Dante on View: The Reception of Dante in the Visual and Performing Arts

Dante on View opens an important new dimension in Dante studies. The volume's interdisciplinary approach to reception brings together literary criticism, visual culture and performance studies. Dante's Commedia is re-created through the performances of readers and artists in a wide range of media. The essays analyse creative uses of the poet from medieval manuscript illumination to nineteenth and twentieth-century stage productions, from film to ballet and hyperinstruments.Dante on View opens an important new dimension in Dante studies: for the first time a collection of essays analyses the presence of the Italian Medieval poet Dante Alighieri in the visual and performing arts from the Middle Ages to the present day. The essays in this volume explore the image of Dante emerging in medieval illuminated manuscripts and later ideological and nostalgic uses of the poet. The volume also demonstrates the rich diversity of projects inspired by the Commedia both as an overall polysemic structure and as a repository of scenes, which generate a repertoire for painters, actors and film-makers. In its original multimediality, Dante's Commedia stimulates the performance of readers and artists working in different media from manuscript to stage, from ballet to hyperinstruments, from film to television. Through such a variety of media, the reception of Dante in the visual and performing arts enriches our understanding of the poet and of the arts represented at key moments of formal and structural change in the European cultural world.Contents: Introduction; Part I Dante in Performance: The Comedy as a text for performance, Peter Armour; Dante on view: performance of The Divine Comedy in France and Britain, Richard Cooper; The Inferno in the 1900s: from drama to film, Antonella Braida; From Dante to Dante sonata, Jane Everson; 'La dolce sinfonia di paradiso': can mere mortals compose it?, Maria Ann Roglieri. Part II Dante in the Visual Arts: The image of Dante, poet and pilgrim, Rachel Owen; Francesca observed: painting and illustration, c1790-c1840, Nicholas Havely; Dante and the pre-Raphaelites: British and Italian responses, Guiliana Pieri; From Hell to Paradise or the other way round? Salvator Dali's Divina Commedia, Ilaria Schiaffini. Part III Dante in the Cinema and Multimedia: Francesca da Rimini: the movie, Amilcare Iannucci; Dante in the cinema or Dante in the Cinema?, Christopher Wagstaff; From Dante's Inferno to a TV Dante: Phillips and Greenaway remediating Dante's polysemy, Luisa Calè. Coda: Wish you were here: postcards from the afterlife, Alex Cooper; Bibliography; Index.About the Author: Dr Antonella Braida is lecturer in Italian at the University of Durham, UK and Dr Luisa Calè is a lecturer in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.