Depicting Dante in Anglo-Italian Literary and Visual Arts : Allegory, Authority and Authenticity [1 ed.] 9781443891813, 9781443899352

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Depicting Dante in Anglo-Italian Literary and Visual Arts

Depicting Dante in Anglo-Italian Literary and Visual Arts: Allegory, Authority and Authenticity By

Christoph Lehner

Depicting Dante in Anglo-Italian Literary and Visual Arts: Allegory, Authority and Authenticity By Christoph Lehner This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Christoph Lehner All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9935-6 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9935-2

Dedicated to my family for their everlasting love and support, and to the memory of my beloved grandfather, Josef Anton Pytlik (1921-1997).

Life has bestowed opportunities on me, which you had been denied.

Conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma. —Dante Alighieri, Purg. XXX, 48.

For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice. —T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS .............................................................................. xi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................. xiii PREFACE ................................................................................................... xiv INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 1 DANTE ALIGHIERI: A LITERARY AUTHORITY AND HIS CULTURAL CAPITAL CHAPTER I .................................................................................................. 10 ANALYSING DANTE I.1 A SHORT HISTORY OF DANTE STUDIES I.1.1 GENERAL STRANDS OF DANTE CRITICISM IN ITALY I.1.2 “DANTE IS HARD, AND FEW CAN UNDERSTAND HIM”: DANTE’S RECEPTION IN BRITAIN FROM ROMANTICISM TO MODERNISM (1785 – 1929) I.2 CURRENT STATE OF RESEARCH: HISTORICAL-AUTHORITATIVE, IDEOLOGICAL-POLITICAL AND VISUAL-INTERMEDIAL DANTE SCHOLARSHIP I.3 COMING TO TERMS WITH DANTE: THE QUEST FOR NEW METHODOLOGIES CHAPTER II ................................................................................................ 28 AESTHETICISING DANTE: THEORETICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODOLOGY II.1 VISUAL RHETORIC AND CULTURAL ICONOGRAPHY II.1.1 ROAMING THE STREETS OF CULTURE: ABY WARBURG’S PATHOS FORMULAE AND THE CONCEPT OF HISTORIOGRAMS II.1.2 ICONOLOGY, STRUCTURALISM AND THE VISUAL TURN II.2 CONNECTING THE VISIBLE WITH THE LEGIBLE II.2.1 IMAGES, ICONS, ICONOTEXTS II.2.2 HISTORICAL INTERTEXTS AND THE ORIGINS OF INTERMEDIALITY II.2.3 PRIMACY OF POETRY: THE LAOCOON DEBATE TH TH IN THE 18 /19 CENTURY II.2.4 STRUCTURAL INTERTEXTS AND THE LIMITS OF INTERMEDIALITY II.2.5 ASSESSING INTERMEDIALITY

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CHAPTER III ............................................................................................... 57 DANTE’S MENTAL AND VISUAL IMAGES IN THE MANUSCRIPT TRADITION AND BEYOND (1321-1517) III.1 IN SEARCH OF DANTE III.1.1 LIFE AND WORK – BETWEEN AUTHENTIC AUTOREFERENTIALITY AND NARRATIVE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS III.1.2 TIRADES AND TREATISES: DANTE’S POLITICAL THOUGHT EXPRESSED IN DE MONARCHIA, IL CONVIVIO AND PURGATORIO VI III.1.3 THE MYSTIFICATION OF A MYTH: EARLY BIOGRAPHIES TH TH AND DANTE’S HISTORIOGRAMS IN THE 14 AND IN THE 15 CENTURIES III.1.4 BETWEEN AUTHORITY AND HAGIOGRAPHY: THE HISTORIOGRAMS OF DANTE IN THE EARLY 15TH CENTURY III.2 EARLY VISUAL IMAGES: FROM PILGRIM TO POET TO PROPHET III.2.1 DANTE’S VISUAL IMAGE IN BOCCACCIO’S TRATTATELLO IN LAUDE DI DANTE III.2.2 AN ALLEGORICAL EVERYMAN: DANTE PERSONAGGIO ON HIS PILGRIMAGE III.2.3 “AND THEN I FELL AS A DEAD BODY FALLS”: MARVELLING, SLEEPING AND FAINTING AS SUPERLATIVES OF HUMAN EXPRESSION IN THE EARLY MANUSCRIPT TRADITION III.2.4 FRAMING THE FLORENTINE: DANTE POETA AND THE ALLEGORY OF TRUTH, WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE III.2.5 PLAUDITS FOR THE POET: SANDRO BOTTICELLI’S SEMINAL VERSIONS OF DANTE III.2.6 SATIRISING THE INTELLECTUAL ICON: LEONARDO DA VINCI’S HEAD OF DANTE CHAPTER IV ............................................................................................. 114 REDISCOVERING DANTE IN BRITAIN IV.1 “TOUCHING THE STONE OF DANTE” – TASTE, TRAVEL AND TRADITION (1719-1850) IV.1.1 THE DANTEAN DISCOURSE IN THE 18TH CENTURY: FRENCH EMPIRICISM, GERMAN AESTHETICISM, AND BRITISH PRAGMATISM IV.1.2 TASTE AND AESTHETCS AS SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL DRIVING FORCES IN BRITAIN: THE COURTIER AND THE GRAND TOUR

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IV.2 “THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ADHESION”: VISUALISATIONS OF DANTE, UGOLINO, AND PAOLO AND FRANCESCA IN 18TH- AND 19THCENTURY BRITAIN IV.2.1 SIR JONATHAN RICHARDSON’S TWO DISCOURSES AND THE “COMMUNICATION OF IDEAS”: THE STORY OF COUNT UGOLINO AS HISTORICAL INTERTEXT AND CONTEMPORARY ICONOTEXT IV.2.2 THE INTERMEDIAL PROCESS OF EXTERNALISING TRANSGRESSION: JOSHUA REYNOLD’S UGOLINO AND JOHN FLAXMAN’S PAOLO AND FRANCESCA IV.3 REJUVENATING DANTE: THE HISTORIOGRAM OF THE YOUNG AND PASSIONATE FLORENTINE IV.3.1 “YOUTHFUL MANNERS AND SENTIMENT”: SCHLEGEL, DE STAEL, HAZLITT AND DANTE’S VITA NUOVA IV.3.2 “A HANDSOME YOUNG APOLLO”: THE DISCOVERY OF THE BARGELLO PORTRAIT IV.3.3 THE ALLEGORY OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP: ROSSETTI’S DANTEAN SELF-FASHIONING AND TRANSMEDIAL INTERMEDIALITY CHAPTER V .............................................................................................. 150 AUDIRE VOCEM AUCTORITATIS DANTIS V.1 DANTE AS THE VOICE OF AUTHORITY IN MODERNIST POETRY V.1.1 “ALL AGES ARE CONTEMPORANEOUS”: MODERNIST ARTISTIC CREATION AND THE LITERARY PAST V.1.2 “THE COMFORT AND THE AMAZEMENT OF MY AGE”: T.S. ELIOT’S THREE DANTEAN LESSONS V.1.3 “HIS WAS THE TRUE DANTESQUE VOICE”: THE ALLEGORY OF ETERNAL TRUTH AND POETIC VIGOUR IN T.S. ELIOT’S LITTLE GIDDING CHAPTER VI ............................................................................................. 168 POSTMODERNISING DANTE VI.1 TOM PHILLIPS’ DANTE’S INFERNO VI.1.1 “A POSTMODERN ART OLYMPICS”: DIALOGICITY, TRANSFORMATIONAL INTERMEDIALITY AND TRANSTEXTUAL MOTIVATION IN PHILLIPS’ DANTE’S INFERNO VI.1.2 “OUR SHADE TAKES FORM”: PHILLIPS’ TALKING FOOTNOTES AS INNOVATIVE ICONOTEXTS IN THE UGOLINO CANTO VI.1.3 “OH EZRA, REMEMBER”: SELECTIVITY, STRUCTURALITY AND STYLISTIC SELF-REFERENCE VI.1.4 “A BRIDGE IN TIME AND REFERENCE”: PHILLIPS’ RICH TAPESTRY OF WESTERN ART, THOUGHT AND IDEAS

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CONCLUSION ............................................................................................ 189 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................... 193 INDEX ....................................................................................................... 214

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Dante caught by ‘myth’. [graph] Figure 2: A comparison of Giovanni Boccaccio‘s and Leonardo Bruni’s mental images of Dante. [graph] Figure 3: Detail of a miniature of Dante’s dream and his soul leaving his body. (MS Egerton 943, 14th century, Northern Italy, Padua or Emilia). Reproduced courtesy of British Library. Figure 4: Priamo della Quercia, Dante e Virgilio. (MS Yates Thompson 36, 15th century, Northern Italy). Reproduced courtesy of British Library. Figure 5: Illustration of Purgatory I with a historiated initial ‘P’ of Dante and Vergil. (MS Laurenziano-Tempiano 1, 14th century, Florence). Reproduced courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz. . Figure 6: Priamo della Quercia, Le tre fiere. (MS Yates Thompson 36, 15th century, Northern Italy). Reproduced courtesy of British Library. Figure 7: Dante and Virgil and Paolo and Francesca. (MS Holkham misc. 48, 14th century, Northern Italy). Reproduced courtesy of Bodleian Library. Figure 8: Giotto di Bondone, Sogno di Gioacchino (Detail). (1304-1306, Cappella degli Scrovegni, Padova). Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giotto_di_Bondone__Joachims_Dream_-_Capella_degli_Scrovegni.jpg Figure 9: Portrait of Dante. (MS Holkham misc. 48, 14th century, Northern Italy). Reproduced courtesy of Bodleian Library. Figure 10: Illustration of the Rossano Gospels: St. Mark (Purpureus Rossanensis). (6th century AD, Archepiscopal Library, Rossano, Calabria /Italy). Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rossano_Gospels. Figure 11: Illustration of Inferno I with a historiated initial ‘N’ of Dante. (MS Laurenziano-Tempiano 1, 14th century, Florence). Reproduced courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz. Figure 12: Andrea di Bonaiuto, Allegory of the Church Militant and Triumphant (Detail). (1363-1365, Cappellone degli Spagnoli, Santa Maria Novella, Firenze). Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Way-of-salvation-churchmilitant-triumphant-andrea-di-bonaiuto-1365.

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List of Illustrations

Figure 13: Domenico di Michelino, Dante e il suo poema (Detail). (1465, Santa Maria del Fiore, Firenze). Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri#/media/File: Dante_Domenico_di_Michelino_Duomo_Florence.jpg Figure 14: Nardo di Cione, Volto di Dante (Detail). (1354-1357, Cappella Strozzi, Santa Maria Novella, Firenze). Retrieved from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Capella_Strozzi 4.jpg Figure 15: Giuliano da Maiano and Francione, Dante in the intarsia doors of the Sala de’Gigli. (1478-1480, Palazzo Vecchio, Firenze). Reproduced courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz. Figure 16: Portrait of Dante (printed after the Bargello portrait of Dante) (1900). Reproduced courtesy of Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz. Figure 17: Il vero volto di Dante. (1340, Palazzo dell’Arte de’ giudici e notai, Firenze). Figure 18: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice. (1853, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). Retrieved from: http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/dante-gabriel-rossetti/the-firstanniversary-of-the-death-of-beatrice-1853.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been written without the help, guidance and support of many people. In the first place, I would like to thank my PhD supervisor, Prof Dr Rainer Emig, who followed my thesis from the very beginning and provided me with insight, suggestions and crucial support. Likewise, I would like to thank my PhD co-supervisor, Prof Dr Isabella von Treskow, who encouraged me to lecture on Dante at Regensburg University. The staff of the following institutes, libraries and archives where I conducted my research were of indispensable help: the Bodleian Library in Oxford, especially Mr Colin Harris for his help at the Tom Phillips Archive, the Kunsthistorische Institut and the Biblioteca Dantesca in Florence, Munich State Library, Rylands Library in Manchester, the European University Institute in San Domenico/Fiesole, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, the University Library of Regensburg and the Hofbibliothek Thurn und Taxis in Regensburg. In particular, I wish to thank Dr Fil Nereo at Manchester University and Dr Christoph Singer at Paderborn University for their indefatigable help. Thanks are also owed to Prof Stephen Prickett, who invited me to speak at the Dante in the 19th century conference in London in 2012 as well as to Prof Mihaela Irimia, the Director of the British Cultural Studies Centre in Bucharest, who invited me to speak at the Culture and Memory conference in Romania in the same year. On that occasion, she introduced me to Prof Peter Burke, Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at Cambridge University, who made seminal suggestions for this dissertation. I would also like to particularly thank Prof Nicholas Havely (University of York) and Prof Mahnaz Yousefzadeh (New York University), who agreed to participate in the conference on Dante and Milton - National visionaries and visionary nationalists as keynote speakers, which I had the honour of organising in collaboration with Dr Christoph Singer at the University of London in 2013. Both lecturers provided me with insight and invaluable suggestions for this dissertation. During my studies in Italy and my work on this PhD project, I received financial support from the Italian Foreign Ministry and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which graciously granted me several research stays in Florence.

PREFACE

The initial inspiration for this book was born in Italy in 2003. At that time, I was studying in Pisa and Florence and I visited the Fratelli Alinari exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the competition for a new illustrated edition of Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia. The renowned Florentine photographic studio Alinari, which at the time specialised in reproducing masterpieces, had launched a contest in May 1900 in order to celebrate Dante’s imaginative poem and to stimulate contemporary artists to find inspiration in Italy’s monolithic work of literary art. Even though the quality of the entries for the competition had fallen short of the jury’s expectations and had not lived up to the Fratelli Alinari’s desire to inspire future elaboration on Dantean themes, the brothers published the new edition between 1902 and 1903 anyway. Around this time, Florence was a hotbed of Futurism and served as a place of creative confluence for many artists, philosophers and thinkers. F. T. Marinetti published his manifesto La ‘Divina Commedia’ è un verminaio di glossatori in 1909 and, like him, many intellectuals frowned upon the political appropriation of Dante as an ideological forefather of Italian unification. In their opinion, a cult of Dante, the so-called Dantismo, would prevent the next generation of literary talents from blossoming in the newly-formed Italian nation and nip their own creative endeavours in the bud. The seminal Alinari exhibition followed in the wake of a resurged interest in Dante, which had begun after unification, and was commemorated in 2002/2003 with all of the 31 original paintings from the competition on display in Florence. Since I had thus far dedicated my art history studies in Florence to traditional Renaissance art, I was completely overwhelmed when I stepped into the Marino Marini museum, which hosted the exhibition. Inaugurated in 1988, the Marini museum was the first Florentine museum of modern art and it occupies the former church San Pancrazio, whose origins date back to early Christianity. Upon entering, I was totally in awe. The juxtaposition of profane modern art and the building’s symbolic Christian architecture, with its slender columns, high-domed ceiling and light-filled galleries, constantly exuded an air of creative inspiration and wellbalanced transformation. There could not have been a better place for this exhibition, since the museum’s outer physiognomy (an ancient place of

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worship transformed into a temple of modern art) perfectly suited the transformation of a canonised literary source into contemporary visual art. Little did I know how fateful this first Dantean encounter would prove to be for my later studies. However, I could immediately sense the inherent cultural and artistic value of the pictures on display. The visual adaptations of scenes and cantos of the Divine Comedy alongside portrays of Dante fashioned in a late-Romantic style opened my eyes to the inspirational transgression of artistic means of expression, the cultural codification of visual images, and the fruitful exchange of literary and medial sources. During my stay in Pisa and Florence, I acquainted myself with all of Dante’s works, studying under the tutelage of the renowned chair of the Filologia Dantesca, which at the time was held by the late Prof Leonella Coglievina. This chair, the pride of the University of Florence and a unique international position, is dedicated solely to the exploration of Dante’s life and works and collaborates closely with the Biblioteca Dantesca, the largest library on Dante which is adjacent to Orsanmichele in the very heart of Florence. On the whole, the instruction, the input and the ideas gleaned during that time and during my many research trips to Florence since then have been most pertinent to my doctoral thesis and formed the architectural groundwork on which I would eventually construct this study. Adding the finishing touches to this publication in the city where it was inspired therefore fills me with pride and gratitude. Florence, July 2016

INTRODUCTION DANTE ALIGHIERI: A LITERARY AUTHORITY AND HIS CULTURAL CAPITAL

“Who is Dante? What is the Comedy? What curious sensation of novelty does one feel when trying to explain in short what the Divine Comedy is 1 about?” These are the words used by the first-person narrator in Primo Levi’s book Se questo è un uomo to explain Dante’s major work to Jean, a young Frenchman he encounters in a German concentration camp during the Second World War. In Levi’s account, the memory of Dante and his work symbolises an act of human endeavour to restore Occidental culture in a place of Fascist barbarism; to remember acts of creative accomplishment in a place of total destruction; to recall one’s own name and one’s own history by looking at Dante’s way of assigning a place for everyone in the hereafter. Depicting Dante therefore functions as the mechanism of retrieval of human existence. However, Levi’s use of Dante serves as a means of pursuing a far from usual and indeed quite remarkable end. Nonetheless, in the short passage quoted above, a number of questions arise, which are highly significant for our reception of Dante today: Is Dante still relevant? What does he stand for? How have his reputation and his appropriation changed over the centuries? Ultimately, why do we still read the Divina Commedia and celebrate its author?

1

Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), p. 101. [“Chi è Dante? Che cosa è la Commedia? Quale sensazione curiosa di novità si prova, se si cerca di spiegare in breve che cosa è la Divina Commedia?”].Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Italian, French, Latin and German are mine. Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia is quoted from the following editions: La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, 2nd edition, 4 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994), and The Divine Comedy, trans. by Allen Mandelbaum (London: Everyman’s Library, 1995).

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Introduction

This book examines key stages of Dante’s appropriation in the course of Western cultural history by exploring the intermedial relationship between Dante’s Divina Commedia, the tradition of his iconography, and selected historical, literary and artistic responses from British artists in the 19th and 20th centuries. At the heart of this study lies the premise that Dante and his work are widespread and have acquired a certain status, which – in sociological terms - has been defined as ‘cultural capital’ by Pierre Bourdieu. I will argue that the many visualisations and visual images of Dante contributed to the creation of a universal icon of authority and authenticity, which has the capacity to acquire, store and transform “symbolically valued cultural accoutrements and attitudes” in 2 various epochs. In particular, in the 19th and 20th centuries, at a time of incremental geographical and socio-political dislocation, Dante became a symbol of moral integrity and literary authority. The British responses discussed in this analysis draw heavily on the manifold historical (self-) constructions of Dante and their productive evolution. Therefore, the supposition is that the visualisations of Dante and his text are “works [which] only become what they are because their being is a process of becoming”, and consequently, “they are [...] dependent on forms which their process [of productive evolution] crystallizes: interpretation, commentary, and critique”.3 This analysis seeks to show that in Dante’s case, such a process of crystallisation comprises acts of intermedial transformation and visual appropriation. It is only the continuous practice of reassessment and reinterpretation that ultimately mines the so-called “truth content” of works of art, to borrow a term introduced by Theodor W. Adorno.4 By analysing the productive evolution of Dante and his work we will, therefore, shed light on the inherent capacity of works of art to acquire, store and transform their cultural capital, and understand the respective intermedial, literary and visual means constitutive of their emergence and evolution. I am quite aware of the fact that writing about Dante is akin to staging a well-known play: You had better provide a new and fresh interpretation, otherwise you inevitably run the risk of being booed and having your work slated. Given the large volume of Dante publications

2

Michael Grenfell and Cheryl Hardy, Art Rules – Pierre Bourdieu and the Visual Arts (Oxford: Berg, 2007), p. 30. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 194. 4 Loc. cit.

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produced each year, it is clear that Dante still features among the most researched poets, which significantly impedes scientific innovation. However, the greater the cultural and historical gap between Dante's age and our own, the more need arises to interpret Dante and his world for our times. “People can’t seem to let go of the Divine Comedy”, writes Joan Acocella in The New Yorker.5 Stressing the paramount cultural importance of Dante’s work, she poignantly concludes that “the Divine Comedy is more than a text that professors feel has to be brushed up periodically for students. It’s one of the reasons there are professors and students” in the first place.6 Interestingly, the poet‘s Christian name Durante - which denotes ‘enduring’ and became shortened to Dante - already hints at his cultural longevity and, with the benefit of hindsight, functions as an omen of eternal literary success. Dante Alighieri has often been called a unique medieval author who truly grasped the knowledge of his world, tantamount to William Shakespeare, who incorporated the knowledge of his time into his plays. Consequently, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third”, as T. S. Eliot confirms in his essay on the Florentine poet.7 Dante’s all-encompassing architectural approach to divide the medieval world into Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, similar to the construction of a Gothic cathedral, made his poem a monolithic cultural artefact, which has stood the test of time and conjured up a variety of responses over the last centuries. Interestingly, the reception of Dante and his work represents a remarkably discontinuous process: adulation and rejection were constantly alternating, particularly in the first 400 years of his appropriation. The interpretations of his work and the Dantean image were also subject to significant changes, with different aspects of his vast political and literary œuvre or one of his presumably characteristic traits retreating to the background or moving to the foreground according to an era’s taste and preferences. Steve Ellis hints at the fact that there are indeed two Dantes, “the Aristotelian one of the secular world, with his concern for the ordering of human society on earth, and the Dante who 5

Joan Acocella, ‘What the hell - Dante in translation and in Dan Brown’s new novel’, in: The New Yorker, May 27 (2013), pp. 82-5, p. 82. For Dan Brown’s Inferno and his use of Dante see also Secrets of Inferno - In the footsteps of Dante and Dan Brown, ed. by Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer (Stamford: The Story Plant, 2013). 6 Acocella, ‘What the hell - Dante in translation and in Dan Brown’s new novel’, p. 82. 7 Thomas Stearns Eliot, Dante (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 46.

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Introduction

presents his Catholic visions of eternity”.8 Such a multitudinous variety of themes addressed in his works, of course, opened up a huge number of sometimes fiercely opposing interpretations. As late as the 19th century, for example, within fifteen years, two critical works on Dante were published in Paris, one celebrating him as a revolutionary socialist and heretic, while the other one praised his Catholic ethics.9 Throughout the year 2015, Dante Alighieri’s 750th anniversary of his birth was being celebrated, thus commemorating the father of Italian poetry, the avenger of political crimes, the doomed and exiled wanderer and the symbol of Italy’s unification, to name but a few of the associations that his name conjures up. From the onset, he was regarded as a highly political author, whose views and convictions were apt to speak for more than one cause. As a result, Dante and his work were repeatedly bound by the political, linguistic or cultural yoke, which inevitably transformed the way Dante and his work were perceived. He has become a universal cultural icon deeply engrained in the world’s cultural memory - albeit only after being rid of much of the cultural and political weight his controversial writings contained in the first place. Much of what Dante is renowned and remembered for dates back to the days of Italy’s unification in 1861, when the Florentine’s legacy was enlisted to support the national cause of providing a foil upon which the newly-formed nation could project itself: having been repeatedly denounced for the supposed sectionalism and factionalism in his works, he was now rediscovered as the forefather of a united Italy, even though Dante was a Republican at heart, who lamented the decline of the Roman Empire and advocated the separation of powers between the Emperor and the Pope. The 150th anniversary of Italian unification (1861-2011) was celebrated with a huge exhibition entitled Dante Vittorioso at the Italian National Library, which once again underlined Dante’s political prevision and his cultural longevity.10 Harking back to Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital, Albert Russell Ascoli points out that “no work is more 8

Steve Ellis, Dante and English poetry - Shelley to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 244. 9 The two publications under discussion are Antoine Ozanam, Dante et la philosophie catholique au treizième siècle, published in 1839, and Eugène Aroux, Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste: Révélations d'un Catholique sur le Moyen Age, published in 1854. 10 For the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, see Dante Vittorioso: Il mito di Dante nell'Ottocento, ed. by Eugenia Querci (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 2011).

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central to the Western canon and the educational and cultural apparatus that still actively propounds it; [...] no author possesses more cultural capital”.11 In Dante’s case, the currency of his cultural capital is based on his literary prestige and his firmly established position as an acknowledged authority. In fact, Dante seems to be more popular now than ever, with Roberto Benigni’s lectures on Dante filling stadiums around the world, his likeness adorning computer games, his figure surfacing in contemporary Italian telecommunication adverts - and even his death mask vexing the protagonists of Dan Brown’s recently published novel, Inferno.12 However, Dante himself understood the fickleness and ephemeral nature of earthly fame and compared the futility of human endeavour to a gust of wind in a famous passage from Purgatorio: Oh vana gloria de l'umane posse! [...] Non è il mondan romore altro ch'un fiato di vento, ch'or vien quinci e or vien quindi, e muta nome perché muta lato. O empty glory of the power of humans! [...] Worldly renown is nothing other than a breath of wind that blows now here, now there, and changes name when it has changed its course. [Purg. XI, 91, 100-2]

In Dante’s case, the wind has changed its course several times in the history of his appropriation. His name, however, has never fallen into oblivion. As already mentioned in passing, this study, therefore, promotes the view that Dante’s earthly fame has not been blown away by the changing course of the winds - not only because of his poetic quality and literary authority, but also because of the manifold iconographic and visual 11

Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 3. 12 The Italian actor and director Roberto Benigni toured with his show Tutto Dante in Europe, the United States, Canada and South America from 2006 to 2013, interpreting and reciting selected passages of the Divina Commedia. He also published a set of DVDs and a book on Dante. See Roberto Benigni, Il mio Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 2008). Electronic Arts published the video game Dante’s Inferno in 2010, which was loosely inspired by Dante’s journey through hell. In 2012, an advert for the Italian telecommunication company TIM featured Dante, Virgil and Beatrice and was broadcast throughout Italy. Dan Brown’s novel Inferno was published in 2013 and will be adapted for the screen in 2016. The story largely takes place in Florence and extensively uses themes taken from the Divina Commedia.

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Introduction

manifestations of work and author, which have secured his cultural longevity. The title Depicting Dante, therefore, carries a double meaning: on the one hand, it refers to the many visualisations of Dante in European cultural history, ranging from the first illuminated manuscripts to the manifold Dante portraits, which carry a fair share of responsibility for turning Dante into a supranational cultural icon. I want to show how Dante’s mental and visual images were being created in the first 200 years of his reception and how these images became productive in British visual and literary art as well as in literary criticism in later epochs.13 Simon A. Gilson has already observed that perhaps the least studied area of Dante’s reception in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence concerns the ways he was represented in visual arts, which also reached a very wide audience. Dante’s presence here offers a rich field of study that includes portraits, sculpture, manuscript illumination, and printed illustrations.14

In the same vein, when studying several portraits of Dante, the former director of the Warburg Institute, Ernst H. Gombrich, had already found that [...] the illuminated codices of the Divine Comedy [...] do not at first confront us with the Dante of our imagination, clad in red with his familiar head coverings and his gaunt profile, but by the fifteenth century at the latest, illustrators tended to adopt it, as Botticelli did in his memorable drawings.15

Therefore, the study of Dante’s largely unexplored iconography in the first 200 years of his appropriation remains a promising area of research, which chapter III of this analysis sets out to address. Interestingly, these early Florentine mental and visual images of Dante had astounding repercussions on his reception in later centuries. The visualisations stripped Dante of most of his philosophical and political concerns and created a unique allegory of literary authority and moral authenticity, which - as will be 13

The terms mental and visual images go back to W.J.T. Mitchell’s taxonomy of images and will be defined for our purpose in chapter II.2 of this analysis. 14 Simon A. Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 12. 15 Ernst H. Gombrich, ‘Giotto‘s Portrait of Dante?’, in: Burlington Magazine, Issue 121 (1979), pp. 471-83, p. 471.

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shown - still functions adequately in the 19th and 20th centuries. On the other hand, the title alludes to the second main goal of this study: making visible the process through which Dante became a vital part of Italy’s and Britain’s cultural histories. The term ‘Dante’ thereby serves as a metonym or, to be precise, a pars pro toto, which denotes not only the historical Dante and his work, but also Dante’s innovations, notably the three famous figures of Inferno, Count Ugolino and the two fateful lovers Paolo and Francesca. These Dantean images have proven to be subversive in the sense that they have the capacity to acquire, store and transform meaning and more than once they have held the key to unlocking the cultural discourse of their respective times. Thus, whilst this analysis is concerned with elucidating historically-specific appropriations of Dante and his productive usage in Britain, it is, for the most part, also dependent on the following interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks: intermedial and intertextual structuralist theory, visual methodology, Cultural Memory Studies and the sociological and cultural approaches subsumed under the superordinate concept of New Historicism theory. In accordance with these goals, the trajectory established in this study can be divided into three separate sections: 1) Theory and Methodology: chapters I and II present the abovementioned theoretical concepts and elaborate on their underlying methodology; 2) History: chapter III traces the emergence of Dante’s mental images based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s and Leonardo Bruni’s historiograms, and his visual images made up of pertinent pathos formulae in Florence in the first 200 years of his reception; and, last but not least, 3) Productive Usage: chapters IV, V, and VI explore the evolution of Dantean images in British visual and literary art as well as in literary criticism. In particular, in the third section of this analysis, it will be shown that Britain assumes a key role in the process of turning Dante into a supranational icon. Not only has the appropriation of Dante’s work undergone a considerable degree of transformation, integration and modification by British artists, but the Florentine poet himself has also been subject to a complex process of mystification, notably in the 18th and 19th centuries. Interestingly, Dante’s reappraisal in Britain was sparked by a change of artistic medium, once Sir Joshua Reynolds increased Dante’s

8

Introduction

fame by reinterpreting the Ugolino passage on canvas.16 Thus, this analysis presents the notion of sustaining cultural longevity through intermediality, and, therefore, explores the British socio-cultural circumstances which favoured such a transition from written to visual cultural constructs: the rise of aesthetics as a driving social force in the 18th century, propagated by Thomas Hoby’s seminal translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, Sir Jonathan Richardson’s Two Discourses promoting the science of connoisseurship, as well as the tradition of the grand tour, which inevitably enhanced the British appreciation for everything Italian. All of these cultural phenomena provided a fertile soil on which Dante’s reappraisal could prosper in the 19th century and, to a lesser extent, in the 20th century. Furthermore, as this study will show, the mental and visual images created out of Dantean appropriations almost always circle around the triad of allegory, authority and authenticity. These three important aspects of revisiting Dante are found in the Dantean image fostered in Florence in the 14th and 15th centuries and feature prominently in the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, T. S. Eliot and Tom Phillips. The selection of these three artists might seem arbitrary and far-fetched at first glance, but it was governed by their contribution to the appropriation of the Florentine in Britain, and the totality with which they embraced his work. Not only did they study and publish on Dante, but their own artistic and literary production was also profoundly influenced by Dante’s oeuvre, as I will demonstrate. Thus, I hope to shed light on both the intricate relationship between these artists and their cultural debts owed to Dante as well as on the remarkable continuity of Dantean appropriation by artists and intellectuals, particularly in Britain from the middle of the 19th century onwards. Therefore, I have chosen one artist from each of the distinctive artistic eras commonly referred to as Victorian, modern and postmodern. Their appropriation of Dante represents landmarks in the productive reception of the Florentine and is invariably linked to a tradition of Dante studies that was established in Britain during the middle of the 19th century by Gabriele Rossetti, who held a chair in Italian studies at King’s

16

Sir Joshua Reynolds’ depiction of Count Ugolino, executed in 1773 and exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art, represents the first seminal transformation of a Dantean theme onto canvas and spurred a huge number of artists embracing Dantean subjects in Britain in the 19th century.

Dante Alighieri: A Literary Authority and his Cultural Capital

9

College in London. For his son, Dante Gabriel, the Florentine provides a model for Victorian Dantean self-fashioning and becomes an allegory of authenticity and morality. For T. S. Eliot, Dante represents the voice of literary authority in Modernist poetry and serves as the allegory of a visionary European author. Furthermore, Dante provides Eliot with the wisdom of allegory as a universal rhetorical device, which Eliot emulated and propagated in his own literary work. For Tom Phillips, the engagement with Dante and his text represents an intertextual and intermedial endeavour, which paves the way for his own highly personalized and individualistic formal and artistic appropriation of Dante, and provides him with a rich cultural tapestry of art, thought and ideas on the Western world. Furthermore, his meta-discourse on Dante is the starting point for his postmodern critique of the economic exploitation of cultural icons. The selection of material for this study does not follow a strictly diachronic pattern. Portraying all of Dante’s images and Commediainspired artefacts in a diachronic way would represent a Mnemosyne project along the lines of Aby Warburg and, albeit desirable, would extend beyond the scope of this publication. What this study will do, however, is suggest how Dante’s image was fixed in the first 200 years of his appropriation in Florence, how fruitfully the Dantean images and his text have been taken up and used for creative and intellectual production in Britain over the course of the past centuries, and what moral, literary, or political messages they continue to convey. Reformulating and modifying Levi’s introductory quote this book, therefore, poses similar questions, such as: Which different kind of roles did Dante play in the course of cultural history? How have our views on Dante and his work been transformed? Which socio-cultural circumstances favoured his appreciation in Britain? In what way have his original ideas been transformed by British artists and intellectuals? Finally, what were the implications for the change of medium on Dante’s reception?

CHAPTER I ANALYSING DANTE

I.1 A Short History of Dante Studies I.1.1 General strands of Dante criticism in Italy Dante and his Divina Commedia represent a monolithic cultural artefact, which has stood the test of time. Without any doubt, no other work in the Western corpus has accrued a comparable amount of cultural capital or literary authority, which Ascoli defines using Bourdieu’s parameters as having a “widely-acknowledged cultural prestige and ideological weight”.1 However, in the course of the last 700 years the critical responses to his texts have been as manifold as the themes treated in Dante’s vast oeuvre.2 This chapter aims to trace the general strands of reception in Italy and Britain from the earliest responses to Dante’s work to the early 20th century in order to provide historical context for the intermedial and visual analyses of the artists and their works that will be discussed in chapters IIIVI. Inevitably, such a preliminary survey requires a number of simplifications to be made, and it is acknowledged that the history of Dante’s reception is a far more complex matter than the general strands indicated here, with different phases of reception overlapping and influencing each other.3 Bearing these restrictions in mind, it can be stated that since the very beginning of Dante criticism in Italy in the 14th century, immediately

1

Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, p. 3 For a chronological overview of Dante criticism, see Aldo Vallone, Storia della critica dantesca dal XIV al XX secolo, 4 vols. (Rome: F. Vallardi, 1981), and Michael Caesar, Dante – The Critical Heritage 1314 (?) – 1870 (London: Routledge, 1989). 3 To complicate matters even further, Dante himself critically assesses his major works and reveals a tendency to auto-referentiality in his texts. This will be discussed separately in chapter III.1.1. 2

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following Dante’s death in 1321, theological questions influenced his reception, for example, the meaning of the allegorical figure of Beatrice in his Vita Nuova and the Divina Commedia.4 Dante’s literary authority was highly debated, since he approached theology as a layman and infused poetry with philosophical and scholastic questions in the Italian vernacular.5 Towards the end of his literary career, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) launched the tradition of public Dante lectures in Florence, where he recited and expounded certain cantos of Dante’s major work, thus fixing and enhancing Dante’s public image at the time.6 While mystifying Dante and his monumental work he also considered him a “poet theologian, whose art was able to probe major philosophical questions as well as treatises on theology or the interpretation of Scripture”,7 thereby greatly enhancing his literary authority and his cultural sphere of influence. In the second half of the 14th, and in the beginning of the 15th, century, the humanists focused on the linguistic qualities of Dante’s text and considered it “the first configuration of humanist poetics”.8 Dante was seen as a protohumanist avant la lettre, whose works centred around the inspirational and rhetorical capacities of man. During the High Renaissance he was enlisted for the national cause and his political endeavours moved to the foreground. Due to his military commitment in the Battle of Campaldino in 1289 (one of the few established facts about Dante’s life) Lorenzo de’ Medici and Cristoforo Landino saw him as a shining example of Florentine patriotism and considered the poet and his work to be “pillars of Florentine civic identity”.9 Landino, who provided one of the most influential comments on the Divina Commedia, argued that

4

Caesar, Dante - The Critical Heritage, p. 7. For the difficulties in defining the term authority as it applied in Dante’s time, see chapter III.1.1. 6 Boccaccio’s pervasive influence on Dante’s public image in the 14th century and on Dante’s subsequent reception will be discussed in chapter III.1.2 of this study. 7 David Lummus, ‘Dante’s Inferno: Critical Reception and Influence’, in: Critical Insights: Dante's ‘Inferno’, ed. by Patrick Hunt (Pasadena: Salem Press, 2011), pp. 63-81, p. 65. 8 Concetta Carestia Greenfield, Humanist and Scholastic Poetics, 1250 - 1500 (London: Associated University Press, 1981), p. 74. 9 Lummus, ‘Dante’s Inferno: Critical Reception and Influence’, p. 66. See also Caesar, Dante - The Critical Heritage, pp.19-21, and Vallone, Storia della critica dantesca, vol.1, p. 194. 5

12

Chapter I [Dante] neither lacked spirit nor strength in his military discipline, because he often took part in battle; it was in the most dangerous battle of Campaldino [...] that he gained honour for his brave fighting and proved himself useful for his hometown.10

Landino also elaborated on a Neoplatonic interpretation of Dante’s journey to the hereafter and read it as “a metaphor for the return of the soul to its maker”.11 He favourably mentioned Dante’s distancing of himself from the then governors of Florence, an indispensable prerequisite for his later major work.12 Furthermore, Landino’s commentary on the Divina Commedia was published in the first Florentine edition of the poem in 1481 alongside Sandro Botticelli’s illustrations, which once again underlined Dante’s status as a literary and cultural authority in his hometown and was therefore used as part of the Medici’s propaganda to turn Florence into a centre of culture to rival ancient Athens and Rome.13 During the debates on the Questione della lingua, the quest for an authoritative linguistic model for Italy, Pietro Bembo, “whose particular achievement [was] to assert and successfully defend the prestige of vernacular writing alongside writing in Latin”,14 argued against the use of Dante’s Florentine-based vernacular while Giangiorgio Trissino was in

10

Cristoforo Landino, Comento sopra la Comedia - Edizione nazionale dei commenti danteschi 28, 4 vols. (Rome: Edizione nazionale, 2001), vol. 1, p. 249. [“Né gli [Dante] mancò l'animo né lle [sic] forze nella disciplina militare, perché spesse volte si trovò in guerra; et nella pericolosissima battaglia di Campaldino, [...], virilmente combattendo honore ad sé et utile alla patria partorì.”]. 11 Lummus, ‘Dante’s Inferno: Critical Reception and Influence’, p. 66. 12 Landino, Comento sopra la Comedia, vol. 1, p. 223. See also chapter III.1.1 of this analysis. 13 On the commentary tradition of the Divina Commedia, see Robert Hollander, ‘Dante and his commentators’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. by Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 226-36, and Deborah Parker, ‘Interpreting the Commentary Tradition to the Comedy’, in: Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by Amilcare A. Iannucci (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 240-58. Landino‘s pervasive influence on the commentary tradition is discussed in Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, pp. 163-93. For Botticelli’s Commedia illustrations, see Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy, ed. by Hein-Thomas Schulze Altcappenberg (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2000). 14 Caesar, Dante - The Critical Heritage, p. 229.

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13

favour of it.15 This debate continued well into the 19th century, when authors like Alessandro Manzoni modelled their literary vocabulary after Dante’s linguistic example and thereby ensured his cultural and linguistic longevity, emphasising the prestige of the Florentine vernacular.16 While the first three hundred years of Dante’s reception in Italy were marked by intricate questions of theology and cultural authority, the 18th and 19th centuries focused on the critical dualism of biography and philology.17 Literary critics and writers such as Giambattista Vico (in the 18th century) and Francesco de Sanctis (in the 19th century) saw Dante as a consummate “poet of the sublime”,18 whose work testified to his genius. Around the same time that de Sanctis published his Storia della letteratura italiana in the middle of the 19th century, Dante’s political appropriation as well as his international reappraisal had reached its climax: in a deliberate act of national reverence, Dante was celebrated as the father of Italian unification.19 De Sanctis had already paved the way for a patriotic reading of Dante when he interpreted literature not as a “document but as the very essence of national history”, in which “Dante’s position is supreme”, since he represents “the first great, truly complete poet produced by Italy”.20 In the same vein, in 1851, the political philosopher Vincenzo Gioberti posed the rhetorical question “whose doctrine and genius displayed in his work was more aristocratic than Dante’s?”, and stated, with the historical Dante in mind, that “the repeatedly instilled and deeply rooted ideas go to form

15

See Pietro Bembo, Prose e rime, ed. by Carlo Dionisotti (Classici italiani 26, Turin 1960), p. 138. and Guiseppe Tavani, Dante nel Seicento - Saggi su A. Guarini, N. Villani, L. Magalotti (Florence: Biblioteca dell'“Archivium Romanicum”, 1976), pp. 13-36. On the emergence and ramification of the Italian Questione della lingua, see also Angelo Mazzocco, Linguistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists: Studies of Language and Intellectual History in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 1993), pp. 24-50. 16 Steven Botterill contends that the authority of the language of poetry “may even be seen as the central concern of Dante’s literary career”. See Steven Botterill, ‘Dante and the Authority of Poetic Language’, in: Dante: Contemporary Perspectives, pp. 167-80, p. 167. 17 For Dante’s critical reception in the 19th century, see Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. by Aida Audeh and Nicholas Havely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 18 Caesar, Dante - The Critical Heritage, p. 45. 19 Dante’s own political convictions and the difficulties involved in the mere biographical interpretation of his work will be discussed in chapter III.1.1. 20 Caesar, Dante - The Critical Heritage, p. 625.

14

Chapter I

the customs, [however], the politicians of today lack political education”.21 Similarly, the politician Giuseppe Mazzini reminded the Italians that “the first step to produce great minds consists in honouring the already deceased”, praising Dante in his essay Dell’amor patrio di Dante as the very epitome of a national poet.22 All of these writings helped create the iconic Dante, who became the divinely ordained promoter of Italy’s art and culture, since according to the prevailing Dante criticism at the time, “God’s creation of Dante and the creation of Italian art coincide”.23 19th-century historiography must be regarded as highly ideological, since “it takes the characteristic form of its discourse, the narrative, as a content, namely, narrativity, and treats ‘narrativity’ as an essence shared by both [ideological and historical] discourses”.24 Dante’s life and work, therefore, was written into the Italian narrative of a unified Italian state and Dante’s own path of life as a crisis-ridden exiled poetic genius forms the narrative template for the formerly disunited and, on a European scale, largely disdained peninsula. Such a political and cultural appropriation of Dante also found its expression in the popular Dante festivals surrounding Italy’s unification and culminated in the festivities of the 600th anniversary of Dante’s birth and the erection of Dante statues in Florence, Verona, 21 Vincenzo Gioberti, Del rinnovamento civile d'Italia, ed. by Luigi Quattrocchi (Rome: Abete, 1969), p. 397. [“Chi fu più aristocratico in opera di dottrina e d‘ingegno che Dante? Le idee ripetute, inculcate, radicate, formano i costumi. [...] Oggi gli uomini politici non hanno educazione politica.”]. 22 Giuseppe Mazzini, Scritti editi ed inediti (Imola: Paolo Galeati, 1906), p. 22. [“Il primo passo a produrre uomini grandi sta nell‘onorare i già spenti.”]. On Mazzini‘s political appropriation of Dante see also Luigi Mascilli Migliorini, Il mito dell‘eroe - Italia e Francia nell‘età della Restaurazione (Napoli: Guida, 2003), pp. 164-7. On the construction of the historical Dante as the mythical visionary of the Italian unification see Thies Schulze, Dante Alighieri als nationales Symbol Italiens 17931915 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005), Stefano Jossa, ‘Politics vs. Literature: The Myth of Dante and the Italian National Identity’, in: Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century, pp. 30-5, and Dante and Milton - Envisioned visionaries, ed. by Christoph Lehner and Christoph Singer (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). 23 Mazzini, Scritti editi ed inediti, p. 325. [“Dio crea Dante e l‘arte italiana ad un tempo.”]. The exhibition Dante Vittorioso: Il mito di Dante nell'Ottocento on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification in 2011 emphasised once more such a reading of the mythical figure of Dante and highlighted the Florentine’s enormous political and cultural relevance for the present day. 24 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 30.

Analysing Dante

15

Trento and Rome.25 Alongside Giuseppe Mazzini, the political émigrés Gabriele Rossetti and Ugo Foscolo, whose “epic struggle for independence and unity [had] sent [them] into exile”, published, commented and disseminated Dante’s works in London.26 Dante’s European reception, however, had already begun in an attempt to defend his work against the criticism launched by the French protagonists of the Enlightenment whose defiance of Dante was criticised by the Swiss philologist Johann Jakob Bodmer.27 All of these examples illustrate how Dante was exploited in many different discourses, which further multiplied by the beginning of the 20th century when fresh artistic movements such as the Futurists led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti were decidedly opposed to the patriotic adulation bestowed upon Dante.28 While his reception in Italy almost exclusively circled around the triad of religion, language and politics, his influence in other countries often went far beyond these themes and engaged with questions of aesthetics, philosophy and literary tradition.29 In the 19th century, the institutionalisation of Dante studies also gained momentum, with the foundation of several Dante Societies and the 25

For the festivities celebrating Dante’s 600th birthday and their socio-political and cultural implications, see Mahnaz Yousefzadeh, City and Nation in the Italian Unification - The National Festivals of Dante Alighieri (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). For the erection of Dante statues in unified Italy, see Schulze, Dante Alighieri als nationales Symbol Italiens 1793-1915, pp. 90-128. 26 Margaret Campbell Walker Wicks, The Italian Exiles in London - 1816-1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1937), p. xiii. Gabriele Rossetti, Dante Gabriel’s father, emigrated from Naples to London where he held the chair for Italian literature at King’s College from 1831-1843. Ugo Foscolo also lectured on Dante in London and composed a commentary on the Divina Commedia. See Nicholas Havely, Dante’s British Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 128-53. On the manifold cultural and political relations between Italy and Britain in the 19th century, see Denis Mack Smith, ‘Britain and the Risorgimento’, in: Britain and Italy from Romanticism to Modernism, ed. by Martin McLaughlin (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp. 13-31, and Alison Milbank, Dante and the Victorians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 58-82. 27 Bodmer’s defence of Dante’s Commedia against French rationalists will be thoroughly discussed in chapter IV.1.1 of this analysis. 28 On Dante’s reception and his influence on modern and postmodern artists in the 20th century, see Vallone, Storia della critica dantesca, vol. 4 for a chronological overview. For Britain, see Havely, Dante’s British Public, pp. 260-83, and for German Dante criticism in the first half of the 20th century, see Mirjam Mansen, “Denn auch Dante ist unser!”: Die deutsche Danterezeption 1900-1950 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003). 29 In particular, British responses to Dante predominately considered the aesthetic and moral aspects of his work, which will be discussed in chapter IV.2.

16

Chapter I

creation of chairs for Italian literature in European universities.30 Alongside Dante’s national appropriation, such a canonisation of his work secured him an undisputed literary position comparable to those occupied by William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in their respective native countries as iconic carriers of cultural memory.

I.1.2 “Dante is hard, and few can understand him”: Dante’s reception in Britain from Romanticism to Modernism (1785-1929) To a certain extent, the history of Dante’s reception in the English-speaking world has been inextricably linked with the history of the translations of Dante’s Divina Commedia.31 Hence, Valeria Tinkler-Villani’s aphoristic 30 The German Dante Society was founded on the occasion of Dante’s 600th anniversary in Leipzig in 1865, the American Dante Society followed in 1881 in Cambridge, Mass., headed by the poet and Dante translator Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Italian Società Dantesca Italiana was established in 1888 in Florence. In 1906, the first English Dante Society was founded in Manchester. These societies are dedicated to the fostering of Dante’s cultural memory, thereby fulfilling Jan Assmann’s criterion of formation in his theory of cultural memory sites. See also chapter II.1.2 of this analysis. On the history of Dante societies in the English-speaking world see The Dante Encyclopedia, ed. by. Richard Lansing (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 286-7. For the establishment of the German Dante Society and its cultural implications, see Eva Hölter, Der Dichter der Hölle und des Exils - Historische und systematische Profile der deutschsprachigen Dante-Rezeption (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), p. 60, and Dante Alighieri: Texte zur literarischen Rezeption im deutschsprachigen Raum, ed. by Eva Hölter (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2015). For a historical overview of the Italian Società Dantesca and its cultural and philological activities, see Enrico Malato, In difesa della Società Dantesca Italiana (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2006). 31 However, in recent years, criticism was targeted against the translation-oriented research on Dante in Britain and in the United States, which to a certain extent tends to equate the appropriation of Dante and his rising fame with the quantity and quality of English translations of Dante’s works. Antonella Braida, for example, encourages scholars to steer away from the logocentrism of translation studies and pleads for a multidisciplinary approach to Dante studies. See Antonella Braida, Dante and the Romantics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 3. For a critical account of English translations of the Divina Commedia in the 18th and 19th centuries, see Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante in English Poetry: translations of the “Commedia” from Jonathan Richardson to William Blake (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989). For a general overview of Commedia translations in

Analysing Dante

17

dictum that for Dante scholarship in Britain it holds true that it “was translation itself that discovered Dante”.32 Apart from Geoffrey Chaucer’s first formal and linguistic appropriation of the Florentine’s works in the 14th century (the initial cultural contact with Italian vernacular writing) which led to “a widening of the scope of [Chaucer‘s] poetry”,33 for a long period of time, the English reception of Dante adhered to the words put into Lady Politick’s mouth in Ben Jonson’s play Volpone - the Fox: “Dante is hard, and few can understand him”, a statement already anticipating Voltaire’s criticism of the Commedia one hundred and fifty years later.34 Even though there were certain linguistic and political considerations to be had surrounding the interpretation of Dante’s Commedia and the ongoing Questione della lingua in Italy (which had serious repercussions in England and contributed to a favourable reception in the middle of the 17th century), Dante remained a poet known to elite circles only, and a real scholarly interest in Dante’s impact on English literature and culture did not begin until the 19th century.35 However, chapter IV.1 of this study will explore the sociocultural circumstances of 18th-century Britain which favoured the reception of Italian art and literature in general and of Dante’s works in particular. Moreover, the rise of aesthetics as a social driving force, Sir Jonathan Richardson‘s Two Discourses promoting the science of connoisseurship, as well as the tradition of the grand tour, which inevitably enhanced the British appreciation of Italian culture, will be examined. All of these cultural phenomena provided a fertile soil on which Dante’s reappraisal could prosper in the 19th century. Apart from these social and cultural changes, the influence of translations on Dante’s reception still remains remarkable. In his major work Dante in English Literature from Chaucer to Cary, the founder of English, including the 20th century, see Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, vol. 1, ed. by Olive Classe (London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000), pp. 339-44. 32 Tinkler-Villani, Visions of Dante in English Poetry, p. 38. 33 Piero Boitani, ‘What Dante meant to Chaucer’, in: Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. by Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 115-40, p. 118. 34 Ben Jonson, Volpone – the Fox, ed. by Philip Brockbank (London: Benn, 1968), Act III, scene 4. For Voltaire’s Dante criticism, see chapter IV.1.1 of this analysis. 35 For the linguistic considerations spurred by the Italian Questione della lingua in Britain in the 17th century see Havely, Dante’s British Public, p. 74.

