SOURCE: Mussetter, Sally. “‘Ritornare a lo suo principio’: Dante and the Sin of Brunetto Latini.” Philological Quarterly 63, no. 4 (fall 1984): 431-48.

[In the following essay, Mussetter considers Dante's repudiation of Brunetto as a sodomite in his Inferno within the context of the differing approaches to politics and secular knowledge represented by these two writers.]

It is not easy after nearly seven hundred years' familiarity with Inferno 15 to persuade ourselves that Brunetto Latini has not been condemned as a sodomite in the usual sense of the term. The sterility of the burning sand, the searching of one man's eyes for those of another, the touch of hand to garment, hand to face—all seem calculated to evoke the suspicion of homosexuality in a canto devoted to one of the most poignant testimonials to male friendship ever to appear in the literature of Europe. Virgil himself has all but set the name to the sin of the man who taught Dante “come l'uom s'etterna.” Preparing the pilgrim for what he will find within the walls of Dis, he says that the smallest giron, the place where Brunetto runs his ceaseless circles on the sand, stamps with its seal those who have done violence to God in nature—that is, the citizens of Sodom, the usurers of Cahors, and the blasphemers of Thebes.¹ And even if we do not recognize in Brunetto's squint an allusion to that caecitas which according to medieval commentators on Genesis 19 was synonymous with the name of Sodom, we can hardly miss in the fire which against the laws of nature falls like snow on his barren plain the suggestion of the cataclysmic end of the city whose lusts would have abused the angels of God.

Despite the authoritative voice of Virgil, however, and the implications of the text, there is not one scrap of evidence outside Dante's poem and its commentaries that even so much as hints that Brunetto was, in fact, a homosexual. Indeed, what evidence there is casts doubt upon the whole proposition. Brunetto himself in the poem he calls his Tesoretto condemns homosexuality as the most vile of man's many sins. “Come son periti,” he exclaims with more than a touch of disgust, “que' che contra natura / brigan cotal lusura!”² To be sure, his would not be the only hypocrisy unmasked by Dante in the course of the Commedia. But even so nearly a contemporary as Boccaccio seems to have been surprised to discover Brunetto among the sodomites. It is just possible, as he and others have surmised, that Dante as Brunetto's pupil was privy to a secret unknown to those on less intimate terms—or that seven centuries have erased any record of sexual aberration that might otherwise have survived. But the pilgrim's startled response to his recognition of Brunetto's charred features—“Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto?” he asks—would suggest that he, like Boccaccio, is surprised at the verdict of divine justice. And in default of any corroborating evidence, one begins to wonder just how much privileged information concerning Brunetto's private guilt Dante might have access to. Though he, like the rest of educated Florence, certainly knew Brunetto's two major works, Il Tesoretto and Li livres dou Tresor, and in all probability had made has acquaintance in the tight literary circles of the city, it seems unlikely that he was in the ordinary sense his pupil. Brunetto was some forty years Dante's senior, and both his age and his official status in the Florentine republic during Dante's youth would seem to preclude the taking on of tutorial duties—and with them, the special intimacy of a secret shared.³

Given such a set of improbabilities—and the fact that in Dante's world a man could do violence against nature not only in body but in mind, it has twice been argued quite forcefully that Brunetto is not meant to be taken as a sexual sinner at all. To André Pézard, he is instead a blasphemer, of a pair with Capaneus in Inferno 14 and thus wholly distinct from those runners with whom, as he himself says, he must not be seen—that is, those represented by the three Florentines of Inferno 16, the sodomites proper. It is true that in his treatise de Vulgari Eloquentia Dante maintains that the gift of one's mother tongue is to be counted among the gifts of nature. And from this it is possible to deduce, as Pézard has done, that Brunetto has been condemned for foresaking his native Italian to write his Tresor in French, despising the Giver in the gift when he praises the language of another as the “plus delitable et plus commune a tous langages.”⁴ But as Dante posits a natural linguistic order in the de Vulgari Eloquentia, so does he argue in the Monarchia—as in the Commedia—that the state too has its origins in nature. Temporal and secular vis à vis the spiritual order of the church, human government is established to assure every man the peace which is his due on earth. And ad mentem Dantis, the government best able to achieve this goal is the universal monarchy, the ideal empire which alone can subject the petty strifes and jealousies of city-states and princedoms to rational rule. Thus, for Richard Kay Brunetto's sin against nature consists in his staunch defense of the Guelf—republican—cause in the face of the rightful claims of the empire. With his pen, that is to say, and to enhance his personal fame, Brunetto opposed the manifest will of God as the three Guelfs of Inferno 16 fought against it in arms. And like them, he is condemned as a sodomite not for any sin of the flesh but because he set himself to preach sedition, the sin which medieval tradition, if we are to believe the wealth of examples which Kay places before us, laid to the charge of biblical Sodom more often than homosexuality.⁵

Neither Pézard nor Kay has found a ready audience.⁶ And yet it would seem a mistake to dismiss their arguments out of hand if only because between them they have raised an interesting point of fact: not one of the named runners of Inferno 15 or 16 is known as a homosexual outside Dante's poem, neither of the three “cherci e litterati grandi” who keep company with Brunetto nor the three “campion” who make a wheel of themselves somewhat later on. There is, however, an even more compelling reason than this for suspecting that Brunetto—so superior to them all in both intellect and political insight—might have been condemned not as a sexual sinner but as a professional. Professional he was above all. In his eulogy, Villani praises him as “maestro” and “cominciatore.” He was the leading if not the first “uomo politico-letterato” of his day. And though both he and his “Tesoro” would in all likelihood have been long since forgotten had he not been remembered as a “father” by the man he calls “son,” it is to him that we owe the credit not only for resurrecting Cicero's long-dead republican ideal, that wedding of political engagement and rhetoric which proved so fertile to the civic-minded humanists of the generations after Petrarch, but also for stirring in his countrymen the interest in Rome which we have come to associate with the Renaissance. Brunetto it was who instructed the Florentines “in bene parlare, e in sapere guidare e reggere la nostra repubblica secondo la politica.” And though he may never have been tutor to the young Dante, one need not read far into his works to realize the depth to which he, as master, influenced the mind and art of his successor.

