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.

The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
-The Inferno: Canto I,1-2 

 


























My first introduction to Dante was in Mrs. Brotman's Honors World Literature course my sophomore year of high school. Despite the otherwise mediocre selections available in that class (Chaim Potok's The Chosen...the name Brotman explains itself) this particular work of poetry fascinated me. Part of this was no doubt due to our textbook's inclusion of some of Gustave Dore's illustrations of the work (which I will discuss in the following blog). But a great deal of my fascination with the work was this ethereal and alchemical exploration of the world beyond. At some point that year I had expressed my excitement to my grandfather who responded by presenting me with this volume (beautifully decorated and with ragged-edged pages, very antique) as well as a book of the complete Gustave Dore illustrations from the Divine Comedy (which I will be discussing in my next blog). This book is of particular importance as I can say that it is the first book of my collection. I had many books already on my shelves but it was this particular tome that piqued my appetite to fill my walls with more of its kind.

For anyone not familiar with the work, Dante's first person narrative begins with his allegorical straying from righteous living into a forest signifying his sin. He is rescued by the poet Virgil (The Aeneid) who takes Dante on a journey through the circles of hell (The Inferno), through purgatory (Purgatorio), and dropping him off at the first circle of heaven (Paradiso) where the divine Beatrice guides him the rest of the way toward the Empyrean, or the ultimate vision of God the creator.
Dante's work is based in Medieval Catholic tradition but with a political twist. In addition to a spiritual kunstleroman Dante offers a scathing commentary on contemporary figures, often placing local potliticians in the circles of hell that he deems fit for their apparent sins.
  I think the most fascinating aspect of Dante's vision is in his sense of perfect justice. Having grown up Protestant a great deal of the punishments applied for certain sins was foreign and interesting. Though the fury of the harpies, the creaking oars of Charon, and the grotesque mastication of the most heinous sinners of antiquity (Brutus, Cassius, and Judas) by Lucifer himself provide sufficient spectacle for any reader the deeper I dug into the Inferno the more interesting the punishments became.
I remember reading of the story of Paolo and Francesca whom Dante encounters eternally circling in the wind above one of Hell's jagged precipices. This punishment was earned for their participation in an adulturous affair (oddly enough, inspired by stories of Lancelot and Guinevere, ARTHURIAN TIE IN, YAY). Surely a poet who could dream up such a specific punishment for every mortal offense has a great deal to say about the tragectory of human existence.

What is interesting is that Dante, much like Milton, is probably the source of a great number of dogmatic beliefs that were handed down, not from scripture, but from the imaginations of poets. I believe this undoubtedly attests to the social power of poetry; a power that modern education and mechanistic social values attempt to ignore.
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Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Henry Francis Cary. Garden City, New York: International Collectors Library, 1946.