In Inferno, Dante depicted his encounters with sinners in the form of a shocking reminder of the evil that penetrates the world and defiles even a pilgrim passing through landscapes of suffering on the way to the knowledge of God. Dante’s concept of Inferno is a place where sinners undergo cleansing trials in order to regain Divine forgiveness, blessing and love (Dominte 87). Every step of his journey shows the true purpose and perspective of the journey. The rebirth that awaits the traveler takes place in the depths of the writer’s consciousness. Therefore, the artists’ illustrations should also reflect the winding road where the sinner will receive a mystical experience, up the slope of redeemed sins and acquired virtues. Before Dante, the doctrine of Inferno was not only relatively new, but also represented a kind of theological abstraction. On the contrary, Dante gave the exact geographical location of Inferno – in the southern hemisphere as the antipode to Jerusalem (Schafer 14). Moreover, he drew a completely new image of what this eschatological Inferno region might look like: not just a monochrome bodily fire, but a mountain divided into different levels with different punishments (Schafer 4). The illustrator of Inferno must share Dante’s original views, distinguishing his position from the opinions of his contemporaries.
If Dante had chosen an illustrator for Inferno, his choice would undoubtedly have fallen on Gustave Dore. His signature style perfectly coincided with the sound of the poem. Filigree in the elaboration of images, impressive anatomical authenticity, boundless imagination in creating otherworldly landscapes endowed his work with magnetism that rivets the eye for a long time. Dore was only 23 years old when he started an ambitious project to create engravings for Dante’s immortal poem (Schafer 2). Despite his reputation as the highest-paid illustrator in France, he still failed to convince his publisher to allocate funding for this idea. Then the artist decided to release the first volume at his own expense. When Inferno with its illustrations saw the light in 1861, the entire circulation instantly disappeared from store shelves (Dominte 91). The question of financing other volumes was no longer there, and by 1868 the rest of the Divine Comedy with drawings by Dore, which became an instant classic, was published. In total, he created about one and a half hundred engravings for the work of Dante. The French writer Theophile Gautier, a friend of Dore, believed that there was no other artist who could illustrate Dante better than Dore. It is Gustave Dore who has that visionary look that is inherent in the Poet (Schafer 6). The artist creates an atmosphere of hell: underground mountains and abysses, a gloomy sky where there is never a sun. He conveys this unearthly climate with amazing persuasiveness. Others believed that the secret of the stunning effect of Dore’s engravings lies in phenomena of a slightly different order. One of the critics after the first edition of the publication wrote that the concept and interpretation come from the same source (Dominte 91). Dante and Gustave Dore convey by occult and solemn conversations the secret of this hell, passed and explored by them in every sense. Anyway, Gustave Dore managed to create such realistic and convincing visions of otherworldly worlds, allows to make the assumption that Dante would have chosen this artist and not any other.
Works Cited
Dominte, Carmen. Witnessing Inferno: Visual Representation and Perception of Light in a Space of Trauma. Literary & Cultural Studies Series, vol. 9, no. 2, 2019, pp. 82-92.
Schafer, Christopher. Satan and The Inferno: Dante’s Contribution to the Legacy of Hell. Italian Language and Literature Commons, vol. 347, no. 7, 2022, pp. 1-15.