Jenseitsbilder

Dante's Commedia intensively influenced the concept of the afterlife for people in Italy. But how did artists react to Dante's imaginary world of images in their visual constructions of the Last Judgment? Based on cycles of wall paintings by artists from Giotto to Signorelli, the author shows how the Commedia altered the traditional picture theme of Judgment Day for the first time. Dante's landscape of the afterlife enabled painters to visualize new pictorial spaces that did not necessarily have a direct connection to the text, but make reference to it nevertheless.

The consideration of this complex pictorial program that is undertaken in this book in turn opens up new ways of understanding the reception and interpretation of the Commedia, so that text and image enter into a productive dialogue.