18

Chapter I

British Dante studies, the Oxford scholar Paget Jackson Toynbee (18551932), cited many references to Dante in English literature, paying particular interest to the formal and linguistic appropriation of the Florentine poet by British writers.36 The first English translation of the Inferno had already appeared in 1782 by Charles Rogers, but only the translations by Henry Boyd, who translated Dante’s major work in the years 1785-1802, and Henry Francis Cary, who translated the Inferno in 1805/6 and published the complete Divina Commedia in four editions entitled The Vision in the following years up until 1844, met with considerable public success. It was due to the fact that only a complete translation of all three cantos could ultimately allow an all-encompassing interpretation of Dante’s work to take place that explains the Florentine’s late arrival in Britain.37 Before the success of these translations, however, if one measured Dante’s fortune by considering the number of complete translations of the Comedy, one would have to conclude that the Florentine poet was totally neglected in the British literary tradition until Boyd and Cary appeared on the scene.38

It is striking, therefore, that Toynbee chose the year 1844 as the conclusion date of his study, since that year saw the publication of Cary’s final edition of The Vision as well as Cary’s death, which once again stressed the importance of translations and translators for Dante’s reception in Britain. Indeed, Cary’s translation boosted Dante’s reception in the Englishspeaking world, particularly in the United States, and became an indispensable prerequisite for Dante’s subsequent world-wide fame. It also had substantial repercussions for the literary scene in Britain, since 36

Paget Toynbee, Dante in English Literature from Chaucer to Cary, c. 1380-1844 (London: Methuen, 1909). The success of Toynbee’s opera magna cannot be overestimated for the impact that it made on all subsequent Dante scholarship in Britain. Together with two more writings on Dante, A Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante (1898) and A Chronological List of English Translations from Dante (1906), compiled in a similar manner, Toynbee’s publications inarguably form the referential groundwork for all other Dante studies, but they fall short of offering insight into the cultural framework of Dante’s appropriation in Britain. 37 In fact, the Italian exile, poet and Dante scholar, Ugo Foscolo, helped Cary shape his proto-Protestant, Anglican interpretation of Dante’s Divina Commedia. See Havely, Dante’s British Public, pp. 128-53. 38 Edoardo Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante: Cary's Translation of The Divine Comedy (Market Harborough: Troubadour Publishing, 2003), p. 5. On the impact of Cary’s The Vision, see also Braida, Dante and the Romantics, pp. 27-55.

Analysing Dante

19

the image of Dante in nineteenth-century Britain was, in fact, considerably affected by Cary’s translation - most of the English Romantic poets acquainted themselves with the Comedy through The Vision.39

The English Romantics thereby discovered Dante as their own preRomantic predecessor avant la lettre. In particular, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake embraced Dante’s work, praising “how Art could represent the totality of human experience” and setting out “to English that Art”, thus making the Divina Commedia “the figurehead for a new kind of visionary poetry”.40 Yet one of the most prominent Romantics ushering Dante into the limelight was Percy Bysshe Shelley. In his Defence of Poetry, he praised Dante and made him palatable for a British audience, presenting Dante as an historical testament to the Middle Ages. According to Shelley, Dante, “whose creations bore a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages which followed it”, represented not only “the first awakener of entranced Europe”, but he also “created a language, a music and persuasion, out of a chaos of inharmonious barbarisms”.41 Such a reading of Dante set up a field of tension between Dante’s poetic genius and the supposed constrictions of his age. This dichotomy further developed some 50 years later under different circumstances, when the Victorian interpretation of Dante was considered a prototypical representative of the idealised Middle Ages in opposition to an incrementally menacing industrialised British present.42 The Romantic appropriation of Dante, therefore, paved the way 39

Crisafulli, The Vision of Dante, p. 6. Lummus, ‘Dante’s Inferno: Critical Reception and Influence’, p. 68. For Coleridge’s influence on Dante’s fame in Britain, see chapter IV.3.1 of this analysis. For Blake’s illustrations and interpretations of the Commedia, see Braida, Dante and the Romantics, pp. 151-78. 41 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry and a Letter to Lord Ellenborough (London: The Porcupine Press, 1948), pp. 39-40. For Shelley’s appropriation of Dante, see also Braida, Dante and the Romantics, pp. 95-127. Shelley, who approached Dante’s work in the Italian original and imitated Dante’s terza rima in English, can be considered the most important Romantic connoisseur of Italian culture. 42 John Ruskin spearheaded the aesthetic movement which promoted Dante’s cultural and poetic supremacy in 19th-century Britain, famously baptising Dante “the central man of all the world”. Quoted in Jay Fellows, Ruskin's Maze: Mastery and Madness in His Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 35. 40

20

Chapter I

for popularizing the Florentine in Britain and securing his place among the world’s most important writers and intellectuals, who could ultimately function as a reflection of the Victorian zeitgeist.43 The discovery of a fresco of the young Dante in the Bargello in the Chapel of Santa Maddalena in Florence by British adventurers and expatriates in 1840 led to an even stronger interest in the Florentine poet and rejuvenated his image, which was then fixed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings and drawings as well as by the numerous Victorian Dante memorabilia circulating at the time.44 Apart from the historical figure of Dante, his creations came into fashion as well: Ugolino, Paolo and Francesca, as well as Dante’s unrequited love for Beatrice appealed to the Victorian tastes for courtly love nurtured in the Gothic revival and they found their way into art and literature.45 Interestingly, Dante’s appropriation during that period tells us much more about Victorian tastes and the moral considerations of that age than it does about Dante’s work and, consequently, it was the task of modernist criticism to free Dante from the many Victorian clichés and distortions surrounding the Florentine and his work. The Modernists’ reading of Dante’s poetry, therefore, can be described as a counteraction to the 19th-century Dante and takes a rather different, decidedly “anti-Romantic” and “anti-Rossettian”, stance.46 The Modernists reconciled Dante, the poet, with Dante, the thinker, and by establishing intertextual references they engaged with his literary and

43

See chapter IV.2 of this analysis. For Dante’s appropriation by the Pre-Raphaelites, see Giuliana Pieri, ‘Dante and the Pre-Raphaelites’, in: Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts, ed. by Antonella Braida and Luisa Calè (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 109-40. The discovery of the Bargello fresco and its artistic implications for Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Dante’s image will be discussed in chapter IV.3. 45 For Beatrice’s productive appropriation in 19th-century Britain, see Julia Straub, A Victorian Muse: The Afterlife of Dante's Beatrice in Nineteenth-Century Literature (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009), and Ellis, Dante and English poetry, pp. 210-43. For Paolo and Francesca’s fortune, see Ilka Soennecken, Dantes Paolo und Francesca in der Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts - Entstehung und Entwicklung eines “romantischen” Bildthemas (Weimar: VDG, 2002), and Nicholas Havely, ‘Francesca Observed: Painting and Illustration, c. 1790-1840’, in: Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts, pp. 95-108. The fate of Count Ugolino and his British appropriation as well as the story of Paolo and Francesca will also be addressed in chapter IV.2. 46 Ellis, Dante in English poetry, p. 211. 44

Analysing Dante

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philosophical qualities.47 Milbank described the radical “masculine poetic apotheosis” of the poet,48 who can be defined as both impersonal and transcendental in his work, while at the same time deeply involved in it as the poet-protagonist of the Commedia. Such a dichotomy of philosophical and metaphysical qualities, on the one hand, and personal commitment on the other, goes a long way to explain Dante’s popularity among the Modernists and lies at the heart of T. S. Eliot’s personal reading of the Florentine, most notably expressed in his essay Dante (1929). Even though it was a long way from the banks of the Arno to the Thames estuary, Dante, once he arrived in Britain, was all the more vigorously embraced by critics and artists alike. It remains a striking feature of Dante’s appropriation that predominantly British artists set out to intensely emulate and creatively innovate Dante’s work through a process of ongoing translational and intermedial endeavour, ranging from William Blake’s illustrations of the Commedia and his own visionary poetry, to T. S. Eliot’s critical literary appropriation and his poetics of Dante, to Tom Phillips’ translations and visual commentaries published in his livre d‘artiste Dante’s Inferno.49

I.2 Current state of research: historical-authoritative, ideological-political and visual-intermedial Dante scholarship Scholarship on Dante has sometimes spearheaded literary criticism. In an article commemorating the 600th anniversary of Dante’s death in 1921, published in the journal Comparative Literature in 1951, research on Dante was considered of great importance, “since it illustrates so well and so abundantly all the new trends in serious literary criticism”.50 It argued that the emphasis of textual criticism had “shifted from the study of the background to the study of the work itself”.51 In the wake of this shift, “symbolism and imagery [...], language, style and metrics were grasped in

47

See chapter VI.1. Milbank, Dante and the Victorians, p. 203. 49 For Dante’s popularity among British artists, see The Poet’s Dante - TwentiethCentury Responses, ed. by Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), and Havely, Dante’s British Public, pp. 260-83. For Blake’s illustrations, see Braida, Dante and the Romantics, pp. 151-78. 50 Helmut Hatzfeld, ‘Modern Literary Scholarship as reflected in Dante Criticism’, in: Comparative Literature, vol. 3, No. 4 (Autumn, 1951), pp. 289-309, p. 289. 51 Loc. cit. 48

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Chapter I

their psychological function as means of expression”.52 Even though such a claim regarding Dante scholarship’s progressive vigour cannot be maintained in today’s diversified field of literary and cultural criticism, it is striking that Dante scholarship has never eschewed modern theory. Nowadays, there is a plurality of approaches towards the reception of Dante and the scholarly analysis of his work, and it almost goes without saying that “multidisciplinarity is a prerequisite to any study of literary reception”.53 Taking into account publications on Dante edited over the last two decades, three dominating threads of scholarship can be singled out, which can be grouped under historical-authoritative, ideological-political and visual-intermedial approaches to the study of Dante and his work.54 In terms of the historical-authoritative research on Dante we can observe questions of literary authority being addressed by many scholars in order to discuss and demystify the historically constructed figure of Dante Alighieri.55 Not only do the reception and influence of Dante’s literary authority in various eras seem to be of interest, but also the cultural responses to the highly stylised literary figure of Dante himself, which has been shaped over 700 years of reception, criticism and appropriation. Such an approach also comprises the socio-cultural circumstances of Dante’s life and the literary tradition on which the Florentine poet drew, which to a large extent also helped sculpt his own writing.56 The ideological-political approach to the Florentine poet discusses the underlying theological and political discourses present in Dante’s work and relates them to the emergence of the Divina Commedia

52

Loc. cit. Braida, Dante and the Romantics, p. 3. 54 This study tries to incorporate scientific research gleaned from all three of these threads present in contemporary Dante scholarship. 55 For Dante’s literary authority, see, e.g., Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. For the historical construction of Dante Alighieri and his literary mystification, see Jason M. Houston, Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dantista (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). For the authoritative position Dante held in Britain and his reception by British artists and poets, see Ellis, Dante and English poetry, Braida, Dante and the Romantics, Milbank, Dante and the Victorians, and Dante’s Modern Afterlife – Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney, ed. by Nicholas Havely (London: MacMillan and St Martin’s Press, 1998), and Havely, Dante’s British Public. 56 For the literary tradition constituent of Dante’s own writing, see chapter III.1.1. 53

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and to Dante’s political treatises.57 This trajectory of Dante scholarship has the longest history and vigorously addresses the political circumstances and the ideological convictions of Dante’s times. Recent publications following this approach consider Dante’s poetry an extension of his theology, and his philosophy a search for truth with poetic means. Interestingly, the third thread of Dante scholarship, the intermedial and visual approach to Dante and his work, appears to be on the rise. This may be due to the iconographic and performative quality of the Commedia on the one hand, but it seems to also be indebted to the fact that aesthetic education functioned as a social driving force in Britain in the late 18th and 19th centuries. 58 Thus, Dante scholarship seems to pay tribute to the need to account for aestheticism in literary studies.59 Antonella Braida argues that

57

Recent publications on Dante’s politics and his ideology are, e.g., Dante and Governance, ed. by John Woodhouse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), Barbara Reynolds, Dante - The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), Dante and the Church - literary and historical essays, ed. by Paolo Acquaviva and Jennifer Petrie (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), Claire E. Honess, Dante Alighieri: Four Political Letters (Cambridge MHRA, 2007), Nicholas Havely, Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the 'Commedia' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009), and "Se mai continga...": Exile, Theology and Politics in Dante, ed. by Claire Honess and Matthew Treherne (Ravenna: Longo, 2013). 58 The topicality of visual approaches to Dante and the Divina Commedia is also reflected in two conferences and an exhibition held in 2014: Würzburg University initiated a day of study entitled Dante INTERMEDIAL - Die, Divina Commedia’ in Literatur und Medien. See the conference proceedings: Dante intermedial. Die, Divina Commedia’ in Literatur und Medien, ed. by Irmgard Scharold (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015). At the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art, the exposition Die Göttliche Komödie. Himmel, Hölle, Fegefeuer aus Sicht afrikanischer Gegenwartskünstler displayed visual responses to Dante’s Commedia from an African perspective and celebrated the Florentine’s work as both supranational and intercultural. See Zeitkunst, Issue 4, April (2014), p. 4. In September 2014, an interdisciplinary conference at Cambridge University entitled Visualising Posture in Dante’s ‘Comedy’: History, Theory, Practice addressed the significance of illustration and embodiment for the study of Dante and the illuminated manuscripts of the Divina Commedia. See [accessed: 26 September 2016]. 59 Recent examples of visual and intermedial approaches to Dante scholarship are Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts, and Metamorphosing Dante - Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the

24

Chapter I the cultural and visual turn in reception studies represents a suitable critical frame for a comprehensive understanding of the reception of Dante, [particularly] between the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries.60

As this quotation demonstrates, the scholarly notion has gradually been given leeway to accept that visual approaches shed particular light on Dante’s appropriation in Britain. Furthermore, the search for new methodologies and the use of visual and intermedial approaches in postmodern theory might reveal an underlying motif, which presumably exceeds the mere scientific desire for analysis. It is a question that postmodern theory has not yet been able to answer thoroughly: to what extent do cultural artefacts remain with us? Thus, the enigmatic question of cultural longevity and cultural sustainability rears its head, which goes beyond the need for interpretation and assessment and enriches the tableau of postmodern theory. Such a search for new approaches inevitably leads to questions of scientific methodology and appropriate terminology. It has become clear that Dante scholarship, therefore, requires a multiplicity of approaches to come to scientific terms with the eclectic nature of Dante and his Divina Commedia.

I.3 Coming to terms with Dante: The quest for new methodologies All of the visual and intermedial approaches mentioned above refer back to questions of aesthetics and how form and content interrelate. Someone who has combined all of these thoughts into a recently rediscovered cultural theory is Aby Warburg, whose socio-historical and aesthetic considerations precede the theoretical part of this analysis. Even the most seminal studies on Dante’s iconography - as brilliant as they may be in terms of their descriptive analysis - fall short of providing a historical and theoretical grounding of the iconographical concepts. The terminology used in these analyses has, for the most part, borrowed from literary criticism; when referring to visualisations, Peter Brieger et. al., for example, who composed the most comprehensive two-volume study of

Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti and Fabian Lampart (Berlin: Turia & Kant, 2011). 60 Braida, Dante and the Romantics, p. 9.

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Dantean illustrations to this day, talk of a “canon of scenes”,61 while Rachel Owen, who analysed Dante’s iconography in a short essay, uses the generic terms “encyclopedia of motifs”, “corpus of material”, or “patterns of iconography”.62 Furthermore, current intermedial analysis lacks adequate terminology and the term intermediality is used in as varied a manner as the discourses in which it is being applied. Jens Schröter hints at the difficulties in finding appropriate words for the description of intermedial relationships and quotes examples such as “visual rhythm” or “writing of light”,63 which illustrate the common practice of borrowing metaphors from neighbouring media in order to denote a medium’s effect. Here, I would like to argue, Warburg fills the need for scientific terminology and an accurate vocabulary for visual and intermedial analysis. Moreover Warburg‘s theory lends itself to a cultural and historical study of Dante’s image, since it helps trace the origin and the development of iconographic predecessors by making the emergence and the evolution of these images visible in a diachronic way. At its best it makes the process of productive reception as well as the “crystallize[d] interpretation”,64 in Adorno’s words, more understandable, since Warburg’s approach includes the intermedial appropriation of art as well as the cultural and social energy stored in, and given off by, visual images. Apart from Warburg, this analysis takes on board further concepts and theories which help shed light on the evolution of Dante’s iconography. I have included a chapter on the Laocoon debate, which was begun by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, since it was a driving force in Warburg's theory and constitutes the European groundwork in the analysis of intermedial processes and, ultimately, of the current debate on intermediality.65

61

Peter Brieger, Millard Meiss and Charles S. Singleton, Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy, 2 vols. (Princeton: Bollingen Foundation, 1969), vol. 1, p. 85. 62 Rachel Owen, ‘The Image of Dante, Poet and Pilgrim’, in: Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts, pp. 83-94, p. 84 and p. 90, respectively. 63 Jens Schröter, 'Four Models of Intermediality', in: Travels in Intermedia[lity] Reblurring the boundaries, ed. by Bernd Herzogenrath (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2012), pp. 15-36, p. 29. 64 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 194. 65 The Laocoon debate was sparked by a discussion on the supremacy of certain art forms and artistic ways of expression over others and can be regarded as the historical precursor of contemporary intermedial discourse.

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Chapter I

As I will demonstrate, Brieger’s above-mentioned canon of scenes follows, to a large extent, Warburg’s concept of pathos formulae and displays so-called superlatives of human expression, such as Dante fainting during his encounter with the wild beasts, Dante sleeping, or Dante receiving divinely ordained messages. Owen’s patterns of iconography or corpus of material, gleaned from a variety of Dante depictions in the early manuscript tradition, can also be connected to Warburg’s engrams or dynamograms, an interpictorial cluster which assumes an important role in creating and sustaining cultural patrimony and cultural identity by storing the social and cultural energy circulating at a given point in time. Last, but not least, I will suggest that the study of the so-called historiograms, which - as I will argue - are made up of the historical discourses surrounding Dante and his work at certain periods of time, contribute to constructing Dante’s mental and visual images. These historiograms influence all subsequent appropriations of Dante, and it is the task of literary and cultural studies to analyse them, to deconstruct their constituent parts and to classify their inherent truth content. All of these theoretical concepts and methodological considerations will be expounded in the following chapter on critical theory and methodology. It has almost become a clichéd and unchallenged scientific conviction that Dante’s image was created by Giovanni Boccaccio. One of the most recent examples of this recurrent theory can be found in Pugh and Weisl’s statement that “the image of Dante is primarily Boccaccio’s, the learned, dedicated genius of poetic craft”.66 This holds true only to an extent, since Boccaccio undoubtedly drafted the blueprint of Dante’s iconic status, but the so-called “naked icon”67 had not always been as unclothed as is sometimes suggested, as the now iconic Dante was gradually fashioned using classical attributes and Renaissance paraphernalia. To complicate matters even further, Dante’s image is derived from a variety of sources, with two of them originating directly in Boccaccio’s texts on the Florentine, but others were created by Leonardo Bruni through a process of rejection and criticism of Boccaccio’s Dantean myth. By harking back to Warburg and Adorno as well as to their terminology, this research will counteract and rectify these frequent interpretational shortcomings, allow for the historicity of the bequeathed Dantean images, and

66 Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl, Medievalisms - Making the Past in the Present (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 15. 67 Loc. cit. p. 12.

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do justice to the rich field of visualisations and appropriations of Dante and his work.

CHAPTER II AESTHETICISING DANTE: THEORETICAL CONCEPTS AND METHODOLOGY

II.1 Visual rhetoric and cultural iconography II.1.1 Roaming the Streets of Culture: Aby Warburg’s pathos formulae and the concept of historiograms Aby Warburg’s studies in iconography have experienced a resurged interest by 21st-century members of the art scene as well as those in the field of scientific cultural studies.1 The reasons for this are several. To a certain extent, Warburg’s idea of mapping recurrent artistic forms of expression in his Bildatlas Mnemosyne provides a fertile modus operandi for both the exhibition of art and the analysis of culture,2 since curators and scholars alike make their living from producing additional value of works of art and artistic objects, thus the juxtaposition of art and ideas can ignite new insight into well-known facts, suggest unexpected similarities, and ultimately transfer cultural meaning. As already highlighted in the previous chapter, revisiting Warburg ultimately fulfils a need in the study of visual culture, because it accounts for the historical dimension of the visualisations under discussion. Warburg was rediscovered as a fundamental and seminal scholar who laid the foundations for an interdisciplinary scientific methodology. His overdue retrieval can be seen as the necessity to acknowledge the history of different scientific

1

In English see, for example, Louis Rose, The Survival of Images - Art Historians, Psychoanalysts, and the Ancients (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), and Christopher D. Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2012). In Italian see, for example, Pathosformeln, retorica del gesto e rappresentazione: ripensando Aby Warburg, ed. by Roberto Venuti (Pisa: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici, 2006). 2 Aby Warburg, Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. by Martin Warnke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2000).

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approaches and to subsume various diverging tendencies in the vast field of Visual and Cultural Studies. As Richard Woodfield has observed: Although there exists no singular practice or discipline that governs art history, it was the emergence of the multi-disciplinary approach that has come to be known as Visual and Cultural Studies that has lead to the recuperation of such marginalised and maligned figures as Warburg.3

The Visual and Cultural Studies addressed in Woodfield’s statement comprise modern picture theory, which tries to identify so-called iconographic or interpictorial clusters. The underlying assumption is that every picture has a set of visual predecessors to which it refers. Similar to the concept of intertextuality, interpictorial clusters trace the additional value given to certain images by establishing an iconographic link. The goal of this concept is to situate pictures within their historical and cultural framework and to identify certain effective and meaningful pictorial constellations, blueprints, or visual prototypes of art history.4 Furthermore, the inherent complexities of a huge number of images produced in a predominantly visual culture can be reduced by categorising and mapping these images - the way Warburg suggested - to a manageable amount of confirmed works of art.5 The term iconography itself denotes the writing with images and refers to the symbolic and allegorical meanings encoded in visual art forms, ranging from paintings, sculptures, emblems and the decorations of the designed world. Many of the supposedly new concepts of Visual Methodology and Cultural Studies described by Woodfield simply hark back to 3 Art History as Cultural History: Warburg’s Projects, ed. by Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam: OPA, 2001), p. 2. 4 Current examples of visual approaches in British and American Visual and Cultural Studies are: US Icons and Iconicity, ed. by Walter W. Hölbling, Klaus Rieser and Susanne Rieser (Wien: Lit Verlag, 2006), Elisabeth Bronfen, Crossmappings - Essays zur visuellen Kultur (Zürich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2011), or Pictorial Cultures and Political Iconographies: Approaches, Perspectives, Case Studies from Europe and America, ed. by Udo J. Hebel and Christoph Wagner (New York: DeGruyter, 2011). 5 Recent examples of Warburg’s topicality are an exhibition entitled Dear Aby Warburg, what can be done with images? Dealing with photographic material [Lieber Aby Warburg, was tun mit Bildern? Vom Umgang mit fotografischem Material], December 2, 2012 - March 3, 2013 at the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Siegen, and the artist collective 8. Salon, headed by Roberto Ohrt in Hamburg, who dedicate themselves to the completion of Warburg’s Mnemosyne project.

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Warburg’s ideas, thereby demonstrating the “intent of establishing methodological as well as conceptual antecedents for these practices”.6 Such multi-faceted and interdisciplinary approaches to Cultural Studies might ultimately fill the need for a sound theoretical and historical grounding and “serve as correctives for the tendency towards subjectivism, arbitrariness and abstraction” in visual and cultural criticism.7 The theoretical approach for the study of iconography was developed by the Warburg School, whose main practitioners included Aby Warburg himself, Erwin Panofsky and Ernst H. Gombrich. Warburg (1866-1929), who had been born into a banking family in Hamburg, founded the Warburg Institute in his native city, but four years after his death the Institute’s library had to be shipped to London in order to prevent its seizure by the Nazi regime. Even today, the Warburg Institute is part of the University of London. From the outset, Warburg’s approach to organising the books and materials of his institute was an interdisciplinary one: the thematic similarity of books governed their distribution and made sure that related topics from art, literature, religion, and philosophy found their place on adjacent bookshelves. Warburg’s student and collaborator Fritz Saxl recalled that “Warburg never tired of shifting and re-shifting [books]”, since “every new idea about the interrelation of facts made him re-group the corresponding books”.8 It arose out of the need “to encourage trespassing, not amateurishness”, as well as “to hack a fresh path into the forest [...] and to facilitate the acquisition of [...] tools”.9 Ultimately, Warburg believed that books were “more than instruments of research. Assembled and grouped, they expressed the thought of mankind in its constant and in its changing aspects”.10

6

Art History as Cultural History, p. 2. A recent collection of essays on the theoretical and historical grounding of Visual Studies can be found in: Theorizing Visual Studies - Writing Through the Discipline, ed. by James Elkins et. al. (New York: Routledge, 2013). 7 Art History as Cultural History, p. 2. 8 Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg - An Intellectual Biography with a Memoir on the History of the Library by F. Saxl (London: The Warburg Institute, 1970), p. 327. 9 Ernst H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 40. 10 Gombrich, Aby Warburg - An Intellectual Biography, p. 327.

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This principle of multidisciplinarity also governed Warburg‘s scientific analyses: when putting together his doctoral thesis on Sandro Botticelli, Warburg analysed the iconographical predecessors and blueprints of such famous Renaissance images as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus or Primavera. He decidedly contrasted his Botticelli to the “fashionable aestheticism” promoted by John Ruskin and Walter Pater in Britain, a movement “which had chosen Botticelli as one of its idols”, and nursed anxieties that his study might be confused with the “Botticelli of those readers who crowd in the Uffizi” in order to catch a glimpse of the premeditated paintings and tick them off their list of sights.11 Warburg’s criticism was directed towards those readers and spectators, who merely “seek the languid painter whose melancholy appeals to their own mood of decadent self-indulgence”.12 It becomes obvious that Warburg, as part of “the young generation of scientifically-minded art historians rebelled against this aestheticism”,13 and refused it because of its inherent superficiality. Instead, Warburg acted out of the necessity to justify “the relevance of the classical tradition for the cultural life”,14 which he saw incrementally doubted by nationalists and modernists alike. He therefore studied and analysed, for example, the antique afterlife of form and content in Florentine Renaissance art by describing the recurrence of visual images and artistic expression, e.g. moving drapes in paintings executed by Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio, which resurfaced in the form of 1920s stamps, and interpreted them not necessarily as a deliberate act of appropriation, but stressed their inherent symbolic quality and their capacity to trigger cultural memory. To Warburg, “the images of the past were important as human documents”, because they have the inherent capacity to “reveal to us something of the psychological fabric of their period and of its dominant mental states and attitudes”.15 His primary interest revolved around what he coined as the pathos formulae, a concept that warrants further explanation; pathos, in its classical Greek sense, signifies an overwhelming feeling or a passionate emotion. The Stoic philosophers defined pathe as excessive impulses. Such pathe found various extreme physiognomic expressions in the moment of greatest excitement, as Warburg noted. For that reason, an array of compositional

11

Loc. cit. p. 97. Loc. cit. 13 Loc. cit. p. 44. 14 Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, p. 40. 15 Gombrich, Aby Warburg - An Intellectual Biography, p. 127. 12

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patterns was developed by classical artists to depict the whole gamut of human moods and sensations, primarily the ecstasies of pain, fear, longing and delight.16 These ecstasies, or “superlatives of human expression”, as Warburg called them, have the capacity to transcend time, artistic genre and religion and therefore may recur in the artistic production of later epochs.17 In a short essay on Albrecht Dürer dating from 1905, Warburg exposed formal and stylistic parallels between Dürer’s drawing The Death of Orpheus and its supposed blueprint, a drawing from the Italian artist Andrea Mantegna’s circle. Warburg commented on the striking similarities by stating that “classical art’s typical pathos-laden language of gestures”, which can be found in both drawings, was tantamount to the way “Greece had stamped it for the same tragic scene”, and which ultimately “intervenes here in a way that is [...] stylistically formative”.18 This way, a Greek depiction of the tragic, mediated through Italian Renaissance artists, is emulated by a South German Renaissance painter. Warburg often found examples for his pathos formulae in the treatment of the accessory form in motion, e.g. the movements in hair, garments or drapes.19 Such a treatment could be the fruit of an intricate network of quotations, not only in a diachronic sense, but also in an intermedial approach to artistic production: hence the literary and the visual intersect and inspire each other. In his interpretation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera, for example, Warburg links the ornamental details with descriptions in Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise Della Pictura (1435) as well as with Angelo Poliziano’s description of Venus in his poetry.20 Both literary sources revolve around

16 The measured depiction of human expression was also at the heart of the Laocoon debate in the 19th century. In his work, Warburg referred to Laocoon several times. 17 Warburg also suggested a classification of artistic accomplishment according to the handling of such superlatives of expression in art by different artists. See Gombrich, Aby Warburg - An Intellectual Biography, pp. 179-80. 18 Quoted by Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, p. 63. 19 Warburg’s analytical dedication to the accessories in an image produced his famous adage “God hides in the details” [“Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail”]. This dictum appeared for the first time as the subtitle of Warburg’s seminar Die Bedeutung der Antike für den stilistischen Wandel in der italienischen Kunst der Frührenaissance, given at the University of Hamburg in 1925/1926. See also, Gombrich, Aby Warburg - An Intellectual Biography, pp. 13-4. 20 Johnson, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images, p. 49.

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the imagery of wind-blown hair. In particular, Angelo Poliziano seems to play a leading role in Warburg’s Renaissance analyses, since the Italian poet and humanist not only “informs the depiction of human figures in paintings such as Primavera”, but he also furnishes Warburg “with symbolic details even as he himself is transformed into something of a symbol, one of numerous combinatory elements in Warburg’s larger comparatist vision of Renaissance expression [...]”.21 For Johnson, Warburg’s pathos formulae therefore represent “paradigmatic and combinatory elements in his Kulturwissenschaft”,22 which resurface periodically in different forms and media. In order to describe these processes of intermedial transfer and cultural remembrance, Warburg made use of Richard Semon’s theory of the engram as a memory trace. In neuropsychology, engrams are hypothetical means whose function is to provide storage for neural memory traces. In Cultural Memory Studies, engrams function as energy stores, which acquire and give off mnemic energy under altered historical circumstances or in geographically different places.23 Thereby, images play a leading role in Warburg’s concept of the engrammatic pathos formulae, since they are “the focal point out of which radiate those ǥenergy tensions‘ that animate history”, and ultimately “were created as a permanent patrimony of humanity”.24 These images, therefore, make up a universal iconic memory and their trajectory can be traced throughout history.25 Art historian Georges Didi-Huberman offers reasons for the recurrence of images when stating that 21

Loc. cit. p. 45. Loc. cit. p. 63. 23 In Greek mythology, Mneme is the Muse of Remembrance, one of the Titanic Muses. Richard Semon wrote two books on memory entitled Die Mneme (1904) and Die mnemischen Empfindungen (1908). In his later studies, however, Warburg used the term dynamograms, a neologism based on Semon’s engram to denote the dynamic process involved in exposing certain pathos formulae and in perambulating an epoch’s mental space. 24 Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. by Richard Pierce (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1989), p. 2. 25 Note that around the same time that Warburg developed his idea of an iconic memory, which determines Western culture, the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs described what he called the collective memory. Halbwachs’ immense accomplishment was to show that our memory, like consciousness in general, depends on socialization and communication, and that memory can be analysed as a function of our social life. The different concepts of cultural memory and their contribution to Cultural and Visual Studies are described 22

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Chapter II an image, [...] having lost its original use value and meaning, nonetheless comes back, like a ghost, at a particular historical moment: a moment of ‘crisis’, a moment when it demonstrates its latency, its tenacity, its vivacity, and its ‘anthropological adhesion’, so to speak.26

Images, therefore, fill the need of externalising recurring conflict and human crisis. In his associative approach to mapping out what he called the “roaming streets of culture”,27 however, Warburg also included rituals and social practices, with the most famous one being the serpent ritual of the Hopi Indians, which he compared with the depiction of the Laocoon group in his Kreuzlinger lecture.28 Therefore, the meaning of the iconographic or interpictorial clusters mentioned above can be extended by Warburg’s engrammatic pathos formulae concept. Not only do they establish an iconographic link to visual or textual predecessors, they ultimately assume an important role in creating and sustaining cultural patrimony and cultural identity by storing the social and cultural energy circulating at a certain period in time. In particular, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, which Warburg began in 1924 in Hamburg, was entirely focused on the emergence and evolution of pathos formulae. For this project, he pinned numerous photographs, pictures, drawings and woodcuts onto wooden screens covered with black cloths. Their selection was entirely dictated by Warburg’s associative approach and comprised “all the lectures and investigations on which he was henceforward engaged”.29 The juxtaposition of these images served to illustrate recurring themes in art and culture, which ultimately form the visual or iconic memory of the Western world. When Warburg died there were forty such screens, most of them displaying up to nearly one in Jürgen Straub, ‘Psychology, Narrative, and Cultural Memory: Past and Present’, in: Cultural Memory Studies, ed. by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter 2008), pp. 215-28. 26 Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (University Park: Penn State Press, 2005), p. xxii. 27 [“Wanderstraßen der Kultur”]. Warburg used this expression for the first time in a letter to his former student Fritz Saxl in 1928. See Aby M. Warburg and Fritz Saxl, Wanderstraßen der Kultur: Die Aby Warburg-Fritz Saxl Korrespondenz 1920 bis 1929, ed. by Dorothea McEwan (Hamburg: Dölling & Galitz, 2004). 28 For Warburg’s famous lecture on the serpent ritual of the Hopi Indians and its cultural implications, see Sigrid Weigel, Jeremy Gaines and Rebecca Wallach, ‘Aby Warburg‘s Schlangenritual: Reading Culture and Reading Written Texts’, in: New German Critique, Issue 65, April 1 (1995), pp. 135-153. 29 Gombrich, Aby Warburg - An Intellectual Biography, p. 283.

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thousand photographs and images.30 Afterwards, Warburg’s contribution to Visual and Cultural Studies fell into oblivion for almost 50 years and the momentum of his rediscovery has been slow. In 1970, Theodor W. Adorno pleaded for a scientific revitalisation of Warburg’s methodology when stating that tracing aesthetic forms back to contents, such as the Warburg Institute undertook to do by following the afterlife of classical antiquity, deserves to be more broadly undertaken.31

Furthermore, Adorno stressed the fact that artefacts do not acquire their function and signification per se, but rely on the immanent dynamics between a work of art’s content and a work of art’s afterlife. Their “truth content”, therefore, might reveal itself only in later eras through an intricate process of appropriation, interpretation and transformation.32 In keeping with Warburg’s terminology and along the lines of Adorno’s approach, I have created the term historiogram, a neologism denoting a hypothetical means, whose function is to provide storage for historical critical discourse, and whose historical memory traces display the inherent capacity of influencing and storing certain ideas, as well as transmitting them under altered circumstances in later epochs. As Adorno pointed out in his seminal study Aesthetic Theory: However, if finished works only become what they are because their being is a process of becoming, they are in turn dependent on forms in which their process crystallizes: interpretation, commentary, and critique. These are not simply brought to bear on works by those who concern themselves with them, and thus they are forms in their own right. They serve the truth content of works as something that goes beyond them, which separates this truth content - the task of critique - from elements of its untruth.33

Historiograms can be made up of the truth content inherent in works of art as well as their circulating exaggerations, distortions, and stereotypes, in short, their myth in the Barthesian sense.34 They capture the crystallised discourse of a specific period in time, might resurface in later epochs and 30

Loc. cit. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 5. 32 Loc. cit. p. 194. 33 Loc. cit. [my italics]. 34 For Roland Barthes’ definitions of myth and discourse, see chapter II.1.3. 31

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are, to a certain extent, recharged by the inextricable links between myth, as a disseminator of ideas, and logos, as a critical historical analysis. These historiograms can be described with the help of associations of cultural practices and traditions, which become linked with specific new ideas. Considering Dante as a divinely ordained author, for example, represents a vital historiogram of the 14th century, which renewed the antique concept of the poeta vates. Most features of the mental and visual images discussed in this study are based on intermedial transformations and visual adaptations of Dante and his work, which had been constructed out of such historiograms of the Florentine poet. “And it is here that the famous example of the portrait of Dante comes conveniently to hand”,35 as Didi-Huberman states in his discussion of Giotto’s supposedly natural and true-to-life portrait of the poet: What happened was this: a commonplace was, if not invented, then at least firmly anchored for quite some time in all our minds, we who look first as ‘humanists’ at the great Western art of portraiture. [...] It heavily conditions the vision [...], such a commonplace is of course not without pertinence, for it finds precise and detailed expression everywhere.36

In order to provide a fruitful modus operandi for Cultural and Visual Studies, the analysis of visual images must first demystify these commonplaces and mystifications involved in the process of their emergence, and, in a second step, reveal the historiograms at their basis. Following the logic of Gadamer, it is not until “myth is conquered by logos”37 that the analysis of historiograms and visual images can expose the ideologies, the prevailing ideas, and “the psychological fabric of their period and of its dominant mental states and attitudes”.38 Analysing these historiograms, therefore, comprises the exploration of artworks’ “own dynamic, their immanent historicity” as an unfaltering dialectic of myth and logos.39 It is the task of literary criticism to dissolve the discrepancy between myth and logos, to determine the moments of falsehood, i.e. myth, in the Barthesian sense, or untruth, along the lines of Adorno, and to 35

Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, p. 221. Loc. cit. 37 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode – Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1975), p. 278. [“Die Überwindung des Mythos durch den Logos”]. 38 Gombrich, Aby Warburg - An Intellectual Biography, p. 127. 39 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 5. 36

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expose them for each historical period. It is a fact that “even the most sublime artwork takes up a determinate attitude to empirical reality by stepping outside the constraining spell it casts”, as Adorno notes, “not once and for all, but rather ever and again, concretely, unconsciously polemical toward this spell at each historical moment”.40 Here, Adorno’s definition of the historicity of artwork bears striking resemblances to Antonio Gramsci’s premise that all intellectual and cultural work is fundamentally political, and, as a consequence, art is related to the ideologies, that is the prevailing ideas, beliefs, and values of the culture in which it was produced.41 Hence, there is some ground for taking on board the idea that, by analysing historiograms and the mental and visual images they construct, we can enhance our understanding of the culture and the period of history which witnessed their emergence. In Dante’s case, the visual and mental image of the Florentine as it had been fixed by his early biographers represents such a historical memory trace, an historiogram, which influenced the subsequent reception of the poet and resurfaced periodically in later epochs. More often than not, these historiograms take up antique models of discourse and representation and adapt them for their own purposes. Such an idea of recurring historiograms lies also at the heart of the exploration of Dantean visualisations with the help of iconographical and structuralist analytical tools. Here Warburg’s approach lends itself to the study of Dante’s iconography, since Warburg’s main intention was to analyse “images whose meanings change, yet continue to resonate with their original texts”.42 The study of historiograms, as well as Warburg’s pathos formulae, will enable us to cast an intriguing new light on Dantean visualisations and endow them with a broader significance. Historiograms are the condensed written discourse of a certain period or a certain era about Dante, which complement Warburg’s engrammatic pathos formulae. While the latter only relate to the visual representation of Dante and make up the visual image by harking back to well-established forms of visual representation, historiograms influence both mental and visual images alike. Warburg’s focus on accessories in motion, on body movement and gestures translates certain aspects of Dante’s image from the written word

40

Loc. cit. For Gramsci’s influential cultural criticism see: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971). 42 Art History as Cultural History, p. 2. 41

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into a visual form and sheds light on the intricate process of creating and fixing a recognisable icon of the author under discussion. In particular, in the early manuscript tradition “the medieval body was central to a process of social classification”,43 and the analysis of the visual image might yield interesting results in the evolution of Dante’s social persona, his literary authority and his cultural precedence. In a second step, the analysed historiograms, Warburg’s pathos formulae and their intermedial appropriation might help elucidate the productive use of Dante’s mental and visual images in British literary and visual art, and show how they resonate in the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, T. S. Eliot, and Tom Phillips. Given the vast interest in the evocative capacity of artistic objectivations and the recurrent resurfacing of everyday cultural practices, we can detect a striking affinity between Warburg and the field of study commonly referred to as New Historicism or Cultural Materialism. There are a number of parallels between Warburg’s iconic memory, his engrammatic pathos formulae as well as his mnemic energy stores and the practices of New Historicist analyses. Among them, is an intermedial and intertextual approach to the analysis of culture, the predilection of the Renaissance period for scientific research, and the inclusion of everyday culture and rituals into the interdisciplinary examination of a certain period. In particular, the term social energy, introduced by Stephen Greenblatt into the field of Cultural Studies, bears a striking resemblance to certain aspects of Warburg’s pathos formulae. With reference to the theatre practices in the early modern period, Greenblatt argues that “through its representational means, each play carries charges of social energy onto the stage; the stage in its turn revises that energy and returns it to the audience”.44 The social energy displayed, therefore, functions as an engrammatic catalyser, which is fuelled by the emotion or the superlative of expression represented by an authority. One might think of Shylock’s greed or Richard III’s ignominy as such energetic driving forces. As Greenblatt states: 43

Roberta Gilchrist, ‘Medieval bodies in the material world: gender, stigma and the body’, in: Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. by Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 43-61, p. 44. 44 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations - The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 14.

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Elizabethan playing companies contrived to absorb, refashion, and exploit some of the fundamental energies of a political authority that was itself already committed to histrionic display and hence was ripe for appropriation.45

The metaphorical use of refashioning energies inevitably echoes Warburg’s detailed study of accessories in motion such as drapes, hair, or gowns, which become redressed with energy under altered historical circumstances. Interestingly, Warburg often traced the pathos formulae originating in ancient pagan rituals and reappearing in Renaissance Christian art. In New Historicist analysis it is often the other way around: the social energy set free by the loss of Catholic rituals, such as the use of exorcism, for example, found its way into artistic production.46 Hence, both analyse the social and psychological energy store and its recurrent manifestation under new social and cultural circumstances. As Nigel Jonathan Spivey poignantly put it: “A pagan frenzy of delight could serve as a pattern for a Christian frenzy of grief: for the expressive impact, the frenzy is what counts”.47 To a certain extent this might explain the cultural longevity of New Historicist theory as well as Warburg’s pathos formulae, whose recurrent cultural engrams and display of social energy function as constituents of an epoch’s iconic and social memory. Ultimately, both concepts aim at gaining “insight into the half-hidden cultural transactions through which great works of art are empowered”,48 and into the formation of an epoch’s cultural self-identity. A long time before Jan Assmann’s concept of Cultural Memory, Aby Warburg had coined the term iconic memory with regard to the cultural level of memory.49 Warburg’s ultimate goal, the unaccomplished Mnemosyne project, aimed at the depiction of the iconic memory of the Western world. He was the first historian to treat images, that is, cultural objectivations, as time-transgressing carriers of memory. The concept of Warburg’s pathos formulae has been further elaborated on by Warburg’s

45

Loc. cit. p. 40. See, in particular, Greenblatt’s chapter on ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, in: Shakespearean Negotiations, pp. 94-128. 47 Nigel Jonathan Spivey, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude (Berkeley: University of California Press 2001), p. 119. 48 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 4. 49 On the theoretical concept of Cultural Memory, see Jan Assmann, ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, trans. by John Czaplicka, in: New German Critique, Issue 65, April 1 (1995), pp. 125-33. 46

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fellow scholars Ernst H. Gombrich and Erich Panofsky, whose work will be addressed in the following chapter. In conclusion, one might say that Warburg’s all-encompassing, interdisciplinary approach to analyse works of art and to perpetuate the social and cultural sphere of their emergence secured his iconological methods a predominant position in the methodology of art history as well as in the methodology of Visual and Cultural Studies, which increasing numbers of contemporary scholars have come to realise.50

II.1.3 Iconology, Structuralism and the Visual turn The so-called visual turn in the humanities has taught us that images acquire, carry and ultimately change meaning according to the cultures in which they are produced and received.51 Criticism has been levied against the primacy of the written word over the visual image, hence, the recovery and rehabilitation of visualisations as cultural artefacts in the humanities.52 The British cultural historian, Peter Burke, even claimed that visual images have played a vital part in the cultural construction of society, and

50 For a discussion of the history of visual methodology, see Ikonographie und Ikonologie. Theorien - Entwicklung - Probleme. Bildende Kunst als Zeichensystem, ed. by Ekkehard Kaemmerling (Köln: Dumont Buchverlag 1979), and Margarita Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual After the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005). 51 The term visual turn alludes to the linguistic turn of the 1960s and is used here as a generic term for a variety of concepts emerging in the early 1990s, namely the imagic turn, described by Ferdinand Fellmann in 1991, W. J. T. Mitchell’s pictorial turn, which is discussed in the next footnote, and the iconic turn, expounded by Gottfried Boehm in 1994. As a common denominator, they all share a critical approach towards the primacy of the written word and strive for a cultural and social reassessment of visual images. See Ferdinand Fellmann, ‘Innere Bilder im Licht des imagic turn’, in: Bilder im Geiste: zur kognitiven und erkenntnistheoretischen Funktion piktorialer Repräsentationen, ed. by Klaus Sachs-Hombach (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 21-38, and Christoph Asmuth, Bilder über Bilder, Bilder ohne Bilder. Eine neue Theorie der Bildlichkeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2011). 52 On the imperialism of language, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), p. 43, and E. B. Gilman, ‘Interart Studies and the “Imperialism of Language”’, in: Poetics Today, 10 (1989), pp. 5-30. See also, W. J. T. Mitchell’s discussion of the pictorial turn in: Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 11-34.

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thus the study of certain pictures often represents the key to unlocking central aspects of a period’s cultural discourse.53 When applying a visual approach to research, scholars inevitably refer to the Warburg school and, in particular, to Erwin Panofsky’s ideas on iconological interpretation in art history, an elaboration of Aby Warburg’s pathos formulae described in the previous chapters.54 Panofsky drew a basic distinction between iconography, which concerns itself with the subject matter of works of art, and the study of their intrinsic meaning, which he termed iconology. This intrinsic meaning or content is comprehended by ascertaining, under varying historical conditions, the general and essential tendencies of the human mind [...] expressed by specific themes and concepts [...]; [by] documents bearing witness to the political, poetical, religious, philosophical, and social tendencies of the personality, period or country under investigation.55

Panofsky’s definition of intrinsic meaning echoes Warburg’s concept, which also aimed at the description of the “psychological fabric of [a certain] period and of its dominant mental states and attitudes”.56 Therefore, a work of art has the potential to reveal its cultural significance to us on close scrutiny. To a certain extent, it seems that postmodern theory has come full circle, since Panofsky’s iconological interpretation is not far from Roland Barthes’ later semiological system. In order to study “significations apart from their content”, Barthes took on board semiological ideas and terminology, in particular Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole.57 In addition, he elaborates on the Saussurean theory of a sign being made up of the signifier, usually an acoustic image, and the 53

See, in particular, the chapters ‘Material Culture through Images’ and ‘Views of Society’ in: Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing - the use of images as historical evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), pp. 81-122. 54 See Erwin Panofksy, ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art’, in: Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), pp. 26-54. 55 Loc. cit. p. 39. 56 Gombrich, Aby Warburg - An Intellectual Biography, p. 127. 57 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Cape, 1967), p.11. Interestingly, Panofsky was termed the ‘Saussure of Art History’.

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signified, the element a sign represents. He argues, therefore, that myth is a “second-order semiological system” in as much as a sign in the Saussurean sense becomes a mere signifier in the Barthesian sense, as soon as the original sign is “caught by myth”.58 Crucial to the understanding of Barthes’ theory is his definition of myth as a mode of signification. Unlike the usual definition of a sign, which is made up of content and form, myth has lost its content and becomes a mere form charged with different or altered meaning. In this process of conversion, discourse represents its most common vehicle of dissemination. The concept of historiograms described in the previous chapters presumes that the historical discourse on Dante, his critical reception as well as his gradual mystification, forms a historical memory trace, a socalled historiogram, which influences all subsequent mental and visual images of the poet. In particular, the iconic quality of Dante deserves further attention. Here it is expedient to look at a definition offered by Klaus Rieser: icons constitute an attempt to focus and anchor the sliding of signification [...] They are, in short, a central element in the manufacturing of consent. Through their employment, the underlying relationships of historical processes are hidden from our perception; instead, we build our understanding of the world on (mass mediated) appearances.59

Icons, therefore, establish a community’s shared common denominator of meaning and understanding, while, at the same time, an icon’s larger-thanlife shadow obscures the historical processes at work during an icon’s emergence and evolution. Such a historical process relates to Adorno’s historicity of cultural objectivations, or, in this case, of well-established icons, and Adorno’s pledge to analyse these respective historical processes. Similarly, modern visual methodology promotes the study of the signifier, signified, and myth as a mode of signification in order to decipher the meaning or truth content of visual images and their respective 58

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1973), p. 109. 59 Klaus Rieser, ‘Icons as a Discursive Practice’, in: US Icons and Iconicity, ed. by Walter W. Hölbling, Klaus Rieser and Susanne Rieser (Wien: Lit Verlag, 2006), p. 9.

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cultural discourse. On these grounds, the concept of historiograms might be a useful tool for the dissolution of myth and logos and, ultimately, for the analysis of visualisations and the use of pictures in different media. The pervasive influence of images on culture today demands an overarching grand design of study. Bernd Herzogenrath states that “the ever-expanding and heterogeneous field of intermediality and visual studies has grown to be one of the most vital and invigorating developments within the humanities today”.60 Therefore, he affirms that “today, more than ever, in the light of these ongoing interactive (and intermedial) processes, cultural studies [...] are challenged to restructure and recognize themselves as media studies”.61 The fact that Dante’s gradual appropriation in Britain went pari passu with a change in medium is often neglected, but will be shown to be essential for Dante’s cultural sustainability and his global reception. To a large extent, the change of medium rescued Dante from oblivion and secured him and his work eternal longevity. If Marshall McLuhan defined media as the “extensions of man”,62 in Dante's case, the use of different media led to the extension of the author Dante Alighieri, because it enhanced, transformed and secured his fame on a large scale by creating an iconic figure. Such an analysis, of course, not only calls for the use of visual methodologies, but also for an intermedial approach to the analysis of Dante’s reception and his appropriation in Britain. It is no coincidence that Dante’s resurrection during the Romantic period should coincide with the rise of the concept of intermedial art, largely epitomized by Richard Wagner’s seminal idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk.63 In fact, the invention of the term intermedia is generally attributed to one of the most prominent Romantics and, even more so, a true connoisseur of Dante’s work: Samuel Taylor Coleridge.64 Historically, the term was often employed to denote a 60

Travels in Intermedia[lity] - Reblurring the boundaries, p. 2. Loc. cit. 62 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). 63 On the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk see Jack Stein, Richard Wagner and the Synthesis of the Arts (Westport: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1973), p. 151. 64 Coleridge first applied this term to his theory of narrative allegory. However, throughout his work he elaborated on the idea of medial interdependency. See Dick Higgins, Horizons - The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 23, and Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. by T. M. Raysor (Folcroft, P. A.: The Folcroft Press, 1936), p. 33. 61

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“revolutionary and utopian attitude regarding the triumph over ‘monomedia’ as a social liberation”.65 Such a synthetic form of intermediality “functions to break up habitualized forms of perception” and creates a “refreshing and invigorating, regenerating shift in one's own horizons”.66 This perception of the fusion of different media, originating in Wagner’s and Coleridge’s transmedial approaches in the 19th century, found its most prominent advocate in the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins one hundred years later.67 Taking into account these examples of intermediality, how can we define this term and what are the criteria that can be used for the analysis of a work of art? A short glance into the history of this term will shed light on the ways it can be used today. In the following section, the macrostructure of theories and concepts described above will be further expounded upon with the help of historical and contemporary examples while exploring a set of instruments for visual, intertextual and intermedial analysis.

II.2 Connecting the visible with the legible II.2.1 Images, icons, iconotexts Before we can begin a thorough intermedial analysis we have to clarify one essential question: what is an image and how can we define it? An illuminating taxonomy can be found in W. J. T. Mitchell’s seminal essay on images.68 In it, Mitchell distinguishes between graphical, optical, perceptual, mental, and linguistic images. It is striking that his definitions oscillate between the abstract and the concrete. An example for a graphical image would be a drawing, whereas linguistic images are metaphors or descriptions. Mitchell’s definition also oscillates between different media, since linguistic images refer to textual sources, while graphical, optical and perceptual images strictly adhere to visualisations. In a further step, Mitchell blurs the boundaries between textual sources and visual images when he defines words as the images of an idea, and ideas as images of things. Nonetheless, for our purpose we can utilise his distinction between objective and materialistic images such as drawings, pictures or portraits

65

Schröter, 'Four Models of Intermediality', p. 16. Loc. cit. p. 17. 67 Higgins, Horizons - The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. 68 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘What is an Image?’, in: New Literary History, vol. 15, No. 3, Image/Imago/Imagination, Spring (1984), pp. 503-37. 66

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on the one hand, the visual image, and subjective and mental images such as written abstractions, metaphors or distortions, on the other. In terms of theoretical description, we can refer to Dante’s mental and visual images, which are linked with myth in the Barthesian sense and Adorno’s truth content. They both make up the concept of historiograms described above, and their truth content has to be perpetually explored. A further important definition for this analysis refers to the term allegory. Its origins are found in the Greek word allegoria which means ‘veiled, figurative language’. As a literary or rhetorical device, it can be defined as an extended metaphor. Linguistically speaking, it constitutes a form of displacement, in which the signifiers become exchanged and the exchanged signification is extended or sustained several times. Etymologically, the Greek word metaphorá denotes a ‘transfer’ and underlines such an exchange of signification.69 An allegory serves to illustrate complex ideas and concepts and conveys meaning through symbolic figures or images, which often represent an abstract idea. In this analysis of Dante, it is argued that the Florentine poet himself becomes an allegory, a symbolic figure representing the idea of moral integrity and literary authority. Moreover, throughout this analysis, allegory and symbolism are also used as stylistic devices relating to the process of representation itself, in which symbolism marks a literary device setting up the allegory of a text: the “dark wood” (Inf. 1, l. 2), for example, is a symbolic device, which stands for the erratic state of the soul, or of mankind, whereas the allegory inherent in the Commedia refers to the overall representation of Dante’s poem as a constant path of purgation.70 Thus, all the symbols of a text become connected and form an allencompassing allegory. In this manner, allegories help create, express and illustrate the moral or political meaning of a message, with the most famous example being the Cave allegory in Plato’s Republic.71 Since the understanding of metaphors, and consequently, of allegories, heavily relies on the capacity to decipher their underlying exchange of signifiers, such an understanding has roots in the collective or conventional use of the signifiers at work. However, this convention is extended so that the

69

Jürgen Link, Literaturwissenschaftliche Grundbegriffe: Eine programmierte Einführung auf strukturalistischer Basis (Munich: Fink, 1974), p. 149. 70 Dante himself suggested the allegorical reading of his poem. 71 Plato, The Republic, ed. by Giovanni R. F. Ferrari, trans. by Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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metaphors or allegories form a reality of their own: the shadows in Plato’s Cave allegory, for example, refer to the conventional use of the shadow cast by figures or objects standing in front of a source of light. In addition to this, the shadows help illustrate Plato’s theory of forms, in which forms or ideas constitute the real knowledge, and not the material world experienced by the senses. The mere sensory awareness of the material world is signified by the shadows reflected on the cave wall, while the real forms and ideas are puppets and figures passing between the fire and behind the prisoners’ backs, who stare, fixated, at the wall. Therefore, the allegory helps visualise the dichotomy between real knowledge and true understanding as opposed to merely apparitional or unreal knowledge. When read in this light, such an act of understanding and deciphering ‘veiled language’ comprises both the visual and the cognitive, and makes them particularly interesting for visual studies, since the visual becomes a constitutive component of decipherment and the understanding of the exchange of signification. Allegory, therefore, is an intermedial device per se, since it often draws on a visual exchange of signification. In the statement ‘He is a lion and tears his enemies apart’, which represents an extended metaphor, we imagine the subject as a strong man doing away with his enemies with a leonine roar. Thereby the visual and the written intersect, because the written aspect of this sentence is accompanied by the sensory imagination and the pictorial representation.72 In the course of Dante’s reception, the depiction of Dante has acquired an almost iconic status, but what exactly does the term icon denote? Icon stems from the Greek word for image, İȚțȦȞ, and denotes a symbol. Furthermore, an icon can be regarded as a special form of allegory. As already mentioned in the previous chapter, icons are “a central element in the manufacturing of consent”.73 They establish a community’s shared understanding by representing “symbols of popular identities and interests”.74 This can lead to the negative usage of icons as “tools of dominant groups to control [...] the interests of the mass of people”, or the establishment of “democratic elements in the media age”, which help strengthen and symbolise shared values and beliefs.75 In 72

T. S. Eliot defined allegory as the one universal tool of a great poet. See chapter V.1.2. 73 Rieser, ‘Icons as a Discursive Practice’, p. 9. 74 Loc. cit. p. 8. 75 Loc. cit. Note that here Rieser harks back to Michel Foucault’s seminal discourse analysis.

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Dante’s case, we can detect such an iconic moral and auctorial status, which was acquired by the manifold attributes cast upon the Florentine poet over the course of his appropriation, and confirmed by the visual image of his outward appearance. However, such an iconic status blocks out the inherent historicity of every larger-than-life icon and raises a number of significant questions. Pugh and Weisl have drawn attention to the fact that to declare that Dante registers as an icon of the Middle Ages is itself an interpretative statement, for it reduces a complex human being and acclaimed literary genius into a symbol of his era. Furthermore, to argue that Dante is stripped of a particular meaning when he is deployed as an icon implies, at least somewhat, that he should signify in a particular manner and that if he were used properly, he would signify differently.76

Despite such interpretative shortcomings of icons in general, and the iconic Dante in particular, icons communicate instantly through their visual image. Ultimately, “Dante’s iconic status reveals the motivations of the person who cites his name more than any inherent truth about Dante, literature, or the Middle Ages”.77 Icons, therefore, always function within a framework of semantic reduction and historical shortening. Peter Wagner defined iconotexts as “the appropriations of images by texts”.78 These appropriations can be either literary or critical texts. In this analysis, such an appropriation can also be the textual description of Dante’s visual image, with one of the most significant examples being Boccaccio’s elucidation of Dante’s physiognomy in his Trattatello in laude di Dante. Furthermore, iconotexts can be captions or titles of pictures referring to Dante and the Divina Commedia, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s inscriptions used for his treatment of Dantean subjects, or Tom Phillips’ talking footnotes, which serve as innovative iconotexts commenting on both Dante’s text and Phillips’ visual adaptation.79 After defining the terms image, icon, allegory, and iconotext for our purposes, the next chapter will provide an overview of the development of intermediality and will cite examples of historical intertexts.

76

Pugh and Weisl, Medievalisms - Making the Past in the Present, p. 13. Loc. cit. p. 14. 78 Icons – Texts – Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality, ed. by Peter Wagner (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), p. 10. 79 Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s and Tom Phillips’ use of iconotexts will be discussed in chapters IV and VI, respectively. 77

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II.2.2 Historical intertexts and the origins of intermediality In his unfinished treatise, De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante states that “poetry is nothing but rhetorical fiction composed in a musical fashion”.80 Barbara Reynolds interprets Dante’s dictum in her seminal biography on the Florentine and concludes that “it is clear that the musical setting is the first consideration” when Dante describes poetry and poetic structure, since “it is possible that Dante, while composing a canzone, had a melody in his head, or that indeed he sang as he worked”.81 What Dante’s statement and Reynold’s interpretation imply is the notion that different art forms intersect and inspire each other. Furthermore, inklings of an even older source of the same idea can also be heard, since the origin of intermediality can be traced back as far as Greek antiquity: in Plutarch’s Moralia, we find Simonides’ famous statement that “painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks”.82 After Dante’s lifetime, during the Renaissance period, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno revived this seminal idea and enhanced the concept of interdependent art forms in his book De Imaginum, Signorum & Idearum Compositione, published in 1591. In this work, he claimed the affinity of music, poetry, painting and philosophy, for true philosophy, music or poetry is also painting, and true painting is also music and philosophy, and true poetry or music is a kind of divine wisdom and painting.83

Bruno further expounds on his theory of the interweaving of arts, since the painter can be considered “an establisher of infinite images”, who constantly combines sights, sounds and images “in a multiplicity of ways”.84 As these historical examples illustrate, the concept of intermediality always refers to 80 Dante Alighieri, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and trans. by Steven Botterill, II, 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p 2. [“poesi[s] [...] nihil aliud est quam fictio rhetorica in musica composita”]. 81 Reynolds, Dante - The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man, p. 59. Note that already, Boccaccio had argued that Dante “took great pleasure in sounds and songs in his youth”. Boccaccio, Trattatello, p. 159. [“si dilettò in suoni e in canti nella sua giovinezza”]. 82 Plutarch, Moralia (“De Gloria Athenensium”), vol. 4 (London: Loeb Classics Library, 1936), p. 501. 83 Giordano Bruno, On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas (New York: Willis, Locker & Owens, 1991), p. 129. 84 Loc. cit.

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a sort of bridging between different media.85 All of these examples share, as a common denominator, the idea that specific characteristics of an art form or a medium can be transferred to another art form or medium. In the case of Simonides, a picture has the potential to capture the beauty of spoken lines with brush and colour, and vice versa. In the case of Dante, poetry and music share the same compositional elements such as rhythm, rhyme, and metre. In the case of Giordano Bruno, there is the pantheistic idea of divine wit which pervades all true art, no matter which form it is in. Although the notion that all media are one has often been entertained at particular points in cultural history, as the examples of Simonides, Dante and Bruno show, the term intermediality today is “as varied as are the discourses in which it is being produced”.86 The question of which medium dominates over the other(s) can only be addressed historically and has to account for the unbalanced relationship between the written word and all other media: we can only theorize and describe using the help of texts, which inevitably leads to the preference of writing over, for example, painting to describe scientific research. This observation is strongly connected with Jacques Derrida and his critical analysis of the logocentrism of Western science and philosophy.87 Such a discussion would certainly go far beyond the scope of this study. Nonetheless, to a certain extent, Michel Foucault’s coinage of the phrase the "non-place of language"88 also holds true for the description of images, which in itself constitutes an oxymoronic endeavour, since we are inevitably forced to refer to written descriptions of visual artefacts and favour iconotexts over iconic images. 85

There were, however, attempts to narrow down the number of media involved in an intermedial process, particularly at the beginning of intermedial studies. Hansen-Löve, for example, promotes the analysis of intermedial relations exclusively between literature and visual arts. See Aage A. Hansen-Löve, ‘Intermedialität und Intertextualität. Probleme der Korrelation von Wort- und Bildkunst - Am Beispiel der russischen Moderne’, in: Dialog der Texte. Hamburger Kolloquium zur Intertextualität, ed. by Wolf Schmid and Wolf-Dieter Stempel (Wien: Gesellschaft zur Förderung slawistischer Studien, 1983), pp. 291360. Schröter, however, describes four different types of intermediality, which follow formal and structural criteria and embrace all types of media. See footnote 79. 86 Schröter, 'Four Models of Intermediality', p. 31. 87 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1967). 88 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, ed. by R. D. Laing (London: Tavistock, 1977), p. xvi.

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II.2.3 Primacy of Poetry: The Laocoon debate in the 18th/19th century During the Age of Reformation, it was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing who addressed the question of intermediality by opposing various art forms and claiming the primacy of poetry over sculpture.89 The observation of the antique statue Laocoon, which Nigel Spivey calls “the prototypical icon of human agony” in Western culture,90 served as a foil upon which Lessing expounded his theory of art.91 His analysis of Greek and Roman art had led him to believe that beauty formed the vanishing point of artistic creation, which dominates any process of artistic production. Since that work of art was supposed to represent a moment of intense pain and ferocity, and thus the very opposite of beauty and harmony, the scream had to become a subdued sigh, since this was the only way to prevent Laocoon’s facial expression from becoming distorted and deformed, and thereby failing to adhere to the governing principle of beauty described above. Such a depiction of extreme emotion corresponds to Warburg’s concept of pathos formulae and captures a superlative of human expression. Moreover, a second important aspect of figural representation comes into play; the moment that is captured in a work of art has to be chosen carefully, since it must leave room for thought and imagination. When observing the Laocoon statue, the mind recalls the story of Laocoon and the imagination can fill in the blanks of Laocoon’s fate. Had Laocoon been depicted as a priest, screaming in pain, no observer would have had the chance to imagine the ending of the story. Thus, the transitory moment becomes of the utmost importance in figural art, since the spectator has to see the most decisive moment of a story. It is understood that Lessing expects the spectator of figural art to already know the ancient tale of Laocoon. This way, he is able to mentally reconstruct Sophocles’ or Vergil’s version of the story while observing the sculpture. In sum, a work of art delivers the blueprint of a story, while the specifics must be filled in 89

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, ed. by Friedrich Vollhardt (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012). For Lessing’s pervasive influence on aesthetics and art, see H.B. Nisbet, German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 55-134. 90 Spivey, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude, p. 25. 91 The fate of the Trojan priest Laocoon had been the subject of a lost tragedy by Sophocles and was also mentioned in Vergil’s Aeneid. The life-sized statue, Laocoon and His Sons, was rediscovered in Rome in 1506 and shows Laocoon and his sons struggling with death while being attacked by sea serpents.

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by the recipient’s mind. Lessing goes on to compare Vergil’s verses on Laocoon with the rediscovered sculpture and reaches the conclusion that the poetic description must have preceded the artistic production. From his point of view, the most decisive difference between poetry and figural art is their relation to time. Poetry can only use a limited number of adjectives to describe an event or a person; a picture, by contrast, can fully represent an event or a person due to the co-existence of epithets in figural art.92 In reverse, poetry can capture an event or a plot using a limited number of words, whereas a number of pictures or sculptures would be needed in order to adequately portray a succession of events in figural art. In Lessing’s case, there is the conviction that certain art forms prevail over others, even though they are granted the potential to treat a subject adequately and to influence each other. Warburg used Lessing’s debate as a starting point for his own observations and noted that “poetry, which proceeds in time, can describe change and transience; visual signs are forever fixed and are thus only suited to the representation of the relatively immobile”.93 Moreover, it seems that, to a certain degree, “the aesthetic of tragic pathos in the late Romantics”, as epitomised by Laocoon’s fate, “aided Warburg in his revolutionary formulation of anthropological - and psychic - ‘adhesion’ of the primitive in the historical present of images”.94 Today, of course, the Laocoon debate seems to be a mere anachronistic footnote in the field of Visual and Cultural Studies. However, for the first time, the debate addressed questions of intermediality and opposed different media and their effects in the process of artistic creation. As chapter IV.2 will show, we can still find echoes of this debate in the treatment of Dantean subjects in their British transformations.

II.2.4 Structural intertexts and the limits of intermediality In the context of this analysis, the term intermediality can be understood as an extension of Julia Kristeva’s definition of intertextuality as “a passage from one sign system to another”,95 while the sign system invariably 92

Lessing uses the metaphor of a “squint-eyed sense” [“schielender Sinn”], if a noun is surrounded by too many epithets. Here, Lessing harks back to Homer, who tended to use only one adjective to describe a noun, quoting him as a shining example to follow and pinpointing the limits of poetry in its limited use of epithets. See chapter 21 of Laocoon. 93 Gombrich, Aby Warburg - An Intellectual Biography, p. 44. 94 Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, p. xxiii. 95 Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), p. 59. [“un passage d’un système de signes à un autre”].

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consists of signs used in, and transferred to, different media. If the cruelty of Dante’s Ugolino canto is transposed to canvas, such a passage from one medium to another has been completed. For our purpose, we can determine that an intermedial relationship is established if a sign or signs used in one medium or in one art form are converted to another medium or art form. The basic problem at the heart of any intermedial analysis consists of the fact that written descriptions of visualisations are simultaneously interpretations. Panofsky was already aware of this analytical Gordian knot without being able to untangle it completely.96 The following analytical concept tries to integrate a number of theories while at the same time allowing for the insoluble intricacy involved. Further questions raised when analysing such a passage refer to the degree of imitation, influence and integration of the work of art under discussion, its possible transformations, as well as its altered reception aesthetics. The latter deserves particular attention, since such an intermedial juxtaposition opens up new possibilities of experiencing a work of art. Here, intertextual theory is only of limited use, since it focuses primarily on the relationship between texts without looking at the recipient. There are, however, certain features of intertextual theory which prove to be expedient when analysing intermediality: Gérard Genette’s “transtextualité” elaborates on Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality and offers a number of terms, which can also be applied to the study of intermedial relationships between different media or art forms.97 Genette suggests the term “paratextualité” to denote elements such as title, subtitle, preface, illustrations and epigraphs.98 These paratexts can also be analysed from an intermedial perspective to assess the degree of imitation, influence or integration of a particular work of art. Moreover, the term “hypertextualité” explains a relationship between two texts, with text B transforming text A without commenting or elaborating

96 Panofsky addressed the problem of describing images with words in a lecture given in 1931, which was published one year later. See Erwin Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst’, in: Logos, 21 (1932), pp. 103-19. The lecture was reprinted in: Erwin Panofsky, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. by Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen (Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1964). For a critical assessment of Panofsky’s essay, also see Peter Schmidt, Aby M. Warburg und die Ikonologie (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993), pp. 13-20. 97 Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982), p. 7. 98 Loc. cit.

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on it.99 Such a hypertextual relation applies to visual images, which completely transform ideas originally taken from their source text, but what makes a work of art or a medium, a medium? An accepted definition for medium considers it a mere form, which essentially contains information. Without information, it would not be, by definition, a medium.100 In order to decode the information the recipient has to make use of socio-culturally defined rules and conventions as well as the common code or terminology involved in deciphering the particular medium.101 A portrait of Dante, for example, might therefore only be fully understood if we take into account the socio-cultural background of its creation and its reception as well as its iconological information.

II.2.5 Assessing intermediality In the previous chapter, we defined an intermedial relationship between two works of art as the passage from one sign system to a different one. If a canto of Dante represents the basis of a painting, we can therefore detect and analyse such an intermedial relationship. If, however, a painting refers to another painting, the sign system does not change and we can only speak of an interrelated reference instead.102 Such a distinction becomes necessary particularly when looking at the vast amount of British paintings treating the same Dantean subject, so that we can speak of prototypical depictions or iconographical clusters and their successors. They share the same source - usually one canto of the Commedia - so all of these visualisations form a hypertext, and their relationship is clearly interrelated. So far, we have defined the terminology we can apply to intertextual and intermedial analysis. Now, we have to define the criteria which make up intermediality and which assess its degree. Here, it is expedient to consider Manfred Pfister’s criteria for the analysis of intertextuality and to elaborate on certain aspects of this for our purposes.103 Furthermore, these aspects will be analysed against the 99

Loc. cit. Thomas Eicher, ‘Was heißt (hier) Intermedialität?’, in: Intermedialität: Vom Bild zum Text, ed. by Thomas Eicher and Ulf Bleeckman (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1994), pp. 11-28, p. 17. 101 Since Umberto Eco defined a code according to the conventionality of its signs, texts as well as images must contain legible or decipherable meaning. See Umberto Eco, Einführung in die Semiotik (Munich: Fink, 1972), p. 130. 102 See Eicher, ‘Was heißt (hier) Intermedialität?’, p. 18. 103 Manfred Pfister, ‘Konzepte der Intertextualität’, in: Intertextualität - Formen, Funktionen, anglistische Fallstudien, ed. by Ulrich Broich and Manfred Pfister 100

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backdrop of the intermedial discourse of the last 25 years as described by Schröter.104 Pfister claims that texts display a high degree of intertextuality if their pretexts are implicitly communicated to the recipients or even explicitly indicated by the author. The same criterion can be applied to assess an intermedial relationship if we analyse the paratextual elements of a work of art or study the recipients’ responses to it. The criterion of structurality denotes the degree of formal and structural imitation.105 Here, Pfister cites the examples of classical epics, adaptations, parodies and contrafactums. For obvious reasons this criterion cannot be translated in a ratio of 1:1 into intermedial terms, but, along the lines of Simonides and Dante, formal and technical aspects of representation can be analysed, which imitate distinctive features of the pretext or translate these features into a different medium. Schröter describes such a relationship as formal or trans-medial intermediality, in which “formal levels are separated from the material basis of the media”.106 In addition to this, narrativity, “fictionality, rhythmicity, [and] compositional strategies (of pictures, for example) [...] could also be regarded as possible cases of such transmedial structures”.107 I support the view that formal structures (such as narrative and compositional strategies) are not specific to one medium, but can be found - differently instantiated - in different media. The painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, for example, tried to reproduce the gloomy atmosphere in Ugolino’s dungeon with the use of dark, saturnine oil colours. Here, striking features of the pretext can be clearly identified and their rendering in the new medium can be accurately described. The criterion of selectivity refers to the significance of a reference, how well a quotation or a selected passage renders the original idea. Pfister argues that sometimes a carefully selected quotation can be akin to a pars pro toto and almost express the whole context of the original source. This holds particularly true for iconotexts, for example captions, which elucidate certain visualisations and establish a relationship between text and depiction. The last criterion is called dialogicity and denotes the field of tension set up by the use of a pretext and its integration into the new

(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1985), pp. 1-30. 104 Schröter, 'Four Models of Intermediality', p. 17. 105 Pfister, ‘Konzepte der Intertextualität’, p. 28. 106 Schröter, 'Four Models of Intermediality', p. 21. 107 Loc. cit. p. 22.

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medium. The more opposed they are semantically and ideologically, the more they communicate to each other. Therefore, a high degree of dialogicity is achieved if the new medium transforms the original context and sheds new light on it. This criterion is inextricably linked with the selectivity of a reference, because an intermedial dialogue can only be initiated if the new medium displays a meaningful adaptation of the pretext. Dialogicity also feeds into an iconological interpretation of a work of art, since the use of the pretext and its integration has to be analysed according to the cultural background in which it was created. Such an analysis may bear interesting results both for the pretext and its intermedial heirs. The criterion of dialogicity bears a striking resemblance to the so-called “transtextual motivation”, which “involves any appeal to conventions of other artworks, and hence it can be as varied as the historical circumstances allow”.108 Harking back to Kristin Thompson's neoformalist film analysis, Schröter explains that this term can be used to describe how an artefact is motivated by analysing its relation to canonical texts or blueprints and the genre-conventions it adheres to.109 Schröter also describes the so-called “transformational intermediality”, which denotes the exhibition of one medium by a further medium.110 In its simplest form, it is a mere representation of one medium in another, for example a photograph showing a written text. If, however, a medium’s “everyday, normal states of being are defamiliarized or transformed”, a medium can make “interesting inferences to the ‘selfconception’ of the presenting medium”.111 In Tom Phillips’ appropriation of Dante we will encounter several examples of transformational intermediality, since Phillips comments on Dante’s pretext in his talking footnotes and distorts the illuminated manuscripts of the Divina Commedia in his own visual works of art. In the same vein, drawing upon Genette’s theory of transtextuality, Liliane Louvel suggests the term transpictoriality, with the expression metapictoriality referring to “one system comment[ing] upon the other system”.112 The above-mentioned criteria for intermedial assessment are by no means exhaustive, yet they represent an abundant kit 108

Loc. cit. Loc. cit. For Thompson’s film analysis see Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 110 Schröter, 'Four Models of Intermediality', p. 26. 111 Loc. cit. pp. 26-7. 112 Liliane Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. by Karen Jacobs, trans. by Laurence Petit (Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2011), p. 56. 109

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of necessary tools to analyse the intermedial relationship between works of art. Pfister also suggests quantitative criteria such as frequency, range and number of used pretexts.113 These criteria will also be integrated in the analyses of depictions of Dantean subjects in chapters IV-VI of this analysis.

113

Pfister, ‘Konzepte der Intertextualität’, p. 30.

CHAPTER III DANTE’S MENTAL AND VISUAL IMAGES IN THE MANUSCRIPT TRADITION AND BEYOND (1321-1517)

III.1 In search of Dante III.1.1 Life and work - between authentic autoreferentiality and narrative self-consciousness Dante’s biography has to be approached with caution. Not only do we lack profound knowledge about the historical figure of Dante – neither manuscripts nor portraits carried out during his lifetime have survived – but we are also short of reliable data concerning his political and literary commitments.1 Such an “ignorance of most of the data of Dante’s life”, of course, “is no bar to the understanding of his works”, as Ezra Pound famously remarked.2 However, the absence of reliable data concerning Dante’s life invites readers and literary critics alike to confound the historical Dante and the personal narrator of the Divina Commedia. What we do know about the Florentine poet has indubitably been deduced from Dante’s own works and from his early (and rather biased) biographers, Giovanni Boccaccio and Leonardo Bruni, which makes it even more

1

See Frank-Rutger Hausmann, ‘Fast alles, was wir von Dante wissen, wissen wir von Dante: Plädoyer für einen kritischen Umgang mit Dantes Biographie’, in: Bright is the Ring of Words. Festschrift für Horst Weinstock zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. by Clausdirk Pollner, Helmut Rohlfing and Frank-Rutger Hausmann (Bonn: Romanistischer Verlag, 1996), pp. 109-125. See also Giuseppe Mazzotta, ‘Life of Dante’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. by Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1-13, and the chapter ‘Autobiography’ in: Dante - A Very Short Introduction, ed. by David Robey and Peter Hainsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 11-28. 2 Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1953), p. 118.

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important to prevent mixing the autobiographical with the biographical. Since Dante continually addresses his readers throughout his literary work and even suggests textual interpretations of his writings, for example, in his epistle to Cangrande della Scala, it is very likely that in his works Dante only revealed as much about himself as he wanted us to know.3 Thus Dante, the narrator and the protagonist of his poem, blurs the boundaries between his fictitious journey to the hereafter and his own path in life, and his “biography - his ‘history’ - is being used as a basis for the reading of his poetry”.4 From a literary point of view, the poem gains considerable authenticity and poetic force by doing so. The historical figure of Dante thereby is made the first to configure man, not as an abstract or anecdotal representative of an ethical type, but man in his living historical reality, the converted individual in his unity and wholeness.5

What this brings about is the inevitable interference of poetry and history. It becomes most clearly visible in the passages on exile in the Commedia. In Par. XVII the reader is addressed directly in the lines:

3

For Dante’s inclination to self-exegesis see Leo Spitzer, ‘The Addresses to the Reader in the Commedia’, in: Italica, vol. 32, No. 3, Sept. (1955), pp. 143-165, and Caesar, Dante – The Critical Heritage, pp. 1-3. See also chapter 4, ‘Autocommentary - Dividing Dante’, in: Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, pp. 175-228. In a letter to Cangrande della Scala, Dante expounded the fourfold exegesis - a typical tool for Biblical interpretation - as a means to understand the Divina Commedia. See Robert Hollander, Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 80-90. For the long tradition of scriptural interpretation and its application in Renaissance Italy see Simon Brittan, Poetry, Symbol, and Allegory - Interpreting Metaphorical Language from Plato to the Present (London: University of Virginia Press, 2003), pp. 38-48. 4 Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 50. Charles S. Singleton has already hinted at the double role of protagonist and author assumed by Dante in his prosimetric poem Vita Nuova. The same idea can be argued for the Commedia. See Charles S. Singleton, An Essay on ‘The Vita Nuova’ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958). 5 Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 175-6. In his famous essay on European literary realism, Auerbach argues that unlike the personified vices or virtues in Medieval mystery plays, Dante enters the stage as an individual and conscious human being.

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Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta più caramente; e questo è quello strale che l’arco de lo esilio pria saetta. Tu proverai sì come sa di sale lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle lo scendere e l’salir per l’altrui scale.

You shall leave everything you love most dearly: this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know how hard a path it is for one who goes descending and ascending others’ stairs. [Par., XVII, 55-60]

The narrator compares the state of exile to an archer shooting a poisonous arrow, which makes you lose everything you love most. By choosing the personal pronoun tu / you the narrator forces the reader to identify with the narrator’s situation and thereby amplifies the feeling of compassion instilled in the reader. Moreover, in Par. XXV the narrator of the Commedia unmistakably overlaps with Dante’s own path in life, when expressing the faint hope that se mai continga che ‘l poema sacro al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra, sì che m’ha fatto per molti anni macro, vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra del bello ovile ov’io dormi’ agnello, nimico ai lupi che li danno guerra; con altra voce omai, con altro vello ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte del mio battesmo prenderò ‘l cappello; if it should happen ... if this sacred poem this work so shared by heaven and earth that it has made me lean through these long years can ever overcome the cruelty that bars me from the fair fold where I slept, a lamb opposed to wolves that war on it, by then with other voice, with other fleece, I shall return as poet and put on, at my baptismal font, the laurel crown; [Par., XXV, 1-9]

Here the narrator makes use of a metaphor to describe his place of upbringing – “the fair [sheep]fold” – while an embedded simile refers to

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the narrator himself: “where I slept as a lamb”. The whole line evokes a peaceful, almost pastoral scene, which stresses the narrator’s juvenile innocence and sharply contrasts with the cruelty of the belligerent wolves. The pastoral aspect of this scene also aggravates the burden of exile experienced by the narrator, which – given the innocent state of youth symbolized by the sleeping lamb – becomes tantamount to the expulsion of paradise. By hazarding a glimpse into an uncertain future and wistfully expressing the wish to return one day and take the laurel crown, the narrator adds a hopeful, emotional quality to the nostalgic atmosphere conjured up in these lines. These two examples perfectly illustrate the fact that by directly addressing the readers the narrator tries to manipulate them and ultimately win them over. Furthermore, by creating such scenes full of pathos the narrator suggests his own characterisation as a doomed and crisis-ridden exile. Dante’s self-reference can therefore be seen as the auto-generated historiogram of the innocently exiled literary author, left out of the Florentine society he so strongly claimed access to, and whose warnings were misunderstood in a world of political favouritism.6 The literary figure Dante, the narrator of the Divina Commedia and the Vita Nuova, might therefore be little more than a stylised literary character in a tale of diligently composed and all-encompassing auto-fiction, which already sows the seeds of its subsequent mystification.7 By infiltrating his subjectivity into his text, Dante challenges medieval ideas of authorship and gives birth to a novel understanding of the concept: he queried the idea of divinely ordained authorship, while at the same time shaping the idea of secular human authorship. As Ascoli points out, Dante brings together these two forms of authorship, whose meaning “anticipates, without being identical to, those current today”.8 To a certain extent, Dante’s acts of autoreferentiality, the deictic overlapping of personal and fictional fate as shown above in Par. XXV, strengthen the credibility of Dante’s journey and impregnate the narrative 6

This auto-generated historiogram, gleaned from Dante’s text, becomes vital in 19th century Britain, when famous figures of the literary circle such as George Eliot and Oscar Wilde fashioned themselves after Dante. 7 In particular, Giovanni Boccaccio nurtures these seeds of mystification and interprets Dante’s exile as a necessary obstacle to overcome on his way to poetic maturity. Boccaccio’s pervasive influence on Dante’s first historiograms, as well as the mental and visual images they helped construct, will be thoroughly discussed in chapter III.1.3 of this analysis. 8 Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, p. 18.

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process of the Commedia with authority and authenticity. The Oxford Dictionary cites the Greek origins of the latter, authentikos, which denotes ‘principal, genuine’, and authentes, ‘one acting on one’s own authority’. The term authority, on the other hand, stems from the Latin verb augere, which means ‘to increase, to originate, to promote’. The respective Latin nouns auctoritas and auctor became autorite and autor in Old French and, interestingly, in an act of assimilation, the spelling with th was established in English under the influence of authentic, probably in an attempt to graphically and linguistically mirror the metonymic relationship between authority and authenticity: an author is the originator of ideas, in Dante’s times “a person worthy of faith and obedience”,9 and the term authenticity is associated with the truthfulness of an author’s origins, of their commitment and their sincerity. The technical term authenticity is generally used in aesthetic theory, in psychology as well as in existentialist philosophy and denotes the degree to which one is true to one's own personality, spirit, or character, despite external pressures.10 In Dante’s case we can detect a high degree of authenticity, since Dante did not give in to his enemies and remained in exile, even though he had been offered redemption. Dante, however, preferred to stay away from Florence rather than sacrifice his political convictions.11 Moreover, we can find authenticity mirrored in Dante’s works, because in his Commedia he names the vices and decadences of his age and harshly condemns them, which makes him a prototypical representative avant la lettre of the existentialist concept of authorship devoted to the so-called littérature engagée. As Manuele Gragnolati puts it: the Divine Comedy [...] derives much of its force and pervasiveness from bringing in also Dante's subjectivity or personality, in the sense that Dante is everywhere in the poem and his depiction of reality seems to begin with and from his own concrete, individual self [...].12

9

Loc. cit. p. 15. For the use of the term in cultural theory see Barry Sandywell, Dictionary of Visual Discourse - A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 161. 11 See Reynolds, Dante - The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man, pp. 43-51. 12 Manuele Gragnolati, ‘(In-)Corporality, Language, Performance in Dante's Vita nuova and Commedia’, in: Dante's Plurilingualism - Authority, Language, Subjectivity, ed. by Sara Fortuna, Manuele Gragnolati and Jürgen Trabant (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), pp. 211-22, p. 212. 10

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This “bringing in his subjectivity or personality”, however, does have its limits. The narrator of the Commedia states very clearly that his function is merely to record or scribble down what he sees: in Inferno, he asks the muses to help him accomplish such a feat of memory: O muse, o alto ingegno, or m'aiutate; o mente che scrivesti ciò ch'io vidi O Muses, o high genius, help me now; o memory that set down what I saw. [Inf., II, 7-8]

This way the narrator becomes a vessel, which is gradually filled with impressions, encounters and insight throughout the course of his journey. To a certain extent the narrator, in the process of writing his work, is reliving the journey he once made as a pilgrim in precisely the same way that William Wordsworth recalls the memory of the daffodils in his mind’s eye some hundred years later in a deliberate act of poetic remembrance. In this process, the narrator is clearly aware of his unique intermediary position and uses yet another topos of modesty to illustrate this fact, when he addresses his guide Vergil with the following words: [...] Poeta, che mi guidi, guarda la mia virtù s‘ell è possente, prima ch‘a l‘alto passo tu mi fidi. [...] Poet , you who are my guide, see if the force in me is strong enough before you let me face that rugged pass. [Inf., II, 10-2]13

By doubting his own abilities, the narrator not only follows the literary conventions and topoi established by ancient authors, he also makes himself appear humble, while, at the same time, he tries to elicit compassion from his recipients. Thus Dante’s addresses to the reader, his autobiographical allusions as well as his ostentatious downsizing of his persona make up what I would like to call the narrative self-consciousness

13

Interestingly, in this passage Dante calls to mind Ulysses and his odyssey, which underlines the challenge lying before him: Martin Raether has drawn attention to the fact that Ulysses used the expression alto passo to describe his embarking on his sea voyage. See Martin Raether, ‘Dantis Ulixes figura poetae. Eine typologische Interpretation von Inferno 26 als Poetik der Divina Commedia’, in: Poetica, 13, (1981), pp. 280-308, p. 300.

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of the Commedia, which makes it even more difficult to distinguish between Dante, the historical figure, and Dante, the narrator of the text. Bearing in mind these interpretational restrictions, the timeline of Dante’s life, his literary and political activities and convictions can be sketched out.14 Dante was born in Florence in 1265 into a Guelph family of modest background and he studied philosophy and rhetoric with Brunetto Latini, one of his most important attachment figures.15 During his youth, he befriended Guido Cavalcanti, with whom he broke away from the current form of poetry and developed a more subtle style of love poetry, whose main focus became man’s inner perfection initiated by the love of an Angelic woman. Following the path partly paved by Guido Guinizzelli’s poem Al cor gentil, Dante capitalized on the new ideals and sentiments of the time and composed his first major work, Vita Nuova.16 This piece of literature represents a prosimeter, written in sections alternating between narrative prose and more contemplative verse, which displays the sorrow he felt regarding his muse’s premature death, the love he had for her which cleansed him of sin, and the adulation of her perfection, which helps the narrator to live on.17 Already in this early work, Dante reveals a tendency to blur the boundaries between biographical reality and fictional poetry.

14 For an overview of Dante’s youth, his education and his early adult life see Reynolds, Dante - The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man, pp. 1-17, and Nicholas Havely, Dante (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 1-24. 15 Latini is most likely to have introduced Dante to classical literature and, presumably, assumed the role of a guardian after the death of Dante’s father. See Reynolds, Dante - The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man, pp. 155-6. 16 For Dante’s formal, linguistic and metaphorical debts to Guinizzelli see Vincent Moleta, Guinizzelli in Dante (Rome: Ed. di Storia e Letteratura, 1980), pp. 51-128. A general overview of Tuscan poetry including Dante’s so-called opere minori, his minor works, in the 13th century can be found in Stefano Carrai, La lirica toscana del Duecento: cortesi, guittoniani, stilnovisti (Rome: Laterza, 1997). 17 The Florentine stilnovisti around Dante’s circle drew on the Sicilian literary tradition established by emperor Federico II and his intellectual circle, the so-called Sicilian School of Poetry. See Reynolds, Dante - The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man, p. 152.

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III.1.2 Tirades and treatises: Dante’s political thought expressed in De Monarchia, Il Convivio and Purgatorio VI Apart from his work as a poet, Dante also composed a number of treatises, which reflect his scientific interests and his political commitments, and testify to Dante’s “joy of communicating [...] how the world may be put right”.18 However, Dante interrupted his work on two major treatises – Il Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia, which would both remain incomplete – and started working on his Divina Commedia. Such a strong intention behind the composition of his major work, which made him abandon writing about science, can only be explained by his frustrated political engagement and his deep despair over the bleak situation in his hometown, which in the course of his fictitious journey through the realms of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise becomes synonymous with the conditio humana gone astray: at the time, Florence was a place of political agitation, with opposing factions fighting it out for supremacy, favouring either the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor. The two major treatises mentioned above give evidence of Dante’s meticulous occupation with political and philosophical matters and help us understand his views on contemporary politics: in the fifth chapter of the fourth treatise of his Convivio, Dante enunciates the allencompassing centrality of Rome as the keeper of peace and justice. Since Rome had been the capital of the Roman Empire, Dante considers the city the very epitome of legal and civil virtue. He bases his argumentation on the sound footing of Roman history, listing examples of Roman political actions, which in his view exceed human power and were the fruits of divine inspiration: “[Rome] was exalted not with human but with godlike citizens, whose love of her was inspired not by a human but a divine love”.19 For this reason, Dante believes that Rome’s cultural and political magnificence “could not and should not have happened unless there was a special end, conceived for her by God, brought about through a very great infusion of celestial grace”.20

18

Reynolds, Dante - The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man, p. 64. Dante’s Il Convivio (The Banquet), ed. and trans. by Richard H. Lansing (London: Garland Publishing, 1990), p. 160. On Dante’s ideas of political governance, its Aristotelian sources and its historical background see also Dante and Governance, ed. by John Woodhouse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 20 Dante’s Il Convivio, p. 160. 19

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Divine intervention also accounted for warding off external enemies such as the Albans, the Franks and Hannibal. Hence, Rome could only survive their attacks because “the arm of God appeared to be present”, and the eternal city “had a special birth and a special evolution, conceived and ordained by God”.21 Summing up his convictions, Dante concludes that the growth of Rome, from the time of its founding father, Romulus, until the age of its highest perfection was the result of divine, not merely human, activity. In his treatise De Monarchia, Dante further elaborates on this idea, also addressing the question of what form of political organisation best suits human nature. Even authorities such as the Roman writers Livy and Lucan had testified to the fact “that God had produced miracles in order to lead the Roman Empire to its highest evolvement”.22 As a consequence, Dante also interprets Rome’s downfall teleologically as a prerequisite for the new empire: after the Donatio Constatini, Rome also became the centre of Catholicism and the residing pope represented the warrant for the salvation of humanity. Dante identifies this historical event as the key event in human history and reads Roman history through the lens of the Catholic faith. He admits that the emperor is dependent on the Holy Church, since “imperial authority is directly imposed by God”.23 He argues that if God had chosen a monarch for earthly justice and Peter’s substitute for ecclesiastical affairs, then these two tasks should be carried out by two different persons. Hence Dante’s plea for the separation of powers between pope and emperor, since “neither the Papacy nor heads of states should meddle in the affairs of the other”.24 Dante believes that one hierarchical monarchy, the so-called ordinatio ad unum, mirrors God’s initial idea of human creation and is therefore the best form of terrestrial government. Dressed in Aristotelian logic, Dante points out the importance of universal peace for humankind and recalls to memory the Golden Age of 21

Loc. cit. p. 161. Dante Alighieri, Nuova Edizione Commentata delle Opere di Dante Monarchia, vol. 4, ed. by Paolo Chiesa and Andrea Tabarroni (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2013), p. 92. [“Quod autem pro Romano imperio perficiendo miracula Deus portenderit”]. 23 Monarchia, p. 216. [“auctoritas [...] vel si ostensive probetur a Deo immediate dependere”]. 24 Glenn O. Hilburn, ‘Medieval Views of the Church’, in: The People of God: Essays on the Believers’ Church, ed. by Paul Basden and David S. Dockery (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1991), pp. 193-208, p. 204. 22

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Emperor Augustus, during which time Rome had reached a peak in its cultural and political development. In order to recreate such a fruitful period, he argues in favour of the emperor, a position his party, the White Guelphs, continued to staunchly advocate. Since mankind assumes an intermediate state above the animals and below the angels, there must be peace on earth in order to reach fulfilment. Such a state of peace can only be obtained by a world-ruler, who governs all lesser rulers. In his work, Dante sums up the wisdom gleaned from his own political experience and his fateful downfall: Dante had enrolled in a guild in order to assume the function of one of six elected priors who governed Florence for periods of two months at a time. He was also one of three ambassadors representing the Tuscan city-state in Rome. Due to his political activities, he was condemned to perpetual exile in 1302, when the Black Guelphs took over control of the city. From a distance, he analysed the social and political situation in Florence, Italy, and Europe: in his view, greed, envy and violence led to moral corruption in his hometown;25 and lack of guidance and governing on the part of the emperor led to an unbalanced state of European politics and enabled the Church to trespass on worldly affairs while neglecting to give guidance in spiritual matters. In Purg. VI we find all of his concerns summarised: according to the narrator, Italy was an “abject inn of sorrow, [a] ship without a helmsman in harsh seas”.26 Here Dante unmistakeably refers to the German Albert I of Habsburg, emperor from 1298-1308, who, in his eyes, had turned his back on Italy and did not live up to his imperatorial duties. “The garden of the Empire”, therefore, was “gutted”,27 and Italy was an untamed and wild beast, “because there are no spurs that would correct it”.28 People should be humble and according to God’s will let the emperor sit in Caesar’s empty saddle. It is only then that the country’s lack of justice and legislation can be corrected. Here, the narrator refers to the Codex Iustinianus, the basis of Roman legislation, which was still in use in the Middle Ages and which (as we have seen in 25

Separating himself and his actions from his - in his view - malicious and corrupted place of birth, Dante explicitly refers to himself as “Florentinus nationes, non moribus” [“Florentine by birth, but not by character”] in the Incipit of the Commedia. He explains the Incipit to Cangrande della Scala in his epistle. See Hollander, Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande, p. 39. 26 [“Ahi serva Italia, di dolore ostello, nave senza nocchiere in gran tempesta”] (7677). 27 [“che 'l giardin de lo 'mperio sia diserto”] (105). 28 [“per non esser corretta da li sproni”] (95).

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the passages of the Convivio) for Dante represented the most important accomplishment of the Roman Empire, and whose persistence justified the translatio imperii, the transfer of divine power from the Roman Empire to the Roman Catholic Church. In short, in Dante’s perception, the order of things was strongly out of junction and desperately needed readjustment. Hence, the Commedia’s primary concern was to assign a place for everyone and to restore the worldly balance of powers in the hereafter. Dante spent approximately ten years composing the Commedia and lived periodically in Verona and in other northern Italian cities. He refused to adapt his political convictions to suit the new Florentine rulers – who, in the meantime, had offered him redemption on condition that he renounce his political persuasion – and, without ever seeing his hometown again, died in Ravenna in 1321, presumably from a malaria attack.29 In 1329, De Monarchia was publicly burnt as a heretical text in Bologna. According to Boccaccio, a plan to burn Dante’s bones together with his treatise had ultimately been foiled. Although Boccaccio turned out to be an unreliable source concerning historical data on Dante, the lasting impact that De Monarchia had on Dante’s fame is evident nonetheless. The Catholic Church placed it on the Vatican’s Index of Prohibited Books, from which it was removed only in 1881. Since opposition against the pope rose in the centuries after his death, Dante and his text became more exploited for political and anti-papal reasons.30 De Monarchia lends itself to a variety of interpretations and appropriations, with its clearly structured argumentation in favour of, as well as against, the pope.31 As the interpretation of the above-mentioned canto - Dante’s tirade against the emperor - as well as Dante’s political treatises illustrate, the narrator of the Commedia intentionally records what he sees “for the benefit of the world

29

For the time spent in exile and Dante’s death, see Havely, Dante, pp. 25-56. Dante’s political convictions were used, for example, during the anti-papal adaptation of the Commedia in England. Toynbee draws attention to the times of the English Reformation, when Dante “curiously enough [...] was claimed as a champion on behalf of the Protestants”, and offers an explanation for this phenomenon, which in his view “was due to the fact that in certain well-known passages of the Divina Commedia, Dante vigorously denounces the corruptions of Rome and of the Church”, and hence “is frequently quoted by English reformers in this and in the next century as ‘an Italian writer against the Pope’”. Toynbee, Dante in English Literature, p. 23. 31 During the time of the Reformation, the so-called editio princeps of De Monarchia was published in Basle in 1559, which represented Dante’s appropriation on the part of Calvinist propaganda. 30

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that lives so badly”,32 and needs salvation. Only as a result of his exile and the bleak political situation in Italy did Dante start writing his cantos, in which “we are given to see [...] the history of man’s inner life and unfolding”.33 Such a biographically motivated impetus grew when Dante had finally found the narrative templates for his endeavour: Lino Pertile identifies two different attempts to write the poem and pinpoints Dante's use of the new models for his first attempts after the summer of 1304, when Dante was exiled and lost hope of ever returning to Florence. These two new literary models were “one classical and one Christian: Aeneas's visit to the underworld, and Saint Paul's visit to the third heaven”.34 Both of them supplied Dante with the narrative needed to tell his story and were able to “extend, complicate, and change the nature of Dante's original project from private to romantic to public and prophetic”.35 Ultimately, Dante promotes himself “from poet to prophet”,36 which also created repercussions in the mental and visual images of Dante at the time.

III.1.3 The mystification of a myth: early biographies and Dante’s historiograms in the 14th and in the 15th centuries Soon after Dante’s death, a process of immediate and deliberate mystification set in. According to Mitchell’s definition of a mental image as an abstraction gleaned from a variety of writings, this chapter explores two of the most seminal texts on Dante’s life and analyses the historiograms which constructed these mental images: Giovanni Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante, better known as Trattatello in laude di Dante, and Leonardo Bruni’s Le Vite di Dante e del Petrarca. Both biographical texts on the Florentine poet were put together after his death and reveal a feeling of reverence and deeply felt adoration.37 Moreover, Bruni’s biography takes 32

Lino Pertile, ‘“Trasmutabile per tutte guise”: Dante in the Comedy’, in: Dante's Plurilingualism - Authority, Language, Subjectivity, pp.164-78, p. 175. 33 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p 202. 34 Pertile, ‘“Trasmutabile per tutte guise”: Dante in the Comedy’, p. 175. 35 Loc. cit. 36 Loc cit. 37 Expressing his deeply felt reverence and adoration, Boccaccio himself added the epithet divina to Dante’s work. Dante had chosen the title Commedia because of its joyful ending and the presence of socially low-ranked characters, following the literary conventions of the time. For the epithet divina, see also Pio Rajna, ‘L’epiteton divina dato alla Commedia di Dante’, in: Bollettino della Società Dantesca Italiana, 22 (1915), pp. 107-115 and pp. 225-258. On the metaphor of

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up where Boccaccio’s Trattatello left off, supplements it and critically responds to the biography in various aspects, which yields interesting insights into humanist critical discourse. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), who publicly lectured on Dante in Florence towards the end of his literary career, composed his Trattatello in the years 1351/1355, and slightly changed it in 1360.38 His influence on Dante’s mental, as well as on his visual, image cannot be overemphasised, since it has left an inextinguishable imprint on Dante’s iconography. To this day, Boccaccio’s image of Dante is deeply engrained in the cultural memory store of Dantean visualisations.39 In his biography on the Florentine poet, “which accommodates a great variety of legendary and fantastic material”,40 Boccaccio juxtaposed anecdotes about Dante with biographical data gleaned from the interpretation of Dante’s works. Interestingly, Boccaccio interprets a set of biographically difficult constellations, such as Dante’s passion for his muse Beatrice despite his being married, or his political conflicts with Florence’s upper echelon, as necessary obstacles, which ultimately forced him to grow as a writer. As love and passion were concerned, Boccaccio stated that In luogo della quale rimozione e quiete, quasi dall’inizio della sua puerizia infino allo stremo della sua vita, Dante ebbe fierissima e importabile passione d‘amore.

the divine poet, see also Patricia A. Emison, Creating the “Divine” Artist: from Dante to Michelangelo (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2004), pp. 111-72. 38 During that period, Boccaccio’s choice of material displays a predilection for biographical and mythographical themes. While working on the Trattatello in laude di Dante he also composed De casibus virorum illustrium, a collection of biographical tales about famous and illustrious men. Shortly after the Trattatello he wrote Genealogia deorum gentilium, a mythological compilation of the ancient pantheons, and De mulieribus claris, tales about famous women. On the three slightly different redactions of the Trattatello see Pier Giorgio Ricci, ‘Le tre redazioni del Trattatello in laude di Dante’, in: Studi sul Boccaccio, 8 (1974), pp. 197-214. 39 Boccaccio’s persistent influence on Dante’s visual image will be discussed in the next chapter. 40 Caesar, Dante - The Critical Heritage, p. 159.

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This “unendurable passion” was spurred when he encountered Beatrice, whose “beautiful vision he could neither get rid of nor abandon in thought”.42 She represented his first muse, and his passionate love became a life-long source of inspiration for his poetry, which made him “compose more and more praiseworthy rhymes”.43 Furthermore, in politics, the state of exile and the citizens’ faith in him strengthened his poetic tenacity and made him compose the Divina Commedia as an act of mystical providence, since “in him the divine and the human seems to be encapsulated to the utmost degree”.44 The structure of Boccaccio’s Trattatello thereby almost resembles a Bildungsroman avant la lettre, with Dante as a protagonist overcoming biographical obstacles and growing to reach poetic maturity. In his Trattatello, Boccaccio’s style of writing is far from objective, since he consistently refers to Dante as il nostro Dante and sings the praises of his excellence in the liberal arts of his time: [...] non ingiustamente meritò il nostro Dante altissimi titoli, perciò che alcuni assai chiari uomini in iscienza il chiamarono sempre maestro, altri l‘appellavano filosofo, e di tali furono che teologo il nominarono, e quasi generalmente ogn‘uomo il dicea poeta, sì come ancora è appellato da tutti. [...] our Dante rightly deserved the highest degrees, since some of the most brilliant scholars always called him a master, others referred to him as a philosopher, there were many who called him a theologist, and almost everyone generally named him a poet, just like everyone still calls him.45

Here, Boccaccio paints the picture of a universal genius excelling in many disciplines and winning the respect of the erudite people of his birthplace. 41

Giovanni Boccaccio, Vita di Dante (Trattatello in laude di Dante), ed. by Paolo Baldan (Bergamo: Moretti & Vitali, 2001), p. 149. 42 Loc. cit. p. 150. [“la bella imagine di lei né spegnere poté né cacciare”]. 43 Loc. cit. p. 151. [“compose più e più laudevoli cose in rima”]. 44 Loc. cit. p. 154. [“in lui sommamente le divine cose e l‘umane parevano esser fermate”]. 45 Loc. cit. p. 149.

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Furthermore, everyone recognises and identifies him as a poet, the accomplishment he is still remembered and celebrated for today. These allusions to approval and reverence towards Dante within the circle of Florentine scholars as well as the frequent use of the possessive pronoun our intend to integrate Dante into a Tuscan community, which only partly acknowledged his works and in which his status as a leading author had not yet been ensured.46 Boccaccio clearly takes up Dante’s auto-generated historiogram of the innocently exiled literary author, whose native city still refuses to bestow fame on her unrecognised son and confer the laurel wreath. Moreover, in the quotation above, Boccaccio extends this historiogram by emphasising Dante’s erudition and associating it with the antique ideals of the so-called vita contemplativa, the contemplative life, considered the most perfect and desirable one by Aristotle.47 As the examples above illustrate, Boccaccio seems to have followed two main intentions in his editing: establishing Dante as a divinely ordained authority and famed vernacular poet, and creating a historical link leading up to Boccaccio himself as one of the tre corone.48 As Jason M. Houston has pointed out: The entire force of his figuration lies not in a straightforward narrative of the man‘s life or a year-by-year analysis of his poetic production; rather, Boccaccio [...] uses the conflicts in Dante’s life to dramatize the spiritual and poetic development of the model poeta vates.49

Such a poeta vates functions as a mediator between the text, which the poet can claim material authorship for, and a divine or God-given 46 See the discussion on the terms author / authority and Dante’s faint hope of becoming an authority himself at that time in the first chapter of Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, pp. 3-21. 47 On the ancient concepts of vita contemplativa and vita activa as well as their resurgence in early Renaissance moral philosophy, see Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays, ed. by Paul Oskar Kristeller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 20-68. 48 For Boccaccio’s critical assessment of Dante and his diligent work as Dantista, see Houston, Building a Monument to Dante: Boccaccio as Dantista. See in particular the respective sections on the composition of the Trattatello in laude di Dante in chapter 2, ‘Crafting the Figure’, pp. 52-88. On Boccaccio’s attempt to establish the vernacular as a literary model, see Martin Eisner, Boccaccio and the invention of Italian literature - Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 49 Houston, Building a Monument to Dante, p. 78.

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inspiration, which represents the genuine initiator of the text. This concept of authorship originates in Plato’s Ion, in which Plato defines divine inspiration as the heart of literary authorship, in which the muses infuse the poet with zeal and enthusiasm, thus providing the driving force in poetic production: “you [Ion] can say what you say [...] because of a divine gift, because you are possessed [...] and your soul is dancing”.50 The concept, as well as the visual depiction of such a process of divine inspiration, represents a vital pathos formula in the Warburgean sense. Originally a Greek idea, it was passed on in Christianity and became an important iconographic cornerstone in the depiction of Dante, as will be shown below. As Paul Zanker has observed: The notion of spiritual inspiration that marked Late Hellenism and the Christian belief in the creation of Holy Writ through the agency of celestial powers are in essence the same. And this general picture will obtain well into the Middle Ages: wisdom is a mercy that comes directly from God, transmitted by his messengers.51

For that reason we can also find elements of hagiography in Boccaccio’s Trattatello, which play an important role in constructing Dante as a providential and divinely mandated figure: one anecdote, for example, describes Dante’s birth, which his mother envisages taking place under a laurel tree, a telling portent of her son’s later career. God also appeared in her dreams to tell her about the precious gift she carried.52 An even more striking anecdote tells the story of the last thirteen cantos of the Commedia, which were supposedly lost until Dante’s ghost appeared to his own son and told him that the cantos were hidden in a little window in the wall. Dante’s ghost is described as a saint-like apparition, who had reached a state of divine splendour, since it was dressed in “extraordinarily white clothing and an unusual and sparkling light on his face”.53 In this anecdotal episode, Boccaccio clearly uses hagiographic elements which echo Christ’s Ascension Day and which make Dante assume saintly or even 50 Plato, Complete Works, ed. by John M. Cooper (Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1997), p. 943, 536c. See also Penelope Murray, Plato on Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 6-12, and Stefan Büttner, ‘Inspiration and Inspired Poets in Plato’s Dialogues’, in: Plato and the Poets, ed. by Pierre Destrée and Fritz-Gregor Herrmann (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 111-130. 51 Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates - The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), p. 328. 52 Boccaccio, Vita di Dante, p. 147. 53 Loc. cit. p. 170. [“candidissimi vestimenti, e d’una luce non usata risplendente nel viso“].

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divine qualities. Moreover, the anecdote suggests that the retrieval of the lost cantos of the Commedia represents an act of divine providence. All of these examples illustrate that the mystification of the historical figure Dante Alighieri had already started at an early stage of his reception. In his Trattatello in laude di Dante, therefore, Boccaccio not only creates a monumental and mythical literary figure, but he also takes great pains to mark Dante as something more than just a vernacular poet, and [...] seeks to elevate him to the authoritative position of auctor and divine agent.54

The concept of an authoritative auctor or auctoritas denotes competencies acquired in the process of imitating and emulating the established canonical writers, hence the medieval notion of an author as “a person worthy of faith and obedience”.55 In particular, in the scholastic medieval tradition the writings of the Christian fathers of the Church such as St Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas formed an irrevocable and monolithic canon of texts, which any new author had to engage with in order to be respected. Harking back to Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital, Ascoli defines the auctores as a limited number of classical texts that have accrued cultural capital and with it the status of guarantors of truth and models for imitation over the centuries [...] and [...] bear truths that exceeded the limitations of historical contingency - being valid in any time and any place.56

An auctorial legitimation of a new author, therefore, followed the principles of the so-called imitatio veteris, the imitation of the forefathers.57 This common practice of poetic imitation can also be seen as an indispensable prerequisite to the understanding of literary production in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. In humanist teachings, it comprised the imitation of Latin and Greek literary ideals, and can be 54

Houston, Building a Monument to Dante, p. 77. Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author, p. 15. 56 Loc. cit. p. 7. 57 On the concepts of imitatio and auctoritas in the Middle Ages, see Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship. Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Scholar Press 1988), and Albert Russell Ascoli, ‘The Vowels of Authority’, in: Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. by Kevin Brownlee and Walter Stephens (Dartmouth: University Press of England, 1989), pp. 23-46. 55

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traced back to the Aristotelian precept of emulatio, the emulation of the masters. It is therefore very likely that Boccaccio deliberately ascribed to Dante the position of such an auctor or authority, since the Florentine poet “provided the perfect figure for a hybrid humanism that prioritizes classical models while championing the new perspective of the vernacular”.58 Thus, Boccaccio’s engagement with Dante ultimately enhanced his own literary position as his legitimate and approved Tuscan heir, who followed in the Florentine’s footsteps. The following figure sums up Boccaccio’s mental image of Dante, which is based on Barthesian myth-making.59

Dante Ĺ reduced to a mere signifier Ĺ first-order semiological system 1. acoustic image 2. Florentine poet, his literary and political achievements 3. Dante Alighieri (historical figure)

passionate poet literary authority prophetic auctor

Dante according to Boccaccio

Figure 1: Dante caught by ‘myth’ (Signifier and signified in a second-order semiological system according to Roland Barthes)

58

Houston, Building a Monument to Dante, p. 44. For Dante’s own emulation of classical authors in the Divina Commedia, see the introductory essay by Kevin Brownlee, ‘Dante and the classical poets’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Dante, pp. 100-19. A detailed account of Dante’s classical sources is offered in Stefano Carrai, Dante e l‘antico: l‘emulazione dei classici nella ‘Commedia’ (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo per la Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, 2012), and Martin L. McLaughlin, Literary imitation in the Italian Renaissance: the theory and practice of literary imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). McLaughlin argues that imitatio was “probably the most significant literary concept of that period”. McLaughlin, Literary imitation, p. 2. 59 For the blueprint of this table see Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. by Annette Lavers (London: Vintage, 1973), p. 115.

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More than four decades after Boccaccio’s last redaction of the Trattatello in laude di Dante, historian and statesman Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444) took over the task of writing about Dante’s life and work. In doing so, Bruni responded, to a certain extent, to Boccaccio’s presentation of Dante’s life. During his career, Bruni advocated for specific uses of Latin on the one hand, and the Florentine vernacular on the other hand, and he was seen as the “new generation’s talent for a more classicizing style and of the new locutionary energy that it provided”.60 For Bruni, Dante was of particular interest, since Dante’s work could help him promote the use of the Italian vernacular for well-defined purposes such as public discourse and effective oratory. He engaged with the historical figure of Dante Alighieri twice: in his biographical treatise Le Vite di Dante e del Petrarca in 1436 and in his work Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum (1404/1406), which contained, among other things, an apology of the Florentine vernacular as a literary model. Here, Bruni follows the tradition of the Greek dialectic revived in Renaissance Humanism and harshly criticises Dante’s work in one dialogue only to reconcile him in the next one: picking up a common criticism raised towards Dante’s use of the vernacular in the Commedia, Bruni differentiates between effective rhetoric in public oratory and in written texts.61 When referring to Dante’s language in his Commedia he expounds that “Dante knew himself much better adapted to this vernacular style in rhyme than to that Latin and literate style”.62 The use of language, therefore, is governed by an author’s own literary assets and the purposes his writing is meant to fulfil: since Dante’s Commedia lends itself to recital and, according to Bruni, Dante’s Latin writing was inferior to his use of the vernacular, Bruni justifies Dante’s use of language in the Commedia.63 The famous Oxford scholar E. H. Carr 60 Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2000), p. 404. 61 Already during Dante’s lifetime, his use of the vernacular was subject to criticism, particularly among the learned élite. Gilson notes that in 1318-19 Giovanni del Virgilio, a professor from Bologna, repeatedly attacked Dante for not writing the Commedia in Latin. See Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, p. 5. 62 Leonardo Bruni, Le Vite di Dante e del Petrarca, ed. by Antonio Lanza (Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 1987), p. 49. [“Dante conosceva sé medesimo molto più atto a questo stile volgare ed in rima che a quello latino e litterato”]. 63 Dante’s use of terza rima, his rhyme scheme deliberately invented to string the verses of the Commedia together, testifies to his awareness of the Commedia’s oral appeal and the tendency to enhance its memorability.

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once pointed out that, before studying the facts, it is important to study the historian who set out to elucidate them.64 The same holds true for philologists: Bruni’s main achievement was the translation and publication of classical Greek texts into Latin, which, subsequently, enabled the reception of Greek writings in the vernacular. Prominent examples of his successful intermediary function as a translator and disseminator are five different vernacular versions of his Latin publication De primo bello punico and thirty manuscript versions of his De bello gothico.65 His entire literary career was dedicated to the dissemination of classical texts, humanist writings and the revaluation of the Italian language. In his Le Vite di Dante e del Petrarca (1436) Bruni reinforces once more the role of the Italian vernacular and suggests different uses of Latin and the vernacular, each appropriate for specific purposes: while Latin should be the lingua franca for supraregional and written exchange, the vernacular was adapted for localized, deliberative, and forensic exchange, as well as for poetic purposes.66 As already mentioned in passing, one of Bruni’s main goals in his Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum was the determination of usage of the Florentine vernacular as opposed to Greek and Latin.67 Dante, therefore, becomes his shining example of poetic excellence, since he was capable of employing any linguistic style or speech register in his texts. Hence, Bruni’s main argument in favour of strengthening the vernacular as a literary model:

64

E. H. Carr, What is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 1-24. See James Hankins, ‘Humanism in the Vernacular: The Case of Leonardo Bruni’, in: Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt, ed. by Christopher S. Celenza and Kenneth Gouwens (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2006), p. 26. See also Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, pp. 97-131 on Dante as a civic and linguistic model in the Quattrocento. 66 See Andrea Rizzi, ‘Leonardo Bruni and the Shimmering Facets of Languages in Early Quattrocento Florence’, in: I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 16, No. 1/2, Fall (2013), pp. 243-56. 67 At the time, a huge number of vernacular books and vernacular translations of Latin writings were circulating as a response to the socio-economic, cultural and political changes taking place in Northern and Central Italy. In particular, the rising mercantile class, usually illiterate in the sense that they had not learnt Latin, created a great demand for these works. Therefore, Bruni reacted to the changing social environment in Florence and strengthened the Florentine vernacular. On the vernacular translations, see Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy - Illiterate Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 65

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Ora questa è la verità certa e assoluta del nome et dell‘effetto de’ poeti: lo scrivere in istile litterato o vulgare non a ha fare al fatto, né altra differenza è se non come scrivere in greco o in latino. Ciascuna lingua ha sua perfezione e suo suono e suo parlare limato e scientifico; 68 So this is the absolute and certain truth about a poet’s name and his effect: writing in a literary or in a vernacular style does not broach other subjects, nor does it differ from writing in Greek or in Latin. Every language has its perfection and its sound as well as its sophisticated and scientific usage;

In other words, Bruni put forward the argument that no matter what language a highly skilled author uses, he will always be able to write in an excellent and admirable style. Dante’s excellence, however, could be found first and foremost in his vernacular poetry.69 For that reason, Bruni’s definition of the poet is marked by superlatives and dressed in a political comparison: [...] ogni presidente comanda et impera, ma solo colui si chiama imperadore che è sommo di tutti, così chi compone opere in versi, è sommo, excellentissimo nel comporre tali opere, si chiama poeta.70 [...] every leader commands and governs, but only the highest of them calls himself Emperor, so he who composes works in rhyme and is the highest, most excellent one in doing so, is called poet.

With the benefit of hindsight, Bruni’s comparison of a skilled poet to an emperor seems to be by no means arbitrary, since it represents the first step towards a political appropriation of Dante, which culminated in the Medici portrait of Dante executed by Sandro Botticelli.71 Apart from linguistic considerations, Bruni also stressed Dante’s political activities and his “fighting for his hometown”72 in an attempt to build up a civic identity in the process of strengthening the frailty of the Florentine citystate’s power. The historiogram he created, therefore, was that of a prolific literary authority and an active politician in the tradition of the ancient vita activa, in addition to Boccaccio’s historiogram based largely on the vita

68

Bruni, Le Vite, p. 49. Loc. cit. 70 Loc. cit. 71 See chapter III.2.5. 72 Bruni, Le Vite, p. 34. [“combattere per la patria”]. 69

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contemplativa discussed above; 73 “Dante [...] led a civil, honest, and studious life, [...] highly serving the [Florentine] Republic”.74 For Bruni, Dante was the epitome of a learned scholar combining both of these ancient ideals by engaging in Florentine politics as well as in philological erudition.75 When responding to Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante, Bruni was obviously well aware of the fact that Boccaccio’s image of Dante was a myth and had very little to do with the historical person of Dante Alighieri. In particular, he lamented the fact that Boccaccio’s Dante was more of a fictitious character, which could have been taken out of Boccaccio’s own texts, especially his Decamerone. In the introduction of Le Vite di Dante e del Petrarca (1436), Bruni states that [Boccaccio] così scrivesse la vita et i costumi di tanto sublime poeta come se a scrivere avessi il Philocolo, o il Philostrato o la Fiammetta, [...], come se l‘huomo nascesse in questo mondo solamente per ritrovarsi in quelle dieci giornate amorose, [...], le Cento Novelle.76 [Boccaccio] wrote about the life and customs of this sublime poet as if he wrote the Filocolo, the Filostrato or the Fiammetta, [...], as if that man had been born into this world merely to find himself in those ten amorous days, [...], the Decameron.

This introductory sentence already unmasks Boccaccio’s attempt to stylise Dante as a monumental literary figure. Furthermore, Bruni was critical of the fact that Boccaccio “left out the grave and essential parts of Dante’s life”, while, at the same time, “remembering only the light ones”.77 Therefore, he sets himself the task to write Dante’s life story with “more diligence and attention to the noteworthy aspects” of his biography, since, ultimately, his “writing was supposed to supplement” Boccaccio’s version.78 Bruni’s Vite represents the first attempt to quarry the truth content of Dante’s mental image by directly opposing Boccaccio’s version 73

See footnote 247 for the dichotomy of vita contemplativa and vita activa. Bruni, Le Vite, p. 36. [“Dante [...] vivendo civile ed onesta e studiosa vita, fu adoperato nella repubblica assai;”]. 75 See Martina Hansmann, Andrea del Castagnos Zyklus der ‘uomini famosi’ und ‘donne famose’: Geschichts-verständnis und Tugendideal im florentinischen Frühhumanismus (Hamburg: Lit, 1993), p. 205. 76 Bruni, Le Vite, p. 29. 77 Loc. cit. pp. 29-30. [“che le gravi e substanzievoli parti della vita di Dante lassa indietro”]; [“ricordando le cose leggieri”]. 78 Loc. cit. p. 30. [“con maggiore notitia delle cose estimabili”]; [“perché lo scriver [mio] sia quasi un supplimento [allo scrivere di lui]”]. 74

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of Dante’s life. In his account of Dante’s life, Bruni discusses Dante’s upbringing, his political endeavours and his years spent in exile. In addition to this, Bruni establishes Dante as a classical writer and a staunch Florentine patriot, and festers the canonical authority that Boccaccio had already intended to promote in his Trattatello in laude di Dante.

III.1.4 Between authority and hagiography: the historiograms of Dante in the early 15th century Both Giovanni Boccaccio and Leonardo Bruni share a common desire to elevate Dante to the position of literary model and classical author. What sets them apart is the fact that Boccaccio tried to enhance and mystify Dante’s image, while Bruni peels off the fictitious and stylised image that Boccaccio created and “eliminates almost completely the mythologized account of Dante as poeta-theologus”.79 Instead, he brings Dante, the poet and politician in the ancient tradition of the vita activa, into the foreground. In doing so, Bruni exemplifies the use of the vernacular on the one hand, and gives a shining example of political engagement on the other hand.80 Boccaccio’s and Bruni’s mental image of Dante, however, is firmly based on the historiogram of the authoritative literary author Dante, which found its resonance in a number of remarkable illustrations of Dante’s Divina Commedia, as we shall see below. In their texts, each had created the image of a classical poet, who, in Boccaccio’s case, had even been attributed with saint-like qualities. Giovanni Boccaccio passionate poet literary authority prophetic auctor

Leonardo Bruni poet of the vernacular literary authority political engagement / vita activa

Figure 2: A comparison of Giovanni Boccaccio‘s and Leonardo Bruni’s mental images of Dante

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Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, p. 121. For Dante’s linguistic and ideological appropriation in Florence between the years 1350 – 1481, see Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, pp. 54-162. Gilson argues that Bruni drew extensively on the technique of heroic narrative and biographical selectivity employed by Plutarch in his Lives. See pp. 114-5. Note that apart from Bruni, there were similar attempts to include Dante within a select group of politically active and celebrated Tuscans, most notably by the Florentine historian Filippo Villani. See Hansmann, Andrea del Castagnos Zyklus, pp. 201-4. 80

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Boccaccio’s attribution of saint-like and prophetic qualities, as well as recognition of Dante’s insatiable passion, can be regarded as myth, whereas Bruni’s depiction of Dante as a politically engaged author along the lines of the ancient vita activa has its repercussions in Dante’s accepted biography. Both see him as a literary authority, which is probably the most important element of Dante’s historiogram in the early 15th century. I would like to argue that these two mental images and their underlying historiogram found their respective visual counterparts in the first illuminated manuscripts of Dante’s epic poem. Furthermore, they were preceded by a third visual image of Dante active at the time, which will be explored in the next chapters. The historiogram of Dante as a literary authority also marks the first step towards a literary canonization of the Florentine poet. Thus, Boccaccio and Bruni initiated a process of elaboration, in which Dante became considered “a man of study, emotion, generosity, and genius”, as well as “a man worthy of the reader’s deepest trust”.81

III.2 Early visual images: from pilgrim to poet to prophet III.2.1 Dante’s visual image in Boccaccio’s Trattatello in laude di Dante In 2009, an interdisciplinary group of scientists set out to reconstruct Dante’s face with the help of morphological and metric data collected from the poet’s cranium. They were able to create a physical model of Dante’s face, which “morphologically conforms most faithfully to the anatomical traits of Dante’s skull”.82 In the description of their project, the scientists stressed the fact that “there are reasonable doubts about the accuracy of [Dante’s] likenesses in the vast number of illustrations of him”.83 The reason for this can be found in the early visual depictions, which originate in Boccaccio’s stereotyped description of Dante in the Trattatello in laude di Dante. To this day, everyone is familiar with the striking physical features such as the aquiline nose, the gaunt figure, and

81

Pugh and Weisl, Medievalisms - Making the Past in the Present, p. 14. Stefano Benazzi, et. al., ‘The face of the poet Dante Alighieri reconstructed by virtual modelling and forensic anthropology techniques’, in: Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 36, Issue 2, February (2009), pp. 278-83, p. 282. 83 Loc. cit. p. 278. 82

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the articulated chin.84 As we have already seen in the previous chapter when discussing Boccaccio’s mental image of Dante, Boccaccio frequently elaborates on his depiction of the Florentine poet in anecdotes. In his Trattatello, we can also find the description of Dante’s physiognomy encapsulated in an anecdotal episode: Fu il nostro poeta di mediocre statura, ed ebbe il volto lungo ed il naso aquilino, le mascelle grandi, e ǥl labbro di sotto proteso tanto, che alquanto quel di sopra avanzava; nelle spalle alquanto curvo, e gli occhi anzi grossi che piccoli, e il color bruno, ed i capelli e la barba crespi e neri, e sempre malinconico e pensoso. Per la qual cosa avvenne un giorno in Verona, essendo già divolgata per tutto la fama delle sue opere, ed esso conosciuto da molti uomini e donne, che, passando egli davanti ad una porta, dove più donne sedevano, una di quelle pianamente, [...], disse alle altre donne: vedete colui che va in inferno e torna quando gli piace, e qua su reca novelle di coloro che là giù sono. - Alla quale semplicemente una dell‘altre rispose: - In verità egli dee così essere: non vedi tu com‘egli ha la barba crespa ed il color bruno per lo caldo e per lo fummo che è là giù? - Di che Dante [...] sorridendo passò avanti.85 Our poet was of average height, he had a long face and an aquiline nose, a huge jaw, his protruded lower lip thrusting out more prominently than his upper lip; his back was curved, his eyes were huge rather than small, his complexion tan, his hair and his beard curly and dark, and his expression was always melancholic and pensive. So that one day in Verona, when the fame of his works had already spread and he was wellknown, it happened that he passed by a gate where a group of women was sitting. One of them said quietly [...] to the others: look at him who goes to hell and returns when he likes to, and he brings novelty of the ones who live down there. Another woman simply responded: in reality he has to look like this; don‘t you see that his curly beard and his dark colour is due to the heat and the smoke down there? After that Dante [...] smiled and walked on.

84 In fact, there was an outcry when the Italian public realised that these features had very little to do with the historical figure of Dante. In 2005, Dante’s supposed ‘real face’ was discovered on a fresco inside the Palazzo dell’Arte dei Giudici e Notai in Florence, which revealed that Dante’s physiognomy strongly conflicted with the established Dantean iconography. See Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, ‘Il volto di Dante? Senza naso aquilino’, in: Corriere della sera, March 7 (2005). The scientific exploration of Dante’s cranium and the physical model of his face were also spurned in public discussion and speculation about Dante’s original likeness abounded in the wake of the discovery of the Giudici e Notai fresco. 85 Boccaccio, Vita di Dante, p. 159.

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This anecdotal iconotext establishes a metonymic relationship between Dante’s physiognomy and his experiences in hell: obviously, his skin and his beard look the way they do because the smoke and the heat darkened them during his journey to the hereafter. Moreover, the passage strengthens once more the argument in favour of a continuous overlapping of the biographies of Dante, the narrator of the Divina Commedia, and the historical figure of Dante Alighieri, mystified by Boccaccio. Furthermore, Boccaccio enumerates the typical Dantean features he was known for and associated with: a long, aquiline nose, huge eyes and a massive jaw. His demeanour was melancholic and thoughtful, probably due to his terrifying experiences in the hereafter. Dante’s prototypical depiction by Boccaccio has been copied numerous times and “has become part of the collective imagination”.86 The above-mentioned iconography established in the 14th century forms the visual blueprint which influenced subsequent discourse on Dante’s visual image until the middle of the 19th century. However, a second image of Dante existed, which only partly corresponded to Boccaccio’s iconotextual description in the Trattatello.

III.2.2 An allegorical Everyman: Dante the personaggio on his pilgrimage Some of the earliest visual evidence of Dante can be found in the vast tradition of illuminated manuscripts, or codices, of the Divina Commedia. The earliest of Dante’s illustrated texts with an exact date can be traced to the year 1337 and was produced in Florence, the main centre of Commedia productions in the first decades of the manuscript’s illustration.87 There are more than 500 codices of the Commedia, dating from the 14th and 15th centuries, which contain illustrations. Around 130 manuscripts have miniatures at the beginning of each cantica and around 60 manuscripts display visual narratives, depicting each canto or selected parts of each cantica of the epic poem.88 What kind of information can these illuminated 86

Benazzi, ‘The face of the poet Dante Alighieri’, p. 280. This first manuscript is now stored in Milan, Biblioteca dell‘Archivio Storico Civico Trivulziana, MS 1080. Other famous illuminated manuscripts produced in the second half of the 14th century and in the first half of the 15th century include: Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 1005; Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, MS Palatini 313; Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plutei 40.35; London, British Library, MS Egerton 943; London, British Museum, MS Yates Thompson 36; Milan, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, MS AC XIII 41 (AN XV 17). 88 For more detailed information on the major illuminated manuscripts of the Divina Commedia see the two most seminal studies by Brieger, et. al., Illuminated 87

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manuscripts provide for the context of our study? Firstly, the vast majority of these illuminations were created in the 14th and 15th centuries. They all show a high degree of consistency concerning the scenes they depict. As Brieger found, the “canon of scenes” was set by the mid-14th century and underwent very few corrections.89 Given this consistency of depiction, we may deduce certain preferences for some scenes over others, which hopefully can be explained by the cultural reverberations which governed their selection and which entered these depictions. Since these first depictions are closest to the author’s own culture and time period they provide an illuminating visual commentary on the Commedia and serve as a collection of iconotexts for intermedial analysis. Secondly, these depictions also contain the first visual images of Dante and might elucidate the way Dante was perceived during that period. Thus, these first images represent an indispensable prerequisite to the study of Dante’s later reception and shed light on the ways that his European image has changed over the course of the centuries. In fact, Dante’s characteristic physiognomy - the aquiline nose, long chin, and clean-shaven features - with which he was generally associated since Boccaccio’s description appeared in his Trattatello, was flanked by a further visual image of Dante in the 14th and mid-15th centuries, whose “visual agenda” - as Owen states - could have been to “identify the figure of Dante by his clothes and his gestures, rather than by his physiognomy”.90 This was Dante, the fervent pilgrim and visual representative of the Everyman. To depict Dante as a pilgrim seems the most obvious visual choice, since the Commedia narrates his journey into the hereafter and the word journey itself is already mentioned in the very first line of Dante’s text. Moreover, the narrator himself makes it clear in Inf. I that the pilgrimage - in an allegorical sense - serves the purpose of absolving mankind from sin, since it had lost its way:

Manuscripts, and Marcella Roddewig, Dante Alighieri: Die göttliche Komödie: Vergleichende Bestandsaufnahme der Commedia-Handschriften (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1984). On the manuscript tradition, see John Ahern, ‘What did the First Copies of the Comedy look like?’, in: Dante for the New Millennium, ed. by Teodolinda Barolini and Wayne Storey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), pp.1-15. 89 Brieger, Illuminated Manuscripts, vol 1, p. 85. 90 Owen, The Image of Dante, p. 85. See also Richard Holbrook, Portraits of Dante from Giotto to Raffael (London: Phillip Lee Warner, 1911), p. 14, and Brieger, Illuminated Manuscripts, vol. 1, p. 93.

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Chapter III Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in una selva scura, che la diritta via era smarrita. When I had journeyed half of our life’s way I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray. [Inf., I, 1-3]

The narrator is clearly on a quest for purification. Some scholars even take it for granted that the narrator’s allusion to a pilgrimage is used in the literal sense and that he really embarks on his journey as a pilgrim. Mary Alexander Watt, for example, provides deictic evidence taken from the first canto and identifies the "selva scura" (l. 2) with the "many hills and mountains one must climb along the pilgrimage routes to Rome, to Santiago de Compostela, or to Jerusalem".91 Furthermore, she argues that the image of the pilgrim intersects with the image of Dante, the crusader, when she refers to Paradiso and quotes subtle textual references to the history of crusades such as Federico II’s regaining of Jerusalem in 1229, concluding that "the pilgrim in the Paradiso has reached the Promised Land and is no longer a traveler".92 However, in neither Dante's iconography, nor in his mental image of the time do we find a similar transition from pilgrim to crusader. I argue, therefore, that the first illustrators engaged with Dante’s text and established a hypertextual relation, in which they used the original ideas of the textual source, their pretext, and visually transformed them. The idea of Dante, the pilgrim, for example, can be found in a great number of early manuscripts. One of the most felicitous depictions is Dante’s figure in MS Egerton 943 (figure 3):93 Dante is shown in profile, he wears a pilgrim’s hat and a red gown. His darkened complexion and his black beard form an 91 Mary Alexander Watt, The Cross That Dante Bears - Pilgrimage, Crusade, and the Cruciform Church in the Divine Comedy (Tallahassee: University of Florida Press, 2005), p. 17. See in particular chapter 7, ‘Towards the light’, pp.117-46, and chapter 4, ‘Let him go up to Jerusalem’, pp. 62-75. 92 Loc. cit. p. 64. 93 The illuminated manuscript named MS Egerton 943 dates back to the second quarter of the 14th century and originates in Northern Italy, presumably in Padua. It is now held in the British Library. For details on this manuscript see Roddewig, Vergleichende Bestandsaufnahme der Commedia-Handschriften, pp. 163-64, Alessandro Conti, La Miniatura bolognese: Scuole e botteghe 1270-1340 (Bologna: ALFA, 1981), pp. 67-68, and Brieger, Illuminated Manuscripts, vol. 1, pp. 262-69.

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intermedial relationship with w Boccaccio’s anecdotal description of o Dante’s features in hhis Trattatelloo in laude di Dante, D in whiich the originaal written source of D Dante’s physioognomy is ren ndered faithfullly on paper. His body is displayedd in an upwardd movement, since s he walkks uphill, an allusion a to the Commeedia’s Mount Purgatory an nd his uphilll journey to Paradise. Small trees that surrounnd the poet as a well as treees in the baackground establish thee first canto’s setting, the “sshadowed foreest” (l. 2).

Figuree 3: Detaill of a miniaturee of Dante’s dreeam and his souul leaving his bo ody (MS Egerton 943)

Even thoughh we lack eviidence regarding the illustrrator’s familiaarity with the pretextss - Dante’s Commedia C and d Boccaccio’ss Trattatello - we can identify a hiigh degree off formal and structural s imittation, since th he setting follows Dannte’s descriptiion establisheed in the firstt canto of Infferno, and Dante’s phhysiognomy originates o in n the anecdoote published d in the Trattatello.

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Paradoxically, such a striking intermedial link to Boccaccio’s anecdote has been given only minor attention in the most seminal analyses of the first illuminated manuscripts, and seems to have been largely overlooked in the study of Dante’s early iconography. Linda C. Sokolowski, for example, argues that “fourteenth-century illuminations tend to give the pilgrim a rather ‘generic’ face, roundish and without distinguishing features”.94 Brieger, on the same note, observes that on the whole, the portrait image of Dante was not established until the 15th century.95 Although the common Dantean physiognomy was far from being immediately recognisable in the 14th century, I would argue, however, that we can detect a co-existence of an individualised visual image of Dante originating in Boccaccio’s Trattatello on the one hand, and a more generic visual image of Dante on the other hand. To make matters even more complicated, Boccaccio’s visual image of Dante has two different physiognomic expressions, as will be shown below. The more generic visualisation of Dante can be explained by the above-mentioned depiction of Dante as a pilgrim or as an allegorical Everyman: there are many episodes in the Commedia where the narrator assumes a more general perspective and reveals the allegory intended by the author and explained in his epistle to Cangrande della Scala. An example is the personal pronoun I’(o) / I referred to Dante, the author, in lines such as [...] I’ mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando. [...] I am one who, when Love breathes in me, takes note; what he, within dictates, I, in that way, without, would speak and shape. [Purg., XXIV, 52-4]

Once more, this reveals the author’s narrative self-consciousness and his dual role as personaggio-poeta which recedes and gives way to his allegorical role as a pilgrim on his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and

94 Linda C. Sokolowski, ‘A Pilgrim and his Journey: Illuminating Interpretations of Dante’s Commedia’, in: Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association, vol. 3, ed. by Ruth E. Hamilton and David L. Wagner (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 1986), pp. 219-230, p. 222. 95 Brieger, Illuminated Manuscripts, vol. 1, pp. 93-4. See also Dorothy Hughes Gillerman, ‘Trecento Illustrators of the Divina Commedia’, in: Dante Studies, 77 (1959), pp. 4-5.

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Paradise. This is illustrated, for example, at the very beginning with the use of the possessive pronoun “nostra” in Inf., I, 1: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”.96 Here the narrator becomes Everyman on his pilgrimage, a more generic character that the reader can identify with, and assumes “the personification of Christian endeavour, after whom the reader should mold himself in mind and heart”.97 It is very likely that such an interpretation of Dante as Everyman lies at the heart of a variety of depictions found in the first illuminated manuscripts. The illuminators might have therefore been interested in rendering an allegorical picture of the pilgrim instead of depicting the poet as an individual, and their visualisation forms a hypertextual relationship with the allegorical interpretation of the Commedia. The only characteristics which clearly identify and distinguish the narrator from other figures are a long robe and the beret of the scholar or magister, the insignia of a learned person.98 One striking example is the famous illuminated manuscript referred to as Yates Thompson 36, attributed to Priamo della Quercia and Giovanni di Paolo and now kept in the British Library (figure 4). The manuscript dates back to the middle of the 15th century and was presumably created in Tuscany in the years 1444-1450.99

96

[“When I had journeyed half of our life’s way”]. [my italics] The personification of ‘Christian endeavour’ in connection with the Commedia’s narrator was formulated for the first time in Brieger, Illuminated Manuscripts, vol 1, p. 94. On the different perspectives inherent in the Commedia, see Gianfranco Contini, Un’idea di Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), pp. 42-61. 98 Brieger, Illuminated Manuscripts, vol. 1, p. 93. 99 This illuminated manuscript was named for its last owner, Henry Yates Thompson, a British newspaper owner and manuscript collector. For further information on this illuminated manuscript, see Giulietta Chelazzi Dini, ‘Lorenzo Vecchietta, Priamo della Quercia, Nicola da Siena: nuove osservazioni sulla Divina Commedia Yates Thompson 36', in: Jacopo della Quercia fra Gotico e Rinascimento: Atti del convegno di studi, Siena, Facoltà di Lettre e Filosofia, 2-5 ottobre 1975, ed. by Giulietta Chelazzi (Florence: Centro di Florence, 1977), pp. 203-28, Brieger, Illuminated Manuscripts, vol. 1, pp. 269-76, The Painted Page: Italian Renaissance Book Illumination 1450-1550, ed. by Jonathan J. G. Alexander (London: Prestel, 1994), p. 22, and Benjamin David, ‘Sites of Confluence: The Master of the Yates Thompson Divine Comedy’, in: Tributes to Jonathan J.G. Alexander: The Making and Meaning of Illuminated Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Art & Architecture, ed. by Susan L’Engle and Gerald B. Guest (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2006), pp. 21-32. 97

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Figuree 4: Dante e Virgilio (MS Yates Y Thompsonn 36)

Herre we find Dante, D the young y pilgrim m, with moree generic features andd a roundish face, f carefully y entering thee dark wood. His eyes are bashfullly fixed on thhe ground, a gesture of ineexperience on n the one hand and, onn the other haand, a sign off reverence tow wards his guide Vergil to the right. In contrast too Dante’s you uth, Vergil is depicted as a wise old man, sportinng a grey bearrd and grey tuffts of hair. Hi s hands point upwards, once again an allusion to the Comm media’s Mounnt Purgatory and their uphill journney to Paradise. Interestingly, Dante weaars a blue sou utane and Vergil a redd one. In manny illuminated d manuscripts we find thesse colours exactly alterrnated, since blue b was ofteen associated with royalty, authority and heavennly grace. Reed, on the other o hand, rrepresents po ower and importance.100 The four half-length figures f surrouunding the historiated h initial repreesent allegoriies of Justicee, Power, Peeace and Tem mperance. Symbolicallly these qualities are attriibuted to Verrgil and Dan nte at the beginning oof their journeey. Even thou ugh Dante doees not bear th he typical physical traaits he wouldd later becom me associatedd with, he is i clearly recognisablee as the narrattor of the Diviina Commediaa, since he is generally 100

On the sym mbolic use of colours c in the Middle M Ages, seee John Gage, Color and Meaning: Arrt, Science, andd Symbolism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 67-89.

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depicted as being accompanied by his guide, Vergil, in Hell and in Purgatory or by Beatrice in Paradise. In addition to this, for their representation of Dante the pilgrim, the first illustrators might have been influenced by ideas of both paratext and hypertext. Firstly, the paratext offers the epithet divina, which - apart from Boccaccio’s praise of Dante’s genius - suggests the journey of a pilgrim to God. Secondly, we can also detect hypertextual elements which are still linked with the textual source, but which have clearly transformed the original meaning. Such an interesting example of intermediality leads to the last manuscript illustration discussed in this chapter: the illustration of the first canto of Purgatory in MS Laurenziano-Tempiano 1 (figure 5).101 The beginning initial P forms the frame for the depiction of Dante and Vergil sitting in a boat. The opening lines of this canto make use of an extended metaphor, in which the narrator states that the writing of Purgatorio (“my talent’s little vessel lifts her sails”) will be much smoother (“to course across more kindly waters”) compared to the writing of Inferno (“leaving behind herself a sea so cruel”).102 In the Divina Commedia, however, Dante and Vergil do not reach Purgatory by sea. They climb through the centre of the earth and arrive at the foot of the mountain, where the sinful souls await their purification. In the second canto of Purgatorio the narrator explains to us that the saved souls, released from their physical bodies, are taken to the purgatorial island by boat, which proves that there is a logical connection between Purgatory and the sea. At this stage of the journey, however, the depiction is inaccurate. We may therefore deduce that, along the lines of Mitchell, a linguistic image (the extended metaphor) had been transformed into a graphical image: the illustration of the first canto. Since the applied metaphor unmistakably refers to the author’s writing process and not primarily to his pilgrimage, this illustration gives evidence of the illustrator’s perception of Dante as a traveller or pilgrim, whose experience represents the journey of Everyman.

101

This illuminated manuscript was presumably compiled in Florence between the years 1386-1400. It is now stored in Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, MS Laurenziano-Tempiano 1. 102 Purg., I, 1-3. [“Per correr miglior acque alza le vele omai la navicella del mio ingegno, che lascia dietro sé mar sì crudele”].

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Figuure 5: Illustratioon of Purgatoryy I with a historriated initial ‘P P’ of Dante andd Vergil (MS Laaurenziano-Tem mpiano 1)

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Once again, Dante is depicted in a more generic way, lacking any individual physical traits, yet accompanied by his guide Vergil. Dante clutches at the mast of the sailboat, a sign of fear and uneasiness, while Vergil rests quietly and self-assuredly in the boat. What this passage underlines is a visual overlapping of Dante as personaggio with Dante as poeta, so that an intermedial relationship between the two Dantes in the Commedia, namely his roles as narrator and protagonist, is established. Whether the illustrator deliberately negated the author’s metaphor or not remains open to speculation. From a literary point of view, this metaphor is of inestimable value, since it testifies to the narrator’s self-perception as a writer and testifies once more to the Commedia’s inherent narrative selfconsciousness. Similar to the narrator’s constant references to his readers throughout the Commedia, the reflection upon his own writing process represents an extraordinary case of fictional self-awareness in European literature. Furthermore, in the sections of the text where the author and narrator overlap, the pilgrim-protagonist can be seen both as a specific individual as well as an allegorical Everyman. As Sokolowski notes: In choosing scenes and settings from the literal level of the text, the illuminators identify the pilgrim as Dante; but in giving the pilgrim generic facial features, they do not restrict the reader’s ability to see the analogies between his own experience and Dante’s.103

On an iconographical level, these illuminations therefore repeat the textual self-reference, since they support the narrator’s capacity to win over his readers and to make them identify with his own journey: the journey of Everyman. Last, but not least, these illuminations form the visual blueprint of Dante, the pilgrim, which becomes productive in the first 200 years of illuminated manuscripts, before Dante’s visual image was fixed. They already hint at the ongoing overlap of Dante as personaggio and Dante as poeta, since “any reader would, upon reading the work, identify the pilgrim as Dante, even if on the basis of the illuminations he initially identified him as an allegorical Everyman”.104 Such a distinction becomes visually depicted in the illuminated manuscripts and frescos discussed in the subsequent chapters.

103 104

Sokolowski, ‘A Pilgrim and his Journey’, p. 230. Loc. cit. p. 223.

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IIII.2.3 “And d then I fell as a a dead boody falls”: Maarvelling, slleeping and fainting as ssuperlativess of human expression in the early e manusscript tradition In chapter III.1.1, we defined the term narratiive self-consciousness according tto Dante’s addresses a to the reader, his autobio ographical allusions as well as his osstentatious dow wnsizing of hhis persona on a literary level. This cchapter argues that these elements e havee visual counterparts in the form off superlativess of human expression. e W Warburg’s term m for the depiction off the human ecstasies e of paain, fear, longging and delig ght can be applied to a number of pathos p formulaae in the earlyy manuscript tradition. These depicctions represent Dante ex xperiencing a variety of different emotions: D Dante marvellling at what he sees durinng his journeey, Dante sleeping in a state of divvine inspiratio on, or Dante fainting in th he face of horror. In Y Yates Thompsoon 36, Dante is depicted slleeping on thee left side of the illustrration and throowing his han nds up in the aair in the middle of the depiction duuring his encoounter with th he three wild bbeasts (figure 6).105 He is clearly loonging for hellp in his strug ggle to escapee his fierce ag ggressors. His generic face and his beseeching gaze towards tthe sky thereb by evokes an empatheetic response from readerrs and obserrvers, since Dante is presented ass a helpless annd vulnerable human h being in the face off danger.

Figure 6: Lee tre fiere (MS Yates Tho ompson 36)

105

For the illuminated mannuscript Yates Thompson T 36, see Brieger, Illuminated I Manuscripts, vol. 1, pp. 269-76.

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Figgure 7: Dante and a Virgil and Paolo P and Franncesca (Detail) (MS Holkham m misc. 48)

Such a supperlative of human h expresssion establishhes a high degree d of identificatioon with Dantee the personag ggio and transsfers certain aspects a of Dante’s narrrative self-coonsciousness, such as his connectivity with the reader or hiss alleged inferriority in view w of his superrnatural missio on, to the visual imagee. An additionnal standard mode m of preseentation often n found in the early m manuscript traddition explicittly refers to tthe literal lev vel of the pretext andd depicts Dannte fainting at his encouunter with Paolo and Francesca inn Inf. V. Herre, the narrattor states thatt “because off pity - I fainted, as if I had met my m death. And d then I fell ass a dead body y falls”.106 In MS Holkkham misc. 48, 4 Dante’s words w are faithhfully translatted into a visual depicction of the Florentine F fain nting (figure 77). This underlines the tendency too humanize Dante D the perrsonaggio, wh which is simillar to his depiction ass a generic Everyman E enccountered in the previouss chapter. Once again,, Dante’s supeerlative of hu uman expressiion invokes th he pity of the empatheetic reader and a enhances the sympathhy felt for Dante D the personaggioo, since, ultiimately, in such s a depicction of Dan nte, “the 106

Inf. V, 1400-42. [“sì che di pietade io venni men così com’io morissse. E caddi come corpo morto cade.””] These worrds have beenn subject to numerous interpretationns, ranging from m Dante’s own shame about hiis early love po oetry to his perplexity in the face of Paaolo and Franceesca’s fate. Forr recent interpreetations of canto V see, ffor example, thhe chapter ‘Il caanto della pietàà’ in: Nicola Lo ongo, Studi danteschi: daa Francesca allla Trinità (Rom me: Ed. Studium m, 2013), pp. 11-64, 1 and Giuseppe Maazzotta, Readingg Dante (Londo on: Yale Univerrsity Press, 2014), pp. 3851.