Whatever Dante may have come to believe about the sanctity of one's native tongue, he can hardly have failed to note that Brunetto's Tresor, an encyclopaedia in the manner of the great Speculum of Vincent of Beauvais, was the first work of its kind to be written—in the vernacular—for the education of laymen. And Il Tesoretto, in which Brunetto traces his own education in those things which he would have all men know, precedes the Commedia by forty-odd years as the first allegorical and didactic autobiography written in Italian verse. The pilgrim might well confess his undying gratitude to such a “cominciatore” as this. But gratitude or no, it was Dante's destiny to eclipse the master whose work in so very real a sense prepared the way for his own. And he has seen fit to condemn as a sodomite the man whom the pilgrim remembers in the image of a “father.” It is still possible, of course, that Brunetto was in secret a homosexual. It is more likely, however, that as Pézard and Kay maintain, Dante had come to realize that Brunetto's professional example was in some fundamental way sterile, his lessons so contrary to nature that the natural bond between father and son—however fondly remembered—had to be cut asunder. If this is indeed the case, the evidence for making it must be found in Inferno 15.

It has often been noted that in the pilgrim's confession of gratitude to the man who taught him “come l'uom s'etterna” Dante alludes to that passage in the Tresor where Brunetto speaks of the “seconde vie” which is the glorious reward of good works. And it is usually felt that the allusion is not wholly uncritical, for “gloire” as Brunetto intends it there is fame among men, and his obsession with the work in which he thinks he still lives is rendered almost pitiable by his present wasted state. This is only one of the several allusions which Dante makes in Inferno 15 to the works of his master, however. When Brunetto asks “qual fortuna o destino” has brought him to Hell with a guide he does not know, the pilgrim answers that only yesterday—as he was on the point of returning to a valley in which he had lost his way—“questi” appeared to lead him back home, “a ca.” He gives no more than the barest selection of details: his age, the day, his discovery of the guide he does not name. But in his brief account of the turns he made from and toward his present goal, we recognize the events of Inferno 1. If we were as familiar with the prologue of Il Tesoretto as Dante's original audience must have been, we would recognize something else besides. For Brunetto, too, once lost “il gran cammino” and wandered in a “selva diversa” until “tornando in mente” he raised his eyes to a mountain and discovered a guide. Not Virgil, but the Goddess Natura she is, and it is at her direction that the newly awakened Brunetto undertakes the journey which relieves his despair.⁷

As one would expect, a radical difference in occasion and moral tone divides Brunetto's allegorical pursuit of earthly wisdom through the realms of natural history, philosophy, ethics, and love from Dante's pilgrimage through the three regions of the otherworld to the vision of God. But something else must strike us as particularly worthy of note in this most pointed allusion to Brunetto's work. Dante has paid it the honor of imitation in both Inferno 1 and 15. But he has condemned to the circle of those who have done nature most offense the self-confessed servant of the Goddess who holds it all in her sway. We need only read Il Tesoretto to the end to discover how this might be. For Brunetto's tale does not tell of his natural desire for earthly wisdom only, but of his equally natural desire for that certain revelation which lies beyond. Nature reminds him as he rides off through the forest that “la Ventura” is to be his goal. And coming eventually to repent of his worldliness, Brunetto accedes to the advice of Ovid and rides to the friars at Montpelier to take instruction in “la fede cristiana,” confess his sins, and be absolved (2389-2426). He is, he writes, “mutato” now, converted and on the threshhold of “la Ventura” toward which both nature and grace have directed his course. But here, “un dì di festa,” he changes his mind. And happily renouncing the promises of a Christian future for the joys of the earth, he returns “a la foresta” to study astronomy with Ptolemy (2893).

Brunetto's return to the forest is an allegorical fiction. And even a poet with the moral vision of Dante might have taken it in the jocular tone in which it is cast had Brunetto not been writing as a professional—as a “maestro” addressing “un valente segnore” whom he calls his “caro amico.” But even if his autobiography had been intended for no one's eyes but his own, there is no denying that in turning back to the wooded valley where his journey began Brunetto has done violence to the great law of motion which the will of God enjoins on the whole of the created world. It is natural, Dante writes in Convivo 14.12.14, that a man desire above all “lo ritornar a lo suo principio.” For this is first and foremost of nature's laws. But the place of origin to which nature moves all creatures to return cannot be set at any point in the past: it must be instead the First Principle of all. Thus Nature has directed Brunetto toward “i•Dio d'Amore” whom he will find in “la Ventura.” And Beatrice will tell the pilgrim as he enters Paradise that the goal toward which “tutte nature” aspire is the Unmoved Mover, the cause and end for whom the moving system of the universe is made. Individual creatures have their “diversi porti,” admittedly, for each moves to its particular end “per lo gran mar dell'essere” according to its star. But however great the multiplicity of individual motions, the teleological dynamic which drives the whole—moved as it is by the great wheels of the heavens themselves—returns all things to the Principle of creation in whose eternal peace they at last can take their rest.⁸

