On 22 October, a packed hall at the Taylor Institution witnessed the inaugural lecture of Oxford’s sixth Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies (click here to watch online). Chair of the Society for Italian Studies (2017-), elected as a council member of the Dante Society of America, Harvard (2005-07), and an honorary member of the Italian Dante Society in Florence (2008-), Simon Gilson is the Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford and a professorial fellow of Magdalen College. He has worked on Dante and Renaissance Italian literary, cultural and intellectual history. He has published widely on Dante, literary criticism in Renaissance Italy, and the relations between science, philosophy and literary culture in Medieval and Renaissance Italy.
Professor Gilson’s lecture dealt with the literary masterpiece by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321): the Commedia. This work – despite being 700 years old and deeply medieval in content – has exercised and continues to exercise a perennial fascination on readers across the globe. Some of the reasons for this fascination were at the centre of his talk: e.g., 1) Dante’s capacity to describe the whole universe in his poem and his concrete interest in things and ideas; 2) the extraordinary diffusion of the Commedia, a diffusion which helped to establish Dante’s literary Florentine as the Italian language; and 3) Dante’s global reach and scale through translations into over 80 languages and various other forms of adaptation (such as illustrations, fictions, and performances). In his lecture, Professor Gilson also pointed out how Dante is not a relic. He can, instead, be seen as someone who is ‘ahead of us’, a view argued by the Italian scholar Gianfranco Contini (1912-1990), whose words are paraphrased in the lecture’s title. That Dante might be considered as being ‘ahead of us’ is perceivable from various points of view: 1) as far as language is concerned, the Commedia still embeds contemporary Italian (indeed, 90% of the 2000 most common words that one needs to communicate in Italian today are already in Dante’s poem); 2) if one considers Dante’s eloquence, his extraordinary linguistic experimentalism, and his stylistic innovations, he can be regarded as a very modern author (one has just to consider his descriptive techniques, which have been often defined as ‘cinematographic’ because of the poet’s obsession with portraying how the objects in his visual field alter their appearance and can be seen from various angles or elevations, or in different atmospheric conditions); and 3) finally, as far as the Commedia’s contents are concerned, the poem raises readers’ attention throughout the ages thanks to its openness and plurality in terms of topics that are dealt with and situations described, as well as thanks to the poet’s remarkable interest in what has been called ‘cultural commingling’ or ‘syncretism’ (i.e. Dante’s capacity to make realities and ideas that seem separate from one other interact: accordingly, we have a Christian poem in which Dante’s first guide is a pagan; and we also have a poet who places Islamic philosophers alongside Hebrew women, the major thinkers of Christendom next to humble illiterate Franciscans).
After a presentation of Dante’s universe and the fascination it raised through the ages, Professor Gilson opted for a philological turn and, by sticking to the text, showed how the Commedia incorporates some aspects of its own cultural context, as a way of suggesting how certain features intrinsic to the poem may have also contributed to his appeal to readers over time and across cultures. He mainly focused on how ideas about vision and cognate faculties (such as wit and the imagination) are central to Dante’s masterpiece, and how understanding these concerns can help us to appreciate not only how his narrative is structured and enlivened but also raise fundamental questions about the poem’s status, ultimate themes and messages.
Sight and vision are fundamental in the Commedia. But how is sight built into the poem? How is it used to stress the providential and inspired nature of the work? How does seeing interconnect with ingenuity and imagination? And, moreover, how does seeing help to put the poem into a special privileged relationship with Dante’s readers? The rest of the lecture was devoted to answering these questions. As mentioned before, Dante is celebrated for his visual imagination, the power to bring things before their readers’ eyes. His interest in his readers and in allowing them to participate in the forms of visibility created by his text is indeed essential. The poet always provides vivid and detailed descriptions of what he sees in the underworld, purgatory, and heaven in order to share with his readers what he learnt from his unique, divine mission. When the poet’s sight fails (as often happens in Paradiso – because of the poet still being human and embodied, even though his powers of vision are increasingly ‘transhumanized’, permitted to extend, that is, beyond their earthly capabilities and to observe the divine mysteries), Dante the poet has recourse to an even richer array of similes than that employed in the previous parts of his work in order to give sense to his readers of what he was allowed to see and to allow them to ‘figure’ what he had experienced by means of visual and mental analogues, even if they are necessarily partial and shadowy ones. Why does Dante do this? One answer lies in the place of vision – physical or divinely inspired and, hence, inner – and its special function in Dante’s poem: it is an instrument of knowledge. When Dante deals with physical forms of vision, he follows precise medical and philosophical theories of sight and gives his readers the possibility to access knowledge through what he describes. But there are situations (occurring in purgatory and paradise) in which he experiences realities that transcend the senses. In these cases, Dante has recourse to a series of inner visions, as a special mode of seeing, ones that are divinely inspired. These visions are experienced through imagination, a faculty capable of receiving images or species even in the absence of direct sensory perception. In the poem, physical vision exists in parallel with (and sometimes metamorphoses into) imaginative ones, when the vision offered to Dante exceeds the senses. Both forms of seeing are a way to access knowledge.
With the reading of a beautiful passage from the tenth canto of the Paradise – where Dante explicitly invites his readers to gaze and marvel before the universe that he has to describe (‘quella materia ond’io son fatto scriba’ [‘that matter of which I am made the scribe’]) –, the new Agnelli-Serena Professor concluded his lecture inviting us all to pursue knowledge in the footsteps of Dante the ‘scriba’.
Giacomo Comiati (Corpus Christi) is a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded project ‘Petrarch Commentary and Exegesis in Renaissance Italy, c.1350-c.1650’.