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vulnerability or fragility of the agent [...] is revealed”.107 The depiction of sleep was, to a certain extent, already suggested by the pretext, since the narrator of the Commedia explicitly states at the beginning of his journey: [...] Tant‘era pien di sonno in quel punto, Che la verace via abbandonai. [...] I was so full of sleep just at the point where I abandoned the true path. [Inf., I, 11-12] Many illustrators, therefore, depicted Dante sleeping, while the narrator’s textual reference referred to the sensus allegoricus, meaning that he was ignorant and unaware of his sinful life, which as a consequence made him diverge from the right path. The illuminators took the allegory of sleep and translated it backwards to the literal level of the pretext, thus depicting Dante either lying on the ground (figure 6) or Dante literally lying in bed before erring in the dark forest (figure 3). Thereby, an intermedial relationship between pretext and visualisation was established. In particular, the depiction in MS Egerton 943 “may have influenced several subsequent ones”, as Owen states.108 Battaglia Ricci points out that the Egerton depiction might have a visual predecessor in a 14th-century illuminated manuscript of the Roman de la Rose. In that model visualisation, the protagonist was also depicted twice, first sleeping and then walking into the garden, so that in Egerton presumably the garden was merely replaced by Dante’s dark wood. Here we can detect an interrelated reference to the original drawing, which inspired the subsequent illuminators of the Commedia.109 In Egerton and in equivalent codices, Dante was depicted as literally sleeping, but sleep was also seen as a meditative state in which an author was infused with God’s message. Similar to the Rossano Gospels, which will be discussed in chapter III.2.4, a divinely mandated auctor receives God’s message in order to write it down. 107

Robin Kirkpatrick, ‘Dante and the Body’, in: Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. by Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 236-53, p. 238. 108 Owen, The image of Dante, p. 90. 109 Battaglia Ricci, Parole e immagini nella letteratura italiana medievale: materiali e problemi (Pisa: Gruppo Editoriale Internazionale e La Libreria del Lungarno, 1994), p. 43. Ricci refers to the portrayal of the protagonist Guillaume in an illuminated manuscript dating back to the 14th century, now stored at the British Library, MS Additional 31840, fol. 3.

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Theere are a varieety of pathos formulae in ttraditional iconography in which sleeep was assocciated with th he depiction oof prophets an nd saints, who were reeceiving messsages directly y from God. A An illustrativee example of Dante’s oown culture reepresents Giottto Bondone’ss Sogno di Gio oacchino, in which Giotto depicts an a angel bringing God’s meessage to Jaco ob, who is in a meditatiive state of sleeep (figure 8)..

Figuree 8: Sogno di Gioacchino (Deta tail) Figure 9: Poortrait of Dantee (MS Holham m misc. 48)

Giotto’s deppiction forms a visual proto otype of the prresentation off prophets in late mediieval art, a pathos formulaa which oncee again can allready be found in Heellenism.110 Thhis depiction is i marked by a secluded po osture and an almost ab absent facial expression. e Th his way, the pprophet-poet reaches a state of trannscendence annd dives into extra-mundanne spheres. Veery often, such a depicction goes haand in hand with w a protectiive gesture su uch as the folding of arrms or legs orr an averted gaze in order tto seal oneselff off from the outside world. In thiss meditative state, s the propphet-poet beccomes the mere recordder of events and a absorbs the divinely orddained messag ge. Such a depiction foorms a hyperrtextual relationship with Plato’s descrription of divine inspirration in Ion, where “the go od takes awayy the poet’s seenses and uses him, likke a seer or prrophet, as a mouthpiece for the god’s message”.111 I would arguue that such a depiction of Dante D represen ents the precurrsor to the differentiatioon between Dante D the perssonaggio and Dante the poeta, since in these visuualisations as prophet-poet the narrator c learly steps ou utside the 110 111

See Zankeer, The Mask off Socrates, p. 33 30-31. Murray, P Plato on Poetry, p. 9.

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action of the Commedia and is presented as a mere recipient of its poetic content. Such a depiction forms the prerequisite to Dante’s subsequent portrayal as an author. As Pertile points out: while identifying completely with what we call Dante the character, Dante does not consider himself to be the subject of the journey, but the recorder of it - the paper, tape or film, if I may say so, upon which the matter of the future poem is gradually impressed.112

This process of recording suggests the depiction of passive observation and quiet meditation, which the illuminators may have found in the established iconography of prophets and saints. Their choice of gestures, therefore, can be seen as vital engrams in Warburg’s sense, which make up the pathos formula of the secluded prophet-poet. Moreover such a depiction of hagiographic elements echoes Dante’s historiogram established by Boccaccio: the myth of the saint-like author. In MS Holkham misc. 48, Dante assumes a similar posture as Giotto’s Gioacchino.113 For the sake of comparison, the two images are juxtaposed on page 94. Figure 9 is entitled Portrait of Dante and it depicts Dante in a pensive state of slumber. Similar to Gioacchino, his head is inclined and the protective position of his left hand and his posture express reclusiveness. Taking over well-established forms of iconography and widely circulating historiograms, the image of Dante thus became enhanced with prophet- or saint-like attributes. Moreover, an intermedial relationship between these images and the mental image of Boccaccio’s Trattatello is established. The depiction of Dante receiving divine messages is further enhanced in the many portrayals of Dante the poeta, which ultimately emphasise the differentiation between the protagonist and the author of the Commedia. While the superlatives of human expression portrayed by Dante marvelling, sleeping or fainting serve the purpose of humanising the protagonist, there are a number of manuscripts which clearly separate Dante the personaggio, as the protagonist of his narrative, and Dante the poeta, or the prophet-like visionary, and lay the

112

Pertile, ‘Dante in the Comedy’, p. 165. MS Holkham misc. 48, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The manuscript is of uncertain origin and belonged to Thomas William Coke (1754-1842); it used to be stored at Holkham Library, Norfolk. See, W. O. Hassall, ed., The Holkham Library: illuminations and illustrations in the manuscript library of the Earl of Leicester (Oxford, The Roxburghe Club, 1970). 113

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foundation for the subsequent mystification of the author, which will be examined in the following chapter.

III.2.4 Framing the Florentine: Dante the poeta and the allegory of truth, wisdom and knowledge Although the early illustrated manuscripts reveal a tendency to depict Dante as a pilgrim on his journey, as a generic Everyman, or as a humanised personaggio, there is some evidence to argue that even at the initial stage of reception, Dante was recognised as a prolific author and even as a divine prophet. Such an awareness “must have been due in part to his own assertion of this role, reinforced by commentators”.114 Both of these visual images find their counterparts in Boccaccio’s and Bruni’s mental images and form a historiogram, as we have seen. First, the mode of presentation of Dante as a poet generally adhered to a firmly established tradition of author portraiture, which ranged from Roman antiquity to the Renaissance.115 Rachel Owen explains that “there was an established tradition of author portraits which illustrators of the Commedia could easily adapt to create an image of Dante as author”.116 A common visual blueprint depicted the writer or scribe sitting at a desk or in his study, thus establishing a metonymic relationship between the person and the paraphernalia of his production. In fact, similar depictions of Dante were widespread in many centres across Italy and can be found in so many illustrated manuscripts that one might suggest a kind of pathos formula, which the illustrators followed by visualising the author at work bent over his desk or carrying and presenting his book. The illuminated manuscript tradition continuously creates an analogy between Dante’s book and the Bible. While the initials N and P of the Inferno often depict Dante in the act of writing, the L of the Paradiso shows Christ as Creator, holding the Book of the World.117 Julia Bolton 114

Owen, The Image of Dante, p. 88. For the tradition of author portraits from Roman antiquity to the Renaissance, see John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), Kurt Weitzmann, Late Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977), and Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 116 Owen, The Image of Dante, p. 88. 117 Brieger, Illuminated Manuscripts, vol. 1, p. 28. 115

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Holloway questioned why the figure of the poet is present in medieval poems118 and argues that “pilgrimage poems in the fourteenth century usurped the place of the epic” and, therefore, explicitly showed “the creators within their creations, in their own image”.119 In the case of Dante, we encounter the depiction of a “stern and bitter [poet] in his eared cap and his long robe; the lean and wild will, looking like a Lollard”.120 Furthermore she puts forward the argument that these poems follow important “authorial, intertextual paradigms”, and ultimately refer to the description of the disciples in Emmaus and their encounter with Christ in Luke’s Gospel.121 Thus “the mirroring of God’s writing in man’s writing is of the essence of pilgrimage imitatio Christi”, and the poet becomes a legitimate and allegorical follower of Christ.122 The engrams of the pathos formula of the scribe were taken over from classical models and gave off their mnemic energy in Dante’s culture, which leads Owen to conclude that “the influence of traditional visual models played a large part in the artists' presentation of Dante as poet”.123 As explained in the first part of this analysis, some of the most seminal studies on Dante's iconography - as brilliant as they may be in terms of their descriptive analysis - fall short of providing an historical and theoretical grounding of iconographical concepts and lack accurate description. Hence, in a Warburgean sense, we can speak of certain engrams or dynamograms which have a long tradition in antique portrayals of writers and intellectuals and which find their contemporary appropriation in the depiction of Dante as a poet. An illuminating example of these engrams is found in several depictions of one of the most famous Florentine codices, MS 1005.124 The illustrations of Inf. I show Dante displaying his book and raising the index finger of his left hand, assuming the posture of a lecturer, who briefly interrupts his recitation to elucidate what he has just enunciated. In this 118

See in particular, chapter 10, entitled ‘The Pilgrim and the Book’, in: Julia Bolton Holloway, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), pp. 209-29. 119 Loc. cit. p. 209. 120 Loc. cit. 121 Loc. cit. 122 Loc. cit. 123 Owen, The Image of Dante, p. 88. 124 The illuminated manuscript MS 1005 dates back to the middle of the 14th century and is stored at the Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence.

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drawing, Daante is clearlyy identifiable as a learned scholar, who ose words possess dignnity and authoority. Next to this depictionn, we find Dan nte sitting at his desk. Here, he assuumes the postu ure of a writerr completely immersed i in his work, with his righht hand touching his lips annd his left hand holding the pages. T This depiction is reminiscen nt of Christiann images of prrophets or Gospel writeers, such as thhe image of Stt Mark writingg on a scroll at a his desk or the illustrration of Carddinal Stefanesschi writing thhe hagiograph hy Life of St George.1225

Figure 10: Illusstration of the Rossano R Gospeels: St. Mark

In pparticular, thee iconography y of the Rossanno Gospels esstablished a visual bluueprint which has become a vital engraam in the Waarburgean sense and m makes up thee pathos form mula of the leearned person n writing (figure 10); the illustrateed image in the Rossano Gospels disp plays the personificatiion of a wom man - presumaably an angell without win ngs - who “has taken thhe place of the Muse and dictates word ffor word to Saaint Mark, 126 even going oover with her finger and ch hecking what he has just written”. w The conceppt, as well ass the depiction, of divinee inspiration becomes 125

The Rossaano Gospels aree supposedly of Syrian originn and date back k to the 6th century AD. They representt one of the old dest surviving i lluminated man nuscript of the New Tesstament and arre kept in Rosssano (Calabriaa / Italy), Arch hepiscopal Library, fol. 121. The illusstration of Card dinal Stefanescchi writing the Life of St George dates back to the firrst half of the 14 4th century andd belongs to thee Codex of St George, V Vatican, Biblioteeca Apostolica Vaticana, Archhivio di San Pieetro, MS C 129, fol. 17. 126 Zanker, Thhe Mask of Socrrates, p. 330.

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personified in this image.. Originally a Greek idea,1227 it persisted well into the Middle A Ages and reprresents a supeerlative of hum man expressio on, a vital pathos form mula in the Warburgean W seense, which inn this case trranscends time, artistiic genre andd religion, an nd therefore recurs in th he artistic production oof later epochs. Paul Zankeer has pointed out that “the notion of spiritual insppiration that marked m Late Hellenism H andd the Christian n belief in the creationn of Holy Wrrit through thee agency of ccelestial poweers are in essence the same”.128 Daante holding a book or dispplaying his Co ommedia, therefore, esstablishes him m as a divinely y mandated auuctor. The boo ok thereby acquires thee quality of a symbol s of trutth and, “insteaad of a simplee attribute that the learrned man hollds or ponderrs, it becomess a spiritually y charged cultural iconn whose power is aimed directly d at the viewer”.129 Similar S to the display of the Holy Scripture, bo ooks came to acquire the ability to ensure “the ttruth revealedd: seeing [the book] b is believving”.130

Figure 111: Illustration of Inferno I witth a historiatedd initial ‘N’ of Dante D MS Laurenziano o-Tempiano 1) (M 127

See pp. 799-80 of this anallysis. Zanker, Thhe Mask of Socrates, p. 328. 129 Loc. cit. ppp. 330-1. 130 Loc. cit. p. 331. 128

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A revealing exaample of an auctor display aying his book can be found in thee cycle of fresccos executed by b Andrea da Bonaiuto, wh hich dates back to the times of the first f Dante dep pictions (figuure 14). In onee painting of this fresco cycle, entitled e Alleg gory of the Church Miliitant and Triumphant,, in the churrch Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Thomas Aquinas is ddepicted holdiing the Holy Scripture andd pointing to itt with his right index ffinger. In thiss way, the heaathens, depicteed on the righ ht, should be converteed to the Catholic faitth. Their deepiction rang ges from doubtfulnesss to piety andd exemplifies the persuasivveness of the book b as a cultural iconn. In Dante’s case, c such a deepiction even enhances the dignified aura attributted to the poeet and testifiess to his growinng reputation, with the book beingg an importannt sign of wisdom, w truthh and knowleedge. By displaying tthe book as a cultural ico on, the authoor passes on truth and knowledge to his disciplles and assum mes a positionn of authority y. Such a “concept of the transmission of knowleedge will from m now on be dominated d by such imaages of authorrity, [in which h] the medievaal teacher sits or stands elevated aboove his pupilss”.131 The autthor’s presenttation of the book b as a cultural iconn, therefore, constitutes c a Warburgean W eengram and constitutes an iconograp aphic pathos formula, f which originated iin antiquity only o to be renewed in the late Midddle Ages and in the early R Renaissance in n order to enhance Dannte’s authorityy as a poet.

Figure 12: Allegory of o the Church Militant M and Triiumphant (Detaail) 131

Zanker, Th The Mask of Soccrates, p. 330. Zanker Z points oout that this steereotypical image of meedieval teachinng also lies att the heart of the iconograp phy of the university.

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Figure 13: Dante e il suo s poema (Dettail)

Onne of the mosst influential depictions off Dante preseenting his book is fouund in the freesco executed by Domenicco di Michelin no in the Cathedral off Santa Mariaa del Fiore in Florence (figuure 13). This depiction of Dante, paartly due to itss prominent position p in thee heart of Florrence, has become onee of the mostt iconic visuaal blueprints oof the Floren ntine. The fresco displaays Dante’s thhree realms, as a depicted inn the Commed dia, along with a view w of Florencee. The spectattors of this fr fresco becomee Dante’s disciples annd marvel at a Dante’s presentation p oof the threee realms. Furthermoree, Dante is croowned with a laurel, l the cla ssical symboll of poetic excellence. The prominennt position of the fresco in the centre off Florence and the pressentation of Dante’s D culturral artefact inn combination n with the Tuscan capiital becomes a clear statemeent of culturall supremacy during d the Renaissancee period. The fact that it was w executedd in 1465, exaactly 200 years after thhe great Poet’’s birthday, fu urther testifiess to Dante’s fu unction as a transmitteer of culturaal memory for the Florrentine city-sstate and underscores, once again, that by the en nd of the fifteeenth century, [...], the

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Comedy’s status as a ‘classic’ had been secured, and Dante had become a key figure in the establishment of a Florentine identity.132 Michelino’s and Sandro Botticelli’s depictions of Dante, executed at the same time, are generally associated with a shift in the perception of writers and artists in the Renaissance period. Along with humanistic ideas, which were cherished by the Medici ruler Lorenzo Il Magnifico and his circle, the commemoration of the past and the worship of the individual artist were gradually celebrated in the highest ranks of society.133 Hence the need for a more individualistic representation of Florence’s greatest poet. The Greek tradition of crowning bards with a wreath of laurel was revived by one of Dante’s contemporaries, the humanist Albertino Mussato (1261-1329), in Padua.134 In 1341, Petrarch crowned himself in the reception hall of the medieval senatorial palace in Rome, an event which culminated in the revival of the antique tradition of the poet laureate, and this practice gave off its mnemic energy in an altered cultural circumstance.135 In Roman culture, the laurel crown was awarded as “a sign of victory for the general in his triumph”.136 Petrarch, however, hoped to ignite a cultural and political renewal by his emulation of classical practices.137 Interestingly, the first depictions of Dante wearing a laurel crown appeared only after Petrarch’s self-coronation and after Boccaccio’s description of a laurel tree as a meaningful portent at Dante’s birth. Boccaccio explains “how the political misfortune of exile robbed Dante of the merited honour of the laurel crown in Florence”, and stresses the fact that throughout his life and career, Dante always “subordinated his search for personal fame to his political and ethical purpose”.138 Michelino’s

132

Lummus, ‘Dante’s Inferno: Critical Reception and Influence’, pp. 65-6. See Margaret L. King, The Renaissance in Europe (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2003), pp. 120-34, and pp. 212-24. 134 Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), p. 20. 135 Loc. cit. p. 32. 136 The World of Roman Costume, ed. by Judith Lynn Sebesta and Larissa Bonfante (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), p. 82. 137 For the circumstances and motivations of Petrarch’s self-coronation, see Jonathan Usher, ‘Petrarch’s Diploma of Crowning: The Privilegium laureationis’, in: Italy and the Classical Tradition - Language, Thought and Poetry 1300 - 1600, ed. by Carlo Caruso and Andrew Laird (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), pp. 161-192. 138 Houston, Building a Monument to Dante, p. 84. Dante expresses his life-long desire to be recognised as a poet laureate in his hometown in Par., XXV, 1-9. See chapter III.1.1. 133

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depiction oof Dante as a poet laureeate represennts an act of belated recognition of the literaryy and political merits of the Florentine. Dannte’s striking physiognomicc features in th this fresco refeer back to one of the most influential depiction ns of Dante iin profile exeecuted by Nardo di Cione (figure 144). The fresco o was completted in the middle of the 14th centuryy and was reediscovered and a used as a prototype for f Dante visualisationns in the 15th century. Gom mbrich points oout that the growing dem mand for a likeness of Dantte led to a tendency to y earlier muraals which werre vaguely recoognise his feaatures in many thouught to date from f this timee. The process could not haave started withhout some prottotype or standaard by which otther images weere judged, but once it was unnder way there were plenty off dignified hood ded figures withh aquiline nosees to choose from m.139

Figuure 14: Volto dii Dante (Detail))

It is very likely that this t “wretched, emaciatedd figure” of Dante,140 executed for the Strozzi Chapel in th he Church of Santa Maria Novella, offered suchh a visual prrototype for subsequent ddepictions of the poet. Dante’s feattures in Nardoo di Cione’s fresco fr bear a sstriking resem mblance to Dante’s porttrait in MS 10040, a manusccript containinng a selection of poems 139

Ernst H. G Gombrich, ‘Giootto’s Portrait off Dante?’, in: B Burlington Mag gazine, 121 (1979), pp. 4771-83, p. 480. 140 Gilson, Daante and Renaisssance Florence, p. 12.

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from Dante’s Canzoniere, now stored at the Biblioteca Riccardiana. Even though Dante is depicted as an elderly man, this portrait was believed to be the most authentic rendering of the poet in 1865 and was used extensively at the 600th anniversary of Dante’s birth.141 Owen points out that “from these Quattrocento examples, the image of Dante was fixed and repeated by sixteenth-century artists” such as Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican and, a little earlier, Botticelli’s portrait commissioned by the Medici family.142 Famous examples of Dante’s fixed image as a prolific author are Andrea del Castagno’s Dante in the Uffizi (1450) and, based on it, Giuliano da Maiano and Francione’s Dante in the intarsia doors of the Sala de’ Gigli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (figure 15), which combines Dante presenting a book with the pathos formula of the laurel-crowned poet. Owen quotes a number of Florentine codices, which more or less follow Nardo di Cione’s depiction of Dante, and argues that “by midQuattrocento, in many Florentine manuscripts at least, Dante the Everyman has become Dante the famous poet, embodied in a recognisable physical form and incorporated into his own narrative”.143 Boccaccio’s and Bruni’s mental images of Dante as a poet had successfully been translated into visualisations, which guaranteed Dante’s physiognomy - similar to his use of the terza rima for his poetry - a high degree of memorability. Nardo di Cione’s version of Dante, once again, establishes an intermedial relationship with Boccaccio’s description of the poet. Dante can be identified by his protruded chin, his aquiline nose as well as by wearing the beret of a scholar. His firmly closed jaw and his hanging upper lip contribute to his grim and severe facial expression, a typical feature of most subsequent depictions.

141

Owen, The Image of Dante, p 93. For more on Dante’s portrait in MS 1040, see Maria Luisa Scuricini Greco, Miniature Riccardiane (Florence: Sansoni antiquariato, 1958), p. 199. For the festivities of Dante’s 600th birthday and its socio-political and cultural implications, see Yousefzadeh, City and Nation in the Italian Unification, pp. 19-38. 142 Owen, The Image of Dante, p. 93. 143 Loc. cit. p. 92.

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Figure 15: Dantte in the intarsia a doors of the S ala de’Gigli.

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Interestingly, as the previous chapters have shown, the gradual framing of Dante’s visual image was a paradoxical process: on the one hand, supposedly individualistic features moved to the foreground, spurred on by Boccaccio’s historiogram of the literary authority, and Dante’s likeness evolved from a generic Everyman to a prolific author. Yet this visual individualisation followed a strictly stereotyped pattern of intellectual portrayal, as the postures and the traditional clothing suggest. Dante’s visual image helped reinforce the cultural autonomy of the author and tried to enhance the authority of art and literature in the early Renaissance, as for example, Michelino’s fresco demonstrates. Taking up well-established iconographic pathos formulae rooted in the Roman Caesarean and the antique Greek traditions, such as the laurel crown and books (which in Warburg’s sense carry mnemic energy), these engrams display their power in the 15th century and give off their mnemic energy under altered circumstances: the author becomes the auctoritas and acquires an individualised, yet iconographically established image. Such visual stereotyping inevitably led to the “reasonable doubts about the accuracy of [Dante’s] likenesses in the vast number of illustrations of him” in later epochs.144 The only portrait to combine Dante’s established physiognomy with the above-mentioned pathos formulae was Sandro Botticelli’s Medici portrait of Dante, which even today represents the most iconic rendering of the Florentine poet.

III.2.5 Plaudits for the Poet: Sandro Botticelli’s seminal versions of Dante Sandro Botticelli, who had been a staunch admirer of Dante and his work, contributed to Dante’s fame at the height of the Florentine’s cultural appropriation by the Medici.145 Even though the two versions of Dante he offered proved to be mildly innovative, they had a lasting impact on the visual image of Dante and on most of the subsequent renderings of the poet. Tom Phillips, for example, whose postmodern appropriation of Dante will be the subject of chapter VI, sings the praises of Botticelli’s “purity and confidence of his supple lines”,146 which inspired his own work on Dante.

144

Benazzi, ‘The face of the poet Dante Alighieri’, p. 282. On Botticelli’s appropriation of Dante, see Silvia Malaguzzi, Botticelli (Florence: Giunti Editore, 2004), pp. 42-4. 146 Tom Phillips, Dante 2 - Correspondence re Publication and Exhibition Notes on Dante (Oxford: TPA, Bodleian Library). 145

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Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, Lorenzo Il Magnifico’s cousin, commissioned the illustrations of the Commedia that Botticelli worked on in the early 1480s.147 For Botticelli, this “graphic project fulfilled the objective of illustrating Dante’s poem with appropriate, effective drawings, creating a sort of visual commentary on each canto”.148 The project, however, remained incomplete: Botticelli coloured only two drawings of the whole cycle, and the remaining illustrations were to a certain degree anachronistic, since they display a variety of gothic and late medieval elements such as a lack of central perspective and a twodimensional plane illustration of each canto’s main topic.149 Moreover, the illustrations of the Florentine poet are among the least accurate physiognomically, since they depict Dante as a generic Everyman, a mode of depiction common of the early illuminated manuscripts of the 14th and early 15th centuries. An example of this can be found in Purg. XXVIII: Dante is depicted as the central figure of the drawing; he is followed by the poets Vergil and Stazio and strikes up a conversation with Matelda, who is picking flowers, and starts explaining the origins of rivers and wind and declares God the greatest good for mankind. She will lead Dante to the river Lethe, where he will be cleansed of sin. Dante wears a long gown, a scholar’s beret and a cape. His physiognomy corresponds to the gaunt profile and the clean-shaven features of which Gombrich spoke.150 In comparison to the two bearded poets next to him, Dante is portrayed as a young man. While the two poets are looking and pointing downwards, Dante is pointing upwards with his right hand and downwards with his 147

The difficulties in dating Botticelli’s drawings precisely are discussed in: Schulze Altcappenberg, Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy, pp. 23-8. In total, 92 of Botticelli’s drawings have survived: 85 of them are now stored in the Kupferstichkabinett of the Kulturforum of Berlin and 7 drawings are stored in the Vatican Apostolic Library. Illuminating background information on the illustrations can also be found in the following: Sandro Botticelli: Zeichnungen zu Dantes Goettlicher Komoedie, ed. by F. Lippmann (Berlin: Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1921), pp. 12-23. For more on the Medici‘s political use of art, see King, The Renaissance in Europe, pp. 212-24. 148 Malaguzzi, Botticelli, p. 42. 149 I owe this thought to Franziska Meier, who lectured on Botticelli’s anachronisms in the Commedia illustrations. See Franziska Meier, Renaissance des Mittelalters? Zu den Dante-Illustrationen von Sandro Botticelli [Open Peer Reviewed Journal, ]. [accessed: 26 September 2016]. 150 See p. 6 of this analysis.

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left, an indication of his intermediate state as a traveller between the terrestrial and celestial worlds. Botticelli probably adhered to the generic and least individualised visual image of the Everyman in an attempt to join and spearhead the rich tradition of Commedia illustration. Hence, the juvenile and less recognisable features of Dante as well as the anachronistic technique of the painting, which presumably had the agenda of establishing a link with the late medieval illuminations of the poem created and published predominantly in Florence. Botticelli’s minute innovation in terms of his Commedia illustration was to add a cinematographic effect by combining two or more scenes, which he displayed simultaneously on one page. Thereby he visually acknowledged the poet’s progress through the three realms. Botticelli’s drawings were published together with the seminal commentary of the Neoplatonic philosopher Cristoforo Landino.151 The entire project, therefore, was carried out by the city’s most accomplished poet and its most influential intellectual (as well as its most gifted painter) and thus “represented an explicit manifesto of the cultural supremacy of Florence” under Medicean patronage.152 The Medici family also commissioned a portrait of Dante which depicts him in profile in the Caesarean tradition of Roman coinage.153 Dante’s skin is given a dark complexion and his grim expression and his aquiline nose refer to Boccaccio’s iconotext in the Trattatello. Dante wears a red cap, which is decorated with an oversized laurel wreath, a symbol of his merits to his hometown. Here, Bruni’s historiogram of the politically engaged author following the ancient vita activa and vita contemplativa is combined into a model of virtue, an example of a life dedicated to study and civil commitment for the benefit of Florence. Together with a number of other portraits of famous Tuscans, Botticelli’s “work was being instrumentalized with the objective of suggesting the superiority of the not yet explicitly proclaimed Medicean Signoria over the old citizens’ Republic that had gone before”.154 At least Dante’s ubiquitous visual

151

See pp. 11-2 of this analysis. Malaguzzi, Botticelli, p. 42. 153 There is a long humanist tradition of Dantean votive medals originating in Middle Italy in the 14th century, which were also inspired by the heritage of Roman Caesarean coinage. See, for example, Dante Alighieri nelle medaglie della collezione Duilio Donati, ed. by Duilio Donati (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 2002). 154 Malaguzzi, Botticelli, p. 42. 152

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image had returned to Florence and played a leading role in establishing a new civic identity.

III.2.6 Satirising the Intellectual Icon: Leonardo da Vinci’s Head of Dante In III.2.1 we saw how Boccaccio’s physical description of Dante in his Trattatello, the seminal iconotext of Dantean visual depiction, became the clichéd standard of representation and can be found following a similar format in many subsequent visualisations of the poet. One illustrious example of Dante’s fixed visual image is a caricature executed by Leonardo da Vinci, which displays these typical features in exaggerated form: Dante is depicted in profile, with his chin and his lower lip conspicuously thrusting out. His aquiline nose is immediately recognisable and appears in a more disproportionate form than in Nardo di Cione’s fresco. The original sheet of this drawing executed by Leonardo had been lost, so the caricature was copied by Francesco Melzi, one of Leonardo’s pupils, and it perfectly illustrates Dante’s fixed physiognomy in a distorted form.155 Da Vinci’s graphical distortions of faces and bodies are invaluable for the history of art as well as for the study of Dante’s iconography. First of all, his “small drawings of grotesque heads, dating to the late fifteenth century, set an important precedent for those subsequently working in drawings and prints”, and represent some of the “most basic compositional devices and visual formulas”, such as exaggerations employed by caricaturists to help make their humorous points.156 Leonardo’s fascination with so-called bizarre heads and his predilection for old age led to a number of caricatures in which he associated certain physiognomic features and facial expressions with

155

Wenceslaus Hollar made a huge number of reproductions of drawings by the great masters, among them were da Vinci’s drawings of the so-called bizarre heads/teste bizarre, as Giorgio Vasari had described them in his Vite. They were printed in the 17th century and circulated in Britain at the time. See Richard Pennington, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar 1607-1677 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For da Vinci’s sheet, see Kenneth Clark, The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle (London: Phaidon Press, 1968). 156 Constance C. McPhee, Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), p. 20.

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character traits and varying degrees of intelligence.157 This way, “according to physiognomic treatises, traces of imbecility or arrogance favorite targets of satirists - could be identified and subsequently portrayed by examining the shape of a subject’s brow, chin, and eyes”.158 In Dante’s case, the visual description established by Boccaccio, already overdone itself, represented an easy template for caricatural exaggeration. Boccaccio’s description and Leonardo’s caricature form an intermedial relationship, since the descriptive signs used in one medium are converted to another art form. In this way, the textual depiction of Dante’s physiognomy is translated into visual exaggerations of the caricature. Da Vinci’s caricature skilfully ridicules the sommo poeta so that the distortion of Dante’s physiognomic features make him appear dumb and imbecilic. In this distorted image of Dante, the laurel crown resembles withered oak leaves and the foolish grin and the squinted eyes suggest stupidity and pronounced debility. Such a depiction stands in stark opposition to the public image of Dante at the end of the 15th century at the height of Dante’s glorification as an accomplished auctor and carrier of cultural memory, and may have been prompted by the growing number of portrayals executed in honour of the Florentine. Furthermore, “the absurd contrasts, overblown forms [...] hold a primal appeal that allows us to recognise the humour of a caricature even if we are ignorant of the specifics of its subject matter”, so that da Vinci might have intended to caricaturize intellectuals and poets in general and expose their public images to ridicule.159 In short, the fact that Dante became the subject of caricature and graphical distortion testifies ab negativo to his consolidated position in the history and culture of Florence. An examination of da Vinci’s satirisation of Dante’s Head concludes this chapter on Dante’s early iconography. Over the course of only approximately 200 years, Dante’s visual image evolved from a generic Everyman, prophet and pilgrim in the first illuminated manuscripts to a highly recognisable icon, which was created out of a distinctive historiogram: Dante, the politically engaged Florentine author and the highly prolific literary authority. The mental image of the passionate poet 157

Giorgio Vasari described da Vinci’s fascination with the teste bizarre in his Le Vite de‘ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti. See Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, ed. and trans. by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 284-98. 158 McPhee, Infinite Jest, p. 20. 159 Loc. cit.

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was not represented visually and the mental image of the saintly messenger was only realised occasionally in the early manuscript tradition.160 The significant visual expression, the visual image, with its distinctive features such as the aquiline nose and the darkened complexion goes back to Boccaccio’s seminal iconotext published in his Trattatello. The depiction of Dante as a generic Everyman or as a bearded pilgrim was limited to the 14th century and - with the exception of Botticelli’s anachronistic Commedia drawings - was eliminated in the 15th century. The first illuminations also helped separate Dante the personaggio from Dante the poeta. The visual blueprints and ancient pathos formulae of author portrayals were employed to fix Dante’s image and to secure his iconic status. In this process, engrammatic pathos formulae such as the physical gestures of the scribe sitting at his desk or of the clergyman displaying the Holy Bible to the heathens were taken out of their Christian context and used for the depiction of celebrated citizens and poets laureate. During the Renaissance, in particular in the Italian centres of humanism such as Rome, Padua and Florence, these pathos formulae were combined with the symbols and traditions of the Roman Caesarean tradition such as the laurel crown and the Caesarean portrait in profile. Thus, an allegory of poetic excellence and of literary authority was created which strongly influenced Dante’s iconography until the middle of the 19th century. This first part of Dante’s iconography and his representation in Italian visual arts in the initial 200 years of his reception has attempted to address the gap in research on “the least studied area of Dante’s reception in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence”.161 The next part of this study will be concerned with Dante’s European appropriation and his arrival in Britain via the intermedial transfiguration of one of the most famous cantos of the Commedia. Furthermore, chapter IV explores the socio-cultural circumstances which favoured such a transition from written to visual cultural constructs in Britain: the rise of aesthetics as a social driving force in the 18th century, propagated by Thomas Hoby’s seminal translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, Sir Jonathan Richardson’s Two Discourses, promoting the science of connoisseurship, 160

There is, however, one highly debated depiction of a young Dante as a youthful dreamer in a fresco found in the Chapel of Santa Maddalena in the Florentine Bargello (c. 1333-7). Since the fresco was only discovered in the middle of the 19th century, it is not included in the analysis of the first 200 years of Dantean visualisations. The circumstances of its discovery and its influence on Dante Gabriel Rossetti will be discussed in chapter IV.3.2. 161 Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence, p. 12.

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and the tradition of the grand tour, which inevitably enhanced the British appreciation for everything Italian. All of these cultural phenomena provided a fertile soil on which Dante’s reappraisal could germinate in the 19th and, to a lesser extent, in the 20th centuries.

CHAPTER IV REDISCOVERING DANTE IN BRITAIN

IV.1 “Touching the stone of Dante” – taste, travel and tradition (1719-1850) IV.1.1 Dantean discourse in the 18th century: French empiricism, German aestheticism and British pragmatism As Nicholas Havely noted, “Dante’s fame [...] seems to have undergone a process of partial eclipse from the early fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries”.1 This was certainly due to the fact that Dante’s “reputation became overshadowed by that of Petrarch”.2 However, Petrarch’s pervasive impact on the reception of Italian literature in Europe only accounts for the 16th and the early 17th centuries. After that time, Dante was being appropriated while he was subject to harsh criticism in rationalist circles, which will be elucidated further below. In the previous chapters, Dante’s rise to fame in Britain in the 18th century was highlighted as having been brought about by a change of medium, from the written manuscripts of the Divina Commedia to visual adaptations of Dantean scenes. However, a number of socio-cultural conditions had to exist in anticipation of Dante’s arrival in Britain, which in this chapter will be grouped under the themes of taste, travel and tradition. The first theme, taste, refers to the process of aestheticising not only Dante and his work, but also the general rise of aesthetics as “an arbitrator of social differentiation” in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries.3 The second theme, travel, refers to the establishment of the Grand Tour as a 1 Dante’s Modern Afterlife, p. 1. For a short critical assessment of Dante’s minor reception in the 17th and 18th century, see Michael Caesar’s chapters ‘Why was Dante not popular in the 17th century?’, and ‘Silences and interjections - the limitations of the eighteenth-century reading of Dante’, in: Caesar, Dante: The Critical Heritage, pp. 35-40, and pp. 46-47, respectively. 2 Dante’s Modern Afterlife, p. 1. 3 Grenfell and Hardy, Art Rules – Pierre Bourdieu and the Visual Arts, p. 30.

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particularly British means used by the upper classes to acquaint themselves with Italian art and literature. This tradition had significant repercussions on the way that Italian literature was received in Britain and it established Dante’s name and his Commedia in upper-class households. Thirdly, there was a deeply-rooted literary tradition of emulating Italian concepts and writings in Britain that was epitomised by Thomas Hoby’s seminal translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier. All of these influences paved the way for Dante’s reception and helped increased British aesthetic appreciation of Italian art and literature. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the term ‘aesthetics’ denotes a set of principles referring to the nature and appreciation of beauty.4 The concept of taste and aesthetic judgement began to emerge towards the end of the 17th century and into the early 18th century in an attempt to counter the rise of scientific rationalism. This can be compared to the defence of Dante’s poetry against rationalist attacks: during the Age of Enlightenment, Dante’s journey to the hereafter in his Commedia was viewed in a critical way, presumably due to its religious overtones of the seeking of salvation, which inevitably clashed with the empirical and analytical approach of the Enlightenment philosophers. A further reason for Dante’s rejection can be explained by the perceived inaccessibility of his major work, which was founded on the outdated Ptolemaic view of the world and presented convoluted theological dogma. Voltaire ironically remarked in his Dictionnaire Philosophique that “he has got annotators, which is presumably one more reason for not being understood”.5 These attacks on Dante and his Commedia have to be set against the backdrop of the Enlightenment’s essential ideas on the equality and universality of human nature. Dante’s poem, with its hierarchical structure and its theological encroachment simply could not be reconciled with these fundamental beliefs of the period under discussion.6 Hence, Dante 4

For an overview of the history of aesthetics as well as a short summary of Dante’s own, often contradictory, use of aesthetic principles, see Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, trans. and ed. by J. Harrell, C. Barrett, D. Petsch (London: A & C Black, 2006, originally published in 1967), pp. 279-81. 5 Voltaire, Œuvres complètes de Voltaire - Dictionnaire Philosophique, I, tome septième (Paris: Chez Furne Libraire-Éditeur, 1885), first published in 1764, p. 401. [“Il a des commentateurs, c’est peut-être encore une raison de plus pour n’être pas compris.”]. 6 For Voltaire’s criticism of Dante and the Commedia, see Eugène Bouvy, ‘Voltaire et la Critique de Dante’, in: Eugène Bouvy, Voltaire et l’Italie (Genève:

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was harshly attacked and his work severely criticised in form and content by the French classicists. In particular, les géomètres, a group of literary theorists aiming to establish a more empirical and mathematical approach to literary criticism - similar to Descartes’ scientific principles in physics were opposed by predominantly British and German philosophers. Their idea was that “we have a sense given us [sic] by nature”, which ultimately makes us judge whether certain “productions of the mind and [...] pictures [...] be good or no”.7 Towards the end of the 18th century, Immanuel Kant expounded his theory of aesthetic judgement and postulated that the notion of taste was marked by common sense and its assessment went beyond any empirical element. In his words, by sensus communis, [...], must be understood the idea of a communal sense [...]; this happens by one holding his judgment up not so much to the actual as to the possible judgments of others, and putting himself into the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that contingently attach to our own judging;8

Aesthetic judgement, therefore, involves an act of comparison and deliberate reasoning, since Kant demands that other possible judgements are taken into consideration when assessing an object or a work of art. The sensus communis, which governs the universal judgement of taste, a common denominator of aesthetic assessment, so to speak, thereby enhances the mere sensory ability of deciding whether something is good or bad. In modern sociological theory, the term ‘taste’ acquired a different meaning: in contrast to Kant’s definition, in the Bourdieuian sense ‘taste’ is used to denote the result of an educative process, which raises the awareness of judgement, and which might eventually be applied for the sake of social differentiation.9 In Britain, the philosophical considerations Slatkine Reprints, 1970), originally published in 1898, pp. 37-96, and based on it, W. P. Friedrich, Dante’s Fame abroad 1350 – 1850 (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1950), pp. 92-102. See also the chapter ‘Dante and Autobiography in the Age of Voltaire’, in: Joseph Luzzi, Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (London: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 104-23. 7 Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, vol. II (1748, first published in 1719), pp. 238-239. 8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge, 2000), 5:293. See also Henry Allison: Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 9 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction - a social critique of the judgement of taste (London: Routledge, 1984).

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concerning the faculty of judgement had been initiated by John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), in which Locke argued that judgement means “putting ideas together or separate them from one another in the mind”.10 The painter, art critic and historian Sir Jonathan Richardson (1667-1745) embraced Locke’s thought and argued that the faculty of discrimination was a quality of judgement that could be learned, refined and honed over time. Crucial to the understanding of Richardson’s theory is his attempt “to promote connoisseurship as a science, a branch of knowledge rather than a matter of opinion”.11 In his view, “a good connoisseur will take care not to confound things in which there is a real difference because of the resemblance they may seem to have”,12 and ultimately he should be careful not “to make a difference where there is none and so attribute those works to two several masters which were both done by the same hand”.13 Richardson entitled his discourses An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates to Painting and An Argument in behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur. Thereby, Richardson tried to provide a sound grounding for aesthetic judgement, which could eventually lead to social advantages and to the acquirement of virtue: in particular, he claimed that the science of “connoissance […] had a natural tendency to reform our manners, refine our pleasures, and increase our wealth, power, and reputation”.14 Such an evaluation of aesthetic considerations coincided with Dante’s rehabilitation, the seeds of which were planted in an attempt to argue with the rationalist wing of French classicism: the Swiss philologist Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783), taking up Jonathan Richardson’s pragmatic ideas on art, advised in his treatise Critische Betrachtungen über die Poetischen Gemählde der Dichter to use a prose translation of the

10 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Gary Fuller, Robert Stecker, John P. Wright (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 141. 11 Carol Gibson-Wood, ‘Jonathan Richardson and the Rationalisation of Connoisseurship’, Art History, 7 (1984), pp. 38-56, p. 54. 12 Jonathan Richardson, Two Discourses (London: printed for W. Churchill at the Black Swan in Paternoster Row, 1719), I, p. 204. In these and the subsequent quotations from Richardson’s essays, the rules for punctuation and capitalisation have been adapted to meet modern English standards. 13 Loc. cit. p. 208. 14 Loc. cit. p. 216.

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Ugolino episode as a subject for artistic production.15 In 1763, Bodmer wrote Ueber das dreyfache Gedicht des Dante, an apology for the Florentine poet, defending him against his neo-classical critics and demanding they do justice to his work. In his words, what had been declared ‘querulant’, ‘gothic’ and ‘contradictory’ by Dante’s critics, could have also been entitled ‘new’, ‘foreign’ and ‘original’.16 Bodmer was also the first philologist who acknowledged the immense store of knowledge contained in the Divina Commedia. If it had not been repudiated, the critics might have discovered the “most delicate assembly of contemporary intellectual power” as well as an “encyclopedia of science” in it, he argued.17 Moreover, he fervently condemned the prevalent tendency among Dante critics to juxtapose only a few cantos out of Dante’s complete work and to jettison the rest, as, for example, Voltaire had suggested when stating that there are about twenty characteristics of Dante which one knows by heart, that’s sufficient and one can save the effort to examine the rest. There are, however, some utmost felicitous and ingenuous verses that have not aged at all in the course of four hundred years and never will.18

Such an ambiguous and partly derisory attitude towards Dante and his work was indeed common at the time. In its most pronounced degree it bordered on ignorance: in a letter to his son dating from the 8th of February 1750, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, argued 15

Johann Jakob Bodmer, Critische Betrachtungen über die Poetischen Gemählde (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1971), original edition: 1741, p. 30 and p. 43. Note that here Bodmer follows once more one of Richardson’s suggestions, who had already translated the Ugolino episode into English. Chapter IV.1.3 will explore Richardson’s appropriation of Dante’s Ugolino canto. 16 Quoted by Leone Donati, ‘J.J. Bodmer und die italienische Litteratur [sic]’, in: Lesezirkel Hottingen, Johann Jakob Bodmer: Denkschrift zum CC. Geburtstag (19. Juli 1898) (Zürich: Stiftung Schnyder von Wartensee, 1900), pp. 283-288. Originally published in: Freymüthige Nachrichten von neuen Büchern und anderen zur Gelehrtheit gehörigen Sachen (1763). [“Mit ein wenig Gerechtigkeit hätte man das, was man in dem Grundriss und der Ausbildung eigensinnig, gothisch, widersprechend und affectirt nennt, neu fremd und original benennen können;”]. 17 Loc. cit. p. 284. [“man hätte eine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften, man hätte die feinsten Verstandeskräfte seiner Zeitgenossen [...] da gefunden”.]. 18 Voltaire, p. 312. [“il y a de lui une vingtaine de traits qu’on sait par cœur: cela suffit pour s’épargner la peine d’examiner le reste. [...] mais il y a des vers si heureux et si naïfs qu’ils n’ont point vieilli depuis quatre cents ans, et qu’ils ne vieilliront jamais.”].

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that he “could never understand him [Dante]”; therefore Stanhope “had done with him, fully convinced that he was not worth the pains necessary to understand him”, because “whatever author is obscure and difficult in his own language, certainly does not think clearly”.19 Of course, Stanhope misses the mark when blaming the author for being incomprehensible and making the weak and subjectively tinged argument of obscurity. In addition, Stanhope considers himself an expert, since he “formerly knew Italian extremely well”,20 thereby holding Dante’s work up to ridicule and displaying his own arrogance. Similarly, the widely travelled nobleman Martin Sherlock derided Dante and his work: The enlightened Italians will own, allowing all the merit of Dante, that his poem is the worst that there is in any language: what we think of the age in which he lived, the poet must be deemed a prodigy; when we read the poem at present, it must be considered as a mass of various kinds of knowledge gothickly heaped together without order and without design. Take away from the Divine Comedy five or six beautiful passages, and four or five hundred fine verses, what remains is only a tissue of barbarisms, absurdities, and horrors.21

Such expressions of contempt led to a largely selective appropriation of Dante’s work, whose “grand passages [...] are reducible to the narration of Count Ugolino, the history of Francesca di [sic] Rimini, [...] and two or three more”.22 These examples illustrate the difficulties the European educated élite had with Dante in the middle of the 18th century, a situation that only gradually changed when the first complete translations of Dante’s work emerged and aesthetic considerations moved into the foreground.

19

Letters Written By The Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, To His Son, Philip Stanhope together with several other pieces on various subjects in four volumes, ed. by Eugene Stanhope (London: Dodsley, 1932), vol. 4, letter 1690, p. 1503. 20 Loc. cit. 21 Martin Sherlock, Letters from an English Traveller (London: J. Nichols, 1780), pp. 138-9. 22 Loc. cit. p. 139.

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IV.1.2 Taste and aesthetics as social and educational driving forces in Britain: The Courtier and the Grand Tour In Britain, the promotion of aesthetics for personal and pragmatic reasons was flanked by two socio-cultural phenomena of the 18th century: the tradition of the Grand Tour and the enduring success of a Renaissance classic, Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano. In order to complete their education, upper-class European youths flocked to Italy to study Italian art and culture. This educational trip to see Italy’s classical sights was designed to add the finishing touches to the sophistication of English gentlemen, which led to the establishment of an “eighteenth-century tradition [...] partly responsible for the development of a new Italian fashion in British art and architecture that was to spread to the world of literature”.23 At the heart of such an endeavour was the belief that the youths’ engagement with Italy’s culture would lead to the refinement of their manners. From a socio-historical point of view, this trend might also have been born out of Britain’s courtly tradition. As Edward Chaney observed: Even in its maturity in the eighteenth century, after the establishment of rules of ‘taste’, when the Grand Tour became almost synonymous with artistic concerns, these remained subordinate to an educational ideal of virtuosity, which [...] led to virtue in the modern sense of the word.24

In particular, the term ‘virtue’ and the educational ideal of ‘virtuosity’ need further elucidation: the Oxford Dictionary cites their Old French and Latin origins, ‘vertu’ and ‘virtus’, denoting valour, merit and moral perfection. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the terms ‘virtue’ and ‘virtuoso’ came to reflect the notion of “the character of an ideal aristocrat - bred and self-fashioned for service and success at court, politically effective, eloquent, commendable, and cultivated in terms of literature and the visual arts”.25 The educational ideal of virtuosity, therefore, expresses the belief in the possibility of obtaining personal perfection of morals and manners through art. These terms are inextricably linked with the cultural appropriation of Castiglione’s book Il Cortegiano, which had been met with overwhelming 23

Braida, Dante and the Romantics, p. 10. Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian cultural relations since the Renaissance (London: Frank Cass Publishers, 1998), p. 203. 25 Hanson, The English Virtuoso, p. 4. 24

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success, particularly in Britain.26 In total, Peter Burke identifies 110 editions of the book produced between the years 1528 and 1619; sixty of them in Italian and at least fifty in other languages.27 As can be deduced from its publication record, the book was widely appreciated in England and praised not least because Castiglione’s “book, advisedly read and diligently followed but one year at home in England, would do a young gentleman more good, [...] than three years’ travel abroad spent in Italy”,28 as Roger Ascham recommended. Furthermore, as one of the book’s first English critics, Ascham employed The Courtier to emphasise the traditional ideals of learning, virtue and service to the commonwealth, which could be enhanced by its study, and which, in his view, represented the proper functions of the gentry. To the many editions flourishing in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries can be added versions of the book that were transformed into a handbook containing glossaries and key words. In these editions, the text accumulated paratext such as marginal glosses, tables and summaries. This transformation gives evidence of the frequent use of Castiglione’s work as a guidebook to courtly and sophisticated manners, which, as Burke points out, “helped transform The Courtier from an open dialogue, probably designed to be read aloud, into a closed treatise, an instruction manual, or one might even say a ‘recipebook’”.29 It seems that from the outset, The Courtier provided a hugely popular code of conduct for the upper classes, which was positively received in Britain. Before investigating the reasons for the success of the ideal that was portrayed in The Courtier in England, the book’s form and content will be examined. The Courtier is made up of four books and reproduces a fictitious conversation held by members of the duke’s family,

26

Castiglione probably wrote the first draft of Il Cortegiano in 1513 and revised it in the early 1520s. The book was first published in Venice in 1528. The first English translation, entitled The Courtier by Sir Thomas Hoby, dates back to the year 1561. In 1577, the book was reprinted in England and in 1588 a three language edition, comprising an English, an Italian and a French translation, was published. See Peter Burke, The Renaissance, (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 68. 27 Loc. cit. See also by the same author: The Fortunes of the Courtier: the European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘Cortegiano’ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). 28 Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. by Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 55. 29 Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: the European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘Cortegiano’, p. 43.

