The question of precedence is a difficult matter to establish or settle, but it may be that Dante, in the repeated dramatic use of the pilgrim's cast shadow in the Purgatorio, was the first artist of magnitude in painting as well as in literature to represent the phenomenon of cast shadows since antiquity. Art historians appear to be in disagreement about dating the first cast shadows in the pictorial arts. Erwin Panofsky holds that it was the Brothers Limbourg in the first years of the fifteenth century who rediscovered cast shadows, while Frederick Hartt observes: “With very few exceptions, cast shadows do not appear in painting until the Quattrocento, yet we can hardly imagine that Trecento painters were unaware of shadows.”¹ Millard Meiss is more candid and specific about the dilemma:

Our knowledge of even so basic a development as that of cast shadows in incomplete. They were present as residual forms, inherited from antiquity, in Byzantine painting, appearing frequently on buildings. A striking example … is a fragment of a mosaic in the Torre Pisana of the Palazzo ex-Reale in Palermo. Around 1300 Italian painters—Roman or connected with Rome—began to see a relationship between these traditional patterns and actual visual phenomena. Small but unmistakable shadows were introduced into the later frescoes of the Life of St. Francis in Assisi, and in the Arena Chapel Giotto painted even a face in deep shade. Francesco Traini introduced three architectural shadows in his triptych of 1344-1345 in Pisa.²

If one may hazard so broad a generalization, in medieval literature prior to Dante, shadow is confined to the topos of the shade cast by a tree or wall, more a tactile sensation than a visual one.³ Jean de Meun does write in the Roman de la Rose (vv. 4753 ff., ed. Lecoy) of the earth's shadow in the eclipse of the moon, but this belongs to an astronomical tradition rather than a humanistic one; the reference is remote and academic, transmitted more than it is freshly experienced, while in Jean Renart's Lai de l’ombre, the ombre of the title refers not to a cast shadow, but a reflection in a well. One looks in vain before Dante for the dramatic, albeit comic, use of cast shadow that one finds, say, at the conclusion of Ovid's Amores I, viii, where the eavesdropping lover's presence is betrayed by his own shadow: “vox erat in cursu, cum me mea prodidit umbra …”⁴

The pilgrim first sees his shadow at the outset of Canto III of the Purgatorio. The newly arrived penitents of the Ante-Purgatory have just scattered upon the chastisement of Cato, indignant that they have succumbed to the blandishments of Casella's song. The pilgrim stays even closer than before to Virgil, who is stung by remorse at his own unreliability as a moral guide. The pilgrim then casts his eyes down before him and observes with terror that he can see only one shadow in front of him. What he takes to be Virgil's abandonment is revealed to be his first recognition of a more general feature of the Other World, that the souls of the dead cast no shadows, and that it is the pilgrim's shadow which is here the exception. Nor, Virgil admonishes him, should the pilgrim marvel at this supernatural phenomenon, for if all events were reducible to rational explanation then there would have been no need for the Christian faith and the mysteries that it teaches.

          Lo sol, che dietro fiammeggiava roggio,
rotto m’era dinanzi a la figura,
ch’avëa in me de’ suoi raggi l’appoggio.
          Io mi volsi dallato con paura
d’essere abbandonato, quand’ io vidi
solo dinanzi a me la terra oscura;
          e ’l mio conforto: “Perché pur
diffidi?”,
a dir mi cominciò tutto rivolto;
“non credi tu me teco e ch’io ti guidi?
          Vespero è già colà dov’ è
sepolto
lo corpo dentro al quale io facea ombra;
Napoli l’ha, e da Brandizio è tolto.
          Ora, se innanzi a me nulla s’aombra,
non ti maravigliar più che d’i cieli
che l’uno a l’altro raggio non ingombra.
          A sofferir tormenti, caldi e geli
simili corpi la Virtù dispone
che, come fa, non vuol ch’a noi si sveli.”

