11 Purgatorio 5–10
CHAPTER 11
Purgatorio 5–10
I have been focusing on a Dante turned to the future, a Dante who thinks and reflects on hope. Nothing else really matters because everything else can only be understood as part of the future, even when it’s past, with the logical underlying assumption that that which is past was once the future, the only reality of time. Dante understands in Purgatorio how time moves in one direction, which is future-oriented, though it turns out to be a return to the Garden of Eden as well.
In Canto 5, however, Dante meets souls who bring to the fore for him the power of retrospection. These are souls who manage to repent at the last minute. Again, it’s a question of time, but a time that is pretty much inexhaustible. It’s always possible to fall back, reflect, and turn one’s life around. He meets a figure who identifies himself as Buonconte da Montefeltro, the son of Guido, whom we met in Canto 27 of Inferno. Buonconte represents a break between the past and the future, since a son or daughter is a statement about a project for the future. The elder da Montefeltro ends up in Hell, but the son ends up in this purgatorial ledge on the way to redemption, so there is no chain of natural necessity and causality between the past and the present and the future. There is a focus on freedom, because once you break that bond of necessity, you are really opening up and inaugurating the idea that we are free to make ourselves, regardless of what antecedents we may have behind us.
Buonconte says, “Ah, so may that desire be fulfilled which draws you up the lofty mountain”—we are in Dante’s universe of desire, impelled by desire’s lure—“do you with gracious pity help my own. I was of Montefeltro, I am Buonconte.” Note the disjunction in tenses. I already pointed those out for you in the canto of Ugolino, and here too Buonconte is asserting his identity in the mode of the present and detaching himself, with the use of the past tense, from his family history. Dante asks him, “What force or what so carried you astray from Campaldino that your burial-place was never known?”1 Dante asks the soul to tell his tale.
What follows is an extraordinary scene, for one very autobiographical reason: namely, Dante himself fought at this battle of Campaldino. It was a moment of maturation for him, his great entering into the battlefield of life, when he discovered that, because of the victory that the Florentines had in Campaldino, he too could make claims about himself, his family, and his political future. Here, though, he meets a victim. And there have been those who have claimed, though with very little evidence, that maybe this is someone that Dante killed in battle, that he brings him back in poetry because he cannot do so in reality. Regardless, it is a paradoxically painful autobiographical moment for Dante, a moment where he experienced war as both perpetrated and suffered violence.
Rather than answering the question of the battle, Buonconte recounts his death. This is generally a poem about births and the portentous quality that being born implies, the kinds of alterations that we all bring on the world around us by the very fact that we were born. But here he talks of death: “At the foot of the Casentino a stream crosses, named the Archiano, which rises in the Apennines above the Hermitage. To the place where its name is lost I came, wounded in the throat, flying on foot and bloodying the plain. There I lost my sight and speech. I ended on the name of Mary, and there I fell, and my flesh remained alone. I will tell the truth, and do you repeat it among the living. The Angel of God took me, and he from Hell cried, ‘O you from Heaven, why do you rob me?’”2 This passage elucidates the notion of the power of time and the power of retrospection, looking back at that final moment in one’s life, which is the decisive moment that confers coherence and meaning on one’s existence. We were born with certain expectations of what we could do, but death becomes the revelatory event.
After this dialogue, the canto concludes with six extraordinary lines, where we may even be seeing a subtle allusion to Dante’s own wife. It’s an encounter with Pia de’ Tolomei, a woman from Siena, and this little passage is meant to remind us of Francesca in Canto 5 of Inferno, the canto that is symmetrical to this one in Purgatorio. A new spirit approaches Dante with a request, “Pray, when you have returned to the world and have rested from your long journey, . . . remember me, who am la Pia.”3 These lines function as an epitaph for la Pia, who was mistreated by her husband but remains incredibly forgiving. The passage tellingly ends with the word gem, which in Italian is gemma, Dante’s wife’s name. So, one may wonder if Pia doesn’t also stand for or bring to mind the kind of wishful thinking on the part of Dante that his wife, whom he had been forced to leave behind because of his exile, may also forgive. Dante is, in any case, introducing the radical category of forgiveness, for if you want to begin again, then forgiveness is exactly what’s demanded. Canto 5 becomes a canto of great pathos and intimacy, where Dante’s really involved, really connected to the souls he encounters here.