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members of the clergy and members of Italy’s high nobility at the court of the Duchy Montefeltri in Urbino in 1506. The goal of this conversation was “to shape in wordes a good Courtier, specifying all such conditions and particular qualities, as of necessitie must bee in him that deserveth this name”.30 These “conditions and particular qualities” include noble birth, stature and skills in arms, speaking and writing skills, virtue, horsemanship and cultural accomplishments such as music and drawing.31 In the course of the conversation, the correct employment of these skills is discussed. In the particular case of musical skills, the perfect courtier is advised “to dissemble the studie and paines that a man must needes take in all thinges that are well done”.32 The art of music serves the purpose to “fill the mind with sweetnesse” and is meete to be practised in the presence of women, because those sights sweeten the mindes of the hearers, and make them the more apt to bee pierced with the pleasantnesse of musicke, and also they quicken the spirits of the very doers.33

The ideal courtier, therefore, makes music for the sake of personal sophistication and pleasure and for the enjoyment and admiration of others. The positive quality ascribed to music has its roots in Pythagoras’ idea of the harmony of the spheres, and we can still detect inklings of this concept in Shakespeare’s plays. In The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo explains to Portia that “the man that hath no music” cannot “be trusted”, as he is “fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils” and “the motions of his spirit are dull as night”.34 A similar view can be found in Othello, where the protagonist’s lack of interest in the arts sets him apart from the Venetians.35 The second book concentrates on a courtier’s relations with his prince, equals and inferiors and gives advice for appropriate behaviour in 30

Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (London: Dent, 1966), p. 29. 31 Loc. cit. 32 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, p. 100. 33 Loc. cit. p. 101. 34 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (London: Penguin Classic, 1994), V. i. 14-19. 35 See, for example, Viviana Comensoli, ‘Music, The Book of the Courtier, and Othello’s Soldiership’, in: The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama – Cultural Exchange and Intertextuality, ed. by Michele Marrapodi (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), pp. 89-105.

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all sorts of possible social configurations at court. The concept of sprezzatura, the guiding principle of a courtier’s employment of his skills, is explained in the third book. Castiglione invented the concept in his book, as the term sprezzatura did not exist with this connotation at the time. A more contemporary English expression for the concept might be effortless mastery, as the courtier must “use in everye thing a certaine disgracing to cover arte withall, and seeme whatsoever he doth and saith, to doe it without paine, and (as it were) not minding it”.36 This quotation encapsulates the very essence of Castiglione’s book; the courtier’s main duty is to display his skills and actions with grace, and at the same time avoid any kind of artifice. It is the striving to achieve this level of mastery in the art of concealing art that moulds a good courtier. Due to this principle, the book can be seen as a guide designed to help distinguish oneself in a specific social context. By employing the skills required of a good courtier, “dissemblingly, as it were a chaunce and by the way, and with […] discretion and warinesse”,37 a courtier unmistakably demonstrates his affiliation to nobility, who regards the display of effort and artificiality in the employment of these courtly skills as a cardinal vice and a mechanism of distinction from “the lookers on and the doers […] of a base sorte”.38 Antonella Braida has observed that Castiglione was still widely consulted in the 18th and 19th centuries, and that for many writers and critics the book provided an antidote to the artistic shortcomings in Britain: “Often quoting Baldassare Castiglione’s Cortegiano writers like William Aglionby urged their countrymen to remedy the artistic failings of their native land”.39 Therefore, similar to Sir Jonathan Richardson, the diplomat, physician and art historian William Aglionby, an elected Fellow of the Royal Society, suggested the study of Italian art and literature as a means to attain refinement and sophistication. Aglionby advocated for a British school of painting and “authored the first original English text to propound a humanist art theory based on the primacy of Italian history painting”.40 Moreover, it is very likely that Aglionby’s publication set a precedent for

36

Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, p. 46. Loc. cit., pp. 96-7. 38 Loc. cit. 39 See Braida, Dante and the Romantics, p. 10. 40 Craig Ashley Hanson, The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), p. 93. 37

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Richardson’s treatise Two Discourses.41 He also suggests the study of art to refine one’s manners abroad: “some people if they have had the opportunity of seeing good things, especially if they have been abroad, and above all in Italy [...] set up for connoisseurs”.42 For both writers, Italy, therefore, functions as the very epitome of art, refinement and culture. Richardson’s plea for connoisseurship originated in Castiglione’s ideal of virtue, which Richardson would have loved to see fulfilled in an educational programme; more “men of birth and fortunes” could become connoisseurs if their parents “would cause more of their younger sons to be applied this way”.43 The Irish historian and travel writer, Thomas Nugent (1700 1772), wrote one of the most successful travel guides for English gentlemen undertaking their Grand Tour. He stated that the Grand Tour tended “to enrich the mind with knowledge, to rectify the judgement, to remove the prejudices of education, to compose the outward manners, and in a word form the complete gentleman”.44 Thus, taste and aesthetic judgement morphed into a social and educational driving force, which saw the visual arts as an integral element of honing and improving one’s virtue and social status. The ideal of Castiglione’s Courtier becomes married to the British ideal of the gentleman. Virtue, therefore, “flourishes through education and cultivation, not as a result of purely innate characteristics”.45 This Castiglionean proposition “must have later had Locke nodding in agreement”,46 as Hanson pointed out. Even more so, Aglionby and Richardson must have been enthusiastic about this statement. Both critics advocated the superiority of Italian art and literature, which paved the way for a cultural reassessment of Italy in general, and of Dante in particular, which was also reflected in the great success of the Grand Tour. Apart from its educational character, this institution could trace its origins to Britain’s decidedly anti-Catholic tradition: 41

Aglionby published his Painting Illustrated in Three Diallogues [sic] in 1685, in which he assessed the supremacy of Italian art and spurred its emulation. For Aglionby’s supposed influence on Richardson’s science of connoisseurship, see Gibson-Wood, ‘Jonathan Richardson and the Rationalisation of Connoisseurship’, pp. 38-56. 42 Richardson, Two Discourses, I, p. 143. 43 Richardson, Two Discourses, I, pp. 60-1. 44 Thomas Nugent, The Grand Tour, or a Journey through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and France (London: Rivington, 1778), p. xi. 45 Hanson, The English Virtuoso, pp. 3-4. 46 Loc. cit.

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Evolving out of and, in Protestant northern Europe, reacting against the medieval practice of pilgrimage in response to demand for a nonsuperstitious justification for travel, the Grand Tour began as an exclusively educational phenomenon.47

To a certain extent, the social energy released by the loss of the religious Catholic practice of pilgrimage was manifesting itself in a surrogate religious practice of revering the accomplishments of Italian artists. This represented an increase in the adoration of art and culture that can be traced back to the many travelogues and travel guides that flourished between 1750 and 1850 in Britain. During this process, the historiogram of Dante as the crisis-ridden exile and misconstrued poetic genius was gradually being revived and set in opposition to the dark and barbarous age that Dante lived in. Thomas Penrose (1769 - 1851), for example, who served as a secretary to the English envoy to the Duke of Tuscany, stated that “to Dante alone was it given to show to an unenlightened nation the bold and vigorous flights of a fervid imagination”.48 Italy, in Dante’s time, appeared to him to be a place of “barbarism” and “monastic ignorance”.49 Yet, Italy “had always maintained a greater degree of refinement and knowledge than any other European country”,50 a fact which was reflected in Dante’s work. His Commedia displays symmetry and grace and is associated with Greek sculpture, since “poetry under the hands of Dante is like a block of marble under the chisel of a Phidias or Praxiteles”.51 When discussing Dante, Penrose employed a metaphor that became a Romantic cliché: the Florentine poet was “a meteor of genius, [...] blazed out with redoubled lustre”,52 thereby lightening up the dark Middle Ages. He went on to praise Dante’s “vivacity of temper”, the “quickness of his genius”, and generally acknowledged that “he is bold, majestic, and sublime”. In Penrose’s comparison, Dante becomes associated with the courtly ideal of virtue and

47

Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour, p. 203. Thomas Penrose, A sketch of the lives and writings of Dante and Petrarch, with some account of Italian and Latin literature in the fourteenth century (London: John Stockdale, 1790), p. 6. 49 Loc. cit. p. 3. 50 Loc. cit. 51 Loc. cit. pp. 29-30. 52 Loc. cit. p. 5. See also page 18 of this book for the clichéd dichotomy of Dante and the age of barbarism. 48

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refinement and, consequently, the interest in his life and work among British travellers increased. One of the most successful publishers of travel guides, John Murray, dedicated increasing amounts of space to Dante, his literature and his reception in every new edition of his popular handbooks, including literary expert reviews of Dante’s work by Italian poets such as Vittorio Alfieri and making Dante the uncontested “Poet-Sire of Italy”.53 In the middle of the 19th century, John Ruskin established Dante as the literary counterpart to Giotto’s artistic genius. Ruskin believed that “the real duty involved in my Oxford professorship cannot be completely done by giving lectures in Oxford, but I thought I ought also to give what guidance I may to travellers in Italy”.54 As James Buzard has pointed out, a typical itinerary of the Grand Tour often included a stay in Florence of several months which was meant to lead to the acquisition of refinement, taste and knowledge.55 Therefore, Ruskin dedicated several volumes of his handbooks to the study of Florentine sights. In the Preface of his seminal travel guide Mornings in Florence: Being Simple Studies of Christian Art for English Travellers, Ruskin stated that “if there is one artist, more than another, whose work it is desirable that you should examine in Florence, [...] it is Giotto”.56 Furthermore, Ruskin imagined “the first great master of Gothic art, Arnolfo, with Giotto at his side, and Dante looking on, whispering sometimes a word to both”,57 since the great master “Giotto was continually painting under Dante’s advice”.58 Here he paints a vivid picture of medieval artistic exchange transgressing the boundaries of art, architecture and literature, which laid the foundations for a subsequent wave of Dantean adoration by British travellers. The most pronounced aspect of a growing cult of Dantean reverence was the inclusion of the Sasso di Dante - Dante’s stone - in the 53

Octavian Blewitt, A Hand-book for Travellers in Central Italy, including the Papal States, Rome, and the Cities of Etruria (London: John Murray, 1850), p. 95. 54 John Ruskin, Mornings in Florence: Being Simple Studies of Christian Art for English Travellers, vol. 1 (London: Watson and Hazell, 1875), p. 1. 55 James Buzard, ‘The Grand Tour and after (1660 - 1840)’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 37-52. 56 John Ruskin, Mornings in Florence: Being Simple Studies of Christian Art for English Travellers, vol. 1 (London: Watson and Hazell, 1875), p. 1. 57 Ruskin, Mornings in Florence, p. 7. 58 Ruskin, Mornings in Florence, p. 2.

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itinerary of the Grand Tour. Legend has it that Dante used to linger on a stone in the proximity of the Florentine Cathedral, marvelling at Giotto’s Campanile and waiting for inspiration. As Graham Smith noted, “the Sasso di Dante was a recurring motif in the writings of British visitors to Florence during the first half of the nineteenth century, and it was mentioned in successive editions of Karl Baedeker’s and John Murray’s popular travel handbooks”.59 Imagining Dante sitting on the stone and waiting for inspiration echoes Boccaccio’s mental image of Dante, the historiogram of the divinely mandated auctor, who receives messages from a higher power. What this superstitious practice reveals is the secularised version of this historiogram, which equates poetic genius to divine inspiration. The stone itself assumes the function of a second-class relic, usually reserved for items a saint owned or touched and to places he frequently visited or lingered. This way “the ‘Sasso di Dante’ provided a particular focus for veneration of the poet [...], it provided visitors to Florence with a locus where they could commune with Dante’s spirit and engage with him”.60 Of course, Florence strongly profited from the constant association with its most prominent son. It was commonly referred to as “the Athens of Italy” and “the birthplace of [...] Dante, the father of Italian poetry”,61 thus enhancing its popularity as a destination for cultural tourism in Italy. Moreover, touching the stone where Dante once sat became “an inspiration for anglophone writers [...], the site provided a material and sentimental focus for an international community of literati, in addition to inspiring a sense of cultural identity for Florence and Tuscany”.62 Over the course of approximately 120 years, ranging from the first publication of Richardson’s Two Discourses in 1719 to the middle of the 19th century, Dante had become a tourist commodity and a central poet with which to acquaint oneself while on the Grand Tour.

59 Graham Smith, ‘The Holy Stone where Dante Sat: Memory and Oblivion’, in: Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century: Nationality, Identity, and Appropriation, pp. 89-110, p. 90. 60 Loc. cit. p. 107. 61 Heinrich Reichard, Itinerary of Italy or Traveller’s Guide through that interesting country (London: Leigh and Son, 1822), p. 69. 62 Smith, ‘The Holy Stone where Dante Sat’, p. 107.

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IV.2 “The anthropological adhesion”: visualisations of Dante, Ugolino, and Paolo and Francesca in 18th- and 19th-century Britain IV.2.1 Sir Jonathan Richardson’s Two Discourses and the “communication of ideas”: The Story of Count Ugolino as historical intertext and contemporary iconotext In his advocacy of connoisseurship, Richardson not only pleaded for the educational Grand Tour, he also proposed using the story of Count Ugolino as a subject for artistic engagement “for the pleasure, and the improvement that is to be had from the seeing, and considering such rarities”.63 As this quotation shows, the goals of acquiring the skills of a connoisseur were strongly focused on the enhancement of personal enjoyment and social status. Richardson’s engagement with Italian art represents an early iconotext dealing with the subject of intermediality. In particular, his taxonomy of different art forms deserves further attention: “sculpture carries us yet farther than poetry”,64 he argues, because it “gives us ideas that no words can: such forms of things, such airs of heads, such expressions of the passions that cannot be describ’d by language”.65 The starting point for his considerations is once more Dante’s Ugolino: he describes this episode as being “very curious and very little known”,66 and sings the praises of its artistic use by Michelangelo Buonarroti, since he had mistaken a famous bas-relief of Ugolino executed by Pierino da Vinci for Michelangelo’s own original work.67 In his treatise, Richardson expounds on how the historian Filippo Villani laid out the historical facts of the Pisan strife between the Guelphs 63

Richardson, Two Discourses, I, p. 49. Loc. cit. p. 23. 65 Loc. cit. 66 Loc. cit. p. 26. 67 For the confusion over the bas-relief, see the seminal essay on the topic by Frances Yates, ‘Transformations of Dante’s Ugolino’, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 14 (1951), pp. 92-117. Further explorations of this subject can be found in Marion Boudon-Machuel, ‘Le relief d'Ugolin de Pierino da Vinci: une réponse sculptée au problème du paragone’, in: Gazette des beaux-arts, 132 (1998), pp. 1-18, and Charles Avery, ‘Pierino da Vinci's lost bronze relief of The death by starvation of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca and his sons rediscovered at Chatsworth’, in: Pierino da Vinci: atti della giornata di studio, ed. by Marco Cianchi (Firenze: Becocci, 1995), pp. 57-61. 64

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and the Ghibellines, which led to Ugolino’s imprisonment, and then he compares the historical events to the tercets presented in Dante’s 33rd canto of Inferno. Dante’s canto tells the story of Ugolino who, condemned to death and imprisoned in a medieval Pisan dungeon tower, devoured his children. The narrator encounters Ugolino and the Pisan Archbishop Ruggieri, a staunch and cruel Ghibelline who had been responsible for Ugolino’s fate by betraying and consigning him to imprisonment.68 Both are frozen in ice, with their heads gnawing on each other. The fact that they are united in sin represents the central point of this canto and Ugolino addresses the narrator with the words: Tu dei saper ch‘i‘ fui conte Ugolino, e questi è l‘arcivescovo Ruggeri: or ti dirò perché i son tal vicino. Che per l‘effetto de‘ suo‘ mai pensieri, fidandomi di lui, io fossi preso e poscia morto, dir non è mestieri; You are to know I was Count Ugolino, and this one here, Archbishop Ruggieri; and now I’ll tell you why I am his neighbour. There is no need to tell you that, because of his malicious tricks, I first was taken and then was killed - since I had trusted him; [Inf. XXXIII, 13-18]

Ugolino’s account makes it unmistakably clear that Ruggieri’s destiny and his own are intertwined. Both of them had sinned against their benefactors and therefore, wearing a traitor’s cloak, faced eternal damnation in Hell. Bearing in mind Dante’s frustration regarding the political situation in Italy at the time, it becomes evident that he explicitly mentions the struggle between Ruggieri and Ugolino because it perfectly symbolised the fraternal strife between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines which had marred Italy. “This one appeared to me as lord and master”,69 Ugolino reasons about Ruggieri, “hunting the wolf and whelps upon the mountain for which the Pisans cannot Lucca see”,70 and yet his malicious tricks brought about Ugolino’s downfall. 68

For the historical figure of Ugolino see, for example, Il conte Ugolino Della Gherardesca tra antropologia e storia, ed. by Francesco Mallegni (Pisa: Ed. PLUS, 2003). 69 [“Questi pareva a me maestro e donno”] [Inf., XXXIII, 28]. 70 [“cacciando il lupo e ‘lupicini‘ al mente per che i Pisan veder Lucca non ponno.”] [Inf., XXXIII, 29-30].

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Richardson’s superb blank verse summary of the first part of Dante’s 33rd canto, included in the first treatise of his Two Discourses, however, stresses the tragic quality of Ugolino’s story.71 In particular, the moment that Ugolino realises his fate was sealed: .

A prisoner in its walls; unquiet dreams oppress’d my lab’ring brain [...] The hour was come when food should have been brought, Instead of that, O God! I heard the noise Of creaking locks, and bolts, with doubled force securing our destruction. I beheld the faces of my sons with troubled eyes; I look’d on them, but utter’d not a word;72

Richardson takes great liberties in summing up Ugolino’s fate: his description of the ‘noise of creaking locks, and bolts’, and the ambiguous meaning of ‘with doubled force securing our destruction’, referring both to the heavy lock and the inescapability of death, have no counterparts in Dante’s original text.73 Presumably, these embellishments and elaborations of Dante’s pretext enhance the sensory and psychological exploration of the canto in an attempt to prepare for its subsequent artistic treatment. Moreover, he acquaints his British audience with Dante and introduces him as the famous Italian poet, who had engaged with the Ugolino story: This is Dante, who was a young man when this happened, and was ruin’d by the commotions of these times [...] This great man [...] in his passage 71

Even though Richardson’s translation introduced Ugolino into England, note that Geoffrey Chaucer, in an attempt to emulate Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium had already appropriated Dante’s 33rd canto in his Monk’s Tale: De Hugolino Comite de Pize represents an historically cleansed version of Ugolino’s fate described in Inf. XXXIII, which according to David Wallace, allowed Chaucer “to introduce the new Italian proto-humanistic format to an English audience” towards the end of the 14th century. See David Wallace, ‘Dante in English’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Dante, pp. 237-58, p. 238. On Chaucer’s Italian influences, see also Havely, Dante’s British Public, pp. 8-32. 72 Richardson, Two Discourses, I, p. 31. Richardson’s translation set the precedent for many English versions of Ugolino to follow. The episode was subsequently translated by Semproni in 1724, by Gerstenberg in 1768 and by Bodmer in 1769. See, in particular, Friedrich, Dante’s Fame Abroad, p. 96 and p. 502. 73 In the original text, Ugolino merely recalls that he “heard them nailing up the door of that appalling tower;” [“e io senti‘ chiavar l‘uscio di sotto a l‘orribile torre;”] [Inf., XXXIII, 46-7].

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thro’ Hell, introduces Count Ugolino gnawing the head of his treacherous and cruel enemy the archbishop, and telling his own sad story.74

In his description of the Florentine poet, Richardson confirms the historiogram of the unrecognised, crisis-ridden exile, who had been mistreated “by the commotions of these times”.75 In Richardson’s view, “Michael Angelo was the fittest man that ever lived to cut, or paint this story, if I had wished to see it represented in a sculpture or in a painting, I should have fixed upon this hand; he was a Dante in his way”.76 In his last remark, Richardson also compared Michelangelo and Dante, a common association which came to be a standard in the later Romantic cult of genius.77 Furthermore, the treatment of the Ugolino subject confirms Richardson’s conviction that “the poet carries this story farther than the historian could, by relating what pass’d in the prison”, thereby hinting at the fame that Dante’s Commedia had grossed.78 Yet, the greatest artistic expression for any historical topic was figural art. For this reason, Richardson discussed the predilection for one art form over another as the central controversy at the heart of his Two Discourses: It has been much disputed which is the most excellent of the two arts, sculpture, or painting, and there is a story of its having been left to the determination of a blind man, who gave it in favour of the latter, being told that what by feeling seem’d to him to be flat, appear’d to the eye as round as its competitor. I am not satisfy’d with this way of deciding the controversy. For ’tis not the difficulty of an art that makes it preferable, but the ends propos’d to be serv’d by it, and the degree which it does that, and then the less difficulty the better.79

Thus, Richardson settles the controversy pragmatically: the art form that serves its ends best is to be preferred over the other. Both painting and sculpture alike, share “the great ends [...] to give pleasure, and to convey ideas”, and yet painting is undoubtedly preferable; [...] since it gives us as great a degree of pleasure, and all the ideas that sculpture can, with the addition of others; 74

Richardson, Two Discourses, I, pp. 29-30. Loc. cit. p. 30. 76 Loc. cit. p. 33. 77 See Emison, Creating the “Divine” Artist: from Dante to Michelangelo, pp. 111-72. 78 Loc. cit. p. 29. 79 Loc. cit. pp. 23-4. 75

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and this is not only by the help of her colours, but because she can express many things which brass, marble, or other materials of that art cannot, or are not so proper for. [...] A statue indeed is seen all round, and this is one great advantage which ’tis pretended sculpture has, but without reason: if the figure is seen on every side, ’tis wrought on every side, ’tis then as so many several pictures, and a hundred views of a figure may be painted in the time that that figure is cut in marble, or craft in brass.80

In this passage, Richardson underlines his preference for painting. Moreover, in referring to Ugolino once more, he regretted that Michelangelo had not painted the Ugolino episode as well, since “there we might have had all the advantages of expression which the addition of colours would have given”.81 The fact that Richardson also described a hypothetical canvas painting by Michelangelo reveals how convinced he was of Michelangelo’s artistic qualities and his authorship of the bas-relief. Such a masterpiece would have exceeded even the brilliance of the sculpture by adding paint, since “the colouring of Michael Angelo was as proper to that, as his genius was to the story in general”.82 Richardson further expands on the impressive use of colours, which would have shewn us the pale and livid flesh of the dead, and dying figures, the redness of eyes, and blueish lips of the count, the darkness and horror of the prison, and other circumstances, besides the habits [...] these might be contrived so as to express the quality of the persons the more to excite the pity, as well as to enrich the picture by their variety.83

Deducing from his description of Ugolino, Richardson goes on to expound his theory of art, claiming that thus history begins, [Dante’s] poetry raises higher, [...] Sculpture goes yet farther, and painting compleats and perfects, and that only can; and here ends; this is the utmost limit of human power in the communication of ideas.84

For Richardson, the classification of art follows an interesting trajectory, with real history as a starting point. Poetry and literature enhance reality,

80

Loc. cit. p. 24. Loc. cit. p. 34. 82 Loc. cit. 83 Loc.cit. 84 Loc. cit. 81

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but only sculpture (and finally painting) leads to perfection. This classification anticipates the Laocoon debate in a way and takes a decidedly firm stand on the superiority of visual arts over poetry. Furthermore, it overthrows the outdated concept of the inferiority of art that originated in Plato’s Republic and culminated in the expression “the imitative art is an inferior who marries an inferior, and has inferior offspring”.85 For Richardson, however, art is superior, since the utmost objective of visual art should be “to raise and improve nature”, and ultimately painting “perfects all that humane nature is capable of in the communication of ideas ’till we arrive to a more Angelical, and spiritual state in another world”.86 For Richardson, therefore, acts of intermediality represent the precondition of all artistic engagement. Ultimately, Richardson’s statement acquires an almost spiritual and religious tone, which also echoes Castiglione’s idea of attaining moral perfection through art. The intermedial act of turning Ugolino into a picture was accomplished by the Royal Academy painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, who made Richardson’s proposition a reality, as will be shown in the next chapter.

IV.2.2 The intermedial process of externalising transgression: Joshua Reynolds’ Ugolino and John Flaxman’s Paolo and Francesca The intention of the main part of this analysis is to explore the intermedial process that helped secure Dante’s fame in Britain. The underlying premise, of course, is the supposition that these acts of intermediality contributed to Dante’s enhanced popularity. In the second half of the 18th century, as well as at the beginning of the 19th century, two central Dantean themes emerged in pictures and portraits. These had a pervasive influence on the Florentine’s overall reception in Britain and were the story of Paolo and Francesca and the story of Count Ugolino.87

85

Plato, The Republic, 458c-461e. Richardson, Two Discourses, I, p. 25. 87 For Ugolino’s adaptation, see the seminal essay by Frances Yates, ‘Transformations of Dante’s Ugolino’, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 14 (1951), pp. 92-117, and John Roe, ‘Foreseeing and Foreknowing: Dante’s Ugolino and the Eton College Ode of Thomas Gray’, in: Dante’s Modern Afterlife, pp. 17-32. For Paolo and Francesca’s appropriation, see Ilka Soennecken, Dantes Paolo und Francesca in der Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts Entstehung und Entwicklung eines “romantischen” Bildthemas (Weimar: VDG, 86

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The narrowing down of Dantean themes was the result of the limited reception of Dantean cantos in the 17th and 18th centuries, the lack of complete English translations of the Commedia and the popularity of these figures among British travellers (not least due to Aglionby’s and Richardson’s recommendations). This chapter tries to perambulate the wider socio-cultural framework of their introduction into 19th-century Britain and attempts to answer the question of why these topics resurfaced during that time in particular, thus demonstrating their “anthropological adhesion”.88 In her essay on the 33rd canto of Dante’s Inferno, Frances Yates argues that “Dante seems to make his entry into eighteenth-century England in the form of Ugolino”.89 Responding to Richardson’s call for a portrait of Count Ugolino to be made, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) executed an oil on canvas depiction entitled Count Ugolino and his Children in 1773. Yates expressed her curiosity that “before any complete translation of Dante exists in English [1814] there are already three verse and three prose renderings of the Ugolino episode, and a picture of the subject by one of the greatest of English artists”.90 The painting itself harkens back to the iconographical cluster established by the Greek mythology of Chronos devouring his children. Reynolds, however, used Richardson’s Ugolino translation and chose the transitory moment of the closing gate as the picture’s main subject, without showing the act of cannibalism involved in the dungeon and in the subsequent contrapasso, when Ugolino and Ruggieri mutually gnaw their heads.91 The pathos formula applied to the painting is that of a staunch believer in God’s plan against all adversity, as in many depictions of the biblical Job.92 Like Job, Ugolino clutches his folded hands, however, where Job often raises his crisis-stricken eyes and his pale face heavenwards, Ugolino’s empty gaze is fixed against the wall in a gesture of resignation. His sons surround him and their facial expressions range from naive incredulity to sheer horror. 2002), and Nicholas Havely, ‘Francesca Observed: Painting and Illustration, c. 1790-1840’, in: Dante on View, pp. 95-108. 88 Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, p. xxii. 89 Yates, ‘Transformations of Dante’s Ugolino’, p. 94. 90 Loc. cit. 91 Famous depictions of Chronos devouring his children, which constitute an act of cannibalism, were executed, by Peter Paul Rubens and by Francisco Goya, for example. 92 One of the most seminal renderings of Job is Antonio de Pereda’s portrait in the Galleria Nazionale, Parma.

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For the execution of this painting, Reynolds transposed elements of the pretext, which was the dark prison cell and the prison bars, onto canvas with the use of a chiaroscuro technique and saturnine oil colours. Thus, the scene displays a high degree of structurality and captures narrative elements of both Dante’s and Richardson’s pretexts in its portrayal of the varying degrees of Ugolino’s sons’ starvation. Yates hinted at the paratextual evidence at the exhibition of the painting at the Royal Academy of Art in 1773: in a caption it was stated that the picture “is intended to represent the moment when the prisoners hear the locking of the door of the tower, Ugolino realized the truth in stony silence, and the youngest child asks apprehensively ‘You gaze so, father, what ails you?’”.93 The exhibition was widely praised, and Nathan Drake, a contemporary of Reynolds’, acknowledged that a whole family perishing from hunger in a gloomy dungeon would appear to partake too much of the terrible for either poetry or painting, yet has Dante, by the introduction of various pathetic touches rendered such a description the most striking, original, and affecting scene perhaps in the world, and Sir Joshua Reynolds by his celebrated picture of Ugolino has shown that through the medium of exalted genius, it is equally adapted to the canvas.94

The link between painting and poetry established Dante as the author of Inferno, and anchored his name as Ugolino’s creator.95 Moreover, Yates points out that “there is some evidence that Reynolds’ friend [Edmund] Burke, who was at this time making his famous speeches in favour of American independence, took an interest in the Ugolino picture”.96 Therefore, it is highly likely that “visitors to the Royal Academy connected Ugolino with liberty - a connection which the later history of the theme [...] was to emphasize more and more”.97 Indeed, Edmund Burke had been a proponent of the independence of the American colonies, which in his view were “not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty

93

Yates, ‘Transformations of Dante’s Ugolino’, p. 99. Nathan Drake, Literary Hours: or sketches critical, narrative and poetical (London: Sudbury, 1798), pp. 247-8. 95 Braida, Dante and the Romantics, p. 26. 96 Loc. cit. p. 108. 97 Loc. cit. pp. 108-9. Note that the association of Ugolino with lost liberty was also reflected in Byron’s poem The Prisoner of Chillon, composed in 1816. 94

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according to English ideas”.98 This deeply rooted sense of liberty, however, was under threat in the colonies, because “the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing”.99 Yates hints at the fact that “the year in which the picture was exhibited was the year of the Boston Tea Party”,100 thus turning the tale of the two traitors Ugolino and Ruggieri into an allegorical depiction of suppressed liberty and moral righteousness, with Ugolino desperately advocating for freedom and independence. The taxation system imposed on the colonies, however, demanded high tolls while at the same time refused adequate representation in the British Parliament. This particular conflict of liberty became the “moment of ‘crisis’”101 in which the Ugolino theme based on 13th-century strife and betrayal could prove its vivacity and its relevance. Similar to the story of Ugolino, the theme of the Paolo and Francesca tale was also introduced into late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain by a change of medium. As Nick Havely noted in his essay Francesca Observed: Painting and Illustration, c. 1790-1840, the subject of Paolo and Francesca also underwent a number of modifications. Starting out as one of the most successful blueprints for further artistic development, particularly during the Age of Romanticism, Dante’s canto of Inf. V was elaborated on by Boccaccio’s insertion of a servant observing the two lovers in his Esposizioni.102 This new character, having overheard Paolo and Francesca’s intimacies, led Gianciotto to see his brother’s affair with his wife and ultimately initiated the lovers’ fateful downfall. The fact that Boccaccio had added to Dante’s narrative does not come as a surprise. One might think of Boccaccio’s vivid imagination when embellishing Dante’s biography in his Trattatello. What is interesting about this narrative modification is its subsequent adoption by artists in later periods. This exposition served as an iconotext and established a new iconography, since many artists explicitly embraced the servant figure as a whole, or exposed parts of his body, e.g. his hands, his feet or his eyes. This ultimately changed the way that Gianciotto was generally depicted.

98

The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 6 vols., vol. 1 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), p. 464. 99 Loc. cit. 100 Yates, ‘Transformations of Dante’s Ugolino’, p. 109. 101 Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images, p. xxii. 102 Giovanni Boccaccio, Esposizioni sopra la Commedia di Dante, ed. by G. Padoan (Milan: Mondadori, 1965), pp. 315-17.

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A well-known example of this is John Flaxman’s (1755-1826) engraving of the subject, in which the husband, hiding behind a curtain, observes the two lovers.103 His triangular figure, with his arms clutching the curtain, his head peering in the direction of the lovers and his legs spread awkwardly apart, mirrors the lover’s triangular posture, with Paolo bending down to Francesca and caressing her. This way the act of observation becomes equally important as the main scene. Antonella Braida has pointed out that in Flaxman’s engravings, “Dante's narrative becomes a series of gripping accounts that do not threaten or challenge the reader’s moral stance”.104 I would like to argue, however, that the early visual representations of Ugolino and Paolo and Francesca challenge the spectator’s moral convictions to a certain extent, since in both pictures, moral considerations surface through voyeuristic fascination, on the one hand, and lead to moral affirmation on the other. Deliberately observing the fate of the two lovers serves as a deterrent and puts a strong “emphasis on [the] personal and public morality disseminated by the Protestant tradition and inculcated by evangelicism”.105 In both cases, moral transgression plays an important role, since cannibalism and adultery can be seen as the epitome of moral damnability. The awareness of Chronos devouring his children and Gianciotto observing Francesca thereby capture the public’s awareness of the receding shoreline of moral, religious and scientific certainties and, in a New Historicist perspective, reveals the moral values, beliefs and convictions prevalent at the time.

103

John Flaxman, La bocca mi baciò tutta tremante (Paolo e Francesca) (Divina Commedia, Inferno, canto V), 1802, Biblioteca Comunale dell'Archiginnasio, Bologna. For the influence of Flaxman’s outline illustrations, see Sarah Symmons, Flaxman in Europe: The Outline Illustrations and Their Influence (London: Garland 1984). 104 Braida, Dante and the Romantics, p. 26. 105 Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude - Sexuality, morality and art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), p. 16.

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IV.3 Rejuvenating Dante: the historiogram of the young and passionate Florentine IV.3.1 “Youthful manners and sentiment”: Schlegel, de Staël, Hazlitt and Dante’s Vita Nuova Apart from Ugolino’s and Paolo and Francesca’s fame in the 18th and 19th centuries, a further cultural impetus was required before Dante’s appropriation in Europe could gain full momentum. The leading figure in promoting Dante on a European scale was without a doubt August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845). Schlegel engaged in literature, poetry and art all his life. In particular, his lecture series Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur, delivered at Vienna University in the years 1809–1811, had been translated into most European languages which established his fame as a scholar promoting the Romantic critical standpoint in opposition to the French neo-classicists.106 Schlegel directly influenced his companion Mme de Staël, who integrated Schlegel’s admiration for Dante and Italy into her novel Corinne ou l’Italie, as well as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who picked up Schlegel’s ideas on Dante in his own lecture series, Lectures on Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Spenser, Ariosto, and Cervantes, in 1819.107 Schlegel also published an essay entitled Dante: Ueber die göttliche Komödie108 in order to “make Dante more popular among us”, but “not to judge him, [since] the voice of nations and centuries has already done so”.109 In this essay, Schlegel, who, according to Friedrich, had been given the title of the “doyen of all Dantean sciences” by his

106

For a summary of Dante criticism in Germany, see Eva Hölter, Der Dichter der Hölle und des Exils, pp. 305-8. 107 R.A. Foakes, The Collected Works of S. T. Coleridge - Lectures 1808-1819 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 341-347, and pp. 393-403. See also Ralph Pite, The Circle of Our Vision: Dante’s Presence in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p.1. 108 August Wilhelm Schlegel - Sämtliche Werke, Bd. III: Poetische Uebersetzungen und Nachbildungen nebst Erläuterungen und Abhandlungen, ed. by Eduard Böcking (Hildesheim: Georg Ohms Verlag, 1971), pp. 199-230, originally published in: Friedrich Schiller, Horen I,3, (Tübingen, 1795). 109 Loc. cit. p. 199. [“Nicht richten will ich in diesen Blättern über den Dante - die Stimme der Völker und Jahrhunderte hat auch längst gerichtet - nur bekannter möchte ich ihn unter uns machen.”].

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brother,110 expounded the basic framework of Dante’s Commedia alongside commentaries on Dante’s biography. Furthermore, Schlegel stressed the importance of Dante’s Vita Nuova in order to understand the historical figure of Dante and his poetic quality. In his essay he lamented the fact that “the Italians merely praise the honourable father of their language and poetry, but don’t read him”.111 If they did, they would find in Dante’s Vita Nuova “his youthful manners, his sentiment and imaginativeness” as well as “the hidden and inextinguishable thirst of a beautiful and strong soul” vividly portrayed.112 In sum, Schlegel reassessed the importance of Dante’s Vita Nuova by stressing the book’s autobiographical value and its author’s impressive literary authenticity, thereby paving the way for Dante’s Romantic mystification. A similar reassessment of Dante was undertaken by William Hazlitt, who published an article on Dante in the Edinburgh Review in 1815, in which he praised Dante’s fervent passion and his poetic power.113 Hazlitt was also a friend of Mme de Staël’s and frequented the European salons at the time. Staël, Hazlitt and Schlegel contributed to the process of Dantean mystification when their writings fell on fertile ground in Europe and prospered due to two inextricably linked cultural movements: the development of an artistic avant-garde and the reevaluation of all things medieval, known as the gothic revival, which had started in England at the same time. These aesthetic tendencies were reflected in the European art scene, which witnessed a remarkable rediscovery of late medieval iconography. Prominent exponents of this resurged interest in predominantly German, Dutch and Italian figurative painting dating back to the 14th and 15th centuries were the Lukasbund, founded in Vienna in

110

Friedrich, Dante’s Fame Abroad, p. 375. [“Altmeister aller Dantesken Wissenschaften”]. 111 Schlegel - Sämtliche Werke, p. 200. [“Es tut mir leid für die Italiäner, daß sie den ehrwürdigen Vater ihrer Sprache und Dichtkunst mehr rühmen, als lesen.”]. 112 Loc. cit. p. 208. [“[...] die jugendlichen Sitten, die ganze Empfindungsweise, den Hang der Phantasie, den geheimen unauslöschlichen Durst der schönen und starken Seele [...]”]. 113 See Maria Cristina Cignatta, ‘William Hazlitt and Dante as the Embodiment of ‘Power, Passion, Self-Will’’, in: British Romanticism and Italian Literature: Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting, ed. by Laura Bandiera and Diego Saglia (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 69-80.

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1809, whose members were later referred to as the Nazarenes, and the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, founded in London in 1848.114 All of these artistic tendencies, while they differ in painting technique and stylistic approach, share a common motivational denominator: their painters were striving towards a fresh expression of human emotion and they were willing to overthrow the fossilised formalism that was being promoted at the academies of arts of their respective times. In a letter to his father composed on April 27, 1808 the young art student Friedrich Overbeck, one of the founders of the Lukasbund, complained about the fact that at the Viennese art academy you are taught to execute marvellous drapery, to draw perfect figures, to engage in architecture and perspective, but you do not become a real painter. One thing is missing: heart, soul and sentiment.115

Artists like Overbeck, Franz Pforr, Peter von Cornelius, and Philipp Veit on the part of the Nazarenes, and John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti on the part of the Pre-Raphaelites, therefore found their inspiration in religious and mythical paintings executed in an authentic and pristine style: the time before Raphael’s creative period. While the Nazarene movement put an emphasis on predominantly Christian subjects dating back to the days before Martin Luther’s Reformation, the Pre-Raphaelite movement focused, from the onset, not only on spiritual, but also on literary subjects.116 The strong link between art and literature can be explained by the fact that many of the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were at the same time writers, scholars and literary critics engaged in contemporary and classic literature. Not only did Schlegel exert a tremendous influence on the European literary scene, but his literary and cultural ideas were also translated onto canvas. Friedrich Wilhelm Nippold pointed out that “it had exactly been within Schlegel’s circle that Overbeck broke with the previous artistic 114

For religious tendencies in 19th-century art, see Cordula Grewe, Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 115 Quoted in Friedrich Overbeck: 1789-1833, ed. by Franz Binder (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1971), p. 71. [“[...] man lernt einen vortrefflichen Faltenwurf malen, eine richtige Figur zeichnen, lernt Perspektive, Architektur [...]; und doch kommt kein Maler heraus [...]”]. 116 A common explanation for these differences is the lack of a Catholic tradition in Britain. Interestingly, Protestant members of the Nazarenes often converted to Catholicism.

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fashion and transferred romanticism into his art”.117 The artist, however, who was most inspired by Dante, was undoubtedly Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the son of Gabriele Rossetti, who held a chair in Italian literature in London.118

IV.3.2 “A handsome young Apollo”: The discovery of the Bargello portrait Dante Gabriel Rossetti was brought in touch with the Nazarenes’ work by his self-appointed teacher, Ford Madox Brown, who introduced him to Nazarene subjects in his studio in London. In Rossetti’s case, the artistic and biographical interpretation and reevaluation of Dante had become a life-long passion. He was christened after his father ‘Gabriel Charles Dante’, however he alternated the order of his Christian names to stress his personal identification with the Florentine. Friends and family used to call him ‘Gabriel’.119 Throughout his career, Rossetti took a particular interest in Dante’s early poetry and in the poets of the dolce stil nuovo. Thus, he translated Dante’s Vita Nuova into English and published an anthology of Italian poetry entitled The Early Italian Poets (From Ciullo D’Alcamo to Dante Alighieri). In a letter written to Ernest Gambart on August 10, 1863, Rossetti discusses two new subjects for his artistic production: the earliest meeting of Dante with Beatrice in Florence and Dante’s meeting with Beatrice in Eden, which “are treated from the real and not the allegorical side of Dante’s love-story”,120 thereby emphasising his interest in the historical figure Dante Alighieri, not the fictional narrator in Dante’s works. Further proof of Rossetti’s predilection for Dante’s early work can be found in the fact that he only illustrated four passages of the Divina Commedia, with one being the famous illustration of the Story of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, and three passages from Purgatorio. All of these pictures, however, were commissioned by John Ruskin. Rossetti’s own artistic choices for his subjects, seem to have been 117

Friedrich Wilhelm Nippold, Welche Wege führen nach Rom? (Heidelberg: Verlagsbuchhandlung Bassermann, 1869), p. 175. [“Es ist denn auch gerade im Schlegelschen Kreise gewesen, daß Overbeck mit der bisherigen Kunstrichtung brach und die Romantik in die Kunst übertrug.”]. 118 See footnote 42. 119 Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘The Painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, in: The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. by Elizabeth Prettejohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 103-15, p. 103. 120 Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. by Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), II, p. 491.

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governed byy his admirattion of Dantee’s early textt, since he ex xecuted a series of draawings inspirred by the Vita Nuova, whhich culminatted in the watercolour The First Annniversary of the Death off Beatrice (1853/54).121 The iconogrraphic featurees we can find d here are verry similar to the t young Dante fresccos found in the Bargello and in the C Cappella de’ Notai in Florence: a young Dante shown in pro ofile, clean-shhaven, calm, holding h a book. Thus Rossetti estabblishes an ico onographic linnk to the earliest visual images of D Dante that we have. h

Figure 116: Portrait of Dante D (printed after a the Bargelllo portrait of Dante) D

If there is onne all-importaant event in th he middle of thhe 19th centu ury, which helped spreead Dante’s fame f in Britaain, then it w was the redisccovery of 121

For the inntricate and sem minal interplay y between Rosssetti’s English translation and his visuaal adaptation of o Dante’s Vita a Nuova, see J . R. Woodhouse, ‘Dante Gabriel Rosseetti’s Translatioon and Illustrattion of the Vitaa Nuova’, in: Britain B and Italy from R Romanticism too Modernism, ed. by Martiin McLaughlin n (Oxford: Legenda, 20000), pp. 67-86.

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Giotto’s fresco executed at the Florentine Bargello, the former town hall. In 1840, the English artist Seymour Kirkup, the Italian patriot Aubrey Bezzi and the American man of letters Richard Henry Wilde discovered and restored the painting with the help of an Italian painter called Marini. What Marini did was fill in Dante’s eye, which had been left untouched by Giotto, as well as smear the face. However, Kirkup had already made two copies of the portrait, which he immediately sent to England. In a letter to Rossetti senior, he compared Dante’s portrait to a handsome Apollo and praised his clean-shaven and youthful outward appearance.122 This fresco ignited the Victorian imagination for various reasons: first of all, Dante was portrayed as a young man, as Kirkup describes him, and this iconography clearly contradicted “the image of the heroic poet with proud and haughty features” hitherto known.123 Secondly, the adventurous and romantic circumstances of its discovery made the portrait very popular. An example of the portrait’s success can be found in a famous sepia print of the Bargello fresco, which was circulating at the time and perfectly blended with the Victorian fascination with medieval aesthetics (figure 16). The fresco’s origins still remain open for debate, since many art historians doubt Giotto’s authorship and favour the thesis that a worker from Giotto’s bottega had executed the fresco.124 We know for sure that the depicted youth is Dante as a young man, since we have further evidence of Dante’s youthful physiognomy; in 2005, another fresco of Dante was discovered, only a stone’s throw away from the Bargello. The portrait displayed above, which in Florence is advertised with the words “il vero volto di Dante” - “Dante’s real face” - is located in the Palazzo dell’Arte de’ giudici e notai, the assembly hall of judges and barristers at the time (figure 17).125 The fresco on the first floor, although partly destroyed, bears a striking resemblance to Giotto’s fresco, following the same iconographical cluster: young man, handsome face, no beard, displaying a book, etc. This fresco is part a whole cycle of depictions which celebrate famous poets such as the tre corone and saints such as St Ives, whose qualities should cast a favourable light on the advocacy. Dante’s fresco presumably dates to the year 1340 and it surely followed the iconographical cluster established in the Bargello some years before.

122

On the resurged interest in Dante’s early life prompted by the discovery of the Bargello fresco, see Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 104. 123 Braida, Dante and the Romantics, p. 26. 124 See, for example, the discussion on Giotto’s authorship in M.V. Schwarz, Giottus Pictor (Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2008), pp. 480-1. 125 [‹www.artenotai.org›]. [accessed April 2, 2015].

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Figgure 17: Il vero volto di Dante

How wever, the viisual images of both a yoouthful and passionate p Dante and a grave, melaancholic Dantee did co-existt in the secon nd half of the 19th ceentury. Oxforrd scholar Ed dward Mooree, the princip pal of St Edmund H Hall, dedicateed a lecture series to D Dante and his h early biographers,, which he published p in 1889. 1 In partticular, the ch hapter on personal traaits and chaaracteristics of o Dante asssociates his dignified movement w with a melanncholic, grim and taciturn character.126 Rossetti, however, keept a copy of the Bargello portrait in hiss collection th hroughout his lifetime.. It was this visual v image of o a young D Dante which in nfluenced him in his own works inspired by the Vita Nuoova. Withoutt a doubt Rossetti’s aadmiration foor Dante’s Vita V Nuova ““constitutes a literary

126

Edward M Moore, Contribuutions to the Texxtual Criticism of the Divina Commedia C (Oxford: The University Preess, 1889), pp. 119-69. 1

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parallel to his artistic enthusiasm for this gentler iconography”, as Martin Mc Laughlin has stated,127 and it is this visual image of Dante Alighieri which Rossetti unveiled and which personified the revived interest in the Middle Ages with its chivalric ideals in Britain. Thereby, Rossetti subconsciously restored Dante’s hidden youthful iconography in the same way that Schlegel and Bodmer had rediscovered the quality of Dante’s mental image, his youthful poetry and, what goes along with it, his literary authenticity, at the turn of the century. Ellis already hinted at the inextricable connection between Dante and his love poetry and stated that “the portrait and the Vita Nuova were to become inseparable in the minds of many readers”.128 Ellis quotes a mid-19th-century article on Dante, which lamented that, had the Vita Nuova been more widely known, “we should hear less of the sternness, the bitterness, and even ferocity, which are taken for granted as the leading features of [Dante’s] mind”, and which could still be found in Moore’s lectures quoted above.129 For his own paintings, Rossetti “exclude[d] much of what was characteristic of the older Dante”,130 while at the same time romanticising the poetic circle and the exchange of artistic ideas in Dante’s Florence, as the next chapter will show.

IV.3.3 The Allegory of Love and Friendship: Rossetti’s Dantean self-fashioning While the grim Dante disappeared, the young Dante took centre stage. Interestingly, the Bargello portrait was published for the first time in England in 1842 in Charles Lyell’s Poems of the ‘Vita Nuova’ and the ‘Convivio’ alongside the Torrigiani death mask of Dante, a further symbol of mid-19th-century iconic transition. One of Rossetti’s greatest achievements in connection with Dante was that he “marks the transition from verbal to visual expression in his own exploration of Dante’s art. At the same time, he gives the earlier poet a role, indeed a founding role […] in the history of Italian visual art, as well as in literature”.131 The key to approaching Rossetti’s appropriation of Dante lies in the preference for the 127

Britain and Italy from Romanticism to Modernism, p. 9. Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 104. 129 Quoted by Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 104. The original text appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in 1847 and was written by Theodore Martin. 130 Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 111. 131 Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘The Painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, p. 103. Note that Rossetti’s reassessment of Dante coincides with the Italian Dante criticism spearheaded by Mazzini at the time. 128

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young passionate poet of the Vita Nuova over the grim avenger of sin in the Inferno. Not only was Rossetti “almost exclusively obsessed by [Dante’s] Vita Nuova”,132 it is also “indisputable that Rossetti nearly always uses the Bargello copy as the basis for his own pictures of Dante”.133 As already highlighted in the previous chapter, Rossetti’s fascination with the young Dante and his circle culminated in two pictures: Art, Friendship, Love, executed in 1852, and The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1853/54). As he explains, I have thus all the influence of Dante’s youth - Art, Friendship and Love - with a real incident embodying them. The combination is, I think, the best which has yet occurred to me in illustration of this period of the poet’s life, and the design is certainly about the best I have made.134

In Art, Friendship, Love Rossetti clearly took artistic liberties in portraying Giotto, Cavalcanti and Dante together in one picture, since their actual life spans would not have allowed for their physical juxtaposition in reality and therefore requires some “stretching of the imagination”.135 Rossetti tried to capture what art critic John Ruskin called the “most touching and impressive divine appointment”, when the “energy of the Middle Ages [could] be gathered”.136 Ruskin pinpointed such an appointment around the year 1300, which in his eyes represented the culmination of collaborative medieval art. Furthermore, Ruskin stated that “all great European art is rooted in the thirteenth century”, thus paving the way for the mystification of medieval artists such as Giotto and Dante, as he had already begun to do in his travelogues and handbooks on Florence.137 Indeed, Rossetti’s drawing captures a remarkable imagined moment of artistic collaboration, with Giotto drawing Dante’s profile and Cavalcanti looking on and holding an open book of poems. This arrangement of figures expresses Rossetti’s desire for a fraternization in art, since “the exchanges of sonnets between Dante, Cavalcanti, Guido Orlandi, Cino da Pistoia, et. al., undoubtedly stimulated Rossetti’s attempt to get his own circle [...] involved in writing, and exchanging poetry”.138

132

Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 125. Loc. cit. p. 120. 134 Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, I, pp. 122-3. 135 Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 117. 136 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ed. by Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), II, p. 86. 137 Loc. cit. 138 Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 115. 133

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Furthermore, in an act of transmedial intermediality, art and literature not only become represented as equal sister arts, but the painting also explains Rossetti’s own artistic agenda as a painter who was strongly inspired by medieval poetry and by Dante’s biography. Rossetti’s self-portrait as Giotto further reinforces a personal reading of the painting. Such a juxtaposition of the great medieval poets and the greatest medieval painter favoured their subsequent representation, which ultimately became “allegorised into those buxom maidens who present ‘Art’ and ‘Letters’ on the façades of Victorian buildings”.139 A further striking depiction of Dante and his circle is represented in The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice. Dante is once again depicted as a young man, following the visual blueprint of the Bargello portrait. The picture displays the moment when Dante is interrupted by his fellow poets of the dolce stil nuovo, who disturb him while he is drawing an angel in commemoration of Beatrice. The position of the figures recalls the pathos formula of Christ calling his first disciples, with a typical arrangement of disciples surrounding God’s son, who appoints a new follower (figure 18). The subject had been treated by fellow artist Adam Brenner, a Viennese painter close to the Nazarene, ten years earlier. This pathos formula was used in Rossetti’s depiction as well as in the display of transmedial intermediality, in which various media are displayed via the medium of painting, suggest that the picture can be considered a visual founding document of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In it, an interesting array of objects, instruments, and paraphernalia mirror the interconnectedness of art, such as a violin and a bow on the floor, the sculpture of a saint on the wall, a stained-glass window, books and various papers. Therefore, as Elizabeth Prettejohn argues, the picture might represent the Brotherhood’s artistic manifesto, since “the image captures something like the spirit of the early gatherings”, and the drawing clearly states that the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood is “devoted to all the arts in concert, scholarly as well as convivial, defined by its affinity to the earlier artistic circle of Dante”.140

139

Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 119. Note that in Truro Cathedral, Cornwall, a Victorian stained-glass window depicts Dante alongside Giotto and Pope Innocent III. 140 Prettejohn, ‘The Painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, p. 104.

