Lumen dantis et lumen Margaretae: el imaginario compartido por Dante Alighieri y Marguerite dicta Porete (original) (raw)
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Eikón Imago ISSN 2254-8718, 2014
In this article we compare the language of light used by Dante Alighieri with the one used by his “heretical” contemporary Marguerite dicta Porete (†1310) to express the final contact-vision of God. We will analyze both authors’ use of the images of light, of the gradual ascent and of the knot, placing their books in the context of the theological doctrines concerning the visio Dei in the 14th century. This will allow us to posit the authors’ shared eschatological background based on the conception of God as a visible being who radiates his love and knowledge through the created universe. In conclusion, we will discuss the visual and narrative strategies these authors employed in order to express a relationship with the divine, focusing on the historical heterodox implications of the Commedia and the Mirouer. Resumen: En este artículo comparamos el lenguaje de la luz utlizado por Dante Alighieri con aquel de su contemporánea Marguerite dicta Porete (†1310) para expresar la visión final de Dios. Para ello, analizaremos el uso que ambos hacen del imaginario lumínico, del ascenso graduado y del nudo, poniendo sus obras en el contexto de las discusiones teológicas sobre la visio Dei en el siglo XIV. Esto nos permitiráreivindicar un transfondo escatológico compartido, basado en la percepción de Dios como ser visible cuyo amor-conocimiento se irradia por todo el universo. Como conclusión, reflexionaremos sobre las estrategias visuales y narrativas que ambos autores utilizan para abordar su visión directa de lo divino y discutiremos las implicaciones que las mismas representan en relación a la posible consideración de sus textos como heterodoxos.
M. Tavoni 2022. The Vision of God and Its Iconography (sample pages)
«The Vision of God (Paradiso XXXIII) and Its Iconography», in Interpretation and Visual Poetics in Medieval and Early Modern Texts. Essays in Honor of H. Wayne Storey, Edited by Beatrice Arduini, Isabella Magni, Jelena Todorović, Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2022, pp. 94-121., 2022
Abstract The first part of the essay studies the ways in which the vision of God in the last canto of Paradise is translated into images in the illustrated manuscripts of the poem, a translation that shows how Dante's imaginative power is hopelessly higher than the figurative capacity of his time painting. The second part of the essay asks whether Dante may have been inspired, for his vision of God, by some iconographic source in the figurative culture of his time. More precisely, given that the standard iconography for the representation of God in Romanesque and Gothic art is the Maiestas Domini or Christ in glory, and the vision of God expressed by Dante in the vv. 85-145 is preceded by two triplets of declared oneirism (vv. 58-63) and accompanied by other strong oneiric signals (passim), an analytical comparison is developed between the Maiestas Domini and Dante’s verbal images, arguing that these result from the dreamlike transformation of single iconographic details of the Maiestas Domini.
Heliotropia, 2023
The essay could be titled " how to deconstruct Boccaccio's Giotto". The paper explores the figure of Giotto in Dante’s Purgatorio 11.94–96 and Boccaccio’s Decameron 6.5, by studying both poets’ active involvement in the ongoing coeval debate on pingere and fingere, in which I believe that the painter of the Arena Chapel in Padua plays a functional role. Petrarch is also involved in the discussion, of course. But what has this debate on fingere and pingere to do with Giotto? Considering the metaliterary dimensions of both the Commedia and the Decameron as observations on varieties of artistic representation, we see that investigations into Giotto as a character in a prose text or in Dante’s verses would lead to differing results. His ability to paint figures that are true to life — as Boccaccio tells us in the story in which the master features as the protagonist (Dec. 6.5) — had already led Dante to distinguish between these very levels of truth achieved by the writer’s pen and the painter’s brush. Thus, the debate around poetry and painting ultimately involves art and nature, and in general the problem of creation. One of the goals of this study is to show that Boccaccio seems to praise Giotto in Decam. 6.5, but in fact, if the story is read within Day VI, in conjunction with the following novella 6.6 of God as an imperfect painter, in relation to the characters of Cesca and Cavalcanti, and above all, within the Decameron as a book , and taking into account the entire production of Boccaccio, in particular Amorosa Visione and the Genealogy of the pagan gods, one sees that Boccaccio totally deconstructs Giotto, to praise himself as a poet, and celebrate the truth of poetry over painting, as Dante and Petrarch did.
