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  • Lives of Dante:Why Now?
  • David Wallace

On reading Elisa Brilli's Ouverture on biography, as an English-based comparatist, and on pondering the recent proliferation of Dantean lives I consulted the catalogue of my London workplace: the Warburg Institute (https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/). This magnificent library has always especially favored work in Italian Studies; its founder, Aby Warburg, was a personal friend of Robert Davidsohn, the great historian of Florence who died in Dante's city in 1937. Davidsohn's works are found in abundance on the shelves of the Warburg, as are the scholarly and editorial works of Giorgio Inglese and Marco Santagata. But curiously, neither of their recent Dante lives are to be found; the most recent catalogue entry under Vita di Dante is the work of Giorgio Petrocchi from 1986.

If one exits the Warburg Institute and walks a few hundred meters to the Waterstones on Gower Street, the largest bookshop in London, one will find Marco Santagata's Dante. The Story of His Life, as translated by Richard Dixon and published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press in 2016. Belknap is the extra-prestigious imprint of an illustrious university press—and yet this is not a book that Warburg finds it necessary to stock on its shelves, in either English or Italian. How can that be?

Santagata's Dante is to be found in the Biography section of the bookstore, which is huge. It keeps company with a number of Dante lives, such as A.N. Wilson's Dante in Love from 2011, a book crushingly reviewed in the Guardian by Peter Conrad as "less a book about Dante in love than an excuse for A.N. Wilson to vent his own ideological hatreds." But life, or Biography, sells, whereas literary criticism is approaching extinction as a bookstore genre. Seasoned Dantisti will know that it is very difficult to convince a university press to publish a book on Dante, unless it be a Handbook, a Guide, or (best of all) a Life. And so there arises the temptation to write a book on Dante that might in essence be literary criticism, but must outwardly appear to be life-like. Dante as a multifarious, foreign textual corpus intimidates, but [End Page 213] Dante as a life becomes manageable, containable, one more celebrity to be collected at high speed.

George Monbiot (2018), in a recent article entitled "Our cult of personality is now leaving real life in the shade," asks who, what class of persons, might we suppose that newspapers now interview most? The answer is not politicians or scientists or business managers, but actors; and increasingly, all those in public life aspire to the condition and skill sets of actors (or TV personalities). Might we then expect to see Dante represented not as author or personaggio, but rather as actor-celebrity? The moment has in fact already come, with the recent publication of yet another Dante life-text, Ian Thomson's Dante's Divine Comedy: A Journey Without End (2018). This book I found half a mile south of the Warburg Institute, prominently displayed in the London Review Bookshop, a venue opened in 2003 in association with England's toniest literary newspaper, The London Review of Books ("located in the heart of Bloomsbury, just a Rosetta Stone's throw from the British Museum", as its website states). This book, selling at £18.99, is gorgeously produced, with sewn spine, a Tom Philips lithograph on its cover ("Dante in his Study"), arresting graphic design, and a plethora of illustrations, mostly in color, beginning with Domenico di Michelino's La Commedia illumina Firenze (1465, Duomo, Florence) and Don Draper on a Hawaiian beach reading John Ciardi's 1954 Inferno translation (from Mad Men, sixth season). This wild mixing of medieval and contemporary forms the Leitmotif of the extended Introduction (Thompson 2018: 13–41), bombarding the reader with a dizzying and disorientating array of images and factoids. There is no dialectic here between the patient scholar seeking to comprehend Trecento life and poetics from the inside, as it were, and the energetic appropriations of modern art: Thomson himself wants to be one of these contemporaries, to...

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