Dante's Medieval and Renaissance Commentators: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Constructions

Criticism of Dante's medieval and Renaissance commentators in the last ten years encompasses a wide range of philological activity: detailed investigations into the earliest commentators' use of sources; new attempts to settle questions concerning dating, dependencies, and attribution; and in-depth studies of one commentator or of a period of commentary. These studies testify eloquently to the recent resurgence of interest in Dante commentaries. However, there is an uncanny sense of repetition to this situation. Resurgences of interest in commentary are periodic. The diverse interests of the last ten years have been in part conditioned by the kinds of studies of commentary that dominated the nineteenth century, the period in which commentary first emerges as an object of criticism. The legacies of these earlier nineteenth-century studies still crisscross the surface of recent work—largely unexamined, yet exerting a considerable influence on later critical activity.

Positivism, Nationalism, and Antiquarianism

Although no brief narrative can account for all the particulars, it is nonetheless possible to identify the influences significant to the move from commentary to criticism of the commentaries. This reorientation was largely due to the effects of positivism, nationalism, and antiquarianism. These three impulses, each of which produces a different thread of the critical legacy, underwrite the renewed interest in Dante in the nineteenth century.

The work of scholars like Alessandro D'Ancona, Adolfo Bartoli, Giuseppe Vandelli, and Isidoro Del Lungo is associated with the historical school of criticism that flourished in Italy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The locus of most of these studies was Florence, which had a long tradition of Dante studies and was the center of other philological-historical researches. Positivist research on Dante tended to focus on the state of the text of the Comedy, on the reconstruction of the poet's historical moment, and on the identification of Dante's literary precursors. We can best get a sense of the spirit and practice of these positivist researches by examining their contribution to one of the most prominent critical issues of the latter half of the nineteenth century: the matter of whether Beatrice was strictly a symbol or a historical person. D'Ancona contended that she was a real woman. Bartoli, on the other hand, argued that Beatrice was based on a feminine ideal inspired by a number of women admired by Dante. This issue was resolved, in part, through recourse to an early commentary on the poem. Bartoli, after being informed by one of his students, Luigi Rocca, that Pietro Alighieri refers to Beatrice Portinari as the woman whom his father loved, published a letter to D'Ancona in the Florentine newspaper La Nazione. This letter, writes Rodolfo Renier, was widely regarded as una mezza ritrattazione on the part of Bartoli. What is significant in this debate is the particular use made of commentary at this time—as a means of adjudicating a dispute, as a kind of critical referee. Such a use was by no means unprecedented or unusual: in the previous century professional scholars and aristocratic connoisseurs had often consulted the medieval and Renaissance commentaries to determine the meaning of obscure points in the poem. Motivated by antiquarian interests, scholars such as Antonio Rosso Martini had examined the codices in the libraries of the Accademia della Crusca and San Lorenzo to check the meaning of words like cruna (Purgatorio 21.37) and brigata (Purgatorio 14.106) in the commentaries of Francesco da Buti, Landino, and Vellutello. Occasionally these forays would lead to speculations concerning the commentaries' dating and provenance. Bartoli, like other scholars, consulted the commentaries as one might other early documents in order to cast light on critical issues of the day. This unreflexive use of commentary is typical: Pietro Alighieri's remarks acquire immediately an authoritative status because of his vicinity to the poet—as a contemporary and as Dante's son. His comments settle, prematurely, a hotly contested interpretive point, with a serene innocence as to the historical status of this commentary in general. This aspect of positivist scholarship, an "objective description of a series of events in an isolated past," fails to consider the historicity of either the Comedy or commentaries to it. Part of its seemingly authoritative status in settling modern disputes results from the particular twists and turns of the ensuing commentary tradition. The tradition of commentary has, in part, worked to produce modern readers who would perceive a force to and authority in Pietro's remarks. The power of Pietro's work to settle interpretative disputes is not so much owing to the commentator's sagacity as to the situation of readers such as Bartoli, who have been prepared to see authority in Pietro's work by the commentary tradition in which they participate and by which they were formed.

A more direct evaluation of the commentaries is offered by Karl Witte, whose work on the poet represents the culmination of the golden age of Dante scholarship in Germany between the 1820s and 1860s. As elsewhere in Europe, historical studies flourished in Germany, but the particular contribution of German scholarship was the emphasis accorded philology. In an essay that with typical directness he titles "The Art of Misunderstanding Dante" (1823), Witte called for greater philological-historical scrupulousness in textual matters. Witte's hopes of producing a more accurate text of the Comedy led him to examine hundreds of manuscripts of the early commentaries for what he hoped would be more reliable transcriptions of the poem. Although Witte's archival researches yielded little in the way of a more correct text of the Comedy, his increasing familiarity with the commentaries did provide him with a new object of study. He amended, for example, many of Paul Colomb De Batines's conjectures concerning the dating and dependencies between Jacopo della Lana and the Ottimo commentator, and many of his observations inform Luigi Rocca's later assessment of these two commentators.

Witte's comparisons between these commentaries and those of his own day also increased critics' awareness of the contributions of early commentaries. In Witte's eyes, nineteenth-century commentators were insensitive to the poem's religious meaning, and their political readings were so farfetched that they were markedly inferior to their medieval...