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A new approach to reading Dante's
La Comedia Divinia through the lens of art history.
Dante, Artist of Gesture brings Dante's canonical text into conversation with the visual art of his time to suggest the importance of visual cues to the reading and interpretation of the text itself.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Reading Bodies in Motion
- 2: Dante as Visual Artist
- 3: Fixity and Flexibility
- 4: Modelling Gestural Virtues in Dante's Purgatorio
- 5: Asymmetrical Affections
- 6: Heavenly Proximities and Contagions
- Bibliography
About the author
Heather Webb is the Professor of Medieval Italian Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2004 and taught at The Ohio State University for eight years before coming to Cambridge. She is the author of two monographs, The Medieval Heart (2010), and Dante's Persons: An Ethics of the Transhuman (2016) and has co-edited five books, including Vertical Readings in Dante's 'Comedy' in three volumes, and the forthcoming Dante's 'Vita nova': A Collaborative Reading.
Summary
A new approach to reading Dante's La Comedia Divinia through the lens of art history. Dante, Artist of Gesture brings Dante's canonical text into conversation with the visual art of his time to suggest the importance of visual cues to the reading and interpretation of the text itself.
Additional text
Dante, Artist of Gesture is an invitation to explore the Comedy through a new perspective in which the reader takes an active role in Dante's journey through an affective response to the characters of the poem...Webb's book makes the kinetic sensitivity of the Middle Ages part of the contemporary experience of reading Dante's Comedy, unveiling a whole network of connections in the poem.
