Sing heavenly Muse...

‍

^{The man who arrives at the doors of artistic creation with none of the madness of the Muses would be convinced that technical ability alone was enough to make an artist...}

                    ^{—Phaedrus, Plato}

^{Look at me well; verily I am, verily I am Beatrice.}

                    ^{—Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri}

‍

‍

Piazza della Duomo‍

“Last night I was on the train. There was a beautiful lady, maybe 40 or 50 years. I was just looking her. She was so beautiful. She was so beautiful. And then, at that time, something came into my mind. I was looking her and I write: Your eyes is so beautiful and your eyes talk of love, but your eyes, they are so sad. And that was true, because I always says, the eyes never, ever lie. It is impossible. Impossible.”

The clamor of the Piazza della Duomo dims beneath Mauro’s voice. He lowers a cigarette from his lips. “The lady, she need love. I am sure she is alone.”

“Did you share your words with her?” I ask.

“No,” Mauro replies.

“Why?”

“It was no necessary.”

Having loved once, there is no more room in Mauro’s heart for new love. I tell him I do not believe in a heart’s full volume. He tells me that maybe I misunderstand—that his heart still grows from the old love.

Mauro is a poet in his odd hours. When his heart thrills, he writes. I imagine his lyric resolutions of the real and ideal as he gazes across the piazza and beholds the revelatory scale of Brunelleschi’s dome and the sublime elevation of Giotto’s campanile—a view he absorbs each day. This gives license to his lyricism. It is no necessary to argue this point.

Florence is a city for which art is existential. To this consideration I am keen. I make every effort to enter the city with the eyes of a poet—with vision sprung from the old forms and their emblematic restorations. It is really not a choice to spend your time in Florence in the exaltation of elaborate arches and frescoed ceilings. One walks across the city in the cadence of versed time, each step through its corridors a measured devotion to aesthetic forms.

I search for doors everywhere. Doors within doors. Doors beyond doors. Mauro stands in one, next to a stone. Between us, there is a marble block within a wall into which is carved the words—Sasso di Dante. Beside the Stone of Dante, where the old poet drew with this finger figures of Beatrice among the clouds, and where he sat and composed his early love poems in the vernacular 700 years ago, Mauro now stands.

Visiting Florence, I seek proximity to Dante Alighieri and his muse, Beatrice Portinari. Many have done so. In 1814, a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, a poetic account of his fictional journey through the stages of the Christian afterlife, was published in England and destined the stone seat to become an imperative of the 19th-century European Grand Tour. A conduit for adulation and reverent sympathies, it was an inflection point of travel for poets and lovers of poetry. William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were attracted to this alleged site of the poet’s seat, both of whom wrote poems about the experience. When Emerson arrived in Florence, the long stone bench had been removed and a marble block had been placed where Dante sat and wrote sonnets of his love for Beatrice.

Here, by chance, I meet Mauro, who overhears my explanation of the stone to my partner. Amused, he offers that I know the story well. Working in a shop next to the stone, he beholds every day the architectural scar tissue of the renaissance from the vantage of Dante’s poetic gaze. When he speaks of love in a lady’s eyes, I lean into his words.

‍

‍

Sala di Promoteo, Palazzo Pitti‍

A window in the Salon of Prometheus looks out to the Boboli Gardens. Rain textures the tiered garden whose peak on clearer days offers panoramas of Florence. The sea-stormy scene could be a painting, but for another room and from another century. Next to the window, within an ornate golden frame, dresses billow in a whirl of bodies. No heels touch the ground as a sacred melody turns the circle. Ritual space is enclosed by the held hands of Apollo and the nine muses. What art is born of these rhythmic articulations? To bestow creative vision, the muses must dance.

Baldassarre Peruzzi painted this bestowing moment of creativity in 1514. His Apollo and the Muses tunes the other paintings in the salon to the key of the dance’s divine music. Among the oldest works within the Palatine Gallery of the Pitti Palace, the paintings align to the muses’ circling in their whirl around the walls. Filippo Lippi’s Madonna with the Child joins the dance. The Young Bacchus by Guido Reni enters and propels the circle.

The rain outside continues. The bright golden sky above, frescoed onto the salon’s ceiling, is crossed by Apollo in his chariot of the sun, surrounded by the nine muses. Under Minerva’s protection, Prometheus trails beside the chariot holding a torch of stolen fire—divine fire which he will bring to earth to engineer civilization. Along with his other attributing powers for poetry, music, and dance, Apollo is the Greek sun god. The flames possessed by Prometheus are ancillaries of Apollo’s primordial pyre, whose muse-delivered sparks ignite the creative strokes of pen and brush and lyre.

Of course, long before Peruzzi painted his muses, the muses of antiquity had become little more than artifacts of poetic adornment. Line-breakers since Homer have explored the divining of creativity in other shadows. Still, when Milton invokes—Sing heavenly Muse—in the early lines of “Paradise Lost,” his summoning of the aesthetic hoard in 1667 feels apropos to the sublime grandeur and cosmic scale of his epic poem.

