Word and Image in Alfonso d'Aragona's Manuscript Edition of the Divina Commedia

In his introduction, Marco Lettieri, assistant professor of Italian, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, emphasizes that most of the previous illuminated manuscript scholarship of Dante's Divine Comedy involves authorship of the illustrations and the historical background of the creation of the manuscript. While very valuable, these studies fail to explain the interaction of the words and images on the reader/viewer. Since 1941, the original document (MS Yates Thompson 36) has been located in the British Library in London. The fact that it was written on parchment and not paper, as well as its size (36.5 cm by 25.8 cm), testify to its consequential significance. The manuscript was commissioned by Alfonso V of Aragon (1396–1458), who employed, between 1442 and 1450, Priamo della Quercia, to illustrate the Inferno and the Purgatorio, and, in 1450, Giovanni di Paolo to provide artwork for the Paradiso.The first chapter considers the phrase visibile parlare found in canto 10 of the Purgatorio (17), which offers an overview of the distinctive word-image interaction of illuminated manuscripts. In chapter 3, Lettieri notes two possible interpretations of the conception of an illuminated manuscript: “1) an image is able to reveal more than words; 2) words provide a more powerful impact than images” (67). Lettieri, however, offers a third possibility: “[T]he consensus of words and images elevates a work of art to a whole new level. This consensus can clearly be found within the pages of the illuminated manuscript: the words of a poet, enhanced by the lines, colours, and contours employed by an artist” (67).Two works constitute the theoretical foundation for Lettieri's monograph. The first is Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism with Other Essays, which forms a metaphysical account of art and beauty together with the artist's traits and objectives. The second is Umberto Eco's The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, which considers the nature of art, albeit with interpretational differences. Both scholars provide insights into Dante's notion of visibile parlare. Throughout the remainder of this study, Lettieri offers incisive and perceptive responses to the following research questions (15): (1) What does one learn from a manuscript composed of both words and images?; (2) Will more information be revealed from a manuscript that is made up of words and images as opposed to a manuscript composed of only words?; and (3) Is it possible to infer as much information from images as from words in an illuminated manuscript? Lettieri correctly asserts that “visibile parlare, with its emphasis on the illocutionary power of visual images, produces a reading experience in which visual language surpasses or parallels the written and spoken word” (19). Because Dante wrote in the volgare, he sought to have the widest audience possible for his work. Lettieri hastens to point out that an illuminated manuscript made the document available to illiterate individuals with no linguistic training (32). Lettieri offers a persuasive argument for the value of a word/image document that appeals to the senses of audition and vision because it constitutes multiple artistic meanings when he maintains that “[t]he poetry of Dante in the illuminated manuscript is not only limited to the sense of hearing; the sense of sight is also ignited, immersing the reader in an aesthetic experience” (33). The author argues that words and images are not separate entities but are interactively interdependent on each other (29).Chapters 2–4 examine the three cantiche of the illuminated manuscript of the Divina Commedia: The Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso. Lettieri states that his study will only consider selected illuminations of the 112 total to make his case about their significance (35). His selection criteria are: (1) extensive commentary available for the passage, (2) the amount of detail in the image, and (3) the historical literary significance that the canto possesses (35). Thus, Lettieri reproduces twenty-seven images, of which twenty-two are unique, while five are cropped images (7, 12, 10, 26, and 27) that allow him to focus in greater detail on specific components of these miniatures for further explanation and interpretation. In these three chapters, the reader quickly discerns that Lettieri has a complete command of the extant literary and art historical criticism and the appropriate precise critical vocabulary as well as the interpretive ability to explicate the interactive significance of word and image in the illuminated manuscript. Throughout the entire study, the author discusses the artistic features of the miniatures, including color, tone, composition, texture, mood and atmosphere, form and shape, lighting, viewpoint and pose, subject matter, style, and size.In this work, Lettieri comments on the fidelity of the miniatures to Dante's text. He notes, however, some instances of pictorial deviation from the original text. It must be remembered that Dante completed the Divina Commedia around 1321, during the medieval period, when religion played a significant role, while della Quercia and di Paolo produced their miniatures between 1442 and 1450, or 129 years after Dante's death during the more secular period of the Renaissance. As a result, some miniatures deviate from the original text. Two selected examples suffice. In the Purgatorio (figure 11, canto 18, 69) acedia (sloth) was a serious sin, whereas during the Renaissance, it was considered an illness, which della Quercia depicts through his visual portrayal of two slothful sinners. Di Paolo likewise deviates from Dante's text when he (105–108) excludes a textual reference to Saint Bernard, and, instead, includes Beatrice, which demonstrates that his role is “no longer limited to that of a visual commentator, but becomes that of an artist, a creator, and a visual poet” (116).The Divina Commedia is a literary masterpiece because its layered text provides insight into the social, political, moral, and religious circumstances of the time, which Dante knew and experienced. Lettieri's critical analytical account of Dante's illuminated text provides the reader with a novel multifaceted grasp of the interaction of word and image in this work. This monograph constitutes essential reading for its nuanced examination of the Divina Commedia and the important relationship between word and image in this illuminated text. This book is a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation directed by Domenico Pietropaolo. The high-quality paper used by Società Editrice Fiorentina results in a clear reproduction of each miniature

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