The relative absence of attention to the early printed illustrations of the Commedia calls for some explanation, which I limit here to two briefly stated points. First, though these images were all created within the historical period referred to as the Renaissance, they do not match the aesthetic expectations that have come to be affiliated with this era. Still a new art form that emerged in the West in the fifteenth century, early printed illustrations tend to lack the visual harmony and natural representation that have been celebrated qualities of the visual arts’ proclaimed return to classical antiquity. Their harsh lines, and their figures’ contorted gestures and appearances, instead tend to invoke the earlier, “gothic” world from which the humanists distanced themselves. The manuscript illuminations of the Commedia, though mostly predating the printed illustrations, better embody what one would typically expect to see as a work of art from the Italian Renaissance. As an example of how the early the printed illustrations of this work have been regarded, Richard Holbrook wrote that “from a purely esthetic point of view the [printed] illustrations of the Poet’s journey through the afterworld are mostly valueless.” Though an acquirable taste, these woodcuts and early engravings assuredly do not match preconceived notions of what art from the Renaissance looks like.
A second explanation for these illustrations’ relative lack of attention is that these editions are by largely unnamed artists. The few exceptions to anonymity are, moreover, surrounded by debates of attribution. Thus, while the likes of Sandro Botticelli, Giovanni di Paolo, and Luca Signorelli are affiliated with Renaissance drawings, miniatures, and frescoes representing Dante’s work, nearly all these printed Commedia illustrations are executed by artists we will never be able to name. Even the recognizable body of work by a Venetian miniaturist and woodcut designer, to whom Lilian Armstrong attributed the designs in the 1491 Benali and Capcasa Commedia, is known only by a style. This artist is simply called the Pico Master for the miniatures executed in Pico Della Mirandola’s manuscript copy of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis. The principal exceptions to this anonymity are Baccio Baldini, with whom the first printed illustrations of 1481 have been affiliated, and Giovanni Britto, to whom the 1544 woodcuts in the Marcolini Commedia have been attributed. Perhaps by no coincidence, the images in these editions—and especially the 1481 printing by Nicolo di Lorenzo, also connected to the Botticelli drawings—have received far heavier scholarly attention than most of the other illustrations of Dante’s poem from the early history of print.
The above explanations for the lesser degree of interest in this group of images relate to another introductory point, namely, why this book can be regarded, in a sense, as microhistorical. These designers, woodcutters, and engravers are “Menocchios” of sorts, in that they are little-known figures, excluded from grander and more frequently emphasized historical narratives. Often, like Menocchio, the subject of Carlo Gizsburg’s paradigmatic microhistorical study, their lives were likewise “passed in almost complete obscurity,” at least from our perspective. In fact, we can learn even less about these artists’ personal lives than Ginzburg could of the sixteenth century miller. But unlike Ginzburg’s work, the goal of this study is not to reconstruct elements of individuals’ biographies through documented fragments to uncover broader social themes. I am focused less on the lives of people per se, and more on the lives of images—albeit images created by and for people. This book provides windows into how imagemakers read texts, how they drew from other imagemakers’ textual engagements and from the intellectual currents around them, and how readers during this period used these images.
This is an art history and a book history, but it also a literary investigation into the textual nature of these illustrations that in turn brings out the visual nature of this text, their generative source. Further, giving weight to Hans Robert Jauss’s suggestion that the “history of literature is a process of aesthetic reception and production,” this study can also be viewed as a literary history. It is, in addition, an inquiry into how images may themselves be forms of literary criticism. If humanities scholarship in the twenty-first century continues with strict divisions of subfields as they were established in nineteenth-century Germany, these images belong as much within a department of literature as they do to departments aligned with any other subfield of cultural historical inquiry. But as a still underappreciated phenomenon insofar as it merits its own space for consideration, literary illustration is a fundamentally transmedial object of inquiry that calls for transdisciplinary work. Signifying images sitting in close proximity to the text they signify cannot be adequately treated by only one methodological approach or a perspective derived from just one disciplinarily database. Because of the unusual position of this study as it relates to traditional disciplinary structuring, it is also microhistorical in that it reconstructs a story that sits on the peripheries of cultural historiographical canons.
This book is microhistorical in yet another sense. As Ginzburg noted elsewhere, microhistory has meant various things, and to express another of its significances he relies on the metaphor of a camera’s “close-up” in contrast to “extreme long shots.” Illustrations included among twenty-eight printed editions may not seem to constitute much of a “close-up” perspective. Books have been written on smaller gatherings of editions. However, in focusing on the illustrations of one work of literature among many during the period of early print, this book takes on, at least relatively speaking, a closely focused lens. It is specifically trained on a subset of the printed illustrations of one literary work produced almost exclusively in Italy (with several French exceptions). Its methods and conclusions could then be tested against an enlarged framework of other printed and illustrated works produced during these centuries. Moreover, these early printed illustrations of the Commedia could be studied against later renderings of the poem, and even more broadly, against renderings of other literary works produced during the centuries preceding and following those of central interest in this book.
(excerpted from introduction)
