84–86; Durling 1976 7–18; Shapiro 1980 49–53); a brief inventory is appropriate here. In both form and content, Dante's sestina exemplifies—manifests—the temporal cycles described in the cosmogony of the Timaeus: "in this manner and for these reasons day and night came into being, the period of the single and most intelligent revolution" (39c [Cornford 1937 115] ). Dante's sestina, with its initial juxtaposition of poco giorno and ombra, echoes the Platonic creation story as well as the hexaemeral account of Genesis 1, in which light is first divided from the dark ("appellavitque lucem diem et tenebras noctem") and the luminaries are subsequently created to mark times and seasons ("et praessent diei ac nocti et dividerent lucem ac tenebras"). Time, we saw in "Amor, tu vedi ben," is coeval with light and motion, but also with number: Plato called it an "everlasting likeness [of eternity] moving according to number" (37d [Cornford 1937 98]). Dante, after Aristotle, understood time as the "numeration of continuous movement"; in the same passage of the Physics, Aristotle observes that time is generally thought to be a circle[1] . The cosmic perspective of Dante's sestina—including shadow, hill, lady, vegetation, and stone—and the turning of time (volta di tempo ) with the seasons are in both these traditions.
The cosmological importance of the number six should not overshadow its intrinsic numerical interest; indeed, they are related, since the "perfection" of six, as Augustine maintains, is the reason for its choice by the Creator for the number of days of creation and for the number of ages (De trinitate 4.4.7–8; PL 42.892). If time is the number of motion, six is the number of time. Six is perfect because the sum of its aliquot parts is equal to their product: 1 × 2 × 3 = 1 + 2 + 3. Augustine's description (which would be repeated by Isidore and thus become standard in the Middle Ages) parses the aliquot parts as both addends and factors in a kind of imbrication: "Sexta ergo eius unum est; tertia, duo; dimidia, tria" (thus 1/6:1; 1/3:2; 1/2:3). "Unum autem et duo et tria consummant eumdem senarium" (PL 42.892). The imbricated form of Augustine's division suggests the double sequence, with inversion, of the displacement of rhyme–word order in the sestina (615243 = 6,5,4; 1,2,3). Six is thus also a kind of reversible number. We have seen that the six in the sestina is one of a series—61 52 43—of numbers that express the apportionment of zodiacal houses to the planets and luminaries. As Macrobius (1970a 89) notes, moreover, the "zodia-
cal" order is (more or less) Plato's order, in which the sun is placed below Mercury and Venus, making it the sixth planet, counting from outside in.[2] Thus the sestina, whose scheme depends on the zodiacal order of the planets, also alludes numerically to the sun—which is in any case the marker of time and principal cause of the seasonal cycles—as a sixth planet.
But the sixes of the sestina allude with specific force to the summit of creation, the microcosm: mankind. A slogan of Honorius of Autun encapsulates the tradition:
Sexta namque die Deus hominem condidit,
sexta aetate, sexta feria, sexta hora eum redemit.
Dante often alludes to the Adamic six. In the Paradiso, Dante's Adam confesses he spent just over six hours in Eden:
"da la prim'ora a quella che seconda,
come'l sol muta quadra, l'ora sesta"
(26.141–142)
—while the pilgrim himself spends ninety degrees of arc—six hours—in his natal sign of Gemini (Paradiso 27.79–81).[3] The sixth canto of each cantica is devoted to one of the collectives of the human city, in increasing order of comprehensiveness: Florence, the divided city of Inferno 6; Italy, abandoned by the emperor, in Purgatorio 6; the flight of the Roman eagle—of Empire—in Paradiso 6. Dante probably derived from Augustine the view that history was divided into six ages, analogous to the days of creation (De trinitate 4.4, 7–8; De civitate Dei 22.24), and that the sixth age, which had begun with the Incarnation, was nearing its close (Convivio 2.14.11–13), to be followed by a time of rest and peace. Thus the sestina, in its move to the seventh unit, the tornata, adumbrates the completion of temporal cycles in the eschaton (Durling 1976 17; Shapiro 1981 70–72); implicitly, the invisible (or nonexistent) eighth unit is a resurrection or a judgment. As the number of man (Apoc. 13.18) and of human history, six is therefore also the number that signifies the immortal soul embedded in time (Durling 1965 88): Dante's sestina does in fact refer to the life span of the speaker ("tutto il mio tempo," 35).
Six is also the specific number that helps date the sestina in the context of the petrose. "Io son venuto" dates itself to the winter solstice of 1296 (12/21/1296 in conventional terms, 12/13/1296—St. Lucy's day—if Dante used the astronomical date of the winter solstice), Christmas Eve if we are to take the reference to the conjunction of Venus and the sun as determinant. The number 1,296 is the fourth power of six; 1296 was also a leap year, and as such referred to in the Julian calendar as annus bissextilis because of the introduction of an extra day six days before the end of February (VI. Kal. Martis)—a double six as it were. The number 1,296 has remarkable properties, such as being divisible by six, nine, twelve, and their squares; in this sense it, too, is "reversible" and "complete."[4]
Time and motion are not the only signifieds of six. As Dragonetti (1982 234–236) observes, the space of the cosmos is traced by the divine sextant: "colui che
volse il sesto allo stremo del mondo" (Paradiso 19.40). The six-line stanzas of the sestina, and thus the sestina itself, are spaces—hexagonal spaces, so to speakwithin which the poet employs and articulates various measured units. Piero Cudini (1982) has shown that Dante exhaustively deploys syntactic, lexical, and phonetic ratios that express six or its inner relations (3:2, 2:1, 4:2, 3:3, 1:3). Among Cudini's instances are the frequency of bipolar or dittological phrases ("di bianco in verde," "Al poco giorno," 11; this feature noted in Dante 1946 157); tricolon ("poggio né muro mai né fronda verde," 24); the proportion of fully assonant to nonassonant pairs of rhyme-words (4:2; colli, verde are excluded); the proportion of thematic-associative pairs (2:2:2); the ratio of rhyme-words in terms of tonic accent on o or e (3:3); the presence of rhymewords in bipolar phrases (4:2; petra and donna excluded); the presence of six stanzas (stanza 5 excluded) with a verse lacking predicate. In this way the hexamorph space is "filled" and elaborated perfectively, like the number itself; the poem, a microcosm of a cosmos traced with the sesto, derives its power from its fullness of sixes.
Appendix 3—
Precious Stones in the Paradiso
Dante's use of words for gemstones in the Paradiso, both generic and specific, repays scrutiny.[1] Dante names the sapphire, balash ruby, diamond, and pearl (as perla ), each only once. But the balasso is a kind of ruby, so its mention forms one of a class with rubino and rubinetti, while perla forms part of a class with the three mentions of margarita. Or does it?—for in old Italian margarita is also a generic term for a precious stone.[2] Thus the use of margarita in the moon, where perla also appears, is probably specific, those in Mercury and Saturn (not normally associated with pearls) probably generic. Sapphire, although appearing only once as such, also appears in a specific verb, inzaffira (there is also a generic verb, ingemma, which appears twice). Topazio is mentioned twice identically. Only one stone is mentioned three times identically, and that is cristallo, which balances the three appearances—one specific, two generic—of margarita. These uses can be ranked:
|
A ranking can also be made of the generic terms for precious stones:
|
|
The uses are more revealing when arranged by heavens (fig. A-1). We also include whether the lapidary term is of the planet, of the soul(s), or other, and whether it is used properly or as a trope. We omit borderline cases like alabastro (15.24), pietra (20.20), ambra (28.25), and vetro (28.1, 28.25); however, the last two are discussed above, pp. 252–254. Dante's scheme is complex but discernible. It is not primarily based on an implicit ranking of the actual properties of the stones, such as color, hardness, or "virtue," except very generally (the milky whiteness of pearl at one extreme, the complete transparency of crystal at the other, with colored stones—red, yellow, red—mostly central).[3] Rather, the chief principle of the arrangement is linguistic: it has to do with the range and intensity of meaning of the terms in context. If we exclude the Empyrean, where the two stones are mentioned in similes for the angels, then the pattern is systematic.
The first two, and the three outermost, spheres are symmetrical because of the repeated margarita in the first two, the repeated cristallo in the last three. Moreover, adamante in the moon is linked to cristallo because adamant is a "darker" crystal (Albertus Magnus 1967 39); to correspond, there is one use of margarita in the sphere of Saturn. Even in view of these symmetries, however, linear development is apparent. The divisions correspond to those of Dante's heaven: first the subsolar planets, then the central sun, Mars, and Jupiter; and finally the spheres joined by the ladder the pilgrim sees in Saturn (Saturn, Stars, Primum Mobile and beyond). The moon and the Empyrean are inferior and superior "terminal zones." In each major section there is development. Thus, in Venus there is the introduction of the first clearly generic term, gioia (after the ambiguously generic margarita in Mercury), of Folco, and the first specific term, balasso, also of Folco. This is a "weak" use of a term in a class, however, because the balash is a weak, or watery, ruby.[4] In the next division, beginning with the sun, the generic gioie pluralizes the use in Venus, now with a new use referring to the sights and sounds of the heaven. Although the sun is poor in terms for gems, Dante's conception of the two crowns (corone ) of theologians suggests that the image of two crowns of gems is implicit (see Freccero 1986 312); on this basis we might entertain Dragonetti's suggestion (1968 302) that Dante includes the solis gemma in the sun.[5] To the generic gioie we then would add the specific, punning "gem of the sun" (cf. ardenti soli at 10.76). From the paucity of the sun we proceed to Mars, where there is another departure, a new generic term, gemma, further varied by its verbal counterpart ingemmi. Gemma here, for the first time since the heaven of the moon ("perla in bianca fronte"), is used properly, of a real gem on a ribbon ("né si partì la gemma dal suo nastro") to describe the movement of Cacciaguida. Most dramatic, however, is a new specific use, topazio—powerful because of its etymology from the Greek tò pân ("the all," totality), which is linked to the status of Mars as the "harmonic" center of the cosmos ("la più bella relazione," as
|
Fig. A–1. Uses of Words for Gemstones, by Heavens
Dante says at Convivio 2.14.0) and perhaps also to its reddish-golden color (it anticipates the golden ladder in Saturn).[6] Jupiter, like the sun, is prevailingly generic: gemme again, the verbal form ingemme, twice repeated; a new diminutive generic form, lapilli; and a new specific form, also weakened by being diminutive, rubinetto, and referring to many souls. The generic dimension is powerful, however, through repetition (gemme is part of a system of rhymes on -emme that recur in the heaven; 18.113–117, 19.1 25–129). The diminution of terms, debility, or veiling of the colored stones in the middle heavens (with the significant exception of the "topaz" Cacciaguida) prepares the domination of the transparent stones and the Virgin's sapphire in the upper. The three last heavens are dominated by the triple repetition of cristallo, in each case more comprehensive. If the force of Jupiter, highest of the middle planets, is generic and cumulative, that of the last three heavens is based on both specificity and breadth of kinds of reference: crystal, specific, of the planet Saturn; margarita, generic, of St. Benedict and other contemplatives; gioia, generic, of Faith—the first abstraction to be represented since the music and lights of the sun. Another unique specific use, zaffiro, of the Virgin, and a unique specific verb, inzaffira, which also refers to the Empyrean, leads to the second appearance of cristallo, standing for John the Evangelist but also comparing him to a sun. In the Primum Mobile, the third use of cristallo is comprehensive to the greatest degree, embracing the entire cosmos.
The logic of Dante's uses of terms for precious stones is therefore one in which terms acquire progressively greater scope and force as they are repeated and varied, with respect to specificity or generality, substantival or verbal form, literal or troped use, depending on context and position in the scheme—much as if they were repeated rhyme-words in the rime petrose; here, too, there is a kind of significant repercussio. Only six distinct kinds of gem are named: adamante, perla (margarita ), balasso (rubinetti, rubino ), topazio, zaffiro, cristallo. Both the relative paucity of uses and the number six recall the practice of the petrose, where three stones (marmo, cristallina petra, and diaspro ) are specifically named and the number six figures prominently. It is striking that the only important class of colored stones omitted are the green stones (which make up the important first group in Isidore's lapidary), while in the petrose both of the colored stones named or implied (elitropia, diaspro ) are traditionally green. Of course, the presence of Beatrice, whose eyes are smeraldi (Purgatorio 31.116) may account for the omission. More striking still is the fact that the system begins with the "obscure" crystal, adamant, and achieves perfection in the repetition of cristallo—the only name of a precious stone reminiscent of the petrose; it is therefore not implausible to deduce that Dante thought of the luminous Paradiso (and perhaps of the whole Commedia, which also includes cristallo at its lowest point, Inferno 33.98) as a great crystal.
Appendix 4—
Texts and Translations:
The Rime petrose
Vita nuova 19
De vulgari eloquentia, Book 2
The Rime Petrose
1
I have come to the point on the wheel where the horizon gives birth at sunset to the twinned heaven,
and the star of love is kept from us by the sun's ray that straddles her so transversely that she is veiled;
and that planet that strengthens the frost shows itself to us entirely, along the great arc where each of the seven casts little shadow: and nonetheless my mind casts off not one of the thoughts of love that burden me, mind harder than stone to hold fast an image of stone.
There arises from the sand of Ethiopia a traveling wind that darkens the air, all because of the sun's sphere that heats it now;
and it crosses the sea and brings us such plenteous cloud that if some other wind does not scatter it, it shuts and solidifies all this hemisphere;
and then it resolves itself and falls in white flakes of cold snow and in harmful rain, and the air becomes all grieving and weeps: and Love, though he take up his spiderwebs on account of the rising wind, does not abandon me, so beautiful a lady is this cruel one given to me as lady.
Every bird that pursues the warmth has fled the lands of Europe, which never once lose the seven cold stars;
and the others have posted a truce to their songs and will not sound them again until the green season, unless it be for some distress;
and all animals that are happy by nature are released from loving, for the cold extinguishes their spirit: and mine bears more love; for sweet thoughts are not taken from me nor given to me by time's turning, but a lady gives them who has lived but a short time.
1
Io son venuto al punto de la rota
che l'orizzonte, quando il sol si corca,
ci partorisce il geminato cielo,
e la stella d'amor ci sta remota
per lo raggio lucente che la 'nforca
6 sì di traverso che le si fa velo;
e quel pianeta che conforta il gelo
si mostra tutto a noi per lo grand'arco
nel qual ciascun di sette fa poca ombra:
e però non disgombra
un sol penser d'amore, ond'io son carco,
la mente mia ch'è più dura che petra
13 in tener forte imagine di petra.
Levasi de la rena d'Etïopia
lo vento peregrin che l'aere turba,
per la spera del sol ch'ora la scalda;
e passa il mare, onde conduce copia
di nebbia tal che, s'altro non la sturba,
19 questo emisperio chiude tutto e salda;
e poi si solve, e cade in bianca falda
di fredda neve ed in noiosa pioggia,
onde l'aere s'attrista tutto e piagne:
e Amor, che sue ragne
ritira in alto pel vento che poggia,
non m'abbandona, sì è bella donna
26 questa crudel che m'è data per donna.
Fuggito è ogne augel che 'l caldo segue
del paese d'Europa, che non perde
le sette stelle gelide unquemai;
e li altri han posto a le lor voci triegue
per non sonarle infino al tempo verde,
32 se ciò non fosse per cagion di guai;
e tutti li animali che son gai
di lor natura, son d'amor disciolti,
però che '1 freddo lor spirito ammorta:
e 'l mio più d'amor porta;
ché li dolzi pensier' non mi son tolti
né mi son dati per volta di tempo,
39 ma donna li mi dà c'ha picciol tempo.
The leaves have passed their limit, appointed when the power of Aries brought them forth to adorn the world, and the grass is dead;
every branch with green foliage is hidden from us, except in laurel, pine, fir, or other that keeps its verdure;
and the season is so strong and bitter that it has killed the little flowers along the slopes, which cannot endure the frost: and his cruel thorn Love for all that does not draw from my heart, for I am certain to bear it ever while I am alive, though I should live forever.
The veins pour forth smoking waters because of the vapors the earth has in her belly, who draws them up from the abyss;
therefore the path that on a fair day pleased me has now become a river, and will be one as long as the great assault of winter lasts;
it turns the ground into a surface like enamel, and the standing water changes to glass because of the cold that locks it in from without: and I in my war have not turned back one step for all that, nor do I wish to; for if the suffering is sweet, the death must surpass every other sweet.
Song, now what will become of me in that other sweet new season, when love rains down on the earth from all the heavens, if through these freezings love is only in me and not elsewhere? It will be with me as with a man of marble, if in a young girl there is a heart of marble.
2
To the shortened day and to the great circle of shade
I have come, alas! and to the whitening of the hills,
when the color is lost from the grass:
and my desire still does not lose its green,
it is so barbed in the hard stone
that speaks and has sensation as if it were a lady.
Passato hanno lor termine le fronde
che trasse fuor la vertù d'Arïete
per adornare il mondo, e morta è l'erba;
ramo di foglia verde a noi s'asconde
se non se in lauro, in pino od in abete
45 o in alcun che sua verdura serba;
e tanto è la stagion forte ed acerba
c'ha morti li fioretti per le piagge,
li quai non poten tolerar la brina:
e la crudele spina
però Amor di cor non la mi tragge;
per ch'io son fermo di portarla sempre
52 ch'io sarò in vita, s'io vivesse sempre.
Versan le vene le fummifere acque
per li vapor' che la terra ha nel ventre,
che d'abisso li tira suso in alto;
onde cammino al bel giorno mi piacque
che ora è fatto rivo, e sarà mentre
58 che durerà del verno il grande assalto;
e la terra fa un suol che par di smalto,
e l'acqua morta si converte in vetro
per la freddura che di fuor la serra:
e io de la mia guerra
non son però tornato un passo a retro,
né vo' tornar; ché, se '1 martiro è dolce,
65 la morte de' passare ogni altro dolce.
Canzone, or che sarà di me ne l'altro
dolce tempo novello, quando piove
amore in terra da tutti li cieli,
quando per questi geli
amore è solo in me, e non altrove?
Saranne quello ch'è d'un uom di marmo,
72 se in pargoletta fia per core un marmo.
2
Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra
son giunto, lasso, ed al bianchir de' colli,
quando si perde lo color ne l'erba:
e 'l mio disio però non cangia il verde,
sì è barbato ne la dura petra
6 che parla e sente come fosse donna.
So too this strange lady
stands there frozen, like snow in the shade:
for she is not moved except as a stone is
by the sweet season that warms the hills
and turns them from white to green
and clothes them with flowers and grass.
When she has on her head a garland of leaves
she drives from my mind every other lady:
because the curling yellow mingles with the green
so beautifully that Love comes to stay in the shade there,
Love who has locked me among little hills
more firmly than mortar locks a stone.
Her beauty has more power than a precious stone,
and the wound it gives cannot be healed by herbs:
for I have fled over plains and over hills
to learn to escape from such a lady;
and yet from her face there is no shade,
not of a hill, or a wall ever, or a green branch.
I saw her once dressed in green
such that she would have begotten in a stone
the love that I feel for her very shadow:
and so I have wished to have her in a fine meadow of grass,
as much in love as ever lady was,
a meadow closed in all around with high hills.
But well may the rivers climb the hills
before this moist green wood
will ever take fire (as ladies do)
for me, though I would endure to sleep on stone
all my season, and go eating grass,
so I might only see where her skirts make a shade.
Whenever the hills make blackest shade,
under a lovely green the youthful lady
makes it disappear, as a man a stone under grass.
3
Love, you see perfectly well that this lady
cares nothing for your power at any time,
though you be accustomed to lord it over other ladies:
and since she has been aware of being my lady
because of your light that shines in my face,
she has made herself Lady Cruelty,
so that she does not seem to have the heart of a woman
but of whatever beast keeps its love coldest:
for in the warm weather and in the cold
Similemente questa nova donna
si sta gelata come neve a l'ombra:
ché non la move, se non come petra,
il dolce tempo che riscalda i colli,
e che li fa tornar di bianco in verde
12 perché li copre di fioretti e d'erba.
Quand'ella ha in testa una ghirlanda d'erba,
trae de la mente nostra ogn'altra donna:
perché si mischia il crespo giallo e 'l verde
sì bel, ch'Amor lì viene a stare a l'ombra,
che m'ha serrato intra piccioli colli
18 più forte assai che la calcina petra.
La sua bellezza ha più vertù che petra,
e 'l colpo suo non può sanar per erba:
ch'io son fuggito per piani e per colli,
per potere scampar da cotal donna;
e dal suo lume non mi può far ombra
24 poggio né muro mai né fronda verde.
Io l'ho veduta già vestita a verde,
sì fatta ch' ella avrebbe messo in petra
l'amor ch'io porto pur a la sua ombra:
ond'io l'ho chesta in un bel prato d'erba,
innamorata com'anco fu donna,
30 e chiuso intorno d'altissimi colli.
Ma ben ritorneranno i fiumi a' colli
prima che questo legno molle e verde
s'infiammi, come suol far bella donna,
di me; che mi torrei dormire in petra
tutto il mio tempo e gir pascendo l'erba,
36 sol per veder do' suoi panni fanno ombra.
Quandunque i colli fanno più nera ombra,
sotto un bel verde la giovane donna
39 la fa sparer, com'uom petra sott' erba.
3
Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna
la tua vertù non cura in alcun tempo,
che suol de l'altre belle farsi donna;
e poi s'accorse ch'ell'era mia donna
per lo tuo raggio ch'al volto mi luce,
6 d'ogne crudelità si fece donna;
sì che non par ch'ell'abbia cor di donna,
ma di qual fiera l'ha d'amor più freddo:
che per lo tempo caldo e per lo freddo
she seems to me exactly like a lady
carved from some lovely precious stone
by the hand of some master carver of stone.
And I, who am constant (even more than a stone)
in obeying you, for the beauty of a lady,
I carry hidden away the wound from that stone
with which you struck me as if I had been a stone
that had caused you pain for a long time,
so that the blow reached my heart, where I have turned to stone.
And never was there found any precious stone
that from the brightness of the sun or its own light
had so much virtue or light
that it could help me against this stone,
that she not lead me with her coldness
to a place where I will be dead and cold.
Lord, you know that in the freezing cold
water becomes crystalline stone
under the mountain wind where the great cold is,
and the air always turns into the cold
element there, so that water is queen
there, because of the cold.
Just so, before her expression that is all cold,
my blood freezes over always, in all weather,
and the care that so shortens my time for me
turns everything into fluid cold
that issues from me through the lights
where her pitiless light came in.
In her, beauty gathers all its light;
and so of all cruelty the cold
flows to her heart, not reached by your light:
so beautiful into my eyes she shines
when I gaze on her, that I see her in stones
and in everything else, wherever I turn my sight.
From her eyes comes to me the sweet light
that makes me not care about any other lady:
would that she were more merciful a lady
toward me, for I call out night and day,
only to serve her, for place and time,
nor for any other reason do I wish to live a long time.
Therefore, O Power older than time,
than motion or visible light,
take pity on me in my evil time;
enter her heart now, for it is surely time,
and drive out the cold
that prevents me from having, like others, my time;
mi fa sembiante pur come una donna
che fosse fatta d'una bella petra
12 per man di quei che me' intagliasse in petra.
E io, che son costante più che petra
in ubidirti per bieltà di donna,
porto nascoso il colpo de la petra
con la qual tu mi desti come a petra
che t'avesse innoiato lungo tempo,
18 tal che m'andò al core ov'io son petra.
E mai non si scoperse alcuna petra
o da splendor di sole o da sua luce,
che tanta avesse né vertù né luce
che mi potesse atar da questa petra,
sì ch'ella non mi meni col suo freddo
24 colà dov'io sarò di morte freddo.
Segnor, tu sai che per algente freddo
l'acqua diventa cristallina petra
là sotto tramontana ov'è il gran freddo,
e l'aere sempre in elemento freddo
vi si converte, sì che l'acqua è donna
30 in quella parte per cagion del freddo:
così dinanzi al sembiante freddo
mi ghiaccia sopra il sangue d'ogne tempo,
e quel pensiero che m'accorcia il tempo
mi si converte tutto in corpo freddo,
che m'esce poi per mezzo de la luce
36 là ond'entrò la dispietata luce.
In lei s'accoglie d'ogni bieltà luce;
così di tutta crudeltate il freddo
le corre al core, ove non va tua luce:
per che ne li occhi sì bella mi luce
quando la miro, ch'io la veggio in petra,
42 e po' in ogni altro ov'io volga mia luce.
Da li occhi suoi mi ven la dolce luce
che mi fa non caler d'ogn'altra donna:
così foss'ella più pietosa donna
ver' me, che chiamo di notte e di luce,
solo per lei servire, e luogo e tempo,
48 né per altro disio viver gran tempo.
Però, vertù che se' prima che tempo,
prima che moto o che sensibil luce,
increscati di me, c'ho sì mal tempo;
entrale in core omai, ché ben n'è tempo,
si che per te se n'esca fuor lo freddo
54 che non mi lascia aver, com'altri, tempo:
for if your strong season
comes upon me in this state, she, noble stone,
will see me lie down in little stone
not to rise again until the end of time,
when I shall see if there was ever a lady
in the world as beautiful as this cruel lady.
Song, I carry in my mind a lady
such that, though to me she be stone,
still she gives me boldness where all other men seem cold:
so that I dare to make in this cold
the newness that lights up your form,
that was never thought before in any time.
4
So in my speech I would be harsh as is in her acts this beautiful stone, who more and more achieves greater hardness and crueler nature,
and she clothes her person with a crystal so hard that—whether because of it or because she dodges—no arrow from any quiver finds her naked, ever.
And she kills, and it avails no man to shield himself or gain distance from her mortal blows, which, as if they had wings, reach you and shatter any armor, and I neither know how nor have the power to defend myself against her.
I find no shield that she may not shatter nor place that may hide me from her face, but, as a flower the tip of a plant, so of my mind she holds the summit.
About my sufferings she seems to care as much as a ship about a sea without waves; and the weight that is sinking me is such that no rhyme can equal it.
Ah, rasping pitiless file, silently wearing away my life, why are you not as afraid to gnaw so at my heart, layer by layer, as I am to tell who gives you your power?
For my heart, whenever I think of her in any place where others send their eyes, for fear that my care may shine through and be discovered, trembles more
ché se mi giunge lo tuo forte tempo
in tale stato, questa gentil petra
mi vedrà coricare in poca petra,
per non levarmi se non dopo il tempo
quando vedrò se mai fu bella donna
60 nel mondo come questa acerba donna.