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Figure 18: D Dante Gabriel Rossetti, R The Firrst Anniversary of the Death off Beatrice

Furthermoree, Rossetti fashions himself once againn after Dante, because “by showingg Dante makiing a drawing g, Rossetti cauuses his predeecessor to identify, rettrospectively, with himself as painter-ppoet”.141 Such a selffashioning aafter Dante’s biography was w extended into his own personal life: in an aact of Danteaan emulation, Rossetti tookk onboard the idea of female guiddance by combbining the sen nsual and spiriitual aspects of o love.142 Rossetti wass obsessed byy his muse, hiss first wife Eliizabeth Siddaal, who he stylised as a Victorian Beeatrice and wh hose death in 1862 led to a period of depression aand drug adddiction for the artist, and finally resultted in his 141

Loc. cit. p. 103. For a disccussion of critiicism surround ding Rossetti’s misunderstand ding of the medieval conncept of love,, see Ellis, Dante D and Engglish Poetry, pp. p 121-3. Generally speeaking, Rossettti separated Beeatrice from heer theological function f in the Commediia and embraceed her image ass Dante’s musee, as captured in i the Vita Nuova, by m moving her intto the foregrou und. For Victoorian reinterpreetations of Beatrice, see also Julia Strauub, A Victorian Muse: The Aftterlife of Dante's Beatrice in Nineteenthh-Century Literrature (London n: Continuum International Publishing P Group, 2009)). 142

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death in 1882.143 What Rossetti clearly shared with Dante was the romanticized and mystified life-story, which kept his reputation alive throughout the 20th century, even though “Pre-Raphaelite art was excluded from high culture”.144 In conclusion, not only the themes and subjects, but also the different levels present in Dante’s texts found their way into Rossetti’s paintings, so that “Rossetti’s poetic and visual projects were intertwined, and in ways that had a formative impact on the movement as a whole”.145 The next two chapters will explore decidedly anti-Rossettian stances in Dante’s appropriation by the most important artists who championed Dante’s work in the 20th century.

143

Alison Milbank has drawn attention to the fact that not only Rossetti, but also a number of well-known Victorians compared themselves (even physically) to Dante. For example, Oscar Wilde and his mother claimed descent from the Alighieri family, as did George Eliot, who described herself resembling a cousin of Dante’s, “rather smoke-dried - a face with lines in it that seems a map of sorrows”. Milbank argues that “these three celebrated examples of Dantesque physiognomy should all be figures viewed by their contemporaries as transgressive”. See Milbank, Dante and the Victorians, p. 2. Interestingly, these Victorians fashioned themselves after Dante’s autogenerated historiogram of the innocently exiled and crisis-ridden author, who has been left out of the society he so strongly claims access to, and whose warnings were misunderstood in a world of political favouritism. Of course, the analysis of their desire to identify themselves with Dante would go beyond the scope of this study. However, it is striking that to a certain extent these Victorians, like Dante, assume a position outside of society, which makes them appear eccentric in the sense that they “emerge from privileged positions, yet without necessarily conforming to the rules of their class”. See Rainer Emig, ‘Right in the Margins: An Eccentric View of Culture’, in: PostTheory, Culture, Criticism, ed. by Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 93-112, p. 96. 144 Prettejohn, ‘The Painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, p. 109. 145 Loc. cit.

CHAPTER V AUDIRE VOCEM AUCTORITATIS DANTIS

V.1 Dante as the voice of authority in Modernist poetry V.1.1 “All ages are contemporaneous”: Modernist artistic creation and the literary past Dante can be considered a monolithic cornerstone in the critical engagement of Modernist writers with the Western literary tradition. Unlike the term Modernism suggests, many Modernist poets did not cut themselves off from the literary heritage of preceding epochs. On the contrary, they often entered into a dialogue with the literature of the past and extensively used it for the creation of poetry in their own present. What had changed, however, was the way the production of poetry and the absorption of literary heritage was regarded: for at least two of the most seminal Modernist writers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the engagement with the literary past represented a vital component of their own creative process. Thus, ultimately, the attitude of many Modernist writers towards literary tradition can be summarised as the “interrelation between [their] perception [of the past] and [their own] artistic creation - or rather the blurred borderlines between the two”.1 This chapter, therefore, aims to do four things: first of all, it analyses Ezra Pound’s and T. S. Eliot’s attitudes towards artistic creation and its relationship with the literary past. Secondly, it reassesses their engagement with Dante’s texts as literary critics and as astute readers. Thirdly, it argues that the knowledge gleaned from these critical studies directly influenced the most Dantesque lines in English poetry, found in Eliot’s poem Little Gidding in the Four Quartets. Last, but not least, it strives to comprehend Eliot’s view on Dante as set against the backdrop of the historiograms discussed in the previous chapters. Here, it becomes clear that Eliot, and to a certain extent also Pound, not only distances 1

Emig, Modernism in Poetry, p. 66.

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himself from the late Victorian iconic image of Dante that was circulating and was strongly cultivated by the Pre-Raphaelites, but he also gives birth to a fresh take on the poet by integrating antecedent Dantean historiograms into an allegory of literary authority and moral authenticity. To a certain extent, Eliot’s reading of Dante’s poetry can be described as a counteraction to Dante’s appropriation in the 19th century, as a kind of “anti-romantic” and “anti-Rossettian” stance,2 and his appeal to the Modernists lies in a sort of moral and allegorical function that draws together political vision and poetic efficacy. In his engagement with Dante and the poets of the past, and first published under the title of The Spirit of Romance in 1910, Ezra Pound stated that early Tuscan sonnets are often very “Elizabethan”, and the Spanish imitations of the Tuscans are often more so. Great poets seldom make bricks without straw; they pile up all the excellences they can beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries, and then set their own inimitable light atop of the mountain.3

This metaphor, which establishes a metonymic relationship between the construction of a building and the construction of a poem, not only implies that there is no poetry without tradition, it also suggests that the literature of the past provides an indispensable construction material for the contemporary poet. The converse argument of Pound’s statement exhorts that a poet failing to exploit his literary predecessors is destined to fail in his attempt to become a great and, paradoxically, also an inimitable poet. This paradox stems from the fact that all great poets have to study and emulate their predecessors in order to achieve stylistic greatness and to finally achieve their own inimitableness. It is here that the style of Dante, as Eliot formulated twenty years later, can help make a poet better in any language, since Dante was “the most universal of poets in the modern languages”.4 To a certain extent, Eliot’s and Pound’s convictions echo Humanist teachings, which comprised the imitation of Latin and Greek literary ideals, and can be traced back to the Aristotelian precept of 2

Loc. cit. p. 211. Pound, The Spirit of Romance, p. 162. 4 Eliot, Dante, p. 9. Dante’s universality of language will be explained in chapter V.1.2. 3

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emulatio, the emulation of the masters as a first step towards literary authority. In the Modernist appreciation of the literary past, this concept of emulation, however, becomes a vital ingredient in the search for artistic originality. In particular, the first two decades of the 20th century saw a continuous occupation with the literary past, and a huge number of often contradicting artistic manifestos, such as F. T. Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism (1909) and Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto (1918), were published. T. S. Eliot’s essay Tradition and the Individual Talent coincided with this wave of publications and was first issued in the newspaper The Egoist in 1919. Unlike Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, which advocated a decisive break with the literary past, Eliot did not frown upon the literary masters like Dante, who had preceded his own artistic creation.5 Instead, Eliot argued that the contemporary writer is yet another member of the largest collective of all writers, dead or alive, thereby establishing a “conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written”.6 Thus, an author conscious of the literary tradition “is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past”.7 Such a concept of the contemporariness of all literature and of all ages, already enunciated by Pound in The Spirit of Romance, regards the past as a literary archive the contemporary poet has to draw upon.8 As Pound famously stated: All ages are contemporaneous. [...] This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grandchildren’s contemporaries [...].9

5

See the Preface for Marinetti’s sceptical attitude towards the reappraisal of Dante in Italy. For further information, see Marinetti e i futuristi, ed. by Luciano De Maria (Milan: Garzanti, 1994). 6 Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920), p. 53. 7 Loc. cit. p. 59. 8 The philosophical background of this notion can be found in the theory of the French phenomenologist Henri Bergson, whose lectures Eliot attended in 1911. Bergson described time as a duration, a continuous present, in contrast to a division of time into single moments. On Bergson’s concept of time, see, for example, Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time - An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 42-105. 9 Pound, The Spirit of Romance, p. 8.

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Therefore, it is inevitable that a great poet puts his talent to the test by subscribing to the idea that “[he] must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career”.10 Interestingly, in such an understanding of poetry and the creative process, new works emerge by reassembling, reassessing and restructuring ideas of the past. This strongly relates to Eliot’s so-called ‘impersonal theory’, also set out in Tradition and the Individual Talent: it is only the poet’s “finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations”.11 In such a creative process, therefore, the poet merely becomes a medium capable of regrouping sentiments and ideas, while at the same time relinquishing his own personality. Eliot argues that since “the emotion of art is impersonal, [...] the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done”.12 Moreover, for Eliot, “the other aspect of this impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author”.13 The poet must be aware of “the present moment of the past”, so that the terms tradition and individual talent ultimately become interchangeable, because the individual talent reveals itself in the treatment of the material gleaned from the literary past. The tradition, on the other hand, constantly resurfaces as an indispensable element of Modernist poetry, as in, for example, the ubiquitous literary quotations found in Eliot’s The Wasteland. To a certain extent, such a concept of artistic production resembles the historiogram of the prophet-poet receiving divine messages, in which the author becomes the mere mediator between the text, which the poet can claim material authorship of, and a divine or God-given inspiration, which represents the genuine initiator of the text. The exception, of course, is the fact that in the case of Eliot’s impersonal theory, in lieu of a divine inspiration we find the engagement with the literary past and the poetic tradition as a permanent creative “catalyst”,14 as Eliot calls it, or prompter of literary cues for artistic production. Both writers, Pound and Eliot alike, share the conviction that only the

10

Eliot, The Sacred Wood, p. 52. Loc. cit. pp. 53-4. 12 Loc. cit. 13 Loc. cit. 14 Eliot, The Sacred Wood, p. 54. 11

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engagement with the literary past brings about modern forms of poetry and attaches value to their own artistic creation. Even more than Pound, Eliot stressed the monolithic prominence of Dante for his personal poetic growth and regarded him as a leading example for poets of any language to follow. Ultimately, the Commedia had successfully demonstrated how the engagement and conversation with dead masters, as the narrator of the Commedia had undertaken, can lead to the discovery of one’s own distinctive poetic voice.

V.1.2 “The comfort and amazement of my age”: T. S. Eliot’s three Dantean lessons “No one will deny Eliot’s temperamental and ideological affinity with his Italian master”,15 stated Dominic Manganiello in his essay on T. S. Eliot and Dante, thereby summing up the symbiotic relationship between the medieval and the Modernist authors. For T. S. Eliot, reading Dante was, in Eliot’s own words, “the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime”.16 Indeed, Dante’s pervasive influence on Eliot can be found in his poetry, in his critical essays as well as in his personal outlook on life. The benefit, however, was mutual, since Dante’s reassessment in the 20th century and his revitalisation for modern readers can undoubtedly be ascribed to Eliot and Ezra Pound.17 Eliot was aware of this fact and stated that “perhaps confessions by poets, of what Dante has meant to them, may even contribute something to the appreciation of Dante himself”.18 It comes as no surprise that the Swedish Academy at the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature ceremony called Eliot “one of Dante’s latest born successors”.19 One year later, when asked about his favourite Italian writer, Eliot admitted “Dante, and then Dante, and then Dante. There is always something to discover in 15

Dominic Manganiello, T. S. Eliot and Dante (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), p. 7. 16 Eliot, The Sacred Wood, pp. 250-1. 17 On Eliot’s and Pound’s engagement with Dante’s ideology and his poetry see, for example, Dante Among the Moderns, ed. by Stuart Y. McDougal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), and Evi Zemanek, T.S. Eliot und Ezra Pound im Dialog mit Dante: die Divina Commedia in der modernen Lyrik (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008). 18 Eliot, ‘What Dante Means to Me’, in: To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), pp. 125-35, p. 25. 19 Les Prix Nobel en 1948 (Stockholm: Norstedt & Söner, 1949), p. 51.

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the Divine Comedy. [...] I have always returned to Dante, to his poetry”.20 When asked about his career in 1961, Eliot, referring to Dante, admitted that “there is one poet [...] who impressed me profoundly when I was twenty-two [...] one poet who remains the comfort and amazement of my age”.21 Many a time, Eliot has celebrated Dante’s talent for illuminating his readers through his social and linguistic impact, because in making people comprehend the incomprehensible, [Dante] demands immense resources of language and in developing the language, enriching the meaning of words and showing how much words can do, he is making possible a much greater range of emotion and perception for other men, because he gives them the speech in which more can be expressed.22

Apart from these snippets, Eliot critically engaged several times with the Florentine poet, most notably in his essay Dante (1929) and in his lecture given at the Italian Institute in London entitled What Dante Means to Me (1961, published in 1965). Even though the first impetus to compose an essay on Dante came from publisher Geoffrey Faber, who convinced Eliot that if he “would do this it would be a first-rate essay to start the [Poets on the Poets] series”,23 Eliot was conceived that his occupation with Dante might one day even exceed the length of an essay and - once gained “the solidity required” - be turned into a book.24 Interestingly, Eliot sought out scholarly approval for his essay and also considered publishing it in Germany, once he had “receive[d] the approval of Curtius”.25 As far as Dante’s influence on his own work is concerned, Eliot explains that

20

Quoted by Manganiello, T. S. Eliot and Dante, p. 1. Eliot, ‘To Criticize the Critic’, in: To Criticize the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 23. 22 Loc. cit. p. 134. 23 The Letters of T. S. Eliot 1928-1929, vol. 4, ed. by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), p. 280. 24 See Eliot’s letter to W. Swan Stallybrass in The Letters of T. S. Eliot 1928-1929, vol. 4, p. 285. 25 See Eliot’s letter to Erich Alport in The Letters of T. S. Eliot 1928-1929, vol. 4, p. 508. Eliot conversed extensively with the German professor Ernst Robert Curtius, who held a chair in Romance Languages in Bonn. Curtius saw Dante as a mediator between medieval Latin and early modern culture, a conviction put forward in his opera magna Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, published in 1948. 21

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More than that, the important debts are represented by the “three lessons [Eliot] had been taught by Dante’s poetry, the lessons of craft, of speech and of exploration of sensibility [...]”.27 All of these lessons are, to a certain extent, interdependent, because the representation of the “complete scale of the depths and heights of human emotion”28 in the Divina Commedia requires a number of artistic skills and choices concerning craft and speech. The first lesson, the lesson of craft, was thoroughly addressed in his essay Dante, in which Eliot states that the poetry of Dante is the one universal school of style for the writing of poetry in any language; [...] there is no poet in any tongue - not even in Latin and Greek - who stands so firmly as a model for all poets.29

According to Eliot, Dante’s Florentine speech represented a “universal language” close to medieval Latin,30 the widespread intellectual lingua franca at the time. Eliot argues that speech inevitably influences the mindset:31 at the time of Dante’s Europe, despite “all its dissensions and dirtiness, [it] was mentally more united than we can now conceive”.32 Intellectual communication in written form, therefore, is governed by the use of certain words, which “have associations, and the groups of words in association have associations, which is a kind of local self-consciousness, because they are the growth of a particular civilisation”.33 Hence, Eliot claims a linguistic and cultural unity for Dante’s Europe, since “the culture of Dante was not of one European country but of [the whole of] Europe”.34 This implies that Dante

26

Eliot, ‘What Dante Means to Me’, p. 132. Loc. cit. p. 135. 28 Eliot, Dante (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 51. 29 Loc. cit. p. 50. 30 Loc. cit. p. 10. 31 Note that around the time that Eliot composed his essay on Dante, the philosopher and linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein received his PhD at Cambridge University and went on to usher in the linguistic turn in the Humanities. 32 Eliot, Dante, p. 11. 33 Loc. cit. 34 Loc. cit. 27

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not only thought in the way in which every man of his culture in the whole of Europe then thought, but he employed a method which was common and commonly understood throughout Europe [...], the allegorical method [which] was a definite method not confined to Italy.35

Even though Eliot does not mention it explicitly, it is evident that Europe’s common ground at the time was cultivated by the Catholic Church. The allegorical method in action, therefore, refers to the tradition of rhetoric as an ancilla theologiae, a discipline serving as the exegesis of the Holy Scripture.36 This implies, as Eliot argues, that “allegory was not a local Italian custom, but a universal European method”.37 In The Spirit of Romance, Pound had already hinted at the quality of allegory in medieval texts, which enabled the author “to separate himself, not yet from complete moods, but from simple qualities and passions, and to visualize them”.38 In chapter II.2 we defined allegory as a form of displacement, in which the signifiers become exchanged and the exchanged signification is extended or sustained several times. Furthermore, we stated that an allegory serves to illustrate complex ideas and concepts and conveys meaning through symbolic figures or images, which often stand for an abstract idea. In Dante’s case, the allegorical meaning of the “selva oscura” (Inf. 1, l. 2), for example, symbolises the sinful life, which has led the narrator of the Commedia astray and forces him to search purgatory for his sins. For Eliot, the masterful use of allegory in poetry has multiple stylistic implications for authors and readers alike: despite the common degradation of allegory as a “tiresome crossword puzzle” or its association with “dull poems”, the use of allegory in Dante’s case, paradoxically, leads to a “particular effect”: the “lucidity of style”, which ultimately “makes for simplicity and intelligibility”.39 Eliot stresses several times how his first exposure to Dante provided him with a “direct shock of poetic intensity”.40 This poetic revelation at a time when he was not capable of grasping the Italian language directly, had taught him that “genuine poetry can communicate 35

Loc. cit. p. 14. Dante himself explicitly mentioned the fact that he would like his Commedia to be interpreted with the help of the fourfold exegesis. 37 Eliot, Dante, p. 16. 38 Pound, The Spirit of Romance, p. 85. 39 Loc. cit. p. 14. 40 Loc. cit. p. 8. 36

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before it is understood”.41 Hence savouring sounds, words, and rhymes, and the awareness of the fact that “the [allegorical] meaning is there, too”,42 without comprehending it intellectually at first, constitute what Eliot termed Dante’s so-called “poetic lucidity”.43 In The Sacred Wood, Eliot specified that there are, for instance, many scattered lines and tercets in the Divine Comedy which are capable of transporting even a quite uninitiated reader, just sufficiently acquainted with the roots of the language to decipher the meaning, to an impression of overpowering beauty.44

Thus, the application of allegory makes it possible for the reader, who might not even be a good Italian speaker, to appreciate Dante, since allegory is a widely understandable visual device, and while “speech varies, [...] our eyes are all the same”, as Eliot argues.45 It seems that Eliot found inspiration to apply allegory in his own poetry from Dante, with one of the most prominent examples being The Game of Chess, an allegory of a woman’s mature manipulation and careful calculation in The Waste Land. Eliot expounded that “for a competent poet, allegory means clear visual images. And clear visual images are given much more intensity by having a meaning”.46 Here he harks back to Pound’s conviction, formulated ten years earlier, that in comparison to Shakespeare, “Dante would seem to have the greater imaginative vision”, as well as a “more compressed or elliptical expression of metaphorical perception“.47 Ellis has observed that Eliot’s constant turn towards allegory offered the “opportunity [...] for escaping from self [...] into a common, external order, and thus the opportunity for appeasing the extraordinary burden of self [...] it is the ‘objective correlative’ in a more extended and significant form”.48 41

Loc. cit. Note that here Eliot contradicts Pound, who claimed that it takes a fine understanding of the Italian language in order to grasp “Dante’s supremacies”. See Pound, The Spirit of Romance, p. 154. 42 Loc. cit. p. 15. 43 Loc. cit. p. 10. Eliot uses this term in opposition to intellectual lucidity, the clarity of speech and argument. 44 Eliot, The Sacred Wood, p. 14. Note that the title of Eliot’s collection of critical essays, first published in 1920, alludes to Dante’s sacred wood at the end of Purgatorio, which the Florentine poet crosses right before his ascension to Paradiso. It also alludes to the dark wood at the beginning of Inferno. 45 Loc. cit. p. 15. 46 Loc cit. 47 Loc. cit., p. 158. 48 Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 214.

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This way, in Eliot’s writing, allegory acquires a form of previously unexperienced “therapeutic value”.49 When explaining the significance of allegory for Eliot, his use of the term visual needs further clarification, since it differs from the common connotation of a mere sensory ability. When Eliot calls Dante’s imagination a visual one, he explicitly refers to the shared Latin root visus, denoting the ‘power of sight’, inherent in both the terms visual and visionary alike. The application of clear visual images, therefore, springs from a clear vision in the poet’s visionary mind: Dante’s [...] visual imagination [...] is a visual imagination in a different sense from that of a modern painter of still life: it is visual in the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw visions. It was a psychological habit, the trick of which we have forgotten, but as good as any of our own. We have nothing but dreams, and we have forgotten that seeing visions - a practice now relegated to the aberrant and uneducated was once a more significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of dreaming. We take it for granted that our dreams spring from below: possibly the quality of our dreams suffers in consequence.50

In particular, the ironic remark delivered in the last sentence of this quotation - an allusion to the psychological id and the subconsciousness of dreams explored by Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung - makes it clear that Eliot regrets the loss of the pre-Freudian concept of visionary dreaming. This has a further implication: in Eliot’s statement the written and the visual intersect, arguing that poetry communicates more through images than through words. Thus the visual perception, spurred by the use of allegory in poetry, has the effect of lingering in the reader’s mind, and to connect beyond the mere significance of words. Modern cognitive psychology confirms such a claim, stressing the enhanced imagination and high memorability inherent in cerebral visual perception.51 As far as a poet’s craft is concerned, Eliot addressed two fundamental concepts in his essays: the theory of impersonality, already 49

Loc. cit. p. 216. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, p. 15. 51 Some scientists even claim the existence of so-called imagery neurons, which respond to perceiving and imagining visual concepts and objects. See, for example, Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, ed. by E. Bruce Goldstein (Wadsworth: Cengage, 2011), p. 279. 50

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mentioned in the previous chapter, and the general themes of poetry. The latter were also expounded in his essay Dante, in which he stated that “it took me many years to recognise that the states of improvement and beatitude which Dante describes are still further from what the modern world can conceive as cheerfulness, than are his states of damnation”.52 This occurred to him because of the premise that “poetry not only must be found through suffering but can find its material only in suffering”.53 The preference for severe and lugubrious topics as inspiration for artistic creation as a revolt against the ostentatious “cheerfulness, optimism, and hopefulness” of some 19th-century art,54 therefore, prevented him for a long time from thoroughly enjoying Dante’s Paradiso. Furthermore, Eliot states that he was influenced by the conviction that a poet has to suffer and express his suffering, but that the study of Dante convinced him that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates”.55 For Eliot, there must be a distancing between the experiences made as a protagonist in one’s own life and the poetic creation, which subsequently follows it. Such a process of “hierarchical ordering of experiences and emotions” is, for Eliot, supremely illustrated in Dante’s Commedia, in which Dante also becomes the mere recorder of events.56 Eliot strongly opposes the 14th- and 19thcentury cult of genius surrounding Dante and his work by focusing on the poetic quality of the text instead. He states that “very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet”.57 Therefore, Eliot’s theory of impersonality also contradicts the biographical interpretations of the Commedia, which claim that the pervasiveness derives primarily from its biographical impetus. In the most successful poetic passages of the Paradiso, Eliot detects such a mature poetic mind, capable of sacrificing the poet’s personality for the sake of poetic quality. An example is the description of the Holy Trinity, which Dante encounters in the last canto of Paradiso, and whose radiant light makes the narrator burn with love from within:

52

Eliot, Dante, p. 42. Loc. cit. 54 Loc. cit. 55 Eliot, The Sacred Wood, p. 18. 56 Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 219. 57 Loc. cit. 53

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O luce etterna che sola in te sidi, sola t’intendi, e da te intelletta e intendente te ami e arridi! Eternal Light, You only dwell within Yourself, and only You know You; Self-knowing, Self-known, You love and smile upon Yourself! [Par., XXXIII, 124-6]

For Eliot, these passages of Paradiso are among the most beautiful lines ever written, first and foremost because here, the narrator of the Commedia completely fades into the background and gives way to a haunting description of the Holy Trinity. Summing up Dante’s excellence in craft and style, Eliot argues that “for the science or art of writing verse, one has learned from the Inferno that the greatest poetry can be written with the greatest economy of words, and with the greatest austerity in the use of metaphor, simile, verbal beauty, and elegance”.58 Dantean themes and his images have proven to be flexible and to lend themselves to modern adaptations. In his annotations to The Waste Land, Eliot himself quotes Dante, whose lines he alluded to in the poem: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus. 59

The passage referred to is the story of Count Ugolino and his starvation in the tower. Alongside the textual reference, in his annotations Eliot also quotes F. H. Bradley, who wrote in Appearance and Reality that “my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside [...] every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it [...] the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul”.60 Ugolino’s fate, therefore, becomes reinterpreted as representing the modern individual’s fate of being caught up in their own mind, thinking only of the key to their own prison, which excludes them from partaking in a community. The allusion to Coriolanus, a Roman outcast who had turned his back on Rome, 58

Loc. cit. p. 28. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909 - 1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), p. 68. 60 Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 75. 59

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confirms such a reading of self-constructed exclusion. In this respect, the use of Ugolino resembles Eliot’s Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock, in which “the Ugolino episode serves as an element in a complex ironic depiction of a vain man proud of living within the walls of his own prison”.61 In Modernist poetry, it seems, Ugolino’s prison has moved inside the protagonist, alienating him from the outside world he so desperately wishes to gain access to. Interestingly, Pound and Eliot also often used references to, or from, Dante to sing one another’s praises. The most famous examples are, of course, Eliot’s dedication of The Waste Land to Pound, using Dante’s words that referred to Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio: Il miglior fabbro Ezra Pound. In Italian, the comparative form ‘miglior’ can also be understood as a superlative; the meaning in Dante, as well in Eliot, therefore, remains ambiguous and can either denote the ‘better’ or the ‘best craftsman’. Dante refers to Arnaut Daniel in Purg. XXVI, who is introduced as “a better artisan of the mother tongue” by Guido Guinizelli.62 The mutual poetic references between Pound and Eliot culminated in Pound’s famous dictum “His was the true Dantescan voice - not honoured enough, and deserving more than ever I gave him”, uttered at Eliot’s funeral in 1965.63 Moreover, the final line of Purg. XXVI served Eliot well as it became one of the fragments “shored against my ruins” in the final verse of The Waste Land.64 Similarly, the Provençal poet Arnaut Daniel, whom Dante encounters while he is caught in the purgatorial fire, delivered the title of Eliot’s second poetry collection, Ara Vos Prec (1920), and various of Arnaut’s lines also reappeared in Ash-Wednesday (1930) and in Four Quartets (1943). It seems, therefore, that Purg. XXVI, in particular, had made a lasting impression on Eliot, and the insinuating lines of Arnaut’s soliloquy, Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan; consiros vei la passada folor, e vei jausen lo jorn, qu‘esper denan. [...] I am Arnaut, who, going, weep 61

Andrija Matic, ‘T. S. Eliot, Dante and Irony’, in T. S. Eliot, Dante, and the Idea of Europe, pp. 87-94, p. 91. 62 Purg., XXVI, lines 116-7. [“miglior fabbro del parlar materno”]. 63 Quoted in George Bornstein, Ezra Pound among the Poets (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), p. 180. 64 Eliot, Collected Poems, p. 69.

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and sing; with grief, I see my former folly; with joy, I see the hoped-for day draw near. [Purg. XXVI, 142-44],

which express Arnaut’s mournful purgatorial suffering along with his hopeful expectation to rise beyond his present state, might encapsulate Eliot’s own disposition as a poet. Massimo Bacigalupo observed that “the image of the suffering poet who weeps and sings would be recognised by Eliot as a portrait of his own ordeals”.65 Dante’s miglior fabbro, as Daniel is addressed in the Commedia, had already been ranked “among the masters” by Ezra Pound, though Pound considered him to have been overshadowed by Dante’s fame.66 Along the lines of Pfister, the criterion of selectivity, which refers to the significance of a reference and to the question of how well a quotation or a selected passage renders the original idea, seems of the utmost importance here; the selected quotation becomes akin to a pars pro toto and almost expresses the entire context of the original source in Eliot’s quotation. Moreover, the new context, in which the quotation is used in the dedication of The Waste Land, establishes a new frame of signification, making Arnaut and Guinizelli out of Eliot and Pound. This constellation reflects Dante’s and Guinizelli’s playing out of their Provençal poetic role model. Ironically, despite this dedication, Eliot’s fame overshadowed Pound’s literary work. As already outlined above, Eliot is often associated with Arnaut Daniel. Even though one should hesitate before confounding Eliot’s and Arnaut’s biographies and jumping to premature conclusions,67 there is some validity in stating that Arnaut’s persona represented a template for Eliot’s compound self in Little Gidding, which will be discussed in the following chapter.

65

Massimo Bacigalupo, ‘Dante’, in: T. S. Eliot in Context, ed. by Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 180-9, pp. 180-1. 66 Pound, The Spirit of Romance, p. 22. 67 Bacigalupo suggests allusions to Eliot’s “more than usually conflicted [...] sexuality” because of the fact that Arnaut was punished among the lustful. Loc. cit. p. 181.

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V.1.3 “His was the true Dantesque voice”: the allegory of eternal truth and poetic vigour in T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding Eliot’s late work, the Four Quartets, published in 1943 in the United States and in 1945 in Britain,68 remains today as one of Eliot’s most highly debated poems. In a recently published essay, F. W. Bateson harshly criticises the poem when stating: There are, of course, some brilliant moments - notably the Dantesque airraid episode in Little Gidding - but the writing is in general slack and tired, and too often merely pretentious, groping towards profundity by contortions of repetition.69

Little Gidding, the last poem of the Four Quartets, however, is beyond reproach and is interesting from various perspectives: on a formal level, it contains an imitation of Dante’s rhyme scheme terza rima, the tercets deliberately invented for the Commedia. On an intertextual level, it is full of allusions to Inf. XV and Purg. XXXVI, Dante’s encounter with Brunetto Latini in hell, and his meeting with Arnaut Daniel and Giudo Guinizelli in the purgatorial fire. On a programmatic level, it can be regarded as “a deliberately retrospective summary of Eliot’s poetic career” as well as “an evaluation of the influences that have shaped his poetic voice”.70 Therefore, many of the lessons learned from Dante and the poetic convictions laid out in his essays as a critic are put into action in this poem. Eliot named all the poems in the Four Quartets after biographically important places. Little Gidding is a small parish in Cambridgeshire, which used to be a fortress of Anglican faith, particularly during the Civil War. Eliot visited the place in May 1936, while preparing the lecture of a historical play dealing with Charles I, who had gone thrice to Little 68

Eliot’s Four Quartets has been thoroughly discussed in literary criticism. See, for example, Helen Gardner, The Composition of ‘Four Quartets’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), and Emig, Modernism in Poetry, pp. 80-7. On the biographical circumstances of the composition of Little Gidding, see Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, pp. 175-97. 69 F. W. Bateson, ‘Criticism’s lost leader’, in: The Literary Criticism of T.S. Eliot: New Essays, ed. by David Newton-De Molina (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 119, p. 16. 70 Emig, Modernism in Poetry, p. 84.

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Gidding.71 For Eliot, the small parish Little Gidding had always been “a distant paradigm of contemplative life”.72 The church had been ransacked by Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army almost 300 years before Eliot’s visit to the place, yet the Ferrar family running the parish continued to lead their pious parish life full of prayer and duty. The historicity of the site and the political circumstances of World War II experienced by Eliot during the period of the poem’s composition are reflected in the writing: right at the beginning of the first section, ‘midwinter spring’ is evoked; an almost unreal season which can only be imagined. An array of antithetic expressions sets up a field of tension between hot and cold sensations: ‘between pole and tropic’, ‘with frost and fire’, ‘the sun flames the ice’, ‘between melting and freezing’. Thus, the nature conjured up in the poem captures a timeless hybrid state between summer and winter, when it is ‘neither budding nor fading’. The reason for this unusual spring, which appears out of the natural order, and therefore, ‘not in time’s covenant’, nor ‘in the scheme of generation’, lies in the unexpected eruption of ravaging and chaos; the destruction of Little Gidding in the 17th century is combined here with the air raids in England in 1941. The lyrical I’s reaction to this is a deeply felt shock, which comprises the ‘heart’s heat’, the quivering of the ‘soul’s sap’, and ‘a glare that is blindness’. Thus, the paralysed narrator desperately wishes for the restoration of order or a constant pattern in his stricken human existence, which is expressed in the question ‘where is the summer, the unimaginable zero summer?’ The narrator then alludes to the historical dimension of the place and answers, akin to a tourist guide pointing the way, ‘If you come at night like a broken King’, in reference to Charles I. In the fourth section of Little Gidding, Eliot imitates and modifies Dante’s original rhyme scheme, the terza rima, and establishes an intertextual relationship with the Florentine poet on a formal level. Eliot’s rhyme scheme goes ABA BA CC DED ED CC, thereby ending the first five lines of each stanza with a rhyming couplet, which leads the imitated Italian rhyme scheme to a traditional English ending, since in early modern English poetry in particular, rhyming couplets were used to

71

Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel, pp. 175-97. Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 175.

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emphasize the theme of a poem.73 Such a modification perfectly illustrates Eliot’s accomplishment in emulating his master by honing his skills and transposing them onto his own tradition of poetry. This fourth section also emulates Dante linguistically, since ‘love’, ‘flame’, ‘despair’, ‘fire’ and ‘suspire’ recall Dante’s vocabulary that was elaborated in the poetic tradition of the dolce stil novo: ‘amor’, ‘fiamma’, ‘disperazione’, ‘sospiri’ are the ingredients of the love poetry, in which the unrequited love for an angelic woman, who gazes at the spectator, leads the narrator to moral purification. Dante distilled the dolce stil nuovo together with Guido Guinizelli from the Sicilian School of Poetry as well as from troubadour poetry, whose most prominent poet was Arnaut Daniel. Eliot bridges a gap between literary periods ranging from the 12th to the 20th century and pays homage to his adored Provencal master. In his canzone Donne che avete intelletto d‘amore, which appeared in the Vita Nuova, Dante writes that “out of her eyes [...] such loveenkindled (= flaming) spirits soon depart”, which ultimately “pierce and go straight to the heart”.74 Eliot takes up the metaphorical flames, which in his case carry the seed of destruction and fall from the sky bringing “incandescent terror”, a metaphor for the German air raids on England during World War II. Similar to the narrator in Dante’s love poetry and Arnaut Daniel in Purg. XXXVI, the narrator in Little Gidding can only be purged by fire and reach moral fulfilment by his being consumed by the flames. The “tongues” and “doves” in the first and the third lines refer to the miracle at Pentecost described in the Acts of the Apostles. In particular, this “vision with clear biblical overtones [...] creates the impression of a transcendental reality outside the text by linking its metaphors and metonymies to established, namely religious, symbols, thus supplying them with a symbolic aura”.75 Similar to the Acts, Eliot’s plea for an authoritative and comprehensible voice can be understood as a necessary tool to spread the word and offer guidance in the modern world. 73

The most prominent example is Shakespeare’s sonnets, which often display rhyming couplets at the end for the sake of emphasis. Interestingly, Eliot marries Dante’s invented rhyme scheme to Shakespeare’s sonnet tradition on a structural level, thereby illustrating in practice his theoretical view on literary tradition, in particular his statement that Shakespeare and Dante complement each other. 74 [De li occhi suoi [...] escono spirti d‘amore inflammati [...] E passan sì che ´l cor ciascun retrova] l. 51-3. 75 Emig, Modernism in Poetry, p. 85.

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As soon as the narrator encounters the ghost, he admits that he is “Knowing myself yet being someone other”. Different personalities begin to merge, and the ghost character, a fusion of famous poets such as Dante, Swift and Yeats, becomes the allegory of eternal truth personified by a literary ghost. Eliot’s words in the third section of Little Gidding, spoken by the literary ghost, thereby assume an almost programmatic character: “last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words await another voice”. This refers to the unremitting quest to find one’s own literary voice, which might be heard in society. The narrator found “words he never thought to speak”; his ultimate goal as a speaker, as a narrator and as a poet was to “urge the mind to after sight and foresight”, which directly alludes to Dante’s journey to the hereafter and his description of what will happen there as a warning to the living. Here, Eliot formulates the role of the poet in society, and he finds his master and role model in Dante. The ghost in Little Gidding becomes an allegory of the auteur engagé par excellence. In Little Gidding, therefore, Eliot achieved “that for which he envies Dante - namely, a poetry of belief, in which belief and words are one, and in which the thought cannot be prized free from the controlled and beautiful language”.76

76

Roger Scruton, ‘T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor’, in: First Principles Journal, Issues 1-2, Spring (2004) [ISI web journal, ]. [accessed:26 September 2016].

CHAPTER VI POSTMODERNISING DANTE: TOM PHILLIPS’ DANTE’S INFERNO

VI.1 A postmodern “art Olympics”: dialogicity, transformational intermediality and transtextual motivation in Phillips’ Dante’s Inferno Even though in the 20th century, the number of visualisations of Dante has strongly decreased, we can still find innovative and creative renderings of the Dantean subject.1 The drop in popularity may be due to the complexity of Dante’s work, which - similar to Dante’s rejection in the late 17th and early 18th centuries - has presumably put off modern artists from taking on the challenge and looking into Dantean subjects in moving fast-paced art world. Indeed, the most rewarding renderings in recent years seem to be those that have taken their time and explicitly deal with Dante’s work as a whole. Tom Phillips’ paintings of the Divina Commedia (1976-1983), for example, manage to relate Dantean themes to the modern world by elaborating on the original ideas of Dante’s text in a highly personal way.2

1

For Dante’s popularity among British artists in the 20th century see The Poet’s Dante - Twentieth-Century Responses, and Havely, Dante’s British Public, pp. 260-83. 2 There is little secondary literature published on Tom Phillips and his work in English. A useful introduction to his work can be found in Tom Phillips, Works and Texts, book published on the occasion of the exhibition of Tom Phillips’ work, held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (Stuttgart: Staib & Mayer, 1992). Further essays, which deal with Phillips’ engagement with Dante’s Commedia, are e.g. Karl Fugelso, ‘Neomedievalisms in Tom Phillips’ Commedia illustrations’, in: The Year’s Work in Medievalism, ed. by. E. L. Risen (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2011), pp. 27-35, and Tabea Kretschmann, ‘Höllenmaschine - Wunschapparat’ Analysen ausgewählter Neubearbeitungen von Dantes ‘Divina Commedia’ (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012), pp. 139-70.

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Another reason for the smaller number of visualisations might be the technical revolution that occurred over the last century. Even though many critics stress the plasticity and the performance qualities of the Commedia,3 Dante and his work have only rarely made the transition from figural visualisations on canvas to the screen and, in a further step, into the world wide web.4 Phillips’ engagement with Dante is also interesting from a theoretical and methodological point of view: his appropriation of Dante comprises three of the four types of intermediality defined by Schröter, which are discussed in chapter II: he fuses different media in order to elaborate his Dante’s Inferno, i.e. paintings, texts and quotations (synthetic intermediality), he exhibits other media, i.e. books as reminders of the tradition of illuminated manuscripts, in his work (transformational intermediality), and takes over formal or narrative structures from his pretexts, i.e. Dante’s autoreferentiality and his self-quotations, and inserts them in his own works of art as a sign of his own artistic accomplishments (trans-medial intermediality).5 In his transposition of Dantean themes into visual art, the British artist Tom Phillips, born in London in 1937, followed in the footsteps of his fellow countryman, William Blake, who had already undertaken the task of translating and visualising Dante’s poem in the 19th century. 3

See, for example, Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts, pp. 9-16. 4 For the analysis of an early American adaptation of Dante’s Inferno for the big screen and the problems involved in changing the medium, see Nicholas Havely, ‘Hell on a paying basis - Morality, the Market, and the Movies in Harry Lachman’s Dante’s Inferno (1935)’, in: Metamorphosing Dante - Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camiletti and Fabian Lampart (Berlin: Turia & Kant, 2011), pp. 269-84. Tom Phillips and the British director Peter Greenaway also adapted selected cantos of Dante’s Commedia for television, produced by Channel Four in 1989 and broadcasted in 1990. See Luisa Calè, ‘From Dante’s Inferno to A TV Dante: Phillips and Greenaway Remediating Dante’s Polysemy’, in: Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts, pp. 177-92, and Alessandro Amaducci, ‘A TV Dante - The Inferno di Peter Greenaway e Tom Phillips: La Rappresentazione audiovisiva di un testo classico’, in: Dialoghi con Dante - riscritture e ricodificazioni della Commedia; atti del convegno, Torino, 17 - 18 maggio 2004, ed. by Erminia Ardissino and Sarina Tomasi Stroppa (Roma: Ed. di Storia e Letteratura 2007), pp. 97-106. 5 On the four models of intermediality, see chapter II.2.4 of this analysis.

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Phillips, “an ascendant originator and forgetive recycler” in his art,6 dedicated seven years to this project, accompanying each canto of Dante’s Inferno with four illustrative engravings. Thus, Phillips created a blank verse translation of Dante’s Inferno, which “makes his version highly readable, [but] inevitably leads to the loss of Dante’s vast range of styles”.7 Since the publishing house he had been working for burnt down and destroyed a part of his hitherto existing work, Phillips took on the additional roles of printer and publisher. This fervent commitment to his Dante project testifies to Phillips’ firm intention to turn his version of the Inferno into reality at all costs. Phillips composed letters to many of his friends and acquaintances, i.e. to Baron Alexander Bernstein of Craigweil, asking them to subscribe before the actual publication date in order to reserve a copy of his book. Hence, Phillips managed to secure the finances for the production in advance. In these letters, Phillips called the Inferno “the book, which I am determined to make the most distinguished (in as much as that lies within my powers and capabilities) produced in Britain this century”.8 Phillips also acknowledged that one of his major inspirations was Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Polophili, “the most beautiful of printed books, published in Venice in 1499”.9 By referring to this illustrated masterpiece, Phillips ranks himself within the prestigious tradition of artists’ books, which reveals the strong transtextual motivation of his artistic endeavour.10 It becomes evident that Phillips considered his work on the Inferno one of the major projects of his career, to which he attached the greatest importance. He even kept a studio calendar from January 1980 until the end of 1985, which gives evidence of his meticulous and industrious work on his Dante projects.11 In 1983, a three-volume livre d’artiste with 432 pages and 139 illustrations was published, followed by a 6 These attributes are used to describe him by Huston Paschal in the introduction to Phillips, Works and Texts, p.13. 7 Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, ed. by Olive Classe (London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000), vol. 1, p. 343. 8 Tom Phillips, Dante 2 - Correspondence re Publication and Exhibition Notes on Dante (Oxford: TPA, Bodleian Library). 9 Loc. cit. The Renaissance novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is considered an early masterpiece of the art of book printing. 10 For Phillips and the legacy of artists’ books, see A Companion to the History of Books, ed. by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), pp. 505-6. 11 Tom Phillips, Dante 4 - Studio Calendar (Oxford: TPA, Bodleian Library).

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reduced-scale, one-volume facsimile in 1985. In 2007, the Bodleian Library in Oxford acquired Phillips’ preparatory work on the Talfourd Press edition of Dante’s Inferno, including all the surviving original artwork as well as his sketches, bound and disbound versions of the final book and a series of letters, in which Phillips discussed his endeavour with fellow artists.12 The archive is described as “a major addition to the Library’s holdings relating to Italian studies”,13 and its incorporation into the Bodleian Library’s prestigious archive series for the equivalent of £18000 testifies to the significance of Phillips’ work on Dante. Phillips describes his first, rather disappointing, encounter with Dante’s Inferno at an early age with the following words: When I read the Inferno at school, as a more than usually pretentious fifth-former, I seem to remember finding it disappointingly parochial; thus missing the point entirely, as I discovered later when reading the original with the aid of Singleton’s copiously annotated edition.14

Nonetheless, this first reading of Dante kindled Phillips’ enthusiasm for the Commedia which grew into a life-long interest in Dante’s Inferno, culminating in his seven-year occupation with Dante’s original text, which was accompanied by his daily notes written down in A Dante Diary. In his own iconographical commentaries to his Inferno, Phillips points out that he was interested in the image sources of Dantean themes, whose elaborations on his part “should not be thought of as anything but optional reading”.15 Such an optional reading provides an intermedial relationship between Dante’s text and Phillips’ elaborations, since the two works of art represent the passage from a written to a visual sign system. Not only does he create an interesting field of tension by playing the original source off against his postmodern paintings, but he also enhances the dialogicity of the translated cantos by transferring them into a modern setting. The criterion of intermedial dialogicity assumes two different levels in Phillips’ Dante’s Inferno: on the one hand, Phillips engages with Dante’s pretext, 12

24 Hour Museum Staff, Tom Phillips' version of Dante's Hell acquired by Bodleian Library []. [accessed: 26 September 2016]. 13 Loc. cit. 14 Phillips, Works and Texts, p. 227. 15 Tom Phillips, Dante's Inferno: The First Part of the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 1985), p. 283.

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which he palimpsestically refers to in the title and in the respective chapters following Dante’s classification into thirty-three cantos. Moreover, from the outset, Phillips was aware of the meaningful and illustrious tradition of Dante illustrations, which he engaged with in a time-transcending artistic dialogue. He altercated between “the many artists who have revelled in the rich pictorial opportunities provided by the poet, especially in the Inferno”.16 In Phillips’ notes on this subject, we can detect his comprehension of the artistic importance and gravity of such an endeavour. He mentions many artists such as Salvador Dalì and Georg Grosz, who had tackled similar work, “though unfortunately not in their artistic prime”.17 Phillips goes on to expound that “athletes have it easier, for in their events they merely compete with a narrow age band of the living”, whereas “in the art Olympics we have to run against the dead as well, some of whom though over five hundred years old are still in great form”.18 This witty remark underlines his profound understanding of art history’s sometimes daunting gravity for contemporary artists. It seems, however, that a great deal of inspiration and incentive to engage in a dialogue with the tradition of Dante and to “run against the dead” was prompted by the scholar Martin McLaughlin (Magdalen College, Oxford). He asked Phillips in an email on August 18, 2006 to explain how his work relates to previous iconographical material and the tradition of illustrating Dante.19 McLaughlin prepared an exhibition on the history of Commedia illustrations in Oxford at the time and included some of Phillips’ original works. In his preparatory material for the exhibition notes, Phillips explicitly talks about two of the most prominent Inferno illustrators, Gustave Doré and Sandro Botticelli. While he regrets the fact that “Doré has nothing to say beyond the faithful picture of each episode”, he sings the praises of Botticelli’s “purity and confidence of his supple lines”.20

16

Tom Phillips, Dante 2 - Correspondence re Publication and Exhibition Notes on Dante (Oxford: TPA, Bodleian Library). 17 Loc. cit. 18 Loc. cit. Note the similarity of Phillips’ statement to Ezra Pound’s conviction of the contemporaneity of all literature discussed in chapter V.1.1. 19 Tom Phillips, Dante 2 - Correspondence re Publication and Exhibition Notes on Dante (Oxford: TPA, Bodleian Library). 20 Loc. cit.

