Dante Alighieri (21 page)

    
“But, apart from all this, this worthy man in all his adversities showed the greatest fortitude. Only in one thing he was, I know not whether I should say impatient or passionate, namely, he was more given to faction after his exile than was becoming to a man of his parts, and more than he would have had it believed of him by others. And what I most blush for on account of his memory is that in Romagna it is perfectly notorious to every one that any feeble woman or little child who had spoken on party matters, and found fault with the Ghibelline party to which he belonged, would have stirred him to such a pitch of madness that he would have thrown stones at them if they had not held their peace; and this passion he retained to the day of his death. And assuredly I blush to be obliged to blot the fame of so great a man with any defect; but the manner in which I ordered my matter at the outset in some sort demands it, for if I were to be
silent regarding things not to his credit, I should shake the faith of my readers in the things already related which are to his credit. Therefore to him himself I make my excuse, who maybe from some lofty region of heaven looks down with scornful eye upon me as I write.

    
“Amid all the virtue and all the learning which has been shown above to have been possessed by this wondrous poet, the vice of lustfulness found no small place, and that not only in the years of his youth, but also in the years of his maturity;
³
the which vice, though it be natural and common, yet cannot be worthily excused. Nevertheless bearing in mind what is written of David, and Solomon, and of many others, our poet may be allowed to pass by, not excused, but accused with less severity than if he had been alone in this failing.”
⁴

    
With this account of Dante by Boccaccio it is interesting to compare the brief description of his personal characteristics furnished by his contemporary and neighbour in Florence, the chronicler Giovanni Villani, who, if his nephew Filippo is to be believed, was also a personal friend of Dante.
⁵

    
“This Dante,” he says, “was an honourable and ancient citizen of Florence, belonging to the Porta San Piero, and our neighbour. . . . This man was a great scholar in almost every branch of learning, although he was a layman: he was a great poet and philosopher, and a perfect rhetorician both in prose and verse, and in public debate he was a very noble speaker; in rime he was supreme, with the most polished and beautiful style that ever had been in our language, up to his time and since. . . .
This Dante, on account of his great learning, was somewhat haughty and reserved and scornful, and after the manner of a philosopher little gracious, not adapting himself to the conversation of the unlearned. But on account of his other virtues and knowledge and worth, it seems right to perpetuate the memory of so great a citizen in this our chronicle, albeit that his noble works left to us in writing are the true testimony to his fame and a lasting honour to our city.”
⁶

 

    
¹
See above, p. 103 note.

    
²
This anecdote was quoted in a letter written in 1624 by Lord Keeper Williams to the Duke of Buckingham, in which he tried to persuade the Duke to accept the office of Lord Steward. “I will trouble your grace,” he writes, “with a tale of
Dante
, the first
Italian
Poet of Note: who, being a great and wealthy Man in Florence, and his Opinion demanded who should be sent Embassador to the Pope? made this Answer, that he knew not who;
Si jo vo
,
chi sta
,
si jo sto
,
chi va
; If I go, I know not who shall stay at Home; If I stay, I know not who can perform this Employment” (see Paget Toynbee,
Dante in English Literature
, vol. i. p. 117).

    
³
There are several passages in the
Divina Commedia
which seem to hint at Dante's consciousness of this failing (see above, p. 71).

    
⁴
Vita di Dante
, ed. Macrì-Leone, §§ 8, 12, pp. 43-7, 59-62.

    
⁵
See above, p. 37 note.

    
⁶
Bk. ix. ch. 136.

    
Portraits of Dante—The Giotto portrait in the Bargello—Norton's account of the Bargello portrait—Its disappearance and rediscovery—The death-mask—Its relation to the portrait—The Naples bronze—Portrait by Taddeo Gaddi—The Riccardi portrait—The picture by Domenico di Michelino.

F
ROM the written descriptions of Dante the transition is natural to the subject of the actual representation of the poet's face, depicted during his lifetime.

    
Of portraits from the life, so far as is known, there is one only, that most beautiful of all the portraits of Dante, painted by Giotto, the great Florentine artist, whose fame is inseparably connected with that of the great Florentine poet. An interesting account of this portrait, of its disappearance and rediscovery, together with a comparison of it with the mask supposed to have been modelled from Dante's face after death, is given by Professor Charles Eliot Norton, in his work
On the Original Portraits of Dante
, which was published in 1865 in honour of the six-hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth. After quoting Boccaccio's description of Dante's physiognomy, which has already been given above, Professor Norton writes:–

    
“Such was Dante as he appeared in his later years to those from whose recollections of him Boccaccio drew this description. But Boccaccio, had he chosen so to do, might have drawn another portrait of Dante, not the author of the
Divine Comedy
, but the author of the
New Life
. The likeness of the youthful Dante was familiar to those Florentines who had never looked on the presence of their greatest citizen.

PORTRAIT OF DANTE BY GIOTTO IN THE BARGELLO AT FLORENCE

From a drawing by Seymour Kirkup

    
“On the altar-wall of the chapel of the Palace of the Podestà (now the Bargello) Giotto painted a grand religious composition, in which, after the fashion of the times, he exalted the glory of Florence by the introduction of some of her most famous citizens into the assembly of the blessed in Paradise. ‘The head of Christ, full of dignity, appears above, and lower down, the escutcheon of Florence, supported by angels, with two rows of saints, male and female, attendant to the right and left, in front of whom stand a company of the magnates of the city, headed by two crowned personages, close to one of whom, to the right, stands Dante, a pomegranate in his hand, and wearing the graceful falling cap of the day.'
¹
The date when this picture was painted is uncertain, but Giotto represented his friend in it as a youth, such as he may have been in the first flush of early fame, at the season of the beginning of their memorable friendship.

