Delivering Dante: Representations of Reproduction in the Commedia

Bologna in the Middle Ages was one of Italy’s premier cities. The list of its distinctions is very long. But almost all students of Italian culture would agree that relatively high on the list must come manuscript illumination, practiced by a great many (unfortunately) anonymous artists. This paper, which I am honored to contribute to the celebration of Giuseppe Mazzotta’s career, is a preliminary study of a manuscript of Dante’s Commedia illuminated in Bologna around 1400 by a craftsman whose identity most likely we will never recover. Although the manuscript is utilitarian, the illuminator anonymous, the date far from certain and the work incomplete, I hope to show that, even so, of early illuminated manuscripts of the Commedia, this one is possibly among the more important, because of the insight it provides us into how the Commedia was being read within the first century of Dante’s death. My research to date suggests that a patron instructed the illuminator out of a fund of understanding profoundly sympathetic to Dante’s agenda.

The particular thought experiment I propose is this: the incomplete program of illuminations in this manuscript may owe its existence in part to Dante’s son, Pietro, who studied law in Bologna. If this hypothesis should hold, the implications of several illuminations of the late cantos of the Inferno may prove extremely important, since these illuminations suggest that the mind guiding the artist had a very clear idea of the poet’s understanding of the role of human sexuality and sexual reproduction in salvation and that this idea may possibly have derived from the poet himself through the intermediary of his son. It is practically certain that Pietro himself did not commission the manuscript or direct the illuminator. It is, however, possible that a younger contemporary of Pietro, who had been acquainted with him in some manner or other and had discussed the “sacro poema” (Par. 25.1) with him, may have commissioned the manuscript and then not lived to see it through to completion.

Little-known and relatively little-studied, MS Roma Biblioteca Angelica 1102 is confidently assigned by all who have considered it to a provenance of Bologna and less confidently assigned to the first quarter of the fifteenth century (Mario Salmi considered it the work of Simone dei Crocefissi [d. 1399]).¹ Although it has an impressive array of illuminations, it is not a deluxe production.² Moreover, it is incomplete, with only the program of illuminations for Inferno having been finished, although spaces were left in the other two canticles for the illuminations to be inserted (each approximately 3.5 inches square). Few studies have actually devoted much attention to this manuscript. From what I have said so far, this is not difficult to understand. Still, I think it is possible to suggest why the manuscript deserves more and better attention.

Bologna was one of the two great centers of manuscript illumination in high medieval Europe, Paris the other. Dante’s indirect acknowledgment of this fama in his often discussed exchange in Purgatorio 11.79–84 with the miniaturist Oderisi da Gubbio is frustratingly tantalizing. We would like to know so much more than we do about Franco Bolognese, apparently now surpassing Oderisi. The practice of illumination in Bologna included interest in and sensitivity to not just pictorial representation but also the dynamic unfolding in time of narrative. The manuscript really belongs in the larger context of Bolognese illuminations of both vernacular and Latin writings alike. Eventually, I hope to be able to establish a connection with the illumination of legal manuscripts, for which Bologna was renowned, for such a connection would lend credibility to the possibility that the commissioner of this manuscript may have moved in the circle of lawyers that included Pietro when he was a student in Bologna. I do suspect that it may descend from someone who knew him (and not just his and his brother’s commentaries on their father’s poem), and I believe that such a hypothesis is worth pursuing.

Restrictions of space constrain me to treat...