In line with the tradition of text-image studies conducted on the illuminated witnesses of the Divine
Comedy, the project aims to investigate the relations between iconography and exegesis in the
illuminated codices of the poem’s earliest textual transmission. In particular, by recovering the lesson
of the ancient commentaries, the investigation intends to shed light on the interference between visual
and textual exegesis in those witnesses of the Commedia‘s manuscript tradition whose figurative
apparatuses show that the choices made in the iconography depend on the exegetical devices that,
since the first decades after the poet’s death, spread in the Commedia‘s glosses, both when the
commentaries are present on the codex and when they are presupposed in absentia. The investigation
of the relationship between ancient exegesis and figurative apparatus of the manuscript tradition also
aims to reconsider the methodological tools of the philology of texts accompanied by iconographic
apparatuses, starting from an ‘integrated philological perspective of texts and images’ that
understands ecdotal praxis as a dimension not bounded within the limits of the constitutio textus but
extends to those aspects of the material study of the manuscript codex capable of enlightening the
events of the history of tradition.