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INFORMATION ABOUT GRAPHICS USED ON THIS SITE
The graphical design of this site was created by Villing & Company, Inc. through a Web Site Makeover Grant awarded by the University of Notre Dame Office of Web Administration. Following is some information about the images that were incorporated into the site design.
Dolphin and Anchor Device
 The dolphin and anchor device used by the Venetian scholar-printer Aldus Manutius (ca. 1449-1515) "is perhaps the most celebrated of all printers' marks. It is singularly graceful in design, eminently characteristic of the distinguished scholar who first adopted it, and is affixed to a series of works which contributed more than those of any single printer or family of printers to the progress of learning and literature in Europe." (Christie, 247)
The classical motto for which the device serves as an emblem is "Festina lente" (Suetonius, Augustus 25.4, and Aulus Gellius 10.2.5), meaning "hasten slowly." Aldus began to use the device in 1501, and it appears in a second variation in his Dante of August 1502.
The version of the device adopted for use in connection with the Devers Program in Dante Studies appears on the recto of the second title page from the second Dante issued by Aldus shortly before his death with the assistance of his son-in-law, the printer Andrea Torresani, in 1515, where the name "Dante." is set in type above the woodcut device. (Click for larger image.)
References:
R. C. Christie, Selected Essays and Papers of Richard Copley Christie, ed. William A. Shaw (London: Longmans, Green, 1902), esp. the study titled "The Aldine Anchor."
Harry George Fletcher, New Aldine Studies (San Francisco: Bernard Rosenthal, 1988), pp. 43-59, esp. pp. 48-49, where the variation of the device used on the secondary title page of the 1515 Aldine Dante appears as No. 5.
Dante Encountering the Three Beasts and Virgil
 The banner image that appears in the heading of each page of this site depicts Virgil summoning Dante to his otherworldly journey. It is a detail from a miniature painting that serves as a frontispiece to the Inferno in a copy of the 1502 Aldine edition of Le terze rime of Dante owned by The Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois (Wing ZP 535.A354, fol. a1v, used by permission). This and other illuminations in the volume are splendid examples of the style of expert miniaturist and manuscript illuminator Benedetto Bordon (c.1450-1530). (Click for larger image.)
References:
Helena K. Szépe, "Bordon, Dürer and Modes of Illuminating Aldines," in Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture. Essays in Memory of Franklin D. Murphy, ed. David S. Zeidberg and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (Florence: Olschki, 1998), pp. 185-200, esp. 198-99.
Sail and Yard Device
 The sail and yard device adopted as a logo for the ItalNet Consortium is derived from its appearance on the lower portions of the pilasters that frame the extremities of the façade of the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Italy. It appears there with other emblems and inscriptions pointing to the patron who commissioned the work in the mid-fifteenth century, Giovanni Rucellai.
Though members of other Florentine families, notably the Pazzi, occasionally employed the emblem of a wind-filled sail (vela gonfa), it is most commonly associated with Rucellai, who seems to have adopted it as a personal impresa. Art historian Aby Warburg regarded it as an echo of Rucellai's preoccupation with the goddess Fortune, who depended on the winds. According to Warburg's interpretation, the sail thus represents "wind, wealth, and fate."
(Click for larger image.)
References:
Bruno Nardini, "La Facciata," in Santa Maria Novella: la basilica, il convento, i chiostri monumentali, ed. U. Baldini, L. Bartoli and M. Listri (Firenze: Nardini, 1981), pp. 44-52.
Brenda Preyer, "The Rucellai Palace," in Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, vol. 2: "A Florentine Patrician and his Palace" (London: Warburg Institute, 1981), pp. 155-228, esp. 198-202, and also the "Introduction," pg. 3.
Brian E. Roy, The Façade of Santa Maria Novella: Architecture, Context, Patronage and Meaning, Ph.D. Thesis, McGill University, 1997, available on microfiche from the National Library of Canada/Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, Ottawa (ISBN 0612445682).
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