Civilisation (1969–1970): Season 1, Episode 3 - Romance and Reality - full transcript

(BIRDSONG)

(MEDIEVAL MUSIC)

I am in the Gothic world,

the world of chivalry,
courtesy and romance.

A world in which serious things
were done with a sense of play,

where even war and theology
could become a sort of game,

and when architecture reached a point
of extravagance unequalled in history.

After all the great unifying convictions
of the 12th century,

high Gothic art can look fantastic
and luxurious,

what Marxists call "conspicuous waste".

And yet these centuries
produced some of the greatest spirits



in the whole history of man,

amongst them
St Francis of Assisi and Dante.

Behind all the fantasies
of Gothic imagination

there remained, on two different planes,
a sharp sense of reality.

Medieval man
could see things very clearly,

but he believed that these appearances

should be considered
as nothing more than symbols or tokens

of an ideal order,
which was the only true reality.

The fantasy strikes us first.

A charming example
is this series of tapestries,

known as The Lady With The Unicorn,

one of the last and most seductive
examples of the Gothic spirit.

It is poetical, fanciful and profane.

Its ostensible subject is the four senses,



but its real subject is the power of love

which can enlist and subdue
all the forces of nature,

including these two emblems
of lust and ferocity,

the unicorn and the lion.

They kneel before
this embodiment of chastity

and even hold up the corners of her tent.

These fierce beasts have become,
in the heraldic sense, her supporters,

and all round this allegorical scene

is what the scholastic
medieval philosophers

used to call "nature naturing”.

Natura naturans.

Birds,

trees,

flowers, leaves galore,

and those rather obvious symbols
of nature naturing, rabbits.

There is even nature domesticated,

sitting on a cushion.

What an image of worldly happiness
at its most refined,

what the French call the douceur de vivre,

which is often confused with civilisation.

We've come a long way
from the powerful convictions

that induced knights and ladies
to draw carts of stone up the hill

for the building of Chartres Cathedral.

And yet the notion of ideal love

and the irresistible power
of gentleness and beauty,

which is emblematically conveyed
by the homage of these fierce beasts,

can be traced back for three centuries,
and we may even begin to look for it

in the north portal of Chartres.

(FAINT SACRED MUSIC)

This portal, the north portal,
was decorated about the year 1220

and it seems to have been commissioned

by that formidable lady
Blanche of Castile,

the mother of St Louis.

Perhaps for that reason,

or perhaps simply because
it was dedicated to the Virgin Mary,

many of the figures are of women.

Several of the stories on the arches
concern Old Testament heroines.

At the corner is one of the first
consciously graceful women

in Western art.

Only a very few years before,
women were thought of as like this.

And those were the women
who accompanied the Norsemen to Iceland.

Now, look at this embodiment of chastity,

lifting her mantle, raising her hand,
turning her head

with rhythms of self-conscious refinement
that were to become mannered

but here are genuinely modest.

In fact, she represents a saint
called St Modeste.

But she might be Dante's Beatrice.

Of the two or three faculties that
had been added to the European mind

since the civilisation of Greece and Rome,

none seems to me stranger
and more inexplicable

than the sentiment of ideal
or courtly love.

It was entirely unknown in antiquity.

Passion, yes. Desire, yes, of course.
Steady affection, yes.

But this state of utter subjection

to the will
of some almost unapproachable woman,

this belief
that no sacrifice was too great,

that a whole lifetime might
properly be spent in paying court

to a disdainful lady,
or suffering on her behalf.

This would have seemed
to the Romans or to the Vikings

not only absurd, but unbelievable.

And yet, for hundreds of years,
it passed unquestioned.

It inspired a vast literature,

from Chretien de Troyes to Shelley, most
of which 1 find completely unreadable.

And even up to 1945, we still retained
a number of chivalrous gestures.

We raised our hats to ladies
and let them pass first through doors,

and, in America,
pushed in their seats at table.

We still subscribed to the fantasy
that they were chaste and pure beings

is whose presence we couldn't tell certain
stories or pronounce certain words.

Well, that's all over now,

but it had a long run
and there was much to be said for it.

How did it begin?
The truth is that nobody knows.

Most people think that, like the
pointed arch, it came from the East,

that pilgrims and crusaders
found in the Muslim world

a tradition of Persian literature

in which women were the subject
of extravagant compliment and devotion.

