Novello da Polenta, a nephew of Francesca da Rimini. At Ravenna the last
seat of Roman arts and letters, in a sepulchre attached to the convent
of the Franciscan monks, he was buried with the honors due to a saint
and a sage. The inscription on his epitaph said to have been composed by
him on his deathbed, is paraphrased by Lowell in the following words:

"The rights of Monarchy, the Heavens, the stream of Fire, the Pit
In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed fit.
But since my soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars,
And happier now, hath gone to seek its Maker with the stars,
Here am I, Dante, shut, exiled from the ancestral shore
Whom Florence, the fairest of all-least-loving mothers, bore."

Such is the brief outline of the outward life of him of whom
Michelangelo declared:

"Ne'er walked the earth a greater man than he."

It will help us to a better understanding of that man if his likeness is
impressed upon our memory. The portrait made by his friend Giotto, shows
him as a young man perhaps of twenty to twenty-five years, with a face
noble, beardless, strong, intelligent and pensive--a face which would
not lead one to suspect an appreciation of humor. Yet writers find two
distinct forms of that quality--a playfulness in his eclogues and a
grotesqueness in certain of his assignments to punishments in Hell.
Contrasting with this picture of his early life is the face of his death
mask and of the Naples bust, suggesting the lines

"How stern of lineament, how grim
The father was of Tuscan song."