색은 어떻게 단테를 구원으로 안내하는가?

Abstract

In the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri suggests the literary way of how the natural phenomenon of color can inevitably be connected with the divine enterprise of salvation. The color is the result of human perception of nature which, however, can never be obtained without the operation of light: the symbol of God. In the Comedy, we can find many hints of this kind of co-arrangement between divine light and human color; further, Dante, as a literary writer, shows how it is possible to represent that relationship through human tool of language. Concerning the issue of color, Dante's primary aim seems to be concentrated on how God-light can be represented on human language. In order to show Dante's curious attempt to express the stair to God-light in human way, I pay special attention to the fact that he uses the effect of paintings in his writing. It is not by chance that a lot of painters have been inspired by his illustrious text. I take Jaime Franco as an example; particularly I hold that in Franco's paintings we can find the possible implications of knot in the dimensions of technique and meaning. The knot plays the role of uniting all the different things in a context and at the same time it makes them disseminate toward each others' directions. I call this endlessly repeated process love which is no other than the path to salvation devised by Dante himself with his affirmation that the highest place derives from the lowest place as we can find in the relationship between the color of Tyrian purple and snail. For Dante the color is the medium-knot to connect all kinds of different things which is exactly the power to lead him to salvation.