I don't know enough about
Persian literature to say this is true

but I do think that the crusade

had another, less direct,
influence on the concept of courtly love.

The lady of the castle
must always have had a peculiar position,

cooped up with so many
unoccupied young men

who couldn't spend
all their time fighting,

and when the lord was away
for a year or two,

the lady was left in charge.

She took on his functions

and received the kind of homage
that was accepted in a feudal society.

And the wandering knight who visited her

did so with the mixture
of deference and hope

that one gets in the troubadour poems.

(TROUBADOUR SONG IN FRENCH)

In the support of this theory

is the subject
of the Siege Of The Castle Of Love,

which appears on mirror cases and caskets

and other domestic objects
of the 14th century.

(TROUBADOUR SONG CONTINUES)

I ought, perhaps, to add

that the idea of marriage
doesn't come into the question at all.

Medieval marriages
were entirely a matter of property.

Well, as everybody knows, marriage
without love means love without marriage.

And then, I suppose one must admit

that the cult of the Virgin
had something to do with it.

In this context,
it sounds rather blasphemous.

But the fact remains that one often
hardly knows if a medieval love lyric

is addressed to the poet's mistress
or to the Virgin Mary.

The greatest of all writings about ideal
love, Dante's La Vita Nuova, The New Life,

is a quasi-religious work.

And in the end, it is Beatrice
who introduces Dante to paradise.

So, for all these reasons, I think one
can associate the cult of ideal love

with the ravishing beauty and delicacy

that one finds
in the Madonnas of the late 13th century.

(SOLO MALE VOICE SINGS SOLEMN SONG)

Courtly love
was not only the subject of lyrics,

but of long, very long,
stories in prose and verse.

This reminds me of something else

that the Gothic centuries
added to the European consciousness,

that cluster of ideas and sentiments

which surrounds
the words "romantic" and "romance".

One can't really say that
romance was a Gothic invention.

I suppose that, as the word suggests,
it was Romanesque

and grew up
in those southern districts of France

where memories of Roman civilisation
had not quite been obliterated

when they were overlaid by the more
fantastic imagery of the Saracens.

But the chivalrous romance of Gothic time,

from Chrétien de Troyes
in the 13th century to Malory in the 15th

with their allegories
and personifications,

their endless journeys and night-long
vigils, their spells and mysteries,

had a special appeal
to the medieval mind.

For 200 years,

the Roman De La Rose was probably
the most-read book in Europe,

except for Boethius and the Bible.

Well, it's not much read today,
except in order to pass examinations.

But of course,
the effect of these romances

on 19th-century literature was decisive,

whether as a quarry,
or as an imaginative escape,

especially in England.

The Eve Of St Agnes,
La Belle Dame Sans Merci,

the Idylls Of The King,

to say nothing of that crucial masterpiece
of the late 19th century,

Wagner's Tristan And Isolde.

One can't say that Gothic romance
hasn't played a part in our experience,

if only at second-hand.

(SOLO MALE VOICE SINGS IN FRENCH)

The summit of court civilisation
was in the late 14th century in France,

under the patronage of the Duc de Berry.

He built a series of fabulous,
filigree castles

of which the painter, de Limbourg,
has left us an apparently accurate record.

He filled them with jewels
and jewelled contraptions, paintings,

and tapestries.

This warlike scene is only a tapestry.

The duke wasn't fond of war.

The duke's artists have given us
a vivid account of his court.

Here he is, giving a grand dinner
to celebrate the New Year.

There are no ladies present,
which is curious

because the duke,
who was an amiably self-indulgent man,

is reported to have said of women,

"The more the merrier,
and never tell the truth.”

But we can see
some of his famous collection

of 1,500 dogs,
which is too many, even for me!

They seem to have had
the run of the table.

Behind him is his chamberlain,
saying to some bashful suitor,

"Approche, approche!”

And his courtiers, including a cardinal,
are raising their hands in astonishment

at such condescension.

The castles, pictures, tapestries,
have vanished with the dogs.

But a few of the treasures remain.

This gold cup is one, which seems
to have been owned by the duke

and one of the few objects

from which one can still catch the flavour
of this fanciful, luxurious world.

(INSTRUMENTAL MEDIEVAL MUSIC)

And this - nominally a reliquary,

but actually an extravagant,
but charming toy.

It's supposed to have held a thorn
from Christ's crown at the Crucifixion.

