Dante on View

The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts

Antonella Braida, Luisa Calè, Antonella Braida, Luisa Calè

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754658962
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351946308
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Dante on View opens an important new dimension in Dante studies: for the first time a collection of essays analyses the presence of the Italian Medieval poet Dante Alighieri in the visual and performing arts from the Middle Ages to the present day. The essays in this volume explore the image of Dante emerging in medieval illuminated manuscripts and later ideological and nostalgic uses of the poet. The volume also demonstrates the rich diversity of projects inspired by the Commedia both as an overall polysemic structure and as a repository of scenes, which generate a repertoire for painters, actors and film-makers. In its original multimediality, Dante's Commedia stimulates the performance of readers and artists working in different media from manuscript to stage, from ballet to hyperinstruments, from film to television. Through such a variety of media, the reception of Dante in the visual and performing arts enriches our understanding of the poet and of the arts represented at key moments of formal and structural change in the European cultural world.

PART I

DANTE IN PERFORMANCE

Chapter One

The Comedy as a Text for Performance

Peter Armour

Several passages in the Comedy allude to the enduring fame earned by poets, and in Paradiso XVII Dante shows that he conceived of his own great narrative poem as the vehicle of his fame among posterity, and thus as a text to be read long after his death, ‘tra coloro / che questo tempo chiameranno antico’ (Par. XVII, 119–20).¹ For him it was certainly a written text, and he refers on numerous occasions to his pen, his papers, his act of writing and his individual reader, his ‘lettor’, addressed in the ‘tu’ form. Other addresses, however, imply a plural readership or audience — ‘O voi ch’avete li ’ntelletti sani […]’ (Inf. IX, 61), ‘O voi che siete in piccioletta barca […]’ (Par. II, 1).² Sometimes for the purpose of moral polemic Dante the poet interrupts the narrative of his journey to address an entire city or region: ‘Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se’ sí grande […]’, ‘Ahi Pisa, vituperio de le genti […]’, ‘Ahi Genovesi, uomini diversi / d’ogne costume […]’, ‘Oh Romagnuoli tornati in bastardi!’ (Inf. XXVI, 1; XXXIII, 79, 151–2; Purg. XIV, 99).³ Sometimes, too, speaking in his own voice, he addresses his messages to the whole of Christendom or even the entire human race: ‘O superbi cristian, miseri lassi […]’, ‘Or superbite, e via col viso altero, / figliuoli d’Eva […]’ (Purg. X, 121; XII, 70–71),⁴ in the usual modern punctuation of this text, allotting it to Dante poet rather than to the angel. Most of the moral lessons and invectives contained in the Comedy, of course, are placed by Dante in the mouths of the souls whom he meets, but these, too, often contain passages directed to living people in the plural. Thus, in his lesson on Fortuna Virgil addresses the human race as a whole – ‘Oh creature sciocche […]!’ (Inf. VII, 70) – as he does later, too, when dealing with the limitations of human understanding: ‘State contenti, umana gente, al quia […]’ (Purg. III, 37).⁵ In Purgatory, Marco Lombardo acts as an important mouthpiece of the poet to the world of the living: ‘Voi che vivete ogne cagion recate / pur suso al cielo […]’ (Purg. XVI, 67–8).⁶ A particularly interesting example of this universalised address occurs in Beatrice’s mini-sermon on vows: ‘Siate, Cristiani, a muovervi piú gravi […]’, and so on (Par. V, 73–84).⁷ This is, as it were, spoken as part of a dialogue within the narrative, but Dante goes on immediately to refer to his duty as the poet to record Beatrice’s speech within his written text: ‘Cosí Beatrice a me com’ ïo scrivo’ (Par. V, 85).⁸

Though certainly written to be read, the Comedy contains innumerable references to the poem, and to works by other poets, as speech or song, and hence to its receiver as a hearer rather than as an individual reader. Occasionally, indeed, these two aspects of the poem’s receptors are mixed: ‘O tu che leggi, udirai nuovo ludo’ (Inf. XXII, 118).⁹ Intriguingly, this address to the reader occurs in what all agree is the most ‘theatrical’ episode in the entire poem – the grim farce of the devils and their ‘ludo’, their ‘game’ or ‘play’, in the bolgia of the barattieri.

