- intercalatory narrative structure of Inferno 16 and 17: Dante splices the narrative of the transition from circle 7 (violence) to circle 8 (fraud)
- the arrival of Geryon, ”image of fraud”
- Dante’s treatment of usury continues the indictment of the Florentine nobility from the previous canto
- Dante’s treatment of usury, like his treatment of sodomy, is culturally non-normative, since he avoids stigmatizing Jews or invoking the typical anti-Semitic rhetoric that associates Jews with usury and money-lending (for anti-Jewish iconography, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, cited in Coordinated Reading)
- Dante’s own family was involved in the money-lending business
- the flight on Geryon and the pilgrim’s identification with two “failed flyers” of classical mythology: Phaethon and Icarus, doomed by their reckless daring
- Dante’s sustained interest in Icarus’s father, the great artifex Daedalus, paired with another mythological figure who challenged the limits set for humans in her mimetic woven tapestries: Arachne
- Phaeton, Icarus, Daedalus and Arachne: all are avatars of Ulysses, the embodiment of transgression in Dante’s personal mythography
[1] In The Undivine Comedy, Chapter 3, I analyze the “intercalatory structure” of the Geryon episode, referring to the complex way in which Dante uses splicing techniques to narrate the transition from the seventh circle (violence) to the eighth circle (fraud). In Inferno 17, the narrator begins by having Virgilio announce the arrival of Geryon: “Ecco la fiera con la coda aguzza” (Behold the beast who bears the pointed tail [Inf. 17.1]). We are in this way given the impression that we have already moved forward to the eighth circle: Geryon is a representation of the circle of fraud who will serve as a vehicle of transition to the eighth circle. But, after the initial sequence describing Geryon, the narrator in Inferno 17 then “goes back” (narratologically and physically) to describe the encounter with the usurers, thus postponing the descent to the eighth circle and reminding us that we are in fact still in the seventh. The narrator finally moves forward and completes the transition to the eighth circle in the last section of Inferno 17, which features the awe-inspiring depiction of the travelers’ downwards flight, into the abyss, on Geryon’s back.
[2] By retarding the descent to the eighth circle to the end of the canto, and by splicing the arrival of the representation of the eighth circle (Geryon) with a final substantive episode devoted to the seventh circle (the usurers), Dante-narrator makes transition itself a protagonist of his narrative. Again, as in Inferno 8, Inferno 16 ends in medias res, as the travelers wait to see what emerges from the abyss.
[3] With his splicing technique, Dante uses narrative structure to make a spiral pattern writ large, terza rima writ large. For more detail, see the narratological analysis of these canti in The Undivine Comedy. The spiral pattern is visible in the following diagram (The Undivine Comedy, p. 73):
[4] The approach to this transition begins in the first verse of Inferno 16. Here the narrator first registers the crashing sound — “rimbombo” (Inf. 16.1) — of the waterfall: it cascades over the cliff that marks the physical boundary of the seventh circle. After the interlude with the three Florentine nobles who are among the sodomites, in Inferno 16.91 the narrator returns to the waterfall and begins to describe the transition. There is a long section on the “cord” that Dante wears around his waist and that Virgilio now throws into the abyss as a kind of lure. Inferno 16 ends in medias res (as had Inferno 8), as the narrator retards the action with a striking metapoetic moment: the poet swears that the amazing creature that he saw swimming out of the deep was not a figment of his imagination but rather absolutely real.
[5] Using the “suspense” (etymologically, suspense is the condition of being suspended, i.e. left hanging, as at the end of Inferno 16 we are literally left hanging over the abyss) that is created by the interrupted action at the end of canto 16, Dante postpones the description of Geryon until the exordium of canto 17. Inferno 17 begins dramatically, with Virgilio heralding the arrival of Geryon:
«Ecco la fiera con la coda aguzza, che passa i monti, e rompe i muri e l'armi! Ecco colei che tutto 'l mondo appuzza!» (Inf. 17.1-3)
“Behold the beast who bears the pointed tail, who crosses mountains, shatters weapons, walls! Behold the one whose stench fills all the world!"
[6] After the detailed description of “that filthy effigy of fraud” — “quella sozza imagine di froda” (Inf. 17.7) — who parks himself at the edge of the cliff and swishes his tail in the void (23-5), Virgilio and Dante head toward the monster. However, as the travelers approach the edge of the cliff, Virgilio points out the group of souls that sits on the edge: these are the usurers.
[7] The usurers are the last sinners in the circle of violence. The English word “usury” derives from the medieval Latin noun “usuria,” which in turn is etymologically linked to “usus,” the past participle of the Latin verb “uti,” to use. Usury is, simply put, the excessive charging of interest on money loaned: literally, it is compensation for the “use” of money. The issue of usury is complexly interwoven with the growth of capitalism in the Italian city-states, where the great merchant banking houses are part of the new growth of trade and cultural exchange that liquidity promotes. Liquidity, money that is not tied up in great feudal landholdings but available for investment and self-promotion, undoubtedly underlies some of the anxiety that Dante feels about the rise of the “gente nuova” and their “sùbiti guadagni” (the new people and their sudden gains [Inf. 16.73]).
[8] Indeed, liquidity and “sùbiti guadagni” go hand in hand. The changes in the texture of Florentine life that Dante rues are thus deeply connected to banking and money-lending: to the promotion of liquidity and exchange. Dante knew this business intimately, as his own family’s principal occupation was money-lending: “l’attività principale della famiglia: il prestito del denaro” (the principal activity of the family: the lending of money; see Faini, “Ruolo sociale e memoria degli Alighieri prima di Dante,” p. 27).
[9] Technically (aka theologically), the church viewed usury as an affront to God because it allows humans to make money from money rather than only through the sweat of their labor (see the end of Inferno 11). However, in practice, most of the up and coming citizens of cities like Florence are merchants and/or bankers, and we should bear in mind that Popes, like secular rulers, borrowed money from Florentine banks.
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[10] In Inferno 17 Dante focuses not on the individual usurers but on the usurer’s family. There is no individual encounter of resonance and importance to the pilgrim; indeed, the usurers are identified only through their family crests. What is important is what the pilgrim learns about Florentine society. Each usurer’s family name — the names of great Florentine families, with the inclusion of one Paduan — is inescapably indicated through minute evocations of the family’s heraldic crest. The various components of these crests are so carefully designated that illustrators of the Commedia have, since the beginning of the commentary tradition, painted them with precision.
[11] The heraldic crests of Inferno 17 gesture back to the world of cortesia that the use of heraldry signals — “back” both in terms of the immediate narrative past, to Inferno 16, and in terms of the feudal historical past, to the world of “cortesia e valor” (courtesy and valor [Inf. 16.67]) evoked by the Florentine sodomites of the previous canto.
[12] At the same time these heraldic crests are now positioned on material objects whose connotations are as far from cortesia as one can imagine. For the heraldic crests of Inferno 17 emblazon the moneybags that hang around the necks of the damned usurers: “che dal collo a ciascun pendea una tasca / ch’avea certo colore e certo segno” (from the neck of each a purse was hung / that had a special color and an emblem [Inf. 17.55-56]). The narrator here notes that the purses are distinguished by specific colors and emblems: “certo colore e certo segno” (56). He goes on to describe them as possessing a medley of the bright colors that are so absent from Inferno. The specificity of color and emblem are signs that indicate — or, rather, indict — specific noble Florentine families. Thus, the indictment of the Florentine nobility continues from Inferno 16.
[13] The representative of the Florentine Gianfigliazzi family (Black Guelph) boasts “a yellow purse with azure on it / that had the face and manner of a lion”: “in una borsa gialla vidi azzurro / che d’ un leone avea faccia e contegno” (Inf. 17.59-60). The representative of the Ghibelline Obriachi family wears a “purse that was bloodred, / and it displayed a goose more white than butter”: “vidine un’ altra come sangue rossa, / mostrando un’oca bianca più che burro” (Inf. 17.62-3). The usurer who speaks to Dante is a Paduan of the Scrovegni family, as indicated by the insignia on his moneybag:
E un che d’una scrofa azzurra e grossa segnato avea lo suo sacchetto bianco mi disse: «Che fai tu in questa fossa?» (Inf. 17.64-6)
And one who had an azure, pregnant sow inscribed as emblem on his white pouch, said to me: “What are you doing in this pit?”
