12 Italian illustrators and artists were invited to create an artistic work in homage to the author of the Divine Comedy. Alongside these creations, the exhibition offers a journey through the most famous adaptations of the comic poem.
Representing the Divina Commedia in comics may seem irreverent, almost sacrilegious, so far, a medieval poem appears from this modern narrative technique that only in recent years has it received a license of respectability and is becoming a real artistic genre, a new form of expression. Yet, speaking of languages, Dante himself invented a new one by composing his work in a language that did not exist before. The Florentine vernacular becomes the language of the Italians with Dante's poem and the basis of our literary tradition. But also, in reference to the images that the poem arouses in the fantasies of seven centuries of humanity, Dante is a revolutionary. He invents an iconographic paraphernalia that still dominates our infernal visions today. Groups, bolge, skies and beatitudes have become the geography of the afterlife of all Western culture. Each of us, thinking about hell, cannot help but retrace Dante's descriptions.
In recent decades our cultures have been hunting for stories, recycling Nordic sagas or inventing new cosmogonies such as Tolkien's to entertain an audience that, at the sunset of faiths and ideologies, no longer believes in anything but wants to believe everything. In the world of pre-Covid, to escape the rampant homologation, masses of tourists traveled the globe to visit cities, museums and archaeological sites always in pursuit of new narratives that had the reassuring connotations of a still distinct cultural identity. And we, who in our culture have such a formidable history as the Divina Commedia, have never thought of making it a colossal or a series with infinite seasons to which generations of fans will be loyal. Yet the intrigue is irresistible: a journey to hell and back, passing through purgatory and paradise. The tables of this exhibition are an innovative and captivating transposition of Dante's poem whose power lies not only in poetry and theological construction but also in the invention of an adventure, of a journey into the beyond which, however paradoxical, thanks to Dante seems possible to us.
From February 23rd 2023 to September 22nd 2023
Bibliothèque Université Laval - 2345, allée des Bibliothèques, Québec, QC G1V 0A6
Opening, Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023 by invitation only
