Exhibition Review: Non per foco ma per divin’arte | Dantean echoes from the Uffizi Galleries
Detail from Federico Zuccari, La Selva Oscura, Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe degli Uffizi
Joe Kenelm reviews an “online visit” from the Uffizi Galleries.
In 1950, the Italian government commissioned a new, illustrated edition of Dante’s Divina Commedia, to mark the 700th anniversary of the poet’s birth. They picked Salvador Dalí for the job. It was an odd choice, given the religious resonance of the work and the poet’s near-sacredness to Italy and its national culture. As a Catalonian, with a fraught (even blasphemous) relationship with Catholicism, the Libreria dello Stato Italiano’s commission was met with public outcry. The dispute was tabled in the Italian Parliament; facing a lawsuit from one representative, the government finally revoked Dalí’s contract. An exhibition of his illustrations planned to take place in Rome was cancelled.
Predictably, this did not deter Dalí. By this point, he was committed to the project and utterly absorbed in the Commedia. He offered the project to a French publisher, and continued to work on the illustrations. In his diaries, he describes the intoxicating effect of Dante’s poetry: “Gustave Doré conceived hell as a coal mine; I saw it under a Mediterranean sky, with an exacerbated horror”; Dante’s hell, he continues, “is illuminated by the sun and the honey of the Mediterranean”. For Dalí, this bright hell holds a sweet and appalling magnetism, inducing a kind of irreverent mania: “I wanted my illustrations for the Dante to be like the faint markings of moisture in a divine cheese. This explains their variegated aspect of butterflies’ wings. Mysticism is cheese; Christ is cheese, better still, mountains of cheese!”
By 1960, the Spaniard had produced over a hundred watercolours for the series. As a new online exhibition by the Uffizi Galleries shows, such sustained artistic engagement with Dante and the Divina Commedia is not exceptional to Dalí (if not made manifest quite so peculiarly). This “hypervision” is part of a raft of digital material issued by the Uffizi in the wake of the lockdown imposed in Italy. It also marks the first annual Dantedì, a national celebration legislated by the Italian government to coincide with the date of Dante’s entry into the afterlife in the poem, ahead of the 700th anniversary of the poet’s next year. Subtitled “Dantean echoes from the Uffizi Galleries”, the exhibition draws on digitised works from the gallery’s collection to explore the manifold ways the Divina Commedia has reverberated with artists since its composition, and the profound influence it has exerted on religious and political institutions through the years.
Early on, the exhibition shows Andrea del Castagno’s portrait of Dante, from the middle of the fifteenth century. Described by Bocaccio as “aquiline”, it is the poet’s long, hooked, and exceptionally delicate nose that is the triumph of Castagno’s portrait. At the exhibition tells us, the oldest surviving portrait of Dante is on a chapel wall in Florence’s Palazzo del Podestà. The poet wears deep red robes and holds the Commedia; to draw on Bocaccio again, his expression is “melancholy and thoughtful”. (Fittingly, for a space overlooked by Dante, the Chapel was where those condemned to death spent their last night, when the Podestà functioned as a courthouse.) The portrait was painted by Giotto, who places the poet amongst the blessed souls at the Last Judgement: an honour Dante would have recognised, having described Giotto’s contemporary distinction in the Purgatorio:
In painting, Cimabue thought he held the field,
And now it’s Giotto’s they acclaim,
The former only keeps a shadowed fame
(XI, 94-6)
Those lines emphasise the transience of earthly fame, but Dante’s own celebrity would not prove so fleeting. Castagno’s portrait is one of a series of frescoes which originally decorated a wealthy Florentine villa. Such pictorial cycles served two purposes, “inciting the exercising of virtue and celebrating the national glories”; as such, the poet’s iconography could exercise moral as well as political authority. As indicated by the design – both graphic, and political – of Dantedì, that is still true today. The government’s branding features a silhouette of Dante: the recognisable features are a red cloak, a crown of laurel leaves, and his aquiline nose.
