INFERNO XXIV
INFERNO XXIV
1–21. This elaborate canto-opening simile (see note to Inf. XXII.1–12) and its aftermath knit the narrative back together: Virgil had walked away from Catalano (and from Dante) at the end of the last canto; now, getting his anger under control, he turns back to reassure Dante and continue his leadership. That is a fair summary of how the simile works as a reflection of what is happening between the two characters. However, this simile (like the Aesopic material in Canto XXIII) can be read for more than one set of equivalences: (1) Virgil’s frown (hoarfrost) melts and he once again encourages Dante (the humble wretch), who eventually will, having completed the journey, feed us (his sheep) with the pages of the poem; (2) the devils’ deception (hoarfrost), in the form of an incorrect presentation of the terrain, discourages Virgil (the wretch), who finally reads the signs right and will lead Dante (his sheep) to pasture. A form of this second simultaneous reading was proposed by Lansing (Lans.1977.1), pp. 77–80.
As Frankel has noted (Fran.1984.1), pp. 82–83, the simile itself is divided into two rather different stylistic zones; the first six verses are “classicizing” and rather high-flown, while the final nine are in the low style. Hollander (Holl.1984.4) suggests that the first tercet of the “classical” part derives from Virgil’s third Georgic (vv. 303–304), a citation also found in the second and third redactions of the commentary of Pietro di Dante, and also noted by Tommaseo. For other studies in English of this much studied simile see Bake.1974.1, Econ.1976.1, and Lans.1977.1 (pp. 74–80); for Dante’s knowledge of the Georgics see Marigo (Mari.1909.1).
The reference to Aquarius sets the time within the simile as winter, since the sun is in that constellation from 21 January to 21 February. And so the sun cools his “locks” (its rays) in this season. [return to English / Italian]
22–24. The sight of the ruina, the scree fallen at the Crucifixion, now gives Virgil hope: it is a way up and out of the bolgia. Catalano, unlike Malacoda, has given him valuable advice. [return to English / Italian]
31. The phrase “people wearing leaden cloaks” obviously refers to the hypocrites whom we saw in the last canto. [return to English / Italian]
32–36. The protagonist’s physical difficulty, since unlike Virgil he must move his flesh and bones against the pull of gravity, is insisted on. The interplay between Virgil and Dante, now with roles reversed from Cantos XXI–XXIII (when Virgil was the one at a disadvantage) goes on for some time, through verse 60. It is in no way meant to make the reader believe, as did John Ruskin, in Modern Painters, that “Dante was a notably bad climber.” [return to English / Italian]
37–40. Once again (see Inf. XIX.35 and note) the poet insists that the far sides, or banks, of each bolgia are not as high as the ones encountered first, since the sloping floor of the Malebolge cuts down across each ditch. [return to English / Italian]
49–51. The commentators are almost unanimous in taking Virgil’s words at face value and as sound advice. See, for example, Chiavacci Leonardi (Chia.1991.1), pp. 712–13, who argues for earthly fame’s “double valence” in the poem; she claims that it is sometimes an excusable aim (as here), sometimes a culpable one. Certainly the net effect of Virgil’s appeal here is to get Dante moving upward in order to continue to the top of the ridge, whence he will be able to see into the next ditch as he continues his journey. Yet is it not strange that the motivation offered by Virgil is not the need to struggle onward toward the presence of God so much as it is the reward of earthly fame? Rossetti, in his commentary, was perhaps the first to observe the resonance of what has now become a standard citation for these verses, the entirely similar similes found in the book of Wisdom (5:15): “like the insubstantial foam that is dispersed by the storm, like the smoke that is dissipated by the wind.” In Wisdom the comparisons are to the hopes of the impious man (as opposed to those of the just, whose thoughts are set on God [5:16]). Narrowly construed, Virgil’s words are those of the impious man who lodges his hopes in the most transitory of things—exactly what the poem will later establish as the true and fleeting nature of earthly fame (Purg. XI.91–93). If we were to imagine St. Thomas as guide here, we would expect his words to have been quite different. Beginning with Gregorio Di Siena, commentators also cite another apposite text for these lines, Aeneid V.740, “tenuis fugit ceu fumus in auras”: it is the vision of Anchises that vanishes from Aeneas’s sight “like thin smoke into the air.”
