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Purgatorio, IX.76-78 |
vidi una porta, e tre gradi di sotto
per gire ad essa, di color diversi,
e un portier ch'ancor non facea motto.
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I now made out a gate and, there below it,
three steps-their colors different-leading to it,
and a custodian who had not yet spoken.
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Purgatorio, IX.94-96 |
Là ne venimmo; e lo scaglion primaio
bianco marmo era sì pulito e terso,
ch'io mi specchiai in esso qual io paio.
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There we approached, and the first step was white
marble, so polished and so clear that I
was mirrored there as I appear in life.
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Purgatorio, IX.97-99 |
Era il secondo tinto più che perso,
d'una petrina ruvida e arsiccia,
crepata per lo lungo e per traverso.
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The second step, made out of crumbling rock,
rough-textured, scorched, with cracks that ran across
its length and width, was darker than deep purple.
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Purgatorio, IX.100-102 |
Lo terzo, che di sopra s'ammassiccia,
porfido mi parea, sì fiammeggiante,
come sangue che fuor di vena spiccia.
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The third, resting above more massively,
appeared to me to be of porphyry,
as flaming red as blood that spurts from veins.
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Purgatorio, IX.103-105 |
Sovra questo tenea ambo le piante
l'angel di Dio, sedendo in su la soglia,
che mi sembiava pietra di diamante.
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And on this upper step, God's angel-seated
upon the threshold, which appeared to me
to be of adamant-kept his feet planted.
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Purgatorio, IX.106-108 |
Per li tre gradi sù di buona voglia
mi trasse il duca mio, dicendo: "Chiedi
umilemente che 'l serrame scioglia".
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My guide, with much good will, had me ascend
by way of these three steps, enjoining me:
"Do ask him humbly to unbolt the gate."
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Purgatorio, IX.109-111 |
Divoto mi gittai a' santi piedi;
misericordia chiesi e ch'el m'aprisse,
ma tre volte nel petto pria mi diedi.
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I threw myself devoutly at his holy
feet, asking him to open out of mercy;
but first I beat three times upon my breast.
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Purgatorio, IX.115-117 |
Cenere, o terra che secca si cavi,
d'un color fora col suo vestimento;
e di sotto da quel trasse due chiavi.
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Ashes, or dry earth that has just been quarried,
would share one color with his robe, and from
beneath that robe he drew two keys; the one
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Purgatorio, IX.118-120 |
L'una era d'oro e l'altra era d'argento;
pria con la bianca e poscia con la gialla
fece a la porta sì, ch'i' fu' contento.
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was made of gold, the other was of silver;
first with the white, then with the yellow key,
he plied the gate so as to satisfy me.
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Translated by Allen Mandelbaum
John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion
In the 17th chapter of Luke (v. 6), Christ speaks to his disciples about faith in terms of
the famous mustard seed:
If you had faith as a mustard seed, you might say to
this mulberry tree, 'Be thou plucked up by the root,
and be thou planted in the sea'; and it should obey you.
The more familiar version of Christ's words about the mustard seed is the one reported by
Matthew (17:20), where faith moves mountains rather than mulberries. The passage from Luke
had an altogether independent history, however, thanks in part to St. Ambrose, who helped
establish the exegetical tradition for the meaning of the mulberry. He identifies the tree
with Satan, planted in the hearts of men, precisely because of its three-colored fruit:
For the fruit of this tree is white when in flower, then turns red
when formed, and black when mature (nam fructus eius primo
albet in flore, deinde iam formatus inrutilat, maturitate nigrescit).
So the devil, deprived by his transgression of the white flower and
red power of angelic nature, bristled with the black odor of sin.
Ambrose's colors identify the tree as Satan and at the same time provide Satan with a history
that captures in an instant the dynamism of decay. There can be scarcely any doubt of the
influence of the gloss on Dante's description of the devil.
But an equally authoritative and contemporary exegete, St. Augustine, gave the
mulberry tree a reading totally different from the one just quoted. Commenting upon the same
passage, he insists that the mulberry tree represents the gospel of the cross of Christ,
Evangelium crucis Christi, because of its bloody fruit, tanquam vulnera in ligno
pendentia (like wounds hanging from the tree). These two glosses by Ambrose and Augustine,
respectively, on the passage in Luke entered into the Glossa Ordinaria and became
traditional allegorizations of the mulberry tree, to be repeated by virtually every important
commentator throughout the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, either as alternate
meanings of Christ's words, in bono and in malo, or as the tropological and
allegorical meaning of the verses. Thus the mulberry tree was associated with both the devil
and the cross and its three colors were therefore applied indifferently to either of the two
poles in the drama of man's redemption.
The paradox that Dante chose to represent at the center of his symbolic cosmos
was already implicit in the exegetical tradition and was available to almost any literate man
who could take the hint of the canto's first verse and who knew enough to approach the figure
of Satan, not as spectacle, but as figure of the poem's dramatic action. Dante chose this
brilliant gloss because it captured a process, a becoming, and was no mere static justaposition
of "this for that". His colors do not stand for the moral abstractions which the critics have
since invented. They are rather a portrail of Satan in all of his awful historicity— a
synoptic view of all gradations of the process of corruption. The poet's own survey of the
history of Satan serves as a device for the infernal emblem:
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Inferno, XXXIV.34-36 |
S'el fu sì bel com'elli è ora brutto,
e contra 'l suo fattore alzò le ciglia,
ben dee da lui proceder ogne lutto.
