«Dante in the shell of a walnut», here is the Same collection of the Museodivino of Naples

The volume created thanks to the support of the National Committee for Dante’s celebrations of 2021 is (also) a fascinating photographic journey through Antonio Maria Esposito’s 42 Dante-inspired walnut shells. The beautiful images that speak for themselves allow you to enter this tiny Divine Comedy completely unpublished, but a textual guide for the reader’s use could not be missing because, if the Comedy by Antonio Maria Esposito is a twentieth-century creation, an era in which the ” priest-artist ”begins the creation of his micro-sculptures, however Don Antonio refers with his work to a dimension of spiritual art rooted in the Middle Ages, at the dawn of an illustrative tradition of Dante’s masterpiece that will continue for 700 years.

And it is in this dimension that the first of the five critical essays leads, gradually widening the gaze from Don Antonio’s Comedy to the great history of the Divine Comedy in art.. Fara Autiero, a member of the Illuminated Project, leads from the fourteenth century and the first illuminated manuscripts of the Divine Comedy to twentieth-century interpretations. Then we approach Rodin’s monumental Hell’s Gate with the director of the research center of the Musée Rodin Véronique Mattiussi and we enter into the London writings of Virginia Woolf through the expert in Modernism Teresa Prudente. An interview with the studiosto Lucia Battaglia Ricci allows you to have an overview of the long and fascinating history of the illustration of the Divine Comedy in art. The essay by Serena Picarelli, also a member of the Illuminated Dante Project, allows instead to explore the (almost) impossible representation of Paradise in the work of Dante, and of the various artists, from Blake to Flaxman, who have accepted this arduous challenge. And while the professor Marco Collareta of the University of Pisa introduces the section dedicated to the Comedy by Antonio Maria Esposito, to introduce the entire volume is instead an essay by the Italianist and literary critic Carlo Ossola.

Museodivino therefore preserves in Naples the smallest sculptures in the world dedicated to the Nativity and the Divine Comedy. Forty-two small walnut shells “in which the gaze is lost in the depths of dark infernal circles, rests on the peaceful shores of Purgatory, and finally opens up to the contemplation of the angels of Heaven”: in his “minimal” Divine Comedy the priest from Stabiese Antonio Maria Esposito created from grains of pear pulp, fragments of moss and droplets of paint a tiny Dantesque cosmos where the art of the twentieth century meets medieval miniaturists in a work of singular, delicate beauty. The museum is open every day from 11 to 16 (for info and reservations 3394640080 or info@museodivinonapoli.it).

Saturday 29 October the presentation of the book will take place at the Domus ARS – Il Canto di Virgilio in Naples, from 4 pman initiative supported by the Campania Region, with the interventions of Carlo Ossola, Fara Autiero, Serena Picarelli and Teresa Prudentemoderate Silvia Corsi. Also present was the photographer author of the shots of the publication Giorgio Cossu and the publisher Daniele Olschki.

Two fascinating musical events will follow. A Dante on the border with Pulcinella is the protagonist at 19.00 of “Dante in the Neapolitan Hell”short preview of a still unpublished show to discover an entirely Neapolitan reinterpretation of the Divine Comedy by Carlo Faiello with songs, music and poems, from Matilde Pierro to Pasquale Ruocco: on stage the same Carlo Faiello in the company of Sonia De Rosa, Gennaro Monti and Pina Valentino.

At the end of the intense afternoon at 8 pm the conference-concert “Dante, Mazzini, Music and the Stars (and a Neapolitan guitar)”created with the patronage of the National Committee for the Celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Mazzini. Rossella Bonfatti of the University of Verona and the classical guitarist Marco Battagliawill take you through the Dante’s suggestions of the young patriot until you listen to a Neapolitan guitar that belonged to himself in a selection of nineteenth-century music, from the little-known pieces for guitar by Paganini to the “Rossiniana” by Giuliani, passing through Zani de ‘Ferranti and Legnani.