With simplicity most sublime, Beatrice articulates Dante's understanding of the force which moves the visible and the unseen world. And as she does, she sets the seal to Brunetto's sin. For nature may decree that all things set their course on God, but this is not to say that they all comply. Any creature can turn aside “in altra parte,” she says, or return to earth “torto da falso piacere” (Par. 1. 130-35). This, it would seem, is what Brunetto has done—and by a conscious fully willed choice. The Goddess has warned him not to turn from “il gran cammino” (1133-60) as she has set his “corso” toward its proper end. And when he comes to part company with his “caro amico,” he can wave him on in the direction of the final good that transcends nature (2817-92). As for himself, however, he confesses he has “poco cura” to pursue such a course, and fully cognizant of what he is doing, he turns his back on “la Ventura.” His tone is too light-hearted, perhaps, to be “spregiando” in the worst sense. But despise nature he does. And some measure of the importance which Dante must have attached to such an act of the twisted will we can gauge by the end of Inferno 15. For there again Brunetto takes cheerful leave of a friend he has shown how it is that “l'uom s'etterna” and turns back—not this time to the wooded valley of nature, but to the burning sand where nothing grows.

Brunetto's turn is a symbolic gesture, of course, as much a product of the literary imagination as Beatrice's conception of natural motion in the form of a great circle that begins and ends in God. But allegorical fiction or no, the pull of the master's example seems to have been strong enough to have tempted the pupil to follow suit. The pilgrim confesses as he describes his own experience in the dark wood that he was on the verge of returning to the valley in which he had lost his way—and that it was only when he discovered Virgil that his course was set aright (15. 49-54). The Convivo tells the story of Dante's long—and ultimately abandoned—flirtation with his Lady Philosophy, the figure of that earthly wisdom which he subordinates to a higher order with his conversion. But something more than a tacit confession of a less than perfect past is suggested by the pilgrim's words. We have, perhaps, an example of professional tact in his quiet refusal to identify his new master to the old as anything other than “questi.” But Virgil, guide, master, and reason, is also the long-unheard voice of imperial Rome newly awakened in Dante's heart (Inf. 1. 63). And given Brunetto's unshakable adherence to all things republican, we might expect to find in Dante's implicit shift of allegience between two such masters as these allusions not only to the pursuit of a higher wisdom but to the internecine political struggles of republic and empire, Guelf and Ghibelline, which so regularly disrupted the civil peace of thirteenth-century Florence.

It is from such a dichotomy as this, in fact, that Richard Kay has made his case: Dante the monarchist has condemned as unnatural Brunetto's opposition to the imperial cause. Certainly, though Kay does not cite the text as evidence, nature and politics do merge in the language of the prophecy which Brunetto speaks in Hell. Nature both good and ill, one might say, seems in Brunetto's view to determine not only the personal fortune of the pilgrim but the political fate of the city as well. Anticipating the words in which Beatrice will describe every creature's natural inclination toward its appointed goal, Brunetto tells the pilgrim that he cannot fail his “glorioso porto” if he but follows his star (55-56). Such is his nature as an artist. But such is the nature of the Florentines, a people forever blind, avaricious, envious, and proud, that like beasts they will seek to destroy him for his “ben far”—“l'una parte e l'altra” resenting the honor which is his due. It might strike us as somewhat odd that a man condemned as the enemy of nature should speak with such confidence in language borrowed almost exclusively from the natural world. But this is indeed what Brunetto has done: and whatever fears he may have for the survival of “la sementa santa” of the city's good Roman stock—even the continued existence of “la pianta” which bears it—he knows that it is contrary to natural law that “lo dolce fico” come to fruition amidst “li lazzi sorbi.” In Dante's case nature guarantees that “l'erba” will escape the goat. He will be exiled, and it is Florence that will be reduced to barrenness and ruin by “le bestie fiesolane,” the political factions that turn the city of flowers into a dungheap.

We know from Il Tesoretto that, despiser of nature that he was in Dante's eyes, Brunetto could speak her language with considerable force. And when we have reached the end of our analysis of Inferno 15, we will understand, perhaps, how it is that Dante has him do so here. More than the language that he uses, however, it is what he says that seems somewhat out of keeping with the Brunetto we know from outside the Commedia. In Hell, he is no less “un uomo politico” than he was alive. And his continued concern for the affairs of his city might seem to lend some authority to the reading which Kay has made of Inferno 15. But Brunetto—Guelf partisan that he was—does not speak in Hell as an opponent of the imperial cause. It is factionalism itself—the bestiality of “l'una parte e l'altra”—that he sees as the enemy not only of Dante but of Florence.

This is not the political stance which Brunetto assumes in the Tresor, at least not in Book 1 where he undertakes to trace the history of world government, spiritual and temporal, from its origins in Eden and Troy down to his own time. A Guelf writing, as he says, “en exil … por achoison de la guerre as florentins” might be expected to betray a personal aversion to things imperial. And indeed, the line of Aeneas is suspect from the start. Taking a non-Virgilian line, Brunetto reports that Aeneas was thought by some to have known of “la traison” against his city “et … en fu compains” (1. 33). He says much the same of Caesar who “n'ama onques les signatours ne les autres officeus de Rome, ne il lui, car il estoit de la lignie as fuis Eneas” (1. 36). As defender of Catiline, the man shortly to become the first of the emperors was suspected by many to have been “compains de cele conjuroison.” And proud monarchist that he was, according to Brunetto, he sought to arrogate “la signorie” to himself alone “selonc ce ke ses anciestres avoient eu” (1. 36). Only Charlemagne, the good “emperes de Rome” who fought “les enemis de la sainte Eglise” comes in for praise (1. 92). Manfred, whose victory at Montaperti made Brunetto an exile in 1260, fares the worst. Bastard, enemy of “li champion Jhesucrist,” he smothers his father for the imperial “tresor,” kills the other pretenders to the throne, and sets out to conquer his patrimony by “force d'armes” (1. 97). Brunetto is by no means unhappy to conclude his history with Manfred's defeat six years later at Benevento, for it is then that he and the other exiled Guelfs can return home, freed forever from the threat of imperial encroachment on their republican commune.

