Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)

Italian poet. His masterpiece La divina commedia/The Divine Comedy (1307–21) is an epic account in three parts of his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, during which he is guided part of the way by the poet Virgil; on a metaphorical level, the journey is also one of Dante's own spiritual development. Other works include De vulgari eloquentia/Concerning the Vulgar Tongue (1304–06), an original Latin work on Italian, its dialects, and kindred languages; the philosophical prose treatise Convivio/The Banquet (1306–08), the first major work of its kind to be written in Italian rather than Latin;De monarchia/On World Government (1310–13), expounding his political theories; and Canzoniere/Lyrics.

Dante was born in Florence, where in 1274 he first met and fell in love with Beatrice Portinari (described in La vita nuova/New Life (1283–92)). His love for her survived her marriage to another man and her death in 1290 at the age of 24. According to the writer Boccaccio, from 1283 to 1289 Dante was engaged in study, and after the death of Beatrice he seems to have entered into a period of intense philosophic study. In 1289 he fought in the battle of Campaldino, won by Florence against Arezzo, and from 1295 took an active part in Florentine politics. In 1300 he was one of the six priors of the Republic, favouring the moderate Guelph party rather than the extreme papal Ghibelline faction (see Guelph and Ghibelline); when the Ghibellines seized power in 1302, he was convicted in his absence of misapplication of public money and sentenced to death. He escaped from Florence and spent the remainder of his life in exile, in central and northern Italy.

Dante's works fall into three distinct periods. The first is that of new life, the epoch of worship of the real Beatrice, in which the young poet saw many things by his intellect, ‘as it were dreaming’. This period includes La vita nuova. The second period is that of passion, political turmoil, and philosophical research, and marks a great advance in almost every direction. It includes the greater part of his lyric verse and the two unfinished prose treatises the Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia. The Latin treatise De monarchia may also belong here. The last period is that of La divina commedia, the return to Beatrice, now an allegorical figure. Two eclogues, pastoral poems in Latin hexameters, probably also belong to the closing period of Dante's life, but their authenticity has been questioned.

His remaining lyric verse falls into four groups: the first of La vita nuova period; the second in which allegory is beginning to supplant the real Beatrice; the third expressing passionate love of other real women; the fourth, canzoni on rectitude, nobility, and gallantry. Just as in the La vita nuova Dante collected all his early lyrics in a prose narrative, so in the Convivio he attempted to collect 14 of his later canzoni, with a prose commentary to the glory of his mystical lady, Philosophy. The work, however, was left incomplete. Of the Latin works, De monarchia is an attempt to solve the burning medieval question of the relations of church and state, of spiritual and temporal authority. It is divided into three books, and has been described as ‘the most purely ideal of political works ever written’. De vulgari eloquentia, also unfinished, deals with the search for the highest form of the vernacular, and with the application of Italian to poetry.