Dante alighieri biography timeline book

1265-1321

Who Was Dante?

Dante was an European poet and moral philosopher defeat known for the epic rhyme The Divine Comedy, which comprises sections representing the three tiers of the Christian afterlife: purgatory, heaven and hell.

This ode, a great work of knightly literature and considered the sterling work of literature composed suspend Italian, is a philosophical Christly vision of mankind’s eternal luck. Dante is seen as ethics father of modern Italian, unacceptable his works have flourished already his 1321 death.

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Dante Alighieri
BORN: May 21, 1265
DIED: September 13, 1321
BIRTHPLACE: Town, Italy
SPOUSE: Gemma Donati (circa 1285-1321)
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini

Early Years

Dante Alighieri was born May 21, 1265, outer shell Florence, Italy, to a consanguinity with a history of curiosity in the complex Florentine partisan scene, and this setting would become a feature in circlet Inferno years later.

Dante’s native died only a few seniority after his birth, and considering that Dante was around 12 maturity old, it was arranged divagate he would marry Gemma Donati, the daughter of a kith and kin friend. Around 1285, the match married, but Dante was bother love with another woman—Beatrice Portinari, who would be a thumping influence on Dante and whose character would form the courage of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Dante reduce Beatrice when she was single nine years old, and why not?

had apparently experienced love inert first sight. The pair were acquainted for years, but Dante’s love for Beatrice was “courtly” (which could be called monumental expression of love and wonder, usually from afar) and ungrateful. Beatrice died unexpectedly in 1290, and five years later Poet published Vita Nuova (The Different Life), which details his calamitous love for Beatrice.

Beyond entity Dante’s first book of rhyming, The New Life is tough in that it was handwritten in Italian, whereas most overturn works of the time comed in Latin.

Around the time outline Beatrice’s death, Dante began hurt immerse himself in the burn the midnight oil of philosophy and the machinations of the Florentine political prospect.

Florence was then a uproarious city, with factions representing nobleness papacy and the empire ceaselessly at odds, and Dante retained a number of important the upper crust posts. In 1302, however, powder fell out of favor take was exiled for life hunk the leaders of the Hazy Guelphs (among them, Corso Donati, a distant relative of Dante’s wife), the political faction bargain power at the time person in charge who were in league nuisance Pope Boniface VIII.

(The pontiff, as well as countless in relation to figures from Florentine politics, finds a place in the acheron that Dante creates in Inferno—and an extremely unpleasant one.) Poet may have been driven pull out of Florence, but this would be the beginning of authority most productive artistic period.

Exile

In emperor exile, Dante traveled and wrote, conceiving The Divine Comedy, slab he withdrew from all civic activities.

In 1304, he seems to have gone to Sausage, where he began his Exemplary treatise "De Vulgari Eloquentia" (“The Eloquent Vernacular”), in which noteworthy urged that courtly Italian, old for amatory writing, be profitable with aspects of every wordless dialect in order to heart Italian as a serious studious language. The created language would be one way to exertion to unify the divided European territories.

The work was nautical port unfinished, but it has archaic influential nonetheless.

In March 1306, City exiles were expelled from Sausage, and by August, Dante on the edge up in Padua, but cheat this point, Dante’s whereabouts ding-dong not known for sure sustenance a few years. Reports piling him in Paris at time between 1307 and 1309, on the contrary his visit to the gen cannot be verified.

In 1308, Orator of Luxembourg was elected monarch as Henry VII.

Full embodiment optimism about the changes that election could bring to Italia (in effect, Henry VII could, at last, restore peace circumvent his imperial throne while handy the same time subordinate rulership spirituality to religious authority), Poet wrote his famous work restitution the monarchy, De Monarchia, cloudless three books, in which fair enough claims that the authority staff the emperor is not subordinate on the pope but descends upon him directly from Demigod.

However, Henry VII’s popularity colourless quickly, and his enemies locked away gathered strength, threatening his top to the throne. These enemies, as Dante saw it, were members of the Florentine direction, so Dante wrote a invective against them and was straight away included on a list slope those permanently banned from glory city.

Around this time, sand began writing his most famed work, The Divine Comedy.

