The Pilgrim Meets Cato

                I found Dante’s written and Dore’s engraving of the encounter between the pilgrim and Cato very interesting. In the painting we see the pilgrim on his knees, showing reverence to the guardian of Purgatory. Virgil, on the other hand, remains standing in both depictions of the events. This does not make much sense to me. Virgil is a soul from Limbo. Even though this may not be in the lower reaches of Hell, he is still a pagan outside of God’s kingdom without the opportunity to reach salvation. On top of this, Virgil may be the pilgrim’s guardian, but he is not the guardian of Limbo, just another soul there. Cato is also a pagan, yet he was lifted out of Limbo and has come to hold authority over Purgatory. For these reasons it seems that Virgil should be bowing to show reverence to Cato instead of standing as if he was on equal terms with Cato. In my opinion, the positions could even be switched, with the pilgrim standing and Virgil bowing. This is because the pilgrim is still alive and may return to following the “right” path on his way to salvation. In this respect he has more power, or at least potential, than his guide.

                Another interesting aspect of this engraving is the four-star constellation that is in the middle of the night sky. As can be seen in Dore’s work, the stars are giving off an incredible amount of light; enough to illuminate Cato’s face to appear as bright as the sun and cast shadows from Virgil and the pilgrim. Cato’s shade, however, does not appear to cast a shadow. One may expect the pilgrim to cast a shadow, since he is still living and his flesh is real. But Virgil, a dead soul, is also creating a shadow. It would seem to make more sense if both souls did not cast shadows. This difference may be because Cato holds the four virtues the stars of the constellation represent so fully that not only do they illuminate his face, but shine forth from his entire being so as to never create a shadow. Obviously a shadow is darkness, the opposite of light and in relation to the Comedy, a lack of knowledge or understanding. Virgil and the pilgrim’s shadows then may be seen as these two not possessing these virtues to such an extent as the guardian of Purgatory.

                In both of these regards, Dore’s depiction of the first canto of Purgatory is very interesting. It may be that I am just reading too much into Virgil standing while the pilgrim bows and Virgil’s shadow. But both of these details may be important to fully interpreting Dore’s piece.

Dali's Vision of Satan and the Divine Comedy

After finishing Inferno, one thing that I wanted to know more about was Dante's depiction of Satan. The image of Lucifer as dumb and weeping with three multi-colored heads is one that I had never seen or heard of before. Within this question in mind, I sought out more artistic representations of the Comedy. I found a few scattered images of Satan with three faces, feasting on Judas and the rest. But eventually I stumbled upon a few sites that had Salvador Dali's collection of pieces depicting each canto of the Divine Comedy. The one that seemed most complete (while unfortunately having very small images online) was the CFM Gallery.

The website explains the context for Dali's creation:
"In the early 1950s, shortly before the septecentennial of Dante's birth, Dali was invited by the Italian government to produce a series of illustrations for a deluxe edition of The Divine Comedy to be published by La Libreria dello Stato in Rome. Between 1951 and 1960 Dali created a series of 101 watercolors for the book, which was unhappily never completely realized in its textural form.

"The watercolors were exhibited at the Palazzo Pallavici in Rome. However, the reception of Dali's project in Italy was extremely negative, since it did not seem appropriate for a Spanish (rather than Italian) painter, much less an irreverent Surrealist and sometime fascist sympathizer, to illustrate a commemorative edition of the greatest Italian poet's masterpiece to be published by the State Press."

Despite the negative feedback, Dali eventually completed the project with the help of a French publisher. 

As I mentioned before, Dali made a print for each canto. Of course, the first print I looked for was one depicting Satan. I found one titled "The Devil Logician"  (http://www.cfmgallery.com/Salvador-Dali/pages/Hell/Hell27.htm) but it is not considered a reference to the image of Satan at the end of Inferno. Instead, it is a reference to Canto 27, where Guido da Montefeltro explains how he was tricked by Boniface VIII. Guido describes how Satan stops the angels from taking Guido to heaven and brings him to hell instead, saying "Oh wretched me! how I trembled when he seized me, telling me: 'Perhaps you did not think I was a logician!'" (27.121-3)

The line is considered by translator and editor Durling to be a reference to the inability of the devil to philosophize and his ability to use Aristotelean logic instead, but this doesn't seem very relevant to the picture. Dali's image shows Satan with only one face, eating one sinner that we presume is Judas. There is some kind of large wedge in Satan's head that is similar to the color of the sinner in his mouth, but it is not clear what it is. It also reflects an image of another person. I'm not sure what Dali's intent was with this choice of representation and or why he chose to depict the devil in Canto 27 instead of Canto 34, but nonetheless his art adds more to the vast canon of Dante. I hope to return to Dali's prints as we move into Purgatorio.

Lucifer, Satan, the Devil...

        The ninth circle is one of the cantos that intrigued me the most, perhaps because my image of Hell prior to reading was red, fiery, burning, and Dante chose to represent it in the opposite way. The blocks of ice, the frozen wind - neither are things that I would have imagined being present in Hell.
        In Canto 34, the imagery of Satan was so strong that I couldn't help but choose to represent him in a collage. I tried to stay very true to the text, so I will note below the passages from which I took my information.

• "I saw three faces on his head! One was in front, and that was crimson... the right one seemed between white and yellow; the left was such to see as those who come beyond the cataracts of the Nile" (34.37-39, 43-45.)
• "Beneath each one came out two great wings... their mode was like a bat's; and he was fanning them, so that three winds went out from him" (34.46,49-51.)
• "With six eyes he was weeping, and down three chins dripped the tears and the bloody slobber" (52-54.)

        I also included frost and stars in the background - the frost to represent the ice that abounds in the ninth circle, and how Dante feels "frozen and feeble" upon seeing Lucifer, and the stars to represent the end of the Comedy when the poet and Virgil find themselves back in the real world, looking at the sky (34.22.)

Can Dante Take a Joke?

There is an old dinner joke that goes as follows

Heaven Is Where:

The French are the chefs
The Italians are the lovers
The British are the police
The Germans are the mechanics
And the Swiss make everything run on time

Hell is Where:

The British are the chefs
The Swiss are the lovers

The Germans are the police
The French are the mechanics
And the Italians make everything run on time

I personally have always liked this joke, but I wonder what Dante would have thought of it if it had been told at his dinner table after having written The Inferno. Would he have laughed along with his guests, seeing the humor in exposing the relative strengths and weaknesses of different European nations? Or would he mill in fury, retaining that famous scowl of his that we’ve seen in so many paintings. To find out, let’s see how this joke fits in with Dante’s own vision of hell.

Are there any chefs in Dante’s inferno? There aren’t any chefs by trade, though we do have Ugolino, who prepared himself a meal with the flesh of his sons. We also have Alberigo, who served his family a grand meal before slaughtering them all over a land dispute. Neither of these men is British though (they are Italian), so we know that Hell is probably spared from having to eat broiled haddock. As for the lovers, the most prominent one in Dante’s hell is Francesca, who we know was Italian- Dante does place other figures of various nationalities in the second circle, but I don’t believe any of them are Swiss. Again, we have conflict with the joke, which says it is in heaven where the Italians are lovers. There is something of a police force in Dante’s Inferno, if you count the Demons that chased Dante and Virgil, but they certainly weren’t German. Of course, there are no mechanics in the inferno, but if there had been any engineers, they probably would have been among the Greek thinkers in Limbo. And finally, no one makes things run on time in the inferno because time itself is stagnant. So, Dante’s version of the joke would be:

In Hell

The Italians are the chefs

The Italians are the lovers

Demons are the police

The Greeks are the engineers

And nothing runs on time, because there is no time.

The joke, of course, is structured in an entirely different way than Dante’s inferno. Francesca wasn’t sent to hell because she was a particularly bad lover, nor was Ugolino known as a lousy cook. While the joke implies that hell still has some semblance of a normal society, Dante envisions it as a completely different kind of place, a place that we can’t even imagine in terms of our own societal structures. If Dante were to here this joke, then, he would probably just get angry at the trivialization of hell’s misery.

Though, to be fair, British cooking is pretty god awful. 

Dante vs Milton

In my British Literature class we are reading Milton's Paradise Lost and it is impossible not to see the comparison between Paradise Lost and Inferno. I think anyone writing about Hell after Dante's Inferno became popular cannot help but be influenced by the view of Hell that Dante portrays. While we intuitively think of Hell as a hot and burning place, Dante portrays it as a frozen wasteland where the most evil sinners are frozen in ice and cannot move; even Satan is immobilized. Milton is clearly influenced by this portrayal of Hell as the demons that explore Hell notice the water that is so cold it performs the function of fire.

