Divine Comedy

Dante belonged to the Guelphs, who in central Italy's struggle with the Ghibellines generally favoured the papacy over the Holy Roman Emperor. Around 1300 Florence's Guelphs split into White and Black factions, and in 1302, after troops under Charles of Valois entered the city at the request of Pope Boniface VIII, who supported the Black Guelphs, Dante was among the White Guelphs exiled. The exile lasted the rest of his life and shapes the poem, from prophecies of it to the eternal damnation of some of his opponents and a constant longing for a strong emperor to restore order to Italy and Europe. Beatrice, the Florentine woman he had admired from afar in the courtly love tradition of his earlier La Vita Nuova, became his guide through Heaven.

Without access to Homer, Dante took Virgil, Lucan, Ovid and Statius as models, Virgil above all. Its philosophy rests on Aristotle, known to Dante from Latin translations and through Albertus Magnus, and on Scholasticism, especially Thomas Aquinas, so that the poem has been called “the Summa in verse”. Its language often follows the Vulgate, with five hundred or so direct quotations and references, and it belongs to the genre of katabasis, influenced by the fourth-century Apocalypse of Paul. Dante's Europe also had substantial contact with the Muslim world, through Averroism and the patronage of Alfonso X of Castile; Frederick Copleston argued in 1950 that Dante's respect for Averroes and Avicenna acknowledges a “considerable debt” to Islamic philosophy.

Told in the first person, the poem follows Dante's journey through the three realms of the dead, from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in the spring of 1300. Aged thirty-five and lost in a dark wood, beset by a lion, a leopard and a she-wolf, he is rescued by the Roman poet Virgil, who leads him down through the nine circles of Hell to Lucifer at its bottom. Each punishment is a contrapasso, a symbolic instance of poetic justice: in Canto XX fortune-tellers walk with their heads on backwards. Hell is divided into sins of indulgence, violence, and fraud and treachery, with Limbo for the virtuous pagans and a circle for the heretics.

On the far side of the world the two climb the Mountain of Purgatory, whose seven terraces cleanse the seven deadly sins, understood as love perverted: excessive, deficient or malicious. Below lies the Ante-Purgatory and at the summit the Garden of Eden. Beatrice then guides Dante up through the nine concentric celestial spheres, ordered by the cardinal and theological virtues, to the Empyrean; near the end Bernard of Clairvaux takes over for the last three cantos, and the poem ends with Dante seeing the Triune God.

Allegorically the three realms trace the soul's journey to God: the recognition of sin, the penitent Christian life and the ascent to God. The poem also takes in the science of its day, from a spherical Earth with its time zones to Ptolemaic astronomy and the angle of reflection.

Dante began the poem about 1308 and completed it about 1321, shortly before his death. He wrote it in Tuscan, and so was one of the first in the Middle Ages to treat a serious subject, the Redemption of humanity, in the low and “vulgar” Italian language rather than in Latin; Boccaccio's account that Dante began an early version in Latin is still controversial. He called it simply Comedìa, because ancient poems were classed as high (tragedy) or low (comedy), and low poems had happy endings and everyday language.

The structure is mathematical. The poem's 14,233 lines fall into three cantiche of 33 cantos each, with an opening canto bringing the total to 100; the first two cantos form a prologue to the whole and the opening two of each cantica a prologue to it. The verse is terza rima, hendecasyllabic lines in tercets rhymed ABA BCB CDC, so that each tercet has 33 syllables. Each realm follows a pattern of nine plus one: nine circles and Lucifer, nine rings of the mountain and Eden, nine heavenly spheres and the Empyrean. Within each nine, seven elements follow a moral scheme in three subdivisions and two others are added.

In his letter to Cangrande, whose authenticity is disputed, Dante explains how to read the poem, outlining beside the allegory the historical, moral, literal and anagogical levels of meaning. The poem is often praised for the characters he draws, his bitter denunciations of Florentine and Italian politics, and the power of his imagination.

The poem was widely admired in the centuries immediately after its publication. Boccaccio's Trattatello in laude di Dante, written between 1351 and 1355, gives the earliest known use of the adjective Divina, likely for its profound subject and elevated style, and the Comedy was among the first works of vernacular literature to receive serious critical attention, which before 1300 had been reserved for religious texts and classical literature. Commentaries began with Iacopo Alighieri in 1322, and line-by-line commentaries have since been written in languages across Europe, the Americas and Asia. Galileo Galilei is known to have lectured on the Inferno.

During the Enlightenment the work largely fell into obscurity, with exceptions: Vittorio Alfieri, Antoine de Rivarol, who translated the Inferno into French, and Giambattista Vico, who began the romantic reappraisal of Dante by setting him beside Homer. In the English-speaking world it was “rediscovered” by William Blake, who illustrated passages of it, and by the Romantic writers of the 19th century.

Its sources have long been argued over. In 1919 the Spanish priest and scholar Miguel Asín Palacios argued that Dante drew on Ibn Arabi and on accounts of Muhammad's night journey, the Isra and Mi'raj, known in Latin as the Liber scalae Machometi; Francesco Gabrieli doubted it for lack of a means of transmission, while Maria Corti speculated that Brunetto Latini could have brought Dante a copy.

According to the Italian Dante Society, no original manuscript written by Dante has survived, but there are many manuscript copies from the 14th and 15th centuries, some 800 of them listed on its site. The text also travelled early in translation. Coluccio Salutati put quotations from it into Latin for his De fato et fortuna in 1396–1397. The first complete translation, into Latin prose, was made by Giovanni da Serravalle in 1416, during the Council of Constance, for two English bishops, Robert Hallam and Nicholas Bubwith, and an Italian cardinal, Amedeo di Saluzzo. Matteo Ronto made the first verse translation, into Latin hexameters, in 1427–1431; Enrique de Villena completed a Castilian prose translation in 1428, and Andreu Febrer made a Catalan verse translation in 1429.

The first printed edition was published in Foligno by Johann Numeister and Evangelista Angelini da Trevi in 1472. Of the 300 copies printed, fourteen still survive, and the original printing press is on display in the Oratorio della Nunziatella in Foligno. That edition still used the title Comedìa, later adjusted to the modern Italian Commedia; the first edition to call the poem Divina Comedia in its title was that of the Venetian humanist Lodovico Dolce, published in 1555 by Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari.

The poem helped establish Tuscan as the standardized Italian language, and Edward Mendelson, who counts it among the originators of the encyclopedic novel, compared Dante's later importance to Italian national identity with the culture-building work of Shakespeare, Cervantes and Melville. Erich Auerbach held that Dante was the first writer to depict human beings as the products of a specific time, place and circumstance, and that the poem inaugurated literary realism and self-portraiture in modern fiction. For T. S. Eliot, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them”; for Jorge Luis Borges it was “the best book literature has achieved”.

Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, C. S. Lewis and James Joyce drew on it. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was its first American translator, and it has been translated into English more times than into any other language, and poets including Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky and W. S. Merwin have translated all or parts of it. In Russia, Osip Mandelstam gave a modern reading of it in his “Conversation on Dante” in 1934.

It has inspired artists for almost seven centuries: musicians from Franz Liszt to Hozier, whose album Unreal Unearth (2023) draws on it; Auguste Rodin in sculpture; and Timothy Schmalz, who made 100 sculptures, one for each canto, for the 700th anniversary of Dante's death. Federico Bardazzi recorded all the music the poem mentions in La musica della Commedia (2015).