A brief biography of Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and best-known writer of the High Middle Ages.
Dante Alighieri was a Florentine writer, poet, and political figure best known for his Divine Comedy and its three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. He was a leader in the dolce stil nuovo literary movement, identified by use of the vernacular Tuscan dialect (rather than Latin) and by the topic of Divine Love.
Dante Alighieri: The Man
Dante was born into minor nobility in 1265 in the city of Florence. His mother Gabriella died when he was a child, and his father passed away when he was around eighteen. Nothing is recorded about his education.
At the age of nine he first saw the girl named Beatrice Portinari who would inspire his major works, The Vita Nuova and the Comedy, through his unrequited love for her. She was wearing a crimson dress and the mere sight of the child Beatrice was described by Dante as making his heart tremble and the meeting conferred upon him a profound spiritual experience which he records in the Vita Nuova.
Dante may have seen Beatrice fewer than three or so times in his life, and probably actually spoke with her on even fewer occasions. He kept his affection quiet and by the late 1280s she was married to another man, and Dante himself was married to Gemma Donati, a marriage that had been arranged when Dante was only eleven or twelve.
Arguably, Dante's life centered around one event. In 1290 Beatrice died. In what may be the most stirring poem in his Vita Nuova, which begins "A very young and sympathetic lady…" (Vita Nuova XXIII), Dante describes the sun and stars weeping and birds falling dead from the sky. The earth shakes and angels can be seen raising Beatrice to heaven in a little white cloud.
The other highly important date in Dante's life is the year 1300. In that year, Dante was elected one of the six priors of Florence, a post that only lasted two years or less before the rival political party (The Black Guelfs, Dante was a White Guelf) sent the poet into exile from his beloved city. 1300 is also the year in which the Comedy was set.
Dante lived out the rest of his life in exile. He died in 1321 in Ravenna after just finishing the Paradiso, completing the Comedy. The complete work was made public posthumously.
Of Love, Heaven, and Hell
Dante's experience of love gave him, as he called it, a New Life, which became the title of the collection of poems and memoirs known as the Vita Nuova. Influenced by the Provençal troubadours and his colleague Guido Cavalcanti, he developed the burgeoning theme of Romantic Love to its highest spiritual potential. After all, it was Beatrice who led him to heaven itself, says the Paradiso.
The Inferno famously begins "in the middle of our life's journey" with Dante wandering in a dark wood, pursued by a leopard, a lion, and a wolf. Allegorically, he may have been contemplating suicide, as dialogue may indicate when he comes upon the suicides in hell (who also dwell, perhaps meaningfully, in a dark forest). Beatrice sees him in heaven and sends the poet Virgil to guide him away from danger. Dante begins a journey that will culminate with a divine vision in the highest heaven, but to get there he first goes through hell and purgatory.
A lot of people focus upon the Inferno when they consider Dante. Perhaps the darkness and tortures of hell are far more intriguing to our society than the theological niceties of Purgatorio and Paradiso, but above all Dante was a love poet. Beatrice underlies a large amount of his work and, to Dante, the oblivion of hell was but a necessary suffering on his way to Beatrice and God.
SOURCES:
Dante. The Divine Comedy. trans. Allen Mandelbaum with introduction by Eugenio Montale. Everyman's Library (1995).
Dante. Vita Nuova. trans. and introduction by Mark Musa. Oxford University Press (1992).
