Basilica di Santa Croce cont'd
Dante's Divine Comedy Multimedia
From parchment to paper, from paper to magic lantern slides, from magic lantern slides to celluloid. Over thecourse of six centuries the carte ridenti of the Divine Comedy were gradually transfigured into moving images. A century later, Dante, The Eternal Poet by Felice Limosani, for the first time in history, transposes the majestic cycle of Gustave Dorê's engravings in an animated visual corpus, both musical and sensorial, which adds a further innovative laver to the history of the reception of the sacred poem: a digital layer. The Divine Comedy and Dante's "visibile parlare" (visible speech) are represented with an intense expressive strength as the one with which they moved the various audiences in the long journey from parchment to pixel. A visual and cultural project whose pages will continue to live on as an open-source electronic textbook, acquired for long-term custody and diffusion by the Harvard Library for their Harvard Digital Collections. An immersive work where living animations and the specially composed musical choirs vibrate within the architectural masterpiece of the Pazzi chapel in the monumental complex of Santa Croce, the place par excellence of dantean memory. A unicum extraordinarily suited to a spiritual, contemplative and emotional council in honor of the Highest Poet.