Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
From an article on the artist Kawita Vatanajyankur:
“[…] Other videos, like ‘The Carrying Pole,’ above, suggest torments worthy of Dante or ancient mythology. And some audiences have asked whether she had a political aim, or if she meant to criticize abusive interrogation tactics like waterboarding in these endurance works. […]” —
“The final issue of Jimbo – #7 – chronicles Jimbo’s descent into Hell, represented on the page as an abandoned mall. The comic is a scant 33 pages long, but Fantagraphics decided to make a big deal of it: they repackaged Jimbo #7 as Jimbo’s Inferno, a gigantic, 11×15 hardcover book, and followed it with Jimbo in Purgatory.
“The wider reading public began to notice what Panter was doing: each page corresponded to a canto in Dante’s classic poems. Though the improvisational-looking drawings were of robots or monsters or yokels on tractors, they were all part of a highly complex representational scheme that paid homage to, and made fun of, Dante all at once.
“The last volume in the trilogy ships this month: Songy of Paradise merges Dante’s Paradiso with Milton’s Paradise Regained, and tells the story of Jesus’s temptation in the desert, with a gap-toothed hillbilly named Songy taking the place of Jesus (Panter: ‘I didn’t want to deal with Jesus’).” –Sam Thielman, “Gary Panter: The Cartoonist Who Took a Trip to Hell and Back,” The Guardian, July 18, 2017
See also our previous post on Gary Panter’s 2006 graphic novel Jimbo’s Inferno here.
“Since Dante’s Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) first appeared in 1320, visual artists have been rethinking Dante’s trip into hell with Virgil as his guide. Eugène Delacroix chose the subject for his first major painting, The Barque of Dante, also known as Dante and Virgil in Hell, which introduced the artist at the Salon of 1822. A few years later, William Blake drew visions of the Divine Comedy in London while G.G. Macchiavelli did the same in Bologna. William-Adolphe Bouguereau painted Dante and Virgil in Hell in 1850; Edgar Degas finished Dante and Virgil at the Entrance to Hell in 1858; and Gustave Doré financed his own Inferno in 1861, finishing the trilogy in 1868.
“In the wake of Doré’s popularity, the Italian caricaturist Antonio Manganaro (1842-1921) translated Dante’s epic to his own era, imagining what would happen if Dante and Virgil attended the opening of The International Maritime Exhibition held in Naples in 1871. Manganaro’s rare lithographic volume, recently acquired by the Graphic Arts Collection, includes plenty of ghosts, fish, and wine.” — “Dante and Virgil Attend an Exhibition,” Website of the Graphic Arts Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University (May 20, 2017)
Robert Brinkerhoff, Professor of Illustration and Dean of Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), has embarked on what he calls “an ambitious undertaking, to say the least“: he proposes to illustrate the Comedy in 100 canto-by-canto drawings. The Inferno illustrations will be completed in December 2017, with Purgatorio and Paradiso projected for a future date. In January 2017, he began blogging the Inferno illustrations on his personal blog Brinkerhoff Brimmeth Over.
Of the project, he writes, “Most of us read L’Inferno in high school or freshman lit classes in college, and its pulpy, phantasmal imagery appeals universally to youthful sensibilities. I last encountered L’Inferno (sans the rest of the poem) at age 19, my mind mired in newfound pleasures of freely available sex and beer and (finally, after 12 years of public school in which art class was shoved to the periphery) full-time dedication to art making. But in middle age I suspect the poem resonates more profoundly as it mirrors the preoccupations of people (like myself) whose paths in life are pondered with affection, regret, lost love, resentment and a desire to clarify, once and for all, the rest of the journey. Pick up Dante at age 50 and it will be a different literary experience. Spend many hours translating and drawing its tercets of terza rima and you’ll realize how much you have in common with a 14th century poet, despite the hundreds of years and linguistic traditions that separate you.” — Robert Brinkerhoff, “Introduction to Inferno: Una Selva Oscura,” Brinkerhoff Brimmeth Over, January 18, 2017
See his Divine Comedy images and follow the updates on his blog.
All submissions will be considered for posting. Bibliographic references and scholarly essays are also welcome for consideration.
Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.
