Abstract
AbstractAs a poetic creation, Dante's Matelda is a wonderfully realized lady of natural beauty, shining love, and spontaneous joy; in terms of concept and interpretation, she poses a series of apparently insuperable problems. For six cantos she remains as a constant and integral element in Dante's presentation of the final stages of purification in the garden of original innocence, and yet to us she seems indeed to resemble both types of nymph to which she is compared (Purg., 29. 4–6), now coming out from the forest shadows to shine clearly before our eyes in all her beauty, now fleeing back into the mysterious depths of Dante's poetic imagination, eluding all our attempts to capture and define her essential being. This is as it should be. With Matelda Dante wished to create a figure of both clarity and mystery, poetically real and yet conceptually elusive. Dante's poem, however, aims at universal instruction and reform, and in this respect, as a vital and supremely beautiful feature in his enticing descr...
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