Canto 6, instead, is a more public canto, a political canto like Canto 6 of Inferno and Canto 6 of Paradiso. You know by now that there’s a principle of symmetry at work in the Comedy. Yet, while Canto 6 of Inferno is about the city of Florence, Canto 6 of Purgatorio is about Italy as a whole, and the disarray, the chaos, the disunity of the country. Dante writes, “When the game of hazard breaks up, the loser is left disconsolate, repeating the throws and sadly learns. With the other all the people go along: one goes in front, one plucks him from behind, and at his side one brings himself to mind. He does not stop, but listens to this one and that one; each to whom he reaches forth his hand presses on him no longer, and thus from the throng he defends himself. Such was I in that dense crowd, turning my face to them this way and that and, by promising, I got free from them.”4 It’s a remarkable comparison. All the penitents are so surprised at seeing Dante alive in the beyond that they go after him, and there’s a throng of people pressing on him. So, he is like the winner in a game of hazard. Dante’s the winner, and they all go after him and neglect Virgil, who is the loser here.
It is as if Dante were speaking of his salvation, of the uniqueness of this journey that he is undertaking, in terms of a game of hazard. We have been thinking that this is a providential journey, and now he is casting it as if it were just a game of chance. It’s an interesting metaphor from the point of view of the language of play. It’s like a lottery. Someone loses, and someone wins, and Dante acknowledges that because he happened to be born after the Incarnation, he had the possibility of saving himself, while Virgil did not. This question of play in Dante’s theological perception is an issue that I will talk about much more extensively when we reach Paradiso. But one thing is clear: Dante understands that the relationship between the soul and God is a one shaped by risk on both sides, and that this idea of risk that would seem to be a blind casting of the dice in effect constitutes the freedom of human beings. By using this language of hazard and chance, salvation is disengaged from the idea that God knows all and we are already determined in what we are doing.
To be more precise, many philosophers in antiquity, Boethius being the most important, would discuss the relationship between human freedom and God’s foreknowledge. They would always present the case that God is outside of time. All times converge in God, so God sees all things in the present with a point of view that is transcendent and therefore synoptic for God, while we live in a diachronic world. We think that we live in a world where we do not know what tomorrow may bring us, but according to this logic, whatever decisions we make now have already been decided. The consequences, whether they’re unpredictable or not, have been determined by things that escape our control, things that only God knows. This is the Boethian scheme of harmonizing God’s foreknowledge and human freedom. It doesn’t take too much to realize that this is really a little bit of a delusion, because either I’m free or I’m not. It may be that God knows all, but it doesn’t mean that He wills that I do what I do. And yet, He knows and I don’t know, so my own freedom is still somewhat rhetorical.
Dante approaches it differently, with a departure from Boethius. The relationship between God’s foreknowledge and the soul’s being in time is one that introduces the question of chance and hazard and that involves both God and the soul. He doesn’t say it directly here, but as we work with the text, it will become very clear. The issue is that in a love relationship between God and the soul, we are always at risk. If you accept the principle of a love economy regulating the universe, which Dante certainly does, then you understand this notion of hazard not as a principle of chance in the sense of casual blind randomness, but in the sense of this risk element. Dante’s universe is a universe of love, and that’s how the creation of the universe and of human beings takes place. The involvement that every soul has with God is one of love. And just as in the relationship between, say, Beatrice and Dante, there is an element of risk in this loving. What is that risk? I can think of several. One loves, and one may not be reciprocated in that love, for instance. Certainly, it’s a risk of God who creates and may not be loved, which is the story of what disobedience is. And this certainly is the existential experience of one person involved with another person. Dante likes figures such as St. Francis, who goes to pray on the cliffs at night because he wants to dramatize the idea that even a prayer puts you at risk of being hurt and disappointed, of discovering that the world does not go the way you want it to go. And that which is true of prayer is also true of love. Sometimes love hurts.
In the next part of Canto 6, this political canto, there is another encounter between two poets, Virgil and Sordello, who is a Mantuan poet. They share the same birthplace, Mantua, across the centuries. When they meet, the very idea of their birthplace becomes an immediate topic of discussion. Virgil starts to speak of Mantua but is cut off. Dante is clearly playing with a famous epitaph of Virgil’s in Naples where he was buried, which says: “Mantua made me and the south, Calabria, took me away. I sang the arms [The Aeneid], the herds [The Georgics], the fields [The Eclogues].” In two lines we get an account of his whole life.
