ander lip prominent; his complexion was dark, and his hair and beard thick, black, and crisp, and his countenance was always sad and thoughtful. His manners, whether in public or at home, were wonderfully composed and restrained, and in all his ways he was more courteous and civil than any one else." Such was Dante as he appeared in his later years to those from whose recollections of him Boccaccio drew this description. But Boccaccio, had he chosen so to do, might have drawn another portrait of Dante, not the author of the Divine Comedy, but the author of the New Life. The likeness of the youthful Dante was familiar to those Florentines who had never looked on the living presence of their greatest citizen. On the altar-wall of the chapel of the Palace of the Podestà (now the Bargello) Giotto had painted a grand religious composition, in which, after the fashion of the times, he exalted the glory of Florence by the introduction of some of her most famous citizens into the assembly of the blessed in Paradise. "The head of Christ, full of dignity, appears above, and lower down, the escutcheon of Florence, supported by angels, with two rows of saints, male and female, attendant to the right and left, in front of whom stand a company of the magnates of the city, headed by two crowned personages, close to one of whom, to the right, stands Dante, a pomegranate in his hand, and wearing the graceful fall ing cap of the day.' The date when this picture was painted is uncertain, but Giotto represented his friend in it as a youth, such as he may have been in the first flush of early fame, at the season of the beginning of their memorable friendship. Of all the portraits of the revival of Art, there is none comparable in interest to this likeness of the supreme poet by the supreme artist of medieval Europe. It was due to no accident of fortune that these men were contem poraries, and of the same country; but it Lord Lindsay's History of Christian Art, Vol. II. p. 174. was a fortunate and delightful incident, that they were so brought together by sympathy of genius and by favouring circumstance as to become friends, to love and honour each other in life, and to celebrate each other through all time in their respective works. The story of their friendship is known only in its outline, but that began when they were young is certain, and that it lasted till death divided them is a tradition which finds ready acceptance. It was probably between 1290 and 1300, when Giotto was just rising to unrivalled fame, that this painting was executed. There is no contemporary record of it, the earliest known reference to it being that by Filippo Villani, who died about 1404. Gianozzo Manetti, who died in 1459, also men. tions it, and Vasari, in his Life of Giotto, published in 1550, says, that Giotto "became so good an imitator of nature, that he altogether discarded the stiff Greek manner, and revived the modern and good art of painting, introducing exact drawing from nature of living persons, which for more than two hundred years had not been practised, or if indeed any one had tried it, he had not succeeded very happily, nor anything like so well as Giotto. And he portrayed among other persons, as may even now be seen, in the chapel of the Palace of the Podestà in Florence, Dante Alighieri, his contemporary and greatest friend, who was not less famous a poet than Giotto was painter in those days. In the same chapel is the portrait by the same hand of Ser Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, and of Messer Corso Donati, a great citizen of those times." One might have supposed that such a picture as this would have been among the most carefully protected and jealously prized treasures of Florence. But such was not the case. The shameful neglect of many of the best and most interesting works of the earlier period of Art, which accompanied and was one of the symptoms of the moral and political decline of Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, extended to this as to other of the noblest paintings of Giotto. . "I desired to make a drawing. It was denied to me. . . . But I obtained the means to be shut up in the prison for a morning; and not only did I make a drawing, but a tracing also, and with the two I then made a fac-simile sufficiently careful. Luckily it was before the rifacimento." Florence, in losing consciousness of May 11, 1850, "the eye of the beautipresent worth, lost care for the me- ful profile was wanting. There was a morials of her past honour, dignity, and hole an inch deep, or an inch and a distinction. The Palace of the Po- half. Marini said it was a nail. It destà, no longer needed for the dwell- did seem precisely the damage of a nail ing of the chief magistrate of a free drawn out. Afterwards. Marini city, was turned into a jail for common filled the hole, and made a new eye, criminals, and what had once been its too little and ill designed, and then he beautiful and sacred chapel was occu- retouched the whole face and clothes, pied as a larder or store-room. The to the great damage of the expression