[14] A key social issue related to usury is anti-Semitism, which was frequently expressed in attacks on Jewish money-lenders. The commentary tradition of the Commedia does not look at the social and historical context of usury and therefore readings of Inferno 17 do not bring up the topic of anti-Semitism. Because anti-Semitism is not invoked as a relevant conceptual category with respect to usury, the commentary tradition does not register the absence of Jews from Dante’s treatment of usury.
[15] As a result the commentaries fail to note two key features of Dante’s treatment of usury in this canto: 1) Dante does not mention Jews; 2) he does mention and feature the iconography that was associated with Jews, namely moneybags.
[16] Dante’s use of moneybags, and his placement of them around the necks of his usurers, is very important, since it indicates his awareness of an iconography traditionally associated with Jews. For ample documentation of this iconography, see the book of Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (full reference in Coordinated Reading). The reader can also view a selection of Strickland’s images in my essay “Dante’s Sympathy for the Other, or the Non-Stereotyping Imagination: Sexual and Racialized Others in the Commedia” (see Coordinated Reading).
[17] Rachel Jacoff writes: “By the time Dante was writing the Inferno the negative associations of Jews with usury were current, but Dante’s usurers are all Christian” (Dante and the Jewish Question, p. 16; see Coordinated Reading for full citation). We can build on Jacoff’s astute observation. Dante transfers the stereotypical image — the moneybags worn around the neck — from the stereotypical wearers: from the Jews who were synonymous with usurers in much of Europe. Dante transfers the anti-Semitic trope of moneybags around the neck to Christian usurers from well-known and non-Jewish families: two contemporary Florentine families — Gianfigliazzi and Obriachi — and one Paduan family (Scrovegni).
[18] In my essay “Dante’s Sympathy for the Other”, I draw on the visual documentation of medieval anti-Semitism provided in Debra Strickland’s book, Saracens, Demons, and Jews. Strickland documents the visual demonizing of Jews, including the depiction of Jews heading into Hell with moneybags around their necks. One image, from a late thirteenth century Psalter from Northern France, shows a Jew in Hellmouth with a moneybag around his neck:
Jew with moneybag in Hell. Psalter. Northern France, late 13th century. Add. ms 17868, folio 31. Courtesy of the British Library.
[19] Put into social and historical context, we can see that Dante’s treatment of usury is remarkable for its strict avoidance of Jews, even though they were marginal — unimportant — members of his society. Rather than scapegoat the marginal, Dante focuses instead on his society’s most normative members: on the great Christian families whom he indicts through the heraldic crests that blazon the moneybags worn around their necks.
[20] In other words, in Inferno 17 Dante evokes the precise iconography associated with Jewish usurers, namely the moneybags worn around the necks, but he jettisons the anti-Semitic cultural context to which that iconography is linked. Dante then transfers the moneybag iconography, along with the status of usurer, to Christians: in Dante’s Hell the moneybags hang around the necks of Christian money-lenders.
[21] In her essay “Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew”, Sylvia Tomasch writes about the “erasure” of Jews from the Commedia, noting that Jews “never appear as Jews anywhere in the Divine Comedy” (p. 248, for the full reference, see Coordinated Reading). I am not convinced by Tomasch’s argument that the absence of Jews from the Commedia — a poem whose premise is the Christian afterlife — is in itself a negative. After viewing the virulent visual evidence of how Jews were depicted in medieval Europe, evidence laid out in Strickland’s book Saracens, Demons, and Jews, I came to the conclusion that in this case exclusion is a good thing. While it is true that anti-Semitism was not as virulent in Italy as in northern Europe — Strickland’s visual documentation comes from Germany, England, and France — it is also true, as Jacoff notes, that “By the time Dante was writing the Inferno the negative associations of Jews with usury were current”.
