Dante Biography

Dante Alighieri was an Italian poet, writer, and philosopher who was known simply as Dante. His Divine Comedy, first titled Comeda and afterwards christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely regarded as one of the most important Middle Ages poetry and the greatest literary achievement in the Italian language.

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Dante is credited with pioneering the use of the vernacular in writing at a period when most poetry was written in Latin and only the most educated readers could understand it. One of the first scholastic defences of the vernacular was his De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular). He used the Tuscan vernacular in works like The New Life (1295) and Divine Comedy, which helped to shape the modern-day standardised Italian language. Important Italian writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio would eventually follow in his footsteps.

Dante was a key figure in the development of Italian literature. His portrayals of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven influenced a great body of Western art and literature. He influenced many English writers, including Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, and Alfred Tennyson, among others. He is also credited with being the first to adopt the terza rima, or interlocking three-line rhyme structure. He is known in Italy as il Sommo Poeta and is regarded as the "father" of the Italian language ("the Supreme Poet"). The tri corone ("three crowns") of Italian literature are Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.

Childhood of Dante is Explained in Dante Biography as:

Dante was born in what is now Italy, in the Republic of Florence. His exact date of birth is uncertain, however, it is thought to have been around 1265. This can be gathered from the Divine Comedy's personal allusions. Between the 11th of May and the 11th of June in 1265, the sun was in Gemini (Julian calendar).

Dante claimed that his ancestors were ancient Romans, but the earliest living relative he could name was Cacciaguida degli Elisei, who was born in 1100. Dante's father, Alighiero di Bellincione, was a White Guelph who faced no punishment when the Ghibellines defeated the Ghibellines at the Battle of Montaperti in the 13th century. This shows that Alighiero or his family held some protective prestige and rank, however, some speculate that the politically inactive Alighiero was of such low status that he was not thought worthy of exile.

Dante's ancestors belonged to the Guelphs, a political coalition that supported the Papacy and fought the Ghibellines, who were backed by the Holy Roman Emperor. Bella, the poet's mother, was most likely an Abati family member. Dante was only ten years old when she died. Although widowers were socially limited in such matters, it is unclear whether he truly married her, but she did bear him two children, Dante's half-brother Francesco and half-sister Tana (Gaetana). Alighiero's father married again soon after, to Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi.

When he was 12 years old, he was married to Gemma di Manetto Donati, the daughter of Manetto Donati, a powerful Donati family member. Contracting weddings for children at such a young age was customary, and it entailed a formal ceremony that included documents signed in front of a notary. Though he never knew Beatrice well, Dante claimed to have seen her frequently when he reached 18, exchanging greetings with her on the streets of Florence.

He claims to have encountered Beatrice again years after his marriage to Gemma; he composed several sonnets to Beatrice but never mentioned Gemma in any of his poetry. In his Divine Comedy, Dante mentions more Donati relatives, especially Forese and Piccarda. The exact date of his marriage is unknown; the only known fact is that he had three children with Gemma before his banishment in 1301. (Pietro, Jacopo and Antonia).

At the Battle of Campaldino, Dante fought among the Guelph cavalry (11 June 1289). The Florentine constitution was reformated as a result of this triumph. Dante joined the Physicians' and Apothecaries' Guild in order to participate in public life, which was one of the city's many business or artisan guilds. In the years that followed, his name was occasionally mentioned as speaking or voting in the republic's different councils. However, because a large number of the minutes from such meetings between 1298 and 1300 were lost, the exact extent of Dante's engagement in the city councils is unknown.

Some of the Famous Works From Dante Alighieri Biography

After his exile in 1301, Dante created the majority of his literary work. The sole important work that predates it is La Vita Nuova ("The New Life"), a collection of lyric poetry (sonnets and songs) with prose commentary, allegedly intended to be disseminated in manuscript form, as was traditional for such poems. It also tells the storey of his love for Beatrice Portinari, who would later serve as the final emblem of salvation in the Comedy, as hinted at in the last pages of the Vita Nuova. 

Many of Dante's love poems are written in Tuscan, which was not unusual at the time; the vernacular having been widely employed for lyric compositions throughout the thirteenth century. 

