Dante and ‘visibile parlare’Lina Bolzoni

My contribution takes inspiration from chapter 6 of The Undivine Comedy, ‘Re-presenting What God Presented: The Arachnean Art of the Terrace of Pride’. In this chapter, Barolini provides a metapoetic reading of the terrace of pride, demonstrating in a highly convincing manner that its ekphrastic artwork constitutes ‘an authorial meditation on the principles of mimesis as they apply to Dante and to his art’,11See Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 122, hereafter UDC. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. a meditation that immediately violates traditional boundaries because art overcomes nature and because of the involvement of different senses. Moreover, the comparison with the caryatides, whose image ‘fa del non ver vera rancura’ (‘makes the unreal give rise to real distress’; Purg. 10.133),22All citations from the Divina Commedia are drawn from Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi (Milan: Mondadori, 1966–67). Translations into English, with modifications at times for clarity, are from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Allen Mandelbaum, 3 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980–82). tells us that the unreal suffering of the sculpted images causes real distress in the pilgrim-observer. Here Dante describes reality using the experience of art and offers a synthesis of the canto that asks what is real and what is not: ‘This line, “la qual fa del non ver vera rancura”, epitomizes the theme at the heart of this canto, the question Beginning of page[p. 246] the poet is posing throughout: what is reality, what is truth?’ (UDC, p. 125). If God’s art is real, Barolini argues, Dante’s art wishes to represent reality: ‘And so we find the programmatic use of a lexicon that blurs the boundary between the divine mimesis and the text that is charged with reproducing it’ (UDC, p. 126). Similarly: ‘the various techniques for blurring the boundary between art and life employed in the representation of the reliefs also serve to blur the distinction between God’s representation and the representation that represents it’ (UDC, p. 130). And: ‘the “visibile parlare” of the engravings works to suggest the interchangeability of the two artists and to approximate on the page what God did in stone’ (UDC, p. 130).

At the same time, Barolini notes — in what, in my view, is one of the most important contributions of the chapter — that Dante is fully conscious of the risks that such an operation entails: his reference to Arachne, who is ‘mad’ (‘folle’) like Ulysses, is also a reference to the significance that Ovid gives to this story, and to the risks human representation implies. In Ovid’s telling, Arachne presumes to be the goddess Minerva’s rival, her ‘aemula’ (Metamorphoses, 6.83): ‘Arachne, aemula indeed, matches verisimilitude with greater verisimilitude’ (UDC, p. 131). This is a risk that Dante, however, is determined to assume — all the way to the end.

In this essay I would like to focus on some of the ways that Dante seeks to realize this ‘visibile parlare’ (visible speech), employing a kind of mimesis that competes with its divine equivalent: ‘these cantos speak of Dante’s greatness and establish the poet as an Arachne, as aemulus; indeed, they constitute in themselves an Arachnean act of emulation’ (UDC, p. 141). My viewpoint will be above all that of reception, or rather of how the pact that the poet creates with his own readers is realized.

I believe the recurrent use of a lexicon that implicates the visual senses, which picks up on that of the figurative arts — I limit myself to recalling here Beatrice ‘col volto di riso dipinto’ (‘with a smile painted on her face’; Par. 29.7) — brings us back to a fundamental characteristic of the poem: that is, the attempt to reveal the afterlife by rendering it almost visible to one’s physical eye, as well as to the eye of one’s mind, with all that this entails in terms of universal consciousness, a prophetic vision of the present, and interior transformation. For Beginning of page[p. 247] this reason, the Dantean journey is also a progressive training of one’s sight. The poet states in Purgatorio 26.58: ‘Quinci sù vo per non esser più cieco’ (‘That I be blind no longer, through this place | I pass’). Throughout the poem his guides — first Virgil and then Beatrice — lead him gradually to see, to look fixedly, to forcefully turn his gaze, and to orient it in the correct direction.

The cantos of Purgatorio in which humility is exalted and pride is punished give us an extraordinary example of this phenomenon:

Virgil is more than anything the director of Dante’s gaze here: at the beginning, he is on the left, on the side of the heart, and following his words Dante moves so that he has the second scene right in front of his eyes. The view, or rather the description of the various sculptures, corresponds to the stopping points along a precise journey that we as reader-viewers must also follow and reconstruct with precision in our mind.

