Luca Signorelli, Dante Alighieri

Description

The portrait of Dante by Luca Signorelli places the Supreme Poet among the other illustrious men of antiquity and above all with the eleven monochrome medallions depicting scenes from Purgatory, among the last subjects painted by the Cortonese. The Orvieto portrait of Dante also reaches its definitive typology and becomes the model for subsequent portraits, in its idealized physiognomic features and in the presence of the laurel wreath. It is a scholarly, humanist and wise Dante, who meditates on the lesson of the ancients, an expression of an art as the result of the effort of the intellect. The image of Dante that Signorelli has in mind is therefore the one reworked by Florentine Humanism starting with Bruni, in order to celebrate Florence's excellence in the vernacular, and then made its own by Ficino's Neoplatonic circle, which preaches a Dante as a "spiritual hero", "poet theologus".