IMMAGINI NATURALI DELL’OLTREMONDO DANTESCO

Abstract

Natural images of Dante’s underworld. – Dante Alighieri’s ability to represent the reality of the afterlife is known. The effectiveness of this representation is entrusted by the author to the use of similitudes. The main goal of this research is to underline how the similitudes used by Dante refer mostly to the natural world and how the author constructs the infernal geography through physical and concrete data of an experiential world to which every man can refer to. This attitude of Dante to “speak in images” (visibil parlare), then, is investigated as the main cause that has allowed and inspired so many successive transcodes from literature to the visual arts.