What It Is
The first ledge of the mountain is of stone, and the stone comes in three forms. The white marble wall on the inner side, carved with such art that neither Polyclitus nor nature would be ashamed, bears the figures of humility: the Annunciation, David before the ark, the emperor Trajan and the widow. The floor of the ledge, wrought like the slabs of tombs, bears the figures of pride punished, from Lucifer to Troy. And the penitents carry blocks of rock on their backs, bent so low that Dante distinguishes them only by their beating on the breast. Virgil bids him look fixedly and clear with his sight what lies beneath the stones. The poet's comparison is with the figures of consolation that, on ceilings, hold up their weight with their knees against the chest: they make arise, in whoever looks at them, a true pity for a pain that is not theirs.
Where It Appears
The wall speaks in Canto X of Purgatory. The first scene is the Annunciation, so exact that Dante hears her speech:
Giurato si saria ch’el dicesse ‘Ave!’; / perché iv’ era imaginata quella / ch’ad aprir l’alto amor volse la chiave; / e avea in atto impressa esta favella / ‘Ecce ancilla Deï’, propriamente / come figura in cera si suggella., One would have sworn that he was saying Ave; for there was imagined she who turned the key to open high love; and in her gesture was impressed this speech, Ecce ancilla Dei, as exactly as a figure is sealed in wax.
The last is that of Trajan with the widow, and it is there that humility becomes argument:
ed ella: «L’altrui bene / a te che fia, se ’l tuo metti in oblio?»; / ond’ elli: «Or ti conforta; ch’ei convene / ch’i’ solva il mio dovere anzi ch’i’ mova: / giustizia vuole e pietà mi ritene»., and she: the good of others, what will it be to you, if you forget your own? And he: Now take comfort; for it is fitting that I discharge my duty before I move: justice requires it, and pity holds me back.
The poet calls what he has just seen a speech made visible:
Colui che mai non vide cosa nova / produsse esto visibile parlare, / novello a noi perché qui non si trova., He who never saw anything new produced this visible speech, new to us because it is not found here.
And he turns to the proud Christians:
O superbi cristian, miseri lassi, / che, de la vista de la mente infermi, / fidanza avete ne’ retrosi passi, / non v’accorgete voi che noi siam vermi / nati a formar l’angelica farfalla, / che vola a la giustizia sanza schermi?, O proud Christians, wretched and weary, who, sick in the sight of the mind, place your trust in backward steps, do you not realize that we are worms born to form the angelic butterfly, which flies to justice without shields?
In Canto XI of Purgatory the penitents say an Our Father and ask that the peace of the kingdom come to them, because by their own ingenuity they cannot reach it:
Vegna ver’ noi la pace del tuo regno, / ché noi ad essa non potem da noi, / s’ella non vien, con tutto nostro ingegno., May the peace of your kingdom come to us, for we cannot reach it by ourselves, with all our ingenuity, if it does not come.
Oderisi gives the lesson for the arts:
Oh vana gloria de l’umane posse! / com’ poco verde in su la cima dura, / se non è giunta da l’etati grosse! / Credette Cimabue ne la pittura / tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido, / sì che la fama di colui è scura., O vain glory of human powers! how little green lasts on the summit, if it is not followed by coarse ages! Cimabue believed he held the field in painting, and now Giotto has the cry, so that the fame of the first is dim.
In Canto XII of Purgatory comes the ground. The first example is the highest one that fell:
Vedea colui che fu nobil creato / più ch’altra creatura, giù dal cielo / folgoreggiando scender, da l’un lato., I saw him who was created more noble than any other creature, falling from heaven, flashing like lightning, on one side.
And the poet turns to the living with irony:
Or superbite, e via col viso altero, / figliuoli d’Eva, e non chinate il volto / sì che veggiate il vostro mal sentero!, Now be proud, and go with your face held high, sons of Eve, and do not bow your face so that you may see your evil path!
What It Means
The stones are the weight and the mirror of pride. The weight is the penalty: the proud man who carried his own greatness now carries the stone, and the bent body is what pride denied. The mirror is the lesson: the wall teaches humility through images, the floor teaches the fall through examples, and what they share is that the teaching enters through the eye.
The poem applies to the ledge the same method the ledge teaches: what is seen in the stone does what the words do, and Dante, who reads the Virgin and Trajan as he reads a text, walks bent over the floor as over a page. Two readings coexist for the remedy. In the first, the cure for pride is visual, and it is enough to look down until the sight remembers the right size. In the second, it is bodily, and the weight and the bending do on their own what the image prepares. Canto XII joins the two movements and does not say which prevails.
Relationships
- Default themes: Pride, Art, Redemption.
- Themes of the work: Pride, Art, Redemption.
- Characters: Dante, Virgil.
- Neighboring symbols: the seven P's on the forehead, whose first is erased at the end of this ledge, and the mountain and the rush of humility, the humility that the wall shows in figure.