Abstract

The article focuses on the iconography of the manuscript known as the Paris-Imola ‘Inferno’, currently divided into two codicological units: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France It. 2017; Imola, Biblioteca comunale, ms. 76. The codex, realised for Filippo Maria Visconti, contains the ‘Inferno’ and a commentary by court humanist Guiniforte Barzizza, and features 72 tabular miniatures realised by the ‘Magister Vitae Imperatorum’. In this work the attention is drawn on the interaction between text and image, from the analysis of which emerges the possibility that the exegete also intervened in iconographic choices: in the following examples, the images seem to depend not only on Dante’s poetry, but also on what is written in the commentary. In this way, Barzizza’s role in the creation of the manuscript could be reinterpreted: he may not have limited himself to the exegesis of the text, but he may also have been a ‘concepteur’, working into dynamics related to the material aspects of the codex.