1613, Vicenza: FRANCESCO LENI
1629, Padua: DONATO PASQUARDI
1629, Venice: NICOLO MISSERINI
While approximately thirty editions of the Divine Comedy were published
during the 16th century, only three appeared in the 17th -- and all within
the first thirty years of that century. No other work by Dante was published
in Italy at all during the 17th century, with the exception of one edition
of the De vulgari eloquentia included in an anthology of rhetorical
texts (Venice, 1643). Dante's fortune slid into a trough during the 17th
century and would only make its way up the slope again a century later.
The sad state of Dante's reputation is best illustrated by the small size
and unrefined presentation of these humble editions produced at the beginning
of the 17th century.
Hostility toward Dante had been building in Catholic Italy, based in part
on Counter-Reformation suspicion of what looked like dangerously pre-Lutheran
elements in the ideological structure of the Comedy, and upon the selective
use religious reformers made of Dante in the 16th century. The Comedy
was put on the Index in 1614, with the injunction that certain passages
be expurgated, including Inferno XIX, 48-117 (simoniac popes); Purgatorio
XIX, 106-18 (on Pope Adrian V's avarice and conversion); and Paradiso
IX, 136-142 (against the avarice of the Vatican high clergy).
In literary terms, the early 17th century's more hedonistic view of poetry,
as against that of the previous few generations, worked against Dante. Particular
attention paid to outward beauty and form characterized the baroque aesthetic,
which was essentially at odds with Dante's poetry. F. Guarino spoke for
his age when he wrote in 1620:
You sculpt well, Dante, but you do not polish;
you are good, but not beautiful;
you benefit, but do not please,
and with too much knowledge you oppress the Muse.
(L'Inferno d'amore, canto V)
As did Paolo Beni (1552-1625) who wrote in his Il Cavalcanti (1614) that
Dante's
... slack lines, forced rhymes, various improprieties, insufferable
obscenities, frequent affectations, and, to be brief, the horrid, stupid,
licentious style, along with endless other errors of learning and art, show
clearly that Dante was a worse than awful Poet, so little did he have any
right to claim superiority over other Poets. And so it seems to me that
he was very unfortunate, with a Poem in which one can perceive no industry
or need of effort, that it should make him (so he sings) grow thin (the
word is his) for many years.
Yet another reason for the 17th century's rejection of Dante is that during
that phase of "the battle between the ancients and the moderns,"
Dante was deemed to be too primitive, and as occupying a position in vernacular
literary history which had been superseded. The rejection of Dante emerges
also from the polemics with which the modernists reacted to the decision
by the Crusca Academy to base its
Vocabolario of 1612 primarily on the language of the 14th-century
classics, to the exclusion of more recent writers and those from other regions.
Thus, the dismissal of Dante had everything to do with advancing the cause
of the moderns.
1613 Edition
1629 Paduan Edition
1629 Venetian Edition
