This paper deals with the interpretation of Dante's metamorphoses of space and it's visual realization in Russian art in the 20 th century. We will take a look at the works of Vladimir Favorsky (1886-1964) and his pupil Mikhail Pikov (1903-1973), both illustrators of Dante's works. We will also examine the views of the philosopher, theologian and mathematician Father Pavel Florensky on Dante. He has expressed these views in his book „Imagination in Geometry“, the design for which was done by Favorsky. The three of them managed to find connections between the works of the great Italian and many important problems of 20 th century art, the art of a century which, like Dante's times, was a marked turning point between epochs.

Dante and Giotto worked at the junction of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and this made them especially interesting for Florensky and Favorsky.

The search of this reformers of the Protorenaissance for new structures led Florensky and Favorsky to the idea that it is necessary to create a synthesis of various traditions: those of Antiquity, the Middle Ages (which transformed his value system) and the Protorenaissane with its varied solutions for the depiction of space, in the art of 20 th century avantgarde.

„Giotto was a predecessor of Cubism“, Favorsky told his students in his lectures. The two most widely unsed descriptions given Favorsky by his contemporaries were „the Russian Giotto“ and „the Cezanne of Russian xylography“. Incidentally this also proves that in his views he united old and new tendencies.

Both the philosopher and the artist tried to implement their ideas of a synthesis in the most varied forms of art and cultural activities: they wrote books, painted frescoes, did engravings, gave lectures etc. In this way they tried to reach the whole from different sides.

The designing and illustrating of books, however, remained Favorsky's main interest. To the artist, a book was like an entire organism. In this he differed from other artists (among them other illustrators of Dante's works) to who illustrations were no more than a visual „explanation“, a re-telling of a literary plot. We will speak about these differences later on.

The artist belonged to the last generation of Russians who had the opportunity to travel and study in the West. In 1906 he travelled to Florence for the first time, coming from Munich, where he was studying at Hallas's studio. In 1911 when he was already a student at the Department of the History of Art at the Moscow University, he went there again. This way, Favorsky received two diplomas: one Eastern European, the other Western European.

The problem of the junction of the East and the West is quite organic to his passion for Italy, since the main focus of his interests is Italy at the turn of the 13 th and 14 th century. After his second journey to Italy he therefore chose the following subject for his thesis: „Giotto and his predecessors“. Favorsky was interested in the interpretation of Byzantine art and of all its branches that led up to the Protorenaissance and Old Russia. He became one of the first scholars to analyze these common roots. It helped that at the beginning of the 20 th century took place the rediscovery of old Russian icons, which had been unknown for quite a long time. At the begin of the 20 th century restorers learned how to take off the uppermost layer of drying oil and in 1913 there was organized the first exhibition of the newly rediscovered old Russian icons.

It was his broad understanding of seemingly contrary epochs in the history of art that in the 1920ies brought Favorsky to the famous school Vkhutemas, the head of which he became, and where he invited his friend Father Pavel Florensky to read a course of lectures on the analysis of space. In 1921, the year of the 600 th anniversary of Dante's death, Florensky writes a book about innovative solutions of space. The world, it says in this book, stands at the threshold of a new spiritual synthesis and should revere Dante above all others, as he was the greatest exponent of an understanding of the world as an entirety. Florensky speaks about the commonness of Dante's metamorphoses and the compositions of Russian and Byzantine „Descent to Hell“ icons. The philosopher interprets the architectonics of the universe, as it is depicted in the „Divine Comedy“, in a principally new way. He considers the Aristoteles', Ptolemy's and Dante's conception of the world as very far from the static character of the Euklidean universe. Florensky describes the outdated attitude in the following way: „the sphere of the Earth, which is surrounded by the spheres of the heavenly bodies, the heaven of fixed stars, the crystal heaven and the empyrean, Dante's path after he comes out of the Earth's interior, is a broken line, spiralling through concentrical spheres, turning back upon itself and toward the zenith of Zion. But this sketch concords neither with Dante's narrative nor with his cosmology. The universe cannot be pictured by Euklidean drafts, as Dante's metaphysics are incommensurable with the philosophy of Kant“.