Brunetto's antagonism toward the Caesars past and present is perhaps sufficient to have condemned him in Dante's eyes. But such a view is complicated by two noteworthy features of Brunetto's work. Proto-humanist that he was, he saw the history of Florence as closely integrated into that of Rome. And at more than one strategic point in his tale, he makes what we know from Il Tesoretto is a characteristic turn. We might not be inclined to connect these two disparate pieces of information were it not for what we know of Dante's—and Brunetto's—understanding of nature's motions toward a goal. It seems, however, that we have been invited to. For as the pilgrim's recollection of the dark wood leads us to Il Tesoretto, so are we led to these two interrelated passages of the Tresor by Brunetto's appraisal of Florence in Inferno 15.

When Brunetto attributes the political upheavals of Guelf and Ghibelline to “le bestie fiesolane,” he refers to the legendary origins of the city. Fiesole, so the story goes, harbored Catiline the conspirator, rising up with him in his rebellion against Rome. And it is when traitor and allies have been defeated that the Romans founded Florence on the Arno plain, mixing their noble blood with the bad blood of Fiesole to create a new—and ever warlike—race (1. 36, 37). Brunetto is not the only Florentine to tell this story.⁹ But if we examine the context into which he sets his version of it, we discover that he has a particular end in mind. He has interrupted his history of Rome just as the republic which was once a kingdom is on the verge of becoming an empire. The Catiline conspiracy has cast Cicero and Caesar as adversaries. And it is not difficult to determine where Brunetto's sympathies lie. When Caesar pleads for clemency on the grounds of Catiline's noble ancestry, he is tainted with complicity in the crime. “Li tres sages Marcus Tullius Cicero,” on the other hand, “li mieus parlans hom del monde et maistres de rectorike,” is praised “par son grant sens” (1. 36, 37). The conspiracy has thus divided Rome into factions, Cicero's and Caesar's. And when Brunetto interrupts his history at this point to tell of the founding of Florence, we realize that in his view these same two factions—Guelf and Ghibelline—were bred into the city when the blood of republican Rome was mixed with the blood of those who would defend an aristocratic traitor.

Florence does not reappear in Brunetto's history of Rome until the very end. But his attitude toward the course of events set in motion by the Catiline conspiracy is graphically demonstrated at three significant places. When Octavian has avenged the death of Caesar, Brunetto decides to leave off speaking of the emperors—“et retorne a sa matire” (1. 38). He uses the same figure again a chapter later when he has “devisé la droite istore” of the Franks down to the “commencement de lor empire.” Refusing to proceed past Charlemagne, he says that “il … retornera a sa matire” (1. 39). Again when Manfred and Conradin have been defeated, “li mestres … se taist … et torne a sa matire” (1. 98). Such turns are a rhetorical device, of course, a means of transition no more “real” than the fictional return to the valley of the Goddess of Nature. But before we dismiss them as mere figures of speech we should note that in each case Brunetto has turned his back on the empire's progress—and that the occasion of the last turn is alluded to in Inferno 15. For in the sentence immediately preceding his return to “sa matire,” Brunetto declares that with the death of Manfred and Conradin the line “a l'empereor Frederik” has ended “en tel maniere ke de lui ne de ses fiz n'est demoret in terre nule semence” (1. 98). No seed remains of the imperial line of Aeneas at the end of Brunetto's history of world government. But Frederick's seed, bearer of the Roman inheritance, must be for Dante “la sementa santa” which God has planted forever in nature. And when in the Tresor Brunetto not only declares it dead but turns away, we cannot fail to appreciate the irony that undercuts his fear for its survival in the vicious Florence whose demise he prophesies in Inferno 15.

With this, we come to the point at which we can not only evaluate Brunetto's sin but discover why Dante has condemned him to run in the ceaseless circles of Sodom. Certainly, Brunetto has shown himself hostile to the empire. But if we conclude that it is this alone that has damned him, we involve ourselves in a logical improbability. Brunetto not only identifies his republican ideal with Cicero's, he takes Cicero as its authoritative source. And since Dante as a child of his time also traced to Rome the origins and forms of the modern state, it follows that in order to condemn Brunetto as a Guelf, he would also have to declare the ancient republic and Cicero with it anathema because of their opposition to Caesar. This can never be. Not only does Dante praise Cicero, “nuovo cittadino di piccola condizione,” for defending the liberty of Rome against so noble a citizen as Catiline, he draws from the pages of Roman history proof that her “cittadini divini” in all ages were inspired not by human but divine love in their love for her (Convivio 4.5). Dante has no quarrel with the republic of Cicero—nor, if we can believe Virgil when he tells the pilgrim to pay his respects to the three Guelfs of Inferno 16, does he have any quarrel with the leaders of a generation who knew a Florence of “cortesia e valor.” Guelfs they may be, but their deeds and honored names he has always heard “con affezion.”¹⁰

For all his respect and admiration, however, Dante considered the republic, whether the republic of Cicero or the “primo popolo” which fell at Montaperti, a transitional form of government, a middle state which in the course of time and nature must cede to the golden age of universal peace. Speaking in the Convivio 4.5 of the self-evident claim of the Roman empire to the allegience of all men, he adopts a characteristic metaphor of natural growth. Guided by the Divine Will toward its providential goal, the universal monarchy was nursed and tutored by the kings in infancy, emancipated in “adolescenza” by its “cittadini … divini,” and “essaltata” by the civic virtues of the republic—all in preparation for the peace of Caesar. Brunetto no less than Dante perceived the growth and change in human government: God has established for all created things a “ciertain cours,” he writes at the beginning of the Tresor, and made Nature his vicar (1. 8). And it is this course that he traces as he follows the movement of “signourie” from east to west, from Adam to the present day. The Roman kingdom becomes a republic, Caesar is made emperor because there is no turning back to kings (1. 38). But knowing all this, Brunetto concludes his history by declaring the imperial line extinct and returning with the Guelfs in exile to revive the republic of “il primo popolo” on the very ground which for six years had been home to the empire (1. 98).

