Textual images - painted images. Intermediality according to Dante: the case of "Inferno XVII"

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy does not only illustrate the afterlife as a world theatre. In the course of its reception, this long narrative poem has also become an extraordinary media event. The ‘verbal images’ and the particularly imaginative visions designed by the Italian poet have resulted in a kind of iconic commentary on the Divine Comedy from the 14th century to the present. On the one hand, these examples of a highly intermedial reception of Dante’s poem refer to the original text, but on the other hand they transpose rather freely the poem into the visual medium, which leads further and further away from the ‘sensus spiritualis’ of the Divine Comedy. The paper traces this long tradition on the basis of representative examples, such as John Flaxman’s as well as Pitt Koch’s illustrations or Salvador Dalí’s watercolours commenting on the Divine Comedy, Inferno XVII.