Michelangelo’s Bedtime Reading

Michelangelo knew The Divine Comedy by heart. Many men and women did.

Nowadays it’s hard to understand how a single poem, a single poet, could have meant so much to people, though we read about that kind of veneration in Rome, of Virgil, and in ancient Greece, of Homer. Educated men and women knew those works by heart. Even private letters are filled with quotes and allusions.  People saw what those great Seers saw and chose just the words those Poets had chosen to speak about it. And not only that: they imagined what those Poets imagined and took their fantasies for truth, for reality.  Sailors watched out for the Sirens when they came to an eerie stretch of ocean. Generations of young warriors daydreamed of doing the shining deeds of Achilles.    If Dante said Hell had twenty levels, Hell had twenty levels, and it was right that it should. They could just see that sign over the Gates of Hell: Abandon All Hope, You Who Enter. It was real.

Dante was the greatest man in hundreds of years. Until his time there were two irreconcilable worlds: the ancient and the medieval one.  The ancient world was pagan and so, essentially corrupt. You couldn’t learn from those old thinkers: they themselves were lost.  Christian theology had come to substitute their groping philosophies. Life now had an explanation—the explanation.    Along came Dante.  He found that the old  pagan philosophers and poets  weren’t always so wrong.  Sometimes they even seemed to speak like good Christians. And, when you came right down to it, the Latin poet Virgil had written like an angel, his verse was so beautiful.

Dante came up with the idea of writing a great poem about the World to Come; and he would put all those great men in it, from whatever time. And that World to Come would be the heaven Dante’s time knew, but it would also be the Underworld of the old pagans.

And he would write his poem in Italian, in his own Tuscan dialect.  That was a real novelty: until then, educated men wrote and read Latin.  His poem was so good, he wrote with such precision, grace, and beauty, that it became the model of language for all men during centuries.  Of language, of thought, of fantasy. Michelangelo read The Divine Comedy at night after work and sighed when he came to the deep and beautiful lines. He had never learned Latin and Dante was his whole education.

And the truth is, all the Renaissance philosophers and linguists, though they learned Latin and Greek and adored the writings of the pagan writers, at night they went home and read their Dante.  He spoke to them in the direct, untranslated, language of their hearts and heads. And made them feel that it was incredibly beautiful.