    
“Of all the portraits of the revival of Art, there is none comparable in interest to this likeness of the supreme poet by the supreme artist of mediæval Europe. It was due to no accident of fortune that these men were contemporaries and of the same country; but it was a fortunate and delightful incident, that they were so brought together by sympathy of genius and by favouring circumstances as to become friends, to love and honour each other in life, and to celebrate each other through all time in their respective works.
²
The story of their friendship is known only in its outline, but that it began when they were young
is certain, and that it lasted till death divided them is a tradition which finds ready acceptance.

    
“It was probably between 1290 and 1300, when Giotto was just rising to unrivalled fame, that this painting was executed.
³
There is no contemporary record of it, the earliest known reference to it being that by Filippo Villani,
⁴
who died about 1404. Giannozzo Manetti, who
died in 1459, also mentions it;
⁵
and Vasari, in his
Life of Giotto
, published in 1550, says that Giotto ‘became so good an imitator of nature, that he altogether discarded the stiff Greek manner, and revived the modern and good art of painting, introducing exact drawing from nature of living persons, which for more than two hundred years had not been practised, or if indeed any one had tried it, he had not succeeded very happily, nor anything like so well as Giotto. And he portrayed among other persons, as may even now be seen, in the chapel of the Palace of the Podestà in Florence, Dante Alighieri, his contemporary and greatest friend, who was not less famous a poet than Giotto was painter in those days. . . . In the same chapel is the portrait by the same hand of Ser Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, and of Messer Corso Donati, a great citizen of those times.'

    
“One might have supposed that such a picture as this would have been among the most carefully protected and jealously prized treasures of Florence. But such was not the case. The shameful neglect of many of the best and most interesting works of the earlier period of Art, which accompanied and was one of the symptoms of the moral
and political decline of Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, extended to this as to other of the noblest paintings of Giotto. Florence, in losing consciousness of present worth, lost care for the memorials of her past honour, dignity, and distinction. The Palace of the Podestà, no longer needed for the dwelling of the chief magistrate of a free city, was turned into a jail for common criminals, and what had once been its beautiful and sacred chapel was occupied as a larder or storeroom.
⁶
The walls, adorned with paintings more precious than gold, were covered with whitewash, and the fresco of Giotto was swept over by the brush of the plasterer. It was not only thus hidden from the sight of those unworthy indeed to behold it, but it almost disappeared from memory also; and from the time of Vasari down to that of Moreni, a Florentine antiquary, in the early part of the present century,
⁷
hardly a mention of it occurs. In a note found among his papers, Moreni laments that he had spent two years of his life in unavailing efforts to recover the portrait of Dante, and the other portions of the fresco of Giotto in the Bargello, mentioned by Vasari; that others before him had made a like effort, and had failed in like manner; and that he hoped that better times would come, in which this painting, of such historic and artistic interest, would again be sought for, and at length recovered. Stimulated by these words, three gentlemen, one an American, Mr. Richard Henry Wilde, one an Englishman, Mr. Seymour Kirkup, and one an Italian, Signor G. Aubrey Bezzi, all scholars devoted to the study of Dante,
undertook new researches, in 1840, and, after many hindrances on the part of the Government,
⁸
which were at length successfully overcome, the work of removing the crust of plaster from the walls of the ancient chapel was entrusted to the Florentine painter, Marini. This new and well-directed search did not fail. After some months' labour the fresco was found,
⁹
almost uninjured, under the whitewash that had protected while concealing it, and at length the likeness of Dante was uncovered.
¹⁰

    
“‘But,' says Mr. Kirkup, in a letter
¹¹
published in the
Spectator
(London), 11 May, 1850, ‘the eye of the beautiful profile was wanting. There was a hole an inch deep, or an inch and a half. Marini said it was a nail. It did seem precisely the damage of a nail drawn out. Afterwards . . . Marini filled the hole and made a new eye, too little and ill designed, and then he retouched the whole face and clothes, to the great damage of the expression and character.
¹²
The likeness of the face,
¹³
and the three colours in which Dante was dressed, the same with those of Beatrice, those of young Italy, white, green, and red, stand no more; the green is turned to chocolate colour; moreover, the form of the cap is lost and confounded.

    
“ ‘I desired to make a drawing. . . . It was denied to me. . . . But I obtained the means to be shut up in the prison for a morning; and not only did I make a drawing,
¹⁴
but a tracing also, and with the two I then made a facsimile sufficiently careful. Luckily it was before the
rifacimento
'.

    
“This facsimile afterwards passed into the hands of Lord Vernon, well known for his interest in all Dantesque studies, and by his permission it has been admirably reproduced in chromo-lithography under the auspices of the Arundel Society.
¹⁵
The reproduction is entirely satisfactory
as a presentation of the authentic portrait of the youthful Dante, in the state in which it was when Mr. Kirkup was so fortunate as to gain admission to it.
¹⁶