The Poetry of Science: Dante’s Comedy and the Crafting of a Cosmos

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How do maps allow us to access, interpret and understand Hell? Or, as one sixteenth-century author put it, to “see Hell before our eyes?”

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Florentine mathematician Antonio Manetti is considered the first person to have measured Hell. His calculations were illustrated in a volume published by the Giunti family of printers of Florence in seven woodcuts, the first maps of Dante’s Inferno in print (1, 2). These maps inspired a visual tradition upheld by the poem’s modern editions.

Starting with the Comedy’s first illustrated printed edition in 1481 (3), artists, editors and publishers employed different printing techniques and styles to illuminate Dante’s Inferno. Maps helped readers more easily grasp the complex moral, philosophical and geographical structure of Dante’s poem, while reflecting the richly cartographic nature of his writing. The poet’s own detailed descriptions of cities, countries, mountains, monuments and bodies of water oriented readers to Hell’s topography. Dante also assigned precise mathematical dimensions to the lowest circles of Hell, sparking a debate among Italy’s most illustrious thinkers about the underworld’s geography.

Through the circulation of atlases, travelogues, chronicles and globes, sixteenth-century readers could experience worlds both real and imagined. A field of renewed interest in the early fifteenth century, cartography offered another way to situate literary landscapes in the natural world. Indeed, as the author of the 1506 edition argues, readers should consult maps and seafaring charts to accurately navigate the poem’s geography. Comparing maps in editions of Dante (4, 5) and Petrarch (6) to contemporary maps in print (7) reveals how the Comedy might have been interpreted through cartography and speaks to the dialogue between geography and literature in the 16th century. Maps also illuminate how cartographical interpretations of the poem began to shore up Dante’s authority in scientific culture.