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overthinking entertainment	

Book: Inferno: Canto 33

La bocca sollevò dal fiero pasto
quel peccator, forbendola a' capelli
del capo ch'elli avea di retro guasto.

He lifted his mouth from that cruel meal,
that sinner, wiping it on the hair
of the head which he had ravaged at the back.

His children ween'd that it for hunger was
That he his armes gnaw'd, and not for woe,
And saide, "Father, do not so, alas!
But rather eat the flesh upon us two.
Our flesh thou gave us, our flesh take us fro',
And eat enough;" right thus they to him said.
And after that, within a day or two,
They laid them in his lap adown, and died.

And if Pedrillo's fate should shocking be,
    Remember Ugolino condescends
To eat the head of his arch-enemy
    The moment after he politely ends
His tale: if foes be food in hell, at sea
    'Tis surely fair to dine upon our friends,
When shipwreck's short allowance grows too scanty,
Without being much more horrible than Dante.

Dante once prepared to paint an angel:
Whom to please? You whisper "Beatrice."
While he mused and traced it and retraced it,
(Peradventure with a pen corroded
Still by drops of that hot ink he dipped for,
When, his left-hand i' the hair o' the wicked,
Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma,
Bit into the live man's flesh for parchment,
Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle,
Let the wretch go festering through Florence)—
Dante, who loved well because he hated,
Hated wickedness that hinders loving,
Dante standing, studying his angel,—
In there broke the folk of his Inferno.
Says he—"Certain people of importance"
(Such he gave his daily dreadful line to)
"Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet."
Says the poet—"Then I stopped my painting."
[Robert Browning (1855), "One Word More", in Men and Women, volume 2, page 231]

On that day, which marked a year since this lady [Beatrice] had become a citizen of the eternal life, I sat apart, in some remembrances of her, drawing an angel upon some tablets: and while I was drawing, I turned my eyes and saw standing by me some men, who were worthy of honour. And they were looking at what I was doing, and I discovered later that they had been standing there for some time before I noticed them. When I saw them, I got up and greeted them, and said, "Someone else was with me, and so I was thinking." [Dante, Vita Nuova, translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1899), page 135.]

I think if Mr. Norgate will read the lines from One Word More (to which I referred in my query), he will see that the passage he quotes from the Vita Nuova does not explain them. Those of whom Dante speaks in the Vita Nuova as interrupting him were evidently friends, and, as Beatrice had been dead a year, the painting could not have been undertaken to please her. [10 February 1877, pages 115–116.]

In the year of Christ 1247, in the month of July, a great division was created over the government of Pisa; for one party was the judge Nino di Gallura de' Visconti with certain Guelfs; and the second was the count Ugolino della Gherardesca with another part of the Guelfs; and the third was the archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini with the Lanfranchi, Gualandi, Sismondi and other Ghibelline houses. Count Ugolino, because he was lord, approached the archbishop and his party, and betrayed judge Nino, ignoring the fact that he was the son of his daughter, and ordered him and his followers to be expelled from Pisa or imprisoned. [Note on Inferno 33.4–6.]