walls, adorned with paintings more and character. The likeness of the precious than gold, were covered with face, and the three colours in which whitewash, and the fresco of Giotto Dante was dressed, the same with was swept over by the brush of the those of Beatrice, those of young Italy, plasterer. It was not only thus hidden white, green, and red, stand no more; from the sight of those unworthy in- the green is turned to chocolate-colour; deed to behold it, but it almost disap- moreover, the form of the cap is lost and peared from memory also; and from confounded. the time of Vasari down to that of Moreni, a Florentine antiquary, in the early part of the present century, hardly a mention of it occurs. In a note found among his papers, Moreni laments that he had spent two years of his life in unavailing efforts to recover the portrait of Dante, and the other portions of the fresco of Giotto in the Bargello, mentioned by Vasari; that others before him had made a like effort, and had failed in like manner; and that he hoped that better times would come, in which this painting, of such historic and artistic interest, would again be sought for, and at length recovered. Stimulated by these words, three gentlemen, one an American, Mr. Richard Henry Wilde, one an Englishman, Mr. Seymour Kirkup, and one an Italian, Signor G. Aubrey This portrait by Giotto is the only Bezzi, all scholars devoted to the study likeness of Dante known to have been of Dante, undertook new researches, made of the poet during his life, and is in 1840, and, after many hindrances of inestimable value on this account. on the part of the government, which But there exists also a mask, concernwere at length successfully overcome, ing which there is a tradition that it the work of removing the crust of was taken from the face of the dead plaster from the walls of the ancient poet, and which, if its genuineness chapel was intrusted to the Florentine could be established, would not be of painter, Marini. This new and well-inferior interest to the early portrait. directed search did not fail. After But there is no trustworthy historic some months' labour the fresco was testimony concerning it, and its authofound, almost uninjured, under the whitewash that had protected while concealing it, and at length the likeness of Dante was uncovered. "But," says Mr. Kirkup, in a letter published in the Spectator (London), This fac-simile afterwards passed into the hands of Lord Vernon, well known for his interest in all Dantesque studies, and by his permission it has been admirably reproduced in chromo-lithography under the auspices of the Arundel Society. The reproduction is entirely satisfactory as a presentation of the authentic portrait of the youthful Dante, in the state in which it was when Mr. Kirkup was so fortunate as to gain admission to it. rity as a likeness depends upon the evidence of truth which its own character affords. On the very threshold of the inquiry concerning it, we are met with the doubt whether the art of taking casts was practised at the time of Dante's from the face after death,]-the slight differences noticeable between them being such as might occur in casts made from the original mask." One of these casts was given to Mr. Kirkup by the sculptor Bartolini, another belonged to the late sculptor Professor Ricci, and the third is in the possession of the Marchese Torrigiani. death. In his Life of Andrea de Ver- of which have been judged by the rocchio, Vasari says that this art began first Roman and Florentine sculptors to come into use in his time, that to have been taken from life, [that is, is, about the middle of the fifteenth century and Bottari refers to the likeness of Brunelleschi, who died in 1446, which was taken in this manner, and was preserved in the office of the Works of the Cathedral at Florence. It is not impossible that so simple an art may have been sometimes practised at an earlier period; and if so, there is no inherent improbability in the supposi tion that Guido Novello, the friend and protector of Dante at Ravenna, may, at the time of the poet's death, have had a mask taken to serve as a model for the head of a statue intended to form part of the monument which he proposed to erect in honour of Dante. And it may further be supposed, that, this design failing, owing to the fall of Guido from power before its accomplishment, the mask may have been preserved at Ravenna, till we first catch a trace of it nearly three centuries later. There is in the Magliabecchiana Library at Florence an autograph manuscript by Giovanni Cinelli, a Florentine antiquary who died in 1706, entitled La Toscana letterata, ovvero Istoria degli Scrittori Fiorentini, which contains a life of Dante. In the course of the biography Cinelli states that the Archbishop of Ravenna caused the head of the poet which had adorned his sepulchre to be taken therefrom, and that it came into the possession of the famous sculptor, Gian Bologna, who left it at his death, in 1606, to his pupil Pietro Tacca. "One day Tacca showed it, with other curiosities, to the Duchess