Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary and Popular Culture

Odds & Ends Archive

Dante Font

dante-font.gif

"The first Dante fonts were the product of a collaboration between two exceptional artists: Giovanni Mardersteig, a printer, book and typeface designer of remarkable skill and taste, and Charles Malin, one of the great punch-cutters of the 20th century.

"Dante was Mardersteig's last and most successful design. By this time he had gained a deep knowledge of what makes a typeface design lively, legible and handsome. Years of collaboration with Malin had also taught him the nuances of letter construction, and the two worked closely to develop a design that was easy to read. Special care was taken in the design of the serifs and top curves of the lowercase to create a subtle horizontal stress, which helps the eye move smoothly across the page.

"In 1955, after six years of work, the fonts were used to publish Boccaccio's Trattatello in Laude di Dante. The design took its name from this project."

http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/recentreleases/2006/dante+pro.htm

Verbi italiani

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http://www.italian-verbs.com/verbi-italiani.htm

Contributed by Sam Donovan (Bowdoin, '07)

This experimental website, inspired by students of Arielle Saiber’sDante’s Divine Comedy” course, has been built to archive occurrences of Dante and his works in popular and contemporary culture of the twentieth century and beyond. The site catalogs a wide range of Dante "sightings": from the cursory to the extensive, and from a place of superficial knowledge of Dante and his works to deep familiarity with them. We leave the readers the opportunity to judge the nature of each citing, and note the frequency of certain themes over others. The goals are twofold: 1) to provide a central access point for said references; and 2) to offer data that students and scholars of Dante can use to think about the Nachleben (“afterlife”) of Dante’s works in relation of reception theory, resonance, and cultural studies.

Background Image: Domenico di Michelino, Dante and His Comedy, 1465

Bowdoin College

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