The assassin calls the priest back in order to confess, not his own crimes, but those of his master in crime, thereby gaining his freedom. Since cessare, used transitively, ordinarily in Dante means 'to avoid,' it does so here as well. 263-69, opts for a strikingly different solution, one that has had some success among recent commentators. Pagliaro ( Ulisse: ricerche semantiche sulla “Divina Commedia”, pp. But almost all agree on the basic meaning: the assassin calls back the friar in order to delay his death a while. Most of the early commentators think the verb cessare is used intransitively most later ones disagree, believing it is used transitively (as it is at Inf.
The last verse of the tercet has caused controversy. Whatever explanation we find most acceptable, it seems clear that Dante is referring to an actual event that his former fellow-citizens would remember.ĭante now assumes the role of confessing friar. Francis's order, 'primo sigillo a sua religïone' ), now stakes his authority as Florentine and poet on the charitable nature of his act, which others had apparently characterized as sacreligious. XI.93, where Pope Innocent gave his approval to the founding of St. His solemn oath, reminiscent of the language describing papal bulls and their seals (see Par. It is this and not the marble of the font (which Benvenuto da Imola has Dante breaking with an axe brought to him by a bystander ) that the poet broke, thus saving the near-drowned child. to XIX.13-20) has perhaps the most believable explanation (even if he criticizes the author for including this detail, which, according to him, adds nothing to the poem): in his view the baptismal font and its several little pozzetti were protected by a thin wooden covering in order to protect the holy water from sight (and desacralizing droppings?). That question is probably not resolvable, as the noun can have either meaning.Īll the early commentators take the incident referred to here as actually having occurred, when a child, playing with other children, became lodged in one of the smaller baptismal fonts of the Forentine baptistry. 457-512) gives reasons for believing that it refers to the fonts themselves. Mirko Tavoni (“Effrazione battesimale tra i simoniaci ,” Rivista di letteratura italiana 10 (1992], pp. Reviewing the commentary tradition, he supports the view of most of the early commentators that the noun battezzatori refers to the priests who performed baptismal rites. Mazzoni (“Dante's battezzatori ) affirms the literal meaning of the passage, while leaving in doubt the nature of the act that Dante claims to have performed. 41-63), who argues that the public vow of adherence to the French king taken, in the Baptistry and thus in proximity to the font, before Charles of Valois entered Florence in 1302, is what Dante now confesses he 'broke.' The language of the passage is so concrete that it seems difficult to credit such an ingenious solution.
248-62) and, more recently, Susan Noakes (“Dino Compagni and the Vow in San Giovanni: Inferno XIX, 16-21,” Dante Studies 86, pp. An Autobiographical Incident in Inferno XIX II. Some have argued that this passage is not credible if taken literally and, therefore, must be understood as metaphorical.
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