Sforza, who, having wrapped it in a scarf of green cloth, carried it away, and God knows into whose hands the precious object has fallen, or where it is to be found. On account of its singular beauty, it had often been drawn by the scholars of Tacca. It has been supposed that this head was the original mask from which the casts now existing are derived. Mr. Seymour Kirkup, in a note on this passage from Cinelli, says that "there are three masks of Dante at Florence, all In the absence of historical evidence in regard to this mask, some support is given to the belief in its genuineness by the fact that it appears to be the type of the greater number of the portraits of Dante executed from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, and was adopted by Raffaelle as the original from which he drew the likeness which has done most to make the features of the poet familiar to the world. The character of the mask itself affords, however, the only really satisfactory ground for confidence in the truth of the tradition concerning it. It was plainly taken as a cast from a face after death. It has none of the characteristics which a fictitious and imaginative representation of the sort would be likely to present. It bears no trace of being a work of skilful and deceptive art. The difference in the fall of the two half-closed eyelids, the difference between the sides of the face, the slight deflection in the line of the nose, the droop of the corners of the mouth, and other delicate, but none the less convincing indications, combine to show that it was in all probability taken directly from nature. The countenance, moreover, and expression, are worthy of Dante; no ideal forms could so answer to the face of him who had led a life apart from the world in which he dwelt, and had been conducted by love and faith along hard, painful, and solitary ways, to behold "L'alto trionfo del regno verace." The mask conforms entirely to the description by Boccaccio of the poet's countenance, save that it is beardless, and this difference is to be accounted for by the fact that to obtain the cast the beard must have been removed. The face is one of the most pathetic upon which human eyes ever looked, for it exhibits in its expression the conflict between the strong nature of the man and the hard dealings of fortune,-between the idea of his life and its practical experience. Strength is the most striking attribute of the countenance, displayed alike in the broad forehead, the masculine nose, the firm lips, the heavy jaw and wide chin; and this strength, resulting from the main forms of the features, is enforced by the strength of the lines of expression. The look is grave and stern almost to grimness; there is a scornful lift to the eyebrow, and a contraction of the forehead as from painful thought; but obscured under this look, yet not lost, are the marks of tenderness, refinement, and self-mastery, which, in combination with more obvious characteristics, give to the countenance of the dead poct an ineffable dignity and melancholy. There is neither weakness nor failure here. It is the image of the strong fortress of a strong soul "buttressed on conscience and impregnable will," battered by the blows of enemies without and within, bearing upon its walls the dints of many a siege, but standing firm and unshaken against all attacks until the warfare was at end. The intrinsic evidence for the truth of this likeness, from its correspondence, not only with the description of the poet, but with the imagination that we form of him from his life and works, is strongly confirmed by a comparison of the mask with the portrait by Giotto. So far as I am aware, this comparison has not hitherto been made in a manner to exhibit effectively the resemblance between the two. A direct comparison between the painting and the mask, owing to the difficulty of reducing the forms of the latter to a plain surface of light and shade, is unsatisfactory. But by taking a photograph from the mask, in the same position as that in which the face is painted by Giotto, and placing it alongside of the fac-simile from the painting, a very remarkable similarity becomes at once apparent. The differences are only such as must exist between the portrait of a man in the freshness of a happy youth, and the portrait of him in his age, after much experience and many trials. Dante was fifty-six years old at the time of his death, when the mask was taken; the portait by Giotto represents him as not much past twenty. There is an interval of at least thirty years between the two. And what years they had been for him! The interest of this comparison lies not only in the mutual support which the portraits afford each other, in the assurance each gives that the other is genuine, but also in their joint illustration of the life and character of Dante. As Giotto painted him, he is the lover of Beatrice, the gay companion of princes, the friend of poets, and himself already the most famous writer of love verses in Italy. There is an almost feminine softness in the lines of the face, with a sweet and serious