Dante describes Satan as being massive, with wings that appear as big as windmills. Satan is so big that the giants are smaller than Satan's arms. This description of Satan is used by Milton when he ascends to speak to the demons and is described as a massive being. In describing the massive size of Satan, Milton also describes his shield as being as big as the moon and his spear as being so big that the biggest mast from a ship would appear like a needle next to it.

All of these comparisons show Dante's influence on Milton's physical description of Hell and Satan. This however is where the similarities end because Dante's Satan has the exact opposite personality of Milton's Satan in every sense of the word. Dante creates a crying Satan that seems pathetic and not able to speak because he is busy chewing the sinners. This Satan is an instrument of God, as he is used to give out punishment to the sinners and does not seem to be the cause for any of the sins committed. By creating an impotent Satan, Dante is suggesting that all the sins that the souls have committed are of their own free will and they have chosen to commit the sins that sent them to Hell.

Milton on the other hand, creates a Satan that is very active, and very admirable as he gives speeches to encourage the demons to rise against God again. Although Milton's Satan also weeps, when he does, it does not make him seem pathetic, but rather sympathetic as he is crying while giving his speech to the demons.  This is a Satan that seems very attractive to the reader as he describes his viewpoint on his fall from Heaven.

Milton also follow's Dante's description of portraying Satan as a mirror to Jesus  as Dante shows him with three different colored heads, resembling the Holy trinity and Jesus' wounds at the crucifixion. Milton's Satan also mirror's Jesus as Satan volunteers himself for the mission to go back out of Hell and investigate God's creations, while Jesus volunteer himself to be crucified for the salvation of mankind.

All of these comparisons and differences between the two Satans show the different viewpoints that each author it trying to portray about the nature of sin. While Dante shows an immobile and pathetic Satan, suggesting that sins originate from free will and the sinners' own decisions, Milton describes a very active Satan that observes God's creations and then plans to manipulate and turn them against God. This suggests that Milton wants to question exactly how much free will humans truly have if God is omnipotent and can see the past and future. Milton believes that if God can see the future and knows that Adan and Eve will go against him, then how much freedom do they truly have in choosing to go against God. Milton and Dante therefore have contradictory views on the nature of sin as the creation of Dante's Satan show that he is not the root of all sins, while Milton's Satan is active and therefore is the root of all sins and lead to the corruption of human soul.

Bedroom in Hell

I've done several posts now about Dante inspired songs.  This next song comes from a lesser known band from my local area of the Hudson Valley.  The band is called 3 and they are one of my personal favorites.  The song is called "Bedroom in Hell" from the album Summercamp Nightmare.  I've been thinking of this song for a while now because of the connection to Hell, but I hadn't really found a place to discuss it until we reached Cocytus, the frozen Hell; I will explain why momentarily. The genre is progressive rock, which gives a nice contrast, I think, to all the metal songs I've done previously. Here follows my select lyrical analysis.

Bedroom In Hell
Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF1EkwGBGBM
Lyrics: http://www.allthelyrics.com/lyrics/the_3/bedroom_in_hell-lyrics-1233443.html

The song opens with:

"Hell's not hot,
it's so cold that it burns"

This immediately evokes the image of Cocytus and is why I waited until we reached the frozen Hell to discuss this song.  Many people when they think of Hell would traditionally bring forth images of fire and burning, but Dante makes the center of Hell a frozen lake wasteland.  Why? Literally, because Satan's flapping wings cause a whirlwind that freezes Lake Cocytus.  More metaphorically, the frozen dead land is a representation of the exact opposite of God: life, light and love.  Throughout the Inferno, Dante associates light with knowledge and hope, so it is fitting that at the very pit of Hell where there is no hope and all is dark that the world would be devoid of light and warmth. "So cold that it burns"; usually we associate fire with burning, but if you've been stuck outside in one of Rochester's cold winters, you've experience the sensation of freeze-burn. Perhaps Dante thought that be burned by frost and ice was a worse punishment than fire.  If we think of human populations, the world is densely populated at the hottest and most tropical regions around the equator, but scare near the frozen poles. Thus, it seems that as a race, humans prefer warmth to cold, so being frozen forever would seem a worse punishment that being burned.  This is why we have the idiom "As cold as Hell".

