Was Dante inspired by message?

Pantaleone's mosaic in Otranto depicts East and West cultures as peaceful

From the grotto over the Adriatic where he survived on a diet of prayer and roots, a monk saw a ship on the horizon. Maybe this happened in Y1K, maybe earlier; it was a time when the Basilian monks had been scattered away by Catholic kingdoms and were in hiding.
For days on end the hermit had not been disturbed by any living being, and that ship astounded him; maybe he thought that was a sign that God had not forgotten him. Overjoyed, the monk searched his poor belongings for something sharp, and with that object he carved on the walls of tuff a drawing of the ship, its sails, its majestic hull.
That ship is still visible today. Reaching it is far from easy, beyond steep cliffs, sudden cracks in the rocks and narrow ledges, but those amazed lines are well worth the climb.
In much the same way, Pantaleone's mosaic is worth the pain of reaching Otranto, at the far end of Italy where Apulia stretches its hand to the Byzantine and Islamic East.
Otranto was far from Sicily where Frederic II, emperor of Germany, ruled as king: these shadowy alleys were only faintly aware of the divisions within the imperial centre of power. However, Otranto was next to King Frederic when he tried to overcome those divisions to open the dialogue among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and to keep it open.
Frederic was the only king of Christendom who refused to lead a Crusade. He paid for his refusal with an excommunication by Pope Gregory IX, but he was able to obtain the Holy Sepulchre and Jerusalem without bloodshed, by negotiating the return of those lands with Sultan Malik Al Kamil. He liked the weapons of diplomacy better than the campaigns of the armies. This strategy of dialogue was also the work of Niceta Nettarius, the seventh and most educated abbot of Casole.
When in 1163, Jonas, archbishop of Otranto, decided to enrich his cathedral with a large mosaic, he turned to Casole for its cultural patrimony. He assigned the task to Brother Pantaleone, Master of Painting Art in that great abbey-university. Nowadays he would probably be called "Dean of the Faculty of Architecture." Pantaleone completed the task in just 12 months. He both designed and directed the execution of the mosaic (almost 1,000 square metres), employing Norman and Tuscan workers and using rocks from the Salento area and the coloured pebbles washed ashore near Otranto by the Adriatic Sea.
In his "stone book," Pantaleone recounted the great events of universal culture, between chronicle and allegory. He put Adam and Eve cast off Eden, Cain and Abel, Deucalion and Pyrrha, Noah and Alexander the Great, King Arthur, Jonah the Prophet and the construction of the Tower of Babel, in a sort of "slideshow"; then he added Indian elements, Viking ships, Greek and Latin myths, Arabic sagas, the Zodiac, Hell and Heaven.
"In this great pictured encyclopaedia," says Monsignor Grazio Gianfreda, for many years the pastor of the cathedral of Otranto and the author of meticulous studies about the mosaic, "Pantaleone retraced the steps of humankind from Eden to the Judgement. He was talking about life, which is a universal value and therefore cannot have political or religious boundaries."
In order to prove that, Pantaleone, a Christian monk, used a non-Christian symbology the tale narrated by the "tree of life" must be read from the foliage to the roots, and not the other way around. This recalls the Islamic theology, according to which God descends to Man in order to redeem humankind. What's more, Pantaleone used Mohammed's Mirag (ascension) to depict the world beyond earthly life: Heaven's reward, Hell's punishment. He was 150 years ahead of Dante Alighieri. No documents show whether Dante saw the mosaic in Otranto, but too many similarities link the "stone book" with the "holy poem," Divina Commedia, for them to be merely the result of coincidence.
For instance, Pantaleone imagined the Minotaur, the monster killed by Theseus in Crete, as a bull with a man's head, and so did Dante, whereas mythology and ancient statues all agreed in depicting it as a man with a bull's head.
Also, allegorical figures have the same meaning in the mosaic and in Divina Commedia: the she-wolf symbolizing avarice, the lion standing for haughtiness, and a prancing bear for lust.
Precursor and maybe even source of inspiration for Dante, Pantaleone depicted the damned exactly like the poet would later do: stingy souls and prodigal souls pushing heavy weights with their shoulders; thieves with their hands bound with snakes behind their backs; both authors imagined Fraud to be a beast with a sharp-pointed tail. "All these figures," concludes Monsignor Gianfreda, "had been illustrated differently in previous times, but are extraordinarily similar in Pantaleone and Dante."
However, the geography of afterlife drawn by Pantaleone in 1163 and by Dante in 1302 is the same that can be found in Mohammed's Mirag, in the XVII sura of the Koran. One night, the Prophet was awakened by the Archangel Gabriel who urged him to mount al-Buraq, a mythical creature with a woman's head and peacock's wings, and brought him to Jerusalem. Once there, Mohammed ascended a bright stairway; still led by Gabriel, he passed through the Eight Heavens, reaching Paradise and contemplating the vision of God; then he passed the Seven Lands, descended to Hell and was horrified by the torments therein; finally, he returned to Earth and told his vision to his followers.
Dante knew the Koran, and quite evidently his concept of Divina Commedia was inspired also by Mohammed's Mirag. What about the mosaic? Ruling out a trip to Otranto by the poet (there's no evidence of that), it seems however likely that he must have known about it. This wasn't particularly difficult: the abbey of Casole, very well known in the Middle Ages, kept the original drawings for the mosaic, and after its completion had circulated some illustrations with commentaries.
Among the columns of this cathedral, a unifying logic shared by high spirits of the past can be understood: distressed by the divisions and barriers erected in defence of narrow-minded certainties and petty interests, they sent out a clear sign to all people regardless of their race and faith.
East and West revealed their universal character; they are not enemy civilizations because the peoples of the Mediterranean basin who generated them share origins, dreams, and visions of Heaven; divisions and wars, both "holy" and profane, are tragic follies; and killing in the name of God is a blasphemy without absolution.
The sunset out of the cathedral's shadows is bright. Over the large parvis, some tourists film the big tuff rosette with their digital cameras. Otranto's ancient silence fills the air in this anguished autumn.
War cries, yells, neighing and the clash of weapons echoed on this same parvis at dawn, on August 14, 1480, when the Turks came and found the cathedral's great doors barred. They tore the doors down and attacked everything and everyone: women, men, children who had sought refuge there, and sacred images, symbols of the hated religion of the "infidels." Yet they stopped in front of the mosaic. They looked at it, curious at first and then amazed, and they realized that it included too many elements of their culture and faith to be considered only a patrimony of the infidels. That realization saved the masterpiece.
The new Diasporas of this turn of the millennium has poured thousands of desperate people coming from the Near and Middle East upon these shores. They are changing the face of Italy, which is forced to cope with an emergency too long to be considered temporary. They are forcing Italians, who had become too self-assured about their degree of civilization, to understand and coexist with someone else's.
Italy has become a country of immigrants, like Canada. Both these countries, once again brought close by this reality, will only be able to accept the challenge of globalization if they will strengthen their tolerance. This is not simply something shared by people of good will, but first and foremost the cuiosity and interest towards a foreigner who appears "different." There's no difference under either this late summer sky of Otranto or the transparent but already cold sky of Toronto, which brings the red-and-yellow autumn on the trees.
The trip is over. If it will have proved that the September 11 infamy was brought forth by impious people with neither faith nor morals, it won't have been useless, nor tiresome.

Publication Date: 2001-10-21
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=530