700 Years of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Art

Domenico di Michelino, La Divina Commedia di Dante, 1465 — Source

A man wakes deep in the woods, halfway through life. Far from home, unpermitted to return, his heart pierced by grief. He has strayed from the path. It's a dark night of the soul, his crisis so great that death becomes a tempting end. And then, as wild beasts advance upon this easy prey, his prayers are answered. A guide appears, promising to show him the way toward paradise. . .

Today marks the seventh centenary of Dante Alighieri's death, the Florentine poet who wrote The Divine Comedy, arguably our most ambitious Western epic. Eschewing Latin, the medieval currency of literature and scholarship, Dante wrote in his vernacular tongue, establishing the foundations for a standardized Italian language, and, by doing so, may have laid cultural groundwork for the unification of Italy.

The poet's impact on literature cannot be overstated. "Dante's influence was massive", writes Erich Auerbach, "he singlehandedly established the expressive possibilities and the landscape of all poetry to come, and he did so virtually out of thin air". And just as the classical Virgil served as Dante's guide through the Inferno, Dante became a kind of Virgil for later writers. Chaucer cribbed his rhythm and images, while Milton's Paradise Lost may have been actually lost, were it not for Dante as a shepherd. The Divina Commedia is a touchstone for works as diverse as fifteenth-century Castilian and Catalan verse; Gogol's Dead Souls (1842); and Mary Shelley's Italian Rambles (1844), which finds the poet at every turn:

There is scarcely a spot in Tuscany, and those parts of the North of Italy, which he visited, that Dante has not described in poetry that brings the very spot before your eyes, adorned with graces missed by the prosaic eye, and which are exact and in perfect harmony with the scene.

If Dante's poetry summons landscapes before its reader's eyes, artists have tried, for the last seven hundred years, to achieve another kind of evocation: rendering the Commedia in precise images, evocative patterns, and dazzling color. By Jean-Pierre Barricelli's estimate, a complete catalogue of Commedia-inspired artworks would exceed 1,100 names. The earliest dated image comes from Florence in 1337, beginning the tradition soon after the poet's death in 1321. Before long, there were scores of other illustrations. As Rachel Owen notes, due to medieval guild production, early illustrations of the Commedia featured highly collaborative work, where a single miniature could pass through multiple hands, introducing variation in style across a single manuscript, but also conventions of representation.

Spanning the Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the rise and fall of Romanticism, the images gathered below reflect changing techniques for rendering perspective and summoning humanist pathos. While this evolution might be expected, the consistency with which artists have chosen specific Cantos from the Commedia is almost uncanny. And there are surprising gaps, as well — a dearth of Dantean images during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, perhaps in line with Goethe's quip, ca. 1824, that the Italian poet would soon be lost to obscurity. Nothing like this happened, however, for the mid-nineteenth century saw Dante's works become a popular subject for visual artists once again.