After their birthplace-driven exchange, Sordello and Virgil embrace, a demonstration of the reciprocity of affections across time. This embrace, this existential encounter, is insubstantial, however, because they can’t really embrace. They’re spirits, after all, so this moment becomes another failure after the one that we saw with Casella in Canto 2 of Purgatorio. That failure triggers Dante’s political invective against Italy, having awakened his civic sense of responsibility.
So, Dante begins his incredible vituperation, his attack against his homeland: “Ah, servile Italy, hostel of grief, ship without pilot in great tempest, no mistress of provinces, but brothel! So eager was that noble soul, only at the sweet name of his city, to give glad welcome there to his fellow-citizen—and now in you your living abide not without war, and of those whom one wall and one moat shut in, one gnaws at the other!”5 Here we get a much grimmer version of the reciprocity seen between Virgil and Sordello. Earlier one embraced the other, now one gnaws at the other. The new exchange is an exchange that always turns on itself. It reverses and denies the reciprocity indicated by the previous phrase.
Another detail worth emphasizing here is the idea of community that Dante simultaneously establishes and dismantles. The word community etymologically comes from the Latin for “wall,” moenia. Community thus stems from a concept of sharing walls, houses, piling them together and building one on top of the other. The shared walls of the city are here viewed as separating one person from another. This separation will continue as a motif in this diatribe, with mentions of the lack of laws and divided families, including the Montagues and Capulets. Things are falling apart.
Dante concludes this rant with a return to his birthplace in the form of bitter satire: “O my Florence, you may indeed rejoice at this digression which does not touch you, thanks to your people who are so resourceful.”6 Dante talks about Italy but then, with the invocation of Florence, turns back to Inferno 6. He calls this invective a digression, which literally means that it does not belong in the poem, that Dante is stepping out of the economy of the poem and talking in his own voice. But the meaning of this digression is made clear when he says, “which does not touch you.” How ironic. Of course he’s literally saying that Florence is so much better than all these other towns, but the irony is that Florence is truly no better, so the digression doesn’t concern it. The line can also be understood in another, far more tragic and sinister way. This digression does not touch you, that is, my language will not affect you. The whole statement in all its ambiguity becomes a reflection on the impotence of poetic language to affect the unfolding of history and the ordering of the city. It is as if Dante were saying that the relationship between the voice of the poet and the political order is one of inevitable rupture. Dante tries to bring about improvement and change, that’s clearly the thrust of the passage, but the invective also declares his powerlessness in doing so.
Dante then begins to discuss where the first night of Purgatorio will take place. He and Virgil take refuge in the so-called Valley of the Princes, where a new garden is going to be described, which in many ways fulfills the garden of Limbo in Canto 4 of Inferno. Dante brings in motifs that keep reappearing, and here not only in the sense of the natural beauty of the place. There are precious stones here, implying that though Purgatory is the world of transition for transient souls, there is something abiding about this realm. And yet Dante the pilgrim is taken with nostalgia for his hometown. It is a pilgrimage of desire and a poem of desire, desire for God, desire for Beatrice, and now desire for the comfort and shelter of the home he has lost. The Latin hymn whose opening words follow gives a sense that the night is dangerous, fraught with phantasms of the past that will intrude on the powers of judgment of various souls, including Dante’s.
The movement forward to Canto 9 of Purgatorio, as with every Canto 9 of the Comedy, marks the rupture from a particular area of the canticle to another. Remember Canto 9 of Inferno and the failed encounter with Medusa, the passage into the city of Dis? Now, with this ninth canto, Dante moves into Purgatory proper. How is this purgatorial purification going to take place? The seven deadly sins are arranged by starting with spiritual sins, with pride as the root of all sin, to lust at the end. In every representation of sin in Purgatory, Dante precedes it with a representation of its opposite virtue, so we have humility in Canto 10, and then punished pride in Canto 11. It is as if Dante has to learn intellectually that which he’s going to witness a little later. The incredible quality of the structure of the poem is that Dante wants us to see experiences of evil in Inferno first, so that when we get to Purgatorio and Paradiso, we really have a chance to appreciate what the good is and what the absence of the good may be, what evil generates and engenders. In Purgatorio, he starts instead with the representation of the virtue and then follows with the sin. In a sense, Purgatorio presents an absolute reversal of the economy of Inferno.
