Dante Alighieri, P. Papinius Statius, Purgatorio XXI, cultural heritage, dulcedo, Walter Benjamin
Abstract
Starting from a lectura Dantis of the XXI canto of Purgatorio, Statius’ presence in the Middle Ages is investigated, in order to define the meaning of his ‘fidelity’ to Vergil in Dante’s poem. Dante’s text still openly invites the modern reader to a ‘sweet betrayal’ of the cultural tradition of the past: Statius enucleates from the forth Eclogue of his beloved Vergil an element which is totally foreign to it (wiz. the announcement of the nativity of Christ), and saves himself by ‘actualizing’ the literary tradition in a radically new perspective. Statius knows well that those new meanings were completely unknown to Vergil (and to past genera-tions), but he continues to remain faithful to his great master and model of poetry, despite having achieved something (salvation) that is denied to Vergil. The past holds in itself the potential for salvation, but this is released only in a far and unknown future. Even in the otherworldly realm of the Commedia, Benjamin’s Rettung der Vergangenheit is only par-tially accomplished: Vergil remains in the limbo of the unsaved. The embarrassed and almost comic game of glances at the end of the XXI canto hides and at the same time reveals the melancholy of all that is forever lost, in the past, in the violence of history and in the mystery of human condition.
