The eldest and greatest poet of modern Italy. He was of a noble Florentine family. He came into stormy times, and his life was tempestuous. His native city was then split between the fierce hostile factions of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the two great parties that distracted Germany and Italy in the middle ages. An urban faction in Florence was that of the Blacks and Whites. Dante was a Ghibelline, and a White: a keen partisan, and a distinguished citizen, he shared the passions and the vicissitudes of his party. Two battles are mentioned in which he gained honour as a soldier. At thirty-five, he was in the supreme magistrature of the city. When Charles of Anjou, in passing through Florence, took the part of the Blacks, Dante was amongst the sufferers. He was condemned to exile, and confiscation of his property: but, on a revision of the sentence, to be burned alive. He wandered long, in France and in Italy, and rested at last, under the shelter of Guido Novelli, at Ravenna. He died there. He was once married, but not happily. A boyish love for Beatrice Portinari lives, as a sort of ethereal idea, throughout his poetry and life. He wandered and sang. His marvellous poem, “The Divine Comedy,” was composed during his long exile. It at once raised the modern Italian to the rank of a classical tongue, and the poetry of modern Italy to a height to which it has never again soared. The poet relates his journey, as a living man, through the three invisible worlds, which receive, as his church teaches, the souls of other men when released from the body: Hell, Purgatory, Heaven. Through Hell and Purgatory he is led by the shade of the poet Virgil—indeed his beloved leader in their common art. Through Paradise, his Beatrice herself, in whom he impersonates Theology, guides him. The ghosts he sees, those under punishment especially, are chiefly his deceased contemporaries, and Italians: so that the other shadowy world is with him almost a reflexion of his own world here. From the first step of his pilgrimage to the last, he sees sights of his own imagining, transcending all experience, almost all conception, yet delineated with such vivid precision, in language so simply real, that a feeling only short of belief accompanies the reader, and remains with him. Italian peasants meeting the poet, pointed out, as they looked with awe on “his pale and visionary brow,” the man who had been down to Hell. Prominent characteristics of his poetry are strength, daring, intensity, grace, absolute self-reliance, and boundless invention: above all, the continual self-presence of the poet as the centre to his own thoughts, and to the worlds which he traverses and describes. He began to write his poem in Latin verse; but Dante was too essentially a poet to write out of his mother-tongue;—a poet expresses himself in his verse, and only the mother-tongue is near enough to him for that.

[This Bust is by Alessandro d’Este, and was placed in the Protomoteca at the expense of Canova. It corresponds in the chief characteristics of the face with the portraits taken from the life, of which there are several. In Florence Cathedral, near the tomb of Giotto, is an authentic portrait. The one lately discovered on a wall in the palace of the Podestà at Florence, is extremely interesting, as being a youthful likeness by the hand of his friend Giotto. The monument to Dante in S. Croce is the work of Stefano Ricci. It was erected in 1829, at the public expense.]

174. Francesco Petrarca. Poet.

[Born in Tuscany, 1304. Died at Argua, near Padua, 1374. Aged 70.]

The crown around the brow of Petrarch has many gems. He is poet, diplomatist, scholar, and restorer of ancient letters. To the world, he is the great Italian sonnetteer. This extremely artificial metrical scheme, which seems, however, singularly congenial to his native speech, afforded him the temptation, in the means, to write incessant effusions on one love, really or ideally entertained. He was an ecclesiastic under a law of celibacy. Thus separated from the object of his presumed affections, he allied his soul to hers in verse. His love-strains are studies, without number, of the passion, in its endlessly varying moods and moments—half of them wreaths laid at the feet of the living Laura—half, strewings on her untimely tomb. The flowers, disclosed by the rapidly advancing Spring of the language, breathe the freshness, sweetness, and innocent grace of the season. Ever since, every son of song in Italy strikes this lute of a few chords, but Petrarch remains its Apollo.

[By Carlo Finelli.]

175. Giacomo Sanazzaro. Poet.

[Born at Naples, 1458. Died there, 1530. Aged 72.]

A devoted adherent of the House of Arragon, whom he followed in their disastrous campaign in defence of the Church. During his travels he published his poem of “Arcadia,” which gave a new phase to Italian poetry. A great admirer of Virgil and Propertius.

[From his tomb in Santa Maria del Parto at Naples, by Girolamo Santa Croce, a Neapolitan sculptor of the 15th century. His tomb is one of the most beautiful monuments of the time; designed by Santa Croce, and sculptured by Montorsoli. Two weeping angels lean over the bust which bears the name Actius Sincerus, under which he published many of his works. At the sides of the tomb are statues of Apollo and Minerva, said to be antique, but now called David and Judith.]