Quest’anno, festeggiamo il settecentesimo anniversario della morte del gran poeta italiano, Dante Alighieri. Le opere di Dante sono rispettate come le migliore perché usò tante parole visuali. Ci furono tanti artisti che dipinsero le scene straordinarie dalle parole poetiche di Dante. Specialmente, la “Divina Commedia”, il capolavoro di Dante, fu l’ispirazione di molti poeti ed artisti. Il Canto V dell’Inferno, la prima parte della Divina Commedia, fu il più rappresentata dagli artisti nel XIX secolo.
This 12 months we commemorate the 700th anniversary of the dying of the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Dante ranks among the many biggest poets within the western literary custom that features Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton.
Visible artists partaking the written phrases of Dante (or any poet) introduce us to the wealthy and sophisticated historical past of literary and visible interactions in artwork. What’s the relationship of phrases and pictures by means of time? How do they impart to us? How can we course of verbal and visible info? How does the historical past of language relate to the historical past of artwork? What occurs when textual content is translated into photographs? These questions have lengthy fascinated artists, writers, philosophers, aestheticians, linguists, and philologists. The stress between the literary and the visible has additionally been a weapon for political revolution, non secular reform, social change, and cultural provocation.
The primary and most blatant interplay of phrases and pictures is the reliance by artists all through historical past upon well-known literary sources together with the Bible, Greek and Roman mythology, tragedy and philosophy, the writings of Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and later influential writings by Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Miguel de Cervantes and, lastly, William Shakespeare and John Milton. In all instances, the written phrase acts because the catalyst for visible imagery whether or not in portray, sculpture, graphic artwork, or e book illustration.
No poet or author’s work was extra influential because the supply for visible artists all through historical past than the facility and originality of Dante’s poetry, and nowhere extra so than within the Nineteenth century. Scenes impressed by the writings of Dante, set the stage for an explosion of images within the works of Nineteenth-century visible artists.
Nineteenth-century painters and sculptors like William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Gustave Doré, Odilon Redon, and Auguste Rodin, thought of the written scenes described by Dante to be autonomous creations, requiring autonomous translations into artwork. A portray, sculpture or print was to not be a mere illustration, however a singular reinterpretation of the textual content solid from the artist’s private creativeness. One should keep in mind that all through the historical past of artwork, artists like Michelangelo, Blake, Rossetti, in addition to Victor Hugo, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and lots of members of the Futurist, Dada and Surrealist actions have been themselves poets.
Inside Dante’s whole oeuvre, the foremost supply of inspiration for visible artists was “The Divine Comedy.” Inside the three components of the “Comedia” (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) the favored part was the Inferno. Amidst the sin and despair within the Inferno, it’s within the fifth canto positioned within the Second Circle of Hell that Dante encounters the lustful, those that gave themselves over to sins of the flesh whereas on earth. Their punishment now’s to be eternally buffeted and swept alongside by the pressure of their carnal lust.
One couple among the many lustful pursuits Dante and he’s allowed to name to them and to query them. Right here we’re launched to Paolo and Francesca, whose illicit love affair on Earth eternally dooms them to the everlasting storms and winds of their unchecked passions. After listening to their unhappy and mournful story, Dante is so overcome with emotion that he, for the primary time within the “Comedy,” faints.
Nearly each Nineteenth-century painter or sculptor who discovered inspiration in Dante’s “Divine Comedy” selected this episode from Canto V of the Inferno to symbolize together with, amongst others, William Blake (1757-1827), Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).
For the Romantic creativeness of Nineteenth-century artists, Dante’s punishment of sins of the flesh struck a well-recognized chord and might be interpreted both as romance or tragedy. Dante’s swoon on the finish of the episode has been interpreted in some ways by literary students. On the one hand, Dante seems to really feel tenderness and pity for the plight of the couple. Writing concerning the Paolo and Francesca story and the “Comedy” on the whole, the Dante scholar Renato Poggioli concluded that: “The creative achievement lies in the truth that the poem reconciles inside itself Dante the witness of the wretched distress of man, and Dante the beholder of the terrible majesty of God.”
Images:
1 William Blake, The Lovers’ Whirlwind, Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, 1824-27, pen and ink and watercolor, Birmingham Museum and Artwork Gallery, Birmingham.
2 Auguste Rodin, The Kiss, mannequin 1880, solid c.1898, bronze, Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, Washington, D.C.
3 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, (triptych), 1855, watercolor, Tate Britain, London.
