Abstract
The turning inside out of profane/sacred music has been an aspect of the doubleness of the Commedia. More obvious are those moments where the written text’s Cosmos turns inside out. There had been the moment in the bottom of Inferno where Dante and Virgil climb down/up Lucifer’s legs, the turning point at his groin, his genitalia. Another moment is in Purgatorio where Beatrice and the Gryphon gaze into each other’s eyes, Dante’s joining in that gaze, putting on the mind of Christ. Finally, in Paradiso, Dante drinks with his eyes and the Cosmos turns right way round, to God at the center, the earth at the farthest periphery, the perception Philosophia had taught earth-bound, self-pitying Boethius, and that Cicero had had Scipio Africanus see with his ancestors in his dream. Horia-Roman Patapievici, the physicist who was Romania’s Minister of Culture until he was unjustly ousted by Romanian Nationalism, discussed Dante’s Commedia showing that most perceptions of the Rose are wrong. It is not a small object perched atop the Cosmos but is instead the entire Cosmos righted, the Kingdom of Heaven that is here and now if we would but see it.
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Notes
- 1.
Horia-Roman Patapievici, Gli occhi di Beatrice: com’era davvero il mondo di Dante, trans. Smaranda Beata Elian.
- 2.
The patterns, even in computer programming, are not the linearity of abcdefg, 123456, but instead an algebraic mirroring, of abcdefgfedcba, of 12345654321, like the ripples in a pond from a thrown stone, as we find in music, as we find in the sewn and symmetrical garments we wear. William Blake observed this in the mirroring of typesetting and printing. Satan is God’s parody. Evil is Good turned inside out. Etienne Gilson was Visiting Professor at Berkeley in 1969, taught that evil is the tending to non-being in a brilliant Seminar on Thomas Aquinas.
- 3.
It is interesting that several Brunetto Latino, Tesoro, manuscripts were written out by prisoners, including those in the Stinche, likely commissioned by Francesco da Barberino.
- 4.
Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s Commedia, pp. 297–301.
- 5.
JB Holloway, “Dante’s Commedia: Egyptian Spoils, Roman Jubilee, Florence’s Patron”, Studies in Medieval Culture, 12 (1978), 97–104.
- 6.
John Webster Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer, pp. 136, 197, 256, 282. The landscape serves further to link Virgil and Dante, since Dante’s ancestors, the Elisei, were descended from the Roman Frangipani, whose tower it was. See also The Pilgrim and the Book, pp. 184–185, 190, Plate IXd,e.
- 7.
The mind maps its external reality within itself in a mental representation of that reality. One map I was forced to work with in this cemetery was false, was incorrect, divorced from reality, with two conflicting grids, and it was like madness, having to draw up legal contracts that failed to correspond to the truth. To heal trauma Dante and Joyce accurately map Florence and Dublin when absent from their natal cities.
- 8.
William Sebastian Heckscher, Sixtus IIII aeneas insignes statuas romano populo restituendas censuit, Utrecht University, 1955.
- 9.
Alinari, Vittorio, Paesaggi italici nella “Divina Commedia”. I give these to the text of the Commedia in https://www.florin.ms/Dantevivo.html
- 10.
Etienne Gilson, when Visiting Professor at Berkeley, explained to us that “Ens” for being was an invented medieval word, not extant in classical Latin, but necessary for philosophy.
- 11.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Inferno.
- 12.
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
- 13.
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green, Prose 12, pp. 72–73, 92, on the circle and the center.
- 14.
Brunetto Latino, Il Tesoro, BML Plut.42.20, fols. 74r–75r, on circles as superior to squares; while the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare”, I choose the perceptions of Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind; Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World; and Malcom Guite, Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God, as maps to Dante’s poetry. McGilchrist especially notes the relationship between first-person narrative and right hemisphere activity, pp. 59, 70, 75–76, 81, 88, 89, 191, 397 (e-mail communication, 8/3/2016).
- 15.
- 16.
Vittorio Alinari, Paesaggi italici nella ‘Divina Commedia, passim.
- 17.
Botticelli’s Inferno: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Sandro_Botticelli_-_La_Carte_de_l’Enfer.jpg; Piranesi’s Carceri, https://gregoiredupond.com/piranesi-carceri-d-invenzione-2010/
- 18.
Sperello di Serego Alighieri, The Sun and the Other Stars of Dante Alighieri: A Cosmographic Journey Through the Divina Commedia, p. 66.
- 19.
Giambattista Vico, Principj di una Scienza Nuova Intorno alla Natura delle Nazioni per la Quale si Ritruovano i Principj di Altro Sistema del Diritto Naturale delle Genti, 1725; Samuel Beckett, “Dante… Bruno. Vico… Joyce”, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, 1929.
- 20.
Douglas R. Hofstadter, The Eternal Golden Braid: Gödel, Escher, Bach.
- 21.
Gerhart Ladner noted of Gottfried von Strasbourg’s Tristan and Horia-Roman Patapievici of Dante’s Commedia that these texts turn themselves inside out or right way round, “like a sleeve”. When an Angel dictated in the right brain contemplative mode to Saint Birgitta in her Roman cell the words of her Office for the sisters and brothers of her Order, Birgitta was told that now the cloth was cut out and it was for her to sew the pieces together. We even have scraps of parchment on which she wrote against Cardinals’ corrupting the Church, that she had sewn together, and also her cloak of patchwork from an old dress in which she humbly begged outside the church of San Lorenzo in Panisperna for her household’s keep.
