Text and Image in Dante's Commedia and Its Early Printed Illustrations (1481-1596)

Abstract

The twenty-eight illustrated editions of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia in the Quattrocento and Cinquecento are the focus of this study. Most of these printings and the woodcuts or engravings they contain have received little attention to the present. Further, they have not been treated collectively as a particular manifestation of the reception history of Dante’s Commedia in the Renaissance, which they most certainly are. After introducing the illustrations within these printed editions, with emphasis on the salient direct influences among them, this corpus of printings and images is considered according to three issues, each accompanied by a methodology developed to best address these respective topics. The first issue is that of visual genealogical sources for the woodcuts and engravings within these editions, specifically inquiring into manuscripts and drawings. In light of no few scholars’ questionable claims regarding direct influence from certain illuminated manuscripts to these printed illustrations, methodological principles are proposed to better hone inquiries into visual genealogies, and especially those that incorporate the rendering of originally textual content. Emphasis is given to the semiological multimediality of literary illustrations that draw from predecessors, in that such images do not only have a visual source, but also a textual one, and it is critical to be able to account for both referents. Applying this awareness and its relatedly developed methodological principles to the question of potential miniatures that directly influenced printed editions of the Commedia, despite certain scholars’ expectations otherwise, in part rooted in Kurt Weitzmann’s still-influential concepts, no extant and known illuminated manuscripts can be asserted as certain sources for the printed illustrations of this work. However, inversely, three Early-Cinquecento manuscripts which include miniatures that copied the woodcuts of particular printed editions are explored, principally to highlight the fact that while direct genealogical influence is not evident from manuscript to print, there is a salient commonality in the approaches to illustrating Dante’s poem among the illuminators and the designers of the printed illustrations, to the point that numerous later miniaturists did not hesitate to copy printed renderings of the text. These same principles are then applied to the centuries-long yet continually unsettled question of whether, and to what extent, the engravings in the 1481 Commedia take Sandro Botticelli’s drawings as their source. A close comparative inquiry of the engravings and the drawings, with an emphasis on commonly shared extratextual details, confirms that the engravings unquestionably made significant use of Botticelli’s renderings. A previously unknown set of drawings from ca. 1500, discussed only once in a single Italian article in 1963 and referred to here as the Morgan Dante Drawings, are next presented. These are contextualized as part of the frequently illustrated cosmographical discourse rooted seminally in Antonio Manetti’s studies of Dante’s work, and then demonstrated to be a source for the illustrations in Marcolini’s 1544 edition of the Commedia. The second issue is that of textual to visual narratological transition. Almost entirely accepting the terminology as Marilyn Lavin presented it relatively recently, rooted in the studies of Karl Robert, Franz Wickhoff and Kurt Weitzmann, the three basic categories of monoscenic, polyscenic and continuous narrative are accepted as accurate (with minor alterations to the concept of the polyscene), but also presented as insufficient if one wishes to better grasp the varied ways that the time, space, and characters of a text are re-presented in any given illustration. A more detailed taxonomizing method is thus used, based on a descriptive analysis of the salient distinctions between renderings that fall within the same general category of visual narrative. Developing sub-categories that identify these distinctions, and in turn categorizing and sub-categorizing the unique printed illustrations of the Commedia in the Quattrocento and Cinquecento, eight total distinctions of approach emerge. Necessarily underlying this inquiry are close comparative analyses of the textual and visual details, referred to here as image-text collation; without close looking and close reading, many of these illustrations could not be accurately categorized among the groupings that follow. There are two temporal variations among the monoscenic narratives, which as a general category is used in twenty-three percent of the illustrations under consideration: time, as it is represented in the textual narrative, is either frozen or collapsed in the visual re-presentation. Polyscenic narrative, used as a general category in thirteen percent of the illustrations, and which is particular to several editions’ renderings of Paradiso, is sub-categorized according to the manner in which an illustrated secondary discourse is related to its juxtaposed primary rendered narrative: roughly half of these are biographical or autobiographical, while other forms of discursive relations are wider ranging and less frequent. Hence, they are sub-categorized as either polyscenes with or polyscenes without (auto)biographical secondary renderings. Continuous narrative, as a general category, is used in sixty-four percent of the illustrations, with four sub-categories according to how certain characters are emphasized: the repetition of Dante alone, the repetition of Dante with his guide, the repetition of Dante, his guide and (an) additional character(s), and the sole repetition of an additional character other than Dante and his guide. A salient point that emerges through this taxonomy is the fidelity of the artists to the text, and notably thoughtful choices concerning which approach to visual narrative best encapsulates a given canto, even while there are occasionally strong or unexpected choices, such as a theme of apparitional figures who do not belong where they are according to a literalist reading of the work. The third issue concerns readership, which is to say, how the images among these printed editions of Dante’s poem were used as a means to engage with the text. After a survey of what are almost all passing hypotheses regarding this question, together with related assertions by opinion maker contemporary to the moment of interest, cases of image-specific marginalia, as it is referred to, are explored. A formerly unconsidered sort of annotation among early printed books, this is marginalia in which readers make notes beside, and specifically regarding, an illustration. Based on a survey of more than 100 volumes in nine collections, not including many more consulted through the ever-growing practice of digitization, the annotations fall into three categories: naming rendered characters, identifying the type of sin or sinner punished in Inferno and Purgatorio, and, more rarely, identifying the allegorical or historical significance related to rendered details. The role of images in the theory and practice of mnemonics are then considered as one possibly strong explanation for the strikingly common traits among annotations by a collection of unaffiliated readers. Upon highlighting claims that Dante and his Commedia were deeply informed by the classically-rooted mnemonics tradition, as stated by Giovanni Boccaccio, Ludovico Dolce, and Giacopo Mazzoni, fifteenth and sixteenth century illustrations are featured that demonstrate the two types of mental images that practitioners of the ars memoriae would use to strengthen artificial memory. The first of these are loci, imagined structures, much like the carefully divided spaces of Dante’s afterlife. Represented examples of these locational images bear noteworthy similarities to certain of the topographical representations of the Commedia. The second of these mental images are imagines, often symbolically-charged or grotesque images that aid in one’s recall of more particular details. According to treatises, imagines would be placed within conceptual compartments of the imagined loci. Considering the circles, terraces, and spheres of Dante’s conception of the afterlife as loci, which Dolce’s treatise even explicitly does, most of the printed illustrations could thus be treated as potential inspirations for imagines. The conspicuous absence of image-specific annotations concerning the location where a given illustration takes place in Dante’s imagined world is thus explained by their potential role as more detailed imagines. Such a categorical understanding, on the part of at least some readers, regarding these images’ function may also explain the common habit of noting specific details that one may use these images to recall: above all, rendered characters, and the category of sins for which they are punished. Though these illustrations did not exclusively function mnemonically, this was likely one of their commonly perceived roles. While this absolutely is a study specifically regarding the early printed illustrations of Dante’s Commedia, the microhistorical implications and/or comparative potential of this inquiry are also suggested. More can be learned, it is proposed, by using similar methods to evaluate the renderings of other literary works that were well-illustrated during this period.