Verona

Statue of Dante Alighieri

By Progetto Arte Poli

From the iconography to a "real" figure

A face that shows concentration and tenacity, strong features, an aquiline nose, a slightly prominent chin. The clothing is that of his time: robe, cloak, leather shoes, a cap with ties falling to the neck, and the laurel wreath.

The new statue of Dante follows the iconography that art history has handed down from Giotto, his contemporary, onwards. Some features, however, set it apart, and they come from the exchange with the client, who wanted to give the city a work that could address the viewer almost directly, so that it appears, so to speak, “alive”. We obtained that effect with a particular finish, made with colored art patinas that bring out the bronze and its material presence.

The hand-sketch design and the clay models in reduced and full scale.

The bronze sculpture

The crown of the Supreme Poet

La corona del Poeta è stata realizzata mediante una fusione separata, con colatura diretta del bronzo su veri rami e foglio di alloro. Una scelta ha consentito di inaugurare l’opera coronandola con un gesto reale, dando corpo e realtà all’immaginario del Poeta coronato d’alloro. La corona e il gesto della coronazione assumono così un significato profondamento simbolico, segno dell’ammirazione che noi uomini di questo tempo proviamo per Dante e per la sua opera.

The making of the laurel crown

The incoronation of the statue during the inauguration

A "real" encounter

The color of the statue are intended to return Dante to a pictorial dimension, of verisimilitude, an approach that is not common in traditional sculpture. The choice to do without a plinth, placing the sculpture directly on the ground, is also meant to give the figure of Dante the weight and solidity of a real encounter: Dante, the Supreme Poet, a man of our own time among us, carrying a message that after seven hundred years has not lost its meaning.

Among the events organized by the city of Verona this year for the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death, I would like to recall the award of posthumous honorary citizenship to the Supreme Poet […] and the placing of the statue dedicated to him at the church of Sant’Elena, a work of extraordinary eloquence in its ancient and yet entirely contemporary polychromy, by the maestro Albano Poli.

Maria Maddalena Buoninconti, President of the Verona Committee of the Società Dante Alighieri