Poet and humanistic Italian. Dante Alighieri took an active share with the political life of her birthplace, Florence, and gave to the Italian poetry of the Middle Ages her most vibrating pages, questioning indefatigably the memory of her meeting striking down with Beatrice Portinari, disappeared brutally, and of which it will not cease evoking and transposing the image, in the terrestrial world with Vita nuova, in beyond with the immortal Divine comedy.
Born in Florence into 1265 from a noble and fortunate family belonging to the party guelfe, Dante Alighieri loses her very young father. He marries in 1285 Gemma di Manetto Donati, of which he will have three sons, Jacques, Pierre and Antoine and perhaps a fourth, named Jean.
But it is Béatrice who will inspire in Dante all her poetic production; according to Vita nuova, it is in 1274 qu ' takes place the first meeting. Girl of Folco Portinari and wife of Simone dei Bardi, it dies in 1290.
At the school of the traditional ones
One knows few things about the studies of youth of Dante: Vita nuova watch a thorough knowledge of the crowned texts, a good frequentation of the writings of Aristote, an attentive reading of Virgile, Ovide and Horace; it also makes it possible to suppose a real familiarity with poets like Dante da Maiano and holding them of the dolce stil nuovo, in particular Guido Cavalcanti. The meeting with philosophical works, like Of consolatione philosophiae of Boèce and Of amicitia of Cicéron, probably recommended by the Brunetto Latini Master - popularizer of Cicéron, author of Rettorica and the Book of the Treasury -, pushes Dante to be attended, after the death of Beatrice, the theological schools of Dominican of Santa Maria Novella and Franciscan of Santa Croce, where it comes into contact with the philosophy of saint Thomas d' Aquin.
While continuing to cultivate itself, the poet increases his personal experience: he sanctions the crisis of the stil nuovo in Vita nuova, true autobiographical love story, where - innovation - the love (heard philosophically) is addressed to an allegorical lady, rams courtesy, Wisdom. In the Rhyme, its research seems to move towards a method of avant-garde completely anticonformist, according to the teaching of Arnaut Daniel (Arnaldo Daniello), who is based on allegorical and doctrinal compositions.
Of the policy to the exile
Dante has an active public life: he fights against the Ghibelline ones with the battle of Campaldino (1289), and probably forms part of the riders which accommodate Charles Martel at the time of his visit of the city, in 1294, then he enters the various councils of the Republic florentine. The town life is then upset by fights between the partisans of the family of Cerchi, of modest origin, but is enriched by the trade, and those of Donati, aristocrats, respectively called guelfes white and guelfes black. Dante takes the party of the “White”. Vis-a-vis the policy of Boniface VIII, that the “Blacks support”, Dante is charged, in May 1300, of an embassy near the town of San Gimignano to obtain his participation in the revival of the league guelfe, then must go to Rome to seek to calm the pope. At this point in time Charles de Valois runs to Florence, at the request of Boniface VIII, as a mediator between the two factions, seizes the power violently and requires the cancellation of the measurement of exile striking the Blacks. On January 27th, 1302, Dante sees itself condemned to relegation for two years, the loss of his public offices and a fine; having refused to present itself to pay it, he is condemned to death in absentia.
Thus twenty years of exile start: with each amnesty, Dante will refuse the conditions imposed for his return. In 1302, it is still in Tuscany, in San Godenzo del Mugello, and takes part in a conspiracy of the white party, which will be crushed. It is the beginning for the poet of a life of wandering, between Venezia, Bologna and Lucques. With the death of Boniface VIII, its successor, Benoit XI, show themselves much more reconciling and Dante hopes for a measurement of leniency, in vain. Insulated, including among exiled more and more the florentins, does he write the epistle Populae mei, quid feci tibi? , lost today. The exile is made all the more painful as its own judgment is extended to his/her sons.
It is found in October 1306 at Franceschino Malatesta, of 1307 to 1311 with the castle of Poppi nel Casentino, at Guido di Battifolle. It then founds vain hopes in the arrival of Henri VII of Luxembourg, come in charge of a small army to try to restore the imperial power in Italy. But Henri VII dies in 1313 and Dante, who sees his dream of political and moral restoration of Italy broken, will devote itself from now on primarily to his poem: the apocalyptic vision of the history which the Divine comedy gives must much with this disappointment. Dante settles in Vérone, until 1320; he leaves then for Ravenne, always keeping the hope to return in his fatherland. He dies on on September 14th, 1321, while returning from an embassy in Venice on behalf of Guido Novello.
