An elaborate essay, primarily focused on Dante’s works, but then expanding to include material which is connected to them, either in an explicit or non-explicit way: the Scriptures, the works of eastern and western Church Fathers, Greek and Latin classical authors to whom allusion is made, medieval bestiaries; it also refers to allegorical literature, to bas-reliefs and stained glass windows in Romanesque and Gothic churches, and Byzantine and late-medieval mosaics and pictorial works (the iconographical analysis of these being still unfinished), Rome, 2000-2002.
See below on the lectures of 2002 and previous ones
See below on the lectures of 2002 and previous ones
Chapter headings:
- The Dragon and the Snake • Download pdf
- Notes about Hermeneutics
Forms of allegory, figura. • Download pdf - Devils
- Satan, the Devil, the Adversary or the Enemy. Etymology and history. Pater Noster, the ambiguity of “Evil” • Download pdf
- Outlines of a theology of Evil • Download pdf
- The Devil’s body. Satyrs and Pan. The goat in Jewish customs and in the Epistle to the Hebrews. • Download pdf
- The Abode of the Lord. Specimens of Heavenly Reality and the Good Things of the World to Come
Hermeneutics in the allegory of God or of the theologians, i.e. modes of reading the creation and history: túpos, parabolé, parádeigma, skiá; specimen or model, figura, copy, shadow • Download pdf - Augustine’s Shadow and John’s Darkness
Shadow as a premonition of Light and the divine act for history, darkness as the sign of Evil • Download pdf - Draft for an Improvisatory History of a Single Idea: Shadow and Darkness
The darkness in Homer and in the Greek tragic writers, the shadow in Plato’s “Parable of the Cave”
- The Siren and the Seducer
The parable of the Foolish Virgins in Matthew and in a sculpture on the portal of Strasbourg Cathedral - The Romano-Gothic Iconography of the Devil
The Last Judgment in Bourges, other representations of the same theme by Maitani in Orvieto, by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel. Nicola and Giovanni Pisani - Botticelli’s Drawings for the Divine Comedy
- Bibliography • Download pdf
