(Extra)ordinary Sensation and Visionary Perception in Dante’s Purgatorio XV and XVII

ABSTRACTIn Purgatorio xv and xvii, Dante depicts the pilgrim’s inner visions produced without direct sensory input, which, paradoxically, lead to some of the most extravagantly multisensory descriptions in the second canticle of the Commedia. This article argues for the centrality of the cantos for understanding the visionary dimension of Dante’s work by examining how Purg. xv and xvii meditate on the differences and overlaps between everyday and extraordinary perception. First, I examine Dante’s depiction of the faculties of imaginativa and fantasia, involved both in ordinary and visionary sensation. Second, I explore how the cantos portray the ecstatic dimension of Dante’s experience. Finally, I analyse how Dante uses multisensory language in individual visions so as to reflect on the complexity of perceptual layers in visionary experiences and to appeal to readers who think with, and through, their senses.KEYWORDS: DantevisionsPurgatoriodivine comedysensesmedieval faculties AcknowledgmentsI would like to thank Heather Webb for reading about Saint Stephen’s blood many more times than could be recommended to anyone in their right mind, and Giuseppe Ledda for always offering the most useful advice, even when he disagrees with my readings of the Commedia. My thanks also go to Silvia Ross and the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped to improve this article. My interest in the cantos dates back to a conversation with George Rayson, recorded in February 2021 as ‘Purgatorio 15: Are You Drunk? Visionary Metapoetics’ for the collaborative initiative of the Dante Society of America ‘Canto per Canto: Conversations with Dante in Our Time’: [accessed 14 August 2023].2 Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Purgatorio 16: The Fault Is Not in Our Stars’, in the Commento Baroliniano. Digital Dante (Columbia University Libraries, 2014): [accessed 14 August 2023].3 Among the ancient commentators, Guido da Pisa is the first to understand the opening of Inferno as indicating the status of the poem as a visio per somnium: ‘Hic manifeste apparet quod suas visiones in somno finxerit vidisse, et sic confirmat dictum superius positum’ (comm. on Inf. i, 11). According to Simon Gilson, the category of (dream) vision has been ‘applied and resisted with increasing urgency as we move beyond the midpoint of the [sixteenth] century’ (Reading Dante in Renaissance Italy: Florence, Venice and the ‘Divine Poet’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 214). Teodolinda Barolini summarises the more recent critical debates by presenting Tibor Wlassics’s, Allen Mandelbaum’s, and Antonino Pagliaro’s views on the status of the Commedia as a (dream) vision in The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 147, n. 13.4 For a more extended discussion about how and why Dante might be engaging with the radical ideas of his time, see Dante and Heterodoxy: The Temptations of 13th Century Radical Thought, ed. by Maria Luisa Ardizzone (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014); and James Miller, Dante & the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005).5 On the parallelisms between Dante’s and Paul’s descriptions of their visions, see Gian Roberto Sarolli, ‘La visione dantesca come visione paolina’, in Prolegomena alla ‘Divina Commedia’ (Florence: Olschki, 1971), pp. 113–19; Giuseppe Di Scipio, ‘Dante and St Paul: The Blinding Light and Water’, Dante Studies, 98 (1980), 151–57; and more generally, Giorgio Petrocchi, ‘San Paolo in Dante’, in Dante e la Bibbia, ed. by Giovanni Barblan (Florence: Olschki, 1988), 235–48. I address the Dante-Paul comparison in my article ‘Rapture and Visionary Violence in Dante’s Purgatorio 9’, Annali d’Italianistica, 39 (2021), 247–72. Some critics have also traced Augustinian influences on Dante’s understanding of visionary perception: see Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, ‘Dante and the Pauline Modes of Vision’, in his Structure and Thought in the Paradiso (New York: Greenwood, 1958; repr. 1968), p. 197; and Francis X. Newman, ‘St. Augustine’s Three Visions and the Structure of the Commedia’, MLN, 82 (1967), 56–78.6 In ‘“Why Did Dante Write the Commedia?” or The Vision Thing’, Teodolinda Barolini wonders: ‘[I]s there anything to be learned by bringing the Commedia into dialogue with its humble precursors, Dante into dialogue with the likes of Thurkill and Tundale?’ (Dante Studies, 111 (1993), 1–8 (p. 4)). Elsina Caponetti’s ongoing research on the links between the Irish and Italian vision traditions suggests that there well might be. On visionary writing that precedes Dante, see Visions of Heaven and Hell before Dante, ed. and trans. by Eileen Gardiner (New York: Italica Press, 1989); and I viaggiatori del Paradiso. Mistici, visionari, sognatori alla ricerca dell’Aldilà prima di Dante, ed. by Giuseppe Tardiola (Florence: Le Lettere, 1993).7 On this topic, see the classic essays by Cesare Segre (‘L’Itinerarium animae nel Duecento e Dante’, Letture classensi, 13 (1984), 9–32) and Emilio Pasquini (‘Le metafore della visione nella Commedia’, Letture classensi, 16 (1987), 129–51). Lectura Dantis mystica. Il poema sacro alla luce delle conquiste psicologiche odierne (Florence: Olschki, 1969) considers visio at length. The language of visionary perception in the Vita nuova has also received critical attention: see Ignazio Baldelli, ‘Visione, immaginazione e fantasia nella Vita nuova’, in I sogni nel Medioevo, ed. by Tullio Gregory (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1985), pp. 1–10; and Dino S. Cervigni’s discussion of Dante’s ‘sightings, imaginings, dreams, and visions’ as ‘a highly interdependent structural and thematic unity’ (p. 11) in the Vita nuova (Dante’s Poetry of Dreams (Florence: Olschki, 1986), pp. 39–70).8 On the association between the vis imaginativa and prophecy, see Ernest N. Kaulbach, ‘The Vis Imaginativa secundum Avicennam and the Naturally Prophetic Powers of Ymaginatif in the B-Text of Piers Plowman’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 86.4 (1987), 496–514; and Michelle Karnes, ‘Marvels and the Philosophy of Imagination: True Dreams, Prophecy, and Possession’, in her Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), pp. 27–57.9 Dante describes a comparable situation at the beginning of Purg. iv, where the pilgrim is so fascinated by Manfred’s speech that he loses track of time (ll. 1–14): this can happen when something seen or heard (‘quando s’ode cosa o vede’, iv, 7) so captivates the soul that it does not react to other sensory stimuli. Purg. xvii, on the other hand, offers a reflection of extreme inward absorption that occurs without direct sensory input.10 Here and henceforth, the edition of the Commedia quoted is Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’Antica Vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, 2nd edn (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994).11 Simon Gilson, among others, has shown that Dante’s familiarity with medieval theories of perception is reflected in his writing and that Dante’s visionary vocabulary was influenced by earlier literary visions (Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000)). For the importance of not seeing the Commedia as an isolated high point of medieval visionary writing, but rather as part of its development, see Segre, and Giuseppe Ledda, ‘Dante e la tradizione delle visioni medievali’, Letture Classensi, 37 (2008), 119–42.12 The name assigned to these perceptual units depended on the theory and the level of substantiality assigned to them. Simulacra do not communicate the features of a corporeal object to the soul of the perceiver as a copy of reality, but rather are dependent on the viewer’s senses and the medium of transmission. They then create further simulacra, reproducing the qualities of the thing seen as afterimages in the perceiver’s mind. The notion of simulacra profoundly influenced medieval vision literature. On simulacra, see Giorgio Avezzù, ‘The Deep Time of the Screen, and its Forgotten Etymology’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 11.1 (2019), 1–15; and Laura D. Gelfand, ‘Sense and Simulacra: Manipulation of the Senses in Medieval “Copies” of Jerusalem’, Postmedieval, 