ABSTRACT
This chapter examines ways of visual cognition represented in words by Dante in the Divine Comedy and the results of Botticelli's experiment in actually translating Dante's poem into pictures. The complex cognitive techniques Dante brought to bear and expected of his readers were still accessible to Botticelli, with attenuations. By the fifteenth century, as the visual arts demonstrate in the shift from Gothic to early modern styles, those techniques were mutating into a quite different cognitive system, or plurality of systems. The focus in reflecting on Dante and Botticelli is the sacred festival procession complete with chariot float that concludes Dante's Purgatorio. One destination reached by the above-mentioned mutation of cognitive techniques after Dante is represented by an actual procession and floats in Malines in 1775 celebrating the millennium of the martyrdom of that city's patron, St Romuald. The subject of Dante's poem and Botticelli's drawings is the miracle of seeing God.
