This weighty tome offers specialists and non-specialists alike a feast for the eyes, food for thought, and perhaps even nourishment for the soul. In 20 brief essays and 257 captions, Charles H. Taylor, a psychoanalyst and former professor of English at Yale, and Patricia Finley, a sculptor and retired psychoanalyst, lead the reader through a Jungian investigation of the Divine Comedy. Building on Helen Luke's Dark Wood to White Rose, they read Dante's text as a personal and paradigmatic journey of the soul from a mid-life crisis to the acceptance of mortality and the realization of redemption. But, whereas Luke retells the essentials of Dante's narrative to provide the framework for her interpretation of psychological maturation, Taylor and Finley allow over six- hundred years of Commedia illustrations to tell the story for them.
And the images do so with a splash. Although many of the 257 illustrations have already been reproduced, few have appeared with the outstanding clarity and tonal authenticity that are standard in this beautifully designed and lavishly produced book. Occasionally, the reds are too vivid or the other primary colors are too muted. But most of the images, particularly the 123 pre-modern miniatures, are quite close to the tone and hue of the originals, and only the two illustrations by Guglielmo Giraldi possess the blurry outlines of computer-scanned images.
The clarity of the images is complemented by the authors' keen insights on the text. For example, they observe that the pilgrim's despair at entering the inner city of hell, Dis, represents "that dangerous time in a soul's journey when the encounter with the deeper reaches of the shadow realm may be too much to bear; a personality as yet insufficiently strong must turn away from too direct a confrontation with knowledge of the darker powers that lie beneath the selfish appetites." (112) In thus modernizing the Commedia as a psychic narrative of redemption, Taylor and Finley meet their stated goal of bringing greater relevance to the text, particularly to the oft-neglected Purgatorio and Paradiso.
However, their approach is not without its difficulties. Chief among them is the sense that the authors are sometimes forcing their interpretation onto the images, rather than eliciting it from them. Their choice of images, for instance, is rather selective. Although 257 images may seem to be an ample sample, this collection represents less than ten percent of the over 2700 Commedia illustrations. One can therefore hardly help but feel that the illustration tradition is not fully represented, that the selection of images promotes a highly biased viewpoint.
The authors' interpretation of these images, moreover, sometimes seems teleological. In the interest of finding what they seek, they occasionally oversimplify or overinterpret. They reduce Virgil's rejection of Filippo Argenti and embrace of the pilgrim (Inf. 8.40-45) to the observation that "with such strong approval, the poet suggests there are people in life, or parts of one's psyche that, once seen, must be brutally refused or pushed away." (36) At the other extreme, Taylor and Finley claim that "Botticelli's sacred wood, with its supple trees and lissome guide, gives us an awakening touch, a glimpse of the spiritual feminine power that comes later in the Earthly Paradise." (xiii) And they propose that the examples of generosity flying through the air in the Holkham image of Canto Thirteen in Purgatorio are "the artist's attempt to suggest the elevated character of inner voices that offer us a positive alternative." (144)
In seeking a rather strict analogy to the Jungian model of spiritual development, Taylor and Finley also tend to dismiss any evidence to the contrary. Although they disavow commitment to doctrine or insistence on it, their concern with "the deepest psychological meaning of the text" sometimes runs to an exclusiveness that recalls the "cultists" from whom they try to distance themselves (viii-ix). The authors claim that William Blake "does not see clearly how the work of meaningful suffering in Purgatory leads to Dante's most profound visions" (xv), Henry Fuseli "has a dramatic Romanticism that often misses the point" (45), Renato Guttoso attends the suffering of the gluttons "but seems to miss its redemptive character" (157), and, in an image of Canto Fourteen of Paradiso, Gustave Dore "fails to honor the balance of the opposites implicit in Dante's image of 'a circle's quadrant'." (214) Taylor and Finley even claim to have selected some illuminated miniatures precisely because "they miss the poet's point and thereby highlight it." (xii)
By insisting that the artists miss the spirit or meaning of the Commedia, Taylor and Finley are guilty of not only reading the text deterministically but also failing to account as fully as possible for the circumstances in which the images were produced. They admit that, "in the interest of maintaining the poem's flow of action," they chose to err on the side of brevity in discussing the illustrations. (ix) But, even if they do not provide much context in their text, they should at least have adapted their interpretation to what is known of the circumstances in which an image was produced, and, concomitantly, they should not have stinted on the use of Ockham's razor. The various stages of completion in Botticelli's drawings, for example, may have more to do with standard workshop procedure, with the widespread practice of delegating responsibilities to assistants, than with Botticelli's interpretation of the text (68). And, given that many unfinished manuscripts have notes to the artist from someone else, the stag in an image of Inferno I from the late- fourteenth-century manuscript Additional 19587 may not be "entirely the illuminator's idea." (15)
Although Taylor and Finley do acknowledge the pre-modern practice of imitating visual models, they do not always account for it in their interpretations. Rather than ascribe a fourteenth-century, hieratic image of John, Luke, Paul, and the four authors of the Epistles to the many pictorial prototypes upon which this miniature directly depends, Taylor and Finley attribute its "stained-glass look" to "the ritually emblematic style of the medieval artist." (170) And rather than acknowledge that Giovanni di Paolo probably drew on one of innumerable heraldic sources for his imperial eagle in Canto Eighteen of Paradiso, they ascribe the bird's "proud visage" and "sharp claws" to a desire to foster "attentive respect." (221)
Taylor and Finley take not only images but also texts, at face value. They treat Dante's La vita nuova, for example, as a record of the author's actual thoughts, feelings, and actions at the moments described. They even assume that Dante had the dream of Beatrice in the arms of God. They do admit that Boccaccio may have fabricated the legend that Jacopo Alighieri discovered the last seven cantos of Paradiso after dreaming where his dying father had hidden them, but they support the veracity of the story by claiming that it makes psychological sense (273). At almost every turn, the authors seem to resist the possibility that Dante and his supporters may have been building a myth around the poet, that they may have shaped the text and its reception in order to serve political, social, or other agendas.
When Taylor and Finley do attend to context, they often overgeneralize, particularly in relationship to pre-modern culture. In the spirit of Barbara Tuchman's popular survey A Distant Mirror, they claim that "the medieval attitude of spontaneous humility before God's creation cannot be duplicated today" (xii-xiii); "the medieval illuminators had no difficulty assuming that their embodied images of what the poet describes as lights were symbolic representations not to be taken literally--any more than the pilgrim's whole journey was- -and therefore no violation of the spirit of the poem" (205), because "thinking in pictures or in symbolic actions came naturally to the medieval mind" (9); and "medieval illuminators often comment with straightforward pungency and textual precision" (xiii), for they "were accustomed to teaching with narrative images." (141) No less antiquated is their evolutionary model of painting, which looks back to an era of art history that has, by and large, gone the way of the dinosaurs: "the sense of hieratic simplicity and unself- conscious candor of the earliest illuminations is followed by the more sophisticated linear perspective of the Renaissance and later periods; modern artistry then returns to a conscious use of degrees of flatness for the exploration of symbolic expression." (xii)
In all fairness, Taylor and Finley do not make any claim to expertise in art history, medieval culture, or Dante studies. And that would be fine if they were not trying to interpret the thoughts and feelings of the author via the thoughts and feelings of the artists. But the outdated surveys and introductions that populate the two-page list of works cited do not provide a solid foundation for second-guessing pre-modern pictorial interpretations of a pre-modern text.
Yet, though Taylor and Finley may play it a little fast and loose with the images, this does not detract from the value of their textual interpretation. The illustrations galvanized an interesting and innovative reading of the Commedia that offers much to the modern reader.