Dante Alighieri (19 page)

    
“Do you then seek to be the guardian of your Dante. Ask for him back again, making a show of this humanity, even if you do not desire to have him back; with this pretence at least you will rid yourself of a part of the reproach you have so justly incurred. Ask for him back again! I am certain he will never be given back to you, and thus you will at once have made a show of compassion, and, being refused, may yet indulge your natural cruelty!

    
“But to what do I urge you? Hardly do I believe, if dead bodies have any feeling, that Dante's body would remove from where it now lies, in order to return to you. He lies in company more honourable than any you can offer him. He lies in Ravenna, a city by far more venerable in years than yourself; and though in her old age she shows somewhat of decay, yet in her youth she was by far more flourishing than you are now. She is, as it were, a vast sepulchre of holy bodies, so that no foot can anywhere press her soil, without treading above the most sacred ashes. Who then would wish to return to you and be laid amongst your dead, who, one must believe, still retain the evil passions they cherished in their lifetime, and fly one from the other, carrying their enmities into the grave?

    
“Ravenna, bathed as she is in the most precious blood of numberless martyrs, whose remains she to this day preserves with the greatest reverence, as she does the bodies of many high and mighty emperors and other men of high renown, either for their long ancestry or for their noble deeds, Ravenna, I say, rejoices not a little that it has been granted to her of God, in addition to her other privileges, to be the perpetual guardian of so great a treasure as the body of him whose works are the admiration of the whole world, him of whom you knew not how to be worthy.
But of a surety, her pride in possessing Dante is not so great as her envy of you by whose name he called himself; for she grieves that she will be remembered only on account of his last day, while you will be famous on account of his first. Persist then in your ingratitude, while Ravenna, decked with your honours, shall boast herself to the generations to come!”

    
Boccaccio was a true prophet. Five times the Florentines begged Ravenna to return to his native city the ashes of their great poet, each time in vain.

    
The first request was made in 1396, three-quarters of a century after Dante's death. On this occasion it was proposed to erect monuments in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore to five illustrious citizens of Florence, viz. Accursius the great legist, Dante, Petrarch, Zanobi da Strada, and Boccaccio (the names being mentioned in that order in the official document),
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and it was resolved to secure if possible their mortal remains, doubtless for honourable interment at the same time. The petition for Dante's remains was refused by the Polenta family, the then lords of Ravenna; and a second request, preferred on similar grounds some thirty years later (1430), was likewise refused.
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A third attempt appears to have been made in 1476, when interest was made with the Venetian ambassador (presumably Bernardo Bembo) by Lorenzo de' Medici;
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but, though the ambassador promised compliance, nothing was done, and the hopes of Florence were once more disappointed.

    
At the beginning of the sixteenth century a fourth and most determined attempt was made by the Florentines to
get possession of Dante's remains, an attempt which had very remarkable consequences. From a letter written to Pietro Bembo, secretary to Leo X, in June, 1515, it appears that Leo, who belonged to the Medici family of Florence (he was the son of Lorenzo), and was also by virtue of the league of Cambrai (1509) lord of Ravenna, had granted or promised to the Florentines permission to remove the poet's remains from Ravenna. Four years later (in 1519) a formal memorial
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was presented to Leo by the Medicean Academy, urging that the removal should be carried out, among the signatories being one of the Portinari, a descendant of the family to which Beatrice belonged. This memorial was endorsed by the great sculptor, Michel Angelo, who expressed his willingness to design and himself execute a fitting sepulchre. Leo granted the request of the Academicians, and forthwith a mission was despatched to Ravenna to bring back Dante's bones to Florence. But meanwhile the custodians of the poet's remains had taken the alarm, and when the tomb was opened by the Florentine envoys nothing was to be seen but some fragments of bone and a few withered laurel leaves, the relics no doubt of the poet's crown which was laid upon the bier at the time of burial. In an account of the proceedings submitted to Leo the following “explanation” was offered of the disappearance of the remains: “The much wished-for translation of Dante's remains did not take place, inasmuch as the two delegates of the Academy who were sent for the purpose found Dante neither in soul nor in body; and it is supposed that, as in his lifetime he journeyed in soul and in body through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, so in death he must have been received, body and soul, into one of those realms”.
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There is little doubt that Dante's bones, which were still intact in 1483 when Bernardo Bembo restored the tomb, were secretly removed by the Franciscans in charge, between 1515 and 1519, the period when the question of their translation to Florence was being agitated by the Medicean Academy, armed with the permission of Leo X.