There were many patrons of art
and collectors at that time,

but the duke was peculiar
in that the arts were his whole life

and to pay for his collections,
he taxed his subjects mercilessly

and they probably wouldn't have agreed
with this miniature

where St Peter seems to be
admitting him to heaven

without the usual formalities.

It was a colder world for peasants.

The manuscripts illustrate
another capacity of the human mind

which had grown up
in the preceding century,

the delighted observation of natural
objects - leaves, flowers, animals

and birds.

Birds were a medieval obsession.

They're the subject of one of the earliest
medieval sketchbooks

and they fill the borders of manuscripts.

If you'd asked a 14th-century cleric
to account for all these birds,

he would probably have said
that they represented souls

because they can fly up to God.

But this doesn't really explain

why artists drew them
with such obsessive accuracy,

and I think the reason is they
have become symbols of freedom.

Under feudalism,

man and animals were tied to the land,
very few people could move about.

Only artists and birds.

They were cheerful, hopeful,
impudent and mobile

and in addition, had the kind of markings
that fitted in with medieval heraldry.

The duke's earliest manuscripts

had shown an isolating
and symbolising approach to nature.

But in the middle of his career, he
discovered an artist or a group of artists

called de Limbourg

who, by some stroke of original genius,
saw nature as we see it -

as part of a complete visual experience.

No doubt much of their work's been lost,

but one book remains,
The Very Rich Hours,

which is one of the miracles
of art history.

Here are men and women
cultivating the fields, harrowing, sowing,

with the scarecrow in the background,

haymaking and harvesting,

and suddenly we realise
that all this had been going on

in the same places,
more or less unchanged,

all through the Dark Ages

and went on in the same way
right up to the last war.

In the foreground,

a party of nobles out hawking
indulge in a little mild courtship,

so-called because it was only
in courts that one had time

for these agreeable preliminaries,

instead of getting down to business
immediately.

(SPRIGHTLY MUSIC)

Then, in May,

everyone puts on crowns of leaves
and goes out riding.

What a dream!

No society has ever been more elegant,
more debonair, more dainty.

Those French and Burgundian courts

were the model of fashion
and good manners all over Europe.

(SPRIGHTLY MUSIC CONTINUES)

Many people, when you mention
to them the word “civilisation”,

think of something like this.

Well, it isn't to be sneezed at.

But it isn't enough

to keep a civilisation alive,

because it depends
on a small, static society

that never looks outside or beyond.

And we know from many examples
that such societies become petrified,

anxious only to hold on
to their own social order.

The great, indeed, the unique merit
of European civilisation has been

that it has never ceased to develop.

Even the idea of courtesy
could take on an unexpected form.

In the years when the north portal
of Chartres was being decorated,

a rich young dandy named Francesco
Bernardone suffered a change of heart.

He was, and always remained,
the most courteous of men.

He was deeply influenced
by French ideas of chivalry.

One day, when he had fitted himself up
in his best clothes

in preparation
for some chivalrous campaign

he met a poor gentleman whose need
seemed to be greater than his own,

and gave him his cloak.

That night, he dreamed that
he should rebuild the celestial city.

Later, he gave away his possessions
so liberally that his father,

who was a rich businessman
in the Italian town of Assisi,

decided to disown him.

There upon, Francesco
took off his remaining clothes

and said that he would possess
nothing, absolutely nothing.

The Bishop of Assisi hid his nakedness
and afterwards gave him a cloak,

and Francesco went off into the woods,
singing a French song.

The next three years
he spent in abject poverty,

looking after lepers, who were very much
in evidence in the Middle Ages,

and rebuilding with his own hands
abandoned churches.

In all his actions, he took
the words of the Gospels literally,

and he translated them
into the language of chivalric poetry.

He said that he had taken poverty
for his lady,

and when he achieved some
still more drastic act of self-denial,

he said that it was to do her a courtesy.

It was partly because he saw that
wealth corrupts and is the cause of war,

but partly because he felt
that it was "discourteous”

to be in the company
of anyone poorer than oneself.

I'm so far illustrating
the story of St Francis

by the work of the Sienese painter,
Sassetta,

because although he painted so much later

the chivalric Gothic tradition lingered on
in Siena as nowhere else in Italy,

and gave to Sassetta's sprightly images
a lyric, even a visionary quality,

more Franciscan
than the ponderous images of Giotto.

But I must now change to Giotto,

not only because he lived
150 years earlier than Sassetta -

that's to say much nearer
the time of St Francis -

but because he was chosen to decorate
the great church where I am now standing,

the Church of St Francis,
built very shortly after his death.

How many of these frescoes
are really by Giotto's own hand

is an open question.

Modern English scholars
have taken it into their heads

to say that Giotto practically
never went to Assisi at all.

Italian scholars think
that he painted nearly all of them.

I'm inclined to think that Giotto
was one of those artists like Raphael,

who attached much more importance
to invention than to execution.

He was quite prepared to let his pupils -

there must have been a small army
of pupils - carry out his ideas.

The ones here, above my head,
I am pretty sure he painted himself,

because they have all his weight
and dramatic power.

Where he seems to me to fall short
is in his actual image of the saint.

It's too grave and commanding,
it has none of that sprightliness, almost,

that sense of joy which St Francis valued
almost as much as courtesy itself.

Incidentally, we don't know
what St Francis looked like.

The best-known early painting
is attributed to Cimabue.

It looks quite convincing, but I'm afraid
that it's entirely repainted

and only shows us

what the 19th century thought
St Francis ought to have looked like.

From the first, everyone recognised
that St Francis was a religious genius -

the greatest, I believe,
that Europe has ever produced.

Although he was only a layman,

the Pope gave him permission
to found an order, here at Assisi.

St Francis died in 1226 at the age of 43,
worn out by his austerities.

On his deathbed, he asked forgiveness
of, "Poor brother donkey, my body,"

for the hardships he had made it suffer.

He'd seen his order
go from a group of humble companions

and become a great institution,
a power in Church politics.

And, at a certain point, he had quite
naturally and simply relinquished control.

He knew that he was no administrator.

Within two years - only two years -
of his death, he was canonised,

and his companions began to build
this great church to his memory.

A masterpiece of Gothic architecture,
also an incredible piece of engineering.

Two churches, one on top of the other,

a huge monastery, all built on arcades,
and of such hard stone

that it's almost impossible to believe
that it's original 13th-century work.

I think it must have been built
by a castle architect.

It was decorated
by all the chief Italian painters

of the 13th and 14th centuries,
from Cimabue onwards

so that it has become the richest
and most evocative church in Italy.

(GREGORIAN CHANT)

A strange memorial to the little poor man
whose favourite saying was,

"Foxes have holes,

"and the birds of the air have nests,

"but the son of man
hath not where to lay his head."

But of course, St Francis's
cult of poverty couldn't survive him.

It didn't even last his lifetime.

It was officially rejected by the Church

because the Church had already become
part of the international banking system

that originated in the 13th century

and those of St Francis's disciples
who clung to his doctrine of poverty

called Fraticelli, were denounced
as heretics and burnt at the stake.

And, for 700 years,
capitalism has continued to grow

to its present monstrous proportions.

It may seem that St Francis
has had no influence at all,

because even those humane reformers
of the 19th century

who sometimes invoked him

didn't wish to exalt or sanctify poverty,
but to abolish it.

(COCKEREL CROWS IN THE DISTANCE)

(BIRDSONG)

(DOG BARKS)

And yet his belief
that in order to free the spirit

we must shed our earthly possessions

is the belief that all great religions
have in common, East and West,

almost without exception,

and by enacting that truth
with such simplicity and grace,

he made it a part
of European consciousness,

an ideal to which - however
impossible it may be in practice -

the finest spirits will always return.

And by freeing himself
from the pull of possessions,

St Francis achieved a state of mind
which has been of great value to us -

I mean his belief
in the unity of creation

and the possibility of universal love.

It was only because he possessed nothing
that St Francis could feel sincerely

a brotherhood of all created things,

not only living creatures
like brother pig,

but brother fire and sister wind.

This philosophy inspired his hymn
to the unity of creation

known as the Canticle Of The Sun,

and it's expressed with irresistible
naivety in a collection of legends

known as the Fioretti the Little Flowers.

Not many people can make their way
through the polemics of Abelard

or the definitions of St Thomas Aquinas,

but everyone can enjoy
these holy folk tales, which, after all,

may not be completely untrue.

They are, in contemporary jargon,

amongst the first examples
of popular communication -

at any rate,
since the Sermon on the Mount.

And they tell us, for instance,
how St Francis persuaded a fierce wolf

that terrified the people of Gubbio,
to make a pact

by which, in return for regular meals,
he would leave the citizens alone.

"Give me your paw," said St Francis,
and the wolf gave his paw.

