PietroAlighieri

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PIETRO ALIGHIERI'S COMMENTARY

TO HIS FATHER'S COMMEDIA

ow did I come to Pietro Alighieri's Commentary to his father's Commedia? That in itself is a story. I was writing my Berkeley dissertation on pilgrimage in Dante, Langland and Chaucer and teasing out the fourfold allegoresis, which Dante relates to the Exodus paradigm of going from bondage to freedom, the singing of the Psalm 113, In exitu Israel de Aegypto, which James Joyce reverberates with its unique tonus peregrinus again in Ulysses' Easter Uprising. Doing so I came across Father Dunstan Tucker, O.S.B.'s "Dante's Reconciliation in the Purgatorio," American Benedictine Review 20 (1969), 75-92, which places that Psalm in its Easter liturgical context of baptism. It would have been sung in Florence's Baptistry on Easter Saturday, 3 April 1266, when Dante's name would have rung out beneath that mosaiced dome, all Florentine babies born since the Easter of 1265 and before 1266's Easter being baptized on that date.

Dante, three times, would use its allegorizing, in Convivio I.1, in Purgatorio II, and in Epistola X. But Father Tucker, in making some corrections to his essay, muddled his footnotes. That caused me to try to find his reference to a passage in Pietro Alighieri's Commentary. But it wasn't there at the page number he gave. So, seeking to find it, I read the entire Latin commentary through in both exasperation and gratitude.

Dante named his three sons Pietro/Peter, Jacopo/James, and Giovanni/John, after the three disciples present at the Transfigruation. Pietro Alighieri, born around 1283-1285, when coming of age, was condemned to death with his brothers, and so went to join his father in exile to escape that fate, 6 November 1315. He is documented as a Judge in Verona, in 1332, probably having studied law in Bologna. Around 1355, Moggio de' Moggi tells us, he recited a now-lost poem of his composing in Verona's Piazza delle Erbe outlining his father's Commedia. His brother, Jacopo, also composed a Commentary in verse which is appended to manuscripts of the Commedia that emanate particularly from Francesco da Barberino's officina and which carefully note Dante's death in Ravenna, for instance as in BML Plut. 40.11: ‘Explicit liber comedie Dantis ala/gherij de florentia per eum editus/ sub anno dominice incarnationis/Millessimo trecentimo. de mense mar/tii. Sole in ariete. Luna nona in libra./ Qui decessit in ciuitate rauenne in an/no dominice incarnationis Millessimo/ trecentesimo uigesimo primo die sanc/crucis de mense septembris anima cu/ius in pace requiescat ammen.’ Pietro Alighieri died in 1364. His magnificent tomb is extant in Treviso.

Pietro Alighieri's tomb at the Church of San Francesco, Treviso

There are three versions of Pietro Alighieri's Commentary to his father's poem, the first edited by Vincenzo Nannucci for Lord Vernon, in the edition I read through in its Latin many years ago, finding treasures there, like the cataloging of what would have been his father's library as including the Classics, Aristotle, Ovid, Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Terence, Seneca, and Patristic and Scholastic authors, Augustine, Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Thomas Aquinas, but also Andreas Cappellanus, De arte honetse amandi, and Alanus de Insula. I found most valuable his comment that his father founded the Commedia on the circular Roman theatres such as where Terence's Comedies were performed, for this validated the use of drama in the Commedia, Terence being the freed slave from Africa whose brilliant plays delighted the Roman Republic of the Scipios and the Roman Empire following upon it, his influence as pedagogy with laughter then being used to teach spoken Latin in medieval monasteries and Renaissance schoolrooms. The acting by the abbots, monks and oblates of the Officium Pereginorum with its delightful dramatic irony was done in the context of their study of Terence's laughter-filled Comedies.

Pietro Alighieri tells us:

Libri titulus est: Comoedia Dantis Allegherii; et quare sic vocetur, adverte. Antiquitus in theatro, quod erat area semicircularis, et in ejus medio erat domuncula, quae scena dicebatur, in qua erat pulpitum, et super id ascendebat poeta ut cantor, et sua carmina ut cantiones recitebat, extra vero erant mimi joculatores, carminum pronuntiationem gestu corporis effigiantes per adaptationem ad quemlibet, ex cujus persona ipse poeta loquebatur; . . . et si tale pulpitum, seu domunculam, ascendebat poeta, qui de more villico caneret, talis cantus dicebatur comoedia. . .et quod ejus stylus erat in materia incipiente a tristi recitatione et finiente in laetam . . . Et quod auctor iste ita scribere intendebat, incipiende ab Inferno et finiendo in Paradisum, sic ejus Poema voluit nominari. Item quod poeta in comoedia debet loqui remisse et non alte, ut Terentius in suis comoediis fecit.