[22] In a cultural context in which visual representations of Hell were full of contemporary Jews, depicted with the visual stereotypes that served as identifying markers of Jews (hooked noses, Phyrgian caps, and moneybags — all documented in Strickland’s book), the absence of any contemporary Jews in Dante’s Hell suggests the non-stereotyping nature of his imaginative processes. Maybe this absence is part of why the prominent Jewish writer and scholar, Immanuel ben Solomon, a Roman contemporary of Dante (c. 1270-c. 1330), so admired Dante that he wrote a Hebrew imitation of Inferno and Paradiso and exchanged sonnets lamenting Dante’s death with Bosone da Gubbio. For discussion of these sonnets, and for more on the fascinating figure of Immanuel, see Isabelle Levy, “Immanuel of Rome and Dante”, on Digital Dante.
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[23] The latter part of Inferno 17 describes in tactile and immediate language, which is at the same time highly literary, the experience of flying on Geryon’s back. Geryon carries the travelers in a spiraling motion down into the abyss: from the seventh to the eighth circle.
[24] Dante depicts the experience of flying with great naturalism, basing himself both on navigating a boat and on the swimming of animals. In the opening sequence of canto 17, describing the monster’s position on the edge of the abyss, the poet compares Geryon first to boats that are banked on the shore, part in the water and part on land, and then to the beaver. Then, in order to describe the way in which Geryon backs up from the edge and turns around, Dante again pairs the image of a boat, a “navicella”, with a marine animal, the eel.
[25] In the passage that follows Dante conjures the experience of flying, telling us of the wind that blows on his face and from below: Geryon “sen va notando lenta lenta; / rota e discende, ma non me n’accorgo / se non che al viso e di sotto mi venta” (the beast goes swimming slowly on; he wheels and descends, but I can make out nothing but the wind blowing on my face and from below [17.115-17]). He conjures, from his imagination, the experience of being in total darkness, feeling nothing but the wind and seeing nothing but the animal on whom he rides.
[26] To communicate his fear, Dante cites Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and compares himself to two mythological figures: Phaeton and Icarus. He tells us that neither Phaethon nor Icarus experienced more fear during their doomed flights than did he in his flight into the abyss of lower Hell:
Maggior paura non credo che fosse quando Fetonte abbandonò li freni, per che ’l ciel, come pare ancor, si cosse; né quando Icaro misero le reni sentì spennar per la scaldata cera, gridando il padre a lui «Mala via tieni!», che fu la mia, quando vidi ch’i’ era ne l’aere d’ogne parte, e vidi spenta ogne veduta fuor che de la fera. (Inf. 17.106-14)
I do not think that there was greater fear in Phaethon when he let his reins go free — for which the sky, as one still sees, was scorched — nor in poor Icarus when he could feel his sides unwinged because the wax was melting, his father shouting to him, “That way's wrong!” than was in me when, on all sides, I saw that I was in the air, and everything had faded from my sight — except the beast.
[27] Ovid’s story of Daedalus and Icarus is found in Metamorphoses Book 8, 183-235. You can view the passage in Ovid side by side with Dante’s text through Digital Dante’s Intertextual Dante.
[28] Dante heightens the Ovidian description of Icarus’s flight with a signature personal touch. The haunting and poignant words in direct discourse that Daedalus speaks to his son — “«Icare», dixit, / «Icare», dixit, «ubi es? qua te regione requiram?»” (“Icarus,” he said, “Icarus”, he said, “Where are you? In what region shall I seek you?” [Metam. 8.231-32]) — are modified by Dante, who gives them a moral edge: “gridando il padre a lui «Mala via tieni!»” (his father shouting to him: “You’re on the wrong path!” [Inf. 17.111]). The words that Dante invents, “Mala via tieni”, are words of enormous resonance for the Commedia, a poem constructed on the metaphor of the path.
[29] And what could be more powerful than the concision of the extraordinary verb spennar (literally, “to unfeather”)? Dante uses it in the description of Icarus, who feels “his sides unwinged because the wax was melting”: “le reni / sentì spennar per la scaldata cera” (Inf. 17.109-10). The story of Daedalus and Icarus will be evoked again in Paradiso 8. In another haunting moment, Dante will refer to Daedalus as the one “who, flying through the air, lost his son”: “quello / che, volando per l’aere, il figlio perse” (Par. 8.125-26). Here the emphasis is on the tragically transitive use of the verb perdere (to lose): Daedalus lost his son. To the agency of the verb “perse” in Paradiso 8.126, we add the agency of Daedalus’ crying out to Icarus “Mala via tieni” in Inferno 17.111. Dante humanizes Daedalus by focusing on his tragedy as a father: to the roster of the Commedia’s fathers and sons, we must add Daedalus and Icarus.
