Dante and the Renaissance 209
medium of Virgilian or Ciceronian diction, were distorted
beyond recognition into purely classical personages. Art
showed us martyrs that looked like gladiators, angels with
the musculature of athletes, and saints draped in their ample
togæ like senators. Had humanism developed unchecked,
it seems that the incongruity would have been removed by
the elimination of Christianity itself: the Rome of Leo X
had gone far in that direction. This worship of antiquity,
this audacious and seemingly unconscious blending of pagan
and sacred traditions, no longer astonish us in the Renais-
sance. But when we find this same centaur-like combina-
tion of incongruous elements in Dante, medieval and theo-
logical Dante, well may we be struck with wonder. For the
orthodox poet, it seems indeed as though the Bible and the
Æneid were coordinate revelations. Not only is Virgil his
model and his guide, but it seems as though to Virgil, as
well as to Peter, had been given the promise that their
word would bind and unbind the fate of souls. Rhipeus, a
Trojan hero, is placed in Paradise, among those who loved
and exercised justice, because Virgil proclaimed him a just
man.1 Indeed, it were waste of time to insist upon that
point. The most casual reader has been struck with the
Virgilian setting of most of the “Inferno.” Nor are such
strange touches lacking in Purgatory, where a mythological
example is almost invariably set against a Biblical or Chris-
tian one. In his treatise “De Monarchia," Dante adduces
as proofs of the imperial claims of Rome sundry miracles
which are none other than the prodigies reported by Livy.
No doubt even the Northern countries had not wholly for-
gotten Rome; yet it is sufficient to glance through the French
poems of the Antique Cycle, the Romances of Æneas, of
Thebes, and of Troy, to be conscious of a radical difference
1 “Rifeo,” Par. XX. The reference is to Æneid, II, 486-437.