This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
There’s something deliciously odd about writing a “biography” of something that has never drawn breath. But in Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, Joseph Luzzi makes a compelling case that a great work of art can lead a life every bit as dramatic, chequered and instructive as the artist who made it.
What he delineates is not so much a history of how The Divine Comedy came to be nor a canto-by-canto analysis but an exploration of what Dante’s epic has meant since its publication; how its reception, reinvention and occasional rejection have shaped its cultural afterlife. And how this epic journey can highlight key moments of our own intellectual and artistic history.
That focus on reception might set alarm bells ringing, conjuring visions of the canon as mere construction, “greatness” dismantled and the author quietly pronounced dead. But Luzzi offers something subtler and more enduring. In tracing how a singular voice continues to echo across centuries, he revives a vision of literature — one not unlike Paul Valéry’s — in which cultural creation and the making of masterpieces emerge from a conversation between readers that holds out against the erosion of time.
Luzzi’s biographical approach works because he resists the temptation to bury the reader under an avalanche of detail. Instead, the author carefully selects what he calls “paradigmatic moments”: times when Dante’s vision seemed to speak urgently to readers, artists or critics and, in turn, influenced creative thought. Think of it less as a linear biography and more as a gallery of portraits, each illuminating a different facet of the poet, his work and how our society, through the centuries, deals with its own literary past.
At times, this structure demands a degree of patience. The book moves through key episodes, leaving some ideas, such as Dante’s theological views, in suspense at first. The payoff is a series of sharp, sometimes surprising insights. In particular, Luzzi presents a clairvoyant analysis of the moral and religious pushbacks, from Petrarch’s disdain to Catholic censure (the Comedy was removed from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum only in 1881), drawing a pointed line to our own day’s politically-correct brigade.
In an especially poignant thread, Luzzi traces Boccaccio’s shifting relationship to Dante’s work: initially an ardent admirer, he later folds to Petrarch’s loftier, Latin-bound ideals, internalising his master’s aloof contempt for the Tuscan firebrand. It’s a subtle, quasi-sorrowful tale, probably unfamiliar to many readers. Luzzi paints it with finesse, letting the personal disappointment mirror broader shifts in cultural authority.
The episode also reflects something larger: the way Dante’s literary revolution — rooted in the language of ordinary Tuscan people — would spend centuries struggling for legitimacy against the gatekeepers of “proper” learning. In that sense, the Comedy remains a living text not just for its theological and poetic daring but for the way it continues to provoke anxiety in institutions, both religious and secular, that prefer literature clean, correct and dead.
Luzzi is particularly good at drawing out the tensions that animate The Comedy. The poem series is, amongst other things, a defence speech — Dante’s attempt to clear his name from political exile, in the grand tradition of Boethius. But it is also a visionary quest, a love poem and a philosophical manifesto.
Throughout his investigation, choosing with care key passages from the Urtext, Luzzi unfolds these different dimensions, highlighting the various masks Dante wears or that have been placed upon him by later readers: the embittered exile, the spurned lover, the would-be saint, the ruthless visionary (Harold Bloom’s phrase) and the artist whose ambition was to write in nothing less than the idiom of the divine.
The quiet but persistent tension between high humanism and vernacular daring, where Luzzi charts Dante’s ambition, is one of the book’s best motifs. Perhaps its most compelling chapter explores how Dante not only created a masterpiece but shaped Italian “language” and “literature” of his time.
Luzzi aptly describes the poet as a “solo Renaissance” for Italy. Likewise, his analysis of the word commedia, with its connotations of the lowly and the popular, situated Dante’s project at the crossroads between classical tradition and Christian redemption.
Equally effective is Luzzi’s analysis of Dante’s fall from grace before its eventual rebirth in the Romantic age. In the seventeenth century, we learn, his “sobriety, moralism and arch-seriousness fell flat” in a climate that preferred the urbane wit of Ariosto, the wonders of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the elegant melancholy of Tasso. Dante’s divine severity came to seem overwrought: too medieval for baroque tastes, too devout for the playful scepticism of the age.
Yet even as his cultural relevance waned, many kept the flame alive. Luzzi carefully traces the subterranean channels — commentaries, manuscripts, private devotions — through which Dante survived, if not quite flourished. His predictable comparison with Milton is especially well handled, teasing out how both poets became monumental figures in the literary imagination, even as their actual readership dwindled.
That friction between canonical reverence and cultural neglect also raises wider questions about the nature of the canon itself. The romantic idea that great art naturally or necessarily survives is quietly dismantled. Tastes change, reading habits shift. Even genius can go out of fashion. The Divine Comedy, we are reminded, had to be rescued repeatedly from obscurity. Its endurance owes as much to the contingencies of scholarship and transmission as to its brilliance and reminds us that the canon is not a fixed thing but something constantly reassembled.
Luzzi also turns an eye to Dante’s influence beyond literature. In “Renaissance visions”, he explores new visual interpretations — Botticelli’s eerie Map of Hell or Paradiso sketches — and modern adaptations, including cinema and even video games. The final chapter, “Dante on Screen”, though more suggestive than comprehensive, gestures towards the breadth of the poem’s reach. Music, however, didn’t make the cut, which, for a poet so obsessed with harmony — moral, cosmic and otherwise — seems an unfortunate silence.
Another curious omission is any discussion of translation. Dorothy Sayers, for instance, doesn’t appear, despite her vigorous and often mad rendering of Inferno, which introduced generations of English readers to Dante’s world. It’s no surprise that the Canterbury Institute, a brilliant Oxford research centre, named its literary reading group after her and devoted several summers to reading Dante’s epic in full. In pairing close readings with freewheeling literary debate, I’ve seen first hand the kind of intellectual and moral engagement that few texts can inspire.
Luzzi would surely agree. His book is no hagiography but a kind of love letter, a reminder that great works are not merely studied or analysed, but encountered. That The Divine Comedy can still provoke this, seven centuries on, is perhaps the most impressive fact of all.
