the two main traits of the kite, namely, that he makes very lofty circles and makes them over things most vile. Probably the image-loving poet had watched this phenomenon long before he got a chance to use it against tyrants and disappointing kings.1 1 Kites, of course, were common in Italy then as now, and could not have failed to be familiar to every one. The word nibbio is probably due to a confusion through popular etymology of milvus and nebula, for the kite flies near the clouds. THE eagle's lofty flight and lightning-like plunge, its keen, far-reaching vision, and its function as an heraldic, imperial, or mystic emblem, are treated by Dante mostly in a medieval fashion, and he adds to these qualities certain magical elements such as may have entered his mind from folklore or from dreams. The superstition that the eagle can look unblinded into the sun is as old as Aristotle,1 may be found in scores of medieval writers,2 and is perpetuated by 1 Hist. Animal. IX, 45. Aristotle tells how the sea eagle forces his eaglets to gaze at the sun, and goes on to say that if one of them is unwilling he beats him, makes him turn despite himself, and kills the one whose eyes weep first. 2 See LAUCHERT, Gesch. des Physiol. pp. 19, 172. CAHIER, Mélanges, II, 94-97, 168. POPE GREGORY, Altburgundische Uebersetzung der Predigten Gregors über Ezechiel, ed. by K. Hofmann, p. 29, Car quant il mist son entente en la sustance de la diviniteit, si fichet il assi cum selonc la costume daisle ses oilz el soloil.' On the bronze doors of the cathedral at Pisa may be seen an eagle mounting to the sun. Dante. In the sphere of fire he saw Beatrice gazing into the sun. 'Almost such a passage had made morning there and evening here; and there all that hemisphere was white, and the other part black, when I saw Beatrice turned upon the left side, and looking into the sun; never did eagle so fix himself upon it. And even as a second ray is wont to issue from the first and mount upward again, like a pilgrim who wishes to return; thus of her action, infused through the eyes into my imagination, mine was made, and I fixed my eyes upon the sun beyond our use.' NORTON. '1 Thus Dante gains a fresh strength of vision, greater than would come to a man from the mere renewal of youth, although he seems to have been influenced both by the legend of the eagle's rejuvenation and of its supernatural ability to stare into the sun. The 'Physiologus' declares that man, when the eyes of his heart are darkened, should rise to Christ, the sun of righteousness, and renew his youth in the fount of everlasting life, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.2 Dante recurs to this legend of the magic sight in an apostrophe to Hyperion : The aspect of thy son, Hyperion, Here I sustained, and saw how move themselves The wonderful vision of mortal eagles is mentioned also by the Heavenly Eagle, who says: 1 Parad. I, 43-54. 2 Cf. LAUCHERT, op. cit. p. 172. 8 Parad. XXII, 142–144. 'The part in me which sees and bears the sun 'Now fixedly must needs be looked upon.'1 1 - LONGFELLOW. As the eagle of Aristotle and later authors tests its young, casting away those that cannot endure the glare of the sun; so Beatrice or 'Theology,' leading Dante up to God, like the mother eagle, looks unflinchingly into its rays, and Dante is able also to bear the glow of the sun, which to him so often means God. Though the eagle's strength of vision is unwittingly exaggerated by Dante, he is evidently only rhetorical in advising fools who are geese by nature to desist from emulating the star-sweeping eagle.2 This fling at poetasters becomes a sublime compliment when Dante records his meeting in the nether world with Homer, sovereign poet, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and Virgil. Così vidi adunar la bella scuola Di quei signor dell' altissimo canto, Thus saw I gathered the fair school That o'er the others like an eagle flies. A conventional image was perhaps never more grandiosely beautiful. 1 Parad. XX, 31-33. 2 De V. E. II, iv, 80-82, '. a tanta præsuntuositate desistant, et si anseres naturali desidia sunt, nolint astripetam aquilam imitari.' 8 Cf. the Virginal (559), where an embassy says to a hero, 'Ir varnt den ritern obe als obe dem falken tuot der adelar.' Cited by Lüning, p. 182. ▲ Inf. IV, 94-96. S 4 Nature and heraldry are powerfully mingled in Dante's words on Guido da Polenta, whose family had been lords of Ravenna since 1270, and were hovering in 1300 over Cervia. The arms of the Polenta family, according to Benvenuto da Imola,1 were an eagle, half argent on a field azure, half gules on a field or, wherefore Dante can utter these words to the soul of Guido da Montefeltro : Ravenna sta come stata è molti anni; Si che Cervia ricopre co' suoi vanni.2 Ravenna stands as it long years has stood; Here the outlying domain is covered with the flightfeathers, but elsewhere the princely eagle is like to 1 BENVENUTO DA IMOLA, '. illi de Polenta portant pro insignio aquilam, cuius medietas est alba in campo azurro, et alia medietas est rubea, in campo aureo.' J. WOODWARD, Heraldry, British and Foreign, I, p. 268, gives the Polenta arms thus, 'Per pale or and azure, an eagle per pale gules and argent.' See LITTA, Famiglie Celebri Italiane. Litta apparently gets his authority from MARCANTONIO GINANNI, L' Arte del Blasone. 2 Inf. XXVII, 40–42. 8 3 JACOPO DELLA LANA, 'Sono le penne delle ali presso alle piume ed estreme, che sono appellate coltelli.' FREDERICK II, De Arte Venandi, I, cap. 50, defines the vanni or flight-feathers at length and scientifically, 'Numerus itaque pennarum in unaquaque ala est viginti sex, quatuor magis propinquæ corpori, quæ dicuntur vani, . . . demum versus extremitatem alæ aliæ sunt decem, quæ forinsecæ dici possunt.' Therefore the vans are not the extreme outer feathers. Dante, of course, uses the word vanni figuratively, -a part for the whole, as we say 'pinions.' |