Dante Alighieri (1265–1321)
Florence, Italy: Domenico Manzani, 1595
Brown University Library, Chambers Dante Collection
Writing in vernacular Italian, medieval poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) invited readers to follow him on a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Those who made the trip returned with different impressions of the cosmos he depicted, illustrating the Comedy in ways that reveal as much about their cultural worlds as Dante’s ideas about the literary, scientific, and philosophical issues of his time.
In the early modern period the Comedy was read as a foundational text that embraced all areas of human knowledge. Indeed, a young Galileo Galilei in 1588 presented two academic lectures on the precise dimensions of Hell according to Dante’s description of the underworld in the Comedy. Using the most innovative methods in mathematics, physics, astronomy and scientific illustration, Galileo demonstrated how scientific inquiry and visualization techniques could be used to reveal not only the architecture of Dante’s poem, but the very fabric of the universe.
But Galileo wasn’t the last reader lured by Dante’s Comedy into a discussion of moon spots, infernal cartography, celestial bodies, natural philosophy, and the geometry of heaven and earth. Generations of publishers, artists, editors, commentators, translators and readers added their voices to the conversation. Drawing on the special collections of the John Hay Library, and in particular the Chambers Dante Collection, this exhibition reveals how their interpretations of the landmark poem changed over more than four centuries (1350–1900). By uncovering how geography, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and theology inspired the poem’s interpretation we can see how the Comedy also came to be considered a text of scientific authority in this period. More broadly, the show examines the Comedy’s reception in scientific culture and hopes to invite further dialogue about the role of poetry in the sciences.
Brown University Library Exhibition Credits
Curator: Zoe Langer, Graduate Curatorial Fellow
Exhibitions Curator: Tiffini Bowers
Graphic Design Production: Ben Tyler
Preparators: Marie Malchodi and Erica Saladino
Research Acknowledgements: Brown University Renaissance and Early Modern Studies; Brown University Italian Studies; William Monroe, Senior Scholarly Resources Librarian; Holly Snyder, American Historical Resources Curator; Ronald L. Martinez; Emilia Mickevicius; and Evelyn Lincoln