Art History Archives - Dante Today

700 year old fresco depicts Dante sent to burn in Hell

February 17, 2022 By Hannah Raisner, FSU '25

“Scholars believe they have found a portrayal of Dante being sent to burn in the fires of damnation, hidden in the corner of a 700-year-old fresco in Tuscany.

They say the figure of a man with an aquiline nose and a distinctive red beret bears a striking resemblance to known portraits of Dante, who is revered in Italy as much as Shakespeare is esteemed in Britain.

The demonisation of the poet may have been motivated by the bad relations he had with the Church.

The fresco was painted between 1336 and 1342 by an artist named Bonamico Buffalmacco and adorns a wall of the Camposanto, a historic cemetery in Pisa which is close to the famous Leaning Tower.” — Nick Squires, The Telegraph, February 1, 2022.

Read the full article here.

Commedia-Inspired Renaissance Paintings?

January 6, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

renaissance-painted-ceiling-angels-circling-a-light-art-name-the-triumph-of-the-name-of-jesus-by-giocanni-battista

This review was written in reference to Martin Kemp’s examinations of John Took’s Dante. For more analysis, read the full article here.

“Kemp’s idea is to set up a paragone, comparing, on the one hand, Dante’s scientific and metaphorical/theological understanding of light and sight in the Divine Comedy (1308–21), especially in Paradiso, to, on the other, renderings of divine light in Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting. He opens with a scholarly survey of late medieval natural science accounts of optics and of light (noting in particular the widely accepted theories of the late 10th-/early 11th-century mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, known as Alhazan), before laying out what he understands of Dante’s knowledge of, and interest in, this topic, which he terms the poet’s ‘dazzle’—the failure of sight when confronted with the splendore (blinding light) of Empyrean Heaven.

[. . .] “Kemp makes periodic disclaimers throughout the book that it is impossible to cite documented or obvious connections between Dante’s light and works of art (except for illuminated or illustrated editions of the Commedia) but, to avoid cutting the ground from under his own feet, he makes a Roger-Fry swerve: the viewer will need a special sensitivity to see the ‘Dantesque’ as Kemp does. ‘The more general and less discernible diaspora [of Dante’s divine light] is something that can be sensed as a common factor as we pass from one scheme of decoration to another. This is not a matter of firm historical demonstration so much as the deployment of visual and poetic instinct.’ Kemp is insistent, pounding away with Maslow’s hammer throughout, that it is Dante’s divine light that appears in all the works he cites. It must be said that, in the paragone he proposes, it is not a question of attributable sources that is the problem; it is the category failure of comparing poetry with painting, apples with pears. Ultimately, Dante himself says that the only possible answer to ‘Who does divine light best?’ has to be God Himself, lux eterna.” –Donald Lee, The Art Newspaper, July 2, 2021

See our posts on John Took here and Martin Kemp here.

Theo Wujcik’s “Gates of Hell” (1987)

February 19, 2021 By Jasmine George, FSU '24

“One of Tampa Bay’s best-known artists, Theo Wujcik (1936-2014), spent a decade creating a series drawn from the dark and profound literary classic, Dante’s Inferno. Now, those extraordinary paintings are the theme for Theo Wujcik: Cantos, a special exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. This exhibition celebrates the work of Theo Wujcik (1936–2014), with a focus on the literary references in his work. A fixture of the Ybor City art scene, Wujcik was an accomplished master printer and painter whose expansive practice engaged deeply with art historical tradition and the global contemporary art world.

“This exhibition will premiere the Museum’s newest accession of Wujcik’s work, the diptych Gates of Hell (1987), which complements Canto II (1997), also in the collection. Both of these paintings are based on Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) Inferno, the first part of the epic poem Divine Comedy. Also featured will be selections from the artist’s personal notebooks, collage studies, and a number of select loans.” —Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, 2019

Learn more about Theo Wujcik’s exhibition here.

“Visions of Hell: Dark Souls cultural heritage”

October 27, 2019 By Alexa Kellenberger FSU '22

“It’s hard to place a finger on the most recognizable reference to Gustave Doré’s incredible illustrations in the Dark Souls series. The artist, who in a short 50 year life span produced over 100,000 pieces, and illustrated many of the great works of world literature, haunts many a crooked corner of Lordran, Drangleic, and Lothric. Flicking through his illustrations for Dante Alighieri’s great masterwork The Divine Comedy (1320), it is impossible not to be reminded of the landscapes and demons of Dark Souls. On top of a sheer rock wall we see a clutch of figures, huddled like the Deacons of the Dark. In a shallow pool lie piles of corpses, twisted into an inseparable mess, like the horrible sights that await in the drained ruins of New Londo. The great king Nimrod chained, now a giant and no longer a man, echoes the lost ruler of Drangleic. It is no surprise that it is the first book of The Divine Comedy, Inferno, depicting Dante’s journey through hell, that brings us these images. Doré’s bleak, stony, and understated depictions of Satan’s kingdom so strongly contrasted with decades of medieval hellfire that had gone before. They are powerfully mythic images, ones that have been reached for again and again by artists in search of the power of the dark.

“Though iconic now, the success of Inferno was never assured. Many of Doré’s supporters called it too ambitious and too expensive a project, and so, in 1861, driven by his passion for the source material he funded its publication himself. His risk paid off, and the volume and its subsequent sister volumes Purgatorio and Paradiso, depicting purgatory and Heaven respectively, became his most notable works. A critic at the time of its publication wrote that the illustrations were so powerful that both Dante and Doré must have been ‘communicating by occult and solemn conversations the secret of this Hell plowed by their souls, traveled, explored by them in every sense.’ This plumbing of the depths of despair in search of beauty is the true thematic link between these illustrations and Dark Souls art. Like the monsters of Kuniyoshi, in Doré we don’t just see the aesthetic roots of Dark Souls, we see its themes—the concepts of loss, despair, and the allure of the occult sketched out in chiaroscuro black-and-white.” [. . .] –Gareth Damian Martin, Kill Screen, May 11, 2016.

“Lines of Fire: Dante’s Vision of Hell still has an Afterlife”

February 10, 2019 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“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 epic The 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 mesmerizing 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-style Christianity 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. [. . .]

“My own first experience of Dante was a translation of just one part of the Inferno by Seamus Heaney. Ugolino is in Heaney’s collection Field Work, which is a moving response to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Dante’s tale of Ugolino, who was cruelly treated and took bitter revenge in eternity, fits into the landscape of reprisal Heaney depicts. In other words, one reason for Dante’s enduring power is that we have not really left the middle ages. Vendetta still rules. Entire foreign policies, not to mention civil wars and terror campaigns, are based on ideas of revenge and polarities of good and evil just as primitive as anything in Dante.

“Another reason the great Italian challenges us is that he proposes a morally absolute vision of life that cuts through modern relativism like a knight’s broadsword. So the world is ambiguous and our own actions impossible to morally judge? Dante menaces us with the alternative possibility that every act is scrutinized, that every moment of our lives is weighed in the balance.” [. . .] –Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, May 5, 2011.

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