In the future which Brunetto prophesies for Dante we see the effects which such a return to the past has had on Florence. Faction reigns, and the peace which is the promise of the new golden age having been destroyed, Dante will be exiled as Brunetto was—like father, like son. There is more here than this, however, to suggest that the history of Florence is turning in a vicious circle backward on itself. In one last allusion to the Tresor, Brunetto says that “le bestie fiesolane” will descend from their mountain as they have “ab antico,” still keeping something of the rock about them (61-63). The rock is usually taken as a reference to the mountain on which Fiesole sits. But at the beginning of the Tresor, Book 3, where Brunetto defines the nature of cities by explaining how they came into being, he not only speaks of the civilizing power of “un sages hom bien parlans,” but illustrates his point with the myth of Amphion. It was a rhetorician, he says in the best tradition of Cicero, who first gathered men from “les bois et … les repostailles champestres” where without knowledge of God, marriage, “peres ne fi,” they lived “a loi de bestes”—and brought them to understand “a garder raison et justice.” His “bones paroles,” one might say, like the sweet music of Amphion, charmed men from the “sauvages roches ou il abitoient” and drew them together into common habitation. Brunetto must, in part at least, be thinking of his own role in Florence. He it was who according to Villani employed his many arts to “digrossare i fiorentini,” instructing them not only in “bene parlare” but “in sapere guidare e reggere la nostra repubblica secondo la politica.” But if, as Brunetto teaches in the Tresor, the city is created by a maestro such as he from the savage wasteland of rocks and beasts, then the Florence which he describes in Hell is a city which has reverted to its primordially vicious state. Under his tutelage, that is to say, the city where bestial factions keep something of the rock about them has returned against the course of nature “a lo suo principio.”

Given his pernicious influence on Florence, Brunetto could hardly have escaped the censure of Dante. And it can no longer be much of a mystery that he has been condemned to run in the vicious circles of the sodomites—in a direction contrary to that which the pilgrim now takes with Virgil “a ca.” We may never know whether or not Brunetto was a homosexual, but there is one aspect of the story of Sodom that more than vaguely suggests the nature of his offense. “Mementote uxoris Lot,” Christ in Luke 17:32 commands those who would turn back when called to the kingdom of heaven. He refers, of course, to Genesis 19:17-26 where Lot with his wife and daughters is told by angels not to look back once they have set off from Sodom on the road to sanctuary at Zoar. Lot's wife does. And in doing so she becomes forever a figure of those who “retro respiciunt, et se a spe divinae promissionis avertunt”—for those who like Brunetto look back and turn themselves from the course of their salvation.¹¹

So it is that Brunetto is a sodomite in Dante's scheme of things. But there is a quiet irony that plays over the condemnation of the maestro whom Villani calls “cominciatore.” Dante saw Brunetto's turns as the symbolic gesture of a man who refused the call of both nature and grace. Future generations might have judged him less harshly, however. It is easy from the perspective which five hundred years have given us to make heady claims for the “secularization” of wisdom in the Renaissance and to overdraw the lines of demarcation between the “darkness” of medieval Christianity and the “illumination” of the classical revival. We need only repeat the praise which the humanists, self-consciously engaged in an historical process which they could only dimly perceive, claimed for themselves. Even allowing for the possibility of oversimplification, however, there is a dividing line which must be drawn somewhere between the world of Dante and the world after Petrarch. And it must pass between the mountain of Purgatory where Beatrice reproaches Dante for his study of the world and Mount Olympus where we find Brunetto at the end of Il Tesoretto surveying “tutto 'l mondo” as his intellectual domain. Dante must part even from Virgil and bathe himself in Lethe before he can enter the regions of the stars, while Brunetto, drawn to earth, declares human reason as a means, if not the means to wisdom and opts to study the stars with Ptolemy. Brunetto is at best a proto-humanist, to be sure. And yet, when we consider Dante's quarrel with the lessons of the Tesoro, we find … several of the attitudes of mind which we have come to associate with the Italian Renaissance have taken clear enough shape to set the maestro apart from his—more backward looking—pupil.

Brunetto's preference for secular knowledge not only determines the choice which he makes at the end of Il Tesoretto. Active experience of the world is also the ground from which he teaches his practical ethic to the layman-reader of the Tresor. Brunetto was, besides ambassador to Spain, notary of the Florentine commune. And there breathes through his instruction in the arts of government a spirit which, though never denying man's ultimate destiny, encourages him to participate in the earthly republic and seek satisfaction in his duties as a citizen. If the civic humanists of the Quattrocento still read the Tresor, they would have found there not only the revival of Cicero's political thought, but their own belief that Caesar had conspired against the freedom of the state. And indeed, their own “rediscovery” of Cicero as the citizen defender of the republic which they took as the model for their city-states made it difficult for them to justify Dante's glorification of Caesar. The empire, they thought, had stymied the intellectual energies of Rome, and they opposed it as Brunetto had done lest their communes be suppressed by the tyrants of Milan. Caesar and Cicero thus remain the poles around which the nascent political theories of the Renaissance circled. And so strong was the anti-imperial sentiment that Salutati could go beyond Brunetto and “discover” that Florence had not, in fact, been founded in the time of Caesar with the remnants of Fiesole, but by the veterans of the armies of the republican Sulla.¹²

