Maria Maślanka-Soro

In this article I analyse and interpret three passages from Dante’s Paradise containing more or less explicit allusions to the myth of the Argonauts, which Dante knew from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. All three are intertextual and occur at key points in the Canticle of Light, performing a meta-poetic function. They pertain to the essence and objectives of Dante’s poetry and its pioneering character, both in terms of subject-matter and means of expression, particularly for the depiction of the visions of Paradise. Dante makes use of the metaphor of sailing the seas, which had been a topos of literary creativity since ancient times, and compares his own poetic exploit (The Divine Comedy) with the quest for the Golden Fleece conducted by Jason. Yet at the same time Dante distances his own work from the feat accomplished by the captain of the Argonauts.

In this study, Maria Maślanka-Soro discusses the problem of meta-poetic themes in the Divine Comedy, focusing in particular on Dante’s message about his own work in connection with the topos of Deus Artifex popular in the Middle Ages. The aim is to read this message, referring to the relationship between word and image, in the context of the impression caused by the sight of rock reliefs on the terrace of the proud in the Purgatorio, where the poet, presenting and imitating the art of God, in fact shows the mastery of his own art. In other words, Dante suggests an analogy between the reliefs carved with the “hand” of God, which are vibrant with life and meaningfully called visibile parlare (“visible speech”), and the earthly and extra-terrestrial reality presented in the Divine Comedywith equally great power of expression. The relationship between God’s art and Dante’s art is presented as part of a more general reflection on the analogy that exists between nature, which is the expression of divine art, and the artistic creation of man. This analogy is based on a similar modus operandi, that is giving the matter a proper form, both by nature, which imitates the creative power of the Prime Mover, and by the artist. The issues outlined above are analysed in here on the basis of relevant fragments of Dante’s poem, especially songs X and XII of Purgatorio and some fragments of Paradiso, where the role of Deus Artifex seems to be particularly emphasised. It should be noted that while there are various analyses of songs X and XII of Purgatorio, none of them stops at the meta-poetic function of bas-reliefs on the terrace of the proud. 

The paper begins with a brief reminder of the Deus Artifex topos in mediaeval culture and especially in the Divine Comedy, where this metaphor is enriched with an element of God’s love for his own work. Then, the different shades of meaning of the concept of arte in the Divine Comedy and the hierarchical relationship between God, nature, and art are briefly discussed. Next, the considerations focus on the concept of arte limited to artistic creativity sensu stricto, which takes place on the terrace of the proud. There, penitents contemplate the examples of humility and pride carved on the walls and on the rock path, which are the perfect work of God-the Artist, a work of miniature size when compared to its macroscopic version, which is the Universe created by him. Further analysis leads to the conclusion that the extremely suggestive depiction of the scenes on reliefs, vibrant with life and involving almost all the senses of the viewer, acquires a meta-poetic character in relation to the analogically “living” and “real” episodes presented by Dante in his great poem. The poet implicitly expresses the view that in the works of every great artist, that is, in his understanding, an artist who derives heavenly inspiration, the distance between art and life is blurred.    

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of certain episodes and motifs of Dante’s Purgatory which were partly inspired by the idea of the Otherworld and the category of space in the Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid. In particular we examine the episode which takes place in the Valley of the Rulers (Pg. VII) and the concept of Dante’s Earthly Paradise to confront them with the idea of Virgilian Elysium. The intertextual dialogue of the Italian poet with the author of the Aeneid is sometimes polemical and based on aemulatio rather than on imitatio.

The aim of this paper is to present the position and role of the poetry of Ovid, primarily the Metamorphoses, the product of a great poetic talent (ingenium) and an equally great poetic art (ars), in the work of Dante. The author’s point of departure in an analytical and interpretative approach is a synthetic overview of the Ovidian literary tradition in the medieval Romanic culture. The original and creative allusions Dante makes to Ovid in The Divine Comedy, which is the main focus of this paper’s intertextual analysis, stand out more clearly against this background. A distinct evolution may be observed in the way Dante assimilated the work of Ovid. In his early work, the Rime and Vita Nuova, Dante treated Ovid as an authority and referred to him to corroborate his own ideas, or tended to imitate the Ovidian style in his erotic lyrics. In the spirit of his times Dante resorted to the allegorical potential of the Metamorphoses in his prose treatises such as the Convivio. But it was not until the Divina Commedia that he embarked on an intertextual dialogue with his mentor, occasionally adopting a polemical stance and endeavouring to stress the superiority of his own ideas. The paper employs the motif of metamorphosis to illustrate the aspect of aemulatio which superseded Dante’s earlier imitatio approach to Ovid.

The purpose of this study is to discuss the problem of meta-poetic themes in the Divine Comedy, focusing in particular on the relationship between God’s art and Dante’s art in the context of the impression caused by the sight of the rock reliefs in the cornice of the proud in the Purgatorio, where the poet, presenting and imitating the art of God, in fact shows the mastery of his own art. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the examples of humility and pride carved on the walls and the rock path – the perfect work of God-the Artist, vibrant with life and called by Dante visibile parlare – are, on the one hand, a mise en abyme of its macroscopic version, which is the Universe created by him, and, on the other hand, a mise en abyme of the universe narrated with the simile perfection by Dante.

The Aeneid is the most important intertext for the opus magnum of Dante; and Virgil, sometimes metonymically identified with his work, plays a relevant, or indeed crucial part as one of the characters in it. The main purpose of this article is, on the one hand, an analysis and interpretation of certain, only rarely investigated aspects of the relation between Virgil and Dante the pilgrim, in particular those which deal with the defeat of the former as an authority and guide for Dante on the road to spiritual perfection. They result mainly from Virgil’s excessive rationalism. In the critical moments of their journey through the otherworld Dante the author shows the frailty of Virgil’s Christian faith, attained only after his death and not illuminated by divine Grace; he also discloses the deficiencies in Virgil’s understanding of good and evil.
On the other hand the author of the article analyses the intertextual “dialogue” that the Comedy conducts with the Aeneid on the basis of the Dantean conception of art in general, and of poetry in particular, taking selected examples into consideration. An essential component of this dialogue is Dante’s reinterpretation of Virgil’s masterpiece, which assumes the form of an aemulatio and tends to reveal the Christian potentiality in the Aeneid, of which Virgil the poet was, of course, utterly unaware.