Dante in Love

Dante in Love is the story of the most famous journey in literature. Dante Alighieri, exiled from his home in Florence, a fugitive from justice, followed a road in 1302 that took him first to the labyrinths of hell then up the healing mountain of purgatory, and finally to paradise. He found a vision and a language that made him immortal.Author Harriet Rubin follows Dante's path along the old Jubilee routes that linked monasteries and all roads to Rome. It is a path followed by generations of seekers -- from T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Primo Levi, to Bruce Springsteen. After the poet fled Rome for Siena he walked along the upper Arno, past La Verna, to Bibiena, to Cesena, and to the Po plain. During his nineteen-year journey Dante wrote his "unfathomable heart song," as Thomas Carlyle called The Divine Comedy, a poem that explores the three states of the psyche. Eliot, a lifelong student of the Comedy, said, "Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them, there is no third." Dante in Love tells the story of the High Middle Ages, a time during which the artist Giotto was the first to paint the sky blue, Francis of Assisi discovered knowledge in humility and the great doctors of the church mapped the soul and stood back to admire their cathedrals. Dante's medieval world gave birth to the foundation of modern art, faith and commerce.Dante and his fellow artists were trying to decode God's art and in so doing unravel the double helix of creativity. We meet the painters, church builders and pilgrims from Florence to Rome to Venice and Verona who made the roads the center of the medieval world. Following Dante's route, we are inspired to undertake journeys of discovering ourselves.In the vein of Brunelleschi's Dome, Galileo's Daughter and Wittgenstein's Poker, Dante in Love is a worldly and spiritual travelogue of the poet's travels and the journey of creativity that produced the greatest poem ever written.

Auteur

Harriet Rubin

Contenu

Contents

Part I: Touching the Depths

1. A Time Run by Dreamers and Their Dreams

The High Middle Ages reached their greatest height in a brief thirty-year period, when the thirteenth century ended and the fourteenth century began -- the source of the great institutions we call modern.

2. The Difference Between One Who Knows and One Who Undergoes

In this tale of how Dante, ill-fated fugitive, became Dante, creator of a masterpiece that influences readers from beyond the grave, we take a look at how readers become Dantisti pursuing the art of perfection as did their master. Why anti-Shakespearians see farther. The reward of happiness and genius for readers of The Divine Comedy.

Part II: Inferno (1304-8)

3. The Fearful Infant Whose Ravenous Hunger Cannot Be Satisfied

Two worlds that define the High Middle Ages: poverty and plenty; purity and power. The fanaticism of ambition shapes both church and state. Pope Boniface VIII is Dante's dark twin; St. Francis, who gave Italy poetry, is Dante's vagabond hero. Giotto, who raised the modestly human to the level of high art, defines the third element of achievement in these expansionist times. Throughout Italy, the search for the grail shifts to the search for sugar, cinnamon and gold. Dante experiences this double, squinting time of spiritual forces and commerce as he enters the wilderness of the Inferno.

4. The Ogre of the Brotherhood

The death of poet Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's first friend and "brother" in the Fedeli d' Amore -- "the brotherhood of the faithful in love." Was Dante responsible? The birth of poetry; the first time the word "love" is uttered and Dante's vow to write what had never been written before. The blend of asceticism and passionate desire that led to conflicts among the brotherhood. Dante's sorrows take on a new depth as he travels deeper into the Inferno.

5. The Golden Sperm

How Dante constructed the Comedy. The poet vies with the ghost of St. Thomas Aquinas, author of "that other epic," the Summa Theologica, to lift poetry from its bookish deadness. He studies "alchemy" -- literally, "golden sperm" -- for a new language, and finds a means by which loss can be reversed.

6. The Difficult Discipline of "As Pleased Another"

Can failure be reversed? Wandering the open roads of Italy, an outcast and fugitive with a death warrant hanging over his head, Dante compares himself to the heroic wanderer Ulysses and his failed last voyage. To what can one aspire that is free of the deadlock of ambition? One can try to see morally and aesthetically, looking for the divine in things, learning to read "the mystery of history," which is that "God writes straight with crooked lines."

Part III: Purgatorio (1308-12)

7. Virgin Discoveries

A woman takes on the role of a god. Dante, in the midst of this revolution, discovers the feminine mysteries. Something very dramatic had happened between the two notions of tenderness: piety and pity -- between ancient warrior Aeneas's pious devotion to his father and Michelangelo's Renaissance Pietà: the sculpture of a young woman cradling her dead son in her lap. Out of this, the definition of genius becomes linked with sweetness. Dante prepares for meeting his dead lover, Beatrice.

8. Number-Crunchers in Paris

The abduction of the papacy to Avignon, dashing hopes for a new Roman Empire. Dante voyages to Paris in 1309 in the wake of the pope. The new sciences and Gothic churches fill his imagination and provide him the means for Paradise and Paradiso: "sacred geometry," apparent in the magisterial Gothic cathedrals that are rare in Italy but which dominate France.

9. "We Have Tears for Things," Said Virgil

The saddest moment in literature is not when Juliet dies undeflowered, Byron said, but when Virgil leaves Dante at the pinnacle of Purgatory. The ghost of the great ancient poet has guided his protégé Dante through Hell, which he knows all too well, up the Mountain of Purgatory and then disappears when the student surpasses the teacher with his newfound certainty.

Part IV: Paradiso (1316-21)

10. What the Bread God Wished

Inside the mind of God, fully and at last, Dante learns how to see beyond human sight. Dante reaches this pinnacle in his fifties in Ravenna, truly a secret Paradise. The High Middle Ages is ripening to its death. The poet completes his greatest and most modern work, Paradiso, as chaos threatens. Dante's death, and his restless bones.

Envoi: The Happy Ending

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index