Abstract
In this book, Matthew Collins has mustered a number of scholars and artists to explore “the merging of traditions of engagements with Dante's work, both dating back to the fourteenth century: the Lectura Dantis and visual responses to the text of the poem” (p. 6). With its rich visual apparatus of color images extending to 21st-century illustrations of the Divine Comedy, Reading Dante with Images represents an excellent asset for the art historian, the literary scholar, and the popular culture scholar alike. Its elegant but accessible prose makes it a suitable tool for teaching as well.
This volume is intended as the first of a series, possibly aiming to treat all 100 cantos of the Divine Comedy, and the second volume, edited by Matthew Collins and Luca Marcozzi, is already well underway.
Perhaps the only significant precedent for this volume's approach might be found in Peter Brieger, Millard Meiss, and Charles Singleton's Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy (1969), in the chapter titled “Pictorial Commentaries to the Commedia.” But Reading Dante with Images tackles the visual Lectura Dantis in a more organic and extensive manner, with each of the contributors examining a single canto and its artists across the centuries, thus expanding our understanding of the poem's cultural context in terms of medieval imagery, because “to read visually is also to read in the historical situatedness of the medieval text, in all of its material reality (p. 44)”
After Matthew Collins's introduction, KP Clarke—who for many years has maintained a wonderful blog (“Per correr miglior acque”) on the illustrations of Dante's Commedia—proposes a visual reading of early 14th-century manuscripts, arguing that, unlike Marisa Boschi Rotiroti's assessment of illustrations on manuscripts as mere decorations, the visual impact of such illustrations helps to influence our reading of the poem (p. 36). Clarke instead echoes Gianfranco Contini's vision of the Commedia as illustrabile. While Clarke prudently admits that, in the absence of an autograph, it is impossible to know whether Dante intended his Commedia to be illuminated, he invokes the paleographer Giancarlo Savino's suggestion that Dante might have voiced his desire to have his poem illustrated, possibly in a manner similar to Triv. 1080—one of the earliest witnesses, dating to 1337. Clarke then dwells on other early manuscripts illustrating the Commedia, Biblioteca Palatina Parmense 2385 and Musée Condé 597, the latter showing a high level of interaction between the illuminator and the commentator (Guido da Pisa).
Gianni Pittiglio focuses on Inferno 6 and particularly on the figure of Cerberus, analyzing a vast number of codices, both print and manuscript, from the 14th and 15th centuries, whose illuminations or drawings feature various versions of the monster from classical antiquity: he appears not only as the three-headed dog from Ovid or Virgil, but also with a single dog head and a humanoid body, or with bat wings like a devil, or other Lucifer-like traits.
Michael Papio takes on Inferno 10 with its demography of heretics, especially Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti and Farinata degli Uberti. Papio shows how some manuscripts do away with the flames in the tombs, which are a central part of Dante's punishment of the heretics, while others isolate Farinata from other sinners, including Cavalcante, demonstrating that even one of the most celebrated and critically discussed cantos can be read and visualized in a variety of manners. Papio's survey extends to pictorial representations outside of the book, such as Nardo Di Cione's 1354–1357 fresco in Santa Maria Novella's Cappella Strozzi, the 1911 film by Liguori, or comics (Seymour Chwast), cartoons (Hunt Emerson), and animation (Sean Meredith, 2007). The richness and depth of Papio's research are even more impressive when—besides such classic Dantean illustrators such as Botticelli, Federico Zuccari, Vellutello (attributed), John Flaxman, William Blake, Gustave Doré, Salvador Dalí, Robert Rauschenberg, and Sandow Birk— he treats artists lesser known in the world of Dante studies, such as Cristoforo Dall’Acqua, Tommaso Piroli, Gian Giacomo Macchiavelli, Francesco Scaramuzza, Vincenzo Gozzini, Attilio Razzolini, Amos Nattini, and Barry Moser, who also contributed to the volume.
Peter Hawkins's reading of Inferno 26 highlights how certain illustrations (for example those in Francesco Marcolini da Forlì's 1544 Venetian edition, possibly by Alessandro Vellutello) represent Dante and Virgil moving from one bolgia to another with a visual flow in which elements of Cantos 24–25 (the snakes attacking the thieves) and Canto 26 (the flames enclosing the fraudulent counselors) are present in a textual interconnectedness that links adjacent cantos. Hawkins also devotes a good amount of attention to German artist Monika Beisner and to Sandow Birk, a contemporary American artist who has successfully and significantly taken inspiration from Dante's Commedia (and also contributed a chapter to the volume).
Christian Y. Dupont surveys the historical evolutions in Dantean illustration with respect to the story of Count Ugolino (Inferno 33). Dupont begins with the manuscript Modena Ital 474, then moves through centuries of illustration history with Priamo della Quercia, John Richardson the Elder, Joshua Reynolds, Henry Füsely, John Flaxman, William Blake, Gustave Doré, Rico Lebrun, Leonard Baskin, Narry Moser, Salvadro Dalí, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Silvia Argurio comments on the illustrations of the scene of the newcomers to Purgatory (“Purgatorio 2: The Angel on the Water”), including a fruitful analysis of the works of architects and designers who exhibited on Dante in Caserta in 2005. Argurio's approach treats the artistic worth of the illustrations as a form of art, not merely as an appendage to the poem's text.
Dario Del Puppo, writing on Purgatorio 5, adds more artists such as Pio Fedi, Franz von Bayros, Eliseo Sala, Enrico Pollastrini, Eliseo Ussi, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Tommaso Piroli to the discussion of a canto whose protagonists are victims of murder. Focusing on Pia de’ Tolomei, Del Puppo reveals the inherently experimental nature of the act of comprehension through seeing: the subjectiveness and intimacy of such an act derives from our extension of the “boundaries of standard interpretation to include ideas, images, connections that previously were ignored or seemed irrelevant” (p. 230).
Arielle Saiber's “Paradiso 28: Entruthing the Image” focuses on Dante's vision of the Primum Mobile with its angelic hierarchies as interpreted by 17 artists, including Gian Giacomo Macchiavelli, Sofia Giacomelli, Ebba Holm, Mac Constantinescu, Amos Nattini, Gy Szabó Bela, Katerina Machytovaa, Moebius, and Gelrev Ongbico. Emphasizing the inherent difficulties of depicting angels and their hierarchies, Saiber groups the various representations of that fleeting and metaphysical subject matter according to perspective, color patterns, and the level of distinction between the angelic orders.
Sandow Birk, in “Accidental Dantista: Los Angeles is Not Hell, New York is Not Paradise,” inaugurates the volume's final section, with contributions by contemporary artists who have illustrated Dante's work. Birk makes very clear the meaning of his work and that of his colleagues: “we have done something new, using him, his poem, his vision as the foundation for our own work about our society” (p. 132).
Robert Brinkerhoff, academic and illustrator, combines in “Una selva oscura: Midlife and Metaphor” his experiences as a student, an artist, and instructor of a course on Illustrating Dante's Comedy, while Barry Moser's autobiographical account (“On Illustrating the Divine Comedy”) of how he came to illustrate Dante's Inferno for the 1980 translated edition by Allen Mandelbaum concludes the volume.
A general index to list all artists mentioned in the volume would have been a helpful tool in this rich publication. In our era dominated by the power of images, Reading Dante with Images continues and extends the ancient tradition of the Lectura Dantis, offering readers a chance to rediscover and critically frame the experience of reading Dante's poem through a visual apparatus that has accompanied the text since the early days of its circulation. The vivid color images in this volume make it a pleasure for the eye as well as the mind.
