Seeing the Light: Dante and the Perspectivist Theory of Light as Proper Visible

This study focuses on the role of light as the main object of sight in Dante's works. It proposes a summary historical reconstruction of Dante's tenet of light as proper visible (Convivio III, ix, 6), evidencing that this concept stands apart from the two prevailing optical theories followed at Dante’s time – namely the Neoplatonic extromissionist thesis of the emission of visual rays and the Aristotelian intromissionist thesis of the reception of forms in the eye. In both theories, colour alone is the proper visible. Instead, the idea that light is something sensed per se by sight stems within the context of the recent Western reception of Alhazen’s Perspectiva. Dante sticks to this principle since his early writings, and this, consequently, challenges his alleged early adhesion to the extramissionist theory. This study underlines that Dante was neither a scientist nor had scholarly interests in divulging new and original optical theories; instead, his adhesion to this innovative tenet of contemporary perspectivism was strategic to the employment of light, in the Commedia, as a potent source of gnoseological, theological, and poetic metaphors, some of which are cursorily presented as exemplification in the last section of the essay.