Most famous of all, of course,
is the sermon to the birds,

those creatures which, as I've said,

seemed, to the Gothic mind,
singularly privileged.

Seven centuries haven't impaired
the naive beauty of that episode.

St Francis is a figure
of the pure Gothic time,

the age of crusades and castles
and great cathedrals.

Although he put it to strange
and barbarous uses,

he belonged to the age of chivalry.

Well, however much one loves that world,

I think it remains for us
infinitely strange and remote.

It's as enchanting, as luminous,
as transcendental, as the stained glass,

that is its glory,

and, in the ordinary meaning
of the word, as unreal.

But already, during the lifetime of
St Francis, another world was growing up,

which, for better or worse,
is the ancestor of our own.

The world of trade, of banking, of cities,

full of hard-headed men

whose aim in life was to grow rich
without ceasing to be respectable.

Cities, citizens, civilians,
civic, civic life -

I suppose that all this

ought to have a direct bearing
on what we mean by civilisation.

Behind me is the town hall of Siena

looking very much as it did
in the 14th century.

In fact, the city architect told me
that the population is two less

than it was in the 13th century.

Historians sometimes maintain

that civilisation began in these
Italian republics of the 14th century.

Well, civilisation, as I understand it,

can be created in a monastery
or a court just as well as in a city,

perhaps rather better.

But all the same, the social
and economic system that grew up

in the 13th century had a point.

It was a manageable human unit

and, as opposed to the system -
if you can call it a system - of chivalry,

it was realistic.

And the proof is, that it has survived.

Of course, Siena remained, to some extent,
medieval compared with Florence.

There, industrial and banking conditions
at the time of Dante

were surprisingly similar to those
that exist in Lombard Street today,

except that double entry
wasn't invented till the 14th century,

in Genoa, I believe.

Of course, the Italian republics
weren't in the least democratic,

as, in their pre-Marxist innocence,

the liberal historians
used to think they were.

Exploitation was in the hands
of a few powerful families,

who managed to operate
within the framework of a guild system

in which the workers had no say at all.

The Italian merchant of the 14th century
isn't a sympathetic figure,

less so, really, than that old reprobate,
Jean de Berry.

The stories of Florentine thrift

are like the stories that Jews
used to tell about each other.

But - and here the parallel
with Lombard Street is not so close -

the new merchant classes,
as patrons of the art of their own time,

were at least as intelligent
as the aristocracy.

And, just as their economic system
was capable of an expansion

that has lasted till today,

so the painting they commissioned
had a kind of solid reality

that was to be the dominant aim
of art up to the time of Cézanne.

The first and, in some ways, the greatest
painter of this new reality was Giotto.

This is one of Giotto's frescoes
in the Arena Chapel in Padua,

and as I look at it,
I realise that to anyone

whose eye has been conditioned by realism,

as it existed in European art
from the Renaissance to the cubists,

this will not look very realistic -
perhaps no more so than Gothic tapestry.

But this much is clear -
instead of a decorative jumble,

it concentrates on a few simple,
solid-looking forms arranged in space.

Giotto had,
more than any artist before him,

the ability to make
his figures look solid.

He manages to simplify them into large,
comprehensible, apprehensible shapes,

and it gives one a profound satisfaction

to feel that one can grasp his figures
so completely.

He needs to make his figures
more vividly credible

because he wishes us
to feel more intensely

the human drama
in which they are involved.

Once we have, so to say,
learnt Giotto's language,

we recognise him as one of
the greatest masters of painted drama

that has ever lived.

How did Giotto evolve
this very personal and original style?

When he was a young man -
he was born in Tuscany in about 1265 -

Florentine painting
was really only a less polished form

of Byzantine painting.

It was flat, flowing, linear,

based on traditional concepts which
had changed very little for 500 years.

For Giotto to break away from it and
evolve this solid, space-conscious style

was one of those feats
of original creation

that have occurred only two or three times
in the history of art.

When such drastic changes do take place,

one can usually find certain points
of departure, models, predecessors.

But not with Giotto.

We know absolutely nothing about him
till the year 1305

when he decorated a small, plain building
in Padua, known as the Arena Chapel,

and made it -
to anyone who cares for painting -

one of the holy places of the world.

It was commissioned by a money-lender
named Enrico Scrovegni,

whose father had actually
been imprisoned for usury,

that is to say, for charging
an extortionate rate of interest,

because moderate rates of interest
were unofficially countenanced.

