Peter Brieger, Millard Meiss, Charles Singleton, Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
Call number: PQ 4366 B7 (Main Library)
Countertop: “Illustrations of the Divine Comedy”
This edition consists of two volumes, the first including an analysis of the artworks that enrich a conspicuous number of fully illustrated codices of Dante’s poem and the second presenting more than 1,100 miniatures from a much more extensive body of manuscript materials. The first volume also presents three introductory essays titled “The Irreducible Vision,” “The Smiling Pages,” and “Pictorial Commentary to the Commedia,” as well as a list of the most notable codices with a section devoted to their illustrations. The wealth of miniatures in the second volume attests to the interest that the Divine Comedy raised between the fourteenth century (already a few decades after the completion of the Divine Comedy) and the fifteenth century. These illuminations reveal Dante’s visions and thus become functional components of the poem’s transmission of content through both words and images.
As several other items featured in this exhibit show, Inferno is the canticle that inspired the greatest number of illuminations. Understandably, the largest number of fourteenth-century manuscripts (about six hundred) was made in Florence, and they present typical Florentine elements that are absent or reproduced differently in codices created in other centers. The degree of variation in the iconographic aspects of the illuminations derives from the familiarity illuminators had or else lacked with the text and from how much freedom they had in choosing forms and figures. The introduction of stylistic development progressively distinguishes the graphic techniques of illuminations between the earliest and the later representations.