Cantos XXI–XXIV thus include Virgil’s most difficult moments as guide to the Christian underworld. The rest of the cantica is mainly without such unsetthng behavior toward his master and author on the poet’s part. But this will start up again in a series of moments that are difficult for Virgil in the early cantos of Purgatorio. [return to English / Italian]
58–64. In a moment that will strike anyone who is in fact a “notably bad climber” with its aptness, the passage insists on Dante’s effort to convince his guide that he is better furnished with breath than in fact he is. [return to English / Italian]
65–66. These lines introduce a problem (who is speaking?) that will weave itself through the text until perhaps the eighteenth verse of the next canto. [return to English / Italian]
67–78. These twelve verses have no other point than to underline the intensity of Dante’s curiosity about the identity of the speaker whose unintelligible voice he has just heard. It would be unlikely for him to have left his riddle unanswered. See note to vv. 17–18 of the next canto.
Verse 69 has been the cause of much debate. Is the word in the text ire (as in Petrocchi’s edition, meaning “to go”) or ira (wrath)? For a treatment of the problem see Hollander (Holl.1983.2), offering a listing of the history of the commentary tradition (pp. 29–31) and concluding that the text originally read ira, as almost all the early commentators believed, with the major exception of Pietro di Dante. For a countering view see Stef.1993.1, p. 85.
Once again, while not in agreement with it, we have preserved the letter of Petrocchi’s text in our translation. Berthier, who opts for ira, cites St. Thomas to the effect that one of the five effects of wrath is precisely to cause in the furious sinner “clamor irrationabilis” (irrational cries), perhaps exactly what Dante has made out. It also remains difficult to explain how one can hear, from a distance and in darkness, how a being is “moved” to getting into motion, while it is not at all difficult to hear, in precisely these circumstances, that a voice is moved by wrath. [return to English / Italian]
79–81. The new prospect before Dante’s eyes, once he is over the seventh bolgia, having descended from the bridge that connects to the eighth, completely absorbs his attention. The identity of the speaker, which he has been so eager to learn, is now forgotten—for a while. [return to English / Italian]
82–84. Now begins the drama of the marvelous, what Milton might have called “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” Many have commented upon the exuberance of Dante’s treatment of the scene of the thieves. On the question of the perhaps problematic virtuosity of this and the next canto see Terd.1973.1; for a reply see Hawk.1980.1. [return to English / Italian]
85–87. The serpents derive, as almost all commentators duly note, from the ninth book of Lucan’s Pharsalia with its description of the Libyan desert, replete with them. They are all beyond the pale of any known zoology. For Dante’s knowledge of Lucan in general see Para.1965.2. [return to English / Italian]
88–90. Dante adapts Lucan’s somewhat unusual term for “serpent” (pestis—which generally means “plague”) and now imagines as many deserts as he knows of containing still other improbable serpentine creatures. [return to English / Italian]
91–96. The scene, with its principal actors naked, afraid, and trying to hide, evokes, as Hollander has argued (Holl.1983.2), p. 34, the description of Adam and Eve hiding from God in the Garden of Eden after they have sinned (Gen. 3:9–10): “Vocavitque Dominus Deus Adam, et dixit ei: ‘Ubi es?’ Qui ait, ‘Vocem tuam audivi in paradiso et timui, eo quod nudus essem, et abscondi me’ ” (And the Lord God called Adam and asked, “Where are you?” And Adam said, “I heard your voice in the garden and I grew afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself”). Hollander goes on to examine nine more moments in this scene that reflect the “primal scene” of thievery in Eden, including the parodic version of the fig leaves with which Adam and Eve covered their loins in Gen. 3:7 found here in vv. 95–96. See also Beal.1983.1, pp. 103–5, for resonances of the Edenic scene in this passage.
