Mediating Christ in Paradiso and in MS Vat.lat.4776

Abstract

In Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Vat.lat.4776 (c. 1390-1400) line drawings, of particularly high quality draughtsmanship, accompany Paradiso I-XI. Although Christ does not in any straightforward sense participate in the narrative of Paradiso I-XI, the majority of the drawings contain a small head and neck of Christ enclosed in a nimbus, strongly reminiscent of the devotional iconography of the Veronica or Holy Face. The images explore one of the central questions in the Commedia: how the divine is present in, or mediated by, human encounters. I investigate how, in different ways, in both the images and Dante’s text (here focusing on Dante’s ‘in’ neologisms in Paradiso IX and on Paradiso XIV), Christ is understood as the reality that allows humans to share in a capacity for relatedness that is not bound by normal spatiotemporal limits.