Dante, Artist of Gesture

by Heather Webb

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192866998
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/29/2022
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Heather Webb, Professor of Medieval Italian Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge

Heather Webb is the Professor of Medieval Italian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2004 and taught at The Ohio State University for eight years before coming to Cambridge. She is the author of two monographs, The Medieval Heart (2010), and Dante's Persons: An Ethics of the Transhuman (2016) and has co-edited five books, including Vertical Readings in Dante's 'Comedy' in three volumes, and the forthcoming Dante's 'Vita nova': A Collaborative Reading.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Reading Bodies in Motion2. Dante as Visual Artist3. Fixity and Flexibility4. Modelling Gestural Virtues in Dante's Purgatorio5. Asymmetrical Affections6. Heavenly Proximities and ContagionsBibliography

Editorial Reviews

"Gestural Dante offers, in its focus on gestures, a strikingly original perspective on Dante's poem. Skillfully organized, clearly and gracefully written, the book examines in six chapters the gesturality of the Divine Comedy in the context of visual culture of the period. It uncovers networks of gestural signification in the poem that resonate throughout the three canticles and in a synergistic relation with the iconographic, artistic and literary traditions surrounding the poem, ranging from the mosaics of the baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, to fresco cycles by Giotto, to Botticelli's famous illustrations, as well as to Biblical and classical literary sources (especially Virgil), to lives of saints, to the influential Meditations on the Life of Christ. Gestural Dante will change the way we read and teach the poem." — Theodore J. Cachey Jr., Professor of Italian, Director of Graduate Studies in Italian

"Dante, Artist of Gesture, explores the place and significance of bodily movement and gesture in Dante's works, above all in his poetic masterpiece, the Comedy. Webb investigates how gestures and postures are described and made visible throughout Dante's great poem, and demonstrates their rich implications—social, ethical and political—for the reader. Dante, Artist of Gesture is a remarkable tour de force both in the way it proposes new methodologies and tools of study for reading the gestural and in the way it offers original and powerful close readings of Dante's texts ... Elegantly written, meticulously researched and rich in methodological innovations, the book will be both an essential point of reference in Dante Studies and an indispensable mine for future work on the body, gesture, posture and affectivity in Medieval Studies and other related fields." — Simon Gilson FBA, Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford

"In Dante, Artist of Gesture, Webb offers a visual methodology for reading the Commedia... Webb offers a useful interdisciplinary methodology for readers to interpret Dante's poetry as visual art. Highly recommended. Graduates students, researchers, faculty." — Choice

"Dante, Artist of Gesture is an invitation to explore the Comedy through a new perspective in which the reader takes an active role in Dante's journey through an affective response to the characters of the poem...Webb's book makes the kinetic sensitivity of the Middle Ages part of the contemporary experience of reading Dante's Comedy, unveiling a whole network of connections in the poem." — Rookshar Myram, PhD Candidate, University of Notre Dame, Annali d'Italianistica

From the Publisher