However, Dante's commentary on his own work, both in the Vita Nuova and the Convivio, is written in the vernacular rather than the Latin that was virtually generally employed.

Dante's trip through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso) is described in The Divine Comedy, in which he is initially accompanied by the Roman poet Virgil and subsequently by Beatrice. Purgatorio is the most lyrical of the three books, with more references to contemporary poets and artists than Inferno; Paradiso is the holiest, and many scholars believe it contains the Divine Comedy's most beautiful and mystical sections.

Comedy quickly became a cornerstone in the formation of Italian as an established literary language, thanks to its seriousness of purpose, literary stature, and stylistic and thematic diversity of substance. 

Dante was more aware of the variety of Italian dialects and the need to create a literature and a unified literary language beyond the confines of Latin writing at the time than most early Italian writers; in this sense, he is a forerunner of the Renaissance, which sought to create vernacular literature in competition with earlier classical writers. Dante's in-depth knowledge of Roman antiquity (within the confines of his time) and apparent fondness for some characteristics of pagan Rome clearly testify to the 15th century. Ironically, despite his widespread acclaim in the centuries after his death, the Comedy fell out of favour with men of letters as being too mediaeval, too raw and tragic, and lacking in the aesthetic refinement that the high and late Renaissance demanded of writing.

He wrote the Comedy in an "Italian" language, which was in some ways an amalgamated literary language based mostly on the Tuscan regional dialect, but also including aspects of Latin and other regional dialects. He set out to address a wide audience in Italy, including laypeople, clergymen, and other poets. He demonstrated that the Italian language was suitable for the highest kind of expression by writing a poem with epic structure and philosophic intent. Italian is sometimes referred to as Dante's language in French. 

Dante was one of the first in Roman Catholic Western Europe (together with Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to publish in a vernacular language, breaking away from the constraints of exclusively publishing in Latin (the language of liturgy, history and scholarship in general, but often also of lyric poetry). This decision set a precedent, allowing more books to be published for a broader audience and paving the way for higher literacy levels in the future. Unlike Boccaccio, Milton, or Ariosto, however, Dante did not become a widely read author until the Romantic era. 

To the Romantics, Dante, like Homer and Shakespeare, was a prime example of the "original genius" who created characters of overpowering size and depth, and went far beyond any replication of past masters' patterns; and who, in turn, could not be properly replicated. Dante's renown expanded and consolidated during the nineteenth century, and by 1865, the 600th anniversary of his birth, he had established himself as one of the greatest literary symbols of the Western world.

Newcomers are frequently perplexed as to how such a serious work can be referred to as a "comedy." The term "comedy" refers to works that reflect a belief in an ordered universe, in which events tend toward not simply a happy or funny conclusion, but also one affected by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. The development of the pilgrimage from Hell to Paradise is the quintessential expression of comedy, as Dante purportedly remarked in a letter to Cangrande I della Scala, because the work begins with the pilgrim's moral uncertainty and concludes with the glimpse of God.

Convivio ("The Banquet") is a compilation of Dante's longest poems with an (unfinished) allegorical commentary; De Monarchia is a concise book of political philosophy in Latin that was condemned and burned by the Papal Legate Bertrando del Poggetto after Dante's death, which argues for the need for a universal or global monarchy to establish universal peace in this life, as well as the monarchy's ties with the Roman Catholic Church as a means of achieving eternal peace; and De vulgari eloquentia, on vernacular literature, partly inspired by Raimon Vidal de Bezaudun Razos de trobar.

Some Facts From Dante Alighieri Biography

• Beatrice Portinari was Dante's genuine love, and she was mentioned in several of his sonnets and affected his poetry.

• During Dante and Gemma's marriage, they had four children: Jacopo, Pietro, Giovanni, and Antonia.

• To aid enhance his political career, Dante became a pharmacist. Without holding such a job, he could not run for public office.

• Dante was heartbroken when Beatrice died in 1290.

• The Black Guelphs, the political leaders of the day, exiled Dante from Florence for life in 1302.

• Dante spent a few years in Bologna before moving to Padua after the Florentine exiles were expelled. His life over the next few years is unknown.

• Dante was permanently exiled from Florence after writing a tirade against members of the Florentine government in around 1308.