Dante and Virgil ride Geryon, a mythological creature with the head of a man, the paws of a lion, the body of a snake, and a tail shaped like a scorpion's jaws, in this woodcut from 1757. This image is part of the College's Valentine Giamatti Dante Collection.

It's a pity that Dante Alighieri didn't live to see the advent of special effects, Technicolor, and Surround Sound. Even today, the fourteenth-century poet's nightmarish descriptions of the torments of Hell in The Divine Comedy more than hold their own against the most fantastical imaginings of Stephen King or Wes Craven.

Of course, there were no filmmakers on the scene when Dante finished The Divine Comedy in 1321, but there were plenty of artists of the day who were inspired to create their own interpretation of Dante's visions. In the centuries since, many more have been unable to resist that same challenge.

When Italian scholar Richard Lansing set out five years ago to create The Dante Encyclopedia, the first—and only—English-language encyclopedia on the Florentine poet, it was only natural that he envisioned including illustrations from editions of The Divine Comedy. And, when he began considering where he might find those images, it was only natural that he focused on the Valentine Giamatti Dante Collection at Mount Holyoke.

The Giamatti Collection, with its more than 200 volumes dating from 1481 to the present day, "struck me as being ideal for this book," said Lansing, a professor of romance and comparative literature at Brandeis University. "I wanted to be able to represent what book publishers did in the early days with Dante's other world."

Valentine Giamatti (center) with students in the 1960s.

"It is a stunning collection, and I am very pleased that the intellectual community will be exposed to its variety and quality through the venue of the Dante Encyclopedia. Hopefully American scholars will now be able to take advantage of the collection that Professor Giamatti so carefully compiled,” said MHC's Angelo Mazzocco, an authority on Dante who led Lansing to the collection. Mazzocco, a professor of Italian and Spanish who served on the executive council of the Dante Society of America, was also one of 144 scholars in twelve countries who contributed essays to the 1,006-page encyclopedia. "I felt a certain amount of pride in working with Angelo, a longtime colleague," said Lansing.

The Giamatti Collection was given to the College in 1974 by Valentine Giamatti, a Dante scholar and professor of Italian at MHC from 1940 to 1973. Beginning with a single book presented as a wedding gift, Giamatti amassed a collection of more than 200 editions in twenty-nine languages. Many of his editions were found on his trips to Europe, or were given as presents by friends and students. The collection continues to grow, through purchases by the MHC library and gifts from other book collectors. The illustrations in the collection, estimated to be in the thousands, range from anonymous engravings to works of well-known artists such as Salvador Dali, William Blake, and Sandro Botticelli. "I've had so much fun doing this," Giamatti told an interviewer in 1981, a year before his death. In a eulogy he wrote to his father, Giamatti's son A. Bartlett Giamatti, the former president of Yale and former commissioner of baseball, recalled the influence that Dante exerted on the family's life.

Learn about Mothers of the Renaissance April 19 Margaret L. King, a leading scholar of the Italian Renaissance and women's studies, will deliver this year's Valentine Giamatti Lecture Thursday, April 19, at 8 pm in Mary Woolley Hall's New York Room. In her talk, titled "Mothers of the Renaissance,” King will explore the influence of maternal rearing on the Petrarchs, da Vincis, and Machiavellis who created Renaissance civilization. The Valentine Giamatti Lecture has been given since the mid-1970s in honor of Dante scholar Giamatti, a professor of Italian at MHC for more than thirty years. King's recent books include The Death of the Child Valerio Marcello (1994), which won the Marraro Prize from the American Historical Association as the best book on Italian history, and Women in the Renaissance (1991). She is a professor of history at City University of New York's Brooklyn College.

With the help of the Giamatti Collection's curators—Peter Carini, MHC's director of archives and special collections, and Nancy Birkrem, cataloguing and special collections librarian—Lansing explored the collection and personally photographed the images for the encyclopedia, published in 2000 by Garland Publishing. Most of the work's 200-plus illustrations were taken from the Giamatti Collection, with the rest provided by Brandeis and the University of Notre Dame.

For the power of a single image, consider Dante and Virgil in Judecca, a woodcut taken from a 1491 edition in the Giamatti Collection. Here, Dante, the pilgrim, and Virgil, the Roman poet who is his guide through Hell and most of Purgatory, come face to face with Lucifer, the "evil worm that gnaws the world." Forget notions of fire and brimstone. Here, Lucifer is frozen in the center of Lake Cocytus, the lake into which the rivers of Hell flow. His enormous, batlike wings flap constantly, keeping the lake frozen. He has not one, but three faces, and is devouring live the bodies of Judas, Cassius, and Brutus, three banished to the final circle of Hell for the ultimate sin: betrayal of a benefactor or master. Like many contemporary images, the woodcut helpfully labels the figures of Dante and Virgil with a "D" and a "V," and shows them in more than one place at the same time—a technique employed, Birkrem explained, to put more information into a single image.

Lansing is gratified by the response the volume has gotten so far, particularly the emailed notes of thanks from students grappling with Dante for the first time. "They think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread," he said.