“Now he is scattered among a hundred cities,” W.H. Auden wrote in 1939, “And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections.” Auden was ruminating on the recent death of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, but the words could serve as an epitaph for any great author. Poets like to imagine that their creations confer afterlives—for themselves and their subjects—impervious to the assaults of “wasteful war” and “sluttish time” so ruinous to monuments of marble or metal (see Horace’s Ode 3.30 and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55). But as Auden recognized, the moment an author dies, his or her legacy is on the loose. Any chance those poems have of a future depends on what readers make of them: “The words of a dead man,” Auden continues, “Are modified in the guts of the living.”
In Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, Joseph Luzzi, literature professor at Bard College, offers a vivid account of this process of cultural digestion, and, at times, indigestion, from the Middle Ages to the present day. At first glance, such a slim book—little more than two hundred pages, including notes—would hardly seem adequate to the task, given the number, ardor, and productivity of Dante’s devotees over the centuries. Yet, as Luzzi argues in the introduction, those are exactly the reasons against attempting a truly comprehensive reception history of the Comedy (as Dante called it—Divine was added later by a Venetian printer). Such a study’s girth would be measured in hundreds of thousands of pages. No one would read it.
Instead, across ten chapters, Luzzi mixes passage analysis and brief case studies to illustrate the major trends in the Comedy’s reception. As Dante was the master of distilling a vice, virtue, or sensibility into a single, unforgettable figure or incident, so Luzzi also shows a good eye for casting. His vignettes feature painters, auteurs, philosophers, politicians, and popes—this is a book in which Botticelli, Mary Shelley, and Primo Levi are all home—thereby highlighting the range of Dante’s circulation over time. But Luzzi gives the most attention to leading writers of the Western tradition, his area of expertise and a key barometer of Dante’s standing in any given era.
The book’s chief historical lesson is that the barometer has fluctuated more than you might think. Dante has enjoyed a comfortable position atop the literary pantheon during the past two hundred years. Yet peer back to the Romantic era—when, Luzzi argues, Dante’s “apotheosis” occurred—and the poet’s cultural footing no longer appears so sure. Luzzi reminds us that Dante’s success was far from guaranteed. He chose to write his epic in Italian, his mother tongue, rather than Latin, even though the latter would have offered more prestige, literary models on which to draw, and a wider readership across Europe. Dante thus had to invent not only the epic in his vernacular but also a “new reading public” for it, as Luzzi argues, following the great German émigré critic Erich Auerbach.
Miraculously, Dante pulled it off. As Luzzi details, the signs of that reading public’s rapid emergence are unmistakable. Hundreds of manuscript copies of the Comedy were made in the fourteenth century. Commentaries began to appear in the wake of the poet’s death, in 1321. Dante even became a character in other people’s stories, including one in which he “upbraids a blacksmith for not reciting his Commedia properly.” Chaucer lifted the story of Count Ugolino—translated as “Erl Hugelyn of Pyze”—from Inferno XXXIII for his Canterbury Tales.
Yet amid this quick ascent, and indeed because of his growing fame, the poet also gained prominent critics. The Renaissance Humanists—spearheaded by Petrarch, whose father Dante met—would deem Dante’s Italian uncouth compared to the classical style of Latin they sought to revive as a literary language. As Luzzi points out, Petrarch’s career would be marked by a great historical irony: The Latin historical epic upon which he long labored, Africa, would remain of interest only to specialists, while his vernacular love poems to Laura would win international adoration.
Unsurprisingly, in light of Dante’s criticism of papal abuses (including assigning multiple popes to Hell in Inferno), clerical reaction was mixed. Luzzi spends several pages detailing the Dominican friar Guido Vernani’s political attacks on Dante. Yet even within the same order, avid readers of Dante emerged. In the 1350s, for example, the Dominican house of Santa Maria Novella, in Florence, commissioned frescoes inspired by the Comedy—including a portrait of Dante himself. In the next century, Dante received the scrupulous attention of the Inquisition, which would list three of his works on the Index of Prohibited Books. The Comedy, Luzzi explains, received not an outright ban but a lighter sentence: “moral surgery” consisting of black marks to and paper coverings over troublesome passages.
Here follows what Luzzi dubs the “lost centuries” prior to the Romantic apotheosis (from which point, the biographer argues, Dante’s preeminence has never been in doubt). That characterization of Dante’s status in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries strikes me as a tad overdramatic, though Luzzi’s account only hews to the standard line of Dante scholarship. The Comedy’s cultural decline can, as Luzzi details it, be measured in multiple domains. Only three editions of the Comedy were published in the seventeenth century—the last in 1629—though regular production of editions would resume in the second decade of the next century. The commentary industry also came to a halt, with no new large-scale studies of the Comedy published between 1572 and 1732.
During the Reformation, moreover, Dante fell between two stools. The English Protestant John Foxe delighted in Dante’s denunciation of popes (even though Dante would hardly have joined him in his anti-Catholicism). At the same time, leading Catholic Counter-Reformers found him too irregular to be an ally. Literary taste swung toward a refined and balanced classicism—think Jean Racine and Alexander Pope. From the Enlightenment perspective, moreover, Dante seemed outmoded intellectually and tonally. Voltaire, Luzzi notes, at one point called Dante’s poem a “monster.” Accordingly, Luzzi dwells at length in this section of the book on exceptions, including the philosopher Giambattista Vico—for whom Dante’s “barbarity” was an asset—and the poet John Milton.
