In the past fifty years, Piero Boitani has published more than a dozen important books on English literature, classics, and the Bible, most notably the studies translated as The Shadow of Ulysses (1992/1994), The Bible and its Rewritings (1997/1999), and Winged Words: Flight in Poetry and History (2004/2007). His Timeo in Paradiso. Metafore e bellezza da Platone a Dante (Donzelli, 2023), here ably translated by June Wilkinson, takes the reader on the ambitious intellectual trajectory, encapsulated in his title, from Plato’s cosmogonical dialogue Timaeus to the mystical vision that concludes Dante’s Paradiso. The journey comprises 37 brief chapters, almost as if Boitani envisioned a prose analogy to the 33 cantos of Dante’s final canticle.
The journey begins with Plato’s dialogue, which an appendix offers in the English version by Benjamin Jowett. Boitani celebrates the far-reaching influence of the Timaeus, which includes illustrious heirs such as Longinus and Boccaccio; and he pursues Neoplatonic ramifications in Plotinus, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. (Oddly, Boitani seems nowhere to allude to the metaphors of beauty implicit in Greek kosmos and Latin mundus.) In a biblical excursus, Boitani analyzes “Rachel’s Beauty” with parallels drawn from the Hebrew psalter, but soon returns in “The Lilies of the Field” to the pulchritudo exalted by Ambrose and Augustine (the latter with a debt to Plotinus).
Boitani’s ultimate destination is Dante, but the approach is circuitous. After analyzing the notions of beauty in Augustine and Gregory the Great, he introduces the two great pillars of medieval Platonism: Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Latin philosopher celebrates a Timaean world of divine harmony in stately hexameters, while the Greek theologian in his Divine Names offers a prose hymn to the beauty of the Creation. Boitani then discusses John Scotus Eriugena, who translated and glossed Dionysius, and William of Conches, who wrote commentaries on both Boethius and Plato’s Timaeus. Single chapters now follow that are dedicated to the luminaries who play a role in Dante: Hugh of St Victor, Francis and Bonaventure, and Albertus the Great and Thomas Aquinas. While acknowledging a debt to medievalists like Peter Dronke and Edgar De Bruyne, Boitani as a Dantist is completely at home in the Scholastic world and weaves a fascinating fabric of philosophical reflections on the created world, including works by the Chartrain poets Alan of Lille and Bernardus Silvestris.
We now meet the impressive polymath Hugh of St Victor, who read both the Timaeus and Dionysius, and cultivated an esthetic of light and natural sublimity to underpin his notions of beauty. Following Dante’s example in Paradiso 10–13, Boitani then presents Franciscans and Dominicans as complementary thinkers. Among the former, Bonaventure reflects on the beauty of the Creation, famously sung by his master Francis in the Italian Cantico delle Creature. By contrast, the Dominican theologians Albert the Great and his pupil Thomas Aquinas acknowledge a considerable debt to Dionysius; and Boitani the comparatist reminds us that the latter’s doctrine of beauty famously left its mark on Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Dante makes his entrance in Chapter 19, when in his Convivio he cites Aristotle’s De caelo to refute the cosmography of Plato’s Timaeus. The stage is now set, and in the next chapter Boitani shows how in Paradiso 4. 49 (“Quel che Timeo de l’anime argomenta”) Dante rejects the stellar migration of souls posited in Timaeus 42b. A brief excursus on Ezra Pound leads to Chapter 22, which proclaims “So now Timaeus is in Paradise.” The next fifteen chapters explore passages from Dante’s works—principally Convivio, Epistle to Cangrande, and Paradiso—and argues that the poet interpreted the divine order as a Neoplatonist influenced inter alios by Boethius, Dionysius, Alan of Lille, and Bernardus Silvestris. In essence, Chapters 22 to 33 are a chrestomathy of citations from Paradiso embedded in learned commentary in which Boitani matches Dante’s sublimity with his own inspired discernment. “Neptune and Lethargy,” to select just a notable example, offers tour de force explications of Paradiso 33, in which the Sibyl’s scattered oracles and Neptune’s Argo-inspired wonderment symbolize the ecstatic oblivion later celebrated by Mallarmé!
Boitani concludes his cosmic overview with two chapters of extraordinary scope. The “Epilogue: Descent from Heaven, Ascent to Art and Science,” traces the Nachleben of Dante’s Paradiso in Renaissance manifestations—Raphael, Scève, Camões, Du Bartas, Tasso, Milton—and reveals the beauty of mathematics asserted by scientists from Galileo and Kepler to Whitehead and Heisenberg. Then, in his “Afterword: The Unmoved Mover Begins to Move: Literary and Visual Renderings of the Christian Bible,” Boitani traces how both Boethius and John Scotus Eriugena reconciled the “static” Creation of Genesis with the Aristotelian notion of God as the Prime Mover. This leads to a discussion of Paradiso 29, in which Beatrice describes the Creation, illuminated in the next century (ca. 1445) by the Sienese artist Giovanni di Paolo (Plates 17–19). After surveying medieval figurations of Genesis—the Girona Tapestry of Creation, and mosaics in Monreale Cathedral, San Marco, and San Clemente—Boitani offers later imaginings by Lorenzo Lotto, Lucas Cranach, and Michelangelo. (The final illustration in the book, Turner’s 1843 Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning After the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, is referenced amid Heisenberg’s quotations from Faust, when it was actually inspired by Goethe’s Theory of Colors, published in English in 1840.)
This ambitious survey of Western thought and letters recalls such monumental studies as Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) and Ernst Robert Curtius’ European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), works that Boitani cites in discussing Dante’s final canto (184). But even within the more modest format of brief chapters, Boitani concentrates his insightful juxtapositions, or callidae iuncturae, in a tapestry that reveals complex patterns of intellectual filiations. Given the succinct format of the endnotes, Boitani’s engagement with previous critics may at times appear cursory and rather loosely connected to the “Further Reading” suggested in the end matter. Thus, a note to Chapter 19 (333 n. 29) praises Lino Pertile’s 1998 La puttana e il gigante as an important Dantean monograph, while only Pertile’s 2023 Dante controcorrente appears in the reading list (354).
If Dante is a supremely visual poet, Boitani is a supremely visual critic. As in Winged Words (2004), his literary-philosophical argument frequently appeals to the visual evidence of relevant artworks; reproduced here in 32 color plates, these perforce offer only a limited selection of possible illustrations. In the discussion of the School of Chartres (68–69), for example, the Creation portal reliefs of the cathedral are discussed but not illustrated. But the reader is partly compensated by ten reproductions of the breathtaking Romanesque frescoes that adorn the crypt of the Anagni cathedral.
The sublimities of Neoplatonic and Scholastic reflections on the Godhead engender a sort of dithyrambic style that permeates Boitani’s prose. While he marshals his sources with dazzling facility, the reader may balk at some aspects of his prestidigitation, as when the exposition betrays Aristotelian imperfections of excess (the citations from John Scotus Eriugena that fill pages 63–65) or deficiency (43: “I cannot comment on [Gregory’s reforms] here for lack of space”). Yet despite the considerable syntactic and semantic intricacies of the original, the English translation is faithful and readable.
In sum, Boitani’s perceptive annotations brilliantly illuminate the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition that culminates in Dante’s celestial vision. The ascent to the Empyrean in his company is an exciting and enlightening one, and his magisterial survey of Western cosmographical literature from Plato to Dante “and beyond” will delight and inform a wide readership in this attractive English incarnation.