Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy - Gustave Dore

As I mentioned last week, Gustave Dore's art played a major role in my fascination with Dante's Inferno when I first read it as a high school sophomore. Our text books included just a few of his key engravings to accentuate the poem, namely the dark, grotesque, yet fascinating image of Satan stuck in a lake of ice and eternally chewing on the world's three most heinous sinners.

When I received that copy of the Divine Comedy from my grandfather (I believe it would have been Christmas of 1999) he had thrown in a book of The Dore Illustrations for Date's Divine Comedy allowing me to study his dark but detailed style.

*Satan in the Lake of Ice

Dore was French an artist in the mid 19th Century who specialized in wood and steel engraving, an artistic form that involved etching an image in negative onto a piece of wood or steel and using that engraving to basically stamp the art onto print media. This was similar to some techniques used by William Blake just a generation before but with a drastically different level of detail. Dore's engravings not only demonstrate a precise understanding of the human form, but also a level of perfection that achieves in a visual form the closest approximation of the emotions prevalent in the literature from which he drew his inspiration.

*The Empyrean

Much later I discovered that Dore did not limit himself to Dante but in fact created a multitude of art series based on every classic literary work he could get his hands on. Everything from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, to Milton's Paradise Lost, to Cervantes' Don Quixote was accentuated by Dore's art. A look at the collections of his art demonstrates, at least to me, not only his commitment to telling the entire story of any work he chose to translate to visual art but also the thoroughness with which he read and understood the works that he illustrated.

*From Don Quixote

Though my pictures here may not be of the highest quality, any close look at Dore's work reveals just how intricate each engraving had to be. His images tend to be rather epic in scope (which is somewhat obvious from his choice of stories, but I suppose 'go big or go home' was his philosophy) and heavy in detail. As a print medium Dore was able to work only with contrasting dark and light areas of color (the printing press had no 'grey' setting) yet both the dark and light areas of his engravings take on an expressive texture almost like an intricate topography map that omits any and all dead space. The result is a lively image where all four corners have been touched and made to live by the artist despite the apparent limitations of his medium.

*from Paradise Lost

In addition to the The Dore Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy I have sought out Dore's art whenever possible and thanks to Barnes and Noble's oversized, economical, and altogether fun printings I have also attained versions of Paradise Lost and Don Quixote Illustrated by Dore (as seen above). But I will leave talking about them for another day.
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Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Illus. Gustave Dore. London: CRW Publishing Ltd., 2007.


Dore, Gustave. The Dore Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1976.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Illus. Gustave Dore. London: Arcturus Publishing Ltd., 2005.