Political entities have also drawn variously upon the iconography of the Commedia and sought to capitalise upon its intense cultural prestige. In a climate of profound revolutionary fervour following the European-wide 1848 revolutions and the (unsuccessful) First Italian War of Independence against the Austrian Empire, the Grand Duke of Tuscany Leopold II commissioned Enrico Pollastrini to paint a scene from the story of Pia dei Tolomei, derived from a tender moment in the Purgatorio. After Dante, artists expanded the story; as Bartolomeo Sestini wrote in 1822, her husband Nello, suspecting her unfaithfulness, imprisoned her in a castle in Maremma and eventually ordered her death.
Pollastrini’s painting is included in the exhibition. It depicts the moment Nello realises his mistake and rushes to the castle; he is too late, and finds Pia in her grave. Dressed in white robes, she looks serene. A trail of bindweed curves up from her feet, studding the misty landscape with pearls of white. The exhibition notes that Leopold wanted to draw attention to the lands he had gained in Maremma; but as a moderate with close ties to the occupying Austrians, it may also have been in his interests to show such a moment of feverish passion gone terribly awry – a pointed message, perhaps, to his revolutionary subjects. Nello’s eyes searingly inscribe his horror at what he has inflicted upon his own Lady who, part-buried in earth, begins to become the Italian land. Whatever Leopold’s intentions, they did not work. He was expelled from Florence in a bloodless coup in 1859. Tuscany became a part of the new Kingdom of Italy shortly afterwards.
But it is in the visual engagement with the Commedia that we begin to sense the true power of Dante’s work. The exhibition reproduces one of Federico Zuccari’s 88 illustrations of the poem, produced between 1576 and 1579. This panel captures several moments from the very opening of the Inferno. Dante, lost and afraid in a dark wood, sees an illuminated hill and heads for the top; his way is blocked by a leopard, and lion, and a she-wolf. Deterred, he descends, and is saved by the poet Virgil, who will guide him through hell and purgatory.
By presenting this sequence simultaneously on one panel, Zuccari suggests something of Dante’s rich canvas of feeling in those opening lines: the leopard, “lively, svelt and quick”, disturbs the narrator’s climb; but it is dawn, “the sun was mounting, and those springtime stars / that rose along with it”, and he sees hope in the creature and its “sparkling hide”. The lion, though, renews his unease, “in dread, the air around it trembled”, and the she-wolf in turn “so heavily oppressed my thought with fears … I lost all hope of reaching those heights.” It is an exquisite portrait of the currents of feeling in that “lake of his heart”; deftly marked by Zuccari.
Of course, it is Dante’s vision of hell that seems most to stimulate artists’ imaginations. Livio Mehus and Crescenzio Onofri depict Dante and Virgil the moment before they cross the river Acheron: hell opens out before the poets, a burning, billowing city across the boiling water soaks the outer-edges of the cave’s mouth with firelight, the cliffs’ twisted geology articulate monstrous faces. Filippo Napoletano, meanwhile, gathers the main demons of hell into one ghastly setting: Charon, Cerberus, the Harpies. Taking centre stage, however, is a monster of Napoletano’s own devising: a giant lobster, devouring a man’s head. You cannot help feeling that neither artist has brought off Dante’s vision. Indeed, given the Commedia’s supreme realisation, there is a risk to holding these pictures up next to it. In his “Defence of Poetry”, Shelley wrote of Dante’s poetry:
His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with the lightning which has yet found no conductor.
If not conducting the “lightning” of the verse, there is still much to be gained in uncovering the Commedia from the obscurity of its titanic stature (“His reputation will last because he is little read. Twenty pointed things in him are known by rote, which spare people the trouble of being acquainted with the remainder,” Voltaire wrote), and engaging with the “inextinguishable thought” of Dante’s poetic imagination. In such times, this exhibition is a fascinating way in which to do so.