Leonardo and Allegory

Abstract

In the tenth Canto of Purgatory, Dante and Vergil stumbled upon three carved reliefs: an Annunciation, David's Dance Before the Ark of the Covenant, and the Judgment of Emperor Trajan. They were carved in an extremely lifelike manner. The angel, Dante said, ‘appeared before us so vividly engraved in gracious attitude it did not seem an image [imagine], carved and silent. One would have sworn he was saying “Ave.”’ In David's dance ‘the smoke of incense sculpted there put eyes and nose in discord, caught between yes and no’. And in the last scene, Dante swore he could hear the voice of the mourning mother asking Trajan to avenge her son's death. Artifice of such animation, Dante believed, could have only been authored by God and certainly not by an historical artist. ‘He in whose sight nothing can be new, wrought this speech made visible [visibile parlare], new to us because it is not found on earth’. Not just their artifice but their subject-matter, too, were God's invention. Together, Dante added, these works combined as an allegory of humility. Dante's image theory proposes a remarkable unity of allegory and artefact, of subject matter and its material execution.