Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
“I’m imagining that Hell has turned ‘abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ into a ‘New York, New York’ kind of jingle, which is why I knew immediately that I needed to draw Doug making ‘your name up in lights’ arm gestures.” [. . .] –Jeff Martin, Hell, Inc., 2019
The Hell, Inc. webcomic updates Mondays on Patreon here.
“Dante learns a great many things about the metaphysical world, but this blog post is mostly concerned with the temperature of the 9th circle of hell. For those who haven’t read it, this circle is not a fire pit with little devils poking bare-bummed sinners with pitch forks. It’s frozen solid, and at the very epicenter, Satan is frozen mid-waist, eternally munching on Brutus, Cassius, and Judas in his three mouths. It’s pretty gruesome but not unlike what’s going on in San Francisco this winter.” [. . .] —Snotting Black, January 15, 2013
“Athens is the second European city after Belgrade to host the show, titled ‘Dante Ipermoderno– Dante illustrated in the world, 1983-2021.’ After the Greek capital, the exhibition will travel to Prague, Moscow, London, and Madrid.
“Five internationally known illustrators took it upon themselves to depict the shocking images described by Dante in his monumental work The Divine Comedy: Paolo Barbieri, Monica Baisner, Domenico Palantino, Tom Phillips, and Emiliano Ponzi.” [. . .] —Ekathimerini, January 6, 2021
See more information about the art exhibit here.
Relatedly, see our posts about Paolo Barbieri here and Tom Phillips here.
“I have a vast collection of publications related to the illustrations of Divine Comedy that extends to the most varied artistic expressions from the 18th C to date and beyond, along the latitudes of the poet’s visionary grip in the the world and its variousgeographic-cultural areas.
The work that I present here is the figurative result of my visual study of the iconographic themes of the first part of Dante’s poem, Hell, through the aforementioned tradition and illustrative plurality. The 34 songs of Hell are represented with a mixed technique: manual, marker + coloured ink, and digital, with insertions of manipulated images. An original version of collaging then. This blog is together [a] presentation of the illustrations and understanding of their creative process.
Hence, in each canto-cover you will find the following in-sight information:
My illustration of each canto/song
A choice of the main verses from the poem in ‘cloud’ format
My interpretative notes of the main figurative themes
A very small selection of the many sources that inspired me.” –Contributor Maurizio Coglia
The digital collages can be viewed at Coglia’s website imagodantisinferno.com
“The musical Hadestown (music, lyrics, and book by Anaïs Mitchell) brings a new take on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Much like Dante in the Inferno, the characters of Orpheus in Hadestown travel through an inferno-like factory run by Hades, the god of the underworld. Although the tragic hero Orpheus is mentioned in Canto IV of Dante’s Inferno, the similarities between the Divine Comedy and Hadestown do not stop there.” –Contributor Ava Buchanan
A notable link between the musical and the Inferno is the staging of the piece, which relies heavily on circular motion to move the plot forward (a common motif employed by Dante). Furthermore, the character of Hermes within the musical acts as a Virgil-like guide for Orpheus with the added omnipresent, post-narrative knowledge of Dante “the Poet”.
As a side note, the official Hadestown website notes that it is a “haunting and hopeful theatrical experience that grabs you and never lets go.” This statement echoes Peter Hawkins who – in his biographic essay on Dante – states that “no one remains unchanged by the Commedia.”
The original cast Broadway cast recording of Hadestown can be found here.
Contributed by Ava Buchanan (University of Arkansas, ’23)
