But how cognizant were the actual Renaissance geniuses of their debt to Dante? Dan Brown helps answer that question in his Inferno by having the fictional Professor Robert Langdon call our attention to one of Michelangelo’s lesser known roles: In addition to his better known roles as a painter, sculptor, and architect, Michelangelo was also a poet.
Even though the poet Dante Alighieri lived and wrote at least a century before the time that most scholars would designate as the beginning of the Renaissance, it is easy today to look back at Dante’s Divine Comedy and see the origins of Renaissance thinking.