But perhaps more important than giving the theatricality of his father's Commedia is his understanding of its allegorizing. He combines the Fourfold Allegoresis of the theologians with the Four Causes of Aristotle, the first as literal and material, the second as moral and efficient, the third as figural and formal, the fourth as final and anagogical. There are two types of allegory, the Allegory of the Theologians, which is God's, based in Truth, whose end is damnation/salvation; and the Allegory of the Poets, which is fictive and pagan, where a vice or a virtue is abstracted and intellectualized, away from the marketplace's real world of flesh and blood into an ivory tower, allos+agora. Dante mixes them up together. Which he can do because he, the Author in his reality of flesh and blood, and garbed in his red and ermine teaching robes, outside of his book, which lies on the lectern before him, which he writes and from which he reads, creates an alternative cosmos, his poem. Into which he fictively 'incarnates' his mirror image, now in the blue of the sorceror's apprentice to Virgil the necromancer, and journeying from the bondage of Hell to the freedom of Paradise. During the paideia of this poem this 'Dante' fictively errs, then learns from his errors, and we learn with him, being likewise shaped from vice to virtue. But there is also the Figural and Formal Allegory and Cause, where episodes in the Hebrew Scriptures become mirrors of those in the Gospels, such as Isaac carrying the wood becoming Christ carrying the Cross; in Dante's writings, where Psalm 113's In Exitu Israel de Aegypto becomes Christian Baptism, and even where three poets, Dante, Virgil, Statius, poetando, become like the three pilgrims at Emmaus. This is most beautifully shown in the Botticelli illustrations to that Purgatorio XXI scene.

I have argued that the Anagogical and Final Allegory and Cause is where we meet in the Other that unrecognised/recognized Epiphany of Christ, who seems as if painted in our image, "mi parve pinta della nostra effigie". In Hell Dante perjures himself saying lies are truths, in his fictive Paradise, Dante says truthfully the poem is a fiction. But it is a fiction whose Efficient Cause and Moral Allegory is our salvation, our God-mirroring achieved through his God-mirroring.

Florence, Exile, 1265-1321
Dante Author, in red
True ―›
Material Cause
Literal

Poem, Easter, 1300
Dante Pilgrim, in blue
Dream, Fiction ―›
Efficient and Formal Causes
Moral and Figural Allegories

Everywhere, 1300-2020
We, Readers
True
Efficient and Final Causes
Moral and Anagogical Allegories

Therefore I delight in how Pietro Alighieri differentiates between the flesh and blood reality of his father and the deliberate fictiveness, the trickster-savior playfulness, of his dream vision poem as "una veritade ascosa sotto bella menzogna", as Gregorian chant masquerading with motets such as Casella's and the Siren's Songs which lead the hundred-fold pilgrims, Ulysses, Dante and ourselves astray into a false loveliness, until Cato and Beatrice rudely awaken us.

I had first perused the Commentarium of 1546 in the fine Lord Vernon edition, printed in hand-set and highly legible type on rag paper, findimg it in the library stacks at Berkeley, studying it again in the Società Dantesca Italiana library in Florence, finally purchasing it in two anastatic volumes from India.

Pietro continued his work of elucidating his father's poem, making use of the family library of manuscripts, in two further versions, the final one edited by the tragic scholar Massimiliano Chiamenti who published it with the University of Arizona Press in 2002, using Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ottoboniana Latina 2867 as his base text, which is retrievable from the Vatican website.

And then Massimo Seriacopi found in the Laurentian Library the version of the Commentary translated in volgare, in Tuscan Italian, publishing it in two volumes in 2008 and 2009. We collaborated, he turning my edition of the Opere di Brunetto Latino in an Italian acceptable to Italian scholars, and then we worked together on Canto XXI of the Purgatorio on the Emmaus Peregrini. He next gave me copies of his two volumes of Pietro Alighieri's Commentary in volgare along with this recording of his observations on the importance of that work. Osservazioni sul commento di Pietro Alighieri alla Commedia

As an Assistant Professor at Princeton I finally wrote to Father Dunstan Tucker, trying to clear up that fugitive footnote, and mentioned to him that I would like to have my students perform the Officium Peregrinorum. He suggested that the former Chant Master of St John's Abbey, now made redundant by Vatican II, could come to help me. So, together we, Father Gerard Farrell, O.S.B., and I, had our Princeton University students following five rehearsals be able to perform the Officium Peregrinorum in its Latin Gregorian chant and use the stage directions of the Orléans 201 manuscript, which have the Abbot of Winchester/Fleury "represent" the figure of Christ as the Pilgrim who joins the sorrowing two on the road to Emmaus, Luke 24's text speaking of their sermoning and fabling, hi sermones and dum fabularentur. In my Berkeley dissertation I had shown how this mixture of truth and lie, fact and fiction, informs the major pilgrimage poems of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Dante's Commedia among them. In iconography, and also even in the music, the named disciple, Cleopas, is shown as old while the other disciple in the medieval tradition is a youthful Luke, to be sung by an oblate whose voice has not yet cracked, but who carries the Book of his Gospel in which he will narrate this tale, following being chided by Christ for being foolish 'and slow of heart to believe'. Finally, in Florence and in Ravenna, I was even able to have this scene enacted in Gregorian chant in Latin in Federigo Bardazzi's Ensemble San Felice performance of La Musica della Commedia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej0t2br5P2o&list=PLJJChgOGCbAUljXZOv2TH32IGeYfBwYTq&index=4&t=129s

