Visibile Parlare

Abstract

The Commedia begins and ends with two images of the human person: the shadowy self that inaugurates the Inferno and the visage of Christ (la nostra effige) that concludes the paradisal ascent. I read the Commedia as just this: a chronicle of Dante’s translation (trasumanare) from the former to the latter, from shadow to Image. Specifically, this study offers a meditation on how Dante’s translation from shadow to Image is presided over by the Madonna, whose muted presence throughout the poem serves as a theophany, in literary form, of Divine humility. The controlling image of this thesis is a scene in Purgatorio 10 where Dante, after passing through the gates of purgatory and surveying the penitential landscape that horizons his journey ahead, will measure (misurebbe) that distance according to the scale of un corpo umano (Purg.10.24). As I interpret it, the appearance of this lexicon, misurrebbe—the conditional of misurare, meaning “to measure”—at this specific moment is Dante’s way of subtly articulating how the ascent up purgatory’s mountain is fundamentally a search after the human person: the human measure that is obscured and abandoned in inferno as a result of pride (superbia) is slowly rediscovered and mirrored in purgatory (Purg. 1.129). Specific to the Commedia, the search for this human measure unfolds within a Marian soundscape: it is the voice of Mary’s humility that en-voices anew Dante's own. In Purgatorio 10.97, Dante will name the image of Marian humility as visibile parlare, or speech made visible, an obvious gesture to the incarnation. As the breathing image of God, Mary’s humility represents much more than a mere virtue; at the literary level, it serves as an exegesis of the Divine society, a revealing of God. The image of Marian humility thus provides the key to interpreting the poem’s concluding visio dei, which does not unravel as an imageless mystical vision but appears as an enfleshed image: the face of Christ, whose visage is double, Divine and human. The ultimate aim of this thesis is to ponder the implications of Dante representing Marian humility as the vernacular of God. The result is a theological contribution to Dante studies where the literary presence of the Madonna is more fully thematized, a presence that, though central to both the poem’s form and content, has somehow remained largely understudied within Dante scholarship.