In this particular moment, Virgil’s invitation to gaze assumes one of its most convincing, almost expressionist forms. It is an invitation to look at and to recognize the penitents, the prideful bent towards the ground due to the boulders they must carry, such that Virgil himself had trouble identifying them at first beyond their twisted figures.Beginning of page[p. 248] Within the human figure resides, in fact, the image, or the divine correspondence, which sin corrodes and can even destroy:

The use of ‘disviticchia’ (‘unravel’; v. 118) in these verses makes the reader almost feel the effort of distinguishing or disentangling something that is tightly bound, like a tendril on a plant, and brings back the phonic heaviness of the rhyme ‘rannicchia’ (‘curls up’; v.116). It is again Virgil who signals to Dante the novel placement of the examples of pride:

And it is Virgil who, at the end of the path, invites him to lift his gaze, to shift his perspective to see the angel:

Let us turn now to how Dante describes the images carved into the wall and the floor of the terrace. His first remark relates to the extraordinary quality of the sculptures:Beginning of page[p. 249]

In an ideal competition, these images would be victorious both over nature and over the greatest works of antiquity, here represented by Polyclitus, for they directly convey divine art, of which nature and human art are mere imitations. But Dante tells us something more, and at the same time something less generic. He looks up close, with a fixed and attentive gaze, and communicates to us his reactions as a viewer:

The image seems real, endowed with life and voice, thanks to the ‘atto soave’ (the ‘gracious action’) of verse 38, the posture and attitude as they are represented. If the ‘imagine che tace’ (‘image that is silent’) refers to the ancient tradition in which the visual arts do not possess the voice that characterizes poetry, the reference to the ‘atto’ — an act that will be reprised shortly, in reference to the Virgin Mary — places prominence on the instrument with which painting can overcome its limitations (as Leonardo da Vinci will observe in detail). Specifically, it impresses a voice and emotions on the images. But this is still not enough:Beginning of page[p. 250]

We are well beyond the traditional instruments of the visual arts: here we do not find the artist’s inclusion of carved tablets on which one could read the citations that synthesized the evangelical account of the Annunciation. Here, instead, the ‘act’ is permeated by the word, just like a seal imprints a figure on wax. However, in this case the figure is not the issue, but rather the words that the observers seem to hear, so that the effect is to convey a very strong sense of reality.

This move toward illusionism is made even more complex in the second bas relief, which represents the transportation of the sacred ark along with the punishment of Uzzah, who arrogates to himself a task that is not reserved for him. It also represents the dance of David, the ‘humble psalmist’ (‘umile salmista’):

Dante is in front of the bas relief with his body, and therefore also with his senses. What is enacted for us — who in our turn participate in his experience — is the conflict that is created between the different senses: between sight and hearing, in relation to the song being sung, and between sight and smell, in relation to the smoke of the incense that is imagined there (‘imaginato’ repeats the same verb used in verse 41 for the representation of the Virgin Mary). The illusionism and the appearance of life that are properties of the images are here reprised and reinforced, to the point of synaesthesia: the conflict between the senses comes into play, and the featured senses widen to include smell. There is also an example of incorrect reception within the scene being represented. Michal, David’s wife, is the example of someone who does not know how to grasp the correct meaning, who does not properly invert the message connected to appearance and to exteriority:

The third bas relief with its example of humility, that of Trajan and the widow, seems at first less invested in the illusionistic effect: the widow is ‘di lacrime atteggiata e di dolore’ (‘acting as one in tears and sadness would’; v. 78, emphasis mine), while the splendid emblems, the golden eagles, seem to move in the wind (‘sovr’essi in vista al vento si movieno’ or ‘above their heads […] moving in the wind’; v. 81). But then a rapid theatrical dialogue comes to life in front of us (the carvings ‘pareva dir’; ‘seemed to be saying’; v. 83). The exchange concludes with a gloss or commentary of sorts, in the form of the magnificent oxymoron ‘visibile parlare’ (‘visible speech’), perhaps inspired by the formula ‘verba visibilia’ (see UDC, p. 307 note 7) of Saint Augustine,Beginning of page[p. 252] who uses it incidentally in reference to the corporeal language of actors in the theatre (De doctrina christiana, 2.3):

What Dante witnessed, we are reminded, is the work of God, who is evoked here with a periphrasis that positions him from the viewpoint of the spectator. The pleasure that the work induces in the observer is connected to the quality of the author, or rather of the ‘fabbro’ (‘maker’):

It is also connected to the newness of the artifact, to its being a ‘cosa nova’:

Dante thus gives us precise instructions for our reading: we must revive within ourselves the illusion of reality generated by the images, revive their capacity to engage our senses, to create a theatre in our mind. And we must appreciate the unique nature of their maker and their resulting newness, which in and of itself is a source of pleasure. But that is not enough. We are invited into an affective form of involvement, which draws sustenance from the evocation of a shared earthly experience that then is projected onto the places and the images that the poem Beginning of page[p. 253] offers us. This is the case of the evocation of the caryatids, which immediately follows Virgil’s invitation to look fixedly and, using sight, to unravel the figures who advance oppressed by boulders:

