Q 01/05

Which Rodin sculpture, first called 'The Poet', crowns a bronze doorway inspired by Dante's Inferno?

A) The Thinker

B) The Kiss

C) The Age of Bronze

D) The Walking Man

Answer · why

A) The Thinker

The Thinker. On The Gates of Hell the seated figure looks down on the damned, and the Rodin Museum describes him as Dante pondering his poem; shown al...

Q 02/05

Which of these medieval figures was still alive when Dante finished the Divine Comedy?

A) Thomas Aquinas

B) Marco Polo

C) Kublai Khan

D) Francis of Assisi

Answer · why

B) Marco Polo

Marco Polo. The Venetian outlived Dante by more than two years; his own book, dictated to a fellow prisoner in Genoa in the 1290s, was already circula...

Q 03/05

In which language, rather than Latin, did Dante write the Divine Comedy?

A) Venetian

B) Sicilian

C) Tuscan

D) Provençal

Answer · why

C) Tuscan

Tuscan. A serious poem was expected to be in Latin, and Dante's choice of the everyday speech of his own region did much to make it the basis of stand...

Q 04/05

Who first attached the adjective 'Divine' to Dante's Comedy, in a treatise written in the 1350s?

A) Giovanni Boccaccio

B) Coluccio Salutati

C) Francesco Petrarch

D) Lodovico Dolce

Answer · why

A) Giovanni Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio. Dante's own title was simply Comedìa; his admirer's adjective caught on, but it became a fixed part of the title only after it app...

Q 05/05

Why did Dante call a poem that opens in Hell a 'comedy'?

A) It mocks the popes

B) It was written for the stage

C) It began as a carnival song

D) It ends happily

Answer · why

D) It ends happily

It ends happily. In Dante's day a comedy was simply a story that starts in trouble and ends well, told in everyday language instead of tragedy's lofty...