(Purg. III, 16-33)

Paradoxically, the drama of this moment hinges less on the poet's depiction of the pilgrim's cast shadow than on the miraculous absence of Virgil's shadow. That is to say, no sooner does Dante succeed in representing natural phenomena than he transcends his achievement to direct our attention to the ultimate ends of his poem, which do not lie in the transcription of physical reality but in the revelation of the ultimate spiritual nature of reality. It is as if the revolutionary naturalistic achievement in rendering cast shadows were but the by-product of the supernatural perspective that could envisage a world beyond the limits and clearly seen contingencies of the terrestrial one. Dante sees so well because he sees so much more.⁵

There is a peculiar pathos to Virgil's disquisition on faith, since he as a pagan born before the Redemption is himself excluded from the body of the Church. This sense of inclusion and exclusion as the underlying motif here has been excellently analyzed by Walter Binni in his reading of Canto III.⁶ To the pathos of Virgil's plight is joined the irony that he who speaks so well of the theoretical limits of reason is pragmatically incapable of guiding the pilgrim up the mountain. In this regard Purgatorio III might be said to constitute an anti-Limbo, an explicit criticism of the very souls who were honored in Canto IV of the Inferno, but who are now seen in the superior perspective of Revelation.

Virgil's inability to scale the mountain is not overcome until he encounters the group of penitents moving slowly around its base. Since the contrast between the isolated and perplexed figures of the pilgrim and his guide on the one hand and the large band of penitents on the other is fundamental to this canto, it may not be pure happenstance that the numerically central verse of the canto (v. 73) contains Virgil's joyous greeting of the penitents: “O ben finiti, o già spiriti eletti.” This is the verse by which the smaller group communicates with the larger; the verse, that is, that links the individual to the corporate body.

The extended simile which compares the timid movement within the larger group to a flock of sheep conveys the guileless simplicity of the penitents by its unusual parataxis, and particularly by the repeated use of the conjunction “e.” It presents a strong formal contrast to the mature rigor and complexity of Virgil's diatribe, although, ironically, the descriptive verses 44-45 which conclude Virgil's rebuke subside in exhaustion into the simplicity of the sermo humilis. Now it is no longer the pilgrim who marvels at the absence of Virgil's shadow, but the flock of the elect who gape in naive astonishment at the pilgrim's shadow:

          Come color dinanzi vider rotta
la luce in terra dal mio destro canto,
sì che l’ombra era da me a la grotta,
          restaro, e trasser sé in dietro alquanto,
e tutti li altri che venieno appresso,
non sappiendo ’l perché, fenno altrettanto.
          “Sanza vostra domanda io vi confesso
che questo è corpo uman che voi vedete;
per che ’l lume del sole in terra è fesso.
          Non vi maravigliate, ma credete
che non sanza virtù che da ciel vegna
cerchi di soverchiar questa parete”.
          Così ’l maestro; e quella gente degna
“Tornate”, disse, “intrate innanzi dunque”.
coi dossi de le man faccendo insegna.

(VV. 88-102)

With great subtlety, Dante transfers the pilgrim's initial wonder at the miraculous absence of Virgil's shadow into a convincing astonishment on the part of the penitents at the commonplace event of the living pilgrim casting a shadow in the sun. It is no ordinary event when we consider where we are and what miraculous interventions have brought the pilgrim to Purgatory. Here the pilgrim's shadow becomes the sign, not of his mortality, as it is for the poets and the Bible, but of his vitality, of his solid and fleshly presence in the Other World. This is made abundantly clear by Virgil's brief discourse to the penitents which elicits the simple directions he needs in order to ascend the mountain.

It is a supreme irony that Virgil, who is cast no more heroically in the Commedia than here, should be dependent upon a sheeplike flock of penitents for guidance, but this conforms to the central truth of the canto, that the wisdom of the Church, adhered to through faith, is superior, by virtue of its accumulated experience, to the knowledge of any single man, no matter how talented or conscientious.

The throng of the excommunicate turns out not to be faceless, however. From it emerges the dashing figure of Manfred drawn in the highest individual and heroic relief. One may smile at Manfred's need of recognition, however much he otherwise shares the communal fate of the gente degna. There is an even greater irony in the pilgrim's inability to recognize him despite his exceptional handsomeness and his distinctive wounds. Manfred must in fact disclose his identity at the same time that he bares the wound on his chest. Here it is altogether appropriate that Manfred should, as a token of his submissiveness, define himself not as the son of his ambitious and amoral father, now found in the Inferno (X, 119) among the heretics, but at the outset as grandson of Constance (Purg. III, 113; Par. III, 109 ff.) and finally as father of another, living Constance (Purg. III, 115 and 143). In so doing, Manfred defines the moral condition of Purgatory not as another Hell, but as a region between Earth and Paradise.

