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10. Dante’s Transfigured Ovidian Models: Icarus and Daedalus in the Commedia
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c h a p t e r t e n Dante’s Transfigured Ovidian Models Icarus and Daedalus in the Commedia k e v i n b r o w n l e e The privileged status of key narratives from Ovid’s Metamorphoses as model texts for Dante’s Commedia is well known.1 In this chapter, I consider a particularly dense double set: Daedalus and Icarus (Met. 8.183–235). I argue that the Commedia sets up a Daedalus “program” beginning in Inferno 17.109–11, where Dante the protagonist, riding on Geryon’s back with Virgil, is presented as a corrected Icarus figure, and Virgil, as a corrected Daedalus figure (as artist, as father, as guide). Over the course of the poem as a whole (all the way to Par. 33), these two Dantean Christian corrections of Ovidian models are substantially elaborated (even transformed) in terms of the Commedia’s ongoing meditation on the problematic status of the mimetic artist and on the potentially salvific activity (for Dante-author) of writing poetry, both within the emerging context of the great poem’s Christian cosmos.2 My overall interpretive perspective is the vast and heterogeneous nexus of explicit or implicit comparisons of Dante himself to various model characters from the Metamorphoses.3 The master strategy here involves a corrective Christian rewriting of both failed and successful Ovidian heroes in the person of Danteprotagonist , Dante-poet, or both. Within this overall mimetic strategy, the first (and only) explicit mention of Icarus in the Commedia occurs, as just noted, in the key central canto of the Inferno, as Dante-protagonist is descending from the seventh to the eighth circles on Geryon’s back. A double Ovidian metaphor is at issue here, which (among other things) associates from the outset the Dantean Icarus with the Dantean Phaeton.4 Immediately after an initial comparison of his past fear qua protagonist to that of Phaeton at the fatal moment when he let go of the reins of Apollo’s chariot (Met. 2.178–200, esp. 2.178–200), Dante-poet evokes that of Icarus (in Met. 8.223–30) at the moment he felt his wings melting off:5 Dante’s Transfigured Ovidian Models 163 né quando Icaro misero le reni sentì spennar per la scaldata cera, gridando il padre a lui “Mala via tieni!” (Inf. 17.109–11) nor when the wretched Icarus felt his back unfeathered by the melting wax, while his father shouted to him: “You’re taking the wrong way!” In both cases, it is the difference between the pagan Ovidian model and the Christian Dantean protagonist that is stressed: Dante is both a Phaeton made good and an Icarus in bono. Unlike them, he has a guide whom he obeys; where they descend to death, he ascends to life. The two Ovidian models are read figurally , but in a contrastive mode: they are correctively inverted, converted in Dante-protagonist’s Christian autobiographical narrative; to the degree that they are also exemplary, they are exempla ex negativo. At the same time, these infernal references to Phaeton and Icarus initiate programs, for these two Ovidian characters will, on the one hand, function “separately” as models for Danteprotagonist in the other two cantiche. In addition, this initial pairing of Phaeton and Icarus will work at later moments in the poem to suggest various associations between these two Ovidian figures. At the same time, this initial presentation of Icarus stresses the failure of human artifice (figured by Daedalus and his “invention”) both with scaldata cera in the rhyme position, and by the hapax “spennare,” “unfeathering,” a negative introduction of the “penne motif” which will become crucial as the Icarus program is developed. Finally, the presence (and the perspective) of Daedalus (as failed father, guide, and artificer) is evoked in Inferno 17.111 as he cries ine ffectively to his falling son, whose “wrong way” (mala via) is contrasted to the diritta via involved in Dante-protagonist’s apparent descent in Inferno 17, which turns out to be, paradoxically, a Christian ascent.6 Within the basic context of a double contrastive comparison between Danteprotagonist and Icarus on the one hand, and Daedalus and Virgil on the other, numerous details of the Ovidian model text repay further study. First, the moment of Icarus’s fear described by Dante-poet in Inferno 17.109–10 constitutes a brilliant epitome of Metamorphoses 8.223–30, a passage rich with details...