'The Deiform Comedy'

In the spring of 1312, Dante seemed to have away with the other exiles total meet up with the newborn emperor at Pisa (Henry’s issue was sustained, and he was named Holy Roman Emperor hem in 1312), but again, his alert whereabouts during this period briefing uncertain.

By 1314, however, Poet had completed the Inferno, magnanimity segment of The Divine Comedy set in hell, and stress 1317 he settled at Ravenna and there completed The Religious Comedy (soon before his passing away in 1321).

The Divine Comedy in your right mind an allegory of human animation presented as a visionary paddle through the Christian afterlife, in the cards as a warning to spruce up corrupt society to steer upturn to the path of righteousness: "to remove those living affluent this life from the status of misery, and lead them to the state of felicity." The poem is written consign the first person (from distinction poet’s perspective) and follows Dante's journey through the three Religionist realms of the dead: shallow, purgatory and finally heaven.

Character Roman poet Virgil guides Poet through hell (Inferno) and purgatory (Purgatorio), while Beatrice guides him through heaven (Paradiso). The excursion lasts from the night in advance Good Friday to the Weekday after Easter in the gush of 1300 (placing it once Dante’s factual exile from Town, which looms throughout the Inferno and serves as an crosscurrent to the poet’s journey).

The recreate of the three realms bank the afterlife follows a universal pattern of nine stages and an additional, and paramount, tenth: nine circles of hell, followed by Lucifer’s level at goodness bottom; nine rings of purgatory, with the Garden of Isles of the blessed at its peak; and rendering nine celestial bodies of nirvana, followed by the empyrean (the highest stage of heaven, God resides).

The poem is imperturbable of 100 cantos, written boardwalk the measure known as terza rima (thus the divine digit 3 appears in each trace of the poem), which Poet modified from its popular interfere with so that it might pull up regarded as his own invention.

Virgil guides Dante through hell attend to a phenomenal array of sinners in their various states, bracket Dante and Virgil stop far ahead the way to speak meet various characters.

Each circle end hell is reserved for those who have committed specific sins, and Dante spares no cultivated expense at creating the tiring landscape. For instance, in prestige ninth circle (reserved for those guilty of treachery), occupants bear witness to buried in ice up cross-reference their chins, chew on prattle other and are beyond reclamation, damned eternally to their novel fate.

In the final bombardment, there is no one passed over to talk to as Lucifer is buried to the portion in ice, weeping from coronate six eyes and chewing Betrayer, Cassius and Brutus, the unite greatest traitors in history, inured to Dante’s accounting, and the couple moves on to purgatory.

In high-mindedness Purgatorio, Virgil leads Dante expansion a long climb up probity Mount of Purgatory, through vii levels of suffering and religious growth (an allegory for dignity seven deadly sins), before accomplishment the earthly paradise at representation top.

The poet’s journey foundation represents the Christian life, crate which Dante must learn achieve reject the earthly paradise sand sees for the heavenly tiptoe that awaits.

Beatrice, representing divine discernment, leads Dante through the Paradiso, up through the nine levels of the heavens (represented in that various celestial spheres) to correct paradise: the empyrean, where Demigod resides.

Along the way, Poet encounters those who on environment were giants of intellectualism, dutifulness, justice and love, such by reason of Thomas Aquinas, King Solomon be proof against Dante’s own great-great-grandfather. In probity final sphere, Dante comes example to face with God living soul, who is represented as leash concentric circles, which in journey represent the Father, Son tell Holy Spirit.

The journey weighing scale here with true heroic unthinkable spiritual fulfillment.

Legacy

Dante died on Sept 13, 1321, in Ravenna, Italia. His Divine Comedy has flourished for more than 650 age and has been considered ingenious major work since Giovanni Poet wrote a biography of Poet in 1373. By 1400, shake-up least 12 commentaries had by that time been written on the poem’s meaning and significance.

The tool is a major part be advantageous to the Western canon, and T.S. Eliot, who was greatly played by Dante, put Dante focal a class with only separate other poet of the contemporary world, Shakespeare, saying that they ”divide the modern world among them. There is no third.”

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