Manfred vividly describes how, although having died excommunicate after a life of horrible sins, he repented his waywardness in his last moments and thereby found salvation. This intimate drama undoes the Chruch's historical censure of Manfred through Dante's envisaging of a spiritual progress seen only by God. For in this canto Dante dramatizes both the individual soul's need of the Church's institutional wisdom and experience and, as well, the limits of that institutional wisdom insofar as the Church is a human institution and can err unwittingly.⁷

This careful distinction is symbolized in the canto in Dante's handling of the pilgrim's shadow. The shadow cast by the pilgrim is a reminder of his bodily presence, miraculous in this place, but a sign as well that a living man is compounded of flesh and spirit both. Insofar as man is not pure spirit, insofar as there are physical limits to his being, man requires institutions to whose authority he must submit. Even so, as man is not purely corporeal, that is, insofar as a spirit does not cast a shadow, human institutions, no matter how divinely sanctioned, have their own corporeal limits, and do not see so far nor so keenly as God whose judgment of individual salvation transcends that of His human ministers. The pilgrim's shadow stands for both the sanction and the limit of the Church's authority.

Moreover, the presence of the pilgrim's opaque flesh in a world of diaphanous spirit offers an analogue to the Incarnation, the central mystery of the Christian faith to which Virgil refers in his rebuke. More specifically, the pilgrim's otherness, his living among the dead, bears analogy to Christ's Resurrection and appearance to the disciples, that is, His bearing the wounds of His death among the living. There is in the canto a distinct analogy between the pilgrim's shadow and Manfred's wounds, for twice (VV. 17, 88) in describing the pilgrim's shadow Dante refers to the sunlight as rotto, and this is echoed in Manfred's description of his wounds: “Poscia ch’io ebbi rotta la persona/ di due punte mortali” (VV. 118-119).⁸ Both shadow and wounds are the means by which the pilgrim and Manfred reveal themselves, just as Christ reveals Himself to the disciples after the Resurrection by His wounds. The parallel between Manfred and the Risen Christ of Luke 24: 39 and John 20:20, 27 has been remarked by Binni,⁹ but the injunction of the latter passage (John 20:27) to a faith transcending doubt—“noli esse incredulus, sed fidelis”—is closer in spirit to Virgil's correction of the pilgrim's apprehensiveness after he fails to see Virgil's shadow.

The pilgrim's shadow occurs a second time in Canto V of the Purgatorio, but unlike the thoughtful, concessive opening of the third canto and its play of individual against group, institution against ultimate truth, there is an immediacy and abruptness to the presentation of the pilgrim's shadow here which is in keeping with the theme of violent death cutting off the life of the penitents of the last hour. Ironically, it is not those per forza morti who first see the pilgrim's shadow, but the lethargic, who typically make their tardy discovery just as the pilgrim is leaving their group:

          Io era già da quell’ ombre partito,
e seguitava l’orme del mio duca,
quando di retro a me, drizzando ’l dito,
          una gridò: “Ve’ che non par che
luca
lo raggio da sinistra a quel di sotto,
e come vivo par che si conduca!”
          Li occhi rivolsi al suon di questo motto,
e vidile guardar per maraviglia
pur me, pur me, e ’l lume ch’era rotto.
          “Perché l’animo tuo tanto s’impiglia”,
disse ’l maestro, “che l’andare allenti,
che ti fa ciò che quivi si pispiglia?
…
          E ’ntanto per la costa di traverso
venivan genti innanzi a noi un poco,
cantando ‘Miserere’ a
verso a verso.
          Quando s’accorser ch’i’ non dava
loco
per lo mio corpo al trapassar d’i raggi,
mutar lor canto in un “oh!” lungo e roco;
          e due di loro, in forma di messaggi,
corsero incontr’ a noi e dimandarne:
“Di vostra condizion fatene saggi”.
          E’l mio maestro: “Voi potete andarne
e ritrarre a color che vi mandaro
che ’l corpo di costui è vera carne.
          Se per veder la sua ombra restaro,
com’ io avviso, assai è lor risposto:
faccianli onore, ed esser può lor caro”.

