Imagining Dante’s Comedy Today: Using Art and Digital Technology to Re-envisage a Literary Masterpiece

This event is co-hosted by the Department of French, Francophone, and Italian Studies at the University of Kansas.

Seven centuries after his death, Dante continues to attract global acclaim for composing The Divine Comedy, an Italian epic poem about a man’s journey from hell through purgatory to heaven. Analyses of the story’s vivid visual components have tended to focus on the artwork it inspired, while neglecting what its early readers would have envisioned. Simone Marchesi, Associate Professor of French and Italian at Princeton University, is co-leading a digital project that will evoke the kinds of visual response Dante’s poem might have invited his readers to deploy. Dr. Marchesi’s talk will discuss the advantages of considering not only visual ‘reactions’ to Dante’s poem, but also the horizon of visual expectations that Dante shared with his early readership, a cultural background of iconographic types and motifs against which he intended his poem to be read.

Simone Marchesi, "Imagining Dante’s Comedy Today"