This page is referenced by:

• 1 media/Fig. 1.jpg 2021-08-10T14:26:59+00:00 Studying Dante through Art in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center by Elizabeth Nogrady 9 Essay plain 2021-08-10T15:35:00+00:00

  In his speech “In the Cause of Learning,” given on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Vassar in 1915, college president Henry Noble MacCracken stated boldly: “In a word. . .college is to our time what Dante was to his.”¹ For MacCracken, Dante Alighieri was a figure who embodied the diversity of the late medieval period just as college offered to students “the genius of modern life.” Placing value on the interweaving of subjects, ideas, and disciplines—often in tandem with the college’s “go to the source” ethos—has long characterized education at Vassar. As in 1915, Dante’s oeuvre continues today to serve as an example of how rich source material can be examined simultaneously through the fields of history, literature, language, art, and beyond. Students can investigate Dante’s body of work by moving among the classroom, the library, and the museum on campus. At Vassar’s Loeb Art Center, one particularly useful case study is the Divine Comedy, with its vivid imagery that became so fundamental to the visual arts in Europe and elsewhere. Through art, students can further their exploration of Dante’s text using works from a wide variety of times and places, and analyze them using a range of approaches.²

  One of the most straightforward ways that students could apply their study of the Divine Comedy in the museum would be to interpret art objects as cultural context, so that they might enhance their understanding of Dante’s historical, social, and political surroundings. That would involve inquiry into the incredible art production occurring around 1300 in Italy. In the Loeb, students might look at a gold-ground panel of the Crucifixion (likely a component of a larger work) from around 1360 by an unknown Florentine artist, the small scale of which draws the viewer into an intimate encounter with Christ (Fig. 1).³ Students could also walk over to Taylor Hall and contemplate the imposing plaster cast of the bronze doors (or “Gates of Paradise”) by Lorenzo Ghiberti. While created in the second quarter of the 1400s, well after Dante’s death, these masterworks were added to the Florence Baptistery, featured in Inferno.⁴ In examining these works, students could discuss how Dante’s imagery in the Divine Comedy may have been informed by, and subsequently shaped, this dynamic artistic environment.

  Art as primary text as yet another avenue into works associated with Dante. If portrayals of individuals can be seen as documents to be interpreted, students could look to works such as the somber, three-quarter engraved portrait of Dante by Giovita Garavaglia after Giuseppe Bossi used in Lives and Portraits of Illustrious Italians published by Nicolò Bettoni in 1812 (Fig. 2). This work can be compared to earlier well-known portraits of Dante by Italian artists such as Sandro Botticelli and Agnolo Bronzino, in a conversation regarding how these models impacted Dante’s legacy in the nineteenth century and later. A related investigation can be made of Jerónimo Jacinto de Espinosa’s seventeenth-century picture of St. Bernard de Clairvaux.⁵ How might Dante’s description of the Benedictine abbot as a gentle and contemplative figure who served as a guide through the Empyrean be related to this portrayal of Bernard with downturned eyes and a furrowed brow, emulating the suffering Christ?

  Using art as a means to foster visual literacy is an approach well suited for Michael Mazur’s print series made between 1994 and 2000, L’Inferno of Dante (Fig. 3). Created through a close reading of Dante’s text, this series can aid students in considering images in comparison to the written source. Mazur based his haunting group of forty-one etchings on a group of monotypes that he made for an English translation of Inferno by Robert Pinsky and published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 1993. Mazur’s images resulted from his sustained personal study of the poem and close collaboration with Pinsky, complemented by his exposure to key print exemplars such as Francisco de Goya’s The Disasters of War from 1810–20 and Georges Rouault’s Miserere series of 1948, examples of which are also in the Loeb’s collection.⁶ According to Pinsky, “[T]hat process of collaborating I think in some spiritual way helped me in my effort, and . . . helped me understand the work.”⁷

  Art can also be used to exemplify themes and concepts that, while central to the Divine Comedy, extend far beyond early-fourteenth-century Italy. The description of the angel at the gate of purgatory, for instance, could easily be discussed in connection to French polymath Jean Cocteau’s 1956 watercolor Angel with Key (Fig. 4), featuring imagery from his program for the Chapel of St. Peter in Villefranche-sur-Mer, France.⁸ To meet the challenge of depicting a human encounter with an angel, Cocteau portrayed the celestial being as tall and majestic, its stature enhanced by a cropped composition that truncates the people below, who stand craning their necks at an extreme angle to take in the figure hovering above. Meanwhile, Dante’s descriptions of gluttony, sloth, pride, and other levels of purgatory could be compared to caricatures found in the Loeb’s prints from the 1700s and 1800s by artists like William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier.⁹ Taking further the notion of how artists’ capture the human condition in visual terms could involve abstract works like Kurt Seligmann’s watercolor Lust of 1943.¹⁰

  A final way that students could use works in the Loeb’s collection is as a focal point to create their own creative and intellectual pursuits related to or inspired by the Divine Comedy. One such example might include reading Beatrice’s account of the markings of the moon and the universe beyond in Paradise, followed by an examination of Lewis M. Rutherfurd’s Moon in First Quarter from 1865 (which captured the surface of the moon in highly detailed photographs created using technical innovations devised by Rutherfurd; Fig. 5), and Ross Bleckner’s Symbols of the Sun and other Planets from 1990 (a work in which geometrical precision is interrupted by evidence of human touch in the brushwork; Fig. 6).¹¹ These encounters could lead to writing a poem, composing a piece of music, an experiment in the physics lab, painting a canvas, or studying the sky from the observatory.

  Once again, this viewpoint is nothing new at Vassar. A few years before MacCracken’s speech at the college’s fiftieth anniversary, Vassar art history professor Oliver Tonks gave a talk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during a lecture series concerning ways that educators might integrate the museum into the teaching of subjects such as literature, art, history, and classics. Tonks recommended that students be left alone to explore treasures of the museum on their own, writing, “. . . for you know as well as I do that discoveries made by ourselves seem twice as important and vivid in our minds as those made for us by someone else.”¹² Such a mix of academic and imaginative impulses characterize the very essence of a liberal arts education, and the complexity of Dante’s poem—in particular its engagement with the unseen realms of the afterlife, the inner human landscape, and the distant cosmos—provides almost limitless possibilities for connection and creativity.

  Elizabeth Nogrady
  Andrew M. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs
  The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College
   

  NOTES

  1 Fiftieth Anniversary of the Opening of Vassar College: Sketches of Vassar College, 1915 (Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar College, 1916), pp. 167–68.

  2 The models outlined below are found in Steve Volk and Liliana Milkova, “Crossing the Street Pedagogy: Using College Art Museums to Leverage Significant Learning Across Campus,” in A Handbook for Academic Museums, eds. Stefanie S. Jandl and Mark S. Gold (Edinburgh & Boston: MuseumsEtc, 2012), pp. 88–115.

  3 Fototeca Zeri, no. 5733.

  4 Inferno, Canto XIX, 16–21.

  5 Inv. 1963.6.

  6 See, for example, inv. 1983.11 and 1959.2.7.

  7 Robert Pinsky and Michael Mazur, “Image and Text: A Dialogue with Robert Pinsky and Michael Mazur,” in Occasional Papers (Berkeley, CA: UC Berkeley, Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 1994), pp. 5, 26.

  8 Purgatory, Canto IX.

  9 See, for example, inv. 2015.33.5 and 2003.1.1.

  10 See inv. 1983.40.4.

  11 Paradise, Canto II, 49–148.

  12 See Stockton Axson et al., Art Museums and Schools; Four Lectures Delivered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1913), 143.