Here the reference to a visual memory, easily shared by his public, permits Dante to aid in the visualization of the penitents who are atoning for their pride. Analogous procedures to those we have observed in the description of the examples of humility carved into the wall are applied here to the distorted figures of the oppressed penitents: beyond an emphasis on the concentration of the gaze, we find again the thematic term ‘atti’ (‘acts’),33Translated above by Mandelbaum as ‘aspect’. which mediates between interiority and exteriority as well as suggesting the presence of language and with language the related emotion (unbearable suffering in this case). The poet’s recall of caryatids is directed precisely at generating this affective involvement: the represented bodies and the comparison of them to unreal sculpted caryatids causes real distress in the observer (‘del non ver vera rancura’; v. 133). Affective involvement breaks down Beginning of page[p. 254] the boundaries between real and artificial for the spectator, so that one is made to participate empathically in the suffering represented. The evocation of the caryatids becomes all the more effective in this context if we recall, as critics have noted, that during Dante’s lifetime two caryatids could be found on one of the doors of the cathedral of Civita Castellana. Below them we find the following inscription, which communicates the dialogue between these two sculpted figures:44Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, in her commentary on Purgatorio, writes: ‘in una porta della cattedrale di Civita Castellana si trovavano al tempo di Dante due cariatidi (ora nella chiesa di S. Antonio), sotto le quali si legge questa iscrizione: “Teneas, gative, aiutame | Non possum quia crepo” (“Aiutami, disgraziato; non posso perché crepo”). L’indicazione è del Fallani (ad locum)’. See Dante Alighieri, Commedia, ed. with commentary by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, 3 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1991–97), ii: Purgatorio (1994), p. 313 note 139. The last reference is to the commentary of Giovanni Fallani.

We don’t know if Dante saw these figures, even if Civita Castellana is cited in De vulgari eloquentia 1.13.2. Nevertheless, we can bear in mind that similar inscriptions associated with caryatids could also be found elsewhere. A reader of the poem could thus recall images that really did speak, and who expressed, maybe in an efficient mix of Latin and the vernacular, a suffering without remedy.

There is a functionally analogous reference to the visual experiences of Dante’s contemporaries further along: it is the evocation of ‘tombe terragne’ (‘pavement tombs’), or of tombs excavated into the earth and closed by a slab on which the portrait of the dead person is chiselled, represented in such a way to recall his or her social status:

The reminder of those ‘tombe terragne’ — pavement tombs that we can still see today in churches, cloisters, and cemeteries and that were a feature of shared common experience — serves to introduce the scenes of punished pride that are carved into the floor of this terrace.

Very striking here is the emotional charge that such a memory brings with it: ‘la puntura de la rimembranza’ (‘the pain of recollection’; v. 20) characterizes an impassioned memory that goes far beyond this passage and involves the entire process of knowledge, of memory, and of transformation that the Commedia constructs.55For further discussion of a ‘memoria appassionata’ within the text, see Lina Bolzoni, ‘Dante o della memoria appassionata’, Lettere Italiane, 60.2 (2008), pp. 169–93. There are selected recipients for this action of memory, one that incites only the pious — ‘che solo a’ pïi dà de le calcagne’ (‘which only kicks the heels of the pious’; v. 21) — and that is described in terms that reintroduce with effective realism the theme of the ‘puntura’, as Francesco da Buti noted: ‘come si pugne lo cavallo co li sproni che sono a le calcagna’ (‘as one stings a horse with the spurs at one’s heels’).66See Francesco da Buti, Commento di Francesco da Buti sopra La Divina Commedia di Dante Allighieri, ed. by Crescentino Giannini (Pisa: Fratelli Nistri, 1858–62), ad loc. The English has been supplied by the translator. The reader is invited to join this particularly sensitive and pious slice of the public: the stinging memory, full of renewed pain caused by the pavement tombs, constitutes the perspective one needs to prepare oneself to ‘see’ the images carved into the floor of this terrace. Such images, as we are reminded at the end of the description of exemplary scenes, are of a superior artistic quality to those of human art, evoked here with particular attention to the instruments, to the techniques (the brush of the painter, the stick used to draw), and to the ‘ingegno Beginning of page[p. 256] sottile’ (‘discerning mind’; v. 69) that is required of the artist and/or their public. The whole culminates in an emphasis on the convincing illusion created by the images, on their ability to give the impression of reality:

But there is something else that as readers we must know how to see. We must see the acrostic VOM that takes shape on the space of the page when, shattering the linearity of writing, we revisit the initial letters of the twelve terzine that present exemplary descriptions of pride: ‘Vedea’, ‘O’, and ‘Mostrava’, each repeated four times, with the same words forming the beginning of each verse in the thirteenth terzina that follows (Purg. 12.25–63). What we must know how to see, therefore, is the word UOM or man (U and V were written with the same symbol in inscriptions). That is, we must know how to recognize, in the weft of language, the signs or the fragments that we must then reconstruct into a word that in turn reinforces the apostrophes against the pride of the ‘figliuoli d’Eva’ (‘sons of Eve’; v. 71).

