On a recent Law and Order SVU re-run, detective Elliot visits a (criminal) artist’s studio, and looking around at the paintings, which mix colorful abstract forms and realistic human violence, he says, “Looks like Dante’s Inferno meets Newsweek.”
Harriet Moore’s Paintings and Sculptures of the Comedy
“Harriet Grannis Moore, well-known San Francisco sculptor and instructor in stone and clay, created a series of paintings inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy in the 70s and early 80s. The paintings, measuring 9 feet high by 4 feet, will be accompanied by related ceramic sculpture.
Thirty years ago the noted San Francisco sculptor Harriet Moore was obsessed with Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. By the time she was finished (or it was finished with her), she had painted more than 20 nine-foot by 4-foot panels and completed 22 related sculptures in terracotta, bronze, and wood. Fifteen of the panels and several sculptures (on loan from a private collector) will be shown this spring in ‘Harriet Moore: The Divine Comedy.’ The exhibition opens April 18 and continues through June 27. The opening reception is scheduled for Sunday, April 18, from 1 to 4 p.m.” —Peninsula Art Museum (retrieved on April 26, 2010)
See Peninsula Art Museum homepage.
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
Herman Melville’s Copy of the Comedy
“. . . Associate professor of English Steven Olsen-Smith is a leader in that scholarly community. He is the primary researcher responsible for tracking the recovery of Melville’s dispersed personal library of around 1,000 books and serves as general editor of Melville’s Marginalia Online, a long-term project devoted to the editing and publication of markings and annotations in the books that survive from Melville’s library.
Olsen-Smith recently borrowed Melville’s copy of Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’ from collector William Reese as part of the Marginalia project’s pending transition to a new digital format that will display photographic images of marked and annotated books with commentary on their significance to Melville’s writings. The book will be on campus through March 31, and Olsen-Smith’s student interns currently are working to catalog notations and recover erasures. . .
‘Melville marked subject matter dealing with issues of free will and fate, original sin and divine justice, and aspects of subject matter and rhetoric that relate to the book’s epic character,’ Olsen-Smith said. ‘It is clear Melville read and marked the book at different points throughout his life, and the interns are identifying parallels between the marginalia to Dante and subject matter in his writings.'” [. . .] –Erin Ryan, Boise State University Update, March 31, 2010
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
“For Mets, Gloom and Doom…”
“‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’ That’s what I would write if I felt like paying $395 for a commemorative brick outside the Mets’ ballpark. That sentiment from the poet Dante Alighieri’s Inferno is applicable to the new baseball season, normally a time of hope, but not in Queens, not this year and maybe not anytime soon.” [. . .] –George Vecsey, The New York Times, April 2, 2010
Louis Andriessen, “La Commedia” (2008)
“On Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 8:00 p.m., Andriessen’s extraordinary new opera La Commedia (based on Dante’s Divine Comedy) makes its New York premiere in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage in a concert performance by the Asko Schoenberg ensemble…
According to the composer, ‘I see Dante’s La Commedia as one of the highest points ever reached in literature and philosophy. It combines complexity, intellectualism, horror, beauty, multi-layering, allusions, historical and mythological references, and, above all, irony. I selected sequences of material in the same order as in Dante’s book. So the first two scenes take us from the City of Dis down through Inferno to the deepest regions of hell where we meet Lucifer in the third part. This is where Adam’s Fall is described. We then pass upward through the lighter-hearted Garden of Earthly Delights until we reach Paradise in the final section, Eternal Light.’
La Commedia was premiered in June 2008 at the Holland Festival by many of the same musicians performing in the Carnegie Hall presentation.” [. . .] —Broadway World, March 1, 2010
See also, Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, April 1, 2010
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
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