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If he was once as beautiful [white] as he is ugly
[black] now, and lifted up his brows [red] against
his Maker, well may all sorrow proceed from him.
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Nowhere is Dante's teleological view of moral history more obvious and nowhere
in his allegory is his distaste for the arbitrary more profound.
Just as the exegetes would have recognized in Satan's symbolic colors
the process of moral corruption, so the natural philosopher would have recognized in
the colors themselves the process of physical decay. This becomes apparent from the
poet's retouching of the infernal portrait. The right head of Satan is not white,
the first stage of his history, but is waxen instead: "tra bianca e gialla." This
realistic touch— it happens that the first fruit of the mulberry is indeed
waxen and not white— tells us unmistakably that the irreversible process
whose history is painted on Satan's frozen figure is analogous to the physical
process of decay that begins from the moment of birth. The colors stand for moral
process rather than moral abstractions for the simple reason that the colors
themselves are not arbitrarily chosen but are the colors of process in the natural
world. The shift to off-white indicates unmistakably that the history which we read
in retrospect ended in blackness, the end of the medieval spectrum.
According to some medieval theories of color, changes in heat or humidity
are materially responsible for changes in color, while light is merely the occasion that
makes the colors perceptible. Black is usually associated with coldness and white with heat.
When they operate together "normally," on material that is disposed "normally" (mediocriter)
the resultant color is red. Bartholomeus Anglicus says precisely this in his authoritative
De rerum proprietatibus: "black and white, in equal proportiions, come together to
form a medial color, and thus the color will be equidistant between the extremes, like
red." When white is withdrawn from a mixture of whatever color, by a removal of heat,
it tends to be replaced by black. The first stage of its fading is toward either the
colors glaucus and flavus, in the case of plants which change color in
the fall, or the color pallidus in the cas of man. Thus the color "tra bianco
e giallo" is the moment of the blackening process, the first perceptible indication of
the deprivation of light and warmth. The pictorial history of Satan which Dante presents
to us begins from the moment of decay, when that angelic creature "per non aspettar lume /
caddle acerbo" (through not awaiting light, fell unripe).
The analogy between physical and spiritual processes, such as we have
described in the figure of Satan, was neither a poetic parallelism nor Dante's original
idea. Scholastics of the 13th century saw all change, whether physical or spiritual, in
terms of metaphysical principles. In their search to give the theology of grace a basis
in natural philosophy, they turned to the teachings of Aristotle for a rationalization
of the process of justification. Sanctifying grace was interpreted as an accidental form
of the soul; justification was therefore a real change, a generation of a new form—
generatio ad formam. Charles Singleton has shown the relevance of the Aristotlian
philosophy of becoming, generatio et corruptio, to Dante's drama of justification,
the Purgatorio. We need only review some of the principles established by Singleton's
essay in order to show the dramatic link between the retrospective panorama of Satan's
history, as reflected in his three colors, and the change that the pilgrim is about to undergo.
Using the pictorial language of the portrait, it may be said that in the tropological
sense the pilgrim is about to move away from the blackness of sin, corresponding to
Egypt in the figure of exodus (Inferno XXXIV, 44-45) (such as those who came from
whence the Nile descends), toward the red of grace, before his final ascent to the light...
Dante used in concrete detail, the change from one form to another requires first a
mutation from black to non-black, corruptio of the old, and then a mutation
from non-white to white, generation of the new. The zero point is neither
black or white: "Io non mori', e non rimasi vivo" (Inferno XXXIV.25)
The pilgrim is approaching the central point where descent meets
ascent and death meets Resurrection. Singleton has demonstrated that the continuous
movement of the pilgrim from sin to justification is a motus ad formam. We need
only add that such a movement implies two mutations: the leaving behind of sin, terminus
a quo, and the movement to grace, terminus ad quem. Satan is the zero point
where corruption meets generation, which is to say, the pilgrim's regeneration. The colors
of Satan's retrospective portrait recapitulates the history of the fall from a pristine
whiteness. In order to see the reverse history in the making, an as yet incomplete counterpart
of the infernal process, one need only read as far as the gates of purgatory. The three steps
leading to the angel of God in the ninth canto of the Purgatorio (vv. 95-103) are, in order,
white, black and red. The first is of pristine whiteness, the second is perso, the
color of hell itself (cf. Inferno V.89), while the last is porphyry, "come sangue che fuor
di vena spiccia." (Purgatorio IX.102) (as blood that spurts from a vein). We know by this
time whose blood was shed so that man could take the final step of regeneration. We know
too that when that step is completed it will be white.
John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion
Edited by Rachel Jacoff, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1986, pp. 170-174
Color Symbolism In Buddhist Art
Color Symbolism in Buddhist Traditions
Buddhist Flag Color Symbolism
— Peter Y. Chou
Mountain View, 2-13-2008
These notes were inspired by Elaine Scarry's seminar
"Imagining Colors" at Stanford on February 13, 2008
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(2-16-2008)