Dante, Artist of Gesture

Abstract

Dante, Artist of Gesture proposes a visual technique for reading Dante’s Commedia, as if the striking gestural images that it imprints on the reader’s mind were arranged in an architectural space. Art historians have shown how series of discrete images or scenes in medieval places of worship, such as the programme of mosaics in the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence or the programme of frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, establish not only narrative sequences but also typological parallelisms between registers, forging links between those registers by the use of colour and gestural forms. This book takes up those techniques to show that the Commedia likewise invites the reader to make visual links between disparate, non-sequential moments in the text. In other words, Dante’s poem asks readers to view its verbally articulated sequences of images with a set of observational tools that could be acquired from the practice of engaging with and meditating on the bodily depictions of vice and virtue in fresco cycles or programmes of mosaics in places of worship. One of the most inherently visible aspects of the Commedia is the representation of signature gestures of the characters described in each of the realms. The tracing of described gestures and bodily signs across the canticles of the poem provides a key for identifying affective and devotional itineraries within the text.