Friday, October 29, at 10:00 am Laurent Ferri (curator of the pre-1800 collections of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections) will offer a special guided tour of the Visions of Dante exhibit for graduate students and faculty of the Medieval Studies program.

In a 1900 issue of the student-produced Cornell Magazine, Library curator Theodore W. Koch wrote, “It might be well for Cornellians and Ithacans similarly interested in Dante to petition the University Trustees to provide for some public exposition of Dante's life and work.” More than a century later, the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death (1321) is an ideal opportunity to exhibit the largest Dante collection in North America. Early printed editions will introduce Dante as visual poet and show initial solutions to the challenge of illustrating the poem; they will also serve as a reference point for the persistence of the Divine Comedy as muse through a range of later illustrated editions and portfolios by Botticelli, Fontebasso, Giani, Flaxman, Blake, Doré, Dalí, Walker, Morimura, Birk, and others. Library holdings will be accompanied by works on paper, paintings, photographs, sculpture, and film by artists who treat Dante’s universal themes as catalysts for their own explorations of contemporary culture, mores, and self.