The Doré Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy

gustave doré

Gustave Doré's illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy are an unforgettable visual journey through nightmare landscapes of eternal damnation to the very core of Hell.

In The Doré Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy , Doré reproduces with excellent clarity Dante Alighieri's sublime poetic masterpiece in 135 plates of The Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise; an extraordinarily vivid and imaginative account of the poet's allegorical journey through the afterlife .

From the depths of hell onto the mountain of purgatory and up to the empyrean realms of paradise , Doré's illustrations depict the passion and grandeur of the epic poem in such famous scenes as the embarkation of the souls for hell, Paolo and Francesca (four plates), the forest of suicides, Thaïs the harlot, Bertram de Born holding his severed head aloft, Ugolino (four plates), the emergence of Dante and Virgil from hell, the ascent up the mountain, the flight of the eagle, Arachne, the lustful sinners being purged in the seventh circle, the appearance of Beatrice, the planet Mercury, and the first splendors of paradise, Christ on the cross, the stairway of Saturn, the final vision of the Queen of Heaven, and many more. Each plate is accompanied by appropriate lines from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation of Dante's work, including the phrase often used in a humorous sense in the illustration The Gate of Hell (plate 8), "All hope abandon, ye who enter in!"
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Genres artclassicspoetrynonfictionreligionhistoryreferenceliteratureart historyfrance

144 pages, Paperback

First published June 1,1976

This edition

Format: 144 pages, Paperback
Published: June 1, 1976 by Dover Publications
ISBN: 9780486232317
ASIN: 048623231X
Language: English

About the author

gustave doré

The most popular and successful French book illustrator of the mid 19th century. Doré became very widely known for his illustrations to such books as Dante's Inferno (1861), Don Quixote (1862), and the Bible (1866), and he helped to give European currency to the illustrated book of large . He was so prolific that at one time he employed more than forty blockcutters. His work is characterized by a rather naïve but highly spirited love of the grotesque and represents a commercialization of the Romantic taste for the bizarre. Drawings of London done in 1869-71 were more sober studies of the poorer quarters of the city and captured the attention of van Gogh. In the 1870s he also took up painting (doing some large and ambitions religious works) and sculpture (the monument to the dramatist and novelist Alexandre Dumas in the Place Malesherbes in Paris, erected in 1883, is his work).