The Vision or Hell, Purgatory and Paradise of Dante Alighieri translated by Henry Francis Cary with 109 illustrations by John Flaxman. London: Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press, 1910.
Call number: PQ 4315 C4 1910 (Special Collections)
Case 1: “The Divine Comedy Between Texts and Images”
This early nineteenth-century complete edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy features Henry Francis Cary’s translation and demonstrates the adaptability of this translation, as well as Dante’s text, to visual imagery. The edition consists of a hundred and nine small illustrations by sculptor John Flaxman, a close and lifelong friend of William Blake. It also features the same Life of Dante and Chronological View of the Age of Dante that appear in the exhibited items Dante’s Inferno (H.F. Cary).
The Divine Comedy profoundly influenced Flaxman, who published a series of neoclassical illustrations of the poem as early as 1793. Flaxman uses a minimal number of strokes on paper to delineate the contours of the figures, making no pretense of drawing anatomical details. As such, his illustrations resemble flat bas-reliefs. A portrait of Dante by Seymour Kirkup in resemblance to Giotto’s fresco in the Florentine Palazzo del Bargello (Podestà Chapel; c. 1335) appears on the book’s opening page. As pointed out in Purgatorio 11.94-99, Dante thinks of Giotto as the artist who revolutionized painting in the fourteenth century:
Students’ Assignment: Gabi, Cesca
For this assignment, we compared the illustrations by Gustave Doré in Dante’s Inferno translated by the Reverend Henry Francis Cary (1885) and those by John Flaxman in The Vision or Hell, Purgatory and Paradise of Dante Alighieri translated by Henry F. Cary (1910).
When comparing the two artists we noticed some key differences, especially style. Gustave Doré’s illustrations are romantic and very detailed, while John Flaxman’s are neoclassical and mostly focus on the characters rather than the background. We feel that with more detail more emotion can be revealed; however, Flaxman’s illustrations are more focused on the cantos’ main points, which pairs really well with the reading. It is interesting to note who the authors chose to depict as well. The title The Vision, in which Flaxman’s neoclassical illustrations are present, can be tied to the text of Inferno because of how concise it is. It provides a vision of the scene to go along with the text that all readers can understand and project their emotions onto according to their individual interpretation.
More emotion is present in Doré’s illustrations than in Flaxman’s. However, Dante’s feelings are expressed similarly in both Flaxman’s simple illustrations and in Doré’s more detailed ones, while other characters’ emotions such as those of Charon, Paolo, and Francesca are displayed more clearly and potently in Doré’s representations. Perhaps, this is because in the minds of the illustrators, Dante is a vehicle through which the reader may experience the other character’s emotions and experiences. In their visual representations, the illustrators choose to focus on specific characters rather than others in certain images, and sometimes even conflate multiple scenes into one image. The following examples testify the two artists’ different choice of which characters to include in their works.
“See the beast for which I have turned back: help / me against her, famous sage, for she makes my veins / and pulses tremble.” / “You must hold to another path,” he replied, after / he saw me weep, “if you wish to escape from this / savage place.” (lines 88-93)
from Dante’s Inferno, edited and translated by Robert M. Durling
The two images above depict Dante and the Roman poet Virgil’s meeting in Canto 1 of Inferno (lines 31-135). While there are three beasts that antagonize Dante in this Canto—a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf—Doré and Flaxman did not include all three animals in their respective images, instead choosing to omit one or two in order to focus the illustrations more on the relationship between Dante and Virgil. More specifically, Flaxman shows the lion and the leopard but not the she-wolf while Doré represents the she-wolf but not the lion or the leopard. Furthermore, in Doré’s image Virgil is shielding Dante from the she-wolf which blocks one of the paths out of the dark wood. In Flaxman’s image, Virgil leads Dante away from the leopard and the lion, towards the gates of Hell. The romantic style of Doré’s illustration lends more emotion, specifically fear and confusion, to Dante’s visage while Flaxman’s neoclassicism presents Dante as more of a blank canvas upon which the viewer may project their own interpretations of his emotional state onto the image.
“Now go, and with your ornamented speech and / whatever else is needed for his escape help him so / that I may be consoled. / I am Beatrice who cause you to go; I come from / the place where I long to return; love has moved me / and makes me speak.” (lines 67-72)
from Dante’s Inferno, edited and translated by Robert M. Durling
The two images above depict the scene from Canto 2 of Inferno in which Virgil meets Beatrice, who compels him to guide Dante through Hell (lines 52-117). Both images show Virgil and Beatrice in conversation but the two analyzed artists represent Beatrice in different ways. Doré places Virgil and Beatrice in a grassy field framed by trees and the night sky, portraying Beatrice in an angelic fashion with a halo of light emanating from her head and one of her hands pointed upward towards the heavens. Flaxman, on the other hand, does not include many elements of setting, choosing to include only a simple ground surface on which the characters stand. Flaxman portrays Beatrice as more earthly than angelic: she wears a flowing dress and headdress with no halo and gestures towards Virgil rather than upward. Between these two images, Flaxman’s interpretation is a more direct representation of Beatrice and Virgil’s meeting, while Doré’s interpretation is more fanciful, incorporating a more Christian artistic canon, particularly in regards to Beatrice’s halo of light. Doré chooses to represent Beatrice through Virgil’s imagination in which he sees her as more of a literal angel than a woman from Paradise.