(Purg. V, 1-12, 22-36)

It is the same shadow which is seen in front of the pilgrim by the penitents who have died a violent death, and from both viewpoints the shadow is less a cause for naive astonishment than a distraction to the penitents, and thus serves to characterize their over-dependency on the things of this world. The penitents are surprised by the shadow as they were surprised by death. But if the shadow is a distraction from their spiritual goal, it equally reaffirms the link between the Other World and the world of the living. As the troop dispatches a smaller number from its ranks to be messenger to the larger body, so the pilgrim's shadow bears witness to the pilgrim's ability to serve as messenger between the penitents of Purgatory and the prayers of their kin or friends on earth. Like the body, the shadow is unimportant in itself except insofar as it is symbolic of the link day's departure previously, that is, in terms of the disappearance of shadow: “le tenebre fuggian da tutti lati,/ e’l sonno mio con esse;” (VV. 112-113).

In terms of sheer poetic technique, one can only marvel how Dante rings the changes on the shadow motif.¹⁰ It is no less a measure of Dante's art that the last glimpse of the pilgrim's shadow as the third and final night on Purgatory falls should be the sight of the shadow's disappearance. For with the elimination of the P's on the pilgrim's forehead and his ascent heavenward, we might suppose a gradual shedding of fleshly ways, a progressive disincarnation, despite the prevailing fiction of the poem, that it is in possession of his earthly body that the pilgrim visits the Other World. It will be the last time that the pilgrim sees his actual shadow, the witness to his corporeality, in the ascent to the Beatific Vision. By such literary tact, Dante prepares us for Pauline equivocation (II Cor. 12: 2) whether it was in body or in mind that he ascended to the Empyrean:

          S’i’ era sol di me quel che creasti
novellamente, amor che ’l ciel governi,
tu ’l sai, che col tuo lume mi levasti.

(Par. I, 73-75)

Whereas the standard literary commonplace associated shadow, or rather shade, with relief from the sun's rays, in the Purgatorio, cast shadow is accompanied by painful image of mortal wounds (Canto III), repeated and violent bloodletting (Canto V), and intense fire (Canto XXVI). The fourth appearance of the shadow offers a moment of well-earned repose after the pilgrim has accomplished his trials. Nevertheless, Dante finds a means of introducing the idiosyncratic note of violence and bloodshed in Canto XXVII's opening which tells the hour by the antipodal recollection of Jerusalem as the locus of the Crucifixion, albeit this image is more obviously proleptic of the pilgrim's passage through the fire:

          Sì come quando i primi raggi vibra
là dove il suo fattor lo sangue sparse,
cadendo Ibero sotto l’alta Libra,
          e l’onde in Gange da nona rïarse,
sì stava il sole; onde ’l giorno sen giva,
come l’angel di Dio lieto ci apparse.

(Purg. XXVII, 1-6)

Above and beyond, therefore, the technical realistic and painterly handling of the episodes of the cast shadow, there is a persistent tendency in the canticle to associate the shadow cast by the pilgrim with the wounds received by Christ on the Cross and with the related episodes of Christ's appearance after the Resurrection to the disciples. If we can infer that Dante, through these repeated associations, intended to establish the conceit of the equivalence of shadow and wound, and more particularly the wounds suffered by Christ, then the purgatorial ascent would in yet another detail embody the principle of the imitatio Dei enunciated by St. Paul in Galatians 6: 17, “ego enim stigmata Domini Iesu in corpore meo porto,” and re-enacted by St. Francis. By rights, however, we might expect Dante to mention the pilgrim's shadow not four but five times, since that is the traditional number of the Blessed Wounds which were widely venerated in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.¹¹ Dante, who celebrates the miracle of St. Francis' stigmata in Paradiso XI, was aware of this devotional tradition, even if his allusions to it are characterized by understatement. In Purgatorio XV, 80-81, he refers to the five remaining P's of the seven implanted on the pilgrim's forehead as “le cinque piaghe,/ che si richiudon per esser dolente.”

The very disposition of the four shadows seen so far, twice in the liminal regions of Ante-Purgatory and twice in the uppermost region of Purgatory itself suggests the pairing of the wounds of the Crucified at the extremities of His limbs. This pattern is punctuated by the two references in the canticle to the shadow cast by the Mount of Purgatory itself; the first at VI, 51, the second at XXVIII, 12, that is, closely following each of the paired appearances of the shadow cast by the pilgrim. The Mount of Purgatory and the canticle itself would then correspond to the Body of the Suffering Redeemer, and the placing of the shadows a deliberate reminder, by means of the pilgrim's corporeal resistance, of the Stigmata that testify to the humanity of Christ in His Passion and the divinity of Christ in His Resurrection, marks at once of frailty and miracle, suffering and triumph.¹²

The spear wound in Christ's flank, unlike four wounds of Christ's hands and feet, is a posthumous wound, yet the most vivid, issuing forth blood and water, and the most significant in its fulfillment of scriptural prophecy:

Unus militum lancea latus eius aperuit, et continuo exivit sanguis et aqua. Et qui vidit, testimonium perhibuit: et verum est testimonium eius. Et ille scit quia vera dicit: ut et vos credatis. Facta sunt enim haec ut Scriptura impleretur: Os non comminuetis ex eo. Et iterum alia Scriptura dicit: Videbunt in quem transfixerunt.

