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Ruskin first read Dante in 1845; he was convinced then that ‘the entire virtue and intellectual power of the older schools was consummated in Dante’ Works, 4.118 [n/a].
Ruskin (as well as Coleridge) approved of Cary’s translation of Dante. At Works, 10.307 Ruskin suggests that Cary’s Dante (Cary, H.F., The Vision of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise of Dante Alighieri) is to be preferred to Milton for those who cannot afford both. At Works, 26.224 [n/a] he says that Cary’s Dante is ‘always on the carriage seat or in my pocket’. That is much later but Ruskin refers there to his making notes in Cary’s translation when he was working on Modern Painters III. The suggestion therefore is that Ruskin had used this translation over a very long period.
Cary’s translation of Inferno together with the Italian text was published 1805. In 1814 there was a complete edition of Cary’s translation of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, this time published without the Italian text on the grounds, according to Cary’s introduction to that edition, that versions of the complete Italian text had been published ‘in this country’ in the intervening years. In 1844 Cary published a revised edition, again without the Italian text. It has not yet been possible to determine which edition Ruskin used.
The dates make it tempting to speculate that Ruskin’s introduction to Dante in 1845 was associated with the publication of Cary’s revised edition of 1844.
There are five references to Dante in M, at Notebook M p.5, Notebook M p.76, Notebook M p.173, Notebook M p.181, and Notebook M p.199. Four of them refer to a powerful visual image, either from Dante, or in one case seen as being typical of Dante’s style. One of them raises a problem about the extent to which wealth and political power are to be seen as a reward for just behaviour, an issue relevant to central themes in Stones of Venice. Four of them involve direct quotation and in each case the quotations are in Italian. In one case the inaccuracy of the quotation suggests that Ruskin was quoting from memory. Each of the references to Dante provided problems for the typist of the Ruskin Library Transcript T7A, and each of the passages therefore needs emendation to reflect the manuscript of M.
The text quoted in these notes, which varies slightly from that apparently used by Ruskin is that of Alberto Chiari and Giuseppina Robuschi, Bietti, Milano 1977.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]