Dante’s Graffiti in Palermo: The Divine Comedy in a Prison of the Inquisition
Where: Columbia University
116th St. & Broadway
212-854-1754 Price: Free
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Andrea Celli (University of Connecticut)
The talk centers on two striking images of the ‘hellmouth,’ drawn on the walls of the seventeenth-century prison of the Spanish Inquisition in Palermo. By considering contextual references to the Divine Comedy disseminated in graffiti on the same walls, the talk explores a phenomenon of reception and appropriation of the Comedy in the early-modern Mediterranean. It connects the drawings to Medieval and Baroque plays, to West-Mediterranean iconography, and to early-modern book trade. It also calls into question sociological and cultural notions that literary studies often employ. The Dantesque afterworld represented on the walls of the prison in Palermo reflects intricate interactions between high culture and illiterates, between different religious contexts, and institutional levels. Rigid demarcations of eras – the Middle Ages versus the modernity – also seem to fade.
Respondent: Diane Bodart (Columbia, Art History)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia, Italian)
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