Dante Alighieri - Divine Comedy Paris-Imola

Dante Alighieri - Divine Comedy Paris-Imola

Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265–1321) is remembered as one of the fathers of the Italian language and influenced other great medieval authors like Boccaccio and Chaucer. Guided by the Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC), the author and protagonist of the Divine Comedy passes through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise on a spiritual and philosophical journey that has had a lasting impact not only on Italian literature but on wider European society. Although the original manuscript is not believed to have survived, numerous manuscripts were made shortly after his death and in the centuries that followed including the specimen at hand, which is one of the finest copies of the Commedia in existence: the Divine Comedy Parigi-Imola.

A Fine Specimen of the Lombard Quattrocento

This manuscript is believed to be the work of the so-called “Maestro delle Vitae Imperatorum”, who was active in Northern Italy during the first half of the 15th century. The artist’s pseudonym comes from another masterpiece created by him that is also stored in Paris: Svetonio’s Vitae, a vernacular transcription made by Pietro Candido Decembrio in 1431. Stylistically, the artist was greatly influenced by the International Gothic style and specifically the work of Giovannino de’ Grassi and Michelino da Besozzo, which is characterized by sinuous figures, undulating lines, and chromatic choices ranging from opaque to transparent and making excellent use of diffuse light. Furthermore, it is believed that the Maestro delle Vitae Imperatorum collaborated with Belbello da Pavia on this and other projects. The result is a mixture of naturalism and dreamy, fairytale-like imagery. Only 72 of the original 115+ miniatures that adorned the manuscript survive today, but the manuscript is still extraordinarily adorned in comparison to others. Whereas most Dante manuscripts only have a miniature at the beginning of each cantica, usually embedded in a historiated initial, this manuscript dedicates three or four miniatures to each canto. Furthermore, the text is embellished with colorful gold leaf initials and decorative elements from French illumination like leafy tendrils.

A Divided Masterpiece

The Divine Comedy Parigi-Imola was stored in the famous Visconti-Sforza Library in Pavia until the end of the 15th century, when the Kingdom of France intervened in Italian affairs on the side of Milan and set off the Italian Wars (1494–1559). At this time, the manuscript came into the possession of King Louis XII of France (1462–1515), who is believed to have in turn gifted it to the Duke of Melfi, Giovanni Caracciolo (ca. 1372–1432) as a reward for services rendered to the crown. The work then passed to Caracciolo’s son-in-law, Antoine de Cardaillac, and later to his heirs. In 1835, the manuscript was retrieved from a castle in the Dordogne region of France by the erudite Gaston de Flotte, who purchased it and brought it to Marseilles. Between 1836 and 1837, he collaborated with Giuseppe Zaccheroni, an exile from Imola after the revolts of 1831, to create a critical edition that was published in 1838. After to his return to Italy, Zaccheroni was elected a deputy of the college of Imola in 1865 and in the following year, he donated his annotated Dante manuscript to the Imola Municipal Library. In 1887, de Flotte’s heirs sold the remaining fragment to Bibliothèque nationale de France, where it is still preserved.