Dante's enduring drawing power proof that culture trumps politics, even federal elections
National Post, 19 September 2021
For the seventh centenary of Dante’s death, three Canadian artists have made significant contributions to keeping the Divine Comedy vibrant.
Politics is, too often, too much with us. Emphatically so these past years. It is important, but not ultimately important. Culture is more important, which is why we remember paintings and plays and poems long after contemporaneous political campaigns have faded from memory.
I had occasion to reflect upon this, this past week, observing the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death in the days before a federal election.
Dante was caught up in the life-and-death politics of early 14th-century Florence, so much so that his rivals drove him from the city upon pain of death should he return. He didn’t, dying in exile in Ravenna. He included plenty of indirect commentary in the Divine Comedy about his political travails.
Yet few read it today for the politics. It’s read for the perennial philosophy. And read it they do. This past week in Florence, an in-person and virtual reading of the entire Divine Comedy was staged, featuring prominent English-speaking actors Ralph Fiennes and Helen Mirren, testifying to the reach of Dante beyond his native Italian.
For the seventh centenary of Dante’s death, three Canadian artists have made significant contributions to keeping the Divine Comedy vibrant.
At the Grand Quai in the old port of Montreal, the exhibition Divina Dali brings together the Dante prints of Salvador Dali, who did watercolours of all 100 cantos of Dante’s trilogy. Dali was commissioned in 1950 to undertake the massive work, but subsequently the commission was withdrawn. Dali exhibited the works himself in Paris in 1960, and then prints were made.
Staged in Montreal by the Quebec company La Girafe en feu, the exhibition demonstrates how the religious themes of Dante can capture even a worldly master like Dali. Looking at Dante through Dali’s secular eyes is not the usual vantage point, but offers some intriguing perspectives.
Dali’s expertise in absurd and outlandish figures is well-suited for the “Inferno,” where Dante journeys through hell. Our world, marked by sin, is more like hell than heaven. Dali’s grotesqueries are well-suited to give image to Dante’s vision of the underworld.
In the “Purgatory” and “Paradise,” Dali’s depictions are less apt, but there are some gems. For one of the final cantos, Dali paints Dante as ascending toward the light which has its source in Jesus on the Cross. Dali got Dante.
An artist who certainly gets Dante in the fullness of his theological vision is Timothy Schmalz of St. Jacobs, Ont., perhaps the world’s leading Christian sculptor. (He also does secular monuments, like the Gordon Lightfoot sculpture in Orillia, Ont., or the firefighters’ memorial in Fort McMurray.)
His project of making bronzes of the Divine Comedy is the first time all 100 cantos have been sculpted. With a sense of showmanship that Dante would appreciate, Schmalz was in Florence on Dante’s death anniversary this past week to sculpt the final canto.
The entire project — an enormous introductory sculpture depicting Dante, followed by all 100 bronzes — will form a “Dante Gardens” at the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto and other significant sites around the world. Viewers will be able to walk through hell, purgatory and heaven. Hold the jokes on what is most fitting for the modern academy!
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