Dante’s Renaissance

by Dimitri Laspas

Dante made significant contributions to the early Renaissance and many of his ideas and themes were developed by later writers, artists, and thinkers. Dante contributed to the development of humanism, the use of the vernacular in literature and challenged the hegemonic nature of the Church and these helped to generate the cultural and intellectual changes known as the Renaissance, which transformed the world forever.

Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral Square, Florence, Italy

Dante was born into one of the chief families in Florence. He was married off by contract as a young boy to Gemma Donati, the daughter of another important family of the city as his mother died when he was just 12 years old. However, Dante had alreayd fallen in love with another young girl called Beatrice, who became his muse and who he loved all his life, even after she died at a young age. Her death led Dante to study philosophy and theology, as he tried to find some meaning in life.

It is therefore no wonder that one of his best known works was ‘La Vita Nova’ (The New Life); a series of poems and short pieces related to Beatrice. He also wrote ‘the Banquet’ a series of longer poems. Dante was also revered as a great prose writer, (defined by any written work that follows a basic grammatical structure; think words and phrases arranged into sentences and paragraphs).

He wrote an unfinished piece called ‘De vulgar eloquent’ (On the Eloquence of Vernacular), which debated for the development of an Italian literary language.

Dante’s Divine Comedy

Dante’s work was varied and also included important political papers, his best known one being ‘De Monarchia’ in Latin. De Monarchia was unique at the time as it promoted a Universal Monarchy and the separation of Church and state. It stated that the church should not be so powerful, which was seen as sacrilege by many people in the Catholic Church and for a time his work was banned by the Church.

Dante was born before the Renaissance began, but he always had the mind of a Renaissance man. He is the first person to write a great work of literature for the people in their language.

Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, is considered one of the greatest of his works in Western literature. It is an epic poem, divided into 3 parts and composed of 100 cantos. The theme is of an imagined account of Dante’s journey in the Christian afterlife. The three parts are the Inferno which depicts hell, the Purgatorio which details Purgatory and the last section is Heaven (Paradiso).

The work looks at the human soul's journey to God, guided by the ‘shade’ or spirit of the great Roman poet Virgil. It aims to demonstrate how humans can become united to the love of God, which is seen as the fundamental force in the Universe.

Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in the Tuscan dialect but also borrowed local dialects from other Italian regions as well as Latin. This brave move led to many writers no longer using Latin in their writings but to use their native dialect.

Dante’s influence during the Renaissance spread beyond Italy and into the rest of Europe due to the idea that literary works could be written in the local language of the region. The majority of Renaissance writers in Italy and beyond began to write in their native tongues. As a result, the language of Dante became the official language of many Italian states.

Without doubt, Dante’s Divine Comedy is an enduring literary masterpiece that has stood the test of time. He was far more than just a poet; he changed the nature of poetry of the period and decisively changed the direction of Western literature.