It is not surprising, given Brunetto's love for the republic, that he does not recognize the pilgrim's guide in Hell. His was a Rome without Virgil. But it was Rome, nonetheless. And among the old ideals which he sought to revive in Florence can be counted his belief in a nobility independent of birth and in justice as a guarantor of “humaine compaignie et communite de vie.” Even more important, perhaps, is his faith in those “bones oevres” which “glore” rewards with “un seconde vie,” for in it we not only discover the basis for his participation in political affairs, we sense the first stirrings of the Renaissance cult of personality and desire for “gran fama.” Although he seems not to have had the clear sense of the “pastness of the past” which is often said to be the chief criterion of the classical studies of the later age, neither Brunetto's latinity nor his cultivation of ancient authors is to be scorned. The first chapter of the Tresor, in fact, contains a hint of what the humanists would eventually take as their philological norm. Since no mortal man can know the whole of philosophy, “la rachine” of all “les siences” and the “vive fontaine” from which many waters flow, he will compile the “mervilleus dis des autours ki devant nostre tans ont traitié de philosophie.” He will include, moreover, “seulement” the lessons of the old masters: in no way will his Tresor be “estrais de mon povre sens ne de ma nue science.” Brunetto defers to the giants of a former time, perhaps, more than he reveals a conscious understanding of philological scholarship. But he comes closer than any man of his day to saying that he will allow the masters of the past to speak in their own voice the words which they once actually said.

It is not impossible that Dante could have interpreted such a literary manifesto as yet another unnatural “ritorn' a lo suo principio.” For in the prologue to the Monarchia, where he too speaks of the legacy of the ancients, his attitude toward its use is radically different. He has returned, he says, to the history of Rome not to repeat it in his own age, but to draw from it a lesson which no one before him has ever taught. “Nam quem fructum ille qui theorema quoddam Euclidis iterum demonstraret?” he asks in the language of nature. What fruit, indeed, would he produce who set forth anew Aristotle's arguments on the nature of human happiness or Cicero's on old age? Rather than merely repeat the lessons of the old masters, he would from their labors bear new fruit to the public advantage. For it is in setting the past to serve the present and future that one wins the “palmam,” the prize of immortalizing fame. This is what he does when he incorporates into Inferno 15 the lessons of a master from the more recent past. We have seen how he sets himself a truer course than that which Brunetto takes in Il Tesoretto. But he also changes—converts, so to speak—his political lessons as well. It might strike us as out of character for a Guelf as committed to his partisan cause as Brunetto once was to blame “l'una parte e l'altra” for the devastation of his city, or to call “santa” the seed of Rome which he was once glad to pronounce dead. In making him do so now and for all time, Dante might be charged with falsifying a source, for Brunetto is not allowed to speak in Inferno 15 as he spoke in the Tresor. He speaks, instead, as nature would have had him speak—in the voice of Justinian, the lawgiver and spokesman of the empire who in Paradiso 6 will denounce both Guelf and Ghibelline for their crimes against the providential order of God.

Dante could not have known that in condemning the lessons of Brunetto he was reacting against a future that was fated to come. He saw himself coming to terms with—even redeeming—the failed lessons of a father. Some of the pain and exhilaration which such a process entails is visible in the encounter of Inferno 15, in the certainty with which Brunetto foresees the son's arrival at his “glorioso porto” and in the regret with which the pilgrim moves on his way with a maestro he tactfully leaves unnamed. Our understanding of what the rupture meant in terms at once more personal and universal is deepened, however, when we consider the myth which Virgil attaches to the Veglio di Creta, the grand Old Man whose story he tells as he guides the pilgrim along the stream which divides the blasphemers from the sodomites. The statue of the Old Man stands in a cave on Mount Ida gazing on Rome as if in a mirror and reflecting in its four metals—gold, silver, brass, and iron—the ages of the world in decline. Rent to its golden head by the “fessura” from which flow the rivers that stagnate in the circular pools of Hell, the statue is the graven image of the “paese guasto” in which it stands, the island paradise which once was “lieta d'acqua e di fronde” but has now no power to regenerate itself. There is something of Brunetto, perhaps, in both the dignity and the desolation of the Old Man of Crete. And the lessons of the statue's metals, the direction that he faces, and his one foot of clay are those of the history which Brunetto has laid out in the Tresor.¹³ But there is also in Virgil's tale something of Dante's repudiation of his master. For the statue which contains in itself the inherited legacy of the human race stands in the cave where Rhea concealed Zeus, the son who was destined to rise up in rebellion against his father Saturn, god of the Golden Age, and put an end to his reign.

The violence of Virgil's myth is absent from Dante's displacement of Brunetto Latini, or rather, it is transposed on a different plane. For as Saturn was castrated by the son who rose up against him, so does Dante undercut the claims of Brunetto's paternity by condemning him as a sodomite. Beyond this the myth cannot go in explaining the relation between Dante and Brunetto, however. For there is bound up in the son's need to declare himself free of a dead father a lasting affection which keeps the “cara e buona imagine paterna” alive in his memory. The son would not break away, perhaps, if the stars had not already decreed that he go. Brunetto cautions the pilgrim to cleanse himself from the evil ways of his city, for it is not fitting that the sweet fig bear fruit among bitter sorbs. It is not only Nature, however, that conspires to separate Dante from all that he holds dear. With more than a hint of defiance in his voice, he declares himself unafraid of Fortune and her fool, even when they bring “tanto onor” that he must be exiled. Virgil interrupts to chasten his bravado in the face of both honor and adversity. But in the image of Fortune's wheel we who know more than he are reminded of the great wheels of the heavens which order all the apparent vicissitudes of earth and return every created thing “a lo suo principio.”¹⁴

Notes

1. Inferno 11. 46-51. This and all citations to Dante's poem are to the text established by Giorgio Petrocchi as it appears in the edition of the Comedia prepared for the Bollingen Foundation by Charles S. Singleton (Princeton U. Press, 1970).

