Dante (c. 1265-1321) and the Musical Aesthetics of the Divine Comedy
Gustavo Cambraia FRANCO
Original title: Dante (c. 1265-1321) e a Estética Musical da Divina Comédia
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Medieval Aesthetics, Music, Poliphony.
The present article aims to analyze the figurative-musical aesthetics elaborated by the poet Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy, through the use of musical concepts, contemporary to the author, of monodia gregoriana and choral polyphony. The aim is to demonstrate how Dantian musical theory is applied in the Commedia using an imagetic and instrumental musical repertoire and a specific set of lexical and poetic expressions, whose function is to express, in a comprehensible way to the reader and interpreter, the sonorous dissonance, disharmony and the antimusical cacophony of Hell, the nature of the sacred, monodic Gregorian chant of Purgatory, and the symphonic and polyphonic musical nature of Paradise.