Dante, Artist of Gesture proposes a visual technique for reading
Dante's Comedy, suggesting that the reader engages with Dante's
striking images of souls as if these images were arranged in an
architectural space. Art historians have shown how series of discrete
images or scenes in medieval places of worship, such as the mosaics in
the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence or the frescoes in the
Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, establish not only narrative sequences but
also parallelisms between registers, forging links between those
registers by the use of colour and gestural forms. Heather Webb takes
up those techniques to show that the Comedy likewise invites the
reader to make visual links between disparate, non-sequential moments
in the text. In other words, Webb argues that Dante's poem asks
readers to view its verbally articulated sequences of images with a
set of observational tools that could be acquired from the practice of
engaging with and meditating on the bodily depictions of vice and
virtue in fresco cycles or programmes of mosaics in places of worship.
One of the most inherently visible aspects of the Comedy is the
representation of signature gestures of the characters described in
each of the realms. This book traces described gestures and bodily
signs across the canticles of the poem to provide a key for
identifying affective and devotional itineraries within the text.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780192692627
Publisert
2022
Utgiver
Vendor
OUP Oxford
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter