“Allegory of the theologians” or “allegory of the poets”: Allegory in Dante's Commedia

To define the nature of the allegory in Dante's Commedia has always been one of the main objectives of Dante research. What is the immediately detectable difference between the allegory in the Commedia and that of the traditional allegorical‐didactic poems? What kind of allegory did Dante have in mind when writing the Commedia ? This article is my contribution to a possible solution of this problem. My assumption is that Dante wanted to give the Commedia a complex polysemous structure: a structure that, in a new and original way, unites the two traditional medieval forms of allegory, the poetical and the theological (according to Dante's own terminology in Convivio “allegory of the theologians” and “allegory of the poets”). The article is divided into four parts: first a synthetic presentation of the concept of allegory; an analysis of the most important passages where Dante treats the problem theoretically (this includes especially some passages from Convivio , and the much discussed Epistle XIII ); a discussion of some of the most important positions within the Dante research; and finally a possible solution to the problem.