Exhibiting Dante and the Divine Comedy in Oxford
Four current exhibitions and displays in Oxford celebrate Dante Alighieri, the Florentine poet who, in the Divine Comedy, described his vision of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. This year marks the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, in political exile from his native Florence, at Ravenna. The exhibited works, by artists from the Renaissance to the present, engage in multifarious ways with an issue central to the history of art: the relation between word and image. Another theme of the exhibits is the impact of new technologies on the visual mediation of the poem: the fifteenth-century invention of print; the development of cinema in the early twentieth century; the rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence in the present day. The Ashmolean exhibition highlights the theme of celebrity and its creation: a topic no less interesting to ourselves than it was to Dante. From the fourteenth century to the present, as these displays demonstrate, the Comedy has given rise to a visual culture beyond even its author’s wildest imagination.
- Ashmolean Museum: Dante: The Invention of Celebrity. Until 9 January Dante: The Invention of Celebrity
- Weston Library: The Divine Comedy from Manuscript to Manga. Until 14 November The Divine Comedy, from Manuscript to Manga
- Taylor Institution Library: Illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy. Until 17 December Illustrating Dante’s Divine Comedy
- Christ Church Picture Gallery: Dante in Christ Church. Until 19 December Dante in Christ Church | Christ Church, Oxford University
Gervase Rosser, Professor in the History of Art, is curator of the exhibitions at the Ashmolean and Weston Library. He is also co-curator of the Taylor Institution Library display with Clare Hills-Nova, and of the Christ Church Picture Gallery display with Jacqueline Thalmann, Gabriel Sewell and Cristina Neagu.
These exhibitions form part of the Oxford Dante Festival. For further information and links see: Dante | TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities
