Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.

John Ruskin's Mornings in Florence is a classic work of art criticism, exploring the beauty and meaning of the city's Christian art treasures. With Ruskin's insightful analysis and detailed descriptions, readers will gain a new appreciation for these masterpieces of Renaissance art. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

In the course of 750 years, Dante Alighieri has been made into a universally important icon deeply engrained in the world’s cultural memory. This book examines key stages of Dante’s appropriation in Western cultural history by exploring the intermedial relationship between Dante’s Divina Commedia, the tradition of his iconography, and selected historical, literary and artistic responses from British artists in the 19th and 20th centuries. The images and iconographies created out of Dantean appropriations almost always centre around the triad of allegory, authority and authenticity. These three important aspects of revisiting Dante are found in the Dantean image fostered in Florence in the 14th and 15th centuries and feature prominently in the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, T. S. Eliot and Tom Phillips. Their appropriation of Dante represents landmarks in the productive reception of the Florentine, and is invariably linked to a tradition of Dante studies established in Britain during the middle of the 19th century. For Dante Gabriel Rossetti the Florentine provides a model for Victorian Dantean self-fashioning and becomes an allegory of authenticity and morality. For T. S. Eliot, Dante represents the voice of literary authority in Modernist poetry and serves as the allegory of a visionary European author. For Tom Phillips, the engagement with Dante and his text represents an intertextual and intermedial endeavour, which provides him with a rich cultural tapestry of art, thought and ideas on the Western world. The main focus of this study, therefore, is on how Dante’s image was fixed in the first 200 years of his appropriation in Florence, how fruitfully the Dantean images and his text have been taken up and used for creative and intellectual production in Britain over the course of the past centuries, and what moral, literary, or political messages they continue to convey.