‘Yes, I can do this’:
Images of the Divine Comedy in the present day Giorgio Bacci
Descriptive and interpretative depictions, illustrated commentaries: different typologies which, in the contemporary visual reading of the Divine Comedy, have ended up overlapping, crossing hermeneutic borders and methodological barriers. On the other hand, while Lucia Battaglia Ricci has recently highlighted the fact that these categories are not intended as value systems, corresponding to different levels of artistic intentionality1, Gianfranco Contini had already sensed that it was not an outlandish theory to imagine an illustrator able to leave aside the narrative condition of Dante’s poem, ideally bringing together two words usually understood as opposing semantic poles: illustration and abstraction2. The latter word is to be understood, with reference to contemporary art, not as “abstraction from nature” or “distortion of reality”, but as a work that is abstract per se, the expression of an equally abstract philosophical (or mythical) way of thinking, as expounded by Barnett Newman in The Plasmic Image3. An obviously useful concept when artists find themselves having to give voice to Paradiso, undoubtedly the hardest cantica to interpret visually. In this regard, Monika Beisner (Hamburg, 1942) tellingly points out that “there are no bodies in Paradiso, only flames and bodies of light” and has therefore decided “to work entirely on the circle, because it’s the perfect shape”4. Consistent with this philological attitude, she has altered her methodological approach, going from the plastically intended realism of Inferno to the subtle symbolic transfiguration of Paradiso. And yet even when the images are straightforward and “simple”, they should not be seen as a reductive mimetic rendering of the narrative, but as a figurative equivalent of Dante’s ability to capture the sinner’s “state of mind”. This is a not insignificant detail, indicating as it does the cultural and historical sensitivity shown by Monika Beisner, who develops a heartfelt visual harmony organised around the characteristics of a classical technique used in medieval manuscripts: egg tempera on paper, which works not only to make colours vibrant and radiant but also to allow scholarly references and quotations, ranging from 14th-century manuscripts to Giovanni di Paolo and Vecchietta. See Battaglia Ricci 2018.. See Contini 2001. 3 On this subject see Roque 2004, especially pp. 172-177. 4 See interview in catalogue. 1
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