Dante, Moses and the Book of Islam
Visualizing the Qur'an, from Byzantium to Filippino Lippi's Adoration of the Golden Calf
by Roberta Morosini
Paperback (Published)
(May 2024)
ISBN: 9788891332936
6.65 x 9.41 inches
Price: $250.00
In stock
What does a flying bull with a half moon on its belly in Filippino Lippi’s 1502 painting, the Adoration of the Golden Calf, have in common with Muhammad, as a character of Dante’s Comedy? This is the question that Roberta Morosini tries to answer by following the journey of a legend traveling in the Oriental Mediterranean. She argues that what Lippis’s painting and Dante’s Muhammad have in common is a legend of a celestial delivery of the “bull law,” the Qur’an and Moses’s Tablets of the Law. Just as Moses received the Tablets of the Law from God on Mount Sinai, the Qur’an, written according to Thomas Aquinas by mixing fables and a rippled Bible, is carried by the bull on its horns. Taking us from Medieval Christian Byzantium to the depictions of Muhammad and Averroes in the iconographic tradition, to the Rome of Oliviero Carafa in the events following the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 through Dante’s Comedy, the real protagonists of Dante, Moses and the Book of Islam, a story narrated through texts and images, are the Book and the Mediterranean as spaces of transmission of knowledge. Morosini provides a ground breaking reading of Filippino’s Adoration of the Golden Calf as an ancient scene of anti-Islam propaganda, while shedding new light on Dante’s construction of the cultural other, on his spaces of otherness, and on the importance the poet gives to books that bring unity and give form to what lacks it, like his book, the Comedy.
- Edited by Roberta Morosini
Other Titles in this Series
Similar Books
Beyond Sovereign Courts
Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy
Volume 3
Circulation, Use, Impact
The Consumption of Architectural Books in the Early Modern Eastern Adriatic
Volume 1
Innovation and Medieval Communities
The Circulation of Ideas and Practices in and out of the Town (1200-1500)
Volume 63
Medieval Yeghegis, Armenia
History, Archaeology, Society. Local Multiplicities and Global Connections of a Rural Centre on the Silk Road(s)
Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel
Style Options, Artistic Rivalry and Self Fashioning in Neapolitan Baroque Painting / Plurale Stilbildung, Kunstlerkonkurrenz und Self Fashioning in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei
Nurturing the Elite
Representations of Drinking, Eating, and Religious Vessels in Palmyrene Funerary Iconography
Volume 13
Power and Women in Southeast and Central Europe in Late Medieval and Early Modern Period (1300-1600)
Volume 10
Technical Studies of Asian Art
Proceedings of the Seventh Forbes Symposium at the Freer Gallery of Art
Women in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Studies from Western Europe and North Africa
Volume 44
