“More than a Mere Semblance”

An unusual portrait of Dante: not the grim-faced exile with the fierce gaze of traditional iconography, but instead a young, finicky, Florentine man, given to disgust, snobbish, who, as his friend Guido Cavalcanti once wrote, looked down on many if not most and fled the “blind and madding men.” The restorer, who had been entrusted with the small painting, discovered behind the frame a mysterious scrap of paper on which appears the name Degas; a minor mystery that prompted in its owner, the art historian Bruno Zanardi, one of those endless conjectural drifts that you inwardly know will never arrive at any sense of certainty.