Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

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John Took, Why Dante Matters: An Intelligent Person’s Guide (2020)

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“The year 2021 marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, a poet who, as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘divides the world with Shakespeare, there being no third.’ His, like ours, was a world of moral uncertainty and political violence, all of which made not only for the agony of exile but for an ever deeper meditation on the nature of human happiness.

“In Why Dante Matters, John Took offers by way of three in particular of Dante’s works – the Vita Nova as the great work of his youth, the Convivio as the great work of his middle years and the Commedia as the great work of his maturity – an account, not merely of Dante’s development as a poet and philosopher, but of his continuing presence to us as a guide to man’s wellbeing as man.

“Committed as he was to the welfare not only of his contemporaries but of those ‘who will deem this time ancient,’ Dante’s is in this sense a discourse overarching the centuries, a discourse confirming him in his status, not merely as a cultural icon, but as a fellow traveller.”   —Bloomsbury

See also the Virtual book launch event held at UCL’s Institute for Advanced Study, November 24, 2020.

“Dante and The Divine Comedy: He took us on a tour of Hell”

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“Literary ambition seems to have been with Dante, born in 1265, from early in life when he wished to become a pharmacist. In late 13th Century Florence, books were sold in apothecaries, a testament to the common notion that words on paper or parchment could affect minds with their ideas as much as any drug.

“And what an addiction The Divine Comedy inspired: a literary work endlessly adapted, pinched from, referenced and remixed, inspiring painters and sculptors for centuries. More than the authors of the Bible itself, Dante provided us with the vision of Hell that remains with us and has been painted by Botticelli and Blake, Delacroix and Dalí, turned into sculpture by Rodin – whose The Kiss depicts Dante’s damned lovers Paolo and Francesca – and illustrated in the pages of X-Men comics by John Romita. Jorge Luis Borges said The Divine Comedy is ‘the best book literature has ever achieved’, while TS Eliot summed up its influence thus: ‘Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.’ Perhaps the epigraph to The Divine Comedy itself should be ‘Gather inspiration all ye who enter here.’

“But it’s not just as a fountainhead of inspiration for writers and visual artists that The Divine Comedy reigns supreme – this is the work that enshrined what we think of as the Italian language and advanced the idea of the author as a singular creative voice with a vision powerful enough to stand alongside Holy Scripture, a notion that paved the way for the Renaissance, for the Reformation after that and finally for the secular humanism that dominates intellectual discourse today. You may have never read a single line of The Divine Comedy, and yet you’ve been influenced by it.”   –Christian Blauvelt, BBC, 2018

Read the full article here.

John Curran, “The Painted Veil” (2006)

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john-curran-the-painted-veilThe 2006 movie, The Painted Veil, based on a novel by Somerset Maugham ultimately derives from the author’s fascination with Pia, a character in Dante’s Purgatorio. This discussion of the movie quotes from Maugham’s preface to the novel:

“The idea for the novel began when Maugham was studying Italian under the tuition of the daughter of his landlady in Tuscany before World War I (he had by then decided to abandon a career in medicine for the life of a writer). While working through Dante’s Purgatorio, he came upon this line, spoken by the adulterous wife Pia: Siena mi fe’; disfecemi Maremma. (Siena made me, Maremma unmade me.) Ersilia (for so the tutor was named) explained that Pia was a noblewoman of Siena whose husband, suspecting her of adultery and afraid on account of her family to put her death, took her down to his castle in the Maremma valley, the noxious vapors of which he was confident would kill her off. But she took so long to die that he grew impatient and had her tossed out a window. As Maugham explains in his preface to the novel: ‘I do not know where Ersilia learnt all this. The note in my own Dante was less circumstantial, but the story for some reason caught my imagination. I turned it over in my mind and for many years from time to time would brood over it for two or three days. I used to repeat to myself the line: Siena mi fe’; disfecemi Maremma. But it was one among many subjects that occupied my fancy and for long periods, I forgot it. Of course I saw it as a modern story, but I could not think of a setting in the world of today in which such events might plausibly happen. It was not till I made a long journey in China that I found this.'”    –Edward T. Oakes, First Things, January 10, 2007

Contributed by Patrick Molloy

Commedia-Inspired Renaissance Paintings?

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This review was written in reference to Martin Kemp’s examinations of John Took’s Dante. For more analysis, read the full article here.

“Kemp’s idea is to set up a paragone, comparing, on the one hand, Dante’s scientific and metaphorical/theological understanding of light and sight in the Divine Comedy (1308–21), especially in Paradiso, to, on the other, renderings of divine light in Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting. He opens with a scholarly survey of late medieval natural science accounts of optics and of light (noting in particular the widely accepted theories of the late 10th-/early 11th-century mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, known as Alhazan), before laying out what he understands of Dante’s knowledge of, and interest in, this topic, which he terms the poet’s ‘dazzle’—the failure of sight when confronted with the splendore (blinding light) of Empyrean Heaven.

[. . .] “Kemp makes periodic disclaimers throughout the book that it is impossible to cite documented or obvious connections between Dante’s light and works of art (except for illuminated or illustrated editions of the Commedia) but, to avoid cutting the ground from under his own feet, he makes a Roger-Fry swerve: the viewer will need a special sensitivity to see the ‘Dantesque’ as Kemp does. ‘The more general and less discernible diaspora [of Dante’s divine light] is something that can be sensed as a common factor as we pass from one scheme of decoration to another. This is not a matter of firm historical demonstration so much as the deployment of visual and poetic instinct.’ Kemp is insistent, pounding away with Maslow’s hammer throughout, that it is Dante’s divine light that appears in all the works he cites. It must be said that, in the paragone he proposes, it is not a question of attributable sources that is the problem; it is the category failure of comparing poetry with painting, apples with pears. Ultimately, Dante himself says that the only possible answer to ‘Who does divine light best?’ has to be God Himself, lux eterna.”     –Donald Lee, The Art Newspaper, July 2, 2021

See our posts on John Took here and Martin Kemp here.

How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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