Illuminated Dante Project
In 2021 will occur the seventh centenary of the death
of Dante, the greatest «poet of the secular world» (Erich Auerbach).
Over that period, worldwide celebrations, several international projects
focusing on his works, conferences, seminars and exhibitions will take
place all over the world, along with a renewed popular circulation of
texts, motives, images, performances, and representations concerning his
life and mainly his masterwork. Notwithstanding, the Divine Comedy,
the most illustrated lay work of the Middle Ages,
still demands a systematic survey of its illuminated manuscripts, as well as a clear classification and
explanation of all the vivid images that these precious artefacts
contain. Illuminated Dante Project (IDP), promoted by the
University of Naples “Federico II”, may be the perfect
opportunity for cultural institutions and public and/or private
foundations to advocate the extraordinary literary and artistic heritage
that such handiworks represent. Indeed, IDP aims
to respond for the first time to both the need of an in-depth
understanding of the ancient illustration of
the Divine Comedy and to the lack of a research
tool available not only for academic specialists or for affluent
bibliophiles (such as the printed catalogues and the manuscript
facsimiles), but also for a wider public of passionate readers.
The project aims to provide a systematic survey and
an accurate description of those
early illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy
(miniatures’ extended apparatuses, historiated
initials, elaborated friezes, drawings, sketches, diagrams, schemes)
revealing up to the smallest meaningful reference
to the poem or to a commentary accompanying the poem. Such a crucial
work of classification will be accompanied by the setting up of the
biggest high-definition image archive of the
Divine Comedy, in which both linguistic and figurative
codes of the Divine Comedy intersect in a
multi-disciplinary viewpoint availing itself of the IT means.
By the creation of both an image archive and a database of the earliest illustrations of the Divine Comedy, presented in a charming and user-friendly architecture, IDP will add an indispensable research and knowledge tool to the already existing online academic resources on Dante’s world (Dante online, Digital Dante, Dartmouth Dante Project, Princeton Dante Project).
By the creation of both an image archive and a database of the earliest illustrations of the Divine Comedy, presented in a charming and user-friendly architecture, IDP will add an indispensable research and knowledge tool to the already existing online academic resources on Dante’s world (Dante online, Digital Dante, Dartmouth Dante Project, Princeton Dante Project).
So far, IDP has already created a finding list of
about 280 manuscripts dating and datable between
the 14th and the 15th
centuries, and held in libraries, museums and archives worldwide.
Such institutions will be asked to provide high-definition reproductions (according to the
IFLA and FADGI digitization
standards) of their Dante artefacts, along with copyright licenses for
research purposes and/or re-use permission of their online images
through specific web-interoperability protocols (such as the
IIIF manifest).
At the same time, IDP research team will describe and classify the
manuscripts through in situ missions and will
harvest the codicologic and iconographic descriptions into a
database called IDP. A dataset of such
descriptions will be then related to a high-definition image repository
of the illuminated manuscripts. Both database and digital archive will
be hosted here, on this portal, so to be entirely and openly available
to the needs of librarians, cataloguers, researchers, and passionate
onlookers. The University portal www.dante.unina.it
will share – via the
XML TEI-P5
encoding standard – the codicological descriptions of the IDP corpus with the
National Manuscript Online Catalogue
(Manus online) of the
Central Institute for the Unique Catalogue
(ICCU)
in a special section
dedicated to the project. The digital reproductions of the
Italian State Libraries’ manuscripts will be also accessible on the
Digital Library of Internet Culturale
(IC),
accompanied by a specific dataset concerning the illustrations.
Because of an agreement between the University of Naples “Federico
II” and the General Direction of the State Libraries of Italy
(DGBIC),
made possible thanks to the intermediation of the Centro Pio Rajna
(CPR) and the
Casa di Dante in Rome,
the majority of the manuscripts coming from Italian State Libraries
(almost the half of the corpus) has been already digitised. The manuscripts of some
Italian non-State libraries have also been added
to IDP repository (Biblioteca dell'Archivio Storico e
Trivulziana; Biblioteca dell'Accademia dei Lincei e Corsiniana). Further
agreements with important international libraries such as
the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Oxford University Bodleian
Library have allowed reproducing and studying another consistent part of
the corpus. IDP has also established further
partnerships with the Vatican Library and the British Library for the
the re-use and the analysis of their illuminated Dante manuscripts.