The philosopher argues his refusal to accept the traditioal immobile picture. He thinks that Dante anticipated non-euklidean geometry: „Let's remember the path Dante walks together with Vergil. It starts in Italy. Both poets descend by the circles of a funnel-shaped Hell. The funnel ends at the last, the smallest circle of the Lord of Hell. In all of the both poets remain in an upright position: their heads pointing towards the entrance, that is towards Italy, their feet towards the centre of the Earth. But when the poets reach Lucifer's waist, the both suddenly turn upside down , so that their feet now point to the surface of the Earth, where they came from, and their heads point in the opposite direction. At the end of the chapter about „Hell“ Dante, as is well known, describes his and Vergil's leaving the abbyss for the heavenly bodies. All the while they had been moving straight ahead, the had turned upside down once, and still the poet returns to his former place in the same position he had been in when he left it. Therefore, if he hadn't turned upside down on the way, he would have come back with his head on the ground and his feet in the air. This means that the surface, over which Dante is moving, is such that a straight line with one u-turn brings us back to our former position...

Dante's space is governed by the principles of elliptic geometry... from the point of view of contemporary physics space must be conceived as elliptic space, and it is thought to be finite and, like time, closed in itself.“ Florensky calls these studies contemporary science's gift to Dante's time. He views the artistic model of Dante's world through the prism of the theory of relativity and concludes: „Space breaks up when light moves at large velocity... the area of imagination is real, understandable, and in Dante's language is is called „empyrean“,... the transition from a real surface to an imaginary one is possible only through broken space and the reversing of the body... when we tear apart time, the „Divine Comedy“ appears not behind but ahead of contemporary science.

For Father Pavel's book Favorsky found an image for the dynamics of the real and imaginary surfaces. The problem of the correlation of the outer (the plane of reality) and the the inner (the plane of the imaginary) has always posed itself to art, as it posed itself to Dante.

In „Explanation of a book cover“ Florensky writes that the artist has turned out equal to the task of depicting the nature of both visual and quasi visual images, when letters „stitch“ the paper. The letter not only hold the plane itself, they also hold their backside. But via inflexion of the voice they also communicate the space of sound (in particular there are different levels of writing the name and surname of the author). Florensky maintains that the artist uses the principles of bas-relief when inscriptions pull together „plane space, as if squeezing it between two plates of glass“. The plane represented has depth, but this depth is not unlimited and far from being illusory; this principle was typical for ancient art. The dream of a new spiritual synthesis turned out to be utopian.

Florensky's book helped for the many-layered spatial constructions in the famous novel „Master and Margarita“ by Mikhail Bulgakov. Osip Mandelstam, Evgeny Zamyatin and others were also interested in Florensky's book.

 

Ten years later, Favorsky received the opportunity to illustrate Dante's „Vita nova“. This book with a portrait of Dante and six engravings was published by the famous publishing house „Academia“. The artist himself quite rightly considered „Vita nova“ one of his best works and compared the „body“ of this book with the human body, considering the book a living organism. At the same time the illustrations don't get in the way of the text, don't intrude on the literary outline, but serve as a rhythmic background which through a new kind of imagery communicates the style and fragrance of the epoch.

The role of a book in the surroundings of man is no less important than the interpretation of the imagery of a text. This approach is called „image-object“ by the artist. In „ Vita Nova “ Favorsky realizes this idea very laconically: the binding, which is covered by tracing-paper, reminds on of ancient parchment, the style of the engravings is marked by figures in the clear space of the early Renaissance.

The elegance of the green case with its brown back and the thinly drawn branch in gold create a specific kind of high key for entering Dante's space. Out of this case one takes a small book in warm hues which is easily held in the palm of one's hand. Big red letters on the binding create the emotional counterbalance for the austerity and tranquility of the binding. The frontispiece with the portrait of Dante at work (with the mystical number 9 in the upper corner) forms a rhythmic whole with the title-page.

The first double-page can be read like a musical score and the layout precisely sticks to this rhythm when on the left hand side there appear illustrations. This rhythm is disrupted by the foreword. A fact the artist later on regretted. At the end of the foreword on the left side of the page there appears an engraving of a portrait of young Beatrice with a flower. She moves from left to right into the text as if inviting the reader to open it. Three engravings are dedicated to Dante's sonetts. Favorsky said about the first of these engravings: „Sonett I is Eros. Dreadful Eros.“ Nevertheless the engravings as well as the book itself are quite austere. Eros is bound by an epic artist's (that's what Favorsky considered himself to be) dynamic strokes, bound in embossing, sculpturing forms.

