Her family was nobler and richer than the Alighieris, and they led the Black Guelfs. One, the virtuous Piccarda, whose odious brother tore her from a convent and forced her to marry, greets him in Paradise; another, Forese, a friend of his youth, is a glutton in Purgatory. One would like to think that Dante ghosted her out of discretion—she was beholden to his persecutors.
Perhaps, though, the rueful shade of Ulysses hits upon the real reason in Inferno:. Neither tenderness for my son, Nor duty to my old father, Nor the debt of love I owed Penelope, To make her happy, could compete With my ardor to know the world, And all things human, base and noble.
But while he was away from Florence the Black Guelfs seized power. They banished Dante in absentia and confiscated his property; he would burn at the stake should he ever return. He never did, even in , when the city offered to commute his sentence if he repented publicly. Exile was preferable to abasement for a man of his temperament, which was reported to be vain and contentious. Dante spent the last nineteen years of his working life as an itinerant diplomat and secretary for the lords of northern Italy.
Yet Dante never forgave Florence. The Comedy is both an epic road trip indebted to Homer and a medieval pilgrimage, though it is also a landmark in Western literature: one of its first masterpieces in a Romance vernacular. The two great Florentines were contemporaries, and they may have been friends, despite a disparity of class.
According to legend, the painter spent his boyhood as a shepherd. He would have known how to butcher a lamb. They both inherited an allegorical tradition, and their themes are faithful to its doctrine, yet their protagonists are radically human. Among them is a young man presumed to be Dante, holding a book. He is dressed sumptuously in red, with an aquiline profile and a steely gaze.
A lust for fame was one of his own failings. As the narrator of the Comedy and its central persona, Dante wrestles with his fellow-feeling for sinners condemned to torments that he has invented. He has been condemned to the Seventh Circle for practicing the vice of sodomy, about which, apparently, he was unrepentant. But the tenderness both men express, and their mourning for what they have lost in each other—a father and a son—is in its way a heretical rebuke to the implacable order that forbids their reunion in Heaven.
Salvation, Dante will discover, requires the surrender of precisely that attribute to which he is most attached as an artist, a lover, and a man: his ego. Like birds of prey being tamed by a falconer, the envious have their eyes sewn shut. The gluttons are mortified by starvation amid tormenting aromas. The lustful must pass through a wall of flames. The proud stagger beneath a sack of boulders, and the slothful atone with manic activity.
But Dante is an embed, rather than a mere tourist. Fear and exhaustion sometimes tempt him with dejection, but, Virgil tells him,. He compares himself to a naughty little boy being scolded. No one has told Beatrice that, according to St. Paul, women are forbidden to teach men. She chastises Dante with a pontifical authority that few members of her sex would have then dared to vaunt. But Dante imagined Purgatory as a place of moral change, as well as uffering.
In keeping with this, his Purgatory has angels in the place of devils. Finally, Dante invents an entirely new region of Purgatory. As you will remember, Hell had a region which was invented by Dante, where the indifferent were punished described in Inferno III. This was outside of Hell itself. Similarly, Dante imagines an area outside of Purgatory-proper, where those who have been negligent in some way or another have to serve a certain amount of time before entering Purgatory-proper.
His inventiveness is not limited to the geographical make-up of Purgatory: it is driven by his reassessment of the theology of Purgatory, and by his intense engagement with the psychological processes which he believed to be necessary to achieve salvation. Skip to main content University links. Close quicklinks. School of Languages, Cultures and Societies. Show all contents Contents. Back to top. William Blake — was a British visionary painter and illustrator whose last and incomplete work was an illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy for the painter John Linnell.
Most of his works shown in this series were created for that, although he did draw and paint scenes during his earlier career. I have a major series on his work here. Early in his career, he produced a complete set of seventy illustrations for translations of the Inferno, which were first published in and continue to be used.
These were followed in by more illustrations for Purgatorio and Paradiso. This article looks at his paintings. Further details of him and his works are here. Joseph Anton Koch was an Austrian landscape painter, who worked mainly in Neoclassical style. He completed those between He specialised in genre painting, and was also a successful illustrator.
The painting shown here was exhibited at the Royal Academy in , and was well-received by critics. It was bought by a wine merchant known for his collection of works by Rossetti, Alma-Tadema, Leighton, and Arthur Hughes. He then turned to drawing and print-making before painting in oils and pastels, becoming one of the great pastellists of the early twentieth century. He is known now as a Symbolist, and throughout his career was highly experimental, producing unusual images that can appear surrealist.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti — was of Italian descent but born in London. In , he co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and was a major figure in British painting until his early death in A published poet and author himself, many of his paintings were in response to literature, particularly the poems of John Keats.
Marie Spartali Stillman — was an outstanding watercolour painter who was born in London, into an affluent family of Greek origin. She was a pupil of Ford Madox Brown, and specialised in highly-worked watercolours, several of Italian literary themes, which are comparable to the better paintings of Rossetti.
I have written a series of three articles about her life and work. Wikipedia Danteworlds. Click on the Music link to hear the songs. This feature is intended to enhance readers' understanding of the very different dynamics which obtain in the realm of the saved. Purgatory Purg.
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