Loggia exhibition February 2018

As advertised on the Library blog before the event, the Library held an exhibition on Dante and Somerville to coincide with a conference on the subject in the first week in February. Both the conference and the exhibition were very successful and here Rebecca Bowen (2nd year DPhil, Clarendon scholar and co-curator) writes about the event:

From Mary Somerville herself to this year’s undergraduates, Somerville College has a long and strong tradition in readers of Dante. Through treasures from the collection in the college library, including Mary Somerville and John Stuart Mill’s own copies of the Divine Comedy as well as signed editions of former Somervillian Dorothy L. Sayers’ famous verse translation, the ‘Dante and Somerville’ exhibition traced a history of the Italian poet’s presence at the college and in the minds of its members past and present.

Somerville librarian Anne Manuel and Victoria Maltby Junior Research fellow in Italian Studies, David Bowe, had been considering the possibility of such a project when the catalyst for the exhibition came in the form of a development award I received last spring. From the beginning the aim of the display was to celebrate the intellectual community at Somerville and the place of Dante studies within it. Central to this aim was the library collection and its hidden Dante-related gems.

Amongst the college’s antiquarian copies of the Divine Comedy we discovered a rare first edition of the French illustrator Gustav Doré’s famous 1861 illustrated Inferno, an early Venetian print of the Commedia from 1578, a delicate pamphlet from 1908 with intricate fold-out maps to Dante’s Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, and a beautifully embellished English translation from 1904 with a colourful cover, replete with a portrait of the poet (see image below).

In the spirit of college-wide collaboration the exhibition blurbs were written by Somerville students. Anna Branford, a masters student in French and German, wrote about the 1578 Venetian print, focusing on its woodcuts and their role in the interpretation of the text. Katie Bastiman, a second-year undergraduate in French and Italian, wrote about the pamphlet from 1908, looking at its colour plates. Sofia Derer, a masters student in German, wrote about an English translation of the Commedia with prints of Botticelli’s illustrations. Elinor Lamrick, a second year undergraduate in French and Italian, wrote about Dorothy L. Sayers who translated the Commedia into English terza rima. Joanna Raisbeck, a DPhil Candidate at Somerville and a Lecturer in German at Wadham College, wrote about the library’s signed copies of Sayers’ translations. And Aleksandra Rutkowska, a masters student in History of Art, wrote about the embellished 1904 copy and its striking singular-case binding.

The exhibition also included a retrospective of Somerville Dante scholars, from Christina Roaf and Olive Sayce to Senior Research Fellow Manuele Gragnolati and the current Fellow in Italian, Francesca Southerden.

As well as discovering that John Stuart Mill preferred Dante to Torquato Tasso, that Mary Somerville had a poem dedicated to her by the Italian poet the Contessa Caterina Bon Brenzoni, and that a box of nineteenth century porcelain intaglii depicting ‘illustrious Italian men’ was donated to the college by the astronomer Lady Margaret Huggins, working on this exhibition has given us a chance to bring to light treasures from the college collection in need of restoration.

In collaboration with the Oxford Conservation Consortium we will be launching a crowd funding page in the Spring to raise the funds to conserve these, and other items from the college collection, so that they can be enjoyed by the intellectual community here at Somerville for many years to come.