As Dante's readers are aware, this verse is usually printed as "chinando la mano alla sua faccia," a reading that has been, as we shall see, intelligently questioned in the recent past, but which, restored to its suspect glory by Petrocchi (1966), has returned to nearly unanimous favor. The problem is, for once, a simple one and can be described as follows: Dante, looking down at the burned features of his "teacher," Brunetto Latini, either extends his hand toward that face or else lowers his own face in the direction of Brunetto's.

Every debate in the commentary tradition develops its own particular shape through time. This one has three main "moments." Commentators during the first five centuries were mainly of the opinion that the line should read "chinando la mano alla sua faccia," although there were some interpreters who dissented and preferred the reading here proposed: Francesco da Buti (1385), John of Serravalle (1416 [in a fairly rare, though tacit, disgreement with his teacher, Benvenuto da Imola]), and Guiniforto (1440). Most, however, were of the firm opinion that Dante did not attempt to reach the level of Brunetto's face with his face, but rather with his hand, since Brunetto could reach Dante's hem with his (vv. 23-24). In this negative argument we are faced, so to speak, with a case of unwarranted assumption, namely that Dante wanted to reach the level of Brunetto's face with his own; those who read the text as does this reader argue that Dante here leans forward, intent on paying closer attention, as he will again at Purgatorio XI.73 (a text that tells that he "ascoltando chinai in giù la faccia," as Mestica [1909] noted in his gloss to our verse). Francesco da Buti explains the reason for the protagonist's inclination simply and well: "per vederlo meglio," since Brunetto is not exactly physiognomically what he used to be, now that he is scorched by the flames of his sin.

The flowering of the "age of mia" began with Costa's gloss (about which there will be more, below) in 1819 and endured through that of Sapegno in the 1950's. In 1867 Gregorio di Siena, taking neither side, had produced a very helpful summary of the nineteenth-century debate (which was surprisingly widespread and intense, but is not frequently revisited today). It is fair to say that most commentators at this time and for one hundred years to come were strongly in favor of the reading "mia": Longfellow (1867), Poletto (1894), Tozer (1901), Carroll (1904), Mestica (1909), Casini/Barbi (1921), Steiner (1921), Momigliano (1946), Porena (1946), Sapegno (1955), while the opposition included Torraca (1905), Del Lungo (1926), Scartazzini/Vandelli (1929), Grabher (1934), Trucchi (1936), Pietrobono (1946)--not exactly a rout, but better than a tie, despite the urgent opposition of Scartazzini (1900), never renowned for his good manners, who savaged Luciano Scarabelli (in the first of the thirty-three personal assaults in his commentary upon this editor of Jacopo della Lana's glosses) for having dared to believe that the better reading was "la mia," referring to him as "questo ciarlatano fra i Dantisti," a ferocious judgment that assumed the risk of making its formulator eventually seem less capable than a charlatan--at least in this instance.

The third age arrived with Petrocchi's edition, in the wake of which every commentator represented in the Dartmouth Dante Project, as well as many another, returns to the first reading, mano, on Petrocchi's grounds that (1) mia is only found late in the fourteenth-century manuscript tradition (but even the revised version of the Landiano, in Piacenza, where mia is first found dates from 1350 ca.-see Petrocchi, Introduzione, p. 71-and two other late fourteenth-century codices also contain mia and not mano); (2) it is a lectio facilior. Petrocchi's reading is also found in the editions of Lanza (1996) and Sanguineti (2001). It sometimes falls out that good philology leads to bad criticism, as in this case would seem to be true. Berthier (1892) makes the simple point that, in Italian, one does not, with mano, use chinare but porgere (the Grande Dizionario bears this out, as there is no example of mano used with chinare in the entry for the latter). That is, such a phrase would not really be good Italian, and it is surely not Dantean. One may add that the verb chinare is used 27 times in the Commedia, all but five to indicate the lowering of one's head or upper body, either explicitly (combined with the words viso or testa or capo or fronte or ciglia or faccia or volto or occhi) or implicitly. The other five times it refers to flowers drooping (Inf. II.128), weapons being lowered (Inf. XXI.100), the Garisenda tower seeming to bend toward an observer when a cloud passes over it (Inf. XXXI.137), the wings of night bending down (Purg. IX.9), or the imagined shadow projected by the earth at sunrise (Par. XXX.3).

The argument, still advanced by some modern commentators, that for Dante to describe himself as leaning forward toward Brunetto would involve the poet in a useless repetition is dealt with as summarily as it should be by Berthier, whose sensible reading of this verse deserves at least some attention from those who perpetuate the same weak arguments he had dismantled: "Il Bennassuti dice: «La faccia Dante l'avea inchinata prima, quando disse: Ficcai gli occhi per lo cotto aspetto {v. 26}; il che far non potea senza chinar la faccia a Brunetto. Dante non dice mai due volte la stessa cosa.»" Berthier goes on to agree that Dante does not repeat himself-and had not here, since fixing one's eyes on someone is not necessarily the same act as bowing one's head toward that person, and, in any case, the two physical gestures are described separately and in sequence.

Dante's reference in this passage (vv. 49-53) to his own smarrimento at the outset (Inf. I.3, I.14) recalls, as a few commentators have sensed (e.g., Tommaseo [1837], Longfellow, and Pietrobono), a similar passage in Brunetto's Tesoretto, vv. 186-90 (italics added):

e io, in tal corrotto
pensando a capo chino,
perdei il gran cammino,
e tenni a la traversa
d'una selva diversa.

The phrase a capo chino will be used to describe Dante's reverence before Brunetto (v. 44), a fitting tribute, in the form of a citation (with Dante now playing the role of Brunetto), to the author of the poem that served as surely the most important vernacular precedent for Dante's own vernacular narrative poem and, perhaps, a reminder that Brunetto's 'lostness' would become permanent, while Dante's is only temporary. More to our purpose here, the phrase seems close to decisive in unriddling the problem created by the commentators, as Costa (1819) was clear in maintaining in his gloss: "e sporgendo la mia faccia verso quella di ser Brunetto, che era più basso dell'argine nel quale io stava. A conferma di questa spiegazione vedi i versi 44, 45 di questo canto." Costa's view has been shared by several: Longfellow (1867), Mestica (1909), Steiner (1921), Momigliano (1946), Hollander (PDP, 2000). Moore, in his edition of the poem (Cambridge, 1889), pp. 105-6, is strongly and effectively critical of the reading mano, giving several reasons for preferring mia. Even if he dutifully maintains the reading based on the majority of the manuscripts found at Oxford and Cambridge, there is little question in his mind but that mia was what Dante was most likely to have written. If attended to, this view helps to set straight a crux commentatorum that has managed to stay alive despite the authority of codices and commentators that seemed to resolve it. Dante lowered his head at verse 29 and is still in this posture as he walked along above Brunetto, as he is described as doing in verses 44-45. Francesco da Buti, Paolo Costa, Edward Moore, and Joachim Joseph Berthier display, in this particular, a determination to improve on an interpretation of the textual tradition that is based on imprecise observation and is lacking in common sense.