Dante’s Book of Shadows: Ombra in the Divine Comedy

“There is strong shadow where there is much light.”

—Goethe

Ombra—shadows and shades—is pervasive in the Commedia. The word, used more than ninety times, forms a critical part of the poet’s lexicon. From the first words out of Dante the pilgrim’s mouth—“qual che tu sii, od ombra od omo certo” (“whatever you may be, whether shade or true man” Inf. 1.66)—to the penultimate simile in the poem—“un punto solo m’è maggior letargo / che venticinque secoli a la ‘mpresa / che fé Nettuno ammirar l’ombra d’Argo” (“One point alone is greater forgetfulness to me than twenty-five centuries to the enterprise that made Neptune marvel at the shadow of the Argo” Par. 33.94–96), shadows circumscribe the penumbral boundaries of the poem.¹ Elsewhere, Dante deftly plays with the homonym of ombra: “io facea con l’ombra… vidi molt’ombre” (“With my shadow I was making. … I saw many shades,” Purg. 26.7–9). At the center of this discourse is Statius’s magisterial account of the formation of aerial bodies in Purgatorio 25. This coincidence between the literal—darkness caused by an opaque mass blocking the source of light—and the figurative—the form of the soul in the afterlife—raises a host of fundamental questions about the poem.

At times, when ombre appear in the poem, they concern moments of intellectual perplexity and uncertainty, and spell the limitations of the human senses and rationality. The penitent souls in Purgatorio are repeatedly astonished that Dante’s body breaks the rays of the sun (5.4–6; 26.4–30). Yet in these very moments, shadows also serve as empirical instruments: the length and position of the shadow of Dante’s body provide a vector indicating the specific time of his itinerary. As shadows register the inclination of the sun with respect to the earth, the part of the sundial that casts the shadow is called a gnomon. Dante’s body thus becomes a human gnomon, signaling at once his corporeality and the scope of his scientific knowledge.

In the Paradiso, the endpoint of the earth’s conical shadow serves as a marker separating the first three spheres—Moon, Mercury, Venus—from the higher planets (9.118–19). Beatrice explains to Dante the causes of the Moon’s shadows, segni bui (2.49–148).² Her lesson establishes a general principle in the Paradiso: the conventional, rational means of attaining knowledge are insufficient for the spiritual realities that lie ahead. Beatrice insists that one must apply metaphysical explanations for the formation of heavenly spheres. Poised between and betwixt analogy and reality, metaphor and appearances, shadows signify the limits of human intelligibility but also its potential for full vision.³

This paper places ombra in four categories: 1) a poetic figure and Virgilian intertext; 2) a philosophical problem of the relationship between the body and the soul; 3) a theological prefiguration of Christian providence, as expressed in the Pauline term umbra futurorum (Colossians 2:17); 4) a textuality that casts the entire poem as a shadow. Toward the end of Paradiso Beatrice utilizes the full range of these meanings when she tells Dante that the dazzling images of light he sees are but the “umbriferi prefazi” (“shadow-bearing prefaces,” 30.78) of the truth. Though Dantean shadows are often noted in scholarship, they have not, so far, been adumbrated (or rather, elucidated) in depth.⁴ The contribution of this essay is a synthetic account of the function of ombra across the entire poem. By using ombra literally and figurally, Dante fuses natural indexical signs with conventional linguistic signs, turning an absence of light into an analogy of the afterlife and ultimately an allegory of mimesis. The polysemous senses of ombra thus encompass physics and metaphysics; ontology and epistemology; anticipation and fulfillment; reality and representation.

A shadow, of course, is not a thing but an absence. Ombra is an intriguing material and poetic figure precisely because it does not have a fixed identity: as a form of darkness shaped by the negation of light (or [End Page 196...