This article introduces source texts and images that support a new analysis of the iconography of the Theology (‘Disputa’) fresco, and the proposition that it was conceived as the visual and conceptual centerpiece of the Stanza della Segnatura (1508-11). Designed in particular dialogue with the Philosophy (‘School of Athens’) fresco on the Stanza’s opposite wall, Theology embodies the philosophical concord between Plato and Aristotle. Not structured as an unalloyed Platonic hierarchy, Theology presents Christ’s material body as simultaneously present in heaven and on earth, and structures a corresponding interpenetration of the terrestrial and celestial realms. It also uniquely combines all four branches of knowledge—philosophy, theology, poetry, and jurisprudence—depicted in the room. Understood in this way, the private library may be viewed as a fluid discursive space created for a discerning pontiff and suited to its contemplative function. This also permits a clarification of the contributions of the patron (Julius II), intellectual advisor (Giles of Viterbo), and artist (Raphael). Moreover, it reveals Raphael's intellectual grasp of difficult religious and philosophical ideas, as expressed in his ingenious conjoining of medieval and classical Roman forms, ideas of materiality and immateriality, and body and soul. Such conclusions recast modern understanding of this important monument of the Italian Renaissance as resulting from a collaborative approach to iconographical invention that challenges prior notions of artists working in humanist contexts in the period as ‘passive’ recipients of ‘active’ textual programs.
'Occhi Fissi': Fixing the Gaze in Dante's Commedia, 'Italian Studies', 78.1 (2023): 1-18
Italian Studies, 78:1, 1-18, 2023
Moments of visual fixation appear throughout the Commedia. Reconstructing their connotations in relation to contemporary discourses on sight, this article argues that, as well as a literary trope, Dante's depictions of fixing the gaze function as a metaliterary device, an invitation to the reader's critical eye that, when interrupted, draws attention to the multiple cultures of gazing circulating at the timefrom erotic obsession to contemplative ecstasy via visionary philosophical and theological inquiry. The roots of the trope are traced in Dante's rime and analysed in key episodes of the Commedia, including the dream of the Siren (Purgatorio XIX), Dante's 'too fixed' gaze (Purgatorio XXIII), and the climatic gazes pilgrim and guide turn to God in Paradiso. By encouraging the reader to fulfil the poet's vision in her imagination, the fixed gaze, and its frequent interruption, emerges as a uniquely suitable trope for negotiating the representational challenges of transcendental topics.
The Order of All Things: Mimetic Craft in Dante's Commedia (TOC | Bibliography)
The Order of All Things: Mimetic Craft in Dante's Commedia (Dissertation), 2011
Although scholars have long speculated about the structural details of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia, none have articulated an empirically founded model of the poem’s comprehensive architecture, leaving open the debate about the details of Dante’s design of the poem. While some have adopted widely conjectural numerological methods, others have developed more sustainable mathematical analyses of the poem’s textual dispositio. This study maintains a strictly empirical approach in examining the homology of form and signification in Dante’s Commedia, revealing a close correspondence between the poem’s textual architecture and both physical and metaphysical concepts in Ptolemaic cosmology. Analyzing the Commedia’s program of composition, I first examine the hermeneutic correlation between the multiple Dante subjects and the poem’s stratified diegesis. I then uncover programmatic indices of the poem’s genesis and development in the polysemy of selva, stilo and iri. A close reading of the pilgrim’s final vision reveals the explicitly Trinitary ontology of the terza rima whose ordering function and ubiquity in the text offer a structural mimesis of Divine omnipresence. Following a survey of Dante’s innovative use of Vergilian aesthetics, I demonstrate how Classical nautical metaphors for poetic composition underpin Beatrice’s authority as ammiraglio in the Commedia’s poetic enterprise. Finally, I empirically show that Beatrice’s mathematical identity as the square of the Trinity together with the terza rima are the key to understanding how the Commedia’s quantitative properties — namely the poem’s inventory of distinct rhymes, its canto lengths, their frequencies of occurrence and their distribution across the text — all strictly conform to Pythagorean principles of harmony and proportion. The results of this analysis show how Dante based the comprehensive architecture of the Commedia on the mathematical musica universalis intrinsic to Ptolemaic cosmology. With thirteen notes from the hexachorda dura arranged according to the fundamental Pythagorean musical intervals (octave, 2nd, 4th and 5th), Dante composed the blueprint for crafting a poetically mimetic sign for the cosmos, thus imitating his Maker’s universe in constructing the Commedia as a synthesis of his intellectual patrimony and a signifier for God’s Creation. The study therefore provides the empirical grounds for developing and sustaining scholarship concerning the poem’s textual architecture. Moreover, the study’s enumeration of the poet’s exacting methods for creating meaning contributes to ongoing rational examinations of Medieval aesthetics and Dante’s own mimetic craft as poet.