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Thursday, May 5, 2011

Dante's vision of hell still has an afterlife


To hell and back ... Gustave Doré's Vision of Geryon, from canto 17 of the Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri. Photograph: www.artrenewal.org

Midway upon the road of our life

I found myself within a dark wood ...
– Inferno, by Dante Alighieri.

That is the Norton translation of the greatest opening verse in the history of poetry. The world has a handful of supreme poets. Homer,Shakespeare and Goethe are up there. I'm sure you have your own suggestions. All of these writers – even Homer, with his Trojan war epicThe Iliad – can be made contemporary to us, made to approximate our world-view. Yet the greatest and most universal poet of all is the least "modern" and at times the most obscure. He is Dante Alighieri.
The world-view Dante unfolds in mesmerising images in the three books of his Divine Comedy – Hell, Purgatory and Paradise – is truly medieval. No wonder: he lived most of his life in the 13th century before completing his masterpiece in the early 14th. But it is the relentless Gothic-styleChristianity of Dante's vision that makes it so unnerving: the profound sense of sin behind his biting portraits of the damned in Hell, and the equally absolute faith in a machine-accurate divine justice the poet finally glimpses in Paradise. The Divine Comedy is a dogmatic, cruel work that haunts the imagination like no other. Paradoxically, no "modern" poet has been so frequently illustrated by modern artists; only Byron excites comparable interest.
The latest Dante artist is painter and draughtsman Guy Denning. He has already completed a series of illustrations for Hell, which are about to be exhibited in Bologna, and is now working on Purgatory, with designs that include a dramatic rendering of New York on 9 September 2001. His project follows in the footsteps of many artists who, like Dante in his poem, edged down into those shadows with their best foot backward.
REFERENCE:
Excerpt from the article by Jonathan Jones, for Guardian.co.uk

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