2. Il Tesoretto, 2859-64.

3. Brunetto's works as well as his place in the intellectual and political life of Florence have been recently studied by Bianca Ceva, Brunetto Latini: L'uomo e l'opera (Milan and Naples: R. Ricciardi, 1965). But see also Charles Till Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford U. Press, 1957), pp. 86-94; and “Brunetto Latini and Dante,” Studi medievali n.s. 38 (1967): 421-50; A. Marido, “Cultura letteraria e preunamistica nelle maggiori enciclopedie dell '200,” Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 68 (1916). Of the two works which constitute Brunetto's “Tesoro,” Il Tesoretto is printed in Poeti del Duecento, vol. 2, ed. Gianfranco Contini (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1960); and Li livres dou Tresor, ed. F. J. Carmody, U. of California Publications in Modern Philology, vol. 22 (U. of California Press, 1948).

4. Andre Pézard, Dante sous la pluie de feu, Etudes de philosophie mediévale, no. 40 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1950). Besides his discussion of blasphemy vis à vis the idea of language which Dante expounds in the treatise de Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. Pio Rajna (Florence, 1960), Pézard summarizes six hundred years of criticism on Inferno 15 and examines the extant records pertaining to all the “cherchi.” Not only does he find no rumor of homosexuality attaching to any of them, he finds offenses against language commensurate with Brunetto's.

5. Richard Kay, Dante's Swift and Strong: Essays on Inferno XV (Regents Press of Kansas, 1978). In much briefer form, Kay has argued his thesis in “The Sin of Brunetto Latini,” Mediaeval Studies 31 (1969): 262-86. Finding the records of Florence silent on the homosexuality of the three Guelfs of Inferno 16, Kay concludes that they, like Brunetto, have sinned in defying the preeminence of the empire. For Dante's break with not only Brunetto but Augustine on the significance of the empire, one should consult Davis, pp. 40-73, 91-94; and Etienne Gilson, Dante et la philosophie, Etudes de philosophie mediévale, no. 28 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1953), pp. 167 ff., 190 ff.

6. Reviews, all critical to Pézard, are listed by E. Esposito, Gli studi danteschi dal 1950 al 1964 (Rome: Centro editoriale internazionale, 1965). But see also Pézard's rebuttal of his critics in Cahiers du sud 38 (1951): 35-38; and the more favorable review of L. Portier, Revue des études italiennes n.s. 1 (1954): 251. To date, Kay's work has been reviewd by Robin Kirkpatrick, 75 (1980): 418-19; and Ronald B. Herzman, 78 (1980): 75-78. One telling point against Kay's argument has not been made by either reviewer, however. Since both orders, spiritual and temporal, are said in the Monarchia 3.14.3-8 to originate in man's dual nature, soul and body, Kay seems to have oversimplified Dante's thought. The spiritual order is sanctified by the Incarnation, but its seeds are no less sown in nature than the seeds of world government.

7. Il Tesoretto, 113-283. The lines closest to Inferno 1, however, are reprinted in Singleton's commentary. There seems to be some doubt as to the actual truth of what Brunetto describes here, for in his introduction to the Tresor, Carmody cites a letter purportedly from the elder Latini, informing Brunetto of the fall of the Guelfs. There is no doubt, of course, that Brunetto was exiled, and the problem need not concern us overmuch in any case, for Brunetto draws heavily in Il Tesoretto from such nature allegories as the de Planctu naturae of Alan of Lille, ed. Thomas Wright, in Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets of the Twelfth Century (London: Longeman, 1892), 2:429-522. Dante draws also on other “conversions” than Brunetto's. See John Freccero, “Dante's Prologue Scene,” Dante Studies 84 (1966): 1-25; and Sally Mussetter, “Dante's Three Beasts and the Imago Trinitatis,” Dante Studies 95 (1977): 39-52.

8. Paradiso 1. 03-41, and 2. 112-49. Dante's understanding of nature derives largely from Thomas's commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, book 5, where nature is explained as the “substance of those things which have within themselves as such the source of their motion.” In Against the Gentiles, 3. 2, Thomas argues that “omne agens agit propter finem vel per naturam vel per intellectum.” And since God is the causa causarum of the universe, and since all creatures move “ab imperfectum ad perfectum in omnibus generationis,” nature moves in a great and ordered circle to assimilate itself back to God. The lessons of Beatrice are repeated in the Monarchia, 2. 2, where nature is conceived as the living art to which the Divine Artist gives his own shape and motion. Although Dante need not have owed to Brunetto his understanding of nature and man's response to her motive force, he might have read in the Tresor 1. 8 that the archetypes of nature are “forged” in the visible world, given their “ciertain cours,” and ruled by nature “ki est viaire de son verai pere.” For nature's influence on creatures of intellect, see the Convivio, ed. Maria Simonelli (Bologna: R. Patrón, 1966), which begins with Aristotle's observation that “all men by nature desire to know.”

