Dante and Ravenna

The Master's thesis is focused on research of the Italian academic discourse from the years 1891-2008 dealing with the influence of the visual culture of Ravenna on Dante's Divine Comedy. One of the scholars that can be placed in the context of Italian discourse is the philologist and aesthetician Jaroslav Hruban, the only Czech scholar who occupied himself with the relationship between Dante and Ravenna and continuously followed up the development of the interwar Italian Dantology. The thesis puts forward two questions: how the scholars of the Italian academic discourse and Jaroslav Hruban reflect the relationship of Dante and Ravenna, and if we can trace the influence of the visual culture of Ravenna (especially of the mosaics from the 5th and 6th centuries) in the text of Dante's Divine Comedy. The questions are solved by application of the historiographic methods that were used to examine Italian Dantology, the methods of literary studies and art history by which analysis and comparison of the text and imagery were performed, and also the methods of visual culture that were used to reconstruct the image of Ravenna during the time of Dante's stay in the town and his "period eye". The scholars believe that the inspirational influences of the Ravenna mosaics and visual culture on Dante's Divine..