[30] On the basis of the recurrence of the Daedalus-Icarus story in the Commedia, I suggest that, although in Inferno 17 Dante identifies with Icarus, for him the key figure is the artifex, Daedalus. The artist’s hubris in creating a method for flying ultimately takes precedence in Dante’s imagination over Icarus’ recklessness in the air. Daedalus will be invoked again in Inferno 29, again as the artificer of flight. Here Dante coins the expression “to be a Daedalus”, by which he means to achieve the ability to fly; hence to “make someone a Daedalus” is to teach someone to fly, and “perch’ io nol feci Dedalo” (because I did not make him a Daedalus [Inf. 29.116]) means to fail to teach someone to fly. To “be a Daedalus” is to achieve a consummate mimesis that can transgress the boundaries between art and nature, permitting men to do what they were not endowed by nature to do. Daedalus for Dante is a transgressor of human techne (the “arte vostra” of Inferno 11.103), a mimetic genius par excellence.
[31] In these Ovidian similes of Inferno 17, Dante makes substantial his self-comparison to great “failed flyers” of mythological antiquity. This is a group he simultaneously compares himself to and distances himself from. He fears he might be Phaethon or Icarus, but he knows — and hence we know — that he will not be. Dante’s voyage is not destined to end in failure. We learned that Dante’s journey is willed by God from Virgilio quoting Beatrice in Inferno 2, when Dante-pilgrim initially feared that his journey might be “folle” (Inf. 2.35) — like that of Phaeton, like that of Icarus.
[32] Phaethon and Icarus are treated by Dante, within the poetic economy of the Commedia, as failed flyers who are avatars of his Ulysses. In Inferno 26 Dante will tell a personal version of the Ulysses myth that casts the Greek hero as a transgressor. The voyage of Dante’s Ulysses is a “mad flight” — “folle volo” (Inf. 26.125) — that leads to his perdition. Dante borrows from classical mythology to construct a personal mythography: in his personal mythography, Dante uses Phaethon and Icarus as a template on which to construct Ulysses, who is his most important failed flyer, his most important example of transgression.
[33] Inferno 17 is saturated with mythological figures whose hubris led to their failure: hubris not only existential (Phaeton and Icarus), but artistic (Arachne and Daedalus). Geryon’s adorned and colorful flanks are compared in the early section of this canto to the fabrics woven by Turks and Tartars (a passage that has generated critical interest in Dante’s treatment of textiles and in eastern trade), and to the webs woven by the skilled Ovidian artist-weaver Arachne:
Con più color, sommesse e sovraposte non fer mai drappi Tartari né Turchi, né fuor tai tele per Aragne imposte. (Inf. 17.16-18)
No Turks or Tartars ever fashioned fabrics more colorful in background and relief, nor had Arachne ever loomed such webs.
[34] Arachne will be cited as an example of artistic pride and consequent fall on the terrace of pride in Purgatorio 12. In the Ovidian account Arachne’s reckless pride in her art leads her to challenge the goddess Minerva to a contest. In describing the work of each contestant, Ovid emphasizes Arachne’s mimetic accomplishment. The girl’s woven art is such that not only does Europa seem to be looking back and calling to her companions on the shore, but an observer would believe that the bull and the sea were real: “verum taurum, freta vera putares” (you would think that both bull and waves were true [Metam. 6.104]). Enraged at the girl’s success, the goddess transforms Arachne into a spider. Dante, emphasizing the perils of Arachne’s creativity, of the “opera” (work) that she recklessly made, depicts her in Purgatorio 12 in mid-metamorphosis, on the way to being a spider:
O folle Aragne, sì vedea io te già mezza ragna, trista in su li stracci de l’opera che mal per te si fé. (Purg. 12.43-45)
O mad Arachne, I saw you already half spider, wretched on the ragged remnants of work that you had wrought to your own hurt!
