Dante Alighieri's "The Divine Comedy" 🧵 "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." The Florentine Poet Dante Alighieri is known for his magnum opus "The Divine Comedy", originally called Comedìa (Comedy).

Dante's opus was later christened "Divina" by Giovanni Boccaccio. Dante's "Divine Comedy" is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Not just for the epic tale but the artwork it has inspired.

Dante'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 including William Blake, Milton's Paradise Lost and Mary Shelley, just to name a few.

To get out of the Inferno, Dante & Virgil must climb up the torso of Satan, emerging near the base of Purgatory. The Mountain of Salvation was formed by displacement: the impact of SATAN crashing to earth. This is one of the careful harmonies built into Dante's totalizing vision.

The epic's structure is almost fractal: three lines per stanza; thirty-three cantos per section; and three poetic movements (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), each respectively composed of nine circles, stages, and spheres. This structure emerges gradually in the poem.

But, many artists have long tried to plot the coordinate's of Dante's "Cosmology". Placing Botticelli's well-known, external vision of the Inferno next to a bird's-eye view of Purgatory from 1568 reveals the symmetry between the first two sections of Dante's epic.

Others opt for a more abstracted approach. A 1518 diagram renders hell as a bounded, two-dimensional mineshaft, while in a series of maps from 1855, Michelangelo Caetani makes the funnel-like Malebolge resemble a honeycombed monolith, buried beneath layered earth.

In Paradise, Dante is guided by his beloved Beatrice, who leads him toward the beatific vision. During Cantos 18–20, which take place in the sphere or Heaven of Jupiter,  they come across the Eagle of Justice, composed of myriad souls. Dante has inspired countless masterpieces.

Why? The most simple answer being: there is so much to draw upon. Titans chained deep in hell; Ugolino pausing, mid-cannibalistic chomp, to converse with Dante and Virgil; the ecstatic ascent to the Empyrean; and a seemingly endless configurations of the bizarre yet miraculous.

The three-headed Satan has always been popular, frozen in the ninth circle of hell's last ring. In one of the earliest extant renderings, a Florentine illustration from ca. 1350, each head of the devil masticates Brutus, Judas, and Cassius: the ultimate traitors.

Brutus, Judas, and Cassius were the ultimate traitors, whose treachery was itself a form of consumption: dismembering the Roman Republic and the son of God, Christ.

An Early Renaissance engraving after Botticelli, but also credited to Orcagna, places Satan amid dozens of hellfiends, torturing various tormentees with saws, tridents, and snakes — gathering the evils that Dante has witnessed in previous circles.

Without Dante, we would not have our popular conception of Satan, Lucifer, Purgatory, the Nine Circles of Hell and Heaven. It's important to note: the Commedia ends with an affirmation of love, at once personal, galactic, and divine: “The love that moves the other stars".

As Giuseppe Mazzotta notes, Inferno and Purgatorio also end with stelle (STARS), "So when Dante says that love moves the sun and other stars, what he's really doing is placing himself immediately right back on earth, back at the beginning of his quest."

"(Dante's) here with us looking up at the stars." And we are here with him, as artists have been for centuries, tracing out our own paths through his heavenly designs. Only just beginning to understand the subtle difference between HEAVEN and HELL.

Let's discover some more Dantean Inspired Artwork. Woodcut of Paradiso, Canto XXVIII, most likely colored in the 19th century. The Empyrean. La comedy di Dante Aligieri con la nova espositione di Alessandro Vellvtello.

From "Inferno, Canto XXXIV", Dante and Virgil emerge from Hell and see the stars.

From John Dickson Batten, “Petrified Dante supported by Virgil being transported down into lower Hell”, ca. 1890. Inferno, Canto XVII: the monster is Geryon.

From Sandro Botticelli, Paradise, Canto VI, the Sphere of Mercury. Circa 1485.

From Petrus de Plasiis, Divine Comedy, circa 1491. Paradiso, Canto V: First Heaven, Sphere of the Moon. One of the first fully-illustrated editions of the Commedia.

Woodcut of Paradiso, Canto IX, most likely colored in the 19th century. Dante meets souls in the heaven of Venus.

Woodcut of Inferno, Canto XXXII, most likely colored in the 19th century. Satan in the frozen lake.

Wood cut of Paradiso, Canto XXI, circa 1564. Ascent to the Seventh Heaven, the Sphere of Saturn. Original Article inspired from "700 Years of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Art":

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