Dante's Divine Comedy - No.2
もう少しダンテについて語りましょう。(English) Let's talk a little more about Dante.
Dante's Divine Comedy - No.2
1)
No small number of people and works worldwide have impacted our culture, images, and values.
For example, the first of these is the Bible.
And it is the impact it has had and continues to have on our culture.
Next, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and his seminal work, The Divine Comedy.
2)
Dante was born into a distinguished Florentine family.
He was a young man with a strong sense of justice, passion, and a clear mind with a promising future.
He also aspired to become a leader of the City of Flowers himself.
Dante fell in love with Beatrice at an early age.
He designated her as his poetic goddess.
He had feelings for her all his life, but Beatrice died young.
3)
As depicted in the Divine Comedy, he suffered permanent exile from his beloved Florence due to conflicts with the powers of the time and intrigues by rival forces.
Closed off from leadership, Dante died in Ravenna, leaving him in exile, never to return to his homeland again.
The Divine Comedy was written in exile and is said to have been completed shortly before his death.
4)
The Divine Comedy places Christian values at its bottom.
However, it blended diverse aesthetics, including Greek and Roman, in a free and humanistic sensibility.
What would the subsequent Renaissance have been like if not for this work?
He had such a profound impact on the world that one wonders whether we would have had what might be called a literary revival without him.
5)
The greatness of this work lies in the fact that it gave a new perspective on the social situation and values of Europe at a time when feudal power and Christianity held absolute sway over right and wrong.
It evoked the Renaissance through a Greek or Roman way of free and intelligent thought or a will and aesthetic sense that divine feminine and human beauty, symbolized by the cult of the goddess.
6)
At the same time, it is noteworthy that Dante presented images of hell, purgatory, and heaven through language.
In the Bible, for example, there are concepts of sin and punishment, but neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament describes hell or what it is like.
Nor is there any specific description of heaven about its image.
7)
Dante was the first to describe the underworld as a whole as excellent, and this became the original image that people have subsequently conjured up of hell and heaven.
Conversely, if Dante had not spoken of the 'underworld' with such clarity and impact in The Divine Comedy, it is possible that the world as we know it today would not exist.
The images created by Dante became the subject of painting through the Divine Comedy and the various books that took it as a model, as well as repeatedly by many painters, including Botticelli.
In doing so, they were remembered as a collective fantasy of the people and the reality brought about by the words.