Fenestella Inside Medieval Art

Vol. 4. Milan : Milano University Press, 2023.

Pozhidaeva A., Мирошник А. Д.

Academic editor: F. Scirea

The history of illustration of Dante’s Divine Comedy in the 14th–15th centuries rarely attracts the attention of researchers. Nevertheless, a careful analysis of the manuscripts would make it possible to clarify the process of the emergence of separate iconographic schemes within the framework of a very specific task: illustrating a text replete with literary devices and references to ancient sources that were often unknown to the authors of the iconographic program. The current study is devoted to the iconography of mythological characters found in Dante’s text and their possible iconographic sources based on a number of manuscripts of the Divine Comedy dated from mid-14th and 15th centuries, six of which are fully illustrated (e.g. so-called Budapest Codex, Egerton Codex, Chantilly Codex and some others)

Keywords: iconography, Dante Alighieri, medieval iconography, Divina Commedia, Mythological Characters