Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265, sometime between 21 May and 20 June, into a family of minor nobility. He lost his mother early, and his father died in his teens. Little is known about his upbringing, but later research has revealed a scholarship far superior to his generation’s.
Dante was a Florentine poet, philosopher, politician, and representative European writer of the Middle Ages. He is the author of the monumental work “The Divine Comedy,” a masterpiece of universal literature with a significant impact on literature and theology. Dante Alighieri was also the first great Italian-language poet, the leading promoter of the new literary style “Dolce Stil Novo,” a literary movement that emerged in the 13th century and promoted philosophical love poetry.
His novelty lay in the elaboration of a complete doctrine of love. Dante was a disciple of Brunetto Latini, an essential representative of medieval encyclopaedism, who opened his cultural horizons and later appeared as an important figure in the ‘Divine Comedy.’
Biography of Dante Alighieri
| Full name: | Dante Alighieri |
|---|---|
| Year of birth: | 1265 AD |
| Year of death: | 1321 AD |
| Place of birth: | Revenna, Italy |
| Spouse: | Gemma Di Manetto Donati |
| Nationality: | Italian |
| Death cause: | Natural Causes. |
What is Dante’s most famous work about?
In 1274, when he was only nine years old, he met Beatrice, the daughter of the gentleman Folco Portinari, with whom he fell in love and who became the symbol of divine grace in his works “La Vita Nuova” and, later, in the “Divine Comedy.” He saw her again nine years later, in 1283, when they barely exchanged a few words. Nevertheless, his love for her grew ever more significant.
Dante was devastated by the news of his childhood sweetheart’s death at just 24. He would later publish his most famous work, “La Vita Nuova,” a work in verse and prose inspired by his love for her, in which the poet describes all the feelings he went through since he first saw her, the memory of his first greeting to which she did not respond, how he tried to hide his love for her, and then the foreshadowing and death of her.
At age 20, Dante married Gemma Di Manetto Donati, with whom he had four children: Giovanni, Pietro, Jacopo, and Antonia, and Beatrice, his lifelong love, became the wife of the Florentine banker Simone de Bardi.
Why did Dante write Dante’s Inferno?
First, it must be clarified why two commentators on a literary work, which is a poem, have taken pains to reconstruct geometrically, with exact measurements, Dante’s Inferno, i.e., an imaginary place. The explanation is to be found in Dante himself. Recent literature in the fantasy genre, such as Tolkien’s or science fiction, has accustomed us to describing imaginary worlds as if they were real; they fascinate and convince precisely because they are based on coherent and perfectly plausible physics and geography.
Dante wrote Inferno to heal his soul and restore his and humanity’s values. He undertakes a journey to the three realms of the moon beyond, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise: it is a journey of knowledge, finding the truth, moral purification, and the passion of man and humanity for God.
The story of this journey, which is a personal story of Dante and all humanity, contains not only Dante’s human, social and political experience but also the entire scientific, literary, philosophical, moral, and theological knowledge of his time and is therefore also considered an excellent representation of the European Middle Ages.
What was Dante’s philosophy?
Anyone who has read Dante Alighieri’s Comedy (and not just the Inferno, as has been the fashion for a couple of hundred years now) understands that he is in the presence of a poet who defies many of the ideas we have about poetic art, artistic destiny, content, genre, etc. All the more so because we, today’s readers, look at these things through a system of lenses inherited from the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Modernism.
Dante begins to flirt with philosophy, and in Il Convivio (“The Banquet”), he tries to answer the question, “What is happiness?” this is where his philosophy of happiness begins, dating from the same period, it is the first European treatise on linguistics. The comedy – called “divine” by commentators after Dante’s death – is the pinnacle of the author’s creativity, the supernova that crowns his literary work with the most excellent brilliance.
Fortunately, Dante avoids these schemes, positioning himself beyond the cultural matrix that allows us to dialogue effectively and critically with works of art today. And this “fortunately” is what will enable me to speak now about Dante’s radicalism.
What did Dante do?
In addition to poetry, Dante wrote important theoretical works, ranging from discussions of rhetoric to moral philosophy and meditations on political issues. He was well versed in the classical tradition, studying for his own pleasure such writers as Vergilius, Cicero and Boethius. But, unusually for a layman, he had an impressive command of scholastic philosophy and theology.
