I shall now show how little concern the early readers of Dante felt for his so-called mysteriousness. I have in front of me a photograph of a miniature from one of the very earliest copies of Dante, made in the mid-fourteenth century (from the collection in the library of Perugia). Beatrice is showing Dante the Holy Trinity. A brilliant background with peacock designs, like a gay calico print, the Holy Trinity in a willow frame—ruddy, rosy-cheeked, round as merchants. Dante Alighieri is depicted as an extremely dashing young man and Beatrice as a lively, round-faced girl. Two absolutely ordinary little figures—a scholar, exuding health, is courting a no less flourishing girl.
Spengler, who devoted some superlative pages to Dante, nevertheless saw him from his loge in a German Staatsoper, and when he says “Dante” one must nearly always understand “Wagner, as staged in Munich.”
The purely historical approach to Dante is just as unsatisfactory as the political or theological. Future commentary on Dante belongs to the natural sciences, when they shall have been brought to a sufficient degree of refinement and their capacity for thinking in images sufficiently developed.
I have an overwhelming desire to refute the disgusting legend that Dante’s coloring is inevitably dim or marked by the notorious Spenglerian brownness. To begin with, I shall refer to the testimony of one of his contemporaries, an illuminator. A miniature by him is from the same collection in the museum at Perugia. It belongs to Canto I: “I saw a beast and turned back.” Here is a description of the coloring of this remarkable miniature, which is of a higher type than the preceding one, and completely adequate to the text.
Dante’s clothing is bright blue (adzura chiara). Vergil’s beard is long and his hair is grey. His toga is also grey. His short cloak is rose. The hills are bare, grey.
Thus we see here bright azure and rose flecks in the smoky grey rock.
In Canto XVII of the Inferno there is a monster of transportation named Geryon, something like a super-tank, and with wings into the bargain. He offers his services to Dante and Vergil, having received from the sovereign hierarchy an appropriate order for the transportation of two passengers to the lower, eighth circle:
due branche avea pilose infin l’ascelle;
lo dosso e’l petto ed ambedue le coste
dipinte avea di nodi e di rotelle:
con più color, sommesse e sopraposte
non fer mai drappi Tartari nè Turchi,
nè fur tai tele per Aragne imposte.19
(Inferno, XVII, 13–18)
The subject here is the color of Geryon’s skin. His back, chest, and sides are gaily colored with decorations consisting of little knots and shields. A more brilliant coloration, Dante explains, is not to be found among the carpets of either Turkish or Tatar weavers.
The textile brilliance of this comparison is blinding, and nothing could be more unexpected than the drapery-trade perspectives which are disclosed in it.
In its subject, Canto XVII of the Inferno, devoted to usury, is very close to commercial goods assortments and banking turnover. Usury, which made up for a deficiency in the banking system, where an insistent demand was already being felt, was the crying evil of that time, but it was also a necessity which facilitated the circulation of goods in the Mediterranean world. Usurers were vilified in the church and in literature, but they were still resorted to. Usury was practiced even by noble families—odd bankers whose base was farming and ownership of land—and this especially annoyed Dante.
The landscape of Canto XVII is composed of hot sands—that is, something related to Arabian caravan routes. Sitting on the sand are the most aristocratic usurers: the Gianfigliazzi, the Ubbriachi from Florence, the Scrovigni from Padua. Around the neck of each there hangs a little sack or amulet, or purse embroidered with the family arms on a colored background: one has an azure lion on a golden background, a second has a goose whiter than freshly churned butter against a blood-red background, and a third has a blue pig against a white ground.
Before embarking on Geryon and gliding off into the abyss, Dante inspects this strange exhibit of family crests. I call your attention to the fact that the bags of the usurers are given as samples of color. The energy of the color epithets and the way they are placed in the line muffle the heraldry. The colors are named with a sort of professional brusqueness. In other words, the colors are given at the stage when they are still located on the artist’s palette in his studio. And why should this be surprising? Dante knew his way around in painting, was the friend of Giotto, and closely followed the struggle of artistic schools and fashionable tendencies.
Credette Cimabue nella pintura20
(Purgatorio, XI, 94)
Having looked their fill at the usurers, they take their seats on Geryon. Vergil puts his arm around Dante’s neck and says to the official dragon: “Descend in wide, flowing circles, and remember your new burden.”
The craving to fly tormented and exhausted the men of Dante’s time no less than alchemy. It was a hunger for cleaving space. Disoriented. Nothing visible. Ahead—only that Tatar back, the terrifying silk dressing gown of Geryon’s skin. One can judge the speed and direction only by the torrent of air in one’s face. The flying machine has not yet been invented, Leonardo’s designs do not yet exist, but the problem of gliding to a landing is already solved.
And finally, falconry breaks in. The maneuvers of Geryon as he slows the rate of descent are likened to the return of a falcon who has had no success and who after his vain flight is slow to return at the call of the falconer. Once having landed, he flies off in an offended way and perches at an aloof distance.
Let us now try to grasp all of Canto XVII as a whole, but from the point of view of the organic chemistry of the Dantean imagery, which has nothing to do with allegory. Instead of retelling the so-called contents, we shall look at this link in Dante’s work as a continuous transformation of the substratum of poetic material, which preserves its unity and strives to penetrate into its own interior.
As in all true poetry, Dante’s thinking in images is accomplished with the help of a characteristic of poetic material which I propose to call its transformability or convertibility. It is only by convention that the development of an image can be called development. Indeed, imagine to yourself an airplane (forgetting the technical impossibility) which in full flight constructs and launches another machine. In just the same way, this second flying machine, completely absorbed in its own flight, still manages to assemble and launch a third. In order to make this suggestive and helpful comparison more precise, I will add that the assembly and launching of these technically unthinkable machines that are sent flying off in the midst of flight do not constitute a secondary or peripheral function of the plane that is in flight; they form a most essential attribute and part of the flight itself, and they contribute no less to its feasibility and safety than the proper functioning of the steering gear or the uninterrupted working of the engine.
It is of course only by greatly straining the meaning of “development” that one can apply that term to this series of projectiles that are built in flight and flit away one after the other for the sake of preserving the integrity of the movement itself.
The seventeenth canto of the Inferno is a brilliant confirmation of the transformability of poetic material in the above sense of the term. The figures of this transformability may be drawn more or less as follows: the little flourishes and shields on the varicolored Tatar skin of Geryon—silk, ornamented carpet fabrics, spread out on a shop-counter on the shore of the Mediterranean—maritime commerce, perspective of banking and piracy—usury—the return to Florence via the heraldic bags with samples of colors that had never before been in use—the craving for flight, suggested by the oriental ornamentation, which turns the material of the canto in the direction of the Arabian fairy tale with its device of the flying carpet—and, finally, the second return to Florence with the aid of the falcon, irreplaceable precisely on account of his being unnecessary.