    
The secret of their disappearance was well kept in Ravenna. Two hundred and sixty years later (in 1780) the tomb was once more restored, and, at the inauguration by Cardinal Valenti Gonzaga, it was opened for the purpose of verifying the remains. The official account of the proceeding was couched in vague terms, which were obviously intended to conceal the fact that the tomb was found to be empty. An unofficial account, however, in the shape of an entry by one of the Franciscan monks in his missal, which has been preserved at Ravenna, contains the bald statement that “Dante's sarcophagus was opened and nothing was found inside, whereupon it was sealed up again with the Cardinal's seal, and silence was observed as to the whole matter, thus leaving the old opinion (as to the presence of the remains) undisturbed”.
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The secret of the removal of the remains was still preserved from the public, but that it was known to a select few is evident from the fact that sixty years after the above incident Filippo Mordani, in his memoir of Dionigi Strocchi, records that the latter said to him on 1 July, 1841: “I wish to tell you something, now that we are alone. The tomb of Dante is empty; the bones are no longer there. This was told me by your Archbishop, Mgr. Codronchi. But I pray you not to breathe a word of it, for it must remain a secret.”
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At last, when preparations were being made throughout Italy for the celebration of the sixth centenary of Dante's birth, in 1865, the Florentines once more petitioned for the return of Dante's remains to his native city. For the fifth and last time the request was refused, the Municipality of Ravenna claiming in their reply “that the deposit of the sacred bones of Dante Alighieri in Ravenna could no longer, in view of the happily changed conditions of Italy, be regarded as a perpetuation of his exile, inasmuch as all the cities of Italy were now united together by a lasting bond under one and the same government”.
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CHEST IN WHICH DANTE'S REMAINS WERE DISCOVERED AT RAVENNA IN 1865

    
Whether the Municipality, when they returned this answer, were aware that “the sacred bones” of Dante no longer reposed in the tomb which was supposed to contain them, does not appear. At any rate the secret of the empty tomb could not much longer be kept from the world at large, for the opening of the tomb and the identification of the poet's remains was part of the programme of the sexcentenary celebration. Preparations for this ceremony were already in progress when the startling announcement was made that a wooden coffin containing the actual bones of Dante had been accidentally discovered bricked up in a cavity in a neighbouring wall.

    
The story of this remarkable discovery is as follows. In the course of some operations in the Braccioforte Chapel, adjoining the tomb, in connection with the coming celebration, it became necessary to introduce a pump for the purpose of drawing off an accumulation of water. In order to give room for the pump-handle to work, it was decided to make a cavity in an old wall at the spot where the pump was to be fixed. While the mason was at work with his pick removing the stones, he suddenly struck upon something wooden, which gave back a hollow sound. Curious to find out what this might be, he carefully removed the remaining stones, and to his great surprise came upon a
wooden chest or coffin. On lifting the chest one of the planks fell out and revealed a human skeleton, which on a closer inspection proved to be that of Dante, the identity of the remains being established beyond doubt by the discovery of two inscriptions on the chest One of these, written in ink on the bottom plank, was:
Dantis ossa denuper revisa die
3
Junii
1677.
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The other, written on the lid of the chest, ran:
Dantis ossa a me Fre Antonio Santi hic posita Ano
1677
die
18
Octobris
.
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The precious relics were at once carefully removed and deposited in the adjoining mausoleum.' The news of the discovery meanwhile spread rapidly through the city. The authorities, accompanied by notaries, arrived in haste, and in their presence an official account was drawn up, recording the facts of the discovery, and the result of a professional examination of the skeleton, which, with the exception of a few missing bones, was found to be intact.

    
The excitement amongst the populace was intense, and the crowd could with difficulty be prevented from breaking in. After this discovery the next step, in order to remove all possible doubt, was to open the sarcophagus in which Dante's remains had originally been deposited by Guido da Polenta in 1321, and in which they were supposed by all, except the few who had been in the secret, to have been left undisturbed ever since. It was an anxious moment for the authorities, who would have been terribly embarrassed if a second skeleton had been discovered—Dante could not have had two skeletons! An account of the proceedings, furnished by an eye-witness, was given by Dr. Moore in the
English Historical Review
in October, 1888.

    
“The writer,” he says, “met, a few years ago, one who was present on this most interesting occasion, and who had carried away, and still preserved as a relic, a small portion of the precious dust which was found at the bottom of the tomb. This examination took place on 7 June, 1865, and the tomb was then
found to be empty
, with the exception of a little earthy or dusty substance, and a few bones corresponding with most of those missing in the chest recently discovered, and these were certified by the surgeon present to belong undoubtedly to the same skeleton. There were found in it, also, a few withered laurel leaves, which possess a special interest in reference to the description of Dante's burial.
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. . . It contained, further, some broken fragments of Greek marble, of the same material as the sarcophagus itself. These were soon found to proceed from a rude hole which had been knocked through the sarcophagus itself at the back, precisely at the part accessible only from the inside of the monastery, through which, beyond all doubt, the removal of the bones had been effected. This hole had been stopped up with bricks and cement, and then plastered over outside so as to leave no mark”

    
The reason for the violation of Dante's tomb and for the secret removal of his remains by the Franciscans of the adjoining monastery was, it can hardly be doubted, the alarm created by the news that permission had been granted for the transference of the remains to Florence by Pope Leo X in 1515. The precious relics must have been secreted
in
the monastery for a hundred and fifty years and more before they were deposited in the cavity where they were found in 1865.

    
Having thus been satisfactorily verified, Dante's skeleton was put together and laid on white velvet under a glass case, which was exhibited during the three days of 24, 25, and 26 June, in the Braccioforte Chapel. Here the remains were reverently visited by thousands of visitors from every part of Italy. “The old and the infirm were supported through the crowd, and children, too young to be conscious of what they saw, were taken up to the crystal coffin, in order that in after years they might say that they also had gazed on Dante”
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