Stephen's sardonic picture of Dante falling hotly in love
with a triangle refers to the poet's unprecedented and
unrepeated abstraction of the experience of love. Dante
reconciled the adored lady of troubadour erotic tradition with
Christian theology at a high cost: he made her almost entirely
a vessel of insight into the disembodied truths of divinity.
This transformation is realized most fully in the Paradiso
(finished not long before his death in 1321), but the
groundwork for it was laid in the Vita Nuova (1295).
The relentless Trinitarian echoes in the Divine Comedy have
their origin in the obsessive numerology of this early work,
where the spiritual exaltation of encountering something
utterly new (nuova or nova) in Beatrice
overlaps constantly with the number nine (nove).
The remarkable canzone in section 19 of the Vita
Nuova presents Beatrice (the "Miss Portinari"
that Boccaccio identified as the object of Dante's adoration)
as a divinely created miracle ("God intended to make something
utterly new") who can lead the mind to heaven. When Beatrice's
death is announced in section 28, the reader receives, not an
outflowing of emotion, but "three reasons" for not talking
about the loss in any detail, and a disquisition on a related
number: "since the number nine has appeared many times in what
I have already written (which clearly could not happen without
a reason), and since in her departure this number seemed to
play an important part, it is fitting that I say something
here concerning this, inasmuch as it seems to fit in with my
plan" (trans. Mark Musa).
Section 29 explains: "Let me begin by saying that if one
counts in the Arabian way, her most noble soul departed this
life during the first hour of the ninth day of the month, and
if one counts the way they do in Syria, she departed in the
ninth month of the year, the first month there being Tixryn
the First, which for us is October. And according to our own
way of reckoning, she departed in that year of our Christian
era (that is in the year of Our Lord) in which the perfect
number [i.e., ten] had been completed nine times in that
century in which she had been placed in this world: she was a
Christian of the Thirteenth Century. One reason why this
number was in such harmony with her might be this: since,
according to Ptolemy and according to Christian truth, there
are nine heavens that move, and since, according to widespread
astrological opinion, these heavens affect the earth below
according to the relations they have to one another, this
number was in harmony with her to make it understood that at
her birth all nine of the moving heavens were in perfect
relationship to one another. But this is just one reason. If
anyone thinks more subtly and according to infallible truth,
it will be clear that this number was she herself—that is, by
analogy. What I mean to say is this: the number three is the
root of nine, for, without any other number, multiplied by
itself, it gives nine: it is quite clear that three times
three is nine. Therefore, if three is the sole factor of nine,
and the sole factor of miracles is three, that is, Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, who are Three in One, then this lady was
accompanied by the number nine so that it might be understood
that she was a nine, or a miracle, whose root, namely that of
the miracle, is the miraculous Trinity itself. Perhaps someone
more subtle than I could find a still more subtle explanation,
but this is the one which I see and which pleases me the most"
(trans. Musa).
Stephen's absurd image of Beatrice as a geometrical figure
makes sense in the context of this bizarre passage. An "isosceles"
triangle is one with two or more equal sides––a category which
would include the perfectly balanced equilateral triangle.
Leonardo da Vinci, another Florentine with an interest in
divine order, pairs well with Dante's architectonic
rationality. In addition to his well-known labors in natural
science and engineering, Leonardo indulged a keen interest in
geometric shapes and numerical ratios. His Last Supper and
Mona Lisa have been shown to make use of antiquity's
"golden ratio" of approximately 1.6:1 (based on the irrational
number phi which begins 1.6180339887). Leonardo
explored the use of linear perspective in paintings like The
Adoration of the Magi and was probably the first
European artist to employ the technique of anamorphosis.
Perhaps most relevant to Stephen's conception of Dante, he
also embraced the classical idea that man is the measure of
all things, a quintessential creation whose proportions reveal
the divine mathematics underlying all of reality.
In the notebook drawing he called Vitruvian Man, or
"The proportions of the human body according to Vitruvius,"
Leonardo illustrated the Roman builder's belief that ideal
human proportions should inform works of architecture. In the
text above and below the drawing he articulates many of
Vitruvius' observations. Among them: the length of a man's
outstretched arms are equal to his height; the length of the
face from chin to hairline is one tenth of the total height;
the length of the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the
middle finger is the same; the maximum width of the shoulders
is a quarter of the height; the distance from the elbow to the
tip of the fingers is a quarter of the height; the base of the
penis lies at one half of the height; the distance from the
bottom of the feet to the bottom of the knee is one quarter of
the height; and "if you open your legs enough that your head
is lowered by one-fourteenth of your height and raise your
hands enough that your extended fingers touch the line of the
top of your head, know that the center of the extended limbs
will be the navel, and the space between the legs will be
[aha!] an equilateral triangle."
About Thomas Aquinas ("san
Tommaso Mastino" means "Saint Thomas the Mastiff," or
"The bulldog of Aquin" as Stephen calls him in Scylla and
Charybdis), little commentary is needed. The Summa
Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles are among
the most hyper-rational texts ever produced. Simply reading
their tables of contents yields the impression that all of
creation can be comprehended, divided, subdivided,
pigeonholed, articulated, clarified, and harmonized by human
logic. Thomas would have been associated with Dante in
Stephen's thoughts because so many ideas of the Commedia
were taken from his writings.
