Dante, Artist of Gesture by Heather Webb

Author:Heather Webb [HEATHER WEBB]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780192692627
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-08-30T18:53:33+00:00

4

Modelling Gestural Virtues in Dante’s Purgatorio

Ante-purgatory, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, is a space dedicated to the complex choreographies of mode-shifting. To move through and with the encounters of Ante-purgatory, Dante consciously, and even awkwardly, reconfigures his sense of movement with and towards others. Purgatory proper, accessed in the wake of that reconfiguration, presents its own set of challenges. The greatest of these has to do with participation in the ongoing penance on each terrace. Penance is often enacted through gestural and postural practices that Dante temporarily takes part in along with the shades he encounters. Reading and fully engaging with these penitential practices is challenging work and, as I will seek to show in what follows, kinesic visualization and gestural elaboration may offer the most direct ways in to what the text presents.1

Cantos 10–27 of Purgatorio are laden with examples of vices and virtues: the most explicit of these are those visible or audible to Dante at the entrance and exit of each terrace.2 But the encounters with penitents have exemplary qualities as well, which can be better discerned in light of the threshold manifestations of the virtues and vices. The penitents tend to betray, in their speech, a mixture of unhealed tendencies towards the vice tangled up with decided and resolute work towards the opposing virtue. Nonetheless, the gestural and postural practices that they perform as part of their penance are often the ones that, as I noted in the case of the terrace of pride in Chapter 1, invite imitation or inclusion on the part of Dante as he encounters them, and, potentially, on the part of the reader who seeks out models to help move them towards a particular virtue or away from a particular vice.

When we speak of what is ‘exemplary’, it is important to make some distinctions in the varied functions of each of the elements of every terrace: the virtues, the encounters with the penitents, as individuals and in groups, and then the vices. The virtues provide a poignant affective image to aspire to, but are not always accessible as an attitude to immediately step into. The penitents, conversely, may present a mix of attitudes on the spectrum between the virtue and its opposing vice but generally display an accessible somatic practice that is immediately available, such as bowing or lying prostrate on the floor. The vices presented later allow the healed penitent to engage in sorrow for those who did not take up the opportunity to reconfigure their behaviour.3

Of course, not all the exemplars of the virtues and the vices appear in visual form. And among the penitents, the wrathful are heard rather than seen, from within a dense cloud of smoke. There is no question that Dante employs a wide variety of means in order to transmit examples of virtue and vice on each terrace. Numerous cases are oral, and, in fact, scholars have argued for an emphasis on the verbal in the exemplarity of Purgatorio, linking this aspect to preaching.

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