Canzone, io porto ne la mente donna
tal che, con tutto ch'ella mi sia petra,
mi dà baldanza, ond'ogni uom mi par freddo:
sì ch'io ardisco a far per questo freddo
la novità che per tua forma luce,
66 che non fu mai pensata in alcun tempo.
4
Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro
com' è ne li atti questa bella petra,
la quale ognora impetra
maggior durezza e più natura cruda,
e veste sua persona d'un dìaspro
tal che per lui, o perch'ella s'arretra,
non esce di faretra
8 saetta che già mai la colga ignuda;
ed ella ancide, e non val ch'om si chiuda
né si dilunghi da' colpi mortali
che, com'avesser ali,
giungono altrui e spezzan ciascun'arme:
13 si ch'io non so da lei né posso atarme.
Non trovo scudo ch'ella non mi spezzi
né loco che dal suo viso m'asconda:
ché, come fior di fronda,
Così de la mia mente tien la cima.
Cotanto del mio mal par che si prezzi
quanto legno di mar che non lieva onda;
e 'l peso che m'affonda
21 è tal che non potrebbe adequar rima.
Ahi, angosciosa e dispietata lima
che sordamente la mia vita scemi,
perché non ti ritemi
sì di rodermi il core a scorza a scorza
26 com'io di dire altrui chi ti dà forza?
Ché più mi triema il cor qualora io penso
di lei in parte ov'altri li occhi induca,
per tema non traluca
lo mio penser di fuor sì che si scopra,
than I do at the death that already chews on my every sense with the teeth that Love gives it: that is, my care wears down my powers and slows their work.
He has thrown me to the ground and stands over me with the sword with which he killed Dido—he, Love—to whom I cry out calling for mercy and humbly I beg him, and he seems set to deny all mercy.
Now and again he raises his hand and defies my weak life, this perverse one, and holds me on the ground stretched out and supine, too tired to wriggle any longer:
then in my mind shrieks arise, and my blood that is dispersed through my veins rushes toward my heart, which calls it, and I turn white.
He strikes me under the left arm so fiercely that the pain rebounds into my heart; then I say: "If he lifts his arm another time, Death will have shut me up before the blow can descend."
Would I might see him split her cruel heart right down the middle, for she is quartering mine! Then death would not be black for me, where I run because of her beauty.
For she shoots as much into the sun as into the shade, this murderous thieving gangster. Ah me, why is she not barking for me, as I for her, in the hot pit?
For soon I'd shout: "I'll help you!" and I would, too, gladly, and into her blond hair, which Love curls and gilds to destroy me, I'd put my hand, and then I would please her.
If I had her blond braids grasped in my hand, that to me are become a scourge and a whip, taking hold before tierce I'd pass vespers and the compline bell with them:
and I would not be pitying or courteous, I would be like a bear when it plays, and if Love whips me with them, I would take vengeance more than a thousand times.
ch'io non fo de la morte, che ogni senso
co li denti d'Amor già mi manduca:
ciò è che 'l pensier bruca
34 la lor vertù, sì che n'allenta l'opra.
E' m'ha percosso in terra e stammi sopra
con quella spada ond'elli ancise Dido,
Amore, a cui io grido
merzé chiamando, e umilmente il priego:
39 ed el d'ogni merzé par messo al niego.
Egli alza ad ora ad or la mano, e sfida
la debole mia vita, esto perverso,
che disteso a riverso
mi tiene in terra d'ogni guizzo stanco:
allor mi surgon ne la mente strida;
e 'l sangue, ch'è per le vene disperso,
fuggendo corre verso
47 lo cor, che 'l chiama; ond'io rimango bianco.
Elli mi fiede sotto il braccio manco
sì forte che 'l dolor nel cor rimbalza;
allor dico: "S'elli alza
un'altra volta, Morte m'avrà chiuso
52 prima che 'l colpo sia disceso giuso."
Così vedess'io lui fender per mezzo
lo core a la crudele che 'l mio squatra;
poi non mi sarebb' atra
la morte, ov'io per sua bellezza corro:
ché tanto dà nel sol quanto nel rezzo
questa scherana micidiale e latra.
Omè, perché non latra
60 per me, com'io per lei, nel caldo borro?
ché tosto griderei: "Io vi soccorro!"
e fare' 'l volentier, sì come quelli
che ne' biondi capelli
ch'Amor per consumarmi increspa e dora
65 metterei mano, e piacere'le allora.
S'io avessi le belle trecce prese,
che fatte son per me scudiscio e ferza,
pigliandole anzi terza,
con esse passerei vespero e squille:
e non sarei pietoso né cortese,
anzi farei com'orso quando scherza;
e se Amor me ne sferza,
73 io mi vendicherei di più di mille.
And into her eyes, whence the sparks come forth that inflame and kill my heart, I would look from up close, fixedly, to avenge the fleeing she has done. And then I would give her lovingly the kiss of peace.
Song, go straight to that lady who has wounded my heart but steals away from me what I am most greedy for: and strike her through the heart with an arrow, for lovely honor is acquired by taking vengeance.
Ancor ne li occhi, ond'escon le faville
che m'infiammano il cor, ch'io porto anciso,
guarderei presso e fiso
per vendicar lo fuggir che mi face;
78 e poi le renderei con amor pace.
Canzon, vattene dritto a quella donna
che m'ha ferito il core e che m'invola
quello ond'io ho più gola,
e dàlle per lo cor d'una saetta:
83 ché bell'onor s'acquista in far vendetta.
Vita Nuova 19
It happened then that as I was passing along a road beside which there ran a very clear stream, there came upon me so great a desire to compose, that I began to consider the manner I might follow; and I considered that I ought not to speak to her except addressing ladies in the second person, and not every lady, only those who are noble and not merely women. Then, I say, my tongue spoke as if moved by itself, and said: Ladies who have intellect of love. These words I stored in my memory with great joy, thinking to make them my beginning; and later, having returned to the city mentioned above, meditating for several days, I began a canzone with this beginning, structured as will be seen below in its division. The canzone begins: Ladies who have.
Ladies who have intellect of love, I wish to speak to you of my lady, not because I believe I can complete her praise, but to speak in order to vent my mind.
I say that when I consider her worth, Love makes himself felt so sweetly, that if I did not lose daring then, I would fill people with love by speaking.
And I do not wish to speak so exaltedly that I should become low because of my fear; but I will treat of her noble state
lightly in relation to her, ladies and amorous damsels, with you, for it is not something of which to speak to others.
An angel cries out in the divine intellect and says: "Lord, in the world is seen a marvel in the act that proceeds from a soul that shines back as far as up here."
Heaven, which has no other lack, requests her from its lord, and every saint begs for the boon of her. Only Mercy defends our part,
for God speaks, referring to milady: "My beloved, now suffer in peace that your hope may be as long as I please
there where there is one who will lose her, and who will say in Hell: O ill-born ones, I have seen the hope of the blessed."
Milady is desired in the highest Heaven: now I wish to tell you of her power. I say, whoever wishes to appear a noble lady, let her walk with her, for when she goes through the street
she casts into ignoble hearts a chill that freezes and kills their every thought; and whichever of them could endure to stay to see her would become a noble thing or would die.
Avvenne poi che passando per uno cammino lungo lo quale sen gia uno rivo chiaro molto, a me giunse tanta volontade di dire, che io cominciai a pensare lo modo ch'io tenesse; e pensai che parlare di lei non si convenia che io facesse, se io non parlasse a donne in seconda persona, e non ad ogni donna, ma solamente a coloro che sono gentili e che non sono pure femmine. Allora dico che la mia lingua parlò quasi come per sé stessa mossa, e disse: Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore. Queste parole io ripuosi ne la mente con grande letizia, pensando di prenderle per mio cominciamento; onde poi, ritornato a la sopradetta cittade, pensando alquanti die, cominciai una canzone con questo cominciamento, ordinata nel modo che si vedrà di sotto ne la sua divisione. La canzone comincia: Donne ch'avete.
Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore,
i' vo' con voi de la mia donna dire,
non perch'io creda sua laude finire,
ma ragionar per isfogar la mente.
Io dico che pensando il suo valore,
Amor sì dolce mi si fa sentire,
che s'io allora non perdessi ardire,
8 farei parlando innamorar la gente.
E io non vo' parlar sì altamente,
ch'io divenisse per temenza vile;
ma tratterò del suo stato gentile
a respetto di lei leggeramente,
donne e donzelle amorose, con vui,
14 ché non è cosa da parlarne altrui.
Angelo clama in divino intelletto
e dice: "Sire, nel mondo si vede
maraviglia ne I'atto che procede
d'un'anima che 'nfin qua su risplende."
Lo cielo, che non have altro difetto
che d'aver lei, al suo segnor la chiede,
e ciascun santo ne grida merzede.
22 Sola Pietà nostra parte difende,
che parla Dio, che di madonna intende:
"Diletti miei, or sofferite in pace
che vostra spene sia quanto me piace
Ià 'v'è alcun che perder lei s'attende,
e che dirà ne lo inferno: O mal nati,
28 io vidi la speranza de' beati."
Madonna è disiata in sommo cielo:
or voi di sua virtù farvi savere.
Dico, qual vuol gentil donna parere
vada con lei, che quando va per via,
gitta nei cor villani Amore un gelo,
per che onne lor pensero agghiaccia e pere;
e qual soffrisse di starla a vedere
36 diverria nobil cosa, o si morria.
And when she finds someone who is worthy to see her, he experiences her power, for whatever she gives him is for his good,
and she so humbles him that he forgets all offenses done to him. More, God has given her as a greater grace that he cannot finish ill who has spoken with her.
Love says of her: "How can a mortal thing be so beautiful and so pure?" Then he gazes at her, and within himself he swears that God intends to make of her some new thing.
She has almost the color of pearl, in a form such as befits a lady, not out of measure: she is whatever good can be made by Nature; by her example beauty is tested.
From her eyes, wherever she may move them, there come forth flaming spirits of love, which strike the eyes of whoever gazes on her,
and they pass within so that each one finds the heart: you see Love portrayed in her face, where no one can gaze fixedly.
Canzone, I know that you will go speaking to many ladies, when I have brought you forward. Now I admonish you, for I have brought you up to be a young and gentle daughter of Love,
that wherever you go you say, requesting: "Show me the way, for I am sent to her whose praise adorns me." And if you do not wish to go about like a vain one,
do not stay where there are ignoble folk: contrive, if you can, to be seen only with ladies or with a courteous man,
for they will lead you there by a quick road. You will find Love with her; commend me to him as you should.
This canzone, so that it may be better understood, I will divide more carefully than the others above. And so first I make three parts of it: the first part is a proem to the following words; the second is the matter treated; the third is as it were a servant of the preceding words. The second begins here: An angel cries out; the third here: Canzone, I know that. The first part is divided into four: in the first I say to whom I wish to speak of my lady, and why; in the second I say how I seem to be when I consider her worth, and how I would speak if I did not lose daring; in the third I say how I intend to speak of her, so that I will not be impeded by cowardice; in the fourth, saying again to whom I wish to speak, I say the reason why I speak to them. The second begins here: I say; the third here: And I do not wish to speak; the fourth: ladies and amorous damsels.
E quando trova alcun che degno sia
di veder lei, quei prova sua vertute,
ché li avvien, ciò che li dona, in salute,
e sì l'umilia, ch'ogni offesa oblia.
Ancor l'ha Dio per maggior grazia dato
42 che non pò mal finir chi l'ha parlato.
Dice di lei Amor: "Cosa mortale
come esser pò sì adorna e sì pura?"
Poi la reguarda, e fra se stesso giura
che Dio ne 'ntenda di far cosa nova.
Color di perle ha quasi, in forma quale
convene a donna aver, non for misura:
ella è quanto de ben pò far natura;
50 per essemplo di lei bieltà si prova.
De li occhi suoi, come ch'ella li mova,
escono spirti d'amore inflammati,
che feron li occhi a qual che allor la guati,
e passan sì che 'l cor ciascun retrova:
voi le vedete Amor pinto nel viso,
56 là 've non pote alcun mirarla fiso.
Canzone, io so che tu girai parlando
a donne assai, quand'io t'avrò avanzata.
Or t'ammonisco, perch'io t'ho allevata
per figliuola d'Amor giovane e piana,
che là 've giugni tu diche pregando:
"Insegnatemi gir, ch'io son mandata
a quella di cui laude so' adornata."
64 E se non vuoli andar sì come vana,
non restare ove sia gente villana:
ingegnati, se puoi, d'esser palese
solo con donne o con omo cortese,
che ti merranno là per via tostana.
Tu troverai Amor con esso lei;
70 raccomandami a lui come tu dei.
Questa canzone, acciò che sia meglio intesa, la dividerò più artificiosamente che l'altre cose di sopra. E però prima ne fo tre parti: la prima parte è proemio de le sequenti parole; la seconda è lo intento trattato; la terza è quasi una serviziale de le precedenti parole. La seconda comincia quivi: Angelo clama; la terza quivi: Canzone, io so che. La prima parte si divide in quattro: ne la prima dico a cu' io dicer voglio de la mia donna, e perché io voglio dire; ne la seconda dico quale me pare avere a me stesso quand'io penso lo suo valore, e com'io direi s'io non perdessi l'ardimento; ne la terza dico come credo dire di lei, acciò ch'io non sia impedito da viltà; ne la quarta, ridicendo anche a cui ne intenda dire, dico la cagione per che dico a loro. La seconda comincia quivi: Io dico; la terza quivi: E io non vo'parlar; la quarta: donne e donzelle.
Then when I say An angel cries out, I begin to treat of this lady. And this part is divided in two: in the first I say what is understood of her in Heaven; in the second I say what is understood of her on earth, here: Milady is desired. This second part is divided in two: for in the first I speak of her in terms of the nobility of her soul, narrating some of her effective powers, which proceed from her soul; in the second I speak of her according to the nobility of her body, narrating some of its beauties, here: Love says of her. This second part is divided in two; for in the first [part] I speak of some beauties that are according to her entire person; in the second I speak of beauties that are according to determined parts of her person, here: From her eyes. This second part is divided in two: for in one I speak of her eyes, which are the beginning of love; in the second I speak of her mouth, which is the goal of love. And so that any vicious thought may be avoided here, be remembered what is written above, that the greeting of this lady, which was among the operations of her mouth, was the goal of my desires as long as I could receive it.
Then when I say: Canzone, I know that you, I add a stanza as it were like a maid-servant to the others, in which I say what I desire of this canzone of mine; and because this last part is easy to understand, I labor in no more divisions.
I do say that in order to open further the meaning of this canzone one would have to use further minute divisions; but in any case, whoever has not sufficient wit that he can understand it by these that have been made, it will not displease me if he let it stand, for certainly I fear that I have communicated its meaning to too many by these divisions, if it should happen that many could hear and heed them.
Poscia quando dico: Angelo clama, comincio a trattare di questa donna. E dividesi questa parte in due: ne la prima dico che di lei si comprende in cielo; ne la seconda dico che di lei si comprende in terra, quivi: Madonna è disiata. Questa seconda parte si divide in due; che ne la prima dico di lei quanto da la parte de la nobilitade de la sua anima, narrando alquanto de le sue vertudi effettive che de la sua anima procedeano; ne la seconda dico di lei quanto da la parte de la nobilitade del suo corpo, narrando alquanto de le sue bellezze, quivi: Dice di lei Amor. Questa seconda parte si divide in due; che ne la prima dico d'alquante bellezze che sono secondo tutta la persona; ne la seconda dico d'alquante bellezze che sono secondo diterminata parte de la persona, quivi: De li occhi. Questa seconda parte si divide in due: che ne l'una dico de li occhi, li quali sono principio d'amore; ne la seconda dico de la bocca, la quale è fine d'amore. E acciò che quinci si lievi ogni vizioso pensiero, ricordisi chi ci legge, che di sopra è scritto che lo saluto di questa donna, lo quale era de le operazioni de la bocca sua, fue fine de li miei desiderii mentre ch'io lo potei ricevere.
Poscia quando dico: Canzone, io so che tu, aggiungo una stanza quasi come ancella de l'altre, ne la quale dico quello che di questa mia canzone desidero; e però che questa ultima parte è lieve a intendere, non mi travaglio in più divisioni.
Dico bene che, a più aprire lo intendimento di questa canzone, si converrebbe usare di più minute divisioni; ma tuttavia chi non è di tanto ingegno che per queste che sono fatte la possa intendere, a me non dispiace se la mi lascia stare, ché certo io temo d'avere a troppi comunicato lo suo intendimento pur per queste divisioni che fatte sono, s'elli avvenisse che molti le potessero audire. (Dante 1980 114–132)
De Vulgari Eloquentia, Book 2
i.1. Soliciting again the celerity of our wit, and returning to pen this profitable work, first of all we say that the illustrious Italian vernacular is suited for both prose and verse. But because prose writers more frequently adopt language from poets and because poetry stands as an example for prose and not vice versa—facts that give it a certain primacy—we will first treat eloquence in verse, as we promised at the end of the first book.
2. Let us ask first, then, whether all those writing verse in the vernacular ought to use the illustrious vernacular. And superficially it seems so, because everyone who writes verse ought to adorn his verses as much as he can: therefore since nothing is so great an adornment as the illustrious vernacular, it seems that every versifier should use it. 3. Besides, if what is best in its kind is mixed with its inferiors, it seems not to be worsened by them at all but rather to improve them: therefore if some versifier, though he write verse crudely, mingles the illustrious vernacular with his crudities, he not only does well, but it seems that he ought to do so: those who have little ability need help much more than those who have great ability. And so it appears that it is permitted to all versifiers to use the illustrious vernacular.
4. But this is most false, for not even those who are best at writing poetry ought always to clothe themselves with it, as will appear from what is said below. 5. The illustrious vernacular, then, demands men similar to itself, like our other mores and manners: for magnificence demands men who can do great things, and purple demands men who are noble. So also the illustrious vernacular demands men excellent in wit and knowledge, and it spurns others, as will appear below. 6. For whatever befits us does so either because of our genus or our species or our individual nature: as, to feel, to laugh, to make war. But the illustrious vernacular does not befit us because of our genus, for then it would befit beasts also; nor because of our species, for then it would befit all men, which is out of the question—for no one will say it befits mountain folk discussing rustic things—: therefore it is fitting or not according to the individual. 7. But nothing is fitting for the individual except on account of his individual worth, for instance to sell, to be a knight, and to reign. Therefore, since the fitting is a correlate of worth, that is, of worthy persons, and some are worthy, some worthier, and some worthiest, it is manifest that good things befit the worthy, better things the worthier, and best things the worthiest. 8. And since language is the necessary instrument of our conceptions, no otherwise than a horse is to a knight, and since the best knights deserve the best horses, as has been said, the best conceptions deserve the best language. But the best conceptions cannot exist except where there is knowledge and wit: therefore the best language only befits those who possess wit and knowledge. And therefore, since many write verses without knowledge or wit, the best language is not suited to all versifiers, and therefore not the best vernacular either. Therefore if it is not suited to all, not all should use it, for no one should act unfittingly.
i.1. Sollicitantes iterum celeritatem ingenii nostri et ad calamum frugi operis redeuntes, ante omnia confitemur latium vulgare illustre tam prosayce quam metrice decere proferri. Sed quia ipsum prosaycantes ab avientibus magis accipiunt et quia quod avietum est prosaycantibus permanere videtur exemplar, et non e converso—que quendam videntur praebere primatum—, primo secundum quod metricum est ipsum carminemus, ordine pertractantes illo quem in fine primi libri polluximus.
2. Queramus igitur prius utrum versificantibus omnes vulgariter debeant illud uti. Et superficietenus videtur quod sic, quia omnis qui versificatur suos versus exornare debet in quantum potest: quare, cum nullum sit tam grandis exornationis quam vulgare illustre, videtur quod quisquis versificator debeat ipsum uti. 3. Preterea, quod optimum est in genere suo, si suis inferioribus misceatur, non solum nil derogare videtur eis, sed ea meliorare videtur: quare si quis versificator, quanquam rude versificetur, ipsum sue ruditati admisceat, non solum bene facit, sed ipsum sic facere oportere videtur: multo magis opus est adiutorio illis qui pauca quam qui multa possunt. Et sic apparet quod omnibus versificantibus liceat ipsum uti.
4. Sed hoc falsissimum est, quia nec semper excellentissime poetantes debent illud induere, sicut per inferius pertractata perpendi potert. 5. Exigit ergo istud sibi consimiles viros, quemadmodum alii nostri mores et habitus: exigit enim magnificentia magna potentes, purpura viros nobiles; sic et hoc excellentes ingenio et scientia querit, et alios aspernatur, ut per inferiora patebit. 6. Nam quicquid nobis convenit, vel gratia generis, vel speciei, vel individui convenit, ut sentire, ridere, militare. Sed hoc non convenit nobis gratia generis, quia etiam brutis conveniret; nec gratia speciei, quia cunctis hominibus esset conveniens, de quo nulla questio est—nemo enim montaninis rusticana tractantibus hoc dicet esse conveniens—: convenit ergo individui gratia. 7. Sed nichil individuo convenit nisi per proprias dignitates, puta mercari, militare ac regere. Quare si convenientia respiciunt dignitates, hoc est dignos, et quidam digni, quidam digniores, quidam dignissimi esse possunt, manifestum est quod bona dignis, meliora dignioribus, et optima dignissimis convenient. 8. Et cum loquela non aliter sit necessarium instrumentum nostre conceptionis quam equus militis, et optimis militibus optimi conveniant equi, ut dictum est, optimis conceptionibus optima loquela conveniet. Sed optime conceptiones non possunt esse nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est: ergo optima loquela non convenit nisi illis in quibus ingenium et scientia est. Et sic non omnibus versificantibus optima loquela conveniet, cum plerique sine scientia et ingenio versificentur, et per consequens nec optimum vulgare. Quapropter, si non omnibus competit, non omnes ipsum debent uti, quia inconvenienter agere nullus debet.
9. And where it is said that anyone ought to adorn his verses as much as he can, we agree that this is true; but we do not say that an ox in horse's trappings is adorned, nor a pig in a breastplate, rather we deride them as defaced; for adornment is the addition of something fitting. 10. And where it is said that higher things mixed with lower bring a perfection to the lower things, we say that this is true when the distinction between them is lost: for instance when we fuse gold with silver; but if the distinction remains, the lower things seem more base: for instance when beautiful women join a group of ugly ones. Hence, since the thought of the versifier is always mixed with his words in such a way that the distinction between them remains, if the best vernacular should be associated with thoughts that are not the best, the thoughts will appear worse, not better, like an ugly woman dressed in gold or silk.
ii.1. Now that we have shown that not all versifiers, but only the best, should use the illustrious vernacular, the next is to show whether all subjects are to be treated in it or not; and if not all, to show specifically which are worthy of it.
2. First we must ask what we mean by the term worthy. And we say that something is worthy if it possesses worth, as what is noble has nobility; thus if when we know the condition we know the conditioned thing, then if we know what worth is we will also know who or what is worthy. 3. Now, worth is the effect of merit or its goal; as when we say that someone has deserved well, we say that he is worthy of good, if badly, of ill: for example, we say that someone who fights well deserves victory, one who rules well is worthy of a kingdom, and we say that a liar deserves to blush, a thief to die. 4. But since comparisons are made among those who deserve well and others, for some deserve well, others better, and others best, and some deserve ill, others worse, and others worst, and since these comparisons cannot be made except by reference to a standard of merit, which we call worth, as has been said, it is manifest that worths themselves are to be compared according to greater and less, and that some are great, some greater, and others greatest; and consequently it is clear that some things are worthy, others worthier, others worthiest. 5. And when the comparison of worth does not concern the same object but different ones, as when we say that what is worthy of the greater is worthier and what is worthy of the greatest is worthiest (for nothing can be worthier than that), it is manifest that in the nature of things the best are worthy of the best. Therefore, since what we call the illustrious is the best of all vernacular styles, it follows that only the best things are worthy to be treated in it, and these we call the worthiest subjects.[1]
6. Now let us inquire what they may be. To see this clearly, one must understand that just as man's spirit is triple, namely vegetative, animal, and rational, so he walks on a triple path. For insofar as he is something vegetative he seeks the useful, in which he is with the plants; insofar as he is animal he seeks the pleasurable, in which he is with the beasts; insofar as he is rational, he seeks what is virtuous, in which he is alone or with the angels. Whatever we do, we do for the sake of these three; and since in each of these categories some things are greater and others greatest, by this distinction the things that are greatest
9. Et ubi dicitur quod quilibet suos versus exornare debet in quantum potest, verum esse testamur; sed nec bovem epiphiatum nec balteatum suem dicemus ornatum, immo potius deturpatum ridemus illum: est enim exornatio alicuius convenientis additio. 10. Ad illud ubi dicitur quod superiora inferioribus admixta profectum adducunt, dicimus verum esse quando cesset discretio: puta si aurum cum argento conflemus; sed si discretio remanet, inferiora vilescunt: puta cum formose mulieres deformibus admiscentur. Unde cum sententia versificantium semper verbis discretive mixta remaneat, si non fuerit optima, optimo sociata vulgari non melior sed deterior apparebit, quemadmodum turpis mulier si auro vel serico vestiatur.
ii.1. Postquam non omnes versificantes sed tantum excellentissimos illustre uti vulgare debere astruximus, consequens est astruere utrum omnia ipso tractanda sint aut non; et si non omnia, que ipso digna sint segregatim ostendere.
2. Circa quod primo reperiendum est id quod intelligimus per illud quod dicimus dignum. Et dicimus dignum esse quod dignitatem habet, sicut nobile quod nobilitatem; et si cognito habituante habituatum cognoscitur in quantum huiusmodi, cognita dignitate cognoscemus et dignum. 3. Est etenim dignitas meritorum effectus sive terminus; ut, cum quis bene meruit, ad boni dignitatem profectum esse dicimus, cum male vero, ad mali: puta bene militantem ad victorie dignitatem, bene autem regentem ad regni, nec non mendacem ad ruboris dignitatem, et latronem ad eam que est mortis. 4. Sed cum in bene merentibus fiant comparationes, et in aliis etiam, ut quidam bene quidam melius quidam optime, quidam male quidam peius quidam pessime mereantur, et huiusmodi comparationes non fiant nisi per respectum ad terminum meritorum, quem dignitatem dicimus, ut dictum est, manifestum est ut dignitates inter se comparentur secundum magis et minus, ut quedam magne, quedam maiores, quedam maxime sint; et per consequens aliquid dignum, aliquid dignius, aliquid dignissimum esse constat. 5. Et cum comparatio dignitatum non fiat circa idem obiectum, sed circa diversa, ut dignius dicamus quod maioribus, dignissimum quod maximis dignum est (quia nichil eodem dignius esse potest), manifestum est quod optima optimis secundum rerum exigentiam digna sunt. Unde cum hoc quod dicimus illustre sit optimum aliorum vulgarium, consequens est ut sola optima digna sint ipso tractari, que quidem tractandorum dignissima nuncupamus.
6. Nunc autem que sint ipsa venemur. Ad quorum evidentiam sciendum est quod sicut homo tripliciter spirituatus est, videlicet vegetabili, animali, et rationali, triplex iter perambulat. Nam secundum quod vegetabile quid est, utile querit, in quo cum plantis comunicat; secundum quod animale, delectabile, in quo cum brutis; secundum quod rationale, honestum querit, in quo solus est, vel angelice sociatur [nature]. Propter hec tria quicquid agimus agere videmur; et quia in quolibet istorum quedam sunt maiora quedam maxima, secundum
should be written of in the highest manner, and consequently in the noblest vernacular.
7. But we must consider what these greatest things may be. And first in the category of the useful: if we consider carefully what is desired by all those who seek the useful, we will find that it is nothing other than health.[2] Second, in the pleasurable: we say that what is most pleasant is that which appetite affects as its most desirable object, and that is beauty. Third, in the virtuous: no one doubts that it is moral virtue. Wherefore these three, that is, safety, beauty, and moral virtue, are those greatest things that are to be written of in the highest manner, that is, the things which pertain to them, as: valor in arms, the ardor of love, and the direction of the will. 8. If we reflect carefully we will find that the illustrious have written poetry in the vernacular only about these three things, as Bertran de Born about arms, Arnaut Daniel about love, Giraut de Bornelh about rectitude, Cino da Pistoia about love, his friend [Dante] about rectitude. For Bertran says
I cannot prevent myself from bringing forth a song;
Arnaut:
The bitter air makes the branched thicket brighten;
Giraut:
To awaken joy that has been too much asleep;
Cino:
I am worthy of death;
his friend [Dante]:
Grief lends daring to my heart.
But I find as yet no Italian who has written poetry about arms.
9. These things considered, it becomes clear what subjects are to be sung in the noblest vernacular.
iii.1. Now let us carefully investigate in what form we should bind together the things that are worthy of so noble a vernacular.
2. Wishing therefore to explain the form in which these things deserve to be bound, we say first that it should be remembered that writers of poetry in the vernacular have brought forth their poems in many forms; some as canzoni, some as ballate, some as sonnets, some in other irregular forms, not governed by rules, as will be shown below. 3. Now, of these forms we hold that of the canzone to be the most excellent: thus, if the best things are worthy of the best, as has been proved above, those subjects that are worthy of the noblest vernacular are worthy of the best poetic form, and therefore should be treated in canzoni.
4. Now, that the form of the canzone is as we have said can be proved by various arguments. And first because, although everything in verse is a song
quod talia, que maxima sunt maxime pertractanda videntur, et per consequens maximo vulgari.
7. Sed disserendum est que maxima sint. Et primo in eo quod est utile: in quo, si callide consideremus intentum omnium querentium utilitatem, nil aliud quam salutem inveniemus. Secundo in eo quod est delectabile: in quo dicimus illud esse maxime delectabile quod per pretiosissimum obiectum appetitus delectat: hoc autem venus est. Tertio in eo quod est honestum: in quo nemo dubitat esse virtutem. Quare hec tria, salus videlicet, venus et virtus, apparent esse illa magnalia que sint maxime pertractanda, hoc est ea que maxime sunt ad ista, ut armorum probitas, amoris incensio, et directio voluntatis. 8. Circa que sola, si bene recolimus, illustres viros invenimus vulgariter poetasse, scilicet Bertramum de Bornio arma, Arnaldum Danielem amorem, Gerardum de Bornello rectitudinem; Cynum Pistoriensem amorem, amicum eius rectitudinem. Bertramus etenim ait
Non posc mudar c'un cantar non exparia;
Arnaldus:
L'aura amara fa•l bruol brancuz clarzir;
Gerardus:
Per solaz reveilar che s'es trop endormis;
Cynus:
Digno sono eo di morte;
amicus eius:
Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire.
Arma vero nullum latium adhuc invenio poetasse.
9. Hiis proinde visis, que canenda sint vulgari altissimo innotescunt.
iii.1. Nunc autem quo modo ea coartare debemus que tanto sunt digna vulgari, sollicite investigare conemur.
2. Volentes igitur modum tradere quo ligari hec digna existant, primo esse dicimus ad memoriam reducendum quod vulgariter poetantes sua poemata multimode protulerunt, quidam per cantiones, quidam per ballatas, quidam per sonitus, quidam per alios inlegitimos et inregulares modos, ut inferius ostendetur. 3. Horum autem modorum cantionum modum excellentissimum esse putamus: quare si excellentissima excellentissimis digna sunt, ut superius est probatum, illa quae excellentissimo sunt digna vulgari, modo excellentissimo digna sunt, et per consequens in cantionibus pertractanda.
4. Quod autem modus cantionum sit talis ut dictum est, pluribus potest rationibus indagari. Prima quidem quia, cum quicquid versificamur sit cantio,
[cantio ], only to canzoni has this term been allotted: which would never have taken place without a preference of very long standing. 5. Again: whatever by itself fulfills the function for which it is made, is nobler than what has need of something else; but canzoni do all they are meant to do alone, which ballate do not—for ballate need the dancers for whom they are written; therefore it follows that canzoni are to be held nobler than ballate, and consequently that their form is nobler than all other forms, since no one doubts that ballate excel sonnets in nobility of form. 6. Further: those things are nobler which bring more honor to their makers; but canzoni bring more honor to their makers than do ballate: therefore they are nobler, and consequently their form is nobler than the others. 7. Further: noblest things are kept in the most precious containers; but among things sung canzoni are so kept, as can be seen when one examines books of canzoni: therefore canzoni are noblest, and consequently so is their form. 8. Again: among things fashioned by art the noblest is that which comprehends the entirety of the art; now since things sung are fashioned by art, and since the entire art is contained only in canzoni, canzoni are the noblest, and so also their form. That the entire art of lyric poetry is comprehended in the canzone can be seen in this, that whatever artifice is found in all other forms is also found in canzoni, but not conversely. 9. And there is a ready sign of what we have said: for whatever has flowed from the very summit of the heads of illustrious poets to their lips, is found only in canzoni.
10. Therefore it is clear that the subjects that are worthy of the most illustrious vernacular should be treated in canzoni.
iv.1. Now that we have labored to make plain what poets and what subjects are worthy of the courtly vernacular, as well as the poetic form to which we attribute the honor of being the only one worthy of the noblest vernacular, before we move on to other things let us explain the form of the canzone, which we see many usurping and using more haphazardly than by art; and let us open wide the workshop of the canzone, which we have up to now casually mentioned, omitting the form of ballate and sonnets, since we intend to explain them in the fourth book of this work, when we discuss the middle level of the vernacular.
2. Looking back over what has been said, we recall that we have repeatedly
called those who write verse in the vernacular poets, a term we have assumed with good reason, for they are poets, if we rightly understand the nature of poetry, which is nothing other than a fiction set forth with rhetoric and music. 3. But these differ from the great poets, that is, the poets in Greek and Latin, for the great wrote in languages governed by rule and they wrote by the rule of art, but the vernacular poets write without method, as has been said. Thus it happens, that the closer we imitate the regular poets, the more correctly we shall write poetry. We therefore, aware of the need of doctrine, should imitate their learned methods of composition.[3]
4. First of all we say that each should suit the weight of the subject matter to his own shoulders, lest if he take on too heavy a load he fall into the mud: this is the advice of our master Horace when at the beginning of the Ars poetica he says: "Sumite materiam."[4]
sole cantiones hoc vocabulum sibi sortite sunt: quod nunquam sine vetusta provisione processit. 5. Adhuc: quicquid per se ipsum efficit illud ad quod factum est, nobilius esse videtur quam quod extrinseco indiget; sed cantiones per se totum quod debent efficiunt, quod ballate non faciunt—indigent enim plausoribus, ad quos edite sunt: ergo cantiones nobiliores ballatis esse sequitur extimandas, et per consequens nobilissimum aliorum esse modum illarum, cum nemo dubitet quin ballate sonitus nobilitate modi excellant. 6. Praeterea: illa videntur nobiliora esse que conditori suo magis honoris afferunt; sed cantiones magis deferunt suis conditoribus quam ballate: igitur nobiliores sunt, et per consequens modus earum nobilissimus aliorum. 7. Praeterea: que nobilissima sunt carissime conservantur; sed inter ea que cantata sunt, cantiones carissime conservantur, ut constat visitantibus libros: ergo cantiones nobilissime sunt, et per consequens modus earum nobilissimus est. 8. Ad hoc: in artificiatis illud est nobilissimum quod totam comprehendit artem; cum igitur ea que cantantur artificiata existant, et in solis cantionibus ars tota comprehendatur, cantiones nobilissime sunt, et sic modus earum nobilissimus aliorum. Quod autem tota comprehendatur in cantionibus ars cantandi poetice, in hoc palatur, quod quicquid artis reperitur in omnibus aliis et in cantionibus reperitur, sed non convertitur hoc. 9. Signum autem horum que dicimus promptum in conspectu habetur: nam quicquid de cacuminibus illustrium capitum poetantium profluxit ad labia, in solis cantionibus invenitur.
10. Quare ad propositum patet quod ea que digna sunt vulgari altissimo in cantionibus tractanda sunt.
iv.1. Quando quidem aporiavimus extricantes qui sint aulico digni vulgari et que, nec non modum quem tanto dignamur honore ut solus altissimo vulgari conveniat, antequam migremus ad alia modum cantionum, quem casu magis quam arte multi usurpare videntur, enucleemus; et qui hucusque casualiter est assumptus, illius artis ergasterium reseremus, modum ballatarum et sonituum ommictentes, quia illum elucidare intendimus in quarto huius operis, cum de mediocri vulgari tractabimus.
2. Revisentes igitur ea que dicta sunt, recolimus nos eos qui vulgariter versificantur plerunque vocasse poetas: quod procul dubio rationabiliter eructare presumpsimus, quia prorsus poete sunt, si poesim recte consideremus: que nichil aliud est quam fictio rethorica musicaque poita. 3. Differunt tamen a magnis poetis, hoc est regularibus, quia magni sermone et arte regulari poetati sunt, hii vero casu, ut dictum est. Idcirco accidit ut, quantum illos proximius imitemur, tantum rectius poetemur. Unde nos doctrine operi intendentes doctrinatas eorum poetrias emulari oportet.
4. Ante omnia ergo dicimus unumquenque debere materie pondus propriis humeris coequare, ne forte humerorum nimio gravata virtute in cenum cespitare necesse sit: hoc est quod Magister noster Oratius precipit cum in principio Poetrie "Sumite materiam" dicit.
5. Next, about the possible subject matters of poetry we must have the judgment to understand whether they are to be written about in tragedy, comedy, or elegy. By tragedy we mean to refer to the high style, by comedy to the low style, by elegy to the style of lamentations. 6. If they are to be sung tragically, then the illustrious vernacular is to be used, and consequently a canzone must be constructed. Or, if comically, then sometimes the middle level of the vernacular, sometimes the low: and we reserve this distinction for discussion in the fourth book of this work. If elegiacally, then we must use only the low.
7. But let us omit the others and now, as is fitting, discuss the tragic style. It is clear that tragic style consists in the harmony of serious content and noble verses, elevated syntax, and elevated vocabulary. 8. Therefore, if we remember that it has been proved that the highest subjects are worthy of the highest style, and if the tragic style is the highest style, then those subjects we have identified as highest should be written of only in this style: namely safety, beauty, and virtue, and what we conceive on account of them, as long as it is not lowered by anything merely adventitious.
9. Therefore, let each be cautious and carefully consider all this, and when he intends to sing of these three themes in their purity, or of things that directly follow from them, first drinking from Helicon and tightening the strings of his lyre to the maximum, let him confidently begin to move his plectrum. 10. But to acquire this skill and this discernment as they should be acquired, this is the work and the labor,[5] for it cannot be achieved without great effort of mind, assiduous practice, and secure knowledge. And such poets are those whom Virgil in the sixth book of the Aeneid calls beloved of God, raised up by their burning virtue to the sky, and sons of the gods, though he is speaking figuratively. II. And let this confound the foolishness of those who, lacking all art and knowledge, relying exclusively on their native wit, presume to sing of the highest things, though they are to be sung in the highest style; and let them abandon such presumptuousness, and if nature and inactivity have made them geese, let them not try to emulate the eagle that flies to the stars.
v.1. About the weightiness of content we seem to have said enough or at least what is needful here: therefore let us hasten on to the question of the nobility of verses.
2. One should know that our predecessors used various verses in their canzoni, as modern poets do: but we have found no one who in the count of syllables exceeded eleven or used fewer than three. And although Italian poets have used the trisyllable and the hendecasyllable and all the verse lengths in between, the five-syllable line [Italian: quinario ], the seven-syllable line [Italian: settenario ], and the eleven-syllable line have been used most frequently, and after them the three-syllable line.
3. Of all these, the hendecasyllable is the most magnificent, both because of the time it occupies and because of its capaciousness for thought, constructions, and words; the beauty of all of which is more greatly magnified in it, as is manifest: for where weighty things are multiplied, the weight is multiplied also.
5. Deinde in hiis que dicenda occurrunt debemus discretione potiri, utrum tragice, sive comice, sive elegiace sint canenda. Per tragediam superiorem stilum inducimus, per comediam inferiorem, per elegiam stilum intelligimus miserorum. 6. Si tragice canenda videntur, tunc assumendum est vulgare illustre, et per consequens cantionem ligare. Si vero comice, tunc quandoque mediocre quandoque humile vulgare sumatur: et huius discretionem in quarto huius reservamus ostendere. Si autem elegiace, solum humile oportet nos sumere.
7. Sed ommictamus alios, et nunc, ut conveniens est, de stilo tragico pertractemus. Stilo equidem tragico tunc uti videmur quando cum gravitate sententie tam superbia carminum quam constructionis elatio et excellentia vocabulorum concordat. 8. Quare, si bene recolimus summa summis esse digna iam fuisse probatum, et iste quem tragicum appellamus summus videtur esse stilorum, illa que summa canenda distinximus isto solo sunt stilo canenda: videlicet salus, amor et virtus et que propter ea concipimus, dum nullo accidente vilescant.
9. Caveat igitur quilibet et discernat ea que dicimus, et quando pure hec tria cantare intendit, vel ea que ad ea directe ac pure secuntur, prius Elicone potatus, tensis fidibus ad supremum, secure plectrum tum movere incipiat. 10. Sed cautionem atque discretionem hanc accipere, sicut decet, hic opus et labor est, quoniam nunquam sine strenuitate ingenii et artis assiduitate scientiarumque habitus fieri potest. Et hii sunt quos Poeta Eneidorum sexto Dei dilectos et ab ardente virtute sublimatos ad ethera deorumque filios vocat, quanquam figurate loquatur. 11. Et ideo confutetur illorum stultitia qui, arte scientiaque immunes, de solo ingenio confidentes, ad summa summe canenda prorumpunt; et a tanta presumptuositate desistant, et si anseres natura vel desidia sunt, nolint astripetam aquilam imitari.
v.1. De gravitate sententiarum vel satis dixisse videmur vel saltim totum quod operis est nostri: quapropter ad superbiam carminum festincmus.
2. Circa quod sciendum quod predecessores nostri diversis carminibus usi sunt in cantionibus suis, quod et moderni faciunt: sed nullum adhuc invenimus in carmen sillabicando endecadem transcendisse, nec a trisillabo descendisse. Et licet trisillabo carmine atque endecasillabo et omnibus intermediis cantores latii usi sint, pentasillabum et eptasillabum et endecasillabum in usu frequentiori habentur, et post hec trisillabum ante alia.
3. Quorum omnium endecasillabum videtur esse superbius, tam temporis occupatione quam capacitate sententie, constructionis et vocabulorum; quorum omnium specimen magis multiplicatur in illo, ut manifeste apparet: nam ubicumque ponderosa multiplicantur, [multiplicatur] et pondus. 4. Et hoc om-
4. And this all the learned poets can be seen to have understood, beginning their noblest canzoni with the hendecasyllable; as Giraut de B[ornelh]:
Now you will hear perfect songs
(this verse, though it seems to be a ten-syllable one, is actually an eleven-syllable one: for the last two consonants do not belong to the preceding syllable, and although they have not a vowel of their own, they do not for that reason lose the virtue of a syllable; and the sign is that the rhyme there is completed with one vowel, which could not be except by virtue of another vowel understood as there);[6] the King of Navarre:
From noble love comes wisdom and goodness
(where, if one considers the accent and its reason, it will turn out to be a hendecasyllable); Guido Guinizelli:
To the noble heart love always repairs;
Judge [Guido] delle Colonne of Messina:
Love, who has led me long;
Rinaldo d'Aquino:
Because of refined love I am so joyous;
Cino da Pistoia:
I do not hope that ever for my health;
his friend [Dante]:
Love, who move your power from heaven.
5. And although the hendecasyllable is more celebrated than all the others, as it deserves to be, still if it enters into a kind of association with the settenario it seems to rise upward even more nobly and to shine more brightly, as long as it retains predominance. But let this remain to be explained further on. 6. And we say that after the hendecasyllable the settenario is the most celebrated. The nine-syllable line, however, because it seemed a trisyllable tripled, either was never prized or quickly fell out of use because of its annoying quality. 7. Evensyllabled lines, on the other hand, because of their rusticity, we use but rarely: for they retain the nature of their numbers, which are subject to odd numbers as matter is to form.[7]
8. And so, summing up the aforesaid, the hendecasyllable is the noblest verse: and this is what we were seeking. Now it remains to consider the elevation of syntax and the magnificence of vocabulary; and finally, having prepared sticks and cords, we will show how someone should bind together the promised bundle, that is, the canzone.
vi.1. Since we are concerned with the illustrious vernacular, which is nobler than the others, and have distinguished the subjects that are worthy of being
nes doctores perpendisse videntur, cantiones illustres principiantes ab illo; ut Gerardus de B:
Ara ausirez encabalitz cantarz
(quod carmen, licet decasillabum videatur, secundum rei veritatem endecasillabum est: nam due consonantes extreme non sunt de sillaba precedente, et licet propriam vocalem non habeant, virtutem sillabe non tamen ammictunt; signum autem est quod rithimus ibi una vocali perficitur, quod esse non posset nisi virtute alterius ibi subintellecte); Rex Navarre:
De fin amor si vient sen et bonté
(ubi, si consideretur accentus et eius causa, endecasillabum esse constabit); Guido Guinizelli:
Al cor gentil repara sempre amore;
Iudex de Columpnis de Messana:
Amor, che lungiamente m'hai menato;
Renaldus de Aquino:
Per fino amore vo sì letamente;
Cynus Pistoriensis:
Non spero che giamai per mia salute;
amicus eius:
Amor, che movi tua virtù da cielo.
5. Et licet hoc quod dictum est celeberrimum carmen, ut dignum est, videatur omnium aliorum, si eptasillabi aliqualem societatem assumat, dummodo principatum obtineat, clarius magisque sursum superbire videtur. Sed hoc ulterius elucidandum remaneat. 6. Et dicimus eptasillabum sequi illud quod maximum est in celebritate. Post hoc pentasillabum et deinde trisillabum ordinamus. Neasillabum vero, quia triplicatum trisillabum videbatur, vel nunquam in honore fuit vel propter fastidium absolevit. 7. Parisillabis vero propter sui ruditatem non utimur nisi raro: retinent enim naturam suorum numerorum, qui numeris imparibus quemadmodum materia forme subsistunt.
8. Et sic, recolligentes predicta, endecasillabum videtur esse superbissimum carmen: et hoc est quod querebamus. Nunc autem restat investigandum de constructionibus elatis et fastigiosis vocabulis; et demum, fustibus torquibusque paratis, promissum fascem, hoc est cantionem, quo modo viere quis debeat instruemus.
vi.1. Quia circa vulgare illustre nostra versatur intentio, quod nobilissimum est aliorum, et ea que digna sunt illo cantari discrevimus, que tria nobilissima
sung in it, as is set forth above, and have selected for it the form of the canzone as the noblest of forms, and, to better explain it, have discussed the style and the verse, now let us discuss syntactical constructions.
2. For one should know that construction is what we call an organic unit of words united according to rule, as "Aristotiles phylosophatus est tempori Alexandri" ("Aristotle practiced philosophy in the age of Alexander"). Here five words are joined together by grammatical rule to form a single construction. 3. Now, it is to be considered first that some constructions are congruous [grammatical], some incongruous. And since, if we recall the beginning of our distinctions, we seek the highest, the incongruous can have no place in our search, for it has not reached even the lowest level of worth. Let the ignorant be ashamed, then, let them be ashamed henceforth to presume to write canzoni: we deride them as like blind men trying to judge of colors. It is the congruous we seek, as is plain.
4. But there is a discrimination of no less difficulty that must be made before we attain what we seek, namely of the construction that has the fullest urbanity. For there are numerous levels of construction: namely the insipid, used by the uneducated, as "Petrus amat multum dominam Bertam" ("Peter loves lady Bertha very much"); and there is the salty, used by stiff students and teachers, as "Piget me cunctis pietate maiorem, quicunque in exilio tabescentes patriam tantum sompniando revisunt" ("I am pained, being more compassionate than anyone else, by the case of those who, languishing in exile, can see their fatherland again only in dreams");[8] and there are constructions that are both salty and graceful, peculiar to certain people who have a superficial acquaintance with the art of rhetoric, as "Laudabilis discretio marchionis Estensis, et sua magnificentia preparata, cunctis illum facit esse dilectum" ("The praiseworthy discretion of the marchese of Este, and the magnificences he pours forth, make him beloved of all");[9] and some constructions are salty and graceful and also elevated, and they are used by the illustrious masters, as "Eiecta maxima parte florum de sino tuo, Florentia, nequicquam Trinacriam Totilus secundus adivit" ("Having cast out of your bosom the greater part of your flowers, Florence, in vain the second Totila attacked Sicily").[10] 5. This level of construction we call the most excellent, and this is the one we are seeking, since we are seeking the highest, as has been said.
6. Illustrious canzoni use only this type of construction, as Giraut [de Borelh]:
If it were not for my Above-all;
Folquet de Marseilh:
So much pleases me my amorous thought;
Arnaut Daniel:
I alone know the excess of pain that is allotted me;
sunt, ut superius est astructum, et modum cantionarium selegimus illis, tanquam aliorum modorum summum, et, ut ipsum perfectius edocere possimus, quedam iam preparavimus, stilum videlicet et carmen, nunc de constructione agamus.
2. Est enim sciendum quod constructionem vocamus regulatam compaginem dictionum, ut "Aristotiles phylosophatus est tempori Alexandri." Sunt enim quinque hic dictiones compacte regulariter, et unam faciunt constructionem. 3. Circa hanc quidem prius considerandum est quod constructionum alia congrua est, alia vero incongrua. Et quia, si primordium bene discretionis nostre recolimus, sola supprema venamur, nullum in nostra venatione locum habet incongrua, quia nec inferiorem gradum bonitatis promeruit. Pudeat ergo, pudeat ydiotas tantum audere deinceps ut ad cantiones prorumpant: quos non aliter deridemus quam cecum de coloribus distinguentem. Est ut videtur congrua quam sectamur.
4. Sed non minoris difficultatis accedit discretio priusquam quam querimus actingamus, videlicet urbanitate plenissimam. Sunt enim gradus constructionum quamplures: videlicet insipidus, qui est rudium, ut "Petrus amat multum dominam Bertam"; est et pure sapidus, qui est rigidorum scolarium vel magistrorum, ut "Piget me cunctis pietate maiorem, quicunque in exilio tabescentes patriam tantum sompniando revisunt"; est et sapidus et venustus, qui est quorundam superficietenus rethoricam aurientium, ut "Laudabilis discretio marchionis Estensis, et sua magnificentia preparata, cunctis ilium facit esse dilectum"; est et sapidus et venustus etiam et excelsus, qui est dictatorum illustrium, ut "Eiecta maxima parte florum de sinu tuo, Florentia, nequicquam Trinacriam Totilus secundus adivit." 5. Hunc gradum constructionis excellentissimum nominamus, et hic est quem querimus cum suprema venemur, ut dictum est.
6. Hoc solum illustres cantiones inveniuntur contexte, ut Gerardus:
Si per mos Sobretos non fos;
Folquetus de Marsilia:
Tan m'abellis l'amoros pensamen;
Arnaldus Danielis:
Sols sui che sai lo sobraffan che•m sorz;
Aimeric de Belenoi:
No man can fulfill completely;
Aimeric de Pegulhan:
Like the tree, which overburdened;
the King of Navarre [actually Gace Brulé]:
Grief of love that dwells in my heart;
the Judge of Messina [Guido delle Colonne]:
Although water depart because of fire;
Guido Guinizelli:
I hold it truly a madman's enterprise;
Guido Cavalcanti:
Since I must bear a grieving heart;
Cino da Pistoia:
Although I have earlier;
his friend [Dante]:
Love that discourses in my mind.
7. Do not marvel, reader, to see so many authors called to memory: for we cannot indicate this type of construction, which we call the highest, except through examples. And perhaps, to acquire the habit of it, it would be most useful to read the regular poets, that is, Virgil, Ovid of the Metamorphoses, Statius, and Lucan, and also those who wrote elevated prose, such as Livy, Pliny, Frontinus, Paulus Orosius, and many others that our admiring solicitude calls us to study. 8. Let the sectaries of ignorance cease to extol Guittone d'Arezzo and certain others who never, in words or constructions, lost the habit of plebeian style.
vii.1. The orderly progression of our exposition requires that we now elucidate the grandiose words that are worthy of the highest style.
