The Veronica (Tipped-in)
This chapter explores the significance of Dante’s use of the Veronica in the final chapters of the Vita nuova. Beginning with a tipped-in illustration from Botticelli in an early twentieth-century Spanish translation, this chapter uses the Veronica to highlight the work’s entanglement in the world and Dante’s desire to share the miracle of Beatrice with a larger public. Making Beatrice into a substitute Veronica, Dante draws on the unusual relation between original and copy that is already present in the Veronica itself, which is the impress of Christ’s face. Although the copy is honored as an original, the point of the image to produce copies, just as Dante wants later readers to reproduce his book. To copy Dante’s book gives Beatrice new life. Returning to Botticelli’s image, the chapter examines how Dante reprises many of the Vita nuova’s features discussed in the preceding chapters for his encounter with Beatrice in Earthly Paradise. The chapter concludes by taking up the controversial identification of Botticelli’s painting as a representation of Philology to argue for the connection between this lush and flowering figure and the conjunction of philology and world literature explored in this book.