Botticelli’s drawings for Dante’s Inferno. New York: Lear Publishers, 1947.
Call number: NC 1055 .B7 L4 c.2 (Main Library)
Case 2: “Illustrations of the Divine Comedy and its Legacy Throughout the Centuries”
In the 1480s, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici commissioned the Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) to make a series of drawings to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy. Preserved in different libraries in Rome and Berlin, these illustrations were forgotten since their realization and were discovered only in the middle of the nineteenth century. Botticelli’s representations are faithful to Dante’s text and manage to capture its essence, from the chaotic and frightening atmosphere of Inferno to the ethereal dimension of Paradiso. Botticelli sketched the outline drawings for nearly all the cantos, but added colors for only a few, such as his well-known “Chart of Hell” (first plate in this book). For some drawings, the simultaneous representation of different scenes allows the illustration of episodes narrated in more than one canto.
This edition of Botticelli’s drawings collects only twenty-eight illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, including the two representations of Lucifer for canto 34, one in half (exposed page) and the other in a full figure whose dimensions are twice that of the other drawings (last two illustrations in the book). The book also presents a commentary on all the cantos of the first canticle, often enriched with reproductions of the engravings from Cristoforo Landino’s 1481 Florentine edition of the Divine Comedy.
Representation of Lucifer for canto 34 in Inferno