(John 19: 34-37)

One might therefore expect that the shadow that signifies l’ultimo sigillo, the spear wound in Christ's side, would be substantially different from the shadows that correspond to the wounds of Christ's limbs. Were Dante bound simply to the physical location of the spear wound, we should expect it to precede the wound-shadows of Cantos XXVI and XXVII, but aside from that central reference to the cinque piaghe in Canto XV, we find nothing of the sort. We may assume then that the chronological and spiritual factors set forth in John 19 weighed more heavily in Dante's completion of the symbolic pattern. Proceeding on this assumption then, I think that it is not difficult to detect the passage that provides us with the fifth shadow, one that can be understood as the equivalent of the lance wound in Christ's side.

The passage occurs in Canto XXX of the Purgatorio; it is possibly the most intimate yet richly symbolic moment in the Commedia. Beatrice, having just warned the pilgrim not to weep at Virgil's departure, since he must weep for another sword—“ché pianger ti conven per altra spada” (V. 57)—that is, not for Virgil but for himself,¹³ reveals herself to the pilgrim whom she now names for the first and only time in the poem and rebukes him for daring to approach the mountain where man is happy. The pilgrim then casts his eyes down in shame and sees not his shadow, but his reflection in the stream that flows from the fountain of the Terrestrial Paradise. We may recall here that umbra in Latin is also synonymous with imago and simulacrum, a reflected image. This act of self-reflection induces in the pilgrim a profound contrition, which the compunction of Virgil, rebuked by Cato, just prior to the first appearance of Dante's shadow (Purg. III, 7 ff.) was but a dim foreshadowing. Although Beatrice maintains her severity in the face of the pilgrim's discomfort, the Virtues who are here handmaidens intone the initial verses of the Psalm, In te, Domine, speravi, and the pilgrim named Dante, no longer an everyman, but fully himself, torn between Beatrice's rebuke and the nymphs' psalmody, between judgment and pity, bursts into tears and sighs of contrition:

          Sì come neve tra le vive travi
per lo dosso d’Italia si congela,
soffiata e stretta da li venti schiavi,
          poi, liquefatta, in sé stessa trapela,
pur che la terra che perde ombra spiri,
sì che par foco fonder la candela;
          così fui sanza lagrime e sospiri
anzi ’l cantar di quei che notan sempre
dietro a le note de li etterni giri;
          ma poi che ’ntesi ne le dolci tempre
lor compatire a me, par che se detto
avesser: ‘Donna, perché sì lo stempre?’,
          lo gel che m’era intorno al cor ristretto,
spirito e acqua fessi, e con angoscia
de la bocca e de li occhi uscì del petto.

(Purg. XXX, 85-99)

The expression of this moto spiritale, this metastasis of the greatest intensity, is achieved through a sequence of metaphors and similes of the broadest range: a childhood recollection, a vast inner landscape at once spatial and temporal, a melting candle, the linking of the psalmody to the music of the spheres, the frozen heart. Each of these images has a long history in the literary or Biblical tradition and each picks up motifs that run throughout the imagistic fabric of the Commedia.¹⁴ As the pilgrim responds to the singing of the hand-maidens and his soul is brought at last into tempered harmony with the music of the spheres and the seasonal passage from winter to spring, the old year to the new, so in the very issuing forth of the visible sign of his inward change from sin to grace, the language modulates from the naturalistic “così fue sanza lagrime e sospiri” to the elemental and sacramental simplicity of “lo gel … spirito e acqua fessi.” Yet it is the brief phrase, “pur che la terra che perde ombra spiri,” which is most relevant to our present concern, for it offers a final, fleeting glimpse of the last vestiges of shadow which are cast, albeit metaphorically, not by the pilgrim's body, but by his soul.

The evanescence of this image should not disconcert us if we reflect on the diminishing progression with which Dante has presented the pilgrim's shadow and, too, the already tenuous description of the disappearing shadow in Canto XXVII. The shadow of the pilgrim's body and of the unrepentant sinfulness in his soul must of necessity disappear before he is fit to ascend to Paradise. One can similarly understand the theological role of the image of the child rebuked by its mother, one of the frequent allusions to childhood in this and neighboring cantos, for the pilgrim must become as innocent as a child—“sicut parvuli” (Matt. 18: 3)—before he can see the kingdom of heaven. The moment of contrition is as much a rebirth into spiritual purity as it is a death to sin and the old man, and the sighs and tears that finally do issue forth from the pilgrim as “spirito e acqua” serve to baptize the pilgrim's reborn soul. “Consepulti enim sumus cum illo per baptismum in mortem: ut quomodo Christus surrexit a mortuis per gloriam Patris, ita et nos in novitate vitae ambulemus.” So St. Paul sounded the paradoxes of death-in-birth and birth-in-death in Romans 6: 4. It has gone apparently unnoticed that one of the Biblical texts that the pilgrim is reliving at this moment is the response of Christ to Nicodemus in the Fourth Gospel:

Nisi quis renatus fuerit ex aqua, et Spiritu sancto, non potest introire in regnum Dei. Quod natum est ex carne, caro est: et quod natum est ex spiritu, spiritus est. Non mireris quia dixi tibi: oportet vos nasci denuo. Spiritus ubi vult spirat, et vocem eius audis, sed nescis unde veniat, aut quo vadat: sic est omnis qui natus est ex spiritu.

(John 3: 5-8)

Here are found the images that underlie Dante's account of the pilgrim's contrition, the return to a metaphorical childhood, the simultaneous presence of water and spirit, the wind as a metaphor of the action of grace through the Holy Spirit. As St. Augustine explains in his commentary on John 3: 8: “Nemo videt Spiritum: et quomodo audimus vocem spiritus? Sonat Psalmus, vox est Spiritus; sonat Evangelium, vox est Spiritus; sonat sermo divinus, vox est Spiritus.”¹⁵

Simultaneous with the pilgrim's regeneration in the Spirit is his dying to the flesh, for there is a persuasive analogy between the spirit and water issuing forth from the pilgrim's eyes and mouth and the water and blood issuing forth from Christ's side in John 19: 34, particularly if we collocate the important doctrinal statement of the Trinity in I John 5: 7-8, which is traditionally associated with John 19:

Quoniam tres sunt, qui testimonium dant in caelo: Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus sanctus: et hi tres unum sunt. Et tres sunt, qui testimonium dant in terra: Spiritus, et aqua, et sanguis: et hi tres unum sunt.

The pilgrim's shadow has led us to the innermost mystery of the Crucifixion as well as the paradoxes of the sacrament of penance.¹⁶ The culmination of the shadow motif in the Purgatorio consists in the casting of the pilgrim's reflection and the consequent disappearance of shadow and chill from the pilgrim's soul. “La terra che perde ombra” is a metaphor of that warmest, most illumined and responsive region of the pilgrim's heart, now open to the compassionate harmony of the Virtues and the harsh light of Beatrice's demand for self-inquiry. Here the wounding and healing process, death and regeneration are inextricably one as the pilgrim undergoes the first stage of penance and the inner baptism that precede the completion of his penance and his formal baptism from which he will emerge “puro e disposto a salire a le stelle.”

Notes

1. Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974), p. 54. Hartt continues: “In a famous passage in the Inferno [sic] one of the damned asks who Dante is, since he casts a shadow (and the dead do not).” Erwin Panofsky's dating of the first cast shadows is found in his Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1953), Vol. I, p. 66. The standard treatment of light and shadow imagery in Dante is Guido Di Pino, La Figurazione della Luce nella Divinia Commedia (Messina: D’Anna, 1962). See also the entry on “Ombra” in the Enciclopedia Dantesca.

2. Millard Meiss, “Some Remarkable Early Shadows in a Rare Type of Threnos,” in Festschrift Ulrich Middeldorf, ed. by Antje Kosegarten and Peter Tigler, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), Vol. I, p. 116. I am grateful to Prof. Bruce Cole for this reference. One may note that Traini's frescos appear to be otherwise indebted to Dante in their unusually schematic representation of Hell.

