Data visualization to experience the legacy of Dante’s Comedy and its influence on the cultural heritage
700 years after Dante Alighieri’s death, a digital humanities project celebrates the influence the Divine Comedy has had on the world’s cultural and artistic heritage, inspiring millions of people in Italy and all around the world.
The Divine Comedy is a poetic work that has inspired millions of people in Italy and around the world. 700 years after the death of il Sommo Poeta (“the Supreme Poet”), the website Divinecomedy.digital aims at celebrating, through a vast collection of artworks, the influence that his work has had on the artistic and cultural heritage of the world.
About the poem
Dante Alighieri wrote the Divine Comedy between 1304 and 1321, the year of his death. The poem is written in the Florentine vernacular and consists of 100 cantos, which are divided into three Canticas: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. It is written in tercets of hendecasyllables following a terza rima pattern, for a total of 14,233 lines. Not everyone knows that the original copy hand-written by Dante has never been found: the text of the Divine Comedy survived thanks to the copy of manuscripts. The poem is still important today not only because it has laid the foundation of the current Italian language, but also because its precise depiction of life and after-life has played a crucial role in understanding the late period of the Middle Ages.
Project introduction
Divinecomedy.digital is a digital humanities project that collects artworks depicting the narrative world of the Divine Comedy. This heritage spans seven centuries of art history and represents a summa of the many interpretations that artists and playwrights have given to the Poem, which have contributed to defining this famous and mythical imaginary world.
The website, developed by The Visual Agency, provides the users with a unique and holistic experience, as it explores a vast collection of artworks related to Dante Alighieri’s greatest work: the Divine Comedy. Through an interactive visualization, which maps the complete plot of the Italian poet’s masterpiece, the application creates new ways of exploring the content of the Divine Comedy and its related imagery. Users, therefore, have the possibility to access what is probably the most influential vision of the medieval world, and to observe in an innovative way the interpretations given by artists over the centuries.
The artwork collection
The backbone of the project relies on a database of over 1 thousand artworks that depict a scene from the Divine Comedy.
The research has been conducted with due care and diligence, with a final result of 1,194 artworks — cataloged according to parameters such as author, title, year, museum, etc. — that have been associated with one of the 413 scenes in which the Divine Comedy has been divided.
This visualization shows a panoramic view of the whole collection: more than a thousand artworks have been classified and mapped in relation to the poem’s plot, allowing the users to easily explore the content of this ever-growing catalog.
The visualization of the Divine Comedy’s plot
The Divine Comedy is divided into the famous three Canticas (parts/books): Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Each Cantica consists of 33 cantos (poetries), except for the Inferno which contains an additional canto as a preface; for a total of 100. To better understand the structure, the menu is divided into four columns, respectively divided by: 3 Canticas, 30 settings (i.e.: circles, terraces, spheres), 100 Cantos and 413 scenes.
Each part of the menu can be sized according to the number of verses or artworks that constitute it. In the section Size by, visitors can select Number of verses or Number of artworks to size the parts by desired criteria.
In the section Normalize each, users can select between Cantica, Setting, Canto, or Scene to normalize the parts of the desired column.
Further developments
More than a thousand artworks including illuminated manuscripts, engravings, canvases, frescoes, and drawings have been classified to allow the users to explore the content of this digital collection. The site was born with this wide selection of existing works, but lives of the contributions of all. In order to make it grow it is possible to suggest artworks that are not included in the collection. Through the page suggest artwork, visitors can fill in the form with the necessary information to let us know that something is missing. I think the idea of allowing this collection to grow through the effort of the visitors fits pretty well the philosophy of the digital humanities: users become contributors and vice versa.
Conclusions
With Divinecomedy.digital we wanted to break users’ habits: that’s why we created what we called a slow surfing experience for the visitors. To reach this objective, we relied on a couple of design solutions: the horizontal scrolling and the bottom to top structure of the main visualization — for instance, the inferno is archetypally thought to develop downward, but the whole path of Dante’s redemption develops upwardly, from the Earth to the Paradise. We wanted to let users take their time while listening to the Comedy’s verses, and I think these are some of the most interesting features in terms of design.
However, the most interesting lesson we learned from this project is not strictly related to the design or development phases, but rather to the subject matter. Thanks to the main visualization we’ve been able to see that, contrary to what is commonly held by philologists and educators, the three Canticas are not perfectly symmetrical. They do have the same structure, but there are some differences that don’t allow them to perfectly overlap. In terms of the number of verses, the differences between them are already known. However, now we know the structure of each setting (in terms of Circles, Terraces, and Spheres) is also slightly different. It was an interesting discovery, made possible by the visualization and the filter that allows to normalize the structure and highlight these differences in a way that hadn’t been possible before.
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The project has been created by:
Marco Azzalin, Francesca Bagni, Anna Bardazzi, Giulio Bertolotti, Giacomo Bettiol, Matteo Breda, Matteo Bonera, Nina Corradini, Gianluca Gagliardi, Paolo Guadagni, Eleonora Molin, Thi Xuan Huong Nguyen, Valerio Palmerini, Nicola Petrus, Sara Piccolomini, Francesco Pontiroli, Francesco Roveta, Benedetta Signaroldi, Giulia Zerbini.
Visit: DivineComedy.digital
Visit: The Visual Agency
