This article examines and reinterprets Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia’s paintings of Hell from Dante’s Divine Comedy through Gérard Genette’s hyper-textuality approach. Giovanni di Paolo, a renowned Italian medieval painter, utilized his strong imagination and artistic skills to create intriguing illustrations of Dante’s Inferno. These paintings are notable not only for their meticulous detail and unique artistic style but also for their profound and symbolic interpretation of the original text. Gérard Genette’s hyper-textuality approach allows us to analyze the intertextual connections and reciprocal influences between literary and artistic texts. This article examines the transfer and transformation of Dante’s infernal concepts in Giovanni di Paolo’s paintings using the outlined approach. This analysis demonstrates how di Paolo reinterpreted and expanded Dante’s literary concepts using his visual elements and distinctive style, giving them a new dimension. Conducted qualitatively and descriptively through literature review and documentary sources, this analysis addresses the similarities between existing visual works and Dante’s texts, as well as the changes based on their components. In this research, four works of illustration by the artist of the Siena School were analyzed as examples, and the research results showed that, in most of the examined images, there is a Hyper-textual aspect of the type of imitation.
In some cases, the aspect of transformation is observed. This article aims to provide a novel and comprehensive perspective on the relationship between literary works and visual arts and explain how these fields influence each other. This study can contribute to a deeper understanding of creative processes and cultural interactions in different historical periods. In the first and second images, the hyper-textual relationship in the infernal elements is of the quantitative-reduction type of trigonums. In the third and fourth images, hellish elements exhibit slight contrast and bear similarities or imitations to the previous two images. According to these images and comparing them with the text of the book Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, it was found that the visual artist changed the elements of the story based on his mental or imaginative perception, the most important of which can be the design of the main characters’ clothes and the selection of scenes. The artist followed medieval Gothic traditions, particularly those of the Siena school, focusing on detailed designs of human, animal, and natural forms.