3. See, for example, the entry “ombre” in Tobler-Lommatzsch, Altfranzösische Wörterbuch.

4. Other classical uses of the cast shadow range from Virgil's elegiac note in Ecl. I, 83, Ovid's moralized landscape in Tristia I, ix, 11-14, Lucan's precise geographical observations in Pharsalia III, 247-248, to Statius's melodramatic use of Capaneus's shadow in Thebaid X, 872. In the antique pictorial tradition, both Quintilian (X, ii, 7) and Pliny (XXXV, v, 15) write of painters circumscribing the shadows cast by objects in sunlight.

5. Virgil's attack on the limits of human reason is remarkably close to St. Augustine's criticism of the Platonists in Confessions VII, ix, 14: “Item legi ibi, quia uerbum, deus, non ex carne, non ex sanguine, non ex uoluntate uiri neque ex uoluntate carnis, sed ex deo natus est; sed quia uerbum caro factum est et habitavit in nobis, non ibi legi.” The intellectual odyssey of Book VII of the Confessions is permeated with the light imagery of the Fourth Gospel. In his attempts to envisage God as having extension in space, Augustine describes with his usual mastery the effect of light passing unimpeded through the air. See Confessions VII, i, 2. If Book VII of the Confessions was not the immediate catalyst for the plastic depiction of atmospheric phenomena conjoined with the theme of the insufficiency of human reason in matters of faith that is found in Purg. III, Augustine serves to illustrate the paradox that it is the prophet with his inner vision who is apt to be most painterly in his representation of the physical world.

6. Walter Binni, “Il Canto III del Purgatorio,” in Letture Dantesche, ed. Giovanni Getto (Firenze: Sansoni, 1964), Vol II, pp. 725-745.

7. One may compare the canto to Inferno XIX where Dante attacks simoniacal materialism, yet stresses, in keeping with the necessary corporeal element of the sacraments, the literalness and sheer physicality of salvific intervention (vv. 16 ff.; vv. 124 ff.).

8. The similarity between wound and shadow is adumbrated in the remarkable recollection of Mordret, King Arthur's nephew (or son), in Inferno XXXII, 61-62: “quelli a cui fu rotto il petto e l’ombra/ con esso un colpo per la man d’Artù.” It was prophesied that the treacherous Mordret would be killed by Arthur by a wound so deep that light would pass through it: “il te ferra parmi le cors si durement que apres le cop passera li rais du soleill.” Le Livre de Lancelot del Lac in The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. H. Oskar Sommer (Washington: The Carnegie Institution, 1912), Vol. V, p. 285. The prophecy comes true in La Mort le Roi Artus: “il met parmi le cors le fer de son glaiue. si dist lestoire quapres lestors del glaiue passa parmi la plaie vns rais de soleil si apartment que giflet le vit.” Ibid., Vol. VI, p. 377. While the Arthurian text mentions that the transpierced body allows light to pass through, it does not reckon, as Dante does, on the effect of this wound upon Mordret's shadow. The allusion to Mordret's unusual wound would, to anticipate our argument, constitute yet another antitype of the Crucifixion among the many that are to be found in the final cantos of the Inferno.

9. Binni, op. cit., p. 737.

10. Cf. Chaucer, who in the Introduction to The Man of Law's Tale (init.) gives us a bright morning shadow and the same moral injunctions to purposeful haste (vv. 19 ff.) that we find in Purg. V, while in the Prologue to The Parson's Tale (vv. 2 ff.) Chaucer depicts a late afternoon shadow, appropriate for a tale that is to be the last.

11. See Dom Louis Gougaud, Dévotions et pratiques ascétiques du Moyen Age (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1925), pp. 78 ff.

12. For the mountain itself as a figura Christi, see St. Augustine, Civ. Dei, XVIII, xxx.

13. Dante would seem to follow St. Augustine's distinction: “flente Didonis mortem … non flente autem mortem suam,” in Confessions, I, xiii.

14. Here let it suffice to cite Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), pp. 92 ff.

15. St. Augustine, Tract. in Joan. Ev., XII, iii, 5.

16. For the association of John 19 and I John 5, see St. Augustine, Contra Maximium, II, xxii, 3. The infernal counterpart of this imagery is found in Inf. XXXIV, 54. The crucial part played by the Virtues in eliciting the pilgrim's tears has its complement in a patristic and derivative pictorial tradition which has the four cardinal virtues drive the nails into the Cross. See Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. by Janet Seligman (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1972), Vol. II, pp. 137-140.