Dante was endowed with a remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-assurance. By the time he was 18, as he himself says in Vita nuova, he had taught himself the art of writing verse (Chapter III). He sent one of his first sonnets, which was to become the first poem in the Vita nuova, to the best-known poets of the time. He received several replies, but the most important came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of a great friendship.
His studies and personal involvement in the heated political controversies of the time led to the writing of On Monarchy (De monarchia), one of the major treatises of medieval political philosophy.
What is Dante’s Divine Comedy?
On a more general level,l this book can also be read as an allegory, in the form of a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The poem is notable for its range of teachings, penetrating and comprehensive analysis of contemporary issues, and inventiveness of language and imagery.
Dante’s Divine Comedy, a masterpiece of medieval literature, is a profoundly Christian vision of man’s temporal and eternal destiny. On a personal level, it is based on the poet’s experience of exile far from his native Florence.
By writing this poem in Italian rather than Latin, Dante decisively influenced the course of literary development. He gave voice to his country and succeeded in making Italian the academic language of Western Europe for centuries.
What was the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti?
In the Convivio, written in Italian, and De vulgari eloquentia, written in Latin, Dante was to offer one of the most effective Renaissance defenses of national languages.
As in all encounters between two brilliant minds, the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was complicated. In chapter XXX of the Vita Nuova, Dante says that he wrote, at Cavalcanti’s urging, his first work in Italian, not Latin.
The supreme poet was exiled from Florence in January 1302 following a bloody confrontation between the two great rival political groups in the city: the ”white Guelfs”, who demanded that the pope’s powers be limited to the spiritual realm and to which Dante belonged, and the ”black Guelfs”, who favored the exercise of papal authority over the city’s affairs.
Where is Dante buried?
The summer of 1321 finds him in Ravenna. This city appeals to his diplomatic skills in a conflict with Venice. On his return from the northeastern republic, he falls ill with malaria in the lagoon area. On the night of 13 to 14 September, at fifty-six years and four months old, Italy’s greatest poet, one of the highest spirits known to humanity over 6000 years of history, dies in Ravenna. His coffin is carried on the shoulders of Ravenna’s most prominent inhabitants and buried in a chapel of Franciscan monks.
The tomb of the great poet Dante Alighieri is located at the bottom of Via Dante. Ravenna was once the capital and boasted some of the most spectacular Byzantine mosaics in Western Europe, which it has preserved as Italians know how to care for art.
Dante Alighieri’s mortal remains could be moved to Florenc after the city’s mayor began negotiations with the mayor of Ravenna, which for centuries has been home to the tomb of the “father of the Italian language.”
Primary Takeaways
- Dante Alighieri’s best-known portrait was painted by Tuscan Renaissance painter Andrea del Castagno and housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It has regained the youth it had lost through successive interventions, thanks to new restoration work recently unveiled on the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet’s death.
- The portrait reveals a serene and peaceful image of Alighieri, very different from what was seen before, a symbol of Italian culture and spirit.
- Dante thus describes an imaginary journey in these three dimensions. In which he meets both mythological or historical figures and his contemporaries. Each of these symbolizes a virtue or, conversely, a vice.
Conclusion
In 1265, Dante Alighieri, the greatest poet of the neolithic age, was born in Florence on an unspecified day in the second half of May. The future new Athens of the world. In 1273 he began his first limited studies of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. And he was also reading various texts, especially sacred ones.
If in Hell and Purgatory Dante is guided by the poet Vergilius, as a symbol of wisdom, in Paradise, he is guided by Beatrice, the being he loved to the point of adoration and who symbolizes divine grace, helping him to find his way to God. “The Divine Comedy synthesizes the artist’s philosophical, scientific and political views while dramatizing medieval Christian theology.
Trivia about Dante Alighieri
Bibliography
- Alighieri, D. So. (1784). Dante Alighieri (Vol. 1). presso Antonio Zatta, e figli.
- Alighieri, D. Therefore. (1850). The Comedy of Dante Alighieri is indeed the author.
- D. Alighieri, But. (1912). The Convivio of Dante Alighieri. JM Dent.
- So Alighieri, D. (2007). Indeed Inferno. Inferno, 1000-1114.
