DANTE’S INFERNO

The poet titled the greatest of his works simply Commedia, aligning it with the classical, Aristotelian notion that comedy is concerned with the restoration of order. The root of disorder in Dante’s mind was mankind’s increasing distance from God, beginning with the fall from grace in Eden and perpetuated by the spiritual disillusion that overwhelms the pilgrim in the forest. From Dante’s point of view, any reunion of humanity with God must necessarily begin with his own understanding of divine intent, particularly the concepts of justice, charity, and salvation.

From The Norton Anthology of World Literature

Sandro Botticelli’s Map of Hell (1480-90)

(Close up of 8th circle)

Sandro Botticelli’s depiction of Dante’s Inferno

Dante’s Commedia

• it is a work of Italian medieval literature, named the Divine Commedia by another Italian poet, Boccaccio, to emphasize the subject matter of the work, the realms of the afterlife: hell, purgatory and paradise, but also to signal the elevated style in which it is written.
• Dante claims God has inspired his testament, and so the early commentators take the visionary experience of the poet at face value.
• the three realms of the Commedia‘s three parts are as follows: down in the depths of Hell in the Inferno, up the mountain of Purgatory in the Purgatorio, and through the ever-higher spheres of Heaven in the Paradiso.
• “the Commedia is made up of one hundred chapters that Dante calls cantos (literally, “songs”), divided into three groups of thirty-three; the extra is added to the Inferno, which opens with an introductory canto. The numerological structure of the poem is also revealed in the landscape of each part. Hell is divided into nine circles, each containing a different category of sinners receiving their own proper form of punishment” (taken from the Norton edition).
• the Roman poet Virgil is the pilgrim’s guide, as well as the poet’s, because of his Aeneid.
• in keeping with Christian doctrine, the souls in the underworld (of the Inferno) have no material bodies, yet their shades retain the appearance of the bodies they had while alive; the punishments they suffer in Hell leave marks on their immaterial flesh.

William Blake’s The Vestibule of Hell and the Souls Mustering to Cross the Acheron (1847)

Salvador Dalí’s paintings of Dante’s Inferno

Canto I in Italian

Norton’s Map of the Inferno

Spendthrifts running through the wood of the suicides (1855-61)

by Gustave Doré

See more images here.