Purgatorio · Canto XI ·
Purgatorio XI — The Paternoster
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 45 of 100 · Purgatorio, Canto XI
Before reading
The pilgrim is still on the first terrace, still among the proud bent double under their stones. Canto X showed the reliefs of humility and gave the first description of the souls' punishment; canto XI gives the souls their voices. The canto opens with the entire terrace praying together — a paraphrase of the Pater Noster, the Lord's Prayer — and then narrows to three named figures who speak from inside their bowing. Each names his pride. The most famous of the three delivers, in the middle of the canto, one of the Commedia's most enduring meditations on artistic fame.
Where the canto sits
You are still on the first terrace, the terrace of Pride. The first sin and the deepest. Three sub-categories of pride are conventionally distinguished — pride of lineage (family rank), pride of talent (artistic or intellectual gift), and pride of power (political dominance) — and the canto gives one named speaker to each. The triad is the cantica's complete typology of pride, delivered through three faces (or rather, three voices, since the faces are bent into the ground).
What it helps to know
The canto opens with the proud reciting a paraphrased Pater Noster. The detail is doctrinally specific. Where the souls of canto VIII sang the Te lucis ante and the kings of canto VII sang the Salve Regina, the proud here pray the central prayer of the Christian liturgy itself — the prayer Christ himself taught. Their version is expanded into seven tercets, each tercet a meditation on one of the prayer's seven petitions, with the petitions extended in penitential commentary. The most striking small detail: the prayer ends with a request for the living, not for themselves. We pray no longer for ourselves, for we have no need; we pray for those left behind us. The cantica's economy of intercession is reversed here for the first time. The dead have been asking the living to pray for them. Now the dead pray for the living.
The three named speakers are all northern Italian, all from the immediate political world of Dante's lifetime:
Omberto Aldobrandeschi (d. 1259) was a count of Santafiora in southern Tuscany, of the great family of the Aldobrandeschi — one of the ancient Tuscan noble houses. He was killed by the Sienese, who hated him for his aristocratic arrogance. He speaks the canto's example of pride of lineage.
Oderisi da Gubbio (d. 1299) was a celebrated miniaturist — an illuminator of manuscripts — from the Umbrian town of Gubbio. He worked in Bologna and was known across northern Italy in his lifetime. His speech is the canto's example of pride of talent. The meditation on fame he delivers — on Cimabue eclipsed by Giotto, on the older Guido (Guido Guinizelli) eclipsed by the younger Guido (Guido Cavalcanti), and on another perhaps already born who shall chase them both from the nest — is one of the most quoted passages in the entire Commedia. The other hinted at in the closing line is almost certainly Dante himself. He is, by allusion, writing his own coming fame into the speech of a soul purging pride.
Provenzano Salvani (c. 1220–1269) was the leading Ghibelline of Siena, victor of the battle of Montaperti against the Florentines (1260), and the dominant political figure of his city for a decade. He was captured and beheaded after the Sienese defeat at the battle of Colle Val d'Elsa (1269). The canto reports the act that, for Dante, saved him: when a Ghibelline friend was held to ransom by Charles of Anjou and would be executed if the ransom was not paid by a deadline, Provenzano stripped himself of his political dignity, sat in the public square of Siena (the Campo), and begged passersby for the money. The act of public self-abasement, by a man whose pride had ruled a city, was so contrary to his nature that it earned, in the cantica's economy, the salvation he is now climbing toward. He speaks the canto's example of pride of power — and of its opposite: the pride that breaks itself.
A small structural note. Oderisi will, in his speech, prophesy to the pilgrim that he, Dante, will himself spend time on this terrace after death. The prophecy is one of the Commedia's most quietly chilling moments — the only place in the poem where Dante explicitly assigns himself to a terrace of Purgatory. Watch for it.
What to read for
Read the Pater Noster paraphrase slowly. It is one of the cantica's most carefully constructed liturgical pieces, and the change in the final petition — we no longer pray for ourselves, but for those still on earth — is the cantica's economy of intercession turned over.
Notice the three speakers' different registers of confession. Omberto is bitter; Oderisi is wry; Provenzano is recounted by Oderisi, not by himself. The further the canto's pride extends — from family to art to political power — the more the cantica needs another's voice to deliver the confession.
Listen for Oderisi's meditation on fame. Read it as a poet's reflection on his own coming oblivion. Then notice that the Commedia we are reading is itself, by its own logic, un poco di vento — a little breath of wind. The poem is including itself in its own argument.
