Events & Videos
Past Events
Visions of Dante: A Central NY Humanities Corridor Symposium, Oct 16, 2021
This daylong symposium, offered in conjunction with the exhibition, will welcome speakers who consider the ongoing impact of Dante as a visual poet—from the Italian Renaissance reception of Dante via early printed editions of the Divine Comedy, to the dialogue of Black literature with Dante’s images and ideas, to a mapping of Dante’s vision onto the American postindustrial cityscape. It will also feature a tour and discussion of the exhibition with the curators.
Video of this Event:
9:30-10:30 AM ET: Visualizing Dante in the 16th Century: An Amateur’s Art (Rhoda Eitel-Porter)
10:45-11:45 AM ET: From Etruria to the New World: Cornell’s Copy of the Editio Princeps of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Between Book History, Bibliophilia, and Exegesis (Natale Vacalebre)
1:00-1:45 PM ET: Exhibition Tour (curators Laurent Ferri and Andrew Weislogel)
2:00-3:00 PM ET: Meeting Dante (artist Sandow Birk)
3:15-4:15 PM ET: A Dante Afterlife: LeRoi Jones’s “System of Dante’s Hell” and Derek Walcott’s “Omeros” (Maryemma Graham)
“Visions of Dante” (Exhibition Preview and Discussion), March 30, 2021
At this virtual presentation, exhibition co-curators Dr. Laurent Ferri (curator of pre-1800 collections at Cornell Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections and Adjunct Associate Professor of Comparative Literature) and Dr. Andrew Weislogel (the Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator, Earlier European and American Art, at the Johnson) will preview selected books and artworks from Cornell collections exploring the visual nature of Dante’s Divine Comedy and its reception. Special guest and Dante scholar Dr. Natale Vacalebre (University of Pennsylvania) will discuss Cornell’s copy of the 1472 Foligno edition, the first printed Divine Comedy, uniquely annotated with commentary and marginal drawings.