Dante's Book of Shadows: "Ombra" in the "Divine Comedy"

This paper places ombra in four categories: 1) a poetic figure and Virgilian intertext; 2) a philosophical problem of the relationship between the body and the soul; 3) a theological prefiguration of Christian providence, as expressed in the Pauline term umbra futurorum (Colossians 2:17); 4) a textuality that casts the entire poem as a shadow. Toward the end of Paradiso Beatrice utilizes the full range of these meanings when she tells Dante that the dazzling images of light he sees are but the “umbriferi prefazi” (“shadow-bearing prefaces,” 30.78) of the truth. Though Dantean shadows are often noted in scholarship, they have not, so far, been adumbrated (or rather, elucidated) in depth. The contribution of this essay is a synthetic account of the function of ombra across the entire poem. By using ombra literally and figurally, Dante fuses natural indexical signs with conventional linguistic signs, turning an absence of light into an analogy of the afterlife and ultimately an allegory of mimesis. The polysemous senses of ombra thus encompass physics and metaphysics; ontology and epistemology; anticipation and fulfillment; reality and representation.