For in Purgatorio XXI Dante explicitly tells us that the Commedia is as Luke wrote it, 'come ne scriva Luca', and he presents Virgil as the Cleophas figures, himself as the youthful not-yet-comprehending figure of Luke, while he baptises pagan Statius as Christian, as being like Christ who joins the other two. In a sense he is saying that even the worst criminals in Hell, when met by the other two, by Virgil and Dante, as Cleophas and Luke, have a fractal of that of Christ in them where they can save us from committing their sin. An Egerton manuscript shows Virgil and Dante, who is holding the Book (of Virgil's Aeneid over which he has fallen asleep, of Lucan's Pharsalia, of Luke's Gospel) in the Emmaus iconography, but lacking Chris, where Christ in the Inferno cannot be named.

Let us now take that episode of dramatic irony, found in both Luke and Terence, then in Dante's Purgatorio XXI, and see how the different versions of Pietro's Commentary handle this delightful scene as both theme and variation where even the Christ figure of Statius is uncomprehending of the presence of his beloved Virgil:

Dicendo quomodo post eus venit quidam spiritus, et eos salutavit, et ita allocutus est eos, ut fecit Christus die tertia post passionem apparens sancto Jacobo et sancto Joanni [sic] euntibus per Jerosolimam et loquentibus de eo; dicendo: qui sunt hi sermones, quos confertis ad invicem ambulantes? Qui dixerunt: tu solus peregrinus es in Jerusalem etc. Demjum et cognoverunt eum, ut Lucae Capitolo XXIV. Fingendo dictum spiritum se postea nominare Statium, in quo modo figuratur philosophis moralis, ut in Capitolo II Inferni praemisi.

Inde tangit auctor comparative quod scribitur Luce, capitulo ultimo, scilicet quod dum post passionem et resurrectionem Domini Cleophas et Almeon -- secundum Ambrosium, licet non nominetur in Evangelio dictus Almeon, nam Gregorius dicit quod iste non nominatum fuit ipse Lucas, sed quadam humilitate noluit se nominare -- ient tamquam discipuli Christi per Yerosolmato loquentes ad invicem et dolentes de ipso Iesu Apparuit eium Christus dicens eis: "Qui sunt sermones vestri?" qui non cognoscentes eum dixerunt sibi: "Et tu peregrinus solus es in Yerusalem" etc. Sic itaque fingit hic autor umbram Stati poete Tolosani apparuisse eis ibi et dixisse ut habetur in textu.

Dicendo come drieto a loro venne uno spirito e salutossi faccendo similitudine a quello che scrive Santo Luca, che al dì che Cristo risucito, due discepoli suoi si partirono di Ierusalem e andavano in Emaus e parlavano di Cristo. E Cristo, in forma di pellegrino, appari loro di dietro, e andò con loro infino allo albergo. E finge questo essere lo spirito di Stazio poeta, nel quale vuole figurare la filosofia morale.

Massimo Seriacopi and I believe that Pietro's Commentary is extremely close in its understanding of Dante's strategy in narrating the poem, as something fictive but with moral intent, that lies to teach truth, where Dante places himself, as Everyman/Adam, created in God's image, who will learn to become Christlike, and with him his readers, ourselves, into the dream vision within the poem, im which we learn from that fiction that he creates, that is contains historical facts and geographical reality, all time and all space, an encyclopedeia, and so progress from vices to virtues, from damnation to salvation. The theatre is not true but pretend, but its pretense, as at Epidauros, Athens, Fiesole and Rome, could heal iand teach ts citizenry. Aristotle defines comedy as where the anagnorisis comes about in time, in tragedy, too late. While the Inferno is high tragedy, alta tragedia, the entirety is comedy, la Commedia.

I am most grateful to the felix culpa of Father Dunstan Tucker's lost footnote.

Bibliography

Petri Allegheri. Commentarium super Dantis ipsius genitoris Comoedia. A c. Vincentio Nannucci. Lord Vernon edition. India: Pranava Books, n.d. 2 vols.

Pietro Alighieri. Comentum super poema Comedie Dantis. A Critical Edition of the Third and Final Draft of Pietro Alighieri's Commentary on Dante's The Divine Comedy. Ed. Massimiliano Chiamenti. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002.

Pietro Alighieri.Volgarizzamento inedito del Commento di Pietro Alighieri alla Commedia di Dante. Ed. Massimo Seriacopi. 2 vols. Regello: FrenzeLibri, 2009.

Dunstan Tucker, OSB. "Dante's Reconciliation in the Purgatori", American Benedictine Review 20 (1969) 75-92. Communicating with Father Dunstan Tucker enabled Father Gerard Farrall, OSB, also of St John's Abbey, no longer needed as Abbey Chant Master following Vatican II, to come to Westminster Choir College and for us together to produce liturgical dramas, the Officium Peregrinorum, the Resucitatio Lazari, the Filius Getronis, in Princeton's University Chapel, students learning the Gregorian Chant and Latin in five rehearsals.

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