Depiction of Dante’s Cosmos

Depiction of Dante’s Cosmos

Manoscritto Pal 313; Dante Poggiali; Chiose palatine; Divina Commedia

Considered to be the first illuminated manuscript of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, the Dante Poggiali (named for the man who discovered it) contains the full story of Dante’s tour of hell, purgatory, and heaven. The illustration here is one of the largest and most detailed in the several hundred page volume. Decorated with vibrant colors and gold leaf, the work is loosely attributed to Pacino di Buonaguida, a Florentine painter who follows the style of the hugely influential Giotto and his humanist concern. Giotto’s artwork, like the image of Dante in the cosmos, is concerned with reconciling the human experience with the mystical nature of God’s creation. In humanist tradition, while the figures look true to life, the setting of the cosmos is abstract, merging the worlds of mortal life and God. The Dante Poggiali attempts to symbolically represent that which, according to the story, cannot ordinarily be comprehended by man. In the narrative, Dante himself is blinded by the heavens and puzzled by the order of nature, which must be described for him as he ascends away from the Earth. The lack of detail in the representation of the cosmos invites the viewer to map the particulars of space themselves, aided by the accompanying text.

The character Dante is guided through the cosmic realms by the poet Virgil and eventually his lost love Beatrice, as seen here. Dante, in his typical red, is led by the embrace of the winged Beatrice to meet Christ, flanked by two angels. Dante is the only living human in this imagination of God's geometry, making him a first explorer in a space uncharted. The cosmos depicted are set in rings of deep blues, plotting the boundaries of the realms leading to Christ. Closest to Earth is the heaven of the moon, noted by the silver circle, then the six golden planets, realm of the stars, and eventually the place where the angels, and eventually God, reside.

What is unusual about the illumination is that typically the Ptolemaic universe is centered around the Earth, with the rings of the cosmos radiating out to heaven. Alighieri was faithful to this classical model when writing the Divine Comedy, since he like many medieval thinkers had access and reverence for classical texts. Instead, the illustration is inconsistent with the poem in that we see rings concentric to the Christ figure and angels, with Dante and Beatrice ascending upwards to reach that center. A possible interpretation is described in Dante’s Cosmos and the Geometry of Paradise, where the universe is made up of distinct but connected layers or sheets of space, allowing both a central Earth and a central realm of God in paradise simultaneously. Another inconsistency with the poem is that Dante and Beatrice never meet a human visualization of Christ, yet he floats before them in the Dante Poggiali painting. The artist perhaps intended to represent the movement of the character’s ascension through vast space toward God rather than a literal image of the cosmos. Canto I, the section the illustration precedes, is whimsical and philosophical rather than describing plot action. Here, the visual effect aims to reflect Dante’s wonder as opposed to a mimetic order of the universe.
(Bella Crum 2025)

Pacino di Buonaguida (attributed)

Rome, Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, Pal. 313

Map in a manuscript

Roma: Società Dante Alighieri, 2013.

1330-50

Manuscript

Special Collections, Carleton College, Northfield, MN

Italian

Cosmographical Diagram

Cosmos

Barsella, Susanna, and Vincenzo Vespri. “Dante’s Cosmos and the Geometry of Paradise.” In Italianistica: Rivista Di Letteratura Italiana, N. 1:239–52. Year 50. Rome, Italy: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2021. https://www.academia.edu/76460397/Dante_and_the_Geometry_of_Paradise.

Cachey, Theodore J. “Cartographic Dante.” Italica (New York, N.Y.) 87, no. 3 (2010): 325–54.

Cachey, Theodore J. “Maps and Literature in Renaissance Italy.” In The History of Cartography, vol. 3, part 1, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Dante Alighieri, Allen Mandelbaum, and Barry Moser. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri : A Verse Translation with Introds. & Commentary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Lippincott, Kristen. “Giovanni Di Paolo’s ‘Creation of the World’ and the Tradition of the ‘Thema Mundi’ in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art.” Burlington Magazine 132, no. 1048 (1990): 460–68.

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