3.4 (2012), 407–22.13 As Arielle Saiber points out, parere and apparire can function in a similar way, describing phenomena that are both objectively present and appear to you, taking on an aspect of apparition: they ‘simultaneously are and seem’ (‘Virtual Reality: Purgatorio XV’, in Lectura Dantis: ‘Purgatorio’, ed. by Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 151–66 (p. 152)).14 Much of Dante’s visionary language overlaps with the visionary vocabulary found in Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione and Petrarch’s Trionfi. On Dante’s likely impact on this developing Italian tradition, see Nicolò Maldina, ‘Dante, Petrarca e la cornice visionaria del De casibus’, Heliotropia, 11.1 (2014), 79–104.15 See, for example, Anna Pegoretti, ‘Early Reception until 1481’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dante’s ‘Commedia’, ed. by Zygmunt G. Barański and Simon Gilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 245–58: ‘a number of manuscript miniature illustrations accompanying the opening canto represent Dante-character as sleeping or receiving a visionary experience, thereby promoting an understanding of the poem as the account of a dream […] or of a vision. Such a vision or dream-vision could be interpreted by readers as pure fiction, or as the result of a cognitive experience that the poet enjoyed and then decided to tell in the form of a long narrative fiction. Interestingly, the reality of Dante’s journey through the otherworld was a kind of non-issue, at least amongst learned readers … ’ (p. 251).16 On the medieval internal senses and their classification, see Simo Knuuttila and Pekka Kärkkäinen, ‘Medieval Theories of Internal Senses’, in The Sourcebook for the History of the Philosophy of Mind: Philosophical Psychology from Plato to Kant, ed. by Simo Knuuttila, Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, 12 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), pp. 131–45; and Juhana Toivanen, Perception and the Internal Senses: Peter of John Olivi on the Cognitive Functions of the Sensitive Soul (Boston: Brill, 2013).17 See Albrecht Classen, Imagination and Fantasy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: Projections, Dreams, Monsters, and Illusions, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 24 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020).18 For a more extended discussion of the imaginative faculty (or faculties) in classical and medieval contexts, see Murray Wright Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Mediaeval Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1927), pp. 68–79 and pp. 154–74; Harry Austryn Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew Philosophic Texts’, Harvard Theological Review, 28.2 (1935), 69–133; H. J. Blumenthal, ‘Neoplatonic Interpretations of Aristotle on Phantasia’, Review of Metaphysics, 31.2 (1977), 242–57; and Gerard Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought (Galway: Galway University Press, 1988). On imagination and fantasy in Dante, see Ignazio Baldelli, ‘Visione, immaginazione e fantasia nella Vita nuova’, in I sogni nel Medioevo, ed. by Tullio Gregori (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1985), pp. 1–10. On the terms imagine, imaginativa, and fantasia in the canto, see Kenelm Foster, ‘The Human Spirit in Action: Purgatorio XVII’, Dante Studies, 88 (1970), 17–29 (21–23); and Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, pp. 152–55. See also Patrick Boyde, Perception and Passion in Dante’s Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 44–50, on ‘apprehension’ and its reliance on imaginatio/phantasia.19 Michele Barbi, Problemi di critica dantesca (Florence: Sansoni, 1934), I.226–7.20 Elsewhere, however, Aquinas’ treatment of phantasia is more complicated. See Anthony J. Lisska, ‘The Imagination and Phantasia: A Historical Muddle’, in his Aquinas’s Theory of Perception: An Analytic Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 219–36.21 For a more complete discussion of this topos of novelty, see Giuseppe Ledda, La guerra della lingua. Ineffabilità, retorica e narrativa nella ‘Commedia’ di Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 2002), pp. 81–82.22 Teodolinda Barolini calls this technique the ‘Geryon principle’: the more fantastical the experiences the narrator is called upon to describe, the more he insists on telling the truth (The Undivine Comedy, p. 60). According to Barolini, this rhetorical strategy is one of the ways in which Dante constructs his visionary authority.23 This is the critical view espoused by most modern Dante scholars. Regrettably, Dante’s earliest commentators do not examine this qualifier. On the supernatural character of the light informing the visions in Purg. xvii, and the key terms imagine, imaginativa, and fantasia, see Foster, pp. 21–23. See also Charles S. Singleton’s comment on this verse: ‘The phantasy, or imaginativa, is “lofty” because of the experience of a vision coming from such a source’.24 On alta fantasia in Par. xxxiii, see Mira Mocan, La trasparenza e il riflesso. Sull’‘alta fantasia’ in Dante e nel pensiero medievale (Milan: Mondadori, 2007), pp. 147–87.25 Zygmunt G. Barański, ‘Structural Retrospection in Dante’s Comedy: The Case of Purgatorio 27’, Italian Studies, 41 (1986), 1–23 (p. 3).26 See Attilio Momigliano’s commentary on Purg. xv in La Divina Commedia: Purgatorio (Florence: Sansoni, 1973).27 Dante’s Lyric Poetry: Poems of Youth and of the ‘Vita Nuova’, ed. by Teodolinda Barolini, trans. by Richard Lansing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), p. 151.28 On ‘estatica’ as a hapax, see Robert Hollander, ‘An Index of Hapax Legomena in Dante’s Commedia’, Dante Studies, 106 (1988), 81–110 (p. 95). Alessandro Niccoli explains that in this instance, the verb ‘trarre’ ‘[c]ompare in senso estensivo, con il valore di “rapire”’ (‘trarre’, Enciclopedia Dantesca).29 Bettina Krönung, ‘Ecstasy as a Form of Visionary Experience in Early Byzantine Monastic Literature’, in Dreaming in Byzantium and Beyond, ed. by Christine Angelidi and George T. Calofonos (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), pp. 35–48 (p. 45).30 See Krönung. Closer to Dante’s context, we find Jacopo da Lana’s definition of an ecstatic vision as an experience of alienation, repeated by most commentators afterwards: ‘è quando la mente non è alienata da stupore, ma è alienata da alcuna rivelazione, la quale la tira e occupa sì tutta, che altra operazione o possanza non adovra’ (comm. on ll. 85–86). Alessandro Vellutello’s sixteenth-century commentary discusses ecstasy as contemplative: ‘Exestasis è da’ Latini domandata quella elevazione di mente ad uno obietto, che aviene alcuna volta ne’ contemplanti quando quel solo tira tanto tutte le potenze de l’anima a sé, che in nessun altro si ponno esercitare’ (comm. on ll. 85–93). See also Enrico Malato, ‘estatico’, in the Enciclopedia Dantesca. In Italian poetry that predates Dante, ecstatic states are depicted in the Franciscan poetic tradition (Alessandro Vettori, Poets of Divine Love: Franciscan Mystical Poetry of the Thirteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004)). On ecstasy as discussed by early thirteenth-century theologians in relation to Paul’s visions and other modes of cognising God, see Ayelet Even-Ezra, Ecstasy in the Classroom: Trance, Self, and the Academic Profession in Medieval Paris (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).31 Early monastic treatises frequently mention prayer ([pros]euchē), chanting of psalms and hymns (psallein), fasting (nēsteia), and continence (egkrateia). Other techniques mentioned include rest (hēsychazein), fixed gaze (atenizein), and keeping awake (agrypnein) (Krönung, p. 42). In the Italian context, ecstasy achieved through prayer, communion, singing, attending Mass, or self-injurious behaviours is frequently associated with women mystics, starting with Angela of Foligno and Catherine of Siena (Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century’, Women’s Studies, 11.1–2 (1984), 179–214 (p. 193); and Thomas McDermott, Catherine of Siena: Spiritual Development in Her Life and Teaching (New York: Paulist Press, 2008), p. 38). As Gabriella Zarri shows, such descriptions of self-induced ecstasy in association with the female religious