2. At the outset we affirm that to distinguish properly among words requires no small skill, since we can discover many different species of them. For some words are childish, some are womanish, and some are manly; of these last some are rustic and some are urbane; and among those we term urbane we find that some are combed, some slippery, some hairy, and some bristling. Now, among these the combed and the hairy are the ones we term grandiose; the slippery and the bristling are those whose sonority is uselessly excessive; as in all undertakings of a certain grandeur, some things are the effect of magnanimity, others of presumption: where, though at first sight there may seem to be ascent, once the
Namericus de Belnui:
Nuls hom non pot complir addreciamen;
Namericus de Peculiano:
Si con l'arbres che per sobrecarcar;
Rex Navarre:
Ire d'amor que en mon cor repaire;
Iudex de Messana:
Ancor che l'aigua per lo foco lassi;
Guido Guinizelli:
Tegno de folle empresa a lo ver dire;
Guido Cavalcantis:
Poi che di doglia cor conven ch'io porti;
Cynus de Pistorio:
Avegna che io aggia più per tempo;
amicus eius:
Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona.
7. Nec mireris, lector, de tot reductis autoribus ad memoriam: non enim hanc quam suppremam vocamus constructionem nisi per huiusmodi exempla possumus indicare. Et fortassis utilissimum foret ad illam habituandam regulatos vidisse poetas, Virgilium videlicet, Ovidium Metamorphoseos, Statium atque Lucanum, nec non alios qui usi sunt altissimas prosas, ut Titum Livium, Plinium, Frontinum, Paulum Orosium, et multos alios quos amica sollicitudo nos visitare invitat. 8. Subsistant igitur ignorantie sectatores Guictonem Aretinum et quosdam alios extollentes, nunquam in vocabulis atque constructione plebescere desuetos.
vii.1. Grandiosa modo vocabula sub prelato stilo digna consistere, successiva nostre progressionis presentia lucidari expostulat.
2. Testamur proinde incipientes non minimum opus esse rationis discretionem vocabulorum habere, quoniam perplures eorum maneries inveniri posse videmus. Nam vocabulorum quedam puerilia, quedam muliebria, quedam virilia; et horum quedam silvestria, quedam urbana; et eorum que urbana vocamus, quedam pexa et lubrica, quedam yrsuta et reburra sentimus. Inter que quidem, pexa atque yrsuta sunt illa que vocamus grandiosa, lubrica vero et reburra vocamus illa que in superfluum sonant; quemadmodum in magnis operibus quedam magnanimitatis sunt opera, quedam fumi: ubi, licet in superficie
sharp line of virtue has been crossed, sound reason will see that there has been a falling down the slope on the other side.
3. Therefore pay careful attention, reader, and sift the mass of words so as to accumulate the best: for if you consider the illustrious vernacular, which, as said above, tragic poets should use—and it is these we wish to form—, you will take care that only the noblest words remain in your sieve. 4. You will not be able to place among them childish words, because of their simplicity, such as mamma and babbo, mate and pate; nor womanish words, because of their softness, such as dolciada and placevole, nor rustic words, because of their harshness, like greggia and cetra, nor among urbane words the slippery or the bristling, such as femina and crpo. You will see that only the combed and hairy among urbane words remain, for they are the noblest and are part of the illustrious vernacular. 5. And we called combed those words which have three syllables, more or less, without aspiration [initial h ], without acute or circumflex accent [both terms seem to refer to accents on the last syllable], without double z or x, without doubled liquids [ll or rr ], and without a liquid following a mute [e.g., cr or pl ]; these combed words are smooth, as it were, and leave the speaker with a certain sweetness, like amore, donna, disio, virtute, donare, letitia, salute, securtate, defesa.
6. We term hairy, on the other hand, all other words, besides the above, that for necessity or ornament are part of the illustrious vernacular. We call necessary those we cannot do without, like certain monosyllables like sì, no, me, te, se, a, e, i, o, u', interjections, and many others. Ornamental we call all polysyllables that, mixed in with the combed words, make a beautiful harmony of combination, although they do have the harshness of aspiration and accent and double consonants and liquids and length: such as terra, honore, speranza, gravitate, alleviato, impossibilità, impossibilitate, benaventuratissimo, inanimatissimamente, disaventuratissimamente, sovramagnificentissimamente, which is a hendecasyllable. One might find words of even greater length, but since they exceed the capacity of all of our verses, they do not enter into this discussion, like the famous honorificabilitudinitate, which has twelve syllables in the vernacular and thirteen in Latin, in two of the oblique cases [i.e., dative and ablative plural].
7. Now, the manner in which combed and hairy words are to be harmonized in meter we leave for discussion below. And what has so far been said about the elevation of words is sufficient for anyone with native discernment.
viii.1. Now that we have prepared the sticks and the cords for our bundle, it is time to tie it together. But because understanding must precede any operation, as one must aim at a target before releasing an arrow or throwing a spear, first and principally let us see what the bundle is that we intend to make.
2. The bundle, then, if we have in mind what has preceded, is the canzone. Therefore, let us see what a canzone is and what we understand by the term.
3. According to the true meaning of the word, a canzone or song [cantio, from cano, to sing] is the act of singing, or else what is sung, as a reading [lectio, from lego, to read] is the act of reading or else what is read. But let us distinguish the two sides of the definition, according as the singing in question is active or passive. 4. And here we must consider that the term canzone can be understood
quidam consideretur ascensus, ex quo limitata virtutis linea prevaricatur, bone rationi non ascensus sed per altera declivia ruina constabit.
3. Intuearis ergo, lector, actente quantum ad exaceranda egregia verba te cribrare oportet: nam si vulgare illustre consideres, quo tragici debent uti poete vulgares, ut superius dictum est, quos informare intendimus, sola vocabula nobilissima in cribro tuo residere curabis. 4. In quorum numero nec puerilia propter sui simplicitatem, ut mamma et babbo, mate et pate, nec muliebria propter sui mollitiem, ut dolciada et placevole, nec silvestria propter austeritatem, ut greggia et cetra, nec urbana lubrica et reburra, ut femina et corpo, ullo modo poteris conlocare. Sola etenim pexa yrsutaque urbana tibi restare videbis, que nobilissima sunt et membra vulgaris illustris. 5. Et pexa vocamus illa que, trisillaba vel vicinissima trisillabitati, sine aspiratione, sine accento acuto vel circumflexo, sine z vel x duplicibus, sine duarum liquidarum geminatione vel positione immediate post mutam, dolata quasi, loquentem cum quadam suavitate relinquunt: ut amore, donna, disio, virtute, donare, letitia, salute, securtate, defesa.
6. Yrsuta quoque dicimus omnia, preter hec, que vel necessaria vel ornativa videntur vulgaris illustris. Et necessaria quidem appellamus que campsare non possumus, ut quedam monosillaba, ut sì, no, me, te, se, a, e, i, o, u', interiectiones et alia multa. Ornativa vero dicimus omnia polisillaba que, mixta cum pexis, pulcram faciunt armoniam compaginis, quamvis asperitatem habeant aspirationis et accentus et duplicium et liquidarum et prolixitatis: ut terra, honore, speranza, gravitate, alleviato, impossibilità, impossibilitate, benaventuratissimo, inanimatissimamente, disaventuratissimamente, sovramagnificentissimamente, quod endecasillabum est. Posset adhuc inveniri plurium sillabarum vocabulum sive verbum, sed quia capacitatem omnium nostrorum carminum superexcedit, rationi presenti non videtur obnoxium, sicut est illud honorificabilitudinitate, quod duodena perficitur sillaba in vulgari et in gramatica tredena perficitur in duobus obliquis.
7. Quomodo autem pexis yrsuta huiusmodi sint armonizanda per metra, inferius instruendum relinquimus. Et que iam dicta sunt de fastigiositate vocabulorum ingenue discretioni sufficiunt.
viii.1. Preparatis fustibus torquibusque ad fascem, nunc fasciandi tempus incumbit. Sed quia cuiuslibet operis cognitio precedere debet operationem, velut signum ante ammissionem sagipte vel iaculi, primo et principaliter qui sit iste fascis quem fasciare intendimus videamus.
2. Fascis iste igitur, si bene comminiscimur omnia prelibata, cantio est. Quapropter quid sit cantio videamus, et quid intelligimus cum dicimus cantionem. 3. Est enim cantio, secundum verum nominis significatum, ipse canendi actus vel passio, sicut lectio passio vel actus legendi. Sed divaricemus quod dictum est, utrum videlicet hec sit cantio prout est actus, vel prout est passio. 4. Et circa hoc considerandum est quod cantio dupliciter accipi potest:
in two ways; in one, according as it is fashioned by its author, and in this mode someone is active—and according to this mode Virgil in the first book of the Aeneid says, "I sing arms and the man"—; in the other, according as it is performed, whether by the author or by another, whoever it may be, whether with or without music; in this mode the singing is passive. For in the first case the author determines the song, in the second the song determines the singing; and thus in the first case the term names someone's action, in the second something undergone by someone. And because the song must be determined before it can determine, it can be seen that the name derives from someone's prior action, rather than from what someone undergoes. And the sign of this is that we never say "This is Peter's song [canzone]" because Peter performs it, but because Peter composed it.[11]
5. Next we must discuss whether a canzone is the composition of words harmoniously arranged or of the tune itself. On this subject we say that a tune is never called a canzone, but rather a sonus, or a tone, or a note, or a melody. For no wind player or organist or string player calls his melody a canzone except insofar as it is wedded to some canzone; but the harmonizers of words do call their works canzoni, and such words lying on the page in the absence of a performer we still call canzoni. 6. And thus it is clear that a canzone is nothing other than the action, complete in itself, of writing words harmonized with a view to musical setting; for which reason, not only canzoni, which are our present subject, but also ballate and sonnets and all words that are harmonized in this way we call songs [canzoni] in a generic sense. 7. But since we are only discussing things in the vernacular, leaving aside things in Latin, we say that there is one highest among vernacular poems, which we preeminently call the song [canzone]: for that the canzone is the highest form has been proved in the third chapter of this book. And because the definition we have given is common to several [forms], let us distinguish the canzone properly speaking by restating its definition with its differentia. 8. We say, then, that the canzone by preeminence and as we seek it is: a tragic joining together of stanzas, without refrain, on one theme, as we demonstrated when we wrote
Ladies who have intellect of love.
We said "tragic joining together" because, when this joining is done in the comic [less serious] mode, we call it cantilena, with a diminutive: of which we intend to write in the fourth [book] of this treatise.
9. Thus it is clear what the canzone is, in both uses of the term, generic and specific. It is clear what we mean when we call something a canzone, and consequently what the bundle is that we are preparing to tie together.
ix.1. Since, as we have said, a canzone is a joining together of stanzas, if we do not know what a stanza is we do not yet know what a canzone is: for the defined is known by knowing the definientia; consequently we must now speak of the stanza, both what it is and what we mean when we use the term.
2. And here one must know that this term stanza has been chosen for technical reasons exclusively, so that what contains the entire art of the canzone should be called stanza [room], that is, a capacious dwelling or receptacle for
uno modo secundum quod fabricatur ab autore suo, et sic est actio—et secundum istum modum Virgilius primo Eneidorum dicit "Arma virumque cano"—; alio modo secundum quod fabricata profertur vel ab autore vel ab alio quicunque sit, sive cum soni modulatione proferatur, sive non: et sic est passio. Nam tunc agitur, modo vero agere videtur in alium, et sic tunc alicuius actio, modo quoque passio alicuius videtur. Et quia prius agitur ipsa quam agat, magis, immo prorsus denominari videtur ab eo quod agitur, et est actio alicuius, quam ab eo quod agit in alios. Signum autem huius est quod nunquam dicimus "Hec est cantio Petri" eo quod ipsam proferat, sed eo quod fabricaverit illam.
5. Preterea disserendum est utrum cantio dicatur fabricatio verborum armonizatorum, vel ipsa modulatio. Ad quod dicimus quod nunquam modulatio dicitur cantio, sed sonus, vel thonus, vel nota, vel melos. Nullus enim tibicen, vel organista, vel cytharedus melodiam suam cantionem vocat, nisi in quantum nupta est alicui cantioni; sed armonizantes verba opera sua cantiones vocant, et etiam talia verba in cartulis absque prolatore iacentia cantiones vocamus. 6. Et ideo cantio nichil aliud esse videtur quam actio completa dicentis verba modulationi armonizata: quapropter tam cantiones quas nunc tractamus, quam ballatas et sonitus et omnia cuiuscunque modi verba sunt armonizata vulgariter et regulariter, cantiones esse dicemus. 7. Sed quia sola vulgaria ventilamus, regulata linquentes, dicimus vulgarium poematum unum esse suppremum, quod per superexcellentiam cantionem vocamus: quod autem suppremum quid sit cantio, in tertio huius libri capitulo est probatum. Et quoniam quod diffinitum est pluribus generale videtur, resumentes diffinitum iam generale vocabulum per quasdam differentias solum quod petimus distinguamus. 8. Dicimus ergo quod cantio, in quantum per superexcellentiam dicitur, ut et nos querimus, est equaliam stantiarum sine responsorio ad unam sententiam tragica coniugatio, ut nos ostendimus cum dicimus
Donne che avete intelletto d'amore.
Quod autem dicimus "tragica coniugatio" est quia, cum comice fiat hec coniugatio, cantilenam vocamus per diminutionem: de qua in quarto huius tractare intendimus.
9. Et sic patet quid cantio sit, et prout accipitur generaliter et prout per superexcellentiam vocamus earn. Satis etiam patere videtur quid intelligimus cum cantionem vocamus, et per consequens quid sit ille fascis quem ligare molimur.
ix.1. Quia, ut dictum est, cantio est coniugatio stantiarum, ignorato quid sit stantia necesse est cantionem ignorare: nam ex diffinientium cognitione diffiniti resultat cognitio; et ideo consequenter de stantia est agendum, ut scilicet investigemus quid ipsa sit et quid per eam intelligere volumus.
2. Et circa hoc sciendum est quod hoc vocabulum per solius artis respectum inventum est, videlicet ut in quo tota cantionis ars esset contenta, illud diceretur stantia, hoc est mansio capax sive receptaculum totius artis. Nam quemad-
the entire craft. For just as the canzone is the container [literally, lap or womb] of the entire thought, so the stanza enfolds its entire technique; and successive stanzas are not permitted to introduce any new technical devices, but must clothe themselves in the devices set by the preceding. 3. By this it is clear that the stanza will be the enfolding [literally, enwombing] or weaving together of all those things which the canzone takes from technique: when we have set them forth, the description that we seek will be clear.
4. The entire technique of the canzone can be seen to consist in three things: first the division of the melody, second the arrangement of the parts, third the number of lines and of syllables. 5. Of rhyme we make no mention, because it is not part of the art specific to the canzone. For it is permissible to change or repeat rhymes in the stanza as one pleases: which would not be the case if rhyme were part of the specific art of the canzone, as has been said. But if we desire to keep some aspect of rhyme that is specific to the canzone, it will be included under what we have called "the arrangement of the parts."
6. Thus we can gather together out of the foregoing that the stanza is a weaving together of lines and syllables under a definite melody and in a definite arrangement.
x.1. If we know that man is a rational animal and that an animal has a sensible soul and a body, but do not know what a soul or a body is, we cannot have full knowledge of what a man is: for the full knowledge of anything is reached only with [knowledge of] its last elements, as the Master of the Wise [Aristotle] testifies at the beginning of the Physics. Therefore to have the knowledge of the canzone which we desire, let us give a summary of its elements, and first of the melody, then of the arrangement [of parts], and last of lines and syllables.
2. We say, then, that every [canzone] stanza is harmonized with a view to receiving some melody. But it is clear that they have different modes. For some are governed by one melody progressively from beginning to end, and this without repetition of any musical phrase and without diesis—diesis is the name we give to the passage from one melody to another (which we call volta when speaking to the unlearned). Arnaut Daniel used this type of stanza in almost all of his canzoni, and we followed him when we wrote
To the shortened day and to the great circle of shade.
3. Others, however, involve diesis: and there cannot be diesis, as we use the term, without the repetition of a melody, whether before the diesis, or after it, or both. 4. If there is repetition before the diesis, we say that the stanza has pedes [feet]; and it is fitting for it to have two pedes, though occasionally it is given three, very rarely however. If repetition occurs after the diesis, then we say that the stanza has versus [turnings]. If there is none before, we say the stanza has a frons [forehead]. If there is none after, we say it has a sirma, or tail.
5. See, therefore, reader, how much freedom is allowed to those who write canzoni, and consider for what reason custom has assigned to itself such large choice; and if reason leads you along the right path, you will see that it is only on account of the dignity of authorship that this freedom has been granted.
modum cantio est gremium totius sententie, sic stantia totam artem ingremiat; nec licet aliquid artis sequentibus arrogare, sed solam artem antecedentis induere. 3. Per quod patet quod ipsa de qua loquimur erit congremiatio sive compages omnium eorum que cantio sumit ab arte: quibus divaricatis, quam querimus descriptio innotescet.
4. Tota igitur scilicet ars cantionis circa tria videtur consistere: primo circa cantus divisionem, secundo circa partium habitudinem, tertio circa numerum carminum et sillabarum. 5. De rithimo vero mentionem non facimus, quia de propria cantionis arte non est. Licet enim in qualibet stantia rithimos innovare et eosdem reiterare ad libitum: quod, si de propria cantionis arte rithimus esset, minime liceret—quod dictum est. Si quid autem rithimi servare interest huius quod est ars, illud comprehenditur ibi cum dicimus "partium habitudinem."
6. Quare sic colligere possumus ex predictis diffinientes et dicere stantiam esse sub certo cantu et habitudine limitata carminum et sillabarum compagem.
x.1. Scientes quia rationale animal homo est et quia sensibilis anima et corpus est animal, et ignorantes de hac anima quid ea sit, vel de ipso corpore, perfectam hominis cognitionem habere non possumus: quia cognitionis perfectio uniuscuiusque terminatur ad ultima elementa, sicut Magister Sapientium in principio Physicorum testatur. Igitur ad habendam cantionis cognitionem quam inhyamus, nunc diffinientia suum diffiniens sub compendio ventilemus, et primo de cantu, deinde de habitudine, et postmodum de carminibus et sillabis percontemur.
2. Dicimus ergo quod omnis stantia ad quandam odam recipiendam armonizata est. Sed in modis diversificari videntur. Quia quedam sunt sub una oda continua usque ad ultimum progressive, hoc est sine iteratione modulationis cuiusquam et sine diesi—et diesim dicimus deductionem vergentem de una oda in aliam (hanc voltam vocamus, cum vulgus alloquimur)—: et huiusmodi stantia usus est fere in omnibus cantionibus suis Arnaldus Danielis, et nos eum secuti sumus cum diximus
Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra.
3. Quedam vero sunt diesim patientes: et diesis esse non potest, secundum quod eam appellamus, nisi reiteratio unius ode fiat, vel ante diesim, vel post, vel undique. 4. Si ante diesim repetitio fiat, stantiam dicimus habere pedes; et duos habere decet, licet quandoque tres fiant, rarissime tamen. Si repetitio fiat post diesim, tunc dicimus stantiam habere versus. Si ante non fiat repetitio, stantiam dicimus habere frontem. Si post non fiat, dicimus habere sirma, sive caudam.
5. Vide ergo, lector, quanta licentia data sit cantiones poetantibus, et considera cuius rei causa tam largum arbitrium usus sibi asciverit; et si recto calle ratio te duxerit, videbis autoritatis dignitate sola quod dicimus esse concessum.
6. The part of the technique of the canzone that consists in the division of the melody can be clearly enough seen from this; and so we proceed to the arrangement of the parts.
xi.1. It seems to us that what we call the arrangement of the parts is the most important aspect of the technique of the canzone. For this consists in the division of the melody and the constructing of the verses and the relation of the rhymes: therefore it is to be discussed most diligently.
2. To begin with, we say that the relation of the frons to the versus, or the pedes to the sirma, or the pedes to the versus can be very different.[12] 3. For sometimes the frons exceeds the versus in number of syllables and of lines, or can exceed it—and we say "can" because up to now we have not seen such an arrangement. 4. Sometimes the frons can be greater in number of lines but smaller in number of syllables, as when the frons has five lines and each versus has two lines, but the lines of the frons have seven syllables each and those of the versus eleven syllables. 5. Sometimes the versus are greater than the frons both in syllables and in number of lines, as in the one which we wrote
Love holds the tiller of my mind:
this[13] had a frons with four lines, made up of three hendecasyllables and one settenario; it could not be divided into pedes, since pedes must have equal numbers of lines and syllables, as versus must also. 6. And as we say ofthe frons, so also we say of versus: the versus also can be greater in number of lines but less in syllables, for instance if the versus are two, each consisting of three settenarii, and the frons has five lines, two hendecasyllables and three settenarii.
7. Sometimes indeed the pedes are greater in both number of lines and syllables, as in the one we wrote
Love, who move your power from the heavens.
8. Sometimes the pedes are surpassed by the sirma altogether, as in the one we wrote
A lady compassionate and young in age.
9. And just as we said a frons can be greater in number of lines but smaller in number of syllables (and conversely), so we say of the sirma.
10. The pedes also can be greater or lesser in number than the versus: for there can be in a stanza three pedes and two versus or three versus and two pedes, nor are we limited to this number, for it is permissible to join together a greater number of both pedes and versus. 11 . And just as we have spoken of the preponderance of lines and syllables in the others, so we say of the pedes and versus: for in the same manner either can exceed or be exceeded.
12. Nor should we omit the fact that we use the term pedes in the opposite way from poets writing in Latin, for they say that lines consist of feet, but we say that a pes consists of lines, as must be obvious. 13. And we must not omit to say that pedes must have the same number and arrangement of lines and syllables, for otherwise there cannot be a repetition of the melody. And the same is to be observed in versus.
6. Satis hinc innotescere potest quomodo cantionis ars circa cantus divisionem consistat; et ideo ad habitudinem procedamus.
xi.1. Videtur nobis hec quam habitudinem dicimus maxima pars eius quod artis est. Hec etenim circa cantus divisionem atque contextum carminum et rithimorum relationem consistit: quapropter diligentissime videtur esse tractanda.
2. Incipientes igitur dicimus quod frons cum versibus, pedes cum cauda vel sirmate, nec non pedes cum versibus, in stantia se diversimode habere possunt. 3. Nam quandoque frons versus excedit in sillabis et carminibus, vel excedere potest—et dicimus "potest" quoniam habitudinem hanc adhuc non vidimus. 4. Quandoque in carminibus excedere et in sillabis superari potest, ut si frons esset pentametra et quilibet versus esset dimeter, et metra frontis eptasillaba et versus endecasillaba essent. 5. Quandoque versus frontem superant sillabis et carminibus, ut in illa quam dicimus
Traggemi de la mente amor la stiva:
fuit hec tetrametra frons, tribus endecasillabis et uno eptasillabo contexta; non etenim potuit in pedes dividi, cum equalitas carminum et sillabarum requiratur in pedibus inter se, et etiam in versibus inter se. 6. Et quemadmodum dicimus de fronte, dicimus et de versibus: possent etenim versus frontem superare carminibus, et sillabis superari, puta si versus duo essent et uterque trimeter, et eptasillaba metra, et frons esset pentametra, duobus endecasillabis et tribus eptasillabis contexta.
7. Quandoque vero pedes caudam superant carminibus et sillabis, ut in illa quam diximus
Amor, che movi tua virtù da cielo.
8. Quandoque pedes a sirmate superantur in toto, ut in illa quam diximus Donna pietosa e di novella etate.
9. Et quemadmodum diximus frontem posse superare carminibus, sillabis superatam (et e converso), sic de sirmate dicimus.
10. Pedes quoque versus in numero superant et superantur ab hiis: possunt enim esse in stantia tres pedes et duo versus, et tres versus et duo pedes; nec hoc numero limitamur, quin liceat plures et pedes et versus simul contexere. 11. Et quemadmodum de victoria carminum et sillabarum diximus inter alia, nunc etiam inter pedes et versus dicimus: nam eodem modo vinci et vincere possunt.
12. Nec pretermictendum est quod nos e contrario regulatis poetis pedes accipimus, quia illi carmen ex pedibus, nos vero ex carminibus pedem constare dicimus, ut satis evidenter apparet. 13. Nec etiam pretermictendum est quin iterum asseramus pedes ab invicem necessario carminum et sillabarum equalitatem et habitudinem accipere, quia non aliter cantus repetitio fieri posset. Hoc idem in versibus esse servandum astruimus.
xii.1. We must also consider, as has been said above, the arrangement by which we weave verses together, and therefore let us give an account of it, repeating some of what we have already said about verses.
2. In our usage three verses or lines seem to have the privilege of being used most frequently, namely the hendecasyllable, the settenario, and the quinario; for we have already shown that the trisyllable is used less frequently. 3. Of these then, when we are seeking to write poetry in tragic style, the hendecasyllable, because of its excellence, merits the privilege of predominating in the weave of the stanza. For there are stanzas that rejoice to be woven exclusively of hendecasyllables, like that one by Guido [Cavalcanti] of Florence
A lady begs me, so I will say;
and we also have written
Ladies who have intellect of love.
The Hispani also have used this [verse]—and I call Hispani those who have written in lingua d'oc—: Aimeric de Belenoi:
No man can fulfill completely.
4. There is a type of stanza into which only one settenario is woven: and this can only be where there is a frons or a sirma, for, as has been said, in pedes or versus there must be an equality of verses and syllables. For this reason there cannot be an uneven number of verses where there is neither frons nor sirma; but where both are found,[14] or either alone, one may use an even or odd number of verses at one's pleasure. 5. And as there is a certain type of stanza fashioned with only one settenario, so there can be two, three, four, or five, as long as, in the tragic style, the hendecasyllable predominates. 6. Indeed, we find some who in the tragic style begin with a settenario, namely Guido Guinizelli, Guido de' Ghislieri, and Fabruzzo, all of Bologna:
Of steady suffering,
and
Lady, my steady heart,
and
My going far away;
and certain others. But if we examine the sense of these openings more subtly, this tragic style can be seen to set forth with a certain shading of elegy. 7. We do not concede the same license to the quinario: in a poem in the high manner it is enough to interweave one quinario in the entire stanza, or two at the most if there are pedes —and I say in the pedes because of the necessity of melodic equality in pedes or versus. 8. A trisyllable should never stand by itself in the tragic style; and I say "stand by itself" because we often see it exist by virtue of a
xii.1. Est etiam, ut superius dictum est, habitudo quedam quam carmina contexendo considerare debemus: et ideo rationem faciamus de illa, repetentes proinde que superius de carminibus diximus.
