Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
“Within the video game The Binding of Isaac, Satan is located in the 9th level of the game; Hell is described as ‘cold’ if the player dies on this level (both mirroring Inferno).” –Anonymous Contributor
The Binding of Isaac, Rebirth is a 2014 video game published by Nicalis, an American publisher based out of Santa Ana, California.
You can check out more from Nicalis on their website, and you can buy The Binding of Isaac on Steam and on Humble.
“This is such a daring and visionary album, a contemporary masterpiece of composition. Multilayered, rich and colourful. Dark and radiant at the same time, thrilling and mesmerizing.” [. . .] — Erkka Lehmus, Bandcamp, 2016
Abandon All Hope is an album by guitarist and composer Gretchen Menn released on December 12, 2016. Learn more about this artist on her website.
The track list below includes links to the songs on Bandcamp:
In October 2017, the American Contemporary Ballet of Los Angeles, under the artistic direction of Lincoln Jones, performed Inferno, based on composer Charles Wuorinen’s ballet “The Mission of Virgil” (featured on Dante Today here).
“You can really draw a parallel between Dante’s time and our time because of the incredible divisiveness. The issues were different on the surface but underneath, probably a lot the same. In Dante’s time, cities would fight wars with each other. Dante wanted to get his point of view heard and send the people he thought should be in hell to hell. I think maybe there’s a lot of similar feeling with the diatribes people are writing today against those they feel have it wrong. So there’s a lot of similarities, political corruption, factions.” — Interview with American Contemporary Ballet artistic director Lincoln Jones in the LA Times (October 10, 2017)
Vivian Lee Reach (MFA ’17, University of California, Irvine) presented her thesis concert, A Choreographer’s Voyage Within Dante’s Inferno, at UC Irvine’s Winifred Smith Hall, on April 11, 2017.
Of the inspiration for the performance, Reach explains, “In May 2015, I was introduced to Inferno by one of my past English professors as a ‘fun summer read.’ I was hooked after the first tercet. From that moment on, I decided to dedicate my time to Dante’s Inferno. I am deeply humbled by literary mentors, Giuseppe Mazzotta and David Bruce, who brought me face to face with the elaborate and structured panorama of Dante’s first canticle through their books and words of wisdom.”
Watch the performance on YouTube here.
For the full concert program, click here.
Rebecca Solnit’s London Review of Books essay “Check Out the Parking Lot” is primarily a review of Sandow Birk’s illustrations of the Divine Comedy, but it also contains an extended comparison of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to the three realms of Dante’s afterlife. Here is an excerpt:
“[The Getty] is Dante’s Divine Comedy as a theme park, and just as in the Divine Comedy, the Inferno is the most compelling part.
“You take the Getty exit, and if you’ve been heading north, swing over the overpass and, after a few wriggles, dive into the garage. You come out of the smog-filtered Los Angeles light (which always gives me the impression that a thrifty God has replaced our incandescent sun with diffused fluorescent light) into a dark passage. The garage is underlit, with a low-slung ceiling and construction that evinces the massive weight first of the cement slabwork and then of the floors and earth above. The weight presses down on you as the signs urge you onwards. Down you go, and down, and further down, spiralling into the seismically unstable bowels of the Los Angeles earth in circles of looming darkness, questing for a parking space of your own, further and further down. I believe there are nine circles, or levels, in this vehicular hell. Finally, you find a place for your car in this dim realm, stagger to an elevator, and move upwards more quickly than Dante ascended Purgatory.
“Though you aren’t in Purgatory yet. The elevator opens onto a platform where you can catch a monorail up the hill to the museum. Disneyland too has a monorail, and though on my first visit to the Getty I thought of it as a nice tribute to its sister amusement park, we perplexed everyone around us by walking up the unfrequented road the quarter mile or so to the museum. Altitude correlates neatly with economic clout in urban and suburban California, so although the presumed point of the Getty was to let people look at art, first they parked, then they looked at the mighty fortress of the Getty hunched up on high, and then up there at various junctures they got the billionaires’ view. Purgatory was the museum itself. There you went through the redemptive exercise of experiencing art, lots and lots of it, from ancient times through to the early 20th century, room after room of altarpieces and portraits and still lifes and drawings.” [. . .] — Rebecca Solnit, “Check Out the Parking Lot,” London Review of Books 26.13 (8 July 2004), 32-33.
The full LRB essay can be accessed here.
