Who He Is
Farinata is the leader of the Ghibellines of Florence, the party that opposed that of Dante, and he is named by Virgil when he points to him in the tomb of the sixth circle, that of the heretics. He speaks to Dante in Canto X of the Inferno from inside a tomb with its lid raised, standing from the waist up, as one who holds Hell in great scorn, and he is the first great condemned Florentine that the pilgrim meets. He had already been cited in Canto VI of the Inferno, when Dante asks Ciacco where the good Florentines are and hears that Farinata is among the blackest souls. What defines him in the canto is his bearing, the question he asks before hearing any name, Dante's forebears, and the bond he keeps with the city, the only thing that interests him.
Farinata is named by Virgil.
Trajectory
In Canto VI of the Inferno, Dante mentions those who bent their wit to doing good, Farinata among them, and asks whether heaven sweetens them or hell poisons them. Ciacco answers that they are among the blackest souls, for various faults, and that Dante will see them if he descends so deep. In Canto X of the Inferno, along a path between the wall and the torments, Virgil explains that the tombs with raised lids will be closed when the dead return from the valley of Jehoshaphat with the bodies they left up above, and that there lie those who make the soul die with the body:
Tutti saran serrati / quando di Iosafàt qui torneranno / coi corpi che là sù hanno lasciati., all will be sealed when they return here from Jehoshaphat with the bodies they left up there.
The voice that comes from a tomb recognizes Dante as a Tuscan by his speech. Dante shrinks back, and Virgil calls him to look:
Ed el mi disse: «Volgiti! Che fai? / Vedi là Farinata che s’è dritto: / da la cintola in sù tutto ’l vedrai». / Io avea già il mio viso nel suo fitto; / ed el s’ergea col petto e con la fronte / com’ avesse l’inferno a gran dispitto., and he said to me: turn! What are you doing? See there Farinata, who has risen up: from the waist up you will see all of him. I already had my face fixed on his; and he rose with his chest and his brow, as if he held Hell in great scorn.
Virgil pushes Dante up to the foot of the tomb and tells him to measure his words. Farinata looks at him for a while and, almost with disdain, asks who his forebears were. Dante, who wants to obey, hides nothing, and Farinata raises his brows a little and says that they were fiercely opposed to him, to his ancestors and to his party, and that twice he dispersed them. Dante answers as a Guelph, with the sting still fresh on his tongue:
«S’ei fur cacciati, ei tornar d’ogne parte», / rispuos’ io lui, «l’una e l’altra fïata; / ma i vostri non appreser ben quell’ arte»., if they were driven out, they came back from every side, I answered him, one time and then the other; but yours did not learn that art well.
The answer strikes him but does not bend him. When another shade rises beside him, visible only up to the chin, kneeling, and falls back on his back after a verb in the past tense, Farinata does not change his bearing. The poem does not give the name of that shade: tradition identifies it with Cavalcante dei Cavalcanti, father of the poet Guido Cavalcanti, and it is through his son, Guido, that the shade asks Dante about him.
Ma quell’ altro magnanimo, a cui posta / restato m’era, non mutò aspetto, / né mosse collo, né piegò sua costa, but that other magnanimous one, at whose request I had stayed, did not change his expression, nor move his neck, nor bend his side.
He takes up the sentence again at the point where the other interrupted it: if his own learned badly the art of returning, that torments him more than the bed of fire, and Dante will soon know what it weighs. He asks why Florence is so cruel to its own, and he hears of the Arbia dyed red. He answers that he was not the only one to act, nor did he act without cause, but that he was the only one to defend the city with his face open when everyone consented to destroy it. Dante, who does not understand how they see the future and yet lose the present, asks him to untie the knot for him, and he explains his condition:
Noi veggiam, come quei c’ha mala luce, / le cose», disse, «che ne son lontano; / cotanto ancor ne splende il sommo duce. / Quando s’appressano o son, tutto è vano / nostro intelletto; e s’altri non ci apporta, / nulla sapem di vostro stato umano., we see, like one who has poor sight, the things that are far from us, he said; so much the supreme guide still shines on us. When they draw near or are, our intellect is all in vain; and unless another brings it to us, we know nothing of your human state.
He gives the rule from within: when the future closes, their knowledge dies entirely. Dante, contrite, asks him to tell the fallen man that his son is still alive. Farinata names, among more than a thousand who lie there, the second Frederick and the Cardinal, and falls silent. He does not appear again in the poem, but his prophecy returns in Canto XV of the Inferno, where Dante keeps it beside Brunetto's so that a lady may explain it.
Themes Embodied
Farinata is the man of party whom Hell cannot diminish. Politics is the only matter left to him, and he handles it in the tomb as he did while alive: he asks about the interlocutor's ancestors, takes the measure of the outcome of the struggles by having scattered the Guelphs twice, and suffers more because his own did not learn to return than he does from the fire. Honor and Reputation lies in the defense of Florence with an open face, which he claims as a service, and in the gesture of not moving while the other collapses. The Sin that puts him there appears in none of his speeches: the poem places him in the sixth circle, where Virgil puts those who make the soul die with the body, and the punishment is a knowledge that goes out, a sight that reaches far and loses what is near.
Farinata's greatness and his limit are in the same gesture. He continues the sentence as if Cavalcante's fall were an incident apart from him, and the text sustains both readings: the hardness of one who has only the city in his head, or a greatness that the poem itself acknowledges when it calls him magnanimous.
Divergent Readings
Erich Auerbach, in the chapter of Mimesis dedicated to this canto, makes Farinata the central case of Dante's realism: the eternal situation does not erase character, it reveals it.
The two belong to the same category of sinners and suffer the same objective punishment, but each receives it in a radically different way, and it is in this difference that Auerbach reads the core of Dante's realism: the eternal situation does not erase character; on the contrary, it reveals it without the wear of earthly action.Farinata is, in the midst of Hell, greater, more powerful, and nobler than ever, for never during his life did he have the opportunity to show, in this way, the strength of his heart
The same critic draws from this a thesis about the poem: the divine order was meant to be exalted by the figure of Farinata, and the force with which Dante realizes it goes ahead of judgment.
the figure of the human being stands before the figure of God
Carpeaux, for the whole poem, chooses a shorter term, and it is with this term that the scene is usually read:
Dante is a realist, above all.
Whoever reads Farinata as a figure sees a man greater than the place, and the scene teaches us to admire him. Whoever reads by the order of Canto XI of the Inferno sees someone who, despite his bearing, is where Virgil's map places those who deny the life of the soul, and the canto leaves the tension unresolved, because the map of the next canto does not say where heresy belongs. The two readings coexist in the scene.
Relationships
- Dante: the interlocutor whom he recognizes by his speech, from whom he receives a Guelph's answer, and to whom he makes the prophecy of exile (Canto X of the Inferno).
- Virgil: the one who points out Farinata and pushes Dante up to the tomb, bidding him measure his words.
- Brunetto Latini: the other Florentine who speaks of Dante's future, in Canto XV of the Inferno, whose prophecy Dante keeps beside that of Farinata.