Italian Literature Commons^™

The Venetian Arsenal And Dante's Poetic Purpose, Eliot Davila

Augsburg Honors Review

John Ruskin remarked that if we were to pick an "honestly studious" three or four out of every hundred of Dante's admirers, then "we should rarely find one who knew why the Venetian Arsenal was described." Indeed, the wonderfully elaborate description of the Arsenal in Inferno XXI has long posed a problem for readers of the Commedia. This paper approaches Dante's representation of the Arsenal from a new perspective and finds that a more complete understanding of the image offers readers an original insight into what can be called the poetic purpose of Dante. For clarity of presentation, the paper …