Let me propose an alternative interpretation of this phase of Dante’s reception history: The Comedy now became a classic in the negative sense. I have in mind Mark Twain’s witticism that a “classic” is “something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Or, to put it another way, a classic is a book we pay the supreme compliment of citing and discussing without having read (thoroughly or at all). Thus, Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) speaks of “Dante, that famous Italian poet,” whom he almost certainly had not read, when recounting an apocryphal anecdote in which Dante is refused admission to a feast because “his clothes were but mean.” In The Great Exemplar (1649), Anglican divine Jeremy Taylor quotes an “elegant expression of Dante” from Paradiso (in Italian) to drive home his point about one of Jesus’s miracles. Again, it’s not clear how much of the Comedy Taylor had read; clearly though, Taylor assumes that Dante’s words will carry weight with readers. Dante’s circulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would be worthy of a chapter in Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (2007). In fact, Voltaire said as much: “His [Dante’s] reputation will always be high because he is hardly read. There are twenty-odd passages in him that people know by heart: which is sufficient to spare oneself the trouble of looking at the rest.”
I am suggesting that in these “lost” centuries we find countless signs of what has become a quite normal condition of cultural literacy in which people accumulate certain “set pieces” from the Comedy—Dante memes, if you will—from their general reading and viewing. As an illustration of these dynamics on a national scale, consider the eighteenth-century English fascination with Ugolino. Across that century, six translations—three in verse, three in prose—were made of Inferno XXXIII, the first appearing in the artist and critic Jonathan Richardson’s 1719 A Discourse on the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure, and Advantage of the Science of a Connoisseur, in which he compares the portrayals of Ugolino by a historian, a poet (Dante), a sculptor, and an imaginary painter. The real painter Joshua Reynolds answered a few decades later with his Count Ugolino and his Children in the Dungeon, which was displayed to great fanfare at the Royal Academy in 1773. (“Thy Ugolino gives the heart to thrill,” the poet William Hayley wrote in a verse tribute to Reynolds, “With Pity’s tender throbs, and Horror’s icy chill.”) Later in the same decade, an engraved illustration of the head of Reynolds’s Ugolino appeared in the Swiss pastor and body-theorist Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente. The Swiss painter Henry Fuseli’s studies of the “heads of damned souls from Dante’s Inferno,” made in the 1770s, were incorporated into Lavater’s subsequent Essays on Physiognomy (1789–1798). I could go on. But already the lesson is plain: Europeans with cultural pretentions still knew of the Comedy, even something of the “thrill” of Dante, without turning a page themselves.
John Milton, as I have mentioned, is enlisted as an example of someone from this period who actually did read Dante—in the original—with care. In Milton’s work, we find references not only to the Comedy but also to Dante’s De Monarchia, a political treatise; Convivio, a sequence of philosophical poems (and commentary); and Vita Nuova, a collection of early love poems. As the authors of the two greatest Christian epics, Dante and Milton have always been compared, and those comparisons tend to play up differences and thereby set the poets against each other. Despite Luzzi’s attempt at striking a compromise between the two, significant differences remain. Milton, for example, did not believe in the “fable” of Purgatory. And the two poets part ways in their respective portrayals of the Trinity: Milton’s picture of the Father and Son having a chat (“Only begotten Son, seest thou…”) is totally at odds with Dante’s final vision of the Trinity as a “deep and bright essence” of “exalted Light,” in which he beholds three circles “having three colors but the same extent.” A wiser response to the duo was suggested by C.S. Lewis in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942): “No doubt Dante is in most respects simply a better poet than Milton. But he is also doing a different kind of thing.”
In Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art, historian Rochelle Gurstein has recently reminded us that what we take to be classics now may have been sitting, unmissed, in some king’s parlor for centuries (e.g., the Mona Lisa), while we stride quickly past works that sent our ancestors into raptures (ever heard of the Venus de’ Medici?). Luzzi’s book is a valuable brief on these matters from the realm of literature. The critic shows us how this “instant classic” in medieval Italy has endured for seven centuries, been counted a masterpiece by many great names (albeit for diverse and sometimes contradictory reasons), and never entirely lost cultural currency, even when the leading lights of a generation found it objectionable. In this respect, the history of Dante’s reception is a history of Western taste in miniature.
That history is also a testimony to the density and multiplicity of the Comedy’s contents. The Italian word we use to describe regulated groupings of poetic lines, stanza, means “room” or “chamber.” The Comedy contains thousands of such chambers, and into them the poet packed his entire mental world—hundreds of saints and sinners, breathtaking and revolting images, sonorous lines, ponderous questions, allusions to the classics of his day, slang fresh off the street, tender moments, bitter memories, special effects that still elude CGI. To cite Lewis again, the Comedy is “as unified and ordered as the Parthenon or the Oedipus Rex, as crowded and varied as a London terminus on a bank holiday.” The centuries have demonstrated that it will reward the passerby as well as the disciple, the seeker of set pieces and the hardy pilgrim bound for Paradise. “A classic,” Italo Calvino famously declared, “is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.” The Comedy is such a book; its biography remains in its early chapters.