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

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2011/may/05/dante-hell-poetry-divine-comedy