According to cachedhealth.com, the position taken by the Spanish Inquisition was limited to the following points: in the Index of 1583 the Monarchy appears prohibited, as already in the Portuguese Index of 1581. Again in 1583, the generic condemnations of Landino’s commentary began. Only in the seventeenth century, and precisely in the Index of 1612, did not only appear prohibited the “Dantis Monarchia” and the comments by Landino and Vellutello, but the same Comedy “no corrigiendo”. The verses to be expurgated are exactly If XI 8-9, XIX 106-117, Pd IX 136-142. A total therefore of 21 lines, whose prohibition was maintained until the last Index of 1790. Therefore, no condemnation of the global text of the poem, so that anyone who would like to allege it as the cause of the loss of literary prestige of the Comedy in the century is mistaken. XVII. Moreover, the mentions and citations of D. in the seventeenth century are, at the present state of research, much more frequent than in the previous century, when the reaction of Petrarchian taste was more lively. Only in a novelist and essayist like C. Suárez de Figueroa, D., “varón doctísimo”, is he named and quoted directly in at least three of his works, composed between 1609 and 1617. Other references to D. in seventeenth-century literature – almost always cited as an undisputed cultural value – they are found both in the mythologist Baltasar de Vitoria (1620), and in popular and cultured theater, in fiction, in history and above all in some epic poets, such as N. Bravo (1604), C. de Mesa (1611), D. de Hojeda (1611) – whose demonology and certain formal characteristics demonstrate a more intimate connection.
It would be right to ask at this point what was the attitude towards D. of some of the great Spanish authors of the Golden Age. Referring to the individual entries dedicated to them in this Encyclopedia (see especially Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de; Quevedo y Villegas, Francisco Gómez de; Vega, Lope de); Diego de Saavedra Fajardo and Baltasar Gracián will remember here. The first, in the República literaria (of 1612, but published posthumously in 1655) clearly demonstrates, in a hasty judgment, that D. is at the top of a ridge that leaves them perplexed: “El Dante, queriendo showarse poeta, no fue científico, y queriendo showing científico, no fue poeta “. Gracián, in his greatest work El Criticón (1651-1657), twice calls D., as Lope de Vega had already done, “Alígero”, playing with the surname of the Italian poet (“al fin Alígero per su alado ingenio”) and relates an anecdote – which he had already mentioned in Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1648) – about the poet’s quick and witty answers. This anecdotal aspect therefore also has a reflection in Spanish literature, because the same story had already been told by Luis Milàn in El Cortesano (1561), a book in which the other well-known anecdote of D.’s ingenious response to the buffoon is reproduced. . Still Lucas Gracián Dantisco in the Galateo español (1593) narrates a third one, which demonstrates that not even this pseudo-biographical and mythical projection of the man D. was absent in the Golden Age.
In the eighteenth century there was a greater and more effective separation of culture from Dante’s work. The most lively models among the Italian classics, in Spain at the time, were undoubtedly Petrarch and Tasso. D. in practice disappears not only as a leaven of inspiration but also as an erudite quotation. The most symptomatic data is provided by the most characteristic writer of the Spanish Enlightenment, GM de Jovellanos (1744-1811) of whom we know the vast readings of both national and foreign authors: but the name of D. will be searched in vain., quoted in passing alongside Petrarch, Tasso and Maffei, in Los eruditos a la violeta (1772) by José Cadalso. Again, in the second edition of Luzán’s Poética (1789) D. is considered among “los restauradores de la buena poesía”: which is to say that only after 1770 the memory of the Italian poet begins to emerge again timidly. Of particular importance are the Jesuits ousted from the Spain in 1767, many of whom passed to Italy: among them Javier Lampillas (1731-1810), who repeats the eulogy that Bettinelli makes of D.; Esteban Arteaga (1747-1798), who considers D. a genius but crude; Juan Andrés (1740-1817), who, although he recognizes the part represented by D. in the history of Western culture, does not understand its “extravagances” and that mixing of such different elements in the poem.
From the first decades of the nineteenth century we also lack evidence of sympathy or knowledge of Dante’s work. Only after the first important review of the beginnings of Spanish romanticism, “El Europeo” (1823), did the name of D. become more and more frequent, until the appearance of a judgment on the Commedia, due to LA del Cueto, on ” El Laberinto “(1843) and another article of specific Dante criticism in” El Fénix “of Valenza (1849). But the Italian poet was already considered, before 1840, as one of the masters of the new sensibility alongside Shakespeare and Calderón.