[35] In The Undivine Comedy, where I analyze the Ovidian component of Purgatorio’s terrace of pride, I classify Arachne as “the textual/artistic correlative of Ulysses”, and therefore also of Phaeton and Icarus:
By comparing the designs woven on Geryon’s flanks to the tele woven by Arachne, Dante summons the mythological figure who more than any other is an emblem for textuality, for weaving the webs of discourse. Her tele are the webs of textuality, of art: they signify the inherent deceptiveness of an art that can deceive through its mimetic perfection, its achievement of verisimilitude (art, therefore, as “craft” in both its senses, as handiwork and Ulyssean guile); also, because Arachne challenged Minerva, her webs signify our hubris (again Ulyssean), our will to challenge, to go beyond. In other words, Arachne is the textual/artistic correlative of Ulysses, and also therefore of those surrogates for Ulysses who figure so prominently at the end of the Geryon episode. (The Undivine Comedy, p. 64)
[36] Hubris and failure are evoked in both existential and representational terms in Inferno 17. Existential and representational hubris overlap in the story of Daedalus and his son Icarus, for artistic hubris is of course also present in the poignant figure of the great craftsman whose art is responsible for his son’s death: “pennas aspexit in undis / devovitque suas artes” (he caught sight of feathers on the surface of the sea; and Deaedalus cursed his own artistry [Metamorphoses, 8.233-34; trans. Allen Mandelbaum]). As Ovid writes, Daedalus seeks to imitate nature by constructing true wings that can really fly:
Dixit et ignotas animum dimittit in artes naturamque novat. Nam ponit in ordine pennas, a minima coeptas, longam breviore sequente, ut clivo crevisse putes; sic rustica quondam fistula disparibus paulatim surgit avenis. Tum lino medias et ceris adligat imas, atque ita compositas parvo curvamine flectit, ut veras imitetur aves. (Metamorphoses, 8.188-95)
At once he starts to work on unknown arts, to alter nature. He lays out feathers — all in order, first the shorter, then the longer (you’d have said they’d grown along a slope); just like the kind of pipes that country people used to fashion, where from unequal reed to reed the rise is gradual. And these he held together with twine around the center; at the base he fastened them with wax; and thus arranged— he’d bent them slightly — they could imitate the wings of true birds. (Metamorphoses, trans. Allen Mandelbaum)
[37] The language used here by Ovid stresses the idea that art and human techne are an imitation of nature. Ovid embraces the idea that the more verisimilar the work of art — the more life-like it is — the greater it is. The greatest work of art is the one that is most like life. Arachne surpasses Athena as an artist because the figures on her woven textiles are more true to life.
[38] Both Arachne and Daedalus are committed to the practice of mimesis and both incur disaster as a result of their mimetic prowess. This mimetic characterization of these figures is already present in Ovid and is reprised by Dante. Dante has already indirectly informed us of the theory of mimesis in his discussion of God’s two “possessions” (nature and art) in Inferno 11.97-105, where he instructs us that nature imitates God and that our art imitates nature. In that passage he effectively sketches a mimetic hierarchy in which human representational art is at two removes from the divine.
[39] As the pilgrim prepares himself for the terrifying transition to yet further depths of evil, Virgilio stresses that there is no avoiding the evil around him. In order to progress in this voyage, the pilgrim must himself henceforth utilize and come into contact with the monsters and guardians that he will meet. In this case he must fly to the eighth circle on the back of the “filthy effigy of fraud” that is Geryon: “sozza imagine di froda” (Inf. 17.7). Later a giant will place him on the ice of Cocytus. Most remarkably, he will have to climb on Lucifer’s body in order to depart from Hell.
[40] In other words, it is not enough for him to witness Hell as an observer. The pilgrim must have his own personal encounter with evil. As Virgilio says to him, speaking of clambering onto Geryon and flying on the monster’s back: “Omai si scende per sì fatte scale” (for from now on our descent is by this kind of stairs [Inf. 17.82]).
[41] Dante must go to the heart of darkness within himself.
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