“Such a world, naturally, produced every manner of sin imaginable, and all these sins are carefully chronicled in Dante’s descent into the Inferno. The nine circles of the infernal city are, as Dorothy Sayers reminds us, Dante’s picture of human society in decay; the further Dante and Virgil descend, the more radically corrupt and degraded the society becomes. The pilgrims pass relatively quickly through first seven circles of hell. All the sins of appetite and violence are contained in the first half of the cantica. Then the travelers reach the Great Barrier, and here the poem slows down. Dante and Virgil plunge into the abyss of the eighth circle, which houses the fraudulent. Alas, the various sins punished here read like a cross-section of our ruling classes in Washington, New York, and Hollywood: we meet pimps and seducers, flatterers, hypocrites, and thieves, bribe-taking officials, false counsellors, and sowers of discord. They come at long last to the tenth and final ditch of the eighth circle. Here we find the liars—those who perpetrate the purest form of fraud, the one that unites all the others. Their stench is overwhelming.” [. . .] –Ben Reinhard, Crisis Magazine, September 21, 2020.
An anonymous artist/s’ work inspired byInferno (2016)
This series of 14 paintings–each painting paired with a quotation from the poem–begins as such:
“In 2016[1], a previously unknown manuscript of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy was discovered in Florence, Italy: BNE[2] Ms. II I 928. The discovery of this manuscript has reignited debate about the possible survival of the original version of Dante’s poem, written in his own hand. Until now, the study of Dante’s poem has been based upon copies of the poem made after his death in 1321[3]. Scholars have found that the text of this newly discovered manuscript does not significantly differ from the other known copies of the Divine Comedy. BNE Ms. II I 928 nonetheless has unique features. Perhaps most remarkably, scholars have found that the text of the poem is written in a mirror script, i.e., from right to left. This blog[4] is dedicated to dissemination[5] of news about the restoration and interpretation of the manuscript, undertaken in the historic Sala Manoscritti (Manuscript Room)[6] of the BNE in Florence. –Beata Viatrix[7] “
This incipit is followed by explanatory footnotes (1-7). The artist/s do not name themselves on the website where this is posted: Explicit Liber Erratus.
In an email we wrote to the contributor of this citing asking for clarification, “Beata Viatrix” responded as such: “Those of us who have studied the manuscript do not yet know who made its illustrations or when. The ongoing restoration might in the future help to illuminate questions regarding authorship and historical interpretation. We have already found some intriguing evidence of multiple hands in the manuscript. Those hands are in various states of decomposition, so their usefulness for ultimately identifying the manuscript’s creators remains in question.”
Jim Shaw, Donald and Melania Trump descending the escalator into the 9th circle of hell reserved for traitors frozen in a sea of ice (2020)
Jim Shaw’s silkscreen print Donald and Melania Trump descending the escalator into the 9th circle of hell reserved for traitors frozen in a sea of ice (2020) depicts the former US President and First Lady passing into the ninth circle, populated by members of the Trump inner circle: John Bolton, Michael Cohen, Omarosa Manigault, Anthony Scaramucci, Jeff Sessions, and others. The lake of Cocytus appears to have been displaced to the ground floor of a dilapidated American shopping mall.
Simon Lee Gallery describes Shaw’s collected works thus: “The practice of American artist Jim Shaw (b. 1952, Midland, Michigan) spans a wide range of artistic media and visual imagery. Since the 1970s, Shaw has mined the detritus of American culture, finding inspiration for his artworks in comic books, pulp novels, rock albums, protest posters, thrift store paintings – his ever-growing collection of found artworks has been the subject of its own exhibition on several occasions – and advertisements. At the same time, Shaw has consistently turned to his own life and, in particular, his unconscious, as a source of artistic creativity. Providing a blend of the personal, the commonplace and the uncanny, Shaw’s works frequently place in dialogue images of friends and family members with world events, pop culture and alternate realities. Often unfolding in long-term, narrative cycles, the works contains systems of cross-references and repetitions, which rework similar symbols and motifs, allowing a story-like thread to be perceived.” –“Biography,” Simon Lee Gallery
See a discussion of Shaw’s exhibit Hope Against Hope, hosted by the Simon Lee Gallery (London) from October 20, 2020, to January 16, 2021, in The Art Newspaper.
Contributed by Deborah Parker (University of Virginia)
“Dante Alighieri racconta la politica”
See the whole “Dante Alighieri racconta la politica” Facebook page here (last accessed January 13, 2021).
Charles Sykes, “The Agony of the Anti-Anti-Trumpers” (2020)
“They are destined to be forgotten. ‘The world will let no fame of theirs endure,’ Virgil explains. ‘Let us not talk of them, but look and pass.’ Dante describes the vast horde who chase after the elusive banner that “raced on so quick that any respite seemed unsuited to it.” Behind the banner, he writes, ‘trailed so long a file/ of people—I should never have believed/ that death could have unmade so many souls.’
“This, of course, got me thinking about the anti-anti-Trumpers and their season of agita.
“A cry went up this week from the precinct of the anti-anti-Trumpers suggesting that the selection of Kamala Harris was the moment for their decisive break into formal indecisiveness. As much as they loathed Donald Trump, they insisted, there was no way that they could support a Biden-Harris ticket.
“But the choice of Harris wasn’t really a tipping point, because the anti-antis were never going to support a viable opponent to Trump. The essence of anti-anti-Trumpism is the full recognition of the awfulness of Trump and all of his works, but a firm resolve not to actually do anything to confront them.” [. . .] —Charles Sykes, The Bulwark, August 14, 2020
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