The Portrait of Francesca. Inferno V

As far as we know, there is no record of the love story of Francesca da Rimini before Dante's account in Canto V of the Inferno. His portrait of her emerges in astonishingly few verses and, in its passion and pathos, emulates and rivals Virgil's portrayal of Dido. Francesca tells us nothing of her life in the first part of her monologue, apart from her place of birth, which she identifies with elegant periphrasis. Instead, she sums up in retrospect the genesis, consummation and fatal consequences of the love she shared with her inseparable companion in Hell, whom she does not name. Her celebrated apostrophe to love, the unforgettable anaphora on "Amore," is at once succinct and profound, a rhetorical representation in miniature of consciousness and interiority without precedent in the Middle Ages. We shall see that part of it is ultimately derived from Plato's Phaedrus, yet it anticipates the "subjectivity" we associate with the modern novel.

In three anaphoric terzine, Francesca describes love and its effects, not abstractly, as had other poets and especially Guido Cavalcanti in his abstruse canzone, Donna me prega, but existentially, relating how she and her lover fell prey to that passion and so were led to their death. This first half of her meditation ends with a prophetic imprecation

Figure 1.

Frontispiece to Opera nova del magnifico cavaliero Messer Antonio Philaremo Fregoso intitulata Cerva biancha. Corretta novamente, printed by Niccolò Zoppino, Venice, 1525. Biblioteca Angelica, Rome. Photo: Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.

consigning their killer to the circle of Cain. The name of the original fratricide identifies the killer as her lover's brother. When the opening lines of the next canto refer to the couple as in-laws ("i due cognati [VI, 2]"), we have all we need to know about Francesca's marriage, adultery and death.

After a pause and the pilgrim's compassionate plea that she explain how she succumbed to her dubious desires, she resumes her monologue in a different key, narrative rather than analytic, to describe the "first root" of their love. They were reading together of Lancelot, seized by love. Here too, she provides no external detail, describing only their solitude, their glances and their embarrassment. She relates only one event: the notorious "kiss."¹ This second half of her monologue is of the same length as the first, but contradicts it in one important respect. In the first, love was described as spontaneous combustion, "kindled quickly in a gentle heart," which would mitigate the lovers' culpability. In the second part, she describes the occasion of their sin and the mediation of the book by which they were seduced. Like the first half, this part too ends with a curse: "Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse" (v. 137). She first cursed the fratricide for their death and now the book for their damnation. The two parts of Francesca's monologue are like what came to be called engaño and desengaño in Spanish drama of the Golden Age, the juxtaposition of the illusion of love with the stark reality of its consequences.

Francesca was an historical personage, the aunt of Guido Novello, Dante's host in Ravenna. The details of her life were probably well known to the poet and his sympathetic portrait of her has often been taken as his tribute to the generosity of his friend. Nevertheless, he gives us few of those details. He does not say that she was duped into her marriage, nor does he suggest that her sin was a singular tragic encounter, rather than the habitual conduct that would merit damnation. When Francesca says that she and her lover were led by love to a single death, it is unlikely that this means the simultaneous death at the hands of love's assassin. The text alludes to her murder only obliquely—"'l modo ancor m'offende" (v. 102)—and to its perpetrator never by name. We are familiar with what are supposed to be the exterior circumstances of her story...