As an account of a journey through the afterlife, the Commedia is in keeping with the medieval taste for the genre of prophecy and vision. Nonetheless, Dante’s masterpiece clearly surpasses earlier works in the genre on account of its structural rigour and the intensity of its moral message, as well as its inventiveness, philosophical and ideological depth and revolutionary form. Dante himself indicates, albeit through a symptomatic Vernainung (see Inf., II 32: Io non Enea, io non Paulo sono; “I am not Aeneas, nor Paul”) the two models he considers most authoritative: Aeneas’ journey through the afterlife recounted in Book VI of the Aeneid, considered by Dante to be a real event, for which obvious correspondences can be found in many passages especially in Inferno; and Saint Paul’s raptus to heaven, referred to at certain points in the Bible (Revelations and Epistle II to the Corinthians), but developed as a narrative in the Visio Pauli, a work which circulated widely throughout the Middle Ages. In addition to further classical texts (such as the description of the celestial spheres in Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, the story of Erichtho the sorceress in Lucan’s Pharsalia, and the travels to the Avernus narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses), Dante’s invention may also have been influenced by the many visionistic texts produced during the Middle Ages, including the Arab Book of the Ladder and by the equally successful allegorical-didactic tradition, exemplified in Alain de Lille’s Anticlaudianus, the Roman de la Rose and Brunetto Latini’s Tesoretto. Beyond a few evocative correspondences however, a “proto-Commedia” is not discernible in any of these texts. As pointed out by Cesare Segre[1], they all lack three elements which are essential in Dante’s poem: considerable use of Virgilian stylistic processes and themes; a substantial philosophical and theoretical input, which Dante acquired by studying Aristotle and his commentators; and finally, the highly realistic portrayal of the characters in the Commedia.

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[1] C. Segre, Viaggi e visioni d'oltremondo sino alla ‘Commedia’ di Dante, in Id.,  Fuori del mondo. I modelli nella follia e nelle immagini dell'aldilà, Torino, Einaudi, 1990, pp. 25-48.

Dante allo scrittoio: portrait by Luca Signorelli. Web resource: www.italica.rai.it