Botticelli’s Depiction of Dante’s Inferno
The surreal interpretation of Divine Comedy
Source-Wikipedia
Dante’s magnum opus Divine Comedy is considered to be one of the greatest poems in world literature. The poem is a fictitious journey of Dante divided among 100 cantos through the three regions of the afterlife — Hell (Inferno), the region of purification, Purgatory (Purgatorio), and the heavenly Paradise (Paradiso). Exiled for life in 1302, Dante began this long narrative poem probably in 1307 and completed it in 1320, a year before his death in 1321.
Symbolically, Divine Comedy is the journey of the soul towards God with Inferno(hell) recognized as one of the phases for rejection of sin.
In the 15th century, Botticelli (the pioneer of colorful and aesthetically pleasing paintings including The Birth of Venus and Primavera) was commissioned to depict Dante’s Divine Comedy on canvas. Translating words of such a complex narrative was not only an ambitious project but also a time-consuming activity. Unsurprisingly, it almost took a decade for Botticelli to interpret and visualize each canto and create a thematic sequence of drawings.
These drawings were lost for more than 400 years until in the 19th century, eighty-five sheets were found and auctioned by the Scottish Duke of Hamilton to Friedrich Lippmann, then the Director of…
