Inspirations from Dante's Florence (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Cross-cultural Studies and Environmental Communication, 2015
Now remembered chiefly as the first American to translate the whole Dante’s Commedia, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had a lifelong fascination with Italy that was not incidental to his popularity as a poet and international renown during the nineteenth century. The essay considers Longfellow’s regard for Florence, where he sojourned unhappily as a student and more happily in later life with his family, in relation to other Italian cities. After considering Longfellow’s descriptions of Florence in his travel letters and poetry, focusing in particular on his sonnet, “The Old Bridge at Florence,” it turns to examine a late, unfinished work, a dramatic poem on the life of Michelangelo and the ambivalent feelings they shared toward Florence and Rome.
Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, 2010
A revised and updated edition of J. Chesley Mathews, "Longfellow’s Dante Collection," ESQ: Journal of the American Renaissance 62 (Winter 1971) for the special Longfellow bicentennial issue of Dante Studies.
Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, 2010
An edited version of a previously unpublished manuscript by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana for the special Longfellow bicentennial issue of Dante Studies.
Longfellow and the Legacy of the Dante Club
This presentation traces the historical circumstances of Longfellow's "Dante Club" and its impact on the formation of the Dante Society of America and American readership of Dante's Divine Comedy.
Il saggio propone una lettura a tutto tondo del dantismo del più noto poeta americano nel corso di tutto il diciannovesimo secolo, soprattutto attraverso un gruppo lectures, ancora inedite, che egli tenne a Harvard tra il 1838 e il 1852. L’accusa di un’eccessiva dipendenza dalle muse europee e dalla cultura del Vecchio Mondo in genere, che i critici gli mossero all’inizio del ’900 e che tuttora perdura, non rende giustizia dell’identità autenticamente americana della sua poesia e del suo dantismo, incomprensibile dunque al di fuori della tradizione culturale autoctona. Il critico dovrà seguire il ritmo alternato dettato dall’insegnamento accademico a Harvard e dalla scrittura poetica, riconoscendo nel primo il profondo legame di Longfellow con l’Europa e nella seconda il suo tentativo di percorrere le strade aperte dal romanticismo su suolo americano. Il più importante dei suoi modelli poetici, Dante Alighieri, è posto sotto la lente di entrambi gli strumenti di analisi che Longfellow fece suoi, accademico da una parte e creativo dall’altra, come testimoniano, oltre alle lectures, la prima traduzione americana dell’intero poema nel 1867 e i coevi sei sonetti intitolati la Divina Commedia.
On 20 th October 1519 the Accademia Medicea, which included Michelangelo among its members, petitioned Pope Leo X for the restitution of Dante's remains from Ravenna to the city of Florence. Michelangelo added to the petition his heartfelt offer to sculpt a suitable tomb for the "divine poet" 1. His wish to «fare la Sepoltura sua chondecente e in locho onorevole in questa cictà» was however left unfulfilled, since, as is well known, Ravenna was to remain, as it is still today, the burial place of the great poet 2. Michelangelo's admiration for Dante and close knowledge of his work is a well-known, indeed pervasive, theme, though mostly studied on the evidence of Michelangelo's visual art, as opposed to Dante's influence in his poetry 3. This is * I am grateful to Simon Gilson for his assistance and to Davide Dalmas for helpful comments. Heartfelt thanks also to my friend Stefano Jossa for his constant support. 1 «Io Michelangelo Schultore il medesimo a Vostra Santità suplicho, oferendomi al divin poeta fare la Sepoltura sua chondecente e in locho onorevole in questa cictà». In GiorGio VAsAri, Vita di Michelangelo, edited by iVo bombA, Pordenone, Studio Tesi, 1993, p. 259: «I Michelangelo the Sculptor beg Your Holiness to let me make a worthy burial for the Divine Poet in an honorable place in this city». Translation in English is mine. Further translations of citations will also be mine unless stated otherwise. 2 Pope Leo X did send a delegation to Ravenna to ask for Dante's bones to be returned to Florence, but when the papal emissary opened the sarcophagus Dante's remains could not be found; the Franciscan friars had removed them and hidden them in the cloister of the monastery until 1677, when one of the friars, Antonio Santi, identified the poet's bones and put them on display. Florence only managed to boast a beautiful cenotaph to Dante. It was sculpted by the neoclassical artist Stefano Ricci between 1819 and 1830 and installed in the church of Santa Croce close to Michelangelo's monumental tomb.
Dante, Michelangelo, and What We Talk about When We Talk about Poetry
If Donato Giannotti's Dialogi de' giorni che Dante consumò nel cercare l'Inferno e 'l Purgatorio have received relatively scant close attention (with apologies for invoking the rustiest weapon in the academic arsenal while honoring a scholar whose work was unfailingly fresh and imaginative), there are some good reasons for it. The titular subject of the sixtypage text-written around 1546, preserved in a single Vatican manuscript, published for the first time in 1859, and not yet translated into English 1 -possesses the disadvantage of having been studied innumerable times from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century, 2 with mostly identical results, and of having suffered a considerable loss of interest for Dante readers since then. Nor does Giannotti's work bring much of original import to that conversation, except in so far as drawing certain conclusions with which no expert, ancient or modern, agrees. (In fact, the text manages to attack and to plagiarize at the same time.) Then, too, many pages of the Dialogues are tedious in the extreme, as they grind their way through the minutiae of Dante's references to time and through the precise astronomical/ astrological configurations in the heavens that appear to measure that time. It is indeed safe to say that no one-including the present author-would have paid any attention at all to this work, were it not for the fact that one of the speakers is identified as Michelangelo Buonarroti. But that merely piles on more problems. As with many other such invocations of the divino artista during his lifetime, it is prudent to harbor considerable doubt concerning the authenticity of the words and actions ascribed to him 3 ; and even if we develop an algorithm for sifting out the truth, it turns out that the figure named as Michelangelo has little to say in these pages that is relevant to the production of his artistic masterpieces. 1 Barkan The author of the Dialogues does merit some consideration, though. Donato Giannotti lived a long life (1492-1573) in the eye of many political storms on the Italian peninsula. 4 He was First Secretary of the Ten in the Florentine Republic of 1527-30
Dante and Renaissance Florence
The Sixteenth Century Journal, 2006
Simon Gilson explores Dante's reception in his native Florence between 1350 and 1481. He traces the development of Florentine civic culture and the interconnections between Dante's principal 'Florentine' readers, from Giovanni Boccaccio to Cristoforo Landino, and explains how and why both supporters and opponents of Dante exploited his legacy for a variety of ideological, linguistic, cultural, and political purposes. The book focuses on a variety of texts, both Latin and vernacular, in which reference was made to Dante, from commentaries to poetry, from literary lives to letters, from histories to dialogues. Gilson pays particular attention to Dante's influence on major authors such as Boccaccio and Petrarch, on Italian humanism, and on civic identity and popular culture in Florence. Ranging across literature, philosophy, and art, across languages and across social groups, this study fully illuminates for the first time Dante's central place in Italian Renaissance culture and thought. simon gilson is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante (2000) and the co-editor of Science and Literature in Italian Culture: From Dante to Calvino (2004). He has published journal articles on topics related to Dante's scientific interests, the Dante commentary tradition, and his reception in the Italian Renaissance.