Pietro Bordi is a DPhil candidate in Modern Languages and History of Art at the University of Oxford, specialising in the visual reception of Dante’s Commedia in modern and contemporary art. His research examines how we may think of the artist as an original reader and interpreter of Dante’s text, transposing the poem into a personal visual code while also engaging with the Commedia’s longstanding illustrative tradition. One element of his methodological approach is the key interest in the human/non-human figure, and the ways Dante’s emphasis on representing the body in poetic terms translates into a rich array of corporeal figurations on behalf of artists newly experimenting with the poem’s visualisation. Bridging the gap between visual and textual modes of enquiry, his doctoral thesis focuses on the twentieth century and on the surrealist/proto-surrealist artists Alberto Martini and Salvador Dalí, closely examining their interpretations of Dante’s poem by analysing text and illustration side-by-side. Pietro’s Master of Studies dissertation at Oxford centred on early modern and Renaissance depictions of the Commedia in the manuscript and print tradition, focusing particularly on Sandro Botticelli’s drawings for Inferno and exploring the artist’s use of ‘embodied narrative’ in connection to Cristoforo Landino's 1481 exegetical commentary (Comento sopra la Comedia). 

Pietro has presented his research in major conferences and institutions including Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Art in Florence, the University of Bologna, the Université de Côte d’Azur, and the Université de Rennes.