archives@tulane.edu / This thesis focuses on a seldom-studied illuminated manuscript of Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) Commedia, known as Yates Thompson MS 36 (ca. 1450) in the British Library, whose Paradiso miniatures have been attributed to Giovanni di Paolo. One of the most visionary artists of the Quattrocento school of painting in Siena, his oeuvre – and the Yates Thompson codex in particular – begs for sustained critical interpretation beyond issues of connoisseurship, provenance, and stylistic analysis. The manuscript presents a remarkably rare instance in which Quattrocento Sienese pictorial and narrative strategies have been preserved in a complete suite of images, and the recent resurgence of interest in Giovanni di Paolo presents an opportune time to return to his work and to reassess the historiographic legacy that has shelved the art of fifteenth-century Siena as too “fantastic and marvellous” to be critically investigated on its own terms. Focusing particularly on issues of narrative, vision and optical theory, perspective, and the intersections between art, astronomy, and cartography, this thesis takes Giovanni di Paolo's representation of pictorial space as a locus of inquiry into the collaborative nature of manuscript production in the late medieval period, as intellectual circles shifted from spiritual concerns based on biblical tradition to empiricism. More broadly, this consideration of fifteenth-century Sienese visual culture vis à vis twenty-first scholarly concerns reconfigures Giovanni di Paolo's Paradiso miniatures as a referential assemblage or "web of images" that was inextricably linked to a complex entanglement of creative associations, and asks what it means to study an illuminated manuscript that was collaboratively authored over time. / 1 / Shannah Rose
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_90043 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Contributors | Rose, Shannah (author), Flora, Holly (Thesis advisor), Geddes, Leslie (Thesis advisor), Porras, Stephanie (Thesis advisor), School of Liberal Arts Art (Degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | No embargo, Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law. |
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