Dante Alighieri

(1265-1321)

   Italian poet who authored the Divine Comedy (1307-1321). The son of a Guelf notary from Florence, Dante fought in 1289 in the Battle of Campaldino, which led to the defeat of the Ghibellines. In 1295, he became a member of the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries, a membership needed to fulfill his posts as diplomat and magistrate. By 1300 the Guelfs divided into two rivaling factions, the Bianchi and Neri, and when the Neri seized power in Florence in 1302, the Bianchi, among them Dante, were exiled from the city. Dante traveled through Italy, and perhaps also Paris and England. He died in Ravenna in 1321.

   Dante's Divine Comedy describes his journey through hell (Inferno), purgatory (Purgatorio), and paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and then his beloved Beatrice. Written in the vernacular, Dante inaugurated a new literary genre and made the Tuscan dialect he used the standard Italian language. Until the 16th century, Dante's influence on art and culture was clearly felt. The depiction of hell in the Strozzi Chapel at Santa Maria Novella, Florence (1355-1357), by Nardo del Cione is based on Dante's Inferno and, in Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican (1536-1541), Charon, one of Dante's characters in the same text, mans the boat that takes the souls to the underworld. Other artists celebrated Dante by including his portrait in fresco cycles. In the Villa Carducci at Legnaia (1448), Andrea del Castagno placed him among the illustrious men and women he rendered. In the Stanza della Segnatura (1510-1511), Raphael placed Dante in Parnassus alongside Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, and the Ferrarese poet Ludovico Ariosto.