From the very opening lines of Inferno xix, Dante struggles to contain his anger and bursts into a loud cry:
‘O Simon mago, o miseri seguaci […]
or convien che per voi suoni la tromba’. (Inf., xix. 1, 5)
[You! Magic Simon, and your sorry school! …The trumpet now (and rightly!) sounds for you.]
Dante’s ‘tromba’ is both the trumpet of the angels of the final judgement and also the squealing tuba of Horace’s satyrs. The vocabulary and the syntax of the canto are characterised by the typical attributes of satirical writings.
Alongside the tragic nuances of the dialogue with Pope Nicholas, Dante uses a low register. The vocabulary is often vulgar and comical, as the poet lingers on the description of the lower limbs of the body of the sinners:
‘piedi’ (Inf., xix. 23, 64, 79, 81), ‘gambe’ (l. 23), ‘grosso’ (l. 24), ‘piante’ (l. 25),
‘giunte’ (l. 26), ‘buccia’ (l. 29), ‘calcagni’ (l. 30), ‘punte’ (l. 30), ‘anca’ (l. 43),
‘zanca’ (l. 45) ‘piote’ (l. 120) [feet, legs, joints, skin, heel, toe tips, hip, shank, feet]. Of these terms, the word ‘zanca’ [shank], deriving from the dialect, probably of gypsy origin, works as a stylistic marker, tuning the whole piece on a sordid keynote.14 The syntax is rustic, quotidian, colloquial: ‘dopo lui verrà di più laida opra’ [after him, an even uglier thing will come] (Inf., xix. 82);15 ‘Deh, or mi dì’ [Ah, now tell me] (l. 90); ‘Però ti sta, ché tu se’ ben punito’ [Therefore you stay down there, for you deserve your punishment]
(l. 97). Dante insists on the filthiness of the language: the foot soles of the
14 See Francesco D’Ovidio’s chapter ‘Il canto dei simoniaci’ in his Nuovi Studi Danteschi (Milan: Hoepli, 1907), pp. 335–443 (pp. 370–71).
15 For the translation of ‘opra’ as ‘thing’ see Ruggiero Stefanini, ‘La “laida opra” di Inferno XIX 82’, Lingua nostra 66 (1995), 12–14.
simonists are ‘unte’ [greasy] (l. 28), the rock of the pouch is ‘sconcio’ [filthy]
[l. 131], and the future pope is ‘laida opra’ [obscene stuff] (l. 82).
The poet highlights that the canto’s words are ‘vere’ [true] (l. 123), alluding to the standard modus scribendi of satirical writings. In Inferno xix, Dante does not employ circumlocutions but accuses the shepherds point blank of treating the Church as a whore:
‘Di voi pastor s’accorse il Vangelista, quando colei che siede sopra l’acque
puttaneggiar coi regi a lui fu vista’. (Inf., xix. 106–08)
[Saint John took heed of shepherds such as you. He saw revealed that She-above-the-Waves, whoring it up with Rulers of the earth.]
The whole episode is constructed on the satirical trope of inversion, of the mundus immundus, making full use of the upside down world metaphor that proliferates in medieval (and modern!) satirical writings. The word
‘sottosopra’ occurs in this canto (l. 80) and only one other time in the whole Commedia, in Inferno xxxiv, where it serves to describe the position of Satan.16 In fact, the kingdom of Hell is arguably God’s satirical ‘poem’, written to trample the evil and raise up the good. In Inferno xix, the focus of this antithetical representation is on the bodily posture of the sinners whom Dante portrays buried upside-down in holes the size of baptism basins:
‘O qual che se’ che ’l di sù tien di sotto, anima trista come pal commessa… (Inf., xix. 46–47)
[Whatever you might be there, upside down, staked, you unhappy spirit, like a pole…]
In this way, the canto redresses the injustice procured by the simonists with their avarice, a sin that afflicts the world ‘calcando i buoni e sollevando i pravi’ [trampling the good and raising up the wicked] (l. 105). The valley of the simonists resonates with distorted representations of natural roles. In a grotesque carnival of the holy sacraments, the canto parodies the liturgy of baptism, marriage, priestly ordination and confession.17 Kenelm Foster
16 Also the term ‘zanca’ occurs only in Inferno xix and Inferno xxxiv (l. 79), and there again to rhyme with ‘anche’ (Inf., xxxiv. 77).
