A short life of the author
Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321) was born in Florence, probably in late May or early June 1265, into a family of the minor Florentine nobility. His mother died when he was young; his father, Alighiero di Bellincione, was a money-changer. The defining emotional event of Dante’s life occurred when he was nine years old: he saw Beatrice Portinari, a Florentine girl of his own age, and fell into a love that would persist, unrequited and idealised, until her death in 1290 — and beyond, through the afterlife of the Divine Comedy.
Life and Career
Dante was educated in the traditions of the Florentine commune — classical Latin literature, Provençal poetry, Aristotelian philosophy — and studied under Brunetto Latini, whom he would place in the circle of Hell reserved for sodomites (a passage of extraordinary ambiguity). He married Gemma Donati around 1285; they had several children, though Gemma is never mentioned in his literary works.
Dante was active in Florentine politics as a member of the White Guelph faction. In 1302, while on a diplomatic mission to Pope Boniface VIII in Rome, his faction lost power and Dante was sentenced to exile. He never returned to Florence. The last nineteen years of his life were spent wandering through the courts and cities of northern Italy — Verona, Ravenna, Padua — dependent on the hospitality of patrons. The exile was the crucible of the Comedy: Dante transformed personal bitterness and political fury into a vision of cosmic justice.
La Vita Nuova (The New Life, c. 1294), a sequence of poems interspersed with prose commentary, records Dante’s love for Beatrice in the tradition of the dolce stil novo, the “sweet new style” of Italian lyric poetry. De Vulgari Eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular, c. 1304) is a treatise arguing that the Italian vernacular is a fit vehicle for serious literature — a revolutionary claim at a time when Latin was the language of learning.
The Commedia (the adjective “divine” was added by later editors) was written between approximately 1308 and 1320. It is a poem of 14,233 lines in terza rima (an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme of Dante’s invention) divided into three cantiche: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, each consisting of thirty-three cantos, plus an introductory canto — a total of 100 cantos. It tells the story of Dante’s journey through the three realms of the afterlife, guided first by Virgil (reason) and then by Beatrice (divine grace), from the dark wood of despair to the vision of God.
Dante died in Ravenna on 14 September 1321, shortly after completing the Paradiso. His tomb remains in Ravenna; Florence has repeatedly — and unsuccessfully — requested the return of his remains.
Major Works and Themes
The Divine Comedy is the poem that created Italian literature, shaped the Christian imagination of the afterlife, and established the vernacular as a medium for the highest poetic ambition. Its scope is encyclopaedic: theology, philosophy, history, politics, science, mythology, and personal experience are woven into a single narrative of extraordinary density and beauty.
The Inferno is the most widely read of the three cantiche: its vivid depictions of the damned — Paolo and Francesca in the whirlwind of the lustful, Ugolino gnawing on the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri, Ulysses narrating his final voyage — are among the most powerful scenes in Western literature.
The Paradiso, though less immediately dramatic, is Dante’s greatest poetic achievement: the light, the music, the intellectual ecstasy of the celestial spheres are rendered in verse of unearthly beauty that stretches the Italian language to its limits.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Dante’s stature has never been in serious question. He is, with Homer and Shakespeare, one of the three supreme poets of Western civilisation. His influence on Italian literature is total; his influence on European literature is immense — Chaucer, Milton, Blake, Shelley, Eliot, Beckett, Borges, and Heaney all wrote in his shadow. T.S. Eliot called him “the most universal of poets in the modern languages.”
Key Works
- La Vita Nuova (c. 1294)
- De Vulgari Eloquentia (c. 1304)
- Convivio (c. 1304–1307)
- De Monarchia (c. 1312–1313)
- Inferno (c. 1308–1314)
- Purgatorio (c. 1312–1318)
- Paradiso (c. 1316–1320)
Collecting Dante
Dante is one of the supreme collecting authors in Western literature. The manuscripts and early printed editions of the Divine Comedy are among the most important and valuable objects in the history of the book.
The editio princeps of the Commedia was printed by Johann Numeister in Foligno in 1472 — one of the earliest printed Italian vernacular books. It is one of the rarest and most valuable incunabula; copies are almost exclusively institutional. When a copy surfaces (perhaps once a generation), prices exceed $1,000,000.
Other fifteenth-century editions — the Mantua (1472), Venice (Vindelino da Spira, 1477), and the illustrated Landino edition (Florence, Nicolaus Laurentii, 1481, with engravings attributed to Botticelli) — are also major rarities. The Landino edition, with its Botticelli illustrations, is one of the most beautiful books of the fifteenth century.
Later illustrated editions are a major collecting area: the Aldine edition (Venice, 1502), the Venetian editions with woodcuts, and the great nineteenth-century illustrated editions (Doré, Blake) are all collected.
Dante manuscripts are held in major libraries worldwide — the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Florence), the Vatican Library, and the Bodleian Library hold the most important copies. No autograph manuscript of the Comedy survives.