Amilcare Iannucci, whose death in 2007 robbed us of a creative and prolific scholar devoted to the study of Dante’s reception, often emphasized the “producerly influence” of Dante’s literary art, especially his Divine Comedy, in his extensive scholarship on the subject. In the introduction to Dante: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), which he edited, Iannucci explains: “The Commedia produced not only a philological response [i.e., commentaries and scholarly interpretive works] . . . but also a creative response. It inspired the production of other objects, independent of its structure, in both the artistic and literary spheres” (ix). Iannucci explores this quality of Dante’s art in introductory essays in volumes on Dante’s reception that he edited: Dante Today, a special issue of Quaderni d’Italianistica (vol. X, 1989); Dante: Contemporary Perspectives; and Dante, Cinema & Television (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

The excellent volume under review here, Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts, continues in the vein of studies on Dante’s reception that Iannucci pioneered and championed. Iannucci himself contributed an essay to Dante on View, on cinematic adaptations of the famous episode of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno 5, the first sinners in hell with whom Dante the pilgrim has an extended encounter. Iannucci’s characteristically broad reach takes us from nineteenth-century theater, which “saw the production in Europe alone of some 60 plays on the Francesca theme” (153), to early responses to the story in silent film, including D.W. Griffith’s The Drums of Love (1928), as well as in Preston Sturges’s masterful Unfaithfully Yours (1948), Francesca è mia featuring Monica Vitti (1986), and others. Producerly, indeed.

Dante on View examines Dante’s reception under three broad categories: performance, visual arts, and cinema and multimedia. The book opens with an introduction by co-editors Antonella Braida and Luisa Calè that situates the study within a sequence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual trends, moving from Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur to Auerbach’s philology of world literature and its impact on Warburg, Curtius, Panofsky, and their school, to the eclectic mix of comparative approaches that underlie this volume. Twelve essays on different aspects of Dante’s reception form the bulk of the collection. The essays speak to one another, sometimes directly, so that reading through them one has the sense of a coherent collection. Braida and Calè announce the book’s subject at its start: “Readings, adaptations and re-creations of Dante in and through other media are the subject of this book” (1). While there is much material throughout the volume on Dante and the visual arts, the greatest concentration is found in the middle section, “Dante in the Visual Arts,” which consists of the following four essays.

In “The Image of Dante, Poet and Pilgrim,” Rachel Owens “traces the earliest representations of Dante up until the time when his physiognomy was crystallised in the image we have learned to associate with the poet” (83). To establish this genealogy of portraiture requires examining all the early extant manuscripts of the Commedia that contain some form of illumination. Of the approximately five hundred manuscripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that do, one hundred and thirty contain historiated miniatures of some sort, and an additional sixty contain illuminated narratives based on the text of Dante’s poem. These illustrated copies, one of which, MS 1080 of the Biblioteca Trivulziana in Milan, can be dated as early as 1337, constitute the body of material that Owen examines. The arc of time she considers covers approximately one-and-a-half centuries up to Botticelli’s drawings of the Commedia from the 1480s and 1490s. In Botticelli’s work one observes the codification of a “realistic, recognisable and definite portrait of the poet” (84). Up to that point his image is very much in flux. Dante can have a big jaw or not, be clean-shaven or sport a beard, be expressionless or animated; he can even have the familiar aquiline nose or not. Why this variety? “It may be that the illustrators resisted realistic portraits in the Commedia for so long . . . because the Everyman concerned them more than an image of the illustrious poet” (87). That is, the illustrations allude to the interpretations of the poem that emphasize its allegory, with the protagonist’s journey standing for the journey everyone makes through life. Owen points out many fascinating iconographic details along the way. Illustrators reveal a degree of sophistication in understanding the complicated autobiographical link between Dante as poet (the author of the poem) and as pilgrim (protagonist in the poem’s narrative). In some instances illustrators portray Dante as an author at his desk or with book in hand; in others they portray Dante sleeping like a prophet on the verge of a vision. Most of the time they portray him as he moves from one circle to the next. Owen proposes that Nardo di Cione’s image of Dante in his Paradise in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, completed between 1354 and 1357, is the likely model for later representations in fifteenth-century Florentine manuscripts. One of those in particular, from MS 1040, Biblioteca Riccardiana, becomes the model for Andrea del Castagno’s Dante (ca. 1450), which is in turn the model for Domenico di Michelino’s fresco of Dante (1465). And on to Botticelli. The representations by Raphael, Bronzino, and Vasari, among others in the Cinquecento, confirm that Dante the Everyman was superseded by Dante the famous poet.

