Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Hozier, Unreal Unearth (2023 album)

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Hozier’s much-anticipated album Unreal Unearth was released on August 18, 2023. The album, which is comprised of songs mostly written during and immediately following the COVID-19 pandemic, is loosely constructed around Dante’s nine circles. Hozier is extremely eloquent in talking about how his songs take up Dante’s ideas, themes, and images, and his press and social media interviews are worth a listen for anyone interested in his adaptations of Dante!

“While keen to stress that the record is by no means a concept album, Hozier went on to explain how Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell had provided a handy framing device for the record. Specifically, the album reflects upon two of the nine circles of hell: gluttony and heresy.

‘There’s a subtle element and I wanted to be light and playful with it. The album can be taken as a collection of songs, but also as a little bit of a journey. It starts with a descent and I’ve arranged the songs according to their themes into nine circles, just playfully reflecting Dante’s nine circles and then an ascent at the end,’ he said.

‘Because I think everyone went on a little bit of a journey over the last two years, everybody went through something changed, something about their lives, something about their work, something about themselves and came out the other side, slightly changed in some way, shape or form and that, it was sort of, that was just, that’s just how the album is arranged.'”   –Nick Reilly, “Hozier on new EP ‘Eat Your Young’ and how Dante’s ‘Inferno’ inspired him,” RollingStone UK (March 17, 2023)

See the official videos for “Eat Your Young” (Hozier’s take on gluttony),”All Things End” (heresy), and more on Hozier’s YouTube channel.

Contributed by many friends of Dante Today, including Aspen Foulk, Alyssa Granacki, Akash Kumar, Robert Alex Lee, Caleb Taylor, and Emily Yemington. Many thanks to all the contributors!

Farhad O’Neill, Divine Comedy-Inferno (1999)

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“I had first come into contact with the work of Dante Alighieri as a high school student in Canada. A senior’s English class had the Inferno included as part of their curriculum, and I was eager to read the masterwork, as some minor prior contact with the text had intrigued me greatly. I was not dissuaded by the inscription I saw above the vestibule:’“Abandon every hope, all ye who enter’! My interest in the fine arts guided my curiosity, and in time I was thrilled to discover the wealth of artists who had, in previous centuries, endeavoured to give a visual expression to that poet’s massive descriptive and symbolic structure.” […]  Read more here.

Cellist Elliot Murphy, Inferno (2021)

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“Inferno is my first solo album for cello and is a musical interpretation of the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno. [. . .]

“Dante visits twenty-eight distinct locations and I have tried to represent them all through music. Some are thematically linked, some stand alone, some paint a sonic landscape or mood, while others follow the drama of the text. As Dante invites the reader of his text to join him on his pilgrimage so too, I hope, does my music invite the listener on a journey.”    –Elliot Murphy, elliotmurphymusic, September 30, 2021

Dublin Castle’s Coach House Gallery also hosts the Commedia lithographs by Liam Ó Broin. See the related post here. 

Contributed by Elliot Murphy

Liam Ó Broin’s Commedia Lithographs (2021)

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Irish printmaker Liam Ó Broin completed a series of 100 lithographs based on Dante’s Commedia in honor of the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death in 2021. The lithographs are currently available to view in an online exhibit sponsored by the Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland (CDSI).

“Dante’s search on his journey was to go to the depths of the human imagination. In that journey he reveals himself as one who has a deep understanding of the nature, and importantly, the necessity of the human scheme of community. He also reveals, however flawed the mechanism from a political aspect was at the time, a very clear understanding of the way a city state, and by extension a nation, needs to be structured as an entity for good government – its core must be social justice. Here we have Dante the poet, Christian, philosopher and politician – fused into one.”   –From the Artist’s Statement.

Read more about Liam Ó Broin’s career at the artist’s personal website.

View our previous post on Ó Broin’s 2012 Inferno exhibition at Graphic Studio (Dublin) here.

We extend our great thanks to the artist for permission to reprint the image above.

Dante Alighieri: A Suite Of Thirty-Four Lithographs

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“The enduring power of Dante’s imagination in his masterpiece The Divine Comedy has inspired artists from the Middle Ages to the present. On reading this literary epic, the artist Liam Ó Broin began three years ago the daunting challenge to create 34 coloured lithographs in response to each canto of Inferno. Although faithful to Dante’s text, Ó Broin through his powerful imagery brings his personal perspective to bear on the central themes and contemporises Dante’s voyeuristic passage through the realms of Hell by portraying the Inferno of our time.  As Ó Broin states  ‘the one which can be created by ourselves and for others, in the here and now.’ These lithographs not only deepen our appreciation of the richness of the epic’s poetic language, but also seek to examine the multi-layered meanings of the text – universal themes of life after death, divine justice and punishment, man’s immoral actions and crimes to mankind.” [. . .]    —Liam Ó Broin

The Inferno lithographs were exhibited at Graphic Studio (Dublin) in 2012.

Selected prints from Liam Ó Broin’s Inferno series, including a limited edition box set (now sold out), were available for purchase here.

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Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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