Barolini has given a splendid analysis of the artistry of the acrostic, the ‘artificio’ (‘artifice’; v. 23) that Dante inscribes into his text: ‘The figured ground is imitated by the figured text, which now launches into its own artificio, the acrostic whose artificiosità, frequently criticized, is in fact intended to imitate divine artificio’ (UDC, p. 127). She demonstrates how the acrostic revives, at the level of poetic writing, the mimesis of the figured artifice: the figured ground of the terrace, she writes, is imitated and in a certain sense reproduced by the ‘figured’ text of the acrostic. For this reason, she notes, the acrostic is not an arbitrary Beginning of page[p. 257] appendix but is fully inserted into the text. Very meaningful, too, is the comparison that she suggests with Paradiso 18–19 in the heaven of justice: Paradiso 19 is the other canto of the Commedia in which an acrostic appears (Par. 19.115–41), and this is the heaven where the souls eventually compose the shape of the eagle and initially compose the words ‘Diligite iustitiam […] qui iudicatis terram’ (Par. 18.91–93), thus indicating that in God signum and res coincide.

We can observe, moreover, that the acrostic is a rhetorical artifice traceable to that ‘parola dipinta’ (‘painted word’) to which Giovanni Pozzi dedicated a remarkable book, identifying various expressions of the attempt to go beyond the boundary between visible and legible, between body and word.77See Giovanni Pozzi, La parola dipinta (Milan: Adelphi, 1981).

Here, from this clue, we can begin to interrogate ourselves with respect to the nature of Dante’s task, and with respect to the sense of his ‘visibile parlare’. Cantos 10–12 of Purgatorio seemingly propose no more than ekphrases of divine works of art, situated in the afterlife, which act as images of humility and pride. But we have seen how accurately the extraordinary nature of these works is described, and how little by little we are invited, almost compelled, to make them live again within us. And it is precisely Dante, the poet, who does this and here makes us see, with his words, a new and divine art. The cantos of ‘visibile parlare’ are a sort of mise en abyme of the entire poem — a poem that does not only seek to overcome the boundaries between the worldly and the otherworldly, and to measure itself according to divine excess and the ineffable, but also to show us the world of the afterlife.

It is in this key that the passages in which the language of painting is used to describe poetic writing acquire particular relief. I will present two examples. At the end of the list of the ‘spiriti magni’ (‘great-hearted souls’; v.119) whom Dante sees in the noble castle of Limbo, we read the following:

More elaborate is the implicit pictorial comparison found in the words of Statius, who in purgatory explains how he became Christian thanks to the poetry of Virgil:

Drawing and, later, color come to represent various moments in the poem’s narration, which gradually make themselves more precise, and in fact take on shape and life.

We can additionally see the signs of tension between visible and legible as it steadily emerges in the poem and becomes an element of Dante’s rivalry with the classical poets, beginning with Virgil himself. Upon the invitation of his guide in the forest of the suicides, Dante breaks off a branch from which spill both the blood and the laments of Pier della Vigna. Virgil will apologize to Piero, explaining that Dante does not have sufficient faith in what he read in the Aeneid (3.22–68) on the topic of Polydorus:

At the same moment in which Dante shows off his recall of the Aeneid, he also underlines the superiority of visibility, of the perceptible experience that creates a credibility much superior to that of words alone (‘ciò c’ha veduto pur con la mia rima’; v. 48). It is precisely this eloquent visuality that Dante believes he transmits. We read, for example, at the beginning of canto 14 in Inferno:

And shortly after we find the exclamation that demands our attention as readers:

We may only read, but the text attempts to make us participants in the vision that Dante experienced, to make it ‘manifest’ before our eyes.

As Teodolinda Barolini has shown, Dante is the new Ulysses, and also the new Arachne. Knowing well the risks that his mimesis of the divine entails, the risks of what is effectively a sort of Arachnean competition with the divine, he nevertheless arrives safely in port. At least, that is what he tells us.