Statue of Dante at Santa Croce

This commemorative statue of Dante was unveiled in 1865 as part of the festivities related to our poet’s six hundredth birthday. It was made by Enrico Pazzi, a sculptor who was relatively unknown and inexperienced at the time of his commission. Indeed, there was no public competition for the work and, it would seem, Pazzi was selected more on account of his network of acquaintances (including Carducci) than for any other criterion.

For this and several other reasons, an intellectual called Oreste Raggi (1812-82) opened a rather nasty controversy in the newspapers that was apparently meant either to deride or derail the project completely. The question was especially sensitive because Italy’s capital was moved from Turin to Florence that same year and the entire country was caught up in the struggle for unification. Pazzi claimed that Dante’s severe facial expression was related to his diatribe against poor leadership in Italy:

   Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello,
nave sanza nocchiere in gran tempesta,
non donna di province, ma bordello!

(Purgatorio VI.76-78)

   O, enslaved Italy, shelter of woe,
ship without helmsman in a mighty storm,
mistress not of provinces but of bordellos!

Obviously, a significant number of Tuscans thought that the timing and the rendering were somewhat tasteless. The eagle at his feet was mocked as inappropriate from several perspectives, including its long association with Ghibellinism and the Empire. The location was similarly thought by many to be inferior to the other possibilities: the piazza in front of the train station and the one outside San Marco that ended up hosting a statue of General Manfredo Fanti.

What you see here is in some respects the best that Florence could do to accommodate a polemical marble statue meant to honor Dante as an early proponent of unification.

The lions at the corners holding shields (with the names of some of Dante’s works) are a famous Florentine motif known as the marzocco, whose most recognizable example was fashioned by Donatello (1418-20) and placed outside the Palazzo della Signoria where a modern copy now stands. The coats of arms around the base of Dante’s statue represent the cities that made financial contributions to the creation of this monument. The statue originally stood in the center of the piazza but was moved here in 1968.