Manuscripts pien di sonno: Dreaming in Trecento Copies of the Comedy

When Dante writes that he came to himself in a dark wood while pien di sonno (Inf. 1.11), he entreats his reader to consider that the Comedy is, in one way or another, a dream.¹ Most modern scholarly attention has passed over Dante’s allusion to his poem as a literary dream-vision and has explicitly denied that it might comprise a true prophetic vision or visio, following instead Charles Singleton’s well-worn maxim that “the fiction of the Comedy is that it is not fiction.”² Those few scholars who have taken Dante’s invitation seriously have primarily turned to the poem’s text to demonstrate that Dante intended the Comedy as a divine vision in a dream.³ This essay takes a different tack, exploring images within several trecento manuscripts of the Comedy and arguing that these visual incipits comprise evidence for fourteenth-century understandings of the poem as a dream.⁴

At stake here is the role of Comedy manuscripts in forming both medieval opinion of the poem and its meanings and modern scholarship on the topic. Like early textual commentaries on the Comedy, these images of Dante as dreamer disclose their makers’ and patrons’ notions about Dante and his literary or spiritual auctoritas as well as the poem’s wider “use as a culture-bearing work,” to use Deborah Parker’s felicitous phrase.⁵ They also reveal Dante’s trecento illuminators to be a group of commentators who themselves offer a rich and diverse set of interpretations of the poem as dream.⁶ It is only the modern predilection for sanctioning the Comedy alone as the primary producer of its cultural meanings that would have us posit its text as an active cultural agent and its accompanying images as mere illustration or reflection.⁷ This paper considers these pictures as culture-bearing works in their own right, capable of producing, propagating, and circumscribing some interpretations of the Comedy over others.

This suggestion is not without its problems. These miniatures were not the work of private individuals thinking through their own understandings of the Comedy, but professionals working under contract to fulfill the needs of a patron. In the case of the images within MS 597 at the Musée Condé in Chantilly, for example, the interpretation of the poem as dream comes directly from Guido da Pisa, whose commentary is included within the manuscript after the text of the Inferno.⁸ Karl Fugelso and Lucia Battaglia Ricci have both persuasively argued that it was Guido himself who acted as advisor to the artists and carefully determined the visual content of the book to complement his commentary, which explains why images within the Chantilly manuscript directly illustrate Guido’s text.⁹ But in the vast majority of Comedy manuscripts—and, in fact, medieval manuscripts more generally—rarely is there clear evidence laying out the complex network of influences which determine the form and content of its illuminations.¹⁰

What is certain, however, is that the proliferation of textual commentaries during the fourteenth century was matched by a simultaneous abundance of illuminated copies of the Comedy. Illuminators were faced with the need to adapt existing visual paradigms to a relatively new (in comparison with classical and biblical works) text. Dante’s Virgil, for example, was occasionally depicted in a mandorla when he first appeared to Dante, as though the very act of laying eyes on the ancient poet constituted a theophany.¹¹ Illuminators in this case took an instance of sudden “appearance” and poached its visual implications for other ends.¹²

The Chantilly manuscript notwithstanding, this paper presupposes that any charge to turn the textual into the visual, no matter how specific, encounters a gulf between the two media—a gulf that presents an opportunity, or even the necessity, for interpretation.¹³ The Comedy at this point did not have a firmly established iconographical tradition, and this lack would render that gulf especially wide. It is not difficult to imagine that an advisor who asked for an illumination of the Comedy’s first canto would be less sure how...