"The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante's "Commedia""

Matthew Collins holds a PhD from Harvard University in Romance languages and literatures, a JD from NYU Law, and an MA in the history of art and architecture from NYU's Institute of Fine Arts. He is the founding series editor of Reading Dante with Images.

Introduction: Images and Genealogies at the Margins of Renaissance Cultural Historiography 1. From Manuscript to Print: Broken Links and Bigger Pictures 2. From Print to Manuscript: Ideology and Pedagogy in the Hands of Copyists 3. From Drawing to Print (1): The Botticelli Questions 4. From Drawing to Print (2): The Forgotten Morgan Dante Drawings 5. Dante in the Age of Exploration: Meetings of Fact, Fiction, and Cartography 6. Approaches to Visual Narrative: A Taxonomy 7. Early Readership, Marginalia, and Mnemonics Conclusion: The Work of Book Art in the Age of Early Print

"The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante's 'Commedia' seamlessly weaves together art history, book history, and literary history in a fascinating exploration of these illustrations, revealing profound connections between art, literature, and history." -Rhoda Eitel-Porter, co-author of Italian Renaissance Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum "Having already set new standards in visual Dante studies with his innovative editorial project Reading Dante with Images, Matthew Collins integrates visual sources such as the Morgan drawings and the Marcolini Dante into histories of production, perception, and interpretation. His enlightening and engaging book will lead readers into the sibling disciplines of art and literature, print and poetry, Italian and Dante studies, and, not least, into a fresh approach to the history of technology." -Henrike Christiane Lange, author of Giotto's Arena Chapel and the Triumph of Humility "Elegantly written and rigorously researched, Matthew Collins's The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante's "Commedia" provides us with both a wealth of new analyses and a set of new approaches to what it means to illustrate and visualize Dante's poem in print, and all the complex and multifaceted relations between word and image this involved. The book will be of immense value not only to all students of Dante and his reception, but also to cultural, literary and art historians, and to all those working on print and visual culture." -Simon Gilson, author of Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante