Dante's Purgatorio: Canto XXIV

Buonagiunta da Lucca. Pope Martin IV, and others. Inquiry into the State of Poetry.

Oct 15, 2024

Nor speech the going, nor the going that
   Slackened; but talking we went bravely on,
   Even as a vessel urged by a good wind.

And shadows, that appeared things doubly dead,
   From out the sepulchres of their eyes betrayed 5
   Wonder at me, aware that I was living.

And I, continuing my colloquy,
   Said: "Peradventure he goes up more slowly
   Than he would do, for other people's sake.

But tell me, if thou knowest, where is Piccarda; 10
   Tell me if any one of note I see
   Among this folk that gazes at me so."

"My sister, who, 'twixt beautiful and good,
   I know not which was more, triumphs rejoicing
   Already in her crown on high Olympus." 15

So said he first, and then: "'Tis not forbidden
   To name each other here, so milked away
   Is our resemblance by our dieting.

This," pointing with his finger, "is Buonagiunta,
   Buonagiunta, of Lucca; and that face 20
   Beyond him there, more peaked than the others,

Has held the holy Church within his arms;
   From Tours was he, and purges by his fasting
   Bolsena's eels and the Vernaccia wine."

He named me many others one by one; 25
   And all contented seemed at being named,
   So that for this I saw not one dark look.

I saw for hunger bite the empty air
   Ubaldin dalla Pila, and Boniface,
   Who with his crook had pastured many people. 30

I saw Messer Marchese, who had leisure
   Once at Forli for drinking with less dryness,
   And he was one who ne'er felt satisfied.

But as he does who scans, and then doth prize
   One more than others, did I him of Lucca, 35
   Who seemed to take most cognizance of me.

He murmured, and I know not what Gentucca
   From that place heard I, where he felt the wound
   Of justice, that doth macerate them so.

"O soul," I said, "that seemest so desirous 40
   To speak with me, do so that I may hear thee,
   And with thy speech appease thyself and me."

"A maid is born, and wears not yet the veil,"
   Began he, "who to thee shall pleasant make
   My city, howsoever men may blame it. 45

Thou shalt go on thy way with this prevision;
   If by my murmuring thou hast been deceived,
   True things hereafter will declare it to thee.

But say if him I here behold, who forth
   Evoked the new-invented rhymes, beginning, 50
   'Ladies, that have intelligence of love?'"

And I to him: "One am I, who, whenever
   Love doth inspire me, note, and in that measure
   Which he within me dictates, singing go."

"O brother, now I see," he said, "the knot 55
   Which me, the Notary, and Guittone held
   Short of the sweet new style that now I hear.

I do perceive full clearly how your pens
   Go closely following after him who dictates,
   Which with our own forsooth came not to pass; 60

And he who sets himself to go beyond,
   No difference sees from one style to another;"
   And as if satisfied, he held his peace.

Even as the birds, that winter tow'rds the Nile,
   Sometimes into a phalanx form themselves, 65
   Then fly in greater haste, and go in file;

In such wise all the people who were there,
   Turning their faces, hurried on their steps,
   Both by their leanness and their wishes light.

And as a man, who weary is with trotting, 70
   Lets his companions onward go, and walks,
   Until he vents the panting of his chest;

So did Forese let the holy flock
   Pass by, and came with me behind it, saying,
   "When will it be that I again shall see thee?" 75

"How long," I answered, "I may live, I know not;
   Yet my return will not so speedy be,
   But I shall sooner in desire arrive;

Because the place where I was set to live
   From day to day of good is more depleted, 80
   And unto dismal ruin seems ordained."

"Now go," he said, "for him most guilty of it
   At a beast's tail behold I dragged along
   Towards the valley where is no repentance.

Faster at every step the beast is going, 85
   Increasing evermore until it smites him,
   And leaves the body vilely mutilated.