2. In usu nostro maxime tria carmina frequentandi prerogativam habere videntur, endecasillabum scilicet, eptasillabum et pentasillabum; que trisillabum ante alia sequi astruximus. 3. Horum prorsus, cum tragice poetari conamur, endecasillabum propter quandam excellentiam in contextu vincendi privilegium promeretur. Nam quedam stantia est que solis endecasillabis gaudet esse contexta, ut illa Guidonis de Florentia
Donna mi prega, perch'io voglio dire;
et etiam nos dicimus
Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore.
Hoc etiam Yspani usi sunt—et dico Yspanos qui poetati sunt in vulgari oc: Namericus de Belnui:
Nuls hom non pot complir adrecciamen.
4. Quedam est in qua tantum eptasillabum intexitur unum: et hoc esse non potest nisi ubi frons est vel cauda, quoniam, ut dictum est, in pedibus atque versibus actenditur equalitas carminum et sillabarum. Propter quod etiam nec numerus impar carminum potest esse ubi frons vel cauda non est; sed ubi hee sunt, vel altera sola, pari et impari numero in carminibus licet uti ad libitum. 5. Et sicut quedam stantia est uno solo eptasillabo conformata, sic duobus, tribus, quatuor, quinque videtur posse contexi, dummodo in tragico vincat endecasillabum et principiet. 6. Verumtamen quosdam ab eptasillabo tragice principiasse invenimus, videlicet [Guidonem Guinizelli,] Guidonem de Ghisleriis et Fabrutium Bononienses:
Di fermo sofferire,
et
Donna, lo fermo core,
et
Lo meo lontano gire;
et quosdam alios. Sed si ad eorum sensum subtiliter intrare velimus, non sine quodam elegie umbraculo hec tragedia processisse videbitur. 7. De pentasillabo quoque non sic concedimus: in dictamine magno sufficit enim unicum pentasillabum in tota stantia conseri, vel duo ad plus in pedibus—et dico "pedibus" propter necessitatem qua pedibus, versibusque, cantatur. 8. Minime autem trisillabum in tragicum videtur esse sumendum per se subsistens: et dico
certain repetition of rhyme [within a hendecasyllable], as can be found in that poem by Guido [Cavalcanti] of Florence:
A lady begs me,
and in that one of ours
Since Love has altogether abandoned me.
And the trisyllable does not stand on its own in those poems, but is merely a part of the hendecasyllable, answering the rhyme of the preceding verse like an echo.[15]
9. Concerning the arrangement of the verses, one must especially take care that, if a settenario has been woven into the first pes, it hold the same position in the second pes as in the first: for example, if a pes of three lines has hendecasyllables for its first and last verses and the middle one, the second, is a settenario, so also the other pes must have as its second verse a settenario, and as its first and last, hendecasyllables: otherwise the repetition of the melody for which the pedes have been constructed cannot take place, and consequently they cannot be pedes. 10. And it is the same for versus as for pedes: for we can see that pedes and versus differ only in position, for they are called pedes when they occur before the diesis and versus when they occur after it. And we say that what we have said about the three-line pes is to be observed in other pedes also; and also what we have said about one or more settenarii and about quinarii and all the rest.
11. From this, reader, you can gather with what verses to construct a stanza
and how to consider their arrangement.
xiii.1. Let us now discuss the arrangement of rhymes, but not rhyme in itself: we postpone a discussion of rhyme in itself until later, when we discuss the poem in middle style.
2. At the beginning of this chapter certain things must be excluded. One of these is the stanza without rhyme, in which there is no arrangement of rhymes to be considered: and Arnaut Daniel used this type of stanza very frequently, as here:
If in giving joy Love were to me
and we have written
To the shortened day.[16]
3. There is another type of stanza in which all the verses end with the same rhyme, in which it is useless to seek arrangement. Thus it remains to consider mixed rhymes.
4. And first be it known that almost all poets assume very great freedom in rhyme, on which they rely as a chief point of the sweetness of their harmonies. 5. There are some who often do not rhyme all line endings in the same stanza, but repeat them or rhyme them between stanzas, like Gotto of Mantua, who made known to us orally his many fine canzoni: he would always include one verse unrhymed within the stanza, which he called the chiave [key]; and as one may do this with one verse, so also with two, and perhaps with more.
"per se subsistens" quia per quandam rithimorum repercussionem frequenter videtur assumptum, sicut inveniri potest in illa Guidonis Florentini
Donna me prega,
et in illa quam diximus
Poscia ch'Amor del tutto m'ha lasciato.
Nec per se ibi carmen est omnino, sed pars endecasillabi tantum, ad rithimum precedentis carminis velut econ respondens.
9. Hoc etiam precipue actendendum est circa carminum habitudinem, quod, si eptasillabum interseratur in primo pede, quem situm accipit ibi, eundem resumat in altero: puta, si pes trimeter primum et ultimum carmen endecasillabum habet et medium, hoc est secundum, eptasillabum, [et pes alter habeat secundum eptasillabum] et extrema endecasillaba: non aliter ingeminatio cantus fieri posset, ad quam pedes fiunt, ut dictum est, et per consequens pedes esse non possent. 10. Et quemadmodum de pedibus, dicimus et de versibus: in nullo enim pedes et versus differre videmus nisi in situ, quia hii ante, hii post diesim stantie nominantur. Et etiam quemadmodum de trimetro pede, et de omnibus aliis servandum esse asserimus; et sicut de uno eptasillabo, sic de pluribus et de pentasillabo et omni alio dicimus.
11. Satis hinc, lector, elicere sufficienter potes qualiter tibi carminum habituanda sit stantia habitudinemque circa carmina considerandam videre.
xiii.1. Rithimorum quoque relationi vacemus, nichil de rithimo secundum se modo tractantes: proprium enim eorum tractatum in posterum prorogamus, cum de mediocri poemate intendemus.
2. In principio igitur huius capituli quedam resecanda videntur. Unum est stantia sine rithimo, in qua nulla rithimorum habitudo actenditur: et huiusmodi stantiis usus est Arnaldus Danielis frequentissime, velut ibi:
Se•m fos Amor de ioi donar;
et nos dicimus
Al poco giorno.
3. Aliud est stantia cuius omnia carmina eundem rithimum reddunt, in qua superfluum esse constat habitudinem querere. Sic proinde restat circa rithimos mixtos debere insisti.
4. Et primo sciendum est quod in hoc amplissimam sibi licentiam fere omnes assumunt, et ex hoc maxime totius armonie dulcedo intenditur. 5. Sunt enim quidam qui non omnes quandoque desinentias carminum rithimantur in eadem stantia, sed easdem repetunt sive rithimantur in aliis, sicut fuit Gottus Mantuanus, qui suas multas et bonas cantiones nobis oretenus intimavit: hic semper in stantia unum carmen incomitatum texebat, quod clavem vocabat; et sicut de uno licet, licet etiam de duobus, et forte de pluribus.
6. There are certain others, and almost all writers of canzoni, who leave no verse unaccompanied by one or more that rhyme with its ending. 7. And some make the rhymes after the diesis different from those before it; others do not so, but interweave rhymes from the first part of the stanza with those of the second. But this is done most frequently with the first line of the second part, which many rhyme with the last line of the first part: and this seems to be nothing other than a lovely chaining together [concatenation] of the stanza. 8. In the arrangement of the rhymes, whether they occur in the frons or in the sirma, all the freedom one can desire is to be granted; but that of the last [two] lines is most beautiful if they fall into silence with a rhyme.
9. But this freedom is to be used with caution in pedes; and we find that a certain arrangement must be maintained. Making a distinction, we may say that a pes may be complete with either an even or an odd number of verses, and in either case the endings may rhyme or not: no one doubts that this is so for an even number of verses; in the case of an odd number, if any is doubtful, let him remember what we said in the last chapter about the trisyllable, when as part of a hendecasyllable it answers like an echo. 10. And if in the first pes there is an ending to which no rhyme replies, let it by all means be answered in the second pes. But if all the endings in the first pes have companions, in the second pes one may repeat rhymes or bring in new ones, entirely or in part, as long as the order of the first pes is maintained entirely: for example, if the outer endings of a three-verse pes, that is, the first and the last, rhyme in the first pes, so the outer verses of the second must rhyme also; and however the middle verse is treated, rhymed or unrhymed, so let it be in the second also: and this is to be observed in other types of pes as well.[17] 11. In versus we almost always follow this rule—and we say "almost" because occasionally, because of concatenation or the rhyming together of the last two lines, we have reason to subvert the order we have mentioned.[18]
12. Finally, it seems fitting that we append to this chapter the things that should be avoided in arranging rhymes, since we do not intend to say anything more about rhyme in this [second] book. 13. There are three things, then, in the disposing of rhymes, which it is not fitting for the courtly poet to do: namely, the excessive repetition of the same rhyme, unless perhaps some new and unprecedented artistic intention demands this, like the day of the birth of a knighthood, which disdains to go by without claiming some prerogative: this we strove to do in:
Love, you see perfectly well that this lady;
and the second is useless equivocation, which always seems to detract from the meaning; and the third is harshness of rhyme, unless it is mixed well with smoothness: for tragedy particularly shines in the mixing of harsh and smooth rhymes.[19]
14. And let these remarks suffice to describe the craft of the canzone insofar as it concerns the arrangement of rhymes.
xiv.1. Now that we have sufficiently discussed two of the aspects of the craft of the canzone, let us treat the third, namely the number of verses and of syl-
6. Quidam alii sunt, et fere omnes cantionum inventores, qui nullum in stantia carmen incomitatum relinquunt quin sibi rithimi concrepantiam reddant, vel unius vel plurium. 7. Et quidam diversos faciunt esse rithimos eorum que post diesim carmina sunt a rithimis eorum que sunt ante; quidam vero non sic, sed desinentias anterioris stantie inter postera carmina referentes intexunt. Sepissime tamen hoc fit in desinentia primi posteriorum, quam plerique rithimantur ei qui est priorum posterioris: quod non aliud esse videtur quam quedam ipsius stantie concatenatio pulcra. 8. De rithimorum quoque habitudine, prout sunt in fronte vel in cauda videtur omnis optata licentia concedenda; pulcerrime tamen se habent ultimorum carminum desinentie si cum rithimo in silentium cadant.
9. In pedibus vero cavendum est; et habitudinem quandam servatam esse invenimus. Et, discretionem facientes, dicimus quod pes vel pari vel impari metro completur, et utrobique comitata et incomitata desinentia esse potest: nam in pari metro nemo dubitat; in alio vero, si quis dubius est, recordetur ea que diximus in preinmediato capitulo de trisillabo, quando, pars existens endecasillabi, velut econ respondet. 10. Et si in altero pedum exsortem rithimi desinentiam esse contingat, omnimode in altero sibi instauratio fiat. Si vero quelibet desinentia in altero pede rithimi consortium habeat, in altero prout libet referre vel innovare desinentias licet, vel totaliter vel in parte, dumtaxat precedentium ordo servetur in totum: puta, si extreme desinentie trimetri, hoc est prima et ultima, concrepabunt in primo pede, sic secundi extremas desinentias convenit concrepare; et qualem se in primo media videt, comitatam quidem vel incomitatam, talis in secundo resurgat: et sic de aliis pedibus est servandum. 11. In versibus quoque fere semper hac lege perfruimur—et "fere" dicimus quia propter concatenationem prenotatam et combinationem desinentiarum ultimarum quandoque ordinem iam dictum perverti contingit.
12. Preterea nobis bene convenire videtur ut que cavenda sunt circa rithimos huic appendamus capitulo, cum in isto libro nichil ulterius de rithimorum doctrina tangere intendamus. 13. Tria ergo sunt que circa rithimorum positionem potiri dedecet aulice poetantem: nimia scilicet eiusdem rithimi repercussio, nisi forte novum aliquid atque intentatum artis hoc sibi proroget—ut nascentis militie dies, qui cum nulla prerogativa suam indignatur preterire dietam: hoc etenim nos facere nisi sumus ibi:
Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna;
secundum vero est ipsa inutilis equivocatio, que semper sententie quicquam derogare videtur; et tertium est rithimorum asperitas, nisi forte sit lenitati permixta: nam lenium asperorumque rithimorum mixtura ipsa tragedia nitescit.
14. Et hec de arte, prout habitudinem respicit, tanta sufficiant.
xiv.1. Ex quo [duo] que sunt artis in cantione satis sufficienter tractavimus, nunc de tertio videtur esse tractandum, videlicet de numero carminum et sil-
lables. And first we must look to something that concerns the stanza as a whole; then we will consider it according to its parts.
2. In the first place we must make a distinction concerning the subjects which we may happen to write about, for some of them seem to require a certain prolixity in the stanzas, others not. For, since everything we write is either positive or negative—as sometimes we write to persuade, sometimes to dissuade, sometimes congratulating, sometimes sarcastically, sometimes to praise, sometimes to blame—let the words which are negative always hasten toward the end, but the others with a graceful fullness draw to a close gradually . . .
[The treatise ends here.]
labarum. Et primo secundum totam stantiam videre oportet aliquid; deinde secundum partes eius videbimus.
2. Nostra igitur primo refert discretionem facere inter ea que canenda occurrunt, quia quedam stantie prolixitatem videntur appetere, quedam non. Nam cum ea que dicimus cuncta vel circa dextrum aliquid vel sinistrum canamus—ut quandoque persuasorie quandoque dissuasorie, quandoque gratulanter quandoque yronice, quandoque laudabiliter quandoque contemptive canere contingit—, que circa sinistra sunt verba semper ad extremum festinent, et alia decenti prolixitate passim veniant ad extremum . . .
[Cetera desunt]
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Index
A
Aaron, 132 , 397
Abrams, Richard, 418
Act, and potency, 93 , 113 , 117 , 374 –376, 395
Actaeon, 378
Adam, 94 , 132 , 237 , 241 , 247 , 270 , 361 –364, 423 , 433
Adamo, Maestro, 199 , 417
Adam of St. Victor, 231 , 425
Adynaton (rhetorical figure), 115 , 126 –129, 132 , 162 , 253 –254, 381 , 382 , 437
Aeneas, 175 , 182 –184, 192 , 195 , 263 , 382 , 407 –409, 420
Aglianò, Sebastiano, 264
Air, sphere of, 213 ;
and the eye, 389 –390
Alain of Lille, 88 , 168 , 341 ;
Anticlaudianus,360 , 426 ;
De planctu Naturae,381 , 399 , 400
Alaur. See Zodiac
Alba (dawn song), 239 , 246
Alberigo, Frate, 220 , 221 –222
Albertus Magnus, 36 –45, 200 , 366 , 371 ;
De animalibus,374 , 418 ;
De causis et processu universitatis,339 , 349 ;
De homine, 402 –403;
De natura loci,338 ;
In librum de anima,381 ;
In librum de causis,347 ;
Mineralium liber,37 –45, 274 , 338 –339, 367 –368, 375 , 377 , 388 , 395 –396, 416 , 424 , 437 , 438 , 443 ;
Physica, 374 –375;
Super Dionysium de divinis nominibus,341 , 343 , 391 , 393 –394, 411
Alexander of Hales, 347
Alfonsi, Luigi, 18
Alfonsine tables, 7
Alfonso X of Spain, 362
Alhazen, 412
Alighieri, Dante. See Dante
Alighieri, Gemma di Manetto de' Donati, 2 , 47 , 332
Alighieri, Iacopo di Dante, 332
Alighieri, Pietro di Dante, 332
Allard, Guy-H., 341
Allegory, in the petrose,128 , 173 –175, 181 –183
Allers, Rudolf, 332
Alpetragius, 349
Alpha and Omega, 15 –17, 187 , 235 , 241 , 335 –336
Amor (god), 165 , 180 –183, 192 –193, 407 ;
as enemy of lover's life, 170 –179, 183 –185;
as military commander, 406 –407;
relation to Christ, 150 –153, 392 –393;
as simulacrum, 182 ;
sources of, 180 –181;
weapons of, 413
Amor (term), 180 , 392
Amos, Book of, 382 –383, 436
Amphion, 168 , 219 –223, 244 , 399 , 424
Analogy:
in names of God, 390 ;
in order of terms, 162 –163;
of proportion, 395
Anaphora, 17 , 105 , 177 , 178 , 351 , 372
Anchises, 183 , 263 , 337
Andreas Capellanus, De amore,371 , 402
Andrieu, Michel, 440
Angelitti, Filippo, 352
Angels:
as heavenly movers, 35 –36, 39 –42, 86 , 229 –232, 366 –368, 418 ;
relation to God, 36 –42
Angiolieri, Cecco, 404
Annunciation, 244 , 247 , 425 , 434 ;
date of, 206
Antaeus, 218 , 223 , 249
Antiphrasis, 175 , 419
Antistrophe:
in astronomy, 123 , 135 –136;
in choral ode, 30 –31;
in rhetoric, 123 , 136 , 178 , 372
Aphrodite, 353
Apocalypse of St. John, 135 , 267 , 270 , 431
Apokatastasis, 251 , 437
Apollo, 120 , 214 , 255 –256. See also Sun
Apostles, 94 , 242 , 247 ;
compared to heavenly bodies, 368 –369
Apostrophe, 158 –161, 392
Aquarius (zodiacal sign), 213 , 216 , 423
Aquinas, St. Thomas (character), 237
Aquinas, Thomas, 339 ;
astrological views of, 34 –36, 43 –45, 366 , 382 ;
De veritate,367 ;
In Aristotelis librum de anima commentarium,371 , 380 –381, 414 , 423 , 426 ;
In librum dionysium de divinis nominibus,
Aquinas, Thomas
341 , 342 –343, 384 ;
Summa contra gentiles,367 , 390 , 398 ;
Summa theologica,338 , 390 , 391 , 392 , 395 , 409 , 410 , 413 , 425 , 426 ;
Super librum de causis,347 , 365
Arc of life, 74 , 429
Aries (constellation), 249
Aries (zodiacal sign), 78 , 198 , 205 –208, 242 , 249 , 252 , 351 , 356 , 374 , 419 , 435
Aristotle:
as auctor, 242 ;
on color, 389 ;
doctrine of unmoved mover, 14 , 158 ;
on formation of minerals, 34 –36;
on generic and particular, 58 ;
on heavenly spheres, 38 , 388 ;
on intelligence in Nature, 42 ;
on primacy of heart, 371 ;
on semen, tumescence, and orgasm, 82 , 371 , 374 ;
De anima, 43 –44, 366 , 371 ;
De caelo, 351 ;
De generatione animalium,374 ;
De generatione et corruptione,374 ;
De insomniis,412 ;
Metaphysics,374 –375;
Meteorologica,34 ,
Mineralogica,338 ;
Physics, 44 , 269 , 391 –392, 442 ;
Politics, 400 ;
Problemata,353
Armstrong, A. H., 334
Arnaldo da Villanova, 406
Arnold of Saxony, 338
Arnulf of Orleans, 378 , 415
Arrow and teleology, 185 –191, 404 , 407 , 409 –413
Art, human:
affected by astrological influences, 43 –45, 94 , 107 , 147 , 246 , 386 ;
analog of influence of heavens, 41 –45, 94 , 147 –148, 162 –163, 230 –232, 367 –369.
See also Sciences
Ascanius, 408
Astrology, in the petrose,8 –9, 72 –74, 76 , 78 , 79 –107, 94 , 142 –143, 147 , 150 –151, 246
Auctores, Dante and his, 239 –243
Auerbach, Erich, 337 , 382
Augustine of Hippo, 335 , 402 –403;
City of God,270 , 413 –414, 433 ;
Confessions,158 , 184 , 186 , 367 –369, 387 , 391 , 410 –411, 413 –414;
De doctrina christiana,390 ;
De Genesi ad litteram,224 , 424 ;
De trinitate,269 ;
Enarrationes in Psalmos,424
Austin, H. D., 375 , 376 , 381
Averroës, 349 , 365 , 366 , 371 , 441
Avicenna, 54 , 338 , 349 , 365
B
Babylon, 224
Bademagus, King, 407
Baker, David J., 421 , 422 –423
Baldelli, Ignazio, 166 , 167 , 373 , 414 , 415 , 419 , 425 , 433
Baptistery (Florence), 248 –249, 383 , 435
Barach, C. S., 370
Barbi, Michele, 1 , 339 –340, 345 , 349 , 378
Barkan, Leonard, 332 , 378 , 415
Barolini, Teodolinda, 418
Bartolozzi, Vanni, 109 , 120 , 373 , 375 , 378
Battaglia, Salvatore, 375 , 443
Beatific vision, 52 , 126 , 170 , 187 , 191 , 414
Beatrice:
in the Commedia,5 , 93 , 199 –257 passim;
death of, 53 , 419 ;
compared with Donna pietra,197 –198;
and "pargoletta," 5 ;
in the Vita nuova,47 , 53 –69, 95 , 117 , 187 .
See also Eyes
Beggiato, Fabrizio, 373
Benvenuto da Imola, 88 , 424 , 425 , 439
Bergin, Thomas G., 403
Bernard of Clairvaux, 414
Bernard Silvester:
Commentary on Martianus Capella, 88 –89, 360 –362;
De mundi universitate,88 , 97 –102, 347 –348, 370 , 371 , 381 , 424
Bernart de Ventadour, "Tant ai mo cor ple de joya," 350
Bertagni, Renzo, 332
Bettmann, Karl, 362
Bezold, C., 385
Bible, as firmament, 242 , 368
Birth, theme of, in Dante's works, 72 , 83 , 91 –96, 107 –108, 222 , 242 , 246 –248, 256 –258, 420 ;
cosmological views, 26 –30, 37 , 53 –54, 69 , 99 –100
Blasucci, Luigi, 331 , 332 , 417 –418, 421 , 433 , 436
Bloch, Marc, 264 , 438
Bloch, R. Howard, 392
Bloom, Harold, 384
Bober, Harry, 362
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 84 ;
as editor of Dante, 165 , 349 , 396 , 397 ;
Decameron, 357 , 390 , 396 , 441 ;
Esposizioni sopra il Dante,331 –332, 354 , 365 , 424 ;
Genealogie deorum gentilium,357 , 415 , 416 ;
Trattatello in laude di Dante,331 , 356 –357
Bocca degli Abati, 221 , 252
Body analogy. See Microcosm
Body, Glorified, 253
Boethius, 8 –9, 53 –54, 66 –68, 430 , 431 ;
De Musica, 168 , 333 , 399 –400;
Institutio arithmetica,398 .
See also Consolatio Philosophiae
Boffitto, J., 354 , 364
Boitani, Piero, 424
Boll, Franz, 358 , 385
Bonagiunta da Lucca, 202 , 403
Bonaventura of Bagnoregio, 347 ;
Collationes in Hexaemeron,425
Bonaventura, St. (character), 237
Bondanella, Peter, 372
Boniface VIII, Pope, 2
Bosco, Umberto, 431 , 436
Boyde, Patrick, 71 , 155 –156, 177 , 208 , 332 , 337 –338, 344 , 345 , 349 , 354 , 365 , 367 , 372 , 390 , 397 , 399 , 401 –402, 404 , 407 , 419
Brague, Rémi, 333
Brey-Mariño, Maria, 339 , 362
Brundage, James, 440
Büchner, Karl, 333
Buonarrotti, Michelangelo, self-portrait (Sistine Chapel), 257
Burke, Kenneth, 162 , 394 –395
Busnelli, G., 369
Buti, Francesco da, 439
Buti, Giovanni, 332
C
Cacciaguida, 51 , 263 –267, 274 , 276 , 439 –442
Caina, 219 , 231
Calcidius, 8 , 29 –30, 90 , 124 , 333 , 352 , 379 , 428 , 429
Calendar:
ecclesiastical, 206 , 354 , 364 ;
Julian, 251 , 254 –255, 270
Camiscion de' Pazzi, 423
Cancer (constellation), 363 , 365
Cancer (zodiacal sign), 130 –131, 216 , 252 –253, 355 , 365 , 381 , 435
Canzone stanza, 22 –32, 144 –145, 147 ;
parts of, see next entry;
relation of sententia to form of, 26 –27, 75 –76, 125 –126, 145 –149, 176 –179;
settenarii in, 20 , 75 –76, 176 , 398 , 400 .
See also Choral ode; Dante, works of: De vulgari eloquentia; Microcosm; Same and Other
Canzone stanza, parts of:
claves, 24 , 144 ;
concatenatio,26 –28, 31 –32, 75 , 144 , 403 ;
diesis, 23 –24, 26 –29, 31 , 75 –76, 177 , 374 ;
frons, 24 , 25 , 178 ;
pedes, 24 , 177 –178, 352 , 403 ;
sirma, 23 –24, 26 –27, 75 –76, 112 , 177 –178;
versus, 24 , 27 –29
Cattabiani, Alfredo, 436
Cavalcanti, Cavalcante de', 265 , 441
Cavalcanti, Guido:
in Boccaccio, 441 ;
in Commedia,435 , 441 ;
in De vulgari eloquentia,19 ;
in Vita nuova,4 , 19 , 400 , 407 ;
reply to "Già eran quasi," 55 ;
"Donna mi prega," 181 –182, 405 , 407
Centesma negletta,251 –255
Chadwick, Henry, 333
Chamberlain, D. S., 18 , 333
Chanson de Roland,337
Charles of Valois, 441 , 444
Chatelain, Etienne, 367
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 168 , 353 ;
Troilus and Criseyde,194 , 424
Chenu, M. D., 332
Cherchi, Paolo, 381
Chiampi, James, 422 , 423
Chiasmus, 237 , 240 , 429
Chiron, 223
Choral ode, and two motions of heavens, 30 –31, 169 , 236 , 428
Christ:
allegorical sense refers to, 128 ;
and Amor, 158 –161, 392 –393;
as androgyne, 348 , 362 ;
Beatrice as analog of, 64 –65, 68 ;
Cross and celestial chi,240 , 427 ;
Harrowing of Hell, 344 ;
Incarnation of, 247 ;
as light, 160 –161, 392 ;
as Logos, 410 ;
as Logos, in "Amor, tu vedi ben," 158 , 161 ;
as Logos, in Augustine, 158 , 387 ;
as Logos, in Boethius, 335 ;
as Logos, in the Gospel of John, 391 ;
as Logos, searching, 412 ;
his love for the Church, 247 , 414 (see also Song of Songs);
names of, 6 , 158 –160, 391 ;
as perfect man, 237 ;
second coming, 126 –129;
as sun, 158 , 427 , 433 –434;
Triumph of, 240 –244, 432 –434;
union of natures in, 232 , 426
Church:
as Body of Christ, 224 ;
as Bride of Christ, 247 , 425 , 430 , 434 ;
creation of, signified by Genesis 1 , 367 –368
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 437 ;
De amiciia, 53 , 340 ;
De natura deorum,359 ;
De oratore,372 ;
Somnium Scipionis,8 , 30 , 122
Cino da Pistoia, 19
Cioffari, Vincenzo, 375 , 378
Clergy, as heavenly bodies, 94 , 239 –243, 368 –369, 431
Clytie, 116 , 120 –121, 377 –379
Coblas:
capcaudadas,177 ;
capfinidas,177 , 404
Cocito, 168 , 215 , 217 –224, 249 , 252 , 423 –424
Comens, Bruce, 2 , 6 , 375 , 396 –397, 415 , 418
Commentary, reticent, in the Vita nuova,56 , 341 , 342 –343. See also Division
Consolatio Philosophiae (Boethius):
Hercules in, 424 ;
music in, 333 ;
as Neoplatonic source, 8 ;
structure in, 18 ;
on stylistic decorum, 399 , 424 ;
symmetry of meters in, 333 , 348 ;
and Vita nuova,53 –54, 66 , 348
—"O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas," 12 –18, 333 –336;
Alpha and Omega in, 16 –18, 235 ;
and "Al poco giorno," 124 –126;
and "Amor, tu vedi ben," 163 ;
and Augustine, 413 –414;
and Commedia,126 ;
and "Così nel mio parlar," 413 ;
and "Donne ch'avete," 66 –68;
medieval commentaries of, 333 –334;
Consolatio Philosophiae
and Paradiso,227 –230, 232 –236, 250 ;
World-Soul in, 124 –126, 349 .
