Abstract
The article is focused on the personality and work of the Moravian philologist and aesthetic theorist Jaroslav Hruban, the only Czech Dante scholar who dealt with the influence of the visual culture of Ravenna on formation of specific passages of Dante's Divine Comedy. Research suggests that Hruban followed up on the development of the interwar Italian Dantology whose representatives he had met during his travels to Italy, especially to Ravenna, as evidenced by his correspondence with Santi Muratori, the director of the Classense library.
Hruban reflected on Italian Dantology critically and based it on the aesthetic perspective that had not been applied in the Italian discourse. As an aesthetic theorist, he was able to competently analyse and interpret image sources and to work with the meaning of sensory input in Dante's literary corpus, and also to compare the aesthetic qualities of text and image as well as literary imagination with visual imagination.
In addition to building on the comparisons of the Divine Comedy's verses and Ravenna mosaics that were already known in the Italian scholarly literature, Hruban also noticed certain aesthetic connections between the means of expression and the technique of Ravenna mosaics in which light, colours, contrasts and structure play a primary role, and between poetic means of expression and the technique used by Dante to describe the chosen images. The fact that the topic of Dante and Ravenna was crucial for Hruban is evidenced not only by his academic activity but also by his creative literary work.