"The voices of those familiar
Whisper "I'm sorry my son"
If the devil ain't already killed you
Thy kingdom may never come"

To me, the "voices of those familiar" are Dante and Virgil travelling through Hell and meeting people that Dante knew in life along the way.  Familiar, because the people Dante meet as well as Virgil often recognize his speech and even though they may not know him personally, many are able to place him as a Florentine.  "I'm sorry my son" is probably what Dante thought many times as he traveled through Hell pitying many of the souls and crying and fainting along with them, especially in the incontinence levels.  The last two lines make me think of those in Ptolomea who are not yet dead, but already condemned to Hell. "I'f the devil ain't already killed you"; these people are possessed by demons in the real world.  They are a set of some of the worst sinners, with no chance of purgatory and definitely not Heaven therefore "Thy kingdom may never come".  This is a play on the Lord's pray which says "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done...."  Thus, if you've already been thrown down to Ptolomea and haven't been killed by the devils, but are still alive and possessed, the sin you've committed is so great that you will never reach Heaven.

"One by one the guilty trudge
All in single file
One by one they leap from the ledge
One by One they land in the pile"

This portion of the song refers to the beginning of Hell on the shores of Acheron as all the sinners trudge toward Charon and take his ferry over to the other side.  Then once they enter through the speaking gate they "leap from the ledge [and]... land in the pile".  This evokes the image of Minos judge of Hell who picks up each sinner and throws them down to the correct circle with equal twists of his tail to "land in the pile" of all the sinners present in that circle. Master Adam in Canto 30 makes a reference to this experience, saying that he "rained down into this pit" (30:95-96).

"So what do you think?
Of my Bedroom in Hell
Always drips in the sink
Never a drop in the well"

Speaking of Master Adam, these lyrics especially bring him to mind. Master Adam is punished with having many "drips in the sink" as his body is swelled with ill humors as punishment for his counterfeiting.  Yet, he "never [has] a drop in the well"; Master Adam is also punished with constant thirst and the memory of the rushing waters of his homeland streams: "The little streams that from the green hills of Casentino come down into Arno, making their channels cool and moist, always stand before me, and not in vain, for their image dries me far more than the disease that robs my face of flesh" (30:64-69).

Finally:

"See...Hell ain't no place where they melt you down, no
In fact it's so cold that you learn
To sit with your sins 'til a new day begins
And the devil returns"

Again, there is reference to the coldness of the final pit of Hell.  Here also is a reference to the knowledge of the sinners who can see only the past and bits of the future.  With this knowledge they know that they must "sit with [their] sins 'til a new day begins And the devil returns", meaning that they will be punished as they are now till the "new day" or the Last Judgement comes when the "devil returns" or there punishments will be made even greater by the union of body with soul.

The Divine Comedy for Children

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Links: Dante's Divine Comedy As Told for Young People and Paper Dolls

Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy has been translated into many languages so that people throughout the world can enjoy it and learn from Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.  However, The Divine Comedy is not only translated into other languages, it is also abridged and written in a language that children can understand.  I have always enjoyed children’s books and I still like to read them.  So, I thought it would be interesting to see how The Divine Comedy has been made child friendly. 

Starting my search, I assumed that there would be many versions of The Divine Comedy for children.  However, I was wrong.  The only children’s version I found is Dante’s Divine Comedy As Told for Young People, by Joseph Tusiani.  Tusiani’s Comedy is accurate with the original work and clearly explains what is happening in the story.  Unlike the original, which was written in first person with Dante as the narrator, Tusiani’s abridged Comedy is told in third person with Dante as the main character.  Tusiani makes Dante’s journey and struggle relatable to the reader.  He begins by asking the reader: “How would you feel if, awakening in the deep of night, you found yourself no more in your room but in a thick, dark forest called the Wilderness of Death” (Tusiani, Joseph. Dante’s Divine Comedy As Told for Young People. Canada: Legas, 2001. Page 11.).  Tusiani wants to the reader to take Dante’s place for a moment and consider what Dante was feeling at the start of his journey.  Throughout Dante’s Divine Comedy As Told for Young People, Tusiani does not describe all of the symbolism and imagery that Dantes used, but instead focuses on the historical background so that the reader is able to understand what is going on.  Tusiani defines what the sins are and why the sins are condemned.  This book can be used by students studying The Divine Comedy in college because it gives them background about the cantos.  This background provides the student with a good starting point for a more in-depth study of The Divine Comedy.

Another way that The Divine Comedy is made child friendly is through paper dolls.  I have always loved paper dolls, so I thought that it would be interesting to see if there were any paper dolls based on The Divine Comedy.  I found this set of three printable paper dolls, which includes Dante, Virgil, and the three beasts from Canto 1, designed by David Claudon.  Next to each doll, there is a description, which explains why the characters are portrayed this way and contains a little bit of information about the characters.  They are fun for all ages and a good study break!