Commentary Purg X 31-33

Art is clearly a major theme of this canto.  We hear now of the aesthetic superiority of God's intaglios over the work of the sculptor Polycletus or the creative genius of nature herself.  At [Purg X 97] we learn, not of Dante's instruction, but of his delight in the intaglios.  Near the canto's close we are told in a simile of the genuine distress that can be caused by our looking at a sculpted figure of a crunched human shape in a corbel ([Purg X 131-134]).  All these aesthetic moments have at their root the experience of art as moving its audience by its mimetic capacity.  The morality of the art found on this terrace is not to be doubted, but in this canto (as opposed to the next) we at first find art treasured for purely aesthetic reasons (but see C.Purg.X.97-99).

      The words that make their way through the three descriptions of intaglios in vv. 31-81 insist on the artistic nature of what the protagonist sees: forms of intaglio: [Purg X 32], [Purg X 38], [Purg X 55],; of imagine: [Purg X 39], [Purg X 41], [Purg X 62],; of storia: [Purg X 52], [Purg X 71], [Purg X 73].  This art of God, which some commentators have looked upon as uncannily predicting the eventual sculpture of Michelangelo, may be more advanced than that of mere mortals, and even of nature, but it somehow does not seem very far removed from that of Dante himself.  See Barolini (Baro.1984.1), p. 275: 'The exaltation of divine art at the expense of human art paradoxically leads to the exaltation of that human artist who most closely imitates divine art, who writes a poem to which heaven and earth contribute, and who by way of being only a scribe becomes the greatest of poets.'  Mazzotta (Mazz.1979.1), pp. 237-52, frames his discussion of this canto in Dante's supposed 'ambiguity' about the value of fame.  For a spirited and dubious reply to Mazzotta's compulsion to find 'ambiguity' nearly everywhere in Dante's work and as the hallmark of his way of thinking and writing, see Mastrobuono (Mast.1984.1), pointing out, by listing the over-abundance of assertions of this view (pp. 16-17), its distorted nature.  One might also wonder why in his monograph Mazzotta never even discusses Dante's own early statement that poems can be understood plainly because their authors know what they mean when they compose them (V.N.XXV.10).

      Polycletus, Athenian sculptor of the fifth century B.C., for Dante represented the height of classical Greek art.  Torraca (DDP Torraca.Purg.X.32-33) points out that previous thirteenth-century Italian writers cited him in a similar way.  Sources of information about him were found in Cicero, Quintilian, and Pliny.  And Aristotle, mentioning him in the Nichomachean Ethics, brought him to the attention of St. Thomas.  And so, even if Italian vernacular writers of this period had never seen his work, they could refer to it as Dante does here.  Benvenuto (DDP Benvenuto.Purg.X.28-33) tells the interesting tale that he, in a private house in Florence, saw a marble statue of naked Venus that was supposed to have been done by Polycletus, but says that he does not believe it actually was, since, on the (erroneous) authority of Pliny, Polycletus worked in bronze, not in marble.  He adds that Dante really should have named Praxiteles here.