ABSTRACT
This chapter considers various echoes of The Divine Comedy and the metamorphoses of its expanded body across verbal, visual, and spatial media. While allowing that some of the spatial motifs that were incorporated in the poem have their origins in a similar translation from works in other media, including architecture. The Divine Comedy is organized in three parts, Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, set in an ascending spatial hierarchy. A study of most folios that have the complete set of illustrations for The Divine Comedy by an individual artist show the Inferno to be visually the most compelling of the three realms. Particular design decisions are justified by analogy to aspects of the formal compositional structure of the poem, including numerical relationships. Numerical relationships are important to the structure of the poem and to Terragni's design of the Danteum; they are also deeply embedded in the design of the church.
