Dante in Love by A. N. Wilson

Author:A. N. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2011-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

When he went to Rome at Easter 1300, we remember, he saw a Croatian pilgrim clearly thinking to himself, ‘O Jesus Christ, my Lord, the One true God, is this what your face truly looked like then?’ [Par. XXXI.107–8, Musa]. The desire to reconstruct the Jesus of history might seem a natural one to us, but for the first 1,000 years of Christendom, His sacred icon was stylized, as it still is in the Eastern traditions of Christianity. Even if we believe that the stylization is of a face which might plausibly be based upon a memory of the historical Jesus, that is not the point of the Russian or Greek icon. When the faithful Eastern Christian looks at an icon, he prays to Christ to be remembered in His Kingdom, but he is not indulging in historical speculation. Dante’s Croatian, however, is doing precisely that. He is wondering if the Veronica in Rome is an authentic picture.

One of the most dramatic consequences of the Great Schism, the division between Eastern and Western Christianity which was effective from the twelfth, and keenly felt in the thirteenth, century, was the development of visual art, of realistic painting. In Siena, the masters of the Trecento, above all Duccio, straddle two traditions. The gilded and stylized settings of the figures in his Maestà altarpiece are obviously the cousins of the Eastern icon, but in the physiognomical realism, and in their dramatic display of emotion, they are Western. I have looked at Duccio’s Maestà and believed myself to be seeing an illustration to the last canto of the Paradiso in which the faithful, guided by St Bernard, pray to the Virgin and, with all eyes focused upon her, are led up to a vision of the Ineffable, the Almighty Himself.

But the overall effect of reading Dante is something much more robust, something much more shockingly realistic than Duccio’s vision of the world. The painter with whom he has a more obvious kinship is Giotto di Bondone, his Florentine friend and contemporary. Proust’s M. Swann identifies his beloved mistress with the Zipporah in Botticelli’s Sistine frescos; but sees a resemblance between a pregnant housemaid and the figure of Charity painted by Giotto in the Arena Chapel at Padua and gives her the nickname of Giotto’s Charity.

He does so because Giotto has palpably and immediately captured true faces, just as Dante was to do in his Comedy, and Proust, almost 600 years later, but writing in the same tradition of European realist-symbolism, was to do in À la recherche du temps perdu. There are girls, it is true, whose faces possess some of the sorrow and majesty of Duccio Madonnas, but the intensity of emotion in Duccio is almost entirely facial. There is very little drama in his work. It is not rooted in earth.

Proust or – if they are different beings – the narrator of À la recherche – was slow, as a boy, to appreciate the copies of the Giotto figures which M. Swann had given him.

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