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When analysing Phillips’ own version of the Inferno, it becomes evident that he had been influenced by both artists: Doré’s “cinematic quality” as well as Botticelli’s visual commentary, which he considered “a touchstone” in the history of illustration because it provides “a robust dialogue with the Commedia”, resurface in Phillips’ own reworkings.21 An example of is the second engraving for canto XXI, which uses Botticelli’s method of simultaneous depiction of two and more scenes and displays Dante’s head four times,22 who appears to be “both frightened and amused as he watches the devils and learns [...] their names”.23 Similarly, the first depiction of canto XXIX alludes to Doré’s sublime landscape engravings of the Purgatorio illustrations with its bleak and gloomy mountains.24 In his commentary on the fourth engraving of canto XXII, Phillips explicitly states that “much plundering [on his part] has been done from Doré’s illustrations”, while for “a naive, comic-book aspect”, a reminiscence of “Superman, Batman etc. all of which I devoured eagerly when they arrived in parcels from American aunts towards the end of the war”, he employed a professional illustrator.25 The effect of such a juxtaposition of Doré’s and Blake’s established iconographical cluster alongside with comic strips resembles Robert Rauschenberg’s pop-art renderings of the Commedia.26 Thereby Phillips not only makes a “noteworthy contribution to the tradition of illustrating Dante”,27 he also creates a visual commentary to the Commedia and its aesthetic legacy, which manages to imitate and elaborate on the original image sources structurally, while simultaneously looking at cultural history on a meta level. Here the artist is far from applying a mere “superimposition of visual response to verbal text”, as stated, for example, by Nigel Wheale.28 In fact, he clearly goes beyond such a superimposition, since Phillips’ visual responses engage in a discourse on the history of Dantean visualisations, taking up and

21

Loc. cit. On Botticelli’s compositional method, see chapter III.2.5. 23 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 298. 24 Reproductions of the engravings can be found in Gustave Doré, Illustrations to Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ (New York: Dover Publications, 1976). For Doré’s pervasive influence on the perception of Dante’s Commedia and on the symbolists and surrealists, see Milbank, Dante and the Victorians, pp. 196-201. 25 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 299. 26 See Dore Ashton, Rauschenberg’s XXXIV Drawings for Dante’s Inferno (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964). 27 Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, vol. 1, p. 343. 28 The Postmodern Arts: An Introductory Reader, ed. by Nigel Wheale (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 172. 22

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modifying established iconographic clusters and pathos formulae of Dante and his Commedia from some of the most famous artists such as Luca Signorelli,29 Sandro Botticelli, Gustave Doré and Robert Rauschenberg. Apart from his transtextual motivation, prompted by, among others, a famous Renaissance book, and his art historical dialogue with the doyens of his profession, Phillips displays a variety of books in his work. The presentation of different media with the help of illustrations constitutes an act of transformational intermediality, which can make “interesting inferences to the ‘self-conception’ of the presenting medium”.30 In Phillips’ case, the consistently opened and richly ornamented books displayed in the paintings of cantos II, X, and XX, e.g., allude to the illuminated manuscript tradition of Dante’s Commedia as well as to its substantial textual origins. In his commentary, Phillips notes that the book depicted in canto II “is open at the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, the principal source of the Inferno”.31 Symbolically, such a reference mirrors the intertextual basis not only of Dante’s epic poem, but of all works of art - a notion which Phillips also emphasizes on a structural level in his Mallock project.32 Moreover, Phillips’ depicted books acquire symbolic meaning and represent irrevocable philosophical ideas: the sea of opened books in canto X represents Epicurean tombs, in which the nonbelieving authors “signed and sealed their future doom”.33 Therefore, Epicurean quotations such as Horace’s Carpe Diem or Robert Herrick’s Gather ye rosebuds while ye may appear on the opened pages and establish an intermedial link with the doomed Epicureans Dante meets in Inferno. In metaphorical terms, the book and the thoughts expressed in it become an eternally closed tomb, since the Epicureans searched for their philosophical truth outside of religion. Similar to the display of the Holy Scripture in the vital historiogram of the book as a cultural artefact, Phillips’ books transcend their mere physical cover and acquire the capacity of assuring “the truth revealed”.34 In such a process of transformational intermediality, Phillips’ books “imply the imaging

29

Phillips’ appropriation of Signorelli’s Dante will be discussed in chapter VI.1.3. Schröter, 'Four Models of Intermediality', pp. 26-7. 31 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 286. 32 For Mallock, Phillips used snippets of a Victorian novel and reworked it so that a new story emerged. The Mallock project and its compositional technique will be the subject of the next chapter. 33 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 291. 34 Zanker, The Mask of Socrates, p. 331. 30

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process generated by reading”, and reveal “the tendency of a material page to generate immaterial images”.35

VI.1.2 “Our shade takes form”: Phillips’ talking footnotes as innovative iconotexts in the Ugolino canto (Inf. XXXIII) In her critical assessment of Phillips’ A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor describes his book as a “palimpsestically intertextual [...] mixed-media text”, which is certainly to be classified as a parody, in the postmodern sense of the word, and like all such parodies, it is a repetition that does not necessarily mock or reject, but rather sets up a self-conscious, critical distance between the original and the new text.36

Such a critical, playful parody serves the purpose to distance oneself from the pretext, while, at the same time, Phillips’ so-called talking footnotes unmask the pretext’s inherent need to establish the textual identity of its protagonists. Thereby, it reminds “the reader of postmodernism’s dismantling of such myths of coherence”, and makes ironic “textualized ‘versions’ of the self”.37 Phillips himself defined the talking footnotes as a “parallel text embedded in the images; a poetic gloss deriving [...] from [...] A Human Document, [...] that is here plundered and ‘treated’ anew, mined and undermined for possible insights into Dante’s thought”.38 The frequent insertion of talking footnotes recalls Phillips’ Mallock project. For A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, Phillips used several pages of the Victorian novel A Human Document by W. H. Mallock (1892) and painted over them, leaving only small snippets of the original text. These snippets, which he connected with river-like lines, serve as talking footnotes and add additional meaning to the visual image. On the website of the Mallock project, Phillips explains that the novel should “yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems”,

35 Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 90. 36 Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, A Portrait of the (Postmodern) Artist: Intertextual Subjectivity in Tom Phillips's A Humument (Ann Arbor, MI: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 1999), p. 1. 37 Loc. cit. 38 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 283.

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thereby indicating the intertextuality inherent in this project.39 Phillips’ modus operandi, the fragmentation, layering and over painting of pretexts, suggests the inherent intertextuality in works of art on a formal level. In his use of the talking footnotes for Dante’s Inferno, Phillips exploits the same raw material used for his Mallock project. Even though Phillips stresses the fact that the retrieval of this novel was pure chance, there is an interesting subconscious undertone: throughout his writing career, Mallock stood on a conservative platform, advocating intellectualism and the necessity of a strictly defined creed, which to some extent aligns him with Dante’s beliefs and convictions.40 Phillips confessed that he welcomed constraint as a useful formal device in his work on A Humument, which “limited [him] to somebody else’s words to find [his] own poems”.41 The talking footnotes contribute to the multi-layered facets of Phillips’ paintings by suggesting that their inherent meaning has already been stored in the pretext, Mallock’s novel, and become vital in an intertextual commentary. Like Michelangelo chipping away at the marble to reveal a work of art, the artist becomes the sculptor of the text and chips away unwanted words to create new meaning, a process visualising the intertextual interdependency of all art. “This is authorship as pruning”, as Adam Smyth poignantly remarked in his review of A Humument.42 Phillips’ neologism in the title, created by drawing on Mallock’s original title, A Human Document, phonetically echoes the fertile humus on which new literature could prosper, which further expands on the idea of a text growing out of other pretexts. The story revealed in Phillips’ work of art “was in one sense always there in Mallock, just lost amid the torrent of other text”.43 This way, the pretext vanishes and the artist merely uses the raw material in order to form a new commentary, which ultimately becomes associated with Phillips’ images. On a meta level, we can also state that Phillips weaves his former work into his depictions of the Inferno in a continuous progress of creation similar to the way that Dante embedded his convictions expounded in the Convivio and in De 39

[‹www.humument.com›]. [accessed: 26 September 2016]. On William Mallock’s religious, social and political convictions, see Robert Eccleshall, English Conservatism since the Restoration: An Introduction and Anthology (London: Unwin, 1990), pp. 169-73. 41 The Dual Muse: The Writer as Artist, the Artist as Writer, ed. by Lorin Cuoco (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1999), p. 120. 42 Adam Smyth, ‘Double Act’, in: London Review of Books, vol. 34, No. 19, Oct. 11 (2012), p. 35. 43 Loc. cit. 40

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Monarchia and the figure of Beatrice in his Vita Nuova in the Commedia, thereby merging a huge variety of intertexts into a new body of written work. By highlighting words or phrases, adding images and filling its pages with colour, he has transformed the Victorian text in an astonishing range of highly adventurous ways. “I had never heard of Mallock, who was once a very popular novelist and philosopher”, says Phillips, “his book never lets me down. There’s very good language in it, and it has words like web and net which have now changed their meaning”.44 Phillips also admits that his main interests when looking for poignant talking footnotes in A Humument tend to represent “art, love, life, music, the state of the world, and a few sought particulars, [...], and the literature of the past that I lean on, and the echoed prosodies I borrow from the dead”.45 An interesting example can be found in the paintings for canto XXXIII, the Ugolino passage, which we have already encountered in Jonathan Richardson’s Two Discourses and in T. S. Eliot’s poems. Phillips’ talking footnote reads “human beings in the world, that as they stood above down in the depths were horns of bitterness”.46 He thereby establishes a metonymic connection between human action in the here and now and their forfeit below in hell, which recalls Dante’s concept of contrapasso.47 The way they “stood above” thereby literally indicates what these people stand for, their attitudes and their convictions. Such a contrapasso “functions not merely as a form of divine revenge, but rather as the fulfilment of a destiny freely chosen by each soul during his or her life”.48 Furthermore, the metaphor “horns of bitterness” makes one think of the incremental screaming and lamentable yelling that Dante encountered 44

Richard Cork, ‘Art that speaks Volumes’, [‹www.tomphillips.co.uk/publications/item/5769-art-that-speaks-volumes-byrichard-cork›]. [accessed: 26 September 2016]. 45 Andrew David King, ‘“Were there but world enough and time’: Tom Phillips on A Humument”, in: The Kenyon Review, Sept. 7 (2012). [‹www.kenyonreview.org/2012/09/tom-phillips-interview/›]. [accessed 26 September 2016]. 46 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 267. 47 The concept of punishment called contrapasso goes back to Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and literally means ‘suffering the opposite’. The sinners Dante encounters during his journey often are punished with actions resembling the opposite of their sins committed on earth. The sorcerers in canto XX (Inf.), for example, have their heads twisted backwards as a punishment for their predicting the future and acting against divine providence. 48 The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. by Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 63-64.

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during his journey in hell. In his commentary on the picture, Phillips explains that the intention behind this scene was to portray the souls so hell-bent in life that they are pre-condemned and inhabit its deepest regions before their bodily death, while dark spirits inhabit their earthly frames to take them through the motions of the world’s business.49

The figures displayed therefore prototypically represent “the ruthless businessman who would trade souls for gain”.50 In this depiction, Phillips clearly follows Botticelli’s idea of presenting two or more scenes in one picture, so that the spectator can follow the figures from above the ground down to hell.51 Phillips even emphasizes the similar movement of the figures in life and hell, since “one of them strides down to Hell with the same determination and urgency as he is seen striding towards his appointment”, thereby stressing once more the pre-condemnation of the ruthless in an ironic way.52 Meanwhile, the contrapasso is fully put in execution, because “in the Underworld he is fixed in the ice that matches his unyieldingly frozen heart”.53 Phillips also establishes a high degree of structural imitation of his pretexts, Dante’s canto and Reynolds’ Ugolino. For instance, he adapted “the backgrounds of the figures” to reproduce the gloomy atmosphere in Ugolino’s dungeon with the use of dark colours and horizontal stripes, which “echo the bars of a prison and steps descending”.54 Ugolino’s fate resurfaces and forms the intertextual reference to Phillips’ depiction. The moment when Ugolino comprehends his fate is akin to the moment when the businessmen realize they are doomed. In Ugolino’s case, the “dark spirits” are the bishop’s ruthlessness, which constitutes the source of his condemnation. In Phillips’ depiction, these dark spirits move within the body - similar to Eliot’s use of Ugolino

49

Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 309. Loc. cit. 51 See chapter IV.2.1. 52 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 309. 53 Loc cit. Note that Phillips ties in with a tradition of economic criticism inspired by Dante’s Inferno. In his Cantos, Ezra Pound, for instance, also used quotations from Dante’s pretext to criticize the greedy and hard-hearted society he lived in. See Matthew Reynolds, ‘Ezra Pound: Quotation and Community’, in: Dante’s Modern Afterlife, pp. 113-27. 54 Loc. cit. 50

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in The Waste Land - and take over the control of human deeds, which ultimately leads to their downfall and their eternal damnation in the frozen lake. These spirits also recall Dante’s own description of the lustful in Purgatorio XXV, when Statius explains to the pilgrim that “just as we are held fast by longings and by other sentiments, our shade takes form: this is the cause of your astonishment”.55 Their shadow, therefore, mirrors their sin in life, a theme which Phillips visually illustrates in his rendering of the businessmen. This concept goes back to the Scholastic teachings of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who stated in his Summa Theologica that the soul will remain perpetually in whatever last end it is found to have set for itself at the time of death, desiring that state as the most suitable, whether it is good or evil [...] After this life, therefore, those who are found good at the instant of death will have their wills forever fixed in good. But those who are found evil at that moment will be forever obstinate in evil.56

The businessmen represent such spirits fixed in evil and inhabit Phillips’ illustration of Dante’s pretext, thereby forming an intermedial relationship with Dante’s and Thomas Aquinas’ pretexts. The talking footnotes, to a certain extent, parody the businessmen’s ruthless intention, and constitute an innovative iconotext, “a self-conscious [voice establishing a] critical distance between the original [pretext], the new text”,57 and its visualisation. To a certain extent, for Phillips’ juxtaposition of text and image, what philosopher Peter Osborne stated in connection with conceptual art holds true: The making of art in the form of written or printed texts might seem like a simple change of activity: from 'art' (and artefactuality) to 'literature', but this fails to grasp the peculiar function of the texts in the institutional context of visual art. Texts acquire new, and inherently unstable, artistic and cultural functions by being placed in the spaces of art, and claimed as themselves artworks.58 55

Purg. XXV, l.106-9. Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas’s Shorter Summa: Saint Thomas’s Own Concise Version of His Summa Theologica, trans. by Cyril Vollert (Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 2002), p. 201. 57 Wagner-Lawlor, A Portrait of the (Postmodern) Artist: Intertextual Subjectivity in Tom Phillips's A Humument, p. 1. 58 Peter Osborne, Conceptual Art (London and New York: Phaidon, 2002), p. 27. 56

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VI.1.3 “Oh Ezra, remember”: selectivity, structurality and stylistic self-reference in Dante’s Inferno Phillips tried to imitate Dante’s original text on a structural level. The fourfold exegesis - literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical meaning as employed by Dante - is mirrored in four different engravings of each canto, which are kept together in the tight-knit net of associations, motifs and symbols that the reader has to decipher.59 In addition to this, Phillips’ work is also self-referential to a high degree, since he manages to quote himself as an artist and to insert his own creations from previous works of art. In his earlier work, he had used the bench as a sign for mortality, which he inserted in his depictions of the Commedia as well. Huston Paschal stresses the fact that Phillips’ Dante’s Inferno is a highly original and personalised work, which embodies the artist’s own pilgrimage, since “the prestigious production is individualized in every way”.60 This includes special paper commissioned by the artist that secures the application of Phillips’ signature as watermarks, the rifled lines and the frequent insertion of talking footnotes discussed in the previous chapter recall Phillips’ Mallock project, “whose presence signals the artist’s as well”,61 and the hands of Dante and Virgil were even modelled after his own. For one of his paintings, he uses a watercolour copy of a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, which Picasso had been working on the day Phillips was born.62 This way, the illustrations for the Commedia establish an intertextual and intermedial relationship with a large number of pretexts, ranging from Dante’s original source to Phillips’ earlier projects. Such a highly personalised production recalls Dante’s own narrative self-consciousness as an artist, expressed by the means of a painter. All of these examples provide evidence of a self-assured artist setting out to approach Dante as an equal and to translate Dantean artistic ideas into his own work in a fresh and congenial way.

59

See Kretschmann, Höllenmaschine - Wunschapparat, p. 147. Phillips, Works and Texts, p. 19. 61 Loc. cit. p. 18. 62 Phillips was born on 25 May 1937. He stresses the fact that this visual quotation of Guernica - the very epitome of warlike destructiveness - mirrors Picasso’s state of political exile and links him to Dante’s fate. See Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 300. Since Phillips explains his intention behind the quotation and explicitly indicates the pretext, the visual quotation displays a high degree of intermediality. Moreover, the biographical emphasis on the overlapping of Picasso’s Guernica and Phillips’ birth becomes a politically charged portent for the artist’s career. 60

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For his art historical discourse, Phillips selected some of the most seminal interpictorial clusters, pathos formulae and historiograms in the history of Dante’s appropriation. An example is the frontispiece to his Inferno. Here, Phillips decidedly harks back to one of the most famous depictions of Dante, Luca Signorelli’s Dante with Scenes from the Divine Comedy, a fresco painted in the San Brizio Chapel in the Cathedral of Orvieto in the years 1499-1504. The original work displays the Florentine poet in his study reading and depicts the iconography that was standard in the 15th century: the writer at his desk, the historiogram and pathos formula of the Rossano Gospels.63 The figure is surrounded by four grisaille images of scenes from the Commedia, a technique of juxtaposing the author and his work that had already been used by Domenico di Michelino in his depiction of Dante in the Dome of Florence in 1465 during the height of Medici propaganda.64 Signorelli’s depiction of Dante is highly stylised: the face is shown in profile, which makes his distinct features such as his aquiline nose and long chin even more prominent, the laurel crown as a symbol of literary merits, the red gown and the beret of a scholar, the cross-referential use of books as a display of wisdom - all of these features compose the image of the celebrated Poet Laureate and make it immediately recognisable. At first sight, Phillips’ reworking of the original visual source displays a number of striking similarities: Dante is pictured in profile as well, clothes and gesture are almost identical to Signorelli’s Dante, the author is sitting in his sparsely illuminated study reading, and his hands are held in a similar crossed position. A cursory spectator might grasp the inherent iconic quality of both depictions, which transcends their immediate purpose and the background of their production, due to the dense accumulation of highly symbolic features. However, the idea that Phillips’ work is merely a modernised, fresh and innovative rendering of Signorelli’s visual template is misleading. This is best exemplified by examining the differences between Signorelli’s and Phillips’ Dante depictions: in Phillips’ picture we can find a window in the back wall facing the mountain of Purgatory, painted in yellow, the green sea, a dark pine tree and a purple-coloured bay. To Dante’s right we can find quill and green inkpot, to his left sits a pile of two books, the yellow one entitled ROMA, the green one AMOR. The opened pages of the book in front of him resemble an illustrated codice, with its decorated capital letters and a 63 64

See chapter III.2.4 of this analysis. See chapter III.2.5 of this analysis.

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full-page illustration, which again hints at the prosperous Commedia manuscript tradition discussed in chapter VI.1. Where Signorelli’s Dante bears a resemblance to the prophet-like manuscript depictions of a somnolent Dante lost in reverie, Phillips’ Dante unmistakeably has the astute and earnest features of Botticelli’s portrait. Here, Phillips clearly enters into an art historical dialogue with well-established forms of Dantean iconography. Not only does he allude to iconographical symbols, he also mixes and reassembles them. In a way, Phillips thereby creates what I would like to call a twofold symbolism, since the common symbols, like the interpictorial cluster of Dantean iconography, are used, first of all, to establish an environment intelligible to all spectators, and, secondly (and more importantly), to recall their own history by intertwining their visual blueprints as the examples above show. As Anick Bergeron rightly points out: the illustration, which at first appears figurative, assumes a symbolic value. The figurative mode in Phillips’ illustrated work has always merely surface character, which becomes more and more evident in the progress of reading across text and images.65

A further example of Phillips’ two-fold symbolism can be found in the depiction of Dante’s Head, which was modelled after Dante’s death mask. Phillips’ sketches reveal his experimentations with this subject; he tried out a variety of different perspectives and different colours, ranging from bright red to pastel green. In his final version, the fruit “of 300 drawings [he made] of the Torrigiani bust”,66 Dante is shown in a lowangle half-profile, looking staunchly into the distance. The head is portrayed on a monochrome sheet of green surrounded by a golden frame. His expression is harsh and severe, his face is chiselled almost geometrically like a sculpture. In his commentary, Phillips explains that he

65

Anick Bergeron, ‘Quand la lecture se donne en image’, Image & narrative, 3, November (2001) [E-journal on visual narratology and word and image studies, ]. [accessed: 26 September 2016]. [“l’illustration, qui paraissait d’abord figurative, prend une valeur symbolique. Le mode figuratif, dans le travail d’illustrations de Phillips, n’est toujours qu’un effet de surface, ce qui deviendra de plus en plus évident à mesure que la lecture progressera à travers le texte et les images.”]. 66 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 287.

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translated the central theme of canto IV (Dante’s reception in the castle by the poets of antiquity) onto canvas: Dante is proud of the welcome [...] he is thus shown here in a triumph of green which echoes the enamelled lawn of the castle [...] surrounded [...] by a border of bay-leaves to represent the crown of poetry which Dante hoped one day to be conferred on him in his native city (hence the lily motif at each corner).67

Interestingly, Dante’s head is the size of a passport photo and does not fill the space the frame would allow for a portrait. Taking into account the significance of the colour green and the size of Dante’s head, Phillips’ image suggests that Dante, at that stage of his pilgrimage, literally could not fill the whole picture, since he had not reached the state of authoritative auctor like the Greek and Latin poets he encounters in Limbo. He merely dreams of becoming a poet laureate and hopes to return to his hometown one day. Furthermore, the colour green might also allude to the hopes and desires associated with the historical figure of Dante when his image was fixed: the allegories of vernacular literary authority, Florentine cultural supremacy and Italian political unity were projected onto Dante over the course of the last six centuries. The fact that Phillips used Dante’s death mask as a model for his drawings underlines the immutability of certain Dantean appropriations. The talking footnote surrounding Dante’s head completes the Dantean myth-making and explicitly refers to Shakespeare, as Phillips reveals in his commentary. “The one dreamer of action” is associated with Dante, an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s famous statement quoted in the introduction of this analysis.68 Phillips not only uses talking footnotes to express thoughts and ideas, he also uses them to explicitly add messages to the engravings. One such example represents the third depiction of canto XVII, which deals with the usurers. The depiction displays the façade of the Scrovegni chapel

67

Loc. cit. On Dante’s faint hope to be conferred the laurel wreath see also chapter III.1.1 of this analysis. 68 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 37. Eliot remarked that “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third”. See p. 3 of this book. Similarly, Bloom argued that “Shakespeare and Dante are the center of the [Western] Canon because they excel all other Western writers in cognitive acuity, linguistic energy and power of invention”. See Harold Bloom, The Western Canon - The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), p. 46.

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in Padua, where according to legend, Dante visited his friend Giotto. Phillips imagines that they must have talked there often, and, if they were typical artists, the conversation must have turned to discussion of money and no doubt threw up the irony that this glory that Giotto was in the process of glorifying was built on the foundations of usury which in turn funded Giotto’s own work there.69

The letters depicted underneath the chapel read “Oh Ezra, remember how came by Usura Capella Scrovegni & skies of Giotto”,70 an allusion to Ezra Pound’s Cantos and their inherent economic criticism.71 Phillips admits that he “take[s] the liberty of stylistic parody to suggest that we can still see one of the wonders of art that was made in covert atonement for the dubious business practices that financed it”.72 By referring to Pound, Phillips playfully parodies modernist techniques and compositional devices, such as Eliot’s allusion to Ezra Pound and Guido da Monetfeltro in his depiction of Inferno XVII, which echoes The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock.

VI.1.4 “A bridge in time and reference”: Phillips’ rich tapestry of Western art, thought and ideas In his essay on Dante’s Inferno, Karl Fugelso states that the British artist “constructs a veritable primer on how at least one aspect of the Middle Ages, the Commedia, influenced numerous post-medieval intellectuals”.73 Since this statement reduces Phillips’ Dante’s Inferno to a cultural recycling of Dantean ideas, it falls short of doing justice to Phillips’ work. The fascinating part of depicting the Commedia and many of its characters, nonetheless, consists of the fact that “however remote in epoch and name are the characters, time drops away and reveals to us real people: we recognise them and know their modern counterparts”.74 The pictures, which serve as a visual commentary, as well as the talking footnotes and the graphic ideas discussed in the previous chapters, 69 Loc. cit. p. 296. Note that the chapel was originally built by Enrico Scrovegni, who finds himself among the usurers in canto XVII. 70 Loc. cit. p. 141. 71 On Pound’s economic criticism see chapter V.1.3. 72 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 296. 73 Fugelso, ‘Neomedievalisms in Tom Phillips’ Commedia illustrations’, p. 28. 74 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 302.

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“explore the recurrent obsession that makes it such a potent ‘House of Memory’ [and] also seek to bring out the poet’s wit as well as his intellectual intensity”.75 Here we can detect inklings of Warburg’s iconic memory of the Western world, ideas, thoughts and events, which transcend history and assume a more universal value. Phillips’ hope is that “the presence of the pictures will guide forward a steady reading of the text and enhance its pleasure by pointing the reader to unexpected connections, both of mood and meaning”.76 He engages in an intermedial relationship with the objects depicted and combines them in different circumstances and surroundings, thereby adding another layer of commentary on top of them. This way, a constant mirroring of cultural insinuations is created, which ultimately serves to build “a bridge in time and reference”.77 Three of these bridges to our present are exemplified in the following: Phillips’ use of Dante’s head, his version of Paolo and Francesca, and his appropriation of the Laocoon statue. Phillips employs Dante’s head once more in the second drawing for canto XXI.78 Here Phillips presents Dante’s and Virgil’s profiles as they are used on two Italian labels for olive oil and butter, respectively. Dante has an almost female face, he appears to wear some rouge and lipstick. What we can find here is an artistic nod towards pop art, which declared products of mass consumption objects of art. Furthermore, it represents a postmodern critique of the economic exploitation of cultural icons, which only quotes their names and makes use of their cultural capital for marketing purposes without engaging any further with the ideas and works they stand for. Dante and Virgil are also juxtaposed with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, who occupy the lower two frames of a singed film strip. They are shown “in the same relationship as the poets, making a Stan of Dante and an Olly of Virgil”.79 The talking footnotes underline this role reversal, since they juxtapose Dante’s original greeting to Virgil - this time addressing Olly with the Italian for “I am Stan”.80 The humorous contrastive effect of the two famous comedians can be read as an allusion to the interchangeability of roles: even though 75

Loc. cit. Loc. cit. 77 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 283. 78 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 173. 79 Loc. cit. p. 298. 80 Loc. cit. p. 173. Dante greets Virgil with the words “Or se‘ tu quel Virgilio” (Inf. 1, l. 79). 76

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the characters of Stan and Olly followed a stereotyped pattern of behaviour, with Stan messing things up and Olly flying into a temper, their films were marked by a variety of different roles, ranging from fraternal lodgers in one of their most famous productions, Sons of the Desert, to small-time criminals and prisoners in their first film Pardon Us. In the case of Dante and Virgil, it becomes clear that Dante is about to take on Virgil’s role as a new authoritative auctor, whose fame is being gradually enhanced, and his image is about to become fixed. The singed film strip is an allusion to the cinematic quality of Dante’s Commedia, as Phillips explains in his commentary, but I would like to argue that it also functions as a symbol of artificiality and transience for both, their acquired earthly fame and allegedly determined roles. Once the film is burnt, or the performance is over, even the most renowned actors might eventually fall into oblivion. In a way, Phillips reinterprets Dante’s own words written in Purgatorio, “wordly renown is nothing other than a breath of wind that blows now here, now there, and changes name when it has changed its course”,81 within the cultural backdrop of 20th-century Hollywood-style fame. The allusion to Hollywood also hints at the impermanence of acting glory and the rather stereotyped roles found in the film industry. Dante’s effeminate looks further reinforces such a suggestion and illustrates once more the interchangeability of roles. Phillips also manages to add new meaning to Dante’s pretext in his modern adaptation of canto V, describing Dante’s encounter with Paolo and Francesca. In his commentary, Phillips acknowledges that “Dante himself, certainly in his earlier years, was known to be a philanderer [...]”,82 thereby quoting the historiogram of the youthful lover established by Boccaccio. In this canto, Dante therefore “revisits carnal scenes of his youth perhaps [...]”.83 In the depiction of the fifth canto, Phillips establishes an intermedial relationship between Dante’s pretext and his visualisation. What adds to the interpretation are the two lovers in miniature depicted in an endless variety of love-making positions in a whirlwind echoing the contrapasso of canto V, in which the lovers are forced to fly endlessly in a raging storm. Furthermore, the depiction of the two sinners who committed adultery is combined with Adam and Eve’s

81

Purg. XI, lines 101-2. Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 288. 83 Loc. cit. Note that Phillips’ interpretation of Dante’s own carnal sins concords with the general literary criticism of Dante fainting out of shame at the end of this canto. See also chapter III.2.3 of this analysis. 82

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expulsion from Paradise. For this reason, Phillips uses Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel as an iconographic cluster. For his picture, he used a black and white line drawing of Michelangelo’s original and strived for “a suitably distancing crudeness” in his depiction.84 The juxtaposition of Paolo and Francesca’s fate with Adam and Eve’s is explained with the following words: It is no accident that in Hell proper Francesca is the first person to speak or that she is the only woman that speaks to the pilgrims throughout their visit to the underworld. Thus it is that Dante implies that she represents the first of all the sinners, Eve, though he never mentions her by name.85

The use of colours is also highly symbolic: the two figures in the background are depicted in white, which symbolizes their innocence before the fall of mankind. Adam wants to grab an apple, while Eve seems to hold back his arm. Here, Phillips inverts the clichéd gender role of Eve seducing Adam, because in the foreground Adam still seems to be holding the apple in his right hand, trying to keep it at arm’s length and covering his face out of shame with his left hand. The two figures in the foreground are surrounded by a blood-red contour line, which signifies Adam and Eve’s burden of guilt due to their sin. The talking footnote reads “Lovers in horror [...] she motionless. He slowly filled with tears. Her judged lips tremble towards him”.86 In particular, the last sentence, which Phillips made stand out by surrounding it with an additional red contour line, establishes an intertextual relationship with Dante’s fifth canto and almost literally quotes Dante’s lines “this one [...], while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth”.87 However, Phillips changes the personal pronoun to her so that the blame of adultery is put on Eve/Francesca. A further talking footnote reads “In all ages Eve”,88 and, as a confirmation, the footnote repeats “Eve again, Eve”.89 This commentary can be read as an ironic reprimand directed towards Eve, but it can also be an allusion to a continuous process of degradation of women in art and society brought about by religion.

84

Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 289. Loc. cit. p. 288. 86 Loc. cit. 87 Inf. V, l. 135-6. 88 Phillips, Dante’s Inferno, p. 289. 89 Loc. cit. 85

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Apart from Michelangelo’s Renaissance fresco, Phillips also addresses the emulation of classical literature and art in his paintings for the 25th canto of the Inferno. He establishes an intermedial link between “Dante’s extensive references in this Canto to Classical models”, and tries to “echo Dante’s theme of transformation and metamorphosis” in his own art.90 For this reason, Phillips used a modern lithographic reproduction of an etching of the Laocoon statue, which itself has various medial predecessors such as photographs or reconstructions dating from the 19th century and as far back as Classical Antiquity. Thereby, the artist exemplifies the process of continuous artistic reproduction on a meta level. In essence, Phillips manages to transcend the Dantean pretext and confers a much more enhanced meaning on Dante’s core themes. As these three examples illustrate, his visual commentary invites us to reassess certain ideas and burdens them with modern precepts. Phillips therefore creates a rich cultural tapestry of art, thought and concepts, drawing on Dante’s pretext, the cultural history of the Western world, and 20th-century popular culture. The talking footnotes add irony to the cantos while the adjacent drawings exemplify the intertextuality of both Dante’s Commedia and Phillips’ Inferno. Since Dante’s text would be unthinkable without the many Scholastic and philosophical pretexts surfacing in the Commedia, and considering the fact that Phillips’ footnotes are elaborated snippets of Mallock’s novel, their presence literally illustrates the many layers of texts which go into forming a new work of art. Thus, Phillips succeeds in creating a deeper level of historicity in his engravings and lets us have access to both past and present simultaneously.

90

Loc. cit. p. 302.

CONCLUSION

The first part of this study analysed the iconography of Dante Alighieri in the first two hundred years of his reception. It attempted to bridge the analytical gap in the academic treatment of the visualisations created during the decisive period of Dantean appropriation in Florence, which had significant repercussions for the Florentine’s image in Europe in the subsequent centuries. The tools used for this analysis were, firstly, Aby Warburg’s concept of the engrammatic pathos formulae, which describe the afterlife of gestures, emotions and postures in cultural history. This concept was used out of necessity to find appropriate terminology for a critical analysis, which modern cultural, intermedial and art historical studies often lack, in order to allow for the historicity of these visual blueprints and to do justice to the founding father of Cultural and Visual studies, Aby Warburg. Nowadays, his concepts often circulate as an iconographic cluster in Cultural and Visual studies without the original source receiving credit. Secondly, this study suggested the concept of historiograms as central carriers of historical discourse. The historical discourse of Dante and his reception could be made up of exaggerations and myths, as in the case of Giovanni Boccaccio’s biography on Dante, which had a significant influence on Dante’s mental and visual images. In such cases, this study demystified the respective historical discourse by setting it in opposition to the historical facts or by disclosing the historicity and artificiality of these historiograms. Adorno stressed the fact that artefacts do not acquire their function and signification per se, but rely heavily on the inherent dynamics between a work of art’s content and a work of art’s afterlife. The historiograms analysed in this study, therefore, represent the Florentine poet as a prolific literary authority, sometimes even enhanced with saintly attributes, as well as a passionate and youthful poet inspired by his love for Beatrice. Such a reading of Dante was contradicted by his civic qualities as a political author and his official engagement in his hometown. Both historiograms felt their repercussions in the mental and visual images of the poet in the first two hundred years of his reception and, through a profound process of intermedial exchange, were transposed onto the first illuminated manuscripts as well as onto the first frescos and paintings of

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Conclusion

the Florentine. This intermedial transposition was possible because of the use of the antique pathos formulae that the painters and illustrators could rely on, for example, Greek depictions of laurel-wreathed poets, or Biblical depictions of St Mark writing at his desk. Here we can find saintlike depictions alongside authorial poeta-personaggio visualisations. Interestingly, all of these visualisations make use of the concepts of authority and authenticity: they try to portray Dante as a literary authority (sometimes even divinely ordained), and acknowledge Dante’s authenticity as the poeta-personaggio, the narrator and protagonist of his own work, and transpose certain elements of his narrative self-consciousness into images, for example Dante as a pilgrim, Dante marvelling or fainting, and Dante the poet holding his own book. All of these visualisations created a highly recognisable icon and formed an allegory of moral integrity, narrative authenticity, and literary authority, which was to dominate his reception for the next 400 years. In the second part of this study, a strong emphasis was placed on the visual and cultural approaches to Dante research, thereby highlighting the role aesthetics and intermediality played in the process of appropriating Dante and his work. The problems the European élite had with the Divina Commedia during the struggle between French empiricism and German aestheticism was demonstrated, a debate which was pragmatically solved in Britain by Sir Jonathan Richardson and his plea for an artistic engagement with Dante’s Ugolino episode. Richardson’s observations were symptomatic of the rise and employment of aesthetic considerations for the sake of artistic pleasure and social advantage, as already propagated in Britain by Thomas Hoby’s seminal translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano. These ideas were tied to the tradition of the Grand Tour and led to a re-evaluation of Italian art and literature, exemplified in a variety of travelogues and handbooks for British travellers to Italy. In particular, the British responses to Dante underlined the pervasive influence of the Florentine on artists as different as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, T. S. Eliot and Tom Phillips, and underscored the key role that British artists and intellectuals therefore played in promoting Dante and his work. Special attention was paid to Ugolino and his different guises; paving the way for Dante’s appropriation in Britain, Ugolino came to form an allegory for suppressed liberty in the new Americas towards the end of the 18th century. He functioned as the pitiful imprisoned self in Eliot’s poetry, and resurfaced as the ruthless businessman digging his own grave in Phillips’ visualisations and iconotexts. Aesthetic considerations also played an

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important role in the rediscovery of Dante in the 19th century, with the culmination of this reassessment being, of course, Rossetti’s adaptation of the Bargello portrait, which not only retraced Dante, but also revived the historiogram of the youthful passionate poet established by Boccaccio in the 14th century. The grim and gaunt pilgrim was traded in for a zestful young lover, a visual image owing much to the Pre-Raphaelite cult of the medieval. For Eliot, Dante was, on the one hand, the allegory of a universal European author, but on the other hand, his allegorical method represented the universal poetic device to follow for any poet striving to improve his writing in any language. Eliot’s and Pound’s modernist poetics found their precursor in Dante’s text, in a multitude of voices speaking in one work. This textual multilingualism spurred the Modernists’ intertextual referentiality and reflected their own poetic principles. Since Dante’s poetic voice was formed by the many voices both surrounding and preceding him, such as Vergil, the troubadours and the poets of the dolce stil novo, whose influences he incorporated into his own unique voice, Dante became the allegory of poetic vigour and an engaged author avant la lettre. For Phillips, Dante was also the poet of authenticity. His unique treatment of contemporary political themes as well as his own artistic personality and his artistic fingerprint led him to personalize his own Dante project. Furthermore, Dante’s ideas and his themes resurface prominently in Phillips’ intertextual and intermedial allusions and establish a bridge of time and reference which joins Dante’s original text and Phillips’ adaptation. Phillips also addresses Dante’s iconography on a meta level, exploiting the rich cultural history of Dantean visualisations, while at the same time holding up this tradition to poignant criticism. Thereby Phillips deconstructs the figure of Dante Alighieri by showing the constructedness of the iconic Dante in the first place. Interestingly, Phillips’ work roughly coincided with the deconstruction of Dante’s visual image in Florence, which was prompted by the discovery of Dante’s supposed real face, and the scientific and historical research undertaken in its wake. Thr British artist manages to transcend the cantos and confer a much more enhanced meaning on Dante’s core themes. His visual commentary invites us to reassess certain ideas and burdens them with modern thought, as in, for example, his ruminations on the transience of fame or the ruthlessness of business. In doing so, he creates a rich cultural tapestry of art, thought and ideas, drawing on Dante’s pretext, the cultural history of the Western world and 20th-century popular culture.

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As the prevalence of Dante references and Dante allusions in today’s culture proves, Dante is still very much with us, and despite all deconstruction the icon is still very much alive. In recognition of this, T. S. Eliot’s words, borrowed from one of his poems, can be appropriately applied here: “Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in Man. [...] You must not deny the body”. The continued turn towards the iconic Dante and the representation of his outward appearance, therefore, reveals the necessity of a tangible image that can be used in connection with beliefs, ideas and convictions to make things literally visible and make them appear more convincing and effective. Alluding to Primo Levi’s modified questions at the beginning of this study we can state that acts of intermediality helped establish the first iconic image of Dante in Italy, and the visualisations of the two most popular cantos, Ugolino and the two fateful lovers Paolo and Francesca, captured the social energy circulating in Britain at the time of their production. It seems that Dante’s ideas and his poetry were passed on like a runner’s baton from one artist to another, from one epoch to the next. The artist may be long dead, but his ideas, his moral convictions and his literary figures have stayed with us, and the “art Olympics” - to quote Phillips - are not necessarily an acrimonious artistic contest in an agora of thought and wisdom, but a continuous source of inspiration and cultural patrimony that calls for creative artistic appropriation. Ultimately, what Steve Ellis states about modern writers and their relationship to Dante holds true for all the artists analysed in this study: Dante and his work, “like a great landmark on the horizon of time, has helped [them] to make sense of the sequential unfolding of history, [and] to find their own place within it”.1

1

Ellis, Dante and English Poetry, p. 246.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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7. Dante Alighieri Acocella, Joan, ‘What the hell - Dante in translation and in Dan Brown’s new novel’, The New Yorker, May, 27 (2013), pp. 82-5. Acquaviva, Paolo and Petrie, Jennifer, eds., Dante and the Church literary and historical essays (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007). Alighieri, Dante, La Divina Commedia, ed. Fratelli Alinari (Florence: Fratelli Alinari, 1903). —. The Canzoniere of Dante Alighieri, Including the Poems of the Vita Nuova and Convivio: Italian and English, trans. by Charles Lyell (London: John Murray, 1835). Auerbach, Erich, ‘Dante’s Addresses to the Reader’, Romance Philology, 7 (1953-54), pp. 268-78. —. Dante: Poet of the Secular World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). Barbi, Michele, Vita di Dante (Florence: Sansoni, 1963). Barolini, Teodolinda and Storey, Wayne, eds., Dante for the New Millenium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003). Benazzi, Stefano, et. al., ‘The face of the poet Dante Alighieri reconstructed by virtual modelling and forensic anthropology techniques’, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 36, Issue 2, February (2009), pp. 278-83. Benigni, Roberto, Il mio Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 2008) Bolton Holloway, Julia, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer (New York: Peter Lang, 1987). Braida, Antonella and Calè, Luisa, eds. Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Burstein, Dan and de Keijzer, Arne, eds., Secrets of Inferno - In the footsteps of Dante and Dan Brown (Stamford: The Story Plant, 2013).

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8. Taste and Aesthetics Allison, Henry, Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Binder, Franz, ed., Friedrich Overbeck: 1789-1833 (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1971). Blewitt, Octavian, A Hand-book for Travellers in Central Italy, including the Papal States, Rome, and the Cities of Etruria (London: John Murray, 1850).

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9. Dante criticism in the 18th and 19th centuries Ascoli, Albert and von Henneberg, Krystyna Clara, eds., Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (Oxford: Berg, 2001). Audeh, Aida and Havely, Nicholas, eds., Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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10. T. S. Eliot Bornstein, George, Ezra Pound among the Poets (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988). Chmielewski, Inge, Die Bedeutung der Göttlichen Komödie für die Lyrik T. S. Eliots (Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz Verlag, 1969). Douglass, Paul, ed., T. S. Eliot, Dante, and the Idea of Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Eliot, Valerie and Haffenden, John, eds., The Letters of T. S. Eliot 19281929, vol. 4 (London: Faber and Faber, 2013). Emig, Rainer, Modernism in Poetry: Motivations, Structures and Limits (London: Longman, 1995).

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11. Tom Phillips Ardissino, Erminia and Stroppa Tomasi, Sabrina, eds., Dialoghi con Dante - Riscritture e Ricodificazioni della Commedia (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2007). Ashton, Dore, Rauschenberg’s XXXIV Drawings for Dante’s Inferno (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964). Cuoco, Lorin, ed., The Dual Muse: The Writer as Artist, the Artist as Writer, (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1999). Kretschmann, Tabea, Höllenmaschine - Wunschapparat: Analysen ausgewählter Neubearbeitungen von Dantes Divina Commedia (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012).

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12. Web resources Bergeron, Anick, ‘Quand la lecture se donne en image’, Image & narrative, 3, November (2001) [E-journal on visual narratology and word and image studies>]. [a accessed: 26 September 2016]. Cork, Richard, ‘Art that speaks Volumes’ [An interview with Tom Phillips, ]. [accessed: 26 September 2016]. King, Andrew David, ‘“Were there but world enough and time’: Tom Phillips on A Humument”, The Kenyon Review, Sept. 7, 2012. [‹www.kenyonreview.org/2012/09/tom-phillips-interview/›]. [accessed 26 September 2016]. Meier, Franziska, Renaissance des Mittelalters? Zu den DanteIllustrationen von Sandro Botticelli [Open Peer Reviewed Journal, ]. [accessed: 26 September 2016]. Palazzo dell’Arte de’ giudici e notai [Official website, ‹www.artenotai.org›]. [accessed: 26 September 2016]. Phillips, Tom, A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel [Official website, ]. [accessed: 26 September 2016]. Scruton, Roger, ‘T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor’, in: First Principles Journal, Issues 1-2, Spring (2004) [ISI web journal,

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]. [accessed: 26 September 2016]. 24 Hour Museum Staff, Tom Phillips' version of Dante's Hell acquired by Bodleian Library []. [accessed: 26 September 2016]. Visualising Posture in Dante’s ‘Comedy’: History, Theory, Practice [Official website of the conference, ]. [accessed: 26 September 2016].

INDEX

Adorno, Theodor W. 2, 25-26, 3537, 45, 189 Aestheticism 23, 31, 114-127, 190 Aglionby, William 123-124, 134 Alberti, Leon Battista 32 Alighieri, Dante Convivio 64-67, 145, 176 Dante criticism, 10-27 Dante Societies 15 De Monarchia 64-67, 177 De Vulgari Eloquentia 48-50, 64 Divina Commedia 1-10, 11-27, 47, 57-89, 114, 118, 141, 154, 156, 168, 190 Historical figure 20, 57-82, 129, 139, 141, 183 Illuminated manuscripts 6, 23, 25, 55, 57, 80-97, 108, 111, 169, 189 Vita Nuova 11, 58, 60, 61, 63, 138-146, 166, 177 Allegory 6, 8, 9, 43, 45-47, 58, 86, 94, 97-101, 112, 145, 151, 157, 158-159, 164, 167, 190-191 Aquinas, Thomas 73, 101, 177, 179 Ascham, Roger 121 Assmann, Jan 16, 39 Augustus 66 Authenticity 2, 6, 8, 9, 58-61, 139, 145, 151, 190-191 Baedeker, Karl 127 Barthes, Roland 35-36, 41-42, 45, 74 Beatrice 5, 11, 20, 69, 70, 89, 141148, 177, 189 Bembo, Pietro 12 Blake, William 16, 19-22, 169, 173

Boccaccio, Giovanni Decamerone 78-80 Trattatello in laude di Dante 47, 68-82, 85-86, 96, 109-112, 136 Bodmer, Johann Jakob 15, 117118, 130, 145 Bonaiuto, Andrea da 101 Boston Tea Party 136 Botticelli, Sandro 6, 12, 31, 32, 77, 103, 105, 107-113, 172--174, 178, 182 Boyd, Henry 18 Bradley, F. H. 161 Brenner, Adam 147 Bruni, Leonardo 7, 26, 57, 68, 7580, 97, 105, 109 Buonarroti, Michelangelo 69, 128132, 176, 187-188 Burke, Edmund 135 Carr, E. H. 75 Cary, Henry Francis 17-18 Castagno, Andrea del 78, 105 Castiglione, Baldassare 8, 112, 115, 120-133, 190 Cervantes, Miguel de 16 Chaucer, Geoffrey 16-17 Chronos 134 Cione, Nardo di 104-105, 110 Codex Iustinianus 66 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 19, 43, 138 Cromwell, Oliver 165 Daniel, Arnaut 162-166 Dialogicity 54-55, 168-171 Dictionnaire Philosophique 115 Didi-Huberman, Georges 33-36, 51, 134, 136

Depicting Dante in Anglo-Italian Literary and Visual Arts Donatio Constatini 65 Doré, Gustave 172-175 Dürer, Albrecht 32 Eliot, T. S. 3, 4, 8, 9, 21, 38, 150167, 177, 183, 190 Ash-Wednesday 162 Dante 155 Four Quartets 150-167 Little Gidding 150-167 The Wasteland 153 What Dante Means to Me 155 English Romantics 19-21 Flaxman, John 133-137 Foscolo, Ugo 15 Foucault, Michel 46, 49 Francione 105 Genette, Gérard 52-55 Gesamtkunstwerk 43 Gioberti, Vincenzo 13 Giotto 36, 95-96, 126-127, 143146, 147, 187 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 16 Gombrich, Ernst H. 6, 30-34, 40, 108 Gramsci, Antonio 37 Grand Tour 8, 17, 114, 120-127, 190 Greenblatt, Stephen 38 Guernica 180 Guinizelli, Guido 162-165 Hardy, Oliver 185 Hazlitt, William 138-139 Herrick, Robert 174 Higgins, Dick 43-44 Historiogram 7, 26, 28, 35-44, 45, 60, 68, 71-80, 96-97, 107, 109, 111, 125, 127, 131, 138, 149153, 174, 181, 186, 189-191 Hoby, Thomas 8, 112, 115, 121122, 190 Iconology 40-41 Iconotexts 44-47, 48, 54, 83, 175, 190 Intermediality 8, 25, 43-55, 89, 128, 133, 147, 168-174, 190, 192

215

Intertextuality 29, 51-54, 122, 176, 188 Jonson, Ben 17 Kant, Immanuel 116 Kirkup, Seymour 143 Kristeva, Julia 51-52 Landino, Cristoforo 11-12, 109 Laocoon 25, 32, 34, 50-51, 133, 185, 188 Latini, Brunetto 63, 164 Laurel, Stan 185 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 25, 5051 Levi, Primo 1, 9, 192 Livy 65 Locke, John 117 Lucan 65 Maiano, Giuliano da 105 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 15, 152 Mazzini, Giuseppe 15 Medici, Lorenzo Il Magnifico 103, 108 Melzi, Francesco 110 Michelino, Domenico di 103-107, 181 Mitchell, W. J. T. 6, 40, 44, 68, 89 Moore, Edward 144 Murray, John 126 Mussato, Albertino 103 Nazarenes 139-141 Nugent, Thomas 124 Overbeck, Friedrich 140-141 Panofsky, Erwin 30, 40-41, 52 Paolo and Francesca 7, 20, 128, 133-137, 141, 185, 186, 187, 192 Penrose, Thomas 125-126 Petrarch 103, 114 Phillips, Tom 9, 21, 38, 47, 55, 107, 168-188 A Humument 175-177 Dante’s Inferno 21, 168-188 Mallock 174-177, 180, 188 Plato Ion 72, 95 Republic 45-46, 133

216 Poliziano, Angelo 32 Pound, Ezra 57, 150-154, 163-164, 178, 184 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood 140149, 191 Questione della lingua 12, 13 Reynolds, Joshua 7, 8, 54, 133-135, 190 Richardson, Jonathan 8, 17, 112, 117, 123, 124-128, 177, 190 Rossano Gospels 94, 99, 181, Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 8, 20, 38, 47, 112, 140-149, 190 The Allegory of Love and Friendship 145-149 The Early Italian Poets 141 The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice 141, 146147

Index Rossetti, Gabriele 8, 15, 141 Ruskin, John 19, 31, 126, 141, 146 Saxl, Fritz 30 Scala, Cangrande della 58, 66, 86 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 138-145 Shakespeare, William 3, 16, 39, 122, 138, 158, 166, 183 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 19 Signorelli, Luca 174, 181-182 Staël, Mme de 138-140 Stanhope, Philip Dormer 118-119 Toynbee, Paget Jackson 18 Ugolino 7, 8, 20, 52, 54, 118, 119, 128-137, 161, 162, 175-178, 190, 192 Vinci, Leonardo da 110-111 Warburg, Aby 6, 9, 24, 25, 26, 2841, 50-52, 92, 96, 107, 128, 185, 189