“A Form in Time”

This chapter considers the history of illustrating Dante’s Comedy, with special emphasis on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its inspiration was an invitation to review the London exhibition of Burrie Tullett’s The Typographical Dante, and to interview the artist. Tullett’s work—radical, unprecedented, uniquely evocative, and aesthetically beautiful—provides a new vernacular for a twenty-first century sublime, and acts as the proverbial gadfly: what has been the relationship between Dante’s poem and that parallel figurative narrative that has accompanied it from the start? This chapter picks on Osip Mandelstam’s own engagement with the Commedia to trace the dialectics across the poem’s pictorial tradition and inherent pictoriality. The chapter also makes special reference to two relatively unremarked artists, Stefan Mrozewski and Olga Petrova. To be able to incorporate this tradition critically and dynamically, and to create, as Tullett has done, a new, twenty-first century “form in time” for Dante’s poem, that has no historical antecedent and yet remains organically engaged with all that has come before, is a formidable, thrilling feat in terms of both aesthetics and scholarship.