Creating geographies – Jacopo Valentini interprets the Divine Comedy

Text by Nicholas Behrens

All Images © Jacopo Valentini

Jacopo Valentini, born in 1990, is a visual artist who lives between Modena and Milan. He studied at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, Switzerland, where he graduated in 2017; in the same year, he obtained a Master’s degree in Photography from IUAV University in Venice. His work has won numerous awards and was selected in 2021 for Cantica 21, a call promoted by the Italian Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with the project Concerning Dante. Autonomous Cell. His projects are included in several national and international collections, including Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, MUFOCO in Milan, and the Farnesina Collection. He currently teaches at LABA in Rimini and is developing an ongoing research on territorial displacement within the collective imagination.

In our cultural history a few books have held an importance comparable to that of the Divine Comedy. It laid the foundations of the modern Italian language and introduced a new way of making literature, but it also sketched an early outline of what was to become the map of the Italian territory. Dante, in fact, sets his otherworldly journey within a landscape that closely resembles the earthly one, at times recalling real places. Yet these are never mere descriptions: the register in which the poet operates is rather that of evocation. Through the selection and abstraction of specific elements of the landscape, he conveys a more or less precise image of what Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise look like for him. The countless visual interpretations of the text produced from the Middle Ages to the present day have helped shape this notion of what we might define as a “Dantesque” landscape. It is at this juncture that the trajectory of the Comedy intersects with that of Jacopo Valentini, whose research on landscape focuses on territorial displacement and the invention of new geographies. Geography is a powerful tool: it shapes the way we think while simultaneously reflecting it. To invent new geographies is to suggest new configurations for our mental habits, to trigger unprecedented combinations that prompt us to reflect on ourselves and our culture along paths that are different from those we are accustomed to.

If we think of Concerning Dante as a map, its origin point is an engraving by Gustave Doré from 1868. The image, included in Vis Montium, another of Valentini’s works, is the first piece of what soon becomes an extensive research dossier on the Divine Comedy, its cultural span and its iconographic tradition. As Carlo Sala notes in the second essay accompanying Concerning Dante. Autonomous Cell (Humboldt Books, Milan 2021), what emerges is how the impact of the literary text in its relationship with landscape “is such as to influence the perception of certain places to the point of characterizing them as ‘Dantesque.’”
From this consideration arises the desire to reinterpret the geography of the Comedy, leading to the first configuration of the work: three diptychs, each representing a canticle and composed of a landscape photograph paired with a still life of a visual interpretation of the Comedy. The works Valentini selects are Federico Zuccari’s Dante istoriato (1539–1609), the illustrations of Alberto Martini (1876–1954), and the Dante Drawings by Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008). The way these are photographed exemplifies how, for the artist, the final image is the conclusion of a long reasoning. In this sense, the leather covering the surface on which Zuccari’s work is photographed can be read as a reference to Florence’s leatherworking tradition; similarly, the decision to place the illustration plate depicting Dante and Beatrice’s ascent to the Heaven of the Fixed Stars on the ground, at the bottom of the frame, leaning against a shelf whose slats impart a strong verticality to the image, contributes to establishing a sense of ascension that formally translates the depicted content.

The locations that Valentini choose to represent the three canticles are, respectively, the Phlegraean Fields, the Pietra di Bismantova, and the Po Delta. The first two have philological motivations: the Phlegraean Fields were for the ancient Romans the cave of Charon, where Virgil situates the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid; while the Pietra di Bismantova inspired the poet with the form of Mount Purgatory. For Paradise—which Dante does not concretize—Valentini opts for the Po Delta, because of its diffused light and mists that make it an ethereal, timeless landscape in common perception.

The detailed captions placed at the end of the book, where each photograph is associated with the name of the depicted work or place, highlight the key principles underpinning Valentini’s practice: on the one hand, they precisely identify its cultural references, demonstrating the artist’s philological attention; on the other, they allow the geography of Concerning Dante to be mapped. This, in fact, is not limited to the three locations mentioned above. After the creation of the diptychs, the project evolves into a series of photographs that more broadly explore Dantesque places. To do so, Valentini also employs a new type of image—neither purely landscape nor still life—in which the poet’s biographical events introduce new coordinates to the map. These are primarily architectural subjects, such as a detail of the entrance to the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, where Dante used to pray before his exile, or the Palazzo del Podestà in Verona, where the poet was hosted by Cangrande della Scala, his protector and patron, to whom he likely dedicated the third canticle of the Comedy.

This, however, is not the final evolution of the project. After winning Cantica 21, Valentini decided to further expand both the visual discourse and the geography at stake. He selected three islands in the Canary archipelago for their visual pathos, assigning each to a canticle: Lanzarote, with its red soil and volcanic boulders, represents Hell; Fuerteventura is the Purgatory; and La Graciosa—seen from afar, untouched—Paradise. The choice to include places so distant from the italic peninsula, which bear no philological relation to Dante’s work yet resonate with it through their environmental qualities, reflects the artist’s interest in creating non-objective landscapes, born from an inventive geography shaped by intellectual inputs rather than physical data.

Helping us navigate this multitude of places and references, in addition to the aforementioned captions, is Valentini’s rigorous project-based approach, whereby each photograph is conceived as part of a system of meaning. In this sense, the image formats become location markers: those taken in the Canary Islands are always in 4:5 ratio, those taken in Italy in 2:3, and the only horizontal formats are the still lifes. In the printed publication, moreover, the only full-bleed pages are those depicting the waters of the Arno River, marking the transition from Hell to Purgatory and from there to Paradise. These images—the only ones to completely detach themselves from any figurative intent—can be viewed upright or rotated by 90 or 180 degrees without affecting their legibility, further emphasizing the search for a non-objective landscape. A similar procedure is adopted in the pairing of photographs of visually similar places constructed with analogous framing, so that the horizon line, positioned at the same height, connects the images across a double-page spread, generating a new landscape—realistic yet unreal.

Concerning Dante. Autonomous Cell is an ambiguous title, and for that very reason, it is the right one. Concerning Dante means speaking about Dante—his story and his work. So far, so clear. Autonomous Cell is the part that complicates the meaning, as the project in relation to the Comedy is both a cell as container and as organism. It is a container insofar as it encloses its meanings, structure, places, and visual interpretations. At the same time, it is a cell—the smallest basic unit of an organism—because the images can be broken down and experienced in different ways: they can be viewed as cohesive or exploded, with landscapes juxtaposed to still lifes or seen individually, beginning from that series of diptychs that constitute the origin of the project—six images that contain a cosmos without claiming to explain it, yet capable of sparking new reflections. Also, as some kinds of cells that regenerate autonomously, Concerning Dante functions an extension of the Divine Comedy and highlights its generative power and its role as a device that produces imaginaries and influences reality. Perhaps this is, above all, what Autonomous Cell means: recovering an old story in order to tell a new one.