I’m currently in a Zoom reading-out-loud group. We are making our way through Dante’s Divine Comedy. A couple of weeks ago, we were in the midst of Purgatorio, the second of its three parts. I was just sitting in front of my laptop, minding my own business, when all of a sudden, in Canto XI, a familiar name penetrated into my head:
In painting Cimabue thought he held
the field, and now it’s Giotto they acclaim-
the former only keeps a shadowed fame.
That’s the Mandelbaum translation. Or, in the original Italian,
Credette Cimabue ne la pittura
tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido,
sì che la fama di colui è scura:
It turns out that Dante (c1265-1321) and Giotto (c1267-1337) seem to have been friends. Doing a bit of googling, I found out that there is a fresco in Florence where Giotto returns Dante’s verbal portrait by his own painterly one, placing his friend — in an even higher realm — on the wall of the chapel where Paradise is depicted:
(Some scholars quibble about whether the central figure in red is really Dante, or indeed whether Giotto really painted this fresco at all. But we won’t let them spoil our fun, will we?)
As Talking Heads would have it, “Heaven is the place where nothing ever happens”. I don’t know whether this is true. But it is comforting to see that Dante, with book under arm, is well equipped to spend some agreeable time, no matter what might be happening around him. (Or not.)
lessthanamegabyte 