It's one of the first instances of the
"new rich" commissioning works of art

as a kind of atonement,

a practice that has benefited the world

almost as much as vanity
and self-indulgence.

Here he is.

Perhaps the earliest painted portrait
that is obviously a genuine likeness,

presenting a model of his chapel
to three angels,

and for that reason placed among
the blessed in the Last Judgment.

Giotto is a supreme dramatist
of human life in all its diversity.

He can depict a scene like this,
Marriage At Cana,

which is almost Chaucerian.

(MEDIEVAL SONG)

Behind the pots
stands the pot-bellied host

who tastes with astonishment the wine
that has been created out of water.

But Giotto is greatest
when the human drama is greatest,

as in this scene of the betrayal
in the Garden of Gethsemane.

What a marvellous invention that Judas
should put his cloak round Our Lord.

Everything - heads, gestures,
the explosive pattern of the spears -

is a crescendo of feeling,
tension and violence.

But he can also achieve the lyrical beauty
of the Virgin's wedding procession.

(GENTLE SACRED MUSIC)

The tenderness of the Noli Me Tangere,

with its marvellously subtle relationship
between the figures.

And finally, The Lamentation
over Christ's dead body.

It's a masterpiece
of pictorial construction -

a sort of model for high academic painting
for 500 years.

But this technical aspect
is soon forgotten.

Look at the gestures
and the heads of the mourning women.

They need no words from me.

Although I think that Giotto was one of
the supreme painters of the world,

he has equals.

But in the year of his birth
and in the same district

was born a man who is unequalled -

the greatest philosophical poet
that has ever lived, Dante.

Since they were contemporaries
and compatriots,

one feels that it should be possible
to illustrate Dante by Giotto.

They seem to have known each other and
Giotto may have painted Dante's portrait.

In fact, their imaginations
moved on very different planes.

Giotto was, above all,
interested in humanity.

He sympathised with human beings,
and his figures by their very solidity,

remain on earth.

Well, of course,
there is humanity in Dante -

he lived in the thick
of Florentine politics

and all the characters he had pitied
or hated or admired appear in his poem,

not only as representatives
of good and evil,

but with the vividness of real people.

But Giotto
lacked Dante's philosophic power

and moral indignation,

that heroic contempt for baseness
that was to come again in Michelangelo,

above all, that vision of a heavenly order

and the intellectual power
to make it comprehensible.

In a way, the poet and the painter
stand at the junction of two worlds.

Giotto belonged to the new world
of solid realities,

the world created by the bankers
and merchants for whom he worked.

Dante, as has often been observed,
belonged to the earlier Gothic world,

the world of St Thomas Aquinas
and the great cathedrals.

One isn't as close to Dante
in the Arena Chapel

as one is here
in the Romanesque Baptistery at Pisa.

The pulpit,

by Niccolò Pisano, was executed
five years before Dante was born.

Yet it has all his sense of horror,

even some elements of the grotesque
that come into the Inferno,

combined with much
that is derived from antiquity.

It has the same keen eye
for truthful details,

although, of course,

we can no longer believe
in these rather ridiculous monsters.

Niccolo's son, Giovanni, about
15 years older than Dante and Giotto,

and deeply influenced
by the Gothic art of the North,

seems to me perfectly
to reflect the Dantesque spirit.

Giovanni Pisano was one of the great
tragic dramatists of sculpture.

The pulpits he carved
at Pisa and nearby Pistoia

depict a terrible world.

Here is the grief-filled suffering

of The Massacre Of The Innocents.

(MELANCHOLY MEDIEVAL SONG)

But Giovanni Pisano's feeling
of tragic indignation

was only one side of Dante.

In the second half of his great poem,
from the middle of the Purgatorio onwards,

there are moments of disembodied bliss,

to which no artist at the time
did justice.

Nor were the painters of the 14th century

ready to reflect
Dante's feeling for light.

Like all the heroes of this series,

Dante thought of light
as the symbol of civilised life

and in his poem
he describes accurately and economically

light in all its varying effects.

The light of dawn, light on the sea,
light on leaves in spring.

But all these beautiful descriptions,

which are the part of Dante
that we like best,

are only similes.

They're introduced by the words,
"As when."

They are intended to illustrate
and make comprehensible

to our earth-bound senses
the vision of divine order

and heavenly beauty.

(CHORAL MUSIC)