| Summary: | This article seeks to relate the representation in Dante's Commedia of bodily, and in particular of facial, expression to the fundamental Aristotelian concept of hylomorphism and to the notion that the body makes manifest the invisible interiority of human psychology. Concentrating on the Inferno and the Paradiso, the argument contrasts the depiction in the damned and in the blessed of the somatomorphic soul and of the crucial dialectic between the intus of the soul and the foris of the body. Where in the Inferno this relationship is subject to distortions and suppression, the articulation of corporeality in Beatrice and in the redeemed souls is one in which, principally through effects of luminosity, bodies become supremely expressive.
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