I am interested in another figure of the muse, the one whose divinity is scaled down to the human—the private muse of our quiet summoning. Conjurer of lyric poem or painting or song, it is the muse we construct of the beloved—a former or desired love. A condition of this muse is her physical, and often emotional, distance. For the artist, there is intimacy in the reach for the unobtainable. Art summoned by this muse is an expression of longing that seeks to give form to this absence. While originating as a corporeal being, the muse exists as a figment, a recalled grace, a percolation of love, a divining of desire, and finally, as the artist begins to lose sight of himself, an expansion of words or pigments or melody—like a bridge. On the other side of the vital, disruptive, and fertile prevailing, a muse beckons: forms assemble: art closes the betweenness.

To the extent Florence is prodigious in art, it is a muse-house of the centuries. Here, in this stomping grounds of the aesthete, I have the opportunity to explore artistic causality at the intersection of the artist and the muse. The search is personal rather than comprehensive. How a muse behaves and how a poet performs his love as creative expression, I understand through the figure of Beatrice—the muse who signifies all other muses—and Dante, whose poetry allows him to express his love for Beatrice in both corporeal and spiritual realms.

‍

‍

San Piero Maggiore + Purgatory‍

A door is open. I step out of the alleyway and into the Romanesque church of Santa Margherita dei Cerchi. The plain, unadorned walls enclose a dim and narrow interior. Above a bare altar, a 15th-century altarpiece of the Madonna by Neri di Bicci centers my attention. My eyes slowly rise above the painting to a small crucifix brightened by a single window whose light overflows its frame. Dating from 1032, the church’s lack of gilding and marble ornamentation feels true to Medieval form—a bespoke barrenness that ushers in spiritual humility.

I notice that the two short columns of pews are full. A murmur rises as each seated person stands and walks out of the church at one time, followed by a dissipating draft of modernity. I sit down on a center-right pew and shift my eyes into the past tense as I gaze over to the front-left pews. From here, I imagine, Dante gazes at Beatrice. He writes that he repeated for years this view of his beloved across these pews within Santa Margherita dei Cerchi.

A stone slab on the floor and memorial plaque indicates the burial place of Falco Portinari, the father of Beatrice. Here, too, a basket rests full of notes, placed there by pilgrims seeking protection for their love. Many believe the tradition that Beatrice is also buried here, although no documentation establishes her place of burial.

The light that threads through the ancient neighborhood of San Piero Maggiore suggests another era. Proximities in this neighborhood of Dante and Beatrice align along Via Santa Margherita, with the church as a midpoint. I turn right outside the church and a within a minute of walking I am in front of Palazzo Portinari Salviati, where Beatrice spent her youthful years. Inside is where Beatrice first appears to Dante during a May Day celebration. Beside the entrance to the palazzo, now remodeled as a luxury hotel, is a marble plague illuminated by a narrow ray of light. Into it is inscribed the three lines from Dante’s Divine Comedy that describe his first sight of Beatrice before their journey through Paradise.

At the time of the May Day gathering, Dante writes that they were both nine years of age and at Beatrice’s appearance “the vital spirit, which dwells in the innermost chamber of the heart, started to tremble so powerfully that its disturbance reached all the way to the slightest of my pulses.” From this point forward, he exclaims, Love governs his soul.

Returning to the church of Santa Margherita, and in the same short distance from Beatrice’s home in the opposite direction, I arrive where Dante’s home once stood along the Piazza San Martino. Once a large piazza with a reputation in the fourteenth-century for open-air performances of poets and singers, the location now is a small, open intersection tucked-away where Via dei Magazzini dead-ends into Via Dante Alighieri. On one corner is the Torre della Castagna, where Dante held office as an elected prior in 1300, the year in which his poetic journey in the Divine Comedy begins. Here I linger where the world first deconstructed into sign, cipher, symbol, and allegory before Dante’s eyes. I leave before delirium sets in.

Nine years after the May Day party, Dante again encounters Beatrice. She greets him, marking “the first time her words had reached my ears.” In the throes of bliss, Dante retires to his home where “a sweet sleep” overcomes him. In a dream-vision his room is engulfed in a fiery cloud. He sees a joyful man holding a sleeping person, “naked but for a crimson silken cloth,” who he recognizes as Beatrice. In one hand the man is holding a heart consumed by flames, which he feds to Beatrice, who eats it anxiously. The man soon weeps with bitterness and carries Beatrice up into the sky, ending Dante’s dream. In the following days, Dante grows so frail and weak that his friends ask, “Over whom are you so wrecked by Love?”

Dante answers in his poems—some written in solitude on the stone next to Mauro’s shop in Piazza della Duomo. At eighteen, Dante writes a sonnet about his dream of the devoured heart. Ten years later and two years after Beatrice’s death at the age of 24, he collects his poems in praise of his muse in Vita Nuova, his “little book of words,” in which he frames 31 sonnets within brief historical narratives and poetic explications.

