Paradise

Paradise from 1445 at the Metropolitan Museum illustrates Dante's Paradiso with Giovanni di Paolo's unique visionary imagination. The painting, part of a series illustrating the Divine Comedy, transforms Dante's celestial vision into a landscape of supernatural beauty in which the blessed move through a world of radiant light and flowering meadows. Giovanni di Paolo was the most distinctive painter in fifteenth-century Siena, maintaining the city's tradition of jewel-like color and decorative pattern while developing an intensely personal style outside the mainstream of Florentine Renaissance developments. The Dante series represents Giovanni di Paolo's most ambitious literary project, creating visual equivalents for some of the most challenging poetry in the Italian tradition. His Paradise departs from conventional iconography of Heaven as a hierarchical court to imagine a more garden-like realm, consistent with Dante's own descriptions and with the Sienese taste for decorative landscape that distinguished the city's painting tradition from the architecturally focused Florentine approach. The Metropolitan Museum holds this work as part of its collection of Italian Medieval and Renaissance painting.

The paradisiacal landscape is rendered with brilliant color and inventive spatial arrangements, Giovanni di Paolo's distinctive style creating a world that is simultaneously natural and supernatural.