Review of The Dante Death Mask
By: Michael A. Arnold
I was in the Palazzo Vecchio, the medieval castle in the centre of Florence, and I was frozen with shock. It was one of those rare moments when your blood runs cold, I could not believe what I was seeing: the dead face of Dante Alighieri.
Dante is probably my favourite writer. I did my undergraduate dissertation on him, and have reread both The Divine Comedy his much shorter, much lesser known work La Vita Nuova every year since – so seeing his death mask was something very special on a personal level. Then the Sunday bells chimed across city outside calling believers to mass, and the shock wore off a little. I walked toward it.
Physically Dante's death mask is a remarkably small object, suggesting that Dante may have been quite short, and it looks so fragile as it is suspended in the middle of its glass case by a thin metal column — something you cannot really see in pictures of it. Recent studies suggest that it is not actually the original death mask, but is instead a cast from a now–lost effigy, but either way there cannot be any denying its suggestive power. It is the face of a man who had been through a lot in life, and is finally at rest. His eyes are shutting, but never finishing the movement. There is a furrowed brow, like someone either deep in thought or rather annoyed, and his lips are also somewhat hard edged, somehow, despite what might be the ghost of a smile.
It is so easy to wonder what his last thoughts were. Was Dante thinking of the life he had led? Was he wondering if he would go to hell, purgatory or heaven? Was he thinking of the love of his life, Beatrice? Or was he thinking of his home city, Florence? What might we think about at the moment of our own death?
These are the things I found myself thinking about while standing in front of the object. What anyone else would think when looking at Dante's death mask will obviously be entirely subjective. Someone who only knows the name 'Dante', and knows that he had something to do with Hell, might see his face and move on, perhaps it would just be a curiosity. I don't know, like already said, I approached his death mask (literally) as a fan, and as someone who has studied him. Seeing it was almost like walking around his childhood home, which I had actually done only the day before, and was only a street away from the Palazzo Vecchio. For me, seeing his death mask humanised him. Instead of remaining a 'great man', one of the most important writers in human history, he became a human being.
In a way, the Palazzo Vecchio is both the perfect place for Dante's death mask to be, but it is also just slightly inappropriate. It was given to the building, the traditional seat of the Florentine Republic, the 'signoria', in 1911 as an acknowledgement to Dante's importance to the city itself and to honour his contributions to Italian culture and language. But that same republic, in 1302 officially exiled Dante Alighieri and many others in absentia, following a violent overthrow of the city's previous government. If he ever tried to return to the city he would have been put to death, and to this day his physical remains have never returned to Florence. The 14th century was a violently turbulent in Italian history, with many wars and revolutions happening at any moment across the peninsula. With his exile, Dante began a new life of wondering Italy, staying with friends and wealthy patrons, and hiding from the forces that hunted him while writing what is now regarded as one of the masterpieces of world literature. It must have been a hard life at times. In 2008 the city of Florence officially apologised for exiling the great poet, which was nice of them.
When looking at the face on his death mask, I saw some of the pain and fear he must have felt while spending all those years wondering Italy — never to return home. I saw something in his furrowed brow of the deep thinking he did, almost certainly still at work in his last moments (I don't know that, obviously, but I 'know' it), and I saw something of what it must have been like watching him as he performed parts of The Divine Comedy. This was not something he only did in the courts and the homes of the great and powerful, but (as Barbra Reynolds brilliantly and convincingly argues in Dante: The Poet, The Political Thinker, The Man) also on the streets, to the common people — hamming up all the scary parts like any good showman. In the death mask, I saw the face of a man who had laughed, cried, smiled, wanted and hoped — just like everyone else.
Sometimes I think it's easy to see famous people, and especially famous historical people, as somehow not like the rest of us. Like some other species, somehow slightly better than us mere human beings. Now Dante, to me, isn't like that — instead he's someone I feel like I almost know, as bizarre as that sounds.
Beside the death mask there is, or was — I do not know if it is still there now – a little quotation from Dan Brown's novel Inferno which says 'In many ways, by keeping his death mask here, we feel like Dante has finally been allowed to come home'. To be honest, I am not sure if I agree with that. I keep thinking about the little smile I thought I saw on his face, and wondering about it. He spent almost twenty years writing a story about a journey through Hell, Purgatory and then finally Heaven — ending in a place beyond the universe, and outside of time and space, and this might have somehow reflected the way he saw his own life. When he died, maybe he was smiling because he knew his poem would be remembered, and so he would be too. Maybe he was thinking of Beatrice, the love of his life. Maybe he had made his peace with death. Or maybe he was actually thinking of home. 