For Dante (as for other medieval writers) a poem consists essentially of speech; it is a ‘detto’, the product of the act of ‘dire’ or ‘parlare’, produced by the ‘lingua’ (which, of course, in Italian means ‘tongue’ as well as ‘language’). Poetry is a ‘vocale spirto’, both voice and breath (Purg. XXI, 88), and as an ‘art’ or profession it constitutes the ‘gloria de la lingua’ (Purg. XI, 98). Medieval culture, moreover, did not draw an absolute distinction between the two arts of modulating the voice, poetry and music, as Dante himself makes clear in the terminology he uses throughout Book II of De vulgari eloquentia, not least in his famous definition of poetry as ‘fictio rethorica musicaque poita’ (DVE II. iv. 2). A poem is thus in a sense musical, whether it is set to music (‘harmonised’) or not. Thus, too, as regards the Comedy, the Inferno is defined internally as a ‘canzon’, the Purgatorio as the second ‘cantica’, and the whole poem is divided into ‘canti’. In poetry, the terms ‘detto’/‘dire’ and ‘canto’/‘cantare’ come effectively to be interchangeable. With its harsh and potentially unpopular lessons, the Comedy certainly directs its moral teachings to its reader – ‘Se Dio ti lasci, lettor, prender frutto / di tua lezione […]’ Inf. XX, 19–20)¹⁰ – but it is also Dante’s verbal ‘parola brusca’, ‘voce […] molesta’ and ‘grido’, intended to be heard by ‘l’animo di quel ch’ode’ (Par. XVII, 126, 130, 133, 139).¹¹ Within the fiction of the poem it is a commission to Dante, when he returns to this world, to write down what he has seen, as Beatrice tells him: ‘e quel che vedi, / ritornato di là, fa che tu scrive’ (Purg. XXXII, 104–5).¹² He is also commissioned, on his return, not only to write but also to speak out what he has heard, as St Peter orders him: ‘e tu, figliuol, che per lo mortal pondo / ancor giú tornerai, apri la bocca, / e non asconder quel ch’io non ascondo’ (Par. XXVII, 64–6).¹³

Nowadays, generally speaking in our society, the concept of reading is of a silent, even private, individual act, but this is, of course, a comparatively recent development. In an age like Dante’s, only professionals – churchmen, lawyers, scholars – were truly literate in the official language of writing, Latin; some of the upper classes and rising bourgeoisie (though not, according to Vita nuova, XXV, their womenfolk) might have retained a smattering of schoolboy Latin and could have read a vernacular text, though only the richer would have had access to manuscripts of the texts. In this society, the principal means of diffusion of a poem such as the Comedy among the people as a whole would have been by public recitation or by public reading out loud, perhaps with some commentary. Until the invention of printing put copies of the poem into many private hands, the vast majority of the earliest receptors of Dante’s masterpiece would have experienced it as an oral–aural work, and its recitation would have been a public, indeed a social, act. In De vulgari eloquentia, II. viii. 3–4, Dante himself distinguishes two aspects of the ‘cantio’ or canzone: ‘the actus or the passio of singing’ (and he applies the same distinction to reading too). Active song is what is fashioned by its author, the poet, as in the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘I sing of arms and the man.’ Passive song is when the fashioned verse is uttered by its author or by someone else, whether set to music or not; by this public ‘singing’, it acts upon another, that is, presumably, the hearer who receives it from the singer. Although this distinction is made as part of Dante’s discussion of the tragic canzone, there is no reason to believe that he would not have applied it also to ‘singing in the comic style’, known by the diminutive term ‘cantilena’, which he promises to discuss in Book IV, which he never got round to writing. How else would ‘comic’ songs, too, be diffused if not by public singing or recitation, just as canzoni of war, love or virtue, just as religious laude reached most of the people by some form of performance, with or without actual music? Though Dante does not make the point, his distinction between active and passive song echoes that drawn in the Civil Law between the ‘comicus’ (the author) and the ‘comoedus’ (the performer or actor), as well as that between the troubador, the ‘inventor’ who composed his own poems, and the ‘ioculator’, the giullare, joglar, jongleur, the ‘player’ who sang or performed works composed by somebody else (though he too might, of course, compose some of his own as well, in a low or ‘comic’ style).¹⁴ The singing of songs and the recitation of poems, including poems on serious subjects, pertained to the multifarious entertainment activity in the Middle Ages, to the world of ‘plays’ (ludi) and ‘games’ (joca) from which humans receive refreshment, relaxation and consolation, moderated within the limits of the Aristotelian virtue of ‘eutrapelia’, in Latin ‘jocunditas’. For the recitation of Latin epic poems, there were guidelines for the reciter, advising him to adopt appropriate changes in his facial expression and tone of voice, and to make suitable gestures, matching the subject of the poem and always within the limits of decorum; thus recital from memory or the public reading even of a Latin poem would have been in its way partly dramatised, a one-man show.¹⁵ Already in Dante’s day the chivalric romances in vernacular dialect forms were circulating in the streets and might even have been declaimed on a stage (theatrum). In this way, too, the Comedy, also a great vernacular narrative in verse, was capable of being diffused at all levels of society, among the educated, the ecclesiastical and secular leaders, the merchants and middle classes, and even the gens ydiota, the totally unlettered, including the ‘muliercule’¹⁶ – the common womenfolk, those members of society who were least likely to have any literacy at all. For all its hearers, when recited or read out loud and in public, the poem was in the volgare, their mother tongue, and though its language is mostly removed from the everyday and the colloquial, it would nevertheless have been immediately familiar to them in its basic structure and modes of expression in the context of their own daily means of communication. Giovanni del Virgilio’s poetic correspondence with Dante and his epitaph for the poet show too that, during the poet’s lifetime, the Comedy had already passed into public recitation, in mangled tones, among the people and that Dante was already ‘vulgo gratissimus auctor’, an author beloved by the masses.

