Dante, Artist of Gesture

Dante's Comedy is a visual technique for reading, suggesting that the reader engages with Dante's striking images of souls as if they were arranged in an architectural space. Heather Webb argues that the poem asks readers to view its verbally articulated sequences of images with a set of observational tools acquired from engaging with and meditating on the bodily depictions of vice and virtue in fresco cycles or programs of mosaics in places of worship. This book traces described gestures and bodily signs across the canticles of the poem to provide a key for identifying affective and devotional itineraries within the text.

Format: Hardback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 29 September 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Dante, the artist of gesture, presents a visual technique for reading Dante's Comedy, inviting the reader to engage with the striking images of souls as if they were arranged in an architectural space. Art historians have demonstrated how series of discrete images or scenes in medieval places of worship, such as the mosaics in the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence or the frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, establish not only narrative sequences but also parallelisms between registers, forging links between those registers through the use of color and gestural forms. Heather Webb further explores these techniques to show that the Comedy likewise invites the reader to make visual connections between disparate, non-sequential moments in the text. In other words, Webb argues that Dante's poem asks readers to view its verbally articulated sequences of images with a set of observational tools that could be acquired from engaging with and meditating on the bodily depictions of vice and virtue in fresco cycles or programs of mosaics in places of worship.

One of the most inherently visible aspects of the Comedy is the representation of signature gestures of the characters described in each of the realms. This book traces these described gestures and bodily signs across the canticles of the poem to provide a key for identifying affective and devotional itineraries within the text.

Weight: 478g
Dimension: 164 x 240 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192866998