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Illuminating Botticelli’s Chart of Hell
- MLN
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 128, Number 1, January 2013 (Italian Issue)
- pp. 84-102
- 10.1353/mln.2013.0009
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay explores Botticelli’s Chart of Hell which represents an ingenious interpolation of the first canticle. The chart is one of ninety illustrations which the artist (1445–1510) executed for a lavish codex of the Commedia commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. Parker argues that one can read the map as one does the poem albeit in a distinctly different way. The essay seeks to provide a different perspective on the chart, one that explores Botticelli’s visual remediation of a complex poetic narrative and how the artist literalizes that which is allusive.