The Divine Comedy is one of the most famous and timeless narrative poems, being still translated into several languages and inspiring movie adaptations (from Pasolini to Greenaway), pop and rock ...music, advertisement videogames and graphic novels.The transformations the text has gone through throughout the years reveal several different interpretations of Dante’s work and of its meaning. This essay aims at tracing a history of Dante-based graphic novels in the Anglo-American tradition. Particular attention is devoted to Birk and Sanders’ Dante’s Inferno (2004) and to Seymour Chwast’s graphic novel, Dante’s Divine Comedy (2010), which is the only ‘translation’ into a poster design style. This paper also examines how the Divine Comedy changes migrating from its original context to the contexts that characterized the different adaptations and remediations, and from its original poem form to new genres. It argues that the graphic novel is the genre better able to give to a contemporary reader a new Dante’s Divine Comedy keeping intact the delicate balance between words and imagines (the long history of the Divine Comedy’s illustration testifies it: from Botticelli to Joshua Reynolds, from Gustave Doré, to William Blake until Guttuso, see Battaglia Ricci 2018). Between losses and compensations, the graphic novel establishes a dialogue with its reader on several levels, depending on the expertise of source work and stimulating the reading (or the re-reading) of the classic; in this way they could be considered a strategy of survival of the classic.
My paper focuses on Valentine Giamatti’s collection of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy editions at Mount Holyoke College. The son of Italian immigrants, Giamatti (1911-1982) followed a path that was ...unusual in the Italian-American community at that time, graduating both from Yale (B.A.) and Harvard (Ph.D.). He joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke in 1940, at a very delicate moment in the USA-Italian political relations. Giamatti’s collection of Dante editions originated from a wedding gift. Over the years it grew to include over two hundred volumes in many languages. It contains rare editions (including the first Florentine edition of the Commedia with drawings after Botticelli, and the first edition with the adjective ‘Divina’ in print) and curious ones (such as L’Inferno di Topolino). Seven centuries after Dante’s death, the Giamatti collection is the perfect gateway for a reflection on his collecting style and on the immense relevance of Dante’s poem in American culture.
Dante’s Comedy is famous, or should we say notorious, for being ‘difficult’, so thoroughly medieval as to be irrelevant for current readers. Most of this is a misapprehension based on the first ...canticle, Inferno, which few have actually read. Purgatorio and Paradiso are almost never mentioned. With The Great Divorce CS Lewis has taken the Divine Comedy and reworked it, yet still retaining the gravitas and much of the colour. This is a deceptively simple, easy to read work, but it carries a significant punch if carefully studied. For Lewis, the common human sin is not exciting – say, murder or hatred - but ‘accidia’; hell is a featureless grey expanse, and heaven is not easily gained, though we are all invited. All of this is modelled on the Comedy: as in the Comedy, what is easy is not what is valuable, and the struggle of a soul to rise above itself (and the many more who do not even try) is a memorable re-positioning of Dante’s great fable. In the Great Divorce CS Lewis is a master story-teller: we underestimate him at our peril.
This paper deals with the issue of communication and dissemination of scientific knowledge outside the circle of specialists. In particular, in the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the death of ...Dante Alighieri, we will focus on the program for the popularization of knowledge outlined by Dante in the Convivio and De Vulgari Eloquentia, as well as several examples taken from his Divine Comedy concerning mathematical and natural sciences. Some solutions for communicating science proposed by Dante, such as the explanations of principles and scientific methods within a narrative framework (now often called the storytelling method), in addition to dialogues between characters, anticipate methods for science communication used by several authors after him. Examples are provided to show the depth of Dante’s knowledge concerning the basic concepts and methods of mathematics, physics and natural sciences (such as chemistry, meteorology, astronomy etc.). In addition, the examples demonstrate how effectively Dante used analogies and metaphors taken from sciences within his poetry.
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