Italy and the Classical Tradition by Bloomsbury Publishing Bloomsbury;

Author:Bloomsbury Publishing, Bloomsbury;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Part III

The Classical Tradition in Poetry

7

‘Unicuique suum’: Observations on Dante as a Reader of Classical Authors*

Claudia Villa

Dante was the first author to breathe new life into classical poetry by transplanting it from Latin into the vernacular. The significant achievement was recognized by his early commentator Guido da Pisa – and Guido’s view would be confirmed later, by both Boccaccio and Benvenuto da Imola (c. 1320-1388).1 Such recognition is remarkable in itself because it was voiced some decades after Dante’s death, in a time when the authority of Petrarch had already established a radically different vision of classical culture. Dante’s earlier conception was the consequence of a characteristically medieval equivalence – between the need to uphold and interpret tradition (translatio) on the one hand, and the necessity to innovate (renovatio) on the other.

Dante’s dispute with Giovanni del Virgilio about his decision to attempt the comic genre indicates the extent of his reflection on the well-established literary conventions of comedy and pastoral poetry, as well as his interest in reforming them. Dante was an open-minded critic and, like Giovanni, ‘a most uninhibited censor of the ancient poets’.2 By adopting Virgil as the principal model for his ideal of style and as his author and guide, Dante implicitly conferred a special authority on his own re-interpretation of classical sources. The Inferno especially shows how the poet could model narrative and structural patterns of classical origin in new ways, as well as he could provide renewed assessments of particular episodes from classical literature.

The notion of renovatio, to which Dante subscribed, was crucial to the Latin medieval tradition. In addition to its broader ecclesiastical significance, the term had a more specific meaning in the context of the renovatio librorum: the procedure of actually rewriting books. The formulation was attributed to Irnerius, the founding father of medieval jurism in the later eleventh century: it was thus an element of legal practice with which Dante must have been acquainted.3 Guido da Pisa explicitly referred to this in recalling Dante’s attitude towards the ancient poets:

Libros poetarum qui erant totaliter derelicti et quasi oblivione traditi …, renovaret.4

He would renovate the books of the poets, which were wholly derelict and mechanically transcribed in disregard of their content …

If novelty consists of re-interpreting tradition in an original fashion, a poet like Dante is the ideal interpreter of stories that have already been told, and which he is known to have studied. For a medieval reader, Dante’s narration of how his journey began in a ‘harsh wood’ would have been related to the philosophical tradition.5 The adjective ‘harsh’ (Inf. 1.5 aspra), too, would have been seen to allude to the special meaning the term had acquired in relation to the theory of styles – and particularly to comedy as the genre that ‘has its beginning in hardships’ (‘incipit ab asperitate’).

This piece of information so early in the Commedia raises questions concerning the literary status of his work, while it also evokes principles of comic style that go back to the plays of Terence.

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