Dante's Parnassus: Raphael's Parnaso

Abstract

Dante’s Parnassus: Raphael’s Parnaso DISKIN CLAY Parnassus: A complex mountain mass, with two main peaks; hence Ovid’s biceps Parnassus. The higher summit is called Lykoura or Lykeri (“Wolf Mountain,” anciently Lykorea, 2457 m.) and the lower Gerontovrachos (“Old Man’s Rock,” 2435 m. —Blue Guide to Greece. 1. DANTE’S PARNASSUS There are two mountains that bear the name Parnassus. One is located in the imagination of European poets and painters who lived far to the west of Phokis in Greece; the other is more forbidding and distant. Its two peaks rise above Delphi to a great and austere height. A ski lift now desecrates their approach from the village of Arachova . The laurel does not grow on its slopes and Apollo and the Muses are nowhere to be seen—only sheep graze there and the sheepdogs that protect them. Below it is the spring of Kastalia (now closed to visitors as a source of inspiration ) and the oracle of Apollo. European Parnassus was never an austere and terrifying Greek mountain, radiant with the smell of oregano in its season . It was a place for expressing and organizing conceptions of poetry, poets, and the worth and authority of both poetry and poets. Boccaccio evokes Dante’s ascent both to Parnassus and Helicon in a Latin poem he wrote to Petrarch :1 Novisti forsan et ipse Traxerit ut iuvenem Phoebus per celsa nivosi arion 22.2 fall 2014 Cyrreos, mediosque sinus tacitos recessus Naturae, coelique vias terraeque marisque, Aonios fontes, Parnasi culmen . . . Perhaps you knew yourself How Phoebus drew the young man through the snowy heights of Cyrrha, to the inner and silent depths of Nature, and the paths of earth and sea, the springs of Aonia, and the summit of Parnassus . . . Boccaccio goes on in a last line to take Dante to Rome, Paris, and England. England must be an exaggeration, but Rome Dante reached in 1301 (and it seems in the jubilee year of 1300). Both Boccaccio and Benvenuto Cellini thought that Dante reached Paris in his exile. England he reached only in spirit. The summit of Parnassus became a place not of the harmonious music of Apollo and the nine Muses but of ranking and contestation. It has a suitable peak and sloping shoulders , as we can appreciate from Raphael’s Parnaso in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican (fig. 1). Before Parnassus arose in the distance as a lofty vista projected by the imagination of Roman poets, there were other Greek mountains associated with poetry, most importantly Helicon and Kithairon in Boeotia (Boccaccio’s Aonia), and Pieria to the northeast, in Macedonia. The Roman poets who ascended the steep slopes of these mountains were, by their own profession , solitary and they often claimed to be the first to drink from Castalia, Delphi’s inspiring spring. Dante knew of Greek Parnassus from a great distance, as did other Roman and Italian poets from across the Adriatic. He knew the meaning of a few Greek words, but he could not read Greek. Yet, from the distance of his exile from Florence in northern and northeastern Italy, he could climb Parnassus . Its lower peak he had reached with the Eden that awaited him at the summit of his island Mount of Purgatory. He then began his ascent of the higher peak of Cirrha at the start of his Paradiso. Already, towards the end of the Purgadante ’s parnassus: raphael’s parnaso 4 torio, as he reaches the summit of the Mount of Purgatory, Dante speaks of the pagan poets who dreamed of his terrestrial Paradise. On their Parnassus, they imagined a Golden Age (Purgatorio xxvii.141). Dante’s most striking evocation of pagan Parnassus, though, comes in his invocation to Apollo in the opening of the first canto of the Paradiso. This invocation is ambiguous , and very few of its interpreters have registered its ambiguity as it veers from the pagan to the Christian (Paradiso i.13–36): O buono Appollo, a l’ultimo lavoro fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso, come dimandi a dar l’amato alloro. Infino a qui l’un giogo di Parnaso assai mi fu; ma or con amendue m’è vopo...