Jacopo Valentini, Concerning Dante, 2021

Over the centuries, the cultural significance of Dante’s Divine Comedy has gone beyond a purely literary sphere, influencing various aspects of society, thanks also to a vast tradition of visual transpositions.

Concerning Dante – Autonomous Cell is a meta-project on the relationship between literary text and landscape and on the evocative power of the Divine Comedy, which over the centuries has shaped the perception of places to the point of connoting them as ‘Dantean’. Jacopo Valentini has investigated a series of places in Italy mentioned by the Supreme Poet and, by relating them to other landscapes and still lifes with the same visual climax, has created analogies for a Dantesque geography.

Valentini’s visual narrative unfolds around three symbolic places and three famous illustrations from Dante’s text, interweaving the Campi Flegrei, the Pietra di Bismantova and the Po Delta – interpreted as the gateways to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – with the figurations of Federico Zuccari, Alberto Martini and Robert Rauschenberg.