Volkmann, L: Iconografia Dantesca

Excerpt from Iconografia Dantesca: The Pictorial Representations to Dante's Divine Comedy

At first sight it may seem very strange that amongst the many thousands of volumes which make up the ever - growing Dante literature, not one author should have taken up this important problem. For indeed Dante's relation to art - 12a, the pictorial and plastic construction of the Divine Comedy - is so forcible that it does not escape the most superficial reader. Not only is Dante's in¿uence on some of the great masters (giotto, Botticelli, Signorelli, Michelangelo, Rossetti) a commonplace in the history of art, but every tercet of the Comedy is instinct with the artistic Spirit. Dante's intensity of vision, his power of reproducing with almost photographic definiteness the most vanishing shades of light, the most minute details of landscape, - this faculty is almost unparalleled in the whole range of literature. Never was there a poet who possessed to an equal degree the eye of the painter Never was there a poet who used with the same virtuosity the visible world of light and shadow to reach and to reveal the invisible world of feeling and thought. Never was there a genius blending so harmoniously the objectivity of plastic art with the subjectivity of passion and the faculty of abstraction of the philosopher. Whether Dante, the friend of Giotto and Oderisi d'agubbio, did possess or did not possess a talent for drawing - as seems indicated by a famous passage from the Vita Nuova, quoted by Dr. Volkmann - is in itself of very little importance; one thing is certain, Dante, from the constitutional bent of his genius, is the brother of the giant painters of the Cinquecento. It is something more than a metaphor when we say that Dante is the Michelangelo of poetry, as Michelangelo is the Dante of painting. The Divine Comedy is not only the rum/m of all the wisdom of his time, it is not only a chronicle of local and general history, it is, moreover, a marvellous gallery of pictures and a museum of sculpture. As you struggle down the abyss of Hell or up the mountain of Purgatory.

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