See also Microcosm; Neoplatonism; Same and Other; World-Soul
Constantinus Africanus, De communibus locis,370 –371
Contini, Gianfranco, 1 , 6 , 109 , 150 , 155 , 163 , 165 , 188 , 199 –200, 261 –263, 331 , 349 , 373 –378, 382 , 384 , 390 , 396 , 399 , 401 –405, 410 , 412 , 417 , 418 , 421 , 436
Convenienia,424
Conversio, astronomical, 119 , 121 , 128 –129, 136 ;
in rhetoric, 136 , 372
Cornford, F. M., 9 –10, 269 , 332 , 352 , 442
Corti, Maria, 407
Cosmo, Umberto, 425
Cosmology, Dante's views on, 3 –8, 19 , 26 –30, 43 ;
birth of, 106 –108, 261 –267;
poetic ingegno as bodily, 43 –45, 106 –107;
poetic license, 177 , 403 ;
as response to crisis and risk, 48 –52, 258 .
See also Art, human; Canzone stanza; Cycles, cosmic; Dante, works of:
De vulgari eloquentia; Microcosm; Same and Other
Costa, Gustavo, 365
Coulter, James G., 332
Courcelle, Pierre, 12 , 334 , 349 , 354
Courtly love, code of, 47 , 48 , 172 , 183 , 194 –195, 349 –350, 402 , 405 , 415
Crabbe, Anne, 333
Crater (constellation), 363
Creed, Athanasian, 431
Crescini, Vincenzo, 403 –404
Cristo (term), 238 ;
in rhyme, 429 , 440
Crombie, A. C., 332 , 338
Crystal, 33 , 424 –425, 436 –437;
as burning glass, 163 , 388 ;
and Cocito, 219 –223;
cosmos as, 139 , 253 ;
of the eye, 153 –155, 162 , 219 , 224 , 229 , 231 –232, 388 –389, 426 –427;
heavens as, 162 , 388 –389, 436 , 437 ;
in Paradiso,273 –276;
poem as, 139 , 224 , 254 ;
production of, 38 , 74 , 117 , 140 –144, 146 –147, 150 –151, 218 , 423 ;
as term, 33 , 253 –254, 273 –276.
See also Eye; Microcosm; Stones
Crystalline heaven, 252 –253, 388 , 436
Cudini, Piero, 110 , 113 , 271 , 373 , 374 , 380 , 381
Curry, Walter J., 353
Curtius, E. R., 350 , 381
Cycles, cosmic, and literary structure, 18 , 72 –74, 77 –80, 107 , 122 –124, 127 –128, 135 , 144 –145
D
d'Alverny, Marie Thérèse, 332 , 369
Damon, Phillip, 349 , 351
Dance, of stars and planets, 236 , 428 ;
of theologians, 428
Daniel, Arnaut: and "Così nel mio parlar," 415 ;
and "Lo doloroso amor," 417 ;
extent of influence on Dante, 350 ;
and "Io son venuto," 350 ;
sirventes of, 414 ;
and trobar clus,350 ;
works of, see next entry
Daniel, Arnaut, works of:
"Entre 'l taur e'l doble signe" (attrib.), 419
"Lo ferm voler q'el cor m'intra":
and "Al poco giorno," 133 –134;
Biblical references in, 132 ;
Dante's use of, 109 , 128 –129, 401 ;
form of, 116 , 379 , 380 ;
and Raimbaut de Vacquciras, 402 ;
rhyme-words in, 130 , 383 , 437 ;
sexual references in, 381 , 413 ;
tornada of, 132 –134, 383
Daniel, Book of, 382 , 431
Daniélou, Jean, 362
Dante, life of:
accusation of barratry, 215 ;
baptism, 248 –250, 435 ;
date of birth, 2 , 72 , 84 –87, 331 –332, 355 –356, 365 ;
date of death, 331 –332;
development, 2 –6, 50 –52, 53 –54, 69 , 91 –94, 199 –258
passim; exile, 3 , 242 , 264 –265;
horoscope of, 72 , 84 –91, 242 , 254 , 364 , 365 ;
marriage, 2 , 47 ;
nobility, 266 ;
orthodoxy, 365 –366, 429
Dante, works of:
"Aï faux ris" (attrib.), 403
Canzoni:
"Amor, che movi tua virtù dal cielo," 19 , 392 ; "
Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona," 349 , 411 –412, 418 ;
"Amor, da che convien pur ch'io mi doglia," 392 ;
"Doglia mi reca nel core ardire," 403 ;
"Le dolci rime," 397 ;
"Lo doloroso amor che mi conduce," 402 , 417 ;
"E' m'incresce di me sì duramente," 397 , 401 , 404 ;
"Io sento sì d'Amor la gran possanza," 24 , 28 , 445 ;
"Poscia ch'Amor del tutto m'ha lasciato," 4 , 351 , 376 , 444 –445;
"Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute," 402 , 415 ;
"Voi ch'intendendo il terzo ciel movete," 1 , 418
Commedia:
and Albertus Magnus, 37 ;
arrow metaphor in, 185 –191, 409 –410;
astrological basis of, 364 ;
astronomy in, 7 –8, 254 ;
body analogy in, 107 ;
and Convivio,19 ;
Dante's birth in, 91 –93;
fictional date of, 364 –365, 419 ;
frères ennemis in, 88 ;
and Macrobius, 363 ;
and "O qui perpetua," 14 , 125 –126;
and petrose, 1 –3, 6 , 197 –198, 220 , 331 , 399 ;
petrose as anticipating,
46 –52, 131 , 162 , 240 ;
and Psalm 113 , 128 , 382 ;
use of almanach in, 84 ;
in the Vita nuova,69 , 343 –344.
See also Art, human; Horoscopes; Inferno; Microcosm; Paradiso; Purgatorio; Same and Other
Convivio, 3 , 19 , 69 , 339 ;
Book 1, 410 , 434 , 438 ;
Book 2, 53 –54, 66 , 198 , 243 , 270 , 339 –340, 351 , 369 , 373 –374, 377 , 394 , 399 , 409 , 412 , 432 –433;
Book 3, 122 , 213 , 236 , 342 , 351 , 375 , 376 , 377 , 379 , 411 –412;
Book 4, 44 , 365 , 397 , 418 , 431 , 442 ;
canzoni of, 1 , 4 , 349
De vulgari eloquentia,19 –20, 336 –337;
annotations on Book 2, 443 –445;
Horace cited in, 433 , 443 ;
metaphor of birth in, 261 –267;
metaphor of knightly investiture in, 261 –267, 438 –442;
poems cited in, 19 –20;
and theory of canzone, see next entry
De vulgari eloquentia, and theory of canzone, 19 –32;
arrow metaphor, 409 –410;
compared with ballata and sonnet, 20 ;
harsh and smooth words and rhymes, 167 –169, 261 –263, 398 –400, 421 , 423 –424 (see also Harshness);
metaphor of binding, 22 , 25 –30;
metaphor of weaving, 400 , 413 ;
and music, 20 –25;
rhyme, repercussion of, see Rhyme;
stanza and cosmogonic space, see Space, stanza as;
stanza forms, 22 –30, 72 –73, 75 , 109 , 135 , 144 –145, 168 , 403 , 444 –445;
verses, weight of, 403 ;
and vulgare illustre, theory of, 19 –20, 167 –169.
See also Canzone stanza; Cosmology; Microcosm; Same and Other
Ecloge, 434 –438
Epistole, 377 , 378 , 382 , 436
Fiore (doubtful), 181 , 375
Monarchia, 95 , 96 , 126 , 346 –348, 377 , 410 , 420 , 434
"Nulla mi parve" (doubtful), 378 –379
Rime petrose:
adultery, question of in, 46 –47;
and Aeneid 4 , 382 ;
birth of poetics of, 48 , 106 –108;
and Cocito, linked by, 219 ;
Arnaut Daniel in, 109 ;
date of, 2 , 79 –81, 270 , 352 –356;
fictional chronology of, 46 , 110 , 139 ;
metrical schemes of, 22 –29;
problematic, 45 –52;
and Raimbaut d'Aurenga, 71 , 349 , 402 ;
relation to Dante's later studies, 365 –366;
terms for stones in, 33 .
See also Microcosm; Stones; and individual canzoni below
—"Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra," 109 –137, 372 –384;
and "Amor, tu vedi ben," 46 , 144 , 162 ;
and Commedia,205 , 207 , 211 , 232 , 236 , 252 –253, 416 , 419 –438 passim;
and "Così nel mio parlar," 167 , 175 ;
and De vulgari eloquentia, cited in, 19 ;
and "Io son venuto," 46 ;
name of heliotrope in, 33 ;
night circle in, 146 , 211 , 353 ;
numerology, 269 –271, 380 , 442 ;
return of spring in, 46
—"Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna," 138 –164, 372 , 384 –396;
and "Al poco giorno," 114 , 115 , 118 , 128 , 131 , 135 ;
and Commedia,198 , 209 , 217 –219, 224 –232, 235 –236, 240 , 253 –254, 415 –438 passim;
and "Così nel mio parlar," 167 –168, 175 , 180 , 188 ;
and De vulgari eloquentia, cited in, 19 , 261 –267;
and divine names, 341 ;
and Guinzelli, 376 ;
and "Io son venuto," 390 ;
and "O qui perpetua," 336 ;
repercussion of rhymes in, 180 , 261 –267;
rhyme-words in, 261 –267 (see also Rhyme-words)
—"Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro," 165 –198, 396 –417;
and "Al poco giorno," 118 ;
and "Amor, tu vedi ben," 151 , 188 , 388 ;
and Commedia,51 –52, 199 –200, 220 –222, 236 , 254 , 406 , 423 –424;
fantasy of revenge in, 118 ;
hairy and smooth words in, 167 –169, 423 –424;
lover's goal in, 47 –48, 52 ;
suicide as theme in, 221
—"Io son venuto al punto de la rota," 71 –108, 339 , 349 –372;
and Aeneid 4 , 71 , 349 ;
and "Al poco giorno," 109 –115, 131 , 135 , 146 , 373 –376;
and "Amor, tu vedi ben," 141 , 143 –146, 150 –151, 387 , 390 ;
and Commedia,199 , 202 –222, 232 , 235 , 253 , 364 , 416 –438 passim;
and "Così nel mio parlar," 165 –167, 175 –176, 182 , 184 , 198 , 403 ;
horoscope implied by, 112 –113, 146 , 182 , 204 , 205 , 253 , 353 –356, 364
Sonnets:
"Chi guarderà già mai," 376 ;
"Com più vi fere Amor co' suoi vincastri," 399 ;
"Guido, vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io," 404
Tenzone with Forese Donati, 417
Vita nuova, 1 , 4 , 19 , 47 , 54 –55, 399 , 401 , 417 ;
adultery, question of in, 47 ;
Amor in, 180 , 182 , 392 –393;
analogy of Beatrice with Christ in, 64 –65;
Christ in, 392 –393;
Consolatio Philosophiae, as influence in, 12 , 53 , 66 , 340 ;
date of, 53 ;
and De vulgari eloquentia, reference to in, 19 ;
division
Dante, Vita nuova
in, 55 –69;
and Brunetto Latini, 341 , 342 ;
as microcosmic, 3 , 19 ;
Neoplatonism in, 68 –69;
revision of, 68 –69, 349
—Chapter 1, 216 , 423 ;
Chapter 2, 406 ;
Chapter 3, 392 , 412 ;
Chapter 5, 402 ;
Chapter 12, 392 ;
Chapter 19, 53 –70, 187 , 341 –349;
Chapter 23, 436 ;
Chapter 24, 392 –393;
Chapter 25, 341 , 343 , 390 –391, 393 , 405 , 407 ;
Chapter 29, 345
—"Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore," 55 –70, 341 –349;
and "Amor, tu vedi ben," 139 , 159 , 161 –163, 385 ;
and "Così nel mio parlar," 187 ;
in De vulgari eloquentia,19 –20;
metrical scheme of, 24 –25, 27 , 32 , 144 , 403 ;
in Paradiso,221 –231.
See also Microcosm
—"Erano quasi ch'atterzate l'ore," 418
—"Li occhi dolenti," 404
—"Oltre la spera che più largo gira," 66 , 159
—'Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare," 29
Daphne, 377
David, King, 242 , 442
Davis, Charles T., 340 , 341
Death, as theme of petrose,4 –5, 82 , 84 , 101 , 103 –106, 108 , 139 , 156 –157, 164 , 170 , 171 –175, 180 , 390 , 405 , 406 –409
De Bruyne, Edgar, 341 , 384 –385, 393 –394, 396
de Fine Licht, George, 390
Denifle, Henri, 367
"De ramis cadunt folia," 71 , 350
De Riquer, Martín, 402
De Robertis, Domenico, 340 , 341 , 342 , 344
Descort, 177 , 403 –404
Dido, 71 , 175 , 180 –184, 187 , 194 , 195 , 382 , 405 , 407 –409, 420
Diesis. See Canzone stanza, parts of di Girolamo, Costanzo, 373 , 374 , 399 , 404 –405, 413 , 415
Dionysius the Areopagite (Pseudo-), 54 , 187 , 335 ;
De divinis nominibus,54 , 340 –343, 384 –385, 391 , 394 , 411 .
See also Light; Neoplatonism
Dionysus, 353
Dis, City of, 223
Division, as method of commentary:
in Albertus Magnus, 343 ;
in Aquinas, 342 ;
in the Vita nuova,55 –69
Division, metaphysical: in Dante, 62 –63;
in Eriugena, 341 , 344 –346, 348 ;
in Maximus the Confessor, 346 , 348
Dolce stil nuovo, 4 , 116 , 203 , 405
Domínguez-Rodríguez, Ana, 362
Dominic, St., 236 –240, 360 , 369 , 428 –430, 434 ;
life of, 237 –240
Dominican order, 51 , 237 , 360 , 365 , 428 –430
Dondaine, H. F., 340
Donna pietra:
clothing, 116 –119, 134 –135, 189 –190, 192 (see also Ornatus; Sexual references);
fantasy of her desire, 165 , 178 , 189 –190, 193 –195;
fantasy of rape, 193 –196;
identity, 1 , 47 ;
transformation, 116 –119, 149 –151;
youth, 83 –84, 104 , 116 .
See also Hair; Medusa
Dragonetti, Roger, 133 , 269 , 270 , 274 , 379 , 418 , 432 –434
Dronke, Peter, 165 , 191 , 193 , 195 , 331 , 341 , 370 , 404 , 427 , 429 –430
Durling, Nancy Vine, 337
Durling, Robert M., 72 , 105 , 112 , 118 , 119 , 223 , 269 , 270 , 333 , 343 , 357 , 362 , 366 , 369 , 371 –373, 383 , 392 , 424 , 441
E
Earth (element), 37 –38, 40 –41, 82 , 117 , 218
Earth (planet), 8 , 10 , 72 –73, 75 , 77 , 102 , 217 –218, 249
Easter, date of, 354 , 435
Ecliptic, 8 , 10 , 16 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 233 –236, 238 , 363 , 374 , 380 , 383 , 433 –434
Eden, Garden of, 215 , 354 , 364 , 421 –422
Edgerton, Samuel, 412
Egypt, 241
Elements:
and alphabet, 336 ;
combined in the sublunar, 37 , 98 , 167 , 336 ;
and the senses, 98 ;
transformations of, 37 , 140 –142, 159 , 163
Elijah, 266
Eliseo, 266
Elishah, 266
Empyrean, 35 –36, 228 , 252 , 276 , 436
Enclosure:
cosmic, 75 , 142 , 157 –158, 162 , 163 , 174 ;
meter as, 424 ;
and stanzaform, 26 –30, 75 , 130 , 132 , 141 –143, 148 –149, 155 , 372
Epicurus, 409
Epiphanius of Constantinople, 338
Equator, 8 , 10 , 91 , 233 , 238 , 352 , 375
Equinox, 10 , 91 , 124 , 233 , 238 ;
autumnal, 207 ;
vernal, 205 , 206 –208, 215 , 246 , 249 , 254 –255, 430 , 442
Equinoxes, 352 ;
precession of, 339 , 432 , 437 , 442
Eriugena, Johannes Scottus, 54 , 340 –341;
as translator, 340 –341, 344 –345;
Annotationes in Marcianum,360 ;
De divisione naturae,340 , 344 –348, 370
Eschatology, in the petrose,126 –129, 135 , 161 –162
Eteocles and Polynices, 88
Etymology, figure, 226 –227, 394 –395, 438
Evans, Joan, 338 , 375 , 376 , 397
Eve, 96 , 361 , 362
Everard the German, 380
Exodus, Book of, 397
Eye:
centric ray of, 412 ;
and cosmos, 229 , 231 , 389 –390;
poem as, 153 –155, 231 .
See also Crystal; Microcosm
Eyes:
Beatrice's, 57 , 63 –64, 187 , 198 , 232 , 411 –412;
Donna pietra 's, 47 –48, 129 –130, 142 –143, 153 , 187 –190, 193 , 196 ;
the lover's, 47 –48, 153 , 155 , 160 , 171 , 193
F
Faral, Edmond, 400 –401, 409
Fargani, al-, 9 , 90 , 362 , 433
Farinata degli Uberti, 265 , 426 , 441
Father, figures of. See Ugolino, Count
Favati, Guido, 412
Fenzi, Enrico, 71 , 119 –120, 331 , 349 , 350 –351, 372 , 373 , 377 , 387 , 401 , 403 , 404 , 415
Ferguson, Margaret W., 409
Fernando-Guerra, A., 339
Ferrante, Joan, 237 , 430
Feudalism, in courtly love, 194 , 405
Fiedler, Leslie, 373 , 375 , 381 , 383 –384
Figures, rhetorical. See Adynaton; Allegory; Anaphora; Antiphrasis; Antistrophe; Catachresis; Conversio; Etymology; Gemination; Homonymy; Inversion; Metalepsis; Metaphor; Metonymy; Ornatus; Paranomasia; Personification; Troping; Zeugma
Firmament (Genesis 1), as Bible, 368 –369
Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis,9 , 357 , 358
Fleece, Golden, 249 , 258 , 435
Flegias, 223
Florence (city):
Dante's desire to return to, 241 –242, 248 –250, 258 ;
in European politics, 50 , 206 ;
hostility to Dante, 51 , 332 ;
latitude of, 80 ;
longitude of, 355 ;
personified, and Donna pietra,51 ;
prophecies regarding, 254 –255.
See also Baptistery; Horoscopes
Flori, Jean, 264 , 438
Folco di Marsiglia, 276
Folena, Gianfranco, 418
Fortune, wheel of, 83
Foster, Kenelm, 155 –156, 344 , 345 , 372 , 390 , 397 , 399 , 401 , 427 , 429
Fowler, Alistair, 115 , 379 –380
Francesca da Rimini, 181 , 338
Franciscan order, 51 , 360 , 428 –430
Francis of Assisi, St., 360 , 369 , 428 –430, 434 ;
life of, 237 –240;
stigmata, 240
Freccero, John, 5 –6, 124 , 125 , 234 , 235 , 236 , 240 , 335 , 369 , 372 , 380 –383, 413 –417, 427 –430
Friedman, J. B., 337
Friedrich, Hugo, 349 , 410
Froissart, Jean, 439
Fulgentius, G. Plancias, Mythologiae,357
G
Gabriel, Archangel, 244 , 247 , 248 –249, 425 , 434
Galen, Claudius, 353 , 385 , 388 , 389
Galicia, 241
Ganges, 207
Gemination, of stylistic details, 113 , 123 –124, 136 , 209 , 220 , 226 , 236 –240, 271 , 374 , 379 –380, 406 , 427 –429
Gemini (constellation), 363 , 365
Gemini (mythological twins), 88 , 358 –359;
allegoresis of, 88 –89, 95 –96, 106 –108, 191 –192, 239 , 249 , 359 –362, 366 , 432 ;
Francis and Dominic as, 240 , 360 ;
lover and lady as, 107 –108, 183
Gemini (zodiacal sign):
cantos of, 84 –85, 130 –131, 232 , 239 , 240 –258, 364 , 369 , 423 , 430 –438;
in Dante's horoscope, 83 , 85 –87, 143 , 146 , 239 , 332 , 354 –357;
iconography of, 362 ;
identification of Twins, 88 , 96 , 239 , 362 ;
invocation of, 43 , 91 –96, 239 , 355 –356, 369 ;
in "Io son venuto," 77 –95, 112 –113;
in Martianus Capella, 360 –361;
Mercury in, 355 , 357 ;
in Milky Way, 91 , 363 , 435 ;
place of in zodiac, 380 ;
rising, 88 , 95 , 106 , 206 , 257 ;
Saturn in, 356 ;
Twins as male and female, 96 , 107 –108, 361 –362;
visual representations of, 362
Genesis, Book of, account of creation, 158 , 269 , 362 , 367 , 368 –369, 400 , 425 , 432
Geoffroi de Vinsauf, 169 , 401 , 409
Gersh, Stephen, 360
Geryon, 223
Ghil, E. M., 352
Giacomo da Lentini, 403 , 410
Gibraltar, 355
Gibson, Margaret, 333
Giovanni del Virgilio, 378 , 434 , 435
Glossa ordinaria,443
God:
as creator, 13 –14, 26 , 62 –65, 158 –162;
as gardener, 433 ;
as goal of creation, 14 –18, 60 –65, 394 ;
as Neoplatonic One, 13 –17, 229 , 334 , 343 , 387 ;
names of, 15 –17, 157 –163, 341 –343, 391 –395;
relation with angels, 35 , 36 , 59 –60;
signature in creation, 240 ;
as
God
unmoved mover, 14 , 158 .
See also Alpha and Omega; Christ; Neoplatonism
Golden Age, 215 , 251 , 363 , 364 , 437
Golden Bough, 255 –258
Goldin, Frederick, 349 , 352
Gorgon. See Medusa
Gotto of Mantova, 24
Grant, Edward, 332 , 338
Gregory, Tullio, 125 , 332 –334, 346 , 349 , 381 , 427
Gregory of Nyssa, 54 , 346 ;
De hominis opificio,346 , 348
Gregory the Great, 346 , 369 , 370 , 434
Grosseteste, Robert, 36 –37, 97 , 341 , 369 –371
Gruber, Otto, 333 , 334
Guerri, Domenico, 51
Guido da Montefeltro, 410
Guido delle Colonne, 376 , 377
Guillaume de Lorris, Roman de la rose,389 , 405 , 426 –427
Guillaume de Saint-Thierry, 414
Guinizelli, Guido, 202 , 382 , 392 , 415 , 435 ;
"Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amor," 19 , 35 , 40 , 117 , 246 , 338 , 339 , 376 , 377 ;
"Chi vedesse a Lucia un var capuzzo," 194 , 415 ;
"Madonna il fino amor," 376 –377;
"Tegno di folle 'mpres', a lo ver dire," 377
Guittone d'Arezzo, 4 , 399 , 405
Gundel, Hans Georg, 358 , 362 , 385
Gundel, Wilhelm, 358 , 385
H
Hagen, H., 408 , 413 , 437
Hair, metaphor in rhetoric, 169 , 190 , 401 ;
sexual significance of, 189 –196.
See also Donna pietra; Ornatus
Haitham, Ibn, 338
Hardt, Manfred, 427 , 429
Häring, Nikolaus, 399
Harmony:
of human body, 398 ;
soul as, 167 , 398 ;
as union of opposites, 12 –14, 88 –89, 167 –170, 175 –178, 398 , 400 , 410 .
See also Musica mundana; Temperament
Harshness:
of music, 168 –169, 212 , 220 , 399 –400;
of words and rhyme, 167 –168, 190 , 199 , 210 , 212 , 219 , 249 , 263
Haseloff, Arthur, 362
Hauber, A., 87
Hawkins, Peter, 422
Heart, as center of poem, 100 –102, 143 –144, 173 –174, 178 , 181 , 404 . See also Microcosm; Sun
Heavens and sciences, compared, 151 , 243 , 369 , 432
Helen of Troy, 359
Heliades, 377
Heliotrope (plant and stone), 114 –116, 121 –122, 132 , 133 , 136 –137, 375 , 376
Henry VII, Emperor, 50
Hercules, 424
Hereos (sickness of love), 181 –182, 406 . See also Harmony; Medicine; Temperament
Hermes Trismegistus, 39 , 338 ;
Asclepius, 347 –348
Herrad of Landsberg, Hortus deliciarum,360
Hexaemeral literature, 231 , 373 , 425 , 432 . See also Genesis, Book of
Hildebert of Rheims, 362
Hildegard of Bingen:
Liber divinorum operum simplicis hominis,97 , 369 ;
Liber Scivias,362
Hill, R. T., 403
Hippocrates, 398
Holmgard, E. J., 338
Holy Spirit, 244 , 425 , 427 , 429
Homonymy, 133
Honorius of Autun, 270 , 425 , 442
Horace, 359 , 382 , 431 , 433 , 443
Horizon:
and influence of planet, 82 , 351 ;
man as, 95 –96, 106 –107, 112 , 159 , 200 , 345 –348;
moon as, 231 ;
soul as, 125 –127;
World-Soul as, 125 .
