Heaven Archives - Dante Today

Ndary Lo, The Day After (2012)

April 21, 2022 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“I see the world we are living in as both Hell and Purgatory. Our only hope in this life of ours, all that we have left is to try our best to be admitted to heaven someday. The Day After is an installation in which, after walking a long way through a dense and dark forest, one reaches that space where everything seems to be suspended, where one can feel this particular tension that we experience before embarking on a journey of which we don’t really know the name. The place is organized in a materialized circle and inhabited by iron characters which are ready to take off. The circle, in fact a spiral, symbolizes the energy of human beings, who find themselves in a new configuration, and they feel disoriented and experience a feeling of unreality.”

From The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists by Simon Njami.

Read more about Senegalese sculptor Ndary Lô, see Wikipedia.fr.

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.

Higher Self Yoga: Consciousness in the Divine Comedy

December 30, 2021 By Sephora Affa, FSU '24

“[. . .] As an example, consider this scene at the bottom of the mountain of Purgatory. These souls have figured out how to get out of hell and have crossed the river to this mountainous island. The journey up the mountain (toward increasing freedom from destructive patterns and closer to higher consciousness) waits for them.

“What do they do? They turn away from the mountain, hang out on the shoreline, and stare out at the water waiting for entertainers to arrive: TV channel surfing, 14^th Century style. Fortunately, Dante himself is being guided to start to climb the mountain because there is much more waiting for him if he ascends. He does so, and at the very top he meets Beatrice, his Higher Self, who then guides him into higher states of consciousness in paradise.” [. . .] –Dr. Richard Schaub Ph.D., Higher Self Yoga, July 8, 2020

“Dante is remembered most for his depiction of hell. This sculptor wants us to remember heaven, too.”

May 1, 2021 By Jasmine George, FSU '24

“VATICAN CITY (RNS) — In preparation for the 700 anniversary of the death of medieval poet Dante Alighieri, a Canadian artist is creating a sculptural tribute to his ‘Divine Comedy’ that would be the first sculptural rendition of the entire poem.

“‘In our culture Dante is becoming lost,’ said sculptor Timothy Schmalz in an interview with Religion News Service on Monday (July 20).

“Not only is Dante less and less required reading, Schmalz said, but his ‘Divine Comedy’ is often misrepresented by putting the focus only on the first part — the descriptions of hell and its fiery punishments.

“The Italian poet captivated generations by telling his imaginary journey through hell, purgatory and heaven. His use of popular Italian dialect in his writing, instead of the more high-brow Latin, earned him a title as the ‘Father of the Italian Language.’

“’Because I am a Christian sculptor I will right this wrong,’ Schmalz said. ‘I will do what has never been done before in the history of sculpture, which is to create a sculpture for each canto of the ”Divine Comedy.”” –Claire Giangravé, America, 2020

Read the full article here.

“How the Idea of Hell Has Shaped the Way We Think”

April 3, 2021 By Jasmine George, FSU '24

“Our ancestors developed their ideas of Hell by drawing on the pains and the deprivations that they knew on earth. Those imaginings shaped our understanding of life before death, too. They still do.

[. . .]

“The great poetic example of the blurriness between the everyday and the ever after is Dante’s Inferno, which begins with the narrator ‘midway upon the journey of our life,’ having wandered away from the life of God and into a ‘forest dark.’ That wood, full of untamed animals and fears set loose, leads the unwitting pilgrim to Virgil, who acts as his guide through the ensuing ordeal, and whose Aeneid, itself a recapitulation of the Odyssey, acts as a pagan forerunner to the Inferno. This first canto of the poem, regrettably absent from the ‘Book of Hell,’ reads as a kind of psychological-metaphysical map, marking the strange route along which one person’s private trouble leads both outward and downward, toward the trouble of the rest of the world.

[. . .]

“Dante, writing in the early fourteenth century, drew on a bounty of hellish material, from Greek, Roman, and, of course, Christian literature, which is rife with horrible visions of Hell.” –Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker, 2019

Read the full article here.

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