Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
ALIGHIERI, Dante (1265-1321). La Divina Commedia, a leaf from Paradiso, decorated manuscript on vellum [Florence, mid-14th century]
On the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, a remarkable survival from the greatest work of Italian literature: an early fragment with cantos from Paradiso from a manuscript belonging to the Florentine 'Cento' group, the text including Beatrice's last words in the Commedia.

c.317 x 240mm. 30-31 lines in a Florentine chancery hand, ruled space: 195 x 93mm, the text from the end of Canto XXX and the beginning of XXXI, opening 'La ciecha cupidigia che v'amalia' and ending '[e] spera gia ridir com’ello stea', rubric, in the vernacular, prefacing Canto XXXI in red, recto with 3-line initial in blue with red penwork flourishes extending into margin, capitals touched in yellow (horizontal crease along the middle from use as a binding fragment, with associated sewing-holes and faded ink title on verso, edges of leaf folded in, text on the recto in good condition, erased but legible on verso, small tear along the central fold, with loss of line 21 on the recto, and line 22 on the verso). Provenance: (1) Sister fragments are in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, II,IV,587a. (2) Livio Ambrogio collection. (3) Forum Auctions, 25 January 2017, lot 118.

This rediscovered fragment of the Divina Commedia comes from a dismembered manuscript belonging to the ‘Danti del Cento’ group, an early Florentine production of the Commedia renowned for its uniformity of format, layout, decoration and script. The entire group was once thought to be the work of a single scribe, Francesco di Ser Nardo da Barberino, copyist of Trivulziano Codex 1080, but recent studies have ascribed the production of these manuscripts to several scribes active in the same scriptorium in Florence, likely led by Francesco di ser Nardo himself (on the basis of one of the primary exemplars of the Group being Florence, Codice Laurenziano Pluteo 90 sup. 125, illuminated by Francesco). The expression 'del Cento' derives from an anecdote by the 16th-century philologist Vincenzo Borghini in his Lettera intorno a’ manoscritti antichi (1573), in which he reports that a Florentine scribe was forced to copy for a fee one hundred manuscripts of the Commedia in order to provide his daughters with a dowry: 'e si conta d'uno che con cento Danti ch'egli scrisse, maritò non so quante sue figliuole; e di questo se ne trova ancora qualcuno, che si chiamano "di quei del cento"'. Around sixty manuscripts of the Florentine ‘Cento’ group have survived, mostly written in two columns; while only three single-column manuscripts survive. Our scribe is identifiable with the copyist who wrote fragment II,IV,587a in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, identical in layout and decoration, with text from Inferno XX 64-93, XXV 10-69, XXX 145 to XXXI 21. It is plausible these once belonged to the same parent manuscript.

The end of Canto XXX includes Beatrice’s last words in the Commedia: 'Ma poco poi sara da Dio soferto [...] / e fara quel d’Alagna entrar piu giuso', a remark that Clement will not long be on the papal throne, because he will soon be in the bolgia where Simon Magus pays for his sins. Canto XXXI opens with the most famous and sublime 'dunque' in Italian literature: 'In forma dunque di candida rosa', 'So, in the shape of that white rose', announcing the explanatory and didactic functions of the canti, whose duty is to explore the shape and content of paradise. The final lines of the fragment see Dante the pilgrim, participating in a visual tour of the rose: 'E quasi peregrin che si ricrea / nel tempio del suo voto riguardando / e spera gia ridir com’ello stea [...]'.