Listen, finally, for Provenzano in the square. The act is staged with great precision: the man who ruled Siena sitting in its square with his hand out. The cantica's most concrete picture of pride's purgation, performed in life.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
The canto handed the proud their voices. Where canto X had described their punishment as architecture and shown them as corbels, canto XI lets them pray together, then speak one by one, each naming the specific shape his pride took in life. The canto's structure is a single arc: from the collective voice of the Pater Noster, through three named confessions of the three classical sub-categories of pride (lineage, talent, power), into one of the cantica's most enduring meditations on the futility of artistic fame. The arc moves from the most impersonal voice in the cantica (the prayer all souls share) to the most personal (the speech of one named soul about another), and the journey is a journey down into the specificity of what pride actually was. The canto is, by its end, the cantica's most concentrated piece of writing about why the Commedia's own ambition might be exactly the thing the Commedia is here to cure.
The Lord's Prayer reversed
The canto's opening seven tercets are a paraphrase of the Pater Noster — the central prayer of the Christian liturgy — extended into penitential commentary. Each of the seven petitions of the Latin prayer is given its own tercet, and each is expanded with the proud souls' particular self-knowledge. The most striking expansion is at the prayer's end. The canonical Latin Lord's Prayer ends libera nos a malo — deliver us from evil. The proud's paraphrase adds a coda Dante invented: And this last prayer, dear Lord, we make to thee no longer for ourselves, since it would not avail us — but only for those left behind us. The cantica's economy of intercession has, until this canto, been the dead asking the living to pray for them (Manfred, Belacqua, Jacopo, Nino). Now, for the first time, the dead pray for the living. The reversal is theologically precise. The proud, who in life would not pray for anyone but themselves, now pray only for others. The punishment of pride is teaching its opposite.
Three sub-categories, three voices
Medieval theology distinguished three principal sub-types of pride: superbia generis (pride of lineage), superbia ingenii (pride of talent), and superbia potestatis (pride of power). The canto gives one named speaker to each.
Omberto Aldobrandeschi speaks the lineage version. Count of Santafiora in southern Tuscany, killed by the Sienese in 1259 in a punitive raid on his family's villages, he attributes his own death to the arrogance bred by his bloodline. The ancient blood and deeds of gallantry of my progenitors so arrogant made me, that, thinking not upon the common mother, all men I held in scorn. The cantica's diagnosis: hereditary pride forgets la comune madre — the common mother, Eve, the universal parent that levels all aristocracy. Omberto's confession is bitter; he is not yet at ease on the terrace.
Oderisi da Gubbio speaks the talent version. The Umbrian illuminator — celebrated in his lifetime, working in Bologna, known across northern Italy for the fineness of his manuscript miniatures — was, by all accounts of his contemporaries, the leading miniaturist of his generation. His confession is wry rather than bitter, and it carries with it the canto's most quoted meditation. In painting Cimabue thought that he should hold the field; now Giotto has the cry, so that the other's fame is growing dim. Cimabue (c. 1240–1302) was the dominant Italian painter of Oderisi's generation; Giotto (c. 1267–1337) had, by the time Dante was writing, eclipsed him completely. So has one Guido from the other taken the glory of our tongue — the older Guido (Guido Guinizelli, the founder of the dolce stil novo) had been eclipsed by the younger Guido (Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's friend and rival). The catalogue of eclipses culminates in the line that turns the meditation onto the Commedia itself: and he perchance is born, who from the nest shall chase them both. The other hinted at — the one already born, who will eclipse both Guido Guinizelli and Guido Cavalcanti — is, almost certainly, Dante. The poem is, in the speech of a soul purging the sin of pride, writing the poet's own coming fame into the catalogue of fames that fame itself will destroy.
The meditation closes with the lines the canto exists to deliver: Naught is this mundane rumour but a breath of wind, that comes now this way and now that, and changes name, because it changes side. The cantica's whole argument about human fame is in three lines. Fame is wind. The wind blows; the wind changes direction; the name it carries changes accordingly. The proud who pinned their dignity on artistic reputation are, in the punishment, learning that the wind is not what reputation rests on — that nothing humans can build outlives them more than a few generations. Cimabue thought that he should hold the field. The verb is the canto's saddest: credette — thought. Pride is precisely the act of thinking one's name will hold.
Provenzano Salvani speaks the power version, but he does not speak it directly. Oderisi describes him. The technique is significant: the deepest of the three prides (political dominance) is too close to its sin to be allowed to narrate itself, even in penitence. Oderisi tells the story instead. Provenzano had ruled Siena absolutely after the Ghibelline victory at Montaperti in 1260; he was captured and beheaded after the Battle of Colle Val d'Elsa in 1269. The act that saved him, the canto says, was this: a Ghibelline friend of his had been captured by Charles of Anjou and held to ransom on pain of execution. Provenzano stripped himself of all dignity, sat in the public square of Siena (the Campo, the shell-shaped piazza that is still the heart of the city), put his hand out, and begged passersby for the ransom money. All shame being laid aside, he placed himself; and there to draw his friend from the duress which in the prison-house of Charles he suffered, he brought himself to tremble in each vein. The detail is the canto's most precise picture of pride purged in life by an act so contrary to the soul's nature that it cracks the sin's hold from inside. Provenzano did not have to wait, after death, in Ante-Purgatory; the begging in the Campo was his Ante-Purgatory, performed alive.
