Dante as "Auctor" in Musée Condé MS 597

Abstract

The prefatory miniatures in Chantilly, Musee Conde, MS 597, a manuscript that dates from about 1327-28 and comprises an uninterrupted text of Dante's Inferno followed by a presentation copy of Guido da Pisa's commentary on it, offer an extraordinarily articulate response to perhaps the most hotly contested issue in Dante studies—the poet's claims to truth and authority. Critics have long debated the degree to which Dante may have expected audiences to believe that he actually experienced a divinely sanctioned trip through the afterlife. Some scholars have sought to bolster their position by invoking one or more of the eighteen commentaries that survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but few have examined the responses of another early audience, manuscript illuminators. By manipulating perspective and other pictorial elements, miniaturists often expressed viewpoints that are distinct from those of the commentators, including the many commentators who were hired to select the iconography of th...