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Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

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GAU Dante, 2021

May 12, 2022 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

Dante-Inferno-30-31-Street-Art-by-Korvo-for-GAU“GAU-Gallerie d’arte Urbana è un progetto che ha come obiettivo quello di importare un modello di risanamento urbano che riesca, a ispirare bellezza e funzionalità, attraverso la street art, applicata ad un oggetto di uso quotidiano come le campane della raccolta differenziata del vetro. Il progetto ha come obiettivo principale quello di creare un galleria d’arte urbana gratuita, fruibile in ogni momento dal cittadino, per ribadire il concetto dell’arte come bene comune, incentivando l’attenzione sulle tematiche di differenziazione dei rifiuti.

“Per la sua quinta edizione, GAU sceglie di omaggiare Dante Alighieri nel settimo centenario della sua morte. Gli artisti lavoreranno sui 34 canti dell’Inferno, attualizzandoli attraverso la peculiarità del proprio linguaggio artistico, reinterpretando simboli, luoghi e personaggi della Divina Commedia in chiave contemporanea.

“Moby Dick – Giusy Guerriero – Dez – Marta Quercioli – Zara Kiafar – Tito – Violetta Carpino – Kiddo – DesX – Yest – Er Pinto – Olives – Lola Poleggi – Kenji – BloodPurple – Orgh – Lady Nina – Teddy Killer – Valerio Paolucci – Wuarky – Karma Factory  – Muges147 – Maudit – Hoek – Alessandra Carloni – Cipstrega – Molecole – Korvo – Alekos Reize – Gojo.”   —Gallerie d’Arte Urbana

See a gallery of all 34 decorated recycling bins, one for each canto of the Inferno, on the GAU website. You can also download the magazine on the site, which includes a map where visitors to Rome can locate each bin.

The image above features Korvo’s design for cantos 30-31. Photo credit Valentino Bonacquisti.

Categories: Image Mosaic, Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: 2021, Dante Portraits, Face of Dante, Inferno, Italy, Paintings, Recycling, Rome, Street Art, Urban Art

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.

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2021, Art History, Dantists, Empyrean, God, Heaven, Illumination, Light, Paintings, Paradiso, Renaissance

Paolo & Francesca paintings by Derek Overfield (2020)

November 25, 2021 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

paolo-and-francesca-overfield

“Immortalized by Dante’s Inferno and Rodin’s, The Kiss, the historical couple of Paolo and Francesca have moved audiences for over 700 years. The young couple fell in love while reading the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, but their affair was cut short in tragedy. This collection contains 3 paintings, the first of the couple embracing. The second and third capture a moment – perhaps before their embrace, perhaps following their discovery. Twelve preparatory drawings in charcoal also accompany the painting of the embracing couple.”     –from the portfolio of Derek Overfield

For more information about Derek Overfield and their work, view their portfolio here.

Categories: Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: American Art, American Painting, Fairmont, Inferno, Inferno 5, Paintings, Paolo and Francesca, United States, Visual Arts, West Virginia

Beatrice by William Dyce

June 11, 2021 By Ezra Berman '23

“This painting was commissioned by [Dyce’s] friend, the Victorian prime minister WE Gladstone, a great Dante enthusiast. The model for Dante’s heroine was – at Gladstone’s request – Marian Summerhayes, an artist’s model and former prostitute “rescued” by the Liberal politician. It is possible that Dyce also used some photographic studies of the sitter to work from, which could explain the pensive stillness of his Beatrice, who is painted in three-quarter view and has a sculptured quality about it.

‘Dyce’s Beatrice sits serenely, her downcast eyes concentrating on something we cannot see within the picture space, thus elevating herself from this present to another time and place.” [. . .]    –Griffin Coe, The Guardian, May 3, 2021

This entry is part of the Guardian’s Great British Art Tour 2021

Categories: Visual Art & Architecture, Written Word
Tagged with: 2021, Art, Beatrice, London, Muses, Paintings, Paradiso, Purgatorio, United Kingdom, Visual Art

Emma Safe’s “Between Three Worlds”

April 1, 2021 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

emma-safe-betwee-three-worlds-paradiso-1-2014-trasumanar-head-first

“Taking influence from personal experience, classical mythology and Dante’s Commedia, concentrating particularly on existential and ontological themes, the works collected as Between Three Worlds explore human potential and human transience. Space and time is radically questioned. Figures are pulled between states of being; through sublime ascent, catastrophic destruction and the uneasy predicaments in-between. Avoiding idealism and with no certain answers, these works attempt to question different types of love, different states of being, examining the edges of existence and beyond.” [. . .]    –Emma Safe, Between Three Worlds.

Categories: Image Mosaic, Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: 2014, Drawings, England, Illustrations, Paintings, Paradiso, Purgatorio

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How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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