9. It seems to have been as common to disparage Fiesole as the “bad seed” of Florentine factionalism as it was to look to Roman history as the ancient prefiguration of the present. Villani ascribes the warlike character of Florence to its mixed inheritance, 1. 30, and Dante inveighs against the offspring of Fiesole as punic barbarism in Epistola 6. 6 (Dantis Alighieri Epistolae, ed. Paget Toynbee from text prepared by Ermenigildo Pistelli [Oxford U. Press, 1920, 1966]). The subject has been treated in the context of Dante's debt to Brunetto by Davis, pp. 94-98. But for a more detailed discussion of Brunetto's allegience to Cicero as against Cicero, see Ceva, pp. 65-74, 151-56, and 204-08, esp. “Quelle che è Virgilio per Dante, è per Brunetto Cicerone,” says F. Maggini in his introduction to La “Rettorica” italiana di Brunetto Latini, Pubblicazioni del R. Istituto di Studi Superiori (Florence, 1912), p. 70, the translation of the first seventeen chapters of Cicero's de Inventione which appears also as Book 3 of the Tresor.

10. Dante seems not only to have drawn a sharp distinction between the first and second Florentine republics but like many of his contemporaries to have regarded “il primo popolo” as something of a golden age—altogether corrupted in the next generation, however. When Rusticucci has asked whether the “cortesia e valor” of the city they knew still remains, Dante can only exclaim that no, “la gente nova e subiti guadagni” have begotten in Florence “orgoglio e dismisura.” For two sensitive readings of the first half of the canto, see Aleardo Sacchetto, Il canto dei tre fiorentini: XVI dell'Inferno, (Rome: Ausonia, 1953); and Luigi Pietrobono, “Tre fiorentini: Guido Guerra, Teghiaio Aldobrandi, and Jacopo Rusticucci,” Alighieri 3 (1962): 17-24. But for the political background against which these Florentine leaders are best understood, one should consult not only Dante's Epistolae 5, 6, 7, and 8, but M. B. Becker, “Dante and his Literary Contemporaries as Political Men,” Speculum 41 (1966): 665-90; and “A Study in Political Failure: The Florentine Magnates, 1280-1343,” Mediaeval Studies 27 (1965): 246-308. Since two of the “campion” of Inferno 16, Guido Guerra and Teghiaio Aldobrandi, led the Guelfs at Montaperti, Richard Kay believes that they have been condemned as sodomites for their resistance to the empire, pp. 12-15, esp. This is at least partially true, but we should note too, that they form a wheel of themselves—a vicious parody of the great wheel of nature. Perhaps their sin, therefore, is like Brunetto's somewhat more complicated than Kay would allow.

11. Augustine Enarratio in Psalmum LXXXIII, PL 37:1057; Isidore, Quaestiones in Genesin, 15:5, PL 83:215; Bede, Commentarii in Pentateuchum, 19, PL 91:239-40; Rabanus Maurus, Commentariorum in Genesim libri quatuor, PL 107:557-58; and the Glossa Ordinaria printed by Migne under the name of Strabo, PL 113:132 and PL 114:321. But see also de Civitate Dei 16. 33, where Augustine like so many others stresses the enduring lesson to be learned from the bad example of the wife who was turned into a pillar of salt to furnish believing men with a condiment by which they could savor her warnings. There is something of this, too, in Dante's exemplary use of Brunetto.

12. For both the “rediscovery” of Cicero” and the difficulty with Dante's “glorification” of Caesar, see Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton U. Press, 1966), pp. 47-80, 121-29, esp. Other aspects of the early Renaissance which shed light on Dante's repudiation of Brunetto have also been discussed by the same author in “Cicero and the Roman Civic Spirit in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 22 (1938): 72-97; and “Secularization of Wisdom and Political Humanism in the Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (1960), 131-50. But see also Eugene F. Rice, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Harvard U. Press, 1958); and Roberto Weiss, “Dante e l'umanesimo del suo tempo,” Lettere italiane 19 (1967): 279-90; “Lineamenti per una storia del primo umanesimo fiorentino,” Revista storica italiana 9 (1958): 349-66; and The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1969), pp. 13-16, esp. We have often been cautioned about dividing the Renaissance too sharply from the Middle Ages, recently as well as forcefully by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Social Change (Cambridge U. Press, 1979), 1:163-302, esp. Secular studies were of course not unknown to the medieval mind. That in Dante's view they must be submitted to the service of God is obvious from Beatrice's rebuke; see Freccero, “Dante's Prologue Scene,” for one of the many discussions of this point.

13. The statue teaches the combined lessons of the Roman, Hebrew, and Christian worlds: in its metals, the movement of time from the Golden Age to the present (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1. 89-93) and the movement of human government from east to west (Daniel 2:31-35); and in its name, the eternal suffering of the wounded nature of Adam (Romans 6:6, Ephesians 4:22, and Colossians 3:9). The significance of the Veglio in Dante's historical scheme has been discussed by Guiseppe Mazotta in Dante: Poet of the Desert (Princeton U. Press, 1979), pp. 14-38.

14. It has become fashionable since the appearance of Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1973) to talk of literary fathers and sons. And it would seem, if I understand Bloom correctly, that Dante “swerves away from his precursor,” that he “completes” him, and that he breaks away rather than repeat what Brunetto has done. Dante has certainly called in “an intermediary being, neither divine nor human … to aid him.” He yields up his own talent to the man who taught him his art, and finally, “holds his own poem” open not only to the work of the precursor, but to the precursor himself. There seems, however, to be no “anxiety” in Dante here. He has, after all, seen God by the time he writes the Commedia. And he can only have taken comfort from the fact that since it is mandated by nature for fathers to beget sons who will replace them, it is natural for him to supplant Brunetto.