Dante has suffered rather too much from his admirers. Barely was he cold in his grave at Ravenna than the process of reinventing him began. The Florentines, who had earlier driven into exile the man they dubbed an instrument of the Devil, hastened to claim him for their own, appointing Giovanni Boccaccio, his earliest biographer, as their city’s official public lecturer on the poet’s most famous work. First merely entitled Commedia, the visionary epic picked up its Divina from Boccaccio, and the process of literary canonisation began. The hook-nosed bard with his laurel wreath, tabard and floppy hat appeared as a numinous local patriarch in Tuscan frescoes, Renaissance and Baroque savants hailed him as the father of Italian literature (which he wasn’t) while the Risorgimento made him a spear-carrier for national unification (which in a way he was). Victorian Italophiles in England preferred to transmogrify him into something not unlike a Trollopean clergyman, combining the meekness of Septimus Harding with the gritty integrity of Josiah Crawley.
Barbara Reynolds, after a lifetime’s work on Dante, is blessedly unconcerned with foisting such dubious avatars on us. Her admiration, though profound, is not that of the groveller or the fantasist. Her book brings us nearer perhaps than any writer since Boccaccio to Dante as a plausible human being, the gentleman, warrior and lover, as opposed to the dispossessed dreamer on whom many commentators have preferred to dwell. The Divina Commedia, for all its allegorical intricacies and vast spiritual trajectory, is rooted in the worldly experience of a mediaeval Florentine, fond of music, hunting and fine women, keeping disreputable company here and there, and honing his poetic talents via an exchange of scabrous verses with a fellow sonneteer.
There is no reason to disbelieve Dante’s account of falling in love at the age of nine with eight-year-old Beatrice Portinari at a children’s party.
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