“Every thing in Dantes Comedia shews That for Tyrannical Purposes he has made This World the Foundation of All & the Goddess Nature & not the Holy Ghost”
– William Blake
In 1826, William Blake accepted a commission to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy (1320). Blake created 102 drawings for the book before he died, leaving the project unfinished. They rank alongside the great artist’s illustrations of Chaucer, his oil painting, like The Ghost of a Flea, and that glorious metaphysical, satirical drawing of Sir Issac Newton sat on the sea bed conspiring to “unweave the rainbow”. There was ever a chasm between the man who claimed to have seen an angel in a tree in Peckham Rye and the great materialist who created the law of universal gravitation and sought rational explanations in the fantastic.
Dante running from three beasts is rescued by Virgil
If any artist can combine words and pictures to powerful effect, it’s the visionary Blake, whose Songs of Innocence and of Experience is as true a marriage of visuals and verbs as anyone has managed. His drawings lack precision, with parts reminiscent of a child’s sugar-fuelled scribbling, but the result is mesmerising. Blake’s images are packed with verve, movement and the assertion that something strange is out there.
Dante and Virgil enter Hell
The Whirlwind of Lovers; Francesca da Rimini
Cerberus
The Stygian Lake with angry sinners fighting
Virgil repelling Filippo Argenti from the Boat
0, Dante conversing with Farinata Degli Uberti
The Serpent Attacking Buoso Donati
Scheme of the Circles of Hell
he Minotaur (Seventh Circle)
The Wood of Self-Violators: The Harpies and the Suicides
Capaneus the Blasphemer
The Simoniac Pope
The Punishment of the Thieves
Centaur Cacus Threatens Vanni Fucci
Ulysses & Diomedes wrapped in the same flame
Antaeus sets down Dante and Virgil in the 9th circle
Count Ugolino and his sons in prison
Lucifer at the last section of the ninth circle
Beatrice Addressing Dante
Lead image: Dante running from three beasts is rescued by Virgil
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