“And behold coming toward us in a boat an old / man, white with the hairs of age, crying: “Woe to / you, wicked souls! / Never hope to see the sky: I come to lead you to / the other shore, to the eternal shadows, to heat and / freezing. / And you who are over there, living soul, separate / yourself from these here, who are dead.” (lines 82-89)
from Dante’s Inferno, edited and translated by Robert M. Durling
The two images above depict the scene from Canto 3 of Inferno in which the boatman Charon transports damned souls across the river Acheron to Limbo, the first circle of Hell (lines 82-120). While both images focus on Charon, Doré and Flaxman represent different elements of the setting in their illustrations. Doré portrays Charon alone in his boat, navigating the rough waters of the river Acheron, framed by cliffs along the edge of the river. Flaxman chooses to focus more on the social setting rather than on the physical setting, representing Charon as he is ferrying his boat full of damned souls across the river, with little detail of the river around them. Doré’s Charon has a very woeful expression, as if he himself is a damned soul. Flaxman’s Charon, on the other hand, emotes anger and contempt for the damned souls, which is a more accurate representation of Charon’s emotional state as outlined in Canto 3. In this scene in the text, Charon addresses the damned souls with scorn and disdain by crying “Woe to you, wicked souls!” (lines 83-84). Even Virgil characterizes Charon as contemptuous in saying to him, “do not torture yourself with anger” (lines 94-95). Furthermore, Flaxman’s illustration more accurately depicts Charon’s role as a ferryman for damned souls as it is outlined in Inferno whereas Doré’s illustration focuses on Charon’s emotions rather than his duty as is conveyed by the absence of damned souls in his boat.
“We were reading one day, for pleasure, of / Lancelot, how Love beset him; we were alone and / without any suspicion. / Many times that reading drove our eyes / together and turned our faces pale; but one point / alone was the one that overpowered us. / When we read that the yearned-for smile was / kissed by so great a lover, he, who will never be / separated from me, / kissed my mouth all trembling. Galeotto was the / book and he who wrote it: that day we read there no / further.” (lines 127-138 )
from Dante’s Inferno, edited and translated by Robert M. Durling
The two images above depict the scene in Canto 5 of Inferno, in which Francesca da Rimini describes to Dante the sinful act which caused her and Paolo to be damned as lustful souls (lines 121-138). Both Doré and Flaxman choose to conflate two separate scenes in their images; both of their illustrations include their sinful act as well as Francesca’s husband, Gianciotto, about to kill Francesca and Paolo with his dagger. In both illustrations, Francesca and Paolo are sitting together with Paolo kissing Francesca’s neck and the book which urged the pair to commit their sinful act in Francesca’s lap. In Doré’s illustration, the two lovers are on a throne-like chair, framed by flowing drapes and lit by daylight pouring through a grand window; Francesca lets the book nearly slip out of her hands as Paolo expresses his love for her and her husband is to the left of the lovers, represented in the midst of swinging his dagger towards them. In Flaxman’s illustration, the setting in which the two lovers are located is significantly less detailed; the pair sits between two columns and Francesca has a firm hold of the book while her husband peers around the column to the left, his dagger not visible but its presence implied by his puckered expression. Considering these two images, Doré’s illustration better represents the intense emotions felt by Paolo and Francesca as well as Francesca’s husband. The viewer can feel the lust between the two lovers through not only their facial expressions, but also their body language; one can see that Francesca is experiencing so much pleasure that she begins to lose her grip on the material world around her, represented in her hands barely hanging on to the book which she and Paolo were previously reading. Further, Gianciotto’s facial expression of potent anger and jealousy and the position of his body in the midst of movement clearly indicate the sin that he is about to commit: murder.
“While one spirit said this, the other was weeping / so that for pity I fainted as if I were dying, / and I fell as a dead body falls.” (lines 139-142)
from Dante’s Inferno, edited and translated by Robert M. Durling
The two images above depict the scene in Canto 5 in which Francesca da Rimini tells Dante the story of her and Paolo’s sinful act and their subsequent deaths, which causes Dante to faint from pity (lines 88-142). Both Doré and Flaxman represent Dante unconscious on the ground being tended to by Virgil, with Francesca and Paolo turned and floating away from the two poets. While Doré’s illustration is significantly more detailed than Flaxman’s, both illustrations include similar elements of setting, specifically in their representations of other damned lustful souls floating and swirling in the background behind Francesca and Paolo. In Doré’s image, some damned souls behind the two lovers are draped in flowing cloth while others are naked; in Flaxman’s image, instead, the damned souls are all naked save for Francesca and Paolo. Flaxman’s illustration is truer to the text of Inferno in this regard, since Dante depicts nearly all damned souls as naked. In both Doré and Flaxman’s illustrations, the two lovers’ pain is represented in their facial expressions and gestures; specifically, both Francesca and Paolo cover their faces either with a hand or the flowing cloth that envelops them. These two images are more similar to each other than any of the other pairs that were analyzed above, probably because the scene that Dante creates is so specific and emotionally potent.