In “Francesca Observed: Painting and Illustration, c. 1790–1840,” Nick Havely explores the importance of the scene of Paolo and Francesca in the reception of Dante in European Romantic visual arts. From 1776 to 1855, Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman, William Blake, and Ary Scheffer repeatedly depict the encounter between Dante and the two sinners, often with a more or less predictable iconography, that of the pilgrim standing before the wind-swept sinners who hover above while Francesca recounts their tragic tale. But what interests Havely more are those representations inspired by Boccaccio’s fanciful development of the episode in his commentary, with its description of the discovery of the lovers and their murder by Paolo’s brother, Gianciotto. That is, in the examples of illustrations that emphasize the theatrical melodrama, one can read between the lines, as it were, of Dante’s original text. In 1792, Flaxman executed two drawings (engraved by Piroli) that feature Paolo’s brother observing them as they kiss while reading the text of the adulterous love—the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere—that leads them astray. Fuseli also includes the figure of Gianciotto in several versions of the episode from Inferno 5, an oil painting from 1787 and a pencil-and-watercolor version from 1808. Ingres produced no less than seven paintings and eleven drawings of the episode, including a dramatic version first shown in the Paris Salon of 1819 that shows Gianciotto drawing his sword behind the couple as he prepares to kill them. Delacroix produced a watercolor, Paolo and Francesca (1824–25), with Gianciotto leering from the side. William Dyce is the concluding artist in Havely’s survey of this figuring of Paolo and Francesca in Romantic art. In 1837 Dyce produced an oil painting of the lovers on a balcony overlooking a pre-Raphaelesque landscape with, originally, the figure of Gianciotto to their left preparing to attack. The version that we now have in the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, however, only has an ominous pair of fingers clutching the parapet to the left of the couple. The painting was damaged in the nineteenth century, and when Sir Joseph Noel Paton restored it sometime after 1882 he chose to leave the smallest visual reminder of the earlier tradition of “Francesca observed.” Havely’s essay considers the case of how a literary text produces, to use Iannucci’s term again, visual art, and his analysis is a fine example of how a critic can move deftly between those two realms of artistic production.

In “Dante and the Pre-Raphaelites: British and Italian Responses,” Giuliana Pieri examines the intense interest Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian painters had in Dante, which in turn inspired their counterparts in Italy in the late nineteenth century. Much of her focus is on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s idiosyncratic response to Dante. Rossetti translated Dante’s youthful collection of love poems and commentary La vita nuova in 1848. Intending to produce an illustrated edition of his translation (which he never completed), he began to draw and paint numerous scenes from that work, often presenting them to his associates in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt. For John Ruskin he painted Paolo and Francesca da Rimini (1855), one of only four paintings connected with Dante’s epic poem. Most of his energy went toward illustrating the life of the youthful Dante, which was so effective that it brought about a shift in the perception of the Italian poet. From Thomas Carlyle’s view of the poet as hero, Rossetti influences a growing appreciation of the poet as lover, according to Martin McLaughlin (113). The final section of Pieri’s essay considers the influence of Rossetti and other British peers on Italian artists of the second half of the nineteenth century. In the introduction to his translation of Rossetti’s poem, “Last Confession,” printed in 1878, Luigi Gamberale introduced Rossetti’s art, literary and visual, to the general Italian public. In the 1880s and 1890s interest in the Pre-Raphaelites grew, culminating in the First International Exhibition in Venice in 1895, which brought together works by the Pre-Raphaelite painters to much acclaim. The English painters’ focus on Dante inspired their Italian counterparts at a moment in Italian cultural history when the figure of Dante had accrued significant political value as a symbol around whom the new country could unify. To this end, Vittorio Alinari sponsored a nationwide contest inviting artists to submit works for a new illustrated edition of the Commedia, which was published in 1902–3. Many of the contributions to the Alinari volume reveal the influence of Rossetti and company. Pieri claims that in the Alinari project, which was hardly uncontroversial, “Italian artists saw Dante less as a political and ethical figure, and more as a creative force and a vehicle for their interpretation and understanding of the Modern Movement in the arts” (122).

In the final essay of the book’s visual arts cluster, “From Hell to Paradise or the Other Way Round? Salvador Dalí’s Divina Commedia,” Ilaria Schiaffini first establishes the complicated micro-history behind the initial publication of Dalí’s illustrations before carefully analyzing them. Originally commissioned by the Italian Secretary for Education to coincide with the celebration of the centenary of Dante’s birth in 1965, Dalí accused the Italian government of reneging on its commitment during a political crisis. In 1963 he offered the works to a French publisher, Forêt, who published 150 copies and then sold the rights to another house, Les Heures Claires, which produced a substantial run of additional copies. Finally in 1964, an Italian publisher, Salani, issued a new edition of the poem accompanied by Dalí’s art. The process took approximately fourteen years and “the changes in commission, publisher and techniques of illustration” (143) account for some of the differences among the versions. In her analysis of Dalí’s work, Schiaffini makes a case for each image as a translation—most of the time very free but in some cases surprisingly literal—conducted within a Freudian framework.

The first section of the volume contains five essays on “Dante in Performance.” The cluster opens with a piece by the late Peter Armour, to whose memory the volume is dedicated, on the element of performance in Dante’s Commedia itself. Richard Cooper treats the political context in which Dante was put on stage in the nineteenth century, especially in Italy. Antonella Braida looks at the shift from the politics of staging Dante to the first wave of cinematic versions of the Commedia, often an equally charged ideological move. Jane E. Everson digs deeply into the archives to uncover extraordinary information on the allusive art of Frederick Ashton’s wartime ballet, Dante Sonata (1940), dependent on, among other artists, Flaxman and Gustave Doré. Maria Ann Roglieri examines contemporary musical responses from the late twentieth and twenty-first century to Dante’s Paradiso.

The volume’s third section, “Dante in the Cinema and Multimedia,” contains three pieces, beginning with Iannucci’s essay. Christopher Wagstaff looks at various cinematic adaptations of the Commedia in the twentieth century and considers what possible light that specific history of reception might have on our understanding of cinema in general. Luisa Calè does justice to the fascinating A TV Dante (1989) by Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway in her detailed reading. Alex Cooper closes the book with an unexpected “coda”—a short piece on postcards inspired by Dante.