The idea of having the virtues before the vices seems to cast Purgatorio as a variant of a medieval poetic form called psychomachia, which means “a battle of thoughts.” The whole poetic mode of Purgatorio, unlike that of Inferno, is played out through the imagination, art images, memories, phantasms. In other words, we are really in a world that is in between that of bodies and souls, a world of art, and a world of the middle ground of the imagination and all its warring thoughts.
To enter more specifically into Canto 10, we turn to a bit of etymology. The word “pride” in Italian is superbia. The word “humility” in Italian is umiltà. The latter word comes from the ground, the sense of being down, of having one’s feet on the ground, as it were. This is, of course, the very opposite of superbia, which implies an immoderate flight away, a sense of being a superman. It’s the idea that someone wants to transcend the limitations of this world and of being human. In fact, the word humility and the word human have the same etymology, coming from the Latin homo, or “man.” We are called human beings because we come from the earth, are close to the earth, and return to the earth. The idea of humility carries the same notion.
So, how are humility and pride represented in the next few cantos? Canto 10 begins, “When we were within the threshold of the gate which the souls’ wrong love disuses, making the crooked way seem straight, I heard by its resounding that it was closed again; and if I had turned my eyes to it, what would have been a fitting excuse for my fault?”7 Purgatory is a sequence of variations on love; that’s the moral law of the land. All sins here are because we give love to the wrong object, we love too much, or we love too little. These are the three general subdivisions of Purgatory, laid out along the steep slopes of a mountain, which has an abyss underneath it, an invitation to be prudent on the way up.
As a result, “this made our steps so scant that the waning orb of the moon had regained its bed to sink to rest before we came forth from that needle’s eye. But when we were free and out in the open above, where the mountain draws back, I weary and each of us uncertain of our way, we stopped on a level place more solitary than roads through deserts. From its edge, bordering the void, to the foot of the high bank which rises sheer, a human body would measure in three lengths; and as far as my eye could make its flight, now on the left and now on the right, such this terrace there seemed to me.”8 Dante is measuring the purgatorial landscape in terms of the measure of a human being. He’s asking if we are the measure of creation, which is exactly the point of the canto, because pride means an inordinate love and a belief in our own excellence. Pride means that we do not think that we can be measured by others or that we belong where others may think we belong. Instead we want to become the measure for others. We are always proud with those who endanger our sense of our own measure. And this scene is only the first sign that measurement will become a crucial metaphor in Purgatorio.
Then, on the side of the cliff, Dante notices sculptures embodying examples of humility, a representation of virtue through the language of art. He studies these images made of white marble, “such carvings that not only Polycletus but Nature herself would there be put to shame.”9 The metaphor points to measure and order and emphasizes that these are works of art produced directly by the hand of God. God is an artist so skilled that nature, the daughter of God and the mother of the arts, and also a famous artist, the Greek sculptor Polycletus, would be put to shame by His talents. Already there is a sense of rivalry within the pattern of generating the arts.
The first of His images that we see here is of the angel Gabriel, the messenger who came to earth. That’s certainly an image of humility, since he descends from on high, becoming low, while the prideful human beings who are low want to think of themselves as very high. God’s art is so clear and effective that the stone angel “seemed not a silent image: one would have sworn that he was saying, ‘Ave’”—the first words of the angel Gabriel during the Annunciation.10 The Annunciation is a true story of humility, in which, albeit obliquely, God becomes man. Not only does it describe the humility of Mary in accepting the mandate, but it offers up yet another idea of descent.
And Mary, too, appears among the statues in this part of Purgatory: “She was imaged who turned the key to open the supreme love, and these words were imprinted in her attitude: ‘Ecce ancilla Dei.’”11 Mary acknowledges her ancillary role. She is a servant (“Here is the handmaid of God”), and she considers herself a servant. Her image is the central model of humility for those who climb this mountain.
Like the lost souls, Dante has to learn what humility is. There is a need for an ethical education, and there is an aesthetic education occurring simultaneously. After all, Dante is looking at art. The question thus becomes, what is the relationship between virtue and art? How can the two be brought together? To give you an idea of how complicated the problem is, in the next canto Dante meets many painters, including Giotto and Cimabue, who are emblems of people who invest their productions with an inordinate sense of their value. Then Dante compares his friends Guido Cavalcanti and Guido Guinizelli, acknowledges that one Guido outdid the other in terms of fame, and suggests that he himself will probably rout both of them. His proud statement suggests that artists are always prone to inordinate ideas of who they are and what their value may be. The problem, then, is that art can be a source of pride even as it teaches its audience humility.
