Rosetta Migliorini Fissi's brief general introduction to Dante's life and works, published in 1979, is outstanding among the many books of its ilk for its combination of substance and concision; and not least among its claims to be better known is its original and fascinating interpretation of Paradiso. From the outset, Migliorini Fissi founds her analysis of the third cantica on the relationship between Dante's text and the work of Bernard of Clairvaux, which, going beyond the many scholars who have looked for traces of Bernard's presumed influence only in Paradiso XXXI–XXXIII, she finds exemplified as early as canto I. For her, the key to understanding Dante-character's experiences in Paradise is the ‘pregnante neologismo’ trasumanar (Par., I. 70), which she identifies as the ‘autentico correlativo poetico’ of one of the basic concepts of Bernard's mystical theology, deificatio (deification).

Returning, in a later article, to the same topic, Migliorini Fissi has also argued that closer attention to Bernard's mystical doctrine among Dantists is called for, in order to redress the balance of a critical history that has tended to see the Bernard–Dante relationship largely in terms of the Mariological question. Her work, then, must be taken into account in the present study, since it constitutes the first thorough-going attempt to develop the perception of Bernard's importance to Dante as a contemplative (which is guaranteed by the text of the Commedia – Par., XXXI. 109–11; XXXII. I) into a theory of his crucially formative significance for the whole theological – and, eventually, mystical – apparatus of Paradiso.

Gustave Doré's (1832–83) illustrations and Dante's Divine Comedy have become so intimately connected that even today, nearly 150 years after their initial publication, Doré's rendering of the poet's text still accompanies, or even determines, our vision of the Commedia. Indeed, Doré's illustrations together with Dante's text have appeared in roughly 200 editions, with translations from the poet's original Italian available in multiple languages. Doré's fame as Dante's illustrator is worldwide, and the pervasiveness of his Commedia imagery is undeniable. Yet there was another side to Doré. He was also a prolific painter and sculptor with ambitions for acceptance in the world of the beaux-arts salon – ambitions he supported with substantial profits accrued from the literary illustrations for which he is best known.

The balance Doré sought to achieve – popular success with his illustrations, on the one hand, and esteem of artists and critics involved in the beaux arts for his painting and sculpture, on the other hand – was precarious and, ultimately, unsuccessful for him. The role Dante plays in this balance is unique, as Doré composed both popular illustrations and salon paintings based on his reading of the Commedia. However, it was his illustrations of Inferno that truly established his renown – renown which, for the most part, excluded consideration of his abilities as a fine artist. As Doré himself remarked, “My adversary is myself. I must […] kill the illustrator [to be] spoken of only as the painter.”

“A region beautiful and bountiful”

The Russians first appeared in the Amur river valley in the 1630s, in the course of their movement east across Siberia. This movement had begun some 50 years earlier, with the penetration across the Urals by Yermak's cossack band and their victory over the Tatar prince Kuchum. From the outset, the Russians were pulled eastward by a single and simple goal: the quest for the fabulous fur wealth of the Siberian taiga. Furs played a critical role in the finances of the early Russian state, serving not only as the most important item of barter with foreign countries but as a major commodity of domestic exchange as well. Indeed, furs represented one of the most significant sources of mercantile capital for the Muscovite economy, and were used in much the same way and for the same purposes as were the gold and silver of the New World by the Iberian empires. The high value of Siberian pelts ensured that they would be hunted intensively, and as the fur-bearing population of one locale was exhausted the promyshlenniki or fur traders pressed further east, seeking out new reserves. In this manner, furs may well be said to have drawn the Russians across the north Asian landmass, and indeed they did so with remarkable rapidity. Most accounts date Yermak's initial crossing of the Urals to 1582, and the Pacific coast was reached by Ivan Moskvitin in 1639.

The Paradiso is the continuation and culmination of the earlier canticles, and at the same time a new departure. Refiguring themes, issues, images, and episodes from Inferno and Purgatorio, it nonetheless establishes a new set of conditions for both the poet and the reader. While the poet's memory has hitherto been sufficient to his task, the Paradiso acknowledges the gap between memory and experience in its opening lines, and, even more, the gap between both psychological categories and language itself. The agon of the poet in his attempt to negotiate this space beyond memory and speech is ever more insistently foregrounded as the poem progresses. But the poem also provides a series of investitures by figures of increasing authority, calling attention to its progressive definition as a “poema sacro,” a sacred text “to which both heaven and earth have set their hand.” The reader, too, is repositioned. A series of direct addresses, as well as a number of “tasks” which actively engage imaginative collaboration, implicate the reader in the work of the poem.

This chapter traces the exaltation of the poet through the medium of the Paradiso’s poetry: here poetic devices illustrate the poem’s developing capacity to imitate Christ’s humility and, at the same time, to serve the celestial vision of paradise. The humble recognition of Beatrice, and thus of oneself, as part of God’s art is both an artistic and an anthropological revelation of the poem, given its fullest expression in the poem’s final vision of the Trinity.

After his various theological confrontations, the gospels describe Jesus coming out of the temple in Jerusalem, and his disciples commenting in awe at the size and beauty of the magnificent buildings – only for Jesus to tell them ‘there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down’.1 It was a shocking announcement.