- 22.
Matthews, William H. Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of their History and Development.
- 23.
JB Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer, pp. 2–3; Georg Röppen and Richard Sommer, Strangers and Pilgrims: An Essay on the Metaphor of Journey, p. 35 and passim; William H. Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of their History and Development, p. 60 and passim, on p. 193 noting that Juan de Mena wrote El Laborinto in imitation of Dante’s Commedia; BAV lat 4776 has labyrinth on its end paper: W.F. Jackson Knight, Cumaean Gates: A Reference if the Sixth Aeneid in the Initiation Pattern, pp. 12–27; William Durandus, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments, p. 52, notes that bishops walked on Muslim carpets, to trample on paganism; F.J.M. de Waele, The Magic Staff or Rod in Graeco-Italian Antiquity.
- 24.
John V. Fleming, The Roman de la Rose; A Study in Allegory and Iconography.
- 25.
Dante Alighieri, Vita nova XL; Alfonso X el Sabio, Las Siete Partidas VII.
- 26.
JB Holloway, Twice-Told Tales, pp. 6–7; Jerusalem: Essays on Pilgrimage and Literature, pp. 208–209.
- 27.
Dorothy Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, Hell, Purgatory, Paradise.
- 28.
Gautier de Metz. L’image du monde de maitre Gossuin. Texte du manuscrit de la Bibliothèque nationale, fonds français N° 574. Ed. O.H. Prior; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautier_de_Metz#/media/File:Gossuin_de_Metz_-_L’image_du_monde_-_BNF_Fr._574_fo42.jpg; Sonia Minutello, “La cosmografia figurata nei codici in volgare del ‘Tesoro’ di Brunetto Latino”, Tesi, Università degli Studi di Udine, 2003–2004.
- 29.
Maire Herbert, “The Celtic Otherworld and the Commedia/ L’Aldilà Celtico e la Commedia”, The City and the Book II: The Manuscript, the Illumination, Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, via Orsanmichele 4, 4–7 September, 2002, https://www.florin.ms/beth3.html#herbert; “The Legacy of the Irish Peregrini in Tuscany/ Il Retaggio dei Peregrini in Toscana”. The City and the Book Conference I: The Alphabet and the Bible: International Conference in Florence’s Certosa, 30,31 May, 1 June, 2001. https://www.florin.ms/aleph3.html#cork; see also Massimo Bonafin, “Relativistic Time and Space in Medieval Journeys to the Other World”, Cognitive Philology 2 (2009); W.B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero; Kuno Meyer translated the Irish Merugud Uilix Maicc Leirtis: https://www.yorku.ca/inpar/ulixes_meyer.pdf; Phillip W. Damon, “Dante’s Ulysses and the Mythic Tradition”, Medieval Secular Literature, ed. William Matthews.
- 30.
Alfonso X el Sabio gave the legend of Hercules slaying Geryon and burying his head at the foot of the Lighthouse of Hercules: https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0gd5771/tower-of-hercules-secrets-of-the-world-s-oldest-lighthouse
- 31.
https://www.florin.ms/Dantevivo.html, clicking on arrows for Carlo Poli’s recordings of each Canto.
- 32.
The inscription at the bottom of the Domenico di Michelino’s painting reads: QVI COELVM MEDIVMQVE TRIBVNAL LVSTRAVIT LANIMO CUNCTA POETA SVO DVCTUS ADEST DANTES SVA QVEM FLORENTIA SAEPE/ SENSIT CONSILIS PIETATE PATREM NIL POTVIT TANTO MORS SAEVE NOCERE POETA QVEM VIVVM VIRTVS CARMEN IMAGO FACIT.
- 33.
Anna Pegoretti, “Un Dante ‘Domenicano’: La Commedia Egerton 943 della British Library”, Dante Visualizzato: Carte ridenti I:XIV secolo. Eds. Rossend Arqués Corominas and Marcello Ciccuto: “La «destra costa» di cui parla il testo è resa dalla parete rocciosa più alta. Oltre alla capacità di illustrare minutamente gli eventi, colpisce la precisione di determinati particolari: in Purgatorio le anime arrivano sempre dalla parte giusta, così -come sempre corretta è l’ombra di Dante, realizzata con alcuni tratti grigi sulla roccia retrostante (si vedano ad esempio c. 67v o 70r). Questa volontà di illustrare tutto raggiunge un culmine in Pg. IV (68v), dove Dante e Virgilio sono impegnati in una dotta conversazione astronomica che avrebbe scoraggiato qualunque illustratore. La vignetta raffigura alla perfezione i versi immediatamente precedenti («a seder ci po-nemmo ivi ambe dui / volti a levante onde eravam sagliti / che suole a riguardar gio-vare altrui», vv. 52–54). Siamo nella tarda mattinata; Dante, rivolto verso nord, guarda a est e i raggi del sole colpiscono correttamente i viandanti alla loro sinistra, perché siamo nell’emisfero australe; i due sono seduti e indicano proprio quella direzione”, p. 31.
- 34.
Patapievici, Gli occhi di Beatrice, pp. 71–89.
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Bolton Holloway, J. (2024). Chapter 7: Dante’s Labyrinth, Dante’s Cosmos. In: Dante and His Circle. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44093-9_7
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