Mediating Christ in Paradiso and in MS Vat.lat.4776.

In Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Vat.lat.4776 (c. 1390–1400), line drawings, of particularly high-quality draughtsmanship, accompany Paradisoi–xi. Although Christ does not in any straightforward sense participate in the narrative of Paradisoi–xi, the majority of the drawings contain a small head and neck of Christ enclosed in a nimbus, strongly reminiscent of the devotional iconography of the Veronica or Holy Face. The images explore one of the central questions in the Commedia: how the divine is present in, or mediated by, human encounters. I investigate how, in different ways, in both the images and Dante's text (here focusing on Dante's 'in' neologisms in Paradisoix and on Paradisoxiv), Christ is understood as the reality that allows humans to share in a capacity for relatedness that is not bound by normal spatiotemporal limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]