The heliotrope was a stone that supposedly had the power to render its possessor invisible, as Boccaccio’s Calandrino was urged to believe by his trickster friends (Decameron VIII.3). On the heliotrope’s properties see Ciof.1937.1. [return to English / Italian]
97. This figure, so rudely attacked, will turn out to be Vanni Fucci (v. 125). [return to English / Italian]
98–99. For this and the two other forms of punishment found in this bolgia see the “Table of Metamorphoses,” the endnote to Canto XXV. [return to English / Italian]
100. Since the so-called Ottimo Commento (1333), commentators have agreed that these two letters are written most quickly because they are written in a single stroke. But do these two letters signify anything? For instance, are they a code for Dante’s vaunt against Ovid (i.e., “I [io] can portray metamorphosis even better than you”)? Or do they represent the negation of Vanni’s self (i.e., “io” spelled backwards)? For an ingenious argument, extending this second hypothesis, see Darby Chapin (Darb.1971.1), suggesting an Ovidian source. She argues that, when Io was transformed into a cow (Metam. I.646–650), medieval commentators represented her new hoofprint as made of the two letters of her name, the “I” written inside the “O” so as to represent the cleft in her newly formed hooves (
). [return to English / Italian]
107–111. The reference to the phoenix is also Ovidian (Metam. XV.392–402). That rare bird was reputed to live five hundred years and then be reborn out of the ashes of its own perfumed funeral pyre. Christian exegetes thus easily took the phoenix as a symbol of Christ (see Beal.1983.1, pp. 105–7). Vanni, seen in this light, thus parodically enacts the death and resurrection of Christ. [return to English / Italian]
119–120. The poet’s exclamation is part of his presentation of himself not as a merely ingenious teller of fantastic tales, but as the scribe of God, only recording what he actually saw of God’s just retaliation for sins performed against Him. See Romans 12:19, where Paul offers the words of God, “Vengeance is mine; I shall repay.” [return to English / Italian]
122–126. Vanni Fucci’s laconic self-identification tells us that he was an illegitimate son (of the Lazzari family of Pistoia) and insists upon his bestiality (some early commentators report that his nickname was “Vanni the Beast”). He died sometime after 1295, when he apparently left Pistoia, and before 1300—although this is not certain. [return to English / Italian]
127–129. Dante’s response indicates that he had once known Vanni and thought of him as guilty of sins of violence, not necessarily those of fraud. [return to English / Italian]
132–139. Vanni’s shame and honest self-description give him a certain moral advantage over many of the dissembling sinners whom we meet. At the same time his wrathful character extends not only to self-hatred, but to hatred of others, as his ensuing harsh words for Dante will reveal (vv. 140–151). His character, so briefly etched, is that of a familiar enough figure, the embittered destroyer of any human bond.
The theft of sacred objects from the sacristy of the chapel of St. James in Pistoia—which caused an uproar when it occurred, ca. 1293–95—was first not laid to his door and he indeed had left the city before his complicity was revealed by one of his confederates, soon afterwards put to death for his part in the crime. There is speculation that the eventual truth of Vanni’s involvement was only discovered after 1300, yet in time for Dante to present it as “news” here in his poem. [return to English / Italian]
140–142. Vanni’s prophecy is the last of these “personal prophecies” found in Inferno. There are nine of these in the Comedy. (See note to Inf. VI.64–66.) He offers it as a form of revenge on Dante for having seen him in such distress. [return to English / Italian]
143–150. The riddling expression of the language of prophecy is, at least for a contemporary of Vanni’s and Dante’s, for the most part not difficult to unravel. Pistoia’s White Guelphs will drive out the Black party in 1301; Florence’s Blacks will do the same in the same year to the Whites in that city (with one consequence being Dante’s exile). In 1302 the Blacks of Pistoia, allied with Moroello Malaspina (“the headlong bolt”), will have their revenge upon the Whites, taking their stronghold at Serravalle. Some understand that Vanni also (or only) refers to the eventual Black victory over the Whites in Pistoia itself in 1306. [return to English / Italian]
151. Vanni’s acerbic ending, personalizing the prophecy as a way of making Dante grieve, is his tit-for-tat response for the grief that Dante has caused him by seeing him. He may be damned for thievery, but his party will be victorious, while Dante’s will be roundly defeated. [return to English / Italian]