Not long those wheels shall turn," and he uplifted
   His eyes to heaven, "ere shall be clear to thee
   That which my speech no farther can declare. 90

Now stay behind; because the time so precious
   Is in this kingdom, that I lose too much
   By coming onward thus abreast with thee."

As sometimes issues forth upon a gallop
   A cavalier from out a troop that ride, 95
   And seeks the honour of the first encounter,

So he with greater strides departed from us;
   And on the road remained I with those two,
   Who were such mighty marshals of the world.

And when before us he had gone so far 100
   Mine eyes became to him such pursuivants
   As was my understanding to his words,

Appeared to me with laden and living boughs
   Another apple-tree, and not far distant,
   From having but just then turned thitherward. 105

People I saw beneath it lift their hands,
   And cry I know not what towards the leaves,
   Like little children eager and deluded,

Who pray, and he they pray to doth not answer,
   But, to make very keen their appetite, 110
   Holds their desire aloft, and hides it not.

Then they departed as if undeceived;
   And now we came unto the mighty tree
   Which prayers and tears so manifold refuses.

"Pass farther onward without drawing near; 115
   The tree of which Eve ate is higher up,
   And out of that one has this tree been raised."

Thus said I know not who among the branches;
   Whereat Virgilius, Statius, and myself
   Went crowding forward on the side that rises. 120

"Be mindful," said he, "of the accursed ones
   Formed of the cloud-rack, who inebriate
   Combated Theseus with their double breasts;

And of the Jews who showed them soft in drinking,
   Whence Gideon would not have them for companions 125
   When he tow'rds Midian the hills descended."

Thus, closely pressed to one of the two borders,
   On passed we, hearing sins of gluttony,
   Followed forsooth by miserable gains;

Then set at large upon the lonely road, 130
   A thousand steps and more we onward went,
   In contemplation, each without a word.

"What go ye thinking thus, ye three alone?"
   Said suddenly a voice, whereat I started
   As terrified and timid beasts are wont. 135

I raised my head to see who this might be,
   And never in a furnace was there seen
   Metals or glass so lucent and so red

As one I saw who said: "If it may please you
   To mount aloft, here it behoves you turn; 140
   This way goes he who goeth after peace."

His aspect had bereft me of my sight,
   So that I turned me back unto my Teachers,
   Like one who goeth as his hearing guides him.

And as, the harbinger of early dawn, 145
   The air of May doth move and breathe out fragrance,
   Impregnate all with herbage and with flowers,

So did I feel a breeze strike in the midst
   My front, and felt the moving of the plumes
   That breathed around an odour of ambrosia; 150

And heard it said: "Blessed are they whom grace
   So much illumines, that the love of taste
   Excites not in their breasts too great desire,

Hungering at all times so far as is just."

NOTES

1 - 1

Continuation of the punishment of Gluttony.

7 - 7

Continuing the words with which the preceding canto closes, and referring to Statius.

10 - 10

Picarda, sister of Forese and Corso Donati. She was a nun of Santa Clara, and is placed by Dante in the first heaven of Paradise, which Forese calls “high Olympus.” See Par. III. 49, where her story is told more in detail.

19 - 19

Buonagiunta Urbisani of Lucca is one of the early minor poets of Italy, a contempory of Dante. Rosetti, Early Italian Poets, 77, gives some specimens of his sonnets and canzoni. All that is known of him is contained in Benvenuto's brief notice: “Buonagiunta of Urbisani, an honorable man of the city of Lucca, a brilliant orator in his mother tongue, a facile producer of rhymes, and still more facile consumer of wines; who knew our author in his lifetime, and sometimes corresponded with him.”

Tiraboschi also mentions him, Storia della Lett., IV. 397: “He was seen by Dante in Purgatory punished among the Gluttons, from which vice, it is proper to say, poetry did not render him exempt.”

22 - 22

Pope Martin the Fourth, whose fondness for the eels of Bolsena brought his life to a sudden close, and his soul to this circle of Purgatory, has been ridiculed in the well-known epigram, –


“Gaudent anguillae, good mortuus hic jacet ille
Qui quasi morte reas excoriabat eas.”