See also Midpoint
Horoscopes:
Beatrice's, 419 ;
in the Commedia,204 –217, 254 , 364 –365;
Dante's natal, 72 , 84 –91, 354 –356, 364 –365, 419 (see also Gemini);
of founding of Florence, 420 , 435 ;
of Inferno 1, 90 (Figure 5), 204 –205, 364 ;
of "Io son venuto," 80 –88, 92 –93, 112 –113, 146 , 182 , 204 , 205 , 353 –356, 364 ;
in Martianus Capella, 88 , 360 –361;
of Opicinus de Canistris, 357 ;
of world at creation (thema mundi ), 204 –206.
See also Houses, astrological
Hosea, Book of, 436
Hossfeld, Paul, 338
Houses, astrological, 82 , 85 , 87 , 91 , 379 –380. See also Horoscopes
Housley, Norman, 440
Housman, A. E., 363
Hrabanus Maurus, 397 , 413 , 422 –423, 436 , 437
Hübner, Wolfgang, 362
Hugh of St. Cher, 369
Humors, medical theory of. See Medicine
Hyginus:
Astronomica,359 –360;
Fabulae, 359
Hymen, 89
Hymns:
Christian, 14 ;
Greek and Roman, 14 –18
I
Iacopo da Bologna, 406
Inferno, 220 , 243 , 249 –250, 343 –344, 364 , 369
—Canto 1, 202 ;
1.1–13, 419 ;
1.17–18, 232 , 419 ;
1.37–43, 204 –205, 206 –208, 211 , 214 ;
1.38–39, 374 , 419 ;
1.60, 214 ;
1.105, 360
—Canto 2.1–5, 419 –420;
2.31, 439 ;
2.133, 414
—Canto 4, 224
—Canto 5, 181 , 224 , 417 –418;
5.46–48, 202 –203;
5.46–49, 441 ;
5.61 and 5.100, 338 ;
5.106, 405 , 406
—Canto 6, 270 , 417 –418
—Canto 7, 417 –418;
7.28, 441
—Cantos 8–9, 421
—Canto 8.42, 421
—Canto 9, 5 –6, 372 ;
9.1–42, 421
—Canto 10, 265 ;
10.68 and 10.72, 441 ;
10.80, 426
—Cantos 12–16, 224
—Canto 12, 417 –418;
12.84, 95 , 223
—Canto 13, 182 , 199 , 420
—Canto 20.127, 364
—Cantos 21–22, 199
—Cantos 24–25, 212 –217, 422 –423
—Canto 24, 417 –418;
24.1–21, 212 –217, 422 –423;
24.2 and 24.6, 212 ;
24.66, 421 ;
24.89–93, 376 ;
24.107 and 24.142–151, 212
—Canto 25, 417 –418;
25.89–93, 212
—Canto 26, 266 ;
26.8, 26.10, and 26.12, 212 ;
26.25–30, 217 ;
26.25–33, 423 ;
26.48, 266 ,
26.132–135, 422
—Canto 27.79–81, 410
—Canto 28, 199
—Canto 30, 199 , 417 –418
—Canto 31.123, 219 ;
31.142–143, 222
—Canto 32.1–5, 220 ;
32.1–12, 399 ;
32.2, 424 ;
32.3, 219 ;
32.9, 222 ;
32.10–12, 243 –244;
32.12, 424 ;
32.23–24, 218 ;
32.36, 32.38–39, 32.41, and 32.47, 219 ;
32.49, 220 ;
32.53, 219 ;
32.58, 222 ;
32.60, 219 ;
32.63–75, 423 ;
32.70–72, 32.74, 32.107, and 32.108, 219 ;
32.127 and 32.130–131, 220 ;
32.135, 424
—Cantos 33–34, 199
—Canto 33.1–90, 220 –223;
33.5, 220 ;
33.22–24, 244 , 424 ;
33.29–36, 243 ;
33.36, 221 ;
33.41, 245 ;
33.43–75, 244 –246;
33.47–48 and 33.49, 221 ;
33.56–57, 245 ;
33.65, 33.68, 33.69, and 33.74, 221 ;
33.77–78, 221 , 243 ;
33.82, 220 , 222 ;
33.88, 222 ;
33.91, 33.98, 33.101, and 33.112, 219 ;
33.113, 220 , 222 ;
33.117, 424 ;
33.135, 252
—Canto 34.10, 222 ;
34.73–75, 257 ;
34.100, 222 , 257 ;
34.110–111, 217 ;
34.111, 219
Innocent III, 382
Intellect, active and possible, 365
Intelligenza,375 , 376 , 443
Inversion:
of affect, 177 ;
astrological/astronomical, 83 –84, 87 , 91 , 104 , 112 , 115 , 129 , 175 , 207 , 212 , 252 –255;
of plot, 175 ;
in Raimbaut d'Aurenga, 402 ;
of rhymewords, 175 ;
of sound-clusters, 383 ;
in stanza structure, 176 –179;
syntactic, 84 , 113 , 129 , 135 –136, 172 , 235
Investiture, knightly, 138 , 261 –267, 406 , 438 –442
Io, 382
Isaiah, Book of, 224 , 412 –413
Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum libri,34 , 121 , 255 , 269 , 276 , 338 , 369 , 374 –376, 388 , 395 , 397 , 413 , 418 , 431 , 437 , 442
J
Jacoff, Rachel, 415
Jacomuzzi, A., 417 , 419
James, St., 241 –242
Jason, 249 , 377 –378
Jasper (diaspro ), 33 , 167 , 183 , 397 , 408
Jean de Meun, Roman de la rose , 168 , 197 , 370 , 371 , 372 , 381 , 385 , 386 –387, 390 , 415 , 416
Jeanroy, Alfred, 385
Jeremiah, Book of, 436
Jernigan, Charles, 377 , 381 , 383
Jerusalem, 241 ;
Celestial, precious stones in, 443 ;
longitude of, 355 , 364
Joachim of Fiore, 429
Joel, Book of, 382 , 436
John of Garland, 378 , 383
John the Baptist, St., 393 ;
feast of, 436
John the Evangelist, St., 242 , 247 , 252 –253, 423 , 436 ;
feast of, 436 ;
First Epistle of, 391 ;
Gospel according to, 335 , 391
Jordan, river, 128 , 131 , 251 –253
Joseph, 132 , 383
Jubilee, 206
Judgment, Last, 129 , 161 –62;
implied, 126 –129, 135 , 382
Jupiter (god), 88 , 183 , 247 , 359 , 360 –361, 366
Jupiter (planet), 8 , 82 , 85 , 206 , 211 , 247 , 355 , 358 , 364
K
Kaiser, Wolfgang, 365
Kaske, Robert E., 239 , 360 , 383
Katabasis, 49 , 76 , 170 , 186 , 207
Kay, Richard, 332
Keen, Maurice, 264 , 438 , 439 , 442
Keller, Hans-Erich, 352
Kepler, Johannes, 338
Kings, Second book of, 266
Kirkpatrick, Robin, 436
Klibansky, Raymond, 332 , 353 , 354 , 363 , 364 , 407
Klingner, Fritz, 14 , 17 –18, 333 –335
König, Bernhard, 384 , 385 , 386 , 439
Kranz, Walter, 334
Kurdzialek, Marianne, 332 , 370
L
Lactantius, 245 , 431 , 433
Ladder, Jacob's, 250 –252, 436
Laity, as the sublunar, 94 , 239 –243, 367 –369, 431
Lancelot, 406 –407, 438 –439
Language, as foliage, 433
Lapidario del rey d. Alfonso X,339 , 388
Lapidge, Michael, 337
Latini, Brunetto, 399 , 441 ;
Retorica, 341 , 342 , 424
Latona, 247
Leap-year, 1296 as, 270
Lecoy, Félix, 371
Leda, 247 , 256 , 356
Le Moine, Fanny, 361
Leo (zodiacal sign), 92 , 216 , 251 , 363 , 419
Lerer, Seth, 333
Leys d'Amors,403 –404
Lia, 377
Liber de causis,53 , 54 , 339 , 343 , 347 , 349 , 365
Libra (zodiacal sign), 206 –208, 228 , 252 , 354 , 435
License, poetic, 403
Light:
circulation of, 60 –61, 161 , 233 , 239 , 394 ;
creation of, 35 –36, 158 , 390 ;
God as, 151 , 160 , 391 , 394 ;
implied by shadow, 135 ;
and imposition of form, 36 , 366 , 396 ;
and metaphysics, 36 –38, 138 , 338 ;
Neoplatonic theories of, 384 –385, 393 –394, 396 ;
separation of from darkness, 210 , 420 ;
as unifying, 151 , 394 ;
as vehicle of astrological influence, 35 –36, 150 , 151 , 158
Limbo, 223 , 424
Linskill, Joseph, 352
Litt, Thomas, 339 , 366 , 382 , 394 , 425 , 426
Llull, Ramon, 353
Lord's Prayer, 14
Love:
as accident, 390 –391, 393 ;
as substance, 391 , 393 .
See also Amor
Lowes, J. L., 406
Lucan, 375 , 418 , 421
Lucifer, 219
M
MacDonald, W. L., 390
McEvoy, James, 338 , 370
Macrobius:
Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis,8 –9, 30 –31, 90 –91, 122 , 168 –169, 231 , 241 , 269 –270, 332 , 363 , 364 , 366 , 374 , 377 , 379 , 399 , 400 , 425 , 426 , 428 , 431 , 437 ;
Saturnalia, 84 , 353 , 354
Madrazo, Piedro de, 339
Maia, 247 , 360
Malachi, Book of, 382 –383
Malacoda, 199 , 212
Malaspina, Currado, 435
Malebolge, 223
Mandeville, D. J., 338
Manilius, Astronomica,9 , 84 , 91 , 354 , 363
Marbodus of Rennes, Liber degemmis,34 , 116 , 255 , 338 , 375 , 383 , 397 , 424 , 425 , 438
Marco Lombardo, 204 , 405 , 420
"Mare amoroso," 375 , 376 , 410
Mari, Giovanni, 379 , 380
Marigo, Aristide, 163 , 263 , 336 , 337 , 384
Mars (god), 88
Mars (planet), 8 , 75 , 81 –82, 87 , 88 , 91 , 103 , 146 , 206 , 247 , 264 , 353 –357, 364 ;
children of, 360 ;
realms of, in Hell and Heaven, 364
Marshall, J. H., 404
Marsyas, 255 –258
Martel, Charles, 331
Marti, Mario, 417
Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae,9 , 88 –89, 91 , 332 , 360 –363, 369 , 372 , 397
Martinez, Ronald L., 200 , 418
Mary, Virgin, 132 , 241 –242, 431 –434
Mascheroni, Sassol, 423
Matelda, 215 , 422
Mather, Richard, 440
Mattalia, Daniele, 155
Matter, first, 150 , 387
Matthew, St., Gospel according to, 219 , 440
Matthew of Vendôme, 400 –401
Maximianus, 370
Maximus the Confessor, 54 , 340 , 344 –346
Mazzeo, Joseph A., 338 , 415
Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 410 , 411 , 415 , 419 , 422 , 435
Medea, 377 –378
Medicine, medieval theories of, 82 , 100 , 167 , 153 –154, 181 , 353 , 370 –371, 406
Medusa, 221 –222, 371 –372, 397 ;
in "Al
poco giorno," 373 ;
in "Amor, tu vedi ben," 139 , 163 –164, 390 ;
Boccaccio on, 415 ;
in "Così nel mio parlar," 189 , 193 , 196 –198, 397 ;
in Inferno 9, relation to petrose,5 –6;
in "Io son venuto," 105 –106, 372 ;
in Jean de Meun, 372 , 415 ;
in Ovid, 371 –372;
in the petrose,6 , 105 , 118 , 221 , 415 .
See also Donna pietra
Melancholy, 82 , 100 , 181 , 353 , 354 , 357 , 364
Meleagant, 407
Melzi d'Eril, C., 354 , 364
Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, 262 –263, 336 , 385 , 398 , 401 , 413 , 438 , 439 , 443 –444
Mercury (god), 183 , 360 –362
Mercury (planet), 8 , 43 –44, 82 , 85 , 87 –88, 91 , 206 , 211 , 241 , 247 , 270 , 355 –358, 360 –362, 363 , 364 , 365 , 380 , 442 ;
Dante as child of, 87 , 357
Metalepsis, 182
Metaphor:
defined, 409 ;
exchange of, 176 , 190 –191;
teleological function of, 185
Metonymy, 133
Micah, Book of, 382
Micha, Alexandre, 438
Michael Scot, 9
Microcosm, human body as, 97 –102, 228 , 231 , 369 –371;
appetition and animals, 97 , 101 ;
being and stones, 97 , 369 –370;
belly and earth, 102 ;
breasts and hills, 126 , 381 ;
breath and atmosphere, 98 , 100 , 143 , 369 ;
breath and winds, 369 , 421 ;
eye and atmosphere, 153 –155;
eye and heavens, 231 ;
eye and star, 229 ;
eyes and luminaries, 369 ;
feet and earth, 97 , 370 ;
as harmony, 398 ;
head and heavens, 97 , 99 –100;
heart and sun, 236 , 371 ;
life and plants, 100 –101, 370 ;
orgasm and flood, 102 –104;
sensation and animals, 97 , 370 ;
senses and elements, 98 ;
spine and mountains, 421 ;
tumescence and subterranean vapors, 353 ;
veins and subterranean rivers, 102 ;
weeping and precipitation, 100 , 104 , 143 , 371 .
See also Harmony; Same and Other; Temperament
Microcosm, man as, 9 –10;
mind shared with angels, 97 , 370 ;
sciences and heavens, 147 –148, 243 , 367 , 369 , 432 .
See also Microcosm, human body as; Midpoint; Same and Other; World-Soul
Microcosm, poem as:
"Al poco giorno" (two motions of sun, shadow as privation), 110 –112, 119 –126;
"Amor, tu vedi ben" (motion of sun and planets, body analogy, eschaton), 140 –149, 159 –163;
Commedia, 201 –202, 204 , 208 –211, 213 –214, 223 –231;
Commedia (procession and return), 227 –231, 240 –255;
Commedia (two motions of sun), 232 –240;
"Così nel mio parlar" (tempering of opposites, teleology), 167 –170, 175 ;
"Donne ch'avete" (procession and return, Soul as central), 53 –69;
"Io son venuto" (spatial order, motion of sun, body analogy), 74 –76, 96 –108, 146 ;
"O qui perpetua" (procession and return, Soul as central), 12 –18, 334 –336
Midpoint (medietas ):
man as, 64 , 67 –68, 95 –96, 344 , 345 –349;
soul as, 16 , 209
Milky Way, 91 , 432 –433;
as gate of souls, 363 , 431 , 434 , 435
Millas Vallicrosa, José, 332
Miller, James, 381 , 424 , 425 –426, 428 , 432
Minerals, formation of, 33 –45
Minerva, 196 , 397
Moleta, Vincent, 418 , 433
Momigliano, Attilio, 176 , 396
Montagnes, Bernard, 395
Monte Andrea, 376 , 414
Monterosso, Raffaello, 21 , 337 , 398 , 400
Montpellier, longitude of, 355 , 364
Moon, 8 , 80 , 84 , 206 , 208 –209, 242 , 352 , 355 , 364 , 392 , 424 –425;
heaven of, 224 –232
Moore, Edward, 254 , 332 , 364 , 419 , 429 , 436
Moralejo-Alvárez, S., 362
Moses, 242 , 414 –415
Mother figures, 244 –247
Motion:
to and from center, 159 ;
forward, 176 ;
God prior to, 14 , 158 ;
and teleology, 185 –191.
See also Planets; Same and Other; Sun; Time
Motion, retrograde:
of planets, 82 , 136 , 353 , 355 , 356 , 357 ;
in poetry, 383 , 385 ;
in sestina, 122 –123, 133 , 136 , 145 .
See also Retrogradatio cruciata
Mulholland, J. A., 338
Muses, 211 , 242 , 243 –244, 246 , 434
Musica mundana,18 , 22 , 30 –31, 169 , 244 , 337
N
Names and naming in the petrose,157 –164;
of God, 6 , 15 –17, 157 –163, 341 , 384 –385, 391 –395
Narcissus, 105 , 196 –197, 226 , 372 , 389 , 416
Nardi, Bruno, 37 , 53 –54, 74 , 230 , 338 , 339 , 340 , 343 , 345 , 347 , 349 , 351 , 353 , 365 , 371 , 385 , 394 , 405 –406, 424 , 425 , 426
Nathan, prophet, 442
Nebuchadnezzar, 382
Neoplatonism:
Boethius and, 12 –18;
in the Commedia,68 –69, 200 –258 passim;
Dante's knowledge of, 8 –9, 12 , 26 –31, 53 –54, 60 , 62 , 67 –69, 339 –340, 344 –349;
doctrine of division, 62 , 341 , 344 –345;
doctrine of emanation, 54 , 68 –69, 338 –339, 365 , 393 –395;
doctrine of Ideas, 14 , 16 , 334 –335;
doctrine of man as midpoint, see Midpoint;
doctrine of Mind, 125 , 229 , 335 , 427 (see also Angels);
doctrine of the One, 13 –17, 229 ;
doctrine of participation, 443 ;
doctrine of procession and return, 14 –18, 60 , 62 , 64 , 66 –68, 159 , 186 –187, 208 –209, 226 –230, 233 , 242 , 250 –251, 334 , 335 , 341 ;
doctrine of World-Soul, 14 –16, 124 –125, 349 ;
in "Donne ch' avete," 55 –70;
grammar and metaphysics, relation of in, 18 , 227 ;
of Greek fathers, 53 , 64 , 67 , 334 –335, 344 –349;
theories of light in, 160 –162;
and the Timaeus,97 –99;
view of Christ in, 48 ;
view of number in, 269 –271, 336 , 242
Neptune, 196
Neri, Ferdinando, 349
Neugebauer, Otto, 362
Night circle, 352 –353;
in "Al poco giorno," 146 , 211 , 353
Nock, Arthur D., 347
Nominalist-Realist debate, 395
Norden, Eduard, 334
North, J. D. N., 353
North Pole, 351
Numa Pompilius, 424
Numerals, Arabic, 8 , 332
Numerology:
in Boethius, 336 ;
in the Commedia,211 , 419 , 427 ;
in Macrobius, 336 ;
in the petrose,126 , 132 , 144 –145, 269 –271, 380 –381, 385 –386, 392 , 442
O
Ocyroe, 382
Olerud, Anders, 332
Olschki, Leonardo, 360
Olson, Glending, 410
O'Meara, John J., 341
Opicinus de Canistris, 357
Opposites, harmony as mixture of. See Harmony
Origen, 362 , 367 , 370 , 391
Ornatus, theory of, 400 –401;
of poem and of lady, 169 –170, 181 –183, 189 –190. See also Hair
Orr, Mary D., 332
Ovid, 153 , 338 , 350 , 399 ;
Amores, 359 , 406 ;
Ars amatoia,410 ;
Fasti, 358 –360;
Heroides, 184 –185, 195 , 407 –409;
Metamorphoses,119 –120, 373 ;
Met. I, 120 , 371 , 377 , 382 ;
Met. 2, 371 , 377 ;
Met. 3, 226 , 372 , 378 ;
Met. 4, 105 , 116 , 120 –121, 371 , 378 , 415 ;
Met. 5, 372 ;
Met. 7, 378 ;
Met. 10, 415 , 416 ;
Met. 15, 424
Ovide moralisé,378 , 416
Owen, D. D. R., 406 –407
P
Padoan, Giorgio, 331
Palgen, Rudolf, 354 , 357 , 364
Pannier, Léon, 338
Panofsky, Erwin, 353 , 354 , 363 , 364 , 385 , 407 , 413
Pantheon (Rome), 390
Paolo dell'Abaco, 414
Paradise, Earthly, 215 , 354 , 364 , 421 –422
Paradiso:
arrow metaphors in, 185 ;
crystal in, 252 –253;
eye in, 231 –232;
gems in, 200 , 225 , 273 –276, 433 ;
Neoplatonism in, 69 , 199 –258 passim;
and solstice, 129 ;
sun as dominating, 210 –211;
teleology in, 410 –411;
unwintering in, 251 –252, 436 .
