Dante, Milton and Proserpina

Not that faire field

Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flours

Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis

Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world;

Milton's linking of Eve to Proserpina in Book IV immediately prior to our seeing our "general mother" for the first time might awaken echoes of another unfallen woman, Dante's Matilda. In Purgatorio 28, he says to the mysterious virgin who wanders amid the earthly paradise, preserved inviolate at the top of Purgatory:

Tu mi fai rimembrar dove e qual era

Proserpina nel tempo che perdette

la madre lei, ed ella primavera

Thou makest me remember where and what
Proserpina that moment was when lost
Her mother her, and she herself the Spring.

It would require a dissertation to explore the differences between the earthly paradises of the two poets, their visions of unfallen, free humanity, and their uses of the myth of Dis and Proserpina at this very juncture.

One thing is clear: Dante the poet and pilgrim is given a glimpse of Matilda upon successfully completing the journey through hell and purgatory, and being crowned ruler of himself by Virgil. He is fallen man recovering a vision of human innocence, and its loss, at the moment it returns within himself. Milton's reader is given a vision of human innocence, poised on the brink of the Fall. The two poets stand in contrast -- the Italian, seeking salvation for himself, regards the figure of Matilda and remembers retrospectively the tale of Proserpina; the English poet looks at the fair prospect of Eden and of Eve from a time before human liberty was lost. The two poets and their modes of narrative, one prospective, the other retrospective, are as different as can be, but each outdid himself in evoking the daughter of Demeter, the "fairer Floure."

Bees of the Barberini

As was suggested the other day, the allusion to bees at the end of Book I of Paradise Lost could be a dig at a powerful Roman family.

Figures of bees can be found throughout St. Peter's in Rome, because they were the emblem of the Barberini family, a powerful clan originally from Florence that became a dynasty in Rome in the 17th century.

Urban VIII (1623-1644) was born Maffeo Barberini, and extremely powerful, expanding the territories of the Papacy through battle. He also was the friend and later stern chastiser of Galileo, as well as a patron of Bernini. It was Urban who consecrated the new St. Peter's Basilica in 1626, and Bernini went on to create the famous piazza and colonnade of St. Peter's.

In this image by Bernini, Urban could almost be wearing a beehive:

Bernini also produced this image of the rape of Proserpina in 1621-22, which Milton could have seen during his trip to Italy. The event memorialized in Bernini's art is beautifully alluded to in Book 9 of P.L., at the moment of Eve's fall:

In likening the devils in their conclave within Pandaemonium to bees, Milton was effortlessly evoking large features of Roman Catholicism, the papacy, top-down religious control of the intellect (science), and the concomitant absence (as he saw it) of individual liberties of thought and speech.