Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

…and Thence We Came Forth To See Again The Stars, Group Exhibition

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“The Flat-Massimo Carasi gallery reopens its doors to the public, after the protracted closure due to Covid 19, with a collective that look forward for a restart. Convinced that the physical space of the gallery will resist the broadsides of innovations and will remain an essential point of meeting and sharing with the public, we recognize that no man / woman is an island even in its own solitude (a very crowded solitude). Art, in all its disciplines, remains the most enthralling mystery and witnessing its representations in first person will simply remain of VITAL importance. We identify the works of art with the stars, to which Dante refers and illuminate the dark, so in this context we have chosen for the end of the season program, a roundup of works that would like to shape a physiognomy of contemporary being with her/his passions and obsessions, between damnation and holiness, bewilderment and hope.These are works that refer to woman/man but do not portray her/him directly. Instead they evoke his presence by interpreting the fetishes that are left behind as traces. The invited artists, using new and traditional media, adopt the most varied techniques to grasp the human dimension with sometimes simple, or sometimes, categorical gestures.”   —Stefano Caimi, Michael Johansson, Guillaume Linard Osorio, Sali Muller, Jack Otway, Michelangelo Penso, Leonardo Ulian, …and Thence We Came Forth To See Again The Stars, Leonard Oulian, June 11-September 4, 2020 (retrieved on March 28, 2024)

“Floodlines Part VI: ‘Reckoning'”

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“Well, I think the one that was most penetrating that I’ll never forget is in St. Bernard Parish. The whole levee just disappeared. Liquified. So all the ships and the shrimp boats and everything just went right over the Arpent levee and into St. Bernard, and then the water couldn’t get out. And so you had cars on top of houses that we found, and you had these skilled care facilities with all these dead senior citizens inside of them. It was, it was like a scene from Dante’s hell. It was really hard.”   —J. David Rogers, “Floodlines Part VI: ‘Reckoning,'” The Atlantic, March 11, 2020 (retrieved March 26, 2024)

Read the transcript of each part here

“Dante’s Peek”

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“The modern study of historical philology and the discovery of the family tree of Indo-European languages started in the late 18th century. The fuel that took fire from the spark of insight in William Jones’s astonishing paragraph had been gathered over generations, since about 1500, by scattered minds in Europe and South Asia.

“But before that? What did medieval Europeans know or think about their own language map? Latin still was spoken and written in the Church. And the tongues we know as Spanish, Italian, and French were in the air, obviously related to Latin and obviously brethren to one another.

“Dante, in exile about 1300, began a book meant to guide the development of Italian poetics. A language without a literature is a body without a head, and he meant to free his native people from the artistic dominance of Provençal troubadours and Parisian romance-spinners. He sought to winnow the dialects of Italy and discover the ideal medium for a true native Italian literature. (No prize for guessing he would find that ideal in his own Florentine.)

“He dropped it after a few chapters, but what he finished of ‘De vulgari eloquentia‘ contains an explanation in medieval terms of the linguistic map of Europe. It is in the introduction, setting the stage for the argument Dante intends to make.

“Dante begins by stating something obvious to him, and no doubt to his peers, that might seem strange to us. In most of the world around him, he says, there are two languages in the same place. Call them ‘low’ and ‘high,’ or ‘vulgar’ and ‘classical,’ or ‘common’ and ‘learned.’ Dante calls the first ‘vulgar’ or ‘vernacular.'”   —”Dante’s Peek,” Etym Online, May 24, 2020 (retrieved March 21, 2024)

“What Would Hell Be Like for Donald Trump?”

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“As I mulled over the treatment he deserved for the havoc he continues to wreak on the lives of countless others here in the United States and across the globe, I turned almost automatically to the work of Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet whose Divina Commedia minutely recreated in the verse form terza rima what awaited the readers of his time once they died. Dante (1265–1321) laid out his otherworldly landscape in three volumes—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso —that have rightly been considered among the towering and influential literary achievements of humanity.

“There was nothing abstract about the Hell he created. Dante pictured himself personally taking a voyage into the hereafter to meet men and women, both of his time and from the past, who were being rewarded for their virtue or eternally castigated for their offenses. Of that journey through purgatorial fires and heavenly wonders, guided by his dead childhood sweetheart, Beatrice, it was the Florentine writer’s descent into the saturated circles of Hell that most fascinated and enthralled readers throughout the centuries. We listen to stories of the wicked as they express their remorse and experience the excruciatingly sophisticated torments he dreamt up as suitable reprisals for the damage they did during their earthly existence.

“Witnessing the infernal realities President Trump has unleashed on America, I can’t help wondering where Dante would have placed our miscreant in chief in his afterlife of horror. In the end, perhaps not surprisingly, I realized one obvious thing: The 45th president has such a multitude of transgressions to his name that he fits almost every category and canto that Dante invented for the sinners of his age.”   —Ariel Dorfman, “What Would Hell Be Like for Donald Trump?,” The Nation, October 23, 2020 (retrieved February 6, 2024)

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How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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