The metaphor used by Dante in Inf. 1.16-17 to describe the effect produced by the sun’s light striking the shoulders of the mountain that stands before the pilgrim, whose ascent will soon be blocked by three beasts, has generated only occasional interpretive disagreement among critics about its main source. The main differences have chiefly to do with how best to explicate the allegorical building blocks of the scene – le spalle, i raggi, il pianeta, il calle – in which the pilgrim turns his eyes, for the first time, upward:

guardai in alto e vidi le sue spalle
  vestite già de' raggi del pianeta
  che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle.

The first commentator to suggest a source for the image of the mountain’s shoulders clothed with light is Bernardino Daniello, who cites a passage from Vergil’s Georgics: “atque olea magnum vestire Taburnum,” “and to clothe Mount Taburnus in olives." [1]  Later, Tommaseo (1837) would be the first to refer to a more relevant passage in Vergil, the verses “Largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit / purpureo,”  “Here a more generous air clothes the fields with crimson light” (Aen. 6.640-641). Virtually every commentator since Tommaseo has included this reference in his gloss, although Francesco Mazzoni remarks that Dante’s image recalls as well the biblical analogue of the “woman clothed with the sun” (“mulier amicta sole”) in Revelation 12:1, an association that would seem to have only a fleeting correspondence with Dante’s image, since humans normally wear clothes, if not those of solar light.[2] For that matter, the oft-cited verses of Aen. 6, which narrate Aeneas’ sense of liberation as he moves into the Elysian Fields after having viewed the dark and dreary souls of Tartarus, barely provide a better connection. There is no mountain in Vergil’s image, and it is not the sun that streams light but, rather, the air or sky that suffuses the fields with a crimson radiance. And yet the Vergilian scene does underlie Dante’s in a way that has not been noticed before. Dante’s mountain shares with the Elysian Fields a similar positive valence. Both places represent a locus amoenus, an idealized location of human happiness distinct from a region of lesser value.

Devenere locos laetos et amoena virecta
Fortunatorum nemorum sedesque beatas (638-9).

                               

Vergil’s fields are a place of happiness reserved for those who were virtuous and heroic in life. It is here that Aeneas will meet his father Anchises. Dante converts Vergil’s horizontal plane into a vertical trajectory that leads ever higher by means of divine light. Presumably, had the pilgrim been able to reach the mountain’s summit, he would have found an earthly paradise of a kind, perhaps even the very same Eden he eventually comes to under the guidance of Virgil.

In my view, however, there is a more likely source for Dante’s use of the metaphor of dressing an inanimate object, or place, with non-fabric attire. An image of striking similarity appears at the very beginning of Augustine’s De beata vita, a work fairly well known to Dante scholars by virtue of the investigations of John Freccero and Anthony Cassell. Both critics explicitly connect Dante’s colle with the mountain in Augustine’s opening passage, arguing that for Dante the prospect of an ascent toward the light symbolizes the quest for knowledge, or the “pursuit of philosophy.” [3] In Cassell’s view, one that has, as he notes, a precursor in the neglected commentary of John Carroll (here to vv. 13-18), [4]such an ascent would be an act of pride and vainglory, much as Augustine’s image sets up an allegory depicting the attitude of vain superiority of those who have already made it to the top, and who presume to serve as beacons of wisdom to those who are sailing toward the shores below. The passage that concerns us is the following:

His autem omnibus, qui quocumque modo ad beatae vitae regionem feruntur, unus immanissimus mons ante ipsum portum constitutus, quo etiam magnas ingredientibus gignit angustias, vehementissime formidandus, cautissimeque vitandus est. Nam ita fulget, ita mentiente illa luce vestitur, ut non solum pervenientibus, nondumque ingressis incolendum se offerat, et eorum voluntati pro ipsa beata terra satisfacturum polliceatur… (1.3, my italics).

Now all of these men who come to the region of the happy life find a huge mountain set up before the port, where it poses a great danger to those entering it and so should be greatly feared and carefully avoided. For it shines so and is clothed with such a deceptive light that it seems to offer to those who enter a haven, promising to satisfy their longing for the land of happiness.

Augustine’s metaphor shares more points of correspondence with Dante’s verses than Vergil’s. In each a mountain is clothed with light, and in each the mountain symbolizes superior knowledge or learning, whether human or divine. Vergil’s lacks not only a mountain, but light descending from above, or light perceived as coming from on high. Vergil’s heroes dwell in an ambiance of muted splendor, while both Augustine’s and Dante’s paradigm portrays the idea of questing after a desired and higher form of existence, perceived as a state of ideal happiness. Moreover, both use the image to characterize such a venture as improper and flawed: in Dante’s case, because the pilgrim’s quest to reach the pinnacle of happiness lacks a proper guide (Christ), and in Augustine’s because the philosophers mistake pride in their renown for a good and hence a proper source of happiness. For Freccero the philosopher’s presumption gains a special and heightened significance in Ulysses’ recitation of his fatal voyage in pursuit of the forbidden, represented by a mountain he is not permitted to reach.[5] Curiously, neither he nor others specifically observe that Dante derives the image in question, as a verbal structure, from Augustine.[6] Why no one has made the connection before is somewhat surprising.  One can only speculate that Vergil has always been Dante’s preeminent source – the writer alone from whom he took “lo bello stilo” that brought him renown. Augustine could not claim such reverence as a moralist writing in the less exalted medium of prose exposition, but the allegorical trappings that bedeck the philosophic quest in the opening paragraphs of De beata vita reveal a clear correspondence with Dante’s own opening scene, a correspondence empowered by a shared use of metaphor.

[2] “La luce che, con bella ripresa d'immagine virgiliana e insieme biblica (cfr. Aen. VI 641-42: «Largior hic campos aether et lumine vestit Purpureo», ma anche ricorda la «mulier amicta sole» di Apoc. 12. 1), ne ammanta le spalle, è infatti lo stesso «divinum lumen, id est divina bonitas, sapientia et virtus» che penetra e risplende in tutto l'universo come «bonum diffusivum sui» . . . .” All citations of commentators are drawn from the DDP online.

[3]Freccero, “The Prologue Scene,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984), 1-28, esp. 21-3; Cassell, LDA Inferno I (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 22-5.

[4]Cassell, p. 144, n. 4.

[5] Augustine also uses the same metaphor in his commentary on Psalm 35 while elaborating on a connection to the opening verse of Ps. 120 (121), “canticum graduum levavi oculos meos in montes unde veniet auxilium meum”: “Et quomodo, quando oritur sol, prius luce montes vestit, et inde lux ad humillima terrarum descendit” (Enarrationes in Ps., 35.9). Cassell cites this passage in English, but doesn’t connect the phrase “luce montes vestit” to Dante’s text. The image is essentially the same in both texts, but Augustine’s first use of it occurs in De beata vita, which is the more important source of the two for the link to Dante’s verses. Only here does Augustine develop a coherent allegory based on the image of a single mountain standing before, and blocking the way into, a seaport.

[6] Like Cassell, Freccero focuses on the allegorical construct of the larger image of a mountain at the mouth of a port rather than on the more limited figure of speech used for describing the light clothing the mountain top.