The key word in the relationship between Pasolini and Dante can only be that of mimesis, opening the doors to the great themes of representation and imitation. In Pasolini’s reflection on “represented reality” (mimesis), Dante actually had a leading role. In the 1950s, its influence took the form of a certain “Dante realism” in Pasolini’s fiction and poetry, starting with Dante’s example of objectivity, experimentalism and multilingualism spread by an essay by Gianfranco Contini from 1951, Preliminari sulla lingua di Petrarca. In particular, multilingualism would become for him a model for rethinking the representation of the other (of the lower classes and their reality) at the sociological level, in relation to the “question of language” and of the “national-popular”. In the early 1960s, however, Dante became a source of inspiration for a certain “figural realism” in Pasolini’s cinema starting from Erich Auerbach’s concepts of figure and “contamination of styles” - as clearly emerges in the “national-popular” phase of his films ranging from Accattone (1961) to Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964). In these films the contamination of styles, translated into the hybridization of painting, music, literature and moving images, has allowed rather radical semiotic associations between high culture and low culture and, specifically, between the figure of Christ and that of the underclass.
