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Monna Vittoria turned to him now very directly and faced him, and there was a kind of challenge in her carriage. "Messer Dante," she said, "if you know nothing of me, I know something of you, for Messer Brunetto, your philosopher, is one of my very good friends. I had this trinket of him a week ago."
We will eat beans and defy Pythagoras." Dante shook his head. "I thank you," he answered, slowly, and I supposed it grieved him a little to deny so wise a man, "but I may not. I keep a tryst here." Messer Brunetto instantly assumed an air of alarm, and he allowed his voice to tremble as he said, "With no woman, I hope." Dante looked at him squarely. "With no woman, I swear.
Or that poor Brunetto Latini, with the cotto aspetto, "face baked," parched brown and lean; and the "fiery snow" that falls on them there, a "fiery snow without wind," slow, deliberate, never-ending!
Extinguish the architecture and the sculpture, the poetry and the philosophy of Attica; obliterate from the sum of civilization the names of Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, of Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Michel Angelo, of Brunetto, Ficino, Politian; and how much diminished will be the remainder!
He speaks of himself as drawing an angel in his tablets on the first anniversary of Beatrice's death. One of his instructors was Brunetto Latini, the most famous scholar then living; and he studied both at the universities of Padua and Bologna.
Heaven my witness, that matters little, but to be a great poet would matter much." Messer Brunetto patted my Dante very kindly on the shoulder, and looked at him with the look that old men wear when they are advising young men. "I have better hopes for you," he declared, "for I swear you have in you the makings of a pretty scholar."
His sonnets early gained him fame as a poet, and the lovely portrait of him painted by Giotto, on the walls of the Bargello, at the age of twenty-four side by side with Brunetto Latini and Corso Donati, and holding in his hand a pomegranate, the mystic type of good works shows that he was already a man of distinction, and a favorite in the upper classes of Florentine society.
It is a square stuccoed structure, stained light green, and covered by a dome, a tasteless monument, embellished with stucco medallions, inside, of the poet, of Virgil, of Brunetto Latini, the poet's master, and of his patron, Guido da Polenta.
But while he cherished this inward love he continued to study under his master, Brunetto Latini, and acquired not only all the best learning, but also all the most brilliant accomplishments of his day. He had never breathed a word of his love to Beatrice; it was of the unselfish, adoring, chivalrous type, which was content to worship in silence.
He did not duly consider that in Dante's time these fearful things were an indispensable part of every man's theory of the world; and, blinded by his kindly prejudices, he does not seem to have perceived that Dante, in accepting eternal torments as part and parcel of the system of nature, was nevertheless, in describing them, inspired with that ineffable tenderness of pity which, in the episodes of Francesca and of Brunetto Latini, has melted the hearts of men in past times, and will continue to do so in times to come.
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