Object Type: Sculpture and Installations

Creation Place: Europe, Italy

Medium and Support: high relief Castelline marble

Credit Line: Carleton College Art Collection, gift of James Woodward Strong, president 1870-1903

Accession Number: 1997.285

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is best known to us as a Florentine, a poet, the author of the Divine Comedy, and the lover-from-afar of Beatrice, his inspiration and ultimately his guide through the heavenly section of his pilgrimage.

But what did Dante mean when this bust was made in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century? In 1890, he had only just been canonized as a great writer. Writing the entry in the 1890 Encyclopedia Britannica, Oscar Browning, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, situated Dante as one of the heroes of "regenerated Italy," or, in other words, of the newly unified Italian state. Dante Societies were cropping up all over, including the Dante Club in Massachusetts which figures in the 2003 thriller of the same name by Matthew Pearl.

The Britannica article assured contempoararies that Dante was "as real a classic as Virgil." He was "the first great name in literature after the night of the dark ages" and the poast writer who, wrote Goethe, was "still exercisiing [his] full influence on mankind." This newly-discovered Dante, "fully vindicated" by late nineteenth-century scholarship, was a model figure who unified poetry, philosophy, and religion.

Victoria Morse
Department of History