continue well into Renaissance (‘Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century’, in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. by Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 219–303 (p. 286)).32 The edition quoted from is Dante, Vita nuova, ed. by Michele Barbi (Florence: Bemporad & Figlio, 1932).33 For a more detailed analysis of the relationship between ecstasy and affect in Thomas Gallus and Bonaventure, see Boyd T. Coolman, Knowledge, Love, and Ecstasy in the Theology of Thomas Gallus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Robert Glenn Davis, The Weight of Love: Affect, Ecstasy, and Union in the Theology of Bonaventure (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).34 Saint Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, trans. by Zachary Hayes (St Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, Saint Bonaventure University, 2002), 7.4.35 Corinne Saunders, ‘Thinking Fantasies: Visions and Voices in Medieval English Secular Writing’, in Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts, ed. by Hilary Powell and Corinne Saunders (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 91–116 (p. 94).36 Ibid., p. 93.37 Vision and sight have been studied extensively by generations of Dante scholars. Some notable works on this topic include Simon Gilson, ‘Dante’s Meteorological Optics: Refraction, Reflection, and the Rainbow’, Italian Studies, 52.1 (1997), 51–62; Simon Gilson, ‘Light Reflection, Mirror Metaphors, and Optical Framing in Dante’s Comedy: Precedents and Transformations’, Neophilologus, 83.2 (1999), 241–52; and Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). Dana E. Stewart’s The Arrow of Love: Optics, Gender, and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003) specifically examines the gendered dimension of vision in Dante and medieval poetry. For a recent overview of the role of vision in a broader medieval context, see Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Alina Alexandra Payne (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015). In Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Dallas G. Denery II examines visual analogies and the possibility of visual error as addressed in medieval science and theology.38 Saiber, p. 161.39 Carlo Delcorno points out that in other cantos, each purgatorial exemplum ‘occupa di norma una terzina, così che l’unità narrativa viene a coincidere con l’unità metrica’ (‘Dante e l’exemplum medievale’, Lettere italiane, 35.1 (1983), 3–28 (p. 10)).40 According to many early commentators, beginning with Pietro di Dante (comm. on Purg. xv, 94–96), the story of Pisistratus was known to Dante from Valerius Maximus, author of Facta et dicta memorabilia. Yet the question remains not fully resolved: as Giampietro Marconi points out in his entry ‘Valerio Massimo’ (Enciclopedia Dantesca), the passage might also be derived from John of Salisbury’s Policraticus.41 Bosco and Reggio (comm. on ll. 85–105) point out that Dante usually translates Mary’s Latin words from their religious sources with precision, probably as a sign of reverence.42 Another notable example of Dante’s mind only gradually recognising what it is seeing occurs in the same canto, when the pilgrim encounters the Angel of Gentleness (ll. 10–30).43 Enzo Esposito, ‘Purgatorio XV’, Nuove letture dantesche, 4 (1970), 167–92; and Bruno Nardi, ‘Il canto XV del Purgatorio’, in Lecturae e altri studi danteschi, ed. by Rudy Abardo (Florence: Le Lettere, 1990), pp. 127–38.44 On Dante’s choice to emphasise Saint Stephen’s youth and the affective impact it has upon the reader, see Heather Webb, ‘Modelling Gestural Virtues in Dante’s Purgatorio’, in her Dante, Artist of Gesture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 103–30.45 Carrying both classical and theological resonances, ‘the similitude of death for sleep and sleep for death [was in] vogue in medieval and Renaissance literature and iconography’ (S. Viswanathan, ‘Sleep and Death: The Twins in Shakespeare’, Comparative Drama, 13 (1979), 49–64 (p. 49)). On this topic, see Christina Welch, ‘Images of Death in Art and Literature in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1300–1700)’, in A Companion to Death, Burial, and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, c. 1300–1700, ed. by Philip Booth and Elizabeth C. Tingle (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 272–99 (p. 292). For a more anthropological approach, see Ultimate Ambiguities: Investigating Death and Liminality, ed. by Peter Berger and Justin Kroesen (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016).46 London, British Library, MS Egerton 943. This manuscript can be accessed online here: [accessed 14 August 2023].47 Dizionario biografico dei miniatori italiani: Secoli IX–XVI, ed. by Milvia Bollati (Milan: Bonnard, 2004), p. 1040.48 Laura Pasquini, ‘Pigliare occhi, per aver la mente’: Dante, la ‘Commedia’ e le arti figurative (Rome: Carocci, 2020), p. 122.49 In relation to the Egerton manuscript, Anna Pegoretti suggests that its illustrations seem to concretise the procedures of the medieval ars memoria by placing images to be remembered in a serial architectural structure (Indagine su un codice dantesco. La ‘Commedia’ Egerton 943 della British Library (Ghezzano: Felici, 2014), p. 126)). On the importance of architectural structures in medieval memory arts, see Mary Carruthers, ‘Elementary Memory Design’, in The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 99–152. On Dante and ars memoria, see also Harald Weinrich, La memoria di Dante (Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1994); and Lucia Battaglia Ricci, ‘Per una lettura dell’Inferno. Strutture narrative e arte della memoria’, Rivista di studi danteschi, 3 (2003), 227–52.50 Webb, p. 106. See the section ‘Mary and Stephen: Gestures of Mildness’ (pp. 105–13), where Webb discusses other illustrations and precedents for the Stephen episode.51 See Anna Pegoretti, ‘Un Dante “domenicano”: la Commedia Egerton 943 della British Library’, in Dante visualizzato. Carte ridenti I: XIV secolo, ed. by R. Arqués Corominas and Marcello Ciccuto (Florence: Cesati, 2017), pp. 127–42 (p. 130).52 On the evidentiary nature of blood in the Middle Ages, see Peggy McCracken, The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); A Great Effusion of Blood? Interpreting Medieval Violence, ed. by Mark D. Meyerson, Daniel Thiery, and Oren Falk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Blood (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006); and Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700, ed. by Bonnie Lander Johnson and Eleanor Decamp (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).53 Beyond Inf. xiii, Dante’s language of blood has received attention in its political, familial, and economic aspects. See Anne C. Leone, ‘Communal and Economic Implications of Blood in Dante’, Italian Studies, 71.3 (2016), 265–86; and Maggie Fritz-Morkin, ‘Dante’s Blood Elegies’, Dante Studies, 135 (2017), 107–35.54 The Codex Altona represents the micronarratives of Dante’s visions as independent narrative units, while Doré’s ‘Stoning of Stephen’ situates the scene within a landscape that appears indistinguishable from the larger purgatorial surroundings. In both cases, the viewers encounter the scenes directly, without the pilgrim’s mediating presence.55 This is my faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art. The work of art itself is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer.56 Gustave Doré, The Martyrdom of Saint Stephen, c. 1868, engraving, 24.13 × 20.32 cm. Private collection. Image in the public domain: [accessed 14 August 2023].57 Cited in A. Lecoy de la Marche, Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues tirés du recueil inédit d’Etienne de Bourbon (Paris: Renouard, 1877), pp. 4–5. On this topic, see Jacques Berlioz, ‘Le récit efficace: l’exemplum au service de la prédication (XIII’-XV’ siècles)’, in Rhétorique et Histoire. L’exemplum et le modèle de comportement dans le discours antique et médiéval. Actes de la Table ronde organisée par l’École française de Rome (Rome, 18 mai 1979), ed. by Jean Michel David (Rome: École française de Rome, 1980), pp. 113–46.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Vilnius University Foundation.