SIMONE CAMALDOLESE, Don
(active 1378-1405 in Florence)

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (Folio 27v)

1386-88
Tempera and gold on parchment, 305 x 225 mm (page size)
Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven

The masterpiece of the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy was the most widely illuminated book of medieval literature, embraced as a subject for manuscript illumination within a decade of the author's death. Conceived as an epic poem in three parts - Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise) - which are in turn subdivided into short sections called cantos, the Comedy is Dante's personal account of a vision that he had during Holy Week in the year 1300.

The codex in New Haven is one of the finest examples of early Divine Comedy manuscripts to have survived, its remarkable state of preservation allowing full appreciation of the brilliant decoration and regular, harmonious writing. Conforming to an early type of Divine Comedy illustration, the illuminations are confined to the first page of each book, rather than to the whole text, as in later.

The second illuminated leaf is folio 27v, on which a large initial P in the middle left of the page, containing a second nimbed female figure with pink wings and an orange robe over a gilt tunic, illustrates the first canto of the Purgatorio ("Per correr migliore acqua alza le vele" [To course over better waters (now) lifts her sails]). Seated on a bank of clouds against a blue background, the figure cradles in her lap a nest in which perches a pelican feeding her young with blood from her own breast; an image known as the Pelican in Her Piety, it was a popular medieval symbol for the sacrifice of Christ and emblematic of Charity.




© Web Gallery of Art, created by Emil Krén and Daniel Marx.