tenderness well befitting the lover, and the author of the sonnets and canzoni which were in a few years to be gathered into the incomparable record of his New Life. It is the face of Dante in the May-time of youthful hope, in that serene season of promise and of joy, which was so soon to reach its fore-ordained close in the death of her who had made life new and beautiful for him, and to the love and honour of whom he dedicated his soul and gave all his future years. It is the same face with that of the mask; but the one is the face of a youth, with all triumphant splendour on his brow," the other of a man, burdened with "the dust and injury of age." The forms and features are alike, but as to the later face, "That time of year thou mayst in it behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. The face of the youth is grave, as with the shadow of distant sorrow; the face of the man is solemn, as of one who had gone "Per tutti i cerchj del dolente regno. The one is the young poet of Flor BOCCACCIO'S ACCOUNT OF THE COMMEDIA. ence, the other the supreme poet of the world,― "che al divino dall' umano, All' eterno dal tempo era venuto." BOCCACCIO'S ACCOUNT OF THE COMMEDIA. Balbo, Life of Dante. Tr. by Mrs. Bunbury, II. 61, 269, 290. It should be known that Dante had a sister, who was married to one of our citizens, called Leon Poggi, by whom she had several children. Among these was one called Andrew, who wonderfully resembled Dante in the outline of his features, and in his height and figure; and he also walked rather stooping, as Dante is said to have done. He was a weak man, but with naturally good feel ings, and his language and conduct were regular and praiseworthy. And I having become intimate with him, he often spoke to me of Dante's habits and ways; but among those things which I delight most in recollecting, is what he told me relating to that of which we are now speaking. He said then, that Dante belonged to the party of Messer Vieri de' Cerchi, and was one of its great leaders; and when Messer Vieri and many of his followers left Florence, Dante left that city also and went to Verona. And on account of this departure, through the solicitation of the opposite party, Messer Vieri and all who had left Florence, especially the principal persons, were considered as rebels, and had their persons condemned and their property confiscated. When the people heard this, they ran to the houses of those proscribed, and plundered all that was within them. It is true that Dante's wife, Madonna Gemma, fearing this, and by the advice of some of her friends and relations, had withdrawn from his house some chests containing certain precious things, and Dante's writings along with them, and had put them in a place of safety. And not satisfied with having plundered the houses of the proscribed, the most powerful partisans of the opposite faction occupied their possessions,-some taking one and some another, and thus Dante's house was occupied. 205 But after five years or more had elapsed, and the city was more rationally governed, it is said, than it was when Dante was sentenced, persons began to question their rights, on different grounds, to what had been the property of the exiles, and they were heard. Therefore Madonna Gemma was advised to demand back Dante's property, on the ground that it was her dowry. She, to prepare this business, required certain writings and documents which were in one of the chests, which, in the violent plunder of the effects she had sent away, nor had she ever since removed them from the place where she had deposited them. For this purpose, this Andrew said, she had sent for him, and as Dante's nephew had entrusted him with the keys of these chests, and had sent him with a lawyer to search for the required papers; while the lawyer searched for these, he, Andrew, among other of Dante's writings, found many sonnets, canzoni, and such similar pieces. But among them what pleased him the most was a sheet in which, in Dante's handwriting, the seven preceding cantos were written; and therefore he took it and carried it off with him, and read it over and over again; and although he understood but little of it, still it appeared to him a very fine thing; and therefore he determined, in order to know what it was, to carry it to an esteemed man of our city, who in those times was a much celebrated reciter of verses, whose name was Dino, the son of Messer Lambertuccio Frescobaldi. It pleased Dino marvellously; and having made copies of it for several of his friends, and knowing that the composition was merely begun, and not completed, he thought that it would be best to send it to Dante, and at the same time to beg him to follow up his design, and to finish it; and having inquired, and ascertained that Dante was at this time in the Lunigiana, with a noble man of the family of Malaspina, called the Marquis Moroello, who was a man of understanding, and who had a singular friendship for him, he thought of sending it, not to Dante himself, but to the Marquis, in order that he should show it to him and so Dino did, beg |