which of these manuscripts does not depict matthew

9ĭante tells us repeatedly that one of his aims in writing the Commedia was to help lead readers toward the divine. 8 Studying Giovanni's illuminations prompts us to reconsider the types of activity that reading the Commedia could involve. They are particularly sophisticated examples of what, however, holds true for Giovanni's many depictions of Christological, Trinitarian, and Marian subjects: namely, that by refashioning iconographies that in fifteenth-century Italy were aids to prayer, Giovanni creates spaces for the reader-viewer's devotional activity, encouraging and guiding the viewer's meditative turn toward the divine. I focus on these miniatures because they are among the most conceptually complex and iconographically original of the manuscript. One of these images, I suggest, is a reflection on Christ as love, the other a reflection on the inner life of the Trinity. 7 The two illuminations I discuss in this essay are unusual responses to the challenge of depicting the divine. Victor's undertaking to manifest, in a single artwork, the totality of human spiritual striving, 5 to 'the anagogic capacity' of images in the Rothschild Canticles 'to intimate a truth beyond ,' 6 to exploration of Trinitarian images as opening new possibilities for twenty-first-century feminist theology. Scholars are increasingly exploring the many ways in which images can be a means of doing theology, from the manifold uses of images in different forms of prayer, 3 to Hildegard of Bingen's use of art as 'not just illustration … argument,' 4 to Hugh of St.

In this view, Giovanni's illuminations do not merely illustrate the narrative or epistemological content of the Commedia, but also share in the salvific mission that Dante claims for his poem. I suggest that Giovanni's depictions of the sacred are a means of doing theology: that is, they explore the nature and activity of God and invite the viewer's first-person engagement with the divine. 1 This essay proposes that Giovanni's images of the sacred in his illuminations for Paradiso invite forms of devotional engagement on the part of the reader-viewer. In his illuminations for Dante's Paradiso, Giovanni di Paolo, one of the foremost painters of fifteenth-century Siena, reimagines contemporary religious iconographies, sometimes in highly unusual ways.

Which of these manuscripts does not depict matthew