"Circulata melodia": Dante's Paradise and the iconography of the 'Assumption of the Virgin Mary' in Siena

Simone Martini's large wall painting, since destroyed, that once adorned the front of the Camollia outer door of Siena's city walls, introduced to the town a new iconographic canon for the episode of the 'Assumption of the Virgin Mary', which considerably changed with respect to the 'heraldic' formula of the 13th-century tradition. This article investigates the possible textual sources of the new image conceived by Simone Martini, attempting to identify its premises in the two 'triumphal' visions of Canto XXIII of Dante's Paradise. The relationship between the 'Assumption' of Camollia and the Comedy seems to further demonstrate the influence that Dante's poem exerted in Siena in the elaboration of a Marian iconography with a 'civic' intonation