Понкия Кьяра
Падуанский университет, Италия
After Dante’s death in 1321, the Divine Comedy quickly became one of the most appreciated works of Italian literature. Its geographical distribution was impressively wide, and from the first half of the 14th century patrons looking for visual support to imagine Dante’s pilgrimage through the Hereafter began asking for illuminated manuscripts of the poem. Illuminators were therefore faced with the difficult challenge of illustrating a text with no previous iconographic tradition. The easiest way to deal with this issue was to turn to other sources, choosing from among the most suitable iconographies for reuse in Dante’s masterpiece. Particularly for the Inferno medieval art had much to offer the early illuminators of the poem. E.g. devils and hellish settings were often inspired from the sculpted Last Judgments on tympanums of churches and illuminations of sacred texts.
However, just as Dante’s literary sources were both medieval and classical, the illuminators’ quest for images was not limited to contemporary sources, and in some cases the echo of classical models in the Divine Comedy illustrations can be appreciated. E.g. in many illuminations the Hell is represented as a stereotypical fortified citadel that was used in Roman art to symbolize a city. This is even more meaningful because in the Virgilius Vaticanus Hades is represented as a fortified citadel, thus proving that this was an iconographic choice of a long-standing tradition. In other cases, classical references can be even more precise: e.g. in ms. 1102 of the Angelica Library in Rome the sarcophagus of Pope Anastasius II is clearly inspired by a classical one. Lastly, the choices made by the Master of the Paduan Antiphonaries are very significant: he was mainly inspired by Giotto, but sometimes he used classical models, like in the Saint Petersburg Roman de Troie and in the Divine Comedy Egerton 943, where he makes use of iconographies whose origin can be traced back to the classical period.