I believe it to be virtually certain that during his many years of exile Dante, as a paid member of a lord’s household, would have been expected to recite his Comedy, presumably a canto at a time and from memory, on certain occasions to certain audiences. The effect upon the audience must have been overwhelming: for the only time ever, the ‘io’ who visited the afterlife and the ‘io’ who was then describing it to them were the same person. The Comedy is full of phrases and expressions, apostrophes, exclamations and rhetorical questions that reflect its oral transmission by recitation or public reading, by Dante or by someone else, and the impact of these can easily be missed by those who read the text silently instead of hearing it in a public arena. Of the many dialogues in the poem, moreover, perhaps the most important is that between Dante the poet and his audience, with whom he establishes complicity from the very first line: ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita […]’ (Inf. I, 1).¹⁷ This continues throughout the poem in those brief moments when the poet interjects in the present tense such phrases as ‘Io non so ben ridir’, ‘non credo che’ and so on, up to the very last references to language and its inadequacy in the last canto of the Paradiso: ‘Omai sarà piú corta mia favella, pur a quel ch’io ricordo […]. Oh quanto è corto il dire e come fioco / al mio concetto! […]’ (Par. XXXIII, 106–7, 121–2).¹⁸ Occasionally, too, the poet emphasises that he now shares the same physical space as his audience: ‘Se di là sempre ben per noi si dice, / di qua che dire e far per lor si puote […]?’ (Purg. XI, 31–2).¹⁹ In these, and in many other ways, Dante creates a text not just for readers but also for a listening public, that is, as a ‘performed’ text, immediate in its use of the vernacular and in the vividness of the oral expression that accompanies and even underlies it as its principal means of transmission in the first centuries.

To some extent this may help to explain the popularity of the poem among the people in general, the writing of so many commentaries and the glossing of manuscript copies to explain it, and, with Boccaccio in particular, the inception of the public reading with commentary, the unjustly maligned lectura Dantis. The fact of oral transmission goes some way, too, towards accounting for the almost immediate addition of illustrations in the manuscripts, which were generally intended to clarify the storyline for the individual reader who commissioned or bought the manuscript. It helps, too, to explain the essential ‘theatr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I DANTE IN PERFORMANCE
• PART II DANTE IN THE VISUAL ARTS
• PART III DANTE IN THE CINEMA AND MULTIMEDIA
• Select Bibliography
• Index