As for the aesthetic education, Virgil is telling Dante how to look, which is really the most complicated task of the student of art. How do we look at something? What do the eyes reveal to us? Virgil’s advice: “‘Do not keep your mind on one part only,’ said the sweet master, who had me on the side where people have their heart; wherefore I moved my eyes and saw beyond Mary, on the same side as was he who prompted me, another story set in the rock.”12 We must not give into the temptation to lose sight of the totality of things, to take one part for the whole. Dante has to learn how to look and what he’s looking at here are stories. But the word story is etymologically tied to history, so in a certain sense what he sees is also an allegory of history. We begin with the New Testament, the story of Mary, then we get a picture from the Old Testament, David dancing in front of the ark, and then an episode of Trajan, the emperor who is an example of humility. The point is that the whole of history can be read as an allegory of humility, and that is God’s art. That’s what Dante has God represent for us.
The next scene, then, comes from the Old Testament: “There, carved in the same marble, were the cart and oxen drawing the holy ark, because of which men fear an office not given in charge. In front appeared people, and all the company, divided into seven choirs, made two of my senses say, the one, ‘No,’ the other, ‘Yes, they are singing.’ In like manner, by the smoke of the incense that was imaged there my eyes and nose were made discordant with yes and no. There preceding the blessed vessel, dancing girt up, was the humble Psalmist”—David—“and on that occasion he was both more and less than king. Opposite, figured at the window of a great palace, was Michal looking on, like a woman vexed and scornful.”13 This story is told in Samuel, in the Bible, but Dante’s reinterpreting it for us. First of all, David is humbling himself. He’s dancing. He lifts up his ephod, his dress, and starts dancing out of joy. It’s an episode that is used as one of the many cases of so-called ludic theology, playful theology. In the plan of salvation there is always the presence of comedy, and David embodies that. Then there’s this telling little phrase that appears so often in this canto: “more and less.” In a canto where measure is a central issue, it becomes impossible to determine a precise position.
One thing is clear: opposite to David sits his wife, Michal, whose window-side seat offers her a different perspective. This is art, this question of her perspective and what she sees. She is so angry with David because by dancing in front of the ark, he humiliates himself. He’s losing his stature as king. But the fact is that, for Dante, Michal is completely missing the point. It is a stance of someone who thinks that she’s superior, of someone who’s sitting in her great palace and will not have anything to do with what’s below her. We are truly entering the domain of what pride may be, what’s wrong with pride, and why pride may really be a sin. Pride is not sinful simply because we want to reach higher than we are. That’s probably okay in itself. What makes pride a sin is that we tend to have contempt for what we think is below us. That displacement blinds us. So, pride is tied to perspective because it sets my view of myself at odds with my reality. Certainly, this is the case with Michal.
The third episode depicted in this canto is, I think, even more interesting, and comes from secular Roman history. “There storied,” Dante writes, “was the high glory of the Roman prince whose worth moved Gregory to his great victory: I mean the emperor Trajan. And a poor widow was at his bridle in attitude of weeping and of grief. Round about him appeared a trampling and throng of horsemen, and above them the eagles in gold moved visibly in the wind. Among all these the poor woman seemed to say: ‘My lord, do me vengeance for my son who is slain, wherefore my heart is pierced.’ And he seemed to answer her, ‘Wait now till I return’”—he’s going to Romania, Dacia, and the column of Trajan in Rome today is the monument of that expedition. “And she, ‘My lord,’ like one whose grief is urgent, ‘if you do not return?’ And he, ‘He who shall be in my place will do it for you.’”14 It’s the story of an emperor who gets off his high horse and levels with a little widow, the diminutive added by Dante. The language is humble, as Trajan administers and gives this woman justice because, for Dante, the perfect emperor must possess the attributes of mercy and justice. As such, the final lesson in humility in this canto is made clear by Dante’s representation of a Roman emperor.
