Matthew Collins.
The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante’s “Commedia.”
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2024. xii + 360 pp. $ 65.00.
Matthew Collins’s The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante’s “Commedia” offers a timely and substantial intervention in the intertwined histories of Renaissance book culture, visual narrative, and Dante reception. Although the manuscript illumination of the Commedia has long been a central object of art historical inquiry, the early printed illustrations that accompanied the poem’s first centuries in print have often remained peripheral, treated either as crude transitional artifacts or as derivative appendages to more prestigious visual traditions. Collins challenges this historiographical imbalance with impressive methodological rigor, demonstrating that the woodcuts and engravings of Quattrocento and Cinquecento Dante editions constitute not only a coherent corpus but also a critical site for understanding how mechanical reproduction reshaped the life of images, the reading of texts, and the transmission of literary authority.
The book is driven by a fundamental premise: that early printed illustrations of the Commedia deserve to be studied not in isolation, nor merely as imperfect echoes of manuscript precedents, but as objects embedded in dynamic genealogies of visual production and reception. Collins frames his inquiry as both art history and book history, though his approach consistently presses beyond disciplinary boundaries. He is concerned with the lives of images across media, with the interpretive labor of illustrators, and with the practices of early readers who encountered Dante through the hybrid interface of text and print illustration. The result is a work that is at once microhistorical in focus and expansive in implication.
Chapter 1, “From Manuscript to Print: Broken Links and Bigger Pictures,” establishes one of the book’s most significant arguments: that direct visual dependence of early printed Dante illustration on extant illuminated manuscripts is far less demonstrable than scholars have often assumed. Collins revisits long-standing expectations shaped in part by Kurt Weitzmann’s model of visual stemmata, but he finds that systematic copying from manuscript miniature cycles into the earliest printed editions cannot be sustained by surviving evidence. This negative conclusion is productive rather than merely corrective. It forces a reconsideration of how visual continuity operates across the manuscript–print divide, and it highlights the extent to which the conditions of access, circulation, and reproducibility fundamentally altered what it meant for artists to “copy” in the age of print.
The second chapter, “From Print to Manuscript: Ideology and Pedagogy in the Hands of Copyists,” reverses the direction of inquiry and reveals, with greater documentary clarity, that printed Dante illustrations did shape subsequent manuscript production. Collins’s case studies of French presentation manuscripts (notably BnF MS NAF 4530 and 4119) show miniaturists adopting woodcuts from Venetian incunables as compositional models, even while translating them into the idiom of luxury illumination. These examples complicate any linear narrative of cultural hierarchy in which manuscript precedes and print follows. Instead, Collins demonstrates that print could serve as a source of authority, pedagogy, and visual standardization, even within media that retained elite associations.
Chapters 3 and 4, paired under the rubric “From Drawing to Print,” form the analytical core of the volume. Chapter 3 revisits the perennial “Botticelli questions”: the supposed direct relationship between Botticelli’s celebrated drawings and the engravings of the 1481 Florentine edition. Rather than simply reiterating Vasari’s oft-cited assertions about Botticelli’s involvement in the 1481 engravings, Collins revisits the question in light of more recent documentary findings. In particular, he discusses Lorenz Böninger’s archival discovery of financial and production records connected with the 1481 Florentine edition, in which neither Botticelli’s name nor that of Baccio Baldini appears. This absence complicates the long-standing narrative that has linked the first printed illustrations of the Commedia directly to Botticelli’s designs and to Baldini’s hand as engraver. Collins neither dismisses Botticelli’s influence outright nor accepts it uncritically; instead, he reconstructs the uncertainties that still govern the field, offering a model of how to write responsibly in the absence of definitive documentation.
Chapter 4, devoted to the Morgan Library drawings, is among the book’s most original contributions. These little-known Cinquecento sheets, extensively annotated and topographically ambitious, are convincingly positioned as sources for the woodcuts of the 1544 Marcolini edition with Vellutello’s commentary. Collins’s canto-by-canto alignment and close visual comparison reveal a sophisticated program of narrative continuity and spatial mapping that reshapes our understanding of mid-sixteenth-century Dante illustration. Particularly striking is the way these drawings foreground landscape, bird’s-eye perspective, and architectural schematization, anticipating the cartographic imagination that becomes central in the subsequent chapter. Collins’s recovery of this material is not simply additive; it demands that scholars reconsider the networks of visual labor that underpinned Renaissance printed books.
Chapter 5, “Dante in the Age of Exploration,” expands the study outward into the intellectual culture of the Cinquecento. Here Collins traces the emergence of cartographic woodcuts and engraved maps of Hell in printed Dante editions and related paratexts, situating them within contemporary debates about geography, cosmography, and the porous boundary between fact and fiction. By reading Manetti’s infernal measurements alongside Vespucci, Stradano’s Nova Reperta, and Galileo’s lectures on the shape and size of Dante’s Inferno, Collins illuminates how Dante’s imagined afterlife became entangled with early modern epistemologies of discovery. The chapter is particularly valuable for demonstrating that illustration history cannot be reduced to stylistic development; it is also an index of changing intellectual horizons.
The later portions of the book turn from production to reception. Chapter 7, “Early Readership, Marginalia, and Mnemonics,” offers a nuanced account of how early readers engaged with printed illustrations. Collins introduces the category of “image-specific marginalia,” annotations keyed directly to woodcuts and engravings rather than to the verbal text alone. Drawing on archival consultation across multiple collections, he reconstructs patterns of mnemonic use, interpretive labeling, and readerly interaction. In doing so, Collins’s work aligns with, and meaningfully contributes to, a broader scholarly movement of the last decades: the renewed attention to the social history of literary readership, and to the recovery of reading publics through the traces they left behind in surviving copies. His analysis thus joins recent efforts to understand the Commedia not only as a monumental textual tradition but also as a lived object of use, marked by diverse categories of readers whose marginal interventions reveal habits of interpretation, pedagogy, and memory. The chapter situates Dante illustration within wider Renaissance traditions of cognitive practice, reminding us that images in printed books were not merely decorative but could function as active tools for navigation and recollection.
The conclusion, “The Work of Book Art in the Age of Early Print,” returns to the book’s larger stakes, reflecting on what is distinctive about printed illustration as a reproducible form. Collins engages thoughtfully with the implications of mechanical reproduction while remaining attentive to the specificities of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century book art. Throughout, the emphasis is placed on opportunity and access: print created new conditions for the circulation of visual models and for the formation of tighter genealogies precisely because exemplars became available in unprecedented ways.
Collins’s study is learned and carefully argued, and its principal achievement lies in restoring early printed illustrations of the Commedia to serious scholarly consideration. By combining close visual analysis, attention to material transmission, and sensitivity to readerly practices, the book opens productive lines of inquiry for future work on Renaissance illustration, reception, and the cultural life of literary texts in print. If certain avenues, such as broader comparative perspectives beyond the Italian context, remain open for further exploration, this only underscores the richness of the field that Collins helps to reframe. The Early Printed Illustrations of Dante’s “Commedia” provides a valuable foundation for continued study of how Dante’s poem was seen, handled, and understood in the first centuries of its printed existence.
Natale Vacalebre, Universidad de Alcalá