Flaxman S Illustrations For Dante S Divine Comedy

These 110 deceptively simple illustrations are the great achievement of English artist John Flaxman. Awash in pathos and recalling a classically Greek style, they have inspired such artists as Goya and Ingres.

Dante's 'Divine Comedy' is one of the masterworks of European literature. This volume presents John Flaxman's illustrations of all 99 cantos of Dante's poem.

However, such a search can be carried on with some comprehensiveness only in the largest libraries in America, and then often only in the rare book rooms of these libraries.

Dante on View opens an important new dimension in Dante studies: for the first time a collection of essays analyses the presence of the Italian Medieval poet Dante Alighieri in the visual and performing arts from the Middle Ages to the present day. The essays in this volume explore the image of Dante emerging in medieval illuminated manuscripts and later ideological and nostalgic uses of the poet. The volume also demonstrates the rich diversity of projects inspired by the Commedia both as an overall polysemic structure and as a repository of scenes, which generate a repertoire for painters, actors and film-makers. In its original multimediality, Dante's Commedia stimulates the performance of readers and artists working in different media from manuscript to stage, from ballet to hyperinstruments, from film to television. Through such a variety of media, the reception of Dante in the visual and performing arts enriches our understanding of the poet and of the arts represented at key moments of formal and structural change in the European cultural world.

Reproductions of Dore's scenes from the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso are accompanied by lines from Longfellow's translation

William Blake's series of illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy was his last major project and a summation of his religious and artistic beliefs. Blake intended to engrave this series, but it was unfinished at his death. The series includes seven partially complete engravings and 102 works in various stages of completion--some of the most beautiful pictures of his career. These pictures are not simple illustrations, but constitute a thorough reinterpretation and--in Blake's view--correction of Dante's poem. This book compares the two men's theological and artistic views and analyzes in detail the meaning of Blake's illustrations, for the first time introducing their theological and aesthetic exuberance to a modern audience.

In the 1480s, the great Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli was commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici to make a series of drawings to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy. Botticelli gave stunning visual form to the poet's epic journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, but the project was never completed and the sheets were scattered. Now, more than 500 years after their creation, all 91 existing -- and very fragile -- vellum sheets will be shown together for the first time, in Berlin, Rome, and London. This book, which accompanies the exhibition, illustrates each of Botticelli's canto sheets in superb color, faced by a commentary on Botticelli's pictorial response to Dante's poem by Hein-Thomas Schulze Altcappenberg of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, where 84 of the sheets are permanently housed. Eight essays on Botticelli, the Medici, and the Divine Comedy complete this unprecedented volume.