Vasari says that he plunged into the study of
Dante, and even wrote a comment on the _Divine Comedy_. But it seems
strange that he should have lived on inactive so long; and one almost
wishes that some document might come to light, which, fixing the date
of his death earlier, might relieve one, in thinking of him, of his
dejected old age.
He is before all things a poetical painter, blending the charm of story
and sentiment, the medium of the art of poetry, with the charm of line
and colour, the medium of abstract painting. So he becomes the
illustrator of Dante. In a few rare examples of the edition of 1481,
the blank spaces left at the beginning of every canto, for the hand
of the illuminator, have been filled, as far as the nineteenth canto
of the _Inferno_, with impressions of engraved plates, seemingly by
way of experiment, for in the copy in the Bodleian Library, one of the
three impressions it contains has been printed upside down, and much
awry, in the midst of the luxurious printed page. Giotto, and the
followers of Giotto, with their almost childish religious aim, had not
learned to put that weight of meaning into outward things--light,
colour, everyday gesture, which the poetry of the _Divine Comedy_
involves, and before the fifteenth century Dante could hardly have
found an illustrator.
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