In these sonnets, Dante intones in Dolce Stil Novo—the sweet new way—inaugurating with a small circle of poets a new style of poetry fashioned in part by the conventions of courtly romance. In this poetry, deep introspection propels expressions of romantic ardor that praise the beauty and grace of an unobtainable beloved. Beatrice Portinari, the cause of Dante’s simmer and boil, is held aloft—more angel than human, an idealized presence that inspires an emotional love that draws the poet closer to Divine Love. Both seen and imagined, Beatrice’s presence—her performative muse-ness—is a catalyzing force for the poetic art of Dante, and as deeply, his soul’s journey to happiness.

At the end of Vita Nuova, Dante foreshadows his Divine Comedy when he writes—“I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any other woman.” Roughly two decades after writing this line, Dante stands on Mount Purgatory in the Divine Comedy paralyzed with fear before a wall of flames. He recalls the torment of those scorched and burning in the Inferno, and cannot move forward. His guide and protector, Virgil, encourages him—“Now see, son: this wall stands between you and your Beatrice.” On hearing the name that is always flowering in his mind, Dante enters the flames.

Consider if you have not already, that to look into Beatrice’s eyes again, Dante must envision and construct a heaven wherein she dwells—and travel through the agonies of Inferno and the difficult consolations of Purgatory—to finally be guided by her divine presence through the spheres of Heaven until they reach the Empyrean—the mind of God. Beatrice, the Florentine exemplar of grace and beauty who spun young Dante’s amorous blood, is transformed into a celestial figure of divine wisdom. Now in her presence, he speaks—“Every drop of blood in me is trembling…I feel the power of the old love.”

The supreme poet of spiritual architecture and sacred space, Dante is still the poet of the intimate gesture and its eliciting tremors of Amor. Whether it is necessary or not in understanding Beatrice’s function as muse, I think often of Dante as she is composed into being in the Divine Comedy—his bliss at her presence as she is conjured on the page: first her habiliments, then a gesture, her eyes, her voice, her wisdom. In his early romantic sonnets and in his mature cantos, love is the raison d’être of the muse—so the muse can author Love’s expression. The poem performs its possession.

‍

Academy of Arts + Brandywine Valley‍

A century and a half after Dante’s passing, artist Sandro Botticelli holds a metal stylus above a sheet of parchment. His goal is to illustrate, sheet by sheet, the one hundred cantos of the Divine Comedy. The ninety-two extant sheets from this manuscript are reunited—seven from the Vatican Library and eighty-five from the Museum of Prints and Drawings in Berlin—and are displayed together for one of the first times since the fifteenth century at the National Academy of Arts in London in 2001. A friend who attended the exhibition gifted me a framed Botticelli print of Dante’s Paradise Canto VII, purchased from the gift store. Encircled by rings of flaming souls in the second sphere of Heaven, Beatrice hovers before Dante and instructs him on divine justice, original sin, and the redemptive option.

Many years before I receive this gift, in the Brandywine Valley of Pennsylvania, a muse-in-the-making is on the other end of a first kiss outside the girl’s unit at summer camp. Our bodies separate and I walk alone to the boy’s unit under a luminous moon. The field glimmers. The sky is pearled with stars.

A great distance separates us after our woodland romance. Although the early throes stabilize, my days become a curiosity of touchstones—prompts of love pangs that dissociate me from the immediate. A song or a tucked-away photo will do it easily, but also strange clouds, an open map, a long walk or the arrival of spring. To dream of my beloved at night unsettles the morning into a wobbly parable of longing.

Poems fill my silences. I do not write about her, but every line I write is an address to her ear. For years, I easily summon a shadowy exultation that wears her face—and this presence is woven into lyric articulations that attempt to speak an essential part of my young self into being. The poems, like our summer love, are bound by woods and shadows and liminal spaces. These poems become proxy—moments of imagined union that restore a semblance of what once was. When this early poetry is published, I dedicate the collection to her.

There are rules, even for love. In the literature of renaissance Florence, love’s volatile nature is conformed into convention. Raw desire is bound within the normative vernacular of courtly romance and Neoplatonic love. This does not mean that love is lessened in these artistic forms, just that certain conditions are in place.

Years of longing through the past and present tenses of love will bring a need for emotional accountability. Do I need a literary modus through which my heart’s flames may sublimate? In truth, I never question if my muse is necessary in the same way I do not question the authority that metaphors, archetypes, and symbols exercise over my life.

The moment I first referred to my beloved as My Beatrice—the creative workings of the muse became a belief system. Dante’s Beatrice gave form and substance and a mood to my understanding of the muse—which I appropriated for my own according to the conventions. Many years later, my journey to Florence—with art and piazza as its pilgrim-path—allows me to trace and revel in this orthodoxy of artistic inspiration, and to maintenance, perhaps, a debt I owe. Even before I learned that the nine muses were the daughters of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, I had an inkling that memory was the womb-house of the imagination. My muse, forever in the beforetimes of our woodland intimacy and forever in the bloom of its eternal woods—is a formal instrument of literary divination. She is also a relic at the high altar of love. My muse has existed long enough as a vitalizing force in my daydreams and writing that a nostalgia tinges what still remains.

Reader, she is here now. She exists in the materiality of these words and the ideas they express. She inspires these lines that array her—spectral though her presence may be. They are sounded for her ears even if they may never reach them. That there is distance between us is requisite: it requites in the art it compels.

‍