A poet actor of his time
This character of the Italian literary history lived in the middle of the deep historical transformations of his time. While the new local authorities tend to strengthen the universal institutions of the Middle Ages, the Church and the Empire are opposed through Boniface VIII and Philippe the Beautiful one. It is in this political climate that this observer exiled far from its fatherland addresses its test universal Monarchy to the emperor Henri VII, who seeks to restore his lost authority. Published around 1313-1318, this work written in Latin comprises three books: the first seeks to show the vital importance of the Empire - only parking universal peace - for the wellbeing of very whole civilization; in the second book, Dante is based on the history to show that it is the Roman people which have, of right, the Empire; the last book reveals the report which must exist between the authority of the pope and that of the emperor, and concludes that the two authorities are and must be autonomous one compared to the other. The political intention is manifest in Monarchy; there remains however difficult, at Dante, to separate the political interest from the poetic interest, the more so as this urgency of identity between the two elements pushes it to give up definitively the models of the dolce stil nuovo to announce the new image of the well-read man turned towards the knowledge of the nature of its time, exploiting the specific possibilities of research of the literature.
Defense of the Italian language
In exile, Dante composes two other important treaties. In the Banquet, started in 1304 and stopped in 1307, the poet expresses the feeling which it must teach contemporary science not only with one public of cultivated people, increasingly more foreign during the history, but also with a vaster public. The innovation of this initiative, which tends to imply in the world of philosophy “the princes, the barons, the riders and all the other gentlemen (...) not only the men, but also women (...) not only well-read men, but also common people”, seems to be of all the more large importance as the philosophical set of themes is seen entrusted, for the first time, with the vulgar language, whose cultural value is thus legitimated.
There is necessary to evaluate under this lighting the writing of another treaty, Of vulgari eloquentia (1303-1305), remained unfinished. Having chosen Latin to awake the interest of the scientists, Dante tackles scientific Italic vulgar language under investigation. However it appears that the linguistic question is not essential itself, but rather in the only context which is clean for him, context sociopolitic. In the art of Dante, work is located at the delicate time of the passage of the experiment of the Rhyme to that of the Divine comedy, and in this direction this change relates to not only the history of the vulgar language, but also the poetic vicissitudes of Dante. It is accordingly completely personal which reaffirms, in a dominating way, importance of the social context, which is from now on the basic element of its poetic production. Through the delicate linguistic problem, the literature suggests the recourse to a vulgar language, illustrates, cardinal, noble and solemn: rhetoric. It is of this climate, of this need to clarify the direction even literature inside the human community that its major work, the Divine comedy, will be born.
In the spirit of Dante, the exile becomes a providential catastrophe, a requirement to achieve the spiritual goals highest. Thus it feels invested an apostolate carrying out it to convince its similar of the ineluctability of the reform politico-nun which it recommends. Its poetry - and this is not worth that for its poetry in vulgar language - rise at tops up to that point still unknown, is by the goals which he proposes to reach, that is to say by the fantastic universe that he succeeds in creating for this purpose. All human passions are present in the three parts, with a realism which is more translated in the capacity to bring back each element of the fantastic voyage to a precise historico-social interpretation that in the promptness of the representations of the hell or the paradise.
Dante in the University and Bologna
© Commune of Bologna
Dante remained in Bologna one year between the summers 1286 and 1287. Dante would have attended prestigious Université of Bologna as a student. According to the documents which reached us, it would seem that during these “months bolonais”, the poet had bound of friendship with a group of other young people florentins, who them also attended the University at that time.
Dante was struck by the town of Bologna, so much so that it was inspired some in certain by his works. Due Torri are the subject of its first sonnet published entitled No me poriano giamai farre menda, and that of two tercets in song XXXI of the Hell, where one finds a famous comparison between the Tower Garisenda and Antée.
In the Divine comedy, in song XVIII of the Hell, Dante speaks about “bolonais” and it implies avarice at the time of the meeting which starts with the invective against Venedico Caccianemico. In song XXIII, it quotes two bolonais Loderingo and Catalano, located in the pit of the hypocrites. The way of speaking about bolonais lengthily remained engraved in the memory of the poet; we find of them the comments immortalized in work De Vulgari Eloquentia.