Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

“Saving Pedagogy: Dante as the Poet of Education,” Scott F. Crider

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pedagogy

“Dante reveals to students the essence not only of their relationship to their teachers, and ours to them, but also of our combined relationship to the reality (natural, human, and divine) studied during their liberal education. The end of a liberal education is an experience of the Love that created both the subjects of a liberal education and the human persons in need of that education, and Dante achieves that purpose. Through truth and virtue, he becomes wise, and his wisdom sets him free.”

“Without ever addressing the point explicitly with students, I can let Dante reveal to them the essence not only of their relationship to their teachers, and ours to them, but also of our combined relationship to the reality (natural, human, and divine) studied during their liberal education. Dante certainly imagined liberal education as constituted by the trivium and the quadrivium—the arts of word (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and those of number (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music)—as propaedeutic to the study of philosophy and theology, and he imagined poetry, in a work he wrote on the Italian language, De vulgari eloquentia, to be the liberal art combining the consummate art of language and the consummate art of number: ‘Poetry [is] a verbal invention composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music.’ For our purposes, I will hazard a tautology and say that a liberal education liberates. That is, it frees us from error into understanding of the most significant question: How should we live?”

[. . .]

“Virgil’s guidance has been necessary for Dante, but it is not sufficient. His guidance has profound limitations that make it both helpful, given where Dante was, but needing to be surpassed, given where he is going. Imperfect pedagogy, thank goodness, can still save, just not by itself. Students need more than one teacher because of the limits of the master.”

[. . .]

“The relationship between Dante and Beatrice is a suggestive representation of the tendency in pedagogic relationships to confuse the teacher for the thing taught, and to allow one’s shared love of the material to be lost in the distracting presence of the one revealing the material. Guru-ism is a perversion of a truly saving pedagogy—a distortion of a legitimate attraction. Beauty is a salvific distraction, provided the beautiful one reminds us of that which truly saves.”    — Scott F. Crider, Public Discourse, August 21, 2021

Agnosco Veteris, Nina C. Young

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nina-c-young“In book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, Dido, long in grief over her late husband Sychaeus’s death, is suddenly awakened from emotional slumber by the visiting Trojan hero Aeneas. In an upheaval of emotion, she proclaims, ‘Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae,’ or ‘I recognize the traces of an ancient fire.'”

“The quote resurfaces in Dante’s Divine Comedy. The overarching allegory of this epic poem traces themes of Dante’s spiritual quest through symbolism. Dante, guided by Virgil, achieves literary immortality through the act of storytelling that appropriates and amalgamates references to antiquity, classical literature, mythology, Christianity, and (then) contemporary Italian politics. In Purgatorio 30, Dante feels the presence of Beatrice and matches his emotional upheaval to that of Dido. Dante makes a final tribute to Virgil by stating, ‘conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma’ – an Italian translation of the Latin ‘Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae.’”

[. . .]

“Dante appropriates explicit cultural references and symbols as a tool to weave the narrative of the Divine Comedy. However, when I was collecting the source material for Vestigia Flammae, I abandoned explicit quotation. Rather, I tried my hand at writing imagined faux folk, modal, and fanfare-like source-music that could be mistaken for something pre-existing.”

“While episodic in construction, Agnosco Veteris is divided into three large sections. Part 1, the “Music of Before” presents the thematic source material, or sonic memories. Part 2, the “Music of Ritual” is a static reflective checkpoint during which the listener can consider the musical recollections that came before. Part 3, the “Music of After” is characterized by energetic renewal and presents a reconfigured collage of the musical material.”    -Nina C. Young
Listen to Agnosco Veteris here.

“Dante’s Rib” in Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins (2022)

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“In the Margins comprises four essays: ‘Pain and Pen,’ ‘Aquamarine,’ ‘Histories, I,’ and ‘Dante’s Rib.’

“Ferrante’s final essay goes back to the origin of Italian literature and, in giving us a vivid account of her relationship with Dante’s Commedia, continues on with the theme of literature as ‘conversation.’ Indeed, Dante’s ‘most astonishing gift’ is ‘identification’ in Ferrante’s eyes: ‘A Dantesque description is never merely a description but is always the self-transplanted, the heart hurtling swiftly—a few seconds—from inside to out.’ To exemplify this powerful feature, the author cites Dante’s neologisms such as ‘inluiarsi, intuarsi, inmiarsi (enter into him, enter into you, enter into me).’

“According to Ferrante, Beatrice is Dante’s sublime invention as the progenitor of a new hierarchy of women endowed with ‘intelletto,’ able to understand the poet’s praise and not just silent objects to be admired.” [. . .]    -Ann Goldstein, World Literature Today, July 2022

Find Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins here.

Pélagie Gbaguidi, Sacrifice (2013)

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red-script-on-black-drawing-figures“Sacrifice—it appears twice in the usual sense of ‘solemn offer of victims and gifts’ made to godheads. In a broader sense, it refers to any offer, real or symbolic, material or spiritual, made to God: ‘Even as thine own Angels of their will/ Make sacrifice to thee, Hosanna singing, /So many all men make the sacrifice of theirs’ (Purgatorio, Canto XI, 11). In particular, the vow is described as a sacrifice, insofar as its formulation obliges the man, standing before the divinity, to perform or not perform a given action, thus offering to God one’s own freedom of choice. It is Beatrice who clarifies to Dante what the importance of the vow is, as a spontaneous sacrifice and offering to God: ‘closing between God and man the compact, /A sacrifice is of this treasure made’ (Paradiso, Canto V, 29).”

Retrieved from The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists by Simon Njami.

For more information on Pélagie Gbaguidi, see Wikipedia. For more on the artist’s body of work, see AWARE, the Archive of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions.

Berenice Josephine Bickle, film stills (2013)

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shadowy-rags-hanging-in-front-of-red-background

“For the artist, the Divine Comedy represents a ‘theological’ allegory, where the literal level becomes a ‘beautiful lie’ conceived in order to convey a hidden truth. The historical characters that appear in Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso are realistically determined and they provide a figural interpretation of history. From this starting point, the artist feels justified in introducing the viewer to her own reading of the Divine Comedy, in which she investigates histories mirroring Dante’s Inferno from the perspective of contemporary Africa. The work is composed of two opposite video screens, splitting the audience’s point of view between them, as the perception of two narratives occurs simultaneously. The central focus is a looped conversation between Beatrice and Virgil, where the feminine and masculine voices are superimposed by Dante’s presence, a poetical presence that weaves the two narratives together. While Beatrice’s character is dressed in Maputo clothes, surrounded by curious artifacts that together combine to make a coloured plot based on the dynamics of presence/absence and life/death, Virgil becomes a guide to one of the cities of Zimbabwe. No longer a storyteller of the epic on Trojan Wars, the Virgil constructed by the artist narrates the wars of colonial and postcolonial Africa, where the archival footage of Zimbabwe’s liberation war becomes the base for the narrative.”

From The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists by Simon Njami.

For more on the Zimbabwean artist Berry Bickle, see Wikipedia.

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Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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