“Smiling Pages: Visualizing
Dante’s Divine Comedy” presented by Prof. Giuseppe Faustini
Dante Alighieri’s Divine
Comedy has been compared to a Gothic cathedral with its spectacular
architectural design and graceful symmetries. The objective for this Moseley
Lecture is to illustrate Dante’s pictorial creativity that has had a
significant impact on the visual and preforming arts. Dante’s Comedy has truly
become the privileged subject, a fountain of creativity, that has inspired
innumerable artists with very distinctive artistic, socio-political and
cultural notions and perspectives.
Dante’s epic has been a
demonstrable source for renowned artists such as Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael.
Signorelli, Zuccari, Koch, Flaxman, Blake, Ingres, Giacomelli, Sheffer,
Rossetti, Delacroix, Rodin, Doré, Nattini, Scaramuzza, Martini, Dyce, Dalí,
Moser, Rauschenberg, de Chirico, Baskin,
Moser, Mazur, Owen, Birk, Frigo, Schmalz, and literally a thousand more. Their
artistic works are much more than visual
decorations of the poet’s words, they are visual translations, pictorial commentaries, glosses
that illuminate Dante’s epic. The goal of this research in fieri is to
offer a heightened understanding of
Dante’s polysemous poem by combining textual analysis with visual imagery.