Ravenna, major exhibition dedicated to art at the time of Dante's exile kicks off

Opening May 8 and open until July 4, 2021, the exhibition Dante. The Eyes and the Mind. The Arts at the Time of Exile, set up at the Church of San Romualdo in Ravenna. Curated by Massimo Medica (Director of the Musei Civici d’Arte Antica in Bologna) and organized by the Municipality of Ravenna, the Department of Culture and MAR - Museo d’Arte della Città di Ravenna, on the occasion of the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death, the exhibition aims to retrace the main stages of the Supreme Poet’s exile, which finally led him to Ravenna, where the poet died seven hundred years ago. Some of the main stages of his exile are Rome, Arezzo, Verona, Padua, Bologna, Lucca, Pisa and finally Ravenna, cities punctuate the path of the exhibition in which it is possible to admire some masterpieces created at the time of Dante and through which it is possible to retrace the most significant events ofItalian art between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

In recounting the figure of Dante, one has repeatedly wondered about the role that visual experience could play in the conception of his works, and many have noted the Supreme Poet’s ability to think directly in images. Especially when one considers that his hometown was Florence, which was characterized from the mid-13th century by a great artistic flowering, culminating with Cimabue (on display are the Castelfiorentino Madonna and the two cut-out miniatures with Saints Abbondio and Crisanto applied to the exterior doors of a tabernacle-reliquary in the Pinacoteca Civica in Gubbio) and Giotto, whose works Dante must have been familiar with. His exile began in 1302 and led him to wander through various courts and cities in central and northern Italy, thus enriching his vast heritage of images that he had to take into account when he composed the Divine Comedy.

The exhibition route starts in Florence, with the two protagonists of the artistic scene, Cimabue and Giotto, mentioned in the well-known tercets of Purgatory (Canto XI): this first section displays Cimabue’s Madonna and Child of Castelfiorentino placed in comparison with Giotto’s Madonna of San Giorgio alla Costa and the later Badia polyptych of the Uffizi, which Dante himself surely had occasion to admire before his sentence of forced exile. Most responsible for this fact on Boniface VIII, whose cast of the sculpture made by Arnolfo di Cambio depicting him is on display. Life at the papal court in Rome, a city Dante visited in 1300 and 1301, before receiving the news of his condemnation and final exile from Florence, is introduced by furnishings and precious paintings, including the two fragments of a fresco depicting Saints Peter and Paul from the destroyed pictorial cycle of the portico of St. Peter’s.

His years of exile began in the Forli of the Ordelaffi and the Verona of the Scaligeri in 1303-1304, to which he then returned in 1313-1318 during the period of great development of the city promoted by Cangrande della Scala. His sojourn in the Venetian city is documented by valuable textiles, gold work, painted panels and sculptures, the latter by the Master of St. Anastasia. He then arrived in Padua around 1304, when Giotto was completing the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel. Also on display is the very precious Offiziolo (1305-1309) that belonged to Francesco da Barberino, a poet friend of Dante’s, which has various images of clear Dante-inspired imagery inside. The Supreme Poet then passed through Bologna, between 1304 and 1306: it is not excluded that Dante had been able to admire the illuminations that decorated the precious juridical books and liturgical codices; in the 11th Canto of Purgatory Dante mentions the illuminator Oderisi da Gubbio. Illuminated manuscripts from the Bolognese school of the late 13th and early 14th centuries will then be on display, along with other masterpieces from libraries and museums, including the Vatican Apostolic Library.

After his sojourns in the Marca Trevigiana and then in the Lunigiana of the Malaspina family, Dante moved to Casentino, then to Lucca, where he had the opportunity to see the works completed by Nicola Pisano for the cathedral (the cast of the lunette with the Deposition from the Cross, from the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa, is present in the exhibition) and again to Forli in 1310, where he probably learned the news of the descent of the new emperor Arrigo VII into Italy. A special section presents various documents related to the emperor, who died prematurely on August 24, 1313. The solemn funeral ceremony held in Pisa Cathedral was probably also attended by Dante, who thus had the opportunity to admire some of the masterpieces created by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano. The latter was in those years in the service of the emperor himself, who commissioned him to create the funeral monument to his wife Margaret of Brabant, who died on December 14, 1311, and was buried in Genoa Cathedral (from which the sculpture with Justice in the National Gallery of Liguria in Palazzo Spinola comes). The monument had probably been partly prepared in the sculptor’s Pisan workshop between the spring and summer of 1313, at the same time that Dante was in Pisa where he had moved, following the court, from March 1312. The accounts of Nicola and Giovanni Pisano flank those of Arnolfo di Cambio (National Gallery of Umbria) in the exhibition, confirming the pre-eminence the poet attributed to plastic art, as attested by the numerous quotations in the Comedy. Once he left the court of Cangrande della Scala, Dante arrived in Ravenna around 1319, where Guido Novello da Polenta had recently come to power. The presence in the city of the painters Giovanni and Giuliano da Rimini dates back to this period, and the latter was commissioned to decorate the cornu epistulae chapel of the church of San Domenico, followed also by Pietro da Rimini, of whom the city still preserves various testimonies. Ample space will be reserved for these two Riminese artists (Giuliano’s large polyptych owned by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Rimini and deposited in the Museo della Città “Luigi Tonini”) in the final section of the exhibition, interspersed with testimonies related to Venetian figurative culture, in order to document the last diplomatic venture carried out by the Florentine poet on behalf of da Polenta in the lagoon city: however, it proved fatal for him, as he died between September 13 and 14, 1321. He was buried in a small chapel leaning against the wall of the convent of San Francesco, which in ancient times was called della Madonna because of perhaps an ancient carved image with the Madonna and Child enthroned, which originally surmounted the sarcophagus, which has been sought to be identified with the one now preserved in the Louvre Museum, coming in fact from Ravenna. It is an undisputed masterpiece made of marble, datable between the late 13th and early 14th centuries, which for the occasion returns to its city of origin, documenting its relevance to the Byzantine tradition, revisited, however, according to an already Western and Gothic sensibility.

The exhibition counts on the valuable contribution of the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna, the Ravenna Chamber of Commerce and the Emilia Romagna Region.

For more info: www.mar.ra.it

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Image: Giuliano di Martino da Rimini, Triptych with the Coronation of the Virgin, Angels, Saints and Scenes from the Passion of Christ (c. 1315-1320, tempera and gold on panel, 190.5 x 205.5 cm; Rimini, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio, on deposit at the “Luigi Tonini” City Museum)

Ravenna, major exhibition dedicated to art at the time of Dante's exile kicks off

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.