Dali’s Divine Comedy at the FAC
The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center’s collection of prints by famed surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí, illustrate Dante’s famous ‘The Divine Comedy.’ The show runs through November 6, 2016.
It can be argued that Dante is the most important Italian poet in modern history. Known as “the Supreme Poet,” he literally invented Italian by writing The Divine Comedy in a unique mix of Tuscan regional dialects and Latin (the French still call Italian la langue de Dante).
Fast-forward seven centuries to the 1950s. The Italian government commissioned Dalí, one of the most influential surrealist painters of the 20th century, to illustrate The Divine Comedy for Dante’s 700th birthday.
Yet, Italians were outraged that such a definitively Italian work as the Comedy was given to a Spaniard and not a fellow Italian. The government ended up scrapping the project entirely.
Dalí, however, was determined to carry on, and spent the next decade painting 101 illustrations of the famous book in watercolor. He then hired printer Raymond Jacquet and his assistant, Jean Taricco, to create “wood” (technically they were made of a resin-based material) print blocks and reproduce the paintings for self-publication. The process was laborious, involving 3,500 blocks in total, but worth it. The prints are vivid and brilliantly colored, so much so that it’s hard to believe at first glance they’re prints and not actually paintings.
Salvador Dalí: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso will be up at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center now through the end of 2016. It’s a chance to lay your eyes on some of the best illustrative work by one of the most well-known artists of the 20th century.
The author of The Divine Comedy, Dante, came from a prominent family in the city of Florence, Italy. Even though he mostly devoted his time to studying philosophy and religion, he was peripherally involved in politics, which is what got him exiled from the city of his birth. It was while in exile that Dante began to write his most important work, The Divine Comedy, in which he travels through hell, purgatory, and heaven, in that order (hence why it’s a comedy rather than a tragedy). Almost immediately upon publication, artists took inspiration from Dante’s descriptions of the afterlife.
From Sandro Botticelli, the Comedy’s first illustrator, to Dante’s friend Giotto, to William Blake, Eugene Delacroix, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and Auguste Rodin, Dalí was following a long line of visual artists when he accepted The Divine Comedy commission.
There are very few complete collections of Dalí’s illustrated Comedy left in the world–most of the prints were removed from the original book and sold off individually soon after publication–and the Colorado Fine Arts Center’s collection is no exception.
It’s missing some key illustrations, particularly from the hell section of the book. Artists always go hog wild when they’re interpreting the hell scenes, and Dalí was no different, which is why illustrations from this section are particularly prized.
Nevertheless, there are some stand-out illustrations of hell to see at the FAC, like Dante coming across Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the underworld; and The Simoniac, which shows the punishment reserved for ecclesiastical corruption. The landscape of hell is also populated with Dalí’s signature melting faces, stretched bodies, and uncannily empty landscapes.
Dante is always depicted as wearing a red cap and cloak, and has been ever since the famous fresco painter, Giotto, painted a portrait of him in the 1330s. In hell, he has a guide: Virgil, the famous Roman poet, who is dressed in blue. Virgil takes Dante on up through the circles of hell and into purgatory, which for some reason has creepier landscapes than hell does. When it comes to heaven, though, Virgil can’t enter, because he was never baptized. So he hands Dante off to a new guide, one with whom Dante was very familiar.
Dante didn’t just populate his Comedy with mythological beasts and demons, he wrote about people he knew in real life. One of those people was his true love, Beatrice Portinari. He fell in love with her at first sight–for serious–when he was only eight years old. When Beatrice died in 1290, Dante fell into despair and began to devote himself to a monk-like study of Latin literature. It was to Beatrice that Dante dedicated his other great work, a book of love poetry called La Vita Nuova. And it was Beatrice herself who appeared to escort him through heaven in the last part of his journey. Like Virgil, she’s often depicted in blue.
Dalí may not seem like the kind of guy one would typically peg as a romantic–too kooky, perhaps–but he too found his eternal muse in his wife and the love of his life, Gala, who was married AND having an affair with another man when they met. He once said of her, “I would polish Gala to make her shine, make her the happiest possible, caring for her more than myself, because without her, it would all end.”
It was perhaps because he could sympathize with Dante’s devotion to Beatrice that he was able to infuse the Comedy’s scenes of heaven with incredible emotion and power.
Most artists, even the greats, have found illustrating the heaven section of the Comedy a challenge. Not just because hell is (predictably) more interesting, but because while Dante describes hell in painstaking detail, heaven is more abstract and theological, with less concrete descriptions. For example, when he sees God, Dante says, “I can’t describe Him.” Helpful! Dalí not only met this challenge, he crushed it, creating unique, gorgeous, fascinating, and evocative scenes of heaven that are likely the best to ever illustrate that section of the Comedy.
Not only could Dalí sympathize with the romanticism of Dante’s soul, but he could understand the theological aspects of the poet’s work as well. Fun fact: Dalí became a born-again Christian in the 1940s, and from that point on his work became progressively more religious and mystical.
In particular, he used complex mathematical shapes and lines to express esoteric and metaphysical concepts in his art. If you look closely, you’ll probably notice lines in many of his Comedy illustrations; while these can be interpreted as a nod to the one-point perspective that was gaining a foothold in Renaissance painting at the time of Dante, they could also be mathematical expressions of time or spiritual space in heaven and hell.
