The Divine Comedy – Salvador Dali

To celebrate the 700th birthday of the Italian poet Dante Alighiere, Salvador Dali was commissioned in 1951 to create a set of illustrations for Dante's masterpiece, La Commedia Divina. Dali produced a masterpiece of his own, and the set of watercolours and woodcuts with their range of artistic styles demonstrates that Dali was one of the greatest artists of any century.

There was once an excellent site with all the illustrations and their relationships to the text, but it has unfortunately disappeared. Over the next few weeks I will try hunt down good reproductions of all 100 pieces, and I might have to break out the book to find some appropriate quotations. Some of the images below link to larger versions of the artworks; I hope that one day all will.

Three quarters a millennium has not diminished the power of Dante's epic, and one of the best translations is still that by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, in three volumes - Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.

Hell	Purgatory	Paradise
1 – The Delightful mount	1 – The Reign of The Penitents	1 – Dante
2 – Reassurance
3 – Charon and the Crossing of the Acheron		3 – Piccarda Donati
	4 – The Powers of Soul	4 – Beatrice Resolves Danté's Doubts
5 – Minos	5 – Virgil's Admonishment
6 – Cerberus
7 – The Avaricious and the Prodigal	7 – The Law of Climbing	7 – Dante In Doubt
		8 – The ascent to Venus
	9 – The Eagle of Grace
10 – Faritana	10 – Our Lady of the Annunciation	10 – The Song Of The Wise Spirits
	11 – The Proud One	11 – The Dust of Souls
12 – The Minotaur	12 – Ecstatic Visions	12 – The Apparition of Dante's Great-Great Grandfather
13 – Gianni Schicchi's Bite	13 – The Second Cornice
	14 – The Blind For Envy	14 – The Cross of Mars
	15 – The Angel of Mercy	15 – Cacciaguida's History Lesson
16 – In The Hands Of Antaeus		16 – The two Circles of Spirits
		17 – Cacciaguida Sees Danté's Exile in God
18 – The Flatterer		18 – Beatrice Comforts The Poet
	19 – The Siren of The Dream	19 – In The Heaven of Jupiter
20 – The Black Cherub
		21 – The Celestial Staircase
	22 – Prodigality
	23 – Greed	23 – The Garden of Christ
	24 – The Tree Of Punishment
	25 – The Lustful	25 – The Apparition of St James
26 – The Simoniacs	26 – The Two Crowds of the Lustful
27 – Lucifer	27 – Virgil's Last Words
		28 – St Peter and Dante
	29 – Dante and Beatrice
	30 – Dante's Repentance
31 – The Prophecy of Vanni Fucci
		33 – St. Bernard's Prayer To The Virgin