Oderisi's prophecy to Dante
A small moment, easy to miss in the meditation on fame, has a long shadow. Oderisi tells the pilgrim — who has just shown excessive courtesy to Omberto, addressing him with the formal voi of the dead nobility — that the pilgrim himself will not escape this terrace. Thy fame is colour of the grass... it comes and goes; and he that takes it from thee in turn shall fade and a new one shall come. The implication is direct: Dante, the pilgrim, who is at this moment writing a poem whose ambition is to be remembered forever, is being told by a soul purging pride that his ambition is the sin of this terrace. The cantica's self-implication is one of its most subtle structural choices. The poem that risks pride is included, by its own author, in the indictment.
Famous and meaningful passages
The proud's Pater Noster.
Our Father, thou who dwellest in the heavens, Not circumscribed, but from the greater love Thou bearest to the first effects on high, Praised be thy name and thine omnipotence By every creature, as befitting is To render thanks to thy sweet effluence. Come unto us the peace of thy dominion, For unto it we cannot of ourselves, If it come not, with all our intellect. (Purg. XI.1–9)
The opening three tercets of the seven-tercet prayer. Not circumscribed — God is in heaven not because heaven contains him but because his love makes the highest sphere first. The proud's first theological clarification is to disallow the spatial confining of God; the sin's first medicine is to acknowledge that heaven is where God's love alights, not where God lives.
Omberto's confession.
A Latian was I, and born of a great Tuscan; Guglielmo Aldobrandeschi was my father; I know not if his name were ever with you. The ancient blood and deeds of gallantry Of my progenitors so arrogant made me That, thinking not upon the common mother, All men I held in scorn to such extent I died therefor, as know the Sienese, And every child in Campagnatico. (Purg. XI.58–66)
La comune madre — the common mother. The doctrine that all human pride of lineage forgets the universal parent. Every child in Campagnatico — the village where Omberto's death-raid is still spoken of. The Aldobrandeschi pride had local consequences in living memory.
Oderisi on Cimabue and Giotto.
In painting Cimabue thought that he Should hold the field, now Giotto has the cry, So that the other's fame is growing dim. So has one Guido from the other taken The glory of our tongue, and he perchance Is born, who from the nest shall chase them both. (Purg. XI.94–99)
The most famous sequence of eclipses in the Commedia. Cimabue credette. And he perchance is born — the line in which Dante writes himself, by allusion, into his own poem.
The line on fame.
Naught is this mundane rumour but a breath Of wind, that comes now this way and now that, And changes name, because it changes side. (Purg. XI.100–102)
Non è il mondan romore altro che un fiato di vento. The whole meditation in three lines. Romore — rumour, fame, public talk. Un fiato di vento — a breath of wind. The verb muta nome — changes name — is the indictment. Fame does not even keep its content; the wind changes, the name changes with it.
Provenzano in the Campo.
When he in greatest splendour lived, said he, Freely upon the Campo of Siena, All shame being laid aside, he placed himself; And there to draw his friend from the duress Which in the prison-house of Charles he suffered, He brought himself to tremble in each vein. (Purg. XI.133–138)
The lord of Siena seated on the brick paving of his own city, begging. He brought himself to tremble in each vein — the physical detail of the noble's body remembering itself under abasement. Pride purged in life by an act its perpetrator's own nature resists.
What to watch for
Watch the prayer pattern. Each terrace will use a different liturgical text as its formative chant. The proud pray the Pater Noster. The envious will sing the Litany of the Saints. The wrathful will pray Agnus Dei. Each prayer is a precise medicine for the sin it counters.
Watch the meditation on fame. It is the cantica's most concentrated argument against artistic ambition, and the poem will return to it obliquely in every subsequent terrace — most directly in canto XXVI, where Dante will meet Guido Guinizelli himself and have to test what reverence for a predecessor poet actually feels like.
Watch Oderisi's prophecy. The cantica will not return to it in any visible form, but the Commedia itself — the poem you are reading — is shaped by it. Every passage of self-display in the Comedy must be read with the knowledge that its author has, in canto XI of Purgatorio, included himself in the company of the bent-double penitent.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.