Dante 'buon sartore' (Paradiso 32.140): Textile Arts, Rhetoric, and Metapoetics at the End of the Commedia

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Dante 'buon sartore' (Paradiso 32.140):Textile Arts, Rhetoric, and Metapoetics at the End of the Commedia Ronald L. Martinez Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor . . . (James Joyce, Ulysses) Inventas . . . qui vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes. (Vergil, Aeneid 6.663) Dante's Empyrean is represented as a garden, a rose, and an amphitheater for the blessed, with vertical steps and seats in horizontal rows, gathered in an inverted hemispheric cupola.1 As Luca Azzetta underscores in a recent reading of Canto 32 and its adjoining cantos, the distribution of the saved within the Empyrean exhibits a "precisione geometrica."2 The souls are distributed according to whether they lived before or after Christ, so dividing salvation history into two temporal phases, which correspond in turn to equivalent numbers for those eventually to be saved.3 In harmony with this fierce geometry, students of the poem have noted that the last six cantos of Paradiso inscribe numerous recapitulations of moments in the poem already traversed by the reader. To give an example, parts of the first verses of the cantica, "La gloria di colui che tutto move / per l'universo [End Page 22] penetra, e risplende," return with a different metrical distribution in Canto 31: in the canto's fifth verse we find again "la gloria di colui" but must wait until 32.22–23 to find the rest, its word order now reversed: "ché la luce divina è penetrante / per l'universo." These two "parts" of Par. 1.1–2 establish a parenthesis (32.7–21) within which the poet compares the ministrations of the angels among the blest to a swarm of bees in a hive: the angels descend into the rose and return to the godhead ("nel gran fior discendeva . . . e quindi risaliva"), modeling the procession and return of the divine emanation that shapes and unifies the cosmos.4 The image in a sense encapsulates all of creation and heralds the poem's conclusion as a return to the origin of everything in God. In both theological and formal senses, the end of the poem is its beginning.5 In this same vein, the last thirty verses of Canto 32, completing St. Bernard's enumeration of the blessed in the rose, display an increase in the frequency of recapitulatory moments as Dante prepares to finish his work.6 Not only do these verses gather historical figures with which the poet reiterates the two periods of salvation history, they remind the reader of the entire narrative arc of the Commedia and of its allegoresis, as declared in the Letter to Cangrande.7 Bernard identifies as the "two roots" of the rose two patriarchs who, flanking the Virgin Mary, represent the two epochs of sacred history. To the left of Mary is Adam, the father through whose "ardito gusto" humankind knew the bitterness of exile from Eden ("amaro gusta"); to the right of the Virgin is seated Peter, a padre as well, and as head of the Church custodian of the remedy, acquired by Christ's death, for Adam's sin. John the Evangelist and Moses follow, they too as examples of the divide between the Old and New Testaments, "le nuove e le scritture antiche" (Par. 25.88). Moses, sitting next to Adam, led the Jews, who fed on manna in the desert,8 out of Egypt; John, alongside Peter, witnessed the trials of the Church that was acquired with Christ's atonement on the Cross (131–32).9 Moses's presence further recalls that the exitus filiorum Israel de Aegypto as it is reported in the Letter to Cangrande furnishes the historical sense on which the allegorical dimensions of the poem are based; John, placed in relation to the crucifixion, recalls that the "redemption wrought by Christ" is the properly allegorical meaning of the historical Exodus.10 Bernard then pairs Lucy, who is facing Adam across the amphitheater, with Anna, the mother of Mary, who is opposite St. Peter, and immediately thereafter informs us how the pilgrim, lost in the dark [End Page 23] wood, evaded disaster thanks to the interventions of Lucy, Beatrice, and Mary.11 By evoking the crisis and subsequent embarkation on pilgrimage that weaves the...