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The Dartmouth
March 28, 2024 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Manzotta lectures on 'Purgatorio'

Giuseppe Manzotta, a professor of Italian literature at Yale University, spoke yesterday on the ways in which humans receive moral knowledge through art in Dante's "Purgatorio."

He focused on the example of murals that appear etched into a mountain in the tenth canto of the poem, when Dante visits the area where the proud are cleansed of the sins.

The first mural shows Mikah, wife of the Biblical King David, who looks on skeptically from a tower of her palace as her husband dances below.

The second shows the Roman emperor Trajan listening to the pleas of the widow Miserella, whose son was unjustly slain.

Both images comment on justice and mercy--the former shows Mikah expressing arrogance and contempt for her husband, and the latter shows Trajan extending justice and mercy to the suffering Miserella.

According to Manzetta, the experience of looking at these image reflects the pilgrim's broader experiences journeying through hell, purgatory and heaven. Throughout the poem, the pilgrim has been "a humble spectator who is serving a spiritual apprenticeship."

While the pilgrim does experience "aesthetic delight that brings him close to the images," this moral knowledge does not aid him as fully as it should.

A few minutes later, the pilgrim observes actual sinners who have committed prideful acts, who are therefore forced to carry heavy burdens on their backs.

Even after Virgil explained the nature of the punishment to him, the pilgrim fails to understand it fully and even questioned if the shadowy, hunched-over figures are human.

This failure to connect the artistic depictions of pride, justice and mercy with the actual suffering humans in front of him shows what Dante thought to be a fundamental failure of art, Manzetta said.

In this vein, Manzetta quoted a passage from St. Augustine's Confessions, with which Dante would have been familiar, in which Augustine criticizes the nature of tragedy. According to Augustine, people enjoy tragedy because it gives them the opportunity to suffer without feeling obligated to relieve the suffering of the protagonist.

Manzetta also noted that both art and pride are rooted in the desire for individual excellence and a kind of self-love. Many artists are driven by the desire to produce works of art better than those than have been produced in the past, he said.

Still, the very presence of the murals, and the fact that Dante does learn some from their content, suggests that he takes a less extreme viewpoint than Augustine, Manzetta said.

Manzetta also spoke at length about the importance of "visible experience" in the Divine Comedy.

For example, the first letters of tercets spell out identifiable words, so that a reader experiences the poem as a visible object in a way that he or she would not by merely hearing Dante's text read aloud, according to Manzetta.