So, Dante has seen and understood these images and their meaning, but a bit of drama follows in their wake. “While I was taking delight,” Dante explains, “in gazing on the images of humilities so great”—a deliberate oxymoron—“and for their Craftsman’s sake precious to behold, ‘Lo, here are many people,’ murmured the poet [Virgil], ‘but they come with slow step: they will direct us on to the high stairs.’” Virgil has prompted Dante to turn away, to abandon his appreciation of God’s art, but in so doing he leads to Dante’s drama: “My eyes, which were content to behold novelties whereof they are fain, were not slow in turning towards him.” Dante yields to the temptations of the eye. The three temptations include the pride of life, the pride of the eyes or curiosity, and the pride of the heart, and all three temptations are present here. But instead of addressing his own weaknesses, Dante chastises the reader in an apostrophe: “But, reader, I would not have you turned from good resolution for hearing how God wills the debt shall be paid. Heed not the form.”15 He’s telling us not to care about the images as such. He is making a preemptive strike, and asking us not to worry about the peculiar form of the art, but rather to look at its meaning. A certain hypocrisy prevails.
Dante follows Virgil’s instructions, but admits that “what I see moving towards us does not seem to me persons, but what it is I do not know, my sight wanders so.”16 What an incredible contrast! What Dante had seen with God’s images was all clear to him, but now that he’s seeing some human beings who are doubled under massive boulders (because that’s the punishment inflicted on the proud, to be pressed against the earth), he does not recognize them. It is as if his aesthetic education has been for nothing; his ethical education, for nothing. He had no difficulty in deciphering God’s art, which is so clear and luminous, but now he does not want to identify with what he sees. He resembles Michal, who from on high does not want to have anything to do with David. He had no problem with Gabriel, and his descent; he had no problem with Trajan; but he himself is unwilling to identify with those whom he believes are beneath him.
Virgil explains to Dante that these bent and tormented figures are humans like Dante. Dante launches into another apostrophe, to all Christians this time, questioning, “O proud Christians, wretched and weary, who, sick in mental vision, put trust in backward steps: are you not aware that we are worms, born to form the angelic butterfly?”17 I want to stress this shift in pronouns. I begin with “are you not aware” because it shows that Dante is literally taking the higher ground. He is the one who knows, and he’s preaching to the rest of us. But then with a subsequent pronoun—“we are worms”—Dante erases the distance between himself and the readers, between himself and other Christians. He places himself on the same ground as everyone else. That’s the quality of the double voice of Dante, systematically punctuating this text, as a claim of a transcendent superior perspective, because after all, he really has seen the whole unfolding of God’s cosmos, but at the same time, he descends and is part of a common plight.
This line is also an allusion to the fact that you would often see a butterfly imprinted on ancient Roman sarcophagi because the Greek word for “butterfly” is psyche. The Greeks use the same word for the soul, and this emblem of the butterfly indicated that at death the soul would finally be capable of flying off toward the light and the Creator. Finally, this apostrophe includes the language of a metamorphosis. Dante reminds us that we are always in the process of making ourselves, both while alive and in the penitential world of Purgatory.
Dante concludes this introduction to the spirits of Purgatory with an iconographic motif that recapitulates the iconographic aspect of the entire tenth canto: “As for corbel to support a ceiling or a roof, sometimes a figure is seen to join the knees to the breast—which, unreal, begets real distress in one who sees it—so fashioned did I see these when I gave good heed. They were truly more or less contracted according as they had more and less upon their backs; and he who showed the most suffering in his looks, seemed to say, weeping, ‘I can no more.’”18 Dante has just warned us not to pay attention to the form and to look at the meaning of the particular message, and yet here he returns to a focus on form. What he’s describing are the so-called caryatids, decorative human forms that appear to be buttressing buildings. Dante is telling us that form matters after all. By picking up the sculptural motif of the canto, he reveals that we cannot truly arrive at the ultimate meaning by bypassing the form.
What is Dante’s understanding of art, then? It’s potentially dangerous, but there is an important role that art can play in altering our moral perception. In effect, form becomes a way to understand the moral world and the moral terms of your existence. This relationship between ethics and aesthetics is at the heart of Purgatory, and we’ll see this idea resurface many times in the cantos ahead. For now, Dante is giving examples of art and humility, of his mistakes, of his confused perception.
And it is his perspective on perspective that brings together these myriad concerns. Perspective is connected with the representation of art, and it means that I see the world according to the position that I occupy in it, and the position that I occupy in it reveals things to me that are unique and irreducible. For Dante, perspective is connected to an inner world. What is my perspective of myself? What is my sense of the measure of things? A misperception like that of Michal can lead one to pride, the primary sin in these cantos and the spiritual root of all evils. No wonder Dante makes such a big deal of this question of perspective. It means everything when it comes to Dante’s simultaneous aesthetic and ethical education in Purgatorio.