Seeing the Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri's masterpiece, which he referred to simply as "my comedy" (because it ends happily, with the vision of God), is the single most translated work in history, after the Bible. It is also almost certainly the poem that has yielded the vastest iconographic tradition, being illustrated literally countless times, throughout the centuries and throughout the world, in virtually every conceivable medium. The scope of this page is to provide unified access to the largest possible amount of Divine Comedy illustrations freely available on the web. Naturally, as is often the case with artwork, the majority of illustrations of the Comedy are protected by copyrights, and even the images accessible through this site are not always high-quality reproductions. Nevertheless, this is likely the only page on the web where you can find grouped together the full series by Sandro Botticelli, William Blake, John Flaxman, Gustave Dore, and Salvador Dali. The links to these works are below. In the navigation column at the left, you can access several other illustrations by artists such as Delacroix, Fuseli, Rodin and Rossetti (grouped according to time period), as well as a list of relevant readings and the links to the most valuable online scholarly resources of Dante studies. Hopefully, this page will be in continuous expansion, and if you find links to online reproductions of Divine Comedy illustrations that are not yet accessible through this website, please contact me via email.
Sandro Botticelli
The 92 surviving drawings from Botticelli's never completed series, created between 1480 and 1495.
Hell
Purgatory
Paradise
John Flaxman
The British Artist, known mostly for his sculpture, composed a series of 110 drawings for the Divine Comedy at the end of the 18th century, and though deceivingly simple, they are consdiered by many as his single greates artistic achievement.
Hell
Purgatory
Paradise
15 of Flaxman's drawings in higher resolution
William Blake
Blake's last major project was to be a series of watercolor illustrations for Dante's masetrpiece. Before he set out to the task, the aging Blake painstakingly taught himself Italian in order to read Dante in the original. The series, dating from 1824 to 1827 and left incomplete due to the artist's death, consists of 102 pieces.
Blake's illustrations to the Divine Comedy (courtesy of The William Blake Archive: www.blakearchive.org)
Gustave Dore'
Hell
Purgatory
Paradise
Complete - All of Dore's illustrations of the Comedy, in alphabetical order by title, in higher resolution
Salvador Dali
Dali illustrated the Divine Comedy between 1960 and 1964, canto-by-canto, with 100 colored woodblock printings. In line with his surrealist visual poetics, his illustrations often bear only a faint resemblance to the Comedy's superficial narrative.
Hell
Purgatory
Paradise
This page was created for educational purposes only and is of a strictly non-commercial, non-profit nature.