17 On the inversion of sacraments see Erminia Ardissino, ‘Parodie liturgiche nell’Inferno’,
writes that the canto is ‘[a] kind of Anti-Church’,18 where readers encounter the groom ‘avolterate’ [betraying] (l. 4) and making a whore of his wife (ll. 106–11), the (un)charismatic unction of the foot soles rather than the foreheads (ll. 25, 28), the mismatching of baptismal names (ll. 52–53). The subversion of roles is methodical: as he listens to Pope Nicholas III, Dante presents himself as a friar who confesses the assassin (‘Io stava come ’l frate / che confessa lo perfido assessin’, ll. 49–50); but the assassin is in reality a pope, a friar, who, in the right world, should confess the assassin, the poet. Why does Dante depict himself implicitly as an assassin? My hypothesis is that Dante is here thinking of himself as a satyr, someone able to kill with his language. In fact, this is exactly what this canto does. The poet here attacks individuals that are still alive. One of these individuals, Boniface VIII (who died in 1303), is still alive when the fictional journey of the Commedia takes place. The other one, Pope Clement V (who served as pope 1305–14), was alive when this canto was already circulating in Florence.19
Dante’s satirical attack is of a unique kind. I am not aware of another classical or medieval satirical work that so explicitly assaults and defames contemporary figures. Satirical poems such as the Visio Alberici, the Apocalipsis Goliae or Le songe d’Enfer narrate journeys through Hell where the writer claims to have seen countless groups of friars, princes, kings and even popes.20 Unlike these other satirists, Dante puts aside any conventional scruple, and rather than attacking generic social categories,
Annali di Italianistica 25 (2007), 217–32; John Scott, Dante Magnanimo. Studi sulla Commedia (Florence: Olschki, 1977), pp. 75–115; Ronald Herzman and William Stephany, ‘“O miseri seguaci”: Sacramental Inversion in Inferno XIX’, Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society 96 (1978), 39–65; Mirko Tavoni, ‘Effrazione battesimale tra i simoniaci (Inf. XIX 13–21)’, Rivista di Letteratura Italiana 10:3 (1992), 457–512; Filippo Zanini ‘“Simulacra gentium argentum et aurum”. Parodia sacra e polemica anticlericale nell’Inferno’, L’Alighieri 39 (2012), 131–45.
18 Kenelm Foster, ‘The Canto of the Damned Popes’, Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society 88 (1969), 47–68 (p. 55).
19 Francesco da Barberino, I Documenti d’Amore, ed. by Marco Albertazzi, 2 vols (Lavis: La Finestra, 2008), I, pp. 371–72.
20 For an edition of the texts mentioned, see Die Apokalypse des Golias; Visio Alberici. Die Jenseitswanderung des neunjährigen Alberich in der vom Visionar um 1127 in Monte Cassino revidierten Fassung, ed. by Paul Gerhard Schmidt (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1997); The Songe d’Enfer of Raoul de Houdenc: An Edition Based on All the Extant Manuscripts, ed. by Madelyn Timmel Mihm (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984); and Darren Hopkins, ‘Le Salut d’Enfer: A Short Satire Modelled on Raoul de Houdenc’s Songe d’Enfer’, Mediaeval Studies 71 (2009), 23–45.
he gives us the Christian and family names of those friars, princes, kings and popes. In so doing, the poet seems to destroy what his readers know about satire as a literary genre. The rules that rhetoricians had established are broken in front of our eyes by someone who, nonetheless, demonstrates that he knows them perfectly well. Dante presents himself as a satirist in a canto where he is crossing the traditional boundaries of the style, those limitations that were put in place to protect society from the violence hidden in this language.
It is even possible to catch a glimpse of the iconography of the satyr in the filigree of this infernal canto. In the opening lines, as we have seen, Dante mentions the trumpet, the typical instrument of the goat, half-man creature. He then refers to horns in the middle of the canto, in line 60, where he writes that he feels almost ‘scornato’ (literally ‘without horns’), frustrated for not understanding what was said to him: ‘Tal mi fec’io, quai son color che stanno, / per non intender ciò ch’è lor risposto, / quasi scornati’
[Well, I just stood there (you will know just how) / simply not getting what I’d heard come out, / feeling a fool] (ll. 58–60). In the finale of the canto, a third visual clue is released, when a hybrid creature appears re-emerging from the valley of the simonists. Dante is being carried up by Virgil in his arms and, as a result of this bizarre way of transportation, a ‘monstrous’
figure looms up from the third pouch of the eight circle. The appearance in this canto of a double natured figure with legs comparable to goat’s legs is no coincidence but, rather, a deliberate reference to the popular association between satire and satyrs:
Quivi soavemente spuose il carco, soave per lo scoglio sconcio ed erto
che sarebbe a le capre duro varco. (Inf., xix. 130–32)
[And there he gently put his burden down, gently on rocks so craggy and so steep they might have seemed to goats too hard to cross.]
The welding of the two bodies is located at the level of the ‘anca’ [hips]
(l. 43), where classical and medieval iconography locates the passage of nature in the frame of the half-man half-goat god.
This particular reading of Inferno xix raises a whole set of issues regarding the justification of the Commedia and Dante’s self-representation. To some of these problems, at this point of his journey, Dante has no answers:
Io non so s’i’ mi fui qui troppo folle, ch’i’ pur rispuosi lui a questo metro:
‘Deh, or mi dì:…’ (Inf., xix. 88–90)
[I may have been plain mad. I do not know. But now, in measured verse, I sang these words: ‘Tell me…’]
‘I do not know’. The poet does not know if the language (‘metro’, poetry) used against the simonist popes is too harsh and foolhardy.