Look Up: The Eyes of Dante and Giotto

Look UpThe Eyes of Dante and Giotto Mark Sandona (bio) This whole visible world is as a book written by the finger of God, that is, created by divine power, and individual creatures are as figures not devised by human will but instituted by divine authority to show forth the wisdom of the invisible things of God. But just as some illiterate man who sees an open book, looks at the figures, but does not recognize the letters: just so the foolish and natural man, who does not perceive the things of God, sees outwardly in these visible creatures the appearance but does not inwardly understand the reason. But he who is spiritual and can judge all things, while he considers outwardly the beauty of the work, inwardly conceives how marvelous is the wisdom of the Creator. hugh of st. victor (ca. 1130), De tribus diebus 41 The One for Whom no new thing can exist Fashioned this art of visible speech—so strange To us who do not know it here on earth. dante, Purgatorio 10.94–962 Dante Alighieri (1264–1321) and Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267–1337) were contemporaries as young men growing up in late thirteenth-century End Page 18 Florence. Their shared visual world included one of the commune's foundations, the Battistero di San Giovanni, which was understood as the center of spiritual and civic life. In the Divine Comedy, Dante refers to this building, named for St. John the Baptist, three times—and in each instance with a deep emotional connection. The heart of medieval Florence, it was the place where a Florentine was marked with the seal of faith and with the stamp of citizenship. In Inferno, Dante speaks of the place as "my lovely San Giovanni" (19.17); in Paradiso, Dante imagines his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, referring to "your ancient Baptistery" (15.134); and near the end of the poem, the exiled Dante poignantly imagines himself returning to that baptistery and to the very font where he was baptized (25.8–9). The building that loomed so large in Dante's imagination still stands, and its interior has not changed greatly from its appearance when Dante and Giotto lived in Florence. During their boyhoods, the commune spent lavishly to embellish the ancient building with rich mosaics covering the interior dome. The mosaics depict the sweep of salvation history from the creation of the world through the Last Judgment. This sweep of history is precisely the sort of vision that informs the Divine Comedy and the fresco program of Giotto's master-piece, the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Standing in the center of the octagonal building, looking up, the young Dante or Giotto would have seen the interior dome dominated by a huge image of Christ on a rainbow throne, gesturing with thumb up to the elect, thumb down to the damned (see journal cover). As the dead emerge from their sarcophagi, bejeweled angels direct the elect toward the gate of Paradise, and bat-winged demons drag the damned to Hell. The torments that await them are graphically rendered: lizards, frogs, and snakes sink their fangs into sinners' flesh. A horned and bearded Satan is about to devour a sinner, whose legs dangle from his maw. While the lower tiers of the baptistery's dome are populated by human figures, then angels, at the highest point abstract patterns replace the recognizable forms. Is not this organization of images End Page 19 comparable to that of Dante's poem? As with the reader of the Divine Comedy, the viewer in the baptistery moves upward from human history, here in the form of biblical narrative, to eternity, and as the viewer moves toward eternity, earthly images begin to take on the quality of abstraction. Ultimately, the viewer encounters a realm of pure light at the apex of the journey. Light streams through the oculus, the octagonal opening at the summit, and encircling the oculus is a foliate pattern that, from the distance of the floor, suggests the petals of the Celestial Rose, Dante's vision of the Empyrean. How could such images not leave an indelible imprint on...