See also Art, human; Microcosm; Same and Other
—Canto 1, 202 , 365 ;
1.1–18, 377 ;
1.1–3, 161 ;
1.13–24, 256 –258;
1.25–33, 433 ;
1.37–45, 204 , 207 , 210 –211;
1.49–54, 226 , 232 ;
1.103–142, 410 ;
1.112–129, 411 ;
1.119–121 and 1.124–126, 410
—Canto 2, 338 , 349 ;
2.13–16, 225 –226;
2.23, 410 ;
2.34, 225 ;
2.35–39, 226 , 425 ;
2.61–148, 366 ;
2.88–90, 226 ;
2.106–108, 421 ;
2.106–148, 226 –232;
2.112–138, 345 , 365 , 367 –368;
2.139–144, 349 , 388
—Canto 3.10–18, 226 ;
3.36, 376
—Canto 4, 366 ;
4.49–60, 431 ;
4.49–63, 93–94, 224 –225, 241
—Canto 5.91, 410
—Canto 6, 270
—Canto 7.14, 417
—Canto 8.34–37, 331 ;
8.103–105, 410 ;
8.146, 440
—Cantos 10–14, 232 –240
—Cantos 10–17, 51
—Canto 10.1–27, 233 –236, 238 ;
10.2, 428 ;
10.9 and 10.15, 428 ;
10.13–21, 374 ;
10.28–31, 374 ;
10.34, 240 ;
10.53, 242 ;
10.60, 375 ;
10.64–69 and 10.78, 432 ;
10.79, 236 , 432 ;
10.87, 428 ;
10.96, 428 , 433 ;
10.97–103 and 10.113, 428 ;
10.114, 429 ;
10.122, 237 ;
10.138, 432 ;
10.139–141, 236 , 237 , 239 ;
10.140, 430 , 434 ;
10.142 and 10.143, 428 ;
10.146, 237
—Cantos 11–12, 369 , 429
—Canto 11, 369 ;
11.2, 432 ;
11.3–5, 428 ;
11.4–8, 429 ;
11.5, 237 ;
11.25, 428 ;
11.26,
429 ;
11.32, 430 , 434 ;
11.35, 237 , 433 ;
11.35–37, 428 ;
11.35–111, 429 ;
11.37–38, 237 ;
11.38, 432 ;
11.39, 428 , 430 ;
11.49–57, 369 ;
11.50, 429 ;
11.50–51, 238 ;
11.55–57, 430 ;
11.70–75, 237 –238;
11.72, 429 ;
11.84, 430 , 434 ;
11.97, 432 ;
11.104–107, 429 ;
11.115–117, 433 ;
11.118–122, 237 ;
11.139, 429 , 433 ;
11.74, 238
—Canto 12, 369 ;
12.11, 237 ;
12.21, 428 ;
12.22, 236 ;
12.22–24, 428 ;
12.34, 237 , 418 ;
12.39–111, 429 ;
12.43, 434 ;
12.44, 237 ;
12.46–51, 238 , 423 , 429 ;
12.58–60, 430 ;
12.70–75, 237 –238;
12.78, 240 ;
12.78–79, 428 ;
12.85–87, 430 ;
12.97–100, 428 ;
12.106 and 12.110, 239 ;
12.106–111, 237 ;
12.121, 428 ;
12.126, 428
—Canto 13, 365 ;
13.1–27, 428 ;
13.13, 237 ;
13.16–18, 428 ;
13.22, 236 ;
13.34–36, 428 ;
13.43–45, 430 ;
13.45, 428 ;
13.47, 429 ;
13.52–53, 428 ;
13.52–60, 427 ;
13.54, 431 ;
13.55–57, 420 ;
13.62, 428 ;
13.82–84, 428 , 430 , 434 ;
13.89, 429 ;
13.97–100, 428 ;
13.142, 428
—Cantos 14–17, 263 –267, 441
—Canto 14.1, 429 ;
14.27, 433 ;
14.28–29, 428 ;
14.35–36, 434 ;
14.40 and 14.67, 428 ;
14.74, 237 , 264 ;
14.96, 264 ;
14.88–93, 264 ;
14.97–108, 265 ;
14.103–108, 440
—Canto 15, 264 ;
15.6, 405 ;
15.97–102, 51 , 440 ;
15.136 and 15.145–147, 266
—Canto 16.1–9, 266 ;
16.130, 264
—Canto 17, 265 –267;
17.22–27, 265 ;
17.46–48, 51 ;
17.55–57, 51 ;
17.55–61 and 17.106–109, 265 ;
17.130–142, 263 –264;
17.133–134, 441
—Canto 19.40–41, 222 ;
19.48, 219
—Canto 20.143, 405
—Canto 21.16–18, 426 , 436 ;
21.25, 225 ;
21.25–41, 252 ;
21.116, 225
—Cantos 22–27, 199
—Canto 22 , 43 , 85 , 87 , 243 , 256 ;
22.94, 100 ;
22.94–96, 131 ;
22.106–123, 84 , 92 –96, 355 –356, 365 –366;
22.110, 369 ;
22.112–117, 246 , 256 –258;
22.115, 369 ;
22.116, 240 ;
22.117, 249 ;
22.121–123, 256 –258;
22.122, 240 ;
22.128–129, 366 –367;
22.133, 247 ;
22.133–154, 241 , 247 , 425 ;
22.151, 249
—Canto 23, 242 –248, 431 –434;
23.1–12, 244 –247, 383 , 431 , 432 , 433 ;
23.25–30, 432 ;
23.29, 431 ;
23.37, 429 , 432 ;
23.55–63, 249 ;
23.56, 243 –244;
23.57, 246 ;
23.64, 424 ;
23.71–72, 431 ;
23.73, 433 ;
23.79, 244 , 431 ;
23.79–80, 431 ;
23.82 and 23.88–89, 433 ;
23.92, 242 ;
23.95, 432 ;
23.97, 433 ;
23.101, 431 ;
23.103–105, 247 ;
23.109, 432 ;
23.114, 244 ;
23.124, 433 ;
23.130, 244 ;
23.136, 433
—Canto 24.8, 244 ;
24.11, 432 ;
24.28, 247 ;
24.56, 244 ;
24.59, 432 ;
24.62, 432 , 436 ;
24.77, 432 ;
24.84, 243 ;
24.91–92, 244 ;
24.94, 432 ;
24.102 and 24.115, 432 ;
24.134, 243 ;
24.135, 244 ;
24.139–141, 431
—Canto 25.1–12, 248 –250, 258 ;
25.2, 439 ;
25.6, 243 , 433 ;
25.17–18, 241 ;
25.18, 432 ;
25.19–20, 243 ;
25.23–25, 25.38, 25.42, 25.52–57, and 25.64, 432 ;
25.70, 242 ;
25.71, 25.76, and 25.79, 244 ;
25.88 and 25.92, 243 ;
25.94, 432 ;
25.100 and 25.101, 423 ;
25.102, 435 ;
25.103, 432 ;
25.111 and 25.138, 434
—Cantos 26–27, 266
—Canto 26.16 and 26.17, 241 ;
26.22, 432 ;
26.25 and 26.51, 243 ;
26.64–65, 241 ;
26.64–66, 433 ,
26.82–142, 241 ;
26.92, 247 ;
26.93, 434 ;
26.132, 423 ;
26.135–138, 433 ;
26.141–142, 270
—Canto 27, 85 , 243 , 363 , 365 ;
27.40, 434 ;
27.55, 243 , 433 ;
27.63–64, 241 ;
27.64–66, 439 ;
27.67–71, 250 –253;
27.69, 436 ;
27.77–78, 241 ;
27.79–81, 270 ;
27.98, 246 , 257 , 356 ;
27.105–120, 366 ;
27.136–138, 425 ;
27.142–144, 432 –433
—Canto 28, 418 ;
28.4–9, 436 ;
28.4–15, 426 ;
28.81–84, 202 ;
28.117, 374 ;
28.118, 251 ;
28.132, 225
—Canto 29.1–12, 207 –209;
29.22–24, 410 ;
29.25–27, 253 ;
29.25–36, 34 ;
29.87, 431
—Canto 30.126, 251 –252
—Canto 31.3, 434 ;
31.81, 405 ;
31.84, 366
—Canto 32.128, 434
—Canto 33, 52 , 170 , 187 ;
33.64–66, 421 ;
33.143–144, 438
Paranomasia, 162
Parker, R. A., 362
Pastoral, 213 –217, 422
Pastore Stocchi, Manlio, 424
Patch, H. R., 186
Paul, St., 242 ;
1 Corinthians, 413 –414;
2 Corinthians, 414 –415;
Ephesians, 267 , 441 –442;
Galatians, 348 ;
Philippians, 414
Pazzaglia, Mario, 336 , 337 , 343 –344
Pecoraro, Paolo, 354 , 419
Peire d'Alvernha, 373
Pelias, 381
Pellegrini, Anthony L., 375 –376
Pennington, Kenneth, 440
Perella, Nicolas J., 406 , 414
Pernicone, Vincenzo, 166 , 349 , 378 , 392 , 397
Personification, 179 –182, 341
Perugi, Maurizio, 375 , 383 , 401 , 405 , 406 , 413 , 414 , 415 , 417
Peter, St., 241 –242, 247 , 248 –249;
First Epistle of, 443 ;
Second Epistle of, 382
Peter Lombard, 242
Petrarca, Francesco, 381 , 408 ;
as reader of Ovid, 105 ;
sestinas of, 109 , 136 , 383 ;
"Giovene donna sotto un verde lauro," 118 , 371
Petrocchi, Giorgio, 331 , 332 , 339
Pézard, André, 381 , 427
Philosophy, Lady, 12 , 168 , 198 , 349 , 377
Phoebus. See Apollo
Phoenix, 212 , 245 –246
Pier delle Vigne, 182 , 199 , 417 –418, 420
Pierotti, Gian Luca, 425
Pietro d'Abano, 406
Pisces (constellation), 255 , 365
Pisces (zodiacal sign), 206
Place, geographical, power of, 41 –42, 239 , 338
Planets, 8 , 34 –36, 80 –87, 93 –94, 106 , 117 , 122 , 143 , 206 , 228 , 240 , 246 , 351 , 380 , 392 , 442 . See also names of specific planets
Plato, 9 –11, 229 ;
Boethius cites, 168 , 399 , 424 ;
man as copula,346 (see also Midpoint);
negative view of body, 366 ;
numerology in, 9 , 211 ;
order of planets, 380 , 442 ;
theme of return to stars, 93 –94, 242 ; works of, see next entry. See also Neoplatonism
Plato, works of:
Laws, 363
Republic, 30 , 413
Timaeus, 333 , 352 , 426 , 430 ;
Aquinas on, 380 –381;
astronomy in, 10 –11, 122 , 136 , 241 , 269 , 379 ;
Dante echoes in De vulgari eloquentia,27 –30;
descent of soul, 366 ;
Great Year, 437 ;
human song imitates cosmos in, 30 ;
human soul analog of World-Soul in, 11 , 147 –148, 240 ;
justice in, 413 ;
liver the seat of passion in, 100 , 371 ;
Macrobius cites, 379 , 400 ;
making of World Soul, 9 –10, 228 , 379 ;
man's soul triple in, 406 ;
in "O qui perpetua," 13 –18, 124 –125, 334 ;
on semen, 370 ;
on sight, 10 –11, 373 –374;
Same and Other in, 9 –10, 48 , 78 –79, 124 –125, 179 ;
space as receptacle in, 27 –30, 248 . See also Calcidius; Neoplatonism
Pliny the Elder, 34
Plotinus, 334 , 363
Policleitus, 418
Porphyry, 12 ;
Cave of the Nymphs,363
Possiedi, Paolo, 408
Powell, James N., 440
Precession of equinoxes, 254 –255, 339 , 364 –365
Price, H. de Sola, 332
Priest, Paul, 430
Primum mobile, 94 , 225 , 247 , 251 , 256 –257, 432 , 442
Privation. See Act
Proclus, 54 , 334 , 365 ;
on intellect, 265
Prometheus, 197
Prophatius, Almanach,9 , 84 , 85 , 355 , 364
Proto, Ernesto, 245 , 424
Proverbs, Book of, 412
Psalms, Book of:
Ps. 8 , 367 ;
Ps. 44 , 442 ;
Ps. 57 , 412 ;
Ps. 113 , 128 ;
Ps. 139 , 424
Ptolemy, Claudius:
Almagest, 7 , 9 , 90 , 380 ;
Centiloquium,43 –44;
Optica, 338 ;
Tetrabiblos, 9 , 353 , 357 –358, 362 , 363 , 419 , 423
Purgatorio, 209 –210
—Canto 1, 202 , 215 , 365 ;
1.1–6, 207 –208;
1.1–12, 410 ;
1.7 and 1.9, 211 ;
1.9–21, 354 –355;
1.19–42, 204 –205;
1.73–75, 129 ;
1.106, 211 ;
1.133, 440 ;
1.135–136, 257 , 438
—Canto 2.1–9, 386 ;
2.1–6, 207 , 354 ;
2.56–57, 206 ;
2.106–114, 21
—Canto 3.25 and 3.70, 420 ;
3.79–87, 422
—Canto 4.139, 420
—Canto 5, 418 ;
5.109–120, 202
—Canto 6, 270 ;
6.130–131, 410
—Cantos 7–9, 201 , 420
—Canto 7.60, 420
—Canto 8.100–103, 131 –135, 420 –421;
8.133–139, 435
—Canto 9.13–15, 421
—Canto 10.32, 418
—Canto 11, 201 ;
11.115, 117 , 418
—Canto 14.147, 415
—Cantos 15–21, 420
—Canto 15, 420
—Cantos 16–18, 203
—Canto 16.47–48, 405 ;
16.59, 418 ;
16.73, 204 , 420 ;
16.73–81, 365 ;
16.77, 364 ;
16.106–110, 420 ;
16.114, 418
—Canto 17.17, 200 ;
17.33, 376 ;
17.54, 418 ;
17.70–72, 210 ;
17.73, 418 ;
17.77–78, 410 ;
17.84, 210 ;
17.104, 418
—Canto 18.16, 210 ;
18.22–23, 210 ;
18.28–33, 413 ;
18.37–39, 338 ;
18.51, 418 ;
18.57, 210 ;
18.62, 418 ;
18.70–80, 420 ;
18.73, 418
—Canto 19.2–3, 424
—Canto 20.73–75, 441
—Canto 21.46–57, 201 –202;
21.93, 424
—Canto 22.108 and 22.133, 418
—Canto 23.69, 418
—Cantos 24 –27, 203 –204
—Canto 24 and 24.64, 202
—Canto 25, 372 , 420 ;
25.17–18, 410 ;
25.37–45, 371 ;
25.61–66 and 25.103–105, 366 ;
25.122, 125 –126
—Canto 26, 202 , 372 ;
26.43–46, 202 ;
26.117, 350
—Canto 27, 420 ;
27.1–6, 207 ;
27.76–87, 422 ;
27.102, 377
—Canto 28, 5 ;
28.139–144, 422
—Canto 29, 242 , 431
—Cantos 30–33, 197 –198, 417
—Canto 30.1–3, 431 ;
30.32, 197 ;
30.54 and 30.58, 417 ;
30.70, 197 ;
30.73, 417 ;
30.85.99, 421 –422;
30.89, 375 ;
30.109–114, 435 ;
30.133, 417 ;
30.136–138, 439
—Canto 31.2–3, 197 ;
31.16, 416 ;
31.16–21, 410 ;
31.48, 416 ;
31.59 and 31.63, 417 ;
31.70, 416 ;
31.116–117, 411 ;
31.117, 417 ;
31.136–138, 411 ;
31.140–144, 416
—Canto 32.17, 417 ;
32.53–54, 419 ;
32.100, 422
—Canto 33.79–80, 417 ;
33.100–104, 417 ;
33.143, 438
Pygmalion, 196 –197, 386 –387, 389 , 415 –416
Pythagoreanism, 9 , 168
Q
Quadrivium, 88
Quaglio, A. E., 357 , 418
R
Rabuse, Georg, 218 , 225 , 251 , 360 , 364 , 419 –423, 428 , 429 , 434 , 436 , 439
Raby, F. J. E., 350
Raimbaut d'Aurenga, 71 ;
"Ar resplan la flors enversa," 71 , 216 , 350 , 402
Raimbaut de Vacqueiras, 351 –352, 403
Rape, fantasy of, 192 –196
Ravenna, 84
Regan, M. S., 404
Reggio, Giovanni, 431 , 436
Renucci, Paul, 71 , 72 , 349
Repetition, lexical, 226 –227. See also Gemination
Retrogradatio cruciata,122 –123, 133 , 145 , 379 , 386
Rhetorica ad Herennium,383 , 409
Rhyme, repercussion of, 138 , 144 –146, 162 –163, 180 , 226 , 261 –267, 276 , 421
Rhyme-words, 26 –29, 150 –151, 180 , 379 –383, 384 –386;
abstractness of, 150 ;
circulation of, 115 , 121 , 26 –127, 144 –149, 384 ;
Arnaut Daniel's, 132 –133, 377 , 383 ;
in De vulgari eloquentia,261 –263, 385 , 438 –439, 445 ;
as enclosures, 141 –148, 372 , 385 ;
as microcosmic, 132 , 136 –137;
numerology of, 269 , 381 ;
in tornata ofsestina, 133 –134
—Examples discussed:
colli, 150 , 380 , 381 , 383 , 387 , 422 ;
dolce , 106 , 166 , 387 ;
donna, 106 , 110 , 141 , 149 –151, 166 , 383 , 387 ;
erba, 150 , 380 , 383 , 387 , 433 ;
freddo, 141 –143, 146 –148, 163 , 385 –387, 423 ;
luce , 148 , 151 –155, 158 –161, 385 , 387 ;
marmo, 105 , 387 ;
ombra, 114 , 129 , 130 , 373 , 383 ;
petra, 33 , 105 –106, 110 , 132 , 141 , 150 , 166 , 383 , 387 ;
sempre , 106 , 387 ;
tempo, 106 , 148 , 155 –159, 387 ;
verde, 150 , 387 , 422
Rico, Francisco, 332
Riddle, J. M., 34 , 338
Riesz, Janos, 372 , 379
Ristoro d'Arezzo, 369 , 423
Robertson, D. W., Jr., 416
Rohlfs, Gerhard, 376
Rome, 2 , 88 , 205 , 241 , 390
Romulus and Remus, 88
Roncaglia, Aurelio, 402
Roubaud, Jacques, 372 , 379 , 380
Ruello, Francesco, 391
Rufinus, 362 , 391
Ruggieri, Archbishop, 220 –223, 243
Russell, Rinaldina, 404
Russo, Vittorio, 200 , 418
Ryan, Laurence, 418 , 441
S
Sacrobosco, Giovanni, 9
Sagittarius (zodiacal sign), 76
Salomon, Richard, 357
Same and Other:
as logical principles, 10 –11;
in Ovid's Metamorphoses,121
Same and Other, motion of, according to Plato, 9 –11, 48 , 123 –125, 228 ;
Aquinas on, 380 , 381 ;
in Boethius, 16 , 235 ;
in the Commedia,228 –229, 233 –240, 427 ;
in the Convivio,122 ;
as intellect and will, 78 –79, 124 , 424 , 428 ;
in Macrobius, 30 –31, 169 ;
in the petrose,31 , 49 , 77 –79, 111 , 119 , 122 –125, 127 , 135 –136, 146 , 178 –179, 209 , 352 , 379 , 380 , 381 ;
and spiration of Trinity, 427 –428;
and stanza form, 32 , 77 –79, 121 –126, 209 , 236 .
See also Microcosm; Plato
Sandküihler, Bruno, 55 , 58 , 62 , 341
Sapegno, Natalino, 88 , 420
Sarolli, Gian Roberto, 435 , 442
Satan, 218 , 219 , 223 , 249 ;
body of, and body analogy, 223 –224, 424
Saturn (god), 218 , 223 , 247 ;
and Golden Age, 363 , 423
Saturn (planet), 8 ;
children of, 182 , 360 , 407 ;
and crystal, 225 ;
in the Commedia,216 –217, 247 , 363 –364;
Dante as Saturnine, 356 –357;
in Dante's natal horoscope, 85 –87;
and freezing, 82 , 353 ;
Saturn (planet)
in Gemini, 356 ;
heaven of, 92 , 225 , 250 –253, 363 –364;
in horoscope of "Io son venuto," 80 –85, 146 , 205 –206, 353 ;
and inversion, 84 ;
in "Io son venuto," 73 –108;
and melancholy temperament, 82 , 100 , 353 , 356 –357;
negative influence of, 82 , 363 ;
as patron of learning, 43 –44, 91 ;
positive influence of, 43 –44, 91 , 363 –364;
suicide and, 182
Saturnalia, 84
Saville, Jonathan, 433
Saxl, Fritz, 353 , 354 , 362 , 363 , 364 , 407
Scaglione, Aldo, 246 , 432 , 434
Scarry, Elaine, 333
Scartazzini, G. A., 125 –126
Scheible, Helga, 14 , 334
Scheludko, D., 352
Scherillo, Michele, 403
Schipperges, Heinrich, 370
Schnapp, Jeffrey T., 364 , 420 , 439 , 440 , 442 , 443
Schneider, Alexander, 347
Sciences, as heavens, 147 –148, 243 , 369 , 432
Scorpio (zodiacal sign), 91
Seasons, and change, 46 , 74 –76, 104 –106, 112 , 116 –120, 123 , 127 , 146 –149, 204 –207, 352 , 377 , 418 , 422 . See also Ecliptic; Equinox; Solstice; Sun
Seneca, L. Annaeus, De naturalibus quaestionibus,9 , 38 , 72 , 74 , 127 , 333 , 350 –351, 371 , 382 , 385
Serapion Damascenus, 406
Servius the Grammarian, 382 , 408 , 413 , 437
Sexual references:
in Albertus Magnus, 40 –41;
in Bernard Silvester, 98 –99;
in Arnaut Daniel, 103 , 377 , 381 ;
in the petrose,83 , 102 –104, 126 –127, 169 –170, 188 –189, 191 –196, 381 ;
in Plato, 29 ;
in Virgil, 408
Shapiro, Marianne, 112 , 119 , 128 , 269 , 270 , 373 , 375 , 379 , 381 , 382 , 383
Shaw, J. E., 341 , 344 , 375 , 403
Sheehan, Donald, 372
Sheldon-Williams, I. P., 334 –335, 340 –341, 345 , 346 , 348
Shoaf, R. A., 418 , 424
Sicilian School, 376 , 381
Sigier of Brabant, 54 , 429
Signature:
Dante's, 240 ;
God's, 240
Simon of Tournai, 436
Sinai, Mt., 354
Singleton, Charles S., 55 , 64 , 223 , 332 , 365 , 375 , 382 , 405 , 410 , 420 , 424
Sinon, 417
Smyser, H. M., 353
Solomon, 237 , 432 , 434
Solstice:
summer, 85 , 115 –128, 137 , 207 , 246 , 253 , 363 , 375 , 377 , 383 , 433 –434, 436 ;
winter, 2 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 80 , 84 , 110 –124, 131 , 143 , 146 , 151 , 165 , 205 , 207 , 214 , 232 , 255 , 270 , 352 –353, 363 , 377 , 380 , 433 , 436
Song of Songs, 190 , 239 , 381 , 425 , 429 , 434
Sordello, 420
Space:
creation of, 390 ;
as receptacle, 27 –30, 48 ;
stanza as, 27 –30, 147 –148, 222 , 270 –271, 383 .
See also Canzone stanza; Motion; Plato; Time
Spitzer, Leo, 57 –58, 62 , 342 , 398 , 403
Spitzmuller, Henry, 425
Spring, personified, 377
Stahl, W. H., 332 , 363 , 442
Stanza, canzone. See Canzone stanza
Stars, fixed, 8 , 10 , 77 , 90 –91, 225 , 243 , 367 , 432 , 434 –436;
function of, 94 . See also Milky Way; Zodiac
Statius, 399 , 418 , 424 , 431
Stazio, 201 , 215 , 424
Stern, Henri, 362
Stock, Brian, 370
Stoicism, 7 , 366 . See also Seneca
Stones, nonprecious:
adamant, 225 , 273 –276, 424 ;
alabaster, 274 ;
formation of, 32 –45;
glass (vetro ), 274 , 437 ;
limestone ( pietra calcina ), 376 ;
lodestone (calamita ), 117 , 376 –377;
marble (marmo ), 33 , 105 –106, 150 ;
millstones, 236
Stones, precious:
in Bible, 397 , 443 ;
formation and powers of, 32 –45, 152 –153, 163 , 376 –377, 388 ;
gemma, etymology of, 437 ;
margherita (generic), 273 –276, 376 ;
terminology of, 33 , 47 , 117 , 133
—Specific examples:
amber (ambra ), 274 , 437 ;
amber, and electrum, 437 ;
balashruby (balasso ), 273 –276;
emerald (smeraldo, smaragdus ), 376 ;
heliotrope, see Heliotrope;
jasper, see Jasper;
pearl (margherita ), 225 –226, 231 , 273 ;
ruby (rubino ), sapphire (zaffiro ), and topaz (solis gemma ), 273 –276.
See also Crystal
Sturm-Maddox, Sara, 416 , 417 , 421
Suicide, theme of, in the petrose,49 , 164 , 170 , 175 , 182 –185
Sun, 8 , 206 –258 passim;
analogy with God, 125 , 158 ;
analogy with poet, 83 , 148 ;
approaching solstice, 74 , 146 ;
Aquinas on, 36 ;
and Christ, 129 , 158 , 417 , 432 –434;
and crystal, 252 –254, 388 ;
eclipse of, 114 , 122 , 136 , 226 ;
and eloquence, 239 ;
and generation, 92 –93, 117 , 126 –127, 202 , 239 , 240 , 374 , 430 ;
and
gold, 34 , 377 ;
in Guinizelli, 35 , 377 ;
as heart of cosmos, 236 , 371 ;
heaven of, 232 –240;
implied by shadow, 126 , 136 –137;
lady as, 136 –137, 142 –143;
in palindrome, 383 ;
and poetic genius, 92 , 239 ;
and precious stones, 35 –36, 152 –153, 376 , 377 , 378 ;
in pun, 373 –374;
as ruler of zodiac, 125 , 236 , 379 , 428 ;
as twin of moon, 209 –211;
as World-Soul, 427 .
See also Ecliptic; Equinox; Horoscopes; Solstice; Year, solar; Zodiac
T
Tateo, Francesco, 334 , 340 , 426
Taurus (constellation), 255
Taurus (zodiacal sign), 82 , 85 , 91 , 92 , 95 , 255 , 353 , 354 –355, 364
Teleology, in "Così nel mio parlar," 185 –191
Temperament:
humors and, 181 –182 (see also Melancholy);
of sun, 213 –215;
tempering of opposites, 167 –168, 398 , 405 –406 (see also Harshness);
tempering of poet, 386
Terdiman, Richard, 422
Thebes, 168 , 219 , 424
Theiler, Willi, 334
Theophrastus, 34
Thilo, G., 408 , 413 , 437
Thomas of Cantimpré, 338
Thomas of Verceil, 341
Thorndike, Lynn, 338 , 339
Time:
cycles of, see Cycles,
Seasons; as image of eternity, 127 –128;
as measure of motion, 269 , 391 –392, 442 ;
one of quattuor simul creata,390 ;
as thief, 422 –423
Toja, Luigi, 379 , 417
Toledan tables, 9
Tolomea, 219
Toschi, Paolo, 377
Toynbee, Paget, 375 , 431
Trissino, Giovan Giorgio, 31
Trivium, 88
Trobar clus,350 , 417
Tropic:
of Cancer, 77 , 80 , 83 , 111 , 205 , 363 , 380 –381;
of Capricorn, 363 , 380 –381
Troping, of elements and terms, 163
Troubadours, 21 , 24 , 116 , 177 , 203 , 379 , 381 , 385 , 403 –404, 443 , 444 ;
seasonal topos of, 78 , 350 , 352 .
See also Bernart de Ventadour; Daniel, Arnaut; Raimbaut d'Aurenga; Raimbaut de Vacqueiras; Trobar clus
Trouvères, 379
Tuckerman, Brian, 353
Tyndareus, 88
U
Ubertino da Casale, 399
Ugolino, Count, 220 –223, 243 –245, 249 –250
Uguccione da Pisa, 375 , 401 , 431
Ulisse, 422
Ulrich of Strasburg, 341 , 393 , 396
Ursa major (constellation), 77 , 209
V
Valli, L., 341 –342
Vallone, Aldo, 397 , 399 , 401 , 402 , 404 , 406 , 407 , 410 , 414
Vanasco, Rocco, 374 , 376 , 379 , 380
Vandelli, G., 369
Vanni Fucci, 202 , 212
Vanossi, Luigi, 372 , 373
Venus (goddess), 183 , 247 , 407 , 416
Venus (planet), 8 , 73 , 80 –87, 205 , 206 , 215 , 241 , 247 , 270 , 352 –355, 363 , 364 , 380 , 407 ;
positions in 1300 and 1301, 354 –355, 364
Vernet, A., 370
Virgil, 431 ;
Aeneid , 1 , 407 ;
Aen.4 , 71 , 183 –185, 188 , 194 , 349 –350, 352 , 382 , 405 , 407 –409, 413 , 420 ;
Aen.6 , 258 , 263 , 337 , 366 , 438 , 443 ;
Aen.8 , 350 , 381 –382, 420 ;
Eclogue 1 , 375 ;
Eclogue 4 , 215 , 333 , 335 , 363 , 437 ;
Eclogue 8 , 437 ;
Georgics, 422
Virgo (zodiacal sign), 87
Vlastos, Gregory, 10
von Ivánka, Endrc, 341
von Simson, Otto, 385
Vulgate Cycle (Arthurian romances), 438 –439
W
Wallis, R. T., 410
Water (element), 225 ;
and crystal, 37 –38, 140 –142, 150 , 225 –227;
and first matter, 149 –150, 225 , 387 ;
and the moon, 225 .
See also Elements; Fire; Microcosm
Weisheipl, James A., 338
Westra, H. J., 361
Wetherbee, Winthrop, 361 , 370
Wilhelm, James, 418 –419
William of Champeaux, 341
William of Moerbeck, 36 , 365
Willis, James, 360 , 361 , 363 , 380
Wind, Edgar, 255
Wingell, Albert E., 431
Wipfel, J. F., 339
Wisdom (Bible), 198
Witelo, 36 , 366
Wood, Chauncey, 353
Woolsey, R. B., 347
World-Soul, 347 , 349 ;
in Boethius, 14 –18, 67 –68, 229 , 234 , 336 ;
Dante and the, 67 –68, 124 –125, 147 –148, 229 , 234 , 240 , 349 , 427 ;
human soul as analog of, 11 ,
World-Soul
15 , 17 , 68 , 125 –126, 147 –148, 169 ;
in Macrobius, 169 ;
in Plato, 9 –11, 14 –16, 18 , 48 , 124 –125, 147 –148, 333 , 379 , 427 .
See also Microcosm; Midpoint; Same and Other
Wrobel, J., 370
Wyckoff, Dorothy, 37 , 338 –339, 388
Y
Year, solar, 72 –74, 84 , 118 –19, 132 , 151 , 202 , 213 , 238
Year, Great, 437 , 442
Z
Zahlten, Johannes, 337 , 373 , 425
Zechariah, Book of, 382
Zenith, 246 , 380
Zenker, R., 373
Zephaniah, Book of, 382
Zeugma, 116
Zeus. See Jupiter (god)
Zodiac, 10 , 39 , 80 , 91 , 119 , 216 , 236 , 240 , 269 , 362 , 380 , 428 , 431 , 435 , 442 ;
and assignment of signs to planets, 380 ;
constellations of, relation to signs, 364 –365.
See also Ecliptic; Equinox; Houses; Solstice; Sun
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Preferred Citation: Durling, Robert M., and Ronald L. Martinez Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante's Rime petrose. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8s200961/