New Book Salon Book Talk by Roberta Morosini
What does a flying bull with a half moon on its belly in Filippino Lippi’s 1502 painting, the Adoration of the Golden Calf, have in common with Muhammad, as a character of Dante’s Comedy? This is the question that Roberta Morosini tries to answer by following the journey of a legend traveling in the Oriental Mediterranean. She argues that what Lippis’s painting and Dante’s Muhammad have in common is a legend of a celestial delivery of the “bull law,” the Qur’an and Moses’s Tablets of the Law. Just as Moses received the Tablets of the Law from God on Mount...