Christological apparition and sacred iconography in canto IX of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno

Abstract

The arts blend and decentralize, establishing vast relationships that promote mutual influences, deconstructions, and expansions. Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a monumental work of Italian literature, brings together diverse sources: from political philosophy and Aristotelian ethics to Thomistic thought, spanning Ptolemaic cosmology and the poetic structure drawn from the dolce stil nuovo movement. Nevertheless, the visual arts also played a decisive role in Dantean writing, and vice versa. This article investigates the identity of the divine messenger who appears in Canto IX of the Inferno (2019), analyzing his possible Christological configuration considering the iconographic tradition of the Descensus ad Inferos. The scene, in which a celestial being walks over the waters of the Styx and breaks open the gates of the City of Dis with the touch of a wand, marks the transition from Upper Inferno to Lower Inferno – a boundary zone that represents the halfway point of the Comedy’s first realm. The research stems from the hypothesis that this messenger can be identified with the triumphant Christ depicted in sacred art since Late Antiquity. Based on a comparative approach, the study articulates literature and iconography, following the assumptions of Comparative Literature (Nitrini, 2021), and adopts an iconological reading consistent with that proposed by Erwin Panofsky (1955). The iconographic corpus consists of representations of the Descensus, such as the Lipsanoteca di Brescia and byzantine icons of the Anastasis, whose symbolic elements converge with the scene described by Dante in Canto IX. The study concludes that the angel of Dis shapes a semantic field filled with allusions to Christ, as recognized by several commentators and Christian exegesis, expanding the understanding of the scene as a point of contact between Literature and Sacred Iconography.