Purgatory and Adventure – Through Hell to Paradise with Dante Alighieri

Psychedelic depiction of purgatory in the Museo Dante.

Photo: Jürgen Schneider

Over 700 years ago, Dante Alighieri revolutionized the way we think about language. While the poet, born in Florence in 1265, addressed a circle of scholars with his treatise “De vulgari eloquentia” (Two Books on the Expressiveness of the Vernacular), written in Latin, he chose his mother tongue, Florentine, for his famous “Divine Comedy”. volgare. Dante researchers assume that the “Divine Comedy” was written between 1306 and 1321. In it we are led through hell to the center of the earth and from there over the mountain of purification to paradise.

For its 100th annual meeting, the German Dante Society returned to its founding location in Dresden at the end of October 2024. The annual conference program also included a tour of Weesenstein Castle. Dante’s multifaceted language, his choice of a wide variety of words and registers, once motivated King John of Saxony to hold regular interdisciplinary meetings at the Weesenstein and Pillnitz castles in the 19th century. They served to translate the comedìa and to comment on its scientific background. Under Johann’s patronage, the German Dante Society was founded in Dresden on September 13, 1865 with the purpose of “expanding and spreading the understanding of the poet and the love for him.”

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A good place for a gathering of Dante aficionados would also be Station Island in Lough Derg in County Donegal, Ireland. The island is still a place of pilgrimage today. In a “Reyßbüechlein” from 1640 it says: “The purgatory of Saint Patritij surpasses all the miracles that can be found in Ireland. “It is a cave or spelunck with a lake or water surrounding it in the province of Ultonia.”

The idea of ​​purgatory was spread through the “Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii”, a description of the knight Owein’s experience of the afterlife in the purgatory of Saint Patrick, written around 1170-1185 in Middle Latin prose by a monk (under the abbreviation “H.”). One or another derived version was also known to Dante.

At the beginning of November 2024, a very elegant prose translation of the “Comedy” was published by Manesse Verlag, which is thanks to Rudolf Georg Adam. The edition also contains a guide to Dante literature, a timeline and a guide to the most striking passages. In the afterword, Adam writes about Dante’s main work that it “has nothing in common with what we understand by a comedy.” But how did “the strange title” come about? »Dante himself calls his poem “comedìa” in a spelling that was unusual even for his time, with only one “m” and an accent on the “i”. He probably wanted to use the idiosyncratic, Greek-based spelling to indicate that his ‘comedìa’ was something fundamentally different from the classic comedies that had come down to us from Plautus or Terence.” Because Dante, according to Adam, “combines a phenomenal empathy with an inexorable one Sense of justice. All injustice must find its appropriate punishment, if not in this world, then at least in the hereafter.

Dante died on the night of September 13th to 14th, 1321 in Ravenna, where he had been welcomed into the court of Guido Novello della Polenta about three years earlier. Dante’s tomb, built in 1780, is located on the outside of the cloister of the Church of San Francesco. The museum and the Dante House (“Museo e Casa Dante”) are very close by.

There are no documents, relics or even handwritten texts that could be attributed to Dante. Therefore, the museum initially offers an imaginary timeline intended to illustrate the complexities of Dante’s era and highlight the points of contention in Dante research. The next room is dedicated to Dante’s artistic representations. The first to write a kind of biography of Dante was Giovanni Boccacio (1313–1375): “Trattatello in laude di Dante (German: Treatise in praise of Dante)”. Boccacio drew on legends and stories as well as specific dates and events in Dante’s life and compared these with Dante’s main work. On display are some reproductions of sculptures dedicated to Dante. We owe well-known depictions of Dante that cannot be seen in Ravenna to the artists Johann Heinrich Füssli, William Blake, Joshua Reynolds and Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix.

The next room, called the “Montevideo Room,” has existed almost unchanged since 1921. The name refers to the fact that Italians who emigrated to Montevideo contributed financially to the decoration of the room. The central element is the ceiling decoration with a verse from Dante’s “Purgatorio”: “Don’t you see that we are caterpillars, born / to develop into angelic butterflies and to float free of all earthly weight / towards eternal justice?” (in the Adam translation ). Probably the most important exhibit in the museum is the pine wood chest in the “Hall of Cult” in which Dante’s bones have been kept since 1677. After crossing the room, in which, among other things, a Lego bust of the poet can be seen, the audiovisual performance of the “Divine Comedy” follows, although the presentation occasionally appears psychedelic.

Paintings, illustrations and sculptures from the 18th and 19th centuries can be seen in Casa Dante. The booklet accompanying the museum presentation points out the importance of Dante’s reception during the Risorgimento as well as the Dante admiration of the nationalist and supporter of republicanism Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872). Mazzini was not Dante’s only admirer. James Joyce, for example, was inspired by the author of the “Divine Comedy,” and Walter Benjamin studied Erich Auerbach’s work “Dante as a Poet of the Earthly World.” In a note he refers to André Breton’s book “Nadja”, which was also the subject of his surrealism essay, which he was working on at the same time.

Dante Museum and House, Via Dante Aligheri 2/A and via G. Da Polenta 4, Ravenna, Italien
Dante Aligheri: The Divine Comedy. Translated from Italian and with annotations by Rudolf Georg Adam, under editorial supervision by Jochen Reichel. Manesse Verlag, 672 pages, hardcover, €80.

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