“Martin the Fourth,” says Milman, Hist. Lat. Christ., VI. 143, “was born at Monte Pencè in Brie; he had been Canon of Tours. He put on at first the show of maintaining the lofty character of the Churchman. He excommunicated the Viterbans for their sacrilegious maltreatment of the Cardinals; Rinaldo Annibaldeschi, the Lord of Viterbo, was compelled to ask pardon on his knees of the Cardinal Rosso, and forgiven only at the intervention of the Pope. Martin the fourth retired to Orvieto.


”But the Frenchman soon began to predominate over the
Pontiff; he sunk into the vassal of Charles of Anjou. The
great policy of his predecessor, to assuage the feuds of
Guelph and Ghibelline, was an Italian policy; it was
altogether abandoned. The Ghibellines in every city were
menaced or smitten with excommunication; the Lambertazzi
were driven from Bologna. Forlì was placed under interdict
for harboring the exiles; the goods of the citizens were
confiscated for the benefit of the Pope. Bertoldo Orsini
was deposed from the Countship of Romangna; the office was
bestowed on John of Appia, with instructions everywhere to
coerce or to chastise the refractory Ghibellines.“

Villani, Book VI. Ch. 106, says: ”He was a good man, and very favorable to the Holy Church and to those of the house of France, because he was from Tours.“

He is said to have died of a surfeit. The eels and sturgeon of Bolsena, and the wines of Orvieto and Montefiascone, in the neighborhood of whose vineyards he lived, were too much for him. But he died in Perugia, not in Orvieto.

24 - 24

The Lake of Bolsena is in the Papal States, a few miles northwest of Viterbo, on the road from Rome to Siena. It is thus described in Murray's Handbook of Central Italy, p. 199: –


”Its circular form, and being in the centre of a volcanic
district, has led to its being regarded as an extinct
crater; but that hypothesis can scarcely be admitted when
the great extent of the lake is considered. The treacherous
beauty of the lake conceals malaria in its most fatal
forms; and its shores, although there are no traces of a
marsh, are deserted, excepting where a few sickly hamlets
are scattered on their western slopes. The ground is
cultivated in many parts down to the water's edge, but the
laborers dare not sleep for a single night during the summer
or autumn on the plains where they work by day; and a large
tract of beautiful and productive country is reduced to a
perfect solitude by this invisible calamity. Nothing can be
more striking than the appearance of the lake, without a
single sail upon its waters, and with scarcely a human
habitation within sight of Bolsena; and nothing perhaps can
give the traveller who visits Italy for the first time a
more impressive idea of the effects of malaria.“

Of the Vernaccia of Vernage, in which Pope Martin cooked his eels, Henderson says, Hist. Anc. and Mod. Wines, P. 296: ”The Vernage.... was a red wine, of a bright color, and a sweetish and somewhat rough flavor, which was grown in Tuscany and other parts of Italy, and derived its name from the thick- skinned grape, vernaccia (corresponding with the vinaciola of the ancients), that was used in the preparation of it.“

Chaucer mentions it in the Merchant's Tale: –


”He drinketh ipocras, clarre, and vernage
Of species hot, to encreasen his corage.“

And Redi, Bacchus in Tuscany, Leigh Hunt's Tr., p. 30, sings of it thus: –


”If anybody doesn't like Vernaccia,
I mean that sort that's made in Pietrafitta,
Let him fly
My violent eye;
I curse him clean, through all the Alphabeta.“

28 - 28

Ovid, Met. VII., says of Erisichthon, that he


”Deludes his throat with visionary fare,
Feasts on the wind and banquets on the air.“

