Light Archives - Dante Today

Maurice Pefura, The Silent Way (2013)

April 21, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“The spectator is invited to enter, to move through this bright, white virginal structure and to slowly discover that on the surface of the sheets, printed in white on white, there are lines taken from the Cantos that make up Dante’s Paradiso. The ensemble of the elements is illuminated by a soft, pure light that serves as a guide: the transformation that the artist wishes to bring about does not focus on the path followed by Dante, but rather on the perennial and memorable presence of Beatrice, who according to the artist embodies the very sense of Dante’s Paradiso. The installation thus becomes a path on which the onlooker is enshrouded in words and light. A place where—just like in the Comedy itself—it is still possible to enter and be illuminated by the candour and potency of the very essence of love.”

From The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists by Simon Njami.

See also the images in Griot magazine, which describes the piece as it was presented in Njami’s I is An Other / Be the Other exhibit at the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GNAM) in Rome: “Maurice Prefura’s The Silent Way stages La Divina Commedia, a sort of labyrinth made of white floating empty pages that form its walls and hold visitors prisoners. Crossing this labyrinth, however, one realizes that there are visible inscriptions on the pages which can only be seen from certain angles, ‘as if in a rite of initiation.’ Once out of the labyrinth, one meets Beatrice.” –Johanne Affricot, “Contemporary Art and Africa in Rome,” Griot (March 20, 2018)

Commedia-Inspired Renaissance Paintings?

January 6, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

renaissance-painted-ceiling-angels-circling-a-light-art-name-the-triumph-of-the-name-of-jesus-by-giocanni-battista

This review was written in reference to Martin Kemp’s examinations of John Took’s Dante. For more analysis, read the full article here.

“Kemp’s idea is to set up a paragone, comparing, on the one hand, Dante’s scientific and metaphorical/theological understanding of light and sight in the Divine Comedy (1308–21), especially in Paradiso, to, on the other, renderings of divine light in Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting. He opens with a scholarly survey of late medieval natural science accounts of optics and of light (noting in particular the widely accepted theories of the late 10th-/early 11th-century mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, known as Alhazan), before laying out what he understands of Dante’s knowledge of, and interest in, this topic, which he terms the poet’s ‘dazzle’—the failure of sight when confronted with the splendore (blinding light) of Empyrean Heaven.

[. . .] “Kemp makes periodic disclaimers throughout the book that it is impossible to cite documented or obvious connections between Dante’s light and works of art (except for illuminated or illustrated editions of the Commedia) but, to avoid cutting the ground from under his own feet, he makes a Roger-Fry swerve: the viewer will need a special sensitivity to see the ‘Dantesque’ as Kemp does. ‘The more general and less discernible diaspora [of Dante’s divine light] is something that can be sensed as a common factor as we pass from one scheme of decoration to another. This is not a matter of firm historical demonstration so much as the deployment of visual and poetic instinct.’ Kemp is insistent, pounding away with Maslow’s hammer throughout, that it is Dante’s divine light that appears in all the works he cites. It must be said that, in the paragone he proposes, it is not a question of attributable sources that is the problem; it is the category failure of comparing poetry with painting, apples with pears. Ultimately, Dante himself says that the only possible answer to ‘Who does divine light best?’ has to be God Himself, lux eterna.” –Donald Lee, The Art Newspaper, July 2, 2021

See our posts on John Took here and Martin Kemp here.

The Mathematics of The Divine Comedy

November 19, 2021 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“As God’s Creation, we experience a physical realm of differentiated entities and perceive multiplicity in our material reality. The character of Beatrice utilizes this fact in Paradiso 2 when she proposes the mirror experiment. The experiment combines mathematical, geometrical, and optical/physical principles to demonstrate spiritual truths. This experiment, especially its utilization of reflection, plants a seed in Dante, prodding him on his journey to the Divine: ‘Nature offers to the symbolic poet clearly denotable objects in-depth and in the round, which yield the analogies to the higher senses.’ [19] In the Primo Mobile, Dante the poet utilizes these same principles as he approaches the dimensionless punto of the Divine, the source and ground of all being.”[. . .] –Matthew Canonico, University of Notre Dame: Church Life Journal, April 28, 2021

Read the full analysis here.

Martin Kemp, Visions of Heaven: Dante and the Art of Divine Light (2021)

October 23, 2021 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

“In Visions of Heaven, renowned scholar Martin Kemp investigates Dante’s supreme vision of divine light and its implications for the visual artists who were the inheritors of Dante’s vision. The whole book may be regarded as a new Paragone (comparison), the debate that began in the Renaissance about which of the arts is superior. Dante’s ravishing accounts of divine light set painters the severest challenge, which took them centuries to meet. A major theme running through Dante’s Divine Comedy, particularly in its third book, the Paradiso, centres on Dante s acts of seeing (conducted according to optical rules with respect to the kind of visual experience that can be accomplished on earth) and the overwhelming of Dante s earthly senses by heavenly light, which does not obey his rules of earthly optics. [. . .] Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, this hugely original book combines a close reading of Dante’s poetry with analysis of early optics and the art of the Renaissance and Baroque to create a fascinating, wide-ranging and visually exciting study.” — Amazon (retrieved October 18, 2021)

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