Favorsky considered the engraving illustrating the second canzone, which represents Beatrice's sleep and death, the best in this book: „I saw Donnas who ran along paths, with their heads uncovered, crying and groaning.“ Here we also read the lines: „The light of the sun faded“ and „birds were smitten in their flight“. Everything is shown as if in a strange delayed rhythm – „there is more sleep in this“, said the artist. Sleep in open space is a sun turned to coal, spheric space is a bird flying head down. On the one hand rather concrete sizes, on the other hand a representation of sleep as communication between different worlds. It is no coincidence that in some lookers-on this engraving evokes distant associations with the metaphysical paintings by Giorgio de Chirico.

Since the 25 th sonett, the last one in „Nova Vita“ ends with the promise of a glorification of Beatrice in the future, supposedly in the „Divine Comedy“, Favorsky ends his design of the book with the figure of Beatrice among the stars. As show his sketches, the artist intended to represent Dante, turned towards Beatrice. But then he left her alone – the figure is turned towards the body of the text. This is the only engraving that is placed on the right side of a page and it plays the role of a capstone. It ends the book. While they stylistically support the book, Favorsky's engravings also afford the needed combination of the tactile and the visual, the abstract and the concrete, which is always part of the work of a great master of art. These illustrations to Dante's work with their rich details only gain when they are blown up and they look a lot like frescoes.

 

While working on these illustrations Favorsky was watched by one of his pupils, Mikhail Pikov (1903-1973), who lived with his teacher. Why? The reason is the usual interference of Soviet history with the fates of Russian artists. At the beginning of the 1920ies there was one of the usual check-ups of students' social origins (the son of a village blacksmith was considered affluent) and Mikhail Pikov was turned out of the dormitory. His teacher took him in and shared his small room with him. In this hell, at a time of repression when friends and pupils of Favorsky's were being arrested, he helped many of them, like he himself was helped by his own high ideas about art.

Pikov lived in this room, side by side with his teacher, for almost twenty years. Western culture influenced him through his teacher and through illustrations of Western classical literature. A collection of works by Firenzuoli, an Italian writer of the 16 th century, became Pikov's first work. It was followed by Homer and Aeschyll and the collection „The Lyra of Ancient Hellas“.

Dante became the last, longstanding object of affection for Pikov. He spent almost as many years illustrating the „Divine Comedy“ as its author had spent writing it. The result was thirty-one engravings. Growing accustomed to Dante's world, the artist bought a telescope and was interested not only in different viewpoints on space as seen from Earth but also as seen from the spheres of heaven, where Dante is taken by his imagination.

Pikov was especially interested in images of antiquity in Dante's work. There he found the needed liberty in the treatment of classical figures. On the way from Hell to Paradise the strokes become lighter, fill up with the energy of the colour white. The images become more ethereal, their treatment more like illustrations by Botticelli than Doré and his obsessive naturalistic descriptiveness. At the same time the material of the engravings itself dictates their voluminosity and their dramatism, which distinguishes them from Botticelli's fine linear drawings. Pikov's illustration, like Favorsky's, serve as a sort of rhythmic accompaniment of images that were created by a great poet, and not as an imposed visual explanation of a text, by their inadequacy often impeding understanding.

The torch of love, its flame, which Favorsky never depicted, appear in a new way in Pikov's engravings. And of course looking at these engravings causes a lot of cultural associations to crop up in one's mind: Delacroix and his romantic „Dante's boat“, „Colossus“ by Goya and many others. The full three-volume edition was published in 1974 right after the artist's death, at the height of the period of stagnation. A totalitarian regime put pressure on the artists, whose works we have just taken a look at. But this pressure gave rise to counteraction. The Hell that surrounded their livesand its terrors were a sort of frightful forming element. But Dante, the classic, helped these artists restore their emotional balance. That is the main reason why Favorsky and Pikov were able to interpret his works as brilliantly as they did.