29 - 29

Ubaladin dalla Pila was a brother of the Cardinal Ottaviano degli Ubaldini, mentioned Inf. X. 120, and father of the Archbishop Ruggieri, Inf. XXXIII. 14. According to Sacchetti, Nov. 205, he passed most of his time at his castle, and turned his gardener into a priest; ”and Messer Ubaldino,“ continues the novelist, ”put him into his church; of which one may say he made a pigsty; for he did not put in a priest, but a pig in the way of eating and drinking, who had neither grammar nor any good thing in him.“

Some writers say that this Boniface, Archbishop of Ravenna, was a son of Ubaldino; but this is confounding him with Ruggieri, Archbishop of Pisa. He was of the Fieschi of Genoa. His pasturing many people alludes to his keeping a great retinue and court, and the free life they led in matters of the table.

31 - 31

Messer Marchese da Forlì, who answered the accusation made against him, that ”he was always drinking,“ by saying, that ”he was always thirsty.“

37 - 37

A lady of Lucca with whom Dante is supposed to have been enamored. ”Let us pass over in silence,“ says Balbo, Life and Times of Dante, II. 177, ”the consolations and errors of the poor exiles.“ But Buti says: ”He formed an attachment to a gentle lady, called Madonna Gentucca, of the family of Rossimpelo, on account of her great virtue and modesty, and not with any other love.“

Benvenuto and the Ottimo interpret the passage differently, making gentucca a common noun, – gente bassa, low people. But the passage which immediately follows, in which a maiden is mentioned who should make Lucca pleasant to him, seems to confirm the former interpretation.

38 - 38

In the throat of the speaker, where he felt the hunger and thirst of his punishment.

50 - 50

Chaucer, Complaint of the Blacke Knight, 194: –


”But even like as doth skrivenere,
That can no more tell what that he shal write,
But as his maister beside dothe indite.“

51 - 51

A canzone of the Vita Nuova, beginning, in Rosetti's version, Early Italian Poets p. 255: –


”Ladies that have intelligence in love,
Of mine own Lady I would speak with you;
Not that I hope to count her praises through,
But, telling what I may, to ease my mind.“

56 - 56

Jacopo da Lentino, or ”the Notary,“ was a Sicilian poet who flourished about 1250, in the later days of the Emperor Frederick the Second. Crescimbeni, Hist. Volg. Poesia, III. 43, says that Dante ”esteemed him so highly, that he even mentions him in his Comedy, doing him the favor to put him into Purgatory.“ Tassoni, and others after him, make the careless statement that he addressed a sonnet to Petrarca. He died before Petrarca was born. Rosetti gives several specimens of his sonnets and canzonette in his Early Italian Poets, of which the following is one: –


”Of HIS LADY IN HEAVEN.


“I have it in my heart to serve God so
That into Paradise I shall repair, –
The holy place through the which everywhere
I have heard say that joy and solace flow.
Without my lady I were loath to go, –
She who has the bright face and the bright hair;
Beacause if she were absent, I being there,
My pleasure would be less than naught, I know.
Look you, I say not this to such intent
As that I there would deal in any sin:
I only would behold her gracious mien,
And beautiful soft eyes, and lovely face,
That so it should be my complete content
To see my lady joyful in her place.”

Fra Guittone d'Arezzo, a contemporary of the Notary, was one of the Frati Gaudenti, or Jovial Friars, mentioned In Inf. XXIII. Note 103. He first brought the Italian Sonnet to the perfect form it has since preserved, and left behind the earliest specimens of Italian letter-writing. These letters are written in a very florid style, and are perhaps more potential than his verses, which certainly fall very far short of the “sweet new style.” Of all his letters the best is that To the Florentines, from which a brief extract is given Canto VI. Note 76.

82 - 82

Corso Donati, the brother of Forese who is here speaking, and into whose mouth nothing but Ghibelline wrath could have put these words. Corso was the leader of the Neri in Florence, and a partisan of Charles de Valois. His death is recorded by Villani, VIII. 96, and is thus described by Napier, Flor. Hist., I. 407: –


“The popularity of Corso was now thoroughly undermined, and
the priors, after sounding the Campana for a general
assembly of the armed citizens, laid a formal accusation
before the Podestà Piero branca d'Agobbio against him for
conspiring to overthrow the liberties of his country, and
endeavoring to make himself Tyrant of Florence: he was
immediately cited to appear, and, not complying, from a
reasonable distrust of his judges, was within one hour,
against all legal forms, condemned to lose his head, as a
rebel and traitor to the commonwealth.


”Not willing to allow the culprit more time for an armed
resistance than had been given for legal vindication, the
Seignory, preceded by the Gonfalonier of justice, and
followed by the Podestà, the captain of the people, and the
executor, – all attended by their guards and officers, –
issued from the palace; and with the whole civic force
marshalled in companies, with banners flying, moved forward
to execute an illegal sentence against a single citizen, who
nevertheless stood undaunted on his defence.


“Corso, on first hearing of the prosecution, had hastily
barricaded all the approaches to his palace, but, disabled
by the gout, could only direct the necessary operations from
his bed; yet thus helpless, thus abandoned by all but his
own immediate friends and vassals; suddenly condemned to
death; encompassed by the bitterest foes, with the whole
force of the republic banded against him, he never cowered
for an instant, but courageously determined to resist, until
succored by Uguccione della Faggiola, to whom he had sent
for aid. This attack continued during the greater part of
the day, and generally with advantage to the Donati, for the
people were not unanimous, and many fought unwillingly, so
that, if the Rossi, Bardi, and other friends had joined, and
Uguccioni's forces arrived, it would have gone hard with the
citizens. The former were intimidated, the latter turned
back on hearing how matters stood; and then only did Corso's
adherents lose heart and slink from the barricades, while
the townsmen pursued their advantage by breaking down a
garden wall opposite the Stinche prisons and taking their
enemy in the rear. This completed the disaster, and Corso,
seeing no chance remaining, fled towards the Casentino; but,
being overtaken by some Catalonian troopers in the
Florentine service, he was led back a prisoner from
Rovezzano. After vainly endeavoring to bribe them, unable
to support the indignity of a public execution at the hands
of his enemies, he let himself fall from his horse, and,
receiving several stabs in the neck and flank from the
Catalan lances, his body was left bleeding on the road,
until the monks of San Salvi removed it to their convent,
where he was interred next morning with the greatest
privacy. Thus perished Corso Donati, 'the wisest and most
worthy knight of his time; the best speaker, the most
experienced statesman; the most renowned, the boldest, and
most enterprising nobleman in Italy: he was handsome in
person and of the most gracious manners, but very worldly,
and caused infinite disturbance in Florence on account of
his ambition.' [Villani, VIII. Ch. 96].... 'People now
began to repose, and his unhappy death was often and
variously discussed, according to the feelings of friendship
or enmity that moved the speaker; but in truth, his life was
dangerous, and his death reprehensible. He was a knight of
great mind and name, gentle in manners as in blood; of a
fine figure even in his old age, with a beautiful
countenance, delicate features, and a fair complexion;
pleasing, wise; and an eloquent speaker. His attention was
ever fixed on important things; he was intimate with all the
great and noble, had an extensive influence, and was famous
throughout Italy. He was an enemy of the middle classes and
their supporters, beloved by the troops, but full of
malicious thoughts, wicked, and artful. He was thus basely
murdered by a foreign soldier, and his fellow-citizens well
knew the man, for he was instantly conveyed away: those who
ordered his death were Rosso della Tosa and Pazzino de'
Pazzi, as is commonly said by all; and some bless him and
some the contrary. Many believe that the two said knights
killed him, and I, wishing to ascertain the truth, inquired
diligently, and found what I have said to be true' [Dino
Compagni, III. 76.]. Such is the character of Corso Donati,
which has come down to us from